Welcome back to my Dime Store; Humorous tales are located on the right, wisdom on the left–each priced according to demand. Today’s merchandise comes imported from my wife’s latest blog “Child’s Play.” In her last blog, she reminisced on her writing career thus far and offered to her patrons some examples of writing exercises that have worked for her in the past. That got me thinking a little about what I have learned throughout my tenure as an aspiring writer. While I don’t think I’ve learned nearly what she has, certainly, I could not come up with four or more writing exercises to help my patrons in their quest, I have learned one minor thing and one very important thing. Each may only apply to me and my mental struggle with creativity, but I’m banking that someone somewhere will benefit from these two granules of advice.
The first bit of advice, is very bland and generic–at least I think so–and it is this: Always know what you’re going to write before you begin to write it. Have all your secrets, revelations and explanations plotted out. From the very beginning of my attempts at writing back when I was ten and up until now, I’ve constantly made the mistake of writing without truly knowing where I was going with the story and the results where disastrous. Most manuscript were never even completed, left abandoned in a drawer or in some obscure file in an old computer, never to be reopened.
Not thinking things through can lead to some colossal blunders in plot and consistency. For example, one of my earliest attempts at writing–and please remember that I was eleven years old–narrated the death of a character via a heart attack made mysterious by his still beating heart. Yeah, I really didn’t think that one through, but I needed the death to be questionable and since I hadn’t planned ahead, that was what my eleven year old mind came up with. Another infamous–in my mind anyway–literary blunder was a story which I wrote at age twelve in an attempt to create my own The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I had a premise that I wanted to get across to the reader but had no idea how to do so, but I kept writing anyway. The premise was of a fantastical world in which wars fought with the mind and battles were won not by the strongest but by the most mentally deft. What I wrote was a world in which a giant snake-looking creature and a bird-man, played chess on a battlefield instead of trying to kill one another. I WAS TWELVE!!! I knew then that I was going in the wrong direction but I kept pushing through instead of taking the time to think about how to fix the story and get it back on track.
TANGENT: Who is this Justin Bieber? What deal has he made with the devil to suddenly be propelled to the forefront of fame? How is this Canadian Bacon Bit getting enough juice to cause a pre-teen riot in malls? His album just drop a week ago and I’ve been hearing about him for months. How does that work? And more importantly, how do I get my hands on that magical lamp, that monkey’s paw, that cursed artifact that will allow me to become a national treasure in the blink of an eye? Cuz, I’ll do it. I’ll make that wish, I’ll push that button, I’ll take that blood pact, if it means I can achieve a fraction of that little booger’s notoriety.
Back to the point: Maybe not all of you have that problem. Maybe other people can hold the idea and all its twist and turns in their head in an abstract form and just write it out, figuring out the problems as they go along. I am not one of those people. I need to have it all worked out before I start the story. But before I even work out the kinks of the story, I have to have a story to unkink, which brings me to my second bit of advice, and this is the important one: You should always feel connected to what you’re writing. It should mean something to you. That connection will be an anchor that will keep your heart returning to that story when everything else is trying to force you away from it.
I’ve had some amazing stories in my head that have gone nowhere because I couldn’t find a connection to them. And what I realized now is that my whole life, my entire collection of works will most likely boil down to four stories. Three of which I’ve already completed and am in the process of revising or rewriting. The theme–the heart–of each story is as follows: Sibling rivalry; Losing the innocence of youth; Wanting to heal the emotional wounds of loved ones; Fighting for a destiny that is not meant to be. These four themes constitute the messages I’ve always tried to get across in my stories. The window-dressing of the story has changed several times, but I still consider them to be the same stories. And even though I may never see these stories in print, I think I will always be writing one of them in some incarnation or another.
Well, that pretty much wraps up my little bit of advice for now. But before I close, let’s just go over a few more horrible stories I’ve tried to write over the years. Let’s see, there was the King Arthur rip off that in which a boy peasant pulled a mythical sword out of a lake of mud instead of a stone to become the leader of a vast army–I actually thought that detail made it a totally different story. There was the sci-fi story in which a Wolverine character–complete with one retractable claw and animal fits of rage–fought against an evil ‘Regulator.’ There was the other sci-fi story, told through a series of ‘Captain’s Logs,’ that was not at all in the slightest way like Star Trek–at all. There was the one about the talking crystal. There was the one about the teenage group of magical users from another dimension who seemed to make a lot of pop culture references they had no way of knowing about. Oh, there was that one story where I took creative license way too far and actually wrote what I–as the author–was doing as I was writing the story. Example: when I had to stop writing to go to school, I would write that I had to stop writing to go to school and that I would resume the story the next day.
Well that’s enough embarrassment for now.
Thank for visiting my Dime Store; all sales are final.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Lies Your Friends Told You
Come on in to the Dime Store, today we have a buy-one-get-one-free sale; one piece of advice with any anecdote you buy. Our selection is limited to what I type, so you might be a little out of luck–enjoy. Today’s merchandise was shipped into my store via an old memory highway about an old friend I used to know. You can guess by the above title this is not a pensive remembrance of a happy relationship, but rather an angry diatribe–which I very seldom get to do, but am told I do well.
So I was thinking about an old friend and the antics that led him to become an ex-friend and it occurred to me just how ridiculous all of his statements were. So ridiculous as to be both funny and sad at the same time, and I thought there might be others out there with either the problem I used to have with him or with his problem themselves. Either way, either side could use a touch of wisdom.
His problem? He was a habitual liar, which is just a fancy way of saying, he couldn’t tell the truth to save his life. My problem? I let him get away with it for way longer than I should have. Let’s start with his problem. Though I never spoke to him about this in great detail, save for the one time I told him I didn’t believe his latest outrageous story (I’ll get back to that actual story later), I hypothesize that his lies were a way of seeking attention. More than that, I think he lied to make himself feel important. More than that, I think he lied to make other people think he was important. Whatever his reasons for them, he couldn’t get through a day without telling one lie or another and it was always so obvious and so insane that I felt like an idiot for not pointing them out to him. And the more I kept my mouth shut, the more outlandish the lies became until I actually stopped caring that he was lying and just enjoyed the soap-opera-like narrative he spun for me day after day. Of course, that was my failing in the friendship. Had I exposed his lie right off the bat, maybe he would have stopped doing it before it got to the crazy point that it reached.
In my defense, however, it wasn’t as though he spat out crazy gibberish from the first day I met him. No, actually the first few lies were spaced far apart and seemed somewhat plausible up front. He was computer savvy and I was not, so when he told me that he’d created an anti-virus program that worked like a virus, I suppressed my commonsense opinion and thought, ‘oh, that’s amazing,’ and just nodded at him. It wasn’t until I tried to tell someone else what he had told me that I realize how absurd his claim truly was. First of all, he was janitor–not that there’s anything wrong with that–but if he was indeed able to write an anti-virus program that worked as a virus–he probably wouldn’t be working as a janitor. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a while, and when I realized what he said did not make sense, I assumed the fault rested on me, that I had misunderstood him. But deep down, I knew he was full of it.
Still, I indulged his fantasy and did him the favor not to bring it up again so he wouldn’t have to repeat the lie. And when he told me he wrote a program that could cause a computer to overload and explode–but only when someone is typing at the keys–thus killing the user, I chose to pretend he was just teasing me and had not actually expected me to believe the story. At the time, I thought I was helping him by ignoring his plea for attention; at the time, I thought I was being generous by not deflating his ego. How wrong I was.
In the end of our friendship, the lies got so spectacularly retarded that it felt like an insult to be told it. It wasn’t about the lie, it was more about his belief that all my combined brain cells were comparable to those of a stroked out roach. And that’s how stupid I would have had to be to believe some of these lies. What I should have done, what a friend should do, is to address the issue, not the lies. A friend should say, “Hey, I think you have a problem,” or “Just so you know, you don’t need to do this to be my friend,” or something to that effect. What a friend should not do, is ignore, because it opens the door for even more lies and, helps no one, in the end.
TANGENT: Why did Sherlock Holmes always say “The game is afoot,” when he caught whiff of a good mystery? Was he a fetishist? Did he not actually understand that a body part is not actually the same thing as a crime? Did he have athlete’s afoot? Or was he just pretentious and wanted to say something fancy and intelligent-sounding rather than something more straightforward and apt like, “I’m going to solve this mystery!” Or, “I’ll get that criminal!” Or “Damn! That hooker got dead! Better get outta here before someone thinks I did it!”
How bad did the lies get, you might ask. Try these on for size. He told me that he’d built a robot that cleaned his house; He drafted designs to make a functional lightsaber; He used to have scoliosis, but his brother bear hugged him and it straightened his spine; He once fell off a cliff but was spared a horrific death when his wristwatch caught on jagged rock, suspending him in midair. He got engaged to an 18year old girl from Nebraska who tragically fell off her favorite horse, knocking her into a coma from which she awoke with complete recall except for anything about him. Oh, and my personal favorite, he once Force choked his in-law (for those of you not knowledgeable of Star Wars, a Force choke is an ability a user of the mystical telekinetic power of the Force wields to suffocate an opponent using only the strength of the user’s mind).
Other, not so funny lies included telling my wife he knew people in the music industry back when she was trying to break into that business and me that he could help publish my manuscript back when I was still actively writing novels. And these are just the ones I can remember. There were tons more, ranging from mundane to malice. The bottom line though is that he did not trust us enough to be himself around us and he did not respect us enough to cut out the crap and try to get to know us. It was an act from beginning to end and we never really knew one another. Friends like that are not friends at all, just a waste of time...or a good laugh if their stories are outlandish enough.
So if you find yourself with a friend like this, do yourself the favor and cut them loose before they become entrenched in your life, because if they don’t stop lying, the friendship will go south eventually–might as well make it on your own terms rather than theirs. Whatever their reasons for continuing the lies, it’s not your responsibility to fix nor should it be your burden. If you choose to get involved and do get your hands dirty in that mess, then all the more power to you–you’re a better man than I. But be warned, even if the liar will admit to having a problem telling the truth due to some unfulfilled childhood need for his father’s attention, can you ever truly be sure that’s not also a lie?
Hope you enjoyed my Dime Store; we don’t validate parking.
So I was thinking about an old friend and the antics that led him to become an ex-friend and it occurred to me just how ridiculous all of his statements were. So ridiculous as to be both funny and sad at the same time, and I thought there might be others out there with either the problem I used to have with him or with his problem themselves. Either way, either side could use a touch of wisdom.
His problem? He was a habitual liar, which is just a fancy way of saying, he couldn’t tell the truth to save his life. My problem? I let him get away with it for way longer than I should have. Let’s start with his problem. Though I never spoke to him about this in great detail, save for the one time I told him I didn’t believe his latest outrageous story (I’ll get back to that actual story later), I hypothesize that his lies were a way of seeking attention. More than that, I think he lied to make himself feel important. More than that, I think he lied to make other people think he was important. Whatever his reasons for them, he couldn’t get through a day without telling one lie or another and it was always so obvious and so insane that I felt like an idiot for not pointing them out to him. And the more I kept my mouth shut, the more outlandish the lies became until I actually stopped caring that he was lying and just enjoyed the soap-opera-like narrative he spun for me day after day. Of course, that was my failing in the friendship. Had I exposed his lie right off the bat, maybe he would have stopped doing it before it got to the crazy point that it reached.
In my defense, however, it wasn’t as though he spat out crazy gibberish from the first day I met him. No, actually the first few lies were spaced far apart and seemed somewhat plausible up front. He was computer savvy and I was not, so when he told me that he’d created an anti-virus program that worked like a virus, I suppressed my commonsense opinion and thought, ‘oh, that’s amazing,’ and just nodded at him. It wasn’t until I tried to tell someone else what he had told me that I realize how absurd his claim truly was. First of all, he was janitor–not that there’s anything wrong with that–but if he was indeed able to write an anti-virus program that worked as a virus–he probably wouldn’t be working as a janitor. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a while, and when I realized what he said did not make sense, I assumed the fault rested on me, that I had misunderstood him. But deep down, I knew he was full of it.
Still, I indulged his fantasy and did him the favor not to bring it up again so he wouldn’t have to repeat the lie. And when he told me he wrote a program that could cause a computer to overload and explode–but only when someone is typing at the keys–thus killing the user, I chose to pretend he was just teasing me and had not actually expected me to believe the story. At the time, I thought I was helping him by ignoring his plea for attention; at the time, I thought I was being generous by not deflating his ego. How wrong I was.
In the end of our friendship, the lies got so spectacularly retarded that it felt like an insult to be told it. It wasn’t about the lie, it was more about his belief that all my combined brain cells were comparable to those of a stroked out roach. And that’s how stupid I would have had to be to believe some of these lies. What I should have done, what a friend should do, is to address the issue, not the lies. A friend should say, “Hey, I think you have a problem,” or “Just so you know, you don’t need to do this to be my friend,” or something to that effect. What a friend should not do, is ignore, because it opens the door for even more lies and, helps no one, in the end.
TANGENT: Why did Sherlock Holmes always say “The game is afoot,” when he caught whiff of a good mystery? Was he a fetishist? Did he not actually understand that a body part is not actually the same thing as a crime? Did he have athlete’s afoot? Or was he just pretentious and wanted to say something fancy and intelligent-sounding rather than something more straightforward and apt like, “I’m going to solve this mystery!” Or, “I’ll get that criminal!” Or “Damn! That hooker got dead! Better get outta here before someone thinks I did it!”
How bad did the lies get, you might ask. Try these on for size. He told me that he’d built a robot that cleaned his house; He drafted designs to make a functional lightsaber; He used to have scoliosis, but his brother bear hugged him and it straightened his spine; He once fell off a cliff but was spared a horrific death when his wristwatch caught on jagged rock, suspending him in midair. He got engaged to an 18year old girl from Nebraska who tragically fell off her favorite horse, knocking her into a coma from which she awoke with complete recall except for anything about him. Oh, and my personal favorite, he once Force choked his in-law (for those of you not knowledgeable of Star Wars, a Force choke is an ability a user of the mystical telekinetic power of the Force wields to suffocate an opponent using only the strength of the user’s mind).
Other, not so funny lies included telling my wife he knew people in the music industry back when she was trying to break into that business and me that he could help publish my manuscript back when I was still actively writing novels. And these are just the ones I can remember. There were tons more, ranging from mundane to malice. The bottom line though is that he did not trust us enough to be himself around us and he did not respect us enough to cut out the crap and try to get to know us. It was an act from beginning to end and we never really knew one another. Friends like that are not friends at all, just a waste of time...or a good laugh if their stories are outlandish enough.
So if you find yourself with a friend like this, do yourself the favor and cut them loose before they become entrenched in your life, because if they don’t stop lying, the friendship will go south eventually–might as well make it on your own terms rather than theirs. Whatever their reasons for continuing the lies, it’s not your responsibility to fix nor should it be your burden. If you choose to get involved and do get your hands dirty in that mess, then all the more power to you–you’re a better man than I. But be warned, even if the liar will admit to having a problem telling the truth due to some unfulfilled childhood need for his father’s attention, can you ever truly be sure that’s not also a lie?
Hope you enjoyed my Dime Store; we don’t validate parking.
Monday, November 9, 2009
The Not-So-Handy Man
Once again, welcome back to my Dime Store, today’s specials are, my opinions, served generously with antidote sauce and lightly sprinkled with a message. The idea for this blog came to me last Thursday, as I attempted–ATTEMPTED–to replace the old horizontal blinds that have pretty much fallen apart through age with new, more durable and very expensive blinds that will last a lifetime. Me and my wife searched online for a while before we found what we were looking for, and once found, we bought them right away. We waited several weeks for them to arrive and when they did, they sat on our porch for another week and a half. Why didn’t we open those packages up and install our new blinds? Because before I ordered them I failed to remember that I would need an electric drill to install the braces that will house the blinds. The thought occurred to me the day the blinds arrived. I didn’t see the point in bringing them upstairs to block up my hallway until I had the right equipment to install them.
You might be asking yourself–or you might not, I don’t know any of you well enough to infer what you’re thinking from all the way over here–why I, a married male in my thirties who has never been discovered to be mentally deficient and has all of the standard set of limbs, does not own an electric drill. I mean, I’ve had thirty-three birthdays and at least as many Christmases, not to mention my engagement party, wedding party and various graduation parties. Hell, I even work a full time job and have been doing so for nearly thirteen years. Oh, and I’m a male–did I forget to mention that part. So why in all that time have I not acquired or been given an electric drill, the ultimate phallic symbol. After all, it has customizing drill bits, easy to switch from small to large for just the right length. It’s big and bulky and has hours of lasting power (after sufficient amount of recharging time), and it can make a smaller hole into a larger one, making it useless for smaller screws to attempt to enter it.
Yes, the American drill is a staple of masculinity indeed. I, unfortunately, am not that handy. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that men want to handle motorized hole-makers, that they want to squeeze it and control it and declare themselves men for their mastery of the device. There’s nothing wrong with that. Me, I never understood the obsession. But that could be because I can’t work tools the way most people can.
In all seriousness, I’ve never been too lucky with tools. Some people just don’t have a knack for them. I’ve tried several times to build or fix or rewire things, but my efforts have always turned out to be little more than displayed ineptitude. For example: the medicine cabinet I hung on my bathroom wall–it slants to the right; the windshield wipers of my car–I had to ask the mechanic to install so I didn’t spend hours staring at the simple device like a monkey discovering fire for all my neighbors to see.
My issues with mechanical devices extends not only those I attempt to fix but to those that I buy as well. It’s been a long standing joke amongst me and mine that everything I buy, I buy broken or will become broken exactly one day after the warranty runs out. Examples of this are: the wet/vac that would only wet but did not vac; the PS2 that had to be put in the fridge for ten minutes before it would start; the air humidifier that actually dried out my nose instead of...I don’t know...humidifying it.
All these things combine to remind me that I am not the handiest of men nor do I fall into that category of men who define themselves by their prowess with tools. Which brings me to my point–I think. Society has a tendency to define people by gender stereotypes. Men are good with tools and electronics and are natural handymen and are always eager to resort to violence when their tiny brains can’t process rational thoughts or they are puzzled by the complexities of fire. And what’s worse than these stereotypes is that many guys define themselves by them as well, pridefully so. Don’t get me wrong, I would personally love to be able to fix my own car or put up a cabinet without praying to the god of straight lines and wall mounts that it not fall down on my head, but I would never look down on someone else who could not, nor would I judge a woman critically for having the ability to do those things.
It’s a shame to have to be confined inside a set of behaviors and personality traits that may not apply to you. That sort of confinement, leads to pretending and confusion. People start behaving in a way that they think they should act instead of how they really feel like acting. For guys that might mean they have to put on an overly macho attitude and for women, they may have to act passive and delicate. Women may feel ashamed that they can not cook just as guys may pretend to be mechanically inclined or interested in sports. It’s as if behavioral paths are already chosen for us before we even step out of the womb and those who do not fit into that mold are looked upon as misfits.
TANGENT: Go Yankees!! Go Yankees!! Yay, Yankees win!!! Don’t mind me, I just figured that since the newspapers in NY had the Yankees’ victory on the front page for four consecutive days, it was a sure fire way to get some extra hits on my blog. Yankees!! Yankees!! Yankees!! Yankees!! They won their 27th World Series! I was beginning to worry that the team would be burdened with their pitiful 26 wins for the rest of their lives. I mean how embarrassing would that have been. What kind of losers only win 26 World Series and not 27 or more World Series. Now that they’ve won, all the other problems that have been plaguing this world will now be abolished. Wars will stop, universal healthcare will succeed, everyone will have a home and a job and food on their tables. All will be like God had intended it all to be when he made the garden of the Yankees–err...I mean, the Garden of Eden.
Back to my point. So ingrained in our culture is this connection between craftsmanship and masculinity that its words have become synonymous with sex. Nail. Drill. Screw. Saw....What? You can’t cut a 2 by 4 with your penis? Wow, whose the weirdo now?
My view of this phenomena is that it is a perpetuating circle, one that will not be broken easily. All we can do is try to be comfortable with ourselves, our own limitations, and our own desires in life. If you love working with cars or tools–even if you’re not good at it–then by all means pick up that tool and tweak that engine, whether you be a man or a woman. If you are not comfortable with it, then nothing should make you feel ashamed for not falling into a stereotype. And of course this advice goes beyond the narrow range of craftsmanship I’ve defined in this blog; it extends to all facets of life.
As for me, I finally got that drill, made the proper holes, secured the wall mounts and installed the brand new horizontal blinds...It’s not my fault the blinds were an inch too short on the width and would not fit properly into the mounts, forcing me to tie the blinds to the mounts with several layers of twine. It’s not my fault! I actually consider myself to be more of a handyman now because I managed to jerry-rig my windows that way. Yeah, I know, the damn things are probably going to fall down on me one day, but not today and until they do, I’m considering myself a typical manly man.
Thanks for visiting the Dime Store; you break it, you buy.
You might be asking yourself–or you might not, I don’t know any of you well enough to infer what you’re thinking from all the way over here–why I, a married male in my thirties who has never been discovered to be mentally deficient and has all of the standard set of limbs, does not own an electric drill. I mean, I’ve had thirty-three birthdays and at least as many Christmases, not to mention my engagement party, wedding party and various graduation parties. Hell, I even work a full time job and have been doing so for nearly thirteen years. Oh, and I’m a male–did I forget to mention that part. So why in all that time have I not acquired or been given an electric drill, the ultimate phallic symbol. After all, it has customizing drill bits, easy to switch from small to large for just the right length. It’s big and bulky and has hours of lasting power (after sufficient amount of recharging time), and it can make a smaller hole into a larger one, making it useless for smaller screws to attempt to enter it.
Yes, the American drill is a staple of masculinity indeed. I, unfortunately, am not that handy. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that men want to handle motorized hole-makers, that they want to squeeze it and control it and declare themselves men for their mastery of the device. There’s nothing wrong with that. Me, I never understood the obsession. But that could be because I can’t work tools the way most people can.
In all seriousness, I’ve never been too lucky with tools. Some people just don’t have a knack for them. I’ve tried several times to build or fix or rewire things, but my efforts have always turned out to be little more than displayed ineptitude. For example: the medicine cabinet I hung on my bathroom wall–it slants to the right; the windshield wipers of my car–I had to ask the mechanic to install so I didn’t spend hours staring at the simple device like a monkey discovering fire for all my neighbors to see.
My issues with mechanical devices extends not only those I attempt to fix but to those that I buy as well. It’s been a long standing joke amongst me and mine that everything I buy, I buy broken or will become broken exactly one day after the warranty runs out. Examples of this are: the wet/vac that would only wet but did not vac; the PS2 that had to be put in the fridge for ten minutes before it would start; the air humidifier that actually dried out my nose instead of...I don’t know...humidifying it.
All these things combine to remind me that I am not the handiest of men nor do I fall into that category of men who define themselves by their prowess with tools. Which brings me to my point–I think. Society has a tendency to define people by gender stereotypes. Men are good with tools and electronics and are natural handymen and are always eager to resort to violence when their tiny brains can’t process rational thoughts or they are puzzled by the complexities of fire. And what’s worse than these stereotypes is that many guys define themselves by them as well, pridefully so. Don’t get me wrong, I would personally love to be able to fix my own car or put up a cabinet without praying to the god of straight lines and wall mounts that it not fall down on my head, but I would never look down on someone else who could not, nor would I judge a woman critically for having the ability to do those things.
It’s a shame to have to be confined inside a set of behaviors and personality traits that may not apply to you. That sort of confinement, leads to pretending and confusion. People start behaving in a way that they think they should act instead of how they really feel like acting. For guys that might mean they have to put on an overly macho attitude and for women, they may have to act passive and delicate. Women may feel ashamed that they can not cook just as guys may pretend to be mechanically inclined or interested in sports. It’s as if behavioral paths are already chosen for us before we even step out of the womb and those who do not fit into that mold are looked upon as misfits.
TANGENT: Go Yankees!! Go Yankees!! Yay, Yankees win!!! Don’t mind me, I just figured that since the newspapers in NY had the Yankees’ victory on the front page for four consecutive days, it was a sure fire way to get some extra hits on my blog. Yankees!! Yankees!! Yankees!! Yankees!! They won their 27th World Series! I was beginning to worry that the team would be burdened with their pitiful 26 wins for the rest of their lives. I mean how embarrassing would that have been. What kind of losers only win 26 World Series and not 27 or more World Series. Now that they’ve won, all the other problems that have been plaguing this world will now be abolished. Wars will stop, universal healthcare will succeed, everyone will have a home and a job and food on their tables. All will be like God had intended it all to be when he made the garden of the Yankees–err...I mean, the Garden of Eden.
Back to my point. So ingrained in our culture is this connection between craftsmanship and masculinity that its words have become synonymous with sex. Nail. Drill. Screw. Saw....What? You can’t cut a 2 by 4 with your penis? Wow, whose the weirdo now?
My view of this phenomena is that it is a perpetuating circle, one that will not be broken easily. All we can do is try to be comfortable with ourselves, our own limitations, and our own desires in life. If you love working with cars or tools–even if you’re not good at it–then by all means pick up that tool and tweak that engine, whether you be a man or a woman. If you are not comfortable with it, then nothing should make you feel ashamed for not falling into a stereotype. And of course this advice goes beyond the narrow range of craftsmanship I’ve defined in this blog; it extends to all facets of life.
As for me, I finally got that drill, made the proper holes, secured the wall mounts and installed the brand new horizontal blinds...It’s not my fault the blinds were an inch too short on the width and would not fit properly into the mounts, forcing me to tie the blinds to the mounts with several layers of twine. It’s not my fault! I actually consider myself to be more of a handyman now because I managed to jerry-rig my windows that way. Yeah, I know, the damn things are probably going to fall down on me one day, but not today and until they do, I’m considering myself a typical manly man.
Thanks for visiting the Dime Store; you break it, you buy.
Monday, November 2, 2009
I’m Ready To Take On the World...during the next commercial break.
Welcome back to my sphere of influence all of you in the WWW, back to the Dime Store. I have you all in my clutches and will henceforth keep you indefinitely. I’m joking of course, and I know you all did not click onto my blog to hear me tell you how much you need me. I open this Dime Store with an essay-like postulation: Ambition is essential for getting through life. Without ambition, one’s life remains stagnant, destined to tread water in an ocean of Olympic gold medal swimmers, to watch clouds go by while others board rocket ships to touch them, to bemoan your have-nots while others fight to garner millions of dollars as musicians, radio shock jocks, authors and pathetically moustachioed dictators.
Contrarily, despite my opinion on the matter, I have been, thus far, unable to take my own advise. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I never had much ambition for anything beyond continued mastery of breathing and proper maintenance of my blood supply. Maybe it doesn’t sound like much but ask any scientist how difficult it is to change Oxygen to Cardon-Dioxide. It takes A LOT of work, and lots of fancy machines and years in medical school. Whereas I was born with the ability to breathe in one element, convert it to another and breathe it back out, without any conscious effort at all. My lungs can do the work of many expensive scientific machines; I think that’s worth some praise.
Seriously, my aspiration in life prior to now has been not to disturb the natural flow of life. It was always a problem, my inability to make decisions or choose a course of action for myself. It is a big failing of mine and I regret much of the things I’ve let slip by in life as a result. In the past, I would base my actions on which course would disrupt the least amount of people and would be easiest for me to accomplish–which usually meant sitting back and waiting for life to come to me.
Well, big surprise, I went nowhere. I lived in my parents’ apartment until I was twenty-seven–although in my defense, my folks had moved out by then (that’s right, I stuck around as they got sick of the place and bailed; way to go me). I did not go to college straight after High School like I should have and am only now halfway through my junior year (at age thirty-three). The writing career I thought I would have by now has fallen so far by the wayside you’d need a super-powerful electron microscope and a cool enlargement machine to find it.
It’s my awareness of this failing that led me to write this blog entry, as a warning to others out there who would choose to do as I have done and let life come to them. It doesn’t work–well, hardly ever works (former President George Bush did not strike me as the hard working type so much as the never-turn-down-a-job-your daddy-got-for-you- type). You need to take steps toward action, toward a true goal, or that goal will often never come anywhere near your terminally pathetic self. So, since I want to help you poor, challenged living beings, I think I will begin a club or a committee designed to nurture, guide, advise and, ultimately, love the desperately directionless. I think I’ll call it...Lethargics Antagonizing Zealot Individuals Against Social Stereotypes (L.A.Z.I.A.S.S).
Nah, on second thought, that’ll require too much work for me. Maybe someone else will read this article and pick up my torch for me...writing this blog tired me out.
Tangent: I just recalled that the Middle East is located on the continent of Asia. So that means that the Middle Easterners with whom the United States are currently at war–by all geographic definitions–are Asian. Which I find funny because ((((CENSORED: the following statement was deemed too racy and obscene for the realm of this blog and has been removed for your protection by Ismael Manzano: Please accept our apologies and feel free to enjoy the remainder of this blog.))))
Hey! What the (((CENSORED)))!!! That’s unfair! I can’t be censored! I have rights! That’s it! I’m suing! This is a clear violation of my first amendment rights! I’m going to own this blog before this is all said and done!
Wait...Oh...Excuse me...I’ve just been informed by my law firm, Ismael, Maanz and Oh, that there is no precedent for suing oneself in this or any capacity or for any violation. They further informed me that any attempt to do so will guarantee me a long stint in a padded room inside a mental hospital. So let’s stop this nonsense about suing anybody, shall we? We shall speak of it no more.
So back to my laziness. A solution occurred to me a couple of days ago, as I sifted through the hundreds (minus ninety-nine) of emails I’ve received from my throngs (minus the throngs) of fans. With this newfound power of mine comes an inherent responsibility for me to utterly abuse that power to suit my own twisted purpose. I never thought along these lines before, but now I realize the untapped potential of this new medium. As I see–or delude myself to see–the amount of people who willing choose to tune into my blog from one week to another, I realize how immensely powerful I can become. Suddenly, my narrow world of watching one crappy TV show after another, not getting fired from my even crappier job, and bemoaning my inability to balance the crappiest budget in history, is not enough for me. I want more. How much more, you ask. Thank you for asking.
My ultimate compromise between my desire to help my fellow LAZIASS’ and my own terminal case of laziness is to parlay this new found platform to rule the world. Let me be your Czar, president, dictator, Ayatollah or whatever. The beauty of my plan is that I don’t have to lift a finger to do anything. I leave it to you all, my hundred (minus ninety-nine, give or take) fans, to circulate my blogs around the world. Tell your family and schoolmates so they can tell their friends and their family and tell them each to do the same with their friends and family and to tell those friends and family to do the same with their own friends and family, with explicit instructions to likewise do similar with their family and their friends and their friends’ families and their families’ friends and their so on and so and so forth and with that and such as and henceforth.
And so empowered with the support of your friends and family and their friends and family and their families’ friends and–(((DELETED TO SPARE YOU)))–you will all vote me in as President of the United States as an unprecedented write-in candidate in the 2012 election year....if you want to, because I know it’s always hard to get up in the morning and drag yourselves to the election booths and pull that lever and then walk back home and pull the blankets back over your head and try to go back to sleep. It’s hard work, so I won’t be too upset if you guys can’t do it. Okay. But in November of 2012, when I get a call from Obama conceding the office to me, well, you’ll all have my thanks. Of course I will probably have forgotten about this blog by then and will think it’s a joke of some kind, or maybe I just won’t be in the mood to run a country in three years. Who knows? I should start watching reruns of The West Wing, just in case.
Hope you guys managed to smuggle my advise out of these two pages of humor, and if so, hope it does you well in your future endeavors.
Thank you for visiting the Dime Store; enjoy your purchase.
Contrarily, despite my opinion on the matter, I have been, thus far, unable to take my own advise. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I never had much ambition for anything beyond continued mastery of breathing and proper maintenance of my blood supply. Maybe it doesn’t sound like much but ask any scientist how difficult it is to change Oxygen to Cardon-Dioxide. It takes A LOT of work, and lots of fancy machines and years in medical school. Whereas I was born with the ability to breathe in one element, convert it to another and breathe it back out, without any conscious effort at all. My lungs can do the work of many expensive scientific machines; I think that’s worth some praise.
Seriously, my aspiration in life prior to now has been not to disturb the natural flow of life. It was always a problem, my inability to make decisions or choose a course of action for myself. It is a big failing of mine and I regret much of the things I’ve let slip by in life as a result. In the past, I would base my actions on which course would disrupt the least amount of people and would be easiest for me to accomplish–which usually meant sitting back and waiting for life to come to me.
Well, big surprise, I went nowhere. I lived in my parents’ apartment until I was twenty-seven–although in my defense, my folks had moved out by then (that’s right, I stuck around as they got sick of the place and bailed; way to go me). I did not go to college straight after High School like I should have and am only now halfway through my junior year (at age thirty-three). The writing career I thought I would have by now has fallen so far by the wayside you’d need a super-powerful electron microscope and a cool enlargement machine to find it.
It’s my awareness of this failing that led me to write this blog entry, as a warning to others out there who would choose to do as I have done and let life come to them. It doesn’t work–well, hardly ever works (former President George Bush did not strike me as the hard working type so much as the never-turn-down-a-job-your daddy-got-for-you- type). You need to take steps toward action, toward a true goal, or that goal will often never come anywhere near your terminally pathetic self. So, since I want to help you poor, challenged living beings, I think I will begin a club or a committee designed to nurture, guide, advise and, ultimately, love the desperately directionless. I think I’ll call it...Lethargics Antagonizing Zealot Individuals Against Social Stereotypes (L.A.Z.I.A.S.S).
Nah, on second thought, that’ll require too much work for me. Maybe someone else will read this article and pick up my torch for me...writing this blog tired me out.
Tangent: I just recalled that the Middle East is located on the continent of Asia. So that means that the Middle Easterners with whom the United States are currently at war–by all geographic definitions–are Asian. Which I find funny because ((((CENSORED: the following statement was deemed too racy and obscene for the realm of this blog and has been removed for your protection by Ismael Manzano: Please accept our apologies and feel free to enjoy the remainder of this blog.))))
Hey! What the (((CENSORED)))!!! That’s unfair! I can’t be censored! I have rights! That’s it! I’m suing! This is a clear violation of my first amendment rights! I’m going to own this blog before this is all said and done!
Wait...Oh...Excuse me...I’ve just been informed by my law firm, Ismael, Maanz and Oh, that there is no precedent for suing oneself in this or any capacity or for any violation. They further informed me that any attempt to do so will guarantee me a long stint in a padded room inside a mental hospital. So let’s stop this nonsense about suing anybody, shall we? We shall speak of it no more.
So back to my laziness. A solution occurred to me a couple of days ago, as I sifted through the hundreds (minus ninety-nine) of emails I’ve received from my throngs (minus the throngs) of fans. With this newfound power of mine comes an inherent responsibility for me to utterly abuse that power to suit my own twisted purpose. I never thought along these lines before, but now I realize the untapped potential of this new medium. As I see–or delude myself to see–the amount of people who willing choose to tune into my blog from one week to another, I realize how immensely powerful I can become. Suddenly, my narrow world of watching one crappy TV show after another, not getting fired from my even crappier job, and bemoaning my inability to balance the crappiest budget in history, is not enough for me. I want more. How much more, you ask. Thank you for asking.
My ultimate compromise between my desire to help my fellow LAZIASS’ and my own terminal case of laziness is to parlay this new found platform to rule the world. Let me be your Czar, president, dictator, Ayatollah or whatever. The beauty of my plan is that I don’t have to lift a finger to do anything. I leave it to you all, my hundred (minus ninety-nine, give or take) fans, to circulate my blogs around the world. Tell your family and schoolmates so they can tell their friends and their family and tell them each to do the same with their friends and family and to tell those friends and family to do the same with their own friends and family, with explicit instructions to likewise do similar with their family and their friends and their friends’ families and their families’ friends and their so on and so and so forth and with that and such as and henceforth.
And so empowered with the support of your friends and family and their friends and family and their families’ friends and–(((DELETED TO SPARE YOU)))–you will all vote me in as President of the United States as an unprecedented write-in candidate in the 2012 election year....if you want to, because I know it’s always hard to get up in the morning and drag yourselves to the election booths and pull that lever and then walk back home and pull the blankets back over your head and try to go back to sleep. It’s hard work, so I won’t be too upset if you guys can’t do it. Okay. But in November of 2012, when I get a call from Obama conceding the office to me, well, you’ll all have my thanks. Of course I will probably have forgotten about this blog by then and will think it’s a joke of some kind, or maybe I just won’t be in the mood to run a country in three years. Who knows? I should start watching reruns of The West Wing, just in case.
Hope you guys managed to smuggle my advise out of these two pages of humor, and if so, hope it does you well in your future endeavors.
Thank you for visiting the Dime Store; enjoy your purchase.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)