Stupid Sayings

There are a lot of cliche sayings and quotes out there. I guess some of them are decent and promote good things, but some of them are just so damn stupid that I can’t even wrap my head around it. You know what I’m talking about. The kind of things you constantly see on the Facebook “write something about yourself” boxes and “favorite quote” profile supplements and on AIM or iChat away messages. They’re things you’ve seen in print and heard over and over again, for years. Every time I hear one of these now I just begin to overanalyze them, and I think about how absurd some of them truly are. I’ve kept my opinion on these things to myself for a long time, because I’ve been hesitant to offend anyone that buys into many of them and publishes them all over the Internet (as I’m about to do) and on their fucking trapper keepers (mine says Love Conquers All!). I guess, though, I didn’t have much else to write about tonight, and felt that I’d share a few of my least favorite cliched sayings with you.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Who the fuck ever came up with this saying? It really makes absolutely no sense, not even metaphorically. My parents never got me a cake on or around my birthday and been like, “Here you go Scott. This cake is yours. You have it, but you cannot fucking eat it, do you understand me?” Isn’t the only point of having a cake to eat it (unless you’re on Cake Wars)? There is absolutely no point in having something if you can’t use it for what it was made for. Otherwise, it’s a huge waste. You don’t buy a hoagie and just stare at it until it gets moldy, and you don’t buy a television and then never watch it. I can kind of get what people are trying to say with this one, which is something like “You can’t always have things your way,” or something along those lines. Which is probably just exactly what they should be saying in the first place. Delicious baked goods have no place in such a philosophical conversation as “You can’t have a wife and be banging her sister in law” (Brodeur) or “You can’t drink 15 beers everyday and remain at your fighting weight for the rest of your life.” If you have a cake and you’re not going to eat it, don’t waste it. Give it to a homeless person or someone else that’s going to appreciate it. Do the same thing if you buy some shoes you’re not going to wear, too.

“From the bottom of my heart” Where I come from, when you really want something to resonate, you say it came from the top. But, for some reason, when people are talking about the heart, they use extra emphasis by saying the feelings spewing from the heart are coming from the bottom, which makes no sense to me. If somebody tells me they love me from the bottom of their heart, then wouldn’t that mean that the love they feel for me is probably toward the bottom of the standings, underneath that other guy, eating cake, new episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Ugg boots? If I’m metaphorically storing the strongest kind of love in my heart, then I’m probably going to stow it somewhere toward the top, where it won’t get lost or clouded over by other things, like Johnnie Walker Red or burritos from Qdoba.

“Love is all you need” No, it really isn’t. I don’t get this one, either. I mean, love is a pretty good thing to have. It’s an overwhelming and sometimes frightening emotion, and it has a huge place in both our psyches and within society as a whole. (Without love, we wouldn’t have all those ridiculous VH1 shows with Ray J and Flavor Flave and shit.) But, it’s not all that you need. In fact, I’m sure there are certain people who have gone through their entire lives without ever feeling love, people like Adolph Hitler and Ted Bundy. I’m not recommending living without love, but I’m saying it could be done. Also, if you’re in love or you love something, that’s not really all you need at all. Love isn’t even in that magical equation of three that people used to always tell me I needed growing up. I know that food and shelter were the first two, and I can’t remember if it was water or clothing that rounded out the list. I don’t know if water is included in the food category, but if not it’s definitely more important than clothing. People live in nudist colonies and never wear fucking clothes, and they’re probably having a great time. I think this saying is actually very damaging, because people listen to it and spend a very significant amount of time and energy avidly looking for love. That’s not something you can look for, it’s got to find you, I think. I could be wrong.

“Cheaters never win and winners never cheat” If you’re a baseball enthusiast, I encourage you to compare the amount of games you’ve won with Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi or anyone else who has used steroids (see: the entire fucking league). They’ve won. A lot. And they’ve made a lot of money winning, even if their testicles were shrinking. This can also translate over to real life. How many kids do you know that have cheated on a test and done better than you, even though you were being honest? You might feel like a winner, but I’d like to see you go into a job interview and be like, “Well my GPA isn’t as good as some peoples’ because I didn’t cheat ever!” How many people do you know that have gotten a job because they knew someone who worked at the company, even though they may not have been qualified as other people that applied? That’s a form of cheating, but those people ultimately win, no matter what you tell yourself.

“It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” I heard this all the time as soon as I started playing competitive sports, and even then I knew it was a bunch of bullshit, because the vast majority of people that play sports on an officially assembled team play because they like the sport and want to win. I couldn’t then, and still can’t now, comprehend how nobody, in all of the years this saying has been in existence, spoke up and said “Well, isn’t the way that you play the game probably the biggest factor as to whether or not you’re going to win or lose?” It seemed pretty obvious to me.

Now, I know that sometimes this is supposed to tell people that if they’re losing in the final thirty seconds they shouldn’t chop block the opposition or karate chop them in the neck, but why don’t they just tell people not to be pussies, suck up the fact that they lost, and not be a sore loser? Normally, when you lose it’s yours/your team’s fault. Why would you begrudge another team that did what you were supposed to do, only better?

But it is all about winning and losing, pretty much. Because that’s why games exist. If there was no way to crown a winner at the end of a football game, do you think we’d pay a bunch of idiots millions of dollars to just fuck around on a field for three hours? Would baseball players pump themselves full of physically and mentally damaging performance enhancing drugs if they weren’t trying to win?

“The pen is mightier than the sword” No, it isn’t. Say somebody that believes, from the bottom of their heart, that a person really cannot have their cake and eat it too, and they get really pissed at me for chastising their beliefs, so they come up to me on campus and gut me with a saber on Monday morning. I can’t stop a sword with my pen, no matter how smoothly it rolls across pages, and if I get knifed down, my words aren’t really going to be worth that much afterward anyway. People will only look back and say that I antagonized someone that really dug cake.

“Pain is weakness leaving the body” This is often used by the armed forces, a group of people I respect and would not want to fuck with, but I really don’t agree with this saying. Pain is pain. It fucking hurts, and it’s not because your weakness is exiting your being. It’s because muscles and bones and body tissue have nerves that respond to things that inflict pain. The nerves send these messages to your brain that say stuff like, “Why is this fucking guy doing 30 chin-ups?” or “Does this dude not know not to put icy hot anywhere near his genitalia?” or “Why doesn’t he stop punching walls when his girlfriend talks to other guys?” I mean, if you’re working out and you’re sore following that, then I guess the lactic acid could be construed as weakness leaving the body as you get stronger, but that’s about it.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” This is a really popular one, and it was really fucking easy for Gandhi to say something like this, because people loved him. He could actually promote change. Most people are not capable or able to do these things. The kinds of changes people want to see in the world are on such a broader scale than what one individual can accomplish. Take me, for instance. I think one of the biggest changes I’d like to see in the world (besides more fast food restaurants offering breakfast all day like Jack in the Box or Bar Rafaeli falling in love with 22-year-old poor white dudes that write blogs) would be for some of those crazies over there in the middle east to get their damn minds right and stop thinking other countries are the devil, and to stop blowing up their own fucking bodies and killing innocent people just to prove some point that they probably don’t even fully understand. (Seriously, they tell these guys they’re going to get to have sex with 72 virgins in their version of heaven because they fucking blew themselves up. How idiotic is that? It doesn’t even begin to make any sense, but that’s religion for you, sometimes.) They’re pretty set in their ways, and I cannot be the person to change that. It is literally impossible.

“Nothing is impossible.” Okay. I’m not even going to provide an example or explanation here, because anyone with the cognitive abilities to read that bold print has already thought of something that would be completely impossible for them to do.

“If you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best." This one is so extremely popular with the ladies it’s disgusting. Basically, all this quote is good for is to give certain girls the mindset that they are allowed to act like raging bitches around their significant others, simply because when they’re at their best they are just so great and irresistible. What the hell is that shit? If you’re a girl and you’re reading this, then take heed. Do not use this quote anywhere that it can be linked to you. Just don’t do it. And don’t listen to it and think that the way of thinking that could accompany belief in a quote like that is moral or justified, and don’t think that any guy worth his salt would agree with it. It’s not that, if you’re going to be with someone in a romantic way, you won’t ever see their worst. I’m sure that’s part of it (from my experience), if you’re around that person long enough. But don’t embrace the fact that somebody might be a little bitch and let you push them around when you’re ”at your worst.“ It shouldn’t be about handling you, unless you’re a one person trainwreck. It should be about them trying to help you out a little bit and make you feel better.

If you’re not going to take my advice on this, that’s fine. I don’t care. You’ll end up with someone like Spencer Pratt or something. Just keep in mind that this quote originally came from Marilyn Monroe, a woman who was married and divorced three times before the age of 35. She also killed herself by overdosing on barbituates. Probably not the best person to be taking advice from on such matters. It didn’t really work out for her.