Yearly Archives: 2013

32 and a half signs that you’re on the Internet/using a computer/or your cell phone

You clicked on this link. It was blue and then you clicked on it, and when you hit the back button, it turned purple. Unless you’re in incognito mode, in which case it’ll probably stay blue. Or unless you’re on a phone, in which case you didn’t click on anything, you just tapped.
You’re wearing a shirt. If it’s cold outside, you might even be wearing a sweater. If you’re on the subway and it’s raining out and you’re reading this on your phone, a parka isn’t totally out of the question either.
Your leg is tapping on the floor. Isn’t that crazy that you don’t even notice it anymore? Tap, tap, tap, tap, your roommate used to say stuff like, “Stop tapping! Seriously, what’s wrong with you, everything’s falling off the desk, I can’t concentrate! Are you listening to me?” But you weren’t listening, not really, not enough to give a response, and he moved out months ago.
Your cell phone is constantly less than thirty percent charged.
And you’re at a restaurant and you ask the waiter, “Hey man, do you guys have an iPhone 4S charger?” and the waiter looks at you for a second, he can’t outright tell you to go fuck off, so he just kind of stares at you for a while, hoping that through his nonverbal response, you’ll get the hint, like stop wasting my time, of course we don’t keep chargers around for the guests. But you don’t get the hint, so you try, “Can you ask anybody in the back if they have a charger? Any of the other waiters?”
Everything that you read is in numbered bullet points. Like this one right here, number six.
And number seven too. It’s like, there really isn’t any difference between number six and number seven, it’s only by me, the writer, pressing the enter key that
I arbitrarily decide to make a completely new “sign” or “reason.” And that’s how we got from six to eight without having changed topics at all, not really.
But man, when I started writing, 32 and half signs didn’t seem like that big of a challenge. But here I am, I’m only nine deep, I can’t let the readers down, but I’m beginning to suspect that they’re seeing right through me, that I hadn’t really thought out this list, that, sure, three or four of these might be somewhat entertaining, but the rest?
Pure filler. You’re reading pure filler right here.
You’re in an airport terminal waiting for your flight, and that guy’s been hogging the wall outlet for the past twelve minutes, so you ask him, “Hey man, are you going to be done with that outlet soon? My phone’s at six percent.” But he says, “Sorry, my laptop’s at five percent, they take a lot longer to charge than phones do. If you want, you can watch me surf the Internet. I’m reading this list on BuzzFeed right now, “17 Things You’re Doing While You’re Waiting For Your Flight To Start Boarding.”
You’re wearing a shirt. Wait, I said that already. You’re wearing pants.
You’re probably not wearing pants.
Pull up your pants, man, or at least lock the door.
You’re out to dinner, and you don’t want to keep taking your phone out to finish reading this list, but you can’t pay attention to anything else, so you excuse yourself to use the bathroom, and you step outside the restaurant to finish it up, and you look up to see if everything’s OK back at the table, but nobody’s at the table, everyone’s outside with you, they’re on the Internet too.
You’re sitting shotgun in your parents’ new Ford Explorer, your phone is totally out of battery, the giant computer center console clearly advertises its ability to seamlessly integrate your phone’s browser with the car’s navigation system, but does that mean that it’ll be able to charge everything up? Mom? Do you know how to use this? You’ve never looked at the manual? OK, mom? Mom, can I use your phone? Because mine’s out of battery. Eleven percent? I’ll just use three percent, I promise. No, I won’t touch your Candy Crush, seriously, I stopped playing that game weeks ago.
You’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Oh my God, that is so true.”
You’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Well, I don’t really relate to this one.”
You’re reading this and you’re not even concerned that I’m saying one thing and then I’m saying the exact opposite right below.
You’re not reading this at all, someone linked to it on Facebook and you clicked, “Open in new tab,” but you already have so many tabs open, so many other Internet articles and lists that you saw on your news feed, there isn’t enough screen space to fit all of the tabs, and so you can’t even tell what the tabs are, there’s no room for labels, but still, you look at the browser, you think, I’ll read all of those, I’ll get to them eventually, and then months later your computer will freeze or you’ll be forced to reboot for an update, you’ll look at the fresh browser screen and think, wow, that was a relief, a new start, no old links to weigh me down, but just as you resolve to only open links that you’ll actually read, the browser flashes, “Restoring last session,” and there they are, all of them, tons of lists, this list, you’ll finish reading it eventually, you’ll get to it soon.
You’re saying to yourself, “We’re only at number 21? This whole list could have been condensed to two, maybe even one. Why did he decide 32 and a half? What a bunch of nonsense, and we’re barely halfway through. What the hell, man, why do I keep clicking on these lists, seriously, does anybody proofread these things? Why are they so popular? Is somebody actually making money off of content like this?”
You’re scrolling all the way down without reading, just to get a sense of how long this thing is going to go.
But even the writer is getting bored here, so it’s a relief to find the next few numbers to be nothing but short, filler sentences.
More filler.
If I had time, I’d look up some animated gifs.
Like a picture of a TV actress making a face, with the subtitle, “Gurl …” across the bottom.
Or a different TV actress making a different face, like a confused face, and this caption say, “Say what?”
This isn’t so bad. 28 already? 32 and a half doesn’t seem that far out of reach now. Maybe it’s not too late to make it 42 and a half. But that would involve scrolling back up and editing and more typing, no, I guess 32 and a half is fine.
Your phone is really, really hot.
It says something like, “Your phone is overheating. Stop using it for a minute and let it cool down.”
You just got an icepack out of the freezer and, it’s probably not a good idea for thing to be frozen either, so you just kind of alternate, fifteen seconds on ice, fifteen seconds off, fifteen more on ice, and over and over again until that warning goes away.
You could have sworn you read this same exact list sometime a few months ago, but this clearly says that it was written today, so you search Google to see if maybe it wasn’t posted somewhere else a while ago, but you get to Google and they have one of those flash games in place of their home screen, so twenty minutes go by, and you beat it, but you forget what you came there to look up in the first place, and all of the tabs are blurred together, you can’t even find Facebook, so you just open up a new tab and commit to not losing your place this time.

32.5 You finish, you get to the end and you’re like, I did it, I read that whole thing. But where’s that sense of accomplishment you get from reading a newspaper or a book, of having done something? This feels like the mental equivalent of having just scarfed down a twenty-piece McNuggets as a midafternoon snack. And yeah, don’t forget about that that “and a half” punch line that wasn’t really that funny when you read it back in the title. Here it is. 32 and a half signs that you did it, you read the whole thing.

I am Banksy

I’m a little late to the game here, but I just found out about Banksy. Like, I had heard the name Banksy before, but that was about it, I never asked myself, who is Banksy? Why do I keep seeing his name popping up on the Internet? I never clicked through any of those links. And then a couple of weekends ago my brother was talking about Banksy and, not wanting to feel out of the loop, I did my best to pretend like I knew exactly what I was talking about, all while trying to steer the conversation toward another topic.

But now I know about Banksy. I mean, I still haven’t clicked on any links, but I get it, he’s a graffiti artist. He made some sort of a documentary. And nobody knows who he is. He’s like Batman, but without any of the crime-fighting. Actually, if you think about it, he’s actually a part of the problem, defacing public space.

Whatever, I’m not going to get into an argument about right and wrong. Even though I think that’s it wrong. Not that he’s doing it, but that it didn’t work for me. I heard that this guy was making millions of dollars, this whole mystery artist walking around town drawing little pictures of miniature men next to fire hydrants, I don’t get the appeal, of the art that is, I do get the appeal of the cash.

That’s why it appealed to me. That’s why I tried to get out there and tell everybody that I was Banksy. It made perfect sense, I mean, this guy doesn’t reveal his identity, and so I figured that all I had to do was study his drawings enough to make my own convincing Banksy-style replicas, and instead of fleeing into the shadows after I finished a piece, I’d turn around, I’d be wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of sunglasses, I’d wait for the crowd to get really big, I’d even call the cops on myself, I’d be like, “Hello, police? There’s some guy spray-painting graffiti …” and then just as they’d come to handcuff me, I’d rip off the sweatshirt, I’d be wearing a t-shirt that said, “Banksy!” just, you know, to really drive home the point, and I’d scream out, “It’s me! I’m Banksy!”

But getting a crowd to gather, it’s not as easy as just wearing a bunch of clothes from Urban Outfitters and crouching down to tag a building. No, and I was just testing the waters, just kind of taking out the cans, I hadn’t even started painting yet, but nobody was looking at me, nobody stopped and said, “Are you Banksy?” No, not with the paint cans lined up in front of me, not when I started aggressively shaking the cans up and down, over and over again, each time the metal ball inside of the can hit the end I heard it as, “Bank – sy – Bank –sy.”

And finally, he wasn’t a cop, but he was some sort of a security guard, he came outside of the building and stood like a foot away from me. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to, he was just staring right at me, he had his security guard radio in his hand. It was like he was waiting for me to make a move. Well, a move further than just shaking the can up and down.

This went on for like a minute or two, finally I stopped shaking this one can, I held it out in front of me and slowly took off the top. The security guard remained unmoved, just watching me. I thought, OK, a game of chicken, huh? It’s not like this guy was a real cop or anything, and so I was game. I brought the can slowly to the wall, really slowly, like if this guy was going to make a move, I wanted to see just where that line was. But nothing. Maybe this guy was a fan. Maybe he would be the first person to witness me successfully steal the Banksy name.

Something had to happen, so finally I was like two inches away from the wall, and I made the smallest spray, I had the nozzle pressed down for less than a second. And that was it, the security guard wasn’t a fan, he kicked into action, that radio was out and he was shouting something, vandalism, graffiti, call the police. I panicked, I dropped the can, I didn’t even have a minute to pick anything up, I just screamed out, “I am Banksy!” as I booked it out of there.

And like three blocks, four blocks away, nobody was following me, I thought, if this guy’s really anonymous, how is he so rich? What if the police come and they dust my spray-paint can for prints, do I have to have my fingerprints already in the system to be identified? Should I commit some small infraction so the cops can link me to the paint? Could this still work out in my favor?

But then I thought about buying more spray-paint, about how it was so annoying the first time around, I went to this auto-parts store, all of the spray-paint was behind this cage on aisle seven, and I had to have a manager come out from around the back to unlock it. He was so impatient, he was just like, “Pick a color so I can get back to my job,” and I just wanted a minute, to think about which one I should buy, and this guy was so pushy, so I just chose like a royal blue, a sun-kissed yellow. I don’t know, I don’t really feel like going back, spending more money. I’ll just let Banksy be Banksy, for now, I guess.

I love coffee

It’s always a daily struggle to drink the right amount of coffee, to get the caffeine levels just right. I don’t know when I became so dependent, I didn’t start until after I finished school. Whenever I went to Starbucks during college, I’d always get something that didn’t really count as coffee, like a toffee nut latte, something with tons of syrup and milk and whipped cream. Or a frappucino, which is basically an overpriced coffee milkshake.

And I specifically remember one day, at one of my first jobs after graduation, I was working as a paralegal, there was an office kitchen stocked with soda, granola bars, a giant coffee machine. I thought, OK, maybe I’ll drink some coffee. So I had a cup, and then I had another cup, and then a third. And then I had what I can only assume was a caffeine induced panic attack. I sat there in my swivel chair and wondered when my racing heart would finally accelerate past the point of sustainability, I’d drop face down at my keyboard, my nose and my forehead hitting a weird combination of keys that, when entered into whatever spreadsheet I was entering meaningless chunks of data into, it would come out like, “ase0oitja;lwesdddddddddd …”

I wound up surviving and I stayed away from coffee for a while. But now I’m at the point where, for the past several years at least, I get up in the morning and the first thing I do is, before I even go to the bathroom, I go downstairs and make a pot of coffee. There’s something about waking up and drinking my first cup. I can instantly feel the caffeine get to work, there’s a buzz in the background of my consciousness. Even though my eyes aren’t yet fully opened, I know that at least I’m not going to fall back asleep.

And then I have my second cup, I start to feel invincible. I get these bursts of imagination where I envision all that I’m going to get done, I’m going to go running, then I’ll go to the gym, then I’ll come back home and I’ll make some bread from scratch, while it’s rising I’ll go upstairs and bang out five or six pages of writing, while the oven’s preheating I’ll read the newspaper, I’ll start planning lunch while I consider if I have enough time before I have to head into work to go over Home Depot and inquire about renting a power saw, because I just saw this home improvement show on TV, and I should be able to put up crown molding in the living room, I mean, I’ve never had any hands-on experience, but this should all be within the realm of possibility.

But then I take that third cup, which is always this leap of faith, a Mario Kart kind of floating question mark box. What’s going to happen? Am I going to get that final needed kick that lets me get started on all that I’ve set out for myself to do? Is the caffeine going to get stuck only in my brain, allowing me not to actually do anything, but instead to sit here at my computer desk tapping my leg violently against the floor, dreaming wild fantasies about replacing the siding on the front of the house? Or a worst case scenario, the dreaded albeit rare instance where I have another panic attack, the veins in my neck visibly throbbing outward, my chest muscles clenched as far inward as possible, I’m only able to whimper for air every now and then, my mind locked in on the fact that I can’t possibly have enough oxygen in my bloodstream to sustain my heart’s rapid pace, that it’s only a matter of time before I ;iaospjdoifeeeeeeeee.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s in my head. I’ve heard stories about green tea containing the same amount of caffeine as certain coffees, but I’ve never felt it active in my system. It’s the same with Coca-Cola. I could drink like four or five cans in a row and I’ll only ever experience a stomach ache. No, it’s just coffee that does the trick, and it has to be as soon as I wake up. Once I reach that first true caffeinated buzz of the day, regardless of how much coffee I drink later on, I’ll never get up to where I was when I first got up. Every once in a while I’ll attempt an early-afternoon recharge, it has to be one of those extra-large cups from Dunkin’ Donuts, and all that can ever hope to achieve is lessening of the inevitable crash, all at the expense of what I’ll no longer be able to count on as a solid eight hour’s sleep.

But I love coffee. I love feeling like I can barely contain myself. I hope that it’s good for me. I hope that the science works out, that someday researches will discover that people who drink tons and tons of coffee always wind up much healthier than everybody else. And happier. And richer. And smarter.

I’m so grateful

I’m so grateful on Thanksgiving. I’m grateful for Thanksgiving. I hate going to work on Thursdays, so it’s really nice to not have to show up. I’m really grateful for all of the gratitude I feel, mostly just today, because it’s Thanksgiving, and I really want to be true to the spirit of the holiday, extra thankful. I always say thank you, in general, but on Thanksgiving, I say it at least three times, sometimes more. Like even though I hate the idea of shopping on Thanksgiving or consumerism on Thanksgiving, there’s always at least one part of the day where I’m either driving to my in-laws’ house, or to my grandfather’s house, I always stop at Dunkin’ Donuts, probably because it’s the only place that’s really open for business, I get an extra large coffee, some donuts, even though I don’t need donuts at all, it’s just that I love Dunkin’ Donuts’ donuts, I’m so grateful for them, and after I pay, I tell the cashier, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you …” at least a dozen times, a baker’s dozen, even though Dunkin’ Donuts only gives you a regular, non-baker’s dozen, but whatever, I’m grateful for that too, knowing that, at Dunkin’ Donuts, you know exactly what you’re getting when you say, “Give me a dozen, thanks.” Extra thanks.

I’m grateful for the twist ties on the loaves of bread that you buy at the grocery store. I know it seems like a pretty trivial thing to be thankful for, but I’m thankful for everything, especially the little stuff, especially on Thanksgiving, and even more especially since I started buying six-packs of Thomas’ English muffins. They’re awesome, I’m so grateful to be able to go out and buy them, to have them for breakfast, I’m grateful for my toaster, it’s so reliable, I remember when we were shopping for a toaster, I told my wife, “It has to be an Oster brand appliance,” which, I don’t really know where I got that from. Did I mention that I’m really grateful for my wife? It’s just that, somewhere along the line, the idea planted itself in my head that, if I buy any appliance, it has to be Oster. It’s the gold standard of all appliances. And so my wife wanted this Kitchen-Aid toaster, it had a lot more functions, it was cheaper. But no, I insisted on the classic Oster toaster, exactly what you’d imagine a toaster to look like. Like, if you went into any random kindergarten class and told the kids, “All right kids, draw a picture of a toaster,” they’d all draw it more or less looking exactly like ours. Except there’s usually that one kid that insists on drawing Batman or Spider-Man, but whatever.

Wasn’t I talked about twist ties? I’m grateful for them. They’re super useful. I’m not grateful for the plastic tabs that come with the English muffins. I can never bunch up the plastic in such a way as to get it fully cinched, it’s impossible, and the more I try to maneuver everything in place, it starts bending, finally it loses its structural integrity, so even if you somehow manage to get it closed up, it all slowly starts to unfold. Whatever, that’s a petty thing to bring up on a Thanksgiving blog post, all of this stuff about gratitude. I guess I should just say that I’m grateful that I know the difference between twist ties and tab ties, and that I’m thankful that I understand that the twist ties are awesome and the tab ties are terrible.

Going back to Oster appliances for just one second, I was thinking about this one time we needed to buy a blender, and even though I kept saying, listen to me, it has to be Oster, you’ll be grateful later, I lost the argument, we bought some off brand. It lasted like a month, not even, I think we made half a round of margaritas before it broke, no warranty, nothing. I always used to get so mad thinking back on that experience, but it’s Thanksgiving, and I’m trying to be grateful, and so yeah, I guess I am thankful we bought that piece of garbage, if only to prove my point that you simply have to buy Oster, every single time. So yeah, I’m very grateful. I’m so lucky and thankful to be able to be so grateful and appreciative.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I’m a traditionalist

I’ve always thought of myself as a traditionalist, someone who sticks to what works. Why put all of your faith in innovation when some things are perfectly fine they way they are? Like turning signals. Call me old-fashioned, but for many years, drivers shared the road just fine by sticking their hands out of their windows and pointing at which way they were going to turn. But try telling that to the cop that pulled me over last week. He wouldn’t hear it, gave me a ticket for a broken turning signal, even after I showed him, “Look, it works just fine, I just prefer to use the hand signals!” he wouldn’t even respond to me, just kind of tore the ticket out of his book and let it float down in through my open window.

But I can’t expect the police to understand the values of tradition. They’ve practically given up on everything that’s come before them. Routine police work has been overtaken by all sorts of scientific mumbo-jumbo, DNA evidence, surveillance camera tape. When was the last time you saw a detective take out a magnifying glass at a crime scene? That’s like the most basic detective skill I can think of. No, but these modern specialists are all about forensics, taking pictures, using that two-way trick mirror supposedly to make suspects feel as if they’re not being watched.

And come on, if I’m ever in a room somewhere, and half of the wall to my side is a giant mirror, of course I’m going to assume that there’s someone watching on the other side. You know how old-school cops would do it? They’d interrogate a crook with everyone in the force watching, staring. You think a mirror is going to help extract a confession? I’m telling you, this new technology is ruining the force.

It’s ruining everything. It’s ruining dentistry. I went in for a checkup last month and there was this giant TV positioned right in front of my face. Whichever way I turned, regardless of what angle the dentist reclined the chair, I couldn’t turn away, they were playing Everybody Loves Raymond. What happened to sitting in a chair and listening to the soothing sounds of drill-on-tooth? Why do we have to be constantly entertained?

And yes, I still got to hear the drill, which I thought would have been enough to distract me from Raymond, but this fancy dentist thought of that one too, there were subtitles running along the bottom of the screen. When I was a little kid, there weren’t any subtitles. If you couldn’t hear the TV, if the volume button on the set was broken, and your little brother flushed the remote down the toilet, you just had to sit there and guess what they were saying.

And we liked it that way. What’s wrong with giving a kid a lollipop after he gets out of the dentist’s office? Call me an originalist, but I hardly feel like a free toothbrush and a travel-sized tube of Colgate Total makes up for the hour that I had to sit there and feel a tiny metal hook go back and forth over my gums. And go ahead, tell me that it was my own fault, that I shouldn’t complain if I turn down the laughing gas. My grandfather didn’t get to use laughing gas when he went to the dentist, neither did my great grandfather. And they had great teeth.

And they used to tell me that stuff like that was good for you, that sitting there being strapped to a chair while your mouth was in agony was a healthy thing. Like when my kids get braces, I’m going to insist on the old kind, a whole mouthful of metal, and I want those things cemented in, the kind of an adhesive that leaves a discoloration on their teeth after they’re done straightening everything out.

Go ahead and laugh at my antiquated ways, but it’s like I always say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t try to invent something else that improves on how it currently works.” It’s not as catchy as “don’t fix it,” but the gist is the same, and catchy phrases are nothing but grammatical trickery, a bunch of newfangled words arranged in a convenient jingle. No thanks, I’ll stick to how they’ve done it before, old, tested, that’s it.