Social Commentary

Don't they already?

Simple Ideas...

A Simple Poem

If I had one wish, what would it be?

Would it start with a number like 1, 2, or 3?

Would it start with a letter like A, B, or C?

Or would it be simple, like climbing up a tree?

Or a little bit harder, like swimming ‘cross the sea?

If I had one wish, I know what it would be…

To be the very best, the most positive me.

To give myself away, to give myself for free.

It’s more than just that simple wish to be

It’s a lifetime of wishes that you work for, not receive.

A rose by any other name...

Made for me...

Did I mention I love comics?

My Story

My life is a story

My life is a compilation of events in seemingly random sequence.

There is an underlying order.

But no one told me.

And now I live every day in the order I've been given, although I would really prefer to skip over the long boring parts in favor of the action, but alas...

Time.

Is.

Linear.

And skipping steps seems impossible.

But perhaps there is hope.

I know not how.

So I may have to give my old friend Doc Brown a call and discuss his idea for the Flux Capacitor 2.0 that runs on dead skin cells and dreams.

Bananas.

Guilty Pleasure

Sometimes I walk down the street whistling obscure but really recognizable songs in the hopes that someone will join in and whistle too.

And I secretly take pleasure in planting those songs in the heads of innocent bystanders.

That is all.

Cartoons

I love cartoons.

http://www.channelate.com/2010/10/29/scared-magician/

 

Need I say more?

My new favorite thing...

I was talking with Mrs. Rogers the other day about social media.  She mentioned that she didn't really know anything about StumbleUpon, among other social media devices.  I decided to find out for her.

I have now officially logged an entire 40hr work week scrolling through websites thoughtfully brought to me by StumbleUpon...

I'm not going to say that it hasn't been the best week of my life, because that would be a lie, but I can say that I now have an unhealthy relationship with the internet...

Where else can you get sage advice like this:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1iKNrC/www.howtogetagrip.com/2010/ten-things-you-should-already-know-by-now/

Or hilarity like this:

http://threadbombing.com/data/media/2/weird_dance.gif

Or this:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2HxGbW 

And now I, as with the proverbial car accident, can't look away.

Thanks Mrs. Rogers.  No seriously...

Everyone's Got Issues

Things are about to get personal.

My father has been an issue for me from a very young age.  I never felt his attention when I lived with him, and didn’t realize it wasn’t there until he moved 1700 miles away and started calling me all the time.

My mother is disappointed in his parenting, and not afraid to tell him.  My sister and I are also disappointed, but we know that telling him means wasting hours of our lives, only to have him do it again in a month.

The most recent example of this happens to center around birthdays that are forgotten, and Christmas presents never bought.  My parents were on the phone, because my father likes to call my mother once in a while to talk (I think he just misses her and likes the sound of her voice, even when she’s pissed at him).

She laid into him pretty hard about the fact that he didn’t call back during Christmas because he was too busy with his other family.  When he finally did call, he was more than happy to tell my sister and I all about how he spent almost $2,000 on Christmas this year…  We didn’t even get a call, let alone a card or gift.

So she tells him how upsetting it is, and he’s completely taken aback.  Like he never noticed that he hasn’t sent a Christmas present to his kids in 7 years, or remembered to call them on their birthdays…  So he asks, “what should I do”, to which my mother replies, “I would start by writing a check to each of your kids and mailing it out today.”

About a month ago, I got a check for $50.  I haven’t called him back since…

Blood Drive

"You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. "

I saw this quote from Fred Rogers (the other Mr. Rogers you know), and I was thinking about it while I was filling out my form for donating blood at work yesterday.  I’ve never donated before, and I figured that as an adult, it was about time.

First of all, “Have you accepted money, drugs or property in exchange for sex since 1977?” is a bizarre question. 

There were plenty of other questions, but they all kind of blurred together…

After filling out the questionnaire and handing in my raffle ticket (btw, we were entered into a raffle for prizes), I followed several other donors into the donation room.

The procedure leading up to the donation itself is fairly standard.  The only unnerving thing is that no one tells you if your answers to their questions mean anything.  Like when one nurse took my pulse, looked at me funny, took it again, then asked if I was a runner.

No explanation of why she would ask or what that even meant… I had to use my not insignificant powers of deduction to figure out that she asked about me being a runner because my heartrate was low (50bpm), and she wanted to make sure I wasn’t dying in front of her…

And when the mountain of a black man that took my paperwork asked me my height/weight and whether I had donated before…  I answered as best I could, but I was REALLY distracted by the “RIDE OR DIE” tattoo on his forearm…

After sitting through the actual donation, which is pretty uneventful (if you block out the part where they insert the drain pipe they call a needle into your arm and you feel the tube get really hot with your blood), they send you to the “commissary”.  This is the smallest conference room at my office, filled with cookies and chips and juice.

This would have been more or less fine, if I hadn’t noticed this: 

I don’t remember a single person smiling while they were donating.  In fact, most of them were turning white and near unconsciousness.  One girl had to be sent home... Definitely not smiling. Creepy.

But I did my good deed for the day.  I hope it saves a life.

Halloween

It was Halloween.  I was 17.  We had a plan to rollerblade around my neighborhood and egg everyone we knew.  We were dressed in all black, with capes covering our backpacks.  We were the stealthiest ninjas on wheels.  They would never see us coming.  Except that my friend Bobby was riding my sisters’ pink scooter because he didn’t have rollerblades…

After making a run to the grocery store, we geared up, me, Bobby, Mike and Mike.

It was so much fun skating around the neighborhood, sneaking up on our friends.  We threw more eggs than we could count.  We were the gods of the night, unseen, unheard, until it was too late.  By the time you knew what was happening, you’re awesome costume that you spent 3 days making was covered in egg.

A couple of times, we stopped to talk to our friends, and we’d all kind of congregate on someone’s driveway or front yard.  

One of those times, the cops caught up to us.

We didn’t see them coming… ironically.

We were all scared of getting in trouble, so we did everything we were asked to do.  They made us show our ID, and we got pat-downs.  They had heard about a group of kids running around the neighborhood egging people.  “No Sir, we don’t have any eggs.  I think I saw those guys earlier, but they were going down Boldsling Road really fast so I didn’t get a good look at them.”

Suspiciously, the cop made me empty my pockets.  As he went through each item, he made a point to drop in on the ground afterward.  What a dick.

They told us to leave, go home, and that he didn’t want to see us again that night.

He missed my backpack, filled to the brim with cartons of eggs…

Party Pooper

Mo and I have been friends since as long as I can remember.  We go in and out of contact, and we’ve kind of landed on being the kind of friends that don’t stay in touch, but nothing ever changes when we see each other.

It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2007, and Mo, Stacy, Mrs. Rogers and I were hanging out celebrating.  And by celebrating, I mean drinking copiously during the day and trying to find fun places to be that night.  Stacy’s friend was having a house party in Brooklyn, so we figured it would be a good place to land.  

We got off the train in Brooklyn, and walked/stumbled our way to Stacy’s friends’ apartment.  I couldn’t tell you where it was to save my life.  

We join the party in earnest, and it seems to accept us in turn.  I have no idea who any of these people are, so I spend most of my time asking the same people what their names are, with the promise that I’ll remember next time.  I still have no idea who they are.

We’ve all been drinking this whole time, and I notice a peculiar look in Mo’s eyes while we’re bullshitting in the kitchen.  I asked him if he was alright, and he responded by taking one step towards me and falling over…

I barely managed to stop him from breaking his fall with his head (at the time he was about 250-260lbs).  He came to a few seconds later with me kneeling over him and a ring of strangers around us.  I was able to convince him that the bathroom was the place to be (to the chagrin of the other partygoers, there was only one in the house).  I pushed him through the door, only to have it closed abruptly in my face.   Fearing that someone would walk in on him and think him dead, I sat protectively in front of the door, feeling like a guard dog, calling out occasionally to make sure he was still alive.

About 10 minutes later, Mo emerged from this bathroom, again to me surrounded by a ring of strangers (who are all wondering if he’s okay, and more importantly, can they use the bathroom now).  At this point, we decide that it’s time to take off.  We scored a little whiff while he was “occupied”, and wanted to bounce and do it somewhere else.

‘Somewhere else’ ended up being home, because we were all a little too drunk to be going back out.  We get outside, and Mo decides at that moment to let us in on a revelation.  He fainted because he had to poo.  No seriously, he passed out in the middle of a party because he had to take a crap.

Not to sound unsympathetic or anything, but we laughed our asses off (at him) all the way home.  You should have been there when we heard that he did the same thing in the middle of a Quizno’s six months later.  And they insisted that he be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, even after he explained that this wasn’t the first time this happened…