So today I got my haircut, which is something I always dread. Small talk is maddening and I’m not very good at it either. Finding some mindless topic to chatter on about takes great effort for me, so today when I had a good topic, I was very proud of myself.
The fact that the topic might be a social taboo didn’t occur to me. It should have.
This morning, one of the parking decks at my college was closed from at least 9am to 11am. I found out a little bit later that it was because a girl, a student there, had committed suicide by jumping off of the 9-story parking deck.
My idiot self thought this was a fascinating event that deserved to be my conversation-starter for the rest of the day.
Once I had driven to the local Easy Hair and was settling into my chair, I broke out my line.
“Well my day’s been interesting (complete and utter lie). When I got to college today, one of the parking decks was completely shut down. Turns out somebody committed suicide by jumping off of it.”
“Oh my God, that’s HORRIBLE!”
Right about now I realized the amount of social trouble I was in. I had just said something to my haircutter-lady that rocked her world in a bad way. Apparently, she thought suicides only happen on TV.
When I heard there was a suicide, I shrugged. A bunch of adolescents and early “adults” put into close quarters with each other, the pressure of grades, the ever-presence of alcohol and drugs sometimes putting people into a depressed mood – I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often to be honest.
I may not have shared her shocked sentiment, but I realized that I had to recover fast or else I was going to be getting one shitty haircut, and have to sit through awkward silence the whole way through.
Thinking quickly, I replied “Yeah! Can you imagine what her family must be going through? Such a shame. But she picked a good day to do it; the weather is incredible.”
“Oh isn’t it? It already feels like summer!”
Now it was my turn to be shocked. The quip about the weather came out without me even thinking; the second I said it, I wanted it back in my mouth. I couldn’t believe she actually took the bait.
Thank God for people with short attention spans. Saving the socially awkward each and every day.
**********
On a (more than) slight side note, I noticed that Wal-Mart is the people-watcher's paradise today. It gave me an idea for a new blog post. HINT: It involves women drivers, and those god-awful ear piece cell phones.
De-Inspirational quote of the day:
Jon Stewart: Do you enjoy hearing other people’s problems?
Jerry Seinfeld: Yeah. They’re funny. Haven’t you found as a married man when you sit with other guys and they tell you what’s going on in their marriage, the worse it is, the more you laugh?
Monday, March 15, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Talking Heads
The following is a phone conversation I had with a friend. Enjoy, and please don't hate me.
**********
“So what are you doing for your spring break, Jesse?”
“I’m going out to Milledgeville, about 2 ½ hours away, to hang out with my friend at his dorm.”
“What are ya’ll going to do there?”
“Go mudding, he’s going to make me watch the entire first season of Dexter, and… we’ll probably set lots of things on fire.”
*laughs “Sounds fun.”
“Yeah that’s my idea of a good weekend. Mud, murder and fire.”
“What are you going to set on fire?”
“Whatever looks like it should be burned. Well, not anything living. Except for plants, trees, bushes, stuff like that.”
“Not much of a tree-hugger I take it?”
“Definitely not. I’m not interested in driving around cars that make no sound and look like a Rubik’s cube.”
“Don’t you want to save the environment?”
“Dude, human beings and all of our crappy, smoking, smelly machines make up about 1% of the CO2 in the world. All of the termites in the world create more CO2 in a year than all the cars in America do in a year. So instead of driving around shitty cars, I think we should have a mass termite holocaust. Which we could only do by dumping lots of nasty chemicals into the ground, which would be the pinnacle of irony.”
“Where did you hear those stats?”
“A British journalist. Jeremy Clarkson’s his name. Never looked them up to make sure though. But no, I don’t care about the environment. The environment can kiss my ass. I’m never going to own a Ford Focus and drive a vehicle that has an eco-friendly top speed of 80.”
“So you’d rather rape the land?”
“Yes, yes I would. I think you’ve got it, man. I want to rape this land, and rape it good! The previous generations clearly didn’t give a shit about us and the next generation will see us as the worthless history they shouldn’t have to learn, so they won’t give a shit about us either. Why in the world should I sacrifice fun in my life for a generation of people that I don’t know, don’t care about, and who don’t care about me? The answer is that I shouldn’t. We figured out how to cope with the shoddily-built industrial cities that the past generations saw fit to burden us with. We used our technology to deal with it. Let the new residents figure out our mess. I’m not the earth’s landlord; I don’t care what happens to it. And you don’t either.”
“I care.”
“Why?”
“Because we should. It’s important to leave things how you got them.”
“Oh is it now? What, like how we treat rental cars so well? Give me a break. It’s a fad, it’ll go away eventually.”
“Ignoring problems always makes them go away.”
“Most of them, yeah. Because they weren’t solvable or real in the first place.”
“You’re such a pessimist.”
“I see the glass as half-empty because I saw the damn fool who came in and drank the first part of the glass. I know it used to be full and now it ain’t.”
**********
“So what are you doing for your spring break, Jesse?”
“I’m going out to Milledgeville, about 2 ½ hours away, to hang out with my friend at his dorm.”
“What are ya’ll going to do there?”
“Go mudding, he’s going to make me watch the entire first season of Dexter, and… we’ll probably set lots of things on fire.”
*laughs “Sounds fun.”
“Yeah that’s my idea of a good weekend. Mud, murder and fire.”
“What are you going to set on fire?”
“Whatever looks like it should be burned. Well, not anything living. Except for plants, trees, bushes, stuff like that.”
“Not much of a tree-hugger I take it?”
“Definitely not. I’m not interested in driving around cars that make no sound and look like a Rubik’s cube.”
“Don’t you want to save the environment?”
“Dude, human beings and all of our crappy, smoking, smelly machines make up about 1% of the CO2 in the world. All of the termites in the world create more CO2 in a year than all the cars in America do in a year. So instead of driving around shitty cars, I think we should have a mass termite holocaust. Which we could only do by dumping lots of nasty chemicals into the ground, which would be the pinnacle of irony.”
“Where did you hear those stats?”
“A British journalist. Jeremy Clarkson’s his name. Never looked them up to make sure though. But no, I don’t care about the environment. The environment can kiss my ass. I’m never going to own a Ford Focus and drive a vehicle that has an eco-friendly top speed of 80.”
“So you’d rather rape the land?”
“Yes, yes I would. I think you’ve got it, man. I want to rape this land, and rape it good! The previous generations clearly didn’t give a shit about us and the next generation will see us as the worthless history they shouldn’t have to learn, so they won’t give a shit about us either. Why in the world should I sacrifice fun in my life for a generation of people that I don’t know, don’t care about, and who don’t care about me? The answer is that I shouldn’t. We figured out how to cope with the shoddily-built industrial cities that the past generations saw fit to burden us with. We used our technology to deal with it. Let the new residents figure out our mess. I’m not the earth’s landlord; I don’t care what happens to it. And you don’t either.”
“I care.”
“Why?”
“Because we should. It’s important to leave things how you got them.”
“Oh is it now? What, like how we treat rental cars so well? Give me a break. It’s a fad, it’ll go away eventually.”
“Ignoring problems always makes them go away.”
“Most of them, yeah. Because they weren’t solvable or real in the first place.”
“You’re such a pessimist.”
“I see the glass as half-empty because I saw the damn fool who came in and drank the first part of the glass. I know it used to be full and now it ain’t.”
Friday, March 12, 2010
Story Time With Uncle Jesse
So, today I made a mid-day Publix run and was almost carjacked. Let me explain.
Since I am a college student, I pretty much live off of frozen pizza and Dr. Pepper. I was low on the liquid and out of the pizza, so to Publix I went.
It’s raining, which just makes driving even more awesome. I have this strange driving fetish where I absolutely love driving in the rain. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.
Anyways, I drove there, got my goods, and walked out. I was sitting in my car, engine running, buckling my seatbelt like a good citizen, and some dude, maybe in his mid-twenties, comes to my window with a slightly agitated look on his face. He’s saying something and since he presumably wants me to hear him, so I roll down my window.
“Hey man, can I pay you for a ride just up the street? It’s raining and I don’t want to walk.”
You should have thought of this ahead of time when you decided to be 25 and have no car I thought.
What I said, pretty much automatically, was “No man, I’ve got to go somewhere right now.” I mean, I’m in a car; that much should be pretty self-evident. But I wasn’t really interested in giving the guy a ride.
No, he wasn’t black. I didn’t deny a car-less black man a ride up the street. I denied a car-less white guy, in a jacket, a ride up the street. It’s not like he was naked and completely defenseless against the condensation falling from the sky. He wasn’t going to catch pneumonia. He wasn’t going to drown either. He had on boots, jeans, a ragged shirt and a jacket. I felt he was perfectly prepared to walk a little ways up the street, even if it was raining.
The fact that people don’t typically walk up to a running car and ask to pay for a ride wasn’t the thing that made me lock all the doors to my car when he walked away; there was a little bit more to it.
The fact that a guy who doesn’t have a car has money to throw around for rides struck me as odd. The fact that as I sat in my (now locked) car for another minute or so, watching him ask at least 5 other people if they could drive him “just up the street” was more what did it for me. If he was in such a hurry to get up the street and out of the rain, why not just START WALKING? Spending another minute standing around in the rain, which he was so focused on getting out of, didn’t make much sense to me. Once you're wet, you're wet; There's no 5 second rule.
Who knows. Maybe the man was just stupid. Maybe he really did just need to get up the street and was willing to pay someone for the privilege of riding in a dry environment. But I’m going to chose to believe he was trying to carjack somebody. Because that just makes the whole thing almost exciting.
Since I am a college student, I pretty much live off of frozen pizza and Dr. Pepper. I was low on the liquid and out of the pizza, so to Publix I went.
It’s raining, which just makes driving even more awesome. I have this strange driving fetish where I absolutely love driving in the rain. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.
Anyways, I drove there, got my goods, and walked out. I was sitting in my car, engine running, buckling my seatbelt like a good citizen, and some dude, maybe in his mid-twenties, comes to my window with a slightly agitated look on his face. He’s saying something and since he presumably wants me to hear him, so I roll down my window.
“Hey man, can I pay you for a ride just up the street? It’s raining and I don’t want to walk.”
You should have thought of this ahead of time when you decided to be 25 and have no car I thought.
What I said, pretty much automatically, was “No man, I’ve got to go somewhere right now.” I mean, I’m in a car; that much should be pretty self-evident. But I wasn’t really interested in giving the guy a ride.
No, he wasn’t black. I didn’t deny a car-less black man a ride up the street. I denied a car-less white guy, in a jacket, a ride up the street. It’s not like he was naked and completely defenseless against the condensation falling from the sky. He wasn’t going to catch pneumonia. He wasn’t going to drown either. He had on boots, jeans, a ragged shirt and a jacket. I felt he was perfectly prepared to walk a little ways up the street, even if it was raining.
The fact that people don’t typically walk up to a running car and ask to pay for a ride wasn’t the thing that made me lock all the doors to my car when he walked away; there was a little bit more to it.
The fact that a guy who doesn’t have a car has money to throw around for rides struck me as odd. The fact that as I sat in my (now locked) car for another minute or so, watching him ask at least 5 other people if they could drive him “just up the street” was more what did it for me. If he was in such a hurry to get up the street and out of the rain, why not just START WALKING? Spending another minute standing around in the rain, which he was so focused on getting out of, didn’t make much sense to me. Once you're wet, you're wet; There's no 5 second rule.
Who knows. Maybe the man was just stupid. Maybe he really did just need to get up the street and was willing to pay someone for the privilege of riding in a dry environment. But I’m going to chose to believe he was trying to carjack somebody. Because that just makes the whole thing almost exciting.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The Mover of Earths
I stumbled across this on the internet(s) and thought it important to share.
What we have here is the most awesome machine ever created.
I found it when I was trolling for Demotivational Posters, of which my hard drive is already filled. For those who don’t know, the basic idea is to find a funny/cool/hot picture and put a snarky or otherwise humorous comment bellow – put a black border around it all and you have yourself a Demotivational Poster. They’re pretty sweet.
Anyways, the giant-ass saw thing. I was disheartened to learn that the saw is not in fact a saw, but a 70-foot diameter wheel with 20 buckets that hold 530 cubic feet of material. To give that some perspective, a new Jeep Grand Cherokee can hold about 70 cubic feet of junk with the seats folded down. So those buckets are the size of cars.
The beast weighs over 45,500 tons and stands 311 feet tall and 705 feet long. The top speed? 1/3 MPH (hahaha!). Gotta wonder what the gas mileage is on it, although I doubt anyone else cares.
It cost $100 million to make, and all it does is move earth. It’s the most badass Tonka truck around.
Earth Mover - The end is extremely fucking nigh.
I’m still gonna call it the giant-ass saw thing though. Beast.
What we have here is the most awesome machine ever created.
I found it when I was trolling for Demotivational Posters, of which my hard drive is already filled. For those who don’t know, the basic idea is to find a funny/cool/hot picture and put a snarky or otherwise humorous comment bellow – put a black border around it all and you have yourself a Demotivational Poster. They’re pretty sweet.
Anyways, the giant-ass saw thing. I was disheartened to learn that the saw is not in fact a saw, but a 70-foot diameter wheel with 20 buckets that hold 530 cubic feet of material. To give that some perspective, a new Jeep Grand Cherokee can hold about 70 cubic feet of junk with the seats folded down. So those buckets are the size of cars.
The beast weighs over 45,500 tons and stands 311 feet tall and 705 feet long. The top speed? 1/3 MPH (hahaha!). Gotta wonder what the gas mileage is on it, although I doubt anyone else cares.
It cost $100 million to make, and all it does is move earth. It’s the most badass Tonka truck around.
Earth Mover - The end is extremely fucking nigh.I’m still gonna call it the giant-ass saw thing though. Beast.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Renaissance Hick
“Full blown nihilism seems kind of emo. Nihilism paired with sadism or pyromania would be a better combination.”
And so begins the blog.
That quote is from a friend of mine, when he and I were talking about nihilism and just how feasible/not feasible it really is. But, like all of my other conversations in 2009, it veered off into talking about the Joker in The Dark Knight. And no, he’s not a nihilist. Don’t even go there; this friend and I debated bitterly about this for hours, because it totally matters.
This being the first blog, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Uncle Jesse, and I’m a bitter, cynical old man of the ripe old age of 18. I go to college, I read a lot, and I’m a smartass. Also, I overuse comas.
That pretty much covers the basics. We’ll come to know each other over time.
I listen to a variety of music. As long as it’s emotionally intense, I’ll listen to it. Right now, I’m on a movie soundtrack kick. I’m listening to The Dark Knight soundtrack at the moment, and I’m getting seriously stressed-out. The slow build-up on the first track, where that screeching violin-sound backed by trumpets does nothing but put you on edge. Thank God I don’t have turrets or else I’d be blurting out vile thoughts about Tela Techila right now (Oh, did I forget to mention I’m insensitive too? Yeah. Well… Japs, towel-heads, hymie!!)
As a general rule, I hate movies due to the fact that most elementary school kids can (and do) write far more interesting and original stories than Quentin Tarantino would on crack. I mean really, how many dirty cops and revenge-seeking widows and horny teens do I really need to see? It gets old.
The Dark Knight was a rare exception for me. I’m not going to launch into a review here, because there isn’t anything new I can add to the millions of other “reviews” out there. But I loved the movie, thought the Joker was a crazy-ass psycho, and I wanna meet the dude if he really existed. Emo Batman needs to go, but the Joker was pretty cool.
***REAL TIME ALERT TO A SIGNIFICANT EVENT
I just found out that Stone Cold Steve Austin is guest-hosting WWE Raw next Monday! As any pro wrestling fan knows, WWE died the day Stone Cold quit his nightly appearances and “retired”, sort of, even though wrestlers never really retire. They just die of an enlarged heart or go crazy (I didn’t mention and names… C.B…. calm down wrestling purists).
But next Monday he’ll be back on! Oh yeah! This is cause for celebration… well not really. It’s cause to finally record an episode of Raw, and then fast-forward through 80% of it the next day… but hey, it’s something!
On that bombshell, I’m ending this post. AND THAT’S THE BOTTOM LINE, BECAUSE STONE COLD SAYS SO!
And so begins the blog.
That quote is from a friend of mine, when he and I were talking about nihilism and just how feasible/not feasible it really is. But, like all of my other conversations in 2009, it veered off into talking about the Joker in The Dark Knight. And no, he’s not a nihilist. Don’t even go there; this friend and I debated bitterly about this for hours, because it totally matters.
This being the first blog, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Uncle Jesse, and I’m a bitter, cynical old man of the ripe old age of 18. I go to college, I read a lot, and I’m a smartass. Also, I overuse comas.
That pretty much covers the basics. We’ll come to know each other over time.
I listen to a variety of music. As long as it’s emotionally intense, I’ll listen to it. Right now, I’m on a movie soundtrack kick. I’m listening to The Dark Knight soundtrack at the moment, and I’m getting seriously stressed-out. The slow build-up on the first track, where that screeching violin-sound backed by trumpets does nothing but put you on edge. Thank God I don’t have turrets or else I’d be blurting out vile thoughts about Tela Techila right now (Oh, did I forget to mention I’m insensitive too? Yeah. Well… Japs, towel-heads, hymie!!)
As a general rule, I hate movies due to the fact that most elementary school kids can (and do) write far more interesting and original stories than Quentin Tarantino would on crack. I mean really, how many dirty cops and revenge-seeking widows and horny teens do I really need to see? It gets old.
The Dark Knight was a rare exception for me. I’m not going to launch into a review here, because there isn’t anything new I can add to the millions of other “reviews” out there. But I loved the movie, thought the Joker was a crazy-ass psycho, and I wanna meet the dude if he really existed. Emo Batman needs to go, but the Joker was pretty cool.
***REAL TIME ALERT TO A SIGNIFICANT EVENT
I just found out that Stone Cold Steve Austin is guest-hosting WWE Raw next Monday! As any pro wrestling fan knows, WWE died the day Stone Cold quit his nightly appearances and “retired”, sort of, even though wrestlers never really retire. They just die of an enlarged heart or go crazy (I didn’t mention and names… C.B…. calm down wrestling purists).
But next Monday he’ll be back on! Oh yeah! This is cause for celebration… well not really. It’s cause to finally record an episode of Raw, and then fast-forward through 80% of it the next day… but hey, it’s something!
On that bombshell, I’m ending this post. AND THAT’S THE BOTTOM LINE, BECAUSE STONE COLD SAYS SO!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
