Mind Your Own God Damn Business

1: Over the holidays, I read “The Chris Farley Show”, which, believe it or not, is a biography of Chris Farley. It was over 300 pages and thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. Because of it, I decided to head over to Hulu (which is rapidly becoming my favorite site on the Internet) to check out some Chris Farley clips. While I was digging through them, I realized something.

When I was in middle school, I was really gung-ho about a lot of things. Saturday morning cartoons, Umbro soccer shorts, the Macintosh LC, Super Nintendo, Anthrax, boobs and staying up to watch Saturday Night Live. As I’ve grown older, I’ve occasionally revisited the things that I loved when I was 13. I’ll fire up a Super Nintendo emulator, or download an old episode of a cartoon I used to watch, or listen to an old CD.

Almost always, the results are disappointing. I get a quick, enjoyable wave of nostalgia which is slowly followed by the realization that whatever it is that I’m watching, listening to or playing isn’t as cool as I remember it being. I still enjoy it because it reminds me of my past, but there’s no way that I would like it if I hadn’t been exposed to it at an early age.

Whenever I find out that something that I loved as a child wasn’t actually very cool, it bums me out a little bit. It’s kind of fun to think that the things I was into at 13 were as special as I thought that they were when I was experiencing them for the first time. I suppose that in a way it helps me stay young; I don’t spend as much time reminiscing about how much kinder and simpler the world was when I was a kid and bitching about how great music was when I was young as opposed to the trash that kids listen to now, because it keeps me honest; the crap I liked as a kid was just as shitty as the crap that kids like now.

Anyway, as of late, whenever I revisit something from my past, my expectations for it tend to be a little bit lower. I anticipate thinking “This is not very cool anymore, but I can see why I loved it at 13″, because that’s almost always the thought that goes through my head.

Up until tonight, the only real exception to the rule had been boobs, which are just as great as I imagined them being at 13. They’re timeless.

After tonight, though, I think that Chris Farley might be another exception. I spent a lot of time this evening watching clips of him on Hulu, and I think he might actually be funnier than I remember. I spent 45 minutes looking through clips of him, and they’re all funny. Even when the skit is terrible, the parts with him crack me up. Take this one, for instance.

Watch the video. Suffer through as much of it as you can. It’s not funny. Then, skip to minute 5.




I have no idea why the brief moment with Chris Farley is so funny to me. Maybe it’s the beard. Maybe it’s Adam Sandler repeatedly having to jerk his head away from the camera so it won’t catch him laughing. Maybe it’s because he speaks loudly and slowly like the pepper boy is retarded. The bottom line is that no matter how many times I watch those 20 seconds of an otherwise awful skit, I crack up. I was going to try to find the funniest one out of all of them, but I can’t do it. Just click this link and check them all out. It’s worth it.

Riddle me this, Riddle me that, is it worse to get cancer, or watch Ace Ventura Pet Detective?

Granted, this is about a ten year career condensed into some of the funniest things that he ever did, but I’m not sure that matters. I thought that Jim Carrey was really funny when I was 14 too, and you’d be hard pressed to find ten seconds of comedy from him that I respond to with anything but uncontrollable rage.

2: Tonight, after going running, I was sitting at my computer. I stood up to go take a shower.

Suddenly, I felt an intense pain in my groin area. It was a very confusing moment for me. I couldn’t figure out how my forward motion was causing my junk to feel like someone had tied it to the desk when I wasn’t paying attention.

After stopping, slowly moving backward and then examining things more closely, I realized the problem: My headphone cable had somehow wrapped around my goods, and the end of it had ended up on the floor (The cable, of course. You flatter me). I had stepped on the end of the cable when I stood up, which had then resulted in the “your wang is tangled up in a chord that you’re walking away from” feeling that stopped me dead in my tracks. What was perplexing to me was how the chord ended up there in the first place.

What makes it especially perplexing to me is the fact that I was, in an extremely unusual turn of events, fully clothed. I don’t remember stuffing my headphone cable down the front of my pants and looping it around my penis, but apparently that’s exactly what I did.

Oh, and I googled “tied penis” to try and find an appropriate image. After seeing my options, I decided against it. Your welcome.

3: I watched “The Wrestler” last night, and I really liked it. For those of you that don’t know, although I’m guessing that all of you do, “The Wrestler” is about, believe it or not, a fictional wrestler named Randy “The Ram” Robinson. More specifically, it’s a story about a wrestler who was a superstar in the 80′s, but twenty years later is washed up, injured, working behind the counter in a deli and reduced to wrestling in high school gymnasiums and attending small, painfully empty sports memorabilia events to milk the last few dollars out of what’s left of his career. His love interest in the movie is a stripper named Cassidy who is also facing the twilight of a career that probably peaked at about the same time that Randy’s did.

Everyone has been talking about what great jobs Micky Rourke (Randy) and Marisa Tomei (Cassidy) did in the movie (They’re both up for Oscars for their respective roles) and although I’m no expert, I was really impressed by the job that they did. They were both the perfect actors to cast for the roles, and they nailed their parts. Everything coming out of their mouths seemed genuine, and there were numerous times when they weren’t saying anything but it was still abundantly clear what was going through their heads.

"The Ram"

Acting aside, I thought it was a really interesting story, too. It hit on a subject that I seem to find fascinating, which is realizing that the rules of life have changed on someone because something that they thought was a constant was actually very temporary, and so they never bothered to come up with a backup plan. As any of you that know me even casually are aware, I constantly talk about my early 20′s working as a cook. I was relatively satisfied flipping burgers for a living. I was making good enough money to live with a roommate, play video games and buy alcohol, and that was all I needed.

Then one day I started paying closer attention to the 38 year olds I worked with who wanted more than a playstation and one bedroom in a two bedroom apartment out of life, and were having a lot more trouble finding a girl who wanted to hook up with a guy in his late 30′s who sold pancakes for a living. They were ready to move on to the next stage of their life, but they had kind of painted themselves into a corner and didn’t know any other way to do things, so for the most part they just got bitter and tried to pretend, mostly unsuccessfully, that they were still 21.

I saw a lot of that at play in The Wrestler. Randy never prepared for life after wrestling, and 20 years later, when his fame has dwindled down to nothing, he’s almost completely alone, has a bum heart, an estranged daughter that he knows nothing about and is selling potato salad to pay his rent. His big rival from his glory days, “The Ayatollah”, has a used car dealership that pays the bills and more importantly, he seems relatively happy.

Cassidy isn’t old, but too old to have much success as a stripper anymore (Although I have to say, Marisa Tomei looks pretty awesome at 44), and, just like Randy, she’s doesn’t seem quite sure what to make of life now that the rules have changed on her and her looks aren’t paying the bills like they used to. (I would also just like to point out how lucky I am that there is not a market for seeing me naked. If I almost didn’t make it through college because I was just a little bit too comfortable as a line cook, there is no fucking way that I would’ve had the discipline get a degree if I could have been a stripper. I don’t know how much money they make exactly, but I’m nearly positive that it’s way, WAY more than ten bucks an hour.)

Even though it was really depressing, I liked watching the characters struggle with that realization, and it was really interesting to watch them try to figure out how to live now that life had changed on them, and the ending was pretty much perfect.

I constantly bitch about Kevin Smith movies because I hate the dialogue; it’s usually clever, but it doesn’t ever sound like something that somebody would actually say, and so it’s just a constant reminder to me that I’m watching actors recite lines that somebody else wrote.

I can’t take Nicholas Cage seriously in anything that he’s in, because as near as I can tell, he has two emotions: “endearingly confused” and “tough”, and most characters call for a wider spectrum than that. Seriously. Watch “Con-Air” sometime. Listen to his southern accent. Then, spend three hours trying to figure out how he got that role. Doesn’t, like, HALF of America move to L.A. and New York every year to try and make it acting? I just can’t believe that the talent pool is so shallow that they can’t find someone else for a fraction of the cost. As a side note, I picked Nicholas Cage as an example because he was considered for the roll of The Ram in “The Wrestler”. I’m not the only one who thinks that casting him would’ve made for a much more mediocre movie. Everything I’ve read on this subject talks about how much shittier the movie would have been if they had cast Cage for the role. I wonder how that makes Nicholas Cage feel, to see Rourke up for an Oscar and every single review of the movie pointing out what a pile of shit it would be if they had used him instead. I think I would be pissed off.

I’m getting off track. The point is, there are a lot of things that can happen in a movie that take you out of it and remind you that you’re just watching a movie, and none of those happened to me while watching this.

4: Some students at the middle school that I was working at were in gym class and they decided to pat down their balls with Icy Hot while another one of them filmed their reaction. When I asked one of them why he did that, he told me “To see how it would feel”.

Fortunately, they were all clothed, so there were no child pornography charges to worry about.

Unfortunately, it is apparently incredibly uncomfortable to put Icy Hot on your balls, so the students spent a few minutes running back and forth yelling “Ahh! Hot! Hot!” before going to the principal’s office for relief and being sent home to clean up.

I’m sorry. There was a typo in that last paragraph. I put “Unfortunately” where I meant to put “Much to my amusement”. I used to hate middle school, but it’s really starting to grow on me, and it’s all about shit like this. Elementary school kids wouldn’t think to do this. High school kids would think about it, but would be too smart to actually do it. No, you really need to be in the zone to not only come up with the idea to put Icy Hot on your balls, but to convince other people to do it AND to film their reaction. It really made my day. And everyone else’s as near as I can tell. During the day I would intermittently hear hysterical laughter coming from a teacher’s room, and I would know that they had just heard.

Now 120% funnier than Jim Carrey!

Now that I have a better understanding of how the 13 year old mind works, I have decided to start baiting the classrooms that I work in. I’ll put Icy Hot containers all over the place and then look the other way. I’ll place a belt sander on my desk and then conveniently “have” to leave the room to “take care of something”. I’ll put a piranha tank on the floor with a “DO NOT teabag the piranha tank!” sign next to it (I know. This one is almost unfair. Putting the tank at perfect tea-bagging height is temptation enough, but with a sign explicitly forbidding it, most middle school males will be physically unable to resist submerging their balls into the tank.) If they’re going to do this stuff anyway, shouldn’t they at least be doing it somewhere it can make me laugh?

I figure that I’ll be able to do this once or twice before I get called into district headquarters and they start grilling me on the unusually high occurrence of self-inflicted-testicle injury in my classrooms. My response will be simple: “I have no idea how this keeps happening!” I’ll say as I put an open container of Icy Hot on the table, slide it towards the administrator and then deliberately fix my gaze in the opposite direction.

Well, that pretty much taps me for now. I’ll leave you with one more clip of Chris Farley yelling and flailing and cracking me up as hard as he can:




Have a good Superbowl Sunday. Go Cardinals, I guess.