Mind Your Own God Damn Business

I love complaining. So I’m going to.

First of all, I love feeling clean. Hopping out of the shower and knowing that my skin is mostly sweat, stink and oil free is fantastic. Throw in some deodorant and a pair of clean underwear and I’m ready to seize the day. Throw in some pants and I get angry, but that’s not really the point.

During most of the year, I can shower once a day and feel this way for 24 hours. Obviously if I work out or something I have to shower, and I’m usually starting to get kind of gross by the time I hop in the shower again, but not out of control.

Except during the summer. Those of you who have never met me and haven’t ever come into contact with me at all even once before reading this blog post might not know this, but heat turns me into a sniveling bitch. Anyone who’s spent even enough time around me to remember my first name knows that as soon as it gets hotter than 70 degrees I start whining and moping at anyone that will listen.

Part of the reason that I hate it so much is that it reduces the duration of that “clean feeling” I enjoy after a shower. October through early May, I get about 24 hours, like I said. During this time of year, my clean time is drastically reduced. I enjoy about eight or nine minutes before there’s a nice hearty bowl of ball soup cooking in my underpants. I just went running, and after showering off, I’m already starting to feel like maybe I’d better take another shower. Thank God I don’t live somewhere that’s actually hot. I got a facebook message from a girl I went to college with that mentioned that it’s 115 in Arizona, and she wishes that it were 5 or 10 degrees cooler. Oh well. I’ve still got August and early September to complain.

Second of all: I suck at chess.
This statement is always true, but is even more accurate when I’m playing computer chess. My friend Brian started playing again recently, and I’ve been playing against with him. When we’re playing against each other, I’m good enough to play one game where I lose but don’t embarrass myself. That one game always fries my brain, and in the next game I lose in two turns.

I’ve been having a good time with him, so I looked for some chess games for my gameboy. There are a few really really shitty ones that have a very strong “Programmed in somebody’s basement in 1996″ flavor to them (Think lots of lens flare and crappy midi songs), and then a pretty decent one called “Chessmaster: The Art of Learning”. I love learning, and I have plenty to learn about chess, so I downloaded…bought, I mean. I bought it, and started playing around with it. There are some good aspects to it. There is some pretty good instruction on forking, spearing, pinning, discovery…crap that I didn’t know anything about before I got my hands on the copy of the game.

Unfortunately, the game has one minor flaw, which is that I am way too retarded to play it.

After spending a while playing some minigames to learn some new techniques, I decided to play a real game against the computer. There are three tiers of players, so I chose easy, and from the list of easy players, I picked the easiest one. It was someone named Ben. Ben is an adorable 7 year old Asian kid with an elo rating of 500 (an elo rating is apparently a number that helps identify how good you are at chess, and after doing a little bit of googling, I can now say with confidence that a rating of 500 is abysmally low).

And so, my tiny Asian friend Ben, sporting a wide grin and a sparkle in his slanty eyes, with his elo rating so low it is typically reserved for animals, zombies and the mentally handicapped, played me in a game of chess.

And that tiny mother fucker whipped my ass.

I played him again. Same result.

I’ve been playing him ever since, and that little shit mops the floor with me about eight out of ten times. It’s infuriating.

First of all, it pisses me off to lose on the easiest level 80% of the time. Second of all, the easiest level is personified by a seven year old kid, further rubbing salt in my wounds. I know that the picture is probably just some stock photo that the game makers used to give their “Chess for retards” level of their game a more human feel, but the more I lose to him, the more smug his grin looks. I can almost hear him taunting me.

“You embarrassing yourself, roundeye!” Ben laughs gleefully as I sit and stare at the chess board. “I pray against dog that put up more fight than this!”
“You shut the fuck up or I swear to God I’ll cut your throat!” I hiss under my breath at my gameboy.
“Whatevah! Than you just roose to corpse!” He laughs.
Covered in sweat, I move my rook.
“You sure you want to do that?” He is still grinning just as widely as ever at me.
“Yes. I think so – yes. Shut up!” I am trying to sound tough, but my voice is cracking.
“You tha boss! Checkmate! A HA HA HA!!! You roose again! I can’t berieve it!”

And so on and so on.

Even on the rare occasions that I do win against Ben, it’s a shitty, hollow victory – I just beat the easiest level of a chess game that’s personified by a toddler. Am I really entitled to feel proud of that? That’s not a rhetorical question; the answer, of course, is “no”.

But it’s not all doom and gloom.

The good news is, I just saw “Hot Rod” for the first time. Most of you probably don’t remember that movie. It came out…last year, I think? It had Andy Sandberg in it? It didn’t look very good in any of the previews and it bombed with critics and moviegoers alike? No? Nothing?

Doesn’t surprise me.

What did surprise me was how awesome the movie actually was.

I won’t tell you everything about it, but here’s a little taste. Those of you that are familiar with “Footloose” will recognize it. The video even starts with Kevin Bacon tearing it up in the warehouse in a fit of rage. My girlfriend’s roommate described this scene as a combination of “Rocky” and “Flashdance”. She did that because she’s never seen “Footloose”. It’s even the same fucking song, for Christ’s sake. There’s not even any metal in it. Just watch it.




I need to go take a shower.