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!!!