-CBF-

(I originally posted an abbreviated version of this post at the top of another one as an afterthought. After further reflection, I decided something this important warranted more inspection. If you were one of the small handful of readers who saw it before I removed it yesterday, I apologize for repeating myself, although that should be nothing new for anyone who reads this blog with any regularity.)

I wrote a post recently documenting the stupid things that I do when I’m by myself.

My room, last night, 6:47 PM.

On an unrelated note, I was masturbating last night.

Without really thinking about it, when I finished, I yelled “Knock out!”, like they do in Super Punch Out when you…well, when you knock someone out.

I spent a couple of moments thinking “Did I really just do that?” followed by peals of laughter, followed by wondering  if I have a brain tumor or something.

What the fuck makes me do this crap? I don’t remember EXACTLY what I was thinking about while I was engaged in “The Act”, but I have a pretty good idea. There only about three or four things that I’ve got on my mind when I’m enjoying that activity, and none of them even kind of have to do with Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. I have no idea what sort of faulty wiring my brain has, but the part that gets triggered when I climax apparently also stores sound bites from video games.

After some reflection, I think that there are a few important facts that we can glean from this experience and things that need to be considered:

1. If I’m going to scream things like that out, I should go all out. What do I mean by “All out”, you ask?

It’s simple, really: The next time that I’m masturbating, I’ll dim the lights, hit up the Internet, light a few candles…and start blasting the fight music from Punch Out.

Not familiar with that particular tune? No problem. Just hit play on the video below while you keep reading.

Despite what it may sound like from outside, this will not be what I'm looking at while in the throws of passion. At least, not as far as you know.

This course of action has several practical uses:

• My bizarre outbursts will seem, at least on the surface, to make sense. The next time that it happens, I can write it off as a result of the music that was playing and go about my business instead of wasting a few hours reflecting and then writing a short essay about it.
• Say that you, a third party, know what that music means. If you happen to be aware of the fact that when you hear that tune coming from my room and the muffled sounds of me screaming “BULL CHARGE!” and “MIGHTY BLOW!” at the top of my lungs that it means I’m going to have my pants around my ankles and my junk in hand if you come in, you’ll have fair warning that now would probably be kind of a bad time to ask me if I can drive you to the mall.
• Suppose, instead, that you don’t know what that music means. Assuming that I’ve locked the door and drawn the blinds in a way that prevents you from seeing me (NEVER a sure bet, but I guess stranger things have happened), you’ll think that I’m just engaged in an incredibly heated battle with Soda Popinski, not getting off to pictures of severed limbs and Yao Ming/Burl Ives erotic slash fiction.

It’s win/win.

Just like Doc says: “Join the Nintendo fun club today, Mac!”

Next point.

2. If you are ever having sex with me, and I DON’T scream something like “SONIC BOOM!!!” or “HA-DO-KEN!”, you’ll know that I didn’t actually have an orgasm.

Sorry.

It’s just a fact.

Speaking of,

3. Is this bizarre behavior going to remain exclusive to Punch Out? There are plenty of other games with similarly entertaining sound bites. Street Fighter II (“Ha-do-ken!”, “Tiger Uppercut!”, “Sonic Boom!”, “Yoga Flame!”), Mortal Kombat (“Finish him!”, “Fatality!”) and Altered Beast (“Rise From Your Grave!”, “Welcome To Your Doom!”) all come to mind. Am I going to reflexively yell “I’M BAD!” next time?

Who knows? Certainly not me.

4. Seriously. Do I have some sort of degenerative brain disease? I still have no idea why I did that. I guess that it probably doesn’t matter.

Oh well. Even if I’m dying of Alzheimer’s as we speak, this combination of two things that I love certainly adds a touch of whimsy and humor to an activity that I already find thoroughly entertaining.

Now excuse me. I have to enjoy some alone time.

I’M BAD!!!

-CBF-

Grandfathers.

A lot of people love theirs.

"IF YOU THINK I WON'T PUT YOU INTO THE WALL JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE MY FLESH AND BLOOD, YOU ARE SORELY MISTAKEN !!! I'LL KILL YOU, YOU LITTLE MOTHERFUCKER!!!"

They’re portrayed in the media as kind, gentle, friendly old men who want to watch the weather channel or read stories to their grandkids. They have the wisdom that comes from years spent during kinder, gentler times.

Times when a gallon of gas cost eleven cents, women couldn’t drive, and the fucking neighbor kids stayed off of the god damn lawn.

My grandfather does not fit this delightful stereotype. Far from it, unfortunately. He’s old, to be certain – he turned 88 yesterday, but I wouldn’t describe him as kind, gentle OR friendly. He leans more towards, “Crazy, incontinent and sort of mean”.

I got to spend most of my day yesterday hanging out with him.

It started out innocently enough. The family hopped in the van so we could spend an hour and a half in a car driving to an Olive Garden in another city.

It seemed like a decent plan – Eat some breadsticks, listen to him bitch for a little bit about how I don’t come to see him enough, get a lecture about Jesus,  listen to him complain that he’s old and in pain and then claim that I don’t understand what it’s like if I try to offer sympathy, pay the bill and then spend another hour and a half driving home.

And that’s how it went…sort of. When we showed up, it was the apocalypse at the Olive Garden. The reception area was swarming with people. There was hardly anywhere to stand, much less sit. Our party was already on the waiting list, so I found a seat and waited for our little buzzer to go off.

I have spent some time working in restaurants, and as a result, I treat dining out the same way I handle getting pulled over by a police officer; I try to be as unintrusive, polite and unmemorable as possible. I know that the people serving me are fellow humans just trying to make a living, and deserve to be treated as such. I also know that they are preparing a product that I am going to put in my mouth and swallow, they’re doing it somewhere where I can’t watch them prepare it, and they’re not getting paid very much to do it. It’s true that you’re paying them, and it’s their job, and you should expect a certain level of service in exchange for your hard earned cash. Here’s my counter-argument:

They are preparing a product that I am going to put in my mouth and swallow, they’re doing it somewhere where I can’t watch them prepare it, and they’re not getting paid very much to do it.

The defense rests, your honor.

My grandfather does not see it that way.

Olive Garden's special "Toilet Paper" Will do in a pinch. For God's sake, you get as many of them as you want!

As soon as I showed up, he was bent out of shape because there was no toilet paper in the Men’s room. He complained about it to the hostess. You know, the one who was dealing with seven hundred people trying to get a seat at the Olive Garden. No toilet paper in the men’s room is certainly a problem, but probably relatively low on her list of priorities. 45 minutes later, they were still prioritizing “Getting people sat and fed as quickly as possible” (which, for the record, is the point of fucking restaurants) over “giving my Grandfather something to wipe his butt with”, so he demanded to speak to a manager.

I don’t know what they do to Olive Garden managers, but they all have that “I’m so friendly that it crosses the line from being endearing to really uncomfortable” thing going. It’s like they’ve had a lobotomy, or they hang out in the kitchen and huff paint all day. Either way, he came out and replaced the toilet paper, averting the disaster.

We hadn’t even sat down at our table yet, and we were already off to a fantastic start. As we walked to our seats, I wondered just how angry the hostess was and how many sets of balls would get a chance to gently perch on top of my food before it was brought to me.

The meal was innocuous enough. My grandfather always wants salad, and then thinks that the servers are trying to swindle him when they bring out those big bowls of salad that everyone eats from, but after we tried to explain to him that there’s as much as he wants, he calms down.

We finished, my Dad paid the bill to avoid any retarded fights, and we got ready to go. I was in the clear.

At least, that’s what I thought.

“Did anyone save room for desert?” our server asked us.

“No, we have cake and ice cream at home,” my Grandfather responded curtly.

And that was when the real fun begin.

As soon as we got to my grandfather’s house, we sat down in the living room with him.

It started out with the usual. He made it clear that he was in terrible health, and he had diabetes and cancer and this was probably the last time we would ever see him, so we should be nice to him.

I always find this conversation kind of insulting. It makes it sound like he thinks that I’m going to be a dick to him, but that I’ll decide “Ah, hell. I’ll go easy on him, because he’ll be dead soon.” I’m not retarded. I know that people die, and I don’t base how nice I am to them on how much longer I think that they’re going to live. The real problem, though, is the fact that he thinks that I would pull any punches or show mercy to him because of his weakened state. It’s like a slap in the face.

Second of all, he’s been giving us this lecture for almost a decade now, and I don’t believe him anymore. Every time I see him he claims that this is it, we’ll never see each other again, but three months later I’m back in the car driving down to his house. He’s a fucking highlander or something. I’m going to be making this trip for the rest of my life. There can be only one.

After that, my Grandfather started talking about how old he was. Then he told us that this was a good birthday, and that he had enjoyed his 80th as well, so maybe eights were good luck for him. Then, he pointed out that he couldn’t remember anything anymore. I suggested that if he wouldn’t remember, we could just all tell him that it was his 88th birthday again next year. Then I asked him how old he would like to be next year.

"Some babies only live 3 days! Women are made of ribs! I can't eat ribs because I have diabetes! How did you people get in my house? Where am I? TIGER UPPERCUT!!!

“However old the Lord wants me to be!” he said while choking back tears.

And just like that, it was on.

“Some babies only live three days!” he said through tears.

The next forty minutes was rambling stories followed by non-sequiturs followed by religious goofiness.

To his credit, it wasn’t as mean as usual, but it was plenty crazy.

We would never clone a human, because it was too complicated. The idea of cloning was just to ridiculous. He immediately followed that up by pointing out that God had made man out of dirt and women out of ribs.

People were smoking pot on 4/20 because society doesn’t care anymore what people do.

The Lord was great, whether I believed it or not.

Teaching was what people did when they wanted to take the easy path instead of entering a more difficult, competitive field.

The assholes at the DMV refused to renew his license just because he came in with a walker and failed the eye exam the first time.

After a solid three hour tearful soliloquy, it was finally time to go home.

I said my goodbyes, ran to the van and spent another hour and a half driving home.

If that is what being old is like, I’m killing myself before it gets to that point.

Good day.

-CBF-

My little sister was in town last weekend.

While she was here, we spent some time looking through old family photo albums from the early 90′s.

At the time, my little sister was about two years old. As a teenager and young adult, my little sister has been a delight – funny, clever, interesting and an all-around great person. As a toddler, my little sister was basically a hairless feral dog. She was always screaming and biting. She didn’t really trust anyone in the family but my Mom. Any attempt to talk to her was met with a suspicious glare.

Equally entertaining, but in different ways was my little brother. My parents, bless their hearts, made sure that none of my baby pictures were revealing. I was naked is some of them, most of them, even (some things never change), but there was always something covering up my unmentionables.

Not my little brother. He was naked almost as much as me as a child, but my parents were too tired to worry about covering up his goods, apparently, and it’s hard to find a picture of him without cock’n'balls flying everywhere.

Here’s a little sidenote: My little brother and I have picked up a new hobby.

First, watch this video.



Ever since we saw that, whenever we’re around each other, one of us spontaneously starts screaming what we’re doing, and then the other one yells “LIKE A BOSS!” in between. It sounds stupid, right? It is. It’s a lot more fun than you might think. Try it with someone sometime.

Best of all in those albums, though, were the pictures of middle school me. I obviously can’t put any of them in here, because I’m trying to keep the personal information to a minimum on here, so photographs would be a bad call.Trust me, though. I looked like an idiot. It’s always funny for me to look back at those pictures now and think about how this was the point in my life where I was, by far, the most concerned with how I looked, and this is what I managed to come up with. Tight rolled jeans or really short Umbros, large, round glasses, gigantic neon T-shirts, a thick fog of self-loathing, and that stupid chin-length, split down the middle hair cut that only 12 year old boys and soccer moms have.

Which brings me to the subject of this post.

Currently, almost all middle school boys have their hair cut in a bob. For those of you that don’t know, it’s this kind of long, shaggy, androgynous haircut. Shouldn’t bother me, right? Wrong. It creates all kinds of problems for me.

First of all, I feel like they’re trying to bait me into making fun of them.

Middle school kids are incredibly judgmental. They spend 80% to 90% of their day badmouthing their classmates for any perceived imperfections. The last ten to twenty percent of their time is spent badmouthing any adults in the vicinity. Sometimes, that adult is me.

Does this offend me? Not really. When I first started subbing, I was really afraid to set foot in a middle school, because I remembered how hard it had been for me when I was a student in one. It turns out, though, that being insulted by a 12 year old isn’t nearly as hard to deal with when you’re over twice their age.

First of all, their insults almost always miss the mark. I wear running shoes instead of dress shoes most of the time, because I’m on my feet in seven hour chunks. It’s more comfortable, and it’s not as though it’s my wedding day or I’m making a state of the union address; I’m a fucking substitute teacher. I also have really hairy arms, and I tend to wear a lot of blue.

Those are the three things that I get made fun of for the most, probably in that order.

Can you see why I don’t give a shit? I might get a little upset if they were to take some potshots at my lack of a career, or my receding hairline, or my inability to reliably maintain an erection during the first month or so that I’m sexually active with a girl because of nerves (I swear, that’s not true. Why did I say it, then? Because fuck you), but when the best that they can do is make fun of me for my shirts being blue too often, it’s hard to take them seriously.

Here’s the problem, though: I can’t really say anything back. Well, I guess that’s not really the problem, because I suppose that I technically could – I don’t think that I would be breaking any laws – but it would be pretty unprofessional and create a pretty shitty environment for the students. The real problem is that they say and do so many ridiculous things that are begging to be made fun of, and I have to show restraint and bite my tongue.

I hate showing restraint.

Let’s go back to the haircuts. To help emphasize my point, I’ve created a little game. It’s called “Middle School Boy or Adult Woman?” The object is simple. You look at a picture and try to figure out if you’re looking at a 12 year old boy or a grown woman.

Ready? Here we go!

Can you determine the gender of the people above?

Neither can I!

Is Person A Tommy Spencer, 12 year old soccer enthusiast and proud owner of a hairless set of balls, or is it Samantha Dawkins, high-powered executive and proud mother of two? Is Person B smoldering hot 20-something actress Keira Knightley, or awkward, prepubescent chess club president Bobby Jenkins, 13 year old boy? Is person C Katie Holmes, former Dawson’s Creek star and current wife of Tom Cruise, or Castle Greyskull inhabitant and certified bachelor Skeletor?

Who the fuck knows!? It’s like I’m looking at four photos of the exact same person!

You see what I mean? Every time I set foot in a middle school, I’ve got half a classroom of four foot tall kids with high, shrill voices and women’s haircuts. They’re ripe for mockery anyway, AND they’re making fun of me because I’m wearing running shoes with slacks.  but instead of calling them on it, I have to say something like “You know what will help distract you from my shoes? Factoring the odd-numbered equations on page 216 in your book. Remember to put your name at the top, because it’s due at the end of the block. Bitches.”

"A man with hairy arms? That's the most ridiculous thing that I've ever seen!"

Haircuts aren’t the only problem. One day I was in an 8th grade classroom with a girl sporting a noticeable mustache. She was pretty snotty, and during some free time, she was, believe it or not, making fun of how hairy my arms were. I wanted to call her Magnum P.I., or tell her how impressed I was, because I couldn’t grow a mustache like that until I was in my early 20′s, but could I? NO! Instead, I was forced to giggle to myself at the thought of doing those things, which in turn resulted in more sass.

The other, more important problem with the haircuts is that it makes it hard for me to determine anyone’s gender in a classroom. The boys still haven’t hit puberty yet, so their voices are still high and their faces are still androgynous. A lot of the boys have girl’s haircuts, and pretty much all of the girls do. Take a look at D in the quiz above again. Suppose that he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans instead of a tie. Probably a boy, right? But how sure are you? Now, suppose that subject D’s name is “Madison”.

You’re fucked.

Is this one of those things where I’m just going to complain without proposing a viable solution to the problem?

Please. Of course not.

Here’s the plan: From here on out, boys will have two haircuts that they can choose from:

1. MOHAWKS "I pity the fool that can't determine my gender based on my haircut!"

2. FLATTOPS "I also pity the fool, because the author of this has never seen any of my movies or listened to my music, so he doesn't know any of my catch phrases."

Looking good, boys! That’s not all, though. You’re not just sporting a sharp haircut, I am incredibly unlikely to mistake you for a woman!

That settles that. I know what you’re thinking, though: What if a GIRL shows up to school with a mohawk or a flattop?

Simple.

She will receive an absolutely savage beating, because there will only one style of haircut that women will be allowed to wear to school:

THE RHINO

Fucking Awesome.

There you go.

I can already hear all of you complaining: “Is the above image a photoshop job? Assuming that it’s even real, this would take hours to do!”

Look, I don’t have the time to argue semantics with you. How long would it take to style your hair like that? I don’t know. Is it even possible? I have no idea.

Here’s what I do know, though: The person in the picture above is unmistakably a woman. So if you’re a girl, you had better show up with a fucking rhino on your head so you don’t have to deal with the indignity of a substitute teacher calling you “Sir”.

Otherwise you get caned. It’s simple.

Thank you.

-CFB-

I was driving to a nearby town the other day to turn in a subbing application for their district.

It’s not a drive I make very often. The last time was when I was working for the local newspaper, covering the local baseball team. As I was driving, I kept remembering more and more things about the drive; It had been autumn, I was nervous, and I had been on the phone, having a memorably strange conversation with the girl I was dating at the time.

It had been the conversation where she had wanted to know if we were “dating” or “going out”.

I’d like you to all join me in a moment of silence to remember one of the most tragic periods of my life. It was about this time about three years ago. During this time, I made one of the worst decisions of my life.

It all started with my first blog. I enjoyed that blog, but it brought me unspeakable pain and suffering.

Good Food, Good Feelings, Where Did I Go Wrong In Life?.

There was my little legal foray that started with me sharing all of the comical yet highly illegal hijinx that happened at my place of employment and ended with me pissing off an old employer and landing an article in the local newspaper about the dangers of foolishly posting information on the Internet. If you google my name, the first link is to the newspaper article. The second is to an employee’s blog, raving about what an untrustworthy shit head I am.

Then there were all the times that I put information that I shouldn’t have into the blog that resulted in angry friends and girlfriends.

But worst of all, there was the engaging, conversational, hilarious and often simultaneously touching and thoughtful style of writing that I used. It was this incredibly entertaining prose that won the heart of a girl that I would go on to date for several months, and would then go on to heavily regret dating, except when I was swapping dating horror stories with my friends or writing blog posts.

I have written about this train wreck of a relationship at great length, but never in THIS blog, so I need to hash it out again. Here’s why: I constantly repeat myself.

Also, I sometimes forget about all of the really insane things that she did. Have you ever had one of those moments after a relationship where you remember an event that you just shrugged off when it happened, but thinking back on it, you realize how completely inappropriate and crazy it was?

My entire relationship with this girl was like that.

I think that almost all of it can be attributed to one thing.

Blade handling some motherfucker who has, regrettably, decided that he should attempt to ice skate uphill.

As I mentioned a few months ago, I recently reread “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” by Chuck Klosterman. In his very first essay in the book, he claims that he will never be able to be satisfied in a relationship, and neither will most adults. He says that this is because pop music, romance novels, romantic movies and television have skewed the idea of what a relationship should be into an unrealistic, impossible thing. He argues that after several hundred hours of watching Sex and the City, Listening to Coldplay and watching John Cusak movies, we’ve had it beaten into our heads that relationships are intense, all-encompassing, effortless roller coasters. We want someone to stand outside of our house with a boombox like Say Anything, or to come along and take us away from our horrible life like Pretty Woman, or to sweep us off our feet and protect us from Werewolves and Vampires and eventually impregnate us with Wesley Snipes.

Don’t think I forgot about that.

The first time I read that essay, I thought that it was kind of dumb.I thought Mr. Klosterman was being kind of melodramatic for the sake of writing an interesting essay where he could have an excuse to rag on Coldplay (Something that I can always get behind, even if I don’t agree with the logic).

I don’t feel that way anymore, for two reasons.

The first is that most of the people I know that are in what appear to be healthy relationships talk about how much work it is to keep things in good condition. They enjoy their relationships, but they aren’t the effortless joyride that the movies make them out to be.

The other reason is this girl.

Uncontrollable Rage.

There are a lot of different things that could’ve explained her behavior. She could have been lying about her age and actually been 13. She could have been an idiot savant who knew a lot about behavioral neuroscience but was otherwise developmentally stunted. I think that the problem, though, was that our relationship didn’t play out like an episode of Sex and the City, and that was incredibly confusing and infuriating for her.

Let’s go back to that phone conversation about if we were “Dating” or “Going out”. I’ve told people about this conversation before, and the first thing that they ask me is “What’s the difference between those two things?”

The answer is that I don’t know, and neither did she. I asked if it had something to do with dating other people, but apparently it didn’t. She was convinced that there was a difference, but she was unable to articulate to me what it was.

My suspicion, though, is that it was this: While we were “Dating” (which I guess is apparently the more casual of the two), I was allowed to act like me and have the small idiosyncrasies that all of the boyfriends in Sex in the City do before they fully commit to whoever they’re seeing on the show.

Once we moved on to “Going out” (the more serious of the two, I think), I was supposed to drop all of the behaviors that I had previously displayed that weren’t specifically done to make her happy. This was the point where I was supposed to send flowers and sweet cards every day and quit my job so I could move to her little one bedroom apartment in Michigan. I unfortunately refused to drop a lot of those behaviors – I wouldn’t quit my job, I wouldn’t leave my friends and family, and I wouldn’t move to Michigan. Have you ever been to Michigan? It’s probably not the worst place on earth, but it’s certainly not an attractive enough destination to convince me to abandon my friends, family and job for a girl I’ve been seeing for a couple of months. No teenager ever says “I’m sick of this town. I’m picking up and leaving all of these shitheads behind. When I make it big in Lansing, Michigan, they’ll all be sorry!” (Oh, and did you see the NCAA basketball finals last night? North Carolina won. Do you want to know why? Because Michigan sucks.)

At the time, I just thought she was just crazy, but in hindsight, I realize that she was just angry and confused because I wasn’t acting like Mr. Big.

Also, she was crazy.

One time she tried t get me to understand how she was feeling about our relationship by making me watch an episode of Sex and the City.

Another time, she called me, so I called her back. She didn’t answer, so I left a message. She called me back eight hours later, furious that I had only tried to call her back once.

She frequently told me about one of her last boyfriends, who had thrown shit at her when they fought and left little “love notes” on her car that said things like “My dear little whore, call me”. She was mad that I wouldn’t do things like that.

She sent me a myspace friend invite. I didn’t accept it quickly enough, and so she got mad, withdrew it and sulked. As an added bonus, she wouldn’t tell me why, so I got to spend a week dealing with her being angry and then curtly responding “Nothing. Everything is fine.” when I asked her what the problem was.

And who can forget how frequently she would “accidentally” drink a handle of some sort of hard liquor and then spend the rest of the night puking all over the place? I think that about 50%-60% of the time that I spent in the same state with her involved this behavior, which I previously thought was reserved for 16 year olds and alcoholics. Awesome.

This post was originally going to just be about what a disaster my relationship with this girl was because she thought that relationships were supposed to work like romantic comedies, but as I’ve thought about this, I was to blame, too.

Here’s another staple of romantic comedies: The main character spends the entire movie pining over the dreamy captain of the football team, or the bitchy head cheerleader, but they realize five minutes before the credits roll that the girl they were going to make presentable for the school dance on a dare or their nerdy, bookish friend that has been there all along is the one that they’ve really been in love with the whole time.

I think I was trying to make her into the nerdy friend. I was trying to convince myself that I had been dating the really hot but kind of mean head cheerleader, and the girl who could really make me happy had been right there the whole time. Sure, I wasn’t attracted to her, and she was only kind of interesting to hang out with, and she was several hours away by plane, and she forced me to watch Sex and the City, to explain her feelings, and I will never forgive her, or that show, that stupid fucking show, but if this had been a romantic comedy, it would’ve closed with me snubbing the head cheerleader and dancing with this girl instead at our senior prom.

Well, there are two problems with this.

First of all, the nerdy friend always has self confidence issues. I’ve been the nerdy friend once or twice, and I’ve also tried to date the nerd. Whichever one of us is the nerd spends the relationship convinced that the other person doesn’t actually like them, and then spends the entire time analyzing everything that happens, convinced that everything is a snub of some sort and proof that the other person isn’t actually committed to the relationship. You’re not ignoring their myspace request because you forgot, it’s because you’re ashamed that you’re dating them. If you get too quiet at a social outing, it’s because you hate everyone there and hate being there. Eventually, the other person gets sick of everything they do being scrutinized for malice, and things end.

The other problem is that a lot of times, the nerdy friend isn’t the someone you’re attracted to, no matter what the latest teen movie tells you, and they’re just as hard to deal with. The secret that the movies don’t tell you is that the nerdy friend can be just as nuts as the hot, mean girl. Crazy isn’t just reserved for attractive people, and, conversely, there are plenty of really calm, cool attractive people. Ignore this, and suddenly you’re dealing with somebody that you’re not that into, and they’re still starting fights with you over myspace and the alarming lack of sticky notes on their car accusing them of being a whore.

Lesson learned. From now on, I am basing my relationship decisions on one show and one show only:

Mr. Belvedere.

I'll be honest. I've never actually seen an episode of this show. I don't even really know what it's about. That's not going to stop me from using the lessons it teaches to pull a lot of tail, though.

Figure it out.

-CBF-

I was working at my old high school last week. My last class of the day was a planning period with a leadership student. We didn’t have anything to do, I couldn’t leave, because I had that one student, and it turned out that she was a guitar player in a thrash band, so we just sat around and chatted about bands we liked for the hour and a half. It was fun. I have ten years on high school kids, so they seem a little bit like goofballs to me, but they’re excited about things in a way most adults aren’t, and it makes them hard to not like. They say some goofy things, but, hey. I said most of those same things when I was 17, and I STILL say a lot of stupid things.

She kind of reminded me of a teenage me, at least in respect to her enthusiasm for music. Not specifically the bands that she liked (although there was a lot of overlap. She was really into Pantera, and she LOVED Slipknot), but the way that she felt about them.

She was very, very into all of her bands, convinced that they were significant in ways that they probably aren’t.

Okay, so maybe it IS a verifiable fact that Slipknot is awesome. They have two guys in the band who's only job is to stand on top of drum sets and freak out.

She seemed to believe that what’s good and what isn’t is a black-and-white, absolute-truth kind of thing and not a matter of preference – that “Slipknot is good” is just as provable as “2+2=4″, not just a completely subjective opinion.

She had a lot of her identity tied up in her music, so I think that she had to turn her nose up at bands she would’ve liked but that didn’t sync with her self image, and also listen to some bands that I think she mostly “liked” because she thought that she should. For instance, she loves Dream Theater because they’re really “talented” (I have trouble believing that anyone actually likes Dream Theater, no matter how good they are at playing their instruments). On the other hand, she can’t understand the joy of listening to “Chains of Love” by Erasure, because she can’t enjoy anything without double bass drums and screaming without worrying that someone will be judging her (She’s got a point, but when a song is as hot as Chains of Love, you have to realize that every rule has exceptions. Hot, nasty, spiky-haired, vinyl-pants-wearing exceptions.)

I have a theory about this. Most people who are really into music have a band or two that they claim to like just because they think that they should like that band. Then, when people ask them about the music they like, they can talk about how great that CD is and how it completely changed the face of the genre.

Here’s the thing, though: They don’t actually like that music. They tolerate it, but when they’re alone and there’s no one to impress, they never actually listen to it. No one is more likely to do this than a teenager. Some of them (including teenage me) feel like they’re defined by the music that they listen to, and so they have to be sure that they’re listening to the “correct” bands, regardless of how much they like them.

A lot of people do this with The Trout Mask Replica. I’ve listened to it. As near as  I can tell, it’s a bunch of atonal 1970′s blues, but people talk about it like it’s the Citizen Kane of music. Maybe it really is good, but I’m apparently not sharp enough to grasp its brilliance (although I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, because I listen to terrible music for the most part). Tell me what you think:

3OH!3 is the most recent example of this that I can think of. At the beginning of this school year, Everyone in 8th grade and up was obsessed with them. Now, everyone claims to hate them because they “sold out”. Students say that it’s because the band has somehow changed, but they only have one album, so I think that it has more to do with the fact that lots and lots of people know who they are and like them now. I’ve tried to discuss this with students – that the album that they were obsessed with six months ago sounds EXACTLY the same now as it did then, but they don’t seem to buy it. I guess what I’m saying is, if you go from loving an album to hating it because other people listen to it, did you ever actually like it in the first place?

I think most of the time people break out of this habit (although not all of them. I know a 23 year old that has a terminal case of it). I was guilty of it – and I’ll bet I still am, I’m just not self aware enough to identify the ways that I do it now. But one day, you finally decide that it’s okay to listen to goofy music that you like, wear uncool clothes and laugh at low-brow movies that you find funny. You start basing what you like on what you like, instead of what you think you should like.

You're not impressing anyone, you little shit.

You know where a lot of people never shake this shit, though? Books. People buy and read assloads of self help books, airy humor, Twilight and romance novels.

If you ASK people what they read, though, they almost always only list a bunch of pretentious 500 page classics in foreign languages that nobody actually enjoys reading. SOMEONE is buying Dr. Phil’s books, but no one is willing to fess up to it – if it’s you and you like them, quit being a fucking pussy about it, and admit that you like them. Don’t try to impress me with some bullshit about how much you love A Tale of Two Cities and 1984. I’ll start things off. I just finished reading “the War of Art”, which is really just 150 pages of a guy finding different ways to say “GET PUMPED ABOUT BEING CREATIVE!”

Your turn.

And if you tell me that you are a “voracious” reader, so help me God I will punch you in the goddamn face. It irritates me on two levels: first of all, people always say this because they are trying to make it sound like they’re casually telling you about a hobby, when what they’re really trying to do is impress you, the same way lawyers and Harvard alums are always desperately trying to slip that information into casual conversation.

Second of all, it irritates me that they use the word “voracious”. Nobody uses this word for anything other than to maximize how douchy they sound when they’re describing their reading habits. No one ever says “I didn’t have many friends growing up, but I didn’t mind because I was a voracious masturbater,” or “No, I don’t have a television anymore, but I don’t need that idiot box, because I’m a voracious paint-huffer”. People only use that word when they’re describing how they read. It’s just another opportunity to sound like a dick. Besides, nobody is going to understand those fancy multisyllabic words you’re saying with my balls stuffed in your mouth. Then you will be feeling far too lugubrious to tell anyone how voracious your reading habits are, you obsequious addlepate.

See what a dick I sound like when I talk like that?

I’m getting off topic.

We talked about some other bands, and I mentioned a few that I had really loved in high school that I now realized were pretty terrible (see Limp Bizkit). I told her that at least one of the bands she liked would be like that, too. It was hard to say which one, but in ten years, she would look back at how much she loved that band and wonder to herself “what the fuck was I thinking?’

She was polite enough to let me say that without arguing, but I could tell that she thought that I was being stupid, which I guess makes sense. When you’re in high school, you’re pretty sure that you already know everything that there is to know. No one can really have any insights that you haven’t already figured out, and so advice from other people is pretty useless. Either you already knew it, or you disagree with it, so you think it’s wrong. It’ll happen, though. It happens to everyone.

As I’ve mentioned, this is why I refuse to get a tattoo; I can only imagine the kind of stupid shit that I would have on my body for the rest of my life if I’d gotten one in my early 20′s. Hell, a middle school girl I know recently got a tattoo of her boyfriend’s name on her back. She’ll definitely never not regret that decision. That’s what I told her, actually.

Anyway, it was kind of fun to just get some time to chat with her. She was pretty cool, and I usually have 30 kids in a classroom, so I can’t really talk to them because I have to make them watch a video or fill out worksheets, and I don’t really like hanging out with them in my free time. Spending that hour and a half talking kind of reminded me what it felt like to be a teenager, and have that supercharged enthusiasm for everything that I liked and everything that I did. I don’t think I care about anything anymore as much as she cares about seeing Slayer live this summer. I kind of miss that.

But I really do like being able to enjoy “Chains of Love”.

Someday, she will too.

And now, you can.

Live.

On The Rosie O’Donnel Show.



I almost want to be gay when I hear this song.

Did I say almost? I meant “absolutely”.