Yearly Archives: 2012

I’m worried

I’m worried that I’ve run out of ideas. I’m worried that I wrote everything that I have to write about. Like when I started writing, I thought to myself, just keep writing, just keep doing it everyday and you’ll get better. But I’m worried that the opposite has happened, like maybe I only had a very finite quantity of interesting things to say, and now that I’ve written all of them, I’m condemned to, if I want to keep this up, just writing a bunch of nonsense over and over again, until the nonsense becomes so repetitive that every single thing that I write looks identical to every single thing that I wrote the day before. And it’ll get so bad that they won’t just feel or look identical, but they will be identical, like I’ll have written this same piece two or three or four days in a row. And then it’ll get to the point where it’s even worse, where not only is every page the same, but every paragraph is the same. And then the sentences, and finally, it’ll get so bad that I’m only writing one word, on repeat, not even one word, just one letter, just typing out the same letter over and over again. I’ll be like, all right, time to get to work. And I’ll sit down and just start writing, “SSSSSSSSSSSS” and I’ll really want to think of a different letter to type, or even just maybe to make it lowercase, but I’ll be so bankrupt for ideas, I just won’t be able to get past it.

I’m worried that the yogurt I ate of the fridge might not have been as fresh as I thought it was. It said that the expiration date was two days ago, but I don’t buy that, for several reasons. First of all, the whole container is sealed, and the actual expiration date isn’t for a month from now. But then on the side of the packaging it tells me to consume the whole thing within three days as soon as I break the seal. And that’s what I’m talking about when I say that it was expired. Like it wasn’t actually expired. The date hadn’t passed. But I opened it up a week ago. Maybe ten days. But I really wanted a snack, and so I cracked open the container and, yeah, it had definitely been a while because all of this liquid had accumulated at the top. So what do I do, do I drain the liquid or do I mix it back in the yogurt? Part of me thinks that, well, the liquid was there a week ago, but it was still part of the yogurt. So if I drain it and then eat the yogurt, it will be missing something, that liquid. But then another part of me thinks that, isn’t yogurt alive? Like aren’t there active cultures (whatever that means) floating around in it? What if this liquid is just a natural byproduct of a container of living yogurt living in the fridge for ten days, two weeks, tops? Isn’t that gross then? Is that like yogurt pee? I’m worried that it might be yogurt pee. But that’s crazy, because yogurt doesn’t really pee, and it’s gross to keep mentioning it. Finally, I gave it a whiff. Did it smell OK? I’m worried that it smelled fine. And what I mean by this is, even if it’s a fresh yogurt, won’t it always smell a little off? If someone told you that you smell like yogurt, even fresh yogurt, wouldn’t you be a little insulted, feel like you might need to take a shower? So I ate it. But I’m worried that it wasn’t fresh. And not for any of the above mentioned reasons. I’m just feeling really sick now. And now everything smells like yogurt, and it’s just making this whole feeling that much worse.

I’m worried that I might not ever make it to the Olympics. Obviously my chance to compete at a physical level is lost. I’m not an idiot. And I’m not saying that I’m old. I’m just too old to be an Olympic basketball player, or an Olympic swimmer. But what about an Olympic gun shooter? You don’t have to be young or in shape to shoot a gun, right? That’s what I always thought would wind up happening. Well, not always. I always thought I would get there as a real athlete, like a long jumper or a boxer, but that was when I was in grammar school, high school. As I started getting older and realizing that I wasn’t really advancing in any of these areas of athletics, I just changed my goals a little bit, shifted to the shooting. But now the same doubts are coming back, and I’m getting worried again, not just about the shooting, but about making it to the Olympics in general because, and like I said, I’ve already put all of my eggs in the shooting basket. Like I’ve said to myself, I’ll still get there, but I haven’t even started training with guns. I’ve never even shot a gun before. I’m worried that everyday that goes by where I’m not target practicing, the odds of me representing the USA on a shooting team are growing more and more unlikely. I mean, maybe, maybe there’s a really small chance that I could be a gun shooting prodigy, like that could be my hidden talent, like theoretically I could be the Mozart or Einstein or Lebron of shooting, and so then I wouldn’t have to train at all, it would just be a matter of finding a gun and getting in touch with whoever’s coaching the shooting team. But let’s be honest, I’m a realistic guy, that’s probably not the case at all. It could be, sure anything’s possible, but I mean really, now that I’m thinking about it, I was never really good at Duck Hunt, and you’d think if I had some inherent targeting skills locked away inside, they’d at least show up with a shooting video game. Yeah, one time I played Big Buck Hunter at a bar and I was terrible.

I’m worried that my only chance at Olympic gold is to get rich enough to buy an Olympic horse. But still, I’d get so jealous of that horse out there on the field, competing at an Olympic level, and I’d just be sitting on the sidelines, and I might get crazy for a second, and in an impulse I might gallop onto the field myself, screw them, I’ll think to myself, I can beat any one of these horses. But everyone knows how easily horses get spooked, right? I’ll get kicked so hard. And they’ll keep kicking me, over and over again. Maybe right in the jaw. Maybe my jaw will get kicked clean off. What’s my life going to be like then? I’m worried I’ll get depressed, despondent, suicidal. But wait a second. If I’m that rich, rich enough to buy a whole Olympic horse team, won’t I have the money for a new jaw? A better jaw? I’ll have the best prosthetic jaw available, even better than a real jaw. It’ll be able to chomp through boulders. It’ll be able to unhinge, like a snake’s. A six million dollar jaw, but even more expensive, like a twelve million dollar jaw. With gold teeth. I mean diamond teeth.

I’m worried that I’ve wasted everyone’s time here. I’m worried that whoever reads to the end of this blog piece is thinking to themselves, “That’s it. That’s the last time I read this crap. From now on, I’m only reading serious stuff. Rob’s ruined all non-serious reading for me, for life, forever.” And that’ll be a shame, because there’s a lot of non-serious writing that’s out there that’s totally worth reading, and I don’t want to have ruined that for anybody.

The Trilogy: Part five of three

It had to happen eventually. That’s the line that’s been haunting me ever since I posted my award winning trilogy, The Trilogy: The World’s First Four Part Trilogy. I kept fighting the urge to exploit my past success, to phone it in for a day and write the fifth part of what is already one of the most successful four-part three-part sagas in all of history. But I can’t put it off any longer. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to return, to continue the journey. And why the hell not? Let’s see how many parts this trilogy is really made of.

Let me do a really quick recap for those who somehow missed out on parts one, two, three, and four. That’s it. That’s the recap. I made links to all of the other parts, so you can just click on them and read them. Linking is the toughest part of blogging. I naturally assume that eventually society is going to collapse and the servers that sustain our Internet will eventually stop running and that the only thing left of my writing will be the hard copies that I’ve instructed my readers to religiously print out and store away in case of said inevitable collapse. And these sacred texts will get passed down from generation to generation, and finally, somebody will be like, “I didn’t get this part. What was he talking about when he said that was the recap? And why are some of the words blue and bold?” because hyperlinks don’t show up on regular paper. And people might start to doubt me. So for any readers studying this text generations from now, I was just linking. The words showed up blue and you clicked on them and the earlier text I was referring to automatically popped up. But since you don’t have computers anymore, please see The Trilogy, parts one, two, and three, and four.

That was so funny right? The four part trilogy? And I ended it with this big joke that it was going to continue as a five-part trilogy. And then I was like, “just kidding. But am I? I am.” At least that’s what everyone thought. But I kept writing and the months piled up and one day I was so bankrupt for an idea of what to write about I thought, what the hell? And much like Rocky VI, there’s really nothing new being done. This is a huge victory lap. I’m literally taking a break between each paragraph and patting myself on the back, laughing lightly, murmuring stuff like, “You funny devil Rob.”

One of my readers sent me an email after part four, telling me that, “you didn’t do the first four-part trilogy. Indiana Jones did. Ha.” And I know I’ve put off the response for a while, but Indiana Jones? I’ve never seen any of his movies. They all seemed kind of boring. Even when I was a little kid and all of my friends would have sleepover parties and whoever’s parents were hosting rented a ton of movies and we’d stay up all night watching them, I’d always fall asleep as soon as I heard that boring Indiana Jones theme song start up. And then someone would wake up me up, “Rob, Indiana Jones is over. Wake up. We’re putting on Terminator.” I loved Terminator. “I’ll be back,” classic. And I’d be sitting there on the edge of my sleeping bag, totally gripped with suspense and terror, thinking to myself, why are all of my friends laughing? This is a crazy thriller. Why am I not getting any of the comedy? And it wasn’t until I went to the bathroom later that I realized that my friends weren’t laughing at the movie, they were laughing at me, because while I was lost in my Indiana Jones induced coma, everybody brought out some permanent markers and drew penises all over my face.

Terminator is another contender for almost four-part trilogy. Unfortunately, trilogies are all about hindsight, planning. You can’t just make a movie and say, “Well, if it’s successful, we’ll do a sequel. If the sequel is successful, we’ll do a third. And who cares if the third is successful? We’ll put them all in a box and sell them as a trilogy.” It doesn’t work that way. Why don’t you think anybody ever talks about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trilogy? Because it doesn’t exist. There are two cool turtles movie and then a really weird one where everybody gets sent back to feudal Japan. Yeah I didn’t get it either. And it’s the same with Terminator, you could totally tell they were just following the money.

It’s even worse for Indiana Jones, because while I had absolutely no interest in the first three movies, they were out there. They existed. It was a trilogy. And then they ruined the whole triloginess of the first three by releasing that terrible fourth movie. Again, I never saw it, but I think at this point it’s a generally accepted fact that it was an insult to everything that Indy fans held dear.

Look at Star Wars. Did you ever notice me mentioning the second trilogy during my original trilogy posts? No. Because they pretty much sucked also. But Lucas had the foresight to guess that he’d probably lost his touch at storytelling and filmmaking, so he wisely separated the first trilogy from the second trilogy.

And this brings it all back to me. I’ve been planning this ever since I typed out the word “the” as in The Trilogy: Part One. I knew that it was going to be a five-part trilogy. Maybe I know that it’s going to be a twelve-part trilogy. All I know is, I’m calling it. It’s all been carefully set up. And just when you think I’m completely out of nonsense to write about, that’s when The Trilogy is going pop on your computer screen. That’s what trilogies are all about.

Lot of people in this city

The other day it was raining when I got out of work and when it’s raining in the afternoon everything’s always a lot grosser, a lot more uncomfortable, everybody’s all wet, but everybody’s doing whatever they can to stay as dry as possible, walking single file around large puddles, carrying around giant umbrellas, even bigger umbrellas, like a golf umbrella, one of those umbrellas that the fruit stand guy uses to protect all of his produce from the rain or the sun, all at the same time, a giant picnic umbrella, really, something you would bring out at the beach to guard you and your family and your ten best friends from the harmful rays of the sun. And I’m a lot taller than everybody else, and I’m never the kind of guy who brings an umbrella to work if it’s not raining in the morning because, what am I, I’m just going to have to permanently carry around this extra two pounds of dead weight every single day? It doesn’t rain that often. If it’s raining in the morning, obviously I’ll bring an umbrella. But I don’t understand where everyone gets an umbrella from when it starts raining in the middle of the day. I go to work in the morning, it’s dry, nobody has an umbrella. I step foot outside in the afternoon, it’s raining, everybody has an umbrella. What did I miss? What am I not doing that everybody else is doing? Because I know for a fact that regular normal non-crazy people don’t just always carry around umbrellas. What else do you have to always carry around? Snow shoes? Maybe an oar in case there’s a flood and you have to hitchhike home on a passing canoe, but the only way they’ll let you on is if you can help with the paddling, and how else would you paddle if you didn’t bring your spare oar? And I’m so much taller than everybody else, so come quittin’ time when everybody races out their doors, trying to beat everybody else in the city to the subway, I’m standing at direct eye level with everyone else’s giant umbrellas, and I’m just constantly avoiding getting my eyes poked out, and because I’m so nervous about those umbrella spokes which, why are they so sharp and pointy anyway, I don’t notice all of the puddles, and of course I didn’t bring my galoshes, so my feet are soaked, and on these rainy afternoons the rush hour commute just feels a lot more crowded, like when people get wet they just expand, and they get slower, and crankier, and I can’t get my metrocard out of my wallet because my fingers are wet, and the plastic that the metrocard is made out of, it completely loses its grip when wet, but it doesn’t matter because there’s a huge line at the turnstile, because it takes people forever to fold up their umbrellas, keep the line moving, put away their umbrellas, shake out the excess water right on my feet, but my feet are already wet so, whatever, keep trying with the metrocard, nobody can really get a grip, and then going underground, on this particular day, really it was very frustrating, but this guy finally just screams out something like, “Jesus fucking Christ! You fucking people need to learn how to fucking move! Fuck fuck fuck!” and I’m just looking at this dude screaming his crazy screaming in the middle of the subway platform and he looks just like me, just like some guy who doesn’t want to be where he is so badly that the stress and the pressure boils over and it just gets to him and he starts shaking his fists at the universe, and I just started getting really angry at this guy, I really considered yelling back because, what the hell? Do you think you’re the only person inconvenienced by this mob of slow moving human beings? Or the weather? Or being wet? Or feeling uncomfortable? He was mad and he got to express himself and now I was mad and I wanted to express myself, but what would I say, “Shut the fuck up asshole!” or “Why don’t you just calm down there pal?” How confrontational would I get? And nobody ever expects these things to work out. It’ll only just escalate. And we’re underground and what happens if things got heated and somebody got pushed and, you know what? Let that guy have his little temper tantrum. I bet he feels like a big man, telling everybody off, telling everybody to stop getting in his way, making his life a little bit more inconvenient than it had to be. You know what I should have said? I should have said, “Listen buddy, why don’t you move someplace far away from the city, where there are no people to get in your way, someplace real dry, where it never rains, and where nobody has to work, and nobody has to commute, and then you won’t be pissed off. That’ll solve all of your problems my friend.” Actually, no I wouldn’t have said that either. That would have been really way too long and there’s no way I would have gotten all of that out without him interrupting me, going back at me, and then I would have gotten all flustered and my blood would have started to boil and I wouldn’t have known quite what to say so I’d just start saying things like, “Oh yeah?” but really loud, because volume always trumps substance. But that would have led to a path towards escalation also and, one time I read this article about how when too many human beings are close together and they start getting pushy that actual waves of energy start running through the crowd, like currents, like people can get crushed, lifted right out of their shoes, and then who gets charged with murder, everyone? Can you try several hundred people for the murder of one person? And how many sentences are we talking about, does everybody take turns in jail for a day or are we talking about individual multi-year sentences? Yeah, I did the right thing. I kept my mouth shut. Somebody poked me in the eye getting off the train, opening up their umbrella. It hurt, but my eye didn’t fall out, I didn’t get in anybody’s face, I just kind of went, “Ow … Geez,” semi-loudly, to nobody in particular. I’m pretty sure the person who poked heard me softly cry out, but I’m pretty sure I heard that same person say something to me like, “You gotta watch out buddy. Lot a people in this city,” all passive-aggressively, everybody hurrying home, hands in their pockets, heads in their hoodies.

I’m so deep. Really, really serious. And deep.

I’m sure everyone feels like this once in a while, like you don’t have any control over your life. Ultimately, none of us really have any control. But day to day there are a lot of little decisions that we make, what to wear, what to eat, that kind of shape these feelings of, if not control, than at least something, something like steering, like we’re providing a direction, even if we’re just kind of loosely nudging ourselves, guiding the day toward eventually getting into our beds at night.

But how many times do the days just kind of blend into the weeks? All of those little decisions that I talked about before, picking out clothes or figuring out what to eat, so many times they aren’t even really decisions at all. For a complete lack of imagination I can’t even decide what I’m hungry for, and so I’ll whip up one of the many meals I can prepare in thirty minutes or less. And it’s hardly a matter of taste. It’s, what do I have around the house? How quickly can I put something into my belly so I can stop being hungry and return to wasting time on the Internet?

So it’s this weird, I want to say paradox, but that word just sounds big for the sake of being big, and I’m not even sure if I’m using it in the correct way. But it’s a dilemma. It’s something that makes me scratch my head and think, I get so bored sometimes, I feel like I don’t have a lot of control of where life is taking me, but how often am I not even taking advantage of all of the little decisions that I could be making throughout the day?

I mentioned food. Let’s look at clothing. Is it really a choice to figure out what pair of pants I’m going to wear? They all look the same anyway. Jeans. Sweatshirts. Whatever’s clean really. But what if I started wearing a kilt? Or a pair of yellow slacks? That would be a definite decision, a taking of some sort of a stand. But what would I be saying? I’d be saying that I’m going to do something different. I’d be saying that I’m taking a measured interest in exactly how I’m going to dress myself. But more than anything else I’d be saying look at me everyone. Here I am planet Earth. Please pay attention to me.

And part of me wants that, but I don’t want attention just for the sake of attention. It’s one thing to get noticed for doing something cool or interesting, but its another thing to get noticed just because you’re so out there, so completely past the norms of convention, that you’re really just an aberration, that something’s wrong with you. You keep behavior like that up long enough and all of the sudden you don’t have a job, and you’re wearing crazy clothing all by yourself, and you’re talking to yourself on a park bench.

I don’t even really know what I’m talking about right now. I just look at my life, which I’m very happy with. This isn’t a complaint at all, just an observation or a reflection. Everything I do is steeped in choice. Even on the most boring days I’m constantly making choices. How many of these choices are just automatic, just because that’s the way that everything is automatically done? And all of these choices add up. They make me the person that I am. The food that I eat. The clothes that I wear. The things that I do when I’m not working.

I get up in the morning. I take a shower. I leave my house to get a bagel. I walk on the sidewalk. Why do I walk on the sidewalk? Because that’s how this city was laid out. By who? I have no idea. But I’m living my life based on the way that society has been engineered and built by countless people who lived throughout history, all who made their own countless little decisions that somehow shaped this world that I live in and established the rules and behaviors that I follow and conform to simply by being a de facto member of society.

This is a real ramble of an essay here. But every now and then I just can’t help but thinking crazy stuff like, why don’t we all live in oval houses instead of squares? Why are jeans blue instead of green? What makes the default option default?

Really?

I just read an article in the paper today critiquing the phrase, “Really?” and its overuse in popular culture. First of all, as a frequent user of the phrase, I’ll attempt to mount a defense. I’d also like to say, “Really?” but apparently it’s being used too much, it’s cheapening the English language, it’s destroying our culture. I’d like to say it again right here. But I won’t. I won’t indulge those who find the phrase too low-class, too pedestrian. Besides, instead of actually going ahead saying, “Really?” I’ll just write, “I’d really like to say ‘Really?’” This is great because it really adds a lot of words and sentences to my writing, which I’m always in a desperate need of.

The arguments against “Really?” besides what I already mentioned above, are that’s it’s a way for lazy people to communicate snarky sarcasm without actually having to think up something intelligent to say. I’m sorry, but isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t we all be getting to the point where we can transmit vast quantities of information without having to waste so much breath? It’s like the Internet. It’s like emoticons. It’s like the Smart Car. That’s what the spirit of today is all about. I’d write the word zeitgeist here, but I’ve noticed way too many so called newspapermen throwing around Germanic words in the past few years, and quite frankly, I’m a little disappointed.

But, ahem, really? When I’m talking to somebody, I want it to be as short and sweet as possible. The only things that I like to be longish are these blog posts, because I can look at them and think to myself, “Wow Rob, you really did it. You really typed up a lot of stuff here.” And that’s including my use of the phrase, “Really?” I’m reading back into my archives, and I’m noticing that I use the phrase at least once a blog post, once a paragraph if it’s a really good one.

So I’m reading this article and I’m just boiling over with rage, thinking to myself, there’s no possible way that whoever wrote this could add to the insult. But he does. He goes on in the later paragraphs to make fun of some of my other trademark phrases, like “Seriously?” and “Honestly!” What a jerk.

The author’s name is Neil Genzlinger. I only put that in because I wrote the author as a he and I didn’t want the reader to think that I’m just assuming all newspapermen are men. Also, I hope that Neil is one of those journalists who has a Google alert set up for his own name, and he’ll get an email when this goes up and he’ll be like, “Really? I’ve never heard about this web site. Hmm,” before he opens it up, and the title is just going to be, “Really?” And his face is going to get all red. “I hate that phrase!” he’ll shout and his significant other will be like, “Neil! What did I tell you about screaming at your iPad!” and he’ll be like, “Honey! What did I tell you about calling my Samsung Galaxy Smart Tablet an iPad!” and the significant other will be like, “You know what? I’m not doing this anymore. I’m staying at my mother’s tonight,” and Neil will be like, “Really?”

And I’ll have won, because it’s not a bad phrase. It’s great. It’s got just the right mix of tone and brevity, which I actually like to call briefness, because it’s much more a word of the people than brevity, but I don’t want to give Mr. Genzlinger any more ammo for his award winning commentaries on modern American English and its misuse by the unsophisticated mob of public that makes up contemporary society. And besides, you know why I’m getting so upset here? It’s not that I’ve gotten called out as being one of countless lazy writers who uses the phrase “Really?” when he can’t think of anything smarter to say. No, I’m getting pissed off because I actually invented and pioneered the use of the phrase. Seriously. I really did. Honestly.

What kind of evidence do I have to back up such a bold claim? I have a ton of evidence. But I’m not going to stoop down to Neil’s level of gotcha journalism. No, I’ll let him sit at his desk, stewing in his own sense of smug self satisfaction, thinking that he’s won. But I did invent it. I really did. And if anybody should be writing an article about the overuse of the phrase, it should be me. I should be writing it. Because it’s mine, and everybody else is just copying me. I started it. When I use it, it’s great. When everyone else uses it, it loses all of its characteristic zing. And so maybe I will write that article. I’ll write about how everyone who uses the phrase, “Really?” is just a huge poser. And in this list of everybody, I’ll include in it my good friend Neil and his article as just another example of some lazy writer who couldn’t think of anything to write about that day, and so he just picked out one of my most popular phrases and tried to piggyback his way into the editorial hall-of-fame.

Really Neil?