Archive for March, 2008

6. Be left hanging.

March 10, 2008 at 9:00 am · Filed under Relationships

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Friday night is finally here. You’re with your pals, having a grand old time. The beer and Tostitos Queso dip are flowing like wine. Everyone’s crowded around the television, watching the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards or the ever-popular Antiques Roadshow. It’s a perfect evening!
Suddenly, it happens. You can almost feel it coming. There’s a crackle of electricity, a shift in the breeze, a faint smell upon the air. You should probably get that gas leak fixed. But that’s not important now. What’s important is that Something Amazing is about to occur.

And there it is! “Touchdown!” you yell, or “I told you Tilda Swinton would win Best Supporting Actress!” or “That’s one hell of a mahogany armoire!” The room goes wild. Cheers are chanted. Hats are thrown. Pants are removed. You’ve entered a realm of utter chaos, and only one thing will bring it back to anything approaching a semblance of normalcy. It’s time to express yourself through the magic of the sacred High Five.

You turn to your buddy, extend your hand into the heavens, and wait.

And wait.

Time abruptly stops. The party comes to a crashing halt. Tostitos are frozen in mid-air. Were there music playing, now would be the time for your standard awkward-moment-record-scratch. All eyes are on you, except of course for the pair that you most covet: that of the intended recipient of the best and most intense high five you’ve ever prepared. Unfortunately for you and your self-worth, he’s more interested in the funbags that just walked through the door, and, to a lesser extent, the girl that’s attached to them. Either way, his attention no longer belongs to you. And no one feels the piercing pain of this slight more than your cold, lonely, clammy hand.

Sure, you try to salvage your dignity. Your hand immediately, almost instinctively shoves its way into your hair, attempting the old “I was just smoothing my coif” trick. As if displaying your palm to the entire room is something that everyone does before attending to their tresses. Or you change your motive, using your outstretched arm to now wave to someone across the room as if they’ve just arrived, even though they’ve been here since the beginning and you yourself even greeted them at the door and talked to them for no less than an hour about how consistently punctual they always are.

Or, fully accepting that your dignity has left the building and probably fled the country as well, you make no attempt to fix this irreparable situation. You keep your hand high in the air, stoutly resolute, staring down anyone who dares to point and laugh. This will not keep them from doing so, but this is okay with you, as they may in turn attract your friend’s attention quickly enough for him to turn around and end your suffering. You might even try to hurry it along yourself, with a curt “yo” or “dude” or, as a truly last ditch effort, “Up high, BRO!” Though more than likely you will just continue to hang there, forever, until someone quietly points out that you’re starting to resemble a Nazi.

So if you want to suck, be left hanging. It’s technically not your fault, but you knew the risks when you stuck your meaty paw all the way there in the first place. You should have known better.

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5. Miss a trash receptacle from two feet away.

March 7, 2008 at 9:00 am · Filed under Sports

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Another long, hard day at the office. Your printout of this week’s figures is fairly compelling, if not a little dry and slightly riddled with simple spelling errors. But you’re certain the boss will like it. There’s a pie chart and everything. Corporate gold.

So you’re caught off guard when he cries that this barely qualifies as fourth-grade work and demands that you do it all over again. At 4:45 on a Friday? Surely you jest, good sir! you want to scream. But you shove it all down, way down, knowing that this colossal failure results in at least one small ounce of joy: the crumpling up of the paper and the tossing of said crumple into the wastepaper basket.

You’re not new to such epic challenges. You were on the basketball team in high school. Sure, you took the term “warming the bench” to new levels, not only heating the metal but actually setting the surface aflame, but you’re still fairly confident in your abilities. The trash can is a mere arm’s length away. How hard could it be?

Answer: Infuriatingly impossible. Physics dictates that any mere mortal should be able to plot the trajectory of a balled-up sheet of ordinary, 8.5″x11″ paper, but it would appear that you are the exception. You take careful aim, track wind direction and resistance, shush the roaring crowds, release the shard — and almost immediately realize that both the world and your sweaty palm have conspired against you. That projectile isn’t going anywhere near the gaping maw of the can, no matter how long you leave your outstretched arm in place or how much you stick our your tongue in the style of Michael Jordan. It lands a paltry six inches away from the base, bounding across the floor in a delicate dance of mockery and humiliation. Your co-workers cluck their tongues in general disapproval – the Sales team guys shake their beefy heads, Marketing points and laughs, and the Office Whore explicitly informs you that her services are no longer available to hopeless trainwrecks such as yourself.

So if you want to suck, miss a trash receptacle from two feet away. Not only will you become an office-wide joke, but you’ll also be eternally labeled as a litterbug. And Frank the Brass-Knuckled Tank from Maintenance won’t be too happy about that one.

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4. Miscalculate a staircase.

March 6, 2008 at 9:59 am · Filed under Sports

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You’ve been treading up and down stairs like a pro ever since you could walk. You opt out of the elevator, master that you are. You sprint past those steps like they’re homeless people and you’ve got a pocketful of change. You can take them two, sometimes three at a time. Heck, with your skills, you could ascend and descend Mount Everest, provided the Mount Everest Accessibility Association ever build a staircase with a sturdy handrail.

So it comes as as real surprise when both your eyes and your ability to calculate simple math combine to plot your literal downfall.

Sometimes brains just make things up. For instance, your brain may formulate the existence of an extra step. Your foot, foolishly trusting the massive hunk of gray matter that at one time convinced you that it was acceptable to wear L.A. Gear sneakers, decides to give this fictitious extra step a chance. Unfortunately for you and anyone in your path, this will only result in bruises, fractures, and possibly concussions, which is what your brain deserves for deceiving you so insidiously in the first place.

The brain is also adept at subtraction. Removing a step from your vision can result in an equal amount of pain. Tripping up the stairs, while not normally as disastrous as face-planting into the ground after several flights of flailed tumbling, can be just as distressing and twice as embarrassing, as perennial scapegoat Gravity plays absolutely no part this time around. It’s all you.

And finally, less humiliating but almost always fun to watch, are the small missteps that occur only at the top or the bottom of a staircase. Due to darkness or yet another brain aneurysm, you may not be able to detect that you have already reached the last step. You are on solid ground now, fully permitted to continue on your way like a normal human being. But not you. You’re such a steadfast fan of staircases that you want to continue this journey. So you continue to trod downward, expecting a stair but only encountering solid floor. This then causes you to stamp and wobble about, giving off the appearance of one who is simultaneously attempting and failing to dance, or that lame guy at the party who still thinks the staircase-behind-the-couch gag is funny.

Conversely, we have the always-delightful invisible extra step at the top, wherein your near-retarded brain has again decided to take an impromptu vacation and its absence causes you to believe that you are not, in fact, at the top of the stairs. So you take another step, only to find that you’re already out of the basement and fully in the kitchen, groping about with your outstretched leg as if you’ve morphed into an especially large and uncoordinated ostrich. This delights children and adults alike, and, were you more reliable about doing it on a regular basis, you could probably charge admission.

So if you want to suck, miscalculate a staircase. If you live in a ranch-style house, move.

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3. Put a shirt on backwards.

March 5, 2008 at 11:00 am · Filed under Fashion

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A shirt isn’t complicated. Typically, there is a front. There is also a back, usually labeled with, unsurprisingly, a label. But this seemingly simple system is evidently convoluted enough to confuse even the most experienced shirt-wearers among us.

It’s time for the day to begin. You’re well-rested, freshly-showered, and naked. You feel pretty good about yourself. Until the time comes to get dressed. You yank your favorite shirt out of the closet, or off of the bed, for those OCD-sufferers among us who lay their clothes out the night before, or out of a year-old shopping bag, if you so happen to be homeless. Either way, the ability to clothe yourself is something you’re confident you can manage. You’re wrong.

Perhaps you’re not paying attention. Perhaps you become distracted by something – a crying child or a yippy dog or a small electrical fire. Perhaps you’ve entered into a brief moment of hysterical blindness. It doesn’t matter how it happens. What matters is that the moment you don the shirt, it feels wrong. It looks wrong. It smells wrong, though this has nothing to do with the orientation of the shirt. The point is, you’ve screwed up.

And now the tag is itching. It’s sticking up, bursting forth from your collarbone, where no earthly label has any right to be. The front of you has now become a billboard for stupidity, whereas the back of you is now displaying the witticisms that your shirt was originally meant to convey to people you meet head-on. However will they become aware of your whether or not you support the election of Pedro, or if you require more cowbell, or the existence of your undying love for lamp? This is a disaster.

So if you want to suck, put your shirt on backwards. True, the situation is easy to correct. But the emotional damage will remain. No longer can you strut about with the knowledge that you are fully qualified to dress yourself properly. It’s all downhill from here. Soon backward pants will follow, followed by underwear, socks, and somehow, shoes. In the end you’ll either resemble early 90’s rap sensation Kris Kross or your misguided fourth-grade Halloween costume. Enjoy the ride.

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2. Brush teeth incorrectly.

March 4, 2008 at 5:07 pm · Filed under Health

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This is a task that you have (in theory) completed twice a day since you were a kindergartener. Your toothbrush-wielding skills, however, remain remarkably similar to those of your five-year-old self.

But it’s not for lack of trying. You squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube, just like the instructions direct you to. You’ve purchased an American Dental Association-approved toothbrush. You dispense the paste onto the brush at chest-level, in the interest of eye safety. All is going perfectly to plan.

Then the brushing begins. And by brushing, we mean a relentless explosion of hopelessly misdirected foam. There’s really no reason for the paste to end up anywhere other than your mouth, which is a fairly unambiguous target. But you’re steadfastly unable to to coordinate the basic motor skills needed to complete this simple task. It spreads, like wildfire or a particularly virulent strain of syphilis, to every nook and cranny of your face. Up the nose, into the hair, over to the ears – there’s no limit to the number of orifices you can fill. The burning suggests that, were the toothpaste to ever end up in the remote area of your teeth, it would probably do a great job at removing plaque, instead of your quickly-corroding facial skin.

The particularly uncoordinated and unlucky among us may also end up getting toothpaste all over their clothes. This is a real shame, as there is no known way to remove toothpaste from any fabric, ever. Scientists have been working on this for years, but their efforts thus far have proved to be unfruitful, resulting in many a sickly-looking stain and countless donations to Goodwill.

So if you want to suck, brush your teeth incorrectly. Not only will it make you feel worse about having played all those video games only to find out that your hand-eye coordination is practically nil, but it will also cause you to resemble a feral yeti. And that’s worth all the gingivitis-free gums in the world.

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1. Write a blog.

March 4, 2008 at 5:06 am · Filed under Hobbies

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Because all people (excluding Amish folks and the elderly) want to hear your thoughts on the most mundane aspects of life. Find a piece of lint in your breakfast sandwich? Blog that shit. See a homeless guy eat a dead pigeon? Alert the internet. Suffer through a painful breakup that threatens to rip apart every fiber of your shattered soul? Fire up that Livejournal. Moan in a meme. Express your displeasure through emoticons and an indication of which Linkin Park and/or Evanescence song you’re currently sobbing to.

By writing a blog, you’re more or less alerting the world that you have a lot of free time and no one to talk to other than the cold, lifeless face of a blank computer screen. Sure, you put in a couple hours of work or school a day, but let’s face it – your stench alone is enough to put actual human encounters right out of the question. But that doesn’t make it any less imperative for you to get your thoughts on the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica out to that guy in Alaska who still thinks that Starbuck is a Cylon. You’ve got a thing or two to tell that ignorant assclown!

Never mind that you haven’t seen the sun in several months. Never mind that Cheetos make up the foundation of your personal food pyramid. Never mind that you can only dislodge yourself from your chair with the aid of a special “prying stick”. Countless of other cave-dwelling vampires need – nay – crave your musings on what Hilary Clinton’s shoe color says about her stance on health care. It’s your duty as an informed American.

Writing a blog is the first step to successfully sucking at life. And don’t listen to your detractors. They’ll tell you to “grow up”, “get a life”, “the internet is nothing but a series of tubes”, or “Go outside, Jeffrey. For heaven’s sake, you’re becoming translucent.” They’re just jealous of your WordPress prowess.

So don’t worry about it. You’ll get in touch with nature when you’re dead and buried in God’s green earth. Your Technorati ranking, however, will live on forever.

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