Exploding Unicorn

A Fighting Chance

2013-06-17T23:50:00.000-04:00

My favorite sport is mixed martial arts, but it’s hard to find time to watch it with a 3-year-old in the house. Every time Betsy sees it on TV, she says the guys who fight need a timeout. She doesn’t understand it’s morally acceptable to punch people in the face if you do it for money. Mixed martial arts really is an art, but instead of creating a masterpiece with a brush and paint, combatants do it with their elbows and another man’s blood. Sometimes violence is the answer, especially if the question is, “What should I watch instead of baseball?” Considering the alternatives in your cable package, MMA is hardly the worst thing you can turn on in the background to drown out the sound of your wife and kids.

A fighter wears gloves to protect his hands, not the other guy’s face. A working brain is much less important than unbroken finger bones.

Whether you admit it or not, everyone likes to watch people get hurt. We just don’t want the pain to last because then we’d feel guilty and waste $3.50 on a get-well card. This goal of a brief injury followed by a complete recovery is the driving force behind the Internet, which exists primarily to share videos of guys getting hit in the nuts. In MMA, participants break bones, dislocate joints, and gush blood. After the final bell rings, though, the two fighters hug and forget they spent the last fifteen minutes trying to put each other in a coma. This is partially due to sportsmanship and partially because of the brain damage they suffered, but either way the battle is quickly out of their concussion-addled minds. Several hefty medical bills later, the combatants return to peak physical form and search for their next chance to profit by hurting someone. MMA offers fans a front-row view of pain without long-term consequences, making it the perfect sport for America’s 300 million citizens and their 600 million Ritalin prescriptions.

MMA has a special appeal for people with short attention spans. Unlike football or basketball, which last for a set amount of time no matter how close or lopsided the score, MMA can end at any second through a knockout or a submission. On the gridiron, spectators have to wait for a dominant team to run out the clock after it takes the lead by seven touchdowns and a safety. But in MMA, mismatches almost always lead to a violent end for the weaker guy, which is fine because audiences hate an underdog. With the average fight slated for three five-minute rounds, a 30-second knockout means you have 14 minutes and 30 seconds to squander on something else. I recommend you use the time to start a fight with someone in the parking lot or maybe just write some poetry.

The screening process to be an MMA fighter is pretty simply. You qualify as long as you have six-pack abs and at least 95 questionable tattoos.

That’s not to say the underdog always loses in MMA. While crazy comebacks sometimes happen in traditional sports, they’re rare. There aren’t many days when Tom Brady puts up a bunch of touchdowns and then throws nine interceptions in a row. In lopsided fights, however, a losing fighter is only one crazy punch away from a knockout win, no matter how far behind he is on the judge’s scorecards. It’s kind of like if baseball had a rule where you instantly win the game if you hit a 500-foot homerun, even if you’re down by 10 runs and it’s only the bottom of the third inning. The fact that there is no such rule in America’s pastime explains why MMA is growing in popularity while Major League Baseball is now more hated than anal warts and Hitler.

Besides having rules that appeal to easily-distracted fans, MMA also has the kind of athletes people want to cheer for. Too many sports idolize the team player who sacrifices himself for the good of the group. MMA, however, celebrates dysfunctional loners who are only looking out for themselves. The fighter alone has to answer in the octagon for what he says and does leading up to the bout, so he has the freedom to be honest at the pre-fight press conference. If a guy thinks he’s the best puncher since Jesus, there’s no public relations staffer to stop him from admitting it. You might not think the hero of the New Testament was much of a slugger, but all that turn-the-other-cheek business was meant to help Jesus hit the other guy with another uppercut.

Politicians could learn a thing or two from how MMA fighters handle press conferences. Journalists ask easier questions if you’re still covered in the blood of your opponent.

Besides the appeal of their charming arrogance, it’s also easy to cheer for MMA fighters because they largely come from working-class backgrounds. Let’s face it: If your parents have money, they’ll pay for you to do a sport that doesn’t involve getting your face smashed in. There isn’t a lot of overlap between the athletes in MMA and polo. Most fighters wouldn’t have any chance at wealth if it weren’t for mixed martial arts. I can empathize with them since outside of combat sports their prospects for the future are just as bleak as mine.

It costs money to watch these relatable anti-heroes on pay-per-view, but oddly enough that’s actually another of MMA’s perks. Charging $50 to watch a three-hour athletic event might not seem like a benefit, but it makes going to the bar and drinking with my friends the fiscally responsible alternative to staying home and ordering the fight by myself. Honestly, if ice skating was only available at bars, I’d probably be into that, too. Occasionally, though, we do order Ultimate Fighting Championship cards at someone’s house, but only if the cost of splitting it is low enough that our wives won’t yell at us. The main advantage to having people over to my house to watch a UFC event is I can fully utilize my cheap beer from the grocery store. Going to a bar is fun, but I can’t drink nearly as much when I have to drive home at the end of the night. I spent the first 16 years of my life wanting to drive more than anything in the world. Now that I’m older, I just want to someone else to drive for me so I can drink.

MMA appeals specifically to Americans who like superficial, action-packed experiences that are forgotten by the next commercial break. You might not agree with me that it’s the best sport to watch, but at the very least I hope we can agree it’s not the worst. That honor goes to baseball, which really isn’t a sport at all.

Celebrating Overlooked Milestones

2013-06-15T15:45:00.000-04:00

When I take my kids to their regularly scheduled checkups, the doctor asks if they’ve hit certain age-specific milestones. At her last appointment, my 3-year-old Betsy was supposed to have a vocabulary of hundreds of word, which she does. I know because she uses every single one of them to throw temper tantrums. The benchmarks were easier for my 1-year-old Mae, who was only expected to eat, sleep, and poop with a little bit of walking thrown in. I shoot for those same goals in my life. While these thresholds are useful indicators for how much my wife and I are failing as parents, they don’t cover everything. Outside of graduations and weddings, there are all kinds of milestones that aren’t necessarily honored with pictures, cake, and alcohol, although they should be. It’s time to record and celebrate these often overlooked achievements if only to have more excuses to get someone to splurge for an open bar.

First Concussion

In adulthood, my youngest daughter may ask why one side of her head is flatter than the other, so I plan to have pictures to explain. No matter how careful you are as a parent, all children eventually use their heads like battering rams. My kids have craniums the size of watermelons, as the damage to my wife’s reproductive system can attest. Their big heads are filled with ballast, not knowledge, and it shows. Whether the intended target is a wood floor or my nose, they usually emerge unscathed from the collision. Every once in a while, though, they run into something more stubborn than they are. When that happens, the best I can do is keep them awake so they don’t die while I pound that dent out of side of the fridge. Mae is young enough that she doesn’t know how to react after sustaining massive head trauma, so I can get her to laugh off some pretty serious brain damage if I start giggling before she cries. The resulting dazed smile on her face is a good one to photograph so I can explain to her later in life why she has trouble remembering her own name.

It only takes seconds to go from “Get this on camera” to “Put that thing down and grab an ice pack.”

First Broken Heart

Since half of all marriages end in divorce, it’s not exactly surprising that nearly 100 percent of relationships in junior high and high school don’t lead to long-term happiness. In fact, most don’t even lead to short-term happiness, although embarrassment and despair are pretty sure bets. The first broken heart you experience is worth commemorating because it helps you develop the crippling insecurities that define the life of a normal adult. In a perfect world, kids going through puberty would commemorate their first failed love with a regrettable tattoo, but state laws continue to infringe upon the freedom of minors to make permanent mistakes. Instead, I suggest taking as a souvenir something personally significant to your former romantic interest, like her retainer or her prescription heart medication.

First Job

It is an absolute certainty that your first job will suck. If it didn’t, someone more qualified than an unskilled high school student would want it. Common first jobs include slinging burgers and emptying Porta-Potties. Sadly, there’s a fair amount of overlap between the two. The most important lesson you learn from your first job is you never want to do it again. This terrible employment experience motivates many kids to get an education and swap their blue-collar misery for new and different white-collar misery. Both types of work are demeaning, but at least in an office job you get to sit down in air conditioning all day. While lifelong unhappiness is a handy memento of this transition, a fast food meat patty is more appropriate for your scrapbook. It has a longer half-life than carbon, so it will definitely be around as a reminder of your work history for centuries to come.

When aliens pick through the dust of our civilization millions of years from now, the only proof we ever existed will be mounds of uneaten Big Macs.

First Hangover

Legally, alcohol consumption shouldn’t happen until age 21, unless you live in Europe where the drinking age is usually 18 or Wisconsin where it’s 12. Liquor is a powerful substance that amplifies your best and worst characteristics. It’s like steroids for your personality. Since kids start out with no alcohol tolerance, the first night of drinking is guaranteed to end terribly or hilariously depending on if you’re the one imbibing or the one watching. After a night of too much fun, which is really the only kind of fun possible when drunk, you inevitably vow to never drink again. To date, not one of those promises has ever been upheld. Thanks to Facebook, this important occasion is finally getting the remembrance it deserves. Your first night of chemically-assisted fun is commemorated with 1,000 pictures of you holding a red solo cup that will force you to delete your account when you start looking for a real job.

The more fun something is, the fewer pictures you should take of it to prevent yourself from being barred from meaningful employment.

Quarter-Life Crisis

There’s no reason to wait until you’re 40 to freak out about your disappointing life. While you might not yet be locked in with a family and a mortgage in your early 20s, by then you’ve likely made plenty of other irreversible mistakes. Invariably, whatever major you picked was the wrong one, and you’re now tens of thousands of dollars in debt with no meaningful job skills. Your options include working a job where you’re underpaid or going to graduate school where you earn negative money as you take out even more loans. The panic you feel at that point deserves to be commemorated if for no other reason than to serve as a warning to others. Luckily, you already have your diploma, which functions as a permanent memento to all of your terrible life choices.

If you follow my advice, you’ll need to buy extra scrapbooks to keep track of all the important achievements you would have otherwise overlooked. That way when you’re old and senile you’ll be able to look back at a clearly documented timeline of how you failed so hard at life.

Not-So-Happy Endings

2013-06-12T11:08:00.000-04:00

Everything my 3-year-old knows about the world she learned from Disney movies. I can’t blame her. Even I glean truths about life from the animated classics, and I’m old enough to know better. Disney’s control of children’s hearts and minds is so deeply ingrained in society that the only way to stop it is to destroy western civilization and start over with the lifestyle of our cavemen ancestors. Cultural annihilation notwithstanding, the best we can hope for is to understand the messages this cinematic juggernaut sends to our offspring. Since my oldest daughter watches each movie she owns approximately 10,000 times per week, I’ve memorized every frame of Disney’s feature-length cartoons. Here’s what I learned about the plots of these movies along with the lessons they teach our kids.

The Little Mermaid

Ariel gives up her beautiful singing voice and mermaid fishtail to pursue a man. To the prince, the land-based version of Ariel is the perfect woman: She has great legs and can’t talk. Based solely on these qualities, the prince falls madly in love with her. A sea creature named Ursula interferes with this romance because there isn’t much else to do in the ocean. Rather than saving the day with intelligence or virtue, the prince and Ariel simply stab Ursula with the pointy end of a ship. The lesson for children is if you have a problem, hit it with a boat. That’s how the Titanic solved its iceberg issue. After jointly murdering the sea witch and having exactly zero conversations together, Ariel and the prince decide to tie the knot. The movie teaches kids that matrimony is a casual arrangement best entered into on a whim, making Las Vegas weddings seem sacred by comparison. When your daughter runs off and marries a crab fisherman she just met, you can blame Ariel.

The new couple spent a lot of time staring awkwardly into space on their wedding night. Ariel’s conversion from fish to person wasn’t as complete as she led the prince to believe.

Snow White

A jealous queen tries to kill Snow White for being prettier than her, which is understandable since it’s impossible for two attractive women to be friends. Snow White runs away to live with dwarves, who are banished to live in the woods in Disney’s intolerant fairytale world. The dwarves spend their days mining uranium in the hope of building an atomic bomb and destroying the society that cast them out. While Snow White waits for these miniature warmongers to return home, she eats a poison apple, but only because her diet doesn’t allow her to eat poison cake. Snow White falls into a deep sleep, but she is awoken hours later by a prince who dumps an entire pot of coffee on her face. There are two lessons for kids in this movie. First, beauty is punishable by death. Remind your daughter of that when she asks to get her ears pierced. Second, if a suspicious stranger offers you a poisoned apple, drugs, or anything else, you better take it if you want to land the man of your dreams.

Cinderella

Like all heroic underdogs, Cinderella is born rich and beautiful. Then her father dies and her step mother makes her do chores, which is a fate worse than death for someone who is physically attractive. She can’t handle the shame of doing actual work like a common laborer, so she goes insane and spends her days talking to mice. The king throws a royal ball to get his son laid, and all women, even the crazy ones who live in towers and talk to vermin, must attend. Cinderella’s step sisters destroy her dress so she can’t go to the ball, but a fairy godmother intervenes. No one deserves a miracle like a child of privilege who isn’t quite privileged enough. At the ball, the prince falls in love with Cinderella because her glass slippers appeal to his foot fetish. Before things get too serious, Cinderella runs away. There’s a penalty at the magic dress rental shop if she keeps her outfit past midnight. The king orders a warrantless house-to-house search to find her, which he can do since the Patriot Act applies even in fairytales. The royal attendants find Cinderella when her foot fits in the glass slipper she left behind. Apparently she is the only woman in the kingdom who wears a size four. The lesson for kids is the only way to escape work is to pretty yourself up and snag a rich, powerful man who is really into feet.

On the fairy godmother’s first attempt, the rest of Cinderella’s outfit was made of glass, too. Cinderella decided against that dress due to modesty and fragmentation concerns.

Beauty and the Beast

A prince is rude to an old woman, which is a bad idea since all elderly females in fairytales are witches or sorceresses. The woman transforms the prince into a beast and his servants into inanimate objects because the appropriate response to a lack of hospitality is ruining hundreds of innocent lives. The beast must make someone fall in love with him or be stuck as a monster forever, but he is unable sign up for Internet dating since bestiality is illegal. Instead, he takes a hostage. His prisoner, Belle, experiences Stockholm Syndrome and falls in love with him. The beast is transformed into a prince, and all of that kidnapping stuff is instantly forgotten. Legal consequences don’t apply when you’re handsome. The lesson for kids is it’s OK to be ugly on the inside as long as you’re pretty on the outside by the end of the story.

In Disney’s world, no matter how much long-term psychological damage the heroine suffers, it is considered a happy ending if she gets to wear a fancy dress.

Disney movies are bastions of intolerance and materialism. Parents only let their sons and daughters watch them because a $10 DVD is way cheaper than a babysitter. Letting kids be brainwashed with the worst ideas of the 1950s is a small price to pay for a few hours of free time for mom and dad. Every year, more children who grew up watching Disney movies become adults, and the world gets a little worse. There really is no good alternative. Now that the theme park conglomerate owns Star Wars, every worthwhile intellectual property on the planet is under Disney’s control. If you don’t want to fall victim to the twisted morality of the Mickey Mouse company, your only option is to skip movies and read books instead. Good luck with that one.

Gym Class is Canceled

2013-06-10T00:02:00.000-04:00

In general, I support inconveniencing other people, especially when those people are teenagers. I look forward to the day when scientists find a way to transform kids directly into adults without the self-absorbed stage of adolescence in between. But for the same reason I think it’s wrong to test cosmetics on chimps, I believe it’s unethical to inflict gym class on teenagers, even if they are the least intelligent of all primates. Physical education, known as “P.E.” by students who communicate entirely by text, is neither physical nor educational. It’s too short to help anyone get in shape, and the only thing it teaches is that students should’ve tried harder to get out of the class. Its main purpose is to harass teens while making educators feel like they’ve done their part in the war on obesity. With America falling behind the rest of the developed world in math and science, there are better ways for high schoolers to spend an hour of each day than studying the finer points of badminton.

High school badminton involves 10% actual game play and 90% inappropriate jokes about shuttlecocks.

Taking a high school gym class is like being graded on recess. Games and activities that might be fun on their own lose their appeal when insecure teenagers and an out-of-shape gym teacher are involved. Even if each class features a vigorous cardio or strength training workout, most sessions are too brief to do any good. If a class lasts an hour, changing into gym clothes and showering take up the first and last sections of the period. In between these startup and shutdown procedures, there is a brief window in which an educator prods his reluctant students through arbitrary activities ranging from table tennis to distance running. By the time the bell rings at the end of the session, everyone involved is relieved they are one day closer to graduation and ultimately death.

While gym is always pointless, just how useless it is depends on the type of teacher running it. Many people believe all physical education teachers are former athletes who didn’t qualify for professional sports and had no plan B. This stereotype exists because it is absolutely true. There are two varieties of frustrated gym teachers. The first type focuses all of his energy on the popular high school sport he coaches. Any class the school board forces him to teach is an irrelevant distraction, so students are lucky if the only subject he ruins is gym. Putting a wannabe-fulltime coach in charge of an area like math or English can single-handedly drop the SAT scores for an entire school. Neither the teacher nor the students want to be in a P.E. class, so the typical daily activities under a football or basketball coach include free throw shooting and checkers. The coach spends most of his time joking around with players from his team, all of whom are guaranteed A’s. As for the rest of the students, the teacher doesn’t recognize them by name or sight, so he randomly assigns them grades at the end of the semester.

High school coaches who teach gym class motivate students everywhere to do well in school in order to avoid the same fate.

The other kind of teacher compensates for the fact that gym class shouldn’t exist by taking it way too seriously. These educators run their brief exercise sessions with military precision, demanding obedience, effort, and other concepts completely foreign to any 14 to 18-year-old. To perpetuate the fraud of physical education, these overzealous instructors supplement push-ups and sit-ups with unnecessarily difficult written tests. More than a few kids have failed P.E. because they didn’t know a volleyball court is precisely 29.5 feet wide. For grade point average purposes, gym class is often weighted the same as meaningful subjects like chemistry or trigonometry. Under those circumstances, the difference between getting into an Ivy League school and a community college can be a petty gym teacher and a few pull-ups on the Presidential Fitness Test.

With childhood obesity at an all-time high, it’s doubtful school administrators will have the courage to abolish gym class. No one wants to appear soft on fat. Making kids exercise sounds like a good idea in theory, but in practice twenty minutes of jogging doesn’t cancel out the eight hours of sitting a student does during the rest of the school day. It also doesn’t have any effect on the habits of students when they go home, where they consume most of their daily calories. Studies show exercise has only a minor influence on weight compared with the food an individual eats. To burn off the calories he consumes in a single fast food meal, the average adult male has to run 95 miles with leg weights on. If gym teachers really want to help people lose weight, they should skip the jumping jacks and picket a donut shop instead.

Donuts were invented by the Soviets during the Cold War as part of a long-term plan to destroy America through high cholesterol.

Of course, even an improved dietary education won’t make students shed pounds. Health classes existed long before kids weighed more than horses. Teenagers have amazing metabolisms, making it hard for them to take fitness advice from anyone who hasn’t had visible abs since the Carter administration. Eventually, these students will move on to college and get fat, and at that point they’ll have to decide if diet and exercise or morbid obesity and an early death are right for them. Before then, however, all the gym and health classes in the world won’t make a difference.

It’s time to end gym class once and for all for high school students. This advice doesn’t apply to elementary and junior high schools, though, where gym class is basically another free play session. Dodgeball is second only to alcohol in terms of its powers of stress relief, and it would be cruel to deprive little kids of that destructive joy. But the hassle of physical education in secondary school simply isn’t worth it. America is already falling behind the rest of the world in academics. We won’t gain any ground by making kids do sit-ups a few times a week.

State Flag Guide: Part 2

2013-06-06T23:13:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, I set out to make baseless assumptions about every state, a worthy task for which I will undoubtedly win several Nobel Prizes and possibly a kingship somewhere in Europe. Without further ado, here’s what the remaining 25 flags say about the regions they represent:

The white lines coming off the mountain make it look like the mighty peak just had a great idea. That idea was probably to live someplace better than Montana.

Nebraska’s flag shows a guy pounding on an anvil. He’s not forging anything. Everyone in the state just really hates anvils.

The “battle born” slogan on this flag refers to a hooker who savagely beat an out-of-state congressman until he agreed to make Nevada a state. He never actually filed the paperwork, though. That’s why you still need a passport to visit Las Vegas.

As you can tell from the oars sticking out from the side of the ship, New Hampshire prides itself on its fleet of battle rowboats. This one is stuck on a sandbar, though, because the state doesn’t pride itself on navigation.

New Jersey’s flag features a horse head because the mafia there made the governor an offer he couldn’t refuse.

The circle in the middle of New Mexico’s flag represents a portal back to old Mexico. It’s actually just a tunnel under the border.

According to Google, “excelsior” refers to softwood shavings used to protect packages during shipping. Despite New York’s claims of being the center of the world, the region is still best known for manufacturing the antique equivalent of Styrofoam packing peanuts.

As North Carolina’s flag clearly indicates, the state only existed from 1775 to 1776. What’s been there since then is anyone’s guess. I suspect it’s ghosts and overrated college basketball teams.

North Dakota put so much on its flag because there’s nothing in the state. Don’t be fooled by it. You could live there your whole life and never once see an eagle with an awkwardly stretched neck carrying arrows and celery.

No one should be surprised people in the swing state of Ohio have a hard time picking a president. Judging by their flag, they’re also confused by how many sides are on a rectangle.

Oklahoma Indians lost to the settlers for numerous reasons, not the least of which was they beat on their war drums with soft ferns. It was the quietest military defeat in history.

The letters in “State of Oregon” slope up and down because nobody there owns a ruler. This flag is actually the origin of the Comic Sans font. That’s why the entire state of Oregon is currently under indictment for crimes against humanity.

As Pennsylvania’s flag proudly attests, the Quakers were the first to train their horses in the ancient equestrian art of eagle-kicking.

Some states are lands of opportunity. If you’re in Rhode Island, though, you might as well tie your hope to an anchor and sink it to the bottom of the ocean.

Unlike other warm-weather states that depict the sun, South Carolina’s banner shows the moon in deference to the powerful tropical werewolf lobby.

Working in South Dakota’s tourism bureau is the most depressing job in America. Their flag sends a clear message: This state has a large, carved rock and nothing else. A 10-second glance at this banner is exactly as exciting as a two-week vacation to South Dakota.

Tennessee’s flag features a circle with three star-shaped holes because the people there pride themselves on making the most uncomfortable bowling balls in America. If your fingers aren’t bleeding, you aren’t having fun. On a related note, Jack Daniels is made in Tennessee, and in most homes it’s pumped through faucets in place of water.

A while ago, Texas threatened to secede from the union and become its own country again. The proposal was met with universal enthusiasm from people across the political spectrum, prompting Texas to cancel the plan because it made too many people happy. Texas’s flag only has one star because the only thing Texas cares about is Texas.

Utah looks at the world differently than the rest of America, and its flag is proof of that. Based on the eagle’s posture and expression, he is clearly going to take a dump on that beehive. This commemorates the ill-fated turd drop that led to the Battle of the Bees and Eagles in 1896. The bees won, which is why eagles are now an endangered species.

In Vermont, a cow hanging out in the shade of a pine tree is about as wild as things get. The cow was of course given a ticket for loitering.

If you’re in Virginia and you pass out at a frat party, state law requires a guy with a bong and a spear to stand on your chest.

Appropriately, Washington’s flag features an image of the guy the state is named after: Abraham Lincoln.

On West Virginia’s flag, a farmer and a miner proudly stand beside a giant mound of manure. The impressive part is it only took them two days of eating at Taco Bell to create a pile that big.

The middle of Wisconsin’s flag depicts the tools you need to survive in the state: a plow, a hammer, a pickax, and a wolverine. In that part of the country, it’s too cold to use razors, so to shave men cover their beards with peanut butter and then let a wolverine maul off their facial hair.

Wyoming’s flag shows its most famous legend: a bison born with a birthmark of the state seal on its side. Of course, the birthmark is under the animal’s fur, so searching for it involves lots of bison shaving. Few men survive this challenge, which is why Wyoming’s human population currently stands at eight.

If you stuck with me this far, you should now be able to recognize every state flag and spout off a few completely accurate facts about each one. You’ll surely be a hit at parties and probably get laid more often than you can handle. Don’t thank me. Thank the brave men and women who created the most pointless set of banners in existence.

In case you missed it, learn entirely true facts about the first 25 state flags here.

State Flag Guide: Part 1

2013-06-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

Americans don’t take pride in individual states in the same way they feel patriotism for their country as a whole. That’s because states are a gimmick designed to charge car registration fees every time someone takes a job on the other side of an imaginary internal border. Sensing their elaborate fraud was about to be exposed, states created their own flags to trick residents into feeling regional pride instead of indignation and annoyance. These flags celebrate minor provincial differences to inspire a sense of identity within each state. With no research and an extremely weak grasp of U.S. history, I will now interpret what these banners say about the states they represent. It is my sincerest hope a junior high student somewhere will use the following information in a school report. Such a scholar would undoubtedly get an “A” and a full-ride scholarship to the finest college on the moon.

Alabama’s flag is an “X” on a white background. It’s not a design. It was just some guy in Birmingham trying to sign his name. Be sure not to use any big words when you see this flag flying on a pole.

If you stand in Alaska and crane your neck upward, you see stars. This differs from other states, where if you stare into the night sky you see giant flying turtles and irradiated disco balls descending from space.

Arizona’s vast deserts are good for only two things: filling sandboxes and testing nuclear weapons. The state opted to celebrate the atomic angle, with a star and flashes of light representing a hydrogen bomb blast. It’s a proud day when you realize the only thing your state is good for is blowing itself up.

Arkansas was named by pirates with a poor understanding of geography. The region was originally called “Arrr, Kansas,” but it was misspelled on the flag, probably because the flag designer was under attack by pirates at the time. As for the stars on the banner, they’re just pointless decorations. The only reason there isn’t any glitter or sequins is because the state wasted most of its flag budget battling buccaneers.

California never dropped “Republic” from its name because it’ll be its own country again when the whole state breaks off and floats away. The flag depicts a bear on a green surfboard riding out the predicted tectonic shifts in style.

Colorado’s early settlers loved Pac-Man, but they had to depict him with a red border because they never secured his copyright. As for his super-dialed yellow eye, it represents the effects of the state’s most abundant resource: bath salts.

Connecticut is known for two things: wine and magic spells many people mistake for Latin. Its flag features both. Consequently, most of Connecticut’s magic only “works” when its wielder drinks large quantities of alcohol.

On Delaware’s flag, a farmer and a soldier ready themselves to fight over a toy ship, which was a pretty common courtship ritual back them. The two men were later joined in the first gay marriage. Their anniversary date is listed at the bottom of the flag.

After reviewing hundreds of years of state history, Florida’s flag committee simply copied Alabama’s flag and then added a scantily clad woman on the beach to represent spring break. It was the right move.

Georgia is the only state in the union with the word “moderation” on its flag. Its founders wanted to make sure nobody mistook the state for a place to have fun.

Hawaii’s instructions to their flag designer were, “Start drawing patriotic stripes and we’ll tell you when to stop.” They never got back to him.

The creator of this flag made sure to point out it’s for the “state of Idaho,” not the municipality, country, or planet of Idaho. Consequently, the planet of Idaho’s flag just says “Idaho.” The state of Idaho’s banner implies its namesake is a land full of miners and women with spears, but only one of those groups is still there today. All of the miners mysteriously died from spear wounds.

On Illinois’s flag, the word “sovereignty” is written upside down. It was done ironically. When 90% of your governors end up in prison, you really can’t brag about self-governance.

In Indiana, it’s still illegal to buy beer on Sundays. The state’s flag has a torch and stars because its founders knew someday that law would drive residents to burn everything to the ground in the middle of the night.

Iowa, like several other states, apparently delivers important messages via an eagle carrying a banner in its mouth. Hang in there, guys. You’ll get the Internet someday.

On Kansas’s flag, the picture of a wagon train and a horse-drawn plow shows what the state looked like way back in 2009. Since then, times have change. Men on horseback no longer chase bison across the prairie. Now they machine gun bison from biplanes.

Kentucky is a commonwealth, not a state. A state exists to administer laws, whereas a commonwealth’s main purpose is to make men awkwardly dance with each other.

Louisiana understands that nothing inspires state pride like a big white bird getting ready to regurgitate its food to helpless freeloaders. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina makes much more sense now.

Maine’s flag is actually based on an old joke. A farmer, a sailor, and a moose walk into a bar. I don’t remember the rest, but I think it involves sodomy.

Maryland is a former Catholic colony, and everyone knows those papists only like two things: diagonal checkers and condemning people to hell in the name of a loving and forgiving God. This flag covers both.

Massachusetts’s flag features an armed Indian and the severed arm of a settler holding a sword. The state is still proud it suffered humiliating military defeats against peaceful Native Americans.

The early Michigan economy depended heavily on revenue from people gambling on deer fights. The proceeds were used to build Detroit, which everyone now agrees was a mistake. In the middle of the flag near the setting sun, Bigfoot waves. Like everyone else, he moved out of the area years ago to escape the rising crime rate.

Minnesota’s flag shows the meat and vegetables for a shish kabob bordering a picture of a settler and an Indiana. This commemorates the first barbeque between the two groups. The Indians brought beer. The settlers brought small pox.

Nobody told Mississippi the Civil War is over. The south may rise again, but its education level and standard of living certainly won’t.

Missouri’s flag shows two large bears. The third is off somewhere else eating Goldilocks. Collectively, these three bears amount to exactly three more than have ever been seen in the state of Missouri.

If you’ve been counting, you might realize that was only 25 flags. Apparently there are somewhere around 50 states right now, which is quite frankly too many. I’ll get to the others later this week. Hopefully a few of them will secede by then, making my job slightly easier.

Update: Read amazing facts about the remaining 25 state flags here.

Beyond Repair

2013-06-03T06:00:00.000-04:00

Women like a man who can fix a car. They don’t think mechanics are sexy. They just like getting their car work done for free. I know a thing or two about motor vehicles, namely that tires need air and pushing down the gas pedal makes the car go, “vroom, vroom.” Beyond that, I have no idea how a car works. I assume it has something to do with elves and the metric system. According to stereotypical gender roles, it’s my job as a man to understand how these machines run and how to fix them when they don’t. I’ve had mixed results on that front. I once called my wife to figure out why my steering wheel locked up, which is kind of like if she called me to ask how to use a tampon. Even the most basic car maintenance duties exceed my abilities, but that’s OK. The reason I have a job is so I can afford to pay other people to be manly for me.

In some parts of the world, when your car breaks down, you don’t fix it. You just buy a new one for $40 and a chicken.

The only car repair I know how to do is change a flat tire, and that’s solely because I attract nails like middle-aged women attract cats. During one stretch, I had two or three flat tires a year, which indicates malicious intent, either on the part of a human enemy or the universe. I don’t think a mystical force was to blame because if karma was real I would have been mauled to death by agitated chipmunks long ago. For all the bad things I’ve done, my death would have to be both painful and unusual. It’s similarly unlikely that someone was sneaking around slashing my tires. I have lots of former friends who are now my enemies, but the only thing we ever had in common is that we’re all lazy, even when it comes to spite. Regardless of why misfortune befell my tires, the holes in them were always small and cheap to repair once I got my car to the shop. All I had to do was put on a spare, a simple act that requires little physical exertion and even less technical knowledge. I almost killed myself every time I tried it.

The danger began as soon as I propped up a 2,000-pound car with a four-pound jack. The small device is a marvel of physics, and I’d have complete faith in it if the vehicle stayed perfectly stationary. But in my futile effort to get the lug nuts off the tire, I rocked the entire car like I was trying to make it fall asleep. While I’m glad these lug nuts were firmly attached so that my tire didn’t fall off when I cruised at the moderate speeds my car was capable of, it was less than ideal when I had to remove them. I don’t have a ton of upper body strength, so I used my feet against the tire iron, at first stepping on it tentatively and later jumping on it like it was a trampoline. After much effort and even more swearing, either the lug nut gave way, the tire iron broke, or I fell and hurt myself, although sometimes it was all three.

I’m not entirely sure a car needs all four wheels to get around. I’ll wait to test that theory until my wife isn’t home.

Despite my struggles, I’m able to change tires because even an English major can understand how a wheel works. Beyond that, mechanized transportation is a mystery to me. I don’t even know how to change my own oil, although if I did I still wouldn’t do it myself. I have no desire to crawl under a car propped up on tire ramps because I don’t do well at projects where incompetence results death. My survival is guaranteed when I pay a mechanic to do this for me, and he even checks other vital liquids I’ve ignored for years. It just occurred to me the other day that I’ve never refilled my car’s windshield wiper fluid. Either the mechanic has been doing it for me during oil changes or my windshield wipers are magic.

To me, a car is just a tool for transporting me from one failure to the next. As long as the machine starts up when I turn the key in the ignition, I don’t worry too much about whether or not my shortcomings as a man will destroy its inner workings. I also don’t care about the car’s exterior. I never wash it because clean, shiny cars attract the attention of traffic cops and car thieves. Right now, my midsize sedan is covered in a layer of bird poop, which is really a form of protection. Even chop shops don’t want vehicles they have to decontaminate for bird flu. Besides, I don’t own a garage, and it’s pointless to clean something I leave sitting on the side of the road all day. Rainwater itself might not get my car clean, but the acid in it should burn off impurities like dirt and paint.

Cars are lighter and more efficient after all the extraneous features rust off.

Remarkably, there are people in the world who know even less about cars than me. In some states, it’s illegal to pump your own gas. This law provides job security for gas station attendants, which is nice because graduates with liberal arts degrees need to work somewhere. While I know how to fill up my own fuel tank, the number of other car projects I can do myself is pitifully low. The only reason I attempt any at all is because an inoperable car means I have to stay home with my wife. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if I understand how a car works. What matters is that when it breaks down, I know how to find a real man to fix it for me.

Careless Lawn Care

2013-05-31T00:39:00.000-04:00

Instead of judging me by something trivial like my character or my accomplishments, the world evaluates me based solely on one criteria: my yard. When St. Peter reviews my life, my sins and good deeds will be a minor footnote compared with whether or not I got rid of my crabgrass. My father-in-law has suggested more than once that I simply till up my lawn and start over. He knows a thing or two about lost causes because he’s met me. While I do just enough yard work to avoid losing my children in the tall grass, I have little interest in perfectly maintaining my miniscule plot of land. A well-kept lawn sends a powerful message about the type of person who owns it, and that’s why I let mine grow wild. I don’t believe in making a good impression because in my case that’s the same thing as lying.

For me, mowing is an annual tradition because I only do it once a year.

Beyond proving my self-worth to my neighbors, there’s little purpose in having an immaculate outdoor space. Grass didn’t evolve over millions of years to be cut and maintained at a height of exactly three inches. If Jurassic Park taught me anything, it’s that nature will find a way to overcome confinement and kill everyone. If you think rebellious grasses aren’t terrifying, you must not have allergies. We think we’ve beaten the wind-swept meadows into submission, but our dominance is haphazard at best. Mankind uses its technology to wipe out the wrong parts of nature. There’s a reason North America now has zero woolly mammoths and ten trillion dandelions. Tidy landscaping won’t fix the problem. Every time I mow my yard, I’m merely delaying the eventual takeover of our weedy overlords.

If it spreads itself and is easy to grow, it’s a weed, but if you have to plant it and it dies at the first sign of adversity, it’s a flower. Gardening is designed to cause unhappiness.

Whereas fastidious lawn maintenance attempts to cage in mother nature, my indifferent upkeep methods actually encourage a more vibrant local ecosystem. While I keep my grass short enough that I can spot my children if they hold their arms above their heads, there’s still enough groundcover to hide traditional Midwestern wildlife, like cheetahs and alligators. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what animals are out there, and I can’t afford a team of explorers to check it out. While ignoring my property initially helps the environment, by the end of the summer my failure to water my lawn has the opposite effect. My grass dies a slow, painful death, but that’s OK because unlike other things I fatally neglect, I don’t even have to flush it down the toilet afterward. While the cheetahs and alligators might be upset, for me the best day of the year is when I don’t have mow anymore.

If there really is something lurking in my grass, either my dogs will scare it away or it will eat my dogs. I’ll be happy either way.

There are other ways to get out of mowing, and many of them even claim to be eco-friendly. More than one environmentalist on TV has endorsed artificial grass since homeowners don’t have to waste precious water to hydrate it. Nothing says “I support the earth” like covering it in AstroTurf. Other lawn alternatives include paving over your yard with gravel or covering it in mulch-laden flower beds. Smothering unwanted plants with a ground-up layer of dead trees hardly seems like the crowning achievement of conservation. Due to the prevalence of weeds and the fragility of flowers, maintaining a proper yard involves a lot more killing than it does growing. If you say you have a green thumb, you’re actually bragging about massacring everything in your yard except for a few flowers you think are pretty.

While this approach is both labor-intensive and environmentally-harmful, it’s too late to change the system, especially in areas with new construction. Whereas older neighborhoods enforce lawn maintenance through peer pressure and the occasional brick through your window, modern subdivisions have legal mechanisms to compel you to keep up with the Joneses. Homeowners’ associations aren’t restrained by pesky concepts like property rights or democracy in their single-minded quest to make everyone’s yards look nice. To deal with reluctant landscapers, these organizations can send threatening letters, issue fines, or hold your cat hostage until you mow your lawn. While this last tactic might seem unconstitutional, you have to remember that homeowners’ associations rank somewhere above the Supreme Court in terms of their power to make irreversible decisions that inconvenience your life.

That’s not to say all property owners must be prodded into caring for their land. Many people love yard work, but for the wrong reasons. They keep their grass nice and low not because they love an orderly lawn but because they enjoy the dangerous, destructive tools used to maintain it. If there’s a chance a machine could lop off a finger, the average adult male is immediately interested. Thanks to the spinning blades central to their operation, lawnmowers are basically oversized blenders that pulverize any plant that has the audacity to grow after and being watered and fertilized. With other power tools like circular saws and flamethrowers, you eventually run out of stuff to destroy, but with a lawn you have a self-replenishing target. A well-maintained yard, then, is a way to measure how effectively you annihilate nature on an ongoing basis.

As the most intelligent species on the planet, there’s got to be a better way to evaluate ourselves than how well we maintain grass, one of the simplest life forms in existence. Rather than judging me by how green my lawn is, base your estimate on the length of my nose hair or how far I can toss a cantaloupe on a Tuesday. There are a million other similarly irrelevant standards that could be used when comparing ourselves to each other, and all of them would be better than the current approach. The best part is homeowners’ associations don’t have jurisdiction over nose hair or fruit tossing, so we could go about our competition without fear that a shady organization will steal our cats.

Go to Your Room

2013-05-29T06:00:00.000-04:00

My wife and I want to move our one-year-old Mae out of our room, but we’re not quite sure where to put her. She’s old enough to cry herself to sleep now, which seems like a milestone of neglect but is also one of great convenience. Under a certain age, children somehow have infinite energy and will simply cry forever if you lay them down while they’re still awake. Mae, however, is now old enough to be disheartened by life and will give up and fall asleep after a while. Predictably, this is a noisy process, and Lola and I won’t get much sleep if the crib is in our room while it happens. We have two other bedrooms, one of which belongs to our three-year-old Betsy and the other of which is currently inhabited by my Xbox360 and its accompanying 50-inch plasma TV. I must now decide if I’m going to let my screaming toddler disrupt the existence of my oldest daughter or of an inanimate videogame console. This is a tough call.

The only difference between a crib and a cage is a crib doesn’t have a roof.

If we give Mae the Xbox’s current domain, we might ruin her life by making it too easy. I didn’t have my own room until I was in high school, and even then I only got it because my parents were tired of living on the same story of the house as me. The arrangement didn’t last for long. Being Catholic, my mom and dad never stopped having children, and inevitably they had to find a spot for another kid. They dumped my younger brother, Dirk, into my closet, and he spent his early years believing that was his room. I was away at college by then, so he could use my part of the room most of the time, retreating to the closet only to sleep or when I was home on break. If I let Mae have the luxury of her own room, she’d be deprived of the sibling room-sharing experiences that turned me into the twisted, cynical person I am today. I can’t imagine any fate worse for myself than accidentally raising a happy, optimistic child.

My wife and I will presumably have more kids at some point, but it’s impossible to know if that will happen in the near future like I want or when hell freezes over like Lola wants. It’s possible, though unlikely, that we’ll never have more kids, and that both Betsy and Mae could have their own rooms until they move out. While this would make their lives tragically pleasant in their early years, it would be an even bigger problem when they hit puberty. Giving them privacy at that age would be catastrophic, especially if boys were involved. As a member of the male gender, I can say with absolute authority that regardless of if it’s on the phone or in person, unsupervised interaction between my girls and anyone lacking female reproductive organs could only end in disaster. To avoid this fate, I may make my daughters share a room with each other and also several nuns.

A nun-style ruler strike to the hand won’t make a teenage girl behave better, but it might make her fingers too swollen for her to dial her boyfriend’s phone number.

If we put Mae in the same room as Betsy, however, that would come with its own set of problems. First, one child crying in the middle of the night would rapidly multiply into two children crying when they wake each other up. Lola and I can’t hear Betsy’s room all that well from where we sleep, but we definitely could if the voice output from there doubled. Second, they’d have to learn to share. Putting our three-year-old in closer contact with her younger sister would either speed the social development of both of them or cause them both to regress into a chimpanzee-like state of territorial warfare. Finally, it would put twice as many little hands in one place to make a mess. Mae already causes devastation in there on her short visits, leaving a path of destruction akin to an earthquake during a forest fire. If we put her in her own room, the debris would be more spread out, whereas if we put her with Betsy it would pile up in one place and possibly bury one or both kids alive.

If we told my kids their toys were supposed to be in a giant pile in the middle of the floor, I wonder if they’d make a mess by putting them nearly away in the bins and boxes around the room.

Ultimately, the room we move Mae into will probably be determined not by what’s best for the kids, but by sheer laziness. That’s the only criteria I consistently apply to my parental decisions, and I’m still convinced it’s the right one. The Xbox room is currently set up like a second living room. To put Mae in there, we’d have to move out a large TV, bookshelves, a chair, and a futon. To toss the crib into Betsy’s room, though, we only have to move one plastic playhouse that we planned to bring downstairs anyway. Betsy’s room will have a nice crib-sized hole in one corner, and I’ll probably fill that gap with a small, screaming child fighting against sleep. As long as the struggle takes place where I can’t hear it, the arrangement should work out beautifully for everyone but my children.

If we add more kids to our family in the future, this whole issue would become moot. I’d like to end up with at least four kids because I’m awesome and my genes deserve to be propagated as much as possible. If we have either two girls and two boys or four girls, the division is easy. We’d just put two kids in each room or four kids in one and the Xbox by itself in the other if I pull off a miracle and convince my wife to let me keep my man cave forever. If we end up with three girls and one boy, though, the situation would get interesting. After a certain age, no girl wants to be in the same room with her brother, and three girls certainly don’t want to share the same four walls. Should this predicament occur, we’d have to move one or more of the kids outside to live in the yard with the dogs. Our pets at least wouldn’t mind sharing.

Move On From Moving

2013-05-27T15:52:00.000-04:00

It’s better to lose a friend than help one move. Friendship is fleeting, but herniated discs are forever. While human companionship has some intrinsic value, the most important reason to keep people in your life is to draft them as a source of free labor. Just don’t let your buddy know you only let him stick around because he has a strong back and a truck. The biggest danger of depending on people you know to help you move is you’ll be expected to return the favor someday. To reduce that possibility, only request the aid of individuals who are unlikely to ever attain homeowner status themselves. That way even if they do ask you to help them relocate, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to dump their meager belongings under the bridge of their choice. But rather than swapping favors with hobos, it’s much more prudent to never move in the first place. For those who think changing residences is a good idea, here are some reasons why packing up and heading to a new home is more trouble than it’s worth.

You have a lot more stuff than you think you do, and it’s all way heavier than you expect. You won’t realize any of this until you carry every bit of it down a flight of stairs and onto a truck. Closets and cabinets exist for the sole purpose of stashing possessions you don’t need and should’ve gotten rid of a long time ago. Instead, you now have to lug around participation trophies from junior high and college textbooks you couldn’t sell because the publisher put out a new edition 20 minutes after you bought the old one. Books are basically bricks made from paper. Unless you’re going to read them over and over again, you’re only bringing them along so they can look nice on a shelf somewhere. In that capacity, they’re the heaviest decorations on the planet, unless someone out there adorns their living room with designer bowling balls or antique weight sets. If you really want to peruse those books again, buy them in ebook form and ditch the unwieldy paper blocks. Just don’t get rid of them with a book burning ceremony. Neither your old neighbors nor your new ones will appreciate that.

There’s a wonderful new device that makes all books obsolete. It’s called a TV.

What you say to your reluctant labor force can be just as demoralizing as what you make them carry. Nobody wants to hear about how bad your old place was and how great your new place will be. Your friends still remember how you gave the same speech when they moved you into the house or apartment you’re now abandoning. Your new home has flaws, too. You just haven’t them noticed them yet because you only toured the place twice before you decided you wanted to spend the rest of your life there. Some of these blemishes were there from the start, but more will be added on your way in. Dents in the drywall and scratches on the floor have a way of magically appearing when you only pay your indentured laborers in free beer and pizza. That works out to well below minimum wage, so forgive your friends if they’re less than delicate with your china hutch that weighs more than an aircraft carrier.

When we moved into our house several years ago, it took seven men to get our dresser up the stairs. If that didn’t work, plan B was to set up the bedroom furniture in the middle of the dining room.

As damage starts to appear, some of your stuff will vanish without a trace. It went into a box – nobody remembers exactly which one – and somehow never came out. No matter how carefully you label your prized possessions, a lot of them will simply vaporize. Maybe they fell out in transit, or perhaps your spouse threw them away when you were distracted. A lot of alleged poltergeist activity is really just a husband and wife who don’t know how to communicate. If you’re married, even those items that successfully make it to your new place will be impossible to find. Figuring out where to put everything you own requires a million little decisions. Spouses will disagree about every single one of them. That might be why the leading cause of divorce is being married.

Much like the Bermuda Triangle, a moving van is a mysterious place where all of your cool stuff that your wife doesn’t like somehow vanishes without a trace.

The only thing that can save the relationship of a recently-relocated couple is the fear of sleeping alone in the new house. You weren’t afraid in your former dwelling because you were used to every creak and groan. But in a new house, it’s hard to be sure if that noise downstairs is the structure settling or a homicidal maniac tiptoeing around. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could drown out the suspicious sounds by turning on the TV, but your cable and Internet likely won’t be hooked up in your first few days there. So you’re totally isolated from the outside world while strange noises come from somewhere in the night. Welcome to the start of every horror movie ever made. After a while, you’ll be as used to your new house as you were to the old one, but in the meantime it’s nice to know you’re mature enough to have a 30-year mortgage but not enough of an adult to stop being afraid of the dark.

People only move when they finally forget how much of a pain relocating was the last time around. To stifle that impulse, reread this article whenever you’re tempted to pack up your stuff and head out to a new place. The allure of additional square footage or granite countertops isn’t worth uprooting your life and alienating all of your friends. If you still insist on moving, at least leave all of your old stuff behind and start over. Your back will thank you.

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.