One downside of living in society is having to wear clothes all the time. So most people have a wardrobe. You can’t wear dirty clothes if you want people to accept you so you have to wash your shit every couple of weeks. Laundry day can be a chore and a hassle. Especially if you go to the Laundromat. You can either sit there and watch your clothes spin around for an hour or you can leave and hope that no one steals your shit. Neither option is very appealing.
The best thing about laundry day is that you can use it as an excuse, “I can’t do it that day, it’s my only day off and I need to do laundry.” It’s more practical that saying you have to go to the dentist and way more believable than claiming you have a bunch of errands to run.
Laundry day is a part of life, at least until you win the lotto and can afford a brand new outfit every day.
Writer’s block is when a writer can’t write anything. Sometimes they don’t have anything interesting to write about, sometimes they just can’t communicate their thoughts in a coherent manner. Writer’s block sucks. I’m suffering from it right now and it’s a bitch to push your way from punctuation point to punctuation point, trying to fill up the empty spots on the page with something worth reading. It doesn’t always work, so sometimes you will just ramble on about nothing in particular. I’m struggling to write each sentence, even this one. This one too. But I’m slowly getting to a decent length. A few more lines and I will be satisfied. I just don’t know what to say, on account of the writer’s block. Did I mention that writer’s block sucks? Because it does.
Americans like to buy things just to throw them away. We love paper plate and plastic cutlery because throwing that shit away is easier than cleaning up. Take paper towels for example. They are handy for wiping up spills and cleaning around the house. They are like napkins and cleaning rags combined into one inferior product and they come on an elongated toilet paper roll. It’s the ultimate middle finger to the environment. None only am I going to chop down this tree, I’m going to make sure that the end product can only be used once before it’s tossed away. And we wonder how global warming became a problem. But I’m fucking lazy and a hypocrite and I have a few rolls of Bounty in the cabinet, so who am I to judge?
You spend most of your day with your feet confined in socks and stuffed into a shoe. Your feet are trapped and constricted the whole time you’re getting ready for work, going to work, working, coming home from work, and doing whatever it is that you have to do like errands, or meeting friends or family and hanging out. Taking your shoes off at the end of the day feels fantastic. It’s like a reward to yourself for all the hard work you did that day. You earned it. You untie one shoe and take it off and wiggle your toes and ball your feet. You untie the other shoe and take it off and ball your feet and wiggle your toes. You peel off your sweaty socks and massage your feet and discreetly dispose the toe jam. Your feet are free and so are you.
Humans are fragile creatures. That’s why our minds get tired and our body needs sleep. So if you worked all day and have to party that night, you’re going to be a walking zombie at some point. Your head will droop and your eyes will feel heavy, and you want nothing more than to crash in your bed or anywhere you can.
Fight the urge to sleep and grab a drink and power through that shit. If you feel tired long enough, you will start to not feel tired. This magical feeling is known as your second wind. Sometimes you can extend the term to cover drinking. If you are on the verge of puking but manage to keep it down, you will feel better soon and get your second wind. You might still be drunk, but at least your mouth doesn’t taste like vomit and you can still hit on girls.
The coolest things happen when you are sleeping, so you have to avoid it as much as possible. Naps are for cats. Waiting for your second wind is the way to go.
A Rubber band ball is a ball made of rubber bands. Some people wrap rubber bands around a superball or a core object. That is not a real rubber band ball. A real rubber band ball is made of just rubber bands. You have to constantly add rubber bands because the rubber bands will start to break apart. Very few things are as tragic as the inevitable decline of a ball of rubber bands.
I’ve had a rubber band ball since 1997. I had a handful of rubber bands in my pocket (for general mischief like beestings and launching wads of paper) and somehow the rubber bands formed a perfect ball. It was fate. It created itself. I just needed to help it grow. I don’t add rubber bands to it for months at a time, but every now and then I have to provide a maintenance layer. Fifteen years later and it’s bigger than a softball. Rubber band balls are better than paper clip chains.
People who ride bicycles in major cities have to be fearless. Stop signs are optional and coming to a complete stop is a sign of weakness. It’s a good idea to wear a helmet if you are going to risk your life that that, and so a lot of people protect their noggin. Some people decide to live on the wild side and don’t wear helmets. And some idiots buy helmets and just sling them on their handlebars. You are an idiot for riding a bike with your helmet of the handlebars. You have a helmet, you have it with you, you are on your bike… you should fucking put it on. It’s common sense. I hope your helmet strap gets caught in your front wheel and you die. If you have a helmet, fucking use it.
You finally have a day off to catch up on your Netflix queue. You know that you are halfway through the third season of Breaking Bad, but you aren’t quite sure which episode you were on. You were a few episodes in, you know that much. You decide to go with the fifth episode and you think you’ve made the right choice. About twenty minutes into it, it occurs to you that you already heard Walter say that line. Realizing you’ve seen it before halfway through the episode is a terrible feeling. You know that you wasted your time and you have no one to blame but yourself. You could have been twenty minutes into the right episode. You will never get that twenty minutes back. You are twenty minutes closer to death.
Clapping is weird. Somewhere down the line humans decided that one way to show appreciation for something is to smack your palms together repeatedly to make noise. People clap for musicians, when their cousin graduates, at sporting events, when it’s Billy’s birthday, even at the end of movies even though the creators can’t hear your percussive compliment. Hey, you did something that I like, I’m going to hit my hands together a few times in unison with my colleagues.
Congratulations, it’s your birthday. And you got about a hundred posts on your Facebook wishing you a happy birthday. Each one of those people went out of their way to wish you a happy birthday. Some of them even mean it. And you honor that by responding to your birthday posts with a status update thanking them. That’s not proper netiquette. If a bunch of people individually wish you well on your date of birth, you should individually respond to them. Announcing to the internet that it’s your birthday and thanking them for acknowledging it is like yelling “THANK YOU” into a bullhorn: you sound like an asshole and you look like an asshole. Clicking the Like button on each post is the same damn thing. I know it’s your birthday, and I’m really glad that you made it another year without dying. You can at least respond with a simple “Thank You!” if someone tells you “Happy Birthday!!!”. You can even cut and paste the “Thank You!” if you want. At least that shows a little effort. Just because it’s your birthday doesn’t mean you are above using manners.
I’m not afraid of spiders. I don’t want them crawling on me or biting me or anything, but I’m not arachnophobic. My spellcheck says arachnophobic isn’t a word, but it should be. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, I’m not scared of spiders. But walking into a spider web is one of the worst feelings in the world. It’s a creepy feeling to get touched by something invisible. You can’t see what’s attacking you; you just feel little ghost strands clinging to your skin.
You’re in a little bit of a rush. You woke up late and realized you should have left ten minutes ago. That sudden shock of realization is more effective than a shower and you jump out of bed and start getting dressed and gathering your things. You grab your wallet, keys, and bag and run out the door. About three minutes into your commute you realize that you don’t have your phone. You feel naked. You feel lost. Leaving home without your phone is like forgetting to put on pants. You shouldn’t even have to think about it, your phone should always be on you at all times. And now you don’t have it and you cant check the time or Facebook or listen to music. Life can be so unfair sometimes.
Back in the days before text messaging and cell phones, all the cool kids were rocking pagers. Pagers are little electronic devices used for communication. You simply call up the pager number of the person you’re trying to reach and you would write the phone number where they can call you back. If it was a really important message you would add 911 to the end of it.
Most pagers or beepers could only display numerical message like a phone number. It wasn’t longer before some nerds started realizing that you could use the numbers to write out messages. I imagine it started out as a simple joke, maybe one geek texted 80085 to his friend and they realized that numbers could double as crude letters. Some letters are obvious: a 0 is an “O”, a 1 is an “I”. Some letters were created by using multiple numbers: 12 is an “R”, 17 is an “N”, and 177 is an “M”, etc.
Some common phrases like “I love you” had assigned numbers. “I love you” became 143. “I” is one letter, “love” is four letters, and “you” is three letters.
Pager Code wasn’t set in stone. There would be subtle differences between different regions. Pager code was a fad, it was cumbersome to write and difficult to decipher. You could spend a lot of time trying to figure out that 373948177 is “elephant”. I don’t know why you would be paging someone about an elephant, but it probably happened.
I spent a good three months trying to learn pager code back in the day and I was pretty proficient at it. Now it’s like being skilled in Latin, it’s an impressive language but no one uses it anymore. 74875 580. That’s sad.
I have a pretty set schedule, but every once in a while I have to wake up early for some lame reason or another. Waking up an hour or two earlier is not a big deal, but for whatever reason I never go to bed an hour or two earlier the night before to compensate. Most of the time I stay up even later than I normally would. Maybe I’m trying to sabotage myself. Staying up late even though you have to wake up early is a common occurrence; on some level we are all gluttons for punishment.
I hate math. I hated math class. I hated all those algebra and calculus formulas that I had to learn and never used once in the real world. The only math you need is basic math… adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Doing math in your head is an important skill, and one to be proud of. You will always remember the first time you divided 47.63 by 2 successfully. The problem with doing math in my head is that I usually have to bust out my phone to use the calculator to double check my answer. I probably should have just used the calculator in the first place to save time, but I wanted to challenge myself and pretend I’m smart.
The fourth day of the seventh month of the year is just another day for most of the world. For Americans, the fourth day of July is Independence Day, the annual birthday of freedom. And we celebrate with hot dogs, beer, and fireworks. For most Americans, it’s just an excuse to barbeque and hang out in backyards. The best way to celebrate America’s birthday is to blow things up. Every Fourth of July, thousands of cities across the nation try to destroy the sky with an aerial bombardment of bright colors and misshapen smiley faces.
The Fourth of July is a holiday because Americans are stupid. Before the Declaration of Independence there was this thing called the resolution of independence or the Lee Resolution. On June 7, 1776, a Virginian named Richard Lee proposed that colonies should break away from the English. On June 11, 1776, A Committee of Five (Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin) got together to prepare a document detailing why they wanted independence. Only July 2, 1776 we officially declared our independence. On July 4, 1776, Congress approved the wording of the Declaration of Independence. August 2, 1776 is when most people signed the document and the last guy signed it on November 4, 1776.
That’s kind of a watered down version of what happened, but of all those dates, July 4th seems the least likely option to become our Independence Day. John Adams thought that July 2nd would be the day we celebrated our freedom. All he did was help write the Declaration and become our first president after George Washington… what the fuck does he know about American patriotism?
So the Fourth of July is not when we declared our independence, it’s when we finished writing a note to Mom and Dad a letter saying that we were moving out. But then we didn’t sign it until a month later. Most of the world ignores the Fourth of July, and maybe we should too. Because July 2nd seems like a much more logical choice. So does August 2nd. So does June 7th or 11th. Whatever.
The spirit of this holiday is perhaps best captured by Bill Pullman in his greatest performance yet.
The Fourth of July is our Independence Day. I just don’t know why. But I’m a sheep and will go along with it like everyone else. Happy Birthday, America! Now where’s the booze?
My name is Brendan. It’s not Brandon. They might seem similar, but I can tell the difference between the two. They sound completely different. It’s a blessing and a curse to have a name that is not what most people are used to. You can tell who your real friends are… if they can’t say your name right, than they don’t know your name, so you don’t feel entitled to do them any favors.
Pronouncing a name wrong is a bad as calling someone by the wrong name. So is spelling a name wrong. There’s a huge difference between John and Jon, between Shaun and Sean. You either know my name or you don’t. If you don’t, don’t expect anything from me, especially if I’ve known you for a while and you can’t say my fucking name.
Learning someone’s name is half the battle, saying it right wins the war. Just ask anyone named Tara.
criticallyrated 