Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Stuck On You

This entire week I've been trying to think about topics to blog about. I have a few ideas stored in the Notes app on my phone but I kept looking through them and feeling like I just wasn't in the mood to elaborate on any of them. And then, as my roommate and I were watching TV the other night, I randomly came out and said, "You know what's weird? How people can get bloody noses and it's no big deal. But if any other part of your body started bleeding for no good reason whatsoever we'd freak out." (Females...roll with me on this one. Males...be thankful I'm not mentioning what you were thinking I was going to mention.) But if you were just sitting on your couch and all the sudden your knee started gushing blood...you would not be ok with that. But why when it's our noses do we just grab a tissue and move on with life?

So then, I started to try to build that idea into a full post. And I was totally stuck. But I wasn't just stuck...I was stuck AND being continually hit over and over again by the same, and only, idea I had. Every internal conversation would go, "Ok, what else happens to us that concerns us sometimes, but in a slightly different context, it isn't concerning at all? Oh! I know...bloody noses! Anything else? Ooh ooh! Bloody noses. Ok well I'm probably going to need at least a second example. You're right, good point...how aboutttt...bloody noses."

It's like when you're playing charades and someone just keeps shouting out the same exact guess over and over again.

It's also the same feeling you get when you're doing a crossword puzzle and you have the perfect answer to a clue but it doesn't fit. But it SHOULD fit. Because it's so perfect. So you keep going back to it. Maybe the puzzle realized its mistake, and has since adjusted itself accordingly.

OR when your professor explains a concept to the class then some jerk raises their hand and restates exactly what the professor just said.

So anyways, basically what happened is that I finally gave up trying to think of more examples, and decided to write a post about not being able to think of examples. And it feels like cheating. I'm not proud of it.

That's like when you're supposed to sing a song but you're under pressure so all you can come up with is:

Singing a song about singing a song, and then elaborating on your current situation, arguably isn't very clever. BUT judging from the success of the above movie, it can also be argued that it is extremely clever. So...what's good enough for Buddy is good enough for me!


"Shorty's like a memory in my head that I can't keep out, got me singing like na na na na everyday, it's like my iPod's stuck on replay...replay."
-Iyaz, "Replay"
...bet you were thinking I'd go with an Elf quote, weren't ya?

Friday, September 21, 2012

All idiot. All the time.

Our emotions can get pretty complex right? We're not just all happy or all sad all the time. Sometimes we're happy and excited, sometimes we're sad and angry..we're almost always at least 2 emotions at once. Girls are sometimes 235445 at once. Sometimes I cry at Taylor Swift songs on the same day that I refuse to give a homeless man my change. How can I be ridiculously emotional and kind of heartless in one day?

It's because people aren't all one way, or the other way.

You agree with that...right? You can consider yourself a compassionate person, but still recall the time you flipped out at your cable company over the phone. You were having a bad day, they were charging you for ESPN in 30 languages. It was just a combination of things that went wrong. So you can look past the small meltdown.

Still with me? Still agree?

Ok...then when was the last time you walked away from an employee at a store, or a customer where you work, or the person who stole your boyfriend or girlfriend and said to yourself and all of your friends, "Wow, what an asshole."?

Just like that. They do one wrong thing to you and BAM...they're all asshole, all the time. No redeeming them.

And at this point all of your friends are scared of you so no one's going to speak up and go, "maybe they were just having a bad day..."

Nope. It wasn't a bad day. It was just that they are 100% asshole.

Why are we so unforgiving like that? Why are we so quick to assume that just because we had an unpleasant interaction with someone, that every interaction they have ever had and will ever have moving forward is also unpleasant?

Social media makes it especially easy to brand people. Because everyone will agree with you. Post a status about how selfish people are and immediately all of your friends will like it or comment on it...just to make sure that it's definitely not them that is the selfish one. After all, they spent the time to read your comment. And press the like button. No possible way they can be selfish when they are that concerned about you.

I guess my point is, the next time you're thinking about branding someone's entire existence as "mean" or "stupid" think about the times that maybe you faltered a bit, and weren't at your best. Should someone judge your entire life based off of that moment?

Every time I'm on the phone with a customer service rep or anyone like that, and in my head I'm thinking they're the biggest idiot ever, I think about the time I was interning for a company, and someone called me and asked me who the president of the company was. I knew who the president of the company was. But I was eating lunch when the phone rang, I was unprepared to answer, and the president had actually changed in the last month. I stuttered out my answer, then told the person on the phone to "hang on a sec" while I asked the person next to me just to double check. I cannot even imagine how stupid the woman on the phone thought I was.

Oh yeah, then there was the time I called Norway Norwegia. I quickly corrected myself but the damage was done. Luckily I was with very good friends who didn't directly post it to Facebook...ohh wait :)

But I'm still a smart person...I swear.

You unforgiving folks out there are thinking, Nope. All idiot. All the time.


"It requires less character to discover the faults of others than it does to tolerate them."
-J. Petit Senn

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Unnotice this...

I watch way too much TV. I'll put that out there right now. Blah blah blah, my brain is mush, how can I watch that trash, go read a book...I know. And I appreciate the concern. Really.

Ok sorry for beginning the post with a little hostility. I'll be nice now I promise.

Anyways, after you watch enough TV you pick up on some things that are actually really strange, but don't seem strange at all until you notice it. And then once you notice it, you can't unnotice it, and TV is ruined forever!! No, not really. But it really is hard to unnotice.

Ok I'll cut to the chase now.

(What does that expression even mean??)

Ok, for real this time. One thing that I am hopelessly tuned into is how ridiculous laugh tracks are on sitcoms. I started realizing that in The Big Bang Theory, the fake laughing people never shut the hell up. (Random Facebook friends reading this are going, "oh she TOTALLY would watch The Big Bang Theory.")

I just YouTube'd "The Big Bang Theory" and took the first random clip I could find:


I do not need random people guiding me to laugh every time something is supposed to be funny. Or...so I thought...until I just came across this YouTube video...


Crap. Is this show really not funny without the laugh track?

Before I ruin one of my favorite shows for myself, I'm going to move on...

Another thing I've noticed in dramatic shows, and especially suspenseful shows, is that you never really know what's what until the end of the scene where the main character in the scene makes their final facial expression.

I just tried searching YouTube for an example but had no idea how to go about the search so I'm going to just have to explain it.

Say 2 characters are in a conversation, and one is giving the other important information about where to find say...a million dollars. You're wondering to yourself, "Is this really what's happening? Is she really telling that guy where to get the money??" Then at the end of the scene, the guy turns and runs off to get the money, and the camera pans to the woman whose solemn, serious face then cracks into an evil smile. Ohhhh sh$#!! She totally lied about where the money is!!

I'm convinced that if you didn't watch the last 2 seconds of every scene of Revenge, you'd have absolutely NO idea what was going on. The sneaky facial expression is key to understanding who's up to what. Desperate Housewives too, for that matter. 24 did it a lot too.

Ughh, you know what 24 also always did?! Made things that were impossible 5 seconds prior totally possible.

How many times were Chloe's lines:

"I don't think I can hack into the computer Jack...it's encrypted!"
....
"Ok I'm in the database."

Wow, that was some tough encryption there Chloe. Jack Bauer has more important stuff to do than listen to your completely baseless assessment that some computer, building, or bomb is completely un-crackable when you are going to go on to crack it in literally that same scene.


"Say crack again!"
-Damien, Mean Girls

Thursday, September 13, 2012

"Why ya gotta go and make things so complicated?"

Sometimes when I'm in a place like Forever 21, or the grocery store, or even a business meeting, the same thought will run through my mind: When our planet was created, is this what was intended?? If you believe in God, then did God ever think a place like Walmart would exist? Or if you believe in the big bang theory or any other scientific theory, then were millions of earth's particles created so that we could build Macy's?

I think places like Forever 21, Macy's etc. give me this feeling because they're just so full of stuff. It's literally exploding with products. And people. And music. You gotta wonder who the first person was to be like, "You know what would make this open-air market better? Blaring music, and offensive perfume smells. And half-dressed teenagers."

All you have to do to feel like crap in a supermarket is think of all the people in the world that are starving right now. And we are buying cases of flavored seltzer water. How did that happen? (Spare us any comments about slavery or capitalism or how horrible we all are. I'm asking a rhetorical question.)

Business meetings and even sports practices/games always make me stop and think because they get so analytical. Every marketing strategy is laid out, or every game strategy is discussed, and it almost seems kind of funny because we literally made all of this crap up out of thin air. Whenever we use lingo, or have all of this "insider information," it really can't be that complicated or deep because all of it started with a human being saying, "Hey, let's hit this ball with this stick," or "I bet more people will buy ____ if we ___." I refuse to believe anyone when they tell me something is too complicated for me to understand. And I suspect that anyone who tells me that is only saying it because they don't fully understand it themselves.

Anyways, take a look around, think about what you do from day-to-day and try to picture a caveman--sorry, caveperson**--complaining about how much longer his walk to Trader Joe's is as opposed to Shaw's. "Siiigh...grunt....the quality is SO much better but I have to walk right by the sabertooth tiger's lair. Honey...do you really need organic pomegranates this week??"


"Everything is amazing right now, and no one is happy!"
-Louis C.K. in an awesome interview you should watch

Monday, September 10, 2012

Well THAT Worked Out Well!

If you're someone who believes in free will, then on any given day there are an infinite amount of possible things that could happen in the world. That's why it's so exciting when something happens to work out perfectly. Even if it's just the smallest things.

Tell me you don't get excited when you go to fill your gas tank and it stops on either a price ending in .00 or an even amount of gallons.

Or when you make every single green light on the way to work.

Or when you're stopped at a red light on a hill that is the perfect upwards slope that you can take your foot off the break and not move anywhere.

Can I come up with an example that doesn't involve driving, you ask?

Ok fine.

...Ok nevermind, I just stared at my screen for about 3 minutes and couldn't think of an adequate example that didn't involve the commute to work. So, you win.

Slightly shifting the topic here, you know what always impresses me? That trick with the 9 times table where you can count your fingers and it gives you the answer. How the heck does that work out?? If that is not divine intervention I don't know what is. (Yes, I realize that I began this post talking about free will and now I'm talking about divine intervention. But it's my blog and I hold the right to be inconsistent. Embrace it.)

Do you have any clue what I'm talking about?

Here's a Youtube video that explains it in painful detail:


The other cool one that is completely miraculous to me is how you can tell how many days a month has by your knuckles. How absolutely perfect is it that July and August are the only 2 back-to-back months with 31 days, AND your left and right hand's pointer finger knuckles are the only 2 knuckles on your hands combined that don't have that little dip-down in between?? I freaking love when things work out like that!

Don't know this trick either? Here's a Youtube video that's slightly less horrible than the last one I gave you:



Kind of makes you wonder how many other tricks like that people have tried to come up with but then it didn't work out. They were probably pretty bummed out...but we'll never know, because you rarely hear about things that almost work.


"I almost got drunk at school at 14
Where I almost made out with the homecoming queen
Who almost went on to be Miss Texas
But lost to a slut with much bigger breastes
I almost dropped out to move to LA
Where I was almost famous for almost a day
And I almost had you
But I guess that doesn't cut it"
-"Almost" by Bowling for Soup

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Losing It

Do you ever have those moments where you completely lose your mind, or lose control/consciousness over what you're doing and then do something that makes absolutely no sense? I hadn't really paid much attention to it in the past, but once I started thinking about it, I realized it happens quite often to me.

So, thinking about these weird lose-track-of-what-you're-doing moments all started this weekend when I had put some pasta salad in a bowl for lunch, and took out a glass for water. I went to the freezer, grabbed some ice cubes for the glass, and the next thing I knew there were 3 ice cubes in my pasta salad.

This made me think back to the time a couple months ago that I poured orange juice on my cereal. But I feel like that happens to a lot of people, so I let that one slide. BUT...

What about the time when I was a little kid and I was pacing up and down my hallway while brushing my teeth, absentmindedly cupped my hand and spit out the toothpaste as if my hand were the sink? Well, ok...I was really young when that happened.

Well, then there was the time I was in middle school and it was cool to have your pony tail slicked back as tight to your head as possible...I was trying to unclog my aerosol can of hairspray, so I ran the nozzle under hot water and picked away at the dried up hairspray. Then I checked the nozzle...maybe to admire my handywork? Who knows? But anyways, I'm staring directly at the opening, when I suddenly become possessed by some sort of mind-numbing demon for about .5 seconds...just long enough for my finger to find the top of the nozzle and spray hairspray DIRECTLY into my eye. I literally have no idea what happened. I twitched, or got Tourettes for a quick second, or something. Buut I ended up with an eyeball-full of toxic chemicals.

And here's the finale. Hands down the strangest thing I've ever done while my brain went on some sort of mini vacation. Ok, so I was leaving work a few summers ago, and going out to my car in the parking garage. I was thinking about how I was going to drive over to my Grandmother's house from there, and if I should stop and pick something up for her for dinner, etc. So I get to my car, open the door, throw my purse over to the passenger side, sit down, close the door, and go to put my key in the ignition...and I'm sitting in the backseat of my car. You know that shiver you get when you see a dead animal on the road? Or if you're on an elevator that moves too fast? Basically your body's way of saying "this is weird, I don't like this." That definitely happened to me.

Oh yeah, and I just remembered I accidentally walked into the men's bathroom at a restaurant a couple months ago. And the worst part was that I had been to that restaurant before! And I thought to myself, "Weird! I don't remember the sink being there!" Then, I knew I definitely didn't remember that guy at the urinal being there either. ABORT ABORT!!

So anyways, that's quite the list I have going there. Anyone want to try to make me feel better about that?

...Anyone at all?


"I don't suffer from insanity...I enjoy every minute of it."
-Unknown