Thoughts on Preppiness... with Citations!

Admittedly, I’m a very preppy guy. My closet consists of basically the entire color spectrum of polos and four pairs of pants. Still, somebody told me recently that I have a “preppy face.” I’m mostly sure that it was meant as a compliment, but it would also be a pretty thinly disguised way to tell someone that they are a smug prick. "Preppy face..." what does that even mean? I hardly look patrician. If I was forced to guess, I would say that it means I look like every other frat guy that ever existed, slightly unkempt with an overpowering sense of entitlement for no good reason.

Anyway, I like the preppy look. It suits me… mostly. My biggest preppy shortcoming is that I could never pop my collar. I would like to be able to say that the reason is because popping collars is for hose-bags. (I’m pretty sure there is a hyphen in hose-bags.) But really it’s a lack of neck issue; my head merges seamlessly with my chest.[1] A pop collar attempt and a little starch would have probably result in the loss of an ear.

If for some reason I had to abandon team Brooks Brothers I think I would be ironic t-shirt guy. Plenty of upside to that look: dark rimmed glasses, poorly considered facial hair, girls that look like Lisa Loeb.[2] Downside too though; I think they make you wear tight pants. Speaking of which I think my favorite product of the emo movement (besides the emasculating yet extremely enjoyable music) is the fat emo kid. This guy is a comedic goldmine. Stuffing yourself into size four girl’s jeans and layering on the mascara is even more non-conformist when you weigh 200 pounds. This is probably the only sub-specie of emo kid who has a legitimate reason to be melancholy.

For now I guess I’ll stick to the preppy look. Maybe get myself a madras sport coat and some salmon colored pants. That’s a look I can understand. Basically the goal is just to look as much as possible like an Easter egg while keeping a straight face. Whoever can wear a pink bow tie, yellow pants and suspenders without laughing wins. I’m not there yet, but these things take time. You have to build up a tolerance.[3]

I freakin’ love using footnote for evil. Go team WASP!!!

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[1] Much like a tyrannosaur. Between that and the short arms I think that the T-Rex is probably the animal that I relate to most. At least he was the king of the dinosaurs. Some people are gazelles. Some are apes. I’m an extinct bird/lizard.

[2] I’m bizarrely attracted to this look. Can’t explain it. Makes me want to buy them hello kitty stuff and pretend to like their poetry.

[3] Like Iocaine Powder. What you do not smell!

How's this for misogynistic?

A guy I know had a baby recently. That has got to be one of the more intense things that can ever happen to you. It’s mind blowing. You have produced a human being, a tiny, screaming version of yourself that is completely dependent on you for everything. I’m having trouble conveying my feelings on this point. I shudder as I type.

I think I want kids in theory. But it’s a vague, ambiguous desire that I would only wish on a far future version of myself. Let that poor old bastard deal with that. I’m busy drinking and getting into adventures with my idiot buddies. The fact that people who are much younger/dumber/financially instable than me are having kids is ludicrous.

The only thing crazier than fathering a child has got to be becoming a mother. YOU HAVE A PERSON GROWING INSIDE OF YOU! AAHHHH! That’s some science fiction shit right there. I know… I know… it’s natural and beautiful and all that, but good grief man. That’s nuts. Consider it objectively for a second. That’s a person. It’s inside of you. He/she is going to escape and then drink milk out of you like you were a soda fountain. AAAHHHH!!!

I guess all of life’s processes are pretty crazy when you take a step back and break them down. I mean, the fact that you can take a peanut butter sandwich and use it for fuel to run a mile is pretty darn wacky too. But something about pregnancy just strikes me as a little surreal. It just seems like it should be harder to make a sentient creature. Two people, a couple jagerbombs, and a momentary lapse in judgment should not be enough to spawn something that could grow up to write a novel, play an instrument, or for that matter even just get stoned and play super smash brothers.

When it comes down to it I know objectively that birth is just a natural part of life. Hell, I was even a baby once. Somehow though, I just can’t quite wrap my mind around the whole thing. Oh well, that what I like to call a problem for “Future Michael”.

27 Dresses Sucked

I had a period of writer’s block recently and I decided to reach out for a little help from my friends. One of the great things about my life is the fact that I have friends that are earnest and truly decent human beings who are eternal optimists, idealistic and open hearted. Another and even better thing about my life is the fact that I have friends that are smart, jaded, borderline evil bastards. Sure, I love the first group, but on the other hand there is nothing more fun than hanging out with my sarcastic buddies who can appreciate the ironic and the absurd and call it what it is. This post idea comes from a guy who is a bullshit artist of the highest order, and who knows it when he sees it. I give you, “women and weddings”.

I’ve often said that women don’t marry men, they marry lifestyles. Of course this is a vast oversimplification. Wait, did I say vast? What I meant was slight. Kaboom. I got you ladies good. Anyway, the premise here is that women are concerned not only with the man, but with his job, his money, his family, etc. Not that you can consider a human being in a vacuum. I’ll acknowledge that. But women often seem more concerned with all the status nonsense that surrounds a guy than whether or not the guy is a piece of shit. Men on the other hand are more concerned with whether or not the girl is thin and has a good butt. You know… important stuff.

Nowhere is the modern, and I’m willing to call it mostly female, fixation on style and status rather than substance more evident than at a wedding. Your modern wedding is a bankruptcy inducing extravaganza where a girl gets to pretend that she is a princess. Weddings are not about ceremony. They are about spectacle… about spending vast sums of money… about a great excuse to show off. I know that your wedding day is an important day in a person’s life, man or woman, but it is not the point of your life. It seems to me that the idea of a wedding is to enrich and celebrate your life, but people act like the point of their life is to celebrate and enrich a wedding.

Men are complicit in all this nonsense, we have tool showers, and best men, and groom’s cakes, and a lot of the other stuff that surrounds weddings, but it seems like the male version of event is just a half-ass copy of the female version. Even the bachelor party, which is absolutely a male artifact, seems to have been swiped and cruelly perverted by the female sex. When, I ask, is the last time you went out and didn’t see a fat girl in a tiara, condoms glued to her shirt, surrounded by screaming harpies drinking out of penises?

Not that weddings aren’t a good time, they absolutely are. It just seems like they have exploded to become slightly monstrous and out of sync with the concept that should be at the center of them. It’s all good though. Please still invite me to your wedding. I’ll come if there is an open bar.

Platonic like a fox

Here’s a conversation that I’ve had with most of my friends at some point or another:

Dude 1: We need a good group of girls to hang out with.

Dude 2: I totally agree. It would nice to have cool females around that we could go out with regularly.

From here we proceed to discuss all the potential benefits that would go along with having a cool group of platonic female friends: (1) they could introduce you to other cool women that you could be potentially be non-platonic with, (2) when you go out with girls you have immediate street credibility because people assume (quite rightly) that being a serial murderer and having good looking female friends are mutually exclusive, (3) they could provide you with valuable insights and perhaps prevent you from dressing like an asshole, and (4) probably most importantly, sometimes it’s nice not to be surrounded by dong. Then the truth inevitable sets in:

Dude 2: Of course you realize that this will never happen right?

Dude 1: Because if they were cool enough to be our friends and were attractive we would try to hook up with them?

Dude 2: Yep.

Dude 1: …and if they were ugly we wouldn’t want to hang out with them.

Dude 2: Yep.

Dude 1: Sounds good in theory though.

Thus, the dream of the hot platonic friend dies.

On a related note. I absolutely never meet women these days. Or if I do they are either horrible or completely wrong for me. At this point I’m actually getting pretty angsty about it. The worst part is this town is full of beautiful girls, covered up with them. I would blame my horribly misogynistic blog… only no one reads it.

Born? Forlorn? Adorn?

So I opened up my computer this morning and there was an unnamed word document on my desktop. I thought to myself, “what do we have here?” opened it up and got these four words:

Nothing rhymes with pornography?

This happens occasionally now. After I starting writing this stupid blog, I started jotting down my topic ideas when they would randomly occur to me. Typically I do this only after I’ve poured a few cocktails down my head, the only time I think blogging is a good idea. That particular jewel of a theme was brought to you by the fine people at Bushmills. So later, I read these things and wonder how I ever thought I would be able to produce a funny article examining how the word “pornography” doesn’t lend itself to the crafting of poetry.

I’ll open up the notepad function on my blackberry and it’ll say something like “Pregnancy is so weird. Babies growing inside of you.” I’ll find myself in some sort of surreal conversation with an inebriated version of myself who leaves strange notes to me to find later. I’m a cross between Sybil and that stupid Keanu Reeves movie “The Lakehouse”. How’s that for bizarre? It’s like having a really stupid but oddly insightful pen-pal who dreams up wacky stuff to write about, and then expects me to do the actual heavy lifting.

I think that writing down creative or interesting things immediately when they happen is actually a good idea though. How often have you heard or thought something that struck an odd chord in you, but then you forgot it because of all the noise and clatter that goes along with being alive? Here’s a few other things that I’ve heard or thought about lately that were very aptly said by people in my life, with a little surrounding context:

Talking about dumb girls with a musician buddy from home: He likes women that “use their thoughts to think things.” (well said damnit)

Asking my bro how he does what he does on so little sleep: “I just hate myself out of bed in the morning.” (Fierce!)

Personal motto of an cool old roommate I had: “You might not like me, but your parents will fuckin’ LOVE me.” (the anthem of WASPy professional types who are total pricks but who are (let’s face it) exactly who your mom wants you to end up with)

Pop Culture and Rational Decision-makers

I hate a lot of things about pop culture. On the other hand, I HATE a lot of things about how people complain about pop culture. Being angry about the fact that Paris Hilton is famous is the equivalent of being angry about the fact that coffee cost 5 dollars a cup at Starbucks.

Some prick: “This isn’t worth five bucks! It’s just water and coffee beans!” (points to the cup of coffee in his hand)

Prick who took intro to microeconomics: “I just watched you hand that guy five bucks in exchange for that cup of coffee.”

Some prick: “Yeah, but….” (awkward pause) “Fuck”

We are what we eat ladies and gentlemen. We are a nation of haters.

Hater: someone who dislikes or resents or disapproves of a player (the term is used to criticize people who are jealous or who don't respect successful people). ~ Urban Dictionary

The reason famous people are successful is not that they have any greater intrinsic value than anyone else. They are not the smartest, or the fastest, or even the best looking. They are the objects of our attention because they are the objects of other people’s attention. We require a frame of reference in order to relate to each other. Famous people provide this frame of reference. Basically, we find it more interesting to talk about who a complete stranger is sleeping with than to talk about something that has a more relevant impact on our own lives.

Relevant isn’t even the right word. Relevant implies that people have better shit to do with their time. Every day thousands of people choose to read People magazine rather than read Shakespeare. This means that either People magazine is more valuable than Shakespeare, or thousands of people make bad decisions every day. And the answer is…. ding, ding, ding… People magazine is more valuable than Shakespeare. That’s right, I said it. By any standard that matters (money, effort or time) people would rather ingest what dress Kate Bosworth wore to the Oscars than find out what Hamlet did to smoke out Claudius. As much as it pains me to say it, this is a rational decision. (See, I couldn’t even do it without italics) Pretending it’s irrational is a paternalistic waste of time. Imposing what I think people should be on what people are doesn’t change anything. Fuck it. Everybody loves Kate Bosworth.

Bo Derek

I read an article recently talking about the old “on a scale of one to ten” ranking system for evaluating how hot a girl is. This has got to be the closest thing we have to a universal system for the evaluation and degradation of the female gender, but despite its ubiquity it has some serious flaws. I therefore taken it upon myself to establish what shall be, after an appropriate time frame for feedback and discussion amongst my distinguished colleagues (i.e. dudes I know), the new standard for the assignment of one to ten numbers to all of the women of the world.

As an initial matter I think that it is important to point out the major weaknesses in the current system. That is, that what is a 7 to one guy is a 5 to another, what is a 9 to one dude is a 6.5 to someone else. Here I am not talking about inevitable differences in tastes and preferences (for example, my bizarre attraction to freckles) that lead people to rate the attractiveness of people differently, but rather the failure of the ranking system itself to establish a consistent method for number assignment. I think that failure can be fairly attributed to three different issues: (i) our underlying conception of the scale itself, (ii) the population which actually makes up the scale, and (iii) those attributes that can be appropriately considered when making a number assignment.

First, we have different conceptions of the makeup of the scale. Does it represent a bell curve, with all of the women of the world regularly distributed? Or alternatively, is it purely a substitute for what percentile of the population the person happens to fall into?

Second, who makes up the population that the girl is ranked against? Is it simply the entire female population of the country/world? Is it a local standard? What about old ladies and children? Wouldn’t including these people artificially inflate the numbers of the skanks to which we apply the system? Is this in fact a good thing, so that we might be less embarrassed when we tell “that story” about the time we were in a bit of a slump and drank all that jager/tequila/Irish car bombs, etc.

Third and finally, is it in fact appropriate to consider non physical attributes when making a number determination. I don’t think anyone would deny that certain non-physical characteristics can go a long way towards making someone more attractive: a sexy accent, a great laugh, an original sense of humor, a Victoria’s Secret Angel Halloween costume. All of these things can make a girl more attractive, but is it better for the system to make the number award in the metaphorical vacuum, only considering a person’s concrete and tangible features?

In order for the scale to be useful, then we must all have the same understanding of what constitutes an appropriate score in every case. After considering the current application of the system, and what would be the most efficient and economical method for its usage, I feel that the following is the best resolution to the current problems with the scale. I will address each issue individually, in each case advancing my reasons for the final decision.

First, the scale itself must be considered as a representation of a bell curve. To look at it otherwise would result in the award of far too many very high and very low numbers. Average should be a five, and therefore most girls should receive fours, fives, and sixes. I think there are far too many sevens and above being awarded currently. We must not allow grade inflation to creep into our skank rating systems. The business of objectification and debasement of women must remain pure. Note that as a result of using a regular distribution concept, tens should only be awarded to statistical outliers, truly outrageous female specimens.

Second, I think to maximize our system’s utility the population considered must be universal. A seven should be a seven whether you are in Boston, New York or Miami, if this results in there being nothing but threes in New Jersey, then too damn bad. Fuck New Jersey. I also think that the system should take into account only women of certain ages. For purposes of me not being arrested, let’s call that age range 18- 45. Any older or younger and you are outside the scope of the system’s applicability. From now on, any assignment of a one to ten number to a female outside of this range must be qualified with a “for her age” disclaimer.

Third, non-physical characteristics must not be considered when making a number assignment. If your homely girlfriend is funny, rich, and has a sweet Australian accent, then you can just explain that shit after you finish admitting that she is a four. Suck it up. Introducing more subjectivity into the scale can only weaken it’s usefulness for communicating hotnessness and cheapening women. So from this point forward, no docking points on evil bitches, and no charity points for cool chicks. It’s a pure meritocracy… a hotocracy, if you will. Footnotes and asterisks are fine, but no fudging the numbers.

There you have it folks. Wow, that turned awkwardly long and serious.