Yearly Archives: 2013

Happy Labor Day

Happy Labor Day everyone, if that’s what you’re into. Personally, I feel like Americans are always looking for an excuse to take another day off, like the weekend isn’t enough time to sit around not being productive. Not me, I’ll be working extra today, double, or even triple if I can hustle fast enough. Because that’s what makes America great, working, getting back to work, taking a five minute break instead of a ten minute break, and then only using three of those minutes.

My grandfather always used to say, “Work smarter, not harder.” Out of respect for my elders, I’d hold my tongue. But now that he’s dead, I don’t feel bad holding back. That’s a lazy man’s motto. My motto is, “Work smarter and harder,” emphasis on the work. Just keep going, don’t stop moving, never stop working. There’ll be plenty of time to not be working harder when we’re dead.

And while I’m on the subject of dead people, talk about lazy. They’re laying around doing absolutely nothing, no work at all, zero productivity, and yet we have to get them nice suits, fancy coffins, we’re supposed to take time out of our busy days to reflect upon all the good times, visiting their graves every once in a while. What a bunch of nonsense. Look, I’m sorry that you’re dead and that you’re no longer of use to the workforce, but do you think it’s fair to be eating away at the billable hours of the living?

Look, this is probably all coming off as incredibly insensitive. It’s just that I always get riled up on Labor Day, another half-baked excuse for the hippies and the communists to loaf around all day and act like work is some sort of a chore, like sitting around and binge watching an entire season of Breaking Bad is something not only to be proud of, but something deserving of a national holiday.

Has anybody checked out the roots of Labor Day? I think it’s supposed to be an actual day of labor, like all right fellas, summer’s over, enough whining about the heat and trying to sneak out of work early at eight. Let’s hit the fiscal year hard, starting now, starting today, Labor Day. And that’s where you’d see your Labor Day sales, stores like Brooks Brothers and Sears would get you to load up on work shirts and trousers, so that way you couldn’t make up any excuses like, “I need five minutes to drop off my dry cleaning.” Just undo the buttons and put on a fresh shirt. And make sure you’re changing during your three-minute breaks, on your own time. We’re not paying you to put on a fashion show, here.

I’m sick and tired of people afraid to roll up their shirtsleeves and put in an honest day’s work. Everyone’s always taking bathrooms breaks or hanging out by the water cooler or dropping of their parents at the oncologist. What ever happened to a good old-fashioned work ethic? Since when did sweat and a little elbow grease become such scarce resources?

Oh no, it’s fine, I understand, your family’s having a barbeque today. Excuse me, I didn’t realize that sitting around and eating hamburgers was somehow beneficial to the economy, good for the bottom line. I’m sure the shareholders will understand why our revenue was off by about a fifth this week, “Sorry ladies and gents, but the boys felt like sitting around and drinking beer today, blowing up stupid inflatable pools for their snot-nosed little kids, even though they’ve just had a whole summer not going to school, not learning anything, because their lazy teachers with their socialist unions refuse to work for two months out of every year.”

And we wonder why China’s catching up, right? I hate to say it, but that’s a country, a people that really value the meaning of the word labor. Every day is Labor Day in China, and in a good way. Not like the commies over here, everyone looking for a government handout, another excuse to take the day off, “But boss! It’s Christmas! But boss! My mom just died! But boss! I’m just so lazy!”

Think about it. Think about what makes us great. Think about what gives your life meaning. Think about you, sitting in your backyard, shoving hotdogs down your fat face. If you change your mind, you know where to find me, I’ll be in the office, working. Let’s get back to work people. Happy Labor Day.

I had a dream where a red comet fell into the ocean and turned all of the earth’s water into red Kool-Aid

I had this dream the other night where a giant comet fell to the earth from space. It was gigantic, twice the size of the one that killed all the dinosaurs. And by the time NASA figured out that this thing was on its crash course, it was too late to do anything.

“But don’t worry,” the lead scientist tried to reassure the public, “because luckily, this thing is set to land right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, really far away from any of the continents. Maybe some small islands might be impacted, but if we get them on planes right away, I think they’ll be safe.”

This was all at a huge NASA press conference, and some reporter raised her hand, “Really? You think there’s enough time to ferry all Pacific Islanders to safety?” and the scientist really shouldn’t have spoken so soon, his expertise was astrophysics, not aviation, and yeah, now that he thought about it, that probably was a logistical impossibility.

“Uh, you know, I don’t think there’s going to be any real danger with those islanders,” he kind of lied, wishing they had had enough money in the budget for a PR spokesman, someone who could have done all of the reassuring, the translating all of the technical science to everyday English.

The comet fell from the sky, it was much bigger than even the scientists had anticipated. It was all caught on camera, a giant ball of red fire splashing down right in the middle of the ocean. There was a big dip, an audible gulping sound, and then the water started getting red.

It was a slow change at first, like from the orbital cameras pointing at the crash site, you could see the red seeping outward, but it wasn’t until months later that the extent of the red became too much to ignore. It was the entire Pacific, it was turning crimson, and it continued to spread to all of the other oceans, to the rivers and lakes and ice caps, everything red.

And someone eventually tasted it, and the rumors came back that it had the exact same flavor as red Kool-Aid. Nobody believed it at first, but sure enough, it was like right out of the pitcher, red Kool-Aid.

“You see,” the scientist explained at the follow up press conference, “the chemical composition of that comet was precisely enough to not only add red Kool-Aid color and flavor to our planet’s waters, but there were also foreign agents that, when combined with ocean water, had the effect of negating out all of that gross oceany stuff.”

Maybe he didn’t say gross oceany stuff, but all of that science jargon, I couldn’t remember it word for word. Surprisingly, nothing really changed, like in terms of the marine ecosystem, you would have thought that the plants and animals used to living in seawater would have died pretty quickly after having their habitats turned sweet red, but they loved it.

Still, the governments and scientists couldn’t leave well enough alone. They insisted on pouring money into research and development geared at turning the water back to its regular blue. And it took like fifteen years, but finally one of them invented a really powerful bomb that, when submerged deep enough back in the Pacific, it was going to turn the red Kool-Aid into blue Kool-Aid.

“Close enough,” was the consensus. And everything was great for a little while, until another comet came crashing through the sky, landing almost in the same exact spot. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but scientists later figured out that this second comet would have turned the ocean into one of those trick Kool-Aids, like one of the ones that changes colors and flavors halfway through. I think they called it the Great Bluedini or something like that.

Anyway, it was only supposed to work because the ocean was red originally. But scientists had to go ahead and get in the way, making it blue, and the Bluedini comet had nothing to work with. So instead of changing the color of the water, it changed the color of all of the marine life, all of the plants and animals. But this time they all got very sick, like really sick, they all died and floated to the top and the earth’s waters were forever sick and polluted.

And we couldn’t drink regular water because there was no regular water. The change in the evaporation cycle was complete. Now when it rained, it rained blue Kool-Aid, and when we cried we cried blue Kool-Aid tears. And cried we did, that we had to get involved in nature’s plan, that if we had just left things alone, the space lords would have changed it back from red to blue via that second comet, but we had to be big-shot know-it-alls and ruin everything, and now all the fish were dead, and nothing was ever going to be OK ever again.

I spend too much time on reddit

I’m on the Internet a lot, way too much really. It’s gotten to the point where I have an app installed on my computer that actually blocks the Internet for a preset amount of time. It’s kind of sad, that I can’t sit still for more than ten minutes without having my consciousness hijacked by the overwhelming urge to see what’s happening on Facebook (tip: nothing’s ever, ever happening on Facebook.) But it’s a real thing, the Internet sucking away minutes and hours of my productivity. Even when I’m not on the Internet, I’ll start thinking about the Internet.

It’s funny how certain trends get started online. For example, I’m on the web site reddit a lot. It took me a while to really figure out how it worked, but it’s basically a giant forum where people post links to pictures and articles. It’s a rabbit hole that’s easy to fall through and get lost. Under each post, users can add comments, other users can add comments to those comments. You’re given the option to upvote or downvote anything, with the idea being that the cream always rises to the top. There’s more to it than that … actually, I’m trying to think what more to it there is, and I don’t think there is any more to it. That’s it.

And with a ceaseless stream of new information and stupid jokes and cool pictures it’s easy to get lost, to have five minutes turn into two hours. I’ll pry my eyes away from the screen, I hadn’t noticed that the sun set while I was reading people dissect the different possible meanings of a stupid image macro, or watching like a voyeur as two online strangers engaged in a vicious verbal war over who best captained the USS Enterprise (tip: Picard.)

While there’s a lot of stuff out there to keep me entertained, there’s also a lot of nonsense. Like the grammar nazis who make it their virtual life’s mission to scour the web and tear apart the grammatical errors of complete strangers in the most condescending way possible. Or people who add nothing to discussions but copy and pasted segments of previous discussions.

It’s actually pretty cool when you find yourself reading certain forums and you’ll notice patterns begin to emerge, subtle inside jokes that would only make sense to certain people who happened to have been on reddit at the same time. For example, and this is totally going to be one of those stories that’s not at all entertaining when explained by someone else, a few months ago, this redditor posted a picture of a giant safe he found in the basement of a new house he just moved into.

“I wonder what’s in this safe?” he asked the Internet, and the Internet got interested, like yeah, what is in that safe? And that was it for a while, there wasn’t any more news about the safe. But people kept referencing the safe in random conversations about stuff that had nothing to do with the safe. It became the punch line to a joke that was never fully articulated, like any time a comment thread started to unravel, someone would link back to a link that had something to do with that safe. Subreddits popped up dedicated to figuring out what could possibly be hidden away inside. Other users created various hoaxes, claiming to have cracked the safe open.

I have no idea what eventually wound up happening, as much of the safe trend has subsided by this point, but every now and then something about the safe will pop up in random conversation, and I’ll sit there and laugh to myself at my computer, and the sound of my laughter snaps me out of my Internet, brings me back to reality. I’m like, what am I laughing at? A safe? I can’t even really explain why it’s at all funny or even worth my time. But I’m engaged, it’s so weird, this little online world that I spend way too much of my time in.

While I’m on the reddit topic, I just wanted to complain about two pretty annoying trends I’ve been noticing for a while now. The first one is the word “this.” It’s a lazy verbal trick that people use as an affirmation when seeing something that they agree with. Like if I see a funny picture on a subreddit and someone makes an interesting comment, it’s like everybody else has to write out the word “this” as a reply. Yes, this. I like this. This. It’s a waste of everybody’s time. If you like something enough that you’re actually moved to write out the word this, just click on the upvote button. Nothing’s more annoying that reading a thread where every other paragraph is littered with “this, this, this.”

The second annoying little tick is somewhat similar, although used to express a different sentiment: “nope.” People write out “nope” as a reply to something that’s scary or uncomfortable. Like if there’s a picture of a giant spider, or a story about a guy who goes down to his basement and thinks that saw a ghost, everybody’s like, “nope, nope, nope.” “I would have noped out of that basement fast.”

Anyway, I realize that the only thing more annoying than spending too much time on the Internet is then getting off the Internet and spending even more time writing about the Internet. This is like a big Internet circle jerk. It’s like I unplug myself but I’m still somehow wired in, my brain is still firing off thoughts and comments as if I were still online. I’m sure everybody deals with this problem in one way or another, like everybody’s got their favorite web sites that they spend too much time on. Or maybe it’s just me. How would Jesus have managed his life/virtual life balance? I have no idea. I should just get away from my computer for a while.

I hate the PATH train

I want to start out here by saying that this isn’t anything against New Jersey. I’m not going to waste my breath belittling the denizens of Jersey City or Hoboken. I’m sure they’re all terrific places to live. No, my beef isn’t with the Garden Sate. It’s with the PATH train, the sort-of subway that links Manhattan to various locations across the Hudson. It’s a sorry excuse for public transportation, and I hate it.

I’ve only ever taken the PATH three times, and each occasion has been seared into my memory. No matter how hard I try to shake the experience, I still find myself haunted by the little engine that couldn’t. Each time I’ve taken that trip to and from New York, I’ve found myself breaching the surface afterwards like a prisoner who’s seen the light for the first time in years.

If you’re not from New York, or if you’re lucky, if you are from New York but you’ve never had to take the PATH, you might think I’m being slightly dramatic. I’m not. If anything, I’m sugar-coating the experience. I can’t believe that people actually use this system as a means of a daily commute.

You start out at a regular NYC subway station, one that connects to the PATH. You can’t really find the PATH, and I think that this is a safety mechanism, constructed so that unknowing New Yorkers don’t find themselves accidentally heading toward the PATH. If you really must take the PATH, you have to follow miles of signage, underground tunnels that get narrower and tighter, all making you feel like the subterranean world is about to close in on you at any second, and then right before you really start freaking out, there you are, it’s the PATH entrance.

Standing in that PATH station, it’s like traveling back in time, in some other city, like Cleveland or Washington DC. Everything’s laid out as if by an architect who’s never heard of the subway before, or maybe he’s heard of it, but he’s never actually been to one, he’s only seen footage of stations on TV.

The ticket machines are relics from another century. The unfortunate looking piece of equipment that I tried to purchase my fare from read in stenciled-on wordage that it didn’t accept any bills bigger than five dollars. And then even after I went to buy some candy from the newspaper guy to make change, the machine almost refused to take my money. It was only grudgingly, after smoothing out each dollar bill, having them go in and out, the stupid machine making an obnoxious beep each time it considered, then rejected my less-than-pristine bill.

Finally it spit out a MetroCard. It looked almost identical to its NYC counterpart, but it read “PATH” on the back, “Cannot be refilled.” Whatever, I don’t want to refill you’re stupid wannabe MetroCard, OK PATH train? Getting through the turnstile was a huge pain. The reader ate my card, said OK, but then refused to let me through. Apparently only after taking your card out of the other side does the turnstile unlock. Why the confusion? Why not make the system uniform with the rest of the regular subway? Why does everything in the PATH have to be stubbornly, annoyingly, just slightly out of whack with everything else?

This is my biggest issue with the PATH. There already exists a whole etiquette involved in riding mass transit. The subtle flick of the wrist used to gain access with your MetroCard, the process by which I can navigate a touchscreen blindfolded to buy more fares, the way that the tracks are labeled so that you know in which direction you’re traveling from any station in the system.

The PATH takes all of regular subway convention and throws it out the window. I waited at the end of the platform because on every other train in New York, the cars in the middle are full while the two ends usually have some empty seats. But not on the PATH. In fact it was the exact opposite. I watched several empty cars pass by until the last one stopped in front of me, and it was jammed with commuters. What the hell people? You guys are all choosing to sit on top of one another?

And you get in the car, it’s not the same type of train used on every other line. These are like baby trains, it’s making me feel like I’m riding a shuttle in between parks at Disney World. There were these TV screens positioned along the top that looped the same asinine clips over and over again. Some genius transportation planner must have been like, “We’ll make the PATH train entertaining! We’ll put in TV screens and we’ll scroll through random pictures of celebrities for people to look at! And we’ll do games and stuff, like word scrambles! But we don’t want to make them too challenging, so we’ll cycle through the same three word scrambles every two minutes or so!”

I hated everything about the PATH. It took forever. It smelled bad. They don’t let you know in which direction you’re going to be headed, so you have to stand there like an idiot and ask people, “Excuse me, is this one going to Jersey?” Every public service bulletin uses the ridiculous slogan, “The PATH to success,” like, OK, I get it, you’re using PATH as path, but it’s coming off as really forced.

And what do you have to look forward to after having been subjected to one of the worst transportation systems in the world? New Jersey. Again, I’m not trying to bad mouth New Jersey, but come on, if I have to go to there, if I can’t get out of it, it would be nice if the blow could be cushioned somewhat by getting there without taking the PATH. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey should be ashamed of itself for running such a horrible subway. I hate it. I hate the PATH train.

Who hates chocolate?

One of my really good friends hates chocolate. Whatever, to each his own, right? But I couldn’t stand it, I don’t know why but it drove me nuts, every time I’d be eating snacks, like chocolate covered raisins or Hershey’s kisses, I’d be like, “Hey man, you want some candy?” and he’d ask, “What kind of candy?” and I’d remember that he always asks this, because he hates chocolate, and we’d go through the same old song and dance, me eating chocolate, him saying, “No thanks, I hate chocolate.”

Who hates chocolate? Who hates anything that bad, to choose to completely abstain one hundred percent? It’s like, I don’t really care for cucumbers. It’s not that I dislike them, but they’re just kind of a pointless food, pretty flavorless, they’ve got those mushy seeds, the skin makes a squeaking noise on my teeth. Whenever I cook, I rarely use cucumbers. But if you give me a salad, I’m not going to go picking them out. I’ll just eat it.

And besides, chocolate’s great, one of the shining achievements that defines us as a species. Doesn’t anybody remember second grade social studies? They talk about the Incas or the Aztecs, I can’t remember, but they figured out how to turn cacao into chocolate, it’s a pretty hard process, you have to separate the seeds, leave them to dry and ferment in the sun, crack them open and separate the solids from the oils. Who thought to do that? They attributed it as a gift from the gods.

If God gave me a box of chocolates, I wouldn’t say, “No thanks G, I don’t like chocolate,” no, I’d learn to like chocolate. It’s great, dark chocolate, Milky Way bars, I like all chocolate, the way it melts in my mouth while providing the satisfaction of having eaten something of substance. If there’s one junk food that I could eat as a meal, it would definitely be chocolate.

So I decided to see if my friend really didn’t like chocolate, or if he was just saying that he didn’t like chocolate. Like maybe it was one of those early repressed childhood memories, like he was enjoying some chocolate one day and then two seconds later he got bit a spider, and because he was so little, his brain couldn’t separate the two events, and he grew up convinced that chocolate was to blame, that he couldn’t explain why, but whenever he thought about eating chocolate, his skin started to tingle, like a hundred invisible tiny spiders were crawling across his skin.

That made sense to me, my theory, and so I decided to help undo the damage. I bought a big bag of Skittles and poured them into a bowl. “Hey man,” I called him over, “I got Skittles.” He was like, “Thanks dude, I love Skittles,” and he started grabbing them by the handful and shoving them into his mouth.

My plan was working. Unbeknownst to him, I had secretly mixed in a small amount of M&Ms. Just a few thrown in, just enough to make sure that he’d definitely eat at least one or two. And wouldn’t you know it? He didn’t say a word. Not at any point did he stop his chewing, roll his tongue around the inside of his mouth and say, “Hey Rob, are there any chocolates in these Skittles?” No, he finished the whole bowl.

I figured I’d best stick with the plan for a while, gradually increasing the amount of M&Ms until there’d be no way for him to escape the reality that for however long I’d been providing him with free Skittles, he had been eating and enjoying the hidden M&Ms.

This went on for weeks. Finally, I was at the point where there were more M&Ms than Skittles, and so I was about to let it out, the big reveal. “Hey, there’s something I wanted to tell you.”

“Yeah Rob, there’s something I wanted to tell you also,” he interrupted as he poured another fistful of candy into his open mouth, “I just wanted to say that I appreciate how nice you’ve been to me lately, always buying me candy, I know it’s not a huge deal, but it’s a nice gesture on your part, always lifting my spirits with a huge bowl of Skittles.”

“Yeah don’t mention it,” I replied, “What I wanted to tell you was …”

“It’s just that,” he continued, “You’ve been so great to me, all the free candy and everything, and I feel like I’ve been such a mope, just kind of hanging out, eating candy, not really expressing exactly how happy you’ve made me. You see, and I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this, I’ve kept it a secret for so long, but I have no sense of taste whatsoever. I can’t taste anything. I don’t like or dislike any type of food at all, and it’s incredibly frustrating, not being able to share in the joy of a good meal or a midafternoon snack.”

I looked at him, “But what about the whole …”

“The chocolate thing?” he knew where I was going, “That’s just a story. I’m actually really, severely allergic to chocolate. And so instead of getting into the whole no taste thing, I just tell everyone that I hate chocolate. I hate having to constantly ask, but I feel like people would understand the no chocolate thing as opposed to me getting into the whole inability to taste. I don’t want pity. I don’t want people to not enjoy their food in front of me. It’s just an awkward situation and I get pretty down about it.”

“So the Skittles?”

“Well, it was nice to be able to enjoy a snack without having to ask about chocolate, to appreciate a simple act of kindness on your part without having to make a big deal about it.”

“Well why don’t you just tell everyone that you’re allergic to chocolate.”

“Because I don’t want people to go out of their way to make non-chocolate stuff for me, because I can’t taste it, and so what’s the point? They’ll probably get upset, like I’m being ungrateful, when it’s not true at all. Sometimes it’s really hard to fake the level of enthusiasm necessary to express appreciation for a specially made chocolate-free dessert. It’s just much easier to be a little standoffish about the whole thing.”

I felt terrible. But I also felt vindicated. Because seriously, nobody hates chocolate. Chocolate’s delicious. A chocolate allergy, I guess it sounds possible. But my friend didn’t look like he was allergic to chocolate. Maybe he was mistaken about that also. “So, how are you feeling?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, “For the past week or so I’ve been having a lot of trouble swallowing, taking really deep breaths. It’s almost like … It’s almost … It’s …”

And then he looked me right in the eye, and I couldn’t tell in that moment if he knew or not, if he even suspected that I’d been spiking his Skittles. But there was definite eye contact, for a moment, he saw into me, into my eyes, we were locked. I think he did figure it out, in that last second he knew just what I had been up to, but he couldn’t do anything about it, because he couldn’t spit out his words, he was struggling, choking. He raised a hand up in the air as if to accuse me, but then his other hand clutched his throat, and then he dropped dead, falling headfirst into the coffee table, right into that big bowl of half Skittles, half M&Ms.