I have a friend who was introduced to me through a mutual acquaintance. A few weeks after the friend and I met, he was telling our acquaintance that he thought I was kind of funny. Our acquaintance somberly explained to him that I wasn’t, in fact, funny, but that I just quoted funny lines from movies. I had a similar conversation with this acquaintance once where he explained to me that I only liked the music that I liked because the media told me that it was cool. Nobody told him to listen to the bands he enjoyed, he explained to me.

Give me a moment. I need to cool down after remembering that conversation.

Boys, boys! There's plenty of me to go around!

I have to disagree with the music argument. First of all, you NEVER question my love of Pantera, because my love for Pantera is as pure as fresh fallen snow. Second of all, if I based my music preferences on what was most likely to make me look cool, well, let’s just say that I bet on the wrong horse. A few weeks ago, I was driving home from the gym in a minivan singing along as loudly as I could to “Chains of Love” by Erasure, which I was blasting. In a brief moment of self awareness, I looked over at the car next to me, which had a hot (and what I’m guessing was college-age) girl in the driver’s seat, watching me. The look on her face could have meant a lot of things. She could have, as a mental exercise, been trying to figure out if there was any possible combination of actions that I could perform that would ever make her willing to sleep with me after seeing this (The verdict: No). She could have been alarmed at the fact that what appeared to be a clearly mentally handicapped man who wasn’t even wearing his safety helmet had somehow gotten his hands on a minivan. I suppose that it’s even possible that there was someone slaughtering a pig somewhere behind me, she was actually watching that and I mistakenly thought she was looking at me. Any one of those scenarios would have explained the look on her face. I’m not a psychic. I don’t know what was going through her head. I can say, with a fair degree of certainty, however, that “This is a man who’s choice of music makes him seem cooler in my eyes” was not going through her head. Worse, this is not a one-time event. The music and location change, but I do this to myself about once a month.

But what about the accusation that I’m not actually funny, but just a clever mimic who recites funny lines from mass media? I want to say no.

On the other hand, maybe I do.

You’ve probably seen the video of Bill O’Reilly freaking out when he was part of Inside Edition. If you haven’t, here it is:

As much as I want to use that as fodder to accuse O’Reilly of being a crazy asshole, that’s probably not fair. If you wanted to find a one minute clip of me being nuts sometime over the past twenty years, you could probably do it fairly easily. Either way, I was watching some studio footage of Dillinger Escape Plan that they put up to plug their new album. It’s mostly not that exciting if you don’t care about the album, but then I found these two clips:

You can skip to about the 30 second point for this one.

Notice any similarities between that and the clip of O’Reilly? Me too.

Now check out this one, starting at about the 50 second mark:

See where this is going? As near as I can tell, Dillinger Escape Plan has decided that any time you perform something at a high level, you are “Doin’ it live”.

Is this something that I missed out on or something they came up with on their own? Either way, I am on board. I’ve decided since seeing those videos that from here on out, any time that I do something awesome, I will refer to it as “Doin’ it live”. I’ve also decided that if I were ever to form a band, the clip of O’Reilly would be an awesome way to start a set. It will keep ramping up in intensity, until he screams “FUCK IT! WE’LL DO IT LIVE!”, at which point the band starts rocking.

Awesome.

All of this makes me wonder: did that acquaintance have a point? Do I just take the things I find funny, assimilate them recite them until I don’t think they’re funny anymore and then repeat the cycle? I’m not self aware enough to give an accurate answer to that, but I have three thoughts.

The first is that maybe he’s right. I certainly do it some of the time, as evidenced by the fact that I consciously made a decision last night to start saying “doin’ it live” instead of “demonstrating advanced mastery”. I also took a look at my last five blog posts, and their subjects are Valentine’s Day, video games, “floating”, Avatar and then video games again. I’m not breaking any new ground by writing about those subjects, or providing an especially unique perspective on them either.

The second is that I’m suspicious that everyone does a lot of this all of the time. There are six billion people on the planet, and billions more that came before the ones that are alive now. It’s pretty fucking challenging to come up with something that no one else ever has, or that isn’t at least derivative of something else. Unless you’re on the cutting edge of your field, most of your life probably consists of using information you assimilated from other sources.

It's not going to be easy to come up with an appropriate quote from Ghost Dad that will get me out of this situation.

Third, I don’t think it’s a constant thing, because it seems like it would be kind of challenging to purely quote other things. I’m trying to imagine having a conversation with someone where I have to frantically come up with an appropriate, topical line from a movie every time it’s my turn to talk, and I imagine it being really hard.

Fourth, since he knows the cheap, bush league methods I use in a desperate attempt to make people like me, it implies that it would be just as easy for him to sucker a few people into a few cheap laughs by reciting funny things like a parrot too; apparently, he just has too much integrity to stoop to my level and rip other people off to get a chuckle.

Either way…who really gives a fuck? I mostly brought it up in the first place because I needed an excuse to talk about the new slang I’ve decided to add to my vocabulary.

That’s how you fucking do it live.

As I’m sure you know, today is Valentine’s Day, bar none the holiday that I hear more people bitch about than any other. Single people are always angry about it because they feel like it’s a day designed to smear their loneliness in their face like they’re a puppy that took a dump on the carpet. A lot of people in relationships seem to be just as pissed off about it too, complaining that it’s just a day designed to force them to buy crap for their significant other.

"Oh-hoh-hoh! Hoota no bichu kan tu Han Solo!!!"

This makes me feel like I should be bummed out. I’m single, so I should either be bitterly complaining about what a shitty holiday Valentine’s Day is or crying and masturbating. For whatever reason, though, I’m only doing one of those activities, I don’t appear to care, and I’m not exactly sure why. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I have a guess.

First of all, being single means that I don’t have to do any work. I don’t have to put any energy into attempting (and ultimately failing miserably) to make it a good day for my significant other. And trust me, I would fail miserably. I am terrible at Valentine’s Day. One year the girl I was dating said it should be super casual and that we didn’t have to celebrate. I assume that you already know how this story ends, so I’ll skip through the middle and go straight to the end:

We spent about two days fighting, and I learned an incredibly valuable lesson that day: When a 20 year old girl tells you that something isn’t a big deal, make no mistake; she’s lying to you. If anything, it means that it’s MORE important than a normal event, and unless you like fighting, you should prepare for that event as though your ability to do anything over the next 48 hour period other than listen to a girl yelling at you depends on it. Seriously. Anytime you hear “It’s okay. You don’t have to (X)”, you need to pay close fucking attention and then do whatever it is that you “don’t” have to do, because the subtext of that conversation is “I want you to want to do this without me asking, so I’m going to say you don’t have to so I don’t feel like I’m forcing you into anything, but even as we speak, I’m oiling and sharpening my testicle shears just in case you fuck this up.” Just a friendly heads up for all of my readers who are in the market for 20 year old girls, which is exactly none of them.

I can write that one Valentine’s day off as me being really stupid, but there are plenty of other examples where I made an effort and ended up screwing it up, which is really just an extension of how I interact with girls. I try to be friendly or make a date special, and decide that the best way to do that is show up at her parent’s house naked with a severed horse penis in one hand and a DVD of homemade snuff pornography in the other.

Hey, don’t ask me. I think it’s a bad idea too.

One of the slightly less horrifying images that comes up when you google "testicle shears".

What I’m saying is that you don’t have to burn any calories having a bad Valentine’s Day if you’re single. You’re not doing anything wrong and pissing off someone important to you. You’re just ramming your face full of chocolate while you cry and read romance novels on the can.

Apparently this post is just going to devolve into me listing off random wacky scenarios. Oh well.

SECOND OF ALL, my last two relationships have been kind of rocky. Looking back on them, I think it’s pretty clear that the person I was dating and I weren’t very good matches for each other, and were just looking for someone to be with, because after the initial gloss wore off, we were left with hurt feelings, messy breakups and pro/con lists comparing me to ex-boyfriends. You know what’s way better than being in that situation? Not being in that situation.

I think this is all why I’m far more indifferent to Valentine’s Day than usual. I still feel a like I should be more bummed out than I am, though, because that’s normally what I do. Maybe my testosterone levels are dropping, or I’m just getting older, or I have a brain tumor. I don’t know.

Either way, it was a good day. I didn’t have pants on until noon, and I played a lot of games, which is probably apparent, since I’m posting this about an hour before Valentine’s day is over.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

So, I can’t help but notice that it’s been about two weeks since I updated. How embarrassing.

I can explain.

It seems that it’s 2010, and I can play video games again.

And that’s pretty much it.

Whoops! My life is ruined!

At first, it was just Torchlight. Then, I got my hands on Plants Vs. Zombies. Then, I loaded Civilization 4 onto my computer, and that was the beginning of the end. Civilization 4 is the kind of game that’s super easy to accidentally spend several hours playing. A typical game takes about three hours, but it’s segmented into hundreds of tiny turns, so if you’re the kind of person who is willing to do any amount of rationalization necessary to justify playing video games (e.g. me),  it’s incredibly easy to sit down and think something like “I’ll play a couple of turns before I start on something productive!” or “Okay, I’ve just blown two hours playing this. One more turn and I’ll drive my injured friend to the hospital like I promised,” and before you know it, three days have passed and you’re still clicking away, cursing at the Aztecs and trying to invent the Internet before anyone else. I’ve played plenty of games for huge stretches of time, but not quite as much on accident. While I was working at that middle school in the self-contained room for the severely emotionally disturbed kids, I would estimate that I spent between 25-30% of my life playing World of Warcraft, but that was no accident. Back when I was semi-seriously raiding, I knew that if I was going to make it all the way through Karazahn, I was going to have to sit at my computer for six hours talking to people that I hated and pressing the same three or four keys on my keyboard again and again (Indication number 6 that I hated my life and didn’t even realize it about three years ago: the highlight of my week was flushing six hours of my life down the toilet raiding in World of Warcraft. It’s wedged in between “Making dating choices that I wouldn’t normally” and “Enjoying That 70′s Show just a little bit too much”)

Anyway, the first month of January has been filled with video games, and, well, that’s about it. I haven’t quite been rocking it “Early 20′s Johnny Castle” style, where I let my life completely fall into ruins so I can play a few more hours of Starcraft and Tekken 3, but it’s been pretty fucking close. I’ve been making the things I need to get done harder than they need to be. I’m doing fine in school, but I’m perpetually sleep deprived and doing things at the last minute, and the things I want to do that aren’t mandatory have been falling by the wayside. I have a pile of books I want to read that I’ve ignored, one of my plants is dying, I haven’t been shaving as regularly and I think you’ve seen what’s happened to the frequency of my writing.

Looks like someone didn't turn in their homework on time.

Last Monday, I was working this kick ass job at a local middle school. It was for a teacher who ran the gifted and talented program, which took up most of her day but was also something I couldn’t do while I was there, so I had three advanced language arts classes during the day and had the rest of the time to myself. You don’t make a lot of money as a sub, but on days where you only have to spend about two and a half hours actually working and it’s with advanced kids, it still seems like a pretty sweet deal. Like I said, I had quite a bit of free time, so I grabbed a book about teaching off of the teacher’s bookshelf, because, you know, I want to be a teacher, and also because I left the copy of Fargo Rock City that my friend Dan gave me at home.

In the book I picked, who’s title I can’t remember (but the author’s name, which is, I swear to God, Harry Wong, will be burned into my mind forever), there was a section about the four phases of teaching. I can’t remember the name of the first phase, but it was basically “You get fucked in the ass by those kids and it sucks and you want to die”, a phase that I am intimately acquainted with. The second was “Survival”, which is when you aren’t getting killed anymore, and you’ve figured out how to fill up the day and keep the kids busy, but you’re not really doing anything special with them. Essentially, you’ve just managed to figure out a way to make it through the day without the kids burning down the classroom. The third stage was “Mastery”, when you actually start to figure some things out and actually teach the kids instead of just loading them up with pop quizzes and busy work, and the final stage…well, I can’t remember what it’s called or what it entails, so let’s just say for the sake of my amusement that it’s called “Chili Doggin’ It”, and it’s when you learn how to fly and start choke-slamming the kids and showing up to work dressed as the Ultimate Warrior. It’s a highly-enlightened phase that very few teachers reach, and the few that do are promptly relieved of their duties and sent to prison.

Texting in class? BIG MISTAKE.

The book then goes on to say that everyone goes through these different phases, but a lot of teachers spend an inordinate amount of time in the Survival phase, and a lot never really get out of it and move to the next phase. Being a sub is pretty much all about the Survival phase, and I can understand the allure of it; after spending a bunch of time in the first phase when you’re just trying to keep the kids from shitting on the floor and jacking each other off, there’s a pretty strong sense of accomplishment and relief when they’re sitting there quietly working on some pointless busy work instead of swearing at you in Spanish. There have been a few (very few) moments when I’ve worked extended jobs where I’ve gotten a little glimpse at Mastery, though, where I manage to make something happen instead of just keeping the kids from killing each other. It’s a good feeling.

This is related to my love of video games, I promise.

I spent some time thinking about those phases, and I kind of feel like everything Harry Wong (did I mention that his name is Harry Wong? Because his name is Harry Wong. First name Harry, last name Wong. Harry Wong) said about the phases of teaching pretty much ring true for life in general, especially the part about survival. This may come as a shock to those of you who know me, but as a 30 year old who lives in his parent’s basement and is still struggling to find a way to make it above the poverty line, I feel like I’ve spent a fair amount of my life in Survival – not really trying to figure out a way to make sure that I’m better off at the end of the day than I was when I woke up, but just trying to make it through another day at work, collect another paycheck, and just fill up my time and keep my bills paid until I die. A large part of that for me has been video games.

Make no mistake, I’m not bagging on video games – if anything, the fact that I appear to be unable to accomplish things that are important to me when they’re around should be a testament to just how incredibly fucking awesome that they are. I clearly don’t have the necessary self control to be around them all of the time though.

So I think that video games are going to be a weekend-only thing for me. I would be retarded to give them up completely, but I like writing, and I like reading, and I like getting more than two hours of sleep a night, and I don’t seem to be smart enough to make room for those things AND games seven days a week.

So, it looks like the first month of 2010 can be written off as a learning experience and lots and lots of turn-based strategy. Nothing wrong with that, but let’s see if I can start doing some other things that I care about too.

Sorry this post was a motivational speech to myself. It was necessary, though. I’ve got a lot of work to do if I want to be Chili Doggin’ it someday.

I know that’s not the Ultimate Warrior, but I was looking for a good video of him, and nothing I found even came close to the quality of this one. Holy shit Randy Savage is insane. How did he even give an interview this crazy? Did he get hit really hard on the head right before he walked on camera? Did he just give himself a cocaine enema? All I know is that this is the best video I’ve ever seen.

“He says I can’t sing and I can’t dance but I can make romance YEAH right there a fork in the road!”

Why the hell didn’t I watch more professional wrestling when I was a kid?