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Let's get a few credentials out of the way. I have a bachelor's degree in Communication from a top university and was able to graduate with a 3.7 gpa according to my resume. I do not consider myself an intellectual giant by any means, in fact I often surprise myself with how lame my mind can be at times. Somtimes I can't even concentrate enough to listen to someone's story and then I turn around and ask a question that they just answered if only my dumb-ass was listening. At that point, I appear very stupid. Nevertheless, on the whole I remain above average in intelligence which makes the following complaint a legitimate one.
I was at a party recently and this little girl (daughter of the hosts) couldn't have been more than 5 years old. She was enrolled at some Julliard caliber music school here in Manhattan and had accomplished musicians for parents. So she's probably a little smarter and advanced than the average 5 yr-old. But that is no excuse for what ensued. Not knowing her and having a liking for well-behaved children (emphasis on well-behaved, I'm not a afraid to smack a child that's not mine in public), I decided to make small talk with her. Upon finding out that she had recently lost a tooth, I playfully asked, "Oh that's good...did the tooth fairy come for you?"
Now I think I'm about to score huge points and perhaps get a warm hug from an adorable child. Not so. She adjusts her mood and tone, points her finger at me and says, "I happen to know for a fact that there's no such thing as the tooth fairy." My own psychological reaction was that of a perplexing change, something like, "Yeeeeaaahhhh...I'm gonna go ahead and ask you not to make me look stupid in front of the other guests."
Here I am, a grown man, trying to get on board with some goodwill towards a child, and she comes back with a factual correction and makes me look like a jackass in front of everyone? I'm not having that. My actual reaction was that I shut up right then and there and went back to whatever cheese spread I was eating, desperately hoping that no one saw me get schooled by a 5 yr-old prodigy who apparently can't have any fun.
However, my gut reaction was simply to respond, "Okay, no tooth fairy...fine. How bout this economy we're in right now? Your thoughts? Personally I think it's a fiscal problem with too much guesswork being done by greedy bankers, and the exchange of dead assets from the gov't back into the private sector is not the solution. What do you think?.......What's that?........Oh that's right, you don't know shit about economics! Maybe you should have stuck with the tooth fairy when I gave you the opportunity. Now get out of here, go skin your knee so that I have some indication that you're an actual child."
What kind of child at age 5 is not on board with the tooth fairy? And how am I, a reasonable adult, supposed to know that she's not? But because I wasn't, I got shown-up in front of all the other guests. I wanted to throw her ass into the top part of her grand piano, then close the top and have a fat friend sit on it while I knock out a little Linus and Lucy on the keys.
There's such a thing as being too smart for your own good when you'e that young. If it were a little boy, that's the kind of kid that's gonna end up getting an F in P.E., because his parents couldn't correct his physical growth well enough to keep him from striking out in kickball (a shameful thing). Needless to say, he'll be picked last every time on the field/court and even at that he'll often be asked to "sit this one out."
So a lesson to every parent and every child prodigy...If I say there's a tooth fairy, and you're 5 years old......there's a tooth fairy. End of discussion.
I'll fully admit that in reading a fellow blogger's recent post I was inspired to take off a bit on the same concept...Food Network shows. This is a fascinating phenomenon that has happened in television over the last 6 years or so. I think it's fabulous, especially on the plane when there's otherwise not much else to watch.
I'm a fan of cooking myself and fancy myself above average for a bachelor. Granted, I have a serious girlfriend now so that has been incentive to sharpen my skills and is generally a good motivator to cook. And so it's riveting to watch some of these TV chefs work and concoct things that I've never even thought about. Those individuals are true artists and deserve their own show I suppose.
But what I want to rant on for a bit are the people like Rachel Ray and Guy Fieri who appear to only be able to make food for kids who are on there way to fat camp. I was watching Rachel Ray not too long ago because my only other options were literally Dude Where's My Car and Meatballs 2 (the first one is a classic...let it be said). So I'm watching her do her thing, and on that particular day she was throwing together some kind of tac0-stuffed Pizza rolls; wherein you take the ingredients of a taco, put it on pizza and roll it up! And then it hit me....this woman cooks her own trash. She's been able to make a great living coming up with food for hung-over people. It's like her philosophy is to take 2 awful foods, combine them and come up with some concoction that only a 7 yr old would do on accident. I can see her coming back from a commercial right now....
"Welcome back to THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.....we're in the middle of making chili bratwurst dogs topped with tater tots and macaroni salad. This is an old recipe that my mom had from when she looked in her trash can one day..."
That's exactly what she should be saying. Is it just me, or do you have to be a sophomore at Devry holding down a part-time job at a hardware store to enjoy her recipes?
Guy Fieri is not much better. Although he gets a few extra points for not taking two foods that don't go together and trying to create some drunken hybrid version. At least he's not coming back from break saying "Okay...so today we're gonna take some corn beef hash and make a salad with it!" Nevertheless, there's a reason he does the TGI Friday's commercials...that's all he can do apparently. I'm all for wings and chicken kebabs and taquitos. But even he stretches the line with something called a Jambalaya sandwich. I order this all the time..."Yeah, I'm gonna get the Jambalaya sandwich...only hold the bread cuz as it turns out, I'm not mentally disabled."
I appreciate what these people are trying to do.....slack off in the kitchen and essentially get by on a fairly nice pair of breasts or a ridiculous looking bleached spikey hair-do. If that's what it takes to get my own cooking show and put together meals that E.T. could muster with his 3 fingers on each hand, then consider me a viable candidate. I just need to work on the spikey blonde hair-do.
Don't let the title fool you, I'm definitely working all five days this week and it's a crying shame. But that's why I'd like to suggest a re-assessment of how our current work week is laid out. I really don't know the story of how we collectively agreed to work 5 days a week, while only taking 2 for rest and calling it our weekend. I'm a huge fan of rest, a man of leisure, if you will. I don't consider myself lazy by any means, I just know how to relax when it's time to relax. Which is why I think everyone should consider banding together and re-formulating our work week from 5 days to 4.
It seems arbitrary to me that 5 days is the optimal amount of days to work. Very few of us have the luxury of working whenever we want; most of us are forced to adhere to a system that insists on us being up in the morning on Monday and being miserable until at least 2pm that day. I say, "why continue this nonsense?". I think from now on Mondays should be the new Sundays and then we go back to work on Tuesday and work til Friday. Far from being equally arbitrary, there are some good reasons to suggest this. The first is obvious, now we're looking at 3-day weekends all the time. Who in this miserable spectrum we call "corporate America" doesn't look forward to a 3-day weekend? The answer is nobody...we all do. Thus, it seems linear and rational to adjust accordingly and make that the new work-week.
Another reason is the nature and "personality" of a Tuesday as opposed to a Monday. Everyone hates Mondays, but I don't know of one person who has beef with Tuesdays. Tuesday has the most neutral image and personality of any day of the week. We don't look forward to a Tuesday necessarily, but nor do we hate it; thus making it the perfect day to kick off our work-week. No one wants to "go in" on a day that they hate, and neither do we wish to "go in" on a day that we like. Tuesday is the perfect day to start work. With this new implementation of attitude toward days of the week, we find ourselves in an agreeable shift pattern. With the 4-day work week, we no longer feel the creeping stress on Sunday nights in thinking about the next morning. Consequentially, we no longer dread Mondays and yet as an added bonus, our love and appreciation for Fridays remains in tact. This is a win-win proposition; one worth serious consideration.
Another viable reason (for me at least) is that HBO has some stellar programming late at night that keeps a man up later than he'd wish to stay up given that the next day he must go back to work. I'm not talking "cinemax late", I mean that if I want to catch Eastbown and Down to end my weekend, daddy has to stay up til 10:30, which isn't that late, but it kind of is for most people. Thankfully I have DVR.
So I would like to start a movement in American culture that has us sleeping late on Mondays knowing full-well that Tuesday--a day marked by attitudinal neutrality--will be the start of our week. Of course one might critique this philosophy by stating that this will only shift the aforementioned anxieties and problems forward one day...Monday will become the new Sunday and Tuesday will become the new Monday. But I remind my critics to keep one last crucial argument in mind.......this is just a blog!
Tonight, I'm proud to say (yes...proud) that I'm going to see Fleetwood Mac at MSG. This will be a great event for me, not so much because it's Fleetwood Mac, even though they're a phenomenal band, but because it gives me a chance to watch a very select group of people perform for thousands of other not-so-select people and allows me a chance to reflect on the wrong choices I made in my career. Music is an integral part of my life, it has moved me from a very young age, especially bands from the "classic" genre. But you see, I'm sitting here writing a blog at my sorry and pathetic administrative job, and Lyndsey Buckingham is 4 hours from going on stage and making his guitar squeal like a stuck pig in one of the most notorious venues in the world.
When I see that kind of thing, I immediately regret my decision to go to college. I should have stayed in my garage and mastered a musical instrument, formed a band, and then hit the road telling everything and anything else to piss off. Truthfully I had this desire at some point, but it came at around age 20.....it's hard to get good at a musical instrument when you start that late. As they say, it's much easier to learn music and languages (which is essentially what music is) at a younger age. Nonetheless, I formed a band in college called Zero Gravity, we practiced and practiced and had the fortunate success of opening for my dick at my buddy's backyard in front of 9 people. When the adrenalin wore off, we played for a solid hour and a half and much to our surprise apparently Zero Gravity was able to garner zero appreciation and a musical career that equaled zero. But it was worth every minute of it!
Now if you're sitting there thinking that I secretly wish I would have become a rock star....let me just say, there's no secret about it. I think it's just about the best career one could have, assuming you don't end up main-lining Jack Daniel's into your neck to get high. Then again...don't knock it....etc. So when I go to see a concert of one of my favorite bands, it's a love/hate relationship. I love the experience and yet hate those bastards for succeeding when I'm stuck here blogging about Ronnie James Dio knocking heads off at the Beacon Theater some time ago. Don't misunderstand me please, I'm not bitter. I just want to share the stage with Eddie Van Halen and pretend I can sing like David Coverdale. I'm the kind of guy who upon hearing a great rock song, would play air drums in front of my girlfriend's family at Thanksgiving dinner (first time meeting them) with my knife and fork and possibly attempt a drumstick twirl only to have it end up flying into her grandma's eye! Of course I'd feel terrible that it happened, but I will NOT apologize for "feelin' it".
And so hear I sit at the end of my work day anxiously awaiting to see 4-5 people doing what I wished I was doing for a living. Hell, not even for a living, just for a chance to redeem my sad performance in that friggin' backyard.
Off to the concert I go.
Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day and I did nothing. My historical knowledge of certain holidays is pretty meager except for the obvious big holidays like Flag Day and Bastille Day....I'll go on all day about those. It is rather fascinating to me that people take major license to celebrate something they either know little to nothing about, or it doesn't apply to them (Cinco De Mayo) and then simultaneously use the holiday to get really drunk and act like a fool.
Don't get me wrong, there was about 4 straight years when I got drunk and acted like a fool every weekend...the glory days, if you will (okay maybe 6 straight years). However it was on days such as St. Patty's day and New Years Eve that I opted to not join the herd of jack-offs drinking themselves silly and generally being a menace to society. This might sound a little elitist, a bit too cool for school perhaps? If that's what you think, then let me give you some examples of how cool I can be. Instead of joining the frolicking masses in their "amateur hour" celebratory shenanigans, I might instead sit at home with my own six pack for a chance to watch Teen Wolf for the 123rd time. Or let's say I was tempted to "come out" that night with some friends, but randomly I noticed that Roadhouse is gonna be on TBS in less than an hour.......well, guess who's about to cancel? I'm sorry, but a sixie coupled with Swayze ripping throats out and getting hot ass along the way is about as good a night as I can think of. Obviously these are not options to brag about for most people, they are only cited to illustrate how uncool I can be relative to the people who think it's cool to rage on St. Patrick's Day. I simply choose not to be a part of it.
I went out to Hoboken, NJ one week ago completely unaware that for some idiotic reason, they choose to celebrate St. Patty's Day over a week before the holiday. So when I got to the station to get on a train, I was immediately depressed and at the same time impressed to see the tool factory that the PATH station had turned into that morning. Immediately I thought to myself, "I'm gonna murder someone....it's only a matter of time." Half drunk girls wearing ridiculous headwear, popped collar frat boys huddling together talking about their strategy of how they're gonna push everyone out of the way and bomb rush the first available train car when the doors open. I've never wanted to pour gasoline on people and light them on fire until that morning.
When I finally came up to the streets of Hoboken, I was surprised to see that Rutger's had apparently dumped its entire freshmen class in a state of drunkenness on to the town....it was noon by the way. I spent most of my walk looking at the zoo animals and making horrible judgements in my head about each of them thinking, "I wonder who took their Valtrex today.......moreover, I wonder who's gonna need to start taking Valtrex after today." This of course reminded me that I needed to take my Valtrex, so I did and quickly stopped judging everyone else. I ended up getting a forty and passing out in a bush with one shoe.
So happy belated St. Patrick's Day everyone, stay inside next time. Maybe you can join me for Stallone in Cliffhanger!
This is the first blog I've ever done and the first time writing in this first blog. So that's a first...I guess that's what I'm trying to say. I'm a fairly opinionated guy and like most writers, I'm not afraid to call a spade a spade; which is probably what this blog will mostly be about.
As a comedian and a hack actor, I spend most of my time observing the nuances and little things in life, some that matter and some that don't. It's the latter that I specialize in. For instance, I can name all five current and past members of the band Journey. I can also spew out the starting five and the bench players for the Chicago Bulls in the early 90's. I also notice the frustration when a hair stylist is cutting my hair too short and for some reason I don't have the balls to speak up and correct him/her.
These are things that I notice and point out. Do I know what's going on with the economy right now? Yes. Can I explained how it happened? Hell no. But I do know that Nick Cage had a very small role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (at the time, he was Nicholas Coppola).
You see what I mean people? This is my blog, these are the things I'll be writing about. And there's pretty much nothing you can do about it.
So enjoy!
