***I’m not sure, but I think I write a Karate-Kid-related post once every three months. Get used to it, and get prepared for another one starting….NOW!***

A little insight into my resistance to pants:

I went over to my parent’s house tonight to see how they were doing. My dad and I chatted for a while, and he accidentally spilled his tea on the floor. I went into the bathroom and grabbed a towel to throw on it and blot it up. I was too slow, though. By the time I got back, my Dad was already hunched over the carpet, blotting up the tea.

With his pants and underwear, which he had removed. He told me that he saw no reason to waste a perfectly good towel on some spilled tea. He then calmly headed into the bedroom, dong swaying gently in the breeze, put on a clean pair of pants and went back to chatting like nothing had happened.

Welcome to life in the Castle residence (That’s my new name – I’ll explain later). You would think that after 28 years, my father’s cavalier attitude about nudity would stop surprising me, but it still always catches me just a little bit off guard.

I would also like to ask that all of you remember this story the next time that you come over to see me, and when I answer the door in boxer shorts and a hat, maybe be a little bit less sassy and a little bit more grateful that you can’t see my balls. Given the environment that I was raised in, I’m doing you more of a favor than you might realize.

Moving on.

I saw Dirty Dancing for the first time about 3 weeks ago.

As near as I can tell, “Dirty Dancing” is the female equivalent of “The Karate Kid” for girls in my age group. It’s a movie that every girl that is about my age thoroughly loved when they were young and still love now, but for completely different reasons.

Essentially, The Karate Kid seemed like a great movie when I was a little kid for the same reason that I loved a lot of movies when I was a little kid: At the beginning of the movie, the protagonist was someone who I could relate to and had problems similar to mine (albeit heavily exaggerated), but instead of just gritting his teeth and stumbling through those problems, the protagonist would go above and beyond anything I was capable of, and dominate every conflict in the movie.

Predictably, Daniel starts out as a kind of unpopular kid who can’t get the girl and gets picked on by dreamboat Johnny (so far, me) but instead of having to come to terms with being a dorky kid and settling for imagining himself coming up with really sweet burns while he’s walking home from school, Daniel kicks Johnny’s ass in front of everyone at the tri-state karate championship and then has sex with Elizabeth Shue (I haven’t done either of those things…yet. Call me, Liz <3!!!)

10 years later, that movie is still fantastic, but mostly because it's brimming over with unintentional comedy. Mr. Miyagi gives off a very strong "Asian pedophile" vibe, Daniel has a t-shirt with a picture of two pigs having sex with "Makin' Bacon" written underneath, the head of the Cobra Kai dojo screams things like "FEAR...DOES NOT EXIST...IN THIS DOJO! DOES IT?!" and tells Johnny to "sweep the leg" and "put him in a body bag!"

Most importantly, the song used in the karate montage, You’re the Best” by Joe Esposito is not only the best song ever, but should, in my opinion, be used in every movie montage, and I do mean EVERY movie montage.

Think about it. I mean, it’s an obvious pick for action movies, but I think it has some real potential in other places.

Footloose? Lady and the Tramp? The Breakfast Club? Any romance movie ever made? The montages would be immeasurably better with that song playing.

Did The Breakfast Club have a montage? I’m not actually sure. Whatever, that movie would still be better with that song in it.

So, yeah. The Karate Kid was a great movie when I was a little kid, and a great movie all over again for completely different reasons when I saw it again.

Dirty Dancing seems to be that way for girls.
Based on the reaction that I got when I told people that I hadn’t seen Dirty Dancing (a blend of confusion mixed with rage), I’m going to guess that all of you know the movie’s plot.

After seeing the movie and kind of paying attention, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if I were a 12 year old girl at some point in the 80′s, I would have loved Dirty Dancing. I can also say as a 18 year old guy in 2008 that I love Dirty Dancing for completely different reasons that I assume girls also love it for. The music is comical, the plot seems a little thin, and Johnny Castle seems a little less dreamy.

I’ve just decided that I’m going to refer to myself in this blog as Johnny Castle. He’s awesome, and when I get caught blogging again, I’m really looking forward to explaining to a reporter why I chose to refer to myself as Patrick Swayze’s character in Dirty Dancing.

There was one moment that I didn’t quite know how to react to. The most famous line in the movie is “Nobody puts Baby in the corner”. Several people had told me about that line before I saw the movie and that Patrick Swayze’s character says it. I assumed that this meant that at some point in the movie, Johnny Castle was being put into a figurative corner of some sort, and, referring to himself in third person as “Baby”, he informed everyone that he would not be backed into it.
I was imagining an exchange something like this:

———-

CAMP DIRECTOR: Listen, Castle! I’ve had it with your shenanigans! I pay you to come in here and teach these people how to waltz and tango, not show up with your low-cut shirts swinging your pelvis around like you’re trying to mix a goddamn can of paint in those tight, tight jeans of yours!

JOHNNY: You paid me to teach these people to dance, and that’s what I’m doing!

CAMP DIRECTOR: You call what you do dancing? That’s preposterous! Dancing is graceful! Civilized! I’ve seen what you call “dancing, Mr. Castle, and I can only accurately describe it as dirty! You play by my rules or no rules at all, Johnny! You start waltzing, or you can waltz your skinny ass the hell out of my camp!

(Johnny seethes for a moment, the grabs his leather jacket off of a nearby chair and flings it over his shoulder. He storms towards the door, but whips around in the doorway, facing the camp director. He pauses for a moment and puts his sunglasses on)

JOHNNY: Nobody puts baby in the corner.

(Johnny slams the door. The sound of his car door slamming shut can be heard, followed by the roar of his car’s engine as he tears off)

———-

…something like that.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that he was actually talking to someone else named Baby. Ok, I thought, no big deal. Someone is trying to put Baby in a figurative corner, and he let’s it be known that nobody will be doing that.

Wrong again.

It’s the last night of camp, some of the people from camp are singing a boring song. Baby and her family are watching it from a table that happens to be in the corner. Johnny shows up, says the famous line, they do a choreographed dance that 30 extras join in on, and everyone sees that they were wrong to be such tight asses.

First of all, nobody really put Baby in the corner. She was just sitting at a table near a corner, and I don’t really get the feeling that anyone demanded that she sit there.

Second of all, I assumed that Baby was somehow getting punished in the corner, or backed into a corner, or that it was somehow a figure of speech, and so it surprised me that she just happened to be sitting near a corner. If Baby had been sitting next to the salad bar, the line would have been “Nobody puts Baby next to the salad bar”. Am I even kind of doing a good job of explaining why the context of the line was a little bit different than I thought it would be?

Anyway, it was kind of disappointing for me. At the same time, it almost made it funnier. I think I need to start using that line. Anytime someone is somewhere and I want them to hang out with me, I can just say “Nobody puts (name of person) in the (location that they currently are)”.

The fact of the matter is, however, that I can talk as much trash as I want about the movie, but I went out and bought a couple of 2008 calendars the other day. One of them is that little Domo thing, whatever the fuck that is. The other is a Dirty Dancing 2008 calendar. The Domo one goes at my computer desk, but I put the Dirty Dancing one at the foot of my bed. It’s the first thing that I see when I wake up in the morning, so I can enjoy some quality time with Baby and Johnny Castle. Sweetening the deal even more was the poster included with the calendar, which I put up next to my computer desk. What I’m saying is that there aren’t many places in my room where you can look without seeing something Dirty Dancing related, so maybe I liked the movie a little bit more than I’m letting on. Or maybe I just think it’s funny. Who really knows?

I’ll leave you tonight with a special, topical video, but be forewarned: the content of this video is decidedly…dirty.

I also just thought of something else: This movie has a montage of Baby falling in love with the Swayze and learning to dance. A montage with a song playing over it that ISN’T “You’re the Best” by Joe Esposito.

Advantage: Karate Kid.

No shoes.

No pads.

NO FUCKING MERCY.

I let Technician McVicker know about the new blog.

The first thing he said was that a certain lawyer has probably already found it. The lawsuit was settled long ago and I haven’t worked at the filth factory in over a year. Now he’s just on a quest to ruin my life (faster than I’m doing it to myself).

Dan’s probably right. Somewhere on the campus that he works on, that son of a bitch is probably sitting in a dimly lit office at a giant desk , thoughtfully stroking his pet cat with his bionic arm and pouring over my blog posts. I’ll probably get two or three weeks out of this blog before I’ve put enough incriminating material onto here for him to compile a smear campaign against one of my former employers. One thing will lead to another, and it’ll all culminate with a call from a local reporter asking if she can get a few quotes for the article that she’s writing about me taking a dump in the heating duct of a local high school. I’ll shut down the blog for a few weeks, then start a new one that will be safe for a few days before his ip address starts showing up on my stats page.

I’ve just got to be careful about what I say.

On that note, I’ve decided to start doing gay porn.

Let me explain. There are two kinds of porn on HBO:
1) Documentaries about pornography that, instead of being hot, feature strange acts with terrifying people performing them and
2) Films that aren’t porn at all but are suggestively titled so I think they’re porn but turn out to be period dramas.

The documentaries are almost always terrifying exposes on creepy fringe sexual practices, ranging from people who like to dress up as horses and ride each other to a class on how to perform cunnilingus that was primarily attended (and taught) by obese 14 year old boys claiming to be lesbians in their early 30′s.

Well let me tell you something, “Cindy”: You’re not fooling anyone with your Ani DiFranco shirt or your “vagina”, least of all me.

The films that aren’t actually porn always just have promising names like “After Midnight: Ecstasy Unleashed”, but when I hit “Info” on my remote, it’s always something like “In this heart-wrenching romantic drama, Patrick Stewart (Star Trek, X-Men) is at his oscar-worthy best in a touching roll as John Huckabee, a widower looking for a second chance at love in a bubonic plague-ravaged 12th-century England.”

Anyway, Tom and I were watching one of the documentaries the other night, and they had a segment on gay-for-pay sex scenes.

Gay-for-pay, for those of you who don’t know, is when straight men perform in gay sex scenes. Why, do you ask, is a straight man willing to engage in a gay sex scene? Because said scenes pay approximately three thousand dollars, which is well above the amount one can make in guy-girl or girl-girl porn.

If you do a little bit of math, the facts become clear: If I spent two days a week filming gay porn instead of subbing, I would have two hundred eighty eight thousand dollars at the end of the year. I mean, Christ, if I bump it up to 4 days a week, I’m looking at over half a million dollars come tax time.

Do you see what I’m saying? Sure, I would have to do some things I wouldn’t be proud of, but it’s legal, I’m qualified, and at the end of the year I would have over 500 grand to spend on booze, rent, STD treatment and therapy!

Some people that I have run the idea by have told me that although my current job pays less, it’s far less of a compromise to my dignity. They’re right, but here’s the thing:

Doing one day of gay porn pays 37.5 times as much money as one day of subbing. Sure, there’s less dignity in it, but is there 37.5 times less dignity in it? Is putting my balls in some dudes mouth really that much less dignified than spending eight hours telling 14 year old girls to stop sending text messages?

I’m not really sure.

Despite these facts, I don’t foresee this happening anytime soon. After doing a little bit more research into the matter, I found out an alarming fact: in order to do gay porn, I would at some point be required to engage in a sexual act of some kind with another man, something that I am not comfortable with.

To make matters worse, my girlfriend pulled out the old “I’m pretty sure, and by ‘pretty sure’ I mean ‘certain’ that we would have to break up immediately if you started having sex with men for money” card, which is fine, I guess. I sort of figured that she would want me to be successful, but, you know, I guess that I was wrong.

Until then, I guess I just have to keep wearing a tie and yelling at kids for a living.

Damn it.

P.S.: The fact that I even find this video 12% entertaining is evidence that I haven’t grown up.

Good day.

No more posts about girlfriends. I always end up looking like an idiot when things don’t workout. SUCK IT LADIES!!!

Good news first: The Colbert Report and the Daily Show are back and as entertaining as ever. Jon Stewart was a little bit rusty, although it was good to see his smiling face again, but Colbert seemed fresher than he has in a while. I’m wondering if maybe he works a little bit better without writers and just riffs. I guess I’ll never know unless I watch again tonight. Here’s a little taste of the first fresh Stewart/Colbert action I’ve gotten in a month or two.


It’s like hanging out with an old friend.

In other T.V. related news, season 5 of The Wire is up and running on HBO. As always, I’m really enjoying it. I actually bought the first 4 seasons and have been handing them out to everyone that I possibly can to get to watch them. The results have been kind of surprising, actually.

Normally when I have something that I’m convinced that everyone I know HAS to see, it yields mixed results. Everybody that I know mostly hates the music I listen to, so that never goes very well. Occasionally someone pretends to like whatever music I’m making them listen to so they can humor me, but that’s usually about as far as it goes. Things I think are funny are usually hit and miss. Most people sort of think things like Dr. Rockso are funny, but not quite like I do. The Wire has been a whole different story, however.

It usually goes like this: I lend someone season 1. They don’t watch it for a few days, because they just haven’t gotten around to checking it out. Then, they watch a couple of episodes and say something like “That show’s not bad!”

Then, they blaze through the remainder of season one and want season 2 from me. The usually finish that off in about a week.

By the time they are finished with season 2, they are desperate for a copy of season 3. They are ready to break into my house and steal it from me. Everyone seems to like it, everyone wants to see more, and it makes me happy to have another person to talk about the show with.

Should I be embarrassed that a few T.V. shows being on the air again are the most interesting things going on in my life right now?

Probably.

While I was doing my usual pondering over what I can and can’t put into my blog, I was looking through some of my old blog entries on a site that archived them. I could get them deleted, but it would cost me some money to re-register my old blog name and then set it to not let the website archive the entries, and I’m just not sure that it’s worth it. I mean, it probably is, but I’m just not quite smart enough to go to all that trouble.

I do, however, have enough energy to dig through all of those old entries, and it’s amazing how cavalier I was about putting personal information into that blog. Well beyond my name. It’s kind of a miracle that I didn’t get spotted sooner. Jesus Christ.

I’m pretty sure that two girls that I used to have the hots for are now getting married. I have another friend who I know is getting married, another who has been for about 6 years and one more who’s been hitched for roughly 3. I feel like it should be sending me spiraling into a crisis. Once I break up with a girl, I’m always a little bit angrier than I should be that they don’t spend the rest of their life in a black pit of despair pining away over me. I know that’s stupid and shallow and most of all unrealistic, but it’s also how I am. Strangely enough, the fact that everyone is getting married is doing nothing to send me into one of my jealous little pouts.

Furthermore, I feel like this should be sending me into a marriage frenzy. I mean, I’m pushing 30, I’m going bald, I’m fighting it but I’m not getting any less flabby – I should probably be trying to get some sort of legal document binding me to someone while I still have any kind of chance, but the panic just doesn’t seem to be setting in.

That’s probably a good thing. There’s nothing I love doing more than sinking into a deep, dark depression because things aren’t going the way that I thought they would when I was a 16 year old, and it never helps me when I freak out over things like this. It’s just a little bit surprising to me that I haven’t lost my mind over all of it. I’m not going to say that I’m more mature, because that seems highly unlikely to me, but I am handling certain stimulus differently than I normally do.

I try to write more in areas besides journaling and blogging now, so I need to do that for a while.

I already gave you one video, but here’s another one. I loved Ministry when I was a tiny little chap, and I recently found out that Al Jorgenson has been cranking out albums as fast as he can over the past few years, and all of them seem to be about how much he hates our current president. He hates the President and he loves to rock. We have so much in common!

Sure, it might not be your cup of tea, but what do you care? Nobody watches the fucking videos that I embed in these posts anyway.




Take Care.