Allow me to apologize for being creepy…
I am not creepy. OK, maybe I am. I honestly don’t know. That is because “being creepy” is pretty subjective.
Is a person following you or is he just headed to the same place you are? Unless you are also a mind-reader (they walk among us), you probably won’t ever know — barring said stalker saying, “I’m following you! How am I doing?”
That said, I am perpetually worried that I am being perceived as creepy in situations where I am genuinely not trying to do anything creepy at all.
At the gym? I try not to look around. Situational awareness is great if you’re a security guard or Jason Bourne or something. But Greg Elwell will either zone out and listen to his music or watch whatever’s showing on the TV. Look around too much and you’re bound to meet eyes with someone and BOOM! Creepy.
“Does he/she think I’m staring at him/her? I’m already sweaty and gross and now he/she thinks I’m a stalker? Awesome.”
And, honestly, it’s hard NOT to stare at a he/she. I mean, if somebody has half a face that’s a man with a moustache and a tuxedo and the other half is a buxom blonde in a crimson cocktail dress, you can’t not look. And what the hell is he/she doing in the gym dressed like that? You can’t climb the StairMaster in those clothes!
At the grocery store, I am perpetually convinced that people think I’m going to steal their babies. And I cannot make this clear enough — I’m not even sure I want a baby that is half me, much less some strange baby being pushed around Crest.
So, you know, if you see me out and I appear to be creepy, please accept my regrets. I certainly don’t mean to be creepy; though now that I think of it, the hooded sweatshirt, sunglasses and ski mask (and the lack of pants) might be giving everybody the wrong impression.
Again…sorry.
Normal is whatever you are
My friend’s mom cooked green beans with almonds. I freaked out.
As a kid, you get to know things as “normal” because you do them all the time. My mom cooked canned green beans with a little bacon fat and a little sugar. I didn’t know what a fresh green bean tasted like until I was in high school and I didn’t learn to like them until much later.
So when I went to my friend’s house and got this alien green bean almondine, I politely ate a bite and a half and thought, “I’m never coming here for dinner again. These people are insane.”
Of course, the way I live my life now would have been just as insane to 8-year-old me. Sleeping without a night light? Wearing a tie? Eating macaroni and cheese that isn’t straight out the box? That kid would have an aneurysm.
But I’ve come to view the arguments I made as childish, which isn’t surprising, because I was a child. Sadly, too many people still make those arguments now, and they’re supposed to be adults.
Normal is whatever you are. Normal is however you live your life, because normal is relative. There are things I do that would seen foreign to lots of you and vice versa. But guess what? You don’t have to live my life. You have your own. Live it however you see fit.
A co-worker told me today that she doesn’t have a TV at home. I couldn’t live like that, I told her, but if she can survive with two kids and a husband and no idiot box, go for it. Who am I to judge? I probably watch too much TV. But that’s how I choose to live my life and I like it just fine.
It’s time to condense
If ever there was an argument for better health care, it is the state of our pop culture. There is simply too much going on for us to understand and enjoy in one lifetime. Either doctors need to figure out how to keep us alive and lucid for longer, or we need to start putting our brains into robot bodies, a la “Sealab 2021.”
But since Congress is busy screwing up healthcare and scientists are busy coming up with “the new cigarette,” we have to take steps of our own to sort this mess out.
That is why I think we need to condense. Let’s take all of this pop culture ephemera and blend it together — like a smoothie, but useless celebrities and stupid fads in place of yogurt and berries.
For instance, there are vampires everywhere now. There are literally more vampires on TV shows right now than there are high school kids pretending to be vampires.
And with vampires comes all the other MGM movie monsters, so we have to deal with wolfmen and mummies and zombies and Frankenstein’s monsters.
At the same time, we have far too many useless “celebrities” who are famous for a) sex tapes, b) having too many kids and c) being rich and stupid.
I can’t keep up with them all, nor should I have to. So let’s mash the crap out of this stuff and get what we really want — an undead Jon Gosselin with a harem of middle-aged, not-particularly-attractive vampire ladies, while his shrieking ex Kate walks around screaming, “Fire bad! Jon bad! Fire bad Jon!” And, I don’t know, maybe the kids are zombies? They certainly will be soon enough.
Paris Hilton? She should be a mummy. And that’s more for our safety than anything. In fact, let’s wrap all the Kardashians up in bandages, too. If you have a “celebrity” sex tape, you need your brain removed through your nose. (As if most of these people still have brains.)
Tune in next week as I cram together the confusing plotlines of “Lost,” “Flashforward” and “The Sopranos” with the Washington political elite!
Insulting advice from people smarter than you
Hello, you drooling, unwashed sacks of germs. How are your disgusting lives today? Good, good. What’s that? You’re afraid of catching swine flu? Then might I suggest you stop wallowing in your own filth?
Every year since all the newspapers and TV stations made a pact to stop covering real news and just make stuff up (re: 1997), reporters have been forced to “report” on nonsensical things. Like how not to get sick.
“But I’m very interested in that! How is it not news?”
Well, news usually means something is new. Something needs to happen for it to be news. (I suppose news could be nothing happening, but only if it was something we were used to happening, like Old Faithful not going off.)
And there’s nothing really new about flu and cold season, at least when it comes to prevention. Here is a list of the most common sense crap in the world which you should be doing regardless of airborne illnesses.
#1 Wash your hands.
#2 Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. (And do #1 again.)
#3 If you’re sick, stay home and get better.
#4 Try eating a vegetable that isn’t french fries. And maybe drink some water instead of soda.
And every year, people ask the same questions, even though those rules never change. And then people get uppity when a doctor is “condescending” to them. Maybe it’s because, if you can’t remember to all of those things without a doctor telling you, you’re on a lower level.
That’s when condescending has to happen — when you’re below the norm. Morons.
Stay Away From My Wife!
My wife has been talking more lately about having a kid and, frankly, I’m against the whole notion.
It’s not that I have anything against children in theory. They learn things and say cute malapropisms and sometimes they sleep. But the practice of having kids seems…ugly.
There’s poop, for one thing. And crying and snot and sometimes they don’t sleep. And you get in trouble if you leave one alone for a few days at a time because they “can’t feed themselves” or “roll over.”
And kids in general tend to have unhappy consequences on things I love. Like pictures of inappropriate nudity. And ribald humor. And alcohol.
People are always saying, “Think about the children!” And I do think about them. I think, “Why are these children screwing up a good time?”
But if I had to nail down my biggest objection to my wife having a kid, it’s that I don’t want her sleeping with some other guy. I mean, she can’t possibly be thinking about having a kid with me. Let’s be honest, nobody is eager to have my genes polluting the pool for generations to come.
I’m like Hitler and Tila Tequila rolled into one. I’m history’s greatest monster. A smaller version of me won’t do anybody any good.
The New Rules of Reality TV
I am a fan of scripted television and here is why:
TV characters, reading from scripts, have much funnier lines than real people, stuck on an island or in a house, who don’t have scripts. And even if the real people do have scripts (I’m looking at you, “The Hills”), professional actors tend to do a better job delivering those lines.
But let’s forget how boring most reality TV is for a moment and remember instead how oppressively annoying the people on reality TV are.
I meet real people all the time and most of them are nice to be around. They’re funny or they’re serious or smart or dumb or lots of other things, but mostly, they are real. They have no big audience to lie to.
There are no real people on reality TV. They are all playing a character based on themselves (or even a character based on another character they saw once) and most of them do a poor job at it.
But that’s fine. If people still want to watch that crap and people still want to be on that crap, then let that crap go on existing, so long as I don’t have to watch it.
What I will not abide, however, is when reality TV contestants try and exist in the real world. They can be annoying on their own shows — but they need to stay away from appearing on shows that I want to watch.
Which is why I’ve come up with a couple of new rules for reality TV. I hope you will help me enforce these rules with hefty fines and heftier baseball bats.
1. As soon as you become “famous,” you can’t be on TV anymore. Jon and Kate Gosselin, the Kardashians, anybody who was on “Survivor,” you can stay on your own show, but the second you start appearing in tabloids or on “Entertainment Tonight,” your show is canceled and so is your fame. Sorry.
2. No more murderers. I’m kind of surprised this has to be a rule, but apparently nobody thought to do this before, so we’ve had a bunch of thugs and criminals on TV. You’re out.
3. If you’re a former star and have become a “reality star,” then your show at least has to be about why you were famous in the first place. Flavor Flav wants to put out a new album? Fine. Flavor Flav wants to get his G.E.D.? No way. Ideally, you’d do both of those things privately, Flav, but if you insist on being filmed, you better be making a record.
Won’t Somebody Please Think About the Children?
I don’t know about you, but I cannot stop worrying about kids. Are they eating right? Getting enough sleep? Do they know the exact number of seconds to wash their underbits so that they’re clean without starting to enjoy themselves physically?
And, most of all, are they reading? Because if they are, slap the book out of their hands! Reading is the most dangerous activity around!
It’s just like the parents in Norman told me — reading is destructive and awful. Well, they didn’t “tell” me that so much as they showed it to me by keeping author Ellen Hopkins away from their school.
After all, Hopkins wrote a book about her teen-age daughter who got hooked on meth and ruined her life. This isn’t the sort of thing for teen-agers to read about! What if those printed words about the evils of drug use somehow got into their brains, but the kids were confused and started using drugs?
Better to keep them away from all books, I think. The parents at Whittier Middle School know best. Kids who read do drugs, or something. Stick those kids in front of the TV set instead where they can learn from doctors (like on “House, M.D.”) or police officers (like on “The Shield”) about right and wrong.
In other news, I’m pretty sure the Internet is bad for you, too. And since it used to be transmitted by telephone lines, it’s a safe bet we shouldn’t use phones either. I’m not sold on houses, for that matter.
Just so we’re agreed — we’ll live in caves, not communicate, ban reading and just watch TV. That’s how you strengthen America!
Kanye West is a Jerk? Total Shocker…
I am really enjoying how unhappy people seem to be this morning after Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to give props to Beyonce. Not because I think Kanye was right or Taylor Swift (who?) shouldn’t have won, but because…this is news?
Kanye West acting like a jerk in a very public and inappropriate manner is about as shocking as putting a dollar into the vending machine, pressing the button marked “Coke” and getting a bottle of Coke.
He’s an ass. He only has two jobs. 1. Perform music. 2. Be an ass. Last night, he did his job. There should be no more controversy about that than when the guy at Krispy Kreme hands you a free glazed when you come inside or when the lady at Wal-Mart greets you.
Stay tuned next week when Donald Trump unexpectedly says something mean about Rosie O’Donnell. And then, prepare to be amazed as Michael Moore makes an un-even documentary.
An Open Letter to the Dude in the T.O. Jersey at the Bar
Dear Sir,
First of all, let me say how happy I am that the professional football season is here once again. I enjoy the camaraderie with friends, spending long, lazy Sunday afternoons at the local sports bar, watching multiple games while drinking multiple beers. I assume you, also, enjoy the NFL, because you routinely return to the bar on Sundays. Granted, you seem less inclined to watch the games and more apt to jump around and shout epithets at your friends and the TV, but this is one of our many differences.
Another point of departure is that you are always clad in your Terrell Owens 49ers jersey and your…how to put this?…douche hat, while my friends and I wear jeans and T-shirts. I like to think what you wear has little bearing on anything, except that your choice of jersey (and hat) seem to reflect your personal lifestyle.
And it is that lifestyle that is at the heart of this letter. I do not know that you are gay or straight, nor do I care. I have no idea about your religious affiliation, if you have one, and that doesn’t matter to me one bit. The only thing I really know about you is that you seem to enjoy standing up, often blocking the TV screens, and shouting a derogatory term for “homosexual.” Over and over and over again.
I certainly don’t wish to impede your right to free speech, but do you think you could stop doing that? If you are trying to make a political statement or even an artistic one, I think you are failing. The only point that is coming across to my friends, or to the many tables surrounding yours, is that you are a loud, obnoxious jerk.
If that is your aim, then I say bravo, sir. You have certainly found the sweet spot.
But, now that we all know you’re an inconsiderate jackass, I think it’s safe to stop getting drunk at 2 p.m. and screaming insults. Point made. Move on to the next point, which we’re all hoping is rehab, or at least a different sports bar.
Sincerely,
Every Single Person Who Had to Endure You Last Year
Ban the Asterisk
As a semi-literate writer of things, like blogs and sentences, I love punctuation. Periods are great, period. Exclamation points are vital to hyperbole, such that I would die without them!
And question marks? Do you even have to ask?
Even semi-colons are important; I should learn to use them someday.
But there’s one bit of punctuation with whom I am very cross: The Asterisk. I’m not saying that little hanging star isn’t useful, but it almost never contains any good news.*
(* Exception that proves the rule: Those must be space pants, because your butt looks out of this world. That seems like pretty good news.)
An asterisk in sports always involves cheating or some other scandal. Barry Bonds hit 71 homers* (while he was juicing). Michael Phelps won 14 gold medals* (despite a goofy grin on his face).
It’s even worse when you’re buying stuff. Nothing like purchasing floor wax that claims “Great on Floors*” only to read “* Not for use on tile, hardwood, laminate, marble, dirt or carpet.”
And sales are always ruined by the asterisk. “20% off all purchases*” isn’t much use when the disclaimer tells you “*purchases must be $800,000 or greater and include a yacht.”
Rather than hide behind the asterisk, I think we should put everything out there. Let people know the deal up front.
Think about how many bad marriages could be avoided if everything was out in the open? Too many people say “I do” without looking behind their soon-to-be spouses to see a big, fat asterisk, just waiting to screw up their lives.
I say we do away with the asterisk once and for all. And I’m looking at you next, parentheses.
(Oh, crap.)
