Monthly Archives: September 2014

He says he’s not narcoleptic

My friend Hayo gets so tired, he’s always falling asleep everywhere. He swears it’s not narcolepsy or anything that serious, and I’m inclined to believe him. Mostly because I’ve only ever seen narcoleptics on TV, and so I’m guessing that my entire outlook on the narcoleptic community is nothing more than a mash-up of people dozing off face-first into their bowls of soup, just over-the-top depictions of people trying to go about their normal lives, playing horseshoes, carrying a giant tray of eggplant parmesan, hang-gliding, always falling asleep at that perfect moment of comic implausibility.

But he falls asleep on the train, always on the train. I’ve never had that problem. My body has a hard enough time letting its guard down to fall asleep when I’m alone in my bed at night. But on a crowded car? Full of strangers?

“Hayo, where are you? I thought we were supposed to hang out after work?” I used to leave voicemails on his phone after waiting for a half an hour or so by myself at the bar where we were supposed to meet up. “Rob, I’m so sorry,” he’d call me later in the evening. “You’ll never believe what happened.”

Maybe the first time I didn’t believe it. And then the third or the fourth or the fifth time, I totally didn’t believe it. I’d think, really? You’re going to pull the old sorry-I-didn’t-show-I-fell-asleep-on-the-train excuse six times in a row? No, and it got to the point where I wouldn’t bother making plans with Hayo, not unless I was with him the whole time.

“You want to grab a drink?” he’d ask me, and I’d have to follow him around the whole time, making sure to wake him up three or four stops before we got to wherever it was that we were going. I found that out through a little bit of trial and error, that while he’d fall asleep almost instantly, it took quite a bit of rousing not only to wake him up, but to keep him in a sustained state of not being asleep long enough for us to get off the train when we were supposed to.

And I don’t even know why I put up with it for as long as I did, maybe there was some part of me that believed his story. Either way, after watching him nod off right in front of me, after I got off the train those first two or three times, sure that he had to be faking it, unable to believe that a sane human being would willfully miss their stop several times in a row, I came to believe that there was something going on, that maybe he really was constantly falling asleep.

Now that I’m fleshing it out like this, I guess, yeah, I guess it does sound a little like narcolepsy. Again, I hope I’m not offending any narcoleptics. It’s like, I can imagine how annoying it must be to actually have a disease or a condition, and to have it completely misrepresented in popular culture. Like schizophrenia, right, I remember when I was a kid watching TV, schizophrenia was basically multiple personality disorder. Which isn’t the case, right?

Anyway, one time I decided that I wouldn’t wake Hayo up, but I’d stay on the train with him, and just kind of watch how things would normally progress if nobody were riding along with him. And it was just totally crazy. This guy, he was sitting there, his head bobbing up and down as the train rumbled along. There’s no way that that could have been comfortable. The whole whiplash thing should have been a natural wakeup. But stop after stop, the loudspeaker would announce the destination, there’d be that really loud, “ding-dong” as the doors closed, and Hayo was just totally out.

And after a while, after like two or three hours, the train started looping back again in the other direction. I waited for my stop and looked at Hayo before I made a break for it. Should I wake him up? I couldn’t. Nothing really made sense. And when he called me the next day, it was the same, “Hey man, sorry about yesterday, I must have fallen asleep on the train.” And I was just like, “Nah, it’s cool Hayo, you were probably just tired man. Don’t worry about it, all right? Just maybe, just be careful out there, all right man? Just maybe keep your wallet and cell phone in your back pocket from now on, cool?” And I had to stop answering his calls. I just couldn’t count on him, as a friend, for anything really. Because I’m serious, this guy went out, and he was just out.

Tech review: Apple iWatch

Apple sent me an Apple iWatch in lead up to its big launch today. I’ve been wearing it discreetly for the past week or so, which wasn’t easy, because it’s so noticeably a smart watch. I had this whole plan rehearsed in my head if anybody were to come up to me and say, “Wow, is that an iWatch?” like I’d point to something in the other direction before running away. But luckily, nobody said anything.

But I guess Apple is expecting me to do some sort of a review, right? Well, for starters, the iWatch is so cool. It’s like, imagine if the iPhone were Batman, and the iWatch were Batman’s utility belt. Wait, no, Batman is the iPad. Or no, let me start over. Batman is the Mac, like the big computer. And the iPad is the Batmobile. So then the iPhone is like the Batcycle. Does this make sense? I don’t know, I never got an iPad, so now that I’m thinking about it, even though it’s bigger, I guess I’d have to relegate it to Batboat, something you know is out there, and it’s really big and expensive, but you only ever have a need for it if Aquaman’s in trouble.

I think I’m getting off topic here slightly. But yeah, the iWatch is like your own utility belt, but for your wrist. I thought that typing on that really tiny keyboard was going to be tough, but it’s not. It’s like, the QWERTY keyboard is really, really small. And my finger is about as big as the screen itself, so when I was trying to hit a certain key, there really wasn’t much for me to aim at. Yet, the iWatch nailed it, every time. After a while, I just disabled autocorrect to save some battery life, because I wound up never even making any mistakes.

Speaking of battery life, I don’t know how they got this thing to run on a regular watch battery, but it’s amazing to think that a tiny little piece of metal is capable of keeping this piece of high-tech gadgetry running for a full six months. And it’s like the screen never turns off, yet it never gets hot.

Not unless you want it to. One of the best features of the iWatch is temperature control. You can set it to be as hot or as cold as you like. And it’s totally waterproof. So if you ever find yourself with a room temperature drink, but you don’t have any ice readily available, you can just set the iWatch to maximum cool, and drop it in to get your beverage nice and frosty.

Apple, I know that I have to send this iWatch back to you, that you only sent it to me so I can write up a review. But I just wanted to say, thank you. I’ve been begging to be on the Apple tech early review team for years now, and I was so excited that you finally decided to take a chance on me. You have nothing to worry about. This iWatch reviews itself. Seriously. It’s a built-in app. You just launch it, select the Apple product that you’d like to generate a review for, and poof! Instant five-star review.

Apple, you guys are the best. Keep up the great work. I’m going to buy two iWatches when they’re available, one for each wrist.

Check out the supermoon

I hope you’ve all saved up a couple of vacation days, because we’ve got another supermoon heading our way this Tuesday night. You’re going to need to take off from work on Tuesday to prepare, and then on Wednesday, to nurse what’s sure to be an epic supermoon hangover. Did you miss the first supermoon way back at the beginning of the summer? That’s too bad. What about the second one? Really? How could you miss two supermoons? Those are some serious prioritization problems you’ve got there.

Because just ask any astrophysicist: the supermoon is the ultimate astronomical spectator event. Solar eclipses? Overhyped and boring. Perseid meteor showers? Wow, I almost nodded off at the computer just typing out Perseid meteor shower. OK, that time I really did fall asleep. Shit, I was supposed to pick up my wife’s dry-cleaning an hour ago.

Goddamn Perseid meteor shower. Well, you missed the first two supermoons, and you didn’t really have an excuse. But it’s OK, because you’ve got one last chance to behold the glory that will be this Tuesday’s supermoon. It’s going to be awesome. Here are five reasons why you should do whatever it takes to make sure that you don’t miss it.

1. Supermoons are awesome

I can’t believe I actually have to type this out for you, but the supermoon is so f’ing cool. On a clear night, you might actually lose track of night and day, and if you’re not constantly looking at your watch to remind yourself of what time it is, it’s easy to lose your orientation in space-time. For real, during the first supermoon, I wasn’t prepared for just how incredibly bright the sky was going to be. I thought it was a lot earlier than it was, and then all of the sudden the sun started coming up. “What happened? Did I miss night?” and then I was late for work and it took me like a week to get back to my regular sleep schedule.

But for the second supermoon, I came prepared. I bought a pair of moonglasses. They’re really just a pair of sunglasses, but with a very weak tint. You know, you see them by the checkout at Urban Outfitters, you think to yourself, why would I wear those? They look like they offer almost zero protection against the sun. And that’s true. But for the blinding bright-but-not-quite-as-bright-as-the-sun light of the supermoon, they’re almost a necessity. Stock up.

2. You can see the American flags left by the astronauts

Normally you need a pair of ridiculously expensive high-tech binoculars to be able to spot one of the many United States flags planted on the moon during the heyday of the Apollo program, but not many people know that the supermoon offers a very rare opportunity for amateur moongazers to spot the beloved lunar stars and stripes with the naked eye.
I can already hear the space nerds protesting from their computer chairs: “But Rob! That’s not true! Due to the moon’s lack of atmosphere, those flags have all been bleached white thanks to a constant stream of solar radiation!” Blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you something, all right, these colors do not run. You know what that means? That means that I’m not going to let some phony elitist try to tell me that Old Glory is somehow transformed into the white flag of surrender. It’s pure baloney, and I don’t care what the scientists say, because their “no atmosphere” argument doesn’t hold up. My grandparents used to have a giant American flag in their living room. Talk about no atmosphere, what with my grandfather’s constant stream of pipe smoke combined with my grandmother’s penchant for Pall Mall’s, that place was like an atmospheric dead zone. And those colors never ran. Trust me, look closely on Tuesday night. It might take a little while, but you’ll spot them eventually, you’ll see those American flags.

3. The supermoon has super effects on the earth’s gravity

This is just basic gravitational theory: the moon is closer, that’s why it’s bigger. And the moon is pulling on us just like we’re pulling on the moon. So that’s why everything is just slightly lighter when there’s a supermoon. Don’t believe me? Weigh yourself today, and then weigh yourself Tuesday night. As long as you don’t eat an especially heavy dinner, you’ll usually see a difference from anywhere between a half a pound to a pound.

Sure, it’s not a lot, but it’s something. And if you’ve been waiting for the price of postage to drop before you sent that giant care package overseas, why not take advantage of the celestially discounted freight? If you’re in the bulk shipping business, I don’t know what to tell you, because I already told you to take off from work on Tuesday. But how are you going to cash in on all of those savings while simultaneously making sure you have enough time to appreciate the majesty of the supermoon? It’s a tough call. I’m glad I don’t have to make those decisions.

4. The supermoon lessens your inhibitions

Did you know that the word lunatic has something to do with the word lunar, and thus, the moon? It’s because that those same gravitational tugs that pull your giant care package just slightly off of the scale also work the same way on liquids. That’s why there’s always a high tide during a full moon, because the moon’s gravity keeps everything in place. It also works the same way on the liquid in your body, specifically, your brain.

Ask any doctor or nurse of police officer: people are just a lot crazier during a full moon. There are more arrests made, and more crazy people being brought into the hospital. What do you think happens during a supermoon? That’s exactly right, people go totally off the wall. Which is great, because you can basically do whatever you want, and then chalk it up the next day to a bad case of moon madness. Now is the time to start taking those risks that you’d normally shrug off while the moon hangs out at apogee. Make that impulse purchase, hook up with that questionable coworker, run naked through the streets howling at the sky. You might shake your head no, like you’re somehow immune to the cosmic personality-shifting effects of the supermoon. But you’re not, so you might as well embrace the fun times ahead.

5. This is the last supermoon for a long, long time

Yeah, it’s pretty crazy that we’re getting three supermoons this summer. It’s almost getting to feel like supermoons might start becoming a regular thing. But don’t get too comfortable. In fact, I actually hate to be the one to break this to you, but after this supermoon, it’s likely that you’ll never see another supermoon again, unless you live for something like another hundred and thirteen years or so.

That’s right, while the moon’s been steadily growing larger over the course of the past four months, this Tuesday marks the end of the moon’s super cycle. After that, it’s going to start getting smaller, a lot smaller. In a couple of years from now, we’ll start marking our calendars to spot the first in a series of micromoons. At first, it might look kind of cute, charming even. But after a while, it’ll steadily recede into the background of the night sky, getting so tiny until you won’t even be able to differentiate it from the distant stars. And it’ll be really, really sad. Because how often do you we cast our glances upward to appreciate even a regular moon? No, we take it for granted, and we’re all going to be really sorry when it’s gone. So seriously, clear your schedule for Tuesday night. Watch the supermoon. It’s going to be sick.

Originally published at Thought Catalog

5 ice cream flavors you really need to try

I love ice cream. It’s so awesome. But do you ever feel like I do? Like sometimes you can’t decide on which flavor of ice cream to choose? There are just so many options! Next time you find yourself scratching your head, unable to make a decision, check out this guide. I wrote it. It’s a guide to ice cream flavors. Here are five ice cream flavors that you really need to try!

Vanilla

Vanilla is so awesome. It’s really simple. The only flavoring here is vanilla. Have you ever seen vanilla beans? They’re really long and skinny and dark, dark brown. But don’t let that fool you, because vanilla ice cream is white. Vanilla is delicious. Did you know that cream soda is vanilla flavored also? I always wondered why they don’t just call it vanilla soda. Probably because it’s caramel colored, and so people might get confused. They’d say to themselves, wait a second, isn’t vanilla white? It’s confusing.

Chocolate

Chocolate is so good! It’s just like vanilla, but instead of using vanilla as the only flavor, you get chocolate. You know what you never see? Chocolate soda. I’ve never seen a chocolate soda. Although, when I worked at a diner in high school, old people used to ask for chocolate sodas all the time. It’s not the same. They’re either asking for an ice cream soda, which is disgusting, or a chocolate egg cream, which is even more disgusting. I have no idea how the greatest generation got to be so great, because it definitely wasn’t by mixing milk and seltzer. That’s just nasty.

Strawberry

What a great flavor, strawberry. It’s pink. And there are usually chunks of strawberries floating around. The strawberries are frozen. Sometimes when I eat strawberry ice cream, I’ll get strawberry seeds stuck in the back of my molars. But not every time, only sometimes. One time I visited some cousins in Canada, and they had a strawberry plant in the backyard. But the strawberries were really small and sour. Maybe they weren’t strawberries. They were gross.

Vanilla and Chocolate

You know, like a swirl. Some of the ice cream trucks by my house will swirl their vanilla and chocolate soft-serves. But some of them refuse. I’m always like, why can’t you do it? All of the other trucks do it. And they make up some answer about not having the same equipment. I don’t know, I don’t buy it. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being lied to.

Neapolitan

Vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. It’s the best of all three flavors, packed into the same container. I’ve found that, if you try to treat them as separate flavors, it backfires, you wind up mutilating the container. It never comes out just right. So that’s why I like to make sure I get an equal amount of all three flavors in the same scoop. It’s great. Ice cream is great. You should totally try all of these awesome flavors.

Don’t mess with Greg’s coffee

I was with my friend Greg last week, waiting on line at a Starbucks to get a cup of coffee. “And can you leave like an inch or two of space for milk? Please? Thank you,” Greg asked the barista. And I saw it, I saw how everything went down, the polite request, it was almost like he was afraid to ask, like he was really trying to communicate how he didn’t want to be a pain, if he could just get a little less coffee. And then the please and thank you, all very, very timid.

“Here you go Craig,” the barista handed him the cup of coffee. I could tell by Greg’s face that something wasn’t right, and seeing as how there was only one aspect of that coffee that could’ve gotten him upset, I guessed that just by holding the cup, that he could feel the weight, he could tell that something wasn’t right.

My initial instinct told me that the cup was probably filled too high. Maybe some of the hot liquid leaked out of the top hole on the cover, a dead giveaway that the container had reached maximum capacity. But then again, it could have been almost comically under-filled. Maybe instead of one or two inches of space, there were four or five.

I think back to my customer service days. I hate to admit it, because it’s something that I can only really describe as a serious character defect, but a lot of my interactions with customers and guests were directly influenced by the fickle nature of my mood. Sometimes I wouldn’t feel like going to work and waiting tables. And I don’t know what it is, because it’s not something that I want to have happen, but every once in a while, someone would ask me a perfectly reasonable request, like, “Can I get some extra ketchup, please?” and my internal reaction would be this automatic, “Go fuck yourself. I hate you.”

And of course, I don’t want to be that guy. That’s just not a nice way to live. And if you want to be employed as a waiter or a barista or whatever, you can’t be that guy. You’ll get fired. But on an especially dark day if I just couldn’t get my better nature to wrest control of my actions, I had a choice, I could just not get them any extra ketchup. I could say, “Sure, coming right up,” and then disappear for a while. Or I could take a really long time, watch for that customer to flag down someone else, and then right as he’s in the middle of asking that person, “Hey, could I get some extra ketchup, please?” I could show up in mid-sentence, “Here you go, sir,” make it look like he’s the one being really annoying.

This is all terrible, awful behavior, and I hope that nobody thinks that I’m condoning it or trying to make it OK. And it’s not like that’s something that I did, certainly not often. But yeah, I’d be lying if these thoughts weren’t a part of my underlying consciousness, that there’s something in me, and I’m sure in a lot of service industry workers, that just don’t want to, they don’t want to do anything, even if it’s a perfectly good-natured request, it’s so easy to slide into this almost comfortable pit of bitter entitlement.

Anyway, Greg took his coffee over to that little table by the side where you put your milk and sugar in and, it was just as I’d initially suspected. That coffee cup was filled all the way to the top. By the time Greg managed to get the lid off, there was coffee splashing down everywhere. He couldn’t even lift it up without spilling even more, and the cardboard container was already stained, becoming visibly warped by having so much hot liquid poured over the outside of the cup’s lip.

His face said that he was pissed, but I didn’t expect what happened next. I thought, maybe he’d try to take a big sip, which he did, but it was too hot to really get down a good gulp. And there was still the mess to deal with. I thought maybe he’d shake his head back and forth a little bit, try to make eye contact with the barista, give him a really nasty look. Of course the barista wouldn’t be looking. You don’t want to engage too much. The key to being passive aggressive is to focus on the passivity. That way if you get called out, if some guy that you screwed over confronts you, you’re not giving him anything like eye contact or any other sort of ammunition to further provoke a fight.

And I said it already too, that Greg’s a pretty cool guy, very polite, hardly confrontational. But that same thing that’s in me as a waiter, that same voice telling me to tell random people “fuck you” for asking for ketchup, it had to have been in Greg too. And sometimes you just can’t hold it back. Sometimes you know you shouldn’t do something, but you do it anyway.

So Greg went right up to the counter and screamed, “Hey!” and the barista looked up, and Greg splashed the whole cup of coffee right on him. And I’ve got to say, it was a perfect shot. Obviously you can’t go for the face, because that’s a hot cup of coffee, and you’re looking at burns, at legal action. No, it was right in the middle of this guy’s thick, green apron, right where you just knew there were enough layers of apron and black t-shirt and undershirt to absorb a lot of that heat. But it was a big cup, a venti, and so now this guy was soaked. And maybe it wouldn’t scald him, but there was probably a burning sensation, or at the very least, a really uncomfortable feeling of being very hot and wet.

And we just walked out. Nobody said anything, no manager came running after us. Because what were they going to do about it? What would I have done if I were in that barista’s position? I have no idea. It felt really good at the time, to have been there, to have witnessed what surely felt like such a release, just taking that “fuck you” and returning it right to sender, but without actually having to have done anything, no guilt afterward, no regret.

Because there would have been regret, if that were me anyway. Even now, a week later, I can’t help but thinking, what if that guy really did just make a mistake? What if he was really busy, and meant to leave that extra inch, but for whatever reason, he forgot? What if he’s just so conditioned to filling those cups all the way up, that it’s not even a conscious decision anymore, that it’s more muscle memory than anything else? And yeah, he made a mistake, but it’s a mistake. And now he’s got to, what, ask the manager for a new apron? For a new black t-shirt? What if they didn’t have any available? Would he have to go home, leave his coworkers short-staffed? “And why did he splash you? What did you do to piss him off?” the manager might ask, suspiciously.

No, I can’t, I couldn’t, it would have been too much. And I was expecting something out of Greg, an apology, maybe just the slightest expression of remorse, but nothing. I’ve seen him like once or twice since, and it’s like it never happened. And I don’t know, man, there’s something of that in me, definitely, and I’m pretty sure Greg has a little bit of it too. What else is inside? Aren’t you just a little bit sorry? What if he got him in the face? In the eyes?