Fives Are Wild

My friend Ross tagged me and seemed to think I might respond to this. Heck, yeah! I'm totally in my element when I'm doing things that many people find awkward or beneath them. (I've got blue face paint and I'm not afraid to use it.) Besides, having been tagged by a rock star/teen idol, how could I resist the chance to take a shot at, as he puts it, "revealing how insecure I am"?

Here goes everything.

Edit: Oh yeah, almost forgot to post THE RULES:
1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

What were you doing 5 years ago?
Let's see, what was I doing 5 years ago today? (As we all learned in junior high essay tests, it really helps your answers look a lot more solid when you first restate the question before totally B.S.ing the "meat" of your answer.) I know one thing was just starting to breathe again as my wife finished the first of her three final years of school at A&M (after the year off she took to join me in California, which followed her first two years at A&M), and thinking how long the next two years would be until we could get the hay out of College Station. The better question here is, what are you doing today, five years after that time five years ago? The answer then becomes: Watch, and Learn.

What are 5 things on your to-do list today
(NOTE: I started this Saturday. I'm finishing this Monday, but I'm leaving the to-do list intact. Saturday's was much more interesting than today's.)
1. Wake up - check. (Starting the day out slowly and with attainable goals allows for greater momentum going into loftier and more blog-worthy goals.)
2. Help make coffee and quiche for the in-laws in town - check. (Pretty sweet deal, huh? I'm available for private parties, and also I'm a lot of fun on karaoke.)
3. Go look at potential houses - check. (We sort of are and aren't looking at this point in time - today was more of an "are" day than one of the "aren't"s.)
4. Help a friend from our ComGroup move to a new apartment - check. (Get really sweaty while carrying the things that people have to have in all rooms of their house and actually use on a daily basis - also check.)
5. See the new Indiana Jones movie - unchecked at this point in time. But the tickets have been purchased.

What are 5 snacks you enjoy?
1. Tortilla chips with dip
2. Fritos with dip
3. Potato chips with dip
4. Bagel chips with dip
5. Paint chips (plain)

What 5 things would you do if you were a billionaire?
1. Pay off the national debt.
2. Go back to school and take a class in economics.
3. Pay off my own debt.
4. Pay off my friends' and families' debts and probably the debts of a bunch of other people who came up to me and played the sympathy card (I'm such a sucker for these types of people, it's sickening).
5. Go to random stores, on occasion, and say with glee in a loud voice, "I'll have one of everything."
6. Give gobs of money to my church and other Kingdom-minded causes (in a much less showy way). And I'm not just saying that because this guy and this guy said it first.

What are 5 of your bad habits?
1. Loving shock-value attention
2. Eating way too many chips
3. Wow, five is a lot of bad habits to have to list
4. I kind of feel like that first one was worth at least two or three because it was so honest and motive-baring, but okay - I'll list one more:
5. Suddenly quitting a game because I want to, even if other people are still playing (if you've ever played mini-golf or Guesstures with me, you'll know what I'm talking about).

What are 5 places you have lived?
1. Crappy house in Pasadena, TX (a.k.a. Stinkadena)
2. Nicer house in Pasadena, TX (this location smelled a little better)
3. Malibu, CA (if you haven't heard my celebrity stories, I've got a few good ones I can tell sometime)
4. Agoura Hills, CA (through "the Canyon" - this is where Kathryn and I had our first apartment! 500 sq. ft., $670/mo.)
5. Bryan/College Station, TX (hullabaloo connect the dots)

What are 5 jobs you've had? (These will appear in chronological order)
1. Grocery sacker (I was pretty spickin' good at keeping cold items together and totally dominating the canned vegetables, back in the day)
2. Lifeguard (I wasn't actually very good at this)
3. Chick-Fil-A customer satisfaction artist (actually, I don't know what my official job title was, and I only worked there a month because my parents wanted me to focus more on school, but this was a pretty sweet job because you could eat the "employee meals" for $1, which basically consisted of as many of those nuggets and fries as you could fit on a plate)
4. General student worker (I paid my dues for all four years of college...)
5. Various office jobs/Research Assistant (something about wondering whether people noticed that I'd already paid those dues in college - but somehow you continue to pay them long after. I have to be pretty vague here because I'm actually the first name that comes up when I google myself, and most of my current co-workers are either web-savvy or outright techie. Actually, the job I'm at right now is pretty sweet, so it's not like I have a lot to vent about out here in Cyber-topia.)

What 5 people do you want to tag?
1. My wife (seeing as she's working on one of these posts but hasn't published it yet, I'd say this timing works out well; hers will be quite a formidable post, seeing as she's hilarious in her own right, but I can almost bet money on my post being way longer, so I'm not too worried)
2. Thad (he can't ignore the impatient crowds forever)
3. Danny (seeing as he's recently gotten back into blogging, I thought I'd be nice and send all my incredible scores of web-traffic his way)
4. Britt (who is currently suffering from major blog-frost)
5. Cory (another blog-frosty, but ought to be able to craft something hecka interesting)

Common Play-It-Off #1: The "Sniff Catch"

I'm hoping this post will be the first of many explorations of what I'm terming "Common Play-It-Offs" - which are basically timely behavioral adjustments employed to quickly manage the perceptions of those around you. They are clandestinely desperate efforts to ensure that you don't give something of yourself away that you didn't premeditatedly intend to give away. The type of things about which those less subtle of your friends and/or acquaintances might be quick to say, "He's totally trying to play it off!" Hence the name.

Let me give you an example. Let's assume you find yourself in some form of social situation. Suddenly, something in your immediate environment tickles your funnybone. Perhaps you are in conversation and someone says something unexpectedly ironic. Perhaps you are supposed to be hard at work, though in fact you were daydreaming when a joke or scene of hilarity stumbles into the forefront of your consciousness. Within a fraction of a split-second, before you've braced yourself to withstand the wind of laughter, a gust blows through and exits out your nostrils, thus producing a slight, but plainly audible sniff-laugh, perhaps accompanied by a slight twinkling in your eyes. In yet another fraction of a second, this one no larger than the one that brought on this almost certain disaster, your mind rattles off the following: "Oh no! Did anyone hear that? Did anyone see that? Shoot! How embarrassing if they did! But maybe there's still time... maybe I can [everyone all together now] PLAY IT OFF..." Of course, this would be more of a quasi-conscious reaction - the way the play-it-off would more likely be conceived and executed in real time is something like this: ! nff. And "nff," of course, is what I would call the "Sniff Catch." That timely, ever-so-smooth save that, if successful, will have those in your airspace thinking, "Did he laugh just now? Oh, must have been merely clearing his nose."

And of course, if someone asks you how your allergies are doing this season, you know you're in the clear. Golden. (Barring any hint of sarcasm, of course.) However, should you find no forthcoming offers of Kleenex, you are then faced with a difficult decision. Do you follow up your sniff laugh and catch with another similar sniffing combination? Or would doing so jeopardize the subtlety of your defense? After all, your whole strategy here rests on flying below the radar. Friend, let me just say that I don't envy your decision in the least. All I will offer here, other than the obvious advice that you should factor in as many variables as you can in the time you have (what's your audience like - how well do you know them? are you in a noisy location - perhaps the air conditioning prevented anyone from noticing your blunder? how drunk is everyone - not at all or beyond memory? do these people even care whether you exist - perhaps if they all look down on you they wouldn't care even if they did notice?) - you know, read the situation and make an educated guess - is this: prevention is the best defense. Let me explain further in the next paragraph. See you there in a minute - I have to run to the bathroom.

Okay, I'm back. Hopefully you weren't waiting too long. Now, prevention. The key here is practice. I'm talking, stand in front of the mirror and practice all kinds of get-out-of-trouble looks (I'm a younger brother - trust me, they work. Actually, I really did get in trouble a lot as a kid. But I think this tapered off significantly as I got older, so I take that for eventually getting better at getting out of stuff, especially given the fact that I've always been a learn-the-hard-way type of guy). Especially hone in on such gems as the hee-hee-aren't-I-so-cute look (caution: this look's effectiveness can be compromised by the presence of pepper in between front teeth, or any other foreign objects), the oops-aren't-I-so-cute look (the key here is not in making your surprise come off as genuine, but in how adorable you are), and finally the oh-well-aren't-I-so-cute look (the king of all looks, because once you've mastered this one, you can pretty much get away with anything except for cannibalism and cutting in line). Also, Blue Steel and Magnum are handy options. So then, once you've got some tools in your bag, you're ready to pull them out should you totally botch the play-it-off.

So, without further ado, here it is (in my first ever blog-video!) - the "Sniff Catch":

A Week In The Life Of Joe

I’ve determined that weekends are the best times for revealing how desperately inept one is at living life. Here’s the way things typically tend to shake out for me on weekends. Actually, to get a better idea, it’s best to start with Mondays – the days on which, usually, my weekend expectations begin to form. Mondays usually begin with an unpleasant discovery: that in the intervening time between Sunday night bed-time and Monday morning wake-time, a miracle has, in fact, failed to occur yet again, and I will, in fact, have to deal with each week day in due course and miss out on skipping right ahead to Friday night. Such is life (imagine that in a French accent). These types of dark epiphanies are much less common throughout the week, but have been known to occur as late as about Wednesday morning.

Skip ahead to Thursday. I actually like Thursdays quite a bit. They consist largely of the promise of freedom – a certain kind of over-the-hump-ness mixed with a feeling that scores of hours are coming in which I can breathe and run free, sleep in (although I usually prefer to be up sometime before 9 on weekends), and regain the sanity that evaporates off me like steam during the week. Thursdays are great because the next day is Friday, and then you can wear jeans to work! (Never mind the fact that many of my coworkers and I often wear jeans the other days of the week. Never mind that now.)

Friday arrives. Fridays are good, partly because of jeans, but most importantly because of the unshakeable optimism that accompanies knowing that any crap you have to deal with today you most assuredly won’t have to deal with tomorrow (that is, unless you are one of those “task-oriented” employees instead of a “time-oriented” employee, like me…). Ah yes, Fridays. And then it happens. Five o’clock. Everybody saying, “have a good weekend.” Weekend? Hm. I always arrive at this point underprepared. Suddenly I have 63 hours of freedom that I have absolutely no idea what to do with. How can that be, you ask? Let me explain.

In honesty, I have plenty of ideas what I’d like to do on a weekend. They’re the types of things that tend to break the budget, or the inseam, or come across as violations of spousal peace treaties. That is to say, the consumer in me knows exactly what to do with weekends and a debit card. That’s the problem – that dude is a total asshole. And if asshole is left unchecked all weekend, then Monday rolls around and taunts me, in all its sick irony, “time to do it all over again.” Usually, though, those voices in my head start their harassment by Sunday night. It seems they’ve found that it’s best to ease people into despondency, rather than springing it on them all at once.

“Joe,” you say, “it sounds like you’ve been noticing this thing going on for a while.” “Yes,” I answer, “I have.” “Joe,” you continue, “have you thought about planning out your weekends in advance?” “Why yes,” I respond, “I have. In fact, that’s exactly what I did this weekend. I took some time during the day Friday to plan out, wisely I might add, both the sorts of things I would need and want to do this weekend. Additionally, I found some time for my wife and I to communicate about these things, so we could both talk about what we hoped to do this weekend.” “Joe,” you exclaim, “that’s great! How did it go?” “Well,” I sigh, “you’ll be reading about it on my blog. I might label it ‘downbeat something-or-other’.” “Oh.” “Oh.”

Yes, so that brings me to this weekend. Was it horrible? Not entirely – because, for all my shortcomings, I did succeed in one thing: making both my wife and I painfully depressed by late yesterday evening. Score. On my own goal. Kathryn and I have both been wanting to pursue creative projects more in our free time, rather than just watching TV or doing something totally passive like that. (Granted, she can typically be working on some kind of craft project while watching TV, but I certainly can’t. I don’t multitask – TV and activity are like oil and water for me.) So, she comes to me in the afternoon and asks, “Want to work on a video together?” After a little inertia on my part, I decide that I would like to try to brainstorm a project we can do together. So we both brainstorm independently (she’s showering at this point) – collaborative brainstorming sessions have previously tanked in prior instances of this exact situation. Then, a little while later, we both come together to share the ideas we’re both excited about. Let’s just say, our ideas meshed about as well as cold water and wood fire. Creative momentum: successfully managed, i.e., squelched.

I’ll save you the rest of the details (other than clarification that this really wasn’t a fight by any stretch of the imagination – we just had vastly different visions and couldn’t get on the same page, or in this case, even be reading the same book), because I’m short on time and they’re depressing anyways. Suffice it to say we did manage to find a little enjoyment watching Steve Carell host Saturday Night Live. Oh well. Whatever.

Lord, I feel I’ve got a bone to pick with you. Now, I don’t fault you for any of this. You’re not, historically speaking, the one who botches things up so much as the one who steps in and repairs the damage, making things right and good again. But (and, you know, big one or whatnot…), I need some help here, and not just a little. Life just seems more complex and complicated than I can handle. Maybe I’m the one making it difficult, but I need to be taught before I can be expected to perform. You’ve given me an airplane, but I’ve only ever learned to drive a car. You know I want to fly, because a guy can barely walk down here without being assaulted by a thousand damn billboards. You know I’m tired of buying their crap. Teach me to fly. Forgive me for all I’ve spent poorly. Teach me to fly. Forgive me for loving anyone who looked me in the eyes or flashed me a smile, and the stuff they peddle. Teach me to fly. Forgive me for buying when they told me I could be like you without you. Teach me to fly.

Well, time to wrap things up, lest I risk ending it there on a deceptively high note (a ‘false positive’, perhaps?). Moral of the story? Weekends are overrated. Avoid them if at all possible. Weekdays? Avoid those as well, if you can. But since that doesn’t really leave you with much, if anything, I suppose I will leave you with this final dino-nugget of wisdom and ray of ambiguity: make the most of your Thursdays.