Self Esteem is for Pretty People

Feeling cynical today. So I’m going to get my rant on. Buckle up.

The beauty of being smart is that you can feel good about yourself without ever having to actually accomplish anything or produce anything worthwhile. You can give yourself a sense of entitlement and self importance that you in no way earned. It’s a lot like being pretty or athletic, only you have moments of insight into your bullshit.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking about what people actually appreciate in this world. If you look at how people use their time and spend their money. It becomes quite clear that some people are valued more highly that others. Attractive people make more money and get more attention from the opposite sex, smart people make more money and get more attention from the opposite sex, tall people with good hair make more money and… wait for it… get more attention from the opposite sex. You might criticize my use of compensation and status with the other gender as a metric for valuing humans. But guess what? That, my friend, is the coin of the realm.

“All men are created equal.” Horseshit, Bill. Everybody has heard this, and everybody pays lip service to it, all human life has infinite value and all that Kantian nonsense. But nobody, and I mean nobody, actually behaves like they believe it.

Words only have meaning if they have an underlying basis in reality. Watch. I’ll show you. “I’m a hippopotamus.” Guess what. I’m no more a hippo than I was before typing that. That was kinda fun. Let’s try it again. “I’m a super nice guy.” Nope. Still doesn’t quite translate. So much for the power of affirmations.

Anyway, I’ve almost decided that I’d like to do something worthwhile. Whatever the hell that is.

Aging like Fine Wine

I had a birthday this week. Pretty much a non-event. I’m at that age where there is nothing to celebrate anymore, it’s just a better than average arbitrary excuse to drink too much. I can already vote, drink, drive, get drafted, and rent a car. Pretty much the only thing left to look forward to is that inevitable moment when I realize I wasted my youth watching tv shows that featured laugh tracks. I think the over-under on the mid life crisis is about 35.

One potential positive though, I look young for my age. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the upside, when I’m older and dating women half my age, it’ll be way less creepy. But on the other hand, I occasionally get laughed at when I order beer. I suppose it’s the price I pay. I have started noticing the tell-tale signs though. I’m starting to get those little lines around my eyes, the ones that really haggard blonds have when they faked tanned too much. It’s not worth it ladies. Doing that to yourself is like putting a turbocharger on an engine, it might make it run a little hotter now, but the lifespan on that sucker goes in the toilet. Nobody wants to date a catcher’s mitt.

Also, I’ve noticed aging more in my peer group than in myself. When the women that your friends are dating start to look old I think that’s a bigger shock than seeing your buddies turn in to fat old guys. It’s because women are held to a higher standard. We equate feminine beauty with youth. It’s an evolutionary thing; we are attracted to women who have higher reproductive potential. This is why women panic when they think they are getting old and haven’t found a mate. It’s hard to tell yourself not to settle when your ovaries are audibly ticking. One the other hand, our swimmers are good for the long haul. Hence, we find our selves saying things like, “Is that his daughter? Oh wait, look where his hand is… definitely not his daughter… ok… hopefully not his daughter.”

They say stress ages you. So far I’ve been pretty craftily avoiding the stuff. I’ve been dodging and weaving and so far it hasn’t laid a glove on me that I couldn’t roll with pretty easily. Now that I’m in the real world though I can see it starting to raise its head. Actual responsibility is a new experience for me. The fact that things I do matter to people other than me is pretty intense. This is actually a pretty well crafted experiment to see whether stress is what makes people look older. If you check on me in a year and I’m aging like Dorian Gray after confronting his picture then we have our evidence.

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego”

~Norman Mailer

How true. Sitting down to write and not being able to produce content isn’t about your mind becoming vacant. It’s about the fear that the thoughts that are coming out of it are shit. No matter how mentally exhausted, stupid, or unoriginal you get, there is always something going on upstairs. Just this weekend I listened to some idiot girl describe to me, for a full thirty minutes, a highly detailed list of what she had for dinner and her equally uninteresting opinions about that wonderful feast. This person had no qualms about broadcasting her marginally coherent and tedious thoughts into the world. Presumably, this is because she was attractive enough that no one had ever bothered to inform her that she was retarded. However, she will never experience writers block. I’m quite sure that she could sit down with her crayons and write an uninterrupted stream of content off the top of her pretty little head. “Me and my bestest friend in the whole world Julie, she’s like the coolest, oh my god, went to the like the best restaurant ever in the whole world for dinner and had the most amazing lobster soup. OH MY GOD! That lobster soup was AWESOME. I must have eaten like the whole bowl. Oh my god, it was like awesome. Maybe not as good as the lobster soup at … (I blacked out here for about 20 minutes)… I can’t believe I ate the whole bowl. I’m so fat. But it was so, like, good. Awesome. So Good. Like. Awesome.”

Sorry for subjecting you to that, but I felt it really drove home the point. You don’t stop having thoughts just because you are unoriginal and annoying. Just some people have enough respect for other literates that they are hesitant to advance their ideas in written form. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever produced anything over a paragraph long that I didn’t think was garbage. Writers block is a symptom. It is a result of a lack of a necessary arrogance. To write you have to think that your viewpoint deserves to be preserved. Even if no one reads it (perhaps a blog?), writing is like any other activity that people can judge you on. You can’t be good at it unless you have confidence. You gotta go in cocky.

Pychodynamics = Hilarious

Ok people. I’m going to give you some advice that should be given to everyone once they reach the age of comprehension. Swing your arms when you freakin’ walk! I was driving to work recently and I saw a jogger who, I can only assume, was concentrating intently on holding his arms straight down by his sides while he ran. This has got to be one of the most awkward looking things that you can do as a human being, second only to being a thirteen year old boy trying to talk to an attractive female. In any case, this particular symptom of self consciousness does not make you look any less self consciousness. On the contrary, it makes you look like you have some sort of undiagnosed joint disorder, or perhaps a fierce desire to be chosen last for flag football. I tried to imagine what was going on in this guy’s head when he ran. Here’s the internal monologue as I see it.

Asshole’s Id: “Yeah! Let’s get our run on!”

Asshole’s Ego: “Whoa there guy. We want to look cool. Let’s take it in a notch.”

Asshole’s Id: “But it feels natural and good to swing my arms. Screw what people think!”

Asshole’s Ego: “I’ll look out of control and crazy. I’m clamping down!!!”

Asshole’s Superego: “Damn you Ego! Stay away from your mother or I’ll cut off your penis!”

(Isn’t Freud awesome?) How can you expect a guy to run with all that going on up there? I almost feel bad for the guy.

Anyway, moving back towards the original premise. Presumably the goal of all self-conscious behavior is to portray oneself as being unself-conscious, to “act cool”. (Unselfconscious? Un-selfconscious? U-nselfc-onscious? Behold… the beauty of the hyphen.) This is one of those times when our bodies are determined to make us look like assholes. The harder you try to appear casual the more absolutely uncomfortable you look. I think ultimately trying to do things gets in the way of actually doing them, at least on the level of coordinated physical activity. On one side of the spectrum you have our Frankenstein monster of a jogger, and on the other Vince Young. Guess which one can spell coordinated? On the other hand… maybe some people just run like jackasses.

Evidence for Misanthropy

So I stopped at a gas station recently and nature called me into the bathroom. (Don’t worry. There aren’t any scatological jokes coming.) There it was. Written on the wall of the bathroom where I was taking a leak, incontrovertible proof that men are an appalling species. “Meet here 6/4/06 11:00 for blowjob” (It’s hard to convey the real effect of the handwriting… very poor penmanship. I remember being surprised they spelled blowjob correctly.) Every guy in the world has seen this before of course. Women may not be aware of this. I don’t spend a lot of time in the ladies room, but I have a hard time envisioning a female taking the time to scratch the equivalent into a tampon dispenser. I’m reasonable confident that it’s an all male phenomenon. If I’m wrong then I welcome correction from any of the female readers out there. On the other hand, it’s actually astonishing how high a percentage of men’s bathrooms contain sexual appointment vandalism.

This of course begs the question, “exactly how many of these appointments are being filled?” Upon asking myself this, my initial reaction was of course, “suuuurrrely none.” Ah ha… but let’s pause to examine this further… If the answer was none then there wouldn’t be such an enormous amount of similar graffiti attempting to arrange rendezvous in men’s bathrooms. Taking this line of reasoning further, it must be a significant percentage of the time that these dates are being consummated. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there are just a few hyper-productive sexual deviants emptying sharpies onto the walls of America’s lavatories. My instinct is however, that there are more people involved.

Of course the next logical question (and I’m sure you were way ahead of me here) is, “how many of these encounters consist of a gigantic redneck waiting in the next stall with a nine iron, hoping he gets a chance to beat up a “homo” and then go home and jerk off?” Gotta be like 20/30 percent. I’d say higher, but that presumes a certain level of craftiness on the part of our hillbilly friend, and I’m just not ready to give him that kind of credit.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter how you run the math. Mankind, specifically mankind, is despicable. I understand the desire to procreate. I can even vaguely understand the desire to deface property. What I cannot understand is the appeal of trashing a bathroom wall in the hopes that you might be able to engage in a sex act with, let’s face it, what is probably not going to be a stunningly attractive human specimen. In addition to any likely respondent being either horrendously unattractive, a serial killer, of the same sex, or all of the above, the venue for the subsequent exploit is a public bathroom. I won’t even sit down in a public bathroom unless it is absolutely not going to wait until I get home. Fluid exchange is an entirely different ballgame. But I guess if you are willing to blow complete strangers you really aren’t a stickler for personal hygiene.

Anyway, there’s no real way to close this entry. People are fucked up.

Think Globally?

Greetings from the other side of the planet. The posts have been rare lately because I’ve been traveling. A buddy of mine from law school and I decided to take a break after the bar exam and do something adventurous. Ergo, I’m in a rented van in New Zealand. There has been so much going on that even though plenty of things deserved some observational humor I’ve either been sans writing materials or didn’t have the time to write anything. Anyway, thoughts on the world from the other side of it. Broad strokes.
Globalization is a Middle Eastern guy standing in an Irish pub in New Zealand drinking a Corona in the middle of winter and bobbing his head to Ja Rule. (Note… this dude is not a creature of my imagination. I drank a beer next to him yesterday.) There is nothing like traveling to make you realize how big/small the world is. You can be driving into a glacier-carved fiord that is literally as far away from home as it is feasible to get without a team from NASA, turn on the radio and listen to Pink. (here of course I am referring to the white trash turned rapper turned pop starlet turned my stomach) It gives you the feeling that as a species we are becoming really homogenous. Honestly, if you are going to adopt a piece of another culture, the least you could do is try not to adopt the worst shit that we produce. The fact that I have to listen to Daughtry in New Zealand is a monument to the suggestibility of the human animal. Basically, if somebody tells us something is good then we bite. This does not bode well for the tourism industry. Once everything is the same all they will be able to market is the weather.
More to come…

You're the One Who's and Adult

The original focus of this blog was going to be about getting older and coming to terms with things like responsibility and “real” life. I’ve pretty much given up on a motif but I felt like a return to my original mission was overdue. So here goes…

They say you are only as old as you feel. I feel like I’m thirteen, a thirteen year-old with the beginnings of a beer belly, a mortgage, and a hairline that’s fighting a losing battle with his forehead. Aging is a strange experience. I guess I shouldn’t say that because it is a universal ordeal. Still, actually going through it feels unnatural.

Some people are born as adults. They seem to transition into their responsibilities and adult roles without effort or contradictory impulses. However, it seems like a lot of people in my generation (myself included) are very much in a round peg, square hole situation. I’m not talking about irresponsibility or foolishness, that’s too simple a view of the phenomenon. I know plenty of people who are very capable and responsible contributors to society who are very much children masquerading as high powered adults. I can only describe it as a disjoint between my conception of what I thought being an adult meant and the reality of my existence as one. There’s a gap there. As a child I assumed my parents knew how to do everything. My understanding was that there were knowledge and skills that were somehow inherent in all adults. Like a built in time-bomb of maturity that would go off when you reached a certain age… kind of like pubes. You just wake up on day and there they are… profound evidence of getting older. Naturally, I just accepted that when I “grew up” I would acquire adulthood in a similar fashion, roll out of bed one morning to find that I hate loud music and have an overwhelming desire to tuck my shirt in really tight.

Instead, I wake up to the same person I was yesterday, albeit a little balder and slower. I find that rather than my own maturity level rising it seems like my opinion of the general adult population gets lower. It’s not that I get more mature. It’s that I realize that other people are just as juvenile as me. Adulthood is not a transformation into a competent and responsible human being, it’s the slowly dawning realization that nobody else knows what the hell they are doing either.

Vanity and Videotape

So I bought a new camera for my trip to New Zealand. The amount of technology that you can buy for a couple of hundred bucks these days is pretty silly. If I don’t have any pictures in the memory card, I can film a video clip that’s an hour and a half long. That’s three consecutive sit-coms, including the commercials. Ridiculous. Of course, I did what any other person does when they have new recording technology. I turned it on myself.

Seeing or hearing yourself from outside of the confines of your own head is such a bizarre experience. Remember the first time you heard your own voice? Everyone has the same reaction, “Who is that nasally douchebag?” Followed by, “Do I really sound like that?” (Of course you do by the way.) Something about experiencing yourself in this different way makes almost everyone’s skin crawl. Objective judgment of oneself in a recording is impossible. In fact, I’m not sure I can think of a less objective exercise. Seeing your own behavior without the filter of your consciousness is really like looking at a stranger, eerily familiar and yet foreign at the same time. Anyway, it made me realize a few things.

I apparently have trouble forming coherent sentences without constant use of the word “um.” This is horribly irritating. I know that I’m not necessarily the most nimble tongued speaker in the world, but wow. Evidently my brain has been redacting all of these lame interjections before they reach my interior monologue. I had no idea that I had the verbal equivalent of Parkinson’s.

I’m also chubbier than my mental self-image. This was something I’ve been aware of though. You can only declare a certain number of pictures of be inaccurate before the math starts to get a bit strained. Basically it came down to there being a giant conspiracy to portray me unflatteringly or me being less attractive than I originally thought. I’ve almost decided that there isn’t a conspiracy. (See ladies, guys are neurotic too.)

To conclude, the only thing more destructive to personal vanity than self-criticism is informed self-criticism.

Examination Ruminations

Good to be finished with that. The understood going in that the bar exam was going to be pretty terrible. However, I failed to appreciate the extent of its crappiness. This year they had it at a hotel, the embassy suites in Montgomery. Imagine almost a thousand applicants, sitting within a foot of each other, filling a room the size of an arena football field. We did this for 5 different 3 hour tests in 3 days. WEAK FREAKIN’ SAUCE. I am not an anxious person by nature. On the other hand, I think I’m pretty laid back. Not that my heart pumps ice water or anything, just I’m not typically a mash of emotional distress. However, the nature of the bar is such that it induces nervousness. It’s basically a gigantic psychological experiment.

First of all, 2 days of it is handwritten. That’s 9 total hours of solid scratching. Think about the last time you wrote anything by hand. Was it, “remember to buy toilet paper”? Was it written on your hand? Yes, of course it was. That was rhetorical. There is no other reason to ever write anything by hand in an age where you trip over computers when you get out of bed. Aside from thank you letters to elderly relatives, any sort of information is more easily and accurately conveyed through a more contemporary medium. Further, my handwriting is horrible. I mean really bad. It looks like it’s done by a gorilla using his non-dominant hand, except a monkey doesn’t use and thoroughly misspell obscure words. The bar was all in pen too, so any mistakes that I made had to be scratched out and then rewritten. Here’s a typical sentence from my answer booklet. “Thus, the employee’s endorsement was conncurrent (scratched out) concurant (scratched out) con (fuck it) happened at the same time as her conversion.” Technically, they are not supposed to count against you for spelling and grammar. I guess we’ll see.

Second, everyone there is high strung. Honestly, it’s a valid reason to be stressed out. If you fail you are completely embarrassed, and more importantly completely unemployable. This would be manageable except for the fact that some of the examinees will fail. Everybody knows this fact, and that understanding colors the entire process. Being surrounded by a giant mob of people who all have their immediate futures riding on the results of an exam is an exhausting experience.

Anyway, it’s over. Time to read Harry Potter.

Fantasy Football and Sex

I thought I would try an entry about gender stereotypes. It’s an area that’s over-mined for comedic fodder. But hey, “any chance to let the inner misogynist shine through.” That’s what I always say. Here goes….

Men simply aren’t equipped to play defense. Our whole lives are structured around exactly the opposite. Men’s approach to everything is skewed by eons of Darwinian striving. Our ancestors have doomed us to a lifetime of trying to shoehorn prehistoric instincts into a modern world where they are increasingly inappropriate. Our hormones and our baser natures transmogrify everything into competitive, ego-driven combat. In the NFL of sexual politics, men are the Colts. We spread the field and try to run up the scoreboard. Our salary cap is exhausted on big play offensive weaponry. Our defense is undersized, and… let’s face it, doesn’t do very well the longer it’s on the field. I once heard it said that men are as faithful as their options. I don’t take as bleak a view of the male species as that, but I do think when it comes to resisting temptation men have an uphill battle. On one hand we have our better judgment, social condemnation, and our feelings for our current commitment, but on the other hand we have hormones, our evolutionary imperative, our subconscious, and our less evolved lizard brains. I’m not Vegas, but I think I could fix a pretty good line on the outcome of that little scuffle.

On the contrary, women, to supplement the NFL analogy, are the Bears. They are disgustingly good at defense, repelling attack with seeming effortlessness, but their offense can only be described as inconsistent at best. The brutal unfairness of all this of course is that they don’t need offense. They can get what they want through strategic defensive failures. The entire history of men and women actually getting together can be fairly characterized as point shaving on behalf of the female gender.

This brings me to my next point. Somehow, whenever I hear women complain about not getting male attention, it always rings false. Ok, I’ll qualify that. Somehow, whenever I hear attractive women complain about not getting male attention, it always rings false. I understand that women are conditioned from birth not to be too forward, to play hard to get, essentially… to reject a lot of men. But when women (Once again, “attractive women.” Oh what the hell, I’ll back off that, “any and all women”) say that they can’t find a man I have to believe that they have lost touch with the reality of the situation. We are completely powerless to resist them. It’s true.

(I got stuck here because I was determined to make some sort of special teams analogy. It gets a little weird but just bear with it.)

Anyway, to conclude… Just like any battle of great defense vs. great offense, it all comes down to field position. Third date, why not call it the red zone. Last call at the bar, let’s call that third and long, and all those girls that are terrified because they’re not married and their ovaries are committing hari-kari, they’re punting out of their own end zone.

God I love sports metaphors.

Tetrahydrozoline HCl 0.05%

That last entry took on a little bit of a solemn note. In this one I’m going to try to shift things back towards the superficial. Here goes…

I’ve discovered that I’m physically incapable of putting in eyedrops without vasoconstricting (yeah, it’s a noun) the entire front of my shirt. Sure, it seems easy to you. But think about it. You are pouring topical drugs INTO your eyeball. For those of us who didn’t get contacts at age six or spend their college years inside of a bong this is not a natural activity. This is me attempting to put in drops: I take a deep breath. I peer up into the bathroom ceiling. I awkwardly try to hold open my suddenly spastic eyelid with my free hand. I position the Visine in what appears to me to be the center of my eye. I slowly squeeze the bottle until a drop appears… hangs… haaangs…. haaaaannnggs… Then I flinch like a little girl and hose down my clothes with topical eye lubricant. I rinse… I repeat. It’s a phenomenon without explanation. I’m not uncoordinated. I can ride a bike. I can juggle. I can yo-yo like a bastard. And yet somehow trying to bull’s-eye my cornea from an inch away is completely beyond me.

Life and Passion

I read an article recently that was a commentary on how so few people have a real passion or interest that drives them in what they do, especially in terms of what they do for a living. I couldn’t agree more. Ask someone what they are interested in and what comes out of their mouth always sounds like a profile from a bad personal ad. “I love my family, and my friends. I also really enjoy traveling.” That could be rubber stamped on almost everybody I know. Are we really so uninteresting, so utterly fungible? I guess that’s an insight into the commonality of the human experience, but it doesn’t exactly explain why we choose the professions or undertakings that we do. On the other hand, someone who says, “I hate my family. My friends are dirtbags, and I’m never leaving Paducah Kentucky.” That dude has a story to tell, and he probably loves his job at Hot Topic selling eyebrow rings to teenagers.

As for the rest of us, I’m not sure exactly why we end up doing the things we do. What are you passionate about? For that matter… what the hell am I passionate about? My family and my friends are important to me, but one can’t exactly make a career out of being a brother, a son, and a drinking buddy. What else is out there? The stuff that I own is nice, but it’s just stuff. I honestly don’t think I would lose any sleep if all of my possessions were incinerated. (I’ll qualify that. I might shed a tear for my new t.v. That’s fifty inches of sexy!) But where does that leave me motivation wise? Well, I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s troubling.

On a certain level you almost have to be envious of the crazy guy on the corner with the sandwich board that says, “REPENT; THE END IS NEAR!” (Although they usually don’t go with a semicolon. I guess it’s really a style choice.) Honestly though, that guy gets up every day with a purpose. The illuminati ninjas from outer space are plotting to overthrow the government, and he has got to get out there and fucking warn the public! I mean, he’s a screaming lunatic… On the other hand, his particular brand of lunacy gives him a reason to wake up each morning and feel like he’s on a valuable, necessary, and ultimately satisfying mission. That’s passion people; passion that most of us will never know. (Another semicolon for you.)

For us though, the mildly interested, the pedestrian, the ironically detached, we wake up and have to drink four cups of coffee to stay focused on our jobs. We grumble and groan and make sarcastic remarks because the earnestness of passion eludes us. I think that’s just a truth for most of us though. One simply can’t be that passionate and have a functioning existence. Anyway, if you ever see me on the side of the highway looking disheveled and wild eyed with some poorly lettered gibberish on a sign. Don’t feel bad for me, cause I’m out there fighting the good fight. Those space ninjas aren’t going to take us down, not if I have anything to do with it.

Slide and Slip

For the fourth of July one of my buddies is having a week long party at his lake house, boats, kegs, relaxing in the sun, generally good times. I decided to head up Saturday and partake in the festivities. It had been suggested in the month or so previous that we should bring back the staple of 80’s youth culture that is the “slip and slide.” Everyone remembers the commercial version, an extremely thin sheet of yellow plastic about 12 feet shorter than even the least aggressive pre-teen can slide. Our model turned out to be slightly more ambitious. Fifty feet of industrial plastic that terminated in a pool made out of hay bales and rocks (surprisingly, the rocks turned out to be a poor choice in building materials). We lubed it up with dish soap, turned on the hose, and took increasingly long running starts. In any case, it was a lot of fun, and by fun of course I mean ultimately painful for all of the participants.

Take any arbitrary physical activity, add young males, and voila! You have a potentially dangerous competition. Add alcohol in quantity, let females wearing bikinis watch, and you can pretty much go ahead and call the ambulance. Testosterone is a crazy substance. Men will kill themselves competing in physical tasks that in no way reflect on our value as human beings. I’m evolved enough to understand the irrationality of this. On the other hand, I will be damned if any of these assholes were going to be better than me at slip and sliding!!!

So it’s Monday, I can’t straighten my right leg all the way, and I feel like I was sewn into a burlap sack and beaten enthusiastically. However, it is with no small amount of pride that I admit that I was the fuckin’ grand champion of sliding. Who’s a winner, baby!!! In your faces!!!

Murderball Nickelback

So the electrician working on my wiring has a Nickelback cell phone ring. It just went off. “LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRALF!!!! EVERY TIME I DO IT MAKES ME LARF!!!” I think that’s pretty special. It’s so nice of Clearchannel to give those poor retarded boys all that radio play. That lead singer guy might look like Jesus on methamphetamines, but the way he overcame that speech impediment to become a platinum selling artist is still pretty inspiring… or alternatively… a sign of the apocalypse.

Speaking of inspiring stories, everyone should go out and rent “Murderball.” It’s a documentary about the U.S. Paralympic rugby team. Basically it’s quadriplegics ramming each other with wheelchairs that are modified to look like something Mel Gibson would drive in “Road Warrior”. If you are feeling down on yourself or unlucky, then that movie is a kick in the ass. Seeing guys who have limited access to their extremities who are that passionate about what they are doing and who are enjoying their lives is a humbling thing. On the other hand, if you are feeling awkward, or like you haven’t been doing that well with the ladies, that movie is a kick square in the testicles. Half of the quadriplegics on the squad are dating really attractive girls. Coming to that particular realization while watching the documentary by myself on a Friday night wasn’t exactly a morale boost.

Work and Relationships

Last night I had an interesting conversation. I was talking to a friend about some of the more inappropriate things we had heard about law clerks doing. (always fodder for an interesting conversation. It’s astonishing what young, intelligent, highly boozed professionals are capable of.) Anyway, I offered up a story I heard about a summer associate who was sleeping with one of her supervising attorneys. This led to a whole dialogue about work and dating…

At some point in one’s life, I think it is natural to be attracted to a coworker. If nothing else, the sheer amount of time spent doing your job is going to weigh in favor of it. Especially people who work long hours (i.e. lawyers, doctors, brokers, etc.), and who spend the short hours of the day they do have off sleeping, boozing and having myocardial infarctions. This is of course a dangerous game. Gone are the days when businessmen could have blatant affairs with their secretaries and not face censure. I think in the 50’s that sort of thing was a right of passage, something to talk about in the executive washroom. (Here I always imagine some sort of walnut paneled room full of old white guys who smell like scotch.) Back then men wore hats, aftershave, and their assistant’s lipstick on their collars. Hilarious.

Now though, the specter of harassment and propriety are always present. I honestly don’t know how effective that sort of thing is. People are pretty obvious about going after what they want anyway, they are just more likely to get burned for it post factum. I think the only effective policy is discriminate against attractive people during the hiring process. Maybe somehow try to limit the amount of hormones running through the business.

In any case, I have come to the following conclusion. The old saying goes, “don’t shit where you eat.” But what if you eat for twelve hours a day? Where are you supposed to shit? That’s right people… In your pants.

Bar-Bri and Carrot Top

We’ve started Bar-Bri. It’s a pretty ridiculous institution. It pretty much teaches you all of law school in a 1 month intensive program. However, they teach the material like they are teaching auto diesel repair, no analysis, no background, no depth. Just, if they ask this, do this. If they say this, say that. Anyway, they pile a couple of hundred of us in a room where you may or may not be lectured by a giant screen playing a prerecorded lecture. That’s value for your 2000 dollars, those people must print money.

Luckily, today we were lectured by a real live human. Quite a character, I couldn’t pay attention all morning because of his bizarre voice. It was familiar, but just out of reach. During hour two I figured it out. Holy shit, he sounds just like the short guy from “The Princess Bride.” After that I was distracted by constantly thinking, “You fool! I switched glasses when your back was turned! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...” Then I would imagine him falling over dead. Pleasant classroom fantasy.

There are also a lot of characters among my classmates, and by characters I mean douchbags. The guy who sits next to me fancies himself a comedian. Another student kept dropping her pen, so this guy comes to class the next day with a giant novelty pen. “Ha Ha, I brought her a huge pen. Maybe she won’t drop this one because it’s so big. Hey, look at how big the pen is. I bet that she can’t drop this one. Ha ha. I brought her a big pen. It’s way too big to drop. Ha ha ha ha ha.” Then the next person would walk by, “Hey, look at this huge pen.” Etc… ad nauseam. That’s right… prop comedy. This guy’s go to move was prop comedy. He’s the Carrot Top of Bar-Bri. Awesome. Which means that he went home and got a huge pen that he already had, or worse yet, went out, found, and spent money on a giant pen that he could bring to class for the sole purpose of making that torture instrument of a joke. What a son of a bitch.

Memorial Day (edited for content)

Memorial Day was a total mess. I managed to inflict an epic hangover on myself for the ride home. There is nothing quite like your body reversing one of its major processes in an attempt to reject the poison you put in it. I don’t know how you bulimics do it. Two days later and my vocal chords are still wrecked. Worth it though.

San Destin on Memorial Day is basically spring break for adults. The boys and I were probably the youngest group on the beach, or at least the most obnoxious. When we first got the beach we were surrounded by families, and I thought it might be that way all day long... I needn’t have worried. The ones that stayed moved their impressionable youngsters out of earshot. Upstanding young gentlemen we may be, but nobody wants their kid next to the guys who came to the beach with more coolers than towels.

No sunburn!!! Two trips to the beach, eight days in the sun, a preposterous number of beers, and barely a red mark. I rock. That’s gotta be some sort of a record for an Irishman.

JD and Whatnot

Ok, so the regular update thing failed to happen. There’s been so much going on lately that the blog got de-prioritized. So here goes… First of all, I got my sheepskin. I’m a doctor of jurisprudence. Pretty wild. We even got to wear those funny, stop sign shaped hats. Seven years of higher education, tens of thousands in student loans, and I get the privilege to take a three day test for the bar. This is of course an elaborate procedure that is supposed to ensure a limited number of lawyers enter the world, artificial supply control to ensure that we get to bill for outrageous sums. Wheee!!!! In any case, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m three months away from a regular paycheck.

This brings us to the second major life event that took place the week of graduation. I’m broke; a symptom rather than the actual event. The actual event being that I bought a house, a three bedroom ranch on the outskirts of Birmingham. Way too much going on around that particular occurrence to discuss everything. One thing that struck me though is the ridiculous amount of paperwork at closing. The idea that a layperson is going to make an informed decision after reading all that is ridiculous. There is a movement in the law away from legalese and toward plain English. However, translating esoteric language doesn’t make people more competent to make decisions regarding their legal rights. The formality of letting people sign the agreement just makes us feel better about it. It’s comparable to informed consent in medicine. Allowing patients make decisions is only realistic for a fantastically small percent of the population. Untrained people are completely unequipped to look out for themselves in legal or medical situations. For that matter, lots of lawyers and doctors are completely unequipped to fend for themselves in legal or medical situations. Anyway, people are stupid, experts are less stupid. I don’t know the intricacies of how a jet works, but I trust my life to them. I think it’s foolhardy to think that I should have a say in other situations that are beyond my ken.

Second point about the house, pride of ownership aside, moving the yard still blows.

Peter Jackson v. Tchaikovsky

My mom was in town this weekend. We saw the ballet. Yep, I spent my Saturday night at the ballet with my mother. I grew up with ballet. My mom was a dancer and she has taught as long as I’ve been alive. (yes, I took lessons) On the other hand, it’s not something I’ve thought a lot about lately. Seeing one with her inspired some conclusions. Here goes…

Honestly, I can say that ballet isn’t bad. I can appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the production and the athleticism of its participants. The problem is they were designed to entertain people who didn’t have modern attention spans. Swan Lake is like four hours long. This is bad news for a guy that had trouble not drifting off during the Lord of the Rings. An army of orcs and evil wizards battling the forces of light on an IMAX screen can’t keep my attention for four hours. I’m sorry but twenty dangerously thin ballerinas waving their arms in a line isn’t going to get it done. See, the problem is that Tchaikovsky wasn’t composing for people who have the gold package on their cable subscription. He penned those ballets for Russian aristocrats whose other entertainment options included bear baiting, the harpsichord, and syphilis. Given those alternatives I think I would have been a huge proponent of ballet had I been present. Honestly though, beautiful music or not, ballet need some updating. Give us the cliff notes version.

My second point is going to come off as pretty homophobic. (which I don’t think I am, but whatever) I know that not all male dancers are gay. I hear that Baryshnikov pulled crazy ass. On the other hand, there is no denying the influence of homosexuals in ballet. The prince in the Nashville production was chasing swans around with a crossbow that Freddy Mercury would have been embarrassed to carry. Basically it was a tiny glitter-encrusted thing that appeared to use rhinestones as ammunition. They took the most masculine symbol in the show and completely neutered it. If ballet wants to have a broader appeal they should allow a little testosterone to influence things. Instead of calling people homophobic for being uncomfortable with it they should admit that it’s kind of gay. Now, I am not calling for the Bolshoi Theatre to put on a production of NASCAR, the ballet. I’m just saying let’s be honest with ourselves. There are plenty of straight dancers and plenty of straight guys who enjoy going to the ballet. But there are also a disproportionate number of homosexual participants… just like male ice-skating and the WNBA.

Finally, ballerinas are hot. Call me Oedipus Rex because there is something about a girl who dances that I find really attractive. I don’t know if it’s the outfits or the eating disorders but wow.

Swiffer Gets The Axe Body Spray

Consumer technology has been bothering me lately. Almost inevitably it is just packaging with a fancy name for the same product you bought last week. For example, every commercial for detergent has some newly discovered ingredient (brightenite or staindisgrador). These are of course, nothing but fancy words for… wait for it… soap. In the same vein; the people at Swiffer must be stopped. They make a sponge on a stick. Seriously, look closely. It’s a sponge on a stick. And they have multiple versions of this product: Swiffer for dust, Swiffer for hardwoods, Swiffer for that area between your balls and asshole. No one can possibly think that they need all of these products. They are the home economics equivalent of a spoiler on a Ford Taurus, something that you buy because somebody told you it was cool.

The reason I got on this topic originally was razors. Razors are the most visible and notorious promoters of incrementally more useless and extravagant versions of their products. I have often sat in front of the television and mocked Gillette and Remington for their unending attempts to convince America that razors and shaving cream are created in giant laboratories by attractive spacemen. Admittedly, I am not a scientist. I am however, confident that shaving cream is not made by slamming red plasma into blue antimatter in a supercollider. That’s stupid. It’s soap. Soap for your face.

On the other hand, I have to admit that the Fusion is a fantastic product. It vibrates, it has 5 separate blades, it’s neon orange and it’s battery powered… and I… don’t… care. It fuckin’ rocks. You could shave a yak smooth with that thing and the animal wouldn’t notice. I’m sold. Stupid advertising be damned. This is a solid product that I can get behind.

Now, dear reader, before you think I’ve gone soft. I’d like to take a minute to discuss Axe body spray. This advertising campaign is a vivid demonstration of the gullibility of the American populace. This implication of their ads is that if you spray yourself down with a large bottle of cheap cologne, herds of beautiful women will want to sleep with you. It has actually been so successful that other companies are trying to sell the exact same product with the exact same ad. People are spending five dollars on a four liter bottle of smell goods. This is of course violently stupid. However, masses of foolish young men are subsidizing numerous commercials with extremely attractive women. I get to enjoy these commercials. So I guess I can’t really complain. On the other hand, unless Swiffer starts using scantily clad anorexics to sell its stupid sponges, I will continue to rail against them.

Rollertool!!! or alternatively, Drink Mountain Dew

So today I had the privilege of seeing a guy on rollerblades fall down. It was pretty awesome. Not a spectacular wipeout or anything, just the type of awkward collapse that rollerbladers deserve. Reflecting on this later, I decided I didn’t feel bad for chuckling to myself upon seeing this toolbag fall over. Now, normally I think that feeling satisfied watching another human being suffer is morally wrong. On the other hand, I’m comfortable with this particular flavor of schadenfreude.

By undertaking any type of extreme activity you open yourself up to the possibility of other people enjoying the resulting outcome. If, for example, I say, “Hey, I think I can do a double back flip off of this dock.” I fully expect that landing on my face will be met with a roar of laughter. Please, make sure I’m not dead while you laugh, but any injury short of broken bones or concussion is no excuse for cutting your enjoyment short.

Just the other day I found myself making outrageous claims about what wakeboarding tricks I would or would not attempt this summer. I have verbally committed myself to trying (at least once) a tantrum (essentially a back flip). I think this is an appropriate moment to clarify that fact that I am not an excellent wakeboarder. I haven’t been near one for about 6 years, and by that I do not mean to imply that 6 years ago I was capable of more than standing up and going in a straight line. From this, I think we can safely expect that I will concuss myself quite violently when I make this attempt. I fully expect my friends to crack-up at my hilarious, self-inflicted destruction. Hell, it’s only fair.

NO FEAR

You know those guys with stickers on their car that say “NO FEAR”. I’m pretty sure that what they’re not afraid of is looking like a douchebag.

Bluetooth Morlock

Today at the gym I saw a janitor with a Bluetooth phone in his ear. How much of a status symbol is it if you have a dustbin and a broom in your hands? Somehow I don’t think he was making an ironic statement. I’m also of course assuming that he wasn’t on the line unloading Nikkei options before the Asian markets closed. (It never occurred to me that the first cyborgs would be lower class. I always guessed that it would be the elites that inevitably took advantage of technology to improve their bodies, laser vision, rocket feet, etc. The Eloi learned this lesson the hard way.) (obscure reference for you) Of course it’s entirely possible that my lack of enthusiasm for this technology is a result of my dislike of the phone in general. God I hope I don’t have to own of those things…

Anyway, if you are not driving or operating something that requires the use of both of you hands you shouldn’t use the headset deal. Are we that detached from our surroundings? The Bluetooth headset was designed so that telemarketers could jog and still try to get you to switch long distance providers, not so fat marginally employed guys could signal to women that they are important. Further, does this type of thing actually work to attract females? It must… why else would there be so many thousand dollar spoilers on five hundred dollar Camrys? I don’t really know how to address this phenomenon that other than, “Nice hustle buddy. Hope that works out for you.”

On second thought, screw those guys. They’re probably getting more play that I do.

Urinals

You don't realize how much Urinals splash until it gets warm enough to wear flip flops. At which point you perceive it right away. Is it me or has bathroom technology not advanced at all in our lifetimes?

No, Peter Pan was not gay.

I decided to entitle this blog “Peter Pan Complexity” because thus far I’ve been pretty successful at avoiding responsible adulthood. (For those unfamiliar: Peter Pan Complex is a pop-psychology term used to describe an adult male who is socially immature.) The analogy is pretty clear. Peter Pan never wanted to grow up, (sounds like me) lived in a fantasy world, (Vanderbilt anyone?) and had a fondness for small boys (ok, maybe it’s not perfect). Anyway, to draw some more parallels I’ve taken a page from Pan’s playbook and surrounded myself with like minded friends who have similar ambitions. I’m not going to call my buddy’s the “Lost Boys” though, because in addition to that being spectacularly gay I’m trying to avoid referencing any Kiefer Sutherland movies.

(I was planning on running with this for a while, but the Peter Pan references were getting pretty cumbersome. The new job/mortgage/bar exam as Captain Hook and mounting responsibility as the clock the crocodile swallowed? It got pretty fucking retarded quickly. The only upshot of which being I might get to make a Tinkerbell reference about one of my friends. In any case, I’m dropping it here.)

Maybe a bit more preface is an order? I graduated from Vanderbilt in 2004, and I decided that given the choice between getting a real job and going to grad school, grad school was a no-brainer. What better way to recapture the joy of college than by pretending not to graduate for another 3 years. So I managed to hang on to my backpack and flip flops for at least this much longer by going straight to Vanderbilt Law.

Since exams are fast approaching, I decided it was time to adopt a new hobby. This is sort a tradition for me:

Spring 2007 = rambling, unreadable blog (yeah, I know)

Fall 2006 = bought an x-box 360 (logged some serious hours)

Spring 2006 = read entire Harry Potter series (probably faster than your kid)

Fall 2005 = watched all of Sex in the City on HBO on-demand (between that and the Peter Pan thing I’m really coming off gay here)

That’s enough by way of introduction. I hope that someone finds some entertainment value in this. I advise anyone reading it not to take it too seriously. I don’t really expect it to have any coherency either in direction or ultimate meaning. I think the next couple of entries will be related to the whole, “I have to become an adult soon” motif. We’ll see where that goes.