An Analysis of Cosmopolitan Magazine, Part 2

The last time (well the last time that the general public knows about) I read an issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine in its entirety was a little longer than just a year ago. I read it for two reasons. The first is that I just wanted something to write about, and was not adept enough to come up with something that I thought might entertain people without using some kind of outside source, and Cosmo provided that outside source that would give me plenty of material. Basically, I was looking to make fun of something, and since Cosmo is the closest depiction to what a vast amount of American women seek to eventually be in a glossy print format (something I think is very problematic), and since it is their main source of advice concerning things like sex and fashion and comprehension of men, I decided to go with that. The second reason was that I was really really hell-bent on trying to understand women better. I would spend hours upon hours talking to girls that were my friends, just sitting there like the gay best friend that they all wish they could have (I’ve even gone clothes shopping with girls before), simply because I wanted to try and “get” what was going through the mind of a typical woman, because at that time I really, really hated girls (but have since downgraded to “strongly dislike,” based on recent studies that have shown they aren’t all conniving and spiteful whores), and wanted to know just what made them the way they were.

So, this meant that I had to associate myself with them quite often and infiltrate their ranks, kind of get a feel for them. (I was kind of like that dude who was trying to make a documentary about grizzly bears a few years ago, and eventually got eaten by the very mammals he was living amongst. Except that I haven’t been eaten yet, probably because I’m high in fat and low in protein. Girls would not even think about eating me. I’m like a Hot Pocket dipped in ranch dressing.) Part of this--and one I favored because it didn’t actually include being around girls for an extended period of time--was reading that magazine you always (ALWAYS) see gals toting around with them. It’s kind of like how monks are always carrying around bibles , or how Linus is always carrying around his blankey. It was obvious to me that this magazine was something that many girls respected highly, and would take advice from. (This kind of fucks up my Linus analogy, because I don’t think I ever saw an episode of The Peanuts where he was actually getting advised by his childhood play toy, but I’ve always wanted to incorporate that eccentric comic strip character, so I’m going to leave it.)

So, I read it a few times. And I was pretty extremely appalled. Some of the sexual stuff I came across in that magazine they suggested women do to their male partners in the sack was so absurd and disconcerting that it almost made me look at sex the way that elderly religious people and the Jonas Brothers do: never until marriage, and even then with the lights off, a gunshot start and a stopwatch running, with only reproduction in mind. I’m not saying I’m some kind of picky sexual person, or that I’m even a person that knows what the good stuff is supposed to be like, because I’m neither of those. I’m just trying to say that when a girl reads in a magazine--that she highly respects--that she should press on a dude’s taint (I understand that my readership has grown to a few people that are over the age of thirty that probably don’t know what a taint is, so I’ll explain: the middle ground between the male frontal genitalia and his ass) when he is reaching climax, I get a little frightened. This is because I would not press on my taint at any point during my day, and especially not when I’m near climax. That’s a weird area down there, and I don’t want people prodding it. The taint is a bridge, but one that should not be traveled upon. Anyway, that was one of the gripes that I had with this magazine, and so I decided to write an entire little thing about it (last November, it’s on this site somewhere).

This year, I decided to do it again. Mainly because I still feel like I haven’t made much headway at all in the “Comprehension of Females” category, and keep holding on to the hope that either the flaws of Cosmo’s logic in directing young women or its accuracy in actually telling them to do something that the majority of semi-average American males will like--or both--will help me gain just a small fraction of higher understanding about women than what I currently have.

Also, they usually have pretty women on the cover, and I like to smell the sample perfumes they enclose in their advertisements.

So, basically I’m going to analyze another issue of Cosmo, but this time I’m going to dig a little deeper, I think. I’m going to start by doing a little analysis of the cover stories (which was the extent of what I did last time), and then I’m going to go back through the magazine and pick out some of the stuff that strikes me as either good, bad or just absolutely off-the-wall crazy, because I’ve realized you seriously can’t judge a book (or magazine) by its cover.

Fergie: Her Naughty Honeymoon Surprise. The first story I read (well, skimmed) is on the cover model, who happens to be Fergie, or Stacy Ferguson, from the Black Eyed Peas. I wasn’t able to read this entire article, because I have absolutely no vested interest in Fergie, and don’t think she’d really help me understand women any better at all. Men, maybe, because she’s married to Josh Duhamel and he is absolutely a stone cold fox. I did find, though, from my skimming, that Fergie doesn’t like it when people call her “fugly,” because “it hurts.” She also gave some advice by saying not to “assume what someone else is feeling.” I learned not to call people names based on their physical inadequacies, as well as the fact that I was not a mind reader, sometime in kindergarten. I guess sometimes Cosmo’s readership needs a little reminder, though.

Apparently, all the naughty honeymoon surprise from the title entailed was that she took a leather feather duster with her on their honeymoon, but she doesn’t reveal just exactly what she did with it. Hopefully she was getting ready for what marriage is supposed to be like and was actually using it to dust shelves and shit.

“He Shoots, He Scores!” Wacked-Out Things Guys Say in Bed: Read it, and think it’s bullshit. I haven’t been in bedrooms when any guys I know (or don’t know, actually) have been copulating. But, I have watched a lot of porn in my day, and even the actors on most of those don’t fit into the categories they list here (and porn is usually greatly exaggerated). I certainly don’t fit into any of the groups they listed, but would like to try one they listed called “The Announcer,” just for a reaction. Apparently, this is a guy that narrates the entire sexual experience like a correspondent for ESPN. I’m almost certain that nobody in their right mind does this, but I also think it’d be the most hilarious thing ever to do to someone. I wonder, if I ever tried this, if it’d be a good idea to bring Jay’s Telestrator with me.

Is Stress Turning You Into a Raging Bitch? The very first sentence of this article pissed me off. It reads: “This time of year can try even the sweetest chick’s patience, what with crowded stores, too many parties (and hangovers), and annoying family demands--and experts are saying this month will be a perfect storm of stress because of financial worries on top of everything else.”

Seriously, give me a fucking break. At this particular point in my life, I’d say I’m at a pretty low stress level. This is not because I’ve been able to stay away from parties, but probably because I’ve been able to do shit like go to parties and have a good time, because I don’t have much gravely serious stuff to worry about. I absolutely hate that this magazine gives girls the impression that Christmas shopping, getting drunk at parties, and good-natured requests from family members during the holiday season are actually legitimate reasons to be stressed and, apparently in-turn, a bitch and a half. I guess I could understand a girl being stressed and a bit uneasy if she’s actually undergoing something stressful, like a family member being very sick or a really serious make-or-break-your-grade test coming up in the next 24 hours. Even then, though, I’ve learned to no longer tolerate a girl being a bitch during these times, because circumstances like these are not my fault, and I shouldn’t have to be punished for them (unless I’m the one that gave the family member genital herpes or am the professor giving the test). I know guys probably do the same thing, but wouldn’t everything be a little bit easier if we weren’t mean to the people that cared for us the most? I mean, fuck, how hard is that to do?

The only thing from that sentence that I can understand being severely stressful is the whole financial worries thing. Sure, being broke sucks, and a lot of people lost a lot of money last year when everything went to shit. But isn’t that common knowledge? I mean, I know that my family was able to talk about it last year. We basically acknowledged that things weren’t as great as they usually were, and because of such we should all tone down our Christmas gift giving. There, problem solved. I mean, I was kind of pissed that I couldn’t get that entire Burberry wardrobe and pair of Christian Louboutin platform pumps (yes, I know what those are...I’ve been around some materialistic people in my day) but it really wasn’t that big of a stresser.

After that opening line, I couldn’t bring myself to read much more of the article, but I did find a few of the magazine’s solutions to utilize if you have to wait in a line four people deep to purchase a merino wool sweater for your dad for Christmas or were somehow forced to take a shot too many of grape Three Olives at a Christmas party. One was to work out. The other was to kiss your boyfriend. Also included was watching funny Internet video clips, drinking coffee with your girlfriends and talking slower. These all seemed pretty reasonable to me, and completely self-explanitory. Except for the talking slower one. That’s probably just going to piss off whoever has to listen to you. It’s the holiday season. People have shit to do.

Speaking of having shit to do, I’m sure whoever’s reading this has shit to do as well. I just took a look at the rest of the cover and don’t find much enticing there, except for the last article I’m going to talk about. So, I’m just going to put some little thoughts about stuff I saw and observations I made in the rest of the magazine I’ve yet to cover, then finish with the one article in the entire publication that seriously caught my eye.

--JC Penney is apparently a legit place to shop for lingerie, judging by the advertisement I just looked at. Pink bra and panty set with baby blue lace and whit polka dots? I mean, I’d dig it.

--Estee Lauder Sensuous smells not unlike the elderly woman that used to teach me piano when I was like 8 years old.

--There’s an article called “Why Taken Guys Seem Sexier,” which is kind of disturbing. That’s not the way it should be at all. If it wasn’t that way, then Tiger Woods would probably still have a flawless “driving record” and people the world over wouldn’t know that he likes to bang chicks immediately after taking Ambien. (Because having money had nothing to do with Tiger banging at least 10 women out of wedlock. It was because he’s married.) This article mentions something about the competitive nature of women, which makes sense I guess. I mean, I’d probably pay more attention to a woman trying to snipe a married man than one playing a sport.

--I know I just endorsed an ad in the magazine a few sentences ago, but just like everything else in this magazine, their ads are extremely hit and miss. I would definitely enjoy a woman jumping out of a box on Christmas wearing the aforementioned underwear, but I would be extremely let down if I opened a box from her that contained Tim McGraw’s new cologne. I might actually rather have a container of Bod Man. I just flipped another few pages and saw an ad for perfume by Paris Hilton. She is dressed as a mermaid. What the fuck? Who approves these things? It was like when somebody decided to make a sequel to The Sandlot with an entirely different class. Who in the fuck thinks these are good ideas?

--There’s a little article talking about why guys are scared of marriage. Then, they suggest that you talk with your boyfriend about it, and this will help him come around. If a woman brought up marriage to me, I would simply break out some Ludacris lyrics and say, “Sorry, but I’m married to my music, but we got a pre-nup. So if that bitch don’t act right I’m still gettin’ my cut.”

--There’s a stud meter. And Levi McConaughey is on it. Pretty high up, too. He’s 1 1/2 years old. They also talk shit on Jason Lee and say the Chipmunks movies are annoying. Fuck these people.

--I made it about 2/3 of the way through the issue, and was pretty relieved to have not seen anything about stimulating a dude’s taint. Then, I came across an entire page of the magazine dedicated to suggesting how a girl can use a vibrator with her man. Sure enough, one of them was to put a vibrator on the man’s “perineum.” Fuck. I’m definitely not at a point in my life where I would be able to accept, let alone enjoy, something like that.

Make His #1 Sex Wish Come True: This caught my eye. Mainly, because one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in Cosmo are the sex tips. I’m always very wary of these, as I said before, but it also hooks me in. I think this is the whole thing that gets guys to skim through this magazine while in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. There’s always something about sex on the cover, and guys see it and want to see what they might be able to expect from their lady. Sometimes it gets downright frightening. This article alleges that what men want the most is “to be wanted,” which I’m not sure is true or not. I think that’s too deep of a question to really get into in a magazine, or on a blog. People are complicated, or something.

-The first one I read says to call him on his cell phone, and tell him that you’re touching yourself in your bed. I would be all for a phone call such as this, I guess, unless I happened to get it at a very inopportune time. Like when I was driving a car or waiting in line at the post office. Waiting in line with an erection is generally not socially acceptable, and nobody wants to do the waistband tuck. Especially if they have jeans on.

-The next one tells the girl to press her chest into the man’s back so it looks like you’re hugging him from behind. Then you’re supposed to rub your breasts and pelvis against him “for several seconds.” I thought about this and started laughing. How fucking awkward would that look? It’s pretty difficult to do something like that in public, I think. It’s like picking your nose.

-One tells a girl to basically simulate fellatio on a bottle. This could be kind of cool, or also very extremely weird.

-“Write him a note, describing, in detail, a hot time you two hooked up. Make the last one read, ‘Think we can top that tonight?’” That’s all good and well, but before you do this, make sure you’re really okay with giving a guy a suggestion to top your craziest sexual experience together. Because you might end up dressed as Marilyn Monroe trying to get it on 60 feet up in the air on a metal I-Beam suspended from a crane at a skyscraper construction sight in the middle of a brightly lit city. Or something like that.

-“Whisper these eight words into his ear: ‘I want to have sex with you--now.’” You’re supposed to do this in line at the grocery store or while eating breakfast. For the first time in my life, I feel that Cosmo is truly onto something.

-“Sneak up behind your guy while he’s on the phone and reach around to grab his penis.” This would be okay if said guy was not talking to his boss or mother. Also, make sure he has a strong heart. Something like that could be extremely startling.

-“Take off his underwear with your teeth.” Yeah, and watch him cackle uncontrollably.

***Okay. The rest of these are too blatantly sexual for me to talk about on here. I’m starting to get the dumb chills, and have made the decision that, if I ever have a daughter, she will not be allowed to read this magazine until she is at least 18. Who would’ve thought that people might be becoming more promiscuous at a young age because of reading? I didn’t think anybody read anymore. Maybe my career aspirations aren't that fucked after all. Thanks, Cosmo.

Hey, it's a party in the USA

It’s a Friday night, and I’m probably going to be going out to the bar at some point, just like I do most every Friday night. Just like I did last night, and just like I did the Thursday, Friday and Saturday prior to that (where I’m at there’s really not much else to do on a social level). In that time, something has come to my attention (and it’s definitely not that I’m a better dancer than I’d previously thought): The astronomical hit song by teenage sensation Miley Cyrus, called “Party in the USA,” is all over the place. I haven’t been to a bar for more than two hours since I came back to school this fall and not heard that song at least once. The DJ at the bar my friends and I usually go to on Thursdays normally plays it twice, and people go absolutely crazy both times. It’s almost like it turns some kind of switch on in people at the bar that just makes them want to dance. It inspires people to dance slightly more than ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and maybe even Men Without Hats’ seminal classic, “Safety Dance.”

Normally, I don’t really get too excited about these kind of viral songs that absolutely everybody is listening to (“The Macarena,” “Who Let the Dogs out,” that song about Applebottom jeans and stupid fucking boots, most everything by Michael Jackson since his untimely passing except that song he made for Free Willy, etc.), but this song really, really has impressed me (I’m saying that I like it enough to put it on my iPod), and it seems significant because nothing about this song fits the mold of music that I usually find impressive. It’s a song that doesn’t make a lot of sense lyrically, the singer doesn’t really have a captivating voice or any other extreme talent that I can discern (I don’t think the song would be much different if it was sung by someone like Gwen Stefani or Lady Gaga) and it doesn’t seem like the instrumental portion of the song is very complex either. I’ve even been told that Cyrus said she didn’t know which Jay-Z song she was talking about in the song because she didn’t write it and doesn’t even listen to Jay-Z. That makes her and my Mother the only two people in the entire nation that don’t listen to Jay-Z--my Mom would rather get down with Nas. Or Bob Carlisle and/or Kenny Rogers.

So, I’ve been really thinking a lot about why I like it so much, and two definite things have come from it: 1) It truly is a pretty solid song regardless of true artistic merit and 2) My life is the biggest fucking waste of time ever.

For one thing--and I believe this is the foremost reason that I and any other person that’s not a girl between the ages of 4 and 14--it’s the catchiest song that I have heard in a very, very long time. It rivals songs “You Get what you Give,” by The New Radicals, and “Shout,” by those black dudes that play at the party in the movie Animal House, and, of course, “Mmmbop” by Hanson. It’s so catchy that the actual intensity of its catchiness makes me want to just frolick out onto the dance floor and put my hands up, because they are indeed playing my song. I also want to nod my head and move my hips, both like yeah! More importantly than that, though, the catchiness of the song makes me forget that I’m a 22-year-old that will be (hopefully) graduating from college in a few months with a bad haircut and little hope of getting a job in my chosen field. It provides an escape that I usually don’t find in the music I listen to, a kind of joviality that--and this could be bad--makes me think that I’m totally capable of busting a few good moves. (I find escape, but when your favorite bands are Brand New or Bright Eyes you kind of just escape to an even more depressed place than you’d previously been, which actually makes me wonder why I listen to that kind of music virtually all the time. Maybe I’m the idiot, along with Jesse Lacey and Conor Oberst, and people like Britney Spears and the Jonas Brothers are the geniuses.)

Another thing about this song is the absolute cunning involved with it (even if Miley herself doesn’t realize it, which I think might be 100 percent true judging by an interview I just watched where she said she didn’t think it would be popular and made it for her clothing line or some stupid drivel like that). Pretty much as soon as she got astronomically famous in the young kids category, it became the cool thing to do to hate Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana and anything else that she was associated with. I don’t know exactly why this is, but it’s kind of like how older kids despised Barney and Power Rangers whenever I was a kid. It’s also kind of like how I hate Nickelback. I mean, when I reached a certain age, I didn’t like Barney and the Power Rangers because some part of society dictated that I shouldn’t, so I went along with it. In reality, I shouldn’t have given two fucks about Barney, because if I didn’t want to, I never had to watch his television show or buy any of his purple merchandise. All of the time that I probably spent in my formative years railing on Barney could’ve been spent doing Hooked on Phonics or improving my right-handed lay-up. I also never have to listen to a Nickelback song if I don’t want to, and I guess they’re going to be around whether I dislike them or not. I’ll just have to keep avoiding them, like I do with people that are bigger than me that I’ve made fun of or conversations about my immediate future.

***Having said all of the above, I would still like to make it clear that I will continue hating Nickelback and being vocal about it until they are completely publicly disgraced to the point that they stop making music.

I think that maybe people see these things and begin to hate them because they’re making assload upon assload of money off of an impressionable market (little kids and whoever it is out there that buys Nickelback records) by doing things that we feel we could do ourselves given the opportunity. I suppose it’s natural to get pissed off about things like that. The fact that I’m actually aware that I fall into this and hate on certain people or entities for these reasons makes it all the more impressive to me that Cyrus broke down mine and many others’ defenses. She has broken into a market of older people with just one song. It’s unbelievable. The same people that have hated this girl are now dancing to her song in places that she isn’t even old enough to get into yet.

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t dislike Miley Cyrus, or that if you do it’s because of her undeserving fame. Maybe it’s because you think she’s a no talent ass-clown with a terrible personality. Maybe you just don’t dig on the raspy voice. Maybe you don’t like anybody that is of the Billy Ray Cyrus bloodline. Hell, I don’t like Miley Cyrus.

All I like is her one song. And it’s a song that shouldn’t be taken seriously (because apparently Cyrus doesn’t even take it seriously). I guess that’s part of the appeal for me, to listen to a song that is extremely dumb but catchy. I don’t give a fuck if the singer is too stupid to tie her own shoes or give timeless classics like “Big Pimpin’” and “99 Problems” at least one try (if nothing else, these kind of songs could keep her from becoming delusional about a woman’s place in society). Like it or not, the sheer fame this song has garnered will make it one of those ones you hear occasionally ten years from now, so you may as well embrace it. I plan to, because it will be a gateway back to my senior year of college, when I had not a care in the world, was listening to really stupid songs while drinking Miller High Life and sweating on a dance floor.

If you choose not to embrace it, though, just take solace in the probability that she’ll be completely addicted to some kind of hard drug by 2020 and will be, as a personality, completely eviscerated from the public eye.

An Endorsement: The Traditional Handshake

Last night, I went to a friend’s college house party in Pittsburgh with a few of my buddies from high school. Once we arrived at this party, our friend who was hosting it immediately introduced us to his five roommates. Then, throughout the rest of the night, he would periodically introduce us to more people he knew at the party that we’d never met, and we also met some people by way of our own assertion. I would say, roughly estimating, that I met about 20 new people that night. Add that to the number of people that I meet and talk to for the first time on any given night that I go to a party or a bar at my own school, or interview a stranger for my job, and I think it’s safe to say that I meet a lot of new people. I’m not saying this because I think I’m some kind of social butterfly (because a lot of nights I like to just stay home by myself and watch television (porn) or read books (Penthouse), or because I don’t like meeting new people (because I love it). The reason I’m saying this is because you probably meet a lot of people, too, or have at least gone through a phase in your life where you were often in social climates and were meeting a lot of people. I want you to think about this, and see if you feel the same way I feel about what I’m about to say: Meeting new people can be very fucking confusing. Not because people are complex (because most aren’t, myself included, and if they are you’re probably not going to know it immediately upon seeing them for the first time), but because the initial greeting can be very confusing. I mean, the whole, “Hi, nice to meet you” thing has many variations that are all socially acceptable and interchangeable, and that part doesn’t confuse most people unless they’re extremely shy and/or nervous. The part that confuses me is the physical greeting you engage in with a person you’ve just met for the first time. It’s something I think has gotten unnecessarily complex through the years, and for no real beneficial reason. It used to be a person would introduce you to another person, and you would give them a verbal greeting and a simple handshake. It was fucking easy, and didn’t ever really result in an awkward moment unless there were certain extenuating and/or unique circumstances (like you’d heard of who the person was, because you’d been boning their sister and they knew damn well you had been, or if, for some reason, you have been friends with this person on Facebook for the past three months without really knowing them, etc.). Now, though, the whole dynamic has changed.

You know what I’m talking about. You’re standing there with a friend, and they want to introduce you to some other person they know. This should be good. It’s a way of networking that doesn’t involve technology. They bring you over to said person and say something like, “Scott, this is my friend, Brandon,” and you exchange pleasantries. It used to be that you would immediately just reach out your hand and do a traditional handshake with this Brandon character, but now you could potentially get really confused. Now there are so many variations on the handshake greeting that, if you don’t put some time in to analyze this person (that you don’t even know to begin with), you could reach out and engage in this bizarre hand-to-hand collision that’s weird for everybody involved. For example, Brandon could be one of those white kids that like to wear flat-brimmed New York Yankees hats (despite being from someplace in New Hampshire), Enyce sweatshirts and pencil-thin goatees. Sometimes they also wear high-topped Air Force Ones and those really shiny jeans. You get the idea. If he is, then chances are he might come in for the “hip-hop generation” shake, explained below:

Hip-Hop Generation Shake: Like I said above, this is the kind of shake favored by the kids that really enjoy rap music and have immersed themselves in a strange urban culture that (usually) severely counters the way they were raised. (I actually have an Introduction to Creative Writing Class with a white dude that really digs rap, and fancies himself a rapper. Whenever we have to write poems for class, he always comes in with some of his own rap lyrics that he likes to read to everyone. A lot of the time it has to do with guns and projects--the ones you live in, not the ones you do for class--and stuff like that, and I don’t really buy that he was raised in that kind of environment. When he reads these rap songs, all I can think is “This guy’s a gangster? His real name’s Clarence.” Yes. That was an 8 Mile reference, and I don’t think he’d come at me with a normal handshake under any circumstances.) You’ll approach them for a handshake and they will come at you with this handshake wherein you tilt your hand upward a few degrees from the normal position and join hands with your counterpart at the space between your thumb and forefinger. (As far as I can tell this maneuver was originated by older men that listen to rock n’ roll, then these hip hop dudes just took it and ran with it, adding more and more moves to the original product, probably sometime in the 90s. It’s kind of like the abuse of marijuana or the tendency to get into a lot of fights. The two cultures are more similar than one would think, I guess.)

This shake could be the most complex of any of them, because after you get your hand into position for the initial phase, this one has the potential to take all kinds of turns, none of which are predictable. You simply have to feel it out with this person, which is fucking difficult because you’ve never met them in your life. They might lean in for the one armed hug while keeping the hands clasped together. Then, after that, they might go to release the hand, but do so in a sliding motion that ends with the fingers clasping one another and then pulling away in an effort to make a dull snapping sound (and this almost never really works, at least in my experience). This phase of the shake resembles two people getting ready to engage in a thumb war. Any combination of these moves can be employed, and they’re interchangeable. So you can see how this would be fucking confusing.

There are many other newish ways to greet a person. So many, actually, that Budweiser recently came out with a commercial detailing quite a few of them (http://admusicdb.com/ads/budweiser-greetings-commercial.html). There’s the fist bump, also known as the pound or daps, and it was made famous by Howie Mendel. You know, the completely bald guy with a soul patch that hosts Deal or No Deal, the television game show that requires absolutely no real skill whatsoever. Mendel is notorious for being a germophobe that is completely frightened of shaking other people’s hands, and so he does the fist bump instead. There are variations on this one too, that include pulling your fist back after touching your counterparts and making an exploding noise (they love to do this on the office). Also, you can bump fists, keep them together, turn them sideways and then reach your hand up your acquaintences arm (while they do the same). This is called locking it and putting the chain on it (a favorite between my 10 and 8 year old cousins and me). There’s also the high five, the point and go and the simple head nod (which comes in handy if you’d like a hip way to greet someone from across a room). It takes a certain gall and weirdness to greet a person the first time you meet them in any of these ways, but it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that it does happen and is at least partially acceptable in normal society, which baffles me.

Now, I’m not saying that for every occasion people should simply shake hands, because that would be slightly boring. I’m glad there are these other means of greeting, and as far as I’m concerned you can daps the fuck out of somebody if they score the number of the Mandarin hostess you had at P.F. Changs, and you can high five the germs right off of your friend’s hand if the Pens score a goal. Hell, make up a secret handshake with one of your best friends and do it all the time, because that impresses some people. All I’m trying to say is that somehow, someway, we need to get a hold on this first meeting greeting etiquette. Someone needs to step up, like the President or Oprah or someone else that people will blindly follow, a real trend-setter (Lady Gaga maybe, but I don’t think she’d endorse anything as normal as the handshake), and just regulate the whole thing. Someone needs to just say “Alright, no more of that flashy weird shit. Let’s revert to our old ways and just do the traditional handshake on the occasion of a first meeting. We don’t need that awkward moment where you fuck up the hip-hop handshake, or one person goes in for one thing and another is trying to do another. That kind of analysis is not necessary for that whole deal. I mean, you only get one chance for a first impression, and you don’t want to ruin it by fucking up the hand greeting, right?”

So, if you see me any time soon, and we either haven’t seen each other before or are just meeting face-to-face for the first time, let’s just go with a handshake. If things work out, and we’re at the bar watching a sporting event or something, we can go ahead and daps it out following successful happenings. Hell, if we hit it off, maybe we can even do a quick bro-hug if our team is victorious. Maybe, at some point, we can bust out the “feed the chicken” maneuver. I don’t know. Let’s just keep it simple at the starting point, though.

If you’re a female and you just read all of this, I apologize, because you probably don’t really shake hands or do pounds or any of that shit nearly as often as guys do. I think, though, that maybe we should bring back the whole “guy kisses the girl’s hand” greeting. That shit is classy, and very underused these days. Actually, I’m definitely going to start doing that.

Random Thoughts: October Part 1

--October is officially the Month of Free Thought. I’m serious. Someone, somewhere, thought it’d be a good idea to actually pick a month of the year out where people would be encouraged to think freely, because apparently you’re not supposed to for the other 11 months of the year. I only just found this information out today, and I was stunned by it. I’d already known that October was Breast Cancer Awareness Month, as well as Hispanic Heritage Month (the President actually alerted me to this piece of information once). I even knew that October was Pennsylvania Wine month, because a woman I’d interviewed for my internship had told me so. (She also told me that right around now is a great time to go on a wine trail, which is a series of wineries located in the same area that people can tour over the span of one to two days, and get fucked up. The story I was writing dealt with a new marketing campaign the PA Wine Association recently rolled out where they invite bloggers that are experts on food, drink and travel to enjoy a free stay at a participating hotel and a VIP tour of a wine trail. I haven’t received an invitation yet, and I guess that’s because I’m about to write at least 500 words on some of the weird shit the month of October is recognized for, among other reasons.) But, when I heard about the whole free thinking thing, it made me really wonder what other seriously goofy shit that October is nationally recognized for. So, I did my due diligence, and found more than 70 month-long celebrations and awareness campaigns for the 10th month of the year. Here are some of the stranger ones.

National Roller Skating Month: I actually saw a few people roller skating this month--skating and not blading, there is a difference--and I’ve been told that it’s making some kind of comeback. Personally, I don’t understand it, and I definitely can’t comprehend why you would have a national month dedicated to roller skating. It’s like people think that others will see that it’s national roller skating month, then rush out and buy a pair of skates so they can fuck around with them until maybe halfway through November, when it starts to snow and it becomes extremely hazardous to coast around on wheels attached to the bottom of a fucking shoe. If you’re going to have a month dedicated to roller skating, make it May or June, so then people can enjoy getting in their cardiovascular workout on tiny plastic wheels for the next six months straight without any real hindrance besides the occasional rainfall. If you have it in October, people are going to put them in the closet and forget about them, because let’s face it: roller skates are pretty easily forgettable. Just ask anyone who used to mess with them in the nineties. They might not even remember doing it.

***On a sidenote, I’d like to point out that maybe the roller skating comeback has been spurred on by a movie that came out in October titled Whip It. This movie stars Ellen Paige, the goofy pregnant chick in Juno, which is cool. But it also stars (and was directed by) Drew Barrymore. And it is about women participating in roller derbys. I don’t know how this could really spur a comeback to roller skating, unless someone just wants to try skating and add it to the list of things that normal, non-famous people are better at than Drew Barrymore, which would just make them even more bitter (which I admittedly am) that she is famous.

With that being said, I’m not really sure if this is a good movie or not (though I hypothesize it’s not). I didn’t go to see it, probably because I’d rather lay naked in a patch of poison ivy, oak or sumac for 48 straight hours.

Sausage Month: I think every month should be a celebration of sausage. And bacon. Fuck, every month should be dedicated to pigs, because pork in most forms is, to me, very delectable. October is also Go Hog Wild, Eat Country Ham month. If I would’ve known this, I definitely would’ve thrown a sausage party, and not like one of the ones I attend every weekend that consists of a guest list of at least 96% guys, 2% women and 2% toss-ups that you’d never be able to guess unless you got some kind of peek, but an actual party during which people would consume massive amounts of various types of sausage. God, that would be the bee’s knees.

National Family Sexuality Education Month--Let’s Talk!: I’m not lying. That’s really what it’s called, and apparently my family kind of likes to celebrate it, even if unintentionally. I’ll explain. A couple weeks ago I traveled home for the weekend. Upon arriving at my family’s house, I walked into my bedroom and looked at my bed, as is customary because my mom puts all of my mail and magazines and other things that come for me while I’m gone in a pile on top of it. In this pile was a strip of seven condoms. I immediately yelled out into the hall to my Mom, asking what those were doing on my bed. “You know I don’t use those!” I said. She basically sprinted down the hall and into my room where she closed the door. She started talking to me about how my little brother had just begun hanging out with a girl. Apparently, she suspected that this would lead rather quickly to sex, and wanted me to show my little brother how to use a condom, because apparently her and my Dad wanted no parts of that jazz. I thought this would coincide nicely with Eat Better, Eat Together Month, which happens, of course, to be October. So, later that night when we sat down to eat dinner, I brought a condom to the table with me, blew it up like a balloon and started hitting it around the room, trying to get my family to keep it afloat. I told my brother this would come in handy if he ever took this girl to a sporting event or a rock concert.

I found out later you can also use them for intercourse, and so I told my Dad to put bananas on the grocery list for the next time I come home, because it’s going to be brother on brother man talk time.

Halloween Safety Month: Well, I guess this one makes perfect sense.

That was only the tip of the iceberg. If you’d like to check out some of the other ridiculous October month things, you can visit this site: http://www.brownielocks.com/october.html.



--Spencer--my friend and roommate--and I like to talk about extremely deep and philosophical things quite often. One example of this is a dispute we’ve been having for just about a year concerning whether or not quasi-R&B singer and reality TV star (and man that filmed himself boning a chick with an ass so big it’s more than intimidating) Ray-J could afford a Ferrari while still living within his means. I maintain that he easily could, based exclusively on the revenue he probably made from the song “Sexy, Can I?” but Spence doesn’t feel the same.

Anyway, we were sitting in my bedroom last week watching TV and flipping through the newest issue of GQ Magazine, since we’re tasteful men and all, when we came across our newest topic: Would we rather be able to have sex with January Jones (the sexy woman who plays Betty on Mad Men and just did a decently provocative photo shoot for the magazine), or own a brand new silver Lamborghini for ten years?

Startlingly, we both immediately agreed. We came to the conclusion that, if you had a Lambo, you could get laid a lot more than once, and probably by a number of different women (because let’s face it, some women are entirely shallow, and you can just shut the hell up if you want to argue about that, because I could name five girls right now that would bone a dude for having a car with doors that open upward instead of outward), whereas if you got to couple with January Jones one time, she’s of the caliber where it would take roughly 3.5 seconds to finish after disrobing. We basically came to the conclusion of quantity over quality, and would ultimately choose the flashy ride.

I actually Tweeted this question earlier today (I’m still trying to figure out this whole Twitter craze), and Spencer texted me a response that basically says the way I feel about it better than I could ever articulate: “If you own a Lambo, you get to say ‘I’m lambo’n like in that rap song (”This is the Way I live“), but if I get to keep pictures of January, then it’s a done deal.”

I guess the fact that we’d only go with Ms. Jones if we could get footage we could use to reflect back on just goes to show that sometimes the best thing about achieving something is the memory of actually having done it, and not the specific act.

--I get on Facebook almost constantly. Pretty much every time I sit down at the computer. In fact, I’m on it right now, and it really destroys my level of productivity. It also pisses me off from time to time, and this is one of them. I’m one of those people who is generally pretty satisfied with the original way that Facebook does things, and I get into a mode where I enjoy knowing just what to expect whenever I get on. Every now and then, though they change things around that completely throw me off of my Facebook game (which basically consists of endless creeping, and not much of any value at all). Very often they’re little things, but things that make no fucking sense to me whatsoever. Take, for instance, this new thing they’ve recently decided to do. You all know about the little suggestions box they’ve had for a while in the upper right hand corner of the screen. It used to suggest people that you might want to friend request, based on mutual friends and shit like that (but for some reason, women that seem to be amateur porn stars that I have no friends in common with always show up on mine, along with random celebrities). One day, however, I signed on, and that suggestion box was really, really trying to tell me what the fuck to do, and I didn’t like it. First, it was suggesting that I write on people’s walls that I hadn’t spoken to on Facebook for a long time (which, I mean, there is a reason for...I only talk to the people I want to talk to). It wanted me to “reconnect” with some dude I severely disliked when I was in high school, and probably still would now if I was forced to ever be around him. I shook this off, and tried not to get too worked up over it. But then, the next day I got on, and it suggested that I poke two people. Firstly, the poke is a very, very fucking strange and extremely creepy entity (though it has been known to work on at least one occasion that I can attest to...yeah, I’m not making that up) that probably shouldn’t exist. Secondly, the two people Facebook wanted me to poke were a broad that recently got married, and some other dude that I went so high school with.

Seriously, what the fuck? Who ever thought that doing this whole suggestion thing was a good idea at all? It was like when Coke tried to change its recipe in the ‘80s, or when somebody thought it’d be a good idea to let Joel Osteen right books or be on television.

Also concerning Facebook. Does it bother anybody else that college kids seem to be more passionate about the prospect of adding a “dislike” button to a social networking site than they are about a fucking state election, a flu pandemic or the upcoming release of the second Boondock Saints movie? If you don’t like something that someone puts up in their status, either post a reason for why you don’t like it, or just let it go. It makes me wonder what the social life for the people that actually make groups and petitions lobbying for a dislike button consist of. (Not unlike how many of you must wonder what the social life of a kid who sits at a computer and blogs about his gripes with Facebook consists of. And I’ll tell you: it’s only slightly better than that of a Call of Duty addict.)

--I was hanging out with a few of my friends last night, and we were discussing words that we really disliked. One of these words, and pretty much the only one that everyone agreed on hating, was the word “moist.” I’m not really sure why this is, but it makes me wonder who makes up these words. Was there ever a time where somebody was trying to make a word for something that is kind of wet, but not completely saturated, and then was like, “Oh, yeah, we’ll call that kind of thing ‘moist.’ People will fucking love that.”

--My friends and I watch a lot of football on the weekends, and we always complain about the commentators, saying that they don’t know shit and that they constantly state the obvious. (I think this is because, if you’re sitting there for four hours trying to talk about college kids, you kind of lose shit to discuss.) So, I came up with an idea the other day: why not let two women--preferably housewives with no real experience watching, playing or slightly caring about sports--commentate a college and/or professional football game in its entirety. Fuck, lets get a bunch of real-life desperate housewives to get on TV and do some commentating. How fucking awesome would that be?

“Well, Becky, it looks like that man named Brett with the salt n’ pepper crewcut hairdo has his hands in that man’s undercarriage! What is he doing?”
“Well, I’ll be darned, Ruthie. A brown thing just came out of there, and it looks like he just threw it to a colored man, who is running away with it really fast-like. I wonder who it belongs to!”
“Oh well, boys will be boys...holy cow that man that ran away with that brown thing is doing some kind of dance in that painted part of the field!”
“Yes, by golly, yes he is! I think I saw something a lot like that in the movie ”Hook“ with Robin Williams! I made the kids turn it off because it was too violent.”
“That Robin Williams sure is hairy, Becky.”
“Yes he is. Oh my God! Those boys are hitting one another really, really hard!”
“I think it’s time we get on down there and provide them with a timeout, so they can think about what they’ve been doin’ to one another.”
“Indeed!”

...You know, shit like that.

--Penn State (my alleged area of higher learning) is a pretty wild place. Basically, there’s not a lot going on around here except for college-aged kids getting obscenely drunk and getting really, really extremely excited about football games played by their peers. This kind of combined last year to a little riot situation. Penn State beat Ohio State, which was cool and pretty exciting. Afterwards, many of the students of Penn State decided to go to the downtown area, and basically fuck shit up. It was, without question, a riot. People were knocking over light poles and doing all kinds of obscene shit.

I guess my question is, why?

It makes absolutely no sense, no matter how you look at it, for people to start a riot and mess things up in the town that they live in and pay to maintain. If you’re that dead set on starting a fucking riot, go to the Columbus (or whatever place is guilty of losing to your fucking college football team) and mess their shit up. I like to walk to class with nice landscaping to look at, not shrubs thrown all over the damn road.

With that said, I admit that I was down there for the riots last year. I was a passionate observer. And, if something like that happened again, I’d probably go and check it out again. I just don’t understand people’s infatuation with destroying things after a big victory.

--In just a few short hours, I’ll be turning 22 years old, and I’m not even remotely excited about this. I’ve never really been huge on birthdays, except for my 21st, because that was the day that I was deemed legally allowed to beat my liver into submission by buying my own alcohol and drinking it whenever the fuck I chose to (except while driving a car). The reason I usually don’t get too excited about birthdays is because I’m not really the biggest fan of being celebrated for something that I really have no right to take credit for at all. The real person who should be celebrated on a kid’s birthday--and I’m hesitant to say this, because I have rules against giving women credit for just about anything--is the person’s mother. Basically, all I did the day I was born was, well, come out of my Mom, for lack of a more tasteful way of putting it. Besides that, all I did was breathe and cry, which is exactly the same thing I do on days that I lay in bed and watch Armageddon. I didn’t contribute anything to society on that day, and it can be argued that I still really haven’t. So why do people celebrate the day that I was born, and give me shit simply for existing? I’m not saying that I’m ungrateful for the gifts (and drinks) that people have sent my way over the past 22 years, and I won’t hesitate to accept a shot if you give me one tonight. I just think that society as a whole should reconsider the importance that people place on their birthdays. Instead of wearing a tiara or a sash that proclaims that you’ve been on this earth for 21 or 22 or however many years (like billions upon billions of other people), give your mom a call at the exact time you were born, and thank her for boning your dad, not smoking or drinking for nine months and, most importantly, pushing hard.

I was born at 4:27 a.m. I think my Mom will really, really appreciate the call she’s going to get tonight.

Random Thoughts: September

I spend the vast majority of my life pondering very random and usually very strange things. I wish that for just one day you could get into my head and feel the constant churning of subjects and the very intense analysis of things that, at the end of the day, really don’t fucking matter beyond “just slightly.” I sit in my non-fiction class and wonder what it would be like to have Explosions in the Sky playing in the background of my life all the time. I go to work, and while I’m supposed to be researching and writing an article about the swine flu, I’m thinking about how awesome of a band name Mother Effort & The Foolish Its would be, or how dope of a website domain name whatifwenamedit.com would be, and about how I should start using words like “dope,” and “dig,” or “dangit,” or anything that sounds sweet and starts with a D much more often. When I’m in the shower I wonder if the inception of universal healthcare would make medical marijuana easier to come by for someone with no tonsils and a pornography addiction.

I don’t know if anybody else’s head works this way, and to be honest I don’t really care, because I only care about myself and hate all of humanity except for guys. (Did you get that? That’s my new and creative way to say I’m a misogynist.) All I know is that my thoughts can be described as sporadic at best, and that about once in every five times one of these random thoughts comes into my head, I write them down. I’ve written a spattering of entries for this burgeoning website of incoherent rambling and straight-up bullshit that have been titled “Random Thoughts” or something to that effect, but those, like my thoughts, have been very unpredictable. So, I had an idea the other day. I’m going to start collecting these random thoughts I have, and do an entry of them at the end of every month. If you don’t like them, that’s fine, and I completely understand. I probably wouldn’t want to sit around and read the random thoughts of some dude, and if you feel that way then I hope you can spend the time you would’ve spent reading this doing something productive, like saving the print industry or mapping out the migratory patterns of all the loose women in your immediate vicinity.

But, for the rest of you...

***

--I dig the restaurant Subway, I really do. I mean, that place is dope, but dangit it can be stressful. Think about it. You go in there and get in line to get a hoagie, and they just start firing questions at you. It’s like a double-edged sword, too, because you either roll in there with no line, and they start throwing questions at you before you’ve even decided if you want to go healthy (wheat) or happy (Italian herbs and cheese), and as soon as you mumble an answer to that one, they start throwing around questions about cheese. They always ask you what kind of cheese you want, and what if you don’t know what kind of cheeses they have? If you’re not a Subway veteran, you might think that they serve swiss there, and ask for it, at which point the person waiting on you will give you a scornful look that all but says “your parents never even really loved you.” On the other side of the spectrum, you can go in there in a line behind eight people and have enough time to figure out exactly what you want and to play an entire game of Monopoly on your iTouch, and you can get through the bread and cheese, and even the toasted or not question without any real confusion or inconvenience (aside from the fact that you just stood for 20 minutes behind a man that has ordered 12 fucking sandwiches because he must be a Mormon bringing home dinner for the entire family). But then you get to the vegetable portion of the ordering process, when they begin to fire questions at you again. Initially, you knew that you wanted lettuce, tomato, onions, black olives, green peppers, jalapenos, salt, and pepper, but when they start asking you, all you can do is say the first two items you’d wanted before you feel bad because they keep reaching in and grabbing more and more shit to put on your sandwich when they should be helping the 80-year-old woman behind you that’s getting dinner for the entire fucking nursing home. I think the franchise tried to remedy this situation by offering “the works” option, which is when a patron utters that they want those words and they automatically get most of the usual sandwich vegetables applies automatically. The problem with that is, though, that pretty much every single Subway employee has a different perception of what “the works” includes--despite the fact that its inclusions are on a sticker right in front of them and the customer. One day, a lady tried to put carrots on my sub. Fucking carrots. On a sweet onion chicken teriyaki. I mean, come on.

--I like to visit the website postsecret.com when it is updated every Sunday, and I wonder what it would be like if somebody from your hometown read the message on the postcard and then saw the town from which it came from (it’s sometimes very visible on the cards, obviously), put two and two together and realized that it was you who’d written the card. One example of this would be a postcard I saw on the site that came from Germantown, Maryland this week that read “I’ll only have sex w/ my students in my dreams” repeatedly. What if you were a high school teacher and your principal saw that on the site and was immediately like, “That was Mrs. Fucking Mason, goddammit, I know it. She’s always telling Roy she can tell he’s been working out because his delts are just popping. I knew that shit wasn’t normal.” Fuck, that site could be used to catch criminals.

***Update: Shortly after I wrote this one, I checked on Post Secret again and discovered that the address they send the cards to is a Germantown, Md. address. I’m a fucking idiot.

--The other day I was in class, and the girl I sit next to was talking to the girl in front of her. I was sitting there attempting to mind my own business and thinking about what it would be like if morbidly obese people were considered extremely sexy and skinny models were considered outcasts and misfits when I heard the girl in front of me say, “My Dad’s boyfriend’s sister...” Just think about it for a second.

--Have you ever gotten drunk and not remembered everything that happened to you the night before? Well, I have once or twice, and when I do, the first thing I think the next morning is about how much I’d love to know just exactly what I did the night prior. I’ve always thought it’d be really cool if you could wake up and replay your entire evening in one of those “previously on” segments they always play before television shows start. Like, instead of an Entourage “previously on” (that would go something like this: Vince banged some chicks and sucked at acting, E was the biggest douchebag known to man, Turtle wore a Yankees flat brim hat and smoked a bong, Drama drastically overestimated himself, and Ari yelled a lot of random shit at people), it’d be like “Previously on ‘Scott was wasted again last night’: It started out as a nice and relaxing Tuesday evening, and he was going to take it easy and drink two bottles of wine while sitting at his computer and typing fucking stupid random thoughts, but then his friends asked him to go out. He drank the bottles of wine anyway, and chased them down with a few shots of bourbon. Following this he played ‘parkcore’ the entire way to the bar, where he just barely made it in after dropping his identification in a puddle outside of the entrance and right in front of the bouncers. After drinking a few beers, he began to belt out the lyrics to ”Still Fly“ by the Big Tymers even though the actual song playing in the background was ”Party in the USA,“ by Miley Cyrus. After this, he requested that the DJ play ”Party in the USA,“ by Miley Cyrus, and offered to dance with him if he would...etc.

--I’m sure that, although I disagree with a lot of people concerning a lot of things, that everyone that reads this can agree with me on this one statement: weed makes you hungry. Everyone knows it, even if they haven’t tried it (which I haven’t, I have a D.A.R.E. license plate and take that shit seriously, but I have heard things), and I’m not sure why, but it’s supposed to produce quite the appetite. So, I’d like to make a modest proposal: why not legalize marijuana for one day of the year, and make it readily available to the public? I mean, only one day per year couldn’t hurt that badly, could it? And the day I’m thinking of is Thanksgiving. How fucking cool would that be? You could pass a couple of ceremonious blunts around the table for you, your brother, Aunt Ruth, Grandpa Thaddeus and the whole crew to just get ripped on thirty minutes before dinner. At the very least, you’ll be out of it and actually be able to convince yourself that the Detroit Lions are a good football team, and at the very best you’ll be geeking out with your cousins and having a gravy chugging contest. That’s a win-win.

I can see how this might cause some problems for professional sports, though, because their random drug tests for the month would be completely null and void. Ricky Williams would immediately love Thanksgiving.

--I was writing an article at work the other day concerning the Pennsylvania Wine Association’s new marketing campaign that includes something called a ”Libation Vacation.“ This is something they’ve decided to push (because of the economic downturn) that is supposed to attract people to visit PA wine trails instead of taking vacations that are further away and much more expensive. Part of the campaign includes the PWA inviting local bloggers that specialize in food, drink and travel to a wine trail, in hopes that they will write favorably about their experience and encourage others to go get hammered. For some reason, I haven’t gotten an invitation yet. This made me think about how terrible it is to be a resident of Pennsylvania if you’re also a borderline alcoholic. This is absolutely THE WORST state to get drunk in if you’re trying to do it after 9 p.m. and don’t want to go to a bar (which is to say, you’re trying to get drunk by yourself). All of the beer distributors and liquor stores close at nine or earlier, and you can get booze nowhere else. Also, residents of PA pay some of the highest taxes in the country and also some of the highest college tuitions. Fuck this state.

--I was talking to one of my friends the other day, and she told me that 30 % of women do not get off. I don’t know if she meant before the age of 21, or 30, or ever, but I immediately thanked about 8 different deities for having the good fortune of being a man. Because a typical guy can get off anywhere. And I mean anywhere.

--Throughout most of my life I’ve been very averted to commitment to women and the prospect of a long term relationship. This could be for a bunch of reasons, but I think I’ve pretty much outgrown it. The one thing about that whole deal that still gives me pause is when I see couples that have been together for a while, and they seem to kind of hate one another. At the very least they resent each other. I think this might be because once you reach a certain point in a relationship, you start to kind of get comfortable and fuck up in ways that absolutely would not have flown at the beginning. You get to a point in the relationship where things that would have happened at the beginning and resulted in an immediate break-up begin to seem almost trivial, and it’s kind of like people’s standards get lower and lower when they actually have a significant other. This is something that I don’t understand. I know that people can say ”Well, once we’ve been together so long we can’t just throw away everything we’ve had and all the time we’ve spent together over something like that.“ In other words, people learn to forgive, which I’m completely fine with...when it comes to certain things. I just don’t think you should feel like you have to forgive someone just because you’ve been with them for a period of time that you couldn’t get back anyway, unless you have a fucking Dolorian. Think of it this way. If you start dating a new girl and she cheats on you in the first month, you’re going to (unless you’re a total fuck) break up with her, never talk to her again, and probably write a bunch of emo songs about how big of a c-word (cheater, duh) she is. Does it make any sense at all to stay with that person if they cheat on you two years later, just because you’ve spent a lot of time with them and don’t want that all to go to waste? In my mind, if someone cheats on you, all of that time was a fucking waste anyway. There is no other part of life that mimics that, and I don’t know why relationships should be any different. That’s like going to the hospital for a major surgery and realizing that your health insurer doesn’t cover a full frontal lobotomy, but being like, ”Oh, fuck it. I’ll pay for the whole goddamn thing, because I’ve been with HighMark since the early 80s and don’t want to just throw all those years down the toilet. Some things are just more important than my own health, you know?“ It’s like sticking with that stock you bought in Enron back in 2001, just because you don’t want to waste all that time you spent looking their numbers up in the newspaper. Sometimes, you just have to sell the stock.


Now, after I wrote that part about cheating, something came to mind that’s from a conversation I had with my dearest mother shortly after I’d discovered that one of my ex-girlfriends had cheated on me. I was going on and on about how unacceptable cheating is and how I didn’t give a fuck if I was married to someone or not. If they cheated on me, I was out. She told me that maybe that wasn’t entirely fair (which immediately made me think that maybe I really am a postal worker’s child) in some circumstances, since people change through the years. I tried to pay creedence to that, but then I came to my senses and realized exactly what I’d do if I found out my spouse had cheated on me and I had children. I’d gather those little buckaroos around me in their little playroom, give each of them a Klondike (before fucking dinner!) and lay it all out for them. It’d go something like this: ”Hey kids. Well, all that yelling and shattering of the good china and what not that you probably heard earlier most likely has you a little bit in the dark, and I just wanted to be the first to tell you that your mother and I are getting a divorce. I wanted to try and stick it out for all of your guys’ sake, but Mom’s been doin’ Larry from accounting, and I just can’t abide that. Bill, it’s like you keepin’ on with that whole Young Republicans thing even though you know the dude that was president for the past 8 years probably wasn’t doing the right shit. You just realize that you fucked up a little bit, and you move on. You don’t keep going red just because you wasted a few years doing it. Shit. And Macy, fuck, Macy, you’re only eight years old, so you probably won’t remember any of this shit in a few years anyway, but damnit, it’s like you keeping on playing with those Barbies you were so fond of even after you found out they were made with 9/10ths esbestos. Take it from me, young one, it’s not worth getting cancer just because you spent your formative years playing with a piece of fucking plastic. And Jason, well, Jason. I have nothing really to say to you, since you’re always reading books...maybe that’s not a waste of fucking time, and if it is, your old man isn’t ready to face that sad truth yet. Anyway, that’s the deal. Who wants to go to Dairy Queen? What Macy? No, Mom’s not coming. She’s in the bedroom we used to share crying because I tricked her into signing that pre-nup all those years ago when I said it was a modeling contract!“

--I absolutely would not want to be on a commercial for E-Harmony. How embarrassing would that be? Well, I guess not as embarrassing as those commercials for once daily Valtrex, when there’s a couple talking about how one of them hooked up with a burner in high school and as a result caught a serious case of the herp, and the other one is a clean sexual being. And they’re trying to keep it that way. Why would you want to go onto a commercial and be portrayed as that person for the rest of your life? You know people would see you and be like ”Oh, shit! It’s the Valtrex girl!“ Aim a little higher. Try auditioning for a Kotex spot, or something.

--I’ll tell you something else I don’t want to be: sober on December 21, 2012. Allegedly, according to the Mayans, that’s supposed to be the day that the world comes to an end. If this is true, I don’t think I’ll be able to do much personally to change it, so I may as well go out kicking. So, on that day, I’m going to get completely blitzed and try to fulfill everything on my bucket list (mainly sexual fantasies), just in case the world ends. (Personally, I don’t think it will end, and find it odd that people base this hypothesis on the fact that the Mayans stopped making their long ass calendar on that day. I don’t think they did this because they thought this would be the day the world would end, but because they were too busy running away from all the white people trying to fucking kill them to keep making some stupid calendar.)

--Phoenix University is kind of a weird entity. Their main marketing tactic is to show people that they can do all of their college work from the comfort of their own home and in their pajamas. Fuck that. Who wants to be in their pajamas all day? If you’re going to be sitting there all day on your laptop, go naked, and when you have a web conference with your classmates flash them the goat real quick.

--Earlier this month, I was leaving my apartment complex with a couple of friends at about noon to walk up to the Intramural fields to begin our tailgating for that evening’s football game. I was drinking a beer (my first of the day) and enjoying myself when an undercover cop car pulled up next to us and asked for our identification. They then proceeded to site me for having an open container in the borough of State College, where it is apparently illegal (this was about 50 yards from University Park, where there were probably about 75,000 open containers being consumed right then and in a far more dangerous environment). While one of the cops was writing my citation (which always seems to take about half a fucking hour, for whatever reason--potentially illiteracy), I asked the other if she had been assigned to work in State College, or if she’d actually decided to work there.

”Well, I’m a State College Police Officer,“ she said.

”I know,“ I said, because it was fairly fucking obvious. ”That doesn’t really answer my question. Did you choose to work here?“

She told me that, yes, she did indeed choose to work in the area.

”Um, why?“ I asked. ”It seems like all you guys do is give college kids citations and deal with a bunch of stuff that really isn’t that interesting at all.“

She then went on to tell me that State College is a good place to raise a family, and that she likes it here. ”I mean, it’s different than working in a city because we don’t get shot at every day and it pays a lot better.“

I was aghast at that statement. ”You get paid more than officers that work in a city?“

”Yeah, a little more.“

”Like, more than the people that get shot at every day?“

”Yeah.“

”But isn’t the whole point of being a police officer so that you can actually make a difference and stuff?“ Right then her partner came out of the car and handed me my ticket, and began to instruct me on where I had to go to pay it. He also told me that my fine would be determined by the district magistrate and would be ”about $80.“ Good thing the female cop wasn’t in charge of determining my fine, because I think she took my remark about making a difference to the head, because she had one hell of a furrowed brow that made her look like the principal from Matilda. The next week, I went to the magistrate to pay my fine, which came out to $153.50. For having an open beer and not causing harm to anybody.

No wonder people dislike the police.

--I dig Barack Obama, and I voted for him. I never thought he was going to be the nation’s savior, or even that he was the best person in the country for the job, but he was the best one running. He was the lesser of two evils in my eyes, and I still stand behind my decision to vote for him, and don’t think he’s doing a very bad job thus far. I think people should keep in mind that the President is treated very differently from everyone else, in a way that only football quarterbacks are treated. The President gets the credit for triumphs, and they get the blame for the low points, whether or not they were even very instrumental in making either one happen.

But, really, did he have to go on ESPN before Monday Night Football earlier this week and talk about Hispanic Heritage Month? I really don’t think that was important at all, and it’s not because I have anything against Hispanics at all (I understand it might seem that way if you take my question and let yourself make assumptions, but I assure you that I don’t), it’s just that I think he has other, more important issues to be preparing speeches about. Obviously, there’s the economy, there’s war, there’s healthcare. More than all of those, I though Obama should’ve been talking about breast cancer. The entire reason he gave his little speech was because October is Hispanic Heritage Month. October also happens to be Breast Cancer Awareness Month, as you can probably tell by all of the pink gear football players have been wearing. The way I see it, Breast Cancer Awareness is much more important than honoring Hispanic Heritage, and it should be addressed as such. Think about it: 40,610 women are expected to die of breast cancer this year. That’s a lot of people, and it’s a disease thats awareness should be spread as far as possible in an effort to find some more effective ways to battle it, and, maybe someday even cure it. How many people do you think have died because they didn’t get honored for their ethnicity? I’d say zero.

What I Miss, or Something.

"Something dies when you grow older, but you do the best you can."
~Jesse Lacey

I just started my senior year of college, and the implications of such a thing have really begun to set in. After this year, it will become very difficult for me to live the way that I currently do, which is generally pretty relaxed and at times even close to effortless. Next year--unless I go to graduate school--I'm going to have to go out there in the real world and get a real job and eventually fall into a steady routine that will include only brief rations of fun (by way of drinking myself to sleep and relentless masturbation). To say that this scares me isn't really accurate, because I'm only afraid of two things in this world: spiders and commitment. I'm not scared to go out and get a job doing something I'm good at at all; I've actually been preparing my entire life to do just that, I guess, and there's not a doubt in my mind that I'm ready to be a professional. So, it doesn't scare me, but it sure as hell saddens me. I've always had a rough time with change, even when I was a little kid. I used to cry uncontrollably if my mom was going out of town for a weekend, and I don't even like hanging out with that lady (kidding about the hanging out but not the sobbing).

This will be the second time I make a leap like this into a very different lifestyle than I’ve ever experienced before. The first was, of course, the transition from high school to college. You move to a different place and live in a completely different way than you used to, and you get your first taste of independence. Somehow, I was able to withstand the transition from high school to college with only a few major fuck-ups that still haunt me to this day, and I try not to think about them. But now, with a very uncertain future lying ahead (that I hope involves a chance to fight Chad Kroeger and bang at least two Spice Girls, as well as find a lucrative career), I don't know what the fuck to think, and so I escape by retreating into the past. It's saddening, sure, because a lot of the thrills I felt then are now altogether unattainable and have been replaced with other (usually more damaging in some way) things or actions. I can't help--and I'm sure you can't either--thinking about these things that are basically lost and gone away, and they make you happy for a little bit and then you just feel empty. Loss of innocence tends to do that to you. One of my best friends told me recently that everyday you get a little bit happier and a little bit sadder, and I completely agree with her. I think these memories kind of amp up that change in emotions, almost to a manic depressive state, but it can help you stay young. I'd like to dispense a little bit about what I miss from my formative years, if only to distract myself from the stomach-level sadness and dread that come from considering the future and, ultimately, growing up. (Maybe, when you have some time, you can do the same. If you want, you can even write them down and e-mail them to me. That’d be pretty cool, right?) Also, if I keep thinking about these things and don't let the memories go away, I strongly believe that it will help neutralize the growing up process and keep the kid in me for as long as I live. Some would say this is unhealthy, and that I have Peter Pan syndrome. Those people are probably correct.

I miss being innocent, a lot. I'm more than certain that parts of me are still innocent, because a complete loss of innocence happens gradually, event by event and thought by thought. Like if your significant other cheats on you or fucks you over, then you lose the innocence that anyone you let intimately into your world is actually someone that loves you and that you love back. You'll never believe that someone is incapable of hurting you ever again. On the other side of the coin, the first time you fuck somebody over you begin to realize how ruthless and terrible you yourself can actually be, and you'll probably never look at yourself as some innocent, Kevin Arnold-like character ever again. I think a lot of the things I really miss about being extremely young directly correlate with a loss of innocence in some form or another. I'm pretty sure that, with the exception of losing one's v-card, it's nearly impossible to put a positive spin on a loss of innocence, and I think innocence goes hand-in-hand with excitement a lot.

I miss being excited. I guess I still get excited, but not to the extent that I used to, and it's definitely about different things. Instead of getting really excited for the end of a school week and going to a Friday night football game, I get excited for a Friday night that usually results in a level of intoxication that prohibits me from remembering just about anything after roughly 11:30 p.m. (On football weekends, getting to this state usually prohibits me from even being able to wake up on time to go and tailgate for the college game that takes place around noon, and is, I think, probably much more important than any high school game in the entire country.) Instead of getting excited on Christmas Eve about Santa coming and showering me with presents or Jesus being born or whatever, I get excited that I don't have to go back to school for a month, and for the free good scotch that my family members always have at our get-togethers. Basically, what I'm saying is that I really only get excited about getting fucked up, or things that I’ll be doing while fucked up, and even though I guess there are a lot of college kids (and alcoholics) who are like that, and I've made peace with it, it’s still kind of rough to accept that I don’t get giddy about shit anymore. I don't know why this happens when people get older, but maybe it's because life starts to get a little more serious. When you have to spend your whole week paying someone else thousands upon thousands of dollars to teach you things you could’ve learned for “$1.25 in late fees at the Boston Public Library,” (yes, a Good Will Hunting quote) it’s kind of tough to get really excited about some fat guy that allegedly flies around the entire fucking world in one night on a sleigh pulled by reindeer and gives you presents (unless you call your sister stupid, then he’ll give you coal) because a baby was born by a woman who didn’t even get to go through the fun of making it.

I miss fake teenage angst and depression. These are two things that the vast majority of teenagers go through at some point, and it usually hits extra hard if they listen to a lot of indy music (which I definitely did). Kids usually pine after a certain boy or girl, and cannot get her, or they do, and then something goes terribly wrong, like one of you just isn’t ready for a relationship (no fucking shit, you’re in high school and life is not a Taylor Swift song; ask Kanye West if you don’t believe me), or you didn’t respond quickly enough to their instant messages. This puts the slighted person into a deep funk that seems very extremely serious to them, but for some reason their parents laugh a lot at them about it. Then they start writing in journals or talking to their friends about “love” and shit like that. It’s hard to explain, actually, just what this spectacle is like. It’s almost like the kid goes into this depression on purpose, almost so they can seem like they’ve been broken and battered, and they walk around just emanating depression from every single movement they make, so that people will look at them and be like “Oh man, Beatrice looks so sad. I can’t believe Henry dumped her because she wouldn’t give him a handjob when they went to see Fast & Furious last week. Love is hard. I heard he didn’t even sit in the back seat with her on the way home when his dad picked them up!”

I miss that, because that kind of fake funk you get into is so, so, so much better than the real thing. When you actually get hit with a ton of bricks and a huge break-up when you’re actually old enough and mature enough to feel real and significant emotions toward another person, it feels god-awful. It’s indescribable, really, and I’m loathe to even try. All I can say is that you get a weird feeling in your stomach, like you kind of might throw up, and then every time you think of it after that, the back of your neck and shoulders start burning (this might only happen to me). This same feeling mimics itself when you’re on the other side of the spectrum, too, which would be when you execute a colossal and irrevocable fuck-up with someone you didn’t even deserve in the first place. It takes a while, and then it hits you just like when you were fucked over yourself, so that’s also pretty rough. (I don’t know where I’m going with this.)

I miss teenage romance. When you could make anything good with a stuffed animal or a teddy bear, and you made mixes of songs for girls without having any idea what the hell these songs meant. (***SIDENOTE: I miss not knowing what Konstantine, by Something Corporate was about. It turns out that this song, which sounds like the most romantic song ever written, and can be construed as such if you continue to let it mean to you what you’ve always thought it meant...which I recommend...is actually about the singer cheating on his girlfriend. Talk about a fucking surprise.) I miss when you’d write notes to a pretty gal and fold it up all weird and shit, like an origami paper crane, and you’d write said notes in all different colors of gel pen. I miss that. Now, I feel like if I wrote a letter to a girl I’d not at all be taken seriously at all. Maybe because I’m not taken very seriously at all to begin with, but I digress.

I miss high school dances, because these were the times when I became the world’s biggest martyr. I would throw a fit about putting on a suit, because I used to only wear basketball shorts, sweatpants, hoodies, and long sleeve t-shirts. (I miss that, too. I grew up a little bit and realized that a XXL Knoch Knights Basketball t-shirt isn’t really going to score you much in the female affection category.) I fucking hated wearing a suit, and the only thing I hated worse than that was dancing. I honestly barely danced at all at my senior prom. My date danced a lot more than I did, and she was in 10th grade. To be honest, I think I danced more at the prom I went to after my sophomore year of college (why I was there is another story, but it wasn’t particularly by choice and I didn’t have a date), and that is probably one of the saddest admissions I’ve ever made.

I miss feeling bad ass for drinking alcohol. If I could’ve held onto that feeling and felt hard every time I boozed now, I’d probably wear a lot more leather.

I miss study hall, where I could read with no distractions and learn more than I learned at any other point in the day.

I miss not being straightforward with my parents. It used to be like I always had this big secret that I was keeping from them, like they didn’t know anything about the bad things I did. Now that I’m older, I tell them everything, and we say fuck at the dinner table. Talk about a loss of innocence.

I miss getting really, really excited about watching a special TV show at a specific time, before DVR was commonplace. Every single Thursday night I would come home from basketball practice, shower, and sit down to watch the OC while indulging in smokeless tobacco and hoping that my parents wouldn’t come back and find me out. Those were the days.

Alright, this has gone on for a pretty long time, so I’m just going to rattle off the rest of the things I miss (which means I’m too drunk to keep doing this for much longer...that’s what she said): I miss over-the-bra heavy petting, high school basketball, locker room bro-sessions, being scared to death of drugs, I miss the art of seduction prior to Facebook and text messaging, I miss the simplicity of it all, I miss french-kisses being the fucking greatest thing ever, I miss kissing my mom goodnight every single night, I miss the days before the recession (gum-recession), I miss hooking up to John Mayer’s first album, I miss the nub club, I miss ping pong tournaments and bonfires, I miss trying to slowdance to Lifehouse, I miss my long hair, and I miss not worrying.

But, more than anything, I miss feeling no pressure whatsoever beyond the present day and the next, and I miss the mindset that everything would be so much better the older you got.

Wrestling

This is something that I wrote a couple of weeks ago during one of my creative writing classes. Our professor wanted us to write a scene from the point of view of a young, immature child who was witnessing something that adults do that he might not totally understand. I hope you like it.

***

I wanted some milk because I couldn’t sleep and it always helps me sleep so I had to get mom ‘cause she still doesn’t let me pour my own even though I’m seven and a half and will be eight in November. She’s always worried that I’ll spill it because she says I’m a messy eater and sometimes spill my drinks at the table. It gets all over the floor and we have to pick it up, and she doesn’t like doing that because it makes her mad and she has bad knees so she can’t be kneeling all over the floor all the time. I walked into the living room and her and dad weren’t in there but there were a few empty bottles on the table where I sometimes kneel and color pictures of dinosaurs and Captain Planet in front of the TV. I don’t think there was any milk in the bottles though and it was weird that they left them out because mom and dad always get mad at me when I don’t clean up and I didn’t really think that was too fair but they’re grown-ups and I guess that means they can do just about anything they want. I can’t wait to be a grown-up. I was confused at first because when I woke up I saw that the little alarm clock I set sometimes on the weekends so I can get up and eat doughnuts with dad while he reads the paper and I read the funnies said it was only 11:30 at night and whenever I wake up during that time they’re almost always out in the living room watching TV or reading, but then I remembered that mom and dad had gone out to eat that night at some place special or something (if it was Golden Corral I would be mad because I loved eating there and their dessert is so good and you can have as much as you want), and that the babysitter had put me to sleep. Mom and dad didn’t go places without me too often but when they did the nights were always different and now that I knew that I wasn’t so confused anymore and decided to just go find mom.

I walked to their bedroom and opened the door pretty quiet so I wouldn’t wake up dad. Mom says he is a bear when he doesn’t get his sleep, and I think she’s joking but still I didn’t want to find out. As soon as the little big of light from the hallway night light came into the room though I could see that both of them were already awake and were grunting and making all kinds of weird noises. Mom actually sounded kind of like one of the ghosts in Casper when they’re trying to haunt people and it doesn’t really even work. I think they were wrestling and dad must’ve been about to win because he had mom pinned and she was almost screaming. It didn’t look like he was pinning her that tough or anything but I guess ladies aren’t too good at wrestling and she might’ve been just playing along to make him happy. I thought if I was as big as mom I could’ve easily gotten out of that pin and maybe turned it back around on dad and unless he turned into a bear like mom said he sometimes does I could probably end up winning the match.

I thought about how my mom was being pinned and making noises like she was a ghost and that made me laugh and then they both looked over at me at the same time and stopped wrestling. Dad rolled off of mom and gave up his pin and I felt bad for bugging them in the first place because nobody likes a pest. I told mom that I wanted some milk and she told me to go to the kitchen and she would meet me there in just a second so I did. When I walked out of the room I heard dad sigh and I realized he must’ve been mad that he couldn’t finish mom off and win and I felt bad again because I’d interrupted their play time and they don’t get to play too much because dad works a lot. I got my milk and kissed mom goodnight and went back to bed.

I still felt bad the next day about interrupting playtime because mom said I should never interrupt and so I told dad that I was sorry for doing that. He said it was okay because his birthday was coming soon and him and mom always had a big wrestling match—a royal rumble even, he said—on that day and then he started laughing I think because he was already thinking about the moves he was going to use to pin mom again on his birthday which makes sense because nobody wants to ever lose on their birthday. He said she makes him steak on that day too which will probably help him get strong for the rumble.

I told my older brother—he’s thirteen—about how cool it was that mom and dad wrestle even though I thought it wasn’t really fair because I wasn’t allowed to roughhouse with my friends in my bed but I also didn’t work all the time and got to play most of the day and I was small and I guess I could get hurt if I did too much wrestling even though I made sure I drank a lot of milk so I could get strong bones. I don’t know why but he started to act weird and said that my parents were getting it on which makes sense because the announcer always says that before the big fights my dad sometimes watches on TV with some of his friends from work and Uncle Joe. I still don’t understand why my brother acted so weird when I told him though. Maybe because girls have cooties and wrestling with them is almost always pretty much out of the question even though my mom and dad have lived together since they were only still old kids. Maybe he just doesn’t like wrestling and I think that must be it because he always tells me that the wrestling on TV is fake.