Yearly Archives: 2013

Mapping Out My Future!

Originally published at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Today I’m going to make a plan for the rest of my life, for the future. I’m going to lay out all of my goals, break down what I need to do to achieve those goals into individual steps, and I’m going to come up with a timetable, a reasonable expectation for when I should commit myself to realizing all of the smaller tasks that will eventually add up to those larger objectives.

And then tomorrow, I’m going to go to an office supplies store, I’m going to shop for a bunch of binders, color-coded plastic tabs, all sorts of organizational stuff that I’ll need to really put into focus everything that I should be working on. Highlighters, maybe some plastic sheets that can fit into the binder that have separate pockets for different index cards, I’m just thinking maybe I can write out individual reminders on each card, take them out as I need them, really just keep my priorities in check. Forty-seven bucks? Yeah, that’s a lot for office supplies, but it’s nothing compared to the price of my future. That price is priceless, definitely more than forty-seven dollars.

Then the day after tomorrow, I’ll finish eating lunch, I’ll look to that bag of office supplies, I’ll think, man, I can’t believe I didn’t come straight home and get right to work. I don’t know what happened, I took a nap, I made myself some dinner. And then it’ll be halfway through the following day. I’ll think, should I get to work right now? In a minute. I just want to lay down for a second.

And then the week after that, my wife’s going to be like, “Rob, what’s the deal with this bag of office supplies?” and I’ll be like, “Honey, please don’t move those. I need them. I bought them so I can map out my future,” and she’ll be like, “OK, well, are you just going to leave it there on the floor? Can’t you put them away?” and I’ll get annoyed, I’ll say something like, “Listen, I’m going to use them, like very soon, so it doesn’t make any sense to put them away just yet. Just let me take care of it, OK?”

And then sometime later, like maybe a month or a month and a half after that, I’ll yell upstairs to my wife, she’ll be in the shower, I’ll be like, “Hey! Where’s my bag of office supplies?” and she’ll say, “What?” and I’ll repeat, “Office supplies. Where did you put that bag that I had, the one from the office supplies store?” and she’ll say something like, “I can’t hear you. I’m in the shower. Can you wait until I’m out of the shower?” So I’ll run upstairs and open the door, “The office supplies…” but the cold air is going rush into the bathroom and she’ll scream out, “What the hell, Rob? Close the door!” and I’ll say, “Come on, just tell me where you put my…” and she’ll scream louder, “Now!”

And then maybe like one or two years after that, I’ll be on the computer, surfing the Internet, not really understanding why my life is so aimless, the days blending into the nights, each month flying by seemingly faster than the last, and what do I have to show for it? Why can’t I figure out what I’m supposed to be doing? And I’ll think, it’s because I’m not organized enough, I just need to make a plan, I need to set some goals, and break those down into more manageable chunks. But just as I grab my keys to head out to the office supplies store, I’ll remember that I already did this, that I should have some supplies around here somewhere. My wife won’t be home, so I’ll send her a text, but by the time she replies, I’ll be watching TV or listening to a podcast.

I can’t see us staying at our current place for more than three or four more years, and so when we finally decide to move on, we’ll be packing all of our stuff into boxes, I’ll come across that bag of click pens, not the cheap kind, but the ones that come two for seven-fifty, the label maker, all of those plastic separators that go in that binder. I’ll think, this is perfect, I know exactly where I’m going to put this stuff in our new apartment. Once we’re settled in, I’m going to get to work, I’ve still got a whole lifetime ahead to make something of myself.

And then maybe forty or fifty years from now, my kids and my grandkids will be hauling all of my old stuff into a dumpster right after I’ve died. The younger kids will be searching through all of the years of accumulated trash, looking for some sort of hidden treasure, and one of them will come across this bag, they’ll say, “Look mom, a whole bag full of multi-colored post-its, a faux-leather bound document folder, and something called White-Out tape. Can I keep it?” But she’ll say, “No, come on, it’s just going to sit there and take up space, go ahead, toss it into the dumpster, they’re going to haul it away in an hour and we’ve got piles and piles of junk to dig through.” And the kid’s going to go, “Why did Grandpa have a whole bag of old office supplies?” To which she’ll reply, “I have no idea. He worked in a restaurant, and the Internet was around by then, so I couldn’t tell you what he needed any of that stuff for.”

I hate the United States Postal Service

I’ve been waiting for this package for forever. I ordered something from Amazon, but I didn’t realize that the product I purchased was sold from a third-party, from somewhere in China. I got an email one day in broken English informing me that my tracking number could be plugged in on the China Post web site.

So I dug in my heels and prepared for a long wait. I mean, it’s China, it’s like on the other side of the planet. It boggles my mind how we’re able to send things even across our own country, but from China? Man, I buy one item, what kind of process is that like, getting that one item from China to New York?

Does it go on a boat? On a plane? And then there’s the whole question of taxes, of customs, I don’t know, I’m sure that the system works, because stuff comes from China all the time. What doesn’t work, and this I’m all too familiar with, is the United States Postal Service. It’s terrible.

Talk about low-hanging fruit, complaining about the Postal Service is almost not fair. It’s like written into their charter or something, that in addition to never stopping for rain or sleet or snow, they also have to make the most routine pickups and deliveries as maddeningly impossible as they can. I’ve had problems with the Postal Service in the past, and I’ve vowed never again, but every once in a while you don’t have a choice.

It’s the default option. I didn’t specifically choose for my most recent package to be shipped via the USPS, but when I plugged that tracking number into the China Post’s web site, it eventually told me that it was located in some sorting center in New York. OK, well that’s something, I thought to myself, at least my package and I are in the same country. It should only be a matter of time before it shows up at my door.

But then a week passed. And then a month. I’d go on to the China Post web site and enter the tracking number, but the New York sorting center was the last information it gave. I tried the USPS web site, and much to my delight, it recognized the tracking number. Apparently the Postal Service attempted to deliver my package on October 15, but nobody was there, so they left it at the Post Office.

I clicked on an option to schedule a redelivery for the 25^th. That date came and went without any package. That Monday I figured I’d drop by the branch, see if maybe they had it at the office. Actually going to the Post Office, it’s a last resort, you’re only there because everything else you’ve tried has gone repeatedly wrong.

I opened the doors and the place was jam packed with bodies, a line that had nowhere to go, so it just kind of started snaking in on itself, like I had to ask several people to move and reposition themselves just so I could join them at the very end. And even with four tellers actively helping customers, it seemed as if no progress was being made at all.

I tried to mentally prepare myself for a long wait. I took out my phone, started reading the paper. Still, I couldn’t help but feel my pulse accelerate every time I took stock of my life, standing here on this line, it was getting close to an hour here, every ten minutes or so someone ahead of me or behind me would verbally announce their frustration, a whispered, “Come on!” or an, “Unbelievable,” all laced with several grunts, sighs, these general noises of being totally pissed off yet completely unable to do anything about it.

When I finally got to the window, I told a guy wearing a “Steve” name tag about my problem. He told me to hold on, and then disappeared somewhere in the back for maybe fifteen minutes. He eventually resurfaced, shaking his head, telling me to write down my name and number, that he’d give me a call when they found it.

I never got a call. I came the next day and repeated the same routine. After explaining my situation to someone else, I was told to wait by the side for a supervisor. It’s not just the waiting that got to me, it’s the waiting that’s punctuated by five or ten seconds of ridiculous instructions. Step to the side. Give me your address. Wait here. When I finally spoke to the man in charge, the best he could do for me was hold up his hands in confusion and apologize.

What could I do? I voiced my frustration, I explained how long I’d been waiting, and yeah, the guy acted genuinely sympathetic, but what could he do? What could any more complaining do? I was beat by a faceless institution, a mail delivery service fueled by high wait times and general incompetence. I guess I could have stood there and chewed him out for a little longer, I mean, he wasn’t acting defiant or anything. But would I get my package in the end?

No, so now I have to file a claim and hope that I get my money back. What a waste. How absurd is it that I can buy something from across the world only to have that delivery totally botched right at my doorstep? It’s got to be somewhere, right? Was it delivered to the wrong house? Is it buried in the back of some truck somewhere? I have no idea. I’ll never figure it out. All I know is that, going forward, I’ll pay whatever it takes to make sure that USPS stays far, far away from my stuff.

Every once in a while I’ll hear something in the news about the Postal Service, how it’s going bankrupt, how without assistance from Congress they’re going to have to cancel Saturday delivery or even fold up all together. Normally I’d be like, come on, let’s get our act together. But seriously, just shut it down. What a waste. Quasi-government run operations like the Postal Service only exist for groups like the Tea Party to point at and rail about the government’s inability to get anything done. Enough wasting everybody’s time and money on the USPS. Just let UPS and FedEx take over completely.

What makes a hero?

What makes a person a hero? You hear the word thrown around pretty casually, hero, like look at me, I spent six months aboard the International Space Station, or, hey everybody, I just landed an airplane in the Hudson River. Everybody knows what I’m talking about, the word hero applied to people simply for doing their jobs. And in the second example, it’s doing your job, but not even doing it correctly, because airplanes aren’t supposed to land in rivers, they’re supposed to touch ground on a runway, in an airport.

Come on, when I was in high school and my car skidded out of control and I swerved onto my parents’ front yard, nobody was giving me any rounds of applause, no, it was just my dad, yelling about how much it was going to cost to fix all of those holes in the grass, which, I never really understood how you can get so angry about a lawn, it’s just dirt, grass will grow there eventually.

No, real heroics involve going beyond the ordinary, which, while you might think my astronaut examples apply, they don’t, because think about it, astronauts today aren’t doing half of the cool stuff that they used to do. Maybe if one of them hijacked a space shuttle and went to Mars, without permission, without even the necessary provisions, and then he got there and he found a Martian space colony, and it spawned this whole new era of interplanetary diplomacy between us and the previously unknown Martian people, maybe that guy would be a hero.

Maybe. But just hanging out in orbit, running space tests and doing routine space work, yes, it’s a lot more exhilarating than say, waiting tables, but I wouldn’t be too quick to apply the hero label. Again, it’s all about exceeding expectations, about going way further above and beyond what people would think you’re capable of.

Which is cool, because it leaves everyday heroics accessible to the average person. You don’t have to go to space, you don’t have to pilot a giant plane, all you have to do is take everybody by surprise with something that nobody would have ever see coming. Like take the waiting tables example, say there was a guy that started to choke, and I rush over to his side, he can’t breath, and so I start pushing down on his chest, I mean, I took a first-aid course years ago, but I can’t really remember the specifics.

And it’s not working, so I grab a knife and start cutting a hole in his throat, a makeshift tracheotomy, but it backfires, I miss something because, again, I have no medical training, at this point I’m going solely off of stuff that I’ve seen on TV. And he starts bleeding everywhere. No, I’m not a hero. Not yet.

So I take a bunch of straws and I combine them into one really long straw, and then I cut myself open and I stick one end of the straw into my veins and the other into his. I have no idea if it’s going to work, I’m not even sure our blood types are compatible. But I get lucky, and it does work, and he survives, and we both wake up in the same hospital room, side by side on two adjoining beds, it turns out this guy is a billionaire, he leans over to me and says, “Son, you were a real hero. You saved my life! And now I’m going to reward you with a huge cash reward.” I’m still not done. I’d then have to deny the reward, say something like, “All in a day’s work,” and then I’d have to go back to the restaurant and say sorry to my boss for missing the rest of that shift.

Then I’d totally be a hero. Because you need that extra layer of adversity, that final level of impossibility that you still wind up conquering. It’s like, again, I’m not trying to knock the Subway Hero, but is that guy really a hero? You know who I’m talking about, right? The guy that jumped on top of the other guy when he fell on the tracks? I’d say, courageous, yes, quick-thinking, definitely, but heroic?

I’m not so sure. He knew exactly what he was doing. There was a space in the tracks where he was able to wait out the train. All he did was position both himself and that other guy into place. Anybody could have done it. No, heroic would have been like twenty people stuck on the tracks, and the train’s coming, it’s barreling out of control down the tunnel, there’s no way this is going to end well.

But then this guy jumps from the platform, he opens up his chest, he’s Superman. He puts his hand out and slows down the train just by pushing it, and then with his super speed he gets everyone to safety before any damage is done. Now that’s a hero, that’s what I call heroics. If you’re not really going that extra step, if you’re not wowing me, then what are you doing? You’re just doing your job. You’re just kind of regular. And again, I’m not saying I’m a hero, so I’m not trying to put anybody else down. But just take a minute, the next time you go to call someone a hero, think about it. Can this person run faster than a car? Does he have X-ray vision? No? Maybe he’s not a hero after all.

Daylight Savings Time

Daylight Savings Time is such a scam. One night you go to bed and then thanks to some government bureaucrats, you wake up the next day in a different time zone. You’re not allowed to just do that to time. Who the hell do you think you are, you can just take an hour here and put it a few months over there? No, and every year it gets worse, it used to be that you’d have to manually set your clocks to the new hijacked time, but with computers, with the Internet, it’s like it’s all happening behind my back.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the higher-ups rob an hour from me, right in front of my face. I was watching TV, it was like one-thirty in the morning, there was nothing on but, I don’t know, I couldn’t get to sleep, so I was watching reruns of all of those really bad Comedy Central shows. I’m looking at the time, thinking to myself, man, only one more minute until Mind of Mencia is over. I really hope the next show isn’t so ridiculously unfunny.

And that’s when it happened. It went from 1:59, to 3:00, just like that. I took out my phone. Three in the morning. Are you kidding me? “Where is my hour?” I started screaming out loud to nobody in particular, “Where is my time going?”

Because, that’s traumatic. At least if you’re going to change the official time, just keep it to yourself. Fine, the banks and post offices are going start opening a little earlier, and yeah, the restaurants and movie theaters will probably have no choice but to follow suit. But what about me? Don’t I have a say in the matter? If I don’t feel like changing my watch, I’m not going to.

I don’t like this idea that you fall asleep and you wake up and it’s like, you don’t even need to be a part of the equation. “Don’t worry Rob,” whoever’s in charge of this is whispering in my ear, “You don’t have to worry about Daylight Savings Time at all this year. Just go to sleep, and when you wake up, everything will be adjusted for you. What’s that? You feel a little tired? You’re a little late for work? Well that’s not our problem. Just because you can’t get to work on time doesn’t mean that it’s the clock’s fault.”

But it is the clock’s fault. I remember one year, maybe it was the year after the cable box incident, I went to bed thinking, OK, I’ve got to make sure to consider Daylight Savings Time when I’m setting my alarm. I thought, I’ll just set the time for an hour earlier. And then it changed by itself, and my alarm time was the wrong time, even though it should’ve been the right time. And I was trying to tell my boss, I was like, no, just listen, please, I know this is two weeks in a row, but this is seriously an excuse here, I’m not kidding, just please listen to this one sentence, this one really long detailed sentence, because it’s not my fault.

I’m scared as to where this is all headed. It’s like, what’s to say I’m not going to go to sleep one night only to wake up and it’ll be months from now? Like, what the hell? Why is so cold out? How come it’s snowing? And I’ll look on the Internet and it’ll just say, “Relax Rob, everything’s fine, do to Global Warming Adjustment Time, we’re going to go ahead and say that today is February 9th. And yes, unfortunately that means that, since we skipped most of last year, you technically never filed your taxes. And so we had to audit you. And do you care to explain yourself here Rob, why haven’t you been paying taxes for the past several months? Can you explain these numbers?”

And what am I going to say? I’ll be shivering, it’s February now and I’m still wearing my summer pajamas, and when did the Internet get so smart? Why is it asking me about my taxes? Isn’t there an option to turn the clock back a little? But not the actual clock, I’m talking like the technological clock, like Windows 95, I remember you’d wake up after DST and there’d be a little window, “Do you want to change the clock?” or something like that, and that would be great, OK, fine, at least it’s giving me the option. What if I want to keep that hour, can’t I just pretend it’s still eight o’clock, even if just for the weekend? Come on, don’t tell me it’s Wednesday already.

Get off your high horse

Someone said to me the other day, “Rob, get off your high horse,” and I thought about it, yeah, I don’t want to be on a high horse, I want to be on the highest horse. And even though this horse is naturally higher than all of the other horses, certainly bigger than the one I was just on, even though that first one was pretty big, I want it even higher, someone get me a pair of horse stilts, my horse knows how to gallop on horse stilts, and I’ll ride it on top of the tallest building in the country, we’ll have all of these ridiculous jumps set up, so that if you’re up there as a spectator, you’ll think to yourself, what’s that guy on that high horse going to do, ride under those jumps?

Because that’s how high they’ll be, like you’ll look at them and the idea that I’m going to get this horse to leap over those posts, no, it won’t even cross your mind. But my high horse stilts, they’re the robotic kind, they’re the kind that amputees aren’t allowed to use in the Olympics because it gives them an superhuman edge, and I’ll go, “Ya!” and my highest horse is going to whinny and then – jump! – we’ll clear every one of them, all at once, we’ll keep sailing through the sky, way past the edge of the building, by this point nobody’s even going to be scared, maybe anxious, but nobody will doubt what I’m capable of next.

Just me, just me on top of the highest horse you’ve ever seen, I’ll have a backpack on that, when I push a button, these two wings will spring out of the sides, I’ll glide for a while, I’ll be able to integrate the horse’s harness right through the backpack, so whenever I go “Ya!” or “Whoa!” or “Ho!” those will all be voice commands, I won’t even have to do anything, my highest horse will be so well trained, it’ll pull the wings up and down, it’ll be the closest thing anyone’s ever had to a Pegasus, we’ll be able to glide, or even get some lift, to go up and down.

It’s like whenever I’m talking, I can’t get in more than two sentences, someone says “Will you get off your high horse?” How about you get off your low horse? My high horse has X-ray vision. It’s complicated, but via the same backpack harness technology that allows us to fly, I’m able to access everything that my high horse is seeing, or seeing through. That’s the only thing I can’t control – it’s still a prototype – when my high horse decides to look only at the surface or use its X-ray vision to, say, see through your clothing. But when it does, I’ll see it, and as you’re berating me, telling me, “Oh Rob! Why don’t you get off of your high horse!” I’ll be like, “Hey Jeff, nice Incredible Hulk underwear!” and you’ll be like, “What? How could you?”

But I won’t even be around to watch you stammer in embarrassment. “Ya!” I’ll shout out as my high horse and I shoot for the stars. And you know that saying, that, “Shoot for the stars, if you miss, you’ll be on the moon!” well, when I shoot for the stars, my high horse and I make it to the stars. And then we stop by the moon on our way back, because what’s higher than the moon? Nothing on Earth. Go ahead and get your telescope, you thought I had a high horse on the surface, yeah, well, now I’m on the highest horse in solar system, I’m up there screaming down to everyone on the planet, I’m saying stuff like, “How do you like me now?”

And, yes, there’s no air on the moon, so unfortunately my voice doesn’t really have that carry, that same effect like it does down here, but my high horse’s whinny, I haven’t figured out how he does it, but it’s even more powerful up there, it’s enough to propel us off the surface – Pegasus wings, activate! – and we’re able to cruise right back home.

So don’t talk to me about high horses. In fact, maybe you should look into investing in your own high horse, a medium horse, whatever you can afford, feed it lots of oats, but put a sock in it, all right? Talking to me about my high horse, why don’t you get off of your soapbox, OK? You’re going to need a lot more soap than that poor excuse for a box can carry.