Tagged: humor
An August Horror
A shudder rippled through his body. It felt visible, but no one seemed to notice.
He did his best to maintain his composure. He had only just turned away from it when “SNAP!” Without warning he had actually broken the pen he was holding. Exhausted, he realized he was tense beyond belief. His vision wasn’t focused as he sat contemplating everything, but the noise caused him to see that he was staring at it again. Why?
Symmetrical, he knew the round objects could be beautiful in other settings, if they weren’t paired together. Hanging on the wall just a few inches below the ceiling, they were menacing. The one on the right measured time. He wondered how many times it had tormented him before, only to transform as soon as the halfway point was reached. After that, he was always relieved. After that, it became a source of hope.
It wasn’t the clock, but what was left of the it that really gave him nightmares. When he was younger, all the time; these days only while he slept did it cause these nightmares. He felt a paralyzing fear. Who would invent such a dreadful device? Torturous, its design irritated him to this very day. An impenetrable grid of metal covering who knew what–for who knew what reason. He was curious if there had ever been an attack, or if the designers knew precisely the evil they were creating and preemptively bolstered its defensive systems.
He realized everyone was staring at him, just as he stared at the object. He would never know for how long he had been shouting profanities. Luckily, this time around, he was the teacher. This time around the speaker, that formless voice dictating orders as if by divine right, had no hold over him. This time he had no concern for, nor did he need to know, anything it issued forth. This time, he told himself, he wouldn’t be disturbed by it.
He feigned a calm, collected exterior as he and his students waited together. Everyone heard the familiar peremptory crackle of the P.A. They were only moments away now. He thought he could do it. He thought he was bigger. He thought he was more mature. He thought he was grown.
“Good morning school,” the speaker spewed. “This is your principal speaking. Welcome to the first day of the 2013-14 school year.”
Running as fast as he could, he arrived at his car out of breath. Keys in the ignition, the DJ’s giving away concert tickets, he was determined to leave. But he couldn’t. He started this journey, and he could never forgive himself for quitting.
Old People Emailing
After finishing her morning coffee and chores, the old woman sat down at her computer. “What’s this?” she wondered, surprised. “Oh yes, someone sent me an email. Let me see…how do I…? Ah yes, here we go.” Counting “one-two” in her head, she clicked the mouse and opened the email.
She read,
“Dear Grandma,
It’s Pete. I don’t know if you’ll ever read this, but I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday. Happy Birthday!
Pete”
“Oh how nice! Of course, I’ll read it Pete. After all, I’ve been emailing since 2005,” she thought to herself.
“Now how do I reply? Let’s see… What was it Pete told me? Ah yes, ‘to reply, find and click the left arrow.’ He always was a sharp boy. There’s the arrow, one-two and I’m off,” she said with a certain feeling of accomplishment.
“Now where’s that darn SHIFT button?” she asked looking down at the keyboard. As she held the SHIFT key down with her left index finger, she pressed the key marked “D” with her right. Thus it began.
Slowly and painstakingly, taking great joy in the fact that no matter how much she wrote the cost was the same, she responded to her grandson.
“Dear Pete,
Thank you.
Grandma”
Losing confidence for a moment, she closed in on the screen and searched for the SEND button. Relieved, she whispered, “And…send. (One-two).”
She couldn’t put a finger on why, but emailing always gave her a thrill. “I wonder,” she thought, “when he’ll receive it?”
How To Avoid Responsibility
(If you’re short on time, skip to the bottom for numbered instructions.)
“Darn-it!”
He was going to be late. He was going to be late and that meant that there wasn’t going to be parking nearby. He didn’t know what to do. Scratch that, he knew exactly what to do. It was just that what he wanted to do had consequences. Those consequences are what scared him. If only there was some way he could avoid being responsible for his actions.
Then is struck him! His car had emergency flashers. He could park in the no-parking zone right outside the building, and simply fib a little. What would be wrong with that? He knew that the no-parking zone was never needed anyhow. And he was in a hurry. It was a very important event. The brilliance of the plan was that only a real hard-case would call-in a car with emergency flashers blinking. How could anyone actually distinguish whether there was an emergency or not?
Okay, one problem down. Next up, people were waiting for him. He said he’d be there at 9:00. It was 8:57 and he was still 15 minutes away. Like a thunderbolt, he was struck again with a great idea. Reaching for his mobile phone, he texted his friend to say that he would be late. It was beautiful. The best part was that the friend he texted was the most responsible person he knew, so of course he’d already be there. That this friend would share the news with the others further justified his tardiness.
“Yes!” he exclaimed, pulling into the no parking zone. He’d done it. Once inside, his friend chastised him for being late. “But I sent a text,” he started. Noticing his friend’s changing expression, he pressed deeper into the crowd.
Later that night as he approached his car, dizzying yellow lights attracted his attention. “But I had my flashers on!” he lamented to the truck driver.
“Oh well,” he thought to himself. “Nobody noticed I was late, and they can shove this ticket up their ass,” he said tearing up the ticket.
Instructions for How To Avoid Responsibility
Step 1 – Believe you are smarter than everyone else.
Step 2 – Ignore any indications that Step 1 is not true.
How To Listen
(If you’re short on time, skip to the bottom for numbered instructions.)
“What’d you say?” he asked. Realizing he couldn’t remember crossing the bridge she created–the bridge over which her words matured into tears–he felt a great shame settle over him. Leo Tolstoy wrote, “The tears seemed to be the proper lubricant without which the machine of mutual communion between the two sisters could not work successfully.” Similarly, her tears contained the power to recapture his attention. The tears also had the effect of making him want to listen. He briefly wondered how anyone found his way without Tolstoy.
Hours later, he made it a point to determine if he’d always had difficulty listening. At first, his ego caused him to deny such a charge and pointed out that he was an excellent student. He also recalled how he excelled in a professional environment. Both required the ability to listen. Reluctantly, he opened the door Doubt was moments away from breaking down. He didn’t have very many close friends. He certainly hadn’t made any new friends in years. Swallowing his just-a-bit-too-large-a-bite-of-food-which-chokes-but-doesn’t-kill pride, he finally admitted the truth. He objectified people.
This was the only way he could make sense of it. If the person he was with couldn’t help him in some way, his mind found better things to do. Even before this revelation solidified, he had difficulty believing this was a deficient quality. That difficulty became an uncommon resolve which he used to summit his problem. At last he stood atop his terrifying realization. This never-before-seen perspective decisively gave him the vantage point necessary for change.
Instructions for How To Listen:
Step 1 – Stop talking.
Step 2 – Stop objectifying people.
An Apology to LinkedIn Connections
Dear LinkedIn Connections,
I wouldn’t have “Liked” me either. Hurt doesn’t begin to describe how I felt every passing day, every passing week. My fervent efforts appeared to fall short in the eyes of even my first degree connections. Molded by your advice, there I was pursuing my passion. And even those sage connections didn’t “Like” my work. Few canyons reach the depth to which my professional depression dove.
“Joy! Bright spark of divinity!” In a moment that can only be described by Beethoven’s Ninth, I saw the light. Consequently, I owe you an apology.
Whether you felt my anger or not, I’m sorry for ever doubting you. I’m sorry for being upset with you. It’s difficult, you know? I’m new to this, and I was only thinking about me. Until recently, I wasn’t able to look at the problem from your perspective, but I see the truth now.
I realized that LinkedIn is a professional website! How did I ever miss this fact?! This means that supervisors, co-workers, and any of your other professional connections are going to see that you “Liked” my blog. If they’re worth their salt, they’d surely trust your integrity and assume that you actually read my post before “Liking” it. Why is this a problem? Because if they know that you’re reading my blog, guess what they know you’re not doing? Work!
I am so sorry for ever doubting you. All this time I thought you didn’t actually enjoy my writing. Now it is clear that you do, but you just aren’t ready to go public yet. That’s cool. I’m O.K. with that, as long as we understand each other.
In closing, let me just say one more time that I’m sorry. Know that I never stopped liking you, even when I thought you didn’t “Like” me. As time passes it seems like saying I was “angry” might have been too strong; it was more a general feeling of confusion. Okay, I think your boss is beginning to suspect something, so you’d better get going. Thank you for your time. (For real, go! Don’t worry about me. From now on, I’ll just assume you “Like” every single post.)
Very Respectfully,
A Mugwump
Grandparents Wanted
“Now that we know who is doing what, it’s time for the prepared speeches portion of the meeting. Each of our speakers today has prepared what I’m sure will be marvelous speeches. First up, giving her ‘Ice Breaker’ speech, is Debbie Hinkletoe. She has spoken many times in the past, but this is her first speech with us. It appears we are making her feel as nervous as Anne Frank practicing tuba, so let’s be sure to give her all the support we can muster,” joked the old man lovingly attempting ease Debbie’s visible nerves.
It was unclear whether the old man knew that the joke would, to put it mildly, step on a few toes. The few audience members cursed with the inability to resist a joke’s cue-to-laugh recognized their loneliness and quickly adopted silence.
Concluding the awkward moment, a respectable old woman declared, “Not funny.”
“Okay, meetings over. Thanks for nothing, you inconsiderate asshole!” seemed the words the audience expected to hear next. However, following General Waverly’s (White Christmas) advice, “If there’s one thing the army taught me, it was to be positive… …especially when you don’t know what you’re talking about,” the old man made the correct decision to let the moment pass and continue the meeting.
He couldn’t help but smile. He just witnessed an event only found in books: An old man putting to use his well-deserved ability to “not care”, and an old woman responding in kind. Oh, the subtleties of that moment. As if the back-and-forth had caused the air to congeal, a stillness overtook the room for but an instant. Neither mortal would yield. Neither should have. They both behaved perfectly. They both…were grandparents.
He always liked “grandparents” as a group, but he was never quite able to put his finger on why; until that exact moment.
But first, while it may seem obvious, the reader must learn what he believed a grandparent to be. A grandparent is not simply someone whose children have had children. By his thinking, to be a grandparent, one’s children must be (or have) raising their own children. Biological grandparents fulfilling the role of primary parent are not grandparents to him, then. This is a necessary qualification.
It seemed to him that something magical happened when an old person was fully released from parental responsibilities. The concern for ‘appropriate’ and ‘proper’ disappeared, rightfully so. Grandparents, then, were the living proof that even the loftiest concepts needed to be knocked off their pedestals every now and again. It was the exchange between these grandparents that revealed this truth clearly.
This realization had a second effect. It motivated him, for he was a parent. Moreover, he now understood that to earn his status as grandparent he must aggressively embrace his parental responsibility. Any wasted time or opportunity would only result in his missing out on the ability to someday be the salt of life, would result in his missing out on the near-sanctified duty to offend, provoke, insult, but also spoil, entertain, love.
More than that, he finally understood why, no matter what they did, he always felt loved by his own grandparents. It was because they wouldn’t be his grandparents if his parents hadn’t loved him first.
How To Raise A Toddler
(If you’re short on time, skip to the bottom for numbered instructions.)
Okay, bedtime story complete; she’s down. What the? Why would they make something a toddler is supposed to put in her mouth out of cardboard? It took less than two hours for her to flatten the red-party-favor-blower-thing with her brimming with saliva little mouth. Gross. Yep, I’m throwing it out. I’ll just deal with her tomorrow. She probably won’t even remember that it existed. (#1)
“Daddy!”
Yup. She’s awake. I’d guess that it’s probably around 8:00 am. It’s got to be. I already heard my housemate leave for work. Let me just check my phone to see what time it is… 7:00 am! Oh well. I want waffles this morning anyhow, so I could use the extra time.
“Daddy?”
“What is it?”
“Where’s my red thing?”
“What red thing?”
“Daddy, can you turn on the light in your room?”
“Just eat. When you’re done, you can turn on the light yourself. You’re a big girl now. You can reach all the light switches in the house. Turn them on and off yourself as you please.”
“Daddy. I’m done. Peez I get off the table?”
“You’re done?! You haven’t finished your waffles. How are you going to have enough energy to make it to lunch?” (#2)
“Daddy. Peez I get off the table?”
“Fine.”
“Daddy. Where’s my red thing?”
“I threw it… it probably got thrown away. It was broken.” (#3)
“Who breaked it?”
“It’s ‘broke’, not ‘breaked’, ‘broke’. You did. Don’t you remember?” (#4)
“I breaked it?”
“‘Broke.’ Yep. You sure did. You should be more careful next time. Okay, hurry, you have to go to school.” (#5)
“But I didn’t break it.”
“The point is, it is gone.”
“Are we going to the mountains today?”
“No, you have school today. We’ll go to the mountains on the weekend.”
“Oh.”
“Okay, let’s get moving. I’ll get your clothes, time to go potty.”
Not quite making it to school (daycare) on the first trip, I was back in the driveway needing to grab the bathing suit I had told myself not to forget. Leaving her in the running car on the drive during the short trip into the house, I thought of all the morons who’ve car-jacked a car with a kid in the back. Not even fully closing the front door for fear of locking myself out, I might as well have put out the bat-signal.
Feeling the front-door give a little as I twisted the just unlocked handle, I pushed further only to curse myself. Apparently I didn’t remember to lock the deadbolt this morning before leaving like I told myself I would last night during a bout of all-too-common laziness. Who invented deadbolts that require a key to lock it on the inside of the house anyhow? Safe neighborhood, I’m sure.
Upon approaching the car, her child seat was empty. More curious than concerned, I saw movement on the other side of the seat. Good for her. She finally knows how to unlock the seat-belt. Finally, we made it to the ‘Early Learning Center’.
Crying , she wrapped my pinky and fore finger in her left and right hands which had acquired the grip of a python overnight. I pried my fingers free and left her in the arms of some accented foreign lady who is her teacher.
This is probably not doing any long-term damage to her. (#6)
Instructions for How To Raise A Toddler:
Step 1 – Lie as much as you can to the toddler and yourself.
Step 2 — Use the fact that all other parents are also lying as reassurance that you’re on the right track.
How To Be The Best Ever
(If you’re short on time, skip to the bottom for numbered instructions.)
Whoa there! Slow down a minute. Have you really considered what you’re doing?
You know who you are. You’re the one believing that you really do excel at one particular skill. You’re so confident that you could be the best ever at it, that you are on the verge of totally restructuring your life in order to prove it to the world.
If there’s not one confusing thing about life, there’s another. Take definitions for a moment. They can be descriptive or prescriptive. If you’re like me and strive to always exist in the present, you likely find yourself drawn to descriptive definitions. If you’re not like me and you prefer to live in a fantasy world, you’re likely drawn to prescriptive definitions. For example, dictionary.com defines “peace” as “the normal, nonwarring condition of a nation, group of nations, or the world.” That is a prescriptive definition. Howard Bloom, crazy thinker that he is, suggests a more descriptive definition. Starting as a Tabula Rasa, he writes “peace” usually means, “‘Since I’m on top, let’s keep the status quo;’ or ‘Now that I’ve managed to climb on your back, would you please be kind enough to sit still'” (Bloom 265).*
Reading over dictionary.com’s definition is quite comical if it is supposed to be descriptive. The ‘normal’ condition of the world. Right.
Back to you, though. Here you are. The best ever. But no one knows it. We don’t need sources to know what being the best is. It is simply being better at something than everyone else. With 20/20 hindsight, let’s see what we can learn by looking at how a couple of people who are arguably the best ever did it.
I’m thinking specifically of Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong. If you haven’t watched MJ’s Hall of Fame speech, what you need to know is that it disappointed most people. Not me. I took notes. Here was someone who was the best ever. How did he do it? I wanted to know.
Next we have Lance Armstrong. Even more than MJ, Lance Armstrong solidified his place in history as the best ever.
But we’re talking about you. So without further ado, here are the instructions.
Instructions for How To Be The Best Ever:
Step 1 – Forsake everything, literally every other thing in your life if it doesn’t help you become the best ever.
Step 2 – Believe, really believe that when you finally get the recognition you so desire, it will have been worth it.
A Reading’s Surprise
Staring at the small, basic kitchen table that doubled as his computer stand, he just sat. It wasn’t ideas that he wanted, but help. Was this everything? Could this really be how life was supposed to play out?
Only moments earlier he had such hope, such expectation. Now, he only felt resignation and frustration. “Curse you, World!”
Believe it or not, he was upset because he couldn’t believe what he had just read…about definitions. That’s right, he had just read that there are apparently at least two different types of definitions from where the defense of an argument can be mounted. The first being, stipulative definitions or what really should be called creative or inventive definitions. The second, categorical definitions.
The book stated that categorical definitions differ from stipulative in that they focus on classifying ideas in categories (hence, “categorical”). For clarity, here is a categorical definition of motorcycling: one of the many types of transportation available to modern man. On the other hand, this is a stipulative definition of motorcycling: the greatest way to travel from one place to another.
No, this just won’t do. By his thinking, there should just be one type of definition. There should be only one clean, nice, simple way of making sense of the world. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? That’s the point of defining a concept, right? The point of a definition is to organize what an individual sees or believes to be into a set of data that can help fulfill life’s potentialities, right?
As if life wasn’t difficult enough, he now had to deal with this new information that even the very tool he had been using to define his reality couldn’t be simplified down to one type of meaning. How was anyone supposed to get any work done in this madness?! He must change this. Life cannot require this level of complexity.
His first task, then, was to get everyone to agree on everything.
Who Killed the New Kids?
“Censorship is murder.”
Too strong? I thought so at first. Then again, this was an assignment for college and I wanted a good grade, so I decided to run with it.
The task that lay before me was developing this radical thesis. So I thought and I thought and I thought. I asked my housemate what he thought. So he thought. Then we both thought. Here’s the result: Censorship is murder because I believe that “to be a human, as opposed to all other known life forms, requires an unfettered ability to communicate one’s value (in the form of words, images, or music) to other humans. And an external restriction of a person’s expression of value is the same as telling them they have no value. In other words, it is a malicious attempt to end their life.”
It was beautiful.
After developing my thesis, the next assignment was to write about my first experience with censorship. What I discovered was frightening. Even now, I am afraid of the implications.
187. 68. 32. Those are the amounts posters and/or pictures of The New Kids on the Block my cousin Jenny, my sister Kate, and I had on our bedroom walls, respectively, in the summer of 1990. I feel like I should be embarrassed to admit this. I would be if I led the bunch. That I was a distant third clearly showed I was just trying to fit in.
For those of you who don’t recall, The New Kids on the Block were it back then. Their top single, “Hangin’ Tough” spent 132 weeks, that’s nearly two and a half years, on the Billboard charts.
Despite the New Kids’ success, all was not well in households across America. Mine was no different. My memory gets fuzzier by the year, but this much I do remember. My sister was taking piano lessons. She was three years older than me. She was 12, I was 9. Mrs. Misty Bolton, the wife of our church’s pastor of music, was her piano teacher. Even a cool lady like her couldn’t see the storm brewing on the horizon.
I can hear the nice, neat, well-timed piano playing now. Whatever my sister may have lacked in expression, she made up for in crisp playing–just like an older sister to show how its done.
At this point in the story, it’s important that you join me in the room.
You’re already at the front door of the house? Good. Open it. Once you make your way through the front door, you see a hallway to a kitchen table straight ahead. You discover that what you thought was the right wall of that hallway is actually the left side of the staircase which leads to the second floor and a little balcony. Turning all the way to your right, you see the room where the piano is. You know the piano is in the room, not because you see it, but because you can see a reflection of it in the wall sized mirror that hangs opposite it.
This room, unlike any other in the house had a name: the “blue room”. It was named for its predominant color, beginning with the blue carpet, extending to the blue walls. The blue carpet was a plush, thick, luscious carpet that incurred my mother’s wrath if it was needlessly tread upon.
“Key-an’t you go around?,” she’d exclaim. She could be rather vain about carpet.
Do you see me yet? Good. Here it comes.
“Mom! Comeeer. Misty, I mean, Mrs. Bolton says she’ll teach me to play the New Kids on the Block songs if we buy the book! Can we? Pleeeeease?,” my sister begged.
Our mom was no push-over, but it seemed like such a simple request involving learning to play piano didn’t necessitate that kind of begging. It turned out that no amount of begging could overcome the music snobbery we were about to witness.
“Nnnnoooo, I’m not going to hee-ave you playing that garbage! It’s bee-ad enough I hee-ave to hear it and see it all dee-ay long as it is. I will not buy thee-at book for you. Nice try though.”
Crushed! Devastated! If my sister wasn’t crying on the outside, she was on the inside. Try as they might, my boy arms lacked the strength to lift her out of her misery.
-Fast forward to the next lesson-
Guess who showed up with the sheet music book for the New Kids’ latest album “Step By Step”? Mrs. Misty Bolton. This was a bad idea. She obviously had not spent much time in our house. Suffice it to say, my mom was not happy. And so after my mom let Mrs. Baldwin know she wasn’t happy, she made my sister pay for it out of her piddly allowance and then she took the book away and hid it. No piano of hers was going to play the New Kids’ music, and no piano teacher was going to defy her wishes!!
Well, there you have it. My first experience with censorship.
What’s that? You thought I was supposed to be explaining how this experience led me to believe censorship was murder?
But don’t you see? I just did. My mother censored the “Step By Step” album. You still don’t understand? Okay. Okay, quick reminder then. How did the New Kids follow their “Step By Step” album? Don’t remember? That’s because the New Kids on the Block never released another original studio album. By the time those five guys did release another original studio album, they weren’t the New Kids on the Block anymore. They were NKOTB. Still not with me? Fully connecting the dots now– a simple writing assignment in which I was asked to defend my original thesis, that censorship is murder, led me to stumble upon the frightening revelation that the New Kids on the Block died after my mom censored their “Step By Step” album. Therefore, my mom killed them in an act of what appears to be cold-blooded murder! This is the same woman who raised me to do the right thing and all these years she’s been hiding this secret! She, too, must pay for her crime. And I have to turn her in. But how do I turn in my own mom??!
I guess, I’ll just have to take it step… by… step.
Captain’s Log 