Mrs. Easily-Impressed. And she wonders why she's stressed.

The other day I had a conversation with a classmate of mine, a young lady who like so many others is quite busy attempting to navigate the vapid waters of mate-selection. Sensing that I might get a humorous, or just plain sad response, I decided to submit a few questions to her to get her feelings on that whole body of matters. She began to tell me among other things, how hard it is for a girl to find a decent guy. Such a popular tune these days, but I can't help but wonder if we should be dividing the responsibility of this plight equally between the sexes.
She then began to share with me the reasons behind the evolution of the lines of questioning which she puts forth to her new suitors as a kind of pre-screen process to see if they are suitable as potential mates. While I can't say that her questions didn't make sense for a girl to ask, what struck me was the way she proceeded through her checklist. She went through her check-off process for me while tapping off the plus-marks with her fingers: has a job, no kids, no wife, no felonies, "has a vehicle." Wow.
I was really proud of myself for successfully containing my thoughts and not giving away my amusement and disappointment with my facial expressions as I usually do. I understand that these are naturally things one should look for in a potential mate, but as I understand it, these things should be more along the lines of requirements than preferences. As such, a girl cannot award a guy bonus points for satisfying them.
That kind of logic would cripple the worldwide economy if it were applied in other arenas. In the academic world, it would be the equivalent of a teacher giving an A to everyone who passed the class. In the professional world, just showing up to the interview in a suit and bringing your resume would entitle you to employment. Drop by your local Seven-Eleven, ask for a lottery ticket and scribble in the first numbers that pop into your head, and Voila! You win the lottery everyday. The words spoken to me by the soon-to-be Mrs. "No Felonies" made no more sense than any of that.
I understand the whole 'it's so hard to find a good one' litany. But don't make it harder on yourself by being a fucking half-wit. Stop buying into the hype, we all know it's easier to sport the popular excuse and bitch about it later. But there's always a method to achieving the end. And on a sidenote, you must be realistic too. Not that this necessarily applied in this case, but some people's standards are just too high. If you're a blue-blooded, all-american Ford, understand you're probably not gonna be able to trick a Ferrari into parking next to you. It sucks, but this is the order of things. If everyone understands reality, and just uses their brain periodically, we'd all be amazed at the problems we could solve.

Red Flags and Automatic DQs

I believe every person ought to have in their arsenal for evaluating potential girlfriends/boyfriends/future spouses, a few of what I like to call automatic disqualifiers. I'm all for giving people a chance to show themselves, and even to make up for mistakes that they have made, but some shit is just too much to take. For me personally, there are a few things that a girl can say to me that will overshadow any other desirable traits she has, and lead me to conclude that I cannot entertain her any longer than I already have. Some stuff goes without saying (for example being told by a girl that she would be interested in sex with two-men at a time) however there are some that can slip by a little easier I think. Here are just a few of the ones that really stick out in my head.

*Explicit language that may be inappropriate for some contained herein*

If a girl ever tries to describe what kind of guy she likes and says anything like, "I want a smart guy, but with a little thug in him...." Leave, quickly.

If during any part of a girl's "game", she references pop music, she's done. Case in point, a few years back during the 50 Cent rage, in the early stages of speaking to this one particular girl, she put forth, "Can I ask you 21 questions?" To which one can only respond, "No, you corny bitch! Feel free to go to hell, though."

If a girl makes it known to me that at any point in her sexual life she found it appropriate to act in an intentional manner, thereby consenting to her male sex-partner secreting ejaculatory fluids onto her facial region, so help me God, this asswipe's life is over as far as I'm concerned. Any time a girl lets this happen, her soul leaves her body for good, and never comes back. Please don't have children.

Along the same lines, I've been told by a credible associate that his experience dictates wariness of girls with nose-rings, I imagine the same goes with other sorts of exotic piercings that merit red-flags.

Additions will be made as they arise.

but a dream

If we could all control the past, there would be nothing left for the present. We're all basically nihilists in the face of conflict.
It has been said that life is but a dream, for the first time in my life I started to understand exactly what that means on my way home from the bar with some friends tonight.
I pulled up into the garage in my car. The garage was empty because my parents went out of town for the weekend. It was 1:30 in the morning, so it was pretty much dark outside of the silent ambiance of my headlights as I rose up the hill of the driveway and eased my less-than-sober ass into the garage. It was then that I saw this mark on the door directly in front of the parking space where my father's car is usually parked, but since they were gone I parked there myself. I saw this vertical rectangular puncture wound in the door to the storage room that sits right in front of the parking spot, and I instantly remembered the day I put that mark in that door with my first car, the car I inherited from my grandmother, a 1987 Buick Century. That car is long gone. My grandmother has long since taken her last breath. But the imprint of both of them in my memory is still quite vibrant, and it all came rushing back to me at 1:30 on a Sunday morning after a night of Jameson and ginger ales, and a few beers.
I remembered how it happened. I was in high school, 16 years old, shortly after I got my license when I pulled into the garage a little faster than I needed to as I arrived home from school one night. I guess driving faster than I needed to made me feel cool.
As I sat there, contemplating the events of a random night of drinks and conversation some nine years later, I looked to my right at the empty spot next to me where my mother's car is usually parked. There was nothing there on this night because they were out of town, but I remembered. Not my mother's car as it is now, but her old car, the minivan.
I remembered pulling into the garage in high school and looking to my right and seeing that old 1993 Dodge Caravan parked right there. It had been years since my mother got rid of that thing, but it stuck with me, probably because I spent so much time in it. And as I sat in my '91 Honda Accord this late-spring night in 2007, I could still see that minivan parked in my mother's spot. I could see the missing hub-cap that she didn't give a damn about because they're just for decoration and she couldn't see them anyway while she was driving. I saw that tarnished burgundy interior, worn from so many years of children and carpooling and rides home being berated about homework that would surely never be done, smelling of soccer cleats and football pads and fast-food crumbs decomposing in the cracks between the back-seat cushions. I saw that life that seemed so distant but ineffaceable, tormenting the present with visions of its own subdued hilarity as if to say, 'those good 'ol days will never be back', even though I never thought of them as that exactly at the time.
As I sat there in the Honda, smelling the beer and liquor still wafting from my own mouth, I wondered if I could have ever imagined that things would unfold this way as my 16-year-old self sat in that Buick wondering if my parents would ever notice that rectangular gash I had freshly tattooed on their house, and how they would punish me if they ever connected it to my actions. It's funny how the present repeats itself. I sat wondering then, just as I did tonight. Only the substance changed. Things were so much simpler then. So long ago, but not long enough for me to have forgotten. So real, but hopelessly lost and gone forever, just like everything else about the past.
Life is but a dream. Once it's over, you can't have it back, even though you have no idea that you would ever want it back at the time. I guess we're just supposed to try. Try to treat it like dream from which we've suddenly just awaken, and all we want to do is go back to sleep so we can start it all over again, and maybe this time have some input on the ending.

Now for the 2nd L

Today I took an exam in Criminal Procedure, which officially brought to a close the dreaded first-year of law school. I should feel elated, or satisfied, or relieved or something, but instead, I feel anxious. It will be another 3 weeks or so before I learn the results of my efforts that will ultimately have a significant bearing on the job that I am able to acquire when I graduate. This process is very obnoxious. I don't really know what else to say or do but I felt like I had to say or do something, other than purchasing my celebratory case of beer which historically I need very little motivation to do. The moral of the story is if I can do this; finish a year of classes in which I was saddled with weekly reading responsibilities often topping out at over 200 pages per week, and somehow manage to maintain what little sanity I had left to begin with, whatever endeavors that you have for those of you finding yourselves reading this entry, if you're going to put them off, don't do it out of fear that you can't get it done. Lord knows I'm just about the laziest, most unmotivated, slacking, procrastinating excuse for an academic I know, so if I can do this, anybody can do just about anything. Fear not, cause there is always worse. You could be taking a 3 hour essay exam evaluating the likelihood of a fictional statute surviving four different stages of judicial review, that counts for your entire grade in a course that you have no idea what you're doing in. Whatever you're aspiring to do, get it moving.

Snowden's Secret

"I'm cold," Snowden moaned. "I'm cold."
"You're going to be all right kid," Yossarian assured him, patting his arm comfortingly. "Everything's under control."
"I'm cold," he repeated, with eyes as dull as stone.
"There, there. In a little while we'll be back on the ground and Doc Daneeka will take care of you."

Snowden then managed, with the barest movement of his chin, to point towards his armpit. Yossarian bent forward to peer and saw a strangely colored stain seeping through Snowden's flak suit. Yossarian felt his heart stop, then pound so violently he found it difficult to breathe. Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped open the straps of the suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down onto the floor in a pile and just kept dripping out. A chunk of flak three inches big had shot into his chest and blasted all the way through him. Yossarian screamed a second time as he squeezed both hands over his eyes.

He forced himself to look again. Here was God's plenty, he thought bitterly as he stared - liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the fried tomatoes Snowden had eaten for lunch. Yossarian hated tomatoes and turned away and began to vomit. The tail gunner came round while Yossarian was vomiting, then passed out again. Weak and in despair Yossarian turned back to Snowden and wondered how in the world to begin to save him.
"I'm cold," whimpered Snowden softly.
"There, there," Yossarian mumbled mechanically. He was cold too now and shivering uncontrollably as he gazed down at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message. Man was matter...Drop him out the window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.

this side of Even

A lot of people have their own ideas about what is really left of humanity when boiled down to its simplest elements.
I am of the opinion that when it comes down to people's individual feelings about their own lives, when they are standing on the threshold of death's door, finally relenting to that pressure to commence the inevitable 'knock', there are only three essential feelings that one can have about their life. There are those that feel even, and those that feel like they've landed on one side or the other.
I think that in their most private moments; perhaps in their bedroom every night before they go to sleep, or maybe in the bathroom for those who share a bedroom with someone, or maybe it's in the car on the way home from work, or out on a peaceful late-night drive where they feel the most socially liberated, that the bulk of people really focus most on the instances of life where they have felt slighted. Not that they necessarily blame anyone for it, maybe they feel it's their own fault. But just from my own general observations, I think that there are more people that feel like they should have had more, than there are of the opposite.
Personally, if my life were to end today, I would feel like I have definitely gotten more than I have given. Not to say that I haven't given anything, but only lately am I beginning to earn a sense of what I really am capable of giving back, and I feel late.
I know it seems morose, but I often think about what my life will have meant when I shut my eyes for the last time. When I die, I don't want the preacher to have to lie about me. But sometimes, I'm just unsure about exactly what I have to do in my remaining time in order that I not die on this side of even.
In a rather odd twist of egotism and irony, I feel like everyone should want to die at zero. Or maybe even at a loss, if for no other reason than to ensure that someone else has the opportunity to go up one, hopefully only to realize the same thing that I think I'm slowly learning. We can't all have it all. But we should want those that come after us to at least have the choice.

Perception, Screensavers, Dead-End Streets, and Our biggest obligation as I see it

I know this one person who has as one of their favorite just-kidding-type lines, "All that really matters is what's going on in my head. (chuckle-chuckle)." No chuckle-chuckle, this is what you really think. But how can this be? But I give this person credit, because at least they admit it. I think most people really think like this, sadly. But how can a responsible adult function and accomplish anything of substance if they really perceive things in this manner? But what's particularly vexing to me about this one line is that I have always endorsed the obvious philsophical maxim that perception is reality. Just because it has to be.
Our perceptions are the only vehicle through which information from the outside world can be transported into our consciousness. But just because this is true doesn't mean that all that matters is what transpires once this transaction has occurred. We are all obligated I think, to consider before anything else, the likelihood of our own error. We were given consciousness because it is an extremely powerful tool, perhaps the most powerful tool available to any creature that has ever existed. In religious terms, it's simply the blessing that we were given that makes everything else that we do possible. This is the tool we were given to understand our world, and what do we do with it, but disregard it. We let it sit there on idle, like a computer when nobody's using it, until the screensaver comes on, which is just a prelude to the monitor just turning itself all the way off. Why is this? We perceive things, they come into our minds on this nice, smoothly paved road for us to do anything we want, anything we can with it, and what does it become but a dead-end street? We have to do better than that. We have to be able to understand things from outside of our own skull. If we don't, then it's all just a waste, we're using the gift we've been given to reduce ourselves to that which we were supposed to grow past. Aren't we all obligated to do something? Anything. Just not that. You can't let it go on screensaver and forget where it's all coming from and how it got there. And you can't forget that other people have this same tool, but there might be a little different than yours. This is where I think the majority of human conflict arises, people just trying to impose their own perceptions on other people as if this is how they ought to be. But we can't say that, because you can never see things exactly like another person does. I hate sounding like an after-school special, but some things just have to be understood, and we're still failing to grasp them.

A pet-peeve, and an old joke...

Theres an old joke that is frequently attributed to Groucho Marx, but I believe it originally appears in Freud's Wit and it's Relation to the Unconscious, and it goes like this;
I would never want to belong to any club that would have a person like me for a member.
This is a paraphrased excerpt from the opening monologue of one of my favorite movies, Annie Hall. I chose to write about this not because of the joke, but because of the source, 'wit and it's relation to the unconscious' made me think.
One of my pet-peeves is when people are so uncomfortable with disclosing the nature of their true thoughts that they feel compelled to postscribe it to their sense of humor with the insensitivity curbing catch-all phrase, "Just Kidding." In my experience, the most appropriate response to give when someone says this to you is, "No, you're not". And I know you're not, why are you going to insult my intelligence like that?
The point that I am trying to make is that humor has an undeniable tie to our own feelings, because it comes from them. So when we say things to others that we feel the need to disguise as humor when we're really not kidding at all, it should give us all pause, and we should wonder, why are we so bothered by our own feelings, or more specifically by other people's reactions to our own honest feelings about things? If you're not comfortable saying it, then why is it coming out of your mouth to begin with? Or even better, if it's coming out of your mouth, and you really believe it, how can you possibly be uncomfortable with it?
I just think everything would be much better if people we're able to just grow up and roll with it. If you need to say something, stick behind it, don't pitter-patter. Or try thinking before you talk. If you have to tip-toe with it, maybe you really don't need to be saying it in the first place. These are just my thoughts.

.....She Don't Wanna Be Saved

A story was recently related to me about this young man, and his trials and tribulations with his new/probably should have never been bride. I have never met this gentleman, but his story was told to me in rather intimate detail. He recently met and married this girl who is an Hispanic immigrant. She is in her early twenties, and has a 3 year old child from a previous relationship. She was working in the US, a blue-collar, hourly wage job as many first generation immigrants do when they first arrive. I can only imagine the circumstances under which he met her, but as you will see as this story unfolds, I'm sure there were signs everywhere just waiting to be read, and our poor protagonist, like so many before him, was illiterate.
Cut to a few months after the wedding, a scene in the bedroom. The new bride, perhaps in efforts to spice up their already sagging sex life, (which in and of itself is terrible after only a short time being married), she begins to make sexual requests. Much like being at a party on the dancefloor, once you get tired of hearing the same songs on repeat, you ask the DJ to spin some of your personal favorites. In this case, her sexual favorites ran into the bizarre. Requests ranged from mid-coitus punchings in the stomach, to violent face-slapping. Of course, the groom complies, however reluctantly. "I feel like a weirdo" he remarked to his friend as he was relating this episode.
He feels like a weirdo?
This same young lady, upon being notified of her new husbands deployment with the military that will take him away from home for a while says to him in broken english, "Use condoms if you cheat on me."
"That's hot..." he remarks to his friend once again. "She's mad cool about that kind of stuff..."
I would like to meet this young man, so that I could punch him in his stomach.
This kind of shit is precisely why girls think boys are idiots. I guess he was so turned on in the heat of the moment, he didn't stop to ponder how a young lady would discover an interest in such things as being beaten during sex.
Or the corresponding number of men with which she likely slept before encountering one who was so intending to punch her in her stomach, whereupon she discovered that she enjoyed being degraded during sex.
Or the fact that any wife who effectively gives her consent to her husband cheating on her, is most definitely doing the same to him, regardless of his efforts to rationalize the opposite.
The moral of the story is this: she was an immigrant girl, trying to get by with a small child, who felt so comfortable with a young, silly American-male that she hardly knew, that she decided to marry him.
The signs are everywhere, just take a moment to read them, and save the world the trouble of having to deal with the consequences....
Don't save her.

The Ladder of Idiocy

Everybody has the potential to be an idiot. Because that is the lowest possible level of human achievement. Everybody starts at the ground floor where we're born, but as you experience and learn more you get stronger, and you can use that strength to move your way up the ladder.
Some of us are capable of climbing further than the others, and some who aren't as well endowed of intellect can make their way up through good-old fashioned hard work. But one way or the other, if you're going to climb the ladder, you have to be strong enough to do it.
Its obviously easier to stay at the bottom, you don't even have to break a sweat if you do, that's why some never leave the bottom. But the more intriguing phenomenon is when people voluntarily climb down.
Climbing down is always easier to, all you really have to do is let go of your perch and gravity will take care of the rest. But instead of a rough landing on unforgiving ground like what happens in real life, at the bottom of the ladder of idiocy is a nice cushy pillow of absent-mindedness and non-thought. So many people feel at home on this pillow it's disturbing.
I think a lot of this pervasive idiocy has to do with the fact that we reinforce it constantly. TV and the internet are designed to make money for someone. And that someone knows what they are doing, they are catering to the basest level of the ladder, because that's the one with the biggest potential audience since that's the default setting and most of us are down there already. And if the people further up feel tempted to check out what all the noise is down there, all they have to do is let go of the ladder and gravity will bring them right down, front and center in the auditorium of nonsense.
But what happens is that when we come down to the ground and look at the TV or the internet or whatever, we see this reinforcement to our own idiocy.This allows us to make assumptions about our own relative intelligence. If you watch a bunch of stupidity on TV, and all of your friends do too, then it becomes normal for you. It gets to the point where you forget that you can climb.
To me, it's not acceptable to sit idly on your hands just because it's easier, and it's even worse if you are one of the people jumping off of the high rungs of the ladder to test out that pillow at the bottom. Yea it's comfortable, because it's easy, and it allows you to turn your brain off. But if you are capable of being near the top of the ladder, that's where you need to be going. Doing anything else just can't be acceptable. Fuck that pillow!

4th Time Around

When she said,
"Don't waste your words, they're just lies,"
I cried she was deaf.
And she worked on my face until breaking my eyes,
Then said, "What else you got left?"
It was then that I got up to leave
But she said, "Don't forget,
Everybody must give something back
For something they get."

As long as I can remember, I've never wanted to be a taker. I think it's because I've been given so much, it just seems selfish. I am fortunate. My family has been able to give me so much more than some ever see. I can't just take it and run. I have to turn it into something for someone else. When a tree grows in the forest, it takes everything it needs to become a tree from the soil it lives in, and from the water that falls around it. When that tree's life is over, it falls to the ground and rots, giving back everything it took, so that the next generation can start off a little better than the last. Some people want to penalize you for advantages that you've been given where they haven't. Those people are fighting the wrong battle, their greatest enemy is their own self. Those that know better can look past this and see only their goal. My goal is to give something back for everything that I have got.

And, when I was through
I filled up my shoe
And brought it to you.
And you, you took me in,
You loved me then
You didn't waste time.
And I, I never took much,
I never asked for your crutch.
Now don't ask for mine.
- Bobby Zimmerman

"Reality TV" Or How I learned to stop worrying and love commercials.

What is MTV really for? And it's not just MTV, BET (same thing), most TV in fact. I pick on these two because they're particularly terrible. Beyond the fact that they don't really show music videos anymore, I just don't get it. Music videos aren't anything worth watching these days either but still, at least that limited the amount of nonsense your brain could take in to about 3 minute intervals.
The Real World?
Road Rules?
Flavor of Love?
I Love New York? Are you kidding me?

This is what they're trying to sell me now? And I do mean sell. You can tell so much about the programming that you're watching by just taking a look at the commercials. Next time you flip to one of these channels (which I hope you never do again in life) take a look at the products and services that they're trying to sell you during the commercials. Even assuming it is a worthwhile product which it almost never is, look at how they try to do it. I used to see one commercial imploring me to send a text message to some number, and they will send me back a HAHA joke-of-the-day!
What?
Or the classic, send a text message to this number to get on Lex Luthor's email buddy list. Do you know how long it previously was since I had heard the name Lex Luthor? And now, as I enter adulthood, they want me to pay to send them a text message so they can flood my inbox with mail from a fictional comic book character. And it's funny because commercials require companies to spend money. And they don't spend money unless they intend to get it back. Which means that somewhere, on this spinning blue marble of ineptitude we call earth, and specifically in the US, someone is texting these people, and telling their friends the joke of the day because this is the best answer they have come up with.
We can't be serious, everyone is slowly becoming the joke of the day. I'm just trying not to be the punchline.