Underneath the Turban

My Saturday

2011-07-23T20:52:00.001-04:00

What I've Learned So Far in 2011

2011-03-03T13:26:00.004-05:00

Okay, so it's been awhile.

I've been busy. And procrastinating. But like, also busy.

To get reacquainted, let's start off with some notes from 2011 so far:

I went on a trip to Malaysia and Brunei. You haven't heard of Brunei. Check it out. The most random countries have always been the ones that really fry my wonton, and Brunei certainly fits the bill. Some images of this trip are below.

One day I dropped a 12-pound barbell directly on my bare foot while on a business phone call, which left me with a limp for a week. Which left me explaining to people why I was limping. Which left us all enduring the elephant in the room that it was now clear that I had 12-pound barbells in my apartment. More on that below as well.

Winston is doing well. Thanks for asking. His most recent fetish is trying to eat the rug. I'm also concerned that he may be constipated in general. It's unclear.

I fell in love since we last spoke. I know, it's awesome. I'd like you to meet her. Here she is. Now before you start making your judgments—"She's an old man," "She's dead," etc.—watch all 11 videos and you'll understand.

The Oscars are really irritating. The two idiots at the beginning who comment on everyone's dress are painful enough, but then you get to some of the acceptance speeches...like that heinous narcissist who won Best Supporting Actress...and it's basically an unwatchable program.

This is sexually arousing.

But above all, I want to discuss some things I've learned so far in 2011. Here are 7:

1) A chicken can ruin your life.

2) When you're in Brunei, keep your comments about the Sultan positive.

3) Just because you have a strokable beard, it does not mean you look cool.

4) Foot reflexology is not the same thing as a foot massage.

5) My grandfather still cannot hear anything.

6) Dropping a 12-pound barbell directly on your bare foot during a business phone call is a negative life experience.

7) I should never drink a full cup of Starbucks coffee.

More cartoons:

11 Unfortunate Moments From My Past

People Who Suck

9 Things That Make My Life Worse

11 Situations That Make Me Feel Awkward

Animals, Volume 2

2010-12-20T12:54:00.002-05:00

When I posted Animals, Volume 1 five months ago, each of the below animals nervously read through the post and let out a sigh of relief at the end when it was clear they had survived unscathed. I hope they enjoyed their time out of the spotlight, as today we'll be carefully critiquing each of them, in appropriate categories.

Self-Loathing Animals

The Manatee:

Evolution really got lazy with the manatee, settling for a glum loaf of blubber. The manatee very understandably hates itself.

The Zonkey

That's right. The zonkey. The mating of a zebra and donkey produces a remarkably self-loathing creature.

The Yak

Yaks are huge, scary-looking, well-armed, and incredibly cowardly. I came across a pack of yaks on a mountain once -- first, they froze and stared at me. Then, when I took one step toward them, they all sprinted away. Like bunnies. This trait can't do much for their sense of self-worth.

The Ball Beetle

It's most likely not called the ball beetle, but this is the name we have to work with at the moment. Whenever you get close to a ball beetle, it goes into a ball and you can roll it around. The only imaginable emotion the ball beetle must be feeling when rolling around is self-loathing.

The Caterpillar

A classic self-loathing animal. Their whole vibe reeks of it.

The Daddy Long-Legs

I wrote a bizarrely detailed footnote on the daddy long-legs' self-hatred like five years ago.

The Tapir

An utterly hapless creature. I hate myself a little more just looking at this picture.

Animals I Desperately Want to Eat Because They Look Like Delicious Candy:

The Delicious Tropical Frog

Delicious-looking tropical frogs have plagued me ever since I was a child. They are the Michael Jordan of delicious-looking animals.

The Newt

The Seahorse

Seahorses are ridiculously aesthetically pleasing and adorable and delicious-looking. Kind of surprised there isn't some Haribu brand of gummy seahorses.

Sea Anemone

Ocean gummies.

Rodents Who Take Themselves Far Too Seriously, Given Who They Are:

The Hamster

This animal has zero ground whatsoever for taking itself as seriously as it is in this picture.

The Chipmunk

Not a trace of sarcasm.

The Guinea Pig

A comment here is unnecessary.

Animals That Look Like Cartoon Characters:

The Moose

I had to give this photo a long, hard look to determine whether it was real or an animated Pixar character.

The Elephant Seal

Another example of evolution being really lazy. Evolution was like, "Crap, this is a mess. I need to scrap this and start over." And then evolution got distracted by something and just never came back to it. Also funny that a male elephant seal sees a female elephant seal and he's like, "I really want to have sex with that elephant seal."

The Tarsier

Really? This is the package you're presenting to us, tarsier? Very creepy move by evolution.

The Otter

Far and away the most British-looking animal. Absolutely has a Stewie-type voice and accent.

The Bullfrog

I desperately want to fuck with this creature. Poke him with a stick, pour buckets of water on his head, throw pebbles at him, whatever. Just an overpowering urge to fuck with him.

Horrifying Giant Rats That Are Basically The Horrifying Giant Rat From The Princess Bride And For Some Reason Everyone's Okay With That:

The Opossum

Why is anyone okay with opossums? These are so much scarier than rats or racoons or whatever else people are scared of in their garage. And is it possum or opossum? And if it's opossum, why? Did someone decide to get cute when they were naming the animals?

Huge Fucking Loser #2:

Let's start by refreshing you on Huge Fucking Loser #1, from the first Animals volume. The hapless rabbit:

Somehow, the walrus has managed to surpass the rabbit and take the crown. Look at this huge fucking loser:

Animals I Never Really Thought Were That Scary Until I Saw This Picture:

The Octopus

This picture absolutely makes me shit my pants. Imagine scuba diving, turning around at some point, and you see this. Upsetting. Let's move on.

The Bat

This picture's not cool. It's not cool at all. When you're outside at night and you see bats flapping by overhead, it's like, "Whatev." Because they kind of just seem like creepy birds. But this picture is a reminder that they're not birds at all -- birds have beaks and are silly-looking. As this picture makes entirely clear, a bat is nothing short of a small flying monster. Not okay at all.

Animal Whose Name Makes You Think It's The Worst But It Turns Out It's Pleasant-Looking And Quite Handsome:

The Weasel

I kind of want to date this weasel.

Animal That Everyone Thinks Is Cute But It's Actually Kind Of Hideous:

The Koala Bear

Sorry, but it's kind of hideous. People just think koala bears are adorable because they're bears, which makes them tiny little bears, which is admittedly a cute concept. But imagine them as a large version of some ordinary species and they become hideous.

Animal That Is Hideous And Yet Somehow Adorable:

The Tortoise

No, this is not up for discussion.

Animal That Most Looks Like A Normal Bird That Has A Huge Toy Beak Glued To Its Face:

The Toucan

Right?

Animal That Didn't Get The Memo That Dinosaurs Went Extinct And Now Awkwardly Coexists With The Rest Of Us:

The Komodo Dragon

The komodo dragon knows dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. We know dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. And now we're all here and no one is bringing it up. Meanwhile he's stomping around like it's 65,000,000 BC. Super awkward for everyone.

Animal Who Had Hoped For Something Better And Is Not Really Sure How It Came To This:

The Alpaca

The alpaca's not really sure where things went wrong. But things most certainly went wrong.

Animal That A Drunk Human Might Sleep With:

I've never really understood the difference between all the different monkeys. In my head, monkey, ape, chimpanzee, orangutan, baboon, gorilla, etc. are all kind of synonyms. I guess gorilla is kind of distinct from these others, but they're all somewhat the same in my head. But upon digging deeper, I've discovered otherwise. Check it out:

The Baboon

Okay, so the baboon is super, super weird-looking. And definitely an "animal," as opposed to being human-like. Right?

The Gibbon

So definitely still an animal, but with a much less retarded face than the baboon.

The Gorilla

Rad. Totally rad, and I kind of want to be him. Still very much in "animal" territory.

The Orangutan

Okay, here's where things start to get weird. Still an animal, but also kind of a middle-aged Mongolian soccer mom. Let's keep going:

The Chimpanzee

Okay, we are now seriously teetering on this not really being an animal. It is an animal, but it's very close to being more of a human than an animal. Like, I know people that look like that.

The Bonobo

I was blown away by these photos. The bonobo is not an animal. The bonobo is a hideous human being. End of story. Look at the middle picture -- doesn't it feel totally incorrect to call that thing an "animal"? An animal is something that could be in a zoo or bought as a pet or whatever. And there are definitely really drunk girls who would hook up with the dude in the third picture.

Further, I spent an hour of my day today physically playing with a capuchin monkey. Absolutely the best hour of my life. Much more on that in the next post.

11 Unfortunate Moments From My Past

2010-11-17T14:01:00.001-05:00

1) The time I saw an old, hairy, incredibly obese man naked.

2) The day I first learned where milk came from.

We've all decided that this is okay, but it's not. Milk is a cow's breast milk. I was upset by this when I was five and I'm upset by it now. I can handle the fact when I'm eating cheese or ice cream, but you will never see me drinking a glass of plain milk.

3) The day I decided to try something new with my hair for all of eighth grade.

4) When it turns out that the stranger actually does know me.

This is pretty mortifying. It's only happened a few times because I've learned my lesson. The good news is that everyone has forgotten me and my season at this point.

5) The Patriots-Giants Superbowl.

Yes, I was there. No, I'm still not over it.

6) The first and last horse ride I'll ever take.

7) The time I lost my first tooth and the tooth fairy left me a quarter because my dad was cheap.

I shit you not. A quarter.

8) The time I decided "why not" and attended the advanced yoga class because I was there already and this was the only class happening that day.

9) The time I decided it was a good idea to get ragingly drunk in downtown Rio at 3am and leave the crowd with two Brazilian dudes to go to their "fun" "party."

All the fun details are here.

10) The time I had friends over when my grandfather was staying at the house.

11) The time I had a thermometer up my ass for 12 straight days. One summer during college I was a subject in a 12-day sleep study. It was not fun.

For more on this and other traumatizing life experiences from those 12 days, check out the journal I kept.

29 Years, 29 Thoughts

2010-10-28T14:11:00.007-04:00

So.

We're back here, huh?

Back in this weird room where we hang out sometimes.

I'm glad you're here with me, I must say. This is the last place I'd want to hang out alone. It's a room full of my thoughts, and on the right side of the page are like 150 doors and in each door are more of my thoughts. I'm basically standing in the middle of my head. So thanks for being here too.

I’ll break the ice by mentioning that I'm turning 29 in a few weeks. I discussed the concept of birthdays in detail a couple years ago, so I’ll just say this—29 is one of those years that feels much older than the previous year. 20 was one of those. So was 22. So was 25. So was 27. While 21, 23, 24, 26, and 28 kind of all just felt like extensions of the previous age, 29 is one of those "whoa" years for me. Because even though I’m not 30, for the first time, I’ll be “Basically 30.” Can’t believe I’m already basically 30.

And since I think I’ll live to around 87 (my mom’s father passed away at 87 and I look a lot like him), it means I have 58 years left. Which means I’m exactly 1/3 done with this whole thing. The first period of the hockey game has finished. I’m on the 7th tee. It’s the top of the 4th.

Spring is over. On to summer.

And yet, I somehow still refer to myself as a “kid.” Like, if I’m going to meet my mom at her friend’s house for dinner, I might ask, “Are there gonna be any kids there?” At the absolute oldest, I’ll call myself a “dude.”

At some point, I’m gonna have to stop this. What—am I gonna be 50 and referring to other 50-year-olds as “kids”? When does this end?

On one hand, I should probably stop now. On the other hand, calling myself an “adult” sounds as absurd and full-of-shit as calling myself a “man” or an “entrepreneur” or someone’s “colleague” or “boss” or, at some point perhaps, “husband.”

I’m just too immature to take myself that level of seriously at this time. Maybe at some point that’ll change. I’ll keep you posted.

Anyway, for those counting, I have roughly 3,000 remaining weeks and about 700 remaining months.

Kind of a lot, right? If you take the career of a legendary 3,000-hit Hall of Famer, I have a week for every one of his hits. A month for every Hank Aaron homerun. Kind of a lot.

So I guess any freaking out that’ll be taking place will be about this “I think I’m actually really not a kid anymore” thing much more than the “I’m going to perish in not that long” thing. 700 months is a lot to work with.

Glad we went over this.

And since I just jinxed myself to an untimely early death, let's waste no further time getting to our 29 irrelevant items:

1. I have a lot of disdain for nickels. They’re pretty huge and really not valuable. Where does a nickel get off being that big? And they have big dumb smooth edges. I throw pennies in the trash regularly, and I’m tempted to do the same with my nickels, but they’re just valuable enough that you can’t. Worst coin ever.

2. I’m really, really, really happy the Yankees are eliminated.

3. Speaking of really, really, really happy—I’ve been watching this season of The Apprentice, and I’m really happy I’m not on that show anymore. Watching these episodes makes me shudder. Apprentice tasks are such bad experiences. And was my cast as douchy as this one?? There are a huge number of douchebags on this season.

I also wish it were a better show—if they weren’t so concerned with generating massive in-show ad revenue, it could be so much more interesting. One of the producers told me that when the show first started, they were gonna have the tasks be really cool and creative—things like, “Each team is given a pile of one million pennies—whichever team can turn the most of it into paper cash in 24 hours wins.” Fascinating, right? Instead, they’re doing stupid video ads for stupid companies and then one team “wins” and you’re not sure whether the judges actually had a say in that or if the producers just decided which team they wanted to have to fight it out in the boardroom. A shame.

And yes, I’m addicted.

4. While we’re here, in addition to the ubiquitous, “What’s Trump like?”, a question I still get pretty regularly is, “Do you talk to Trump a lot?” This is a pretty silly question. What in god’s name do Trump and I have to talk about? And how would that occur? Would he call me? My phone would ring and the caller ID would say “Donald Trump” and I’d be like, “Hold on I gotta pick this up,” and I’d pick up…and then what? Would he ask me a question? Tell me a story? Ask me how my dumb company is doing? Tell me he liked my last blog post? What reason could possibly exist for Trump and me “talking a lot”?

The closest he and I have come to interacting recently is when I drunkenly walked into Trump Hotel last year and told the front desk that I had been on his show and that he had told me I “could have a room here anytime I was in town” (not true). The woman made a tentative phone call and then told me that unfortunately she would not be able to accommodate me. Worth a try.

5. I never ever say the words "I hope you're well" or "I hope you've been well." But I type them quite often. And each time I type them, I'm slightly self-loathing, because I'm being phony. Meaningless, harmless phoniness, but it still sucks.

6. We need to discuss the concept of married couples having a joint email address. There are two possible scenarios going on here:

A) The couple has this address for things that pertain to both of them, and it’s useful for that purpose. They also each have individual email addresses for things that don’t concern the other / are none of the other’s business.

B) This is the only email address that they have. There are no individual email accounts.

Case A—sure. Makes sense.

But if Case B is what’s happening, that upsets me a lot. I’m incredibly claustrophobic just writing about this. I don’t care how old I am, there will never be a time when I’ll be okay with anyone reading all my emails—life partner or not—and what that would mainly mean is that my friends would basically stop emailing me. None of this is okay.

As far as I know, all of these joint email account users also have individual accounts—but just in case, I had to bring this up.

7. I did laundry the other day and when I put the nearly full 64-ounce bottle of detergent back on my top shelf, it slid off, first landing directly on my pinky toe and then cracking its cap open and splattering detergent everywhere. Swearing occurred.

8. This blew my mind.

9. I can’t believe the midterm elections are only a week away! It’s fascinating—this is a chance for the Republicans to win enough seats that they can make the transformation from being people who blindly criticize every policy initiative of the Democrats to people who blindly block every policy initiative of the Democrats! Exciting!

And maybe the Republicans can win the White House in 2012, and then we’ll get to see the Democrats spend all of their time and power trying to bring down the Republicans! What could possibly be more compelling?!

Politics are the worst.

9a. Politics...is...the worst?

10. I have flies. There are all these flies in my apartment. I’m not terribly pleased about this. I must say, though, that as someone who reacts to bugs like a troubled six-year-old girl reacts to bugs, house flies might be the one bug that doesn’t really scare me at all. House flies are just so silly and dumb and harmless. I’m almost getting used to them. I would buy exterminating spray, but then I’d also exterminate Winston in the process, so I’m just gonna let them hang out for now.

11. If you’re trying to be a recording artist of any kind, watch this. If you’re not, it’ll be a pretty icky video, so you should skip it.

12. It creeps me out a little bit when people start emails with “Dear Tim.” I think the “dear” thing should probably be left out of emails.

13. I’m not entirely sure what it means when someone has “pouty lips.”

14. In a span of one hour the other day, I went to a candy store, a pickle store, and a beef jerky store. It was phenomenal. I imagine heaven having no normal restaurants or grocery stores, just weird delicious stores like those.

15. I went to the dentist last week. A dental cleaning is a truly terrible life experience. And all I can ever think about when I’m there is that the lady who does the dental cleanings has the worst job that exists in today’s world. I’d rather be cleaning public restrooms in Togo.

16. A few years back, I upgraded my browser from Safari to Firefox. It was a life-changing event. Four and a half years later, I’ve upgraded again—to Chrome.

I don’t know why I didn’t try Chrome the second it came out. When I graded companies, Google got an A for a reason—they do things better than everybody else. Just like Gmail is far superior to all other email brands, Chrome is the best browser that exists today. I’ll leave it at that, but if you install Chrome, you should also download some extensions—extensions are Chrome’s version of an iPhone app.

17. While we’re in Tim’s nerd playground, I’m seriously considering getting one of these, just because what could possibly be more delicious?

18. Oh wait—this is more delicious.

19. I really enjoy big thunderstorms and wish there were more of them.

20. I remember thinking that it was a huge deal when there were blue M&Ms for the first time in 1995.

21. Some people have a distinctive laugh that they’ve had forever. And then there are people whose laugh evolves, or whose laugh mimics the laugh of the friend they’re with. And then sometimes, you come across someone who's having a bit of a laugh crisis. They’re searching for a better laugh and having a hard time doing so, and in the meantime, they’re going with whatever they can scrap together, and it’s unfortunate.

22. I found myself in the Kayak Murder Spiral the other night. It’s one of the worst spirals there are. I was booking a flight, and because it was around Christmas and New Years, flights were expensive. So I messed around with the dates and times until I finally made my decision. But when I clicked on the flight I wanted, it brought me to Orbitz, where a red message was displayed that said, “The flight you selected is no longer available. Please select another flight.” So I went back to Kayak and picked another, worse flight. Back to Orbitz. Same message. So I just stayed on Orbitz and tried from there. Picked a flight and it sent me to Delta.com, where Delta explained to me that the fares have changed and the flight I selected was no longer available at the quoted price. So I stayed on Delta and booked a flight there. All good. Except after I entered all my information, it let me know that the flight was not, in fact, actually available.

The Kayak Murder Spiral.

I’ve been here before—usually when booking an international flight. It’s a deeply frustrating and demoralizing experience.

I ended up being saved by Airfare.com, which displayed flights that were cheaper than any of the fake flights on Kayak, and it actually let me book a ticket! Why had I never been on this site before? And apart from the lying business, why wasn’t Kayak displaying the lowest available rates in the first place? Flight fares are shady business.

In any case, note to self and everyone else: Airfare.com > Kayak.com

23. One small plus for Kayak is this, which I enjoyed.

24. I enjoy the noun “chew,” as in “Starburst Fruit Chews.” It makes something seem even more delicious when it’s called a chew. But you can’t really ever say the noun chew out loud in a sentence.

25. I saw The Social Network. I liked it. Although the casting director accidently picked gorgeous topless models to depict the frumpy uptight Harvard girls that actually made up the finals club scene. His bad.

26. I haven’t gotten groceries in a few weeks. Relatedly, I’ve been eating six times more Chinese food than usual. I want to shower just writing about this.

27. If I tell each friend that I’m hanging out with a different friend for Halloween and secretly stay in my apartment watching Planet Earth, will anyone find out?

28. My sister did this dumb thing with me awhile back. And I was regretful the whole time when she was telling me the “interpretation” of all my answers—I prioritized money first, described my own life as “big and cold and icky and scary,” and named a male friend as “someone that I really love.” Then, recently, someone else did it to me, and I was all excited because I could pretend I had never done it before and this time, I could answer the questions the right way. Except I forgot how the interpretation went and ended up extremely embarrassed by my answers again.

100% of me knows that things like this are dumb and meaningless, but like 30% of me can’t help but take the interpretation seriously, and worse, I’m always pretty sure that the person quizzing me kind of assumes the interpretation is correct.

29. Killing time on an airplane the other day, I decide to scramble the names of presidents. Here’s the best I came up with:

Barack Hussein Obama → Banks?! Homes?! Arabia?! C U!!!
George Walker Bush → He beg war; Gore sulk.
William Jefferson Clinton → Fowl stain on M.L.? Fine lie, jerc!

Eh?
_____________

Also, as you can see on the right, this blog officially has 100+ followers. And only like 20 of them think I was on American Idol. Very exciting. If you are not currently following, you probably should. It makes me feel important.

People Who Suck

2010-09-22T10:59:00.002-04:00

People that are loudly social on the street outside my apartment on weekend nights that I decide to stay in, reminding me that I’m being a loser, and ruining everything.

Everyone at the Superbowl party who doesn’t care about the game.

People who think that fruit is a satisfactory solution to hunger.

People who blast music in the car.

I don’t get this. Imagine you’re visiting a friend. You walk into their house and you both head to the living room. Your friend offers you a beer. All good so far. Then your friend heads over to the stereo and turns the radio on, full volume, and sits down in the living room with you.

That would be idiotic, right? So why is the car different?

People who stop me on the street with a really sympathetic cause and leave me feeling like a horrible person for not giving them money.

People who are on a high horse about being 5-10 years behind the curve in technology.

These people suck. They’re not resisting technology because they don’t like it—more so, they're resisting it because it makes them feel superior to everyone else. They see everyone adapt to the new thing, and they don’t want to be part of the flock—even if the sheeps' lives are made much easier and more efficient by embracing modern technology. If the resistance were based on any real principle other than pure self-righteousness, all those people that were so pleased with themselves in the late ‘90s when they didn’t have a cell phone still wouldn’t have one. But as soon as it actually started becoming a legitimate life sacrifice, they all switched over.

I’m not criticizing people who are behind the curve – just the ones who feel superior about it. You know who you are.

Guys whose sense of masculinity is closely correlated to how patronizing they are to me when I start dating their younger sister.

Me and my dumb overthinking brain when it’s time to sleep.

People who can’t help themselves and have to say the dumb, obvious, unfunny joke when it pops into their head.

Self-absorbed girls.

Disappearing for awhile. Back in November…

9 Things That Make My Life Worse

2010-08-31T13:35:00.006-04:00

1) Kids that bang on the piano while I'm playing.

And yes, I'm very proud of that piano drawing.

2) My iPhone deciding to start playing random songs at random times. In the old days, the thing that sucked was when you'd open a website and it would automatically start playing a loud video and embarrass you in public:

But this thing my iPhone occasionally does presents far more horrifying situations. Not only is the speaker really loud when the headphones aren't plugged in, but there's no way to quickly silence iPhone music—it takes a few steps. To compound things, I often have it on shuffle, and it inevitably selects a mortifying song to play:

The above is based on a true story.

3) Hiccups.

4) My inability to sit Indian style. I recently visited my sister, who lives in Boulder. She and her friends are all super "outdoorsy." And there's nothing outdoorsy people hate more than comfort. Indeed, for outdoorsy people, the more physically uncomfortable, the better:

So naturally, when the night's activity was watching The Big Lebowski on a huge outdoor screen, my group didn't consider bringing chairs, deciding a thin blanket would suffice. Which works out fine for people who can sit Indian style.

5) Girls who need to be in a full embrace during sleep. Cuddling is all well and good, but when it's actually time to sleep, there need to be limits.

6) Dick babies.

Let's start by depicting a normal, reasonable baby:

Baby made it look easy, right? And yet, the all-too-common dick baby:

7) Bugs. There are two different ways I react to bugs:

8) Ridiculously loud motorcycles.

9) Watching a movie I really love with someone who has never seen it before.

11 Situations That Make Me Feel Awkward

2010-08-11T11:51:00.002-04:00

Note: I have gotten ahold of a writing tablet...

1) The phrase, "Have you lost weight?" I have never said it without feeling awkward. It's an intensely personal thing to mention to someone you don't know that well, but people do it all the time.

2) The awkwardly attractive self-proclaimed doppleganger. When it's that week where everyone puts up a doppleganger of themselves up on Facebook and someone puts up one that's much, much better-looking than they are.

3) Accidentally hyping up a comment where you're about to brag. When you're talking to someone, and you were all excited about the next thing you were gonna say, but then they said something, and when they were done you forgot what it was you were all excited to say. So you're like, "Wait, I had a really important comment to make" and they're like, "What was it?" and you're like, "I forget. But it was really important. Shit." And they're like, "Well think of it." And so you think for a minute, and then you remember!

But when you remember, you realize that the "important" thing you were gonna say was some bragging comment, tooting your own horn. And it was only important in your mind because you're a horrible, narcissistic person. So you play it cool and you're like, "Shit, I'll have to just remember later." And then a few seconds later you're like, "Anyway, on another note, I've actually been to all six continents," pretending it's a whole different, new thought.

4) The work acquaintance trap. When you work on the same hallway as someone and one day you introduce yourself. It seems like a harmless thing to do, and leads to some smalltalk and some friendliness, and everyone leaves feeling good that it happened. But the problem is this: you're gonna walk by that person in the hallway roughly 650 times in the next year, and now you can't just completely ignore them, as if they're a part of the wall (which is totally acceptable before the introductions happen). Instead, you have to acknowledge them, because you're "friends" now, and it suddenly seems cold and dickish to walk by them and just look away. So you end up falling into this little "hey" / head-nod / "how's it goin?" thing that becomes really awkward after the 200th time.

5) The shitty person opinion trap. When you're with a group of people and there's some big discussion going on and one of the shittier people starts making some point to the whole group (we'll call him Brad), but then one of the other people starts saying something and the group turns to the other person, except you accidentally make eye contact with Brad, who's still into his point, and since you're making eye contact, he just keeps saying the point, but it's directed only at you now, and the elephant in the room is that in broad daylight Brad just got ignored by the whole group—he knows it, you know it, and he knows that you know it—but he keeps making his point, just to you, while he's plainly crying on the inside because the rest of the group is ignoring him, and you're stuck in the awkward pit of hell with Brad, watching him suffer, and you can't believe you were the idiot who made eye contact with him at the moment of group betrayal, and you're pretending to listen to his point, but you desperately want to be free from co-experiencing Brad's personal hell and wish you were listening to the other person's point with the rest of the group. So you listen to Brad with like 40% of your brain and the other person with 60%, and you're nodding to Brad but you're not sure you're nodding at the right times, and meanwhile you really want to comment on something the other person just said.

There isn't a graceful way out of this situation. The only way to really get out is to just rudely defect and be like "uh huh, totally" to Brad, and then suddenly swing to the rest of the group and jump in and say the comment you wanted to say, which in turn crushes Brad's one remaining sliver of self-esteem.

6) Horribly insulting foreign people in foreign countries by inadvertently violating their taboos. Like wearing shoes inside or eating before prayer or touching someone's head.

7) Ambiguous tipping situations. It's very unfortunate to make either Error 1 (tipping too little) or Error 2 (tipping too much).

8) The 4-foot gimme. When you're golfing with someone and they putt to like 4 feet from the hole, and instead of taking the 4-foot putt normally, they're like, "Alright, bogied that one," and they give themselves a "gimme," even though gimmes are supposed to be from like a foot or less. But then instead of picking up the ball, they do a quick, off-balance putt, because they know deep down that it wasn't a gimme and they want to sink it to feel honest about the bogie—but they miss, and then they quickly lunge down and snatch the ball up, and it's uncomfortable because they just got a double bogie, called it a bogie, and everyone there knows it.

9) The adjacent embrace trap. When you're walking with a friend of the opposite sex, or maybe someone you recently started dating, and you decide to put your arm around that person, which prompts them to put their arm around you, which is all well and good until you realize that there's no non-awkward way to stop having your arms around each other. So you're walking there in awkward adjacent embrace, and after 30 seconds, it's 90% of what both people are thinking about, and both parties desperately want out of the situation, but no one knows how to end it. The only solution is to do something fairly drastic that requires the use of your arms.

10) The "paying together" trap. When you're in a convenience store with a friend and you both get a drink from the fridge and bring it to the cash register, and the guy is like, "is this together or separate?" So the person in front has to be like, "together" or else he seems cheap, and then the person in back tries to give a dollar to the person in front, and they get into this whole fucking song and dance where the person in front is like, "no-- please" and the person in back is like, "oh no, no, take it" and the person in front is like, "fucking please" and the person in back is like, "oh, okay, thank you."

When I was 18, this shit never happened. It's one of many dumb things society makes adults do that it doesn't make kids do. 18-year-olds would be like, "separate" and skip a) the song and dance and b) someone paying for someone else's drink for no reason. This whole post could have been about awkward money situations, but the worst part of them is always that moment where the person being forced to have something bought for them ends the song and dance by saying, "Oh, okay, thank you" and puts their wallet back in their pocket. That's always my least favorite part.

11) The ego-crushing bartender snub. When I'm at a bar and go up to the bar with a girl to buy drinks and the bartender is incredibly hard to get ahold of and the girl thinks I'm a loser.

Some Thoughts on a Tuesday

2010-07-20T14:36:00.000-04:00

There is no extra space in New York apartments. A fact I seemed to forget recently when I bought a 12-pack of paper towels. I took one out and put it on the counter. Then I walked around the apartment with the rest of the 12-pack for like six full minutes, looking for a place to put them, before I gave up and just sat on the couch with 11 paper towel rolls in my lap. "I guess I'll just hold them," I thought, resigned. Eventually I got a second wind and walked around the apartment a second time, opening the same cabinets, before remembering that there was nowhere that came close to fitting them the first time. I ended up leaving my apartment with them and brought them back to the store.
_______

According to the internet, 106.5 billion humans have lived in the history of human existence. I find this fact boggling. Part of me is boggled that 100 billion people have lived and died on this earth so far. But a bigger part of me is boggled that 6.7 billion of those 106.5 billion are currently alive, which means that 1 out of 16 humans that have ever existed is alive today.

While we're here, a friend pointed out to me today that by being 28 years old, I've been alive for 1/8 of US history. Odd.
_______

I didn't used to like grapefruits or dark chocolate but both have grown on me over the years. I still don't like milk.
_______

It's pretty weird that there are still feather pillows. It seems like one of those things you'd hear they used in the 1700's. But in 2010? Really? The best we can do for a pillow filling is actual bird feathers? We haven't figured out some synthetic substitute yet?
_______

I see very few movies, but in the last week, I've seen Despicable Me and Inception, both of which were deeply enjoyable. My two favorite movie genres are probably animated movies and sci-fi thrillers.
_______

A friend sent me this yesterday. It may have been better than both of the above movies.
_______

When I was a camp counselor in 2000, I asked one of my campers what his father's job was, and he said, "He's a boss." What a dick.
_______

I feel like a d-bag writing "yup," and if I write "yep" then I look like an idiot because it's wrong, so I just avoid it in writing altogether, and only use it verbally.
_______

I was waiting for a friend on a street corner the other day and ended up watching this group of pigeons interact for like 10 full minutes, during which I noticed all of this social dynamic I had never noticed before when looking at pigeons. There are blatant alpha males in the group who alternate between being intimidating dicks to the other dudes and trying to get laid by thrusting their bosom at the chicks. The girls are totally uninterested and act very standoffish and bitchy.

Then some kid walked by and ran at the whole group to scare them and they all flew away and I came incredibly close to hitting him.
_______

I have an iPhone 4 and all the critics are dumb. It's a wonderful device.
_______

The one Mandarin phrase I retained from my time in China is "duo chao chiennnnnnn," or "how much does it cost?" The problem is that if I don't pronounce it right, Chinese people have no idea what I'm saying. But I like trying when I'm in a Chinatown Chinese restaurant, because it surprises the waiter that I know how to say anything at all. It's a big gamble though—if it clicks with the waiter, he looks surprised, laughs, and says something back to me in Chinese. I laugh, as if I understand what he said, and everyone I'm with thinks I'm funny and charming and worldly. But if it doesn't click with the waiter, he looks at me like, "What's this dude's angle?" and everyone I'm with thinks I'm really embarrassing to be in public with, offensive, and dumb. The stakes are high.

Further, I was in Chinatown with my 88-year-old grandfather for lunch the other day, and at the end of the meal he asked the waiter where the pineapple cubes were. The waiter had no idea what he was talking about since they only serve pineapple cubes in made-for-Americans Chinese restaurants, which this certainly was not. My grandfather had a minor tantrum, but he was partially appeased by the fortune cookie.
_______

I was bored in the airport recently, and to entertain myself, I decided to imagine that the little kids around me weren't actually kids, but rather miniature retarded adults. I highly recommend trying it.
_______

I recently slipped into one of my trademark Wikipedia procrastination death spirals (the cousin of the YouTube procrastination death spiral), during which I read the full Wikipedia page of every one of the random presidents that no one knows anything about (Tyler, Arthur, etc.). One thing that they have on each of the pages is the president's last words before his death. I took note of these as I went along:

William Henry Harrison: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."

John Tyler: "I am going now, perhaps it is for the best."

James Polk: "I love you, Sarah. For all eternity, I love you."

Zachary Taylor: "I have always done my duty, I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me."

Millard Fillmore: "The nourishment is palatable."

I stopped. The nourishment is palatable? For god's sake, Fillmore. And this is what he looked like:

Not impressed.

I also noted that at the very end of James Buchanan's life, he proclaimed, "History will vindicate my memory" (referring to people thinking he sucked for failing to prevent the Civil War). He was deeply wrong, as 150 years later, he's considered to be one of the three worst presidents ever.

Animals, Volume 1

2010-07-04T16:28:00.010-04:00

In the past, we've tackled companies and toys. Today, we'll engage in a discussion of animals.

Animals are funny fellows. They're intensely ridiculous, but they also take themselves intensely seriously. A largely humorless bunch, animals consistently fail to appreciate the comedy of their own existence.

As we embark here, to help keep things organized, the animals we'll be examining will become progressively more ridiculous as we move along.

Category 1: Not That Ridiculous

Animal: The Male Lion
How badly I want to snuggle with them: A decent amount

Comments: I singled out male lions here because they're incredibly rad. First of all, male lions are much more snuggly-looking than female lions. Secondly, they don't deal with any work or hunting or shit—they have like nine wives who deal with everything, both the bread-winning and the child rearing. Male lions just strut around being rad dudes and mating with whomever they please. Their comedy rating is also very low, a rarity in the animal world.

Animal: The Timberwolf
How badly I want to snuggle with them: I'd do it if given the opportunity

Comments: I'm not really inclined to snuggle with most wolves, but the timberwolf has developed a pretty big, squishy head to cope with cold temperatures, raising its snuggle appeal. Not much else to say about them—their low ridiculous rating leaves them fairly boring.

Animal: The Orca
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Pretty badly

Comments: If I could snuggle with any five-ton, carnivorous aquatic predator, it would be the orca. They are the most aesthetically-pleasing and delicious-looking creature on Earth. Not an especially ridiculous creature, but that does not go for all whales.

Animal: Large, Horrifying Insects
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Obviously not at all. I'm annoyed at you for even asking that question.

Comments: There is nothing in existence as upsetting as large insects. Insects in general are a loathsome group, but it's the large ones that make me wet myself. Let's move on immediately—

Animal: The Owl
How badly I want to snuggle with them: As much as I want to snuggle with a serial killer

Comments: Could there possibly be an animal that gives me the willies more? Look at this picture. Is this not the face of a twisted, psychopathic serial murderer? It's the stuff of nightmares. All the way down to the eerie "hoo." Like really—what the hell is that for a bird sound? All the normal birds "chirp," and this dick says "hoo." Imagine waking up in the middle of the night and this thing is in your room staring at you. I'm definitely having nightmares tonight.

Category 2: Fairly Ridiculous

Animal: The Bear
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Very badly

Comments: Bears are a hilarious merging of ferocious and snuggly. I think if I were given Superman strength, the first thing I'd do is go anger a grizzly bear, knowing that I was much stronger than he was. I'd just make him angrier and angrier and every time he'd swipe at me I'd just swipe his arm away, laugh, put him in a headlock, and give him a noogie.

Animal: The Cow
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Not really at all

Comments: What a boring animal. Big animals tend to be smart, and really dumb animals tend to be small. Well consider the cow the exception. Rarely will you find a more vapid creature. On the plus side, they provide a tremendous amount of comedy. No animal sound makes me laugh quite like a good, loud "moo."

Animal: The Pig
How badly I want to snuggle with them: I'd be really upset if it happened

Comments: I know a lot of people have strong affection for pigs. I know they're smart. I'm sure if I owned one I'd love it deeply. But I don't own one. And I don't find them cute at all. And I'm always disappointed, because I always picture pigs being hilariously roly-poly, like this one. But then I see a photo of a real one, and he's just kind of a big weirdo like the one above.

Animal: The Squirrel
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Somewhat, but more than usual with the above one

Comments: All rodents are fairly ridiculous at the least—they're paranoid as hell, they have these silly little twitchy faces, they have tiny little hands, and absolutely no sense of humor about themselves. When you add a weight problem into the picture, as in the above exhibit, you begin to achieve great levels of comedy.

Animal: The Bunny
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Desperately

Comments: Okay, this one gets complicated. So first, I searched around for pictures of a "bunny," and found the above fellow. He's so cute it's painful. And what's more, if you asked me how to possibly make him cuter, I'd say, "Well, how about if instead of running, he bounced." But he actually does bounce. It's almost too good to be true. Further, I found this picture of a baby bunny, which cannot be discussed rationally:

But here's where things get confusing. So then I was like, "Rabbit is kind of a synonym for bunny, right?" and I searched for a rabbit. And I found this embarrassment:

Distinctly different from the bunny, right? And are all rabbits huge losers like this one?

I continued—I searched for images of a "hare," because it's kind of a synonym for rabbit. And I came up with this:

We're now completely out of cute territory. The original bunny was like 96% stuffed animal / 4% real creature, but now suddenly, a couple synonyms away, we have some weird thing with the body of a kangaroo, the head of a dog, and wearing a rabbit ears hat. And it's not at all a stuffed animal.

And then I found this picture of something called the "arctic hare," and really—what the hell is this?

It's a furry egg with a face. Okay, moving on—

Animal: The Tiny Monkey
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Kind of, but it would be weird

Comments: I don't know whether tiny monkeys are chimps, or orangutans, or apes, or whatever, but little, one-foot-tall monkeys wearing overalls are possibly the most delightful creatures around. Would hanging out with one not be the most fun thing possible? When I decided I wanted a pet in 2005, it very seriously crossed my mind to get a small monkey. Then I learned that they cost $10,000+ and that caring for one was as serious and time-consuming as caring for a toddler, and I purchased the rights to Winston instead, which is like caring for an amusing plant. But one day.

Animal: The Crocodile
How badly I want to snuggle with them: It's not something I plan to do

Comments: The crocodile leads the league in the "simultaneously providing immense comedy and immense scariness" category. On one hand, this dude is a ravenous, man-eating modern dinosaur. On the other hand, he's a total doofus. If I had those Superman powers, once I finished giving the grizzly bear his final noogie, I'd be right over to this guy. He'd charge at me, all fierce and shit, and I'd laugh, grab his two front arms, lift him upright, and engage him in a tango. One day.

Category 3: Very Ridiculous

Animal: The Bison
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Badly

Comments: This is Leroy. I took this picture myself in Wyoming a few years ago. Leroy's head is literally the size of one of those big blue street-corner mailboxes. If I owned him, I could just leave him in the back yard and either ride him around when I'm in a good mood, or kick and punch him and take all my anger out on him when I'm in a bad mood. He'd be very useful.

Animal: The Seal
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Desperately

Comments: Is it weird to desperately want to snuggle with a seal? Maybe. And does the seal really belong in the "very ridiculous" category? I thought about putting it in a less ridiculous category, but then I realized that a seal is basically just a slab of fat that's alive. In any case, I find seals to be adorable and I want to spoon with them.

Animal: The Goat
Comments:

Animal: The Elephant
How badly I want to snuggle with them: N/A. Right?

Comments: Any hope the elephant had of landing in the first two categories of ridiculousness is dashed by its trunk. Elephants look absurd. That said, they're one of my absolute favorite animals. I rode one in Thailand once, and the guide led the elephant into water, and we went deeper and deeper until it was too deep for the elephant to stand—at which point I found myself swimming around and playing in the water with an elephant. Far and away the most fun I've ever had.

Animal: The Vulture
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Not at all

Comments: The awesome thing about vultures is that rather than resist their negative reputation, they just decided to embrace it and do their best to look the part. Look at this guy—could he be any more sinister? They're not at all scary—just bursting with comedy. This guy is all hunched with his sinister hands and his curmudgeonly facial expression. More like the villain in a kid's movie than anything to actually worry about.

Animal: The Stingray
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Moderately if the stinger were pointing away from me

Comments: The stingray would normally not be included in this list at all, let alone in the "Very ridiculous" category. But I know a dirty little secret about stingrays. See, stingrays act all mysterious and lethal and shit—but a few years ago, I was in an aquarium and got a view of a stingray from the side…and stingrays are huge nerds. Look:

Animal: The Snail
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Not really at all, and if I did I certainly wouldn't tell you

Comments: I love the snail's move—he was like, "I'm a slug and everyone hates me—maybe if I put this shell on my back, people won't recognize me." And the crazy thing is that it worked. People don't really hate snails at all, even though they're just slugs with a really obvious disguise. This is like some person that everyone hates putting on one of those glasses/nose/moustache disguises and everyone being like, "Who's the new guy? I like him."

Animal: The Rhinoceros
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Only in a very desperate moment

Comments: The rhino is ridiculous. It should absolutely be one of those creatures you read about that died out 50 million years ago. I have a lot of trouble believing that they really exist today.

Animal: The Person
How badly I want to snuggle with them: It depends

Comments: Both the person's ridiculousness and snuggliness vary greatly within the species.

Okay, I just really wanted this photo in my blog.

Animal: The Chicken
How badly I want to snuggle with them: I have too much disdain for them for snuggling

Comments: Chickens are a joke. We have enough respect to call cow meat "beef" and pig meat "pork"—but we just call chicken meat "chicken" because no one has any respect for the chicken. That said, they're ripe with comedy, and one of my favorite all-time activities is chasing chickens whenever I see them.

Category 4: Totally Absurd

Animal: The Bulldog
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Very badly

Comments: The bulldog is ridiculous. But unlike many of the other creatures we're discussing, I feel like the bulldog at least realizes that it's ridiculous. Bulldogs don't really pretend to be legitimate creatures, right?

Animal: The Hippopotamus
How badly I want to snuggle with them: It's not on my list of things to do

Comments: So what's the hippo's deal? It's a completely absurd-looking creature—like some massive water-pig. And they seem totally un-scary and hilarious, but then you hear all these things about how they kill more people each year than sharks and all that. So I'm not really sure what their angle is. In any case, a baby hippo would be a great pet, as long as you could stunt its growth with caffeine or something else.

Animal: The Flamingo
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Badly, if by snuggle you mean swipe their leg out from under them

Comments: The flamingo makes me angry. Whenever I see one, I feel a surge of aggression and desperately want to swipe out its dumb leg from under it. Definitely the most socially awkward bird at every party.

Animal: The Inchworm
How badly I want to snuggle with them: More than you'd imagine, but still not that much

Comments: The inchworm is a rare insect that I'm fond of. It's just a complete joke. What a silly concept for a creature.

Animal: The Camel
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Not really at all; I'm getting sick of this question

Comments: The camel's face might be the most comedic face in the animal kingdom. Look at this photo. How could this possibly not amuse you? Further:

Animal: The Hedgehog
How badly I want to snuggle with them: More than anything

Comments: I'm really obsessed with the creature in this photo. Like the vulture, this guy is just running with the caricature of itself and embracing it.

Animal: The Bald Eagle
How badly I want to snuggle with them: Stop asking me this—birds are not good to snuggle with

Comments: That's right. The great American bald eagle. The source of our nation's pride. In the Totally Absurd category. Treason or not, this is an absurd animal.

Here's what happened—the forefathers decided to make the bald eagle the American mascot. And ever since that happened, this guy has been strutting around with this ridiculous look on his face. The bald eagle has let the whole thing go to his head. He doesn't realize that the whole animal kingdom laughs at him behind his back. Just look at him, drunk with narcissism:

Animal: The Anteater
How badly I want to snuggle with them: It would be an incredibly weird, desperate move by me

Comments: I tried to leave out really bizarre creatures, because they're just such easy targets, but then I saw this anteater picture, and come on. I've never met an anteater, but there's no way they can take themselves seriously, right? I thought it couldn't get more ridiculous than that, but then I found the following picture. Look at this guy's dumb cone head:

Animal: The Ostrich
How badly I want to snuggle with them: If by snuggle, you mean ring its dumb neck, then very badly

Comments: Ringing the ostrich's neck might be the only urge I feel more strongly than wanting to swipe the flamingo's leg. The ostrich is the pinnacle of all animal comedy. On the bright side, from now on, whenever someone asks me to do a favor for them that I really don't want to do, I'll do it, but I'll also email them this photo to express my annoyance.

19 Things I Don't Understand, Volume 6

2010-06-14T16:36:00.006-04:00

You know I've been in an especially dark pit of procrastination whenever this blog has a new look. Yes, I was an very bad place yesterday when I decided to spend a significant amount of time in Blogger's settings, giving my little pixel of the internet a makeover. We tried on all sorts of outfits, and this is where we ended up.

And what better way to commemorate things than yet another list of things that I don't get.

1) What the arctic tern's problem is. So I've always wondered what birds' issue is and why they need to migrate like 10,000 miles twice a year. It's ridiculous. If it's a matter of going from one climate to another, there's no reason to go that far—the North Pole is 6,000 miles away from the equator. Every climate possible exists in between. There's no explanation for going farther than that. It would be like me commuting from New York to Richmond every day for work because I found a good deal on an office there.

And then I read this:

Arctic terns are the champions of long distance migration. They fly about 11,000 miles from their breeding grounds in the Arctic to their winter home in Antarctica.

Champions? Champions of what—horrible decision-making? They're not even changing their climate. This would be like finding an office in downtown Manhattan for $1,300/month, but then deciding to commute every day to San Francisco, where I found an office on an identical-looking street for $1,300/month.

An atrocious decision-maker

Maybe there's more food on one of the poles. Okay, great—then just stay at that pole. Maybe it's better to breed at the other pole. Really? It's that important which pole you breed on? I'm sure you can find a place on the eating pole to rear your young. If you stop the 22,000 miles of commuting each year, you'll have plenty of time to suss out all the best locations. Maybe each pole gets too cold in the winter. Then go 1,000 miles of latitude away and you'll be fine. Either way, going from pole to pole each year is not the answer.

2) What the hell is going on in a girl's shower. I was out of town last week and stayed in the apartment of a female friend. When I used her shower, I noticed that there were about 30 bottles on the shelf. "Good," I thought, "it'll be easy to find normal shampoo on this shelf to wash my hair."

Not so.

I fumbled through dozens of healing body washes, pore-invigorating fruit scrubs, moisturizing conditioners (no idea what conditioner does) and other creepy products—and no shampoo. This is not to mention the several bizarre objects I assumed you were supposed to use to apply the various potions on the shelf. I ended up using some feminine body scrub to wash my hair and smelled like apricots and lilacs for the rest of the day.

3) Why I don't just unsubscribe from all the trash-mail that I get. During my brief and ill-fated yoga phase a couple years ago, after one session the instructor was talking about being present and breathing and all these things I don't do, and then he said he had this mailing list and I was like, "This guy knows shit and I know nothing" and I signed up. This resulted in me having to delete 4,000 promotional emails from that yoga studio over the past two years. Finally, yesterday, just as I was about to press the bracket key to archive the latest yoga spam, I paused, decided to scroll down to the bottom of the page, clicked "unsubscribe," and now I'll never receive another email from that studio again.

Why did it take me 4,000 emails to do that? Why are there 30 other companies spamming me that I haven't yet unsubscribed from? Maybe it's because it's so easy to press the bracket key in Gmail, maybe it's because 5% of me thinks there's a 5% chance I'll want to read one of the emails at some point—but it makes no sense that I haven't unsubscribed from all of them, given how easy it is to do.

4) Why everyone sleeps with a blanket. Is it because we're cold and we need the blanket for warmth? No—if that were the case, people could just turn the heat up a little. And even when it's hot, people still need to be under a sheet. Why? When the room is a comfortable temperature, why do we need to be under something when we sleep? Is it some biological thing, where it helps us feel safe when we're sleeping? If so, that's idiotic. So like, what's gonna happen? A murderer is gonna break into the bedroom at night with a gun and shoot up the place, and then in the morning when you wake up, you see all these bullet holes in the blanket, and you're like, "Wow, thank god I had this blanket on, or those bullets would have gotten to me"? That's what's happening? And if it's not the temperature or safety thing—then what is it?

5) Why we all smile in photographs. So Links of the Week sent me to this collection of early 1900's photographs the other day. One thing that jumped out at me was that no one was smiling. Indeed, people in old photographs always seem to look like this:

From looking at photographs, it seems like everyone in the old days was incredibly serious and depressed. But the fact is, smiling in photos was simply not in style. When I thought about it a bit, the question turned from, "Why is no one smiling in early photographs?" to "Why do we all smile in photographs today?"

If you walk down the street, no one is smiling. If you look around your office, or a restaurant, or anywhere, people aren't smiling. It's unlikely that you're smiling right now. People's faces are, by default, not smiling. People smile as a reaction to something, and then they go back to normal. They also make their surprised face, angry face, and confused face sometimes—and then they go back to normal. So before recent times, people felt—logically—that photographs should capture what they look like 99% of the time, not the 1% of the time they're smiling.

And then, at some point, something changed. At some point, people decided that we all needed to shape our faces into an expression that was not actually triggered by anything in that moment, but rather, is faked.

Pretty weird, right?

Why do we all smile in photos? To look happy? Who are we trying to fool? Everyone who looks at photographs knows that the smiles are fake.

Go to your Facebook page and go look at your "friends." Everyone is fake smiling. Pretty odd when you think about it—right?

But it's one of those things that we started doing and now we can't stop. Because now that we're all used to smiles in photographs, if we stop, everyone will think everyone is depressed.

And this isn't just us—this fake smiling epidemic has spread all the way to the top. Look at our president:

He's fake smiling. Have you ever seen Abraham Lincoln fake smiling? No—there are no photographs of Lincoln fake smiling because no one fake smiled for photographs back then.

Check this out:

All serious until Reagan, and then they're all smiling. Good thing this only started recently. Imagine how much less cool Mount Rushmore would be with four smiling presidents.

6) Why it's called "Instant Messenger." What's being sent are "instant messages." So what happened—they just took a noun that sounded a lot like "message" and used that? It doesn't make any sense. Are they suggesting that the service is some fruity little messenger with some bowtie that's delivering your IM's? While we're here, I have no idea what BBMing is. I hear a lot of people talking about it—usually icky people—but I don't really get what it is. How is it different from text messaging?

7) The whole Chuck Norris thing. So there's this recent trend of people making really lame Chuck Norris jokes—like, "Guns don't kill people—Chuck Norris kills people." And granted, I've never seen a Chuck Norris movie or TV show—if I had, I might feel differently—but I don't begin to understand why Chuck Norris is cool and/or funny and I don't see how people can buy into him as a badass. He's a doofy-looking middle-aged man with a mullet. What am I missing?

8) The term "refried beans." Beans aren't really fried at all, right? Let alone twice.

9) Why Toblerones make up half of the merchandise in every duty-free airport shop. This phenomenon is just weird. Seriously—what is the deal with duty-free shops and Toblerones? What a random product to be the ubiquitous duty-free inventory. And they're not normal Toblerones—they're like 20 pound Toblerones that a giant would buy. And I've never seen a giant in one of those shops—so what the hell?

While we're here, I don't really understand the concept of "duty free" at airports? First of all, who calls it a "duty" anymore. Secondly, so because of some small discount in price, people are falling over each other to buy massive chocolate bars, whiskey, and huge cartons of cigarettes? Is it really that big a draw?

10) Planets that are "gaseous." It always upsets me when I hear that planets like Jupiter and Saturn that are so huge and rad are actually just made of "gas." What kind of shitty planet is made of gas? A big sphere of gas isn't a planet, it's a gas cloud. So are Jupiter and Saturn planets? Or are they just big dumb clouds? I searched around for a bit and found this:

Gas giants are commonly said to lack solid surfaces, but it is closer to the truth to say that they lack surfaces altogether since the gases that make them up simply become thinner and thinner with increasing distance from the planets' centers, eventually becoming indistinguishable from the interstellar medium. Therefore landing on a gas giant may or may not be possible.

This shatters my fantasy of going to Jupiter when I'm older, and they won't even be able to land a satellite on Jupiter or Saturn and send back pictures of what it looks like.

11) How it's possible that women only gained the right to vote 90 years ago. Let's break this down:

1787: Slaves are granted the right to vote. So:

Denying slaves their freedom: Okay
Denying slaves the right to vote: Not okay
Denying slave-owning women their freedom: Not okay
Denying slave-owning women the same voting rights that their enslaved slaves have: Okay

1870: Freed slaves are granted a full vote. So:

Denying former slaves their freedom: Not okay
Denying former slaves the right to vote: Not okay
Denying women who used to own the voting slaves the right to vote: Still okay

1919: Women still can't vote. So:

Denying a distinguished female professor of politics the right to vote: Okay
Denying the drunk male college freshman taking her class the right to vote: Not okay
Denying the black drunk male college freshman entry into her class at the all-white university: Okay
Denying the black drunk male college freshman the right to vote: Not okay

The whole thing is just weird. So to recap:

Denying black men basic human liberties throughout history: Okay
Denying black men the right to vote throughout history: Not okay
Denying white women basic human liberties throughout history: Not okay
Denying white women the right to vote until recently: Okay

12) What the hell the deal is with the word "Latin." First, Latin weasels its way into being the name of the Roman language, when the language clearly should have been called Roman. And now, you have all these Spanish-speaking people in the Western Hemisphere, and they're called Latin Americans. Huh? Why? And the whole "Latino" thing? What's going on? Further, when native Spanish-speaking Americans who have no accent normally say "Latino" with an accent, it irritates me.

13) Why it's a good use of resources to light up massive skylines every night.

I feel like at least 1/3 of the windows in city skyscrapers are lit up at night. Why? Isn't that a massive waste of energy? Who is paying those electric bills and why are they okay with this? It can't be all because cities want a pretty lit-up skyline at night, right?

14) Why juries of clueless citizens are in charge of making critical legal judgments. I've always thought this "jury of one's peers" thing was incredibly stupid. The average juror A) has their own set of biases and prejudices; B) doesn't want to be there and is probably tuning out during most of the testimony; and C) could easily be swayed into conforming to the will of the most coercive or opinionated jurors (who themselves might be acting on prejudices after tuning out on most of the testimony). Why does this make sense? I feel like juries are something that would have existed back in the 1800's and we'd read about them today and they'd seem so silly and antiquated now.

And if juries are making the key judgment when all is said and done, what the hell is the judge's job? To MC the event? To slap on the sentence? The judge, unlike the 12 random jurors, actually does this as a career, is specifically trained not to act on any prejudices, is probably listening intently to testimony, and has years of experience in courts and knows how much weight to give to various testimony. Shouldn't the judge be the judge?

This just scratches the surface of things I don't understand about the justice system. I'm thoroughly confused about bail, and appeals, and parole, and a lot of other things.

15) Why everyone wants to sleep with Ron Weasley in Harry Potter 6. A few years back, I read the first three Harry Potters. Loved them. But then when I saw that the fourth one was 2,600 pages, I threw in the towel. Recently, I was on a 12-hour international flight that had this huge movie selection, including all the Harry Potters, and I decided to catch up on it all. So I watched the 4th, 5th, and 6th. Clearly I'm now completely riveted and would smother a baby to have the 7th one come out tomorrow.

But the Ron thing I don't get. He's an ugly, pre-pubescent red-head. Why is every Hogwarts chick trampling over each other to sleep with him? It's unclear.

Further, and this is a spoiler—

I can't believe that Dumbledore died. This dude was all-powerful. How do you kill an all-powerful person? How does someone who can fly and warp across the world and go invisible die by falling off a balcony?? Very, very upsetting.

Let me also mention that if anyone comments on this post and ruins the 7th movie for me, I'll do that thing to you that the dick guard did to the red-head gay guy who was raping Andy Dufresne.

16) Whether cracking your knuckles actually has long-term consequences. I've heard reputable sources say that it does, and other reputable sources say it doesn't. So I'm going to continue doing it 34 times a day and hope really hard for the latter.

17) What the ethernet is. I understand what the internet is. And I understand which port on my computer I'm supposed to plug the internet cable into, and what that cable looks like. But then this word "ethernet" comes up when people are explaining to me how to connect to the internet. Normally, I pretend that it didn't happen and just plug the cable into the computer and hope that no one knows that I don't know what "ethernet" means.

18) The "J" people write in emails in place of a smily face. When this first happened, I assumed that it was a formatting thing and that the sender had intended to use smily faces and it had come through as capital J's instead. But since then this has happened multiple times more. What am I missing? Did people all agree that J would henceforth represent a smile and no one told me?

19) The "door close" button in elevators. Okay, so let's discuss this. The normal situation is that you press your floor, and then after three seconds, the elevator door closes. Now how about when you press your floor and then you press the door close button? It still closes after three seconds. The door close button doesn't do anything. I'd bet it's not even hooked up to anything—it's a placebo button, literally just there because the guy who designed the elevator was all unsatisfied with the asymmetry of just having a door open button.

Now just say that I'm wrong and the door close button actually does something—how much time does it save? A half a second? Who is that hyper-Type A that they would press a button to cut a half a second out of their vertical commute?

Me. That's who. Me. I wear out the door close button. I don't just press it once either. I press that shit like six times during the three seconds before the elevator door closes.

Whatever.

The extended list of things I don't understand:

Volume 5
Volume 4
Volume 3
Volume 2
Volume 1

The Best Links

2010-05-29T18:50:00.003-04:00

There are only two reasons I go to YouTube:

1) Someone sent me a YouTube link so I click on it
2) I want to search for a specific video

I never just "head to YouTube" to click around and procrastinate. Does anyone do that? I don't think so, right?

For this reason, other than the occasional YouTube Death Spiral (when I watch a YouTube video and then click on one of the "related videos" and so on and so on until I despise myself), internet videos have never really caused me to procrastinate.

At least they never used to.

Recently, several treacherous "link sites" have invaded my life and taken away my freedom.

First, a commenter on this blog told me about wimp.com, a site that lists five videos a day. They range from short to long, science-y to silly, and I am now forced to watch every video they publish.

I don't go to Wimp every day. But when I do go there, I have a lot of trouble not clicking on video after video until I've seen all the new ones since I was there last. Like, a lot of trouble.

Then, with no consideration for my personal weaknesses and shortcomings, a friend of mine started a site called linksoftheweek.com. Links of the Week publishes 12 links every Tuesday, each from one of their "categories," and forces me to view every link they post, whether I like it or not.

And then there are the links people send me over email, which are showing no sign of slowing down anytime soon.

So I've been kept busy.

And knowing that I have this blog that I write things in, I figured that whenever I came across a particularly interesting or entertaining video or photo, I'd copy it to a list which would one day allow me to take away some of your freedom. Today is that day.

And so, I present to you the very best links I've come across:

Pets

There are more pet videos out there than grains of sand in the Earth. And most of them are mediocre. But the great ones are delightful.

Pet 1 - Excellent.
Pet 2 - Along the same lines.
Pet 3 - He's like, "Try as I might, I can't seem to exit this place." 20 seconds is enough.
Pet 4 - Dogs being dumb is funny for everyone.
Pet 5 - This looped at least six times before I stopped watching it.
Pet 6 - Eight times.
Pet 7 - This is someone trying to make a funny video and succeeding. Where have I heard that music before?
Pet 8 - Someone else trying to make a funny video. Someone else succeeding.

Astronomy

If you're fascinated by astronomy, you'll love these vidoes. If you're bored by astronomy, you won't like these (and you're an icky person).

Astronomy 1 - From the Himalayas to the outer reaches of the universe and back.
Astronomy 2 - How the Earth was formed.
Astronomy 3 - The most important photograph ever taken (and my computer desktop wallpaper because I'm a nerd).
Astronomy 4 - I stared at this for a long time.
Astronomy 5 - If you loved the first four links, you'll like this. Otherwise, it's skippable.

Pranks

Pranks and internet video were made for each other.

Prank 1 - Doesn't get old.
Prank 2 - Great idea for a prank.
Prank 3 - So much effort for them so I can sit here and be entertained for one minute.
Prank 4 - Ditto.
Prank 5 - What would you do if you walked past this guy?

Toddlers

Baby videos were so 2007. Toddlers are much funnier.

Toddler 1 - This video could have gone on for an hour and I would have watched the whole thing.
Toddler 2 - This is spectacular and the title makes it even funnier.
Toddler 3 - She's either incredibly irritating or incredibly delightful. It's unclear.
Toddler 4 - This video is very important to me. I've watched it many times. Though the whole thing is pretty fantastic, my favorite parts are the amazingly well-reasoned argument at 1:45 and the dance at 2:21.

Super Slow-Motion

Before the internet, people probably rarely got to see videos like these. But they're intensely cool.

Slo Mo 1 - Who knew? On a side note, I regularly have these weird day dreams where I'm like, "Okay, in this situation, if I suddenly had an active grenade that was gonna explode in three seconds, how could I get rid of it in that time?"
Slo Mo 2 - I understand lightning better after this.
Slo Mo 3 - Delicious.
Slo Mo 4 - Totally succulent. I was suspicious that it wasn't real, but then I found this and confirmed that it was. Apparently golfers can strike a ball with 100mph impact, which deforms the ball slightly, and in this video, the ball is fired at a steel wall and hits it at 150mph, which is why it is so extra deformed. I watched this at least 14 times before clicking away.
Slo Mo 5 - Bugs are so frickin quick, and it's cool to see what's actually going on when you miss with the swatter.
Slo Mo 6 - Cool. And another.

Rad Dudes Being Rad

This is a definite internet video genre. I left out the wingsuit videos because everyone has already seen them, but here are a few others.

Rad Dude 1 - Hard to imagine a recreational activity I want to do more.
Rad Dude 2 - This dude takes his rad pills every morning.
Rad Dude 3 - Long, but good if you like this type of video.

Animals

Not to be confused with Pet Videos. These are Planet Earth-style nature videos. Speaking of which, Life was an orgasm and airs again on Animal Planet starting on June 6 if you missed it.

Animal 1 - I always enjoy a good old fashion bird swarm video.
Animal 2 - If you've seen this before it's like, "eh," but if you haven't it's like, "whoa."
Animal 3 - Creepy and awesome. So interesting watching super slow-moving creatures in fast motion so you can see what their angle actually is.
Animal 4 - How much more stressful is being a dragonfly than being a human, given that things like this are a part of its life?
Animal 5 - I don't know why I included this video. It really upsets me.
Animal 6 - Evolution is amazing.
Animal 7 - I'm happy that I never have to do this.

Optical Illusions

When I was younger, I was always a huge optical illusion fan. Then at some point, I had kind of seen them all and now I'm usually all "whatever" about them. Here are a couple cool ones.

Illusion 1 - This is one of those that often comes in an email that says dumb things like, "If you initially see her going clockwise, you're right-brained. If not, you're left-brained." I never really believe those things.
Illusion 2 - Very cool.

Weird, Compelling People

The classic Weird, Compelling People video is this, which I think most people have seen. Here are a few more.

People 1 - The real life situation is significantly more mundane than portrayed in Memento.
People 2 - I enjoyed this. I really like this guy.
People 3 - Pretty incredible. Like the autistic Rome-drawer video, this highlights how little we access of the boggling potential of the human brain. Here's another guy with the same story.

Futuristic Things

Delicious.

Futuristic 1 - So much better than my faucet.
Futuristic 2 - Don't click out in the first 15 seconds—it gets really good.
Futuristic 3 - Duh. Right?
Futuristic 4 - Duh part two.
Futuristic 5 - Click on "This is Why" and watch the video. It's worth $90 million.
Futuristic 6 - Not sure you need to watch the whole thing, but very innovative stuff.

Data Visualizations

Two diagrams / data visualizations I played with for a long time.

Data 1 - Super interesting.
Data 2 - This company has come up with a great way to view and wrap your mind around a set of data. If you like this link, you'll probably love this fascinating Ted Talk.

From Dump

12 good ones from Dump.com.

Dump 1 - So that's what $205 million looks like. If I had that I could buy two Why Yachts.
Dump 2 - She's mad seasoned.
Dump 3 - Wait—really??
Dump 4 - Fascinating.
Dump 5 - Impressive rate of advancement.
Dump 6 - This is weird.
Dump 7 - People should think of having a soda like they think of having a bag of Skittles—a treat—not as an obvious drink choice to accompany meals.
Dump 8 - Oh come on.
Dump 9 - Cool.
Dump 10 - Useless and pretty.
Dump 11 - About damn time.

27 More Random Videos

Excellent videos that didn't really fit into a category.

Random 1 - One of my favorites. A fascinating glimpse into a random day 105 years ago, along with one of my favorite pieces of music.
Random 2 - David Blaine never disappoints.
Random 3 - If you've never seen footage of a landslide before, this is a must-see.
Random 4 - This totally weirded me out until I realized what was happening.
Random 5 - This takes awhile to develop, but by the end I was laughing uncontrollably.
Random 6 - Gotta love sports.
Random 7 - Pretty cool actually to watch this through, but if not, make sure you check out how ridiculously good it is by the end.
Random 8 - It's really hard to grasp the speed of light, but this helps.
Random 9 - The thing about this is that it isn't someone making a cool internet video—it's this guy's life.
Random 10 - What's horrifying is that a head-on collision between two cars going only 25mph each produces the same impact.
Random 11 - Annoying, but kind of a fun minute. Definitely not rewatchable.
Random 12 - This will only interest some people, but man did it interest me. Humans are so smart.
Random 13 - Really impressive.
Random 14 - This video isn't particularly interesting, but it's fun to watch and the music is great.
Random 15 - Kind of brilliant.
Random 16 - Kind of brilliant part two.
Random 17 - I was bored for awhile and very uninterested in what a differential gear is or how it's made—but by the end, I was upset it was over and wanted to hire this guy to explain the whole world to me.
Random 18 - Got me.
Random 19 - Pretty clever.
Random 20 - I watched this whole thing. I highly recommend not doing so yourself. But a couple minutes of it really brings back the memories. You forget how well you know this guy.
Random 21 - One of the funniest public disputes I have ever seen. I quote this regularly.
Random 22 - For people that like the show How It's Made.
Random 23 - Why didn't anyone show me this four years ago?
Random 24 - I went out and tried this the next day and no one followed me.
Random 25 - This is long and only good if you're interested in how to motivate employees, but what they've done visually makes anything much more fun to listen to.
Random 26 - A must watch.
Random 27 - Nothing like some good old fashion slapstick.

North Korea

And finally, what would a link list be without 14 North Korea videos. Actually, it's just an hour-long documentary of footage this guy took on a visit inside North Korea, broken into 14 short videos. I had no intention of watching more than the first, but then I got addicted and watched all of them. It's pretty fascinating if you have an hour to kill. If not, just check out the North Korean traffic girl.

North Korea 1
North Korea 2
North Korea 3
North Korea 4
North Korea 5
North Korea 6
North Korea 7
North Korea 8
North Korea 9
North Korea 10
North Korea 11
North Korea 12
North Korea 13
North Korea 14

2010-05-26T17:38:00.000-04:00

Company Grades

2010-05-12T00:31:00.005-04:00

We all interact with a lot of companies. And companies that become a part of your continual existence usually fall into one of three categories:

1) Good companies that you like interacting with

2) Less-than-good companies, but good enough that out of laziness and inertia, you'll continue to interact with them

3) Companies that you hate, but that you're forced to interact with because they're the best/only option for a product or service that you need

In discussing some common companies, let's start on a positive note. Then we can end on a really negative note, which is always nice.

Category 1: Good companies that I like interacting with

Company: Google
Personality: Smart; logical
Intelligence: Incredibly high
Dickishness: Low
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Varies; that's like asking, what's your general mood when breathing oxygen?
Grade: A

Comments: Google is as good as it gets. Every product they put out is innovative, user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and utterly practical. Everything they do makes sense. They're always a step ahead of my thinking, always surprising me. If they buy a company, they're going to make it much better (the site you're on, Blogger, is an example). 4/5 people are on Gmail now, and that's for one reason only—it's much better than all the existing options (same reason everyone ditched their default web browser for Google a decade ago). Google is just run by smarter people than the other companies.

Company: Apple
Personality: Delicious
Intelligence: Incredibly high
Dickishness: Low
Creepiness: Moderate-Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Wide-eyed; happy
Grade: A

Comments: [Disclaimer: if you don't like Apple, this paragraph is going to annoy you] The only company I admire as much as Google. Everything Apple does is brilliant. They're incredibly un-lazy. They're ridiculously innovative. They see the big picture and think in the long term better than any other company. They don't create the best product of the existing categories—they invent the categories in the first place. Rather than create an even better-sounding, smaller CD, they invented the iPod and revolutionized the whole music industry. Rather than find a way to make Flash work on iPhones, they're going to put Adobe out of business and move the entire world over to HTML5, which they believe is superior to Flash. They not only catapulted the whole smart phone industry a decade ahead, they jumpstarted a booming industry for phone apps, and now they're changing the face of mobile advertising. I have no idea what the future of tablet computers is, but you can be sure Apple will be leading the way.

Company: JetBlue
Personality: Friendly, good-looking
Intelligence: Moderate-high
Dickishness: Low
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Frantic and panicky; excited and happy once I'm on the plane
Grade: A-

Comments: Unlike the above two companies, JetBlue isn't doing anything groundbreaking. They're just a really user-friendly, sensible, personable company in an industry of gray, faceless giants. Their website is easier to use than all the others. Their rewards program is the only one I can figure out. Their customer service is far more friendly, accessible, and reasonable than any of the others. Their marketing is sharp and clever. Their planes are more comfortable than the others and they have TVs. Even their plane snacks are better. Maybe they're better because they're smaller, maybe they're better because they're run by smarter people—but whatever the case, I fly with them whenever possible.

Company: Amazon
Personality: Reliable
Intelligence: High
Dickishness: Low
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Spendy
Grade: A-

Comments: I'm always impressed by a company that starts out with a niche product (books) and finds a way to become a super-giant. Google did this. Apple did this. Nike is the classic example. Nike used brilliant marketing, over a bunch of years, to create an image that they were a cool brand, not just a sneaker company.

Well Amazon did the same thing. If Amazon were run by less intelligent people, they could easily have disappeared at the end of the dot-com boom like so many others. Instead, an online book company has become the online shopping marketplace for countless people. No matter what I want to buy online, I'll probably end up buying it from Amazon. Part of the reason is the intense ease of interacting with the website. Amazon has perfected the 30-second start-to-finish shopping experience. Which is a horrible thing for impulse buyers, and great for Amazon.

Company: Charles Schwab
Personality: Nice, for a bank
Intelligence: High
Dickishness: Incredibly low
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Pleasantly surprised
Grade: A

Comments: When I was younger, Schwab sounded like a bad man company for bad man customers. Charles Schwab itself just sounded like the name of a d-bag Wall Street dude (they've been doing a good job combating this image with the down-to-Earth "Talk to Chuck" ad campaign). But then I started using Schwab for investments and was pleasantly surprised by my experience. I liked working with them so much that I ditched Bank of America and now do everything with Schwab—investing, checking, and credit cards.

Why do I like them so much? Because someone running Schwab was smart enough to dedicate a larger-than-normal part of their budget to customer service. When I want to get on the phone with Bank of America, it takes 30 minutes of waiting and talking to the automated guy and being transferred before I'm finally on the phone with someone who can help—and that person is often unhelpful. With Schwab, I can call them—any hour of the day or night—and I'm on the phone with a friendly and helpful person within thirty seconds.

Plus, Schwab reimburses all ATM fees. Nice, right?

It's exactly like JetBlue—a smaller company just doing everything better than the bigger ones.

Company: FreshDirect
Personality: Pleasant; it's an online grocery store so who cares
Intelligence: High
Dickishness: Low
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Thrilled
Grade: A

Comments: I've already written about this. It's hard for me to express how happy I am that they exist. I hate going to the grocery store. FreshDirect is cheaper than the grocery store, 100 times easier, and I eat a lot less shit because it's easy to have real food in the fridge at all times. Plus, the website is wonderfully user-friendly.

Company: Winston
Personality: Mundane
Intelligence: Low
Dickishness: Low
Creepiness: Moderate
My general mood when interacting with them: Present; amused
Grade: A-

Comments: The only reason Winston received an A- and not a straight A is that he deuced on my couch yesterday.

Category 1 Honorable Mentions: Dropbox, Pixar, Wikipedia, Honda, NPR

Category 2: Less-than-good companies, but good enough that out of laziness and inertia, I'll continue to interact with them

Company: Yahoo
Personality: Clueless; lame
Intelligence: Moderate
Dickishness: Low
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Resigned
Grade: C+

Comments: The thing about Yahoo is that it has flashes of brilliance and dominates little sectors of the internet like their gossip site and their fantasy sports and some others. And they've been good enough to stay relevant all this time. And if Google didn't exist, I might actually think they were a good company.

But Google does exist, and when compared next to each other, Yahoo is simply worse at everything. Yahoo had the world's attention before Google did, but Yahoo's massive user base (which is mostly there out of inertia, because that's what they're used to—not because it's better) is slowly but surely deserting Yahoo for Google, and it's clear why. The email example sums it all up nicely—after college in 2004, I picked Yahoo for my email because it was the most common and seemed like a safe choice. Then Gmail came around and people seemed to love it more than I loved Yahoo Mail, but I stayed for awhile because I was lazy and switching email addresses seemed icky. And then I finally switched—and doing so was like going ten years into the future. I stuck with Yahoo because I was lazy; I'm sticking with Gmail because it's great. And that's exactly why Yahoo's market cap is $23 billion and Google's is $162 billion.

Company: STA Travel
Personality: Bitchy; uninterested
Intelligence: Low
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: Moderate-Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Frustrated
Grade: D

Comments: I used STA for years for the same reason I used Yahoo Mail for years—it was what I was used to. And while they market themselves as the JetBlue of travel agencies, they're actually a badly-run company with horrible, unfriendly customer service. They don't provide anything you can't find on the internet. And yes, I'm basing much of this vitriol on one experience with one bitchy man who worked there.

Company: Starbucks
Personality: Sassy; d-baggish
Intelligence: Moderate
Dickishness: Low
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Excited that I'm about to have coffee
Grade: B

Comments: I don't hate Starbucks. I actually like Starbucks. Their coffee's good, the stores are pleasant and aesthetic, and they have free wifi. The key is their low dickish rating. The people who work there are actually pretty friendly, and I can sit there all day and work without anyone caring or bothering me. There's always one wherever I go, so no matter what city I'm in, if I have my laptop then I have an office. Their breakfast sandwiches are also heavenly (though undoubtedly made of chemicals, poop, pesticide, etc.). The reason they're in this category is that they can never really crack a "B" grade. It's always better to stumble upon a unique little coffee shop with a lot of character, better coffee, better food, that also has free wi-fi, and I mainly frequent Starbucks because of inertia and because I don't want to deal with searching for a better place in the area.

Company: The Japanese place next to my office
Personality: Japanese
Intelligence: Unclear
Dickishness: Moderate-Low
Creepiness: High
My general mood when interacting with them: Hungry as shit
Grade: C

Comments: This place represents the "default lunch place" in everyone's life. You know which one I'm talking about. It's not that good, you're never that excited about it, you always regret it a little after—but you keep going there because it's really close and easy and you don't have to think too hard. Well, at my current office, this is the place. I can get one of several $7 soups or platters, it fills me up, it's pretty good, and it creeps the hell out of me. Why? It just does—it's just one of those restaurants where you feel like if you saw what goes on behind the scenes, you would never eat there again. Plus, the other day the garnish lettuce at the bottom of the takeout carton was infested with a tiny bug and her even tinier children. It's a full week later and I'm still recovering from this.

Company: All big airlines
Personality: Big and dumb
Intelligence: Too big and dumb to care about being intelligent
Dickishness: Moderate-high
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Listless
Grade: C-

Comments: This applies to all big airlines, but I put American up there because they have made me want to smash my face into the check-in counter more than anyone else. Other than weird niche airlines like JetBlue and Southwest and Virgin America, all airlines are the same. Neither the airplanes themselves nor the quality of service or customer experience has changed at all in the last 20 years. It's like all of them got together and were like, "So, if we all agree to mail it in, then none of us has to stress out about losing customers or making improvements because we'll all suck equally. Deal?"

Company: Facebook
Personality: Increasingly Big-Brotherish
Intelligence: Moderate
Dickishness: Moderate-low
Creepiness: Moderate
My general mood when interacting with them: Self-loathing because I'm wasting my life
Grade: B-

Comments: Facebook is a complicated one. On one hand, they get credit because they entered a field of better-known social networking sites and blew them all away by being cleverer and being better. And then they became an internet super-giant. On the other hand, they only get a "moderate" for intelligence, mainly because of how inept they've been at evolving their messaging. Everyone has a Facebook account, and everyone uses it to write and receive messages—but no one uses Facebook as their primary email account. Why? Because Facebook messaging sucks.

This is a huge blown opportunity. Why didn't Facebook jump on the opportunity years ago and make their messaging better? Why can't I forward a Facebook message? Why can't I hit "r" to reply to a message and "a" to reply to the whole list like I can in Gmail? Why can't someone email my Facebook account from their normal email by writing to an @facebook.com email address? Why is Facebook instant messaging so inferior to Gmail's? Why don't they have video chat yet like Gmail and Skype and AIM? Because of their vast user base, they could have crushed Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail at their own game by developing smart and innovative email tools, but instead they're not even a player in that world. That, at least, was a large fail.

Category 2 Honorable Mentions: The major television networks, ESPN, CNN, Staples, Microsoft, TimeWarner Cable, Twitter, Mint, Webex

Category 3: Companies that I hate, but that I'm forced to interact with because they're the best/only option for a product or service that I need

Company: RadioShack
Personality: Dumb; disorganized; hapless
Intelligence: Low
Dickishness: Moderate
Creepiness: Moderate-low
My general mood when interacting with them: Annoyed that they don't have what I need
Grade: D

Comments: RadioShack is one of those places that no one is ever happy to go. It's always more like, "I have to swing by a RadioShack today for a USB chord." And if that's all you need, then you'll probably be fine. But if you have any questions to ask or need any expertise, good luck. I've rarely seen a company whose stores are so badly run, disorganized, and understaffed. I've waited for 20 minutes before just to get the attention of someone, and then they know less than I do about the product I need. Also, a sign of a well-run company is when every one of their stores looks the same and your experience is consistent. With RadioShack, each store has a different layout and different inventory—just a total hit-or-miss, and it's usually a miss.

Company: Kinko's
Personality: High
Intelligence: Low
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: Incredibly high
My general mood when interacting with them: Creeped out
Grade: F+

Comments: The story of Kinko's goes like this: In the 70's, some likable hippy guy started this small, likable hippy chain (his nickname was Kinko because of his curly hair). It got really big, and then, ten years ago, the guy sold the store and it eventually ended up bought by FedEx. In the following years, the store lost all of its friendliness and all of its charm. Today, going to Kinko's is a really bad experience. The staff tends to be high, weird, slow, and unhelpful, and everything's overpriced. I have no explanation for why the staff creeps me out so much, but they do.

Also, according to Wikipedia, the original founder refuses to go into a Kinko's now because of what it's become.

Company: USPS
Personality: Dickish
Intelligence: Government companies have no incentive to be intelligent
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Cranky
Grade: D

Comments: I'm not really criticizing this company. If I were run by the government I would suck too. And since they don't have to compete with anyone, like most government-run companies, the staff there are astronomically dickish. Even the customers suck. Walking into the post office at 3pm on a Wednesday is like walking into a cranky adult museum. And if you ever have a question for a staff member about pricing or about the box you need, they'll be really mean to you.

Company: Petco
Personality: Weird
Intelligence: Moderate
Dickishness: Moderate
Creepiness: High
My general mood when interacting with them: Allergic
Grade: C+

Comments: Petco finds its way onto my list of errands now whenever I need to replenish my supply of fruit pellets, heat lamp bulbs, or the wood-chip carpet for Winston. And though the animals at Petco are unbearably cute, pet stores in general creep me out. It goes without saying that the staff are weird animal people, and the smell gives me the willies. And Petco never has exactly what I need. Last time I went, I asked to see their large half-log shelters since Winston's fat ass outgrew his current one, and they couldn't find any in stock. So now he's living in a tattered cardboard house that I made for the side of his terrarium, which is the turtle equivalent of some shitty mud hut.

Company: The Ocean
Personality: Stubborn
Intelligence: Low
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: High
My general mood when interacting with them: Fearful; cold
Grade: D+

Comments: The ocean obviously deserves credit for being ridiculously big. Clearly. But beyond that, why should I praise the ocean? It refuses to evolve with the times, doesn't give a crap about its customers, is full of scary shit, and is hugely dickish, ranging from smashing surfers down and getting water up their nose, to capsizing ships and killing people. And all sorts of weird, creepy shit goes on in its depths, stuff that human cameras can't even capture. And it's cold.

This isn't to trash the beach. I love the beach. But the ocean is in this category because I only go in it because it's the best option available. Put a huge delicious swimming pool on the beach next to the shore and I'll be done with the ocean.

This is one of those things that d-bags are gonna get all mad at me about, and be like, "I love the ocean. How could you like a pool more than the ocean??" An opinion only a d-bag would have.

Company: Kaplan
Personality: Greedy; irresponsible
Intelligence: High
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Hateful
Grade: F+

Comments: Kaplan sucks a lot. They get a high intelligence grade because they figured out how to go from an SAT tutoring company to a $2 billion, world-dominating private education company. Very impressive. Fine.

But they are one of the laziest companies around. I'll spare you the full rant because I've gotten into it on this blog before (number nine), but any company that publishes SAT books that students rely on and is too cheap to pay for decent editing can't crack the D- ceiling.

Company: All IT Companies and Web Programmers
Personality: Liars
Intelligence: Moderate-high
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: High
My general mood when interacting with them: Irate
Logo: I found it online and it seemed fitting for this
Grade: F

Comments: I've had a wealth of horrid experiences with web programming companies. They never do things on time, they lie about how long everything took in order to over-bill, and they mislead you on the price at the beginning in order to get you in the door. They're slime. Period. I also gave them a high creepiness rating, because I picture web-guys working in some basement in their underwear with porn aplenty.

Company: All Bars
Personality: D-baggish; thuggish
Intelligence: Moderate
Dickishness: Through-the-roof
Creepiness: Moderate
My general mood when interacting with them: Happy (drunk)
Grade: C-

Comments: The reason they get a C- and not an F is that their lying, bullying, and complete d-baggery actually works. The tougher it is to get in, the longer the line outside, the meaner the bouncer, the bitchier the bartender—the better they seem to do. So it's hard to criticize their methods that much.

But that doesn't stop me from hating them. Just looking at this picture makes me angry.

I also gave them a moderate creepy rating because I feel like a lot of bars (and especially clubs) have dirty, sneaky, corrupt things going on in their funding and in their relationships with promoters and cops.

I want them all to fail.

Company: The Sun
Personality: All up in everyone's grill
Intelligence: Low
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: Low
My general mood when interacting with them: Trying to give it the cold shoulder but it doesn't care
Grade: D

Comments: The sun is our collective abusive husband. And we know and the sun knows that we have no choice but to stick with him despite how he mistreats us, because without him we'll die. The sun has no regard whatsoever for other people's schedules. I go to bed late—does the sun give a shit? No. The sun has woken me up thousands of times in my life before I'm ready. We've all gotten countless sunburns. The sun's terrible for our eyes. I bet you even feel like looking at this picture is bad for your eyes, right? Look right at the picture—you feel like it hurts your eyes, right? Well it doesn't. Cover up the yellow part with your hands and you'll see that it's just white screen like this page's background. But you're so used to the sun's abuse that you assumed that even a picture of the sun would hurt you.

I gave the sun a low intelligence rating too. Scientists say that the sun will run out of energy and burn out in about 5 billion years. With no plan beyond that. What a brilliant long-term strategy.

Company: McDonalds
Personality: Disgusting; Heavenly
Intelligence: High
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: High
My general mood when interacting with them: Starving; vulnerable
Grade: B+/F

Comments: McDonalds is incredibly evil and I hate it. It's the most disgusting thing you can put in your body. And it's orgasmically delicious. I would prefer to never enter a McDonalds again, but there are times I simply have no choice. For example, I'm currently on the Bolt Bus from Boston to New York. And we're currently stopped at a McDonalds because all Bolt Busses stop at McDonalds. And I'm currently eating McDonalds fries. Not my choice at all, and I'm unhappy it's happening.

Company: The IRS
Personality: Faceless and mean
Intelligence: High enough to make me scared of them
Dickishness: High
Creepiness: Moderate
My general mood when interacting with them: Resigned and powerless
Grade: B

Comments: They get a decent grade because they're actually pretty good at what they do. Beyond that, there's nothing whatsoever to say about them. I have no idea why I included them in this list.

Company: Chinatown
Personality: Chinese
Intelligence: Unclear
Dickishness: Unclear; high
Creepiness: Through the roof
My general mood when interacting with them: Starving; invisible
Grade: Unclear

Comments: I never had to interact with Chinatown much before moving to New York. But now I walk to work everyday, and my walk takes me right through Chinatown. And Chinatown is weird. On one hand, there is an overriding upsetting smell, and the storefronts creep me out, and everyone is incredibly unfriendly. But on the other hand, I also feel like I'm wearing an invisibility cloak every time I pass through Chinatown. No one ever looks at me or makes eye contact with me, and if I stop at a storefront to try and buy something, no one addresses me or hears me when I say things so I can't buy what I want.

Company: Hot Russian girls in bars
Personality: Ice cold; mean
Intelligence: Unclear
Dickishness: As high as this category can go
Creepiness: Moderate
My general mood when interacting with them: Longing; hateful
Grade: F

Comments: I have a history with hot Russian girls in bars and I haven't come out on the winning side of that history. It all started when I was with friends in Hurghada, Egypt, and there were hot Russian girls everywhere, and they all despised me, and when I finally tried to talk to one, it went like this:

Me: Hi.
Her: BYE.

Since then, I've made several further similar attempts, and they've all turned out similarly.

Company: MySpace
Personality: A chaotic crack den
Intelligence: As low as this category can go
Dickishness: Too busy with ads and spam to be dickish
Creepiness: As high as this category can go
My general mood when interacting with them: Creeped out; confused; disgusted
Grade: F-

Comments: Ah, MySpace. The worst of the worst. Every criticism I made of Facebook pales in comparison to MySpace's follies. MySpace was the powerhouse of the social networking world—and with intelligent management, it could have been what Facebook currently is. It could have dominated social networking. It could have dominated the online dating world. @myspace.com could have been the most common email address.

That's what could have happened if MySpace had been run by really smart people. It had the users. Instead, MySpace devolved into a flashing ad-filled, spam-ridden, non-usable creepfest and has now become completely irrelevant. Nice work.

Category 3 Honorable Mentions: MTA, all real estate brokers, LAPD, Verizon, AT&T, the DMV, Kazakhstan

21 Musings

2010-04-12T13:46:00.001-04:00

Time to get my muse on.

Dick York looks exactly like a man whose name would be Dick York. Dick York played the anal-retentive husband on the original Bewitched, one of the many shitty TV shows I spent most of my youth watching. When the credits rolled, it always struck me how "right on" the name Dick York was for that actor. See?

I've fallen deeper into confusion regarding gypsies. In this post, I lamented about my inability to understand what a gypsy is. Well a few days ago, a girl from Romania mentioned to me that she knew a lot about what a gypsy is. I jumped on the opportunity and asked her to tell me what a gypsy is, and she launched into a 15 minute monologue, during which she touched on Romania, Brazil, India, education in Romania, skin color, autobody shops, class warfare in Romania, fair trade, nomadic life, racism, and various translations of the word 'gypsy'—and I ended up far more confused than I had been before. I have absolutely no idea what a gypsy is. The main thing I was thinking the whole time was the girl who was explaining all this kind of seemed like a gypsy to me, because she seemed kind of mystical.

There was one interesting tidbit in the monologue—Romanians had originally believed that gypsies came from Egypt. Hence the term.

If there's one silver lining to the American Idol Tim Urban ruining my life, it's that it's been fun weirding out obsessed teenage girls. So there's this small but fiercely loyal group of 13 to 15-year-old girls who are positive that I'm on American Idol. They stalk me on Twitter, on Facebook, and some have even emailed me through my website. They continue to be positive that I'm on Idol, despite the fact that there's a picture of me on the front page of all three of these sites. Yes, they're a dimwitted bunch. One of them wrote me a message on Facebook this week and spelled her name three different ways in the message.

So the question is this: Are American teenage girls just generally an exceptionally dumb group of people, or does the fact that I only hear from the ones who can't figure out that I'm not who they're looking for create a dumbly-skewed sample?

I don't know the answer. But I've done what any reasonable person would do in this situation—I've gotten weird. I responded to one obsessed girl, who asked why I was so gorgeous, with, "The vikings are a robust people." To another with a similar question, I responded, "Good Jewish genes." I've promised a number of them that I'd sing at their birthday parties—all they had to do was contact my agent after the show and let him know that I promised. One young lady who asked whether I had a girlfriend was left pondering this: "Oh, coward conscience. Oh, how you afflict me! But for the days of yore!" I told a Twitter follower that I had many children in many countries, and sent another a link to Darwin's Origin of Species, commenting that "this one warrants a prequel." To another, who asked what I was singing next week, I responded, "An inquisitive youngster! You rogue! You villain!" After a bunch of adoring Tweets one day, I came back with, "Immigrant lesbian magician."

The result is a contingent of Tim Urban's followers thinking, "He is really cute, but he's a little...weird..."

Along the same lines,

It's fun to weird out customer service people over IM. I'm pretty into getting customer service help over IM. When I go to a "Contact Us" page, my instinct is to go straight for the phone number, but I'm learning to go for the IM option instead. It's quicker, just as effective, and most importantly, it's a good chance to get weird. Plus, customer service people are often foreign, which adds to the comedy. For example, my DVR was broken the other day, so I got on IM with Time Warner, and ended up with a man named Aiman. After he solved my problem, I wrote, "Aiman you are a magic man!" to which he responded, "It surely has been my pleasure!" I came back with, "Aiman you devil!" and he responded with, "LOL! I am pleased that I could solve your issue!" I highly recommend this.

It's funny that Biden is Obama's problem. So say there's this woman you're kind of friends with who's always really crazy and annoying—you might say, "Well she's her husband's problem, so I don't have to really worry about her or deal with her issues." And so if she's being crazy or embarrassing in public somewhere, you can just enjoy it, because it's not your problem, it's her husband's problem. Or if a guy brings an out-of-town guest to a party and the guest doesn't know anyone, and the guy has to babysit the guest all night because otherwise the guest will have no one to talk to, you could say that the guest is that guy's problem. And if the guest gets too drunk and starts creeping everyone out, it's funny for everyone except the guy who brought the guest—it's not funny for him because the guest is his problem. You get it.

So the fact that Biden is Obama's problem is a constant source of amusement for me. And I don't have to get stressed about Biden saying dumb things and embarrassing the country, because I know that Obama is the one who has to worry—because Biden is his problem. Even Obama's staff enjoys Biden's screw-ups I'm sure—after all, he's not their problem.

It's that fact that makes videos like this incredibly funny.

Yesterday, a rough, tough, tattooed New Jersey guy carefully styled my hair. This is a regular occurrence. The barbers in the barbershop I've been going to could easily be the next cast of Jersey Shore. And every month, one of them spends 30 minutes carefully trying to make me look as handsome as possible. It's a weird part of my life. I spend most of the time I'm in there trying to seem cool. Yesterday, my barber was telling me about the bar he was "spinning" at last weekend and he was talking about house music and asked me if I liked house music, and I said yes, despite not knowing what house music is. Then he asked me what my favorite music is, and I said classic rock, despite my favorite music being the E.T. score.

This is apparently what my inner stress looks like.

This is news to me, too. But I came into my office one day last week and the woman I work with asked me about the face I had drawn on the board. I had no recollection of drawing the face and we determined that I must have done it after she left the night before, during which time I was on a stressful phone call. So it came entirely out of my subconscious, and this is apparently what my subconscious wanted to draw at that moment.

Pigeons are flying rats that we're okay with. Picture you're walking down the street in a foreign city, and you see rats scurrying around the sidewalk, picking at food bits on the street. You turn the corner—more rats. As you walk, you realize that rats are everywhere, and the people are for some reason okay with this. It doesn't repulse them—they barely even notice the rats. You'd think that was weird, right? You'd write to all your friends at home and tell them about how filthy and infested that city was.

Well that's what happens in New York, except the rats are pigeons. So this either means that we should all freak out about pigeons, or that we should all take it easy on hating rats. I don't care which, but one has to happen.

Painted Easter eggs are a tease. So during Easter week, I saw these everywhere:

I've always had the following problem with these: they look delicious. They look sweet and heavenly. But they're not. They're not delicious at all. They're just dumb hard-boiled eggs. They look like they should have a sugary outer shell with chocolate and caramel on the inside. And every time I see them, I have a jolt of excitement, followed by a sinking disappointment. I think the issue is that between chocolate Easter eggs and Cadbury Cream Eggs, the association between colorful eggs and succulence has been etched into my head. Speaking of which,

It's comical how much more fun Christian holidays are than Jewish holidays. Let's break this down. In December, Christians get Santa, candy canes, extended family, Christmas trees, piles of gifts, Christmas songs, Christmas lights, wreaths, hot cider, kindness, mistletoe, and ham or whatever the hell Christians eat. Jews? They get a multi-pronged candle holder that they light with their cranky weeknight immediate family after dinner, and then they get eight compensatory gifts.

How about in April? In April, Christian kids get an Easter egg hunt. They get to hunt for chocolate that a huge magic bunny hides around their house. Jews? Jews get Matzah. And a Seder, which is basically like sitting in class. But at least they get the Seder Plate! What's on the Seder plate? A Seder Plate includes—and as I tell you this list, I want you to keep the Easter egg hunt in your head—horseradish, parsley, salt water, an apple-coleslaw concoction, a hard-boiled egg, and an old dry piece of lamb.

And don't forget Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur's a fun one.

(This isn't to mention Sweet Sixteen parties versus Bar Mitzvahs, both of which include parties but only one of which comes along with memorizing a lengthy Hebrew passage.)

Men with fragile egos are funny. A perfect example happened recently when I was helping a friend who was selling something by running the credit card machine for him. A man and his girl were making a purchase and the guy handed me his card. When I tried to run it, it was declined. The man's ego did not like this, especially in front of the girl. I witnessed the ego enter a frantic battle for self-preservation. Upon hearing the news of his card being declined, he snapped, "Like hell it was! Try it again." I tried it again. Declined. "That's ridiculous!" he cried out, snatching the card and looking at it for answers. He inspected it closely. The tactic was, I assume, that if he's shocked and indignant enough, the girl will assume this is a fluke situation—most likely a technical problem on the credit card company's end.

So he handed me another card. I ran it. Declined.

Uh oh.

"Christ!" he bellowed. "There must be something wrong with your machine!" I knew there wasn't anything wrong with the machine, but I was really enjoying this and wanted to drag it on as long as possible. I asked the next people in line to try purchasing their item with their card. I ran it. Accepted.

This threw the guy into a frenzy. He fumbled through his wallet furiously, looking for another card. Then the girl said, "I can try using my card..."

The guy almost turned the table over. "NO. We'll use my card, as soon as I figure out what the technical issue is!" He proceeded to get on his phone and raised some hell for awhile, finger in one ear, pacing back and forth furiously. They ended up leaving without the item.

The whole thing was a really special experience for me.

Next time you're with a guy whose credit card is declined, you can get a decent read on his level of internal security by watching his reaction.

I'm not sure what the deal is with Kirstie Alley or why her fatness is apparently compelling. So I had always thought of Kirstie Alley as one of those Andie MacDowell actresses—those late-30's actresses who are really recognizable because they're in a lot of movies but they're also kind of really unfamous and a lot of people don't even know their name (others in this group are Catherine Keener and Toni Collette). And then Kirstie Alley did that fat show, and I was like, "Okay, whatever." But then, today, I saw a billboard advertising what seems to be another Kirstie Alley fat show. Really? An Andie MacDowell actress gets fat in her 50s and this is compelling enough for two shows?

I once had a one-on-one conversation with Vincent Pastore while in my underwear in my bed with the lights off. This statement is true. I was in a restaurant with a friend the other day and they had celebrity pictures on the wall and one of them was of Vincent Pastore, which presented me with the opportunity to point at him, and say the above statement to my friend.

The explanation, which I suppose is warranted, is as follows. When the first Celebrity Apprentice aired, a website hired me to interview the fired contestants the day after they were fired off of the show. So when Vincent Pastore got fired, I was scheduled to call him for the interview the next day at 8am. And I'll be damned if I'm gonna be out of bed at 8am. So I called him in the pitch black in my bedroom and used a dictator to record the interview. (See? It's not as funny once you hear the explanation. You should have left it with the original statement.)

A similarly shocking statement can be made by my dad, after he went scuba diving once. He was with a group of tourists and a guide, and among the other tourists was a man from China who spoke very little English. The protocol was for each person to shimmy down a rope to the ocean floor, one at a time, and stand in a single file line at the bottom, holding hands with the adjacent two people. So the Chinese guy went first, and my dad went second, and then they had a technical issue on the boat. So there was a really long delay while they worked on it on the boat. Meanwhile, my dad and the Chinese guy are down there holding hands. This now allows my dad to truthfully say, "One time, I spent 30 minutes standing on the ocean floor, 40 feet beneath the surface, holding hands with a Chinese man." How many people can say that?

It's weird that 23-month-olds are one. When's the last time you hung out with a 23-month-old? I hung out with one recently, and it was really weird, because we were hanging out, chatting, playing some game—and then it hit me that he was one. Think about that. Right before kids turn two, they're kind of old enough to hang out and interact and do shit—but they're also one, which is just a ridiculous age to be. I was hanging out with this kid and I was like, "So you're one, huh?" And he was like, "Yeah, weird, right?" And I was like, "It's so weird that two-year-olds are double your age," and he was like, "Totes."

I dug up some key examples to illustrate this point. Check out this one-year-old just doing his thing. That kid is no baby—he's a legit dude. But he's also one.

Here's a one-year-old who is much better at pool than I am. Here's another.

This one-year-old is doing his thing on his iPhone.

I feel like you could have a legitimately fun party with only one-year-olds.

I'm gonna get an iPad. I stopped into an Apple store this weekend and played with one for awhile. It's pretty wonderful. While it definitely cannot replace my laptop yet, it will replace my laptop for about half of the things I do on my laptop. And the iPad will make doing all those things easier and more fun than they ever had been on a laptop. For the other half, I'll keep using my laptop. Seems like a decent buy, right?

Does anyone need an iPad? No. But people spend money on a lot of things they don't need, in the name of fun, excess, and convenience. So the hell with it.

It's funny that girls hate the word booby. We all know girls hate the word moist. But I just learned recently of their aversion to the word booby (or boobies). This is intensely funny.

The Pakistani guy who works on my floor pees sitting down. So I've met this guy a couple times. He's from Pakistan, he works the hedge fund down the hall, he has thick black hair which he slicks straight back, and he pees sitting down. The first month, I ran into him in the bathroom several times, and every time, he would go into the stall. This was curious. Then one day, I was changing my pants at the end of work so my stay in the bathroom was longer than usual, and I ended up witnessing the whole routine—he entered the bathroom, went into the stall, peed sitting down, and left. Now when I see him in the hall, it's awkward—because he knows I know. And I know he knows I know. Even worse, he knows that I know he knows I know. And now you know too. Speaking of the bathroom,

Nothing is funnier than the scene in the men's public bathroom where guys want to fix their hair in the mirror but they have to do it in like three seconds and then get the hell out because it's so embarrassing. It's a pure joy to witness this. The best is walking into the bathroom and seeing a guy in there alone who was clearly working on his hair in front of the mirror and as soon as you walk in, he jolts and walks out.

It would suck to be Bill Buckner. I was watching a commercial the other day and part of the commercial was a clip of the ball going through Buckner's legs. I pictured him, somewhere out there, watching TV, seeing that commercial, and being like, "Oh come on!"

We all partake in a lot of social skits. When you want to enter into a conversation with a stranger, or even often a friend, society demands that you partake in a pre-planned skit together first. Like if you call customer service for something, before you ask your question, this happens:

"Hey, how's it going?"
"Good. How are you?"
"I'm good, thanks for asking."

Then you're allowed to ask your question. No actual information is exchanged in the skit. It's just a pre-planned dialogue ritual. A person can be mired in a deep well of hopelessness and depression, and they'll still answer "good" to the above questions. Just like a person can be jam-packed with things going on, and they'll still answer, "nothing" to the question, "What's going on?" It's pretty dumb. Maybe we should all stop.

I've dedicated whole posts to the social rulebook twice before (here and here), so I'll leave this one at that.

I was recently disappointed that no one stole my car. Odd, right? Here's what happened. So the other day, I came out of a restaurant to see that my car had been stolen. I was unhappy about this, but then I realized that my laptop, with all of my important work stuff on it, was in the car and was also gone. Devastating. Then I thought about it more and realized that no!—I had left my laptop in the office that day! It wasn't in my car—hallelujah! I was elated.

Then I woke up. As it began to hit me that it was all a dream, I felt that sinking feeling you get when you wake up and realize that the elation is not real. But I thought about it—I was upset that my car wasn't really stolen, because it meant that my laptop wasn't not stolen with the car, which had really made me happy. I was in the shower a few minutes later, and still felt a little disappointed, and tried to shake myself out of it, since it was a good thing that neither my car nor laptop had been stolen, but it was of little consolation.

Wearing Yellow in Winter

2010-03-24T23:45:00.007-04:00

My sister Lindsay* was in town recently. Whenever she visits, she does her best to help me—to save me from myself—during her brief stay. This time, the most dire situation was in my closet, so we headed clothes shopping to beef up my stale wardrobe. Though she's five years my junior, upon entering the clothing stores, we seamlessly assumed our familiar shopping roles as mature adult woman and bitchy eight-year-old boy. We embarked upon our journey through Tim's personal hell, buying some shirts and a pair of jeans, and overall, everything went smoothly. All set for the next 12 months.

But after the whole ordeal, she said something that threw me for a loop. One of the shirts we bought is a yellow button-down shirt. As I was hanging it up back in my apartment, she mentioned, "You know you can only wear that in the summer, right?"

Wait, what?

"That's a summer shirt—it's yellow—you can only wear that in the warm months."

Oh for god's sake. The world of clothing is already mind-boggling enough, and now I have to think about which shirts are in season??

A few days later, I mentioned this new disturbing fact to my friend Eve, and she was extremely mean to me about it.

"Yeah, obviously—you don't know that you can't wear a yellow shirt in the winter?"

She rolled her eyes.

This is totally new information for me. I have never heard of this before. So I started asking her more questions about which colors are ripe when, and she continued to be abusive.

I defended myself, suggesting that most guys probably weren't aware of this, and she was all like, "No, everyone knows this."

So there we have it. Apparently there are "seasonal" "colors." (Those are air quotes.)

In any case, the good news for me was that I was about to head to LA for the week, where it's always summer.

And indeed, that's where I spent my last 10 days—my first time returning to LA since leaving six months ago.

It's really funny getting used to New York for awhile and then heading back to LA. Once you accept New York as the real world, LA seems like some absurdly calm, pleasant little island in the sky. It was pretty jarring. The best thing I can compare the transition to is that scene in Roger Rabbit when that grumpy main character guy is in his car and driving in his mean, cold city, and then goes through that tunnel and suddenly he's in cartoon land and all the trees are singing and the sun is smiling and shit. That's what going from New York to LA feels like to me.

Anyway, it was good to see LA. The breakup was mutual six months ago, we've both moved on, and it was nice to see that we can be pleasant friends moving forward. And though I have no regrets about my decision—I'm happy with my new chick (that cold, witty little bitch)—it was a little painful to be reminded of how hot LA is. I don't think she dipped below 80 degrees the whole week. I wasn't outside much, but even minimal exposure to the sun after six months in the dark has left me with a slight tan. Like, 15% of a tan. But everyone is so incredibly pale in New York by late March that now, back in New York, everyone's looking at me like I'm Fabio.

Speaking of whom, I have no idea who Fabio is. Like, who the hell is Fabio? And what does he do? The only thing I know about him is that he has long hair. I think he also has a large penis. Right? Is that a real rumor, or is that just something that I assumed is a rumor? But like, is he a model? A porn star? A lion tamer? I'm unclear about Fabio.

And now I forget where I was heading with the first part of this post. The Fabio thing has completely thrown me off.

I'll try to gather myself and continue.

Okay so anyway, I rode JetBlue (obv) on the way back from LA, and I watched delicious basketball on the plane. The lowlight of the flight occurred when I was flipping around during commercials and came across what I think was Pirates of the Caribbean. So there's Orlando Bloom, and he's walking cautiously through some old shack—and then suddenly this goblin or something jumps out at him—which caused me to jolt in my seat like an idiot.

You know when you're startled in a movie and you jolt? It's not that big a deal because other people are jolting, and even if they're not, they understand why you did (some people are more susceptible to jolting than others—my father jumps six feet every time his phone vibrates in his pocket). But on a JetBlue flight, jolting is very, very embarrassing. As soon as it happened, I had that moment like, "Did...did anyone notice?" And out of the corner of my eye, it was clear that both of the people sitting in my row were looking at me. "Play it cool," I thought to myself, and I did an intentional smaller jolt as if I had to straighten my pants out and the only way to do that would be to do a second jolt like the first jolt I had just done a second ago when I was beginning the process of straightening my pants out.

And it just got worse from there. Normally, Winston picks me up at the airport, but he had an art class that afternoon, so I was on my own upon arrival. And after checking my bank statements recently and seeing a hideous $700 worth of cab rides in the last six months, I placed a spending freeze on cab use. So I spent 45 minutes heading from the gate to the terminal to the airtrain, took the airtrain to the subway, and waited for the subway to arrive before realizing I had forgotten to get my checked luggage at the airport. It nearly broke me. It's quite a moment, standing there, as it soaks in that in 90 minutes you'll be standing back at that exact spot after having gone back to get the bag.

The one solace was that clearly you were gonna end up hearing about it.

Incidentally, this is one of those posts where I'm not really sure what's happening. Like, was that one long intro into one of my lists? Or is that the whole post? I'm not really sure. I keep looking around for someone to ask, but the only people nearby seem to be having sex in the apartment above mine, and it would be pretty weird if I went up there, knocked on the door until they finally stopped having sex and came to the door, only so I could ask them what the hell was going on in the blog post I was writing in the apartment below theirs. No, that's not a good plan at all.

And you're all useless, as usual. The whole above paragraph was a cry for help and all of you are just sitting there silently. All the shit I do for you, and in a moment when I really need help—silence.

So what I think is gonna happen now is what often happens when I have some more stuff to say but I'm not really sure what's going on in the post I'm writing. When all else fails, there are always "thoughts."

Some thoughts:

- I was talking to my father the other day, and we got talking about an old friend of mine who lives in Boston, which caused my dad to say, "When you're back in town, you should look him up." This warranted abuse. What is this, the seventies? I should look him up? I made him feel very bad about himself for saying this.

- I asked for directions a few days ago on the street, except the person I asked seemed very unsure of herself and she was pretty icky and untrustworthy-seeming, and while she was telling me where she thought I should go, I decided that whatever she was saying, it was likely to be wrong. So I walked away in a different direction than she had pointed me. It was uncomfortable for both of us. It's a special and unique awkwardness—ignoring the directions someone just gave you because you're pretty sure they're wrong. It's like when you ask the waiter for a suggestion and he makes a suggestion and then you order something else, which is basically saying, "I don't trust your judgment."

- I watched the second season of Lost. It was pretty addictive, kind of scary, and I enjoyed it. Then I stopped watching it—and have had to endure like seven years of people talking about Lost since. Nothing is more annoying than hearing continuously about a show you don't watch. This is half the reason I watch American Idol (the other half is to watch my identity die a slow, slow death). I can't even imagine how irritating the Jersey Shore phenomenon must have been for everyone who didn't watch it. Back to Lost—didn't the show end already? Or am I making that up? I really thought the show ended like four times already. Is this the last season? Please?

- A show I most certainly will watch is Life.

- Why is it okay to type a four-paragraph email to someone but weird to leave someone a four minute voicemail? If you want to catch up with someone you haven't spoken to in awhile, it's totally okay to send them a long email. But this is annoying—typing a long email takes a long time. Who wants to type out all their thoughts? On the other hand, a long voicemail is easy, it can be done while on the go (and listened to on the go), and it's much more personable. But other than a few select people in my life who have accepted that long voicemails from me are going to be a part of their existence, if I leave a four-minute voicemail for someone, they're going to think it's weird. You should be able to dial a number that is just for a friend's voicemail and leave them as long a message as you want. Why is this not something that happens?

- Watching March Madness, one thing always strikes me—a lot of college basketball coaches seem like very bad, bad men. Like Bo Ryan (Wisconsin). And Frank Martin (Kansas State).

- While we're here, filling out brackets and entering a pool is stupid and pointless. You follow all your first round and second round games and you're all happy when things are going well—and none of it matters. All that matters is getting the Final Four right or close to right and picking the winner. It's a bad format. Two much better ways to do it are drafts (2-4 people pick teams in a snake draft and wins in each round are worth more points as you go; person with the most points wins), and auctions (everyone starts with 100 fake dollars and you go through all 64 teams one at a time and people bid for each of them—at the end everyone has a 3-10 team squad and the squad with the most total wins takes it).

- Further, what's with the round two TV schedule? There are eight games Saturday and eight Sunday—but instead of putting two on at a time for eight straight hours of games each day, they start with one game, then they put four on at once, then three on at once. This happens every year in the second round. What could be the reasoning behind this?

- Who knew that the Big Ten logo had a huge 11 right in the middle of it? (Because there are 11 teams in the Big Ten.)

- And then there are commercials. I never watch commercials anymore because of DVR—the one exception is big sporting events. So during the Olympics, or the MLB playoffs, or March Madness, I'll suddenly become upsettingly familiar with the same 12 ads that appear the whole time. (This has to apply to a lot of people, which would make me think that commercials during sports must be way more expensive than commercials during TV shows—right?) A few comments on March Madness commercials:

As usual, the UPS Whiteboard commercials are intensely clever and aesthetically pleasing, and the guy is as rad as ever. I stop whatever I'm doing when one comes on.
Old Spice has managed to accomplish a rare feat—hiring an ad team that's actually funny.
The Lexus hybrid commercial about their "head start" kind of gives me the chills.
That horrid Stephen Baldwin airplane commercial makes me furious, because it means that he's making money. I really hate that guy.
The phone commercial with all the autotuned voices is the most annoying commercial that has ever been made.
Ad agencies are locked in some pretty tight social boxes. If there are 10 commercials about planning for retirement involving a white guy and a black guy, in 10 out of 10 the black guy will be the one with his shit together and the white guy will be the bozo who hasn't planned ahead.

*It's funny bringing Lindsay into my posts. Because I know that somewhere out there, in the next few days, Lindsay will end up reading this post, and upon seeing her name in the first sentence, will gasp and read on, petrified about what's to come. The good news is that me embarrassing her in this blog is kind of her problem and not mine.

11 Thursday Items

2010-03-04T15:51:00.004-05:00

Emerging for a moment from the flood of adoring Tweets and Facebook messages from infatuated girls who seem to think that I'm on a singing show, I'd like to discuss 11 items I feel you should know about:

1) I enjoyed the Olympics. I just like the concept of people working their whole lives for this one all-important moment, all so I can sit on the couch in sweatpants, eating Wheat Thins, and half paying attention to them. Sitting around lazily is always a little more fun when someone on the TV is undergoing severe stress and strenuous physical activity. The fact that they're also outside in the freezing cold is icing on the cake. This is the same exact reason watching football on Thanksgiving and New Years Day is fun. Some further Olympic thoughts:

Watching figure skaters fall lands me in a classic dilemma. On one hand, theatrical and sassy skaters wiping out and ruining their dreams is very funny. On the other hand, part of me feels bad for them, and watching post-fall skaters finish their program is depressing. It's a tough one to figure out. The only easy one is Evgeni Plushenko, who's a pure joy to root against.
My favorite event to watch is short-track speed skating. I find it completely captivating. And Apolo Ohno is one of my favorite athletes. (He should have nine.)
The snowboarding half-pipe event is really fun to watch. Shaun White and I have a complicated relationship. Every time I lay eyes on him, I have immediate disdain for him, and then I listen to him in an interview and like him, and then he snowboards and completely wins me over. Then I forget all that and see him on a magazine cover a few days later and have total disdain for him.
There are few activities that seem more miserable than partaking in a 30k cross-country ski race.
I was really happy that that fat American frat-dude led his team to the bobsledding gold, but this is one of many events that's boring to watch. Why? Because all the sleds look the same when they're going, and you just sit there and wait to see their final time. Long-track speed skating and skiing present the same problem for me. That's why I love short-track so much—they're all battling each other simultaneously.
I was ridiculously excited about the men's hockey gold medal final, but I was out and couldn't see it live. I Tivo'd (Tivoed?) it and was incredibly careful not to talk to anyone who had watched it. I didn't get near ESPN.com. I told my friends not to text me about it. Then, minutes before getting back to my apartment and watching it, my CNN iPhone app sent me a "breaking news alert" text message telling me the final score. Thanks CNN!
One nice thing about the Winter Olympics is that it fills the Superbowl-to-March Madness sports void really nicely. The gap is only two weeks long this year.

2) When I have an extended conversation with someone who has an accent, I start inadvertently speaking to them with a bit of an accent myself. I don't know why. And when they also have shaky English grammar, I'll start incorrectly using grammar too. Like, I'll ask a foreign person if the dishes in the dishwasher are clean or dirty, and instead of saying, "Are these clean or dirty?" I'll say, "These are washed?" Why do I do this?

3) When the cashier hands me change that includes pennies, I usually leave the pennies on the counter. If I'm feeling ballsy I'll throw them in the trash. Both options are better than the two alternatives: insulting the cashier by putting pennies in the tip jar or putting them in your pocket and having to deal with pennies later.

4) A couple more things that people say are gross that really aren't:

Going to a public bathroom barefoot. Bear with me here. So in Case 1, you get someone's urine on your foot. Granted, this isn't optimal. But when do you ever touch the soles of your feet? And when you take a shower, it's gone—right? In Case 2, you get urine on your shoe. You touch your shoe a lot, every time you put it on and take it off. And you never wash your shoes. So the urine is now a part of your life. So I guess I'm not really saying that it's not gross to go to the bathroom barefoot—I'm saying it's less gross than going with shoes on.
The other day, I took a tea bag out of my tea cup and threw it in the trash. Then I drank my tea. Then I wanted more tea. But I had used the last bag. So I reached in the trash and reused the tea bag. People gasped. But what the hell? What's so gross about the trash? Did someone poop in the trash? No. Were there used needles in the trash? No. All that was in the trash was some paper that I had thrown in there myself (recycling is hard). So I took the bag off of a piece of paper. Not gross.

People need to straighten out the rules of what's gross and what isn't. They're off right now.

5) When I got off the subway the other day, this old lady in front of me took 200 years to exit. As a result, when I finally got out the doors were closing. I managed to slip out, but I was holding my laptop bag in my hand and the doors closed on the handle of my bag with most of the bag still inside. So I'm outside the subway, my laptop's inside, and my hand is clutching the bag's handle. A chaotic scene ensued, during which a guy inside the subway joined me in frantically trying the wrest the doors open. On my outside, I was furiously trying to open the subway doors. On my inside, I was sighing, amused by my life. Eventually, the doors opened.

6) When it comes to shopping for groceries and cooking them, I'm one of the laziest people that exist. The process that starts with me thinking, "I need to go to the grocery store," and ends with all the groceries bought and put away in my apartment is incredibly long and arduous. And while things like junk food and pasta are pretty easy to cook, healthy food like vegetables and meat are confusing and difficult. Like, vegetables in bags in the fridge are very far away from being on a plate ready to eat. You have to do hard, complicated things like steaming them and sauteing them and cutting them. So what normally happens is I buy all of this d-bag produce at the grocery store, and then every time I'm hungry, I elect to make pasta or eat junk food or order out over trying to conquer the healthy food, and then after a few days I start to worry that the healthy food may have begun to perish, and without knowing whether it actually did or didn't, I'll throw it away.

But two things have happened recently that have changed everything.

First, I began using FreshDirect.com, the greatest service in the world, so now I don't have to go grocery shopping anymore. I was so excited when my first delivery arrived that I couldn't help but give the delivery guy my sexy eyes, which in turn left him with the willies.

Second, I bought a Vita-Mix, a ridiculously powerful, mannish blender, because my friend is a Vita-Mix salesman and I heard his sales pitch one too many times. Now, when I see daunting vegetables in bags in the fridge, I just pile them into the blender, throw in like 17 random condiments and spices, and three minutes later I'm eating delicious salsa and the kitchen is clean. When I see fruit, I just throw it in, stems, seeds and all, and I end up with a smoothie. If I put vegetables in and leave the blender going for a five minutes, I end up with soup (which is steaming hot at that point because the blades go so fast). Something like making hummus would normally be completely bewildering and impenetrable, but last week, I just clicked the hummus ingredients when ordering from FreshDirect, and I actually ended up making hummus.

Life changing.

But it's not all roses. I talked this machine up the other night to my friend and then brought him to the house where I made him ice cream, one of the Vita-Mix's best tricks (that's right, I brought my male friend to my apartment for a homemade ice cream party), except I got cocky and forgot multiple key ingredients and it was inedible.

Further, now that it's getting warmer, I'm starting to walk home from work, which takes me through Chinatown, which leaves me with no option but to buy Chinese food, which means that none of the above is relevant and I'm going to have a blood-MSG level of .2 until next winter when I start taking the subway again.

7) This is great news. Why only for the playoffs?

8) I decided I was smarter than everyone else at the bar the other night and instead of dealing with the coat check line, I left my coat in the corner of a booth. Yes, it was quite the trick. Then at the end of the night everyone got in line again to get their coats and mine was stolen. Earlier that day, someone stole my sandwich from the office fridge.

9) My friend Melissa told me a couple years ago that she and a friend were writing and starring in a web series called Let's Get Laid about two girls in their early twenties and their various dating debacles. Sounded like a good idea. She said they were basing the stories on their real-life dating debacles—which was upsetting because she was dating me at the time. In any case, they actually made it happen—the most recent episode is here. It's very funny and I hope it ends up as a TV series at some point soon. (Note to struggling actors -- this is the way to get your career going. Create and produce something yourself, cast yourself as the lead, and broadcast it on the internet. It's way more effective than clawing for parts in auditions.)

10) My grandparents just had their 67th anniversary. They started dating 69 years ago. Someone who was in the womb when they first started seeing each other is now beginning preparations for their 70th birthday bash. Marriage is a pretty important thing to get right, huh?

11) When so many things that are supposed to be funny aren't, it's nice that The Onion always delivers.

A Dark Week

2010-02-21T22:07:00.010-05:00

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a potential personal catastrophe that was lurking on the set of American Idol.

Then, this past Wednesday afternoon, a reader of this blog emailed me this link, commenting, “You’re safe!”

I clicked the link. 24 names. No Tim Urban.

YES.

I had done it. I had thwarted the coup. I would not be “The Other Tim Urban” for the rest of my life. The hordes of middle school girls would disappear from my inbox. It was the greatest threat to my name yet and I had survived.

I was safe.

I scanned over the list a few times to make absolutely sure there was no “Tim Urban” on it, leaned back and released a deep sigh of relief.

Suddenly, it all seemed silly. Only 12 guys make it – so really, what were the chances? I had gotten my panties all up in a bunch over mere speculation. I chuckled to myself, satisfied. “You’ve still got it, Tim. You’re still the best Tim Urban around.”

That night, I flipped on the TV. Suddenly, American Idol would be fun to watch again. In fact, I was looking forward to watching Tim Urban be told by the judges that he didn’t make it. “Sorry, Tim,” they’d say, “there’s only room for one Tim Urban in the F-list celebrity world. Sorry, but you’re not going through.” And he’d get up, dejected, having been put squarely back in his place. He’d walk that long walk—away from the judges, out of the building, and back into anonymity. Yes, this was gonna be fun.

So the episode began, and they started filling up those final Top 24 slots. We hit the halfway point. No Tim yet. The 45-minute mark. Tim’s fate was yet to be announced. “I guess they’re saving him for the end,” I thought, calmly.

And then something happened.

They showed one of those quick montages of 3 or 4 people getting the “You’ve made it” from the judges—

I froze. Tim Urban’s face had appeared in this montage, smiling.

I rewound the Tivo. Again, there he was in the “You’ve made it” montage.

Smiling.

I spit out my drink.

I raced to my laptop and googled “Idol Top 24 2010” and I found this. I stared at the screen in horror.

I closed my laptop. I stood completely still. I took a deep, slow breath in. I puffed out my chest, tilted my head back, reached my arms out, palms up to the sky, and let out a long, slow, tortured bellow.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

For your reference, it was the identical reaction to the one Jafar had when the Cave of Wonders swallowed up Aladdin and Abu and he suddenly realized that Abu had stolen the lamp.

The next phase was one of “freaking out.” I raced through options in my head. You can move. You can move to Western China. No one watches American Idol in Western China. Or—or, you can kill him. You can find a hit man and it’ll be an anonymous job. You can find a hit man on Craigslist maybe. Or you—or you can change your name. You were Timmy when you were seven. Maybe you can be Timmy again. Or you can force him to be Timmy. Through blackmail. And kidnapping. You can jump off this balcony. That’ll make headlines, right?

This went on for about 10 minutes.

The third phase involved a personal pep talk. Tim, relaxxxx. It’s just a TV show. And so what if the ratings have consistently hit 30,000,000 a week for the first eight seasons? Who says the ratings won’t suddenly be dismal this year? Maybe they’ll be so dismal that the show will be pulled by Fox mid-season. See? There’s nothing to worry about. The show won’t last all of five episodes before they cancel it for its dismal, pathetic ratings.

In Phase Four, I bathed in a deep well of “panicking about the worst case scenario.” I envisioned Tim Urban not only winning the show, but becoming a Kelly Clarkson / Carrie Underwood-level megastar. This phase quickly ended up back in Western China, and migrated from there to the Stans, where I began rehashing through old memories, trying to envision what kind of life I could carve out for myself after my inevitable move there. I thought wistfully about my future as a Kyrgysh shepherd and wondered if it would be hard for me to slaughter my sheep after spending much time with them out on the hills.

I was in a dark place.

Nice work, Chris Golightly.

Finally, I reached Phase Five: Acceptance.

You win, Tim Urban.

You have defeated me. Broken me.

Just let me beg of you this—please, please, do not become a household name. You won the Google war (it’s currently a hostile takeover, and I will be vanquished entirely in a few days time). You’re younger. You have thick, flowing hair. You sing like a little angel. Your show gets four times the ratings that mine did. You’re current, I’m a has-been.

You win.

Just please be merciful. Don’t become a household name.

Look at me, Tim Urban. I’m not fighting anymore. I’m washed up. I’m an F-list celebrity. Even my mom doesn’t recognize me on the street anymore. I’m not going to hurt you.

So just please be merciful.

An Impending Disaster

2010-02-09T21:56:00.006-05:00

I was in my office today when I got a Facebook message from someone I don't know.

"u r soo hot!!!"

Well, then. Upon visiting Facebook, the mystery admirer was a girl of about 15. Odd.

A few minutes later, another Facebook friend request. This girl seemed to be about 13.

Then another. And another. Puzzling.

Sometimes my season of The Apprentice will air in a new country -- Norway, the Phillippines, Brazil -- and I'll get Facebook friend requests from that country for awhile.

But this was weird. Was it possible that The Apprentice was airing in a nation full of American teenage girls? I was perplexed.

Then, a few hours later, I flipped on the TV and watched American Idol on my DVR. After all, it's Hollywood Week.

And that's when I saw him.

Tim Urban -- one of The Others -- singing his little heart out there on the screen.

I spit out my drink.

Now you might recall my long-standing obsession with The Others -- those 50 or so other Tim Urban's out there.

I don't like them.

And I was always irked when they had the nerve to appear in "Tim Urban" google searches. I used to have to scan for a few pages to find anything about myself, until I finally took action and spent a summer calling Donald Trump "Mr. Trump" to solve this problem. It was a long climb, but I have ascended to the top of the vast, majestic "Tim Urban in google search pages" world. I sit there upon my throne, basking in glory, being fed grapes by the other Tim Urban's.

Never getting over-confident, I've kept a close eye on the other Tim Urban's -- they're a frisky bunch. Especially that troublesome mayor of West Des Moines. I watch him very closely. Should his political career ascend to the national level, my reign will surely be short-lived. I have a seductive prostitute and a stealthy cameraman hired and ready if such an ambition were to cross his mind.

There have been clever outside threats from pairs of closely associated famous people. Tim Tebow and Urban Meyer. Tim McGraw and Keith Urban. You'd think these guys had better things to do than sit around all day brainstorming how to overtake me on google as a pair. In any case, I have thwarted their advances thus far.

And then, just as I'm getting comfortable, this little effing 20-year-old pops in out of nowhere with his guitar. Who the hell does Tim Urban think he is? Did he not get the memo? I'M THE KING OF THIS CASTLE, BITCH.

Sorry, I'm agitated.

Here's the key. He cannot make the Top 24. Should this happen, I'm doomed to be "the other Tim Urban" for the rest of my existence.

I emailed the whore and cameraman tonight to be poised for action.

We are under attack.

16 Superbowl Sunday Irrelevancies

2010-02-07T23:28:00.005-05:00

The problem with your team being the best is that for a bunch of years after that you can’t really enjoy things anymore. Up until 1996, Superbowls were incredibly exciting. What could be more fun than watching two titans clash in the biggest game of the year? My silly Patriots were never a factor of course, so for me, the playoffs were the time of year when all the good teams battled it out. Fun, right?

It was like the World Cup. This summer, the US might get out of their group, and maybe even win a game to make the quarter finals! But make the finals or win the whole thing? Not a chance. Sure, there will be some faint, secret little hope for a magical run while they’re still in, but when they inevitably get eliminated, it’ll be upsetting for a few hours and then it’ll be really exciting to watch all the real teams battle it out for the trophy. That was what the NFL used to be like.

But then came the ’96 Pats. They made a Cinderella run to the Superbowl, and they were within fighting distance of a victory until the third quarter, when Desmond Howard stabbed my eyeballs with a knife, or his penis, or something horrible—I forget the details.

And what followed that was something new for me as a football fan. Suddenly, in ’97, I didn’t just watch the Packers-Broncos Superbowl in boyish awe—I felt a little jealousy instead, like, “Whatever, I bet the Patriots could beat these teams if everyone was healthy.” This wasn’t overwhelming—the Pats were still kind of a silly team—but it was different than all the previous Superbowls.

Then the Pats became silly again and soon enough I was enjoying Superbowls once more.

But then came 2001. And 2003. And 2004. There was nothing silly about these Patriots. Forget being in awe of other Superbowl teams—after 2004, I got annoyed when people talked about any great team in history. The ’85 Bears? Whatever. The ’72 Dolphins? All I’d think was that the Belichick-Brady Pats would beat them. Talk of Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, and Johnny Unitas (let alone Peyton Manning) annoyed me, because I would take Brady over any of them.

After 2004, it was always personal. There was no awe whatsoever. Watching other good NFL teams play after the Patriots were eliminated was stupid and dumb and effing stupid.

So yeah. Superbowl Sunday!! Yay!!! [eye roll]

Anyway, the good news for you is that this will be the last time I bitch about sports until the Red Sox slowly peel my skin off in October.

And since I refuse to watch any pregame specials about Peyton Manning’s bullshit rise to bullshit stardom,* let’s get random now and discuss 16 irrelevant things I’ve been thinking about:

1) The last time I did laundry, I came up with the bright idea to put both loads from the wash into the same drier and just put the over-stuffed drier on for 65 minutes instead of 45. Now you can see my nipples through all of my t-shirts. This isn’t funny. It’s a huge disaster. I don’t just “buy t-shirts.” I collect t-shirts here and there over the years, and no matter what I’m wearing, winter or summer, there’s usually a t-shirt at the bottom of it. It’s not just that they all look ridiculous now—it’s also that I constantly feel claustrophobic. It’s like being used to boxers and then switching to briefs—not a fun transition. I immediately went back to the drier to press the Undo button, but I couldn't find it anywhere.

2) My thoughts on the iPad:

It’s succulent, of course, and I want one badly. But I’m trying to figure out exactly when I’ll use it. When I’m walking down the street or sitting in a waiting room or driving, the iPhone is ideal. When I’m in my office or apartment, my laptop is ideal. So what does that leave? There are two times I can think of in which the iPad will be perfect, where the iPhone and laptop have always been imperfect:

When what you primarily need to do is read. This includes reading books, articles, documents for work, studying for an exam, etc. It’s better than a laptop or an iPhone for pure reading.

When you’re traveling. For me, most of the “work” I do on my laptop is done and stored and dealt with online, so I rarely need my big laptop hard drive anymore. And I can type on an iPad just fine because I would always have the external keyboard accessory in hand. Secondly, you can access the internet without dealing with a Wi-Fi hotspot, which is huge. For traveling, the pros of the iPad largely outweigh the pros of the laptop.

Sure, it’ll be great for games and movies and photos, but the iPhone is pretty great for all of those already and it fits in your pocket.

So what it really is is a phenomenal reading machine and travel laptop. Not bad. I can justify $650 for that. I think.

But here’s why it probably won’t be a breakthrough device—because I need to talk through a justification to buy it. Steve Jobs could take a shit and wrap the shit in smooth multi-touch glass and call it the iShit and charge $199 for it and I would buy it. When the iPhone came out, there was not even a question that I was gonna ditch Verizon, my family’s shared plan, and my current phone and get one.

So if I’m debating whether to get an iPad, that might not be a good sign.

(But I’m clearly getting one.)

3) I recently got a laser pointer. It’s wonderful. Nothing gives me a sense of power and self-importance quite like sitting back in my chair, kicking my feet up on the table, and demonstrating things with my laser pointer. Our director that has to sit in a room with me for 40 hours a week has already reached the sighing phase when she sees me lean back, kick my feet up, and begin a laser-pointing session. Since there’s usually nothing to point at of relevance, I’ve taken to writing stuff on the whiteboards purely so that I can then kick back and discuss what I’ve written using the laser pointer.

4) A woman has come to my attention that I need to tell you about immediately. So the mayor of Providence in the 80’s and 90’s was named Buddy Cianci. Why is this important? Because at one point he married a woman named Nancy Ann.

Think about that.

Nancy Ann Cianci.

Nancy Ann Cianci.

Say it.

This has become a pretty big part of my life.

5) I’ve been seeing previews for Alice in Wonderland. Shocker—Johnny Depp will be playing the part of the creepy weirdo.

6) Historically, I’ve enjoyed being the underdressed idiot on cold winter days. It’s a great tradition of mine. Growing up in Boston, I prided myself on never really wearing a hat or gloves or scarf or anything like that. I often would wait until late December to break out the coat for the first time.

Why did putting myself through pain to spite no one in particular bring me pride? It’s unclear. What was cool or at all beneficial in any way about this practice? I’m not really sure.

And yet, moving back to the East Coast after five warm years in LA, I find myself gravitating toward being the smug cold idiot once again.

But as a recent gift, my dad and stepmom sent me a pair of gloves. So I’ve been wearing gloves. And it turns out that wearing gloves when it’s freezing outside is delicious and heavenly.

There’s just one problem. I have to take a glove off every time I want to use my iPhone. I need someone to invent a glove where the tip of the index finger is attached by Velcro and can come off and on.

7) I really like it when the first of the month is a Monday, because it makes it easy to know the date all month. It’s an extra treat when that month is February, because that means that March will also be one of those months. These are the things that I think about.

8) I was in Starbucks the other day and the woman working there walked around and gave everyone a free cupcake because it was near closing time. Cupcakes might be the best-tasting food.

9) Illy coffee might be the best coffee.

10) Have Superbowl commercials gotten less funny or were they always unfunny and I was just younger then?

11) I was informed recently that the word “criminy” is pronounced “krim-iny,” not “crime-iny.” I was furious that someone had the nerve to even argue this, and then we looked it up, and apparently I’ve been wrong this whole time.

12)
13) I came back from Brazil incredibly tan. I’d go so far as to say I was bronzed. It was great. For a brief stretch of time, everyone was nice to me, girls were smiling bashfully at me, and indeed, the world was my oyster. And we all know that tans fade away, but what happened this time was weird. I woke up one day recently, and just like that—it was gone. One day, bronzed, the next day, sickly and pale. I’m telling you, it was weird. It coincided exactly with me catching a cold, so that might be the explanation.

14) Winston has a Twitter page. It would have taken me 10 minutes to set up a Twitter account. Took him three and a half hours.

15) I know I’m not the only person out there having serious trouble not writing a zero right after the second slash when I write the date. Like 2/7/0_. So I’ve been doing a lot of catching myself after writing the zero and then slipping the “one” in before it. Whatever—what do people expect? It’s hard enough every January getting used to the new year when writing the date—and usually it’s just undoing a year-long habit. But we’ve been writing this zero for ten years. This shit’s gonna take time. I’ve also said “Oh ten” a couple times when referring to the year, which is embarrassing.

16) Talking about the weather is what you do when you have nothing whatsoever to say to the person you’re talking to. It is the smallest of small-talk. I’ll say, “Man, it’s cold out” or “Nice day” to anyone—but anytime it extends beyond that, it means I cannot think of anything whatsoever to discuss with that person. And the depth that the weather conversation goes to has an inverse correlation with the depth of our relationship. If we get to a full minute of weather talk, it means our relationship is paper-thin. We do not connect on any level at all. I found myself last night talking to someone with whom I never have anything to talk about—and we were literally talking about how February was a cold month and how March would probably be a warmer month and how it would be nice when it was April because April would be a much warmer month than February. Small-talk is a huge waste of time and energy in the name of the phony social blanket.

More awkward than the weather conversation from last night will be if that person reads this blog entry. I’m guessing that they won’t. But if they do, the next time we talk will be incredibly awkward. There have been a couple times that writing about a specific person has come back to bite me. One time it bit me hard, providing one of the most awkward interactions of my life. No I will not expand upon that further. This blog is in an unfortunate no-man’s land—not private enough that I can rail on specific people in my life, but not nearly widely-read enough that I can trash a company or person I hate and have it carry any significant weight or consequences.

That would be really fun—to have enough readers that I could get pissed about something and trash them here and it would actually be damaging. I could walk around just daring everyone to wrong me, and then as soon as they did I could quietly walk home and ruin them. Okay, so all that has to happen is this—everyone who reads this needs to force 10 people they know to start reading this, whether those people want to or not, and then all of those people have to force 100 people they know to read this. Deal?
_______

*I wrote all that before the game. I will say—if I have to watch a non-Patriots Superbowl, watching Peyton Manning ruin his legacy and forever end the “Is Manning the greatest quarterback of all time?” talk is a pretty good consolation.

28 Things That Annoy Me

2010-01-25T13:16:00.005-05:00

The five teams I hate most in the AFC are the Colts, Chargers, Steelers, Jets, and Ravens.

So you can imagine how much I’ve enjoyed these playoffs. First, the Patriots embarrass themselves against the trash-talking Ravens. Then, I was treated to Ravens vs. Colts, Chargers vs. Jets, and Jets vs. Colts. It’s been like watching scrimmages of Yankee teammates vs. other Yankee teammates.

You know it’s bad when the only things you’re rooting for in a game are injuries, a close battle so at least the losing team will feel crushed afterwards, and earthquakes to hit the stadium. Are cracks about earthquakes distasteful? Yes. Are they particularly distasteful at this current moment? Yes. But that’s the mood these playoffs have me in. A distasteful mood. After watching three hours of Rex Ryan’s loathsome jowls battle Peyton Manning’s doofy loser face, being offensive sounds great.

To top that off, I have a cold. And a cough. One of those coughs where if you laugh too hard or take too deep a breath you will fall into a painful coughing fit that accomplishes nothing except upsetting everyone around you. And not dry coughs. Wretched, wet coughs. Sexy, huh?

But this is why having a blog is useful. When you’re feeling great about life, you can write about it. When you’re perplexed, you can write about it. And when you’re feeling pissy and in a mood to criticize a ton of shit—there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here.

So let’s get on with it. 28 things that annoy me:

1) “God bless you!” as a response to sneezing. First of all, if I’m God, the last person I feel like blessing is the gross sneezing guy. Secondly, when I’m sneezing, I’m not in a proud moment. I’m unhappy that I’m in public. And what I definitely don’t want in that moment is human interaction. But that’s what “God bless you” is—it is someone, often a stranger, forcing you to interact with them while you sneeze. It’s a reply to your sneeze, as if a) your sneeze were a question and b) you were directing that question toward that person.

It’s one thing if you sneeze once. Then the inevitable “bless you” happens, and I can throw them a “thank you” and it’s over. But I rarely sneeze just once. I sneeze twice. Or three times. Or five times. So by the fourth sneeze, they’re not just saying “bless you” anymore—they’re saying “bless you.” Maybe even “bless you, are you alright?” So now there I am, about to sneeze for the fifth time, despising myself and despising life, looking filthy and wishing to god that I was not in public—and this person is forcing me to interact with them. I have to throw in “thank you”s between every sneeze, and then when they get to the animated “bless you” stage, I have to get into this little effing song and dance with them and be like, “Yeah, this is nuts, right? I don’t know what came over me haha.” Leave sneezing people alone.

2) That the best they managed to come up with to call a piano player is a “pianist.” I first learned of this word when I was about six and I was like, “Wait, really?” How painless is it for someone to say they’re a guitarist or a violinist or a drummer? But piano players are forced to refer to themselves as pianists for their whole lives. It’s not a cool word. Like, girls like it when guys can play the piano, but does any girl want to say she’s dating a pianist? I sure don’t. Couldn’t we have at least decided to stress the second syllable and make it a pianist? It’s a piano. So why would I be a pianist. I go to great lengths to avoid saying this word. I’ve settled on using the lame-sounding “piano-player” (how much cooler is a drummer than a drum-player?).

3) Wedding gifts. So let me get this straight—the deal is, I’ll buy a plane ticket to the wedding destination, I’ll rent a tux (or get my shitty tux cleaned), I’ll dedicate a weekend of my time, I’ll pay for a hotel and a rental car, all to come celebrate you finding a girl who’s not a d-bag, and in return—I owe you a gift? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t I set up a gift registry and send the bride and groom the link? Now for the wedding of a good friend, this feels okay—you’re emotionally onboard and genuinely excited about the marriage (hopefully). So fine, let’s top things off with the high-end kitchen knives. But for weddings I’m already less-than-enthusiastic about attending, the gift seems a bit much.

4) Websites that won’t let you go back to the previous page. You know these? You get to the website, decide to make a u-turn, but when you press back it just refreshes the page and keeps you there. These sites piss me off. What’s their thought process? That I’ll be like, “Well, I guess I have to stay here now and do a bunch of page clicks and buy a bunch of their products and add this page to my favorites and forward it to a bunch of my friends—because they’ve left me with no other option”?

5) When the protruding tissue falls back down into the box and it’s really hard to get it back out and in the process of getting it back out you stretch out the plastic so that now all the tissues are gonna keep falling in. I’ve actually had meltdowns because of this before. Like, I’ll need a tissue fairly urgently, but there's not one sticking out and when I reach in I’ll get so frustrated that I’ll end up just grabbing a stack of like 15 tissues and pulling it out. And then I have to leave the stack sitting on top of the box, which is annoying. I’m also annoyed that I just typed a paragraph on this topic. This topic is not remotely worthy of a paragraph of writing.

6) Jeans with button flies. Jeans with button flies are for d-bags. It’s just another example of people dealing with idiotic inconvenience in the name of fashion. A zipper fly is 100%, objectively, easier and more practical, so it's a fact that people with button fly jeans at some point decided to inconvenience themselves every day so that their fly will be cool. Christ. No one even sees the fly. Unless you’re hooking up with someone. So is that it? Are these dudes like, “I’m gonna go with the button fly, and deal with that every day, but when I’m hooking up with a girl, she’ll appreciate that I have a fashionable fly.” Incidentally, I own several pairs of jeans with button flies. But I’m pretty sure none of them were bought by me—most of my jeans were originally “borrowed” from a friend.

7) People who don’t “reply to all” in emails when they should. This happens all the time. Is this 1997? Have people not grasped that when you email multiple people, you’re doing so because you want them all included in the conversation?

Yes, I’m being really bitchy right now. I realize that.

8) Zombie movies. Like vampire movies, zombie movies should go away forever. Zombies are incredibly uncompelling. And they’re filthy to look at. Look at this photo:

Everything about this photo is unbelievably annoying. And every time I’m sitting in a zombie movie, I’m like, “I haven’t been a nine-year-old boy in a lot of years—why am watching a movie for nine-year-old boys?” A couple years ago, I went to that hideous double-feature Grindhouse and the first two hours was a zombie movie that was the exact kind of movie that d-bags love to love. At the end I told the people I was with that I despised it and they were all mean to me.

9) When you leave a long message for someone and they call you back before listening to the message. My natural urge is to tell them to hang up, listen to the message, and then call me back so I don’t have to repeat it all again. But this rarely goes over well. They’re usually like, “Whatever we’re here now just tell me.” This is only really annoying when I was especially proud of the message I left and thought it was pretty clever, and know that now they’re never gonna listen to it.

10a) When I’m watching TV on an airplane and something interesting or important is happening on the TV and the captain comes on over the loud-speaker and talks for longer than he needs to. First of all, airplane captains have a knack for coming on to say something (which temporarily replaces the TV audio) right at the worst moment. Secondly, they talk incredibly slowly, with these obnoxiously long pauses. Thirdly, sometimes they decide they really like the audio spotlight, and go on and on. Like:

“Good afternoon, this is the captain speaking…...we’re pleased to have you all with us today……..in just a few moments we’ll be reaching cruising altitude of 35,000 feet………………..at that point we’ll be passing over the east part of the country first………..then we’ll be crossing over Kansas……….then we’ll be moving through the center of the country…….at that point we’ll progress over the Rocky Mountains………..and finish up by crossing over the western part of the country……….so please sit back and enjoy the flight…we’re happy to have you with us today…......as we make our way to Los Angeles……………where the weather is………good……….your flight attendants will be passing through the aisles shortly with the food and beverage service……..at that point you’ll be able to select a food and a beverage………….thank you.”

Meanwhile, a brawl broke out in the baseball game, breaking news was announced on CNN about some new political scandal, the narrator on Animal Planet explained how the gopher stores its food during the cold months, four hilarious things happened on Family guy, William Wallace was beheaded, and Rachel Ray explained her secret for keeping the guacamole looking fresh and green for days—and I missed it all.

10b) When the TVs are silenced again toward the end of the flight for six minutes while the flight attendant reads off every connecting flight’s gate. This nightmare should take place under only one circumstance—when there is a power outage in the arrival airport and all the screens which display arrival/departure information are out of service. Why would they ever do this when all of the connecting info is displayed clearly as soon as you exit the aircraft? And of course, they wait until I’m at my most riveted with the TV to launch into this.

11) People who overuse the concept of “gross.” I was with a friend the other day and we stopped by a street stand and I bought a package of Strawberry M&Ms. They were chocolate, but with a strawberry tang to them. My friend decided to tell me that she thought that buying Strawberry M&Ms was “gross.” Really? How about Strawberry M&Ms that had been infested and had maggots living in them? That would constitute gross. Just because it was an unusual purchase and a bit odd perhaps to mix a fruit flavor with chocolate doesn’t warrant the word “gross” entering into the discussion. And yes, this is a sensitive topic because I regularly find myself happily eating things that appall other people.

Other examples of things that might not taste normal or good to someone but that are often (unreasonably) deemed to be “gross” are: ham and pineapple pizza, taco salad, lower-end coffee (like Folgers or something), whole milk, hot pockets, kale, beef jerky, fruit or vanilla-flavored toothpaste, and weird flavored Jelly Belly beans (like buttered popcorn).

12) When my Apple products sulk when I let them run out of batteries. You know I love Apple products deeply and dearly. But even Apple gets on my nerves from time to time. When my laptop or iPhone gets down to 0% battery, it goes black. Fine. Naturally. But then I plug it in, and it should start working again, right? Because I gave it power, right? But no—if I get the plug in at 1% I’m fine, but when either of these devices hits 0%, they punish me by sulking for sometimes as long as 15 minutes before they start working again. They’ll play dead for a probationary period of time to make me think about what I did. And I have to get all effeminate and goofy and weak and make them laugh and then they’re back to normal. Oh wait, that’s with girls. But it’s basically the same thing happening here. It’s weird, too, because this never happened with my other Mac laptops, just this newest version.

On a glorious note, on Wednesday Apple is unveiling its much-anticipated (by nerds, at least) tablet computer. I’m not even sure what a tablet computer is, but I’ll be glued to the keynote as if it’s the moon landing.

13) The disproportionate amount of times black cats cross my path. I’m not superstitious. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find it a little irritating when a black cat crosses my path like a dick. It’s the world’s way of giving you the middle finger. And fine—it happens to everyone. But what really annoys me is the sheer amount that this happens to me. I think it happened four times in the last week. By the fourth time I was openly like, “Oh COME ON,” and people looked at me.

One question—if I run past the cat by cutting in front of him so that I never end up actually crossing over its path, does that take away any bad shit that would have resulted? Oh, and how about if the cat walks in front of where I’m about to walk but then makes a u-turn and walks back? Does he undo the path? These questions are actually really important since this shit happens to me so much.

14) When I’m reminded about frequent flyer miles that I’ve earned and have no idea how to cash. Frequent flyer miles and reward programs are just one of those things that I don’t understand and find incredibly icky. I do my best to pretend that they don’t exist, but then I get these upsetting emails telling me that I have all these miles that are going to expire. Clearly the rational thing to do is figure out how to cash them and get a free flight. Sounds simple. But not for me—I just can’t bring myself to learn how they work. The process of understanding what frequent flyer miles are and how they’re earned and where mine are if I wanted to find them and how I would access them, let alone redeem them for something of value—is so immensely complex and high-level that I prefer to turn my head the other way. I archive the email and quickly forget about it.

But inevitably another one comes. And reminds me about this intangible, esoteric “worth” that is supposedly mine somewhere, and it really upsets me. There are only two times I’ve braved these dark waters—JetBlue’s True Blue rewards program, which itself was deeply icky to me at first but that I eventually learned because JetBlue is actually a well-run company that made it somewhat un-icky, and I figured out how to redeem my “World Points” rewards that I get from using my credit card. I figured this out only once and received cash (1% of what I had spent)—but I don’t really remember how I did it and I might not have the courage to redeem my World Points again in the future.

15) This whole “nom nom nom” thing that is somehow connected to animals or people eating. I don’t get it, but it’s popping up a lot nowadays. I really wish it would go away. It’s not funny and intensely irritating.

16) When I ask the barber not to cut the sides of my head too short because then I'll have a dumb skinny head for the next month and he cuts the sides of my head too short anyway and leaves me with a dumb skinny head for the next month. This isn’t really a minor thing. It’s my head. For the next month. Supercuts used to do this to me constantly, but I didn’t expect it from this barbershop. But indeed, I have had a dumb-looking skinny head for the last two weeks and I’m at least a week away from regaining normal human-head proportions.

17) When Asian delivery restaurants refuse to give me chopsticks because I’m American even though I ask for them. I realize that only d-bag Americans insist on eating Asian food with chopsticks. I’m not defending myself—it’s a huge d-bag move. But whatever—I enjoy using chopsticks and Asian food just tastes worse to me with a fork. In any case, this was never a problem before I came to New York.

18) Arrogant bars. Arrogant bars completely infuriate me. And New York’s got a lot of them. A New York specialty is the bar with no sign or anything on the outside. Nothing is more arrogant than not posting any sign on the wall or door outside of a bar so you have to ask where the place is if you’ve never been there before. The same goes for bars that artificially create a line even though it’s empty inside.

Of course, bouncers are the worst. At least 88% of the times in my life that I’ve desperately wanted to punch someone in the face, it’s been a bouncer that was a huge dick to me or a friend of mine for no good reason. Bouncers are dicks for three reasons: 1) they’re often just dickish people, 2) they’re on a power trip, and 3) they’re not accountable for their actions because a bar’s popularity isn’t tied to its level of customer service (if anything, it’s a reverse correlation). If a restaurant hostess is rude to you, you could make a fuss to the manager and they’d be in some shit. So it doesn’t happen. There’s the natural Capitalist competiveness to keep everyone polite to customers. Not so in a bar—because a bar is all about being “cool” and the coolness is tied completely to its desirability as a hotspot and to the quality of the crowd inside. Once a bar has that going, rudeness just enhances its standing as a place people are dying to get into every night. Just a little taste of what every consumer-business interaction must have been like in Soviet Russia.

(For further tastes of Soviet life, head to the DMV, post office, or traffic court.)

19) When you spend a half hour picking the exact flight you want on Kayak and then click on it and it takes you to Orbitz or Expedia where you see the message, “The flight you requested is no longer available.” This happens a lot, especially with international flights. It’s unbelievably demoralizing. You thought so hard about the exact times of the flight and you found peace with the cost, and then it turns out that Kayak’s database wasn’t updated. When I booked my Brazil flight this happened again and again and I kept clawing for inner peace with each new, increased, ticket price just to get the message again. Further, why are international flights so effing expensive?

20) Professional athlete interviews.

You know, we’re just focusing on the game at hand and everyone’s trying to do their piece. I give the coaches all the credit in the world for keeping us so prepared every week. We’re just trying to go out there and give it everything we have, and just take it one game at a time.

Could anything possibly be more boring than interviews with pro athletes? Their publicists have terrified all of them into saying nothing of any substance whatsoever in any interview. I can’t sit through them anymore. I’d love to give all of them the Liar, Liar disease:

You know, I was completely terrified of choking since I’ve been a head case on and off over the years. But I’m really relieved right now that I came through. The team lost, but I’m in a great mood because I didn’t choke this time. The thing that’s on my mind most is what my agent said about finishing the year with a sub-4.00 ERA. He said if I can do that he thinks he can get me $40 million over five years as a free agent this offseason. $40 million! Think how hedonistic I can be with that much money! And hopefully I can get signed by the Braves or Angels or someone. Anything to get me the hell out of Minnesota. I have a ton of disdain for these fans and the chicks are way hotter in other cities.

21) When people ask me what kind of music I like. This is as silly a question as, “What kind of movies do you like?” or “What kind of food do you like?” Sure, there are favorite bands, but who likes just one or two genres? I can come up with an answer to the question if I need to—but the truth is that my 30 favorite things to listen to probably fall into 10 different genres. Likewise, I’m sure you could answer the movie or food questions, but they would be annoying questions, right? I don’t see the music question as any more reasonable a thing to ask.

22) When women wear deep red lipstick.

Who decided this was attractive? It’s not attractive at all. She looks like the joker. You know what it is? It’s icky. The only people who should wear deep red lipstick are mean, icky, elderly substitute teachers.

Now, I’ll admit that I may be partially swayed by the fact that Mrs. Fox, the meanest, ickiest, elderliest substitute teacher ever from my elementary school years wore deep red lipstick. Mrs. Fox may have bordered on abusive. It’s unclear.

23) Gustavo.

24) Felipe.

25) When people call espresso “expresso.”

26) When people hate famous people only because they hate their fan bases. Dave Matthews is a classic example. Dave Matthews music is pretty fantastic, right? I haven’t heard much since the first few big albums, but that stuff was pretty great, right? Like, if you were at a small music venue, and this unknown band got up there and played Ants Marching, Jimi Thing, Crush, The Best of What’s Around, etc., wouldn’t you be pretty blown away?

And yet, so many people hate the Dave Matthews Band. Why? Because they hate the fans and the incredibly annoying culture surrounding the band. But can’t we separate that annoyance from the music itself? Phish is like this too. Annoying culture—excellent music. This extends to other areas too. Like sports. When Cal Ripkin started being talked about like he was Martin Luther King after his streak and when he got selected for the All-Star game when he was batting .220 towards the end of his career, a lot of people started to hate him. But that was misplaced hatred—it was all the annoying commentators and fans that were to be hated. All Cal Ripkin did was have a ridiculously impressive streak and a great career. What did he do wrong?

27) When I tag a photo of myself and one other person in Facebook and the other person untags him or herself. Hurtful.

28) When I go to great lengths to see Avatar not only in 3D, but in the 3D IMAX theater, despite how hard it was to get tickets, and the “IMAX” isn’t a rad dome screen but rather just a normal screen that’s a little curved. This annoyed me, but mainly it was an excuse to express my opinions on the movie.

I thought it was very, very good. Look—I have seen so many terrible movies in this genre (Transformers II was a horrific life experience, for example), and Avatar really succeeded. Was the plot super original? Definitely not. In fact, it was one of the most predictable plots I can remember. Ten minutes in I could have basically laid out the whole thing just as it happened. But it didn’t need an original plot—it was a classic plot (basically Pocahontas), but with the rad spin of being in the future on a different planet, and the depiction of the planet and life there was simply genius. Both in its concepts and in the spectacular visual presentation. I was just sitting there in the theater loving it. Not bored at all—which says a lot given my thoughts on the plot’s predictability.

When I first saw the previews I had a bit of an uncanny valley repulsion to the appearance of the characters—but this was gone once I saw the actual movie.

Then there’s the whole fact that it was blatant propaganda. This didn’t bother me for one reason only—if there’s any liberal propaganda that doesn’t annoy me, it’s anti-imperialism propaganda. There aren’t two sides to the imperialism story—imperialism in the brutal genocidal fashion in which it is traditionally carried out, is pure evil. So Hitler mass-murdered to exterminate a race and imperialists mass-murdered for economic and political gain-- are they that much better?

Some critics saw the movie as anti-American or anti-Iraq War—but I really saw the major message as anti-imperialism, which applies to many countries at many points in history.

Not a masterpiece, and it of course had its irritating moments, but for a mega-budget January blockbuster, it was a homerun.

Two other times I was in a pissy mood:

33 things that annoy me

69 things that annoy me