Exploding Unicorn

Terrible for Two

2013-05-22T00:44:00.000-04:00

To anyone out there thinking about having kids, my two-year-old once threw a temper tantrum because she couldn’t get rid of her shadow. Since then, Betsy has matured from an irrational, argumentative toddler into an irrational, argumentative three-year-old. You have to pick and choose your battles, unless you’re too young for kindergarten, in which case you choose to fight all of them. I’d say my parenting experience so far is a train wreck, but that implies something dramatic and exciting. In reality, it’s more like a fender-bender between two mopeds. There’s little damage but lots of embarrassment, and people can’t help but stare as they go by. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to gawk at a disaster in a while, here’s what it’s like to guide a child out of her terrible twos and into her terrible threes.

There’s no good way to raise a three-year-old. The first rule of being a parent is to act like you know what you’re doing, even when you don’t. Kids smell self-doubt like sharks smell blood. I can’t show hesitation in front of Betsy because she honestly thinks she knows everything about the world, including fashion. According to her, the latest look is wearing pink rain boots and a princess dress over pajamas. Betsy has told me more than once that she can do what she wants because she’s a big girl. It would be easier to take her seriously if she didn’t still hit her head on doorknobs. Young children are self-centered, but that’s OK. If they don’t look out for themselves, no one else will, either. There’s a reason kids have to learn how to share but know instinctively how to be selfish. The really important survival behaviors are hardwired into their brains. From a Darwinian standpoint, the fittest human offspring are also the most unpleasant. At least that’s what I tell myself when my kid gets more obnoxious by the hour.

Jewelry can be hit or miss depending out the outfit, but sunglasses and bubbles go with everything.

Betsy learned, though, that sometimes the best way to be selfish is to cooperate with others. I learned the same. When she brings me a package of candy she can’t open, I take a piece for myself for the “parent tax.” Democracy works, and it tastes delicious. She doesn’t mind my candy theft, especially when she doesn’t know about it, but under other conditions food is a constant source of anger. She once threw a fit because I didn’t let her butter both sides of her toast. The butter she did put on melted and seemed to disappear, which prompted a separate temper tantrum. So far in her life, her most consistent nemesis is heated bread. I wouldn’t mind this rivalry if she used her inside voice, but in such situations she only has two volumes: screaming and slightly louder screaming. That's why the parenting tools I use the most are Tylenol and earplugs.

If Betsy does finally learn how to outsmart the toast, it won’t be from me. When she was six months old, I found her under the table chewing on a slipper. Clearly, the most influential role models in her life are our dogs. At other times, our canine friends torment her just as much as the toast. When she eats, they circle her like little furry piranhas, waiting for her to drop food within their reach. When she was shorter, everything was within striking distance for them, and they would regularly snatch food right of her hands. That was better than when they merely licked her food before she ate it. She now stands up for herself at meal time, so the scavengers have started stealing scraps from our one-year-old instead. Betsy still isn’t done learning from the dogs. She recently figured out she can go into our backyard anytime she wants if she uses the doggie door. We might have to put a pet microchip in her so the neighbors know which house to return her to if she gets lost.

If Betsy does escape, she shouldn’t be hard to find. The only part of her bike she knows how to operate is the bell.

I don’t agree with Betsy’s logic on the doggie door, but I at least understand it. That’s not always the case with her thought process. Sometimes when we talk to each other, it’s clear we’re having two entirely different conversations. One day I asked her why Cinderella lost her slipper. Betsy replied, “Because I don’t have any pizza.” Another time, she told me, “I don’t like rain. It’s too wet.” She was in luck. The forecast for the next day called for the rain to be a lot drier. Little kids see a very different world than the rest of us, which is fine until they decide to share their perspective with strangers. Betsy once told a grocery store cashier, “Mommy LIKES wine.” My wife doesn’t LIKE wine, but she certainly had a glass that night.

Betsy can’t help but share what she sees because everything is new and exciting when you haven’t been on earth for very long. On one occasion, she breathlessly declared, “There’s snow on the macaroni!” My wife and I were considerably less enthused about the layer of mold on her leftover pasta. Betsy gets similarly worked up when I fill up my car with gas. That’s not the only kind of gas my oldest daughter finds fun. The first time she noticed her body performing a natural but pungent function, she proudly exclaimed, “My bottom is singing!” When I hear her play that song, I become the fastest man alive. I only have about 10 seconds between when my daughter realizes she needs to poop and when she actually starts pooping. Potty training a kid is pretty much just a reflex test for parents.

Raising a toddler was an adventure, but now that she’s three she’s technically a preschooler. In time, her excitement about the world will cool. Then she’ll be a jaded teenager, and I’ll be wrong about everything again. But that’s a battle for another day. For now, I need to brace myself before my next kid hits her terrible twos.

My youngest daughter, Mae, innocently picked at the cake frosting on her first birthday. Next year, she’ll attack it with the deadly fangs every child grows when they turn two.

A Plasma TV is a Girl’s Best Friend

2013-05-17T23:30:00.000-04:00

The worst possible thing a guy can do to the woman he adores is buy her an engagement ring. Putting a diamond on her finger doesn’t say, “I love you;” it says, “I think you have a raccoon-like fascination with shiny objects.” Women don’t like being compared to vermin, even when an expensive gift is involved. Instead, men should associate their marriage offers with a practical, financially-prudent present that will benefit both members of the couple. The only sure way to secure the hand of a modern, sophisticated woman is to skip the ring and buy her an engagement flat-screen TV.

Marriage is really just a lifetime of fighting over the remote.

In terms of hours of enjoyment per dollar spent, there’s simply no comparison between a cutting-edge TV and a diamond ring. Even the shallowest gold digger won’t be entertained by finger jewelry much past the sixty-second mark. The human brain can only stare at a small rock for so long before it moves on to more worthwhile endeavors. Now let’s say the ring providing that single minute of amusement cost $1000. At that rate, maintaining happiness through diamonds would cost $60,000 per hour or just over $525 million per year. Any woman should be hesitant to combine her finances with a man who thinks that’s a smart buy. Instead of burning through money faster than the federal government, a responsible man should invest his $1000 in an engagement plasma or LED TV. The typical flat-screen display provides at least 100,000 hours of entertainment at a rate of approximately one cent per hour. A guy who makes that kind of shrewd purchase can be trusted to handle the household budget, raise a family, and teach everyone how to use the new TV by watching sports on it all the time.

A TV does everything better than a ring, and that includes showing the world that the bride-to-be is off the market. Given the correlation between watching TV and gaining weight, the easiest way an engaged woman can keep away other suitors is to eat Cheetos and watch marathons of Cops. A sedentary lifestyle doesn’t diminish inner beauty, but it can hide it beneath a layer of orange crumbs. Given the plethora of channels available on satellite and cable, the betrothed won’t leave the house much, so even men who aren’t put off by gluttony and sloth won’t be able to get close enough to ask her out. By making the newly-minted fiancée unappealing and unapproachable, a large TV ensures faithfulness in a way a diamond ring never could. HDTV advertisements aren’t referring to signal clarity when they brag about “enhanced fidelity.”

HDTV picture quality is so clear that the only flaws you see are with reality.

A large flat-panel TV also promotes romance far better than a precious stone. A diamond is basically a shiny hand tumor that provides a few moments of happiness for the fiancée and absolutely nothing for her future husband. A TV, on the other hand, is something couples can use together. It encourages them to sit in front of it silently, saving them both from years of awkward small talk. While TVs are better than rings at bringing couples together over time, they’re also better at encouraging romance at the moment they’re revealed. It doesn’t take much effort to carry a fraction-of-an-ounce ring to a fancy restaurant, where it will probably be hidden in a wine glass or a piece of cake. If the lucky lady isn’t paying attention, she could choke on it and die. It shouldn’t be that easy to confuse a marriage offer with a murder attempt. A man has to really love a woman, however, to lug a 50-inch plasma TV to the secluded hilltop where he plans to propose. And when he pops the question and pulls out the TV, there’s absolutely no way his love interest can accidentally choke on it.

No marriage can survive without cable. “Irreconcilable differences” is just another way of saying “lack of channels.”

Additionally, a TV gives a man the chance to impress his favorite lady rather than reaffirming his own incompetence. The average adult male doesn’t know anything about diamonds. No matter how much research he does beforehand, whatever choice he makes will be the wrong one, a trend that will continue long after he’s married. Many jewelry stores offer drinks and snacks to customers, which is a bad sign. If free food is built into the profit margin, the only way a guy will get a good deal is if he mines the diamonds himself. But with a TV, even the most clueless boyfriend can compare prices online for models at different stores. He’ll know exactly what he’s getting and what he should pay for it. As he prepares to begin his married life, it will be the last time he’s ever certain of anything. These astute shopping tactics should make every woman’s heart melt, but if for some unfathomable reason this approach doesn’t work, it’s not a big deal. Should his girlfriend reject his marriage offer, any man who followed these tips would have the consolation prize of an awesome new TV all to himself.

Switching from engagement rings to engagement TVs seems like a huge change, but it wouldn’t be the first time the rules of courtship made an about-face. At one time, rubies, not diamonds, were considered the appropriate way to lock in a spouse. If it’s possible to replace a bad tradition with an equally flawed one, then surely it’s doable to swap an illogical custom with one that can get a 1080p signal from outer space. HDTVs have massive advantages over engagement rings, and the gap between the two will only grow as time goes on. Display technology gets better every year, whereas diamonds haven’t changed much since the Big Bang. Carbon doesn’t have many special features, even when it’s compressed enough to sparkle.

I’m positive this plan will work, even though I didn’t use it myself when I proposed to my wife. She said afterward she would have been fine with an engagement TV. I told her we could still pawn her ring and buy a nice LED display instead. So far, she hasn’t taken me up on the offer.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Succeed at Life

2013-05-12T23:07:00.000-04:00

The English language is an elegant tool that can convey powerful, meaningful ideas. My friends and I use it mainly to joke about fornicating with other people’s mothers. I’d say it’s a guy thing, but you don’t get this stupid just by having a penis. My friends and I all live in different parts of the country now, but we value our camaraderie too much to let that stop us from verbally degrading each other. Love may fade with distance, but slander only gets stronger. Every Wednesday night, we all play Halo 4 together on Xbox Live and celebrate the kinds of comments that would get us expelled from human society in any other setting. For those few hours each week, we trade verbal barbs while firing guns and making stuff explode. Stories are embellished. Lies are hatched. Children are scarred for life. We’re much worse collectively than any one of us could ever be on our own, so it’s important for everyone to show up and contribute to the depravity. Occasionally, though, someone in our group develops a conscience and skips Halo night. My job is to bring them back by any means necessary.

If you’re a mature adult, this is the point where you should stop reading. No one who visits this website on purpose can possibly fall in that category, but if you stumbled here by accident you should leave now. While my friends and I constantly develop new, more offensive insults, there are a few classics that we return to again and again because they work. Chief among those is choking on a bag of dicks. Even if you think oral sex is the greatest thing in the world, you still don’t want to have your oxygen supply threatened by a penis. Gagging on multiple reproductive organs – presumably enough to fill a bag – is almost certainly an unpleasant experience. Unless you can unhinge your jaw like a snake, attempting to take on a sack full of phalluses is suicidal at best. If we tell you to choke on a bag of dicks, proceed with caution.

My friend Rob failed to heed that advice. For a long time he signed onto Xbox Live every single Wednesday, shunning work commitments and potential dates to hang out with his old friends online. That’s a lie. In reality, he showed up for Halo night because his career was going nowhere and he was just as incapable of making new friends as the rest of us. Then one day he got a promotion, and everything changed. He suddenly had professional obligations and recreational contact with his coworkers, both of which threatened his prized status as a failure and a social deviant. He decided to be proactive and lead a rich, fulfilling life, which was obviously the wrong choice since it left him no time for Halo night. When Rob started skipping our Wednesday night sessions, we told him to choke on a bag of dicks, but he just shrugged it off. He simply couldn’t accept that his only options were to return to his old friends or die by a male reproductive organ lodged in his windpipe. I took it upon myself to deliver the point directly to his home.

Before I could make him actually choke on a bag of dicks, I had to overcome several logistical challenges. First of all, sending real penises through the mail is frowned upon. The US postal service doesn’t condone the shipment of sex organs, no matter how many forever stamps you use. Secondly, I didn’t have any penises to send. Nobody is going to give one up voluntarily, and I’d never be able to break into the cadaver lab to steal them. The security guard there already knows what my car looks like. Finally, I had no way to force Rob to put those dicks in his mouth. I didn’t want him to actually choke to death because that would raise liability issues and make him unlikely to play videogames with us in the future. But getting him to at least put it in his mouth would be a moral victory, so I had to make sure whatever I sent him was at least somewhat tastier than a standard penis.

After careful consideration and more than a few beers, I realized what passive-aggressive mothers have known since the dawn of time: The best way to express hostility is with cookies. After a few online searches, I found cheap penis-shaped cookie cutters, but the shipping was outrageously expensive. My dedication to this joke waivered around the $8 mark, so I decided to forgo the cookie cutters and try my luck at making the penis cookies freehand. Then I hit another problem: I have no idea how to bake anything. I quickly shifted to my backup plan and checked with my spouse. The fact that I asked my wife to make penis cookies for my friend to choke on and she agreed tells you everything you need to know about our marriage.

Lola rolled out the dough and carved penis shapes with a knife. Her skill at this task filled me with a mix of pride and fear. I now have a whole new set of questions about her past. On the plus side, at least now I know if her chemistry career doesn’t work out she can go into business as an erotic baker. We put the cookies in a plastic bag to comply with the “bag” portion of the “bag of dicks” threat and put the precious cargo in the mail Saturday morning. It should arrive at Rob’s house Monday afternoon. If he doesn’t return to Wednesday night Halo after that, we either need to make a new friend or more dick cookies. I’ll let you which route we go.

Making penises out of cookie dough taught me the phallus-and-balls arrangement is structurally unsound, at least in high-heat environments. It’s a miracle any of us survive to adulthood with two testicles intact.

We added stickers to let my friend know what a good job he’s doing at making all the wrong choices in life.

When you earn a bag of dicks, you deserve something to remember it by. I assume Rob will hang this on his wall next to his diploma.

Ghost Driver

2013-05-08T00:40:00.000-04:00

I almost died again today. I’m sure many of you are disappointed to see the qualifier “almost,” but as that semi driver found out a few hours ago, I’m surprising hard to kill. On my way home from work, a trucker veered into my lane and came at me head on. I blared my horn, which either woke him up or made him rethink his conscious decision to destroy my sensible mid-sized sedan. The semi jerked back into its own lane moments before it would have demolished me, and I lived to make the world just a little bit worse with yet another blog post. At this point, I don’t get too worked up about close encounters with car-on-car violence. I’ve been the driver in four crashes in my life, and I was found blameless in all of them. Someday I’ll frame the accident reports just to prove to my wife it’s possible for me to not be at fault for something. While I’m a flawless driver, other motorists clearly can’t be trusted. That’s why I’m excited about Google’s project to build a self-driving car. By removing people from the equation, I’ll have a much better chance of dying from natural causes rather than vehicular manslaughter. And really, that’s been my only goal in life all along.

I’m unlucky enough to be in lots of crashes but lucky enough to walk away unscathed. The only logical conclusion is that I’m clumsy but invincible.

The basic idea of a self-driving car is that a computer controls the vehicle using information gathered from video cameras, range-finding lasers, and GPS coordinates. For safety reasons, Google still requires a person to sit in the driver’s seat in case of an emergency, but I’ve never been a fan of caution. That’s why I don’t wear a seatbelt. I simply drink lots of milk so the bones in my head are strong enough to stay intact when I smash through the windshield. While Google expects the human driver to remain awake and alert as the computer steers, there’s little point in having a self-driving car if you’re just going to treat that feature like an advanced form of cruise control. The first thing I’d do with such a vehicle is program it for a destination eight or ten hours away and then go to sleep. I’d close my eyes and wake up where I wanted to go, which means the car would pretty much be a teleporter. With two kids under the age of three, night driving is ideal because the only time my offspring behave themselves is when they’re unconscious. A self-driving car would allow me to nap along with everyone else, sparing my heart and bladder from the nearly-lethal caffeine binges such trips normally entail.

If you’re willing to ignore the human-driver-as-a-backup requirement, there’s no limit to how awesome a self-driving car could be. The biggest perk is it could function as an unmanned chauffeur for kids who are too young to drive. Children are freeloaders who depend on their parents to transport them everywhere. With self-driving technology, I could program the car to swing by daycare to pick up my kids. This approach would work as long as the childcare worker on the other end loads the right children. And if that person makes a mistake, it’s not a huge deal. Under a certain age, kids are more or less interchangeable anyway. When my offspring get a bit older, a self-driving car could ferry them to their afterschool activities, giving me time to pursue fulfilling hobbies, like napping and drinking alone. If Google finds a way to make the car provide emotional support for my kids during soccer games, I could totally remove myself from the child-rearing process. The absence of parents would be a definite improvement for youth sports. There’d be fewer enraged dads to punch referees if the only spectators had four wheels. Of course, if one of those cars did become upset, cleaning up the splattered referee wouldn’t exactly be clean or convenient.

The occasional flattened athletic official notwithstanding, self-driving cars would make the world a safer place for most people. My driving history is irrefutable proof that human motorists other than me are basically kamikazes. In college, I was rear-ended by a woman on her cell phone, and a few years later I collided with a teenager who lost control of her truck and flew through my lane. Both of my other accidents were single-car affairs, but someone else was still to blame. For one crash, I slid into a small snow bank on an icy day, and for the other I demolished a deer who I assume deliberately committed suicide by car. The party at fault in both accidents was God, and luckily he didn’t contest the official police report. Believe what you will about the guy, but I still don’t want to sit across from him in a court of law. Self-driving cars would eliminate these crashes, unless the onboard computer runs Windows, in which case those cars would crash all the time for no reason at all.

It’s been more than a century since the invention of the automobile, yet deer continue to stand in the middle of the road, calling into serious question one of the basic tenants of natural selection.

As long as Google doesn’t partner with Microsoft for this project, the in-car computers should be superior to human drivers. Computers are better than people at everything, including love. That’s while Apple products cost so much. Their stylish hardware may be technically unimpressive, but the affection trapped within those stylish plastic cases fully justifies the 500% markup. I’d have no problem putting my life in the hands of a self-driving car, especially if taking substantial risks with my life enables me to enjoy mild conveniences. I could take a nap during my 35-mintue commute to work or even wake up later than normal and do my entire morning routine while in the car. Hopefully future family vehicles will include a sink and a showerhead. The side windows already double as toilets. Self-driving cars would give me more than an extra hour of free time each day, and I’m sure I’d waste it just like the other 23.

Even with self-driving technology, I still wouldn’t trust my car to stay steady while I shave. It would probably slam on its brakes at random times to get back at me for never washing it.

If the self-driving car does make it to market, I’m sure laws will make it way less fun than I originally imagined. In my mind, it would be the ultimate designated driver, but I have a feeling prudish politicians still won’t let me pound shots as I cruise the countryside. They reserve that privilege for themselves. In the meantime, I could achieve the same level of convenience as a self-driving car by hiring a driver. For potential applicants, a driver’s license is encouraged but not required. I can only pay you in beer and corn chips. Obviously this is the greatest job ever.

Feminine Problems

2013-05-05T14:32:00.000-04:00

It finally occurred to me the other day that I’m outnumbered. Math has never been my strong suit, but even I can count to three. That’s how many females I have in my house, and it’s at least triple the number I’d have under ideal circumstances. I’ve always put my wife in the girl column, but until recently I didn’t associate it with my daughters. Below a certain age, kids are more or less androgynous. I figured with a steady dose of sports and horror movies, I could turn them both into tomboys, at least until puberty. Nature, however, is stronger than nurture, at least when my weak parenting skills come into play. Despite my best attempts to interest my two year old in UFC bouts and zombie defense strategies, Betsy developed a tragic interest in princesses, babies, and big, puffy dresses. I doubt my 11 month old Mae is far behind her. With that much estrogen flowing through our house, there’s a very real danger I’ll start lactating. Before I write off my second kid as a total loss, I need to figure out what went wrong with the first one and avoid repeating my past mistakes for once in my life.

Whoever said little girls are made of sugar, spice, and everything nice never had a daughter. They’re really made of hair tangles and disappointment.

The only sure way to fix Betsy is to alter her DNA with a microwave since her real problem is she inherited two X chromosomes. It’s possibly Betsy’s interests aren’t a result of her genes, but it’s hard to see where they’d come from otherwise. I only interact with my children when I’m deliberately trying to ruin them, and she certainly didn’t develop her nurturing instincts while sitting on my lap as I massacred aliens in Halo 4. At daycare, Betsy is mostly surrounded by boys, but they haven’t been able to dissuade her ill-advised nurturing instincts either. The room she stays in has plenty of trucks and dinosaurs, and she plays with those sometimes, but for the most part she sticks to the baby dolls and the kitchen set. She didn’t get that last interest from her mother, who has never once given into my demands to get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich. To be fair, I only said that to Lola once, and I immediately lost my appetite because I spent the next several minutes cleaning up my own blood. There must be something internal that causes boys and girls to behave differently, even at an early age, because there’s no apparent outside influence that makes Betsy pretend to be a princess instead of a cybernetic super soldier from space. It’s a shame, too, because I’m ready to supply her with all the toy laser guns she wants for imaginary acts of alien genocide.

To a little girl, a father is basically a credit card you can hug.

Maybe Betsy turned into a girly girl not because of an outside influence but due to the lack of one. She definitely doesn’t have a strong male role model. While I’m manly in terms of my total lack of emotional availability and complete inability to understand which colors match, I also have no combat skills and am incapable of building or fixing anything. I even had to force myself to be interested in spectator sports and beer through an intensive regimen of both. I’ve never had any luck with workout plans or other health improvement attempts, but the one time I decided to make myself more unhealthy I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. The point is I’m not a naturally masculine guy. If Betsy’s reason for heading down the pink and sparkly road is external, it’s my fault for lacking sufficient testosterone to counteract all of the undesirable hormones flowing through this house.

I don’t see a solution to my girl problem, and things will only get worse from here. There’s a lot of time between now and when Betsy leaves for college, and I have a dark sense of foreboding about how the intervening years will play out. I’m certain all of my future children will also be girls because I’m clearly being punished by the universe for some past wrong I don’t remember. I don’t doubt I committed it, but I pull off so many immoral acts it’s hard to single any one thing out. At some point I’ll probably have four daughters and one wife, all of whom will have their cycles in synch. I’ll be relegated to cowering in a corner as our house is overrun by stockpiles of tampons. If my female offspring turn out anything like my wife, they’ll never finish what’s on their plates, so I’ll eat everyone’s leftovers and end up weighing 400 pounds. My morbid obesity will dramatically reduce my lifespan, so while I’ll be hopeless outnumbered by the fairer sex, at least I won’t have to suffer through this gender disparity for long.

Eating healthy is fine if you want to stick around for another 80 or 90 years, but never overlook the perks of suicide by bacon.

I may be reacting badly to this whole gender issue, but I’m hardly the first person to struggle with it. There was a kid in the news a while back whose parents hid his sex from everyone until he was five. His mom and dad didn’t want society’s gender biases to adversely impact the way their kid grew up. Instead, they opted to turn their offspring into a gender-neutral media spectacle, which surely won’t result in years of therapy down the road. While Betsy has a preference for all things feminine, I don’t think she realizes boys and girls often play with different types of toys. She just goes with what she likes. She’s slowly becoming aware, however, that there are some undeniable differences between the sexes. She accidentally learned one a few weeks ago when she walked in on my five-year-old brother taking a bath. Betsy immediately noticed an anatomical anomaly on him and demanded an explanation. Being a mature adult, I quickly changed the subject and never brought it up again.

It’d be nice if I could play video games and Dungeons and Dragons with Betsy, but a child isn’t an indentured friend, despite my best efforts to the contrary. Whether it’s nature, nurture, or a simple expression of Betsy’s own choices, she is rapidly developing into a very feminine little girl. The best thing I can do is learn to tolerate a house full of tutus and toy ponies. And when she finally asks for a real horse, I need to be ready to crush her dreams once and for all.

Civil Hostility

2013-04-28T23:31:00.000-04:00

A past employer once gave me civility training to transform me from a hateful misanthrope to a hateful misanthrope who says “please” and “thank you.” These lessons were pointless because I already knew how to be polite; I just chose not to be. If you don’t work on commission, kindness is aggressively punished. Being nice to coworkers and customers makes them come back to you; being hostile makes them go away, preferably while crying. Since corporate America is completely incapable of telling the difference between good workers and bad ones, being anti-social leads to an easier day at the office for you while doing nothing to affect your chances of being caught in the artillery-like salvos of layoffs and firings that land indiscriminately among the employee ranks. I know the skills employees really need to be successful in the workplace. Here are a few examples for how to handle common situations the right way, which is really just any way that results in less work for you.

Scenario 1:

Customer: “Hello.”

Employee: “Please die.”

Analysis: The employee politely said “please,” which is important in this context. Had he simply said, “Die,” it would’ve sounded like the employee planned to do the killing. That’s far too proactive for the corporate world. “Please die” encourages the customer to take the initiative and expire through his own efforts. That way, instead of wasting time and energy knocking off customers, the employee can waste his time and energy doing whatever it is his job is supposed to be. If that job is customer service, he succeeded beyond all expectations. Anyone who aspires to the satisfaction of a job well done must be unfamiliar with the satisfaction of a job avoided altogether.

As for what the customer wanted, it doesn’t matter. The only ones who believe the customer is always right are people who have never actually dealt with a customer. In the age of the Internet, a human being who insists on resolving problems on the phone or face-to-face is likely bewildered by such modern marvels as electricity and the wheel. Helping the customer resolve his problem wouldn’t fix anything since such an incapable person would inevitably have more problems in the future that he would also expect you to solve. That’s why “Please die” is the only appropriate employee response. The only end to stupidity is death.

“Your continued existence is the reason I go through a bottle of Xanax a week. Thanks for your business.”

Scenario 2:

Potential corporate client: “Why should I buy your product?”

Salesman: “How should I know? Let’s snort cocaine and use my corporate credit card to solicit prostitutes.”

Analysis: This is the basic outline of every successful sales pitch since 1980. In a corporate sales situation, both the buyer and the seller are spending someone else’s money, a fact that should discourage you from owning stock in any company ever. Since sales are the main source of revenue for many businesses, spending accounts for salesmen have remained largely unaffected by the recession. While the standard cubicle dweller is expected to power his computer with a hand crank and heat his four-walled work cage with wood he chopped himself, professionals in sales are merely asked to eat no more than a dozen steaks per person at any given meal. This polite suggestion is of course ignored because no prospective buyer will take you seriously if you don’t ingest at least half a cow before you get down to business.

That business involves massive amounts of drugs and unprotected intercourse with whores of undetermined genders, possibly followed by dying on a toilet in an unlicensed tattoo parlor. Members of the sales department make up for their lavish spending accounts by dying young. If you survive more than a few sales calls, you obviously aren’t making any sales, and for that offense a better salesman will be fired in your place while you live on to continue abusing the system.

If it’s good enough for a dead gold fish, it’s good enough for anyone who works in sales.

Scenario 3:

Employee 1: Can you help me with this project?

Employee 2: No.

Analysis: Don’t make excuses when you don’t have to. Save those for important occasions, like when the cops show up and find your buddy from the sales department dead on the toilet. Doing the bare minimum required to keep your job doesn’t make you a bad employee; it makes you a good American. Besides, it pays to let your fellow employees fail, or at least it would if performance was in any way tied to compensation. Since wages and promotions are more or less distributed randomly, letting your work friends suffer humiliating public failures is one of the few acceptable sources of amusement in your otherwise meaningless existence.

Be prepared to draw upon your vast reservoir of lies, however, if your boss ruins your schadenfreude and compels you to help your incompetent office acquaintance.

Scenario 4:

Boss: I order you to help your coworker.

Employee 2: I would, but his face causes rectal bleeding.

Analysis: Be specific, especially when it involves your anus. A simple “I’m not feeling well” will always get shot down. But news that bodily fluids are seeping from orifices people don’t want to hear about usually ends a conversation and elicits no follow-up questions. As for the plausibility of someone’s face causing an adverse reaction in your excretory system, leave that one to science. Your boss is unlikely to look it up on WebMD, but if he persists, offer to produce your underwear as evidence. If your supervisor is willing to cross that line, you should probably find a different job anyway.

Most women use makeup specifically to avoid inducing bloody diarrhea among their coworkers.

If you follow the tactics used in these four scenarios, you won’t work smarter, but you will abandon your daily duties in a much more intelligent manner. No matter what corporate mission statement your employer tries to force upon you, your only goal is to collect the most possible money for the least possible effort. It’s a delicate balancing act that can only be maximized by being incredibly rude to every human being you encounter without going quite far enough to be forced to produce bloody underwear to support your lies. Good luck.

Friends Without Benefits

2013-04-25T00:17:00.000-04:00

Friendship is an alliance of convenience, a loose association between men willing to split the cost of beer and help move furniture if stairs aren’t involved. I’ve benefited from this arrangement for many years, but now it’s threatened because the last of my childhood friends finally moved away. This is a major milestone for them, but more importantly it’s a minor annoyance for me. I’m older than most of my buddies, and I shamelessly abandoned them years ago in pursuit of a career, a wife, and a house, all of which seemed like good ideas at the time but in hindsight obviously weren’t. Despite these irreversible mistakes, I still lived close enough to my hometown that I could occasionally head back to pursue ill-advised shenanigans with my compatriots before crashing at my parents’ house, which at this point in my life is basically a free hotel where I sleep off hangovers. Now that all of my friends are selfishly moving forward with their own lives rather than being an expedient diversion in mine, I find myself isolated and adrift. I should probably make new friends, but only if it’s not more practical to die alone.

Everybody needs at least one friend who will claim you were with them the whole time just in case the police start asking around.

It’s hard to make friends as an adult or whatever it is I am right now, but it wasn’t that way when I was younger. My 2 year old Betsy still has an easy time meeting people. Yesterday a boy at daycare saved her from a worm by spitting at it. Chivalry isn’t dead after all. She and this boy are now friends for life and will probably get married. But acquaintances are harder to come by when you’re old because there are fewer people your own age to save from earthworms. Even on those rare instances when I encounter someone who appears comparable to me at first glance, the odds that we have similar interests and tallies of progeny are virtually nonexistent. Interacting with people who don’t have kids is a challenge because they usually want to hit the bars. To join them, my wife Lola and I have to drive 45 minutes to leave our kids with her parents, who don’t approve or alcohol in particular or fun in general. Then Lola gets stuck as the designated driver, so I drink while she sits there hating me. In other words, it’s pretty much like every night at home, only more expensive.

Since going out is a logistical and financial nightmare, we usually end up inviting people over to our house, which poses its own set of problems. Any time someone visits, we clean in a panic to make it appear as though we live like human beings rather than the bridge-dwelling trolls we more closely emulate. This lie takes a considerable amount of time and effort to perpetrate. It’s probably good that outsiders enter our house at least occasionally because it gives us a deadline to deal with our sanitary disasters. Were it not for the judging eyes of outsiders, we would’ve been crushed to death beneath piles of our own filth years ago. Unfortunately, once we get the house cleaned up, it doesn’t stay that way for long. By the time our guests take off their coats, every toy Lola and I spent half of a day putting away magically finds its way back to the floor. The layer of Barbies and plastic tea sets is so thick I no longer remember if we have carpet or hardwood floors.

Friends: Judging you with a smile.

Logistics aren’t the only drawback of interacting with other people. Friendships are based on conversation, and I don’t have much to talk about. While I can easily rant for 1,000 words at a time on the Internet, when I try to do that in real life people want to respond and interject their own opinions. That ruins the whole experience. Besides adding an undetermined number of kids in the recent past, my life hasn’t change in at least half a decade. When my wife asks me about my day at work, I shrug because I don’t remember. On the off chance that I do have something new to report about my life, our guests likely already saw it online. Facebook is basically a scoreboard to keep track of who fails at life the most. Unemployment and pregnancy are hilarious, but only from a distance. If my acquaintances posted about those topics more often, I could get rid of cable. But as entertaining they are, social networking sites deplete what little small talk material I have at my disposal. Rather than visiting potential friends to share information second-hand, we might as well all stay home and browse Facebook to monitor those poor relationship decisions and ugly baby pictures at their source.

“If you unfriend me, I will stab you in the uterus.”

While most of my attempts at socializing with other human beings end in abject failure, I can sometimes attain an almost-passable level of interaction under very controlled circumstances. I have the easiest time talking with others when I have copious amounts of alcohol and a pretext to consume it. Lola and I have a few other couples with whom we play strategy board games from time to time. Inebriation doesn’t increase the quality of the words I use while we play, but it does drive up their quantity and volume. This seems like a lot of trouble to go through to build new friendships, but I have to keep trying. If I don’t have other people over when I drink, Lola will start to worry about me. Then she’ll host an intervention, and that’ll waste at least one day of my weekend. My time isn’t valuable, but I’m opposed to self-improvement on a moral level.

Father-in-Law Knows Best

2013-04-20T08:05:00.000-04:00

The main perk of living in a house instead of an apartment is it’s harder for the neighbors to hear me when I yell at my kids. This morsel of privacy, however, comes at a cost. When I lived in an apartment, anytime something broke I brought it to the attention of the landlord, who promptly ignored it. Now that I own a house, I serve as my own inattentive landlord. I barely do the basic maintenance to keep this place standing. If there was a fire, I’d probably put it out, but only if I could reach the fire extinguisher without getting up and there was nothing good on TV. I save a ton of time by ignoring all of the cosmetic problems and focusing exclusively on the ones that are an immediate threat to the structure’s stability, like termites or children. My house may look terrible, but thanks to my half-hearted efforts to keep it upright it should be here to disgrace this neighborhood for another hundred years.

While I’ve been largely successful at being lazy, I occasionally slip up and get something done. I can build just about anything with a box of screws, $40 worth of lumber, and six months of nagging from my wife. When I can longer ignore her carefully orchestrated campaign of passive aggressive suggestions and left-handed compliments, I own up to my responsibilities and do the only honorable thing: I use my wife’s refined whining tactics on my father-in-law until he does the project for me. Part of being a man is finding a family member you can badger into doing your dirty work for free. A few months ago, Lola wanted me to install a water softener, but we didn’t need one. Our water was already soft. If it was hard, it would be called ice. Nonetheless, my mom found a water softener on Craigslist and managed to buy it for us without getting murdered, so I knew I had a familial obligation to install it. Sensing the urgency of the situation, I put it off for eight months before calling my father-in-law. I even procrastinate on getting other people to do my work for me.

Lola’s dad is easy to browbeat into tedious manual labor projects because that’s how he shows his love for his kids. As a normal adult male, he is biologically incapable of expressing emotions through words, so he does it through actions like washing cars, installing plumbing, and killing animals with his bare hands. To him, tearing the head off a grizzly bear means the same thing as a hug. His handy-man experience exceeds my own by a slight degree. He once owned a hardware store and built his first house by himself, whereas I sometimes struggle to use a can opener. The main trait we have in common is that I’m also incapable of expressing my feelings through the English language. Instead of simply thanking my father-in-law for his help, I show my gratitude by doing unspeakable things to his daughter on a semi-regular basis. The relationship between me and him is complicated to say the least. Despite these difficulties, he did come over to help me install the water softener. We split the labor evenly. He did all of the plumbing, electrical work, and manual labor. I picked the radio station. I slept well that night.

The main benefit of soft water is it’s easier on your back if you have a waterbed.

My wife waited only a few minutes after the water started flowing to resume her assault on my happiness. Now I need my father-in-law’s services again, this time for the upstairs bathroom. The fixtures in it were designed at a time when the average American’s diet contained less whole grain and more asbestos, so people didn’t grow as tall back then. The sink is at about knee level, which would be fine if my spine didn’t have the flexibility of a 2x4. It’s cheaper to replace the sink than pay a chiropractor. Lola and I found a replacement vanity on Craigslist, and I paid for it and lugged it all the way back to our house before I realized it had a crack in its marble top. It turns out shady strangers on the Internet don’t have a great return policy, so I need Lola’s dad to rescue me once again. He assures me he can fix it, but the main challenge is getting him to help us and not his other children who are equally eager to abuse his services. The secondary challenge is getting him to leave once he’s done. I still don’t know a nice way to say, “I value you as a family member, but not as much as I value you as a source of free labor.” I’ll keep that one to myself. If he expresses love by building houses, he could show his anger by tearing them down.

The vanity’s style can best be described as old world charm meets new world Internet fraud.

There are other projects to do around the house, most of which I could complete without the help of my father-in-law or anyone else. That pretty much guarantees they won’t get done. We have a picket fence that still needs to be stained, and a lot of the paint on the front porch is peeling off. Our home was built between 1912 and 1914, but most of it is covered in 8-inch aluminum siding that was installed by men wearing platform shoes who were running late for a disco. Our home is a classy lady in a trashy dress, which is a poor representation of me. I pride myself on being just as ugly on the inside as I am on the outside. While the aluminum siding robs our home of any possible charm, it does provide us with a mostly maintenance-free exterior. Only the wood columns on our porch lack this impenetrable metal shell, and for that I had hate the primitive technology of our ancestors in the 1970s. They should’ve found a way to coat round surfaces with molten metal to ensure I wouldn’t need to paint even once 40 years later. I don’t care if the superheated metal would have burned down the house. That’s science’s problem, not mine.

There’s a fine line between rustic and white trash. At my house, you can’t see that line because it’s hidden by an El Camino in grass three feet high.

Homeownership is a privilege, not a right, but I still abuse it at every available opportunity. I’m only proactive when my behavior is destructive in some way. My father-in-law’s conduct as a responsible property owner hasn’t rubbed off on me yet, and I’m certain it never will. I just hope my laziness doesn’t rub off on him. Otherwise all of these projects will have to wait until my children are old enough to be the source of free labor I always intended for them to be.

Outsourcing Motherhood

2013-04-15T00:26:00.000-04:00

There is a lot of bitterness in the debate among women about whether it’s better to stay home with your kids or send them to daycare. This isn’t particularly surprising since women are full of bitterness about everything. The fairer sex is capable of 10,000 emotions, but 9,999 of them are variations of hate. The debate over the best way to raise children is a high stakes affair because there are no do-overs. Both camps agree if you make the wrong choice, your child is ruined for life. For whatever reason, mothers take that personally. I think children turn out fine with either approach. That seemingly equitable assertion is controversial. Parents who sacrifice their careers to stay home and care for their offspring want their kids to have a clear advantage over the progeny of absentee parents like me. But daycare doesn’t hurt my kids. There are a million ways I will probably screw up at parenting, but paying responsible adults to watch my children during the day isn’t one of them.

The dispute between stay-at-home and working parents is never-ending because it’s impossible to measure the impact of either approach. No matter how good of a parent you are, you still end up raising an imperfect human being. That doesn’t stop some parents from defining success as ending up with a doctor or a lawyer in the family. I define it as having a kid who doesn’t rob liquor stores as a profession. I’d be OK with it, though, if she only robbed them as a hobby. No one agrees on what parental choices cause some children to end up as medical practitioners and others to end up as booze bandits. The world is full of good kids who overcame bad parents and bad kids who fell short despite growing up in loving households. In the absence of empirical data, we’re left with anecdotal evidence, which is the best kind because it doesn’t require me to research anything. In general, most people agree reading bedtimes stories to kids is better for them than locking them in poorly-ventilated cages, but pretty much everything else is open for debate. For example, nobody knows the effect of reading bedtime stories to children who are locked in well-ventilated cages, and as far as I know there are no scientists courageous enough to find out. At this point, even the best parents are just making it up as they go along.

Good parents teach their children how to pull off an effective rear-naked choke.

Lacking evidence to the contrary, I assume staying home gives you more opportunities to shape your child, for better or for worse. But most parents who leave work to watch their kids do so only when their children are young, and during those years there are limits to how much of a difference you can make. One way or another, little kids have to learn colors, numbers, and how to use the toilet. While a mother or father may be more committed to teaching these subjects than a childcare provider making $8 an hour, it doesn’t make a huge difference who gives the kids this critical information as long as they learn it from somewhere. The only reason to insist on personally educating your toddler is if you want to pass down very specific beliefs, like if you’re morally opposed to indoor plumbing or the number eight. My two year old Betsy and 10 month old Mae go to a daycare run by fundamentalist Christians. As a borderline-alcoholic and practicing Catholic (I guess those are synonyms), the daycare and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. But ultimately I just need them to keep my daughters alive during the day and maybe teach them a few of the basics. As long as my kids learn how to count, I don’t care if the daycare fails to teach them the nuances of evolution. My girls still have a few years before college to make up ground in the sciences. Besides, the world is full of crazy people. They might as well learn how to deal with them now.

I should take a more proactive role in the education of my daughters, but for now I’m content letting them learn by watching me get drunk and scream at people on Xbox Live.

While being a stay-at-home mom and sending your kid to daycare work out the same in the long run, discipline in the early years is the one area where homemakers have an advantage. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a well-behaved toddler, but if one exists, training that kid is a full-time job. My kids aren’t a public nuisance, but only because they focus on being a private nuisance at home. Betsy behaves better for other people than she does for my wife and I, but I was the same way growing up. I never dreamed of defying a teacher, but I happily ignored my mom no matter how many times she told me not to put potatoes in the fish bowl. It’s hard to keep yourself entertained when you don’t have cable. My toddler’s selective disobedience is probably the result of my genes, and for that I owe my wife and that fish an apology. Another reason Betsy might behave better at daycare is peer pressure. If the other kids listen to the staff, Betsy does, too. Since leading from the front is a good way to get yourself killed, the members of my bloodline are predisposed to be followers. The motto on our family coat of arms is “Survive and Propagate.” Charles Darwin would be proud. Keeping Betsy home with me all day wouldn’t make her behave any better, but leaving me in charge for that long would definitely reduce her odds of survival.

My wife and I both work full-time, and for the most part we haven’t had any problems raising our kids. Once, though, someone said to my wife, “Oh, so you’re a part-time mom.” Lola is a mom 24 hours a day. We have the DNA tests to prove it. Being a good mother or father doesn’t mean you have to spend every second of every day with your children. You don’t stop being a parent when a child starts kindergarten or gets married and has kids of his or her own. Honestly, my daughters get more personalized attention at daycare than they would if they spent all day with me anyway. My kids love interacting with friends their own ages. If they stayed home with me, I wouldn’t play with them the whole time. My love for them is infinite, but my attention span is not.

Children are like barnacles. Sometimes the only way to make them let go is with a high-pressure hose.

Ultimately, your children will likely end up the same whether you quit your job to watch them or not. My own mother worked, but she only did part-time jobs that allowed her to watch me and my six siblings without hiring a babysitter. I didn’t turn out right, so sometimes even bending over backwards to be a stay-at-home mom isn’t enough.

Running from the Past

2013-04-11T00:43:00.000-04:00

As I edge toward thirty, there are certain things I can’t do any more. I can’t walk into college bars without getting dirty looks, and I can’t cross my legs Indian-style without getting them stuck that way permanently. That’s an exaggeration. I can get them uncrossed with some WD-40 and a lot of swearing. My whole body, and my lower appendages in particular, are degenerating at a rapid rate. Based on how much I sit at work and then again when I get home, if someone amputated my legs while I slept it would take me a few days to notice. To slow my inevitable decline, I occasionally attempt to exercise, but it’s a different experience for me now than it used to be. When I ran cross country in college, I didn’t win, but I didn’t completely embarrass myself either, mainly because my threshold for shame is incredibly low. Now that I’m older, I can no longer squeak my way through races on low self-esteem alone. I recently did a fun run without training, and for the next week I walked like I was raped by a bear. I’ll need to find the proper balance between preparatory exercise and preemptive self-loathing if I ever want to finish a race again.

I used to wear out a pair of running shoes a year. At the current rate I train, however, this pair will still be in mint condition when archaeologists dig it up millennia from now.

Initially, my decline caught me off guard because I thought I bottomed out a long time ago. I finished my final two college races in dead last, and the only reason I didn’t quit in the middle of them was so my teammates could get pictures of me raising my arms in victory while the crowd gave me the pity clap. I plan to hang those snapshots on my wall and then tell my kids I’m by myself in them because I was winning by so much. Failing in a very public fashion didn’t hurt anything but my pride because I was a non-scholarship athlete. I was slow compared to other athletes in their 20s who trained every day, but I was fairly quick when measured against the whole of humanity. I was in the upper percentiles for speed and endurance when you threw little kids and the elderly into the mix. I figured my years of disappointment in organized competition would translate into a baseline of athletic ability I could draw on in future years. Within a few days of graduating, however, I discovered my reservoir of physical fitness was as empty as my soul.

After I got over the surprise of being just as bad at running as I am at every other aspect of adulthood, I formed a plan to get back in shape. I’m married with children, so I have no one to impress with my level of cardiovascular conditioning. I try to avoid massive weight gain mainly so I don’t have to go to the store to buy new clothes, a fate worse than death. My original plan was to run four races a year. A handful of my friends even signed on for the plan, mainly because we picked only events that had unlimited free beer afterward. A seven-mile race doesn’t do much to offset the subsequent consumption of 10,000-calories of alcohol, but weight loss goals should always take a back seat to drunken debauchery. That’s in the Bible. To highlight which part of race day we really cared about, we bought a traveling trophy to pass around among ourselves. It’s an authentic 1800s German beer stein made in Japan in 1989. After a while, we all figured out we could still drink the beer regardless of how terrible we did during the run. Training stopped, times slowed, and beer consumption increased exponentially. To be honest, life was pretty good once the unpleasantness of the race was out of the way.

The only meaningful awards are the ones that help you get bombed out of your mind. Understanding this, many of my high school classmates used the paper from their diplomas to roll joints.

That was before I got old. When my knees were a few years younger, I could get away with treating races like a minor inconvenience. Even with minimal training, I could still finish in the middle of the pack. As my friends and I aged, however, we started getting injured and dropping out of before the finish line. Some of us skipped the runs altogether and just showed up for the party afterward. Finally, the group more or less dissolved. All of my friends, who had been stuck in post-college adolescence for years, suddenly found jobs, got married, and moved away. At the last race, only two of us showed up, and the other guy quit around the halfway mark. We didn’t even go to the after-party, opting instead to drink by ourselves at my parents’ house. Sometimes I impress even myself with how cool I am.

My countless participation medals are a testament to my impressive feat of showing up.

The most recent race could very well have been my last. I “ran” all the way to the finish, but only in the most technical sense of the word. By the end, old women with canes were passing me. Although I was coming up short against new age and gender demographics, this failure was comforting in a way. My time in organized sports taught me how to lose over and over again, a process that helped me shed unnecessary baggage like self-esteem and personal ambition. Since I no longer train for the races and I don’t have anyone left to drink with at the after-parties, there’s no benefit to doing them at this point. I might as well accept my new sedentary condition and move on with my life. If I play my cards right, I won’t even have to buy a new wardrobe to accommodate my inevitable weight gain. I can just make myself some ponchos out of trash bags to fulfill the basic requirements of public nudity laws. It won’t be fashionable, but it beats shopping.

The War of Mice and Men

2013-04-07T22:38:00.000-04:00

I oppose helping the environment in any way, but I accidentally turned my house into a thriving ecosystem. Besides supporting four humans and two dogs, my humble dwelling now provides shelter for an undetermined number of mice. The presence of these unwanted invaders is curious because my house isn’t particularly dirty. It’s also not particularly clean, but at least there isn’t any vermin-accessible food laying around because my dogs eat every crumb that hits the floor. They aren’t so much valued family members as they are de facto vacuum cleaners. I don’t know why the mice decided now is a good time to cohabitate with us, but my efforts to drive them out have ended in failure, just like everything else I do. If the situation doesn’t improve soon, I’ll have to stop trying to kill them and start charging them rent.

The present conundrum is all the more perplexing because my wife Lola and I have yet to actually see a mouse. Lola was the first one to notice we had a problem, which is typical. Like all wives, she has an innate ability to find fault with any situation, especially if it leads to more work for me. While she was taking a shower, Lola heard a scratching sound she believed was coming from the drain. She assumed it was a mouse, but I helpfully pointed out it could just as easily be a murderous clown or a velociraptor. She refused to acknowledge my logical deduction and instead sent me to the store to buy mousetraps. I’m not sure how a mouse could get into our pipes and then avoid drowning, but we charged ahead with Lola’s plan because home improvement stores don’t sell anything to deal with non-mouse drain monsters. Life will be much easier if Lowe’s ever starts selling hand grenades. I put mousetraps in the tub, but the interloper either sensed the danger or was too snobby for the store-brand peanut butter I used as bait. After a few days, I figured out the scratching sounds were actually coming from inside the walls. I moved the traps from the tub to the bathroom floor and waited. I tend to be patient in such matters because the only problems I’m able to solve are the ones that go away on their own. This one did, at least for a while.

My wife made me clean the drain for 20 minutes before I could take a picture of it, and it still doesn’t look clean. There will be no future pictures of our bathroom.

After a few days of futilely trying to outsmart an animal on the bottom rung of the food chain, the scratching sounds suddenly went away. Everything was quiet for a week or so until the pest made a brilliant deduction: If the bathroom is the place eat, the master bedroom closet must be the place to take a dump. Based on how much he pooped, the reason the mouse didn’t go for the food on the traps is that he was suffering from extreme bowel distress. Unless this creature has some kind of super colon that defies the laws of energy and mass, blasting that much matter from his rectal cannon should have torn him apart. Lola reacted to his freshly planted turd garden with the tone of voice she saves for life-or-death emergencies, like when one of the kids is on fire or when I load the dishwasher wrong. After verifying the mouse wasn’t still pooping in the room at that very moment, I rushed to the store to buy glue traps. I figured if tar pits could catch dinosaurs, surely a sticky pad could ensnare a mouse.

The peanut butter may not appeal to the mouse, but it definitely fascinated my 10 month old. At least now I know what bait to use if I ever need to build a baby trap.

The glue traps remained empty for days, and the walls were suspiciously silent. Where this animal went during his absence I don’t know. Maybe he finally went to a rodent gastrointestinologist, or maybe he was just lying low for a while because he’s behind on child support payments for his 9,000 kids. Whatever he was up to, it wasn’t important enough to keep him away from laundry day. After a week or so with no signs of the mouse, Lola piled some dirty clothes in the middle of the closet floor. She shut off the closet light and closed the door. When she returned a few minutes later, one of her shirts was across the closet, tangled in a glue trap. Since her hands apparently don’t work in crisis situations, it was my job to investigate. I picked through the sticky blouse expecting to find a highly agitated mouse with a fondness for women’s clothing snared in the middle of it, but the creature wasn’t there. My best guess is he tried to drag the shirt across the room to make a nest but got it stuck on the glue trap on the way. That’s more comforting than the alternate conclusion that this trespasser is some kind of magician who enters and then escapes traps for the entertainment of his fellow mice.

A glue trap doesn’t actually kill you. It just holds you in place until you die from something else. It’s a lot like my career in that respect.

In the two months since then, we’ve heard the mouse only once and haven’t noticed any new droppings or attempted shirt thefts. I hate to pay an exterminator since we almost never see signs that we still have any vermin. Besides, if the exterminator brings mouse poison and the real interloper is actually a murderous clown or a velociraptor as I originally suspected, we’ll just piss the thing off. The rest of my family has adapted to our new living arrangement. My 2 year old Betsy now thinks the mouse is her friend. At first she was terrified at bath time when we thought the animal was in the drain. Then she watched the Disney Channel and decided rodents aren’t so bad. She now tells me she plays with the mouse, which isn’t surprising since for a toddler there’s a thin line between pretending and lying. However, if it ever turns out that she actually does see a real mouse when we’re not around, we’ll burn down the house. Then her friend can go mooch off someone else.

Best Man for the Job

2013-03-24T22:50:00.000-04:00

After thinking it over for a few weeks, I’ve decided to do something I’ve never done before: apologize. I’m sorry I’m not pope. While I never explicitly promised my readers I’d be the next supreme pontiff, I heavily implied it. If it weren’t for the near certainty I’d be the next bishop of Rome, I doubt anyone would have even bothered reading this blog. My enemies viewed my posts solely to gather incriminating evidence to use against me down the road. Undoubtedly, my positions on zombie speed and non-consensual unicorn sex would have been highly controversial to the media once I became pope, but to faithful Catholics it wouldn’t have sounded any crazier than the other stuff we believe. On our bad days, we make Scientologists seem normal. Unfortunately for everyone collecting ammunition to shoot down my career, the College of Cardinals passed over me and instead picked someone from within their own ranks in a deal that reeks of cronyism. The new guy, Pope Francis, is supposedly a humble, down-to-earth man, yet he didn’t have the courtesy to pick up the phone when I called him to concede. The Catholic Church has been around for 2,000 years, but that’s nothing compared to how long I can hold a grudge.

The two things every pope receives on his first day are a fancy white outfit and caller ID.

Since nobody at the Vatican would talk to me, I can only speculate as to why the cardinals didn’t pick me this time around. One reason might be that I don’t look good in fancy hats. Another may be that I have a wife and two kids. To be fair, neither my spouse nor my progeny like me. I’m sure they’d be willing to hang out unseen in the papal castle while I was busy with whatever it is popes do with their time. Being exceptionally good at procreating shouldn’t preclude me from becoming the world’s alpha Catholic. Popes in the Middle Ages had all kinds of children, although they tried to pass them off as nieces or nephews. The Church eventually cracked down on fornication among the clergy, but as usual only bad things came from less sex. The popes with children ruled a vast empire and made kings bend to their will, whereas modern popes rule a city the size of mid-sized sedan and haven’t excommunicated a world leader since John Paul II kicked out Fidel Castro for cheating at their weekly poker game. Maybe the fornicators were onto something.

Red-clad church officials are called “cardinals” because of their love for an inept NFL franchise in Arizona.

Since historical precedent would have allowed the College of Cardinals to easily overlook my stockpile of children, they must have rejected me for another reason. Perhaps it came down to linguistics. To communicate with the more than one billion Catholics spread across every country in the world, most popes speak half a dozen language. I only speak English, and my fluency in even that tongue is questionable at best. Once again, this is only a superficial problem. What the cardinals didn’t realize is that I could have gotten around my language limitations by communicating solely through text message emoticons. Even the remotest South American tribes understand that a yellow circle with two eyes and a smile means “happy,” unless they mistake it for a picture of an angry sun god that wants to kill their goats. In those situations, I’d smooth over misunderstandings by giving out lots of high fives and shots of bourbon. The true international language is alcohol, and it is one in which every good Catholic is fluent. To spread my message, I’d challenge nonbelievers to drinking contests, with the loser required to convert. I’d either make the whole world Catholic or end up as the world’s first Muslim pope.

I wouldn’t be the first language-challenged pope. In this famous icon, Pope Gregory I holds up a blank book to symbolize that he was functionally illiterate.

Yet another reason the cardinals may have mistakenly rejected me is that I’ve never done a nice thing for anyone. Pope Francis has supposedly acted selflessly over his entire life to help his fellow man. For me, being a jerk isn’t a personality flaw, it’s a way of life. To date, I can’t be credited with a single good deed, but once again my apparent shortcoming is actually an asset. Francis peaked too early. He wasted all of his good deeds on the poor and oppressed, and now I strongly doubt he has any altruism left. On the other hand, I’m a good deed virgin, having not used a single one on any person, deserving or otherwise. I’ve smartly been saving myself for the day I can ride the popemobile off into the sunset, and the Catholic Church would have reaped the benefits of my potential good deed surplus had they selected me. It might seem like a leap of faith to let a demonstrably wicked man lead an institution devoted to charity and good works, but that’s exactly what any good Catholic should expect. After all, the Church wants us to marry one woman and have sex with only her for the rest of our lives without trying it out even once before the wedding day. Clearly the Church favors making permanent commitments before enough data is available to make an informed decision. By those criteria, I’m by far the best choice.

While I may have been ineligible to be pope due to various technicalities, the Catholic Church could have easily changed the rules to make me the man in charge. Even though my family situation, linguistic deficiencies, and lack of good deeds are actually assets, the College of Cardinals once again made the safe choice rather than the right one. They picked yet another old white guy in flowing robes. Perhaps that more than anything else is why I didn’t get selected this time around. I don’t have the pope look, which marketing researchers have shown is crucial to maintaining the attention of the faithful. I’m young and healthy, which diminishes my credibility. Everyone agrees senior citizens are confused and clueless, except when it comes to God, an area where the elderly apparently know everything. The only serious weakness in my application to be pope is my age. Luckily, I’m getting a little older every day. The next time the position opens up, I’ll be so senile that they’ll have to pick me.

Not So Fast, Zombies

2013-03-17T21:07:00.000-04:00

I’m a tolerant man. If my wife told me she ran over a bunch of nuns, I‘d get over it. But if she said even one time that zombies can run, I’d divorce her on the spot. Some transgressions just can’t be forgiven. You have to raise your kids believing in a reasonable zombie speed. It’s the key to a happy household. If you die and then come back as a mobile corpse, you shouldn’t have the agility of an Olympic sprinter. You should shamble, preferably at a steady pace with minor variations for ground incline and wind direction. But running is absolutely, positively out of the question. You might argue this doesn’t matter since zombies aren’t real, but neither are love and happiness. People still take both of those pretty seriously. Any time a movie shows zombies running, it misses the whole point of the undead apocalypse. The appeal of the traditional zombie battle is it tests the cunning and resolve of plucky survivors against a slow but relentless enemy. All a struggle against fast zombies shows is that whoever has the best cardio gets eaten last.

The hardest part of the zombie apocalypse will be telling the difference between the undead and ugly. I’ll have to lie low for a while.

If zombies can run, they deserve to win. A fast zombie is better than a living person in every conceivable way. The undead don’t sleep, and despite all the people they eat, they don’t actually need calories to carry on. More than anything, they commit acts of cannibalism because it relieves boredom and because it’s a good team building exercise with other members of the horde. It’s the undead equivalent of a golf outing. Reanimated corpses are immune to disease and pain. Unless someone shoots them in the head, they stick around forever. Even their apparent weaknesses are actually strengths. They can’t talk, which makes spending eternity with other zombies much more tolerable. It’s hard to get on each other’s nerves when everyone is under a biologically enforced vow of silence. Their lack of higher brain function isn’t a big deal either. It’s not like the living use their minds for anything now. If the entire population of the world suddenly became zombies, the ratings for Keeping up with the Kardashians would be completely unaffected. Zombies live forever and can’t injure or offend each other. A world of only fast zombies is a Utopian paradise. It’s hard to root for the human hero fighting off an undead horde if he’s the one guy standing in the way of a perfect world.

The housing situation would be better if the zombies win. It’s hard to be overcrowded when everyone is happy with a windowless apartment six feet underground.

The traditional shambling zombie, however, is a different story entirely. Patience is a vice, not a virtue. Only a sucker waits 30 seconds to microwave a burrito. I jam it on a stick and eat it like a Popsicle. If I can’t do something fast, I don’t want to do it at all. That’s why the idea of becoming an old-school zombie is terrifying. It’s an eternity of being slow. If zombies can sprint without ever tiring, however, getting bit by one has the opposite implication. Getting mauled by the undead would be like taking the world’s most powerful performance enhancing drug. It’s hard to think of a way to defeat a group of fast zombies, but it’s even harder to think of a reason why you’d want to. If they can bob and weave, all while running toward you at full speed, a headshot is impossible for all but the best marksmen. You might as well let yourself get bitten and save yourself a lot of trouble. Trying to escape would just be embarrassing, especially given the weight issues for most Americans. In a zombie apocalypse with undead that can run, fatal heart attacks from moderate physical exertion would far outnumber deaths from zombie bites.

Since becoming a fast zombie is an improvement from the natural human state, movies that try to scare the public with running corpses miss the point. The appeal of the zombie apocalypse has very little to do with the zombies themselves. This particular type of disaster holds a special attraction to people like me who fail at society in its current form but baselessly feel we might do better if a catastrophe disrupted the natural order. I don’t know how to schmooze my way up the corporate and ladder, but part of me thinks if the world went hell my negative attitude and lack of attachment to anyone I know would somehow allow me to survive. The MBAs who manage me would find their buzzwords to be as ineffective against the zombie horde as they are at driving up sales. With a slow foe, my fellow slackers and I would have time to use our overlooked and unappreciated skills to make our way in a new, terrible world while our former tormentors would be eaten alive, a fitting end for past petty slights. In a scenario with fast zombies, all that goes out the window. You can’t outsmart a zombie with infinite energy and superhuman speed. I’d be just as dead as all the people I deserve to outlive. A world with fast zombies is just as hopeless as the real one we live in now.

Before you eat my brains, here’s my card. Let’s synergize.

I doubt any movie writers read this blog, but even the average person can make a difference in this debate. If you see a preview for a movie that involves running by the undead, don’t buy a ticket for it. Your non-patronage is a vote, and unlike a ballot in a real election, your input on this issue actually matters. Hollywood will keep pumping out movies with fast zombies even if it’s an illogical idea, but they won’t if it’s an unprofitable one. True, there may be more pressing matters in the world, but in the grand scheme of things the travel speed of zombies absolutely matters. If I don’t deal with fictional problems, I’ll have to deal with my real ones. That’s not a road I’m ready to go down at any speed.

Disagree with the Degree

2013-03-04T23:07:00.000-05:00

I recently read that college degrees are now required even for menial positions like secretaries and file clerks. There are too many college graduates applying for too few jobs, so employers can afford to add arbitrary requirements. Pretty soon working at McDonald’s will require four years of medical school. At least that would come in handy for all of the heart attacks. Requiring a degree even for good white collar jobs is unnecessary. Pretty much all office work is menial, regardless of the associated pay and prestige. Employers require degrees because they want to weed out applicants, but they could do that just as easily by holding sack races or hot dog eating contests. Both competitions have exactly as much do with the average cubicle drone’s daily duties as a liberal arts degree. Most college courses outside the sciences don’t train students to do anything. Instead, they promise intangible benefits like critical thinking skills or broadened horizons and then attach a very tangible price tag. Becoming a well-rounded person isn’t worth six figures of debt. The only thing a liberal arts degree proves is that you’re not afraid to waste your money liberally.

Studies show students learn better inside of expensive university buildings. Of course those studies were conducted inside of expensive university buildings.

I have some authority on the uselessness of liberal arts degrees because I have two of them. I double majored in English creative writing and history at a small Midwestern college. My employer wouldn’t have hired me for my current position if I didn’t have these pointless certificates. But neither one has anything to do with my profession. Studying Charlemagne’s rise to power or doing a literary critique of To Kill a Mocking Bird didn’t prepare me for a desk job that’s hard to explain to my friends and even harder to care about. As is true with most generic paper-pushing positions, there’s no field of study that has anything to do with what I do now. If I started on this job right out of high school and never set foot on a college campus, I could do it exactly as well as I do today with two degrees. In other words, I’d still suck at my job, no matter how much money I squandered on education.

Ultimately, the greatest benefit of college is it delays your entry into the world by four years. I was much more mature when I graduated than when I enrolled, but that’s because I was 21 instead of 18. Yes, it’s fun to hang out with thousands of other kids your own age in an environment devoid of adults who have a vested interest in your survival. It’s a great place to taste freedom and then throw it up all over the dorm floor. But beyond letting students test drive independence, college doesn’t have much to offer, even for good students. I got my current job partly because of my GPA, even though that figure represented proficiency in fields of study lacking any practical application. I was better prepared for work at the end of college than at the end of high school, but only because I was further along in my slow, steady trudge toward the grave, not because of anything I allegedly learned in the classroom.

Those graduation caps are hard, and they hurt when they come back down. Only throw them if you want the first question at every job interview to be, “Why are you wearing an eye patch?”

Since college works because of how long it holds you, not what it teaches, post-secondary education is the most expensive daycare on earth. Based on the tuition rate for an 18-credit-hour semester in 2007, my college charged about $230 per actual hour of class time spent with a professor. During some of those sessions we simply watched a movie or listened to other students give presentations. It’s frightening to think of how much money the school charged for the privilege of watching a group of football players struggle to use PowerPoint. I wish they would’ve plagiarized their work. At least then they would have had something factual to convey. The value of college is dubious at best when a professor actively teaches, but when that educator steps aside in favor of student-led instruction, even the illusion of learning disappears. No one should ever pay money for a class that depends on student participation. The world is full of places you can listen to other people be wrong for free.

Really, a liberal arts class is just a reading list. If you find out the books a professor uses, you can read them on your own and save thousands of dollars in tuition. There is little purpose in paying a professional educator to ask me what I think a book means. I can give myself my own opinion for free. College supporters claim the structured environment of academia allows for the most efficient exchange of ideas, but I had more stimulating conversations with my classmates in a bar than I ever did in a lecture hall. All anyone really needs to have a great debate is alcohol and other people. The world is full of both. The only time you need to learn under the tutelage of someone with a PhD is for substantial subjects like math and the sciences. Unfortunately, those are the subjects in which you’re more likely to see a chupacabra than an actual professor. Instead, the students in those fields almost always toil under the indifferent gaze of a graduate student who would probably still be a terrible teacher even if he spoke English.

By contract, science professors show up to class at least once every four years, but only to let the admissions staff take a new photo for the brochure.

College is a pyramid scheme, and in order for those of us who already forked over our money to get a return, we have to convince the next generation that they need to waste their resources to go as well. The result is that people without an education don’t get hired, even though a degree doesn’t make a candidate any more or less able to do the job in question. I hope this system collapses by the time my daughters are old enough for college. Not requiring a bachelor’s degree for unrelated jobs would make hiring more fair, and more importantly it would save me a lot of money. And that’s what being a good parent is all about.

Holy Meteor Detector

2013-02-18T16:46:00.001-05:00

Here’s a quick recap of the last week: The pope announced he will resign at the end of the month. Then a meteor shattered every piece of glass in Russia, which amounted to three windows and 200 million bottles of vodka. Finally, a chunk of rock half the size of a football field barely missed earth. The pope didn’t turn in his pointy hat because he finally got some fashion sense. He bowed out because he wants to spend more time in his fallout shelter. Just like dogs can sense impending earth quakes, the Supreme Pontiff acts strangely when a large chunk of space debris is about to destroy the world. The College of Cardinals is waiting to elect a new pope until March simply because its members want to see who is still alive after God gets done knocking down cities like bowling pins. So far he’s only hit the former Soviet Union, which is like throwing a gutter ball since there’s nothing there worth destroying. Don’t expect the big man to shank on his next attempt.

God doesn’t play dice, but every now and then he enjoys a good game of dodge ball.

It’s not surprising that whenever it’s time to destroy the earth, the mayhem starts in Russia. The planet is 70 percent water, yet somehow every devastating meteor strike in the last 100 years managed to hit the same desolate country. On June 30, 1908, a meteor exploded over Russian and knocked down trees over an 830-square-mile area in what became known as the Tunguska event. The only explanation for why meteors keep hitting the same spot is that on a cosmic scale misery is drawn to misery. NASA is working on computer models to determine precisely where future meteors will hit the earth, but the agency’s approach is all wrong. Rather than calculating mass and trajectory, they should just make a map of the places where getting drunk and falling asleep outside results in death. Any equation that takes into account both cold and unhappiness would place a bullseye for asteroid impact squarely on the Kremlin.

If the deadly meteor doesn’t hit the mother land, the average Russian will be very disappointed to still be alive.

While these giant rocks from space won’t smash into anything important, if they’re big enough they might cause an inconvenient side effect like the extinction of humanity. An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but they had brains the size of walnuts. Most people are only half that smart, so we don’t stand a chance. The debris from a large enough meteor strike could block out the sun, which might cause another ice age. It’s not as bad as it sounds as long as you have an adequate supply of long underwear. Food might be more problematic. We don’t have enough sweaters to keep our cows from becoming encased in large blocks of ice, and the brain freezes from the resulting milk would likely be lethal. It’s unfortunate that Buffalo Bill hunted woolly mammoths to extinction because they would be an excellent food source once modern agriculture breaks down. Given the animals we have left, we’ll all have to start farming penguins. While some might argue these graceful animals aren’t suited for a life in captivity, it’s important to remember they probably taste delicious with wing sauce.

Oddly enough, this is the only surviving photograph of a woolly mammoth. The camera flash turned his eye red.

Even if there isn’t another ice age, things could still be rough for a while. No matter how big the meteor is, it’s almost certain to knock out power. I don’t know the technical explanation for why, but if a curious squirrel can take down the juice for my entire neighborhood, I’ve got to imagine a massive stone from space would make things go dark. We can probably live without electricity for a while. Not being able to see ugly people at night would actually raise the quality of life for some of us. In the long term, though, we’d have to figure out how to bring back the power. I’m not concerned about hospitals or factories, but if we can just get enough electricity to run the Internet, we should be OK. We might not have food or water, but as long as we have a place to share snarky cat pictures, our most important accomplishment as a species will live on.

During all of this, the pope won’t be idle. He may say a prayer or two for the earth, but he’ll spend most of his time sipping brandy and playing Yahtzee. He can’t do much more than that because he’ll need to save his strength. If the College of Cardinals survives the apocalypse, they’ll pick a new pope in his absence. Then the bunker pope will have to fight the new pope for the right to be the guy modern Catholics ignore. Of course, most of the faithful will be dead, with the only survivors being preppers. These borderline-functional individuals have been stocking up on food and guns for years in preparation for the end of the world. They can’t agree on what will actually destroy the earth, so they all prepare a little differently. Some buy life jackets for the flood they expect to submerge Ohio. Others buy reflective vests so that Jesus won’t run them over. The Book of Revelations predicts that when the son of Joseph and Mary shows back up for the second coming, he’ll drive a monster truck. If a meteor really ends modern civilization, preppers will be ready to survive in the harsh new reality, but only by accident.

Living in a world that consists only of preppers and the pope doesn’t appeal to everyone. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life attending daily mass and eating barbecue penguin, you might want to stop digging your bomb shelter now. The pope’s resignation takes effect at the end of February, so it’s a good bet the asteroid will strike right around then. For those who don’t plan to stick around afterward, now is the perfect time to drain your life savings and follow your dreams. I’ve always wanted to write an original epic poem in my favorite medium. It’s time to buy some sidewalk chalk.

Down with the Sickness

2013-02-05T23:54:00.000-05:00

Before I had kids, I never missed work. I didn’t do it out of dedication to my job. I just didn’t have any marketable skills other than showing up. Besides, infecting my coworkers was much more enjoyable than a day off. My near-perfect attendance record died from an infectious disease when I had kids. My wife and I send our offspring to daycare, a bacteria breeding ground on par with Europe during the plague years. Both of my children are perpetually sick. My two-year-old Betsy has a lingering cough, and my eight-month-old Mae single-handedly drove up the stock price for Kleenex last quarter. These low-level illnesses don’t disrupt our lives much until one of them flares into a fever. When that happens, daycare banishes my ailing progeny. Since the fever came from daycare in the first place, this does nothing to contain the disease. It’s like a bakery that sells cookies but kicks out anyone who buys them. We don’t have a backup babysitter, so when one of my kids gets sent home, I become a temporary stay-at-home dad. My time alone with my kids is a helpful reminder that it’s a good thing this arrangement isn’t permanent.

Constant exposure to disease gives daycare kids powerful immune systems. When they’re finally old enough to go to school with non-daycare kids, it’ll be like when Christopher Columbus killed half of North America with a sneeze.

Hanging out with my children for a day is harder than actually going to work. That’s why I typically send the kids to daycare even when I take time off. We have to pay the daycare regardless of whether or not they watch our kids, and I’m a firm believer the only person who should get paid not to work is me. The sick days I take for the kids are the only time I’m ever home with them when my wife isn’t around. The fact that both of my daughters have survived even that much time alone with me is a testament to dumb luck and the skill of the local emergency room staff. Betsy isn’t as hard to watch as she used to be, but Mae makes up for it by growing more difficult by the hour. She has identical cries for mild indigestion and being eaten alive by hyenas. Since a hyena making it across the ocean and into my bedroom is unlikely, I feel safe ignoring the baby, but I surrounded her crib with razor wire just to be safe.

Like her younger sister, Betsy makes her fair share of noise when she’s healthy, but when she’s sick she doesn’t have the energy to throw her typical daily regimen of temper tantrums. Last week, daycare threw her out because she had a temperature of 103 degrees. She spent the next day at home quietly entertaining herself. More accurately, Netflix quietly entertained her for me. I don’t understand parents who fear TV. A cartoon is just a book with moving pictures that someone else reads to your kid. Even traditional books aren’t the catalysts for quality time they once were. Betsy has a set of Disney princess stories with a tablet that reads them to her. She’s played it so many times the battery drained and the voice became low and vaguely demonic. It doesn’t take much vocal inflection to turn Snow White into a horror story. Even the tablet is unnecessary at this point. Betsy has heard the books enough that she can recite most of them by memory. Thanks to these fairy tales, she now knows all her dreams can come true as long as she’s born a rich and beautiful child of royalty.

If fairy tales were historically accurate, the princess would only save the kingdom when she gets knocked up by some guy she didn’t meet until the morning she married him.

I’d like to use Betsy’s pliable mind for something more constructive, like memorizing profanity-laced tirades she could show off in front of my in-laws, but I have yet to put that plan into action. I’m an idea man, not an actually-do-something man. Besides, the only chance I have to teach Betsy how to swear is when I’m home and my wife isn’t, and that only happens when Betsy is sick. On those occasions, I prefer to be in a different part of the house than her at all times. Quarantine procedures exits for a reason. I’m a dad, not a martyr. My wife feels differently. She has no problem hovering over an ailing child, but she almost never gets the chance to exercise that skill. I’ll always be the one who stays home with our sick kids since I don’t serve a vital function at work or anywhere else.

Getting close enough to teach Betsy the proper way to curse probably isn’t as dangerous as I think. Under the age of five, Tylenol cures everything from head colds to shark bites. Last week, I used that over-the-counter medicine to drive Betsy’s fever into remission five minutes after we got home. That stuff is like Jesus in a bottle, except it doesn’t get all preachy when it performs miracles. If the daycare staff had used this wonder drug, Betsy would have magically gotten better and I wouldn’t have been forced to waste a day at home. Granted, I would have just wasted a day at work instead, but at least I wouldn’t have burned sick leave in the process. I like to stockpile my paid time off until I can use it to do something meaningful, like spend an entire week at home watching TV and napping while the kids go to daycare. My ambition knows no bounds.

Children’s Tylenol tastes like grapes and makes little kids fall asleep. It’s basically wine for toddlers.

Despite my fears over watching a sick child by myself, hanging out with Betsy for the day wasn’t really that bad. The battle between germs and medicine in Betsy’s body kept her mellower than expected for our entire day together. It would have been my easiest parenting experience ever were it not for the fact that she’s two and always eager for me to let my guard down. About the time I’d congratulated myself for completing an uneventful stint of adult supervision, Betsy pooped her pants in the middle of her nap. She’s fully potty trained, so that was something special she saved up just for me. The worst crises are the ones you can smell from several rooms away. Unexpected bowel movements notwithstanding, watching Betsy went well enough that I might keep her home with me the next time I have a day off, even if she’s not sick. I know it’s a radical idea, but that kind of outside-the-box thinking should make me a shoo-in for Father of the Year in 2013.

The Best Ideas are Stolen

2013-01-27T23:07:00.000-05:00

On January 11, I wrote a blog post about why it should be legal to own an aircraft carrier. Six days later, Stephen Colbert did a bit on his show about the same thing. Logically, the Internet reacted with accusations of plagiarism. When I say “the Internet,” I mean two guys, one of whom thought I stole from Colbert and the other of whom thought the TV host pilfered from me. To be clear, I don’t think the comedian or any of his writers ever visited my site, and I certainly didn’t travel to the future to steal from him. I don’t even own a time machine, and if I did I’d take something more valuable than the idea for a blog post that generated 12 cents in ad revenue. As far as I can tell, the whole situation is a coincidence. Calculus was invented twice because two different mathematicians came up with the same idea at roughly the same time. Most high school students agree inventing it even once was too much. Colbert and I each independently concluded aircraft carrier ownership is a reasonable tenant of any gun control debate. Unfortunately, our ideas were so similar that casual readers think one of us copied the other. As with any other cause I get fired up about, this upsets absolutely no one but me.

I’m lucky I posted mine first. If it happened the other way around, Comedy Central would have broken my kneecaps by now.

I suppose I should be flattered at least one reader thinks my ideas are worth stealing, even if he does think I’m the one who stole them. Colbert has millions of viewers, whereas I get about three visitors a day. Since a sizable chunk of America saw the TV host use those jokes while my only witnesses were my mom and two of her friends, anyone who encounters my article will assume I stole it. I can’t count on the average reader to cross check the dates on my post and Colbert’s show. Expecting a reader on the Internet to do due diligence is like expecting a dog to stop drinking out of the toilet and start piloting a space shuttle. All of my bad ideas may be my own, but that doesn’t mean I’m the only person to have them – a fact that doesn’t bode well for our species. There are a limited number of shared human experiences to draw from. We’re born, our parents make us miserable, we get married, our spouses and kids make us miserable, and then we die. I think I just wrote my own obituary. Using naval fighter aircraft to belligerently attack your neighbors is a universal human experience, and Colbert and I can’t be faulted for sharing it.

I’m hardly the only person to ever be stung by accusations of intellectual theft. My website has been visited a few times by the plagiarism detection programs used by educators to make sure students at least reword the stuff they copy and paste from Wikipedia. My blog isn’t exactly brimming with factual information, so it shouldn’t be real hard to figure out when a kid takes something from it. You can place the blame squarely on me the first time a term paper on Christopher Columbus mentions that the explorer’s two alternate name choices for America were “Free Sex and Beer Land” and “Anal Island.” The content I produce here might be useless to society, but the way I abuse the English language occasionally attracts attention. A junior high teacher once emailed me to ask if a student could use my valedictorian speech in an oratory contest. I consented because the idea of having an eighth grader go before a panel of judges to be evaluated on his enunciation of “anthrax squirrels” filled me with an unhealthy amount of glee. As far as factual papers, though, the only individuals who deem the content here worth stealing are special needs students and maybe some of the dumber chimpanzees.

While I have some popularity among juvenile delinquents and primates with learning disabilities, I once aspired to much loftier goals. The American public isn’t exactly discerning in its tastes. I thought the same mental impairments that make spoiled housewives seem like worthwhile prime time entertainment might make my own incoherent ramblings become this country’s next beloved debacle. I figured someday I could be famous enough that when I made a joke days after some failed blogger brought up a nearly identical idea, people would think he’s the one who stole from me. If such a situation came to pass, I’d be gracious from my position of power. I’d simply sue the blogger for everything he’s worth rather than having my hired goons kill his entire family. At the current rate I’m building my readership base, I should attain that level of fame a few centuries after the sun explodes and all life ceases to exist.

While amassing millions of visitors sounds appealing at first, perhaps it’s not a good idea after all. The truth is most of my readers are terrible human beings. People on the Internet are stupid because people in general are stupid and giving them a broadband connection doesn’t change that fact. Every time I get an unexpected burst of traffic, I’m deluged by a wave of comments from angry people who despise everything about me. I used to wonder why strangers would take the time to leave spiteful feedback on an article rather than simply moving on with their lives, but then I realized without that kind of hate I wouldn’t even have a blog. If it wasn’t for things I can’t stand, I’d have nothing to write about. The only difference between me and an angry man shouting in an empty room is I type at 60 words per minute. In that context, my lack of an audience is a blessing for humanity. Let Colbert have the aircraft carrier bit and the millions of people who follow his every word. I don’t need to be widely read. If I wanted to hear from a bunch people who can’t stand me, I’d talk to my family.

What Goes Up Must Come Down

2013-01-20T10:36:00.000-05:00

I don’t get too excited about Christmas, but I decorate for it anyway because it makes me seem normal. My feigned holiday cheer distracts my neighbors from my other suspicious activities, like the hamster fight club in my basement. That’s not a real thing, but only because my investors haven’t come through yet. Hopefully a holiday tree covered in lights will cause people to give me the benefit of the doubt when I start burying a bunch of former combatants in my backyard, but leaving that same tree up for too long could have the opposite effect. A guy who still has a decked-out conifer in his living room in May is almost certainly running a gambling website for rodent death matches. At least that’s what my mother always used to say. When you decorate for the holidays and when you take those decorations down sends a powerful message about who you are as a person and what kind of animals are dying in your basement. Plan your yuletide merriment accordingly.

Hamsters are vicious with their teeth and claws, but they’re much more entertaining once you train them to use katanas.

There is no hard rule for when Christmas decorations should go up or come down, but there is a definite timeline for the assumptions people make about you. It’s been mathematically proven that the longer you leave up your icicle lights, the more likely you are to be white trash. That study was the best money NASA ever spent. The data indicate if your tree is still up in April, you have at least one non-operational El Camino somewhere on your property. Similarly, if your tree is still up in the middle of July, statistics indicate you believe it’s okay to have sex with your first cousin as long as you pull out. This white trash effect reverses itself around Thanksgiving, at which point you’re so late taking down your decorations that you’re now actually early for putting them up for the following Christmas. That approach isn’t a bad way to go if you don’t mind putting up with a few cousin-humping rumors during the summer months.

Leaving up your Christmas tree until July only earns a white trash rating of 95 percent. To get the extra 5 percent, all of your ornaments have to be officially licensed by NASCAR.

This year, I didn’t erect our tree until two weeks before Christmas. I wasn’t very punctual because there aren’t many people around to notice where I fall on the white trash scale. We live a business district, so most of the other humans in our vicinity clear out by 5 p.m.. Our immediate neighbors are a church and a lawyer’s office, both of which are for sale. The house of worship belongs to the Church of Christian Science, whose members don’t believe in going to doctors. I assume the building is being sold because the entire congregation died from easily treatable diseases. As for the lawyer’s office, there’s now a car parked there during non-business hours. I suspect someone finally bought it or a squatting hobo moved in and took down the “for sale” sign on his own. Either way, I’m not going to investigate. Since the target audience for our decorations consists of the homeless and the dead, I felt we could get away with procrastinating for a few weeks after Thanksgiving.

I don’t have the necessary power outlets or motivation to put up lights on the outside of our house, so I had to impress our neighbors solely with interior decorations. Really, we only needed to string lights on the side of the tree that faces the window, but my wife has yet to sign off on that plan. We have an old house with high ceilings, and for some reason we bought an artificial tree big enough to reach them. I briefly considered buying a real tree instead, but everything else about me is fake and I figured it was good to stay consistent. Moving the tree was difficult because it’s 9 feet long and weigh as much as a herd of buffalo. Lifting it into place requires three men, which is unfortunate because I have the strength of half of one. This year, I conned a friend into helping me with the physical labor. Had he not come over, we would have put our Christmas presents under a very unique horizontal tree this year.

After exerting so much effort to put up the tree, I really was tempted to leave it up all year. It’s not like people expect a lot from me anyway, so a few inbreeding stereotypes wouldn’t exactly destroy my reputation. My wife, however, is embarrassed enough to be married to me without people thinking we’re related, so I took the tree down last weekend at her request. I thought the biggest perk of going this route would be eating the edible decorations as we worked, but then I realized half of the candy canes were left over from last year. They’re no longer safe for human consumption, which is why I plan to give them to my coworkers.

My tree for next year will just be a life-sized picture of the tree from this year. From the window, you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what the people in our sparsely populated neighborhood think of us. We don’t interact with them anyway unless they have a subpoena. Maybe if we were less standoffish we’d have someone local to exchange favors with every now and then, but it seems like a lot of work just to have an acquaintance to occasionally watch our dogs or help me bury mounds of dead hamsters. The people in our neighborhood might not like us, but since our tree is down they can’t deny my wife and I our status as respectable members of society. The price of complying with these social norms is we’ll have to repeat the entire decorating process again next year. I don’t know how many more Christmas tree raisings my back can take. We’re not white trash, but that fact won’t pay my chiropractor bill. I might print out a certificate affirming my non-white trashiness, though, just to make it official. I might as well. It’ll be about as useful as my English degree.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Air Superiority

2013-01-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

A high-velocity rifle with a 30-round clip is completely impractical for self-defense. The first time I’m attacked by 31 or more armed assailants, I’m screwed. If I really want to protect my family and my property, I need an aircraft carrier. The right to bear arms is intended to help the public oppose abuses by the government, but I can’t do that stockpiling assault rifles. In order to stand a chance against the military might of Uncle Sam or even the average armed felon, I need naval munitions. It is only by putting this kind of firepower in the hands of law-abiding citizens that we can level the playing field against big brother and increasingly well-equipped outlaws. If we make owning aircraft carriers illegal, only criminals will own aircraft carriers.

A single aircraft carrier has the power to defeat entire nations. Remember to keep the safety on.

An aircraft carrier isn’t a weapon, it’s a tool. As the Swiss Army knife of naval power, this class of ship serves many vital peace-preserving functions useful for a suburban setting. As a private citizen with a nuclear-powered flattop, I could project my power over my neighborhood as a deterrent to violence. And yes, should this enforced tranquility fail, under very limited circumstances this tool could be used for self defense by blasting large numbers of people straight to hell. If an unwary assailant tries to harm my family or my lawn ornaments, I should be able to protect them using precision-guided missiles fired from miles above the earth. As a licensed aircraft carrier owner, I could of course be trusted to use self-restraint. Aircraft carriers don’t kill people; people kill people.

And don’t tell me aircraft carriers are too expensive for the common man. Right now their price is driven up by scarcity. The U.S. only has a handful of them, so the companies that build them charge a premium. Once these versatile vessels become available at Walmart, however, their prices will tumble. Even at their current rates, such ships are affordable to major corporations like Microsoft and Google. If those companies settled their various disputes by sinking each other’s multi-billion dollar fleets instead of engaging in costly patent lawsuits, they could save a tremendous amount of time and money.

Aircraft carrier ownership is an inalienable right on which the government cannot infringe, but it’s not a practical option for everyone. For those people who don’t love their country quite enough to own a ship loaded with advanced fighter jets, traditional gun ownership will have to suffice. Like an aircraft carrier, a gun is a flexible tool. It can weigh down stacks of paper or bring together the décor of a room by looking cool on a wall. Just because the function it does best is knocking holes through living things to make them stop living is no reason to make this tool any harder to buy than a hammer or a paintbrush. There are no laws limiting how big of a screwdriver I can own, and it shouldn’t be any different when it comes to firearms. Sure, .22 caliber rifles are fine for toddlers, but adults need something much stronger for recreational target shooting. To get the most out of your gun range experience, you’re best off buying the largest ammunition you can afford, with the ideal caliber being a seven-inch-wide Hellfire missile launched from an F-18 Super Hornet.

While aircraft carriers and guns are both great fun when used responsibly, there have been news stories lately about a few bad apples who tried to ruin things for everyone. On the surface, it would seem like giving a man that much firepower is directly responsible for the damage that results if he mishandles it. This conclusion is of course wrong. As the National Rifle Association correctly implied at a recent press conference, the fault lies not in the attacker for having that much destructive capacity at his fingertips; instead, the blame rests with the victims who lazily failed to utilize those same readily available resources to defend themselves. The bad guys have the initiative because they decide when and where to strike. To fight back, we need to arm every citizen with a greater amount of firepower than their potential assailants. Issuing powerful rifles with extended clips to every man, woman, and child would be a start, but the only way to ensure the good guys always have the advantage is to get as many people as possible to dock aircraft carriers in their backyards.

To allow for proper backyard naval maneuvers, some koi ponds may need to be enlarged.

Some safety advocates think it’s a bad idea to give private individuals access to arsenals on par with a mid-sized nation-state. While these advocates have remained silent on the issue of aircraft carrier ownership, they have suggested limiting the number of rounds that can be put into a clip for commercially available firearms. Ironically, such a move in the name of protecting the public would put even more people at risk. Not everyone has the time or money to become proficient with the firearms they own. That’s why high-capacity clips are an absolute necessity. When some punk tries to take your grandma’s purse, her frail, inexperienced hands can’t hold her AR-15 steady enough to kill her assailant in the first nine or ten shots. In all likelihood, to get the job done she’ll need to fire all 30 projectiles, sending them careening wildly through a world full of things she didn’t intend to kill. Her crazily inaccurate fire will make us all safer as long as one or more of her randomly sprayed bullets kills her attacker. Of course, if she owned an aircraft carrier, even her arthritis-riddled fingers could use a radio to contact fighter command and request an airstrike. Then the situation – and a good chunk of the block – would be neutralized.

Life Alert won’t keep your elderly relatives safe, but air superiority might.

Legalizing aircraft carrier ownership is obviously the responsible next step for this nation to take in pursuit of gun safety. Unfortunately, none of the major lobbyist groups even have this issue on their radar. Instead, they’re still quibbling over what kind of guns can legally be owned and how many bullets can lawfully be loaded into them. Clearly, the more lead the average person can sling before he or she has to stop to reload and possibly think, the better. I doubt, however, whether any politician has the courage to support that position, meaning we may have a dark day in the near future when aircraft carriers and 30-round magazines are equally illegal. A lot of people are stocking up on these specialized tools now for that very reason, but I’m still waiting to see if my concealed carry permit goes through. If it does, I’m buying a harpoon gun. Aquaman better watch his back.

Sleep on It

2013-01-04T00:25:00.000-05:00

In terms of its health implications, being a parent has the same affect on my wife’s mental faculties as a severe concussion. I thought Lola was a forgiving woman, but it turns out she just has child-induced memory problems. She curls up on the couch every night around 8:30 p.m. and effectively blacks out. She’s incapable of remembering anything that happens after that point, even if it’s a conversation in which she actively participates. This explains why she never brings up old fights. She simply doesn’t know they happened, which is unfortunate for her. It deprives her of the truly classic grudges most other women get to enjoy. It also explains why she married me. Our union would be at an end if she remembered even a fraction of the transgressions I commit on a daily basis. If she had any idea what she’s forgotten, I’d currently be single and she’d be married to a much better husband.

My wife’s short memory means that by the next morning I am no longer held responsible for anything I said or lit on fire. There’s a fine line between a marital spat and arson.

While Lola’s inability to stay awake usually helps me get out of trouble, it occasionally gets me into it instead. She’s scolded me more than once for not telling her things that I did in fact describe to her in great detail sometime after her unnaturally early bedtime. Clothing stains, amateur plumbing disasters, and serious bodily injuries to the children for which I may or may not be culpable are best brought up sometime after 8:30 p.m. Just because she looks me in the eye and nods at what I say doesn’t mean she retains any of it. We’re a lot alike in that regard, but I do most of my ignoring when she first comes home from work and tries to tell me about her day. Although we’ve had more than one fight about whether or not a given late night conversation actually took place, Lola has finally accepted that she does in fact suffer from time-sensitive amnesia. Now, if an important topic comes up during the day, I can say we already talked about it the night before, regardless of whether or not that dialogue really happened. In a healthy marriage, a solid foundation of trust is essential in the construction of a sturdy house of lies.

While I’m definitely a substandard spouse and human being, I don’t have enough misdeeds to truly take advantage of my wife’s forgetfulness. It’s hard to get into that much trouble when I’m always alone late at night. Our 2 year old Betsy goes to bed at 8:30 p.m., which is part of the reason why my wife chooses that time to pass out. Our oldest daughter makes up for this sensible bedtime by waking up every morning at 6:45 a.m., ensuring no one in this house will ever sleep in on the weekend. I plan to return this favor to Betsy in her teenage years, and I’ve already purchased an air horn for that purpose. Our 7 month old, Mae, has a sleep schedule that’s less rigid. She usually collapses with my wife shortly after Betsy goes to bed, but sometimes the baby stays awake past that point out of spite. In that scenario, she becomes my problem. I do my best to bounce her to sleep, giving her brain the gentle giggling it needs to knock her out for the night. I don’t have the patience to do one thing at a time, so I usually soothe the screaming child with one hand while using a Xbox 360 controller with the other. My friends have gotten used to hearing the shrill sounds of parental neglect coming through my headset.

When Mae finally collapses, I continue playing video games with her on my lap because laying her in the crib is chancy at best. Lola is substantially better at setting her down than I am, but it’s impossible to enlist my wife’s help. Once Lola falls asleep for the night, there are corpses that are easier to rouse. When she’s awake, Lola is capable of depositing our baby in one smooth, fluid motion while I tend to drop the kid from a height of several inches. My wife treats our daughter like a fragile infant, whereas I handle her more like a paratrooper.

Believe it or not, there was a time when my wife functioned like a normal person. It took the stress of two pregnancies and the resulting children to give her the sleep schedule of a senior citizen. I can’t fault her too much for her debilitated state since all of the damage to her body and her psyche can be traced directly to me and my glorious reproductive organs. Besides her conditional amnesia, which is occasionally annoying, Lola’s early bedtime only becomes a hindrance if I make the rare decision to interact with her in any way. On New Year’s Eve, for example, we were going to stay up late drinking wine and playing board games. She made it all the way to 9:30 p.m., which for her is the equivalent of a normal person going without sleep for 16 years. For the next few weeks, she’ll have to make up for it by conking out a few hours before the start of the early bird special.

Given my wife’s early bedtime, she considers sleep to be a form of birth control and caffeine to be a date rape drug.

If my wife is a typical adult female – and I have absolutely no evidence that she is – I think I finally know the reason women live longer than men. My theory is that everyone gets a set number of waking hours. Since I use more of them every day than my wife, I will die many, many years earlier than her. This will likely be a relief to both of us. I get to waste the nights of my adulthood alone playing video games and she gets to squander the twilight of her life as a widow doing whatever it is that women do during the day. She will probably spend her waking hours complaining about how I never help out with the housework, even though I’ll have the justifiable excuse of being buried six feet underground. She won’t know I’m dead, of course, because someone will probably tell her that news after 8:30 p.m.

It's High Time for High Times

2012-12-18T23:28:00.002-05:00

Washington and Colorado did a favor for America when they legalized marijuana. Most of the nation’s unemployed college dropouts will now move to those two states, leaving the rest of us to enjoy a greatly enhanced quality of life. I’m not particularly fond of the types of people who traditionally smoke pot, but I have nothing against the drug itself. I’ve never used it, but at this point in my life I’m willing to try anything that helps me escape sobriety without getting me fired or divorced. Unfortunately, smoking marijuana would likely cause both. My company doesn’t care if I’m competent or morally scrupulous, but they’ll send me packing in a heartbeat if I look even slightly less miserable than usual. It turns out there is a test for happiness, but only if it’s chemically induced. As for my marriage, I already drink a lot, and my wife only lets me abuse one substance at a time. She only married me after I agreed to put that rule in our wedding vows. Both of these hindrances might disappear, though, if reefer became legal and socially acceptable nationwide. For that reason and many others, it’s time for the government to end its war on fun.

At some point in human history, there was a guy who lit random plants on fire and inhaled the smoke. I wonder if he tried this technique on marijuana before or after he attempted it on poison ivy.

It still surprises me that alcohol is legal in the majority of the world but cannabis is not. In most situations, the only law pot smokers are capable of breaking is the one forbidding the smoking of pot. In my brief stint as a newspaper reporter on the police beat, I never covered any serious crimes committed by someone high on marijuana. Of course, I didn’t cover many crimes in general because I wasn’t very good at my job, but even the skilled journalists didn’t turn up any pot-induced felonies. That’s because when cannabis users light up, they usually lock themselves in a room and stay there. Drinkers aren’t as sedentary. Socially imbibing leads to fighting, vandalism, and hooking up with women who weigh more than adult walruses. Dollar drafts seem cheap, but not when you factor in the cost of raising a bastard child with tusks. This isn’t an issue with marijuana. Besides reducing your motivation to be a productive member of society, marijuana also lowers your sperm count. It’s all part of God’s plan to keep hipsters from reproducing.

Marijuana kills most of the sperm, and skinny jeans suffocate the rest.

It’s hard to get in much trouble when your mind-altering substance of choice makes you want to stay in one spot and chill out. Some stoners, however, choose to accelerate natural selection by taking their show on the road. I feel the same way about stoned driving as I do about drunk driving, which is that it’s absolutely wrong on roads open to the public. It’s perfectly fine on closed courses, though, especially when the vehicles are operated by professional substance abusers and viewed by a live audience – or a dead one depending on how well the cars stay on the road. At least NASCAR would finally be watchable. If used judiciously, marijuana can also improve other unbearable situations, like dinner with the in-laws and parent-teacher conferences. Even domestic abuse is no match for the calming effect of nature’s magic plant. Never use blunt force trauma when a simple blunt will do.

Of course, there are drawbacks to legalizing marijuana. The most controversial stories I ever covered as a reporter involved restaurant smoking bans, probably because writing hate mail is a great way to deal with nicotine withdrawal. You would think I’d have some expertise on the issue of second-hand smoke after the 900 or so articles I wrote on it, but I always prided myself on not bogging down my professional writing with superficialities like facts or the truth. I’m not a doctor, but I play one when I commit insurance fraud. Based on my highly suspect understanding of the human body, it’s my general impression that second-hand smoke is extremely annoying but not as deadly as critics claim. It does, however, cause my wife to complain excessively about how my clothes smell. Long term respiratory problems are bad, but being forced do my own laundry is far worse. If marijuana is going to be legal, it should be limited to use in the home, preferably one in which my spouse doesn’t reside.

While odor is a serious concern with marijuana, addiction is not. I only have a few friends who use pot – I also only have a few friends who don’t – but none of them light up compulsively. Even if they did, it’s virtually impossible to overdose on marijuana. Granted, it’s feasible to smoke it and then eat so much takeout from Taco Bell that your heart explodes, but the drug itself doesn’t kill you. Alcohol, on the other hand, can be lethal if taken in large enough doses. I was reminded of this when I did a very poor job of chaperoning my 21 year old brother-in-law on his birthday. If we celebrated with pot instead of cheap booze, he wouldn’t have been forced to save his own life by throwing up for several hours. Smoking joints wouldn’t have been entirely safe, though, since trusting us with lighters would have almost certainly resulted in a large fire in the middle of the living room. An out-of-control blaze is a small price to pay for a good time, however, especially since the party wasn’t at my house.

A forest fire that spreads to a marijuana field could result in significant property damage and very mellow firefighters.

Being sober is generally the worst way to experience anything, but that doesn’t mean I think all drugs should be legal. Many of the crimes I covered in my days as a reporter involved meth, which is basically a chemical cocktail of 16 different types of poison. If you’ve ever smashed a plate glass window with your face in an attempt to steal eight dollars worth of quarters, chances are meth was involved. But marijuana doesn’t lead to that kind of destruction, which is why we should treat it like alcohol. It’s time to legalize cannabis since its effects are much milder than America’s current intoxicant of choice. The only real advantage alcohol has over marijuana is that liquor doesn’t set off the smoke detector in the middle of the night and wake up your kids. It was the worst Christmas Eve ever – or so I’ve heard.

Spoiler Alert: Santa is a Lie

2012-12-09T22:21:00.000-05:00

After rigorous scientific testing and consultations with half a dozen psychics, I’ve reached an indisputable conclusion: There’s no such thing as Santa Claus. If you’re under the age of eight, I just ruined Christmas, although the likelihood of a child that young reading this website is pretty small. Kids that age have better things to do on the Internet, like racking up huge debts in online poker or buying handguns on eBay. There’s no limit to the fun you can have with poor adult supervision and a parent’s credit card. Some people go all out when it comes to spreading the Santa story to their children, but my wife and I aren’t among them. It’s just one of the many perks of being dead inside. If I spend money on a gift, my kids damn well better know it’s from me. Unless they hate it, in which case they better know it's from their mother. I don’t want my daughters to depend on a flying diabetes patient to fulfill their arbitrary material desires. If they want to make their dreams come true, they need to turn to the one person they can count on: absolutely no one.

The only way I’m putting Santa’s name on the gift tag is if he splits the bill.

I’m not sparing my children from the jolly fat man out of any sort of dedication to the truth. On the contrary, lying to kids is one of the great joys of my life. My children still think I ride a goat to work. But there are some lessons worth knowing early on, and one of them is that money does matter. There’s no benevolent entity out there to give you costly and unusual gifts, like a go-kart or love. Telling kids there’s no Santa Claus helps them set a realistic level of anticipation. The only thing they should expect on Christmas morning is disappointment. My offspring are lucky to get even that much. I let my oldest daughter live here rent-free, which seems pretty generous to me. Not all two year olds get away with freeloading.

I understand why most parents tell their kids Santa is real. As adults, it’s nice for our children to believe there’s at least one stranger out there who doesn’t want to kidnap or molest them. But a well-intentioned lie is still a lie, and maintaining it takes much more work than just telling the truth in the first place. I tend to use dishonesty to protect my kids only if it’s a short-term situation. If I tell my children the dead wino in the gutter is only napping, I don’t have to remember and defend that lie in the future. Presumably, the hobo will be gone in a few days, either through the work of a charitable undertaker or a hungry pack of stray dogs. Telling my kids that Santa is real, however, takes a lot of effort to maintain. I have to label certain presents as being from the bearded wonder, and then I have to explain how he got past the family of angry raccoons living in our chimney. I also have to make up a story for how Santa can be at every single store we visit and for why his weight fluctuates wildly from one appearance to the next. I could tell my daughters that he’s hooked on fad diets and cocaine, but I’m not sure if they’d believe it. That would make him sound too much like their father.

Not all parents spread belief in Santa for altruistic reasons. Some use Father Christmas as a sort of disciplinary aid, but that approach is ineffective. The idea that Santa sees all the bad things you do is hardly a deterrent for children. Adults believe the same thing about God, but that doesn’t stop them from misbehaving. Kids are a lot like dogs. If the punishment or reward isn’t immediate, they don’t correlate the cause to the effect. If your child can consciously decide to be good or bad months in advance just to get what he or she wants from you one morning in December, then your offspring is either a genius or an aspiring serial killer. Either way, lying to that kid probably isn’t a good idea.

Oddly, the ACLU has never objected to Santa’s warrantless surveillance system.

No matter how much you support the Santa charade, eventually it has to come to an end. I don’t think kids care that much one way or the other as long as they still get their presents. The biggest disappointment that comes from learning there’s no Santa Claus is the knowledge that your dad’s crappy job affects the quality of gifts you receive. The only ones who really lose when the truth comes out are people in the entertainment industry. There are exactly six trillion Christmas specials on TV, and every single one of them involves old St. Nick getting hurt and someone else delivering gifts in his place. By now, Santa should be a millionaire from his workers’ compensation claims alone. Perhaps climbing on icy rooftops in the middle of the night isn’t the best hobby for a guy who is one snow-shoveled driveway away from a heart attack. If these movies had even a hint of realism, Santa would stay home and send out gifts to everyone in the world by UPS. By that standard, there really is a Santa Claus, but his name is Amazon.com.

Santa thought his heart was full of Christmas cheer. Turns out it was just bad cholesterol.

It’s important to make the most of lying to your children while they’re still dumb enough to believe you. But in most situations, perpetuating the Santa myth is more trouble than it’s worth. Learning the truth might not be traumatic for your own child, but it could be for the other children your kid tells. Asking an elementary school student not to spread a secret is like asking a sorority sister not to spread her legs. In no time at all, your kid will taint the holiday for everyone else. There will be lots of crying, and then you'll be meeting with your kid's principal for the third time this month. With that in mind, when my girls get their presents this Christmas, they’ll all be addressed from me and my wife. That way my kids will know exactly who to blame for their terrible lives.

Women hate Women

2012-12-02T12:22:00.000-05:00

Putting women in charge of the world wouldn’t bring an end to war. Most females I know can’t peacefully share an apartment, let alone the earth. Nearly every woman in existence has said a variation of the following: “We used to be best friends, but then we lived together for a while and now we can’t stand each other.” Certainly, platonic same-sex roommates of either gender can have trouble getting along, but it’s a lot more likely if both cohabitants happen to have a vagina. Women have trouble tolerating each other while men usually don’t due to millions of years of Darwinian evolution and the inability of some females to let anything go, no matter how minor. I have no evidence for any of this, but a lack of factual information has never stopped me from pontificating before. Below is a full explanation for why women hate women.

The only thing most women hate more than other women is themselves.

The biggest reason women have trouble living with each other is they care very passionately about topics that don’t matter. A girl I know once had a screaming match with her roommate over how to decorate for the holidays. Nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like putting that bitch in her place. This issue simply doesn’t come up with men. The only decorating we do is occasionally flipping over a couch cushion to hide the beer and blood stains. Alcoholism is a messy hobby. I had four roommates my senior year of college, and we never once had a fight. That doesn’t mean we always agreed. We once had a month-long stalemate over who would take out the trash. Like rational adults, we let the situation get to the point where our apartment was no longer fit for human habitation. Then we held an extensive tournament with games of chance to determine who would get stuck with this undemanding chore. It would have been many, many times quicker for someone to just cave in and take the garbage to the curb, but the delay tactics paid off. We all stayed friends and I wasn’t the one who had to take out the trash, which was really all that mattered. Women would have handled this scenario differently, namely by replacing the light-hearted competition with snippy Facebook posts and lots of crying.

Another reason women have a hard time getting along with each other is natural selection. For most of human history, a woman’s baby cannon was as likely to kill her as it was to successfully fire out an infant. Before the 20^th century, poor nutrition and short life spans meant most women hit menopause around age 17, giving each lady only a few opportunities to reproduce before she either died or started having hot flashes. If a woman planned to pass on her genes, she had to maximize her chances by breeding with the most suitable mate possible. The problem was every other woman was also fighting for the same small pool of desirable partners. In this environment, female friendships took a backseat to biologically-motivated competition. Only the most cutthroat women succeeded at passing on their DNA, ensuring their female offspring were just as catty as themselves. Men, on the other hand, were physically capable of producing a large number of offspring with a nearly unlimited number of women. Since men focused on quantity of quality, they didn’t have much incentive to compete with other men for specific romantic encounters with the opposite sex. As a result, over millions of years men learned to get along while women evolved to tear each other down with passive aggressive text messages.

“We’d love to have you come with us, but I’m not sure if you’d enjoy yourself. There won’t be any ugly guys there for you to hook up with.”

Women make much better roommates if they share a household with a member of the opposite gender. Once a woman has a ring on her finger, she no longer has to compete with other females for a suitable breeding partner since she presumably has one locked down in her husband. She now has a monopoly on his reproductive efforts, at least in theory. If he displeases her with the way he lives in their shared dwelling, she can exercise her monopoly of the relationship’s sex supply to quickly modify his behavior. Men find this approach acceptable since they’re rewarded with copulation for caving in on issues they don’t care about in the first place. The only thing men want you to do as far as deciding on a home’s décor is to leave them out of it. This symbiosis can never occur in a household of two non-romantically linked women. A platonic female roommate will not give in to threats by another woman of withholding sex. If she does, both women are probably characters in a late night show on Cinemax.

A friendship between two women is just a feeling out period where they both look for reasons to hate each other. While most attempts at amity between two females fail, a few succeed, at least for a while. Why these alliances work while most others fall short is matter for speculation. Maybe both women have no reason to feel threatened. Envy can’t sabotage a relationship if each woman secretly thinks the other is inferior in every way. The foundation of lasting female friendships is mutual condescension. That’s why same-sex friendships get easier as women age. Eventually, nobody has anything left to be jealous about. It’s easy to feel superior to your friends when the only issue you compete on is who broke the fewest hips this month.

“Gertrude has the bone density of a whore.”

While my anecdotal argument about why women can’t get along is undoubtedly true, it’s time to support my theory with rigorous scientific research. It would be nice to have hard data proving nearly all women who consider themselves friends at the start of a roommate experience consider themselves enemies just a few years later. Women always work toward becoming adversaries; the process just takes longer if they don’t live together. While adult females aren’t very good at getting along with each other, they’re great at lots of other things to make up for it. I’ll let you know as soon as I think of what those things are.

The Wrath of Toddlers

2012-11-29T00:47:00.000-05:00

If you look them up in a psychology text book, the symptoms are exactly the same for being a toddler and being criminally insane. My two year old daughter Betsy swings from tears of anguish to manic laughter in seconds for no discernible reason. Her temper tantrums are sometimes over in moments and other times last long enough for me to almost finish the paperwork to give her up for adoption. Some people believe this kind of erratic behavior can be modified through firm, compassionate parenting. Personally, I think this level of crazy can’t be cured but might be contained, just like the Ebola virus or veganism. This is my first attempt at raising a toddler, and things aren’t exactly going as planned. The only way I can see myself regaining the upper hand is if the FDA makes it legal to buy horse tranquilizers over the counter. I hear they taste great with apple sauce.

No child’s diet is complete without a healthy blend of fruit paste and barnyard pharmaceuticals.

As far as I can tell, the biological composition of a two year old is five percent organs and 95 percent rage. We usually address Betsy’s anger issues with a timeout, which is basically a prison sentence for a toddler. Whether or not the timeout has any effect depends on who put her there. If Lola did it, Betsy keeps crying because she knows her mother will eventually cave in. If I did it, however, Betsy quiets down, but only because she knows I’m more than willing to leave her there until she’s old enough for college. When Betsy finally decides she’s ready to cooperate, she instantly smiles and acts as though the whole meltdown never happened. She’s either innocent and forgetful or evil and manipulative. I knew there’d be trouble when we switched her bedtime story from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat to Machiavelli’s The Prince. Timeouts don’t so much modify her bad behavior as they do give her a chance to reconsider her bargaining strategy. The next time the U.S. needs someone to negotiate with terrorists, they should send in the parent of a two year old. We know how to deal with irrational people who blow up for no reason.

Due to all the suspicious words I had to Google to find a picture for that paragraph, I’m fairly certain the FBI will be knocking on my door any minute now.

To get out of timeouts, Betsy learned to strategically time her temper tantrums for when Lola and I are in a hurry, like when we’re getting ready for work. Getting both of my daughters dressed in the morning is like herding cats, assuming those felines are actually enraged mountain lions. Betsy is almost completely potty trained and can dress herself if we get out the clothes for her. On days when she’s in a good mood, she’s nearly self-sufficient. I could count the number of mornings that’s happened on one hand. In fact, I could probably count them on my nose. More often than not, Betsy wakes up with a look in her eyes that can only be described as murderous constipation. In those moments, it takes only a moderately offensive action, like talking to her or breathing, to send her into fits of uncontrollable sobbing. To be fair, that’s what I feel like doing every morning when I wake up and remember I have to go to work.

My wife and I take two different approaches to these morning tirades. Lola tries to reason with Betsy, a process that takes a considerable amount of time and does little to abate the tears. Since I have less patience but more upper body strength than Lola, I simply dress our toddler by force. For all my failings, I’m still strong enough to overpower a two year old. If Betsy is still screaming when I finish getting her ready, I sometimes try a nontraditional method to calm her down. You’re not supposed to shake kids, but the law is less clear on flipping them upside down. I tried this one morning when Betsy was in her usual state of incoherent rage. I caught her by surprise when I flipped her over, but in the process her feet swung through the air and smashed a light bulb. Using my daughter for impromptu demolition work did not improve her mood, and it didn’t do much for Lola’s attitude either. With the bathroom floor covered in glass and my wife and my daughter screaming at me, I calmly put on my coat and left for work. I’m at my best when slinking away from the crises I cause.

For some reason, light bulbs aren’t designed to withstand a roundhouse kick from a toddler.

When there’s no time for timeouts, Lola and I sometimes try to keep Betsy in line with spankings. I’m not morally opposed to swatting a child because that’s how I was raised. I turned out to be a disaster, but that’s completely unrelated to the method of discipline my parents used. As the care givers to a pack of dozens, my mom and dad didn’t have time to sit us down and discuss our feelings each time we pooped in a mailbox or blew up a toilet. We either complied with our parents’ commands or we were beaten, at least when we were little. By the time we were older, we either cooperated or my parents started drinking. I liked those days a lot more. Spankings are a good idea in theory, but in practice they haven’t worked with Betsy. At best, she stops crying about whatever she was mad about before and starts crying because her butt hurts. As a form of toddler control, spanking is ineffective, but as a stress reliever, it definitely works for me.

Oddly enough, the only truly effective method at prodding Betsy into doing anything is counting to three. As soon as Lola or I start with the numbers, Betsy springs into action. Her fear perplexes me because all that lurks at the end of that sequence is a timeout or a spanking, neither of which has any effect on the girl. Maybe she thinks we have some special punishment saved for the end of the countdown. Making her stand in a corner is fine, but it’s good to keep her off guard every once in a while by splashing her with cold water or dropping her into a pit of snakes.

If potential parents knew just how difficult toddlers are, no one would have babies and the human race would go extinct. I hope Betsy is just going through a phase, but I suspect her behavior is somehow a punishment for my lifetime of being a terrible person. I always thought karma acted through cataclysmic events, but it turns out a child is a natural disaster every bit as severe as an earthquake or a hurricane. The only upside to Betsy’s behavioral problems is we don’t have to warn her about strangers. If anyone tried to kidnap her, they’d decide to give her back before they made it around the block.

The Company You Keep

2012-11-23T14:51:00.000-05:00

As the holder of a liberal arts degree, I feel threatened by people who actually learned stuff in college. Almost all of my friends have careers in the hard sciences, with the lone easy-science exception being the guy who earned a master’s degree studying cleavage. When my wife and I go out to social functions with these people, I always feel like the dumbest man in the room, which is unfortunate because I already go through enough of that at home. Last weekend, I watched the UFC pay-per-view at a bar with a nuclear medicine expert and electrical engineer. As I enjoyed the spectacle of two highly skilled athletes beating various bodily fluids out of each other, my friends ignored the action and instead talked about computer modeling for data sets. I understood some of what they said, mostly words like “however” and “the.” I was clueless on the rest, but that didn’t stop me from trying to jump in: “That’s a great point about asymmetrical coefficients in nonlinear equations. On a related note, I once wrote a 1,000-word essay on unicorn rape.” Something tells me I don’t quite fit in.

I don’t fully understand the question, but I’m pretty sure the answer is that I failed at life.

My feelings of inferiority have nothing to do with money, although some of my friends do make enough to pay people to escort me from the premises. There’s seldom a correlation between the importance of a career and how much it pays, which is why the wages are better for working at McDonald’s than being a full-time mother. My wife is a chemist, but I actually get paid more than her for whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to do for 40 hours a week. This wasn’t always the case. When I was a reporter, we figured I would eventually quit my job to become a stay-at-home dad. We weren’t exactly a two-income household, anyway, since the only thing the newspaper ever paid me was left-handed compliments. My editor was always quick to point out when one of my stories was less substandard than usual. Thankfully, my full-time parenthood never came to pass. I got a better job, and my paycheck surpassed Lola’s by a very slim margin. I only gloat about it every waking moment of my life.

My wife refuses to take the hint and get a second job, no matter how many times I make her watch Breaking Bad with me.

Although I make more money than Lola, her career, like those of our other friends in similar fields, drastically exceeds my own in terms of its prestige and value to society. At parties, everyone wants to hear about cutting-edge product designs and life-changing research breakthroughs. Nobody listens when I talk about the excellent job I did stapling some pages together. Our friends have an easy time communicating with each other because they all share a common base of scientific knowledge I lack. When I wanted to get better at making awkward small talk with acquaintances, I started watching football. Apparently, I should have studied the inner workings of the universe instead.

I’m not sure these science types are any more intelligent overall than I am, but they’ve definitely made smarter choices with their lives. When I decided to major in English creative writing, I wasn’t so much attracted by the written word as I was repelled by the thought of doing math. I’ve heard a lot of people say a liberal arts degree is a waste of money, and these people are absolutely right. But I had a full-ride scholarship, so all I wasted was my time. I did well enough in college that I was allowed to speak at graduation, but it wasn’t a fair fight. I specialized in a subject with no wrong answers, which made it pretty easy to stay ahead of the physics and computer science majors in terms of GPA. Although I didn’t deserve to speak at commencement, writing that graduation speech was ironically the only thing I could do better than the science majors. Then we all went out into the real world, and I’ve been losing to them ever since.

One of my brothers is a nuclear engineer, and another is studying aeronautics. For the record, I scored higher on my ACT than both of them. If there’s a lifetime achievement award for wasted potential, I’ll still probably find a way to come up short. The field I ended up stumbling into has nothing to do with my degree or any other for that matter, so in terms of my professional life it didn’t make a difference what I studied in college. That’s appropriate, though, since I come from a long line of people who did well academically for absolutely no reason. My dad got straight A’s in high school, an impressive accomplishment that helped him in no way when he took over my grandparents’ small hog farm. The luckiest day of his life was when he hurt his back and couldn’t do manual labor anymore. He went to college and got a soul-crushing white collar job, and we’re all much happier for it – I think. I’m still waiting for the serious bodily injury that transforms me into a success.

I wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps as a hog farmer until I realized pigs are a menu item, not a career choice.

Someone as arrogant as me shouldn’t have an inferiority complex, but it’s hard to avoid when everyone I know looks down on my trade. Not even my wife respects my work. She once told me, “Anybody can do your job,” and she somehow meant it as a compliment. I’m proud to think of myself as an interchangeable part. One possible solution to my self-esteem issues is to read a book for a change and figure out what all my smart friends are talking about. A better solution is to make dumber friends. Getting rid of the old ones should be easy enough. I have a naturally repulsive personality. Were it not for the fact that socially I’m a package deal with my wife, I doubt if I would’ve been invited anywhere this decade. Since I’m done associating with science majors, I’ll need to be somewhat selective about what fields my new comrades are involved with. I think my best options are elementary education majors and prisoners working on their GEDs.