Mind Your Own God Damn Business

So, as you know, I had to write a paper about how to fix OPEC last Thursday. A United Nations simulation starts in that same class on Tuesday. This has been a pretty intense class for the past two weeks. So now, I have the weekend to find out as much as I can about my country and how they typically behave in the real U.N. so I can portray them realistically for the simulation. It’ll require a lot more research that I would like, but it’s not unmanageable.

There’s a problem, though and it has me more than a little bit worried: I’m China. There are a lot of reasons that I could be worried about being China in a model UN simulation – They’re a member of the security council, so I’ll probably have a fairly large role in the simulation, the country has a culture that’s very foreign to me, making it a lot more challenging than if I were a more western nation, They’re a pretty big player in the global economy, so it seems unlikely that I can show up with one goal in mind and stick to my guns throughout – but of all the ways that I can potentially make an ass of myself during this simulation, there’s one that concerns me deeply.

I’m afraid that I’m going to have a Michael Scott of The Office kind of moment if I’m not careful.

Let me elaborate.

Speaking of Inappropriate, I found this topical pictu...wait. What the fuck is going on here?

I spend a lot of time thinking about doing wildly inappropriate things that I think would be funny, and then I spend a lot of time trying really hard to not do them. For example:

• Every time I buy a gallon of milk from the store, I have a strong urge to lob it as far as I can and watch it explode on the linoleum.
• Sometimes in dull moments in my classes, I wonder what would happen if I just started wetting my pants. No talking. No fidgeting. No explanation. Just calmly listening, taking notes, and peeing all over myself.
• Defecating. Almost anywhere. There’s really only one place that IS appropriate to do that, and it tickles me pink thinking about doing it anywhere else.

And this brings me to my model UN simulation.

The one where I’m China.

Here are a few situations that I’m concerned about:

Scenario #1:

Russia: “Russia is deeply concerned with China’s resolution. Despite Iran’s claims that they’re planning to use the uranium that they’ve been enriching for purely peaceful purposes, evidence suggests that they’ve been testing rockets that could potentially carry a nuclear device in them. How can you possibly guarantee the safety of the area surrounding Iran with your isolationist stance?”

What I Should Say: “While China understands the risk that Iran poses, we take them at their word when they say that they will be using their uranium for purely peaceful projects.”

What I’m Afraid I Will Say Instead: “ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET!!!”

Scenario #2:

United States: “Now is not the time to try and please everyone, China. Iran poses a legitimate threat not only to Israel but the United States and even you. What’s it going to take for you to support the United States’ proposal to impose economic sanctions if Iran doesn’t allow UN inspectors in?

What I Should Say: ” We respect your stance, but there’s not a whole lot you can to do sway us. We believe that this is an issue that the countries involved need to resolve, not something that requires intervention.”

What I’m Afraid I Will Say Instead: “FIVE DOLLAH!!! EVERY-TING YOU WAH!!!”

Scenario #3:

U.K.: “It’s no secret that relations between the West and China are tenuous at best, but we believe that a firm stance on this by both China and Russia will persuade Iran far more than pressure from Western powers that it doesn’t respect. Can we count on multilateral action from the West and the East if Iran continues to produce uranium?”

What I Should Say: “No. China abstains.”

What I’m Afraid I will Say Instead: “HEY BABY! ME SOOO HO-NY! ME LOVE YOU LONG TIME, ROUNDEYE!!!”

Did you notice the mistake that I’m making? It’s subtle, but I’ll bet that you can spot it.

That’s right – In two of the three scenarios, I’m spouting off lines from Full Metal Jacket, which takes place in Vietnam, not China! I might as well dress up as a mime with a baguette and start waving a white flag around or show up in an Uncle Sam costume wielding a Big Mac and a bible! I’d be laughed out of the room for making a gaff like that!

But there’s another, lesser known fact that also needs to be taken into consideration: Those phrases are all also incredibly racist and could be considered incredibly offensive by my classmates!

It’s true. I looked it up.

I’ll be honest. I don’t actually think that I’m going to say any of those things. Despite how I may come across in this blog (and over the phone. And in person), I’m a relatively decent human being.

What I AM a little bit worried about is that any time I’m expected to speak during the UN, my brain is going to immediately try to determine what a 1960′s Chinese stereotype would say, and then I’m going to have to give an appropriate response while laughing in a high-pitched, girlish timbre. Everyone is going to think that I’m incredibly amused by UN parliamentary procedure, or maybe that there’s a gas leak in my corner of the room. And what do I say if they ask me what’s so funny? “Oh, no, it’s not you! I was just thinking how funny it would be if I said something really inappropriate and racially insensitive”? That’s only slightly better than just saying whatever inappropriate crap I was thinking!

My first choice was Russia, and I think that would’ve been a much better deal. Nobody’s going to be nearly as offended if I slip up and yell “IN SOVIET RUSSIA, ECONOMIC SANCTIONS IMPOSE ON YOU!!!”

Oh well. If I do slip up, It’ll be fine. I already have a plan if the unspeakable happens.

I’ll just distract everyone by deliberately wetting my pants.

Ancient Chinese secret, huh!?!?

About two weeks ago, my Mom brought home a stray cat. I guess that she was at a friend’s house, and the friend told her that one of her neighbors had recently foreclosed and had left their cat there, so my Mom took him and brought him home. So far, he’s a pretty classy guy – he appears to be litter box trained, he doesn’t claw, and he loves cat nip. The new addition to the household hasn’t been without his problems, though.

He Doesn’t Have  A Name

We’ve been fighting over his name ever since my Mom brought him home. I was originally calling him Chubbs, but that apparently wasn’t dignified enough, and he’s not fat. My brother has been calling him Socrates and my Mom has been calling him Dickens, but I refuse to acknowledge those names. He has a white stripe down his face, like a scar, so I started calling him Omar, but nobody liked that either. It seemed like we were never going to agree on a name, until inspiration struck:

Barry.

You see, I’m actually kind of a creepy cat lady at heart. When students tell me that I’m going to die alone in an apartment with a bunch of cats, a small part of me knows that they’re probably right, but a larger part of me thinks “Cats, you say? That doesn’t sound so bad!” Part of what comes with my Cat Lady personality is spending a lot of time talking to my pets and then having them talk back to me in stupid voices.

Is that more or less crazy than talking to myself? I guess that both are technically “talking to myself”, but I’m also pretending to talk for an animal in this case, so I vote more crazy. You know what, though? I talk to myself a lot too, so  I guess that it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, when my family had greyhounds, I decided that they sounded like  Triumph the insult comic dog. They spent a lot of time threatening to shit on my stuff and insulting me (at least in my head, they did). I decided that the cat should talk like Barry Gibb on The Barry Gibb Talk Show, so I started calling him Barry and then pretending that he was calling everyone around him a sorry excuse for a human being and threatening to humiliate their corpse. Here’s the skit, in case you haven’t seen it:

I have to say, I feel kind of insane talking for my cats anyway, but when I get a good look at my behavior in writing, it’s especially embarrassing. Anyway, I’ve just kept calling him Barry, and even though no one else seems to like it, it’s starting to stick. It doesn’t really matter, anyway; he’s a few years old, and already has a name he’s used to. Unless we stumble on the one that his old family used to call him, he’s not going to know what we’re talking about.

Not really related. I just think it's hilarious.

He’s Kind Of A Pervert

A few days ago, Barry was sleeping on my bed, and I was doing what I always do in here. Can’t guess? Let me give you some hints: I waste hours of my life doing it, I yell random video game lines when I’m done, and it rhymes with “plasterbating”.

So, I was “plasterbating”, and I suddenly realized that Barry was in the room. It wouldn’t have bothered me, but when I looked at him, he was staring at my junk. I tried to ignore it, but when I looked back a few seconds later, he was still staring at it. He was transfixed. After a few more minutes of trying to do my thing with Barry leering at me, I finally had to kick him out of the room. Whatever Barry’s into, that’s fine, but I don’t swing that way, and he needs to respect that. And not eye my dong like it’s made out of fresh salmon.

I suppose that it’s also possible that he was glaring at me. As in “Really? You’re going to do that while I’m in the room? I’ve been here all of three days, and you’ve decided already that we’re close enough that it’s okay to jack off in front of me? I AM BARRY F-ING GIBB! I WILL RIP OFF YOUR HANDS AND USE THEM AS BOXING GLOVES AND BEAT YOU TO DEATH!!!”

And, I guess, a third possibility is that he’s just a fucking cat, and he didn’t really have any clue what was going on. I don’t know, though. I saw that look in his eyes, and there was only one word for it: Catlust.

He Produces Roughly Two Times His Body Weight In Feces Every Day

Seriously. Every time that I walk by that fucking litter box, he’s shitting in it again. I’m several orders of magnitude larger than that cat, and I think he makes seven or eight times as much solid waste in a week as I do. It’s ridiculous.

He glares at me while he’s doing that, too.

—

So there you go. Other than that, he’s a pretty nice cat. only 29 more to go, and I’ll be the creepy loner that middle school kids always accuse me of being.

I wish my OPEC paper could’ve been on a subject like this. I can get a much higher word count a lot faster when it’s on a subject that I’m truly passionate about, like the family pet eye-humping my wang when I’m “Browsing the Internet” in front of him.

Oh well.

Hey.

Since about Saturday, I’ve been working on a paper about OPEC and how to fix its problems. At first, I was planning to put a warlock in charge of the organization, and then he could solve all of their problems with a little economic strategy that I call “magic”.

Countries cheating on quotas? Wave the wand and make their wells overflow with hot, ropey and relatively worthless horse semen instead of sweet Arabian crude for six months as punishment. Large oil-producing countries like Russia and Brazil refusing to join your cartel, making it hard for you to manipulate prices? Send in an army of skeleton centaurs to “persuade” them. Making all of your money off of a finite resource that you will one day run out of, leaving your economy in shambles? Make everyone trade in their cars for skeleton centaurs.

Skeleton centaurs that will turn on their masters if OPEC isn’t compensated handsomely, that is.

Assuming that you’re willing to suspend your disbelief about a warlock running OPEC, it’s an air-tight strategy.

Unfortunately, our teacher told us yesterday that our plan has to be relatively realistic, meaning that for the past four days, I have been completely fucked. I’ve been hacking away at the paper ever since.

And that is why I’ve done a shitty job of updating. It’s not my usual laziness. It’s that I’m focusing all of my energy into coming up with a strategy for fixing OPEC without using a single mind meld or reanimated corpse, which, by the way, is far more challenging.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I would also like to point out that although it’s short and school related, I put more into this post than “sorry I haven’t been updating enough, I’ve been so busy!”, because people have built entire blogs that are nothing but apologies for their lack of content, and those blogs suck.

Now, I’m afraid, I have to re-focus all of my writing energy into a REALISTIC solution. I put the word “realistic” in caps to imply that if I were saying it out loud, it would be with a tone and facial expression that would lead you to believe that I was retarded. I would also be doing jazz hands to really drive home just how moronic the whole concept is.

In my absence, please enjoy this Meagan-Fox-on-SNL-unfunny three and a half minute hate crime that I found on youtube.

I don’t know what Air Farce is, but I know what it’s not.

Funny.

So, as I’m sure you know, Halloween was about a week ago.

As I’m sure you also know, I was a ghost. I went and got a sheet and cut a couple of holes in it, and then proceeded to haunt the shit out of this town. This is nothing new. I wear that same costume every year, and I’ll tell you why: because it kicks ass, that’s why. It’s simple, it’s cheap, I can wear whatever clothing I want with it and I can do whatever I want under that sheet. You’re somewhere with me on Halloween, and all you see is a sheet with some legs sticking out of the bottom and some random movement going on underneath. Maybe I’m texting. Maybe I’m eating a taco. Maybe I’m masturbating. Maybe it’s some combination of the three. Who can tell? Certainly not you; I’ve got a sheet covering me. It’s the ultimate in Halloween terror.

At least, I used to think that it was.

Two weeks ago, my friends Dan and Steph hosted a Halloween party. Dan and I started talking about good ideas for Halloween costumes. Here’s the thing about conversations I have with Dan: they start out simple, and then we fixate on them, the spiral out of control, and three hours later, we’ve come up with a really bad idea. Here are a few examples:

Welcome to Thunderdome.

- I was hanging out with Dan and his roommate at his old place a few years ago. We decided to go get some food, and when we left, I shut the door behind us. It stuck, so I jerked it a little bit to get it to close, which seemed to make Dan cringe in fear. As we walked by the neighboring apartment, a middle age woman came out and started yelling at us. She was pretty vague about why she was scolding us, and I had no idea what we had done. Dan explained to me after we were out of ear shot that she was pissed off about the noise it made when I closed the door. Apparently, she had just moved out of a house and into an apartment, and she got angry any time that anyone made any kind of audible noise, which meant that ever since she had moved into the apartment, she had been pissed off pretty much all of the time. A lot of times, this anger was directed at Dan, because he was in the apartment right next to hers.

If I were talking to someone else, I probably would’ve said “What a bitch!” and ended it at that. In this case, by the time we had finished eating, we had decided that when we got back, Dan’s roommate should repeatedly open and slam his door as hard as he could while I wailed on her door and yelled. While all of this was happening, Dan would come windmilling through her wall dual-wielding sledge hammers and screaming at the top of his lungs. It’s been a couple of years, and I’m still kind of sad that we didn’t do it.

- When Dan and I were roommates, he burned some falafel, which he tossed out onto our concrete porch. We looked at it for a few minutes and decided that it looked like deer droppings. Naturally, we went and got a camera and took a picture of Dan with his pants around his ankles squatting over it.

- One of Dan’s old high school friends invited him to a party where you had to wear a costume and do some sort of performance. I’m going to say that we probably spent six hours over two days trying to come up with the best combination of costume and performance, and I think that after all of that deliberation we finally settled on Dan dressing up as Abe Lincoln and taking a shit on the floor. My only job was to videotape everyone’s reaction.

- Dan had a girl he knew coming from out of town to visit. He wanted to be sure that she didn’t get any ideas about the two of them becoming romantically involved. After some discussion, we decided that the best plan of attack would be for his female roommate to take a dump in the sink every morning, after which she would pour a tiny amount of vinegar down the drain, vehemently claiming that “It kills all the bacteria!” before “flushing” the sink by turning on the garbage disposal for a few seconds.

As I’m looking back at that last one, I’m not quite sure why we thought this was an effective way to keep the out of town girl from wanting to jump Dan, or why we didn’t toy with the idea of him saying something like “I’m flattered, but no thank you”. I’m also noticing that the first example is the only one where Dan and I had a brainstorming session that DIDN’T end with someone taking a dump in an inappropriate place. Oh well. I’ll just change the story before I put this post up.

So, anyway, we were discussing Halloween costumes, and we came up with an idea.

NO MERCY!!!

I dress up as the Kool-Aid man for Halloween. I have a boombox with me that has Andrew W.K.’s “I Get Wet” in it, turned up all the way, on repeat. Then, I head down to campus and show up at a party uninvited. As the powerful melody of “Party Hard”, “It’s Time To Party”, “Party ‘Till You Puke” or, really, any of the other tracks on the album is blasting, I run around the house and trash it. I dance through the house, punching people in the face, breaking tables, feeling up girls and even going through walls if they’re made of a flimsy enough material (and, OBVIOUSLY, screaming “OH YEAH!” the entire time). When I feel like I’ve done sufficient damage to the property, I pick up my boombox and dance out of the house and down the street until I find another party. Wash, rinse, repeat until the cops finally catch up to me or the batteries in my boombox run out.

I thought I had found the perfect costume with the ghost, but this may change that. There’s only one problem, assuming you ignore the fact that it’s a plan that almost certainly gets me beaten up or incarcerated: Dan and I have no idea how to construct a Kool-Aid man costume, much less one that can withstand the kind of abuse that we plan to put it through. If anyone has any ideas, let me know, because his would be awesome.

I mean, look at this video. I’m not coming up with anything that unique here. I’m merely suggesting that something like this needs to happen with a Kool Aid man costume on, and I think I’m just the man for the job.

So, like I said, help me out. Otherwise, chances are about one hundred percent that I’ll just be a ghost again next year, and you’ll have to live through the horror of being at a party with me without knowing if my dick is inside my pants or out (hint: it’s out).

Hope everyone had a good Halloween and that you have a BONE-CHILLING THANKSGIVING!!! oooOOOOOOooo!!!

A few months ago, due to a lot of horse-penis related traffic to my site, decided to get rid of my post that had a picture of a horse penis in it. I replaced it with a picture of a horse vagina. I would link to the post, but I’ve had several conversations with people who read my blog over the past month that have gone something like this: “Hey shit head. I was reading your blog (on a crowded subway/in a computer lab/in church/on an overhead projector in a room full of orphans and nuns) and all of a sudden ‘bam’! Horse vagina. Fuck you.” Because of this, you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that there’s a picture of a horse vagina somewhere on this blog. If you know me, you know that this is a completely plausible scenario – it’s filthy, it’s not funny to anyone but me, and it would be a huge pain in the ass to explain in court.

What could possibly go wrong, right?

Well, it turns out, the answer is “plenty”. Because I love you guys, I’ll keep this post picture free. I think we all know what kinds of terrible images would be staring you in the face right now if I didn’t.

Let’s take a look at my favorite search terms from October, shall we?

1. horse vagina: So far, no surprises. You put a picture of a horse vagina on your blog, you’re bound to get some hits from people looking for a horse vagina.

2. hourse vagina picture: It’s spelled wrong, but, once again, I can’t really be surprised that a search for “hourse vagina picture” leads the user to a horse vagina picture. Just google doing its job.

3. dog vagina: …Alright, that’s a little bit strange, but still. It’s an animal vagina. It’s kind of related. It’s probably a veterinary student or something. There are plenty of good reasons to search for pictures of dog vaginas on the Internet.

4. alien vagina: …what the fuck…

5. how should vagina look: I like to imagine that someone was trying to figure out what a human vagina should look like and they consulted the horse picture. I also like to imagine this guy’s internal dialog on the ensuing date.

“Alright. We’ve shared a bottle of wine, the lights are low, I’ve got the Kenny G playing and we’ve been doing some heavy petting – I think that it’s time to take a little trip to third base! Let’s just get these pants off and take a look under the hood, shall we? I’ve never done this before, but no need to worry, I consulted the Internet first. Oh, she’s wearing those boy shorts underwear! Those are really hot…let’s just get those off and…GOOD LORD WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON DOWN HERE!? No tail? No protective layer of horse hair? I don’t even know how she supports her own weight with these small, pale, hairless haunches! I need to feign sickness and get this bitch out of my house NOW!”

Is it creepy that I’ve put this much thought into this?

6. how do horse pussy look like: I wonder if the person that wrote this thinks this way? “I doesn’t know the ways horse vag looking. I needs with the searching to sees. How do horse pussy look like?”

7. head in vagina: To the credit of whoever searched for this, I would be kind of interested to see that, too.

8. 13 year old vagina: This one’s pretty creepy. I hope he means a horse.

9. cold vagina: I like my beer just like I like my vaginas: fresh, bitter, and as cold as the Rocky Mountains.

10. strange vaginas: I’ll only say one thing about this term: You shouldn’t type it into google, no matter how curious you might be. You won’t like what you find.

11. man eating horse vagina: I little bit unspecific again. Are we talking eating like “Oh yeah, horse, I’m gonna go downtown on that sweet horse vagina”? Or are we talking eating like “Agnes, you need to give me your recipe, because that meal was absolutely divine. I’d better have seconds – pass me another plate of that delicious horse vagina”? How do these people expect to find what they’re looking for if they don’t type it in correctly?

—
Well, I think I’ve learned a valuable lesson about maintaining this blog: Creepy pictures lead to plenty of entertaining traffic searching for those pictures. There’s only one reasonable thing to do: Put something new up every month so I can maximize the amount of amusement I get out of weird search terms. I’m tempted to start now, but I promised to keep this post image free. I guess you won’t know when it’s coming until it happens.

Sleep lightly.

Good lord, it’s not even midnight yet. I’m edging closer and closer to getting these posts up on time again.

There’s a good reason why, too:

This article right here. According to this magnificent article, a recent study suggests that relationships where the wife is AT LEAST five years younger and also smarter than the husband lead to marriages that are more likely to succeed.

This is excellent fucking news for me.

For the last year, I’ve been bracing for a long, unpleasant period of limited human contact. Going back to school and working as a sub on my off days means that I spend most of my day hanging out with college kids who are almost a decade younger than me or middle school students, neither of which make for very solid social contacts.

K-12 kids scare the shit out of me, because all it takes is one accusation that Mr. Castle offered to give them back their cell phone if they gave him a blow job to pretty much ruin any chance I have of ever teaching (or living somewhere that’s not jail). Because of this, I have no interest, and actually a healthy amount of terror about hanging out with students outside of class.

Oh Pancho. I'll never forget whatever it is that you did after finding your name when I googled "1989".

College kids are cooler, of the age of consent and not in a position of trust with me, but there’s just one problem: I’m now the token goofy old guy in the back of the classroom that doesn’t ever quite know what the fuck is going on. Every class has one, and now it’s me. On top of that, even by my remarkably low standards for maturity, a lot of college kids still fall short, and what I mean by “They’re not mature” is “They don’t get pop culture references that predate their birth”.

I could probably chat with these kids without talking about how much Mr. T hates flying, or how Flava Flav is in this really kickass band called Public Enemy, or how I remember exactly when and where I heard the terrible news that Pedro Vargas, Mexican singer and actor, had passed away (thank you, Wikipedia), but you know what I say to that? GET OFF MY LAWN. Let me paint a terrifying picture for all of you: Any mention to a college kid of anything that happened before about 1998 is pretty much always met with a blank stare. Do you want to know why? BECAUSE THEY WERE 8. PEOPLE WHO WERE BORN IN 1990 ARE NOW 19 YEARS OLD. How the hell am I supposed to talk to these kids when they don’t even know who Milli Vanilli is!?!?

All of this adds up to me spending most of my time during the week feeling kind of isolated and lonely.

At least, that’s what I originally thought would happen. That hasn’t really been the case, though.

First of all, I may be old, but I’m really, really immature. As a result, I’ve started making some college friends. Maybe we can’t agree whether Jem was or wasn’t truly, truly outrageous, but if the teacher asks what we think of government intervention and a student in the front row tells us that he’s a teabagger, well, let’s just say that we see eye to eye. Not only that, after we’ve wiped the tears from our eyes and finished laughing at the mental image of the guy up front gently placing his balls in someone else’s mouth, I get bonus points for knowing that he was actually talking about his opposition to taxes and his belief that government intervention is always bad under any condition, because it leads to tragedies like public roads, a national defense system, social programs that helped get us out of the great depression, child labor laws, trust-busting and even a subsidized college education that everyone in the classroom is enjoying the benefits of.

This woman has certainly done an effective job of drumming up support for her cause; after reading that sign, I'm ready to do a little bit of tea bagging of my own. I'm not opposed to doing some pearl necklacing, either, if it helps get my point across.

Second of all, after reading that article, I’ve learned the truth about college girls. I shouldn’t be avoiding them. I should be proposing to them! Consider these facts:

- The article says that the girl should be at LEAST five years younger than the guy. I’ve got this one covered and then some! The average college senior is, what – 21? 22? That’s eight years younger than I am! I mean, it took me twice as long to graduate as it should have, and I got my degree at 25. Even if someone in one of my classes is as catastrophically bad at school as I am, I’m still in the clear!

- The girl needs to be smarter than me. Again, this is not a problem. In all of my political science classes, I’m surrounded by girls who are about to graduate with political science degrees. A few of them are doing internships for state politicians. Most of them are getting ready for grad school. They do things like read The Economist and compete in Model Arab League for fun. I don’t think we have to worry too much about me being smarter than any of them.

My evening classes, which are geography and history for freshmen, are a slightly different story – Some of the girls in there are a little goofy because they’re so young, and some of them are retarded enough that I can tell that they’re going to be doing a lot of waitressing over the next few decades. It doesn’t sound good, but consider this: I’m 30, living in my parent’s basement and deliberately maintaining a blog that I can almost guarantee will eventually cause me legal trouble of some kind. Can I really claim that I’m smarter than these girls? I don’t think I can.

I’ve got this all worked out. I’ll be sitting in class. As soon as I see a girl who’s reading a book or wearing glasses (both surefire guarantees that someone is smart), I’ll walk over and strike up a conversation. After loosening her up with a few of my never-miss jokes referencing Back To The Future and those Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef!?” ads, I’ll drop the hammer: “So, you seem a lot younger than me. We should go back to my parent’s place. And get married. The Internet says it’ll work.”

I’ve done my math and checked it twice, and there’s only one way that a girl can respond to a line like that:

“I do”.

See you Friday.

There’s a guy in one of my classes who’s straight edge. Straight Edge, for those of you who don’t know, is when you don’t drink, smoke or do any kind of drugs. I think that maybe you don’t have sex either…I’m not sure. You know what? I’m going to look this up on Wikipedia.

Okay, here we go (Side note: it’s weird – I’m a little skeptical of the accuracy or completeness of their articles a lot of times, but when it comes to crap like this, or Captain Kirk’s family tree, or how to speak Dwarf, I have complete and utter trust in Wikipedia.)

Anyway, here it is:

Straight Edge refers to a lifestyle and youth movement that started within the hardcore punk subculture whose adherents make a lifetime commitment to refrain from drinking alcohol, using tobacco products, and taking any recreational drugs. The term was coined by the 1980s hardcore punk band Minor Threat in the song “Straight Edge”.

Ok, on the other hand, maybe going Straight Edge does mean you give up sex. Also, I was unable to find this picture without the cats photoshopped in. It's cool though. I actually kind of like it better that way.

So I guess that it has nothing to do with sex, and it’s related to punk music. It goes on to say that along the way the movement picked up veganism, during the 90′s militant Straight Edge kids would get violent to spread their beliefs, and they use that “hxc”, or an x on each hand or an x on either side of a bands name to signify that they’re Straight Edge.

…Awesome?

So, like I was saying, there’s a guy who’s in one of my classes who’s Straight Edge. There are two reasons that I know this:

1. On the first day of class, we all shared out names and something interesting about ourselves. His was that he’s Straight Edge.

2. As near as I can tell, every article of clothing that he owns has “Straight Edge” written on it somewhere. I’ve been paying attention, and I’ve yet to see him show up to class without something that has “Straight Edge” written on it. Sweatshirts, tshirts, probably his underwear- if you can silk screen the word “Straight” followed by the word “Edge” onto a piece of fabric, he will wear it.

I don’t know how I feel about this.

On one hand, I kind of want to commend him for it. It’s cool that he’s decided to steer clear of alcohol, tobacco and drugs. I’ve never heard of a guy lying on his death bed and the doctor saying “God Damn it! This son of a bitch wouldn’t be in this sorry state of affairs if only he’d taken more drugs!” So props to my classmate on taking care of his body in that respect.

On the other hand, I don’t understand the desire to broadcast it as hard as he can all the time in lieu of anything else. I could see maybe one sweatshirt, or maybe a couple of tshirts, but I’ve had class with this kid for two months now, and I have yet to see him without “Straight Edge” written on him somewhere. The only time I’ve ever heard him say anything, it was about his Straight Edge-ocity. Is that really all that there is to his personality? I feel like if I ran into this kid at a party and tried to strike up a conversation about anything other than how awesome not smoking cigarettes is or swap stories about that one time that we didn’t drink some alcohol he would just sit there dumbfounded.

Word to the wise: Don't do a google image search for "Hardcore" without "Dance" after it like I did. You will regret it.

It also seems weird to fixate on something you DON’T do. I don’t take drugs either, but I don’t really even give it conscious thought unless someone is offering them to me, at which point I say no. I definitely don’t walk around all day patting myself on the back for it. I don’t have sex with children, but I don’t wear a shirt to school that says “Ultra Legal” on it every day. I don’t eat my own feces, but I don’t say “Hi guys, my name is Johnny, I’m a secondary education major, and an interesting fact about me is that I don’t eat my own duke.” Congratulations on not consuming alcohol, tobacco or other controlled substances. Now forget about it and tell me something interesting about yourself.

Oh well.

The one saving grace is that I dig some of the music.

Not my favorite, but not too shabby.

Anyway, I’d better wrap this up. I have an early day tomorrow, so I need to get into bed and not stay awake, and not spend the next three hours engaged in some heavy assplay, so I can not fall asleep in class tomorrow.

Now if only I could get that printed onto the front of a shirt. I would wear that thing every god damn day.

Yup, That's exactly what it's like.

I turned 30 earlier this month.

At first, I thought that I would miss my 20′s – my goofy, youthful days of playing Final Fantasy 7 until I was cross eyed, ditching class, making poor, poor decisions and shirking responsibility in favor of surfing the Internet, masturbating or playing gameboy at every opportunity. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my 20′s actually kind of sucked. This is nothing new – I’ve dedicated hours of thought and hundreds of blog posts to fondly remembering little chunks of my 20′s and then deciding that they weren’t actually as great as I remember them, but it didn’t really dawn on me until my birthday a few weeks ago that the entire decade was pretty bad. I’m going to make an effort to make sure that my 30′s aren’t a repeat performance, and as the curtain falls on the decade, I thought I would remember some of my experiences from October of 1999 to now.

1. Feeling Old

I rocked this hard throughout my 20′s. I’m too ashamed to dig through the archives of all of my old blogs, but I can almost guarantee that every third post was me saying things like “Well, guys, I had a good run, but it’s all over now. There were some good times and some bad times, but now that I’m 22 years old, I can feel the icy embrace of death starting to wash over my body,” and “I had so much I wanted to accomplish, but it’s hopeless now. I mean, I’m 24 years old. All that’s left for me to do is let the liver spots and arthritis eat what’s left of my wrinkled, balding carapace.”

This was great on two levels. First of all, sitting around and moping about how old you are is stupid. You could be spending that time masturbating, eating nachos and listening to metal (I’ve never done all three at once, but I’m pretty sure I could if I really wanted to. Spoiler alert: I really want to). Second of all, I was crying about how old I was because I was 23. There’s never a bad time for jacking off, rocking out and eating nachos, but 23 is an especially fine year for it.

For whatever reason, without really making a conscious decision to do it, my “What a long, strange trip it’s been!” attitude wore off at about 29. I’m 30 years old now, which according to my carefully performed calculations is more than 6 years older than I was when I was 23, but I actually feel younger than I did then.

2. Driving My Sweet ’91 Camry

I didn't think it was cool at the time, but the more I look at this picture, the more I realize that during the brief period that I owned this car, I was rolling harder than any other motherfucker on the streets.

This was actually something awesome about my 20′s. My first two years of car ownership involved a brown 1982 Ford Fairmont and a brown 1980 Audi. Through a delicate blend of neglect and poor driving skills, I managed to send both to the junkyard in a remarkably short amount of time. By the time I had rendered the Audi unusable, I had settled into a nice groove of buying and then subsequently destroying a new car every 9 months or so.

Then, when I was 21, my parents sold me their white ’91 Camry, and it lasted me the rest of my 20′s. It didn’t have a whole lot of power, and it always seemed like it was right on the verge of disintegrating, but it almost never broke while I owned it, and I drove it a lot – during one especially heavy period, I was dating a girl who lived about an hour and a half away from me and I was driving to and from her apartment every night. I remember how pissed off I was when gas skyrocketed to an unaffordable $1.75 a gallon before dropping down to $1.25 again. I finally gave the car up a few months ago, when I took it in to get looked at because of a slipping clutch and a was told that it would be about 1400 dollars to fix everything.

It wasn’t a perfect car by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ll always have fond memories of driving on the highway at night with the windows rolled down, rocking out to music and thinking about how I would be having sex with my girlfriend later that evening. Sex, for those of you that don’t know, is kind of the holy grail for 21 year old guys. It’s like Matlock for old people, or dead, underage boys for Sean Hannity.

( Note: I’m not saying that Sean Hannity fucks young boys, and dead ones at that – I’m just wondering why he hasn’t responded to the accusation. What is he so afraid of? What is he trying to hide? I mean, other than his boner, every time a dead young boy enters the room?)

3. Hating my Life

Sitting in my room, thinking about all of my wasted opportunities, lamenting my failures and contemplating how I'm totally going to avenge my girlfriend's death.

I’m not quite sure what changed in my life between the ages of 19 and 20, but I made an abrupt transition from relative optimism about my life to a steadfast conviction that I had crashed and burned too hard to ever hope to salvage anything from the burning wreckage. No matter what was going on, it was a complete, utter failure. Granted, my 20′s weren’t the most productive decade of my life, but they weren’t the total disaster that I make them out to be, either.

I was thinking about this earlier: suppose I go to bed the night before I turn 20. I wake up the next day, 30, with no memory of what has happened for the last 10 years. I think that there would be some disappointments, but I think that for the most part I would feel pretty good.

Who am I kidding? I already know how it would go: “Holy fuck! My room is full of computers that can pirate music, play games and have high speed Internet? I’m not 30! I died last night and went to heaven!”

Once the excitement of all of the new technology wore off (probably somewhere around 38), I think I would be pretty satisfied with things. I certainly wouldn’t kill myself, like I felt like I should for the duration of my 20′s.

4. Going to College

I took about three years off from school during my 20′s, although I only count one of them because I was technically enrolled in classes for the other two. Either way, I spent my 20′s in college. That’s not all that unusual, although most people that do that get PhDs, not a bachelors degree. It doesn’t really matter. Even if I never use my econ degree, and it seems kind of unlikely that I will, finally finishing was one of the most amazing feelings of my life. Up until then, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to get a degree, and getting that monkey off of my back was a pretty amazing feeling. I also met a lot of really cool people in the process. An alarming percentage of my friends are people that I met during during my two years at UNC.

I’m still in college, so I guess that it technically doesn’t count as a chapter of my life that is now closed, but the end is in sight, and I think I’ll be yelling at kids, stealing cell phones and getting summers off pretty soon.

5. Living in Apartments

I spent my 20′s living in the kind of apartments that 20 year old guys live in. That is to say, shit holes. And I liked all of them and have good memories of all of them.

Unfortunately, I’ve decided that while I’m back in school and able to work less, it makes the most sense to swallow my pride and move back home to minimize student loan debt, so every day of my life as a 30 year old I’ve lived at home.

Even if it’s kind of hard on my pride, it adds a compelling twist to my “going to bed 19, waking up 30″ scenario, since I would wake up in about the same spot in the exact same room. The more I think about it, the more suspicious I am that 19 year old me would actually think my life kicks a lot of ass now.

“My bed it twice as big and comfortable! I have a cellphone and an iPod! Is that a laptop? Hey, my acne is gone! Holy fuck, my life is awesome! Way to go, 30 year old me!”

6. A Disappointing Denver Broncos Franchise

I probably don't even have to put a caption on this; you already know what I'm going to say. A picture of someone, obviously incredibly pumped up about something - it's a pretty safe bet that I will be making some repetitive, played-out joke either about metal or him shitting his pants, right? Fine. I won't do it. It's too easy anyway. ...it does kind of look like he's listening to Pantera though, doesn't it?

Granted, they ended the 90′s hot – back to back Superbowls were amazing, but other than an AFC Championship game in 2005 that all but guaranteed that I will hate Ben Rothlesburger and the Pittsburgh Steelers for the rest of their franchise’s miserable, dog-fucking existence, the Broncos struggled to find success during my 20′s.

My 30′s have been a different story. As a matter of fact, since I turned 30, the Broncos haven’t lost a single game.

It’s true. Look it up.

I’ll take it one step further and guarantee that they won’t lose this Sunday either. We’ll see how the rest of the season goes, but so far, so good. My sister and I used to argue about Josh McDaniels; I thought he was a jackass who was destroying the team I loved. She thought he was hot. Now, the only thing we argue about is which one of us he gets to have sex with first.

—————

My 20′s weren’t terrible, but a little bit of reflection and a game plan of some sort could’ve made for an even better decade.

My neighbor told me the other day that her 30′s were the best years of her life. I’m going to make an effort to be sure that mine are too.

So far, so good.

6-0, BABY!

I know, I know – I didn’t put up a post on Monday. I know that this post is two days late, but to make up for its tardiness, it’s going to be really bad. See? It all evens out.

HA!

1) I had some homework, a blog post to write, and a run to go on last night, so, naturally, I was watching Malcolm in the Middle with my little brother. Malcolm in the Middle had a successful 6 year run, received a lot of critical acclaim including a Peabody award, a Grammy and nine Emmys. I have some vague positive feelings for the show because I associate it with my early 20′s, but I’ve probably only seen six or seven episodes and have spent the duration of them scratching my head and wondering why the fuck people loved this show so much. The only reason that I tell you that I don’t really like that show is that I want to make it clear why I was watching it instead of doing all of the other things that I needed to last night.

So anyway, after watching another relatively unfunny segment of the show and letting the sound of crickets fill the room, my brother turned to me and said “You know, this show is actually supposed to be funny”.

At first, I thought he meant “It’s not pulling it off very well, but this show is supposed to be funny”, but after a little bit more explanation from him, it became clear that he actually meant “You probably can’t even tell that they’re telling jokes. This episode is bad enough that if I don’t explicitly state that the intention of this show is to be a comedy, you will be unable to tell that it’s not a drama or a thriller.”

And that alone was way funnier than any humor they could coax out of a bitchy, overbearing mother, a well-intentioned spineless pussy father who’s always in trouble, and three kids who cause trouble in the most adorable ways!

2) As I mentioned before, my brother and I have been living together at my parent’s house while they’re on vacation, and he’s all about clogging toilets. Believe it or not, I had just finished making dinner last night, and I went into the bathroom to wash my hands and noticed that, low and behold, someone had clogged the toilet again. I decided that it was time to have a little dialog with my brother about the problem.

“I can’t help but notice that the fucking toilet is clogged again,” I said.

Once again, my brother claimed that he had no knowledge of it.

I told him that I only use the downstairs bathroom, and that the only person in the house that was using the upstairs bathroom was him.

I have to drop some kids off at the POOOOOOOL!!!

His response, and I swear that this is true, was to blame it on a ghost.

A Ghost.

It’s not him, it’s not even a stranger breaking into the house and destroying our plumbing. It’s a fucking ghost, floating through the wall, wailing, rattling chains, and then dropping some ghoulish ghost-logs into the upstairs toilet that can’t be dislodged without the use of a plunger.

After fixing the toilet for the 4th time in a week, I told him that the ghost better start eating some fucking fiber, because I was sick of having to pick up a plunger every time I set foot in the upstairs bathroom.

My brother responded “Not my problem.”

I told him I’d be showing him how to plunge the toilet himself, and then we’d see who’s fucking problem it was.

“I already know how to use a plunger,” he told me.

“Then why aren’t you taking care of this yourself?” I asked.

“Because I enjoy watching you do it,” he replied.

And just like that, the jig was up.

It hadn’t been a stranger, or a ghost! It had been my little brother the whole time! This whole time, he had been deliberately living a sedentary lifestyle, avoiding fruits and vegetables and eating a lot of dairy and meats for one reason and one reason only: so he could regularly clog the toilet and then get the satisfaction of watching me plunge it. It was the perfect crime, really.

It’s difficult to tell if I should be enraged or entertained by that conversation. On one hand, if he was being serious, that’s bullshit. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure he was just kind of embarrassed and was trying to cover it with humor. As a man who uses that same strategy frequently and can also appreciate a willingness to go for the laugh at any cost, I think that I have to give him a pass. At least, kind of. I won’t be fixing that toilet anymore. I’m making him do it next time. It looks like he’s going to have to find another way to get his kicks at my expense. Maybe he can start slashing my tires or starting kitchen fires. Anything to get a chuckle.

That son of a bitch.

EXCUUUUUUUUSE ME!!!!

Look who’s posting again!

A stunning 33% of the comments I received on my last blog post were in relation to the video I attached to it of the kid freaking out because his Mom canceled his World of Warcraft account. He yells, he flails, he takes all of his clothes off – this guy is serious about throwing a fit.

I’ve actually watched that video too many times to count. I studied it the way a forensic scientist studies a charred, severed penis at the scene of a crime, or a man that googles “horse vagina” studies my site. The first hundred times that I viewed it were focused on trying to figure out if the video was real or if the kid was fucking with me. I mean, the timing was pretty lucky, it was a pretty much perfect shot of the entire meltdown, and it seemed too insane to be real. I remember being a teenager, and I’m familiar with that blind, white-hot rage when you feel you’ve been wronged by a parent and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it, but I was never so angry that I started beating my head with my shoe or trying to ram a remote control up my butt. After thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that it’s legit. I watched all of the other videos on that user’s channel, and they’re all the same – that kid gets incredibly angry over nothing and usually breaks something.

After deciding that I think that the kid in that video is really that fucking crazy, I watched the video another hundred times trying to decide how I feel about that. I mean, the more I watch that boy completely lose his mind, the funnier it gets, but I also have to wonder if something is wrong with him. Do you really go that fucking nuts all the time over everything without having some sort of severe emotional disorder? Is he just crazy? Do his parents beat him? Am I going to end up seeing him on the news in 10 years because the police found a giant pile of dead bodies under his porch? If I’m so concerned about all of that, why can’t I stop laughing?

But it all came into focus on the last hundred views. First, I started having vague feelings of deja vu while watching the video – I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I had seen it all before, or something just like it. Then I noticed a really quiet sound in the back of the video that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. I decided to look into it more carefully and combed over the audio of the video. I painstakingly analyzed every second of the track  for over three hours.

At first, I came up empty handed.

Then, I found something revealing.

I edited the video with the sound that I discovered hidden in the background amplified so it’s easier to hear. See if you can spot it:

Did you catch it? It’s subtle, but if you listen carefully, I think you’ll catch it: This kid is listening to Yippie Kayay Motherfucker, a new track on the Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza’s (TDTE) upcoming album. My best guess is that a car that was blasting it was driving by and got stuck at a red light in front of their house for a few seconds. The kid heard the dulcet tones of TDTE and did what anyone would do: Freaked the fuck out. It explains the feelings of deja vu: I had a nearly identical reaction the first time I heard that song.

And just like that, the riddle is solved. This kid isn’t some hot-headed lunatic who has  a long life of ankle monitors and court ordered anger management courses ahead of him – he’s just a teenager who’s having a completely reasonable response to a song that’s heavy enough to make the panties of every woman in a three mile radius spontaneously burst into flames. I’m honestly surprised that he was able to show as much restraint as he did – it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to hulk out and crash through a couple of walls Kool-Aid man style during that breakdown.

Please enjoy this video while you can – there’s a small possibility that I just thought it would be funny to edit the original video and a copy of that song together and re-post it to youtube. Because of that, there’s no telling how long it will be before the audio is removed or they take down the video altogether. I hope not, though. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to do some pretty simple edits to a two minute video.

Yippie Kayay Motherfucker.