Pipe Telephone

Facebook Knows

2011-05-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

You know that one person who seems to make a point to know every single detail about your life and then judges what you might like to talk about based off of those things? To a certain degree, we all do this, and it might even be a good thing in moderation. When it's all they talk about, though, I start to feel like that person is convinced that that is my only interest and saying absolutely anything else to me will make me either run off waving my hands in a fit of anger or drop dead spontaneously from the insurmountable task of comprehending this new, foreign concept. This is the way Facebook has been treating me lately and I don't like it.

Facebook has always tried to act like it knows the lives of its users. This used to manifest itself in really helpful features--People You May Know and Recommended Pages, for example. Most recently, they began to personalize their advertisements, which is a really good idea on paper. The problem is that the service, when implemented, is a bit... single-minded.

I'm one of those lucky people who lives in a town where I can be at least 73% sure that putting my sexual orientation on my Facebook will not result in a congregation of devotees performing an exorcism outside my door. (Although, come to think of it, I do live three doors down from a church...) One night, after watching a really sappy frustrated-gay-men romcom my mom put in the Netflix queue for me as a teaching moment, I got up the courage to fill the "interested in" box on my Facebook profile. Either no one saw it or no one was surprised (I can't imagine why; I'm totally the motorcycle-riding football-watching boob and beer enthusiast type), but one thing did come of this: Facebook's advertising engine became that friend that always talks about the same thing.

The trouble is that Facebook's advertisements aren't always tactful, either. Of the ads I see, 3/4 of them roughly resemble these two:

Don't get me wrong, I understand their arithmetic.

Male + Interested in: Men + Single + Almost always online on Friday nights + Watches romantic comedies frequently enough to suggest desperation = Interest in dating services

They just don't have to be so accurate.

Then, sometimes, they just get offensive, like this one:

I mean, come on, Facebook. Really? Does it really look like that's a book I'd-- nevermind. Don't want to know the answer to that.

The Time Delusion

2011-04-27T17:14:00.001-07:00

I've become convinced that the governments of the world have been keeping a secret for centuries. An earth-shattering secret that would expose every clock or time-telling device you have ever purchased as the shameless liar that it is. A secret that would make fundamental questions we consider "obvious" uncertain. Does gravity really exist? Is air really there? Would the world be a better place if science found a way for Jacob Pitts and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to combine their gametes and make a baby? After this, we can't be sure.

The secret? Are you sitting down? (I'd be surprised if you weren't--the mental image of the beautiful man-baby offspring of those two men is something I'd consider enough to make just about anyone need to sit down)

The 10 minutes between 7:16 AM and 7:26 AM do not actually exist.

Due to my sleep deprivation on most nights, I am actually sleepwalking for the first thirty minutes I'm awake, so things tend to fall in place the same way every morning. (Being remarkably good at shaving while asleep is the only thing that has kept my carotid arteries intact.) I usually come down the stairs at around 7:14 AM, give or take a few minutes depending on how much time I spend panicking over the fact that nothing in my wardrobe seems to match that early in the morning. (Some traumatizing childhood memories have made me very fastidious. I'll leave it at warning you all that wearing a red t-shirt and green sweat pants will very quickly net you the nickname "Christmas boy.") It has to be around the same time because the first sight I'm greeted with every morning is a close-up of Meredith Vieira's face on the TV screen. This is such a frightening sight that it's hard to forget.

From there, I usually go into the kitchen, grab whatever derivative of cake that society deems acceptable for breakfast, prepare my caffeinated substance of choice and begin the effort to make it through breakfast without falling asleep. It seems to be barely seconds later when I hear the Wicked Witch of the Today Show caterwaul,

"It's 7:26 AM. Now let's take a look into the preparations underway for the Royal Wedding--"

This is around where I start thinking about how little I care about two attractive heterosexual people in positions of power getting married and how Kate Middleton is a total bitch because she's flawless and she's about to become a princess and have a really attractive husband and I don't even have the luxury of a creeper that sends me suggestive text messages, much less a member of the royal court--

Wait a minute, holy shit. 7:26 AM!?

I used to blame myself for this phenomenon. I used to chastise myself for moving too slowly or being too tired, but I will not accept the blame any longer. I know the truth. Why do you think NBC always puts advertisements on around that time? Because it's imaginary advertising, intended to lull you into thinking that time is going by while stuffing your brain with corporate slogans and promotional material.

If I suddenly disappear from the internet and this post is deleted, you know what happened. They couldn't handle the truth coming out. But now you know, and never again will you be tricked into thinking that you have enough time to eat breakfast and still be on time to school.

Down By the Water

2011-04-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

My grandmother made me obsessed with water. To her, it was imperative that any drive--be it to a restaurant for dinner or to CVS to use a coupon--was accompanied by a drive along the shore of Lake Erie. I couldn't blame her. Lake Erie, like many things in America, is really pretty from a distance. Driving along Route 5 in my grandfather's teal Chevy Lumina put us just far enough away from the water to ignore the (often aromatic) brownish sludge on top, but close enough to satisfy my grandmother's desire to watch each wave come to completion.

When I was little, driving to the Dunkirk Pier wasn't just a nice evening out, it was a religious experience. Luckily, the pier is one of the few places in Dunkirk where you can park your car and expect to drive away with all four tires and both side view mirrors intact. When it was nasty and cold outside, we'd go to the Greek restaurant that's situated right by the lake and insist upon a table near the big windows at the back, where I could stare wide-eyed out the window at the seagulls and the waves and ignore my parents' conversations about clients and the court system. But when it was nice out, we'd drive into downtown Fredonia, go to a little sub shop called the Bomber House (I spent years trying to explain to my friends while telling this story that this was not a bomb shelter and we would not get in trouble for talking about it on school grounds), and bring our tinfoil-wrapped dinners to the pier where I could stare creepily at fishermen and ask inane questions about the marine life and the power plant you could see in the distance. At that age, there was nothing better. However, soon after I entered my teenage years, the proprietors of the Bomber House went back home to Puerto Rico (I think) and took their subs with them.

Fast-forward to now. I can't seem to watch any movie, regardless of the subject matter, without ending up a mess of thought and reminiscence at the end; I'm a glutton for introspection. I went to see Water for Elephants last night with a couple friends. Although I drove in the opposite direction on Route 5 to get to the movie theater, it was the same Route 5 and the same Lake Erie, and although Tim Hortons isn't quite the Bomber House, the bagel I ordered at the 24-hour drive thru had enough carbohydrates to send me into a fit of nostalgia. I needed a pretty place to park by the water and I needed it urgently enough to pull haphazardly into the first road I saw going in the direction of the lake. Unfortunately, the actually really pretty place to park had already been discovered by a couple of shady-looking guys standing in the dark (this was at midnight), and had been discovered long before that by the Town of Hamburg, who put up a very intimidating and persuasive sign saying "PERMITS REQUIRED" right at the entrance. My grandmother would have been ashamed. No one should be deprived of the opportunity to sit by the lake and reminisce.

Great Expectations

2011-04-24T10:58:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter. I don't know about your family, but in mine, Easter has been relegated to "dinner holiday" status--we make an effort to avoid the microwave and use the more neglected parts of the kitchen, but that's about it.

More relevant about today is that it's the second-to-last day of my spring break, which means that it's my day to wonder where the time went, remember where the time went, and then hate myself, in that order.

Ever since I have been imprisoned without bail in the public school system, every break has gone almost exactly the same. We don't typically go on vacations, because the Buffalo area in the middle of April is way better than any of that Florida or Bahamas nonsense where the sun is actually visible and people actually go outside. If life were like current-generation video games and kept you participating with unlockable accomplishments/trophies, this is what every break would roughly look like:

Date: The Friday before break begins
Accomplishments I'm Trying For

- Clean room
- Actually catch up on the 15+ games I was so eager to buy but haven't even bothered to touch, half of which are still in shrink wrap
- Do at least part of my homework before the last day of the break
- Lose weight, or at least avoid gaining it (it's a game of expectations...)

Yes, I know, my expectations are high and I'm just setting myself up for disappointment.

Date: The Sunday before break ends
Accomplishments I've Actually Managed

- Go one week without moving a single piece of clutter in room
- Pick up 3 games you haven't played, glance at them, feel guilty for not playing them yet, and then set them back down and go play Scrabble
- Manage not only to avoid doing homework for an entire week, but also forget half of the curriculum of every course taken this year in school
- Gain some weight because half of the meals you ate over break were fried, based on heavy cream, or both, but dismiss it as totally waterweight
- Go to Applebee's twice in two days
- Spend enough money on coffee in a single week to need to take a trip to the ATM to withdraw more money, and stop for coffee right after

Don't be jealous. It isn't easy to live the thrilling life, but with some work and practice, you could be just like me someday.

Bowled Over

2011-04-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

I am not a sporty person. I am known in the physical education department at my school as the kid who "tries really hard and totally gives 110 percent"--the tactful way of saying "your kid seems to intend to move the ball in the right direction, but we've never seen it happen." Although I have no illusions about my athletic aptitude, I've never really been satisfied with it. I was always jealous of the people who actually got the ball passed to them--even if people wanted to pass me the ball, no one was ever quite sure of what team I was even on.

When I was 15, a really good idea called Lucky Lanes presented itself to me. Bowling is kind of a sport, I thought. It involves movement and a ball. Besides, it can't be that hard. There are leagues for old people. Thinking my logic was infallible, I took the next opportunity to schedule a bowling trip with a couple of my friends and eagerly awaited my breakout performance.

When I got there, I realized two things: I am way more hopeless than I ever could have expected, and there are really fit old people in the world.

I didn't even get to an alley before I realized I had miscalculated. I couldn't find a ball that fits me. I have... big-boned fingers, meaning any bowling ball with the standard size holes accentuates every throw with the super attractive half popping, half squeaking sound of my fingers grasping for space. This meant that I had no choice but to go for the balls with the obscenely large holes. Unfortunately, these are also accompanied by a lot of weight (apparently, the assumption is that all overweight people have a lot of upper body strength, which... well... I'd like to see the study that concluded that) and if you're bad at aiming a ball that's light, you're extra bad at aiming a ball that's heavy. By the end of one game, the number of balls I had gathered to "try out" was greater than my average score per frame. When you consider that I was with three other people and only about seven balls fit on a rack... I don't want to talk about it.

Fast forward to now. I am still a terrible bowler--I proved that Thursday night with a group of friends. I made it into the newspaper recently for being recognized for making it into some list of top students in some other newspaper (see, I'm not totally useless...). I'm sitting with my grandfather and my mother at lunch on Thursday afternoon, eating a deliciously unhealthy plate of chicken and biscuits, when my grandfather turns to me and says:

"Oh, by the way, what's your bowling average?"

I had luckily just finished taking a sip of water. That isn't a question I'd ever have expected, and it's not information I'm keen on sharing. "...Why?"

"The newspaper said that you were on the bowling team."

At least the local newspaper is creative.

Don't You Want Me, Baby?

2011-04-22T10:35:00.001-07:00

I cannot stand the idea that anyone I come in contact with throughout the day, no matter how brief the encounter, might leave with a bad impression of me. I put tremendous effort into avoiding this, and it works most of the time. (Or at least I think it does. Please don't tell me if it doesn't.) The problem is that babies seem to have a built-in judgment of me that they are born with.

For some reason, be it my dashing good looks or my fatherly emotional stability, I am always the person a parent chooses in a room full of young adults to interact with their child. I don't usually mind this, since the kids are usually between the ages of 3 and 11 and are thus old enough to consider me a likable person, but it becomes a real problem when the child is a baby. It invariably goes down something like this:

1. Parent offers child to me to either talk to or hold. Understand that I am not, under any circumstances, given a choice in this matter--the parent wants the baby to have attention now, and any attempt to escape is almost guaranteeing my permanent banishment from their home and entire social circle.

2. I reluctantly accept the offer and either make a very lame attempt at holding the baby (after 18 years, I still have no idea how--I have a lot of respect for those 16 and Pregnant girls only because they are not only able to hold a child properly, but do it in front of a camera) or try to strike up some sort of conversation. I cannot and will not do baby talk, which is usually what the parents are expecting me to do. When I was a baby, I found baby talk demeaning and objectifying. Probably.

3. The baby does one of the following:
- Begins to cry loudly enough to mobilize local police stations
- Attempts to slide off my leg (if I'm sitting down) or wriggle out of my arms (this option seems highly illogical, since if the baby is successful, they will fall on the ground and cause themselves brain damage, but I guess talking to me is that bad)
- Stares up at me really awkwardly until the situation gets awkward enough for me to give the baby back to his/her parent voluntarily

4. The parent snatches back their child, scoffs at me with disapproval, and probably whispers apologies and criticisms of me into the baby's ear as if I can't hear them. Any attempt I make at tension-easing conversation (i.e. "Wow, he/she wasn't having any of that! Hahah...") falls flat.

The strangest part of the whole sequence is that I never really did anything in interaction with the baby. The parent's outstretched arms towards me, intending to transfer the child into my possession, are enough alone to send the baby into some sort of attack of writhing and bugged-out eyes. This is only made worse by the parent's repeated baby-talk utterances like, "You want to sit over with Kelly?" or, "You want to talk to him now, don't you? Don't you?" I don't mean to tell other people how to be a parent, but I'm thinking that a baby mimicking a seizure while you're trying to do something is probably a pretty solid hint that they don't want it to happen.

Hungry Eyes

2011-04-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I discovered my latest nemesis: tables that face each other.

I like to watch people. I know that sounds creepy, and it probably should, but it usually isn't with any sort of prurient interest. I just like to see what's happening in other people's lives and pretending to be a part of it. This is usually something I get away with, since I am very well trained at avoiding eye contact (I am a master of the "look over your shoulder at someone but pretend you're actually looking for your lost child" move), but it is impossible to avoid eye contact when you are sitting at a restaurant table facing someone directly across from you.

Making accidental eye contact in this situation at least once is to be expected, but you know you've screwed up when he turns his head a full 90 degrees after he's caught you looking at him for the fifth time... to look at his wife... who is there with their kid.

It's undeniably best to just brush a situation like this off and pretend like it never happened, but I have this insatiable impulse to go over and say something to someone when I've done something that made them feel awkward. What the hell do you say to the patriarch of a happy family of three after you've been caught staring five times? It would come out something like this:

"Hey... uhh... I know you caught me staring at you a couple... I mean, I wasn't staring at you on purpose, it was totally accidental... I wouldn't stare at you on purp--I mean, I totally would stare at you on purpose if I had the choice since you are a pretty attractiv--I mean, uhh... Your kid is super cute! Bye!"

And their chicken hibachi dinner at the Fuji Grill is completely ruined by some creepy kid who just totally hit on someone who's old enough to be his father.

Have you ever been caught staring in a really awkward way? Is staring at someone considered harassment? ...Do you know the number of a really good lawyer? Let me know.

Love in a Real Starbucks

2011-04-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

You are in a dim-lit room scented by coffee beans and cream. Soft jazz tones float through the air from a speaker you can't see, but can feel. You are staring at a list of options, pondering your choice between vanilla and mocha, as you catch the eye of someone on the other side of the counter. You grin coyly to yourself.

What could possibly ruin this (slightly creepy) romantic scene? You and the Starbucks employee you're courting are clearly destined to spend the rest of your lives together, cultivating coffee beans in the sunny landscapes of Colombia and swaying in your future living room to Miles Davis vinyls.

And then he calls you "buddy".

Perhaps it's all due to my inappropriate and misguided interest in retail employees (nobody can quite convince me that they are paid to pretend to like me...), but this scene is way more heartbreaking than any scene of any movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. There is actual kissing in those. In the rain. All I do in the rain is lose my car.

The bigger problem is that this word follows me like it's my real name--this is not the only time this has happened. (You can see that I have a real problem with retail employees...) "Buddy" is probably the most unsexy word in the entire dictionary. It's what fathers call their sons right before slapping them on the shoulder and putting on baseball caps. It's what older brothers call their younger brothers right before... some manly thing that I've never done and know nothing about. It's what people name their dogs! I'm going to start carrying around a dog mask around and every time an attractive guy calls me "buddy" I'm going to put it on and yell, "IS THIS WHAT I LOOK LIKE TO YOU!?" Then I will probably have to get my coffee elsewhere and there will probably be a newspaper headline the next day about a crazy guy in a dog mask making a scene at a Starbucks, but that is the price of making my point.

Do you have a name you hate to be called, but it always seems to follow you? Let me know. But don't call me buddy when you do. Please.

The Abominable, Unanswerable Question

2011-04-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

"What kind of music do you like?"

I always feel as though people who ask me this question are using it as a way to judge me. Since being judged frightens me more than anything else, my mind immediately jumps to a series of potential answers and their outcomes:

The Self-Deprecating Response: Oh, you know, anything that could be found on 80s Teen Pop Hitzzz Deluxe.
Result: Asker concludes that I sit all alone at home on Friday nights in a Saturday Night Fever tribute costume attempting to dance the Electric Slide. Person walks away.

The Mass Appeal Response: 50 Cent and some Drizzy, since that's how I roll, G.
Result: Asker wonders how someone who could ever claim to like "50 Cent" and "Drizzy" uses the word "since" and such proper grammar and concludes that I do not have the proper amount of gold-colored accessories to pull this identity off. Person walks away.

The "I'm Too Cool For You, Be Jealous" Response: Oh, you know, a little jazz here, a little ambient there. Totally a Brian Eno fan.
Result: Asker wonders who the hell Brian Eno is and concludes that I am a pretentious bastard completely undeserving of their attention. Person throws the nearest sharp implement at my head and walks away.

The Actually Truthful Response: My favorite artist is definitely Janet Jackson, but Lady Gaga, Metric, Scissor Sisters, and Utada Hikaru are definitely up there...
Result: The world ends. The person walks away, or at least they would walk away if the world hadn't ended. Unless they're a cockroach, in which case they survive the end of the world and they walk away from whatever is left of my body. But I don't think cockroaches usually care what kind of music anyone likes, so I don't think that's likely.

You can see the common denominator here easily--the person walks away, I am left alone to drown in an ocean of self-pity, and the asker becomes the latest entry on the long list of people I risk my life to avoid contact with. My mind decides that none of these answers will work and instead tries to ad-lib it:

"Oh, you know, a little of everything... a lot of stuff... I could totally tell you if I had (device) to pull up (website)... but you know... that's such a hard question to answer... yeah..."

Remember the ocean of self-pity? Yeah. It pours right out of the cold stare of the person who asked the question.

This wouldn't be a huge problem--yeah, it's an awkward moment, but it's something that can be gotten over relatively easily--if I didn't think about it the whole rest of the day. Everything I do throughout the day reminds me of an answer I could have given that would have made me look totally cool. At this stage, opening my iTunes and scrolling through my library reduces me to a sobbing mess on the floor.

This is kind of related to my problem with band shirts. You don't even know how long it took me to get up the courage to wear my Born This Way t-shirt from the Lady Gaga concert I went to. I'm afraid that I'll accidentally walk into a room full of people who are members of an anti-Gaga coalition that will tear my shirt to shreds as a political statement and burn some sort of insignia into my back that makes sure that everyone knows that I am one of those people who listens to pop superstars.
(can't resist: I almost typed "to shreds" as "to threads"... totally punny)

I'm guessing I'm going to have to learn how to deal with this at some point. How do you answer the abominable question? Do you tell the truth, or do you make up a spiffy lie? Does the world end? Let me know.

Accidental Comedian

2011-04-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

Remember the 90s, when everyone was fascinated with hidden talents? Okay, maybe not everyone, but certainly people who watched Figure It Out know exactly what I'm talking about. The whole premise of that show was celebrities solving puzzles so that super-skilled children would reveal their super-special hidden talent. I probably should never have watched that show, since seeing people my age do more interesting things than I could ever do gave me a huge inferiority complex and made me genuinely concerned that my parents would not love me if I could not walk through a hoop in my own arms without disconnecting my hands or mimic the sound of a domestic animal. But now, 18 and still unable to do any of these things (hell, I can't even roll my tongue up in that weird way everyone does...), I may just now have the chance to finally win my parents' love. I have the hidden talent of being an accidental comedian.

Before you get jealous, it isn't quite as fascinating as it sounds. It doesn't really make me a superhero, since I don't even have any sort of special costume (yet). But it would definitely be enough to get me a spot on Figure It Out, if it was still on and if it wasn't creepy for an 18 year old to go on a Nickelodeon show.

The talent is that I can make people laugh only when I am not trying to be funny. When I try to be funny, it results in crying babies and an awkward staredown. Awkward staredowns are especially awkward and uncomfortable when they take place in elevators. I will explain that later. (I would assume that it goes without saying that crying babies are also significantly worse in elevators, although, come to think of it, I've never been in an elevator with a baby.) The best way to explain all of this would be with examples.

Last Friday, in physics class, we were talking about cell phones and how they relate to radio waves. Our teacher got on the subject of frequencies and how, back in the day, there were only a certain number of frequencies available (I can't remember exactly how many because I was too busy laughing about the fact that he said "walkie-phone") and now there is a broad spectrum of frequencies for security purposes. He brought up that the government could use that to spy on you and tap into your phone conversations. Upon hearing this, my mind immediately snapped to a mental image of a person wearing a tin foil hat. The association makes perfect sense to me:

cell phones -> frequencies -> government spying -> tin foil hat

So I turned around to my friend, who was on the opposite side of the room, and said quietly, "Everybody put on your tin foil hats!" I expected a weak giggle, maybe even a chortle. What I got was room-wide uproarious laughter and it puzzled me, because I wasn't really at all intending to be funny.

Now we'll contrast that with a situation in which I tried to be funny. If this was real paper and not the internet, this is the place where you'd start to see tear drops on the paper--that's how difficult this story is for me to tell.

I was on the elevator at a convention I went to a couple weeks ago. My best friend was beside me and the elevator was filled with people I had met a day earlier at the convention, but didn't really know well enough to be social. Someone had pressed all of the buttons on the elevator, so we stopped at every floor. The people at the front of the elevator were talking about it, one of them having done it. I saw this as my golden opportunity to convince everyone in the elevator that I was totally a person worth getting to know. I waited for the perfect time to strike and said, "Can anyone identify the individual who pressed all the buttons?" The one who didn't do it pointed to the one who did and said his name, and the guy blushed a little. I could've stopped here with a slight groan and just come off as a slightly disgruntled, ornery man, but I felt the beautiful beams of opportunity shining down on me between the cracks of the elevator door and I wasn't about to let it go.

"Anyone have anything to cut the elevator floor with? It's a pretty long drop..."

A pause.

Silence.

I turn to my best friend, desperate for some sort of assistance, and I see her red-faced, chuckling to herself (note: at me, not with me), only able to choke out "that wasn't funny... that... wasn't funny at all..." Unable to come up with a compelling reason to get off at floors 4, 3, or 2, I stood in an elevator as the doors opened at every floor alongside people who genuinely thought I was a psycho with a murderous streak who threatened to kill people who press every button in elevators. All for trying to be funny.

I would try to think of a way to end this post wittily, but that would involve me thinking and trying to be funny, and you now know how that ends. I might end up saying something about burning your house down or poisoning your baby brother or making your breakfast tomorrow morning explosive.

The Romantic Comedy Blues

2011-01-26T20:39:00.000-08:00

I have a problem.

No, it's not with alcohol, and it's not a bitch. It's with romantic comedies.

Stop judging me for my effeminate movie tastes, we all have guilty pleasures. The problem is that this guilty pleasure causes me more pain than it does enjoyment. They are all predictable; I know that by now. Guy and girl meet under some awkward circumstances, one of them is already involved with someone, person they're involved with turns out to be an asshole, guy and girl hook up, guy and girl dramatically break up, one of them dramatically runs to the other's side to get the other back and all of it ends happily ever after. Every time. I think that might be where the problem starts.

Under normal circumstances, I'm not naive enough to think that that stuff actually exists. But by the end of the rom com of the day, when my brain is a gooey mess and my face is buried in my coat with that signature warm-and-toasty feeling, I start to think.

Where the hell are these people in real life? All writing has to be based on some fact. Some guy, somewhere in the world, must have existed at some time to set the standard for the romantic comedy heartthrob. At least one, right? The human imagination isn't that powerful. It can't create things from scratch like that... can it?

Then I need an espresso shot and a targeted mass of carbohydrates to set my mind straight.

It just isn't a good combination. My mind, hopeful, impressionable, and at its deep roots, even optimistic, depends on concepts like that. By that time, it's hopeless; Paramount Pictures has punked me again with a textbook frothy box office sweetheart.

I always leave the movie theater and remain completely taciturn on the ride home, not necessarily unwilling to speak but unable to find any words to say or any reason to say them. The reason for this, in reality, is not because I'm depressed; it's because my mind is scoping out my entire viewing area, planning to pounce on the next spotted moving object that resembles Ashton Kutcher.

Even if the resemblance is a stretch.

...A big stretch.

Oh christ, Valentine's Day is in less than a month. God help me.

Lenguas

2011-01-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, when I applied to work at the friendly neighborhood grocery store, the application wanted to know what languages I spoke at the time. I checked English instinctively and then saw the next check box down, "Spanish," and a wave of pride and self-congratulation large enough to make me check that box as well washed over me. I had dreams of telling customers where the bathroom was and that the juice was in aisle 1 while my coworkers stared at me, jaws dropped, in awe of my bilingual skills.

Tops did not want me, so I never got to live out my dream of locating the juice for los hispanohablantes, but that was probably for the best. I did not realize the mistake I had made until much later.

I have not made my knowledge of Spanish a secret. It's something convenient to brag about, and most of the time, just saying a basic sentence like "Me gusta tu mochila" is enough to satiate people. Of all of the people I've shamelessly boasted to, the person who is undeniably most impressed is my mother, so I take every possible opportunity to speak Spanish when I'm speaking to her and relish the fact that A) she can't understand me and B) she doesn't care, because it proves to her that her son can do something she considers exceptional.

Yesterday, when I was in a Greek restaurant with her, I told the waitress that I wanted a side of tzatziki with my spanakopita. My ability to say these words impressed my mother beyond explanation (I didn't have the time to explain to her that I could only pronounce them because my friend works at a Greek restaurant and she taught me) and, somehow, in my mind, this translated to an opportunity to speak Spanish. My sentence was simple -- "Puedo hablar lenguas diferentes" -- and the chance for making a mistake was minimal.

Nonetheless, when my mouth opened to deliver the punch, I choked a little. I said the sentence so fast that it sounded like one word and my face turned rojo. Instantaneously, I started freaking out, looking around me to see if anyone surrounding me was speaking Spanish and trying to determine if they had heard me. My embarrassment was massive.

I thought about it for a while and determined that I was probably embarrassed because, at the end of the day, I feel fake. I know that my Spanish is tinged with a hint of my awful Western New York accent, and even though I take care to pronounce all of the vowels correctly, I can't do that fancy stuff with "t" or "rrrrr" and that gives me away. I have a nightmarish image in my mind of saying something in Spanish and looking behind me to find an entire family that was on vacation from Spain staring right back at me, coldly, judgmentally, forever exiling me from the group of people who are allowed to speak Spanish and shielding their children's ears from the horror of my speech.

I may have the ability to say "el jugo está en el primer pasillo", but I'd probably run away first. Especially if the people asking have cold, judgmental eyes and children.

Eight, Eight, Before It's Too Late

2011-01-10T14:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, as I was fumbling for the fast-forward button on the remote to skip the ads in a DVR'd episode of The Suze Orman Show, an ad came on for a local gym. People were smiling unrealistically wide for the camera while using treadmills and watching what looked like the morning news as a cheerful female voice boasted the gym's early open time.

I'm paraphrasing, forgive me:

"Yeah, it's really great that the gym opens so early. Most of the people who are in here get up at 5 and are in bed by 8 so this is the only chance they have to work out."

Getting in bed by 8 is what elementary schoolers and really old people do. The only other excuse is mononucleosis. It is not what functional, normal, middle-aged people do. My brain insisted upon this repeatedly as concrete fact.

Then I thought about it for a second and realized that I know little about middle-aged people, less about normal people and nothing about functional people. The time I go to bed is determined by the time that my eyelid droops to the point where I can no longer see the top of the computer screen. This does not ever happen by 8 PM and would probably not be considered by many to be the behavior of a functional person.

I just can't get past the idea of how boring that life would be. How do you do anything? How do you watch The Suze Orman Show? You don't. Unless you DVR it, but that's not as fun, because Suze's brand of insanity is much more satisfying when it's late enough for you to laugh at just about anything.

I have to wonder, though, if that's the reason for the unrealistically wide smiles in the advertisement. Does getting more sleep make a person happier? There are a lot of things I might do if I got more sleep -- I'd get to school on time, I'd be less cranky in the morning, and I'd spend less time writing blog posts about sleep. Maybe I'd do my homework earlier, work out more often, eat healthier, find a cure for cancer, save the world, invent the Presto Change-o Gay Ray I've been dreaming of for so long and fire it at Joseph Gordon-Levitt and be happy for the rest of my life. None of it matters because I am not physiologically permitted to go to sleep before my eyes begin caving in.

I can't really remember a time in which I wasn't this way. Even as far back as when I had that old creaky wooden bedpost with cupboards that faced the door (I section off epochs of my life based on when the arrangement of my room furniture changed), I used my cheap-o Mad Catz screen light to play Pokemon games on my Game Boy Advance until the obscure hours of the morning. Now I play Scrabble and watch CNBC's late-night programming.

I might always be tired, but I will always have one of the larger vocabularies in the room and I know not to ever take money out of my 401(k) once I have one because Suze told me so. Ever.

Home Sweet Home

2011-01-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

From as far back as I can remember up until a couple years ago, my mom had a garden craft out on the lawn with a "down-home" style boy on one side, disturbingly domestic-looking girl on the other, and my family's last name prominently displayed in the middle. This garden craft made my efforts to hide the fact that I was a young boy living in a pink house futile, as anyone who walked within a one-mile radius of the sign's black font on wood painted cream white knew who lived inside.

The craft was intended to be a warm object with appreciable sentimental value -- one of those pieces that "makes a house a home." But I never liked it. To my mother, it was a symbol of love, peace, and clarity; to me, it was a glaring symbol of mediocrity. It appeared to me as if an artist sat down one day and pondered how to best capture what it looks like when life gets boring.

A flood happened in my village a couple years ago, and its waters swept away the girl, seemingly permanently. My mother spent months discovering lost garden decorations buried in the garden, some ours and some belonging to the neighbors, but the girl had escaped permanently.

My mother lamented, but I quietly cheered. The girl had moved on. I fantasized about her eloping with a burly garden gnome, or maybe she was alone, trying to rediscover the excitement life had to offer before she got married to a boy in a straw hat and hitched herself to a cream white wooden sign to be ridiculously exhibited in the garden of a middle-class American family.

The truth is that I'm afraid of the phrase I used to give this post a title. "Home Sweet Home" doesn't conjure up any warm images of fireplaces and tree swings. I imagine an endless winter in which the only things to get up for are work and bill payment deadlines. That life terrifies me.

It's enough for many people. Making a family, buying a modest home, covering it in pumpkin-scented candles in autumn and windsocks with pastel blue skies and puffy white clouds in spring.

I can't imagine how.

Losing Sleep

2010-08-09T20:14:00.000-07:00

This summer, the sleep pattern I've unwittingly adopted would trick you into thinking that my life is interesting. Most of the time, when people stay up until 5 AM or later, it's because they're at sexy parties at a club with enough lights to make you think you're in Las Vegas while tripping on acid. I stay up until 5 AM or later to dramatically lipsynch my favorite songs in my room while reading the same entries on my Facebook news feed five times over and having conversations with people that consist of nothing more than Mac OS X-related pickup lines. (Can I see an iPhoto of your Core Image? ;)) It would be cute if I was 12; at 17, it makes most people question my mental health.

Because I am going to New York City in a couple days on college visits, and, after that, I actually have to do work so that I'm ready for school to begin in September, I made a noble effort to combat this sleep cycle by going to bed at (gasp!) 2:30 AM. It was my first attempt in over a month to go to bed before the sun woke up.

The story of what then happened is something you'll find either amusingly relatable or hilariously pathetic. Or maybe you'll just find it pathetic.

2:19 AM

Determining that nothing had been said in the MSN conversations I had been participating in for at least 20 minutes, I decide to take the golden (and rare) opportunity before me to cover myself with sheets. However, I determine that I would have trouble getting to sleep without music, so I get out my phone and headphones. (Worst mistake of the night, easily)

2:50 AM

I am about 2 minutes into flailing around on my bed and enthusiastically mouthing the words of a particularly raucous Amanda Palmer song when I come to the sudden realization that the sound in each of my ears is not balanced. Panicking about hearing loss, I switch the ear each earphone is in and notice that it is a problem with the earphones and not my hearing. Trying to get the case off my phone, which is latched into the gaps in my phone's slide-out mechanism as tightly as a Lil' Kim dress, I idly turn the volume up to the maximum setting. This results in Amanda Palmer screaming I'M SO EXCITED! into my head really loud. I don't share her excitement.

3:10 AM

I have finally given up on the fruitless process of trying to get my case off of my phone. Deafened and irritated, I take the earphones' plug out of the jack and proceed to jam it in repeatedly with the determination of a virgin on prom night. Eventually, this produces a clicking sound, which satisfies me enough to resume my stage performance pantomiming ritual.

3:30 AM

I am satisfied with the ear balance, but the previous conundrum has given me a resentment for my earphones, so I use the phone's browser to look for new ones. My music abruptly stops and the application playing the music quits itself without provocation. This repeats three times. I go over to the Android Market to look for a new music app, but I make something like three typos and the resulting search leads me to an app that lists Turkish television schedules. Two more attempts leads me to music applications, and I install the one with the prettiest icon.

3:40 AM

The app plays music about as well as an app that lists Turkish television schedules. Maybe it was the Turkish TV Guide app. I don't know for sure. Disgruntled, I uninstall it and go to the ugly, but functional, default Android music app. I resume my search for earphones.

4:10 AM

After spending 30 minutes convincing Amazon that I am not looking for $4 Phillips earphones sold by we-sell-stuff-lol.com, I find things that I hope will be in my price range but are actually double my price range. I am saddened. My phone amplifies this sadness by playing a really depressing Massive Attack song.

4:50 AM

Birds begin chirping.

4:55 AM

I listen to the song about Amanda Palmer being so excited one more time and decide it is a sufficient finale for my imaginary bedroom concert.

5:00 AM

I take out my earphones and try to ignore the fact that I ended up staying awake just as late as I would if I had remained online. It doesn't take me long to realize that the crickets and birds are having a not-imaginary and actually quite loud outdoor concert that is wafting uninvited through my bedroom windows.

5:05 AM

I think of something clever to say about crickets that I can no longer remember. I consider getting up and updating my Facebook status but remind myself that I actually, at one point, had desired to sleep that night.

Somewhere between 5:10 and 5:20 AM

I fall asleep.

12:33 PM

I am violently awakened by my phone ringing. I attempt to pick up my phone but I cannot, in this state of mind, figure out how to take a call, so I throw my phone down in disgust. This somehow automatically ignores the call.

12:34 PM

My mother calls the home phone. I somehow manage to hang up on her again. She calls back. I answer. I yell something obscene about not being able to operate telephones. My mother becomes afraid of me. She reminds me that I should expect relatives coming over later. I say something and my mother clearly cannot understand me because she unexpectedly says goodbye. I say goodbye and hang up.

1:45 PM

I wake up after falling back asleep immediately following the phone call with only one eye that will actually open, one pillow (I started with two), and covers that are thrown completely off the bed. I do not question this. I reminisce on the previous night and think only one thing: I fucking need to go back to school.

7 Reasons I Might Become Anorexic

2010-08-08T11:31:00.000-07:00

I was inspired to write this post by eating a donut. That could be one of the seven reasons, but I already spoiled that one for you and you are expecting seven numbered reasons based on the title, so that won't work. To make you feel better, I can guarantee you that none of these reasons will be something conventional like "Hollywood promotes skinny people" or "horizontal stripes" because those are boring.

7. Jillian Michaels

To anyone with a body fat percentage higher than 1 and a BMI higher than 15, this woman is the antichrist. This is the same woman who now is affiliated with two television shows concerning awkwardly invading the personal lives of fat people and forcing them to not be fat by yelling at people named Joelle when they don't do THIRTY FUCKING SECONDS ON THE TREADMILL RAAAAAAARGHHHH. All of this would be bad enough if she wasn't also pictured in what I'd easily nominate the scariest fucking video game cover of all time:

Skinnier guys might find this photo sexy. Chubbier guys consider the scariness of this photo about on par with getting your sleeve caught on a conveyor belt that leads to a meat grinder. Her eyes stare into your soul like she's remotely measuring your BMI and her accusatory finger definitely knows about that hot fudge sundae you ate last night.

6. Restaurants

For many years, before the massive 21st century push for "healthier food," restaurants were able to get away with putting pretty much whatever they wanted on your plate as long as it wasn't going to kill you immediately. This does not mean, however, that it won't kill you long term. Most restaurants now have nutrition facts posted on their own website, but even this resource has not at all inspired them to change their ways.

Probably about a few months ago, Applebee's began their campaign for Meals Under 550 Calories. When I first heard about this, I thought, "What the hell? Isn't that kind of high for a diet food?" I was so adorably naive. I promptly looked up the nutrition facts of all of my favorite dishes at Applebee's and found that having a calorie count that wasn't in the quadruple-digits was a luxury. Granted, that hasn't stopped me -- I, with little reluctance, tacked about 1,750 calories on to my thighs the last time I went there -- but it does give me all the more reason to be afraid of Jillian Michaels' finger of divine judgment.

5. Buttons

You know how zippers, unless the clothing is so extremely ill-fitting that the zipper breaks, do a pretty good job of hiding your actual weight? This is why jackets are so desirable. Buttons have the opposite effect.

My weight has a tendency to be in flux most of the time. I lost a lot of weight two years ago, and, in celebration, bought a lot of clothes. The half of it I proceeded to put back on disagreed with this behavior, and now none of the clothes from that era fit me particularly well. They fit me just fine, but the buttons, especially those near the bottom, struggle to hold the shirt together, producing those irritating and very unflattering gaps in the shirt where the buttons are pulling apart. I'm trying to think of something funny to say about that, but it's so traumatizing that I can't do it. My apologies.

4. Waitresses

I am an exceptionally fast eater. It's something I've done instinctively since I was a little kid when we had twenty minutes to eat lunch and 19 of those were spent in a line trying to cover your pockets so that the imaginary bully didn't steal your lunch money, even though no one's lunch money ever actually got stolen. This is not usually a problem when I'm at home, because my parents understand and they don't (audibly or visibly) judge me. Waitresses do not work in this way. Waitresses make an attempt to be as tactful about it as they possibly can, since I don't think that they have a history of getting heavy tips from patrons that they call fat (I'll have to conduct a study), but their comments like "Oh, you really must have enjoyed that!" or "Wow, did you even taste that?" are soul-crushing and demoralizing. This happens most frequently, for some reason, at Denny's. I should probably just stop going to Denny's. But their Philly Melt is so good.

(To avoid accusations of chauvinism, I should probably note that all of my experiences with this phenomenon were with waitresses. Male waiters are very rarely paying attention to what they're doing enough to comment.)

3. Pockets

Even more traumatizing than the feeling of having buttons that are slowly separating like tectonic plates is the feeling of trying to get something out of your pocket when your pocket is as tight as shrink wrap. This is usually caused when jeans "fit" in the sense that they get on, but they don't actually in the sense that the pockets are nearly fucking impossible to get into. Unfortunately, since the next size up is so baggy on me that I look like a deflated hot air balloon, I must deal with these airtight pockets that do not lend themselves well to things like tollbooths. I guess there are advantages, though; I'm fucking impossible to pickpocket. If I just kept walking, the pickpocket would probably get tugged down the street behind me.

2. Auditoriums

My school auditorium is fairly old. Space between the chairs is at a premium. At the chorus concerts, the chorus sits in a certain section of the chairs as the band and the younger kids perform first. When we all stand up to get on stage, the scenario plays out the same way every time. I see the people in front of me confidently strolling through the aisles of chairs as if they were as wide as grocery store aisles, so I try to be a conformist and do the same thing, only I find that I can't because my hips are bouncing me back and forth like a really narrow pinball table. Then I need to get up and sing on stage about shit like the beauty of the earth when I'm far more worried about why I'm a guy with seemingly child-birthing hips. That's not fucking beauty.

And the big one...

1. People at the dinner table who say "Oh, this is simply too much food for me!" while I am still eating and I ordered/gathered considerably more food than they did and am probably going to end up eating their leftovers, too

This may seem obscure and irrationally long compared to the six other reasons, which are mostly one word, but it's long because it's specific and it's #1 because it's been happening to me all the fucking time recently. I love my mother, but she has a fondness for doing this to me a lot lately, and she is not helping, especially not when she subsequently offers me the rest of her food while my face is still buried deep in a pile of calories stacked twice as high as hers ever was.

Do you agree with these things? Do you not? Are you actually Jillian Michaels reading this blog, and, if so, are you aware of the donut I ate last night...? Please don't be Jillian Michaels.

If Perez Hilton Made a Cell Phone

2010-08-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much to say lately. My phone and I are having a very tumultuous relationship. The device is reaching end-of-life and I'm getting to the point where I am starting to reevaluate my commitment to our relationship. I downloaded the Android 2.2 manual update for it and installed it, and for the moment, we're on a second honeymoon (everything is so much FASTER. I still can't use it to accomplish much of anything, but I can send texts that say "lol" in AT LEAST 0.3 seconds less than before) but even this will end, and I'll be unable to keep my drooling over new Android devices contained.

It must have caught me looking at some Droid X specs pages, because I'm pretty sure it's exacting revenge on me. A couple days ago, I just touched the faceplate of the case I had on it and it snapped right in two. I thought that would be an isolated incident, but it clearly wasn't. I signed on this morning to find that Perez Hilton has been so wisely selected by Motorola as a promotion vehicle for their new Droid X. The Droid X used to look kind of like a super version of my phone. Now I just see it as dirty whore that will call me fat and try to take inappropriate pictures of me at night and add captions like "LOL, lovehandles!" and "omg, acne alert" after uploading them to a blog with seemingly hundreds of thousands of rabid readers.

While I was thinking about that, I started to think about what it would be like if Perez Hilton was handed a developer kit and all of the parts necessary to make a phone and was allowed to build his own cell phone alone.

I came up with this...

I will disregard the likely fact that an app somewhat like this already exists somewhere and stay curled up in my safety ball of ignorance.

But seriously, Perez Hilton? Motorola thinks it's a good idea to associate themselves with a guy who managed to make a career out of calling female celebrities that way more than 110 pounds "fat" when he is noticeably overweight himself? The same guy that thinks it's hilariously clever to post candid shots of celebrities on the internet and make obnoxious little tooltips next to everything marking out their every flaw? If I buy a Motorola product now, is it going to call me fat? Is it going to disallow me from using it if I have eaten over 500 calories in the past 48 hours? Is it automatically going to set this picture as my wallpaper?

These are valid concerns.

Questionable

2010-07-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

Punctuation is usually my best friend. You know how English teachers always have that fire truck red pen that they use to cover the papers you spend hours on with criticisms and corrections? I love doing things like that. I get some sick pleasure out of the ability to look at another human being and say, truthfully, "Hey, dumbass, I speak words better than you!" Then, I get punched and I get a tooth knocked out, but at least I'll be able to tell the doctor what happened to me with a rich vocabulary, and my affidavit from the ensuing assault and battery case will have properly placed commas and semicolons.

Yesterday, however, punctuation turned on me for the first time. I know things between the question mark and I were growing distant and our relationship was strained and questionable (please forgive me), but I didn't know things were bad enough for it to invade my phone.

My Droid is my baby. People tell me that I don't need a phone that fancy, and it's a waste of money, but I'll never believe them. My Droid and I have something that the rest of the human world will never understand. It is my comfort. It doesn't judge me for staying up until 5 AM and waking up at 2 PM all flustered and wondering where the day went. It is always sitting undisturbed in its charging cradle, waiting for me to swipe my finger across its surface and bring it to life. (I'm inventing a new genre -- it's called phonoerotica)

When I drop it, I might as well have dropped a living baby. It does not cry, but I know it is in pain. Before today, it weathered the pain and remained healthy, After the fall onto the hardwood floor yesterday, though, it got infected with a question mark. The question mark manifested itself in the battery life indicator. The cute green bar letting me know when it was time to put my baby to rest was no longer apparent. I panicked. I was inconsolable. I rushed down the stairs to verbalize my grief with my mother, but it was to no avail; she did not understand the depth of my distress. The only answer was open-heart surgery.

I removed the battery cover and started shuffling around its insides. It kept turning itself off. You will probably visualize this scene differently than I did:

As you can tell, I have a bit of a flair for the dramatic.

The thought of replacing my baby with another baby was horrifying. It wouldn't have my apps yet and it wouldn't have my data, sure, but those things are fixable. It wouldn't have my baby's personality. It wouldn't do that cute thing where I'm trying to look something up and it's really important to know quickly and it pops up that adorable window saying "Process Browser is not responding" and plays with me.

After about thirty minutes of fumbling, I managed to make the uninvited punctuation mark go away, and the green bar I missed so passionately returned. The question mark has not made any more attempts since then, but I am still keeping a close eye. It is such an attention whore.

(Wahoo! I managed to write this entire post without a question mark.)

Free Parking

2010-07-24T20:57:00.000-07:00

I went to a fabulous Goo Goo Dolls concert on Friday night. A crowd of drunk people jumping around and sloppily mouthing the words to the songs they know can add a strange exhilaration to a concert. This exhilaration turns to downright horror, however, once the concert is over and it's time to enter the parking vortex.

"Parking vortex" is a much more apt description than "parking lot" at night. In the daytime, the parking area outside the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center was a completely unthreatening half-grass, half-gravel expanse full of boomboxes and friendly-looking people. In the darkness, however, it was a foreign planet. It was a swirling vortex of cars and smashed beer bottles and more cars and people stumbling around muttering to themselves and more cars. I knew I was in for trouble when a head popped out of one of the first cars I saw, shouted "USA BABY!" and promptly disappeared. Part of me was thankful for his concern that I might have forgotten what country I was in, but the rest of me felt like a sheep in the middle of a herd of patriotic lions that smelled like beer and wanted to eat me.

If I was just trying to get through this place on my way from point A to a nondescript point B, I could have done it without a problem. Unfortunately, I also needed to complete the task of finding my car. In a situation like this, your only defense against the parking vortex is an electronic key fob. When I held it up to the sky, pressed the "lock" button over and over again, and prayed to the CEO of General Motors that my car's beep would be loud enough to guide my steps. In my head, it looked a little like this:

Sword in hand and cape flowing behind me, I fought on into the darkness, braving mud puddles, the sad remains of pre-concert beer parties, and drunk drivers that took sick pleasure in coming as close to running me over as possible.

Getting out of the parking lot after a populated concert is kind of like bumper cars, only with real cars and people won't giggle happily when you come close to bumping into them, they will get out of their car and cut you. Then again, I suppose I am making an assumption there that I can't make -- people may very well get emotional enough about bumper cars to get out and cut you there, too. But bumper car rides have attendants who can protect you from random acts of violence. Parking lots at concerts are supposed to have some form of traffic control, but the policemen on shift that night were far too amused by driving around aimlessly through the grass in a golf cart to actually do their job.

I kept my testosterone and road rage to a minimum and got out of there safely. One woman who was pushed off the trail by the flow of traffic and sat there in desperation as car after car refused to let her in didn't fare as well as I did, but she probably didn't have a key fob sword. That's what happens when you try to get out of a vortex unprepared -- your dignity doesn't make it out alive.

This Facebook Meme Will Never Take Me Alive

2010-07-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

Humans are social creatures. In the "days of old," from what I've been told, people spoke over wired telephones with those pain-in-the-ass "stretchy" coils to organize actual things to do to scratch this social itch. In the 21st century, we'd be embarrassed to be this primitive. We prefer to communicate in small, grammatically dismal, and ultimately pointless blurbs over sites called Facebook and Twitter that politely ask us what's "on our mind" and make us feel wanted. That doesn't mean we take the time to respond to other people's thoughts with actual words -- we have advanced to "Like" and "Retweet" buttons that give us the kind of lazy gratification we always fantasized about as children -- but we damn well hope that someone will Like our words, or else we might just defriend them.

This has produced a lot of noxious consequences -- no one can spell anymore, for one -- but there is one monster that the Facebook juggernaut has given rise to that is easily the most hideous threat the world has seen since nuclear proliferation. I hope you all have seen this before, or else the soulless beast that is this Facebook meme might just make you fall out of your chair and give you nightmares. I don't want to be responsible for your nightmares.

It looks something like this:

Like my status and I'll tell you my first impression of you, what I like and dislike about you, and my confession to you

Just copying and pasting it gives me shivers.

Now, granted, to protect you from neurological damage, I'm prettying it up a little bit. That's the best grammar with which I've seen this meme represented. Most of the time, it looks more like

[LiKe] this n ill tell u my 1st impression of u, what I LiKe and DiSlIkE about u, n a confession!!!!! lol!

That's a sight to be mourned.

Now, granted, before the answers actually come in, this meme has appreciable potential. The idea of millions of hormonal, pubescent Facebook teenagers making huge amounts of drama by daring to say that they dislike someone else's outfits or (gasp!) disapprove of someone's boyfriend or girlfriend is a gratifying concept and a very pleasant mental image. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way. It's bad enough that we're exposed to this on a regular basis; it becomes even worse when we're deprived of any potential entertainment value it had to begin with.

Instead, we are provided with hundreds of asinine, formulaic answers in our news feed, burying everything else and multiplying daily. Apparently, at some point, "we don't talk to each other much :(" became the only thing that anyone dislikes about any other human being -- if that were actually true, no one would fight wars and MTV would not have enough trashy drama in the world to fill a 24-hour schedule. Clearly, someone is lying.

Is a little debauchery and depravity too much to ask for? I'd pay just to see a couple responses where the first impression is "damn, hope that guy doesn't try to talk to me... oh crap," the dislike is something entertaining like "you look like a deer and you always smell like Wheatabix," and the confession is something like, "I saw you running on the side of the road once while I was driving. I was gonna run you over but my mom was in the passenger seat and I knew she wouldn't vouch for me in court so I didn't."

This Facebook meme is the pinnacle of all that is wrong with the world. It's brainless and it isn't even entertaining. I want a new Facebook meme. I want "Like this and I'll post a video of myself pissing on your house" or "Comment on this and I'll tell you how many times your girlfriend has cheated on you." Now that's what I call social networking.

Traffic Circles of Death

2010-07-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

Elton John once famously sang about a "circle of life" in a Disney movie about lions. To protect the innocent children that watch Disney movies from the ugly realities of their world, Elton forgot to mention the "circle of death." This is known in modern society as traffic circle.

Yesterday afternoon, I set out onto the endearingly familiar I-90 thruway on a mission. I was going to head straight into the depths of it, where angry drivers go 30 miles an hour over the speed limit and use their middle fingers as turn signals, on a summer Saturday afternoon. And I was going to make sure that I came out of it in, at most, three pieces. (You can't get too optimistic around western New York. Being in one piece with the way people drive around here is a luxury.)

When I drive in places that are difficult to drive in, I start naturally leaving some of my driving up to instinct. This is exactly the opposite of what driving instructors told me to do in driver's education, but it just happens. When my instinct starts to exert some influence over the steering wheel and the gas pedal, I no longer drive like a timid and feeble 17 year old -- I begin driving like I'm Sebulba in Star Wars Episode I Racer. For those of you who lived less fortunate lives and did not get the blessing of having this unbelievably addictive game as a child, here is a picture:

(If you are also wondering if I look that sexy while I drive, I unfortunately don't think I measure up. That's the kind of good looks that you have to be born with.)

In other words, that means that I drive like my car is a giant podracer with turbo jets and my main objective is to either make you get out of my way or make you explode.

While I was in this state of elevated testosterone and adrenaline, I tried to keep enough of my wits about me to find my thruway exit in a timely enough manner to make it without cutting off everyone on the road simultaneously. The exit I sought was #50, so, naturally, when I came to its antecedent -- #51 -- my tension level rose.

Then I came to exit 50A. Only it didn't look like 50A out of the corner of my eye. It looked like 50. It didn't help that I had a bigass truck with a full size trailer following it. People should not do that. Bringing a full size trailer on the expressway is like trailing an elephant behind you on a bicycle path. You get in everyone's way and it makes no one like you.

Panicking and strongly disliking the guy driving the truck with the trailer, I whipped over into what I thought was my exit and found out just seconds too late that it, very tragically, was not. I was lost somewhere in suburbia between Amherst and Buffalo. I wasn't ready to panic yet, though; I pulled into a gas station parking lot and pulled out my trusty phone with GPS and navigated to my sister's apartment. It showed me a pretty short route. That doesn't look too difficult, I thought. I was, in hindsight, blissfully unaware of the demons I was about to encounter.

It didn't take me long to end up at something that looked remotely like this:

When you are from a city or a suburb, this looks entirely normal to you. In fact, this is probably how you are used to getting around. When you come from a village with one stoplight, though, this looks a lot more like weird concrete crop circles and thus is likely a symbol of the apocalypse.

The sign, which I remember a bit like this, didn't do much to quell my fear and uncertainty.

My phone GPS was my only defense in this strange circular world. Without it, I might have ended up in Fairytopia.

Traffic circles, I soon discovered, are kind of like revolving doors. Only these revolving doors can kill you and have like 5 possible exits. "Missing your exit" on a revolving door is a little embarrassing, but some may find it cute and it is largely harmless unless you manage, somehow, to crush yourself, which is unlikely and would probably require you to be drunk. Missing your exit on a traffic circle is not cute. It's horrifying.

Did I make it out alive? I'd love to leave you in suspense, but considering that I'm writing this, I don't think you're stupid enough to fall for that. Was it beyond terrifying? Yes.

Moral of the story? No one should drive on the expressway with a full size trailer behind their truck. It is an act of cruelty that results in unfair tribulations like this.

Invasion of the Modemsnatchers

2010-07-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

I had an art overload yesterday and spent like 7 hours drawing things and I can't even think of anything to draw for this post so there. No intense face for you today. Don't be sad. I'll draw you more horrifying pictures soon enough.

This is the second day in a row that I have woken up in a bad place. Yesterday, as I wrote about in yesterday's post, it was because of the violent way in which I was awakened. Today, it was because of the invasion of the modemsnatchers.

My mother recently decided to switch our landline over from Verizon to Time Warner. She sees this as a life-altering decision. It's about as important to me as if she replaced all of the boxes of Chex in the house with cheaper boxes of Chex. I don't eat Chex, so I don't give a shit. (This is the second blog post in a row in which I have mentioned cereal boxes and tried in some way to relate them to something. I swear, I'm not paid by General Mills or Kellogg's, although I am completely open to the idea. I'll change my whole page design to a giant cereal box and draw pictures of cereal boxes doing cancer research and donating mosquito nets to poor families in Africa if it means more money to fuel my voracious spending habits.)

However, there was a part I did give a shit about, and that was the fact that that meant big, burly men with toolkits and brightly-colored work uniforms would be stomping enthusiastically up and down the stairs of my house and yelling about "phone jacks" and "modems" while I sat trapped in my dark room, half-awake, disheveled, and wide-eyed for hours. This is not a situation I would wish upon anyone for anything longer than 15 minutes.
I am perfectly capable of moving while the workers are here. I would need to put some clothes on to avoid being offensive, but I'm pretty sure tolerating people living their everyday lives in the houses they work on is part of their job. I just don't want to. I get this tremendous anxiety any time someone is working in the house and I become afraid that I am going to get in their way somehow and accidentally knock them down the stairs and then they are going to sue me and take away my internet connection and my house and then I will die on the street, never again to watch videos of cats jumping off of tables onto carpeted floors or have late-night conversations about swear words in Farsi ever again. The idea of that is too much for me to bear, so I'd rather stay in my room with all the lights off and pretend I don't exist.

There was only one problem with staying in my room: The only thing I can do in my room that doesn't make noise is be on the internet, and when they are working on something that compromises the internet, using it becomes unreliable.

I swear, the evil corporate lobbyists would prevent it from happening with their fancy wines and endless sums of money, but the internet should be classified as a habit-forming substance. I don't necessarily need it. I don't do anything tremendously important on it. I mostly look up Wikipedia articles of obscure diseases, participate in immature group conversations chock full of lewd humor, and, as previously mentioned, watch YouTube videos of cats jumping off of tables. These are all entertaining, but I manage to pull myself away from them for long enough to sleep, eat dinner, and do most of the other things that need to get done during the day.

That doesn't change the fact that, when it's off, I usually enter some sort of fetal position (as close to fetal position as you can get in a computer chair) and begin sweating, squirming, and questioning the worth of my entire existence. I get sudden urges to look up things like "calories in a pomegranate" and "what happens when you put a Beanie Baby on top of a ceiling fan and then turn it on" and I can't because I don't have an internet connection. Then I look to my phone, naturally, which has 3G and all of that new-fangled mobile technology. When that's not working, I go through the five stages of grief, lay down, and pray that sleep will take me out of this misery. Then I end up having dreams about my friends becoming amputees and going fishing with Ellen DeGeneres in an ocean of cherry jello, in turn giving me more things to look up. When I wake up, I am usually in a panic, with my pillow thrown across the room and my mom wondering why I've been screaming "REEL IT IN!" for multiple hours while apparently asleep.

My internet is back now, of course, and I'm a little less upset, but I'm still shaken. The friend in my dream had her leg entirely cut off, and there was a giant crowd around my house because she was at my house for some reason, and she came out completely nonchalantly, got into another friend's car, and went to the mall. It's times like these when I wish dream interpretation worked, although that probably just means that I have a weird fear of getting my leg cut off and I am overdue for a mall trip. Don't even know where to start with Ellen DeGeneres and the jello, though.

Morning War

2010-07-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

There is a pleasant way to get up.

Then there's the way I got up this morning.

My mother is something of a worrier, and she's definitely one of those crazy people that advocates for getting up hours before you have something to attend to. Today, the issue was an 11:00 AM doctor's appointment at a place that is 30 minutes away. I ran this through the little time calculator in my brain and it popped out 9:30 -- one hour to get ready and half an hour to get there. I set my alarm for this optimal time, but in the back of my head somewhere, I knew that there was no way in hell I'd get away with it. She had her mind set on 9 AM at the latest, and it never took her that long to stomp up the stairs and investigate.

Naturally, this meant that she was up in my room no later than 14 minutes after her imposed deadline, staring me down and wondering how dare I not wake up on her schedule. Of course, I couldn't just let this go -- my dream of Perez Hilton trying to take over the world by buying up all of the world's cereal boxes and the only way to stop him was to cover his house in golf clubs (I don't actually know if this was my dream, since now, I don't remember it, but it must have been that interesting because I remember being really pissed about my dream being interrupted in that moment) was being heartlessly truncated -- and I started a half-awake argument with my mother. This is the kind of argument where everything you say is really intense and it feels like there are actually 10,000 people in an audience watching you and you're not really in an argument, it's actually a boxing match and your words are giant puffy boxing gloves. Using gold mines like, "I did set my alarm!" and, "No, that isn't cutting it close! Not in the real world! Maybe in your fantasy world, but not in the real world!" I managed to demoralize my mother quickly enough for her to exit the boxing ring and go downstairs. Despite this small victory, I had still lost overall -- I was awake and there was no way to change that now.

I "went to bed" (more like collapsed melodramatically on my mattress and stuck my head in the nearest available pillow) at 4:30 AM. Why? I was in a group chat talking about the "most trusted name in pumping" and the wonder of dual-ended dildos. (If you must know, we were making fun of the contents of an online Canadian sex shop.)

In case you don't have a brain calculator like I do, that means I got roughly 4 hours and 45 minutes of sleep. Much like arguments, at that level of sleep deprivation, everyday tasks become intense tasks.

That is a face of intensity.

By the time my brain solidified and I was coherent enough to list off the scientific name of at least 5 different oral antibiotics, I was ready for the appointment. Intense driving, however, is not generally recommended for your health, so I resigned to the passenger's seat and watched as the road in front of me grew gradually longer.

You know how sometimes, when you have a really bad headache, everything sounds about 150% as loud as it actually is? Imagine feeling like that at an Adam Lambert concert with a boulder on your head and a middle-aged woman screaming in your ear about Enrique Iglesias water-skiing nude. My mother jumped from subject to subject with remarkable agility, covering Craig Ferguson's last monologue, Inception, Enrique Iglesias, Inception again, how much everyone in New York sucks at driving, a conspiracy theory concerning Tim Hortons' pricing in different areas, the ownership of a local restaurant, and another local restaurant's rumored involvement in the Mafia before abruptly switching to singing along to George Michael's rendition of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me." I really tried to contribute to the conversation when a response came to me -- like "they charge more in higher income areas and less in lower income areas" or "Enrique Iglesias is totally not the biggest thing in Latino music," but all of my responses bubbled and foamed from my mouth like I had rabies. It's really hard to understand people when they're talking if they have rabies.

This is all I set out to say with this blog post, but I feel compelled to add some sort of moral, so the moral of the story is to never interrupt a dream involving Perez Hilton, world domination, and golf clubs. It makes you have a bad day.

The Monster in the Mailbox

2010-07-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

Mail is evil. This could be easily written off as one of my many neuroses, but, at the very least, history is on my side on this one.

Just ponder, for a second, the history of mail. I'm not talking about telegrams, those are too easy. I'm talking about the fucking Pony Express. You know, the days when "mailmen" were actually kickass cowboys that carried your mail on fucking horses through the deserts and mountains of the wild west. It's kind of like texting, only it takes a lot longer and there's a guy on a horse risking his life (and risking being kidnapped by a Mormon fellowship) so that you can send "omg lol wats up" across state lines. (I think AT&T might still use that system, actually.)

Just think of all of the evil things that have been done with mail. Anthrax. Bombs. Credit card bills. Publisher's Clearing House. Invitations to "parties" from creepy boys in your neighborhood in which you're probably going to be greeted at the door with chloroform, scissors, and a cucumber. It's all happened through the mail. Our government, completely unaware of the tremendous evils that can be done through mail, call mailmen and mailwomen public service employees and give them extra benefits for doing the "service" of exposing us to anthrax and cucumber rapists. It isn't right.

Today, I received this completely innocent-looking thing in the mail:

To most of you, this probably looks like an everyday poorly-drawn envelope with a strangely placed barcode and squiggly lines for addresses. However, my eyes, unblinded by the nationwide mail conspiracy, saw it as this:

Yeah, that's right, dragon wings. My CollegeBoard envelope had fucking dragon wings. With more motivation, I probably could have added fire, more Mormons, and a shower tension rod (old fear that I'll explain later), but this does the job of expressing all of the things I am afraid of in one place.

This discovery frightened and disturbed me. Why did this take so long to come? What if I actually did fail? Where did that baby come from? All of these questions burned in my mind simultaneously, and I was nearly unable to proceed.

After about 5 minutes of sweating and squirming in place, I gained the resolve to open the envelope. I was almost certain of failure, so I made a point to read all of the useless information about myself at the top of the page. Eventually, I could resist my desire to see the number and get it over with no longer, and I looked to the right of "AP US History," bracing myself for a 2.

The dragon wings disappeared. The baby was released from its chewy fate and lived on. The "LOL YOU FAILED" sticker fell off abruptly, and the Mormons started cheering. I saw a 5.

It won't teach me anything, of course -- I will still expect failure every time; it's hard-coded into my genes, much like my adoration for Liza Minnelli -- but it's a relief to know that my mail doesn't have dragon wings.

The Pipe Telephone and How My Second Grade Teacher Defeated Me

2010-07-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

When I was in second grade, I thought I was awesome. I was totally the king of relationship advice, I had near-exclusive dibs on the one good computer that was in the room, and I was almost always the first to finish my classwork. Granted, it was all color-by-numbers pictures of birds that don't actually exist and three-word word searches, but that was enough to make me feel like fucking Albert Einstein in a bright yellow Pikachu t-shirt. (That is an awesome mental image. I just realized I have now italicized the word awesome twice. Is that pretentious?)

Unfortunately, my second grade teacher didn't at all comprehend my awesomeness. In fact, she felt threatened. In hindsight, I can see why. She would ask a cute question, like, "Now, kids, what number comes after 99?" and she expected to see a group of slightly confused small children work through the hardest problem of their life. But the second grade me said "fuck that shit" (I don't know if I knew the word "fuck" or "shit" back then, but I'm sure that's what I was thinking anyway) and yelled out "100" like I taught the class. The look on her face every time I'd do that was, if I remember correctly, kind of like a cross between a frog croaking and a toddler's "oh shit" face after they've dropped their lunch all over the floor -- she was vulnerable and defeated. I thought I had won. I had not realized, however, that the horror she felt built over time and consumed her thoughts, eventually culminating in the most nefarious invention I have ever seen.

One day, in class, while we were all trying our hardest to color in the lines with old Crayola crayons to make our color-by-numbers reindeer as accurate and Picasso-like as possible, my teacher innocently called me up to her desk. Realizing that the last two kids that had been called up to her desk had just come back from the principal's office with a look on their face as if their very soul had been pulled out of them through their eye sockets, my heart sank. The smile on her face was a relief for a time, but as I got closer, I realized that it was actually more of a toothy Chuckie grin.

"My husband makes things in our basement. It's kind of related to his job. I've told him a lot about you and he made this for you. I think this will help you!" She was barely able to contain her villainous excitement -- I was in for the psychological knockout of a lifetime.

Out of her desk came a very strange contraption that looked kind of like she had pulled the pipe from the back of her toilet and spray-painted it an unbecoming shade of rusty metallic gray. It was a terribly unwieldy thing. As she demonstrated how to use it, her pupils grew and her eyes widened, and she might as well have been the Wicked Witch of Western New York.

"See, you just hold it up to your ear like this... and when you talk, you can hear yourself! And if you ever start talking too fucking loud like you always do, you will DEAFEN yourself and your ears will bleed and your brain will turn to a mushy pile of gelatin and we will all tear out your intestines in celebration and throw them at the windows of your house so that your mother knows never to send her fucking kids to this school ever again!"

Okay, that isn't what she said, but that was what I heard.

She ensured that she was saying this part as loud as possible, so that the whole class heard. Even with a two-ended pipe up to my ear, I could hear the cackles and giggles. I wasn't going to live this one down.

For three consecutive days, I had to hold the ridiculous thing up to my ear every time I spoke in class. Eventually, I just stopped talking, so that I didn't have to hear myself. My second grade teacher was not only vindicated, but she also thought it was fucking hilarious. I had lost.

It has been at least 8 years since the pipe telephone entered my life, but it has never left. I don't know where it went. I think my mother probably threw it away in a fit of rage towards my second grade teacher's disturbing lack of professionalism and overall villain complex. But, at least in spirit, the pipe telephone has always been attached to my ear, monitoring what I say and never allowing me to raise my voice too much. This blog, named after the pipe telephone that haunts me so, is my 8 year delayed retaliation. This blog isn't just any personal blog -- this is my quest to defeat the pipe telephone.