THX Soundtrack

My good friend Graham was the first one to graduate college and get a real job. He continued living with us and practicing our subsistence lifestyle and weird hours of waking and sleeping, but he was also bringing in actual money. He didn't indulge in too many crazy things beyond a new car, but he did come home with a massive sound system and TV one day. The speakers were so monstrous and clear sounding that he and our other roommate Rob burned a CD that was a looped soundtrack of the THX sound that used to be played at the beginning of movies. It would play over and over at top volume, showing the range and power of the speakers but never introducing a movie. Really, it was more entertaining than most of the movies we sat down to watch in that house.

Early Art Class

For all the early instruction I received in art I never really took to it in school. Never really managed to find my niche or develop a style that I liked. Fortunately, I had an art teacher in elementary school that back then I lacked the vocabulary to describe. Ms. Harold was a 'micromanager.' You'd do half a project and then sit down with her to go over it, and she'd either change it completely or simply finish it for you. It was nice for the rare and uninspired student who disliked art class since they could just rough the project out and let her do all the work. One of the projects I remember is a modular ceramic hamburger that I made in class. Ms. Harold had made the mistake of telling us that big chunks of clay would explode in the kiln, and I designed this burger to go off like a hand grenade during the cooking process. Everyone in class was excited about it, but Ms. Harold hollowed it out and turned it into less dynamic work of art before the kiln firing. It looked totally different than the twisted shrapnel I'd hoped for

Oh Man! Thx for the Work!

I get a lot of spam that needs to be weeded out of my blog comments, and my favorite is the message that simply says, "Oh Man! Thx for the Work!" It's such unbridled enthusiastic joy that it brightens my day a little every time I see it. In my imagination the words are being shouted by an old-school Japanimation cartoon character with big shiny eyes. Then right after he says it, another Japanimation character who looks exactly the same except his hair is bright red instead of bright blue says in conciliatory tones, "Oh Wonky! You'll Nver Get Wrx!"

Negative Online Reviews

Every once in awhile I'll post a negative review about a business in my neighborhood. Of course, the realities of living in a small neighborhood are that you sometimes need to go to a store or restaurant you really dislike, if only because nothing else is open and you can't live without a pint of ice cream. All of the websites I use to level my slanderous opinions from have pictures of me, and I'll worry that a spurned business owner will recognize and yell at me for complaining so eloquently about his freezer burned ice creams.

Adult PJs

Pajamas are super cool when you're a kid. You could get a onesie with built-in feet, ninja outfits, or a screen printed tuxedo top and bottom. I was thinking about how lame adult pajamas are, and then I realized that I can still get all those things, I just don't sleep in them anymore. In fact, I could go buy a ninja outfit tomorrow and wear it around town if I want. When you're a kid, you assume that you'll walk around in ninja outfits and tuxedos all the time as an adult, but then you grow up and find that there are drawbacks to wearing a karate outfit to work.

Covering Your Tracks

When I lived in the Midwest, I'd always have to do a walk-through with the landlord whenever I moved out of a building. They'd go over the property, looking for broken doorknobs, dents, or holes in the wall, and it'd be your opportunity to argue about how much of your deposit you should get back. Ultimately it didn't matter how much you cleaned or argued--landlords made up their mind to either kept all your money or give you a little back well in advance. The last thing you'd always do before the landlord arrived was plug all of the holes you'd pounded in your walls with white toothpaste. It masked holes in the short term, and also gave your place a fresh, minty smell. They always fell for that one.

Name That Tune

Name That Tune is by far the oddest game show in American history. It baffles me. I understand the premise easily enough, but what troubles me is that people watched it. The songs they played and then named in two or three notes were usually classical pieces. I don't know anyone who could name classical composers at the level that contestants on the show did. I understand Jeopardy, you can usually guess a few of those in each category, but classical composers? It's not so weird that people can name the songs, but considering the kind of audience most game shows have, who was tuning in and watching it? It seems unlikely that the classical music and game show audiences would overlap enough to make a show like this even mildly popular, but it somehow stayed on the air for years.

Awkward Hugs

Hugging convention eludes me. When you meet a friend of your girlfriend's and his female companion on the street, and your girlfriend hugs them both, what do you do when introduced? You obviously shake the guy's hand if you're a guy, but your girlfriend just met this other woman and she hugged her. It almost seems rude to stick out your hand. It's not just this situation. What do you do with opposite-sex work friends when you say bye for the weekend after a few drinks? A handshake seems weird since you know each other so well, but a hug is downright creepy. I guess you wave goodbye, or just say you're going to the restroom and then leave without saying bye.

Phone Routing

Now I'm the guy at work who gets all the weird calls. I've had some problems with my phone, and one of the IT guys fixed it. But by 'fixed' I think he meant 'rigged it so all the weird calls get routed to your phone.' I've received several robo calls about filling out my census, and it seems that whenever one of my neighbors gets a phone call and they're on the line, the call gets routed to my phone. Most common though are people trying to call and sell me photocopier machines or just hanging up. If I'm ever having a really bad day at work, I'm just going to go ahead and buy a few of those copiers.

Pennies Suck Movement

When I was in high school, I used to visit a store on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin called Knuckleheads. They sold all the things you'd normally find at a head shop, but I was only interested in procuring a few cigars. Since Madison was a college town and I was already over 6 feet tall then, they never asked if I was over 18. Knuckleheads had a sign on the register that seemed very progressive to me. They refused to accept pennies as payment. Things were priced to the nearest nickel, and they rounded down to the nearest $.05 when you checked out. Not accepting "legal tender" seemed like a major civil disobedience to me, but I liked their logic about the wastefulness of pennies. So far, it seems like that movement has yet to catch on, but I'm sure Knuckleheads is still at it. I've since learned not to look to head shops as harbingers of the future.

Enjoy in Moderation

We walked into a bar once and bumped into a casual acquaintance we'd met a couple times. It turned out to be his birthday, and he'd celebrated by drinking enough so that his eyes no longer lined up. We said hi to him and chatted a bit. Apparently the bouncer at the door noticed, because about an hour later when our birthday acquaintance spilled a shot all over his face instead of into his mouth, the bouncer came over to us and told us that we had to take our friend and leave. We didn't know the guy well or who he was hanging out with, so we nodded that, yes, we understood what was being asked of us, then after a brief discussion among ourselves, we agreed to stay at the bar and see how that played out. Our acquaintance left awhile later, and that was the last time I ever saw him. So far, it seems like our decision was the right one.

Save the Manatees

People like manatees because they're trying to prove that they don't only want to save the cute animals. Also, they feel sorry for them for being so slow and ugly. Maybe it's partly guilt associated with riding over them with jet skis and motorboats. It's kind of like when you see a person on the side of the road next to a broken-down car on a deserted highway in the middle of the night. You stop to help them, or at least slow down and offer to help. They either say they're okay, or you lend a little help and then go on your way. You feel pretty good about it, but why did you stop? Was it because they needed help, or was it because you wanted to avoid feeling guilty, or maybe it's even because you wanted the boost associated doing the right thing. Personally, I stop to rob them, so none of those really apply to me.

Computer Games

One of my old neighbors used to have a desktop computer when we were little kids. They cost roughly the same compact cars back then, so his parents buying and installing one in his bedroom represented something of an investment in his future. Last I heard he was landscaping in Jackson Hole in the summers, fly fishing a lot, and then skiing all winter.  I guess he got his sitting-in-front-of-a-computer work done early enough in life. We used to play video games on his computer all the time, and I remember that after plugging in the 5.25in floppy disk, it would prompt us to go to the game's instruction booklet, and enter the word found on a specific page and in a certain location. It occurred to me finally that this was among the earliest efforts to curb software piracy, since besides copying the disk, you'd also have to photocopy the instruction booklet. They really haven't improved their methods since.

Cheese Voter

I used to work at this awful liquor store that had a big cheese shop attached to it. The owner had an office above the store where he hung out with a rotating pool of secretaries he hired out of strip clubs. His office was packed awards for "Best Cheese Shop" and "Best Wine Selection" that had been bestowed on him by reader votes in the local paper. After a couple months there, voting came up for the local newspaper awards, and a stack of newspapers three feet tall appeared in the break room. We were instructed to fill out surveys before the end of our break, and put them in envelopes and leave them to get sent to the paper. My friend and I filled out dozens, but our employer did not receive any of our votes.

Student Council

I was elected to the post of Treasurer by my peers in elementary school. My job duties consisted of reading the balance of the school store and the student council treasuries at the start of each meeting. I didn't know there was a difference between the two, and my school's secretary would use the balances interchangeably when telling me how much money we had at our disposal. No one noticed that the balance jumped all over the place until halfway through the school year. If I would have been on my A-game, I could have embezzled half that cash without anyone knowing any better. I would have broken my campaign promises to be honest, but I'd already broken them during my campaign when I claimed to have acted as treasurer at my old school. I was a natural politician.

Turtleneck Issues

Fake turtlenecks don't make any sense. Some people call them 'Dickey's.' They look like turtlenecks when worn under a sweater, but it's just a neck with a small skirt around it. You pull the Dickey over your head like a Christmas tree skirt and stuff the skirt part into your shirt. Then people think you're wearing a turtleneck, but it doesn't keep you warm. If the world made sense, Dickey's would be called 'Mock Turtlenecks.' Then again, calling something with a tall neck a turtleneck doesn't make sense anyway. A 'turtleneck' would imply that the neck could be folded down or you could hide your head in the shirt. Turtlenecks should be referred to as Giraffe Necks from now on.

Death's Waiting Room

I've been to a handful of Early Bird dinner specials in my life. Sometimes I made it just in the nick of time for my first meal after sleeping the day away, but more likely it's been because I was visiting older people who prefer to eat early. I had the occasion to go to one in a community packed with retirees, and I must have been the youngest person there by 50 years. I was hoping that a fight would break out because I would have been able to clean house. I'm really not qualified to become a bouncer at most places, but if this diner needed someone to watch the door during the early bird special, I would have been as good a candidate as any. I had the early bird special tonight and got a pretty decent Thai meal with an appetizer and beer for only $10. The beer was only about three-quarters full, but I didn't feel comfortable complaining under the circumstances.

Bad Seats for the Game

My school's football team wasn't very good, but we had an enormous stadium. Games were so poorly attended by students that they school began offer season ticket packages for less than $30 in the student section. Individual games cost about the same, and we'd go to a couple a games a year, so we went in and bought season tickets. You could get big blocks of seats together, but you had to send in all your money at the same time. We finally got our act together and went to the ticket office on the very last day that the deal was still available. They didn't tell you your seats right away, so you had to wait for your pack of tickets to arrive in the mail. When the tickets arrived, we knew they weren't great, but we didn't know how bad they were until we actually went to the first game. The backs were at the wall of the stadium, but I'm not sure why they had to put us all the way up there since no one sat in about 40 or 50 rows in front of us.

Dog Names and People Names

It's bad when you meet a person walking a dog, and then the next time you see them you know the dog's name but not their name. It's not uncommon to see a cute dog in the street and bend down to pet it and then asks its name. It's fairly rare to follow-up with the owner and ask their name. Dog names are much easier to remember because they're usually odder or more dynamic than human names, and on the rare day that you meet a dog named Josh, well, then that seems ever weirder so you remember it.

Margarita Skimming

Two of my friends attended bartending school during college and then accepted jobs at a local chain Mexican restaurant. The bartending school had much better placement for graduates than our university. Their bar was an upstairs setup at a place out in the suburbs. They had to wear polo shirts and black pants every day, but thankfully the job required no flair. The most popular drink at their bar was a pre-mixed frozen margarita dispensed from a huge glowing machine behind their bar. My friends were in charge of mixing the margaritas that would go into this machine, and after a couple weeks at the restaurant, they began adding an extra couple gallons of water to the mixture and skimming the profits off those extra margaritas for their tip jar. It was a pretty clever move and one that's apparently very popular in bars, though I don't think it was covered in bar tending school.

Equal Opportunity Employer

My former gearshop was truly an equal-opportunity employer. One day a man walked into the shop and asked for a job. He'd been living in a cabin on a remote tract of land in Wisconsin by himself for several years. He'd saved enough money to buy the land and supplies, then he built the cabin and tried to support his meager needs only through the sale of his art. He was coming out of the cabin for air and trying to find work to replenish his bank account before returning to the woods. My boss hired him on the spot, and he put his backpack in the basement and began working immediately. We sent him outside to do some handyman work, and it got a little weird when he came back into the store wearing only his hiking boots and short cutoffs to ask for water. Evidently he hadn't spent much of his recent time hanging out in retail stores. He ate hotdogs for every meal and kept his work clothes in the basement next to our shower. Then one day he packed back up and left. Hopefully his art proved more marketable this time around.

Narcissism

My girlfriend asked what 'narcissistic' meant, and I said 'full of yourself.' Then she told me that she'd read a short online article that claimed people with unusual names were more narcissistic. I could see it. Having an odd name like 'Rocky' or 'Darth' means you get a little bit more attention than everyone else on the first day of school, when you meet chatty strangers, and when you have to leave your name on a waiting list at restaurants. Taken individually these moments mean nothing, but add them up over the course of a lifetime and it makes sense that you'd get an overinflated sense of self-importance. I'm talking about everyone else, of course.

Owner vs Renter Rights

Our U.S. Government teacher in high school took a practical approach to education. Every week we'd have a guest speaker from the community come into our classroom and lecture on something that would be useful to us upon graduation. One week it was opening bank accounts, another it was our rights during police confrontations, but the oddest was the time he brought a local landlord in. If there was a slummy part of our community, this guy owned it. He expounded at lengths on the binding nature of leases and pounded the lectern while driving home the point that landlords have more rights than tenants. That weekend, I hung out with some older coworkers from the bike shop, and we rode the guy's brand new mountain bike down the steps of his apartment. Well, some of us rode it, others bailed on the first step and let it tumble all the way to the bottom of the stairs. The next day my friend received an eviction notice, and I laid some knowledge on him about his rights based on my learnings in U.S. Government class--basically that he was screwed. That's when I found out that the landlord who'd come into our class was there to indoctrinate us with his side of things, and that tenant rights far outstrip anything a landlord can throw at you. Now I make sure to ride my bike down the stairs everywhere I live.

Movie Stores

You can never really close your video rental store accounts. I've opened a rental account in most cities where I've lived over the years, and it's come back to bite me. My friend was served a notice from a collection agency on a past-due Blockbuster account in Minneapolis. We'd rented several movies there including the one that they called him about, but I'm certain that we returned the movie. Sadly, I didn't have access to any film documentation or other suitable proof that we'd returned the movie, so I had no recourse. All I could do was go to the movie rental chain in Utah and tell them that I was closing my account. I related my story about the lost video I'd returned and then be charged for, and that's when the guy told me he couldn't close my account. It's just not an option. Every movie store account I've opened since being 13 is apparently still on record somewhere. Now I tell people to put a note in my account saying not to ever rent a movie to anyone--even me, just in case I become the victim of identity theft and someone tries to rent Blade II on one of my former accounts again. I just hope I never move back to any of those old towns and try to rent movies since I've put those notes in every old account.

Gangsta Rap and Kenny Loggins

I always assumed that my generation would outgrow gangster rap and start listening to Jim Croche and Kenny Loggins at some point. The idea of us listening to the same music as we age is somehow troubling. Once in awhile I'll worry that my friend Chrissy is going to still be bumping N.W.A. in her Corolla when driving her grandkids around in 25 years. Well, I guess she wouldn't still have the Corolla. I suppose that rap and speed metal will sound tame compared to whatever kids are listening to in 25 years, but that's somehow not a relief at all.

Entry-Level Job Hunt

There was a bit of a recession when I graduated from college, and entry-level jobs were hard to come by. I went on a lot of interviews and complained about how bad the economy was, and no one hired me. Interviews started getting a bit thinner, so I 'd go and talk to anyone who'd give me a callback. I remember telling my co-worker at the college newspaper that'd I'd just applied for a job selling office equipment. I didn't get an interview for that one, but I did get contacted for a sports marketing job with a vague online description. I borrowed a friend's car and followed my handwritten directions until they terminated in a sketchy part of town. I almost turned around, but I figured I'd bought a new shirt from the Gap for the occasion and already driven all the way out there, so I went in to see what happened. The interview ended with me taking my application off the guy's desk and tearing out my social security number and contact information. It turned out to be a pyramid scam that somehow turned handing stuff out at baseball parks into money. When the economy tanked again last year, I wished that I'd taken that job so that I could prey on college kids and somehow get them to make loads of money for me.

Looking for a Place

I'm looking for a new place to live, which means that I've spent my lunch hours and time after working rushing around looking at apartment after apartment. I've worked with a few realtors. One of them kept showing me places that sounded amazing on paper and in really spectacular neighborhoods. Then we'd arrive and walk through it, and I'd find that it had a big bedroom, but lacked a living room. You went straight from the kitchen to the bedroom. Sure, it's a one-bedroom, but you could have told me that there's no living room. One them that sounded immensely promising looked great until I opened a pantry in the kitchen and found the shower. It's such an odd mentality for the realtor to show me that place--did he think I wouldn't notice? A shower in your kitchen is a pretty important fact, something you might want to put in the listing in the interest of not wasting everyone's time.

The Belligerent Guy

There used to be a belligerent guy at every college party who would make himself known the moment the police arrived. He was the one who'd yell at the campus police from the roof of your house and then loudly proclaim that they were powerless to stop him since he was on private property. He'd be the guy yelling to keep the doors locked when the police knocked on the door to issue a noise complaint. He'd yell, "Make 'em go back and get a warrant!" or "You can't touch me! I don't give you permission to search my friend's house!" The police would always come in and make everyone leave, then sometimes they'd give that guy a ticket. I found myself wondering today whatever happened to that guy that was at every party. My guess is that he became a lawyer, but did poorly in law school and now spends most of his time handling DUI cases. At least now he knows where he stands with the law.

Music Recommendations

The problem with buying concert tickets online is that you have to give them an e-mail address. Then they endlessly send you spam in the guise of music recommendations for upcoming shows. This might be a useful tool if it were always going to see bands that I was really interested in, but I'll occasionally buy a ticket to see a show with a friend or at the behest of my girlfriend. And now I'm on the Third Eye Blind mailing list. Some complex algorithm has taken into account all the shows I've gone to, and it's determined that I'm likely a fan of pop band Third Eye Blind. I don't know who wrote the software that makes music recommendations, but I'm guess that it's a guy with a bit of a Third Eye Blind bias.

The Only Thing That's Safe Around Here

The only thing that can safely be stored in my refrigerator overnight is healthy food. Beer left for a day is gone. This isn't a big deal if you're planning on sitting down and drinking five of them, but when you only want one it's a bit of a hassle to go to the store. At least the store sells single beers so that I don't lose five beers every night. Healthy food is the only thing that sticks around since my roommates won't touch it. It's best to tear labels off cans of fatty, cream based soups before storing them in my cupboard so that they don't get eaten. I should probably be thanking these guys. My health food purchasing is adding years to my life.

Live Music and Beer

The enjoyment of watching live music is nearly ruined for me by the problem of getting beer at rock shows. I figure I'll want to drink four pints of beer during a two-hour set. That means that I can go to the bar myself four times, or I can go twice and buy beers for a friend who will then make the trip twice to buy me beer. This problem is compounded by the fact that my friends like to stand near the front of the stage, so every time I go back and forth I have to fight my way through the crowd. So now you're looking at trying to make your way through the crowd on two roundtrips with two full pints of beer. Tempers can get out of hand when you're pushing your way through a crowd and beer is involved. Then you know you're going to have to go to the bathroom at least once after four beers, so you're looking at another trip through the crowd for the bathroom. The argument could be made that you just don't have to drink beer at live shows, but I don't buy it. Have you tried listening to extremely loud live music without drinking beer? It's horrible.