Monthly Archives: March 2014

5 words we should ban along with bossy

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been popping up all over my Facebook News Feed ever since she unveiled her campaign to ban the word bossy. I for one would actually love to be called bossy, because it might imply that people see me as boss material, or at the very least someone worth paying attention to, or listening to, or not ignoring completely when I politely leave post-it notes asking not to take any of my good Mexican glass bottle Cokes out of the fridge.

But I also hate being told what to do. I feel like I’m constantly being bossed around. By my boss. By the government. So yeah, let’s get rid of the word bossy. I’m all for hashtagging BanBossy. But why stop there? While we’re at it, here’s a list of other words long overdue for a ban:

1. Hairy

I remember when I was a little kid and my family would go on vacation every summer, it would always be a shock to see my dad put on a bathing suit and take off his shirt to jump in the pool. Because it’s not a sight we were used to seeing around the house. Now that I’m a grown man, I feel that same instant recoil, the jolt of disbelief every time I step in front of the mirror on my way into the shower. Nobody told me when I was a little kid exactly what I was in for as an adult.

And even though I try my best at manscaping to a degree of acceptable manageability, every once in a while someone will say something to me like, “Dude, your hands are fucking hairy.” I just smile and try to act casual, but I really want to grab them on the wrist, pull them in close, look them dead in the eye and say, “It’s not just my hands. It’s everywhere. And it’s getting worse. Help me.” Please, it’s time to #BanHairy.

2. Lanky

Here’s a word with absolutely no positive connotations whatsoever, yet it’s thrown around casually, like a term of endearment, the way you’d call a loveable yet disheveled looking puppy mangy or mutt. You might not think lanky is that big of a deal, but you try being a 160-pound high school sophomore who, after a very intensive growth spurt, rockets up to six foot three almost overnight. Would you be able to control the trajectory of your limbs at all times? Do you think it’s easy to constantly not trip while walking or running?

Fast forward ten years and you’re waiting tables for a living. You’ve filled out somewhat, but your arms and legs are still disproportionately long, and the effect is only pronounced when the restaurant can’t seem to find a waiter’s uniform that fits just right. Then there are the accidents, the spilled glass of wine, the five or so dropped platter plates in the kitchen. Just try it, I dare you, see what happens if you say lanky. This applies also to gangly, klutzy, and spastic, OK, but it’s long overdue that we #BanLanky.

3. Clingy

Listen, I don’t think that I’m spending too much time calling you. I just love you so much. Is there something wrong with showing my affection? Yes, after you explained to me how embarrassed you were after I sent that barbershop quartet to serenade you at the office for Valentine’s Day, I get it, that it was maybe too big of a gesture. But if you’d only synch our Google calendars like I’ve been telling you we should, I’d have known that you were in the middle of a really important presentation, I could have waited until later in the day.

And look, I’m behaving myself here, on the Internet. I’m not doing those big public displays of love on the Internet anymore, where I write your full name in the middle of the article, tag you, and then post it all over your Facebook wall. I get it, personal space, boundaries, all of those things the lawyer highlighted in the subpoena, OK, I know how to read. Baby, just give me a call and we can talk about it, OK? Baby? Just don’t call me clingy, OK? We’ve seriously got to #BanClingy.

4. Spicy

Here’s a word that, in its quest to be everything, ultimately winds up meaning nothing. Actually, it’s worse than nothing, it’s doing a disservice to language. It’s like, I went to a Vietnamese place last night with my brother. After I ordered my food, the waiter warned me, “Oooh, that’s pretty spicy.” I told him, “That’s OK, I like spicy.” My brother then put in his dish, to which the waiter said the same thing, “That’s very spicy.”

Ultimately both of our dishes packed about as much heat as a packet and a half of “mild” sauce from Taco Bell, but as we sat there and wondered if maybe the chefs watered down the seasoning because they didn’t think we could handle it, we both recalled different experiences in which dishes marked as “spicy” were served so hot as to be practically inedible. And that’s the problem with spicy. That bag of BBQ Fritos over there is labeled “spicy,” but so is that ghost pepper that would render my tongue immobile. We need more words, vocabulary that’s better able to describe the various degrees of heat. Until then, there’s no option but to #BanSpicy.

5. Lucky

It’s just like Obi Wan said in the middle of Episode IV: “In my experience, there is no such thing as luck.” It’s all skill. Like when I was playing my friend Matt in a game of HORSE last week, he was destroying me. Left-handed shot from the point. H. Three point shot on one foot. H-O. By the time he cornered me all the way to H-O-R-S, I didn’t have any choice. So I started pulling my junk shots out. Slam-dunk. H. Matt’s a lot shorter than me and can’t reach the rim. H-O. Another dunk. And another. H-O-R-S for the tie game.

“You lanky motherfucker!” Matt was pissed. (#BanLanky.) “This is beyond cheap, Rob. I bet you ten bucks you can’t win on a real shot. A three-pointer.” Ten bucks? I couldn’t resist. “You’re on.” And yeah, I don’t have much of an outside shot, but for whatever reason, this one just sailed in, a total swish. And Matt, he hits maybe nine out of ten, a great shot, he missed this one, a brick. Of course I gloated a little, I mean, it’s a competition. And as he handed over the ten singles, he commented, “What a lucky shot.” You know what Matt? It wasn’t luck. It was skill. I don’t always hit those shots, but that one was a perfect three. OK? You can’t take that victory away from me by calling it lucky. Because it wasn’t. And now look. Everybody’s reading about this on the Internet. And they’re all hearing about what a baby you were. I won, fair and square. #BanLucky.

Originally published on Thought Catalog

When are we getting more Avatar movies?

Nobody talks about Avatar anymore. How did that happen? I remember leaving the theater after watching Avatar for the first time, and yeah, I kind of felt a little cross-eyed from wearing those 3D glasses for so long, but I thought that nothing would ever be the same again. Fast-forward four or so years later, and everything’s exactly the same. I can’t remember the last time I’ve even thought about Avatar, let alone heard anybody else talk about it.

Avatar was supposed to usher in a golden age of 3D movies. But it didn’t. If I ever have the option between 3D and 2D, I’ll always go for the 2D. Again, a lot of it has to do with the creeping sense that the pressure building behind my eyes is always about thirty seconds away from exploding into a full-blown headache. But I’ve seen a few other movies in 3D, and it was all totally unnecessary. Like The Great Gatsby. I would’ve actually been OK with only one dimension for The Great Gatsby.

And what about sequels? After Avatar crushed every box-office record in the books, there was all this talk of future films set on the moon off that blue Jupiter-like planet. There were rumors about underwater adventures. Like maybe the Na’vi can swim, and instead of having giant birds to fly them around, maybe they’d have cool dolphins or something to help them swim really fast.

But any speculation is just a waste of time. Because are you even working on any more Avatar movies James Cameron? The last I heard, he was too busy playing Scuba Steve, building that bullet ship that took him down to the deepest reaches of the ocean. How was that James? Did you have fun? You see any cool giant squid or anything?

You know what I was doing while you were underwater James? I was sitting here wishing that you’d never made Avatar in the first place. Because I want more Avatar so badly. Everybody does. There were all these reports about people getting actually depressed when they’d stare at themselves in the mirror, realizing that they’d never get to walk around inside a nine-foot tall blue body.

People were seriously immersed in your alien world, OK Cameron? And then you just disappear, you’re like, “Actually, I think I’m going to turn my attention toward oceanography.” Guess what? Nobody cares about the ocean. Not unless it’s an ocean on Pandora, OK, and not unless we’re staring at that ocean through a pair of 3D glasses, unable to believe that what we’re looking at on the screen isn’t real. Because it all looks so real.

Don’t you feel like it’s all a little arrogant of you? You’re sitting there thinking, it can wait, I can work on a few other side projects if and when I ever decide to get back to doing what God put me on this planet to do: make more Avatar movies. James, nobody knows how much time they’ll have left on this planet, OK, you could die at any moment. A car accident. Food poisoning. Avian flu. And I’m not even including any of the dumb stunts you’ve been pulling lately, like building your own experimental submarine and traveling to the Mariana Trench.

Even if you started working right this second, dedicating the rest of your waking life to working exclusively on future Avatar projects, you’d only be able to accomplish so much. Don’t you want to maximize the amount of Avatar the world has to consume? Why are you doing this to us James? Was this part of your plan all along? To create the first part of what should have been a thriving franchise by now, all to ultimately put everything on the backburner, causing all of us to slowly forget that Avatar ever existed?

And now I remember it, and I’m flooded with despair, that it’s been so long since I felt what I felt four years ago. Avatar. Cameron, get back to work, man, call a huge press conference, OK, tell us that something’s coming, soon, that we just have to be patient. But not too patient, OK, because I’m going crazy here. Just stop being such a dick and give us more Avatar.

Dear Bill Simmons: Goodbye Forever

Dear Bill Simmons:

I’m not sure how much longer I can write these letters to you every week. I’m running out of stuff to talk about. In fact, that’s what I wrote about last week, that I was running out of ideas. That’s something you can’t get away with two weeks in a row. Maybe this isn’t going anywhere. You can only cover so much in an imaginary, one-sided relationship. I mean, I don’t really know you, not any better than anybody else on the Internet does. And while yeah, I know some stuff about some sports, mostly New York Islanders related hockey stuff, if I ever did get an interview with you, and you started asking me anything about the NBA, or the New York Rangers, or anybody besides David Wright on the Mets, you’d probably be pretty disappointed in the overall trajectory of the conversation.

Actually, that’s not true, I’m great at faking my way through most chit-chat, sports or otherwise. I know exactly when to say stuff like, “Yes,” and “Right,” and then I find the perfect moment to insert something cool that I read on Grantland. That’s how I found out about you, about the web site. It’s like, after so many years of standing at the periphery of group conversations, hoping that the topic of discussion might eventually turn to something other than sports, I found your writing, it drew me in, the way you can write about sports that doesn’t immediately cause me to lose consciousness.

That’s what I want to be a part of. Or, wanted to anyway. Like I was alluding to in the first paragraph, I don’t think it’s happening. I’ve been writing these letters to you every week on my blog for about two months now. And as the old saying goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, for two months, and if after that you still don’t see any progress, just give up on it dude, because how long are you going to keep it up for? Three months? A year? Just cut your losses and get out while you still can.”

I guess this is goodbye, Bill. I feel like I just got to imagine what it would have been like to have just gotten to know you. But whatever, I mean, just because you have a dream, doesn’t mean that it’s going to come true, right? And it’s not like I have nothing. Sure, I’m not writing for Grantland, having a wide, far-reaching audience of people being exposed to my work. But I have this site right here, this little blog. That’s something. Chuck Klosterman doesn’t write for me, but that’s cool, I don’t need Chuck. I don’t need you Bill. I don’t need anybody.

OK, I apologize, I was getting a little emotional there. There’s no need for me to be a baby about this, I just get a little overwhelmed sometimes with farewells. You’ve got your life, I’ve got mine. I’ll get through this. Maybe some day we’ll be walking opposite directions through a crowded city street. Time might start to slow down for a second as we cross each other’s paths. For whatever reason, we’ll make brief eye contact. I’ll give you a really subtle nod, a casual smile. You … well, you have no idea who I am, so even if you reciprocate the gesture, it’ll be totally hollow on your part, leaving you with a weird sense of, “Why do people keep nodding at me? What’s wrong with that guy?”

I could go on and on forever Bill, it’s like, some part of me never wants this to end. But it has to. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Or, if you’re reading this for the first time, but it’s years from now, I guess you can still call me up and offer me a job. But I have be realistic. You’re just way too popular for me to be constantly begging you for work every week from my very tiny, almost imperceptibly small corner of the Internet.

But it’s cool. I wish you nothing but the best in the future. If, by some bizarre twist of fate, I ever wind up creating an insanely popular sports and pop culture web site, and you for some reason fall on really hard times, struggle to find your way back to the top, but can’t get out from languishing in obscurity, and you start your own very small web site, and you start writing open letters to me every week, asking me for a job, I’ll totally make something happen for you. Even if I already have a different Bill Simmons working for me, even if he’s not even a writer, like he’s just an accountant or something, I’ll make room for one more Bill Simmons. I’ll even give you the good BSimmons@ email address and I’ll make that other Bill switch to BISimmons@. Unless you don’t feel like inheriting the other Bill’s spam folder. In which case … you know what? Let’s just say that we’ll cross that bridge if we get there.

Goodbye forever,

Rob G.

My 1991 Dodge Stealth

As far back as my memories take me, I always wanted a car. When I got my first restaurant job at fourteen years old, the only thing that truly motivated me to work every Friday and Saturday night was the idea that, if I saved up enough money, I’d be able to make it happen, I’d somehow have enough to buy my own set of wheels.

It wasn’t just about buying a vehicle, it was the independence that came along with it. For the first two and a half years of high school, I was stuck riding the bus. I felt pathetic, standing at this random street corner in my Catholic school business casual dress code, waiting around in the cold with a bunch of upperclassmen from my town that were too cool to be caught interacting with me.

When I was a freshman, the juniors and seniors that rode the bus to school in the morning were anything but cool. They were a bunch of bullies. They’d make us play this game called red light. Basically, you start at the front of the bus and you have to run to the back, touch the red light near the emergency exit, and make it back to your seat, all while this group of sixteen and seventeen year old dweebs gave you dead arms and noogies.

I wanted nothing to do with any of that nonsense. And so I did it, I put enough money away that well before my seventeenth birthday came around, I had enough to buy my own car. There was this house a few blocks down with a red sports car parked in front marked with a “For Sale” sign. I needed it.

My dad came with me to do the negotiating. I found out that it was a 1991 Dodge Stealth, not that I’d ever heard of that model before going to check out this particular car. The seller and his wife gave us their pitch, there was some back-and-forth between the adults about prices and taxes and … to be honest, I have no idea what they were saying. I was just staring into the front seat, imagining myself shifting gears and outrunning cops on the highway. I knew it, that I was going to buy this car. I would have paid everything that I had.

This was all a few months before I was legally licensed to drive, so for a while I had to be content just to look at this thing in my parents’ driveway. I’d sit in the driver’s seat and listen to the radio. I bought a pair of black fuzzy dice for the rearview mirror. It was everything I’d ever wanted in life, right there.

And then I turned seventeen and I started driving to school, to work, to get McDonald’s, to buy CDs. But with great power comes great responsibility. Like the responsibility to start paying for repairs and stuff. After a month or so, one of the power windows died. So that was like two hundred bucks. And then the exhaust system needed to be replaced.

Then there was a little fender bender, and something about a radiator. I think I’ve forced myself to forget the specifics, because it started quickly eating away at my cash reserves. But it was just like at those initial negotiations. You could have quoted me whatever estimate you wanted for a jon, I didn’t care, OK, all I cared about was that car, and I would have paid anything.

Finally after a year or so of use, the transmission started to fade. When I shifted into third gear, it would make this really loud sound, and after a while I had to skip from second to fourth. Eventually the problem got worse and I had to take it in to a transmission shop. They quoted me over a thousand to replace the whole thing. That kind of hurt. I mean, I think I could have made it work. It would have taken maybe a little loan from my folks, but I’d just work extra shifts that summer, pay them back in no time.

But I never even got the chance, because that week I wound up rear-ending some guy, smashing up the front of the Stealth. I would have sold a kidney to pay for the repairs, but nobody was willing to bankroll both the accident and the transmission. There weren’t any options. I had to junk it. They gave me three hundred bucks and then charged me like a hundred to tow it away. I tried not to cry like a little baby.

But man, it took me a long time to get over that car. For the better part of the next decade, it was a very real goal of mine to resave up all of that money and buy another Stealth, the same model, the same year, I didn’t care what else life threw at me, I needed my Dodge Stealth. But yeah, saving up all of that money isn’t as easy when you’re not in high school. I didn’t feel like working every Friday or Saturday night anymore. And now I had other stuff to pay for.

I don’t even have a car now, and there aren’t any plans to buy one in the immediate future. If and when I do have the opportunity to buy something, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be a twenty-year-old two-door coupe. So yeah, for better or worse, I’m slightly more realistic now. And thankfully my soul doesn’t pine for the Stealth with the intensity that it used to.

Still, I’d be lying if I said that I never get those dreams every now and then, the ones where I’m back at my parents’ house and I remember that I didn’t junk my Stealth, that it’s been in the garage the whole time. I spend a frustrating five or ten minutes clearing boxes and other garage junk out of the way. I find the keys and squeeze into the front seat. And as soon as I turn the ignition, I wake up in my bed, the hairs on my arms are standing on end as my euphoria melts into the crushing disappointment that my Stealth is long gone, that I’ll probably never feel as cool as I did that year when I turned seventeen.

Grinds in the coffee

I make my own coffee at home. It’s nothing fancy, just plain drip coffee. And while most of the time there’s nothing to say really, because it’s just a regular coffee machine making regular pots of coffee, every once in a while I’ll screw it up. My mistake won’t be noticeable right away, I’ll pour myself a cup and everything will look OK enough. But as soon as I add some milk, it’s like one of those trick pens that reveals a secret message, that it wasn’t just coffee that I poured out of the pot, but also dozens of chunky coffee grinds floating on the surface.

It’s just such a bummer, like I don’t even know how or why it happens, but it does. Not always, and not often enough that I’d consider really trying to figure out what’s going on, but just every now and then, like oh yeah, coffee with grinds in it, I almost forgot I’ve got to deal with this on a semi-regular basis.

I’ve got a bunch of theories as to what causes the grinds to make their way into my coffee, but they’re all just kind of half-thoughts, nothing conclusive. At first I had the idea that I wasn’t grinding my coffee fine enough, that after the water gets sucked up through the base of the machine, it then sprays over the basket of grinds, and since it’s all so granular and loose, it causes everything to spill out of the filter, into the pot.

So I started grinding my coffee very finely, holding down the top of the grinder until upon examination of the results, you’d never be able to tell that this dust ever came from something remotely resembling a whole bean. And nothing changed. It was still pretty decent coffee, for the most part, except that every once in a while it would still be polluted with grinds.

I don’t know what to do, or what to think either. I looked toward my various restaurant jobs to see if maybe the professionals were doing something that I wasn’t in preparing and serving large quantities of coffee. A quick tour of our coffee prep station gave me a few insights. Like, espresso is ground very finely, and you need a big espresso machine that shoots highly pressured water capable of breaching the tightly packed grounds. Drip coffee was looser, so everything could kind of make its way through the maze of bigger sized coffee crumbs.

This didn’t help at all, because like I said, I’d already tried both methods, and neither of them prevented the inevitable dirty pot. I thought back further, to the restaurant I worked at in high school. We didn’t grind our own beans. Everything came pre-ground in these vacuum packed bags. And everything worked, for the most part. The thing about this particular machine was the glass pots. Every once in a while, you’d brew a batch and a thin layer of tan foam would accumulate at the top.

“It’s the fucking coffee grinds!” my foul-mouthed but insanely good-natured boss Marcello would scream at us from across the restaurant, “You put the fucking grinds in the wrong fucking way and now there’s grinds in the fucking coffee! Throw it away! You! What are you looking at? Do something, lazy motherfucker!”

I swear, despite Marcello’s liberal use of the f-bomb, both in private and directly in front of all of his clientele, he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked for in my life. But even his profanity driven work ethic was unable to prevent the occasional grindy pot of coffee.

And yeah, it’s not pleasant. But what are you going to do about it? Where I work now, you can’t see if there’s a layer of foam, and aside from sticking my fingers in each cup of boiling hot coffee, there’s no way to tell if what I’m serving is untainted liquid. Every once in a while, I’ll see a hand waving in the air from the other side of the dining room. I’ll walk over and a customer will be livid, “There’s grinds in this coffee!”

And trust me, I love my coffee, so I get it. But what are you really going to do? Because there’s no guaranteed solution. When it happens to me in my house, yeah, I used to sometimes wash out the filter and run the whole pot through the machine again. Or if I didn’t feel like going through that whole ordeal, I might skim a piece of paper towel over the surface, try to catch as much particulate without absorbing my entire cup.

But even that is so much more of a hassle than I want to endure. Now I’ll just suck up as much of the grinds as I can into the first sip, and swallow them as fast as I can, before I have to feel them on my tongue, or stuck in between my teeth. Because whatever, sometimes you get grinds in your coffee. Am I going to get pissed off about it? Or expend a bunch of unnecessary energy trying to fix a really minor inconvenience? No, it’s not a big deal. It’s a cup of coffee. Hopefully tomorrow it’ll turn out a little better.