Icees and Marriage

After nearly 8 years of marriage, Kathryn and I are still learning new things about each other. Couples with more years under their belts have said the same thing. They've said, "After nearly 8 years of marriage, Kathryn and Joe are still learning new things about each other." See? It's what everyone is saying these days.

The occasion for today's revelation was a romantic luncheon at Gattitown. We got our hopes up when the Icee machine didn't have an "Out of Order" sign like it did last week (yes, we're star customers at G-Town these days - for some reason, Kathryn feels less preggie-sick when she's eaten pizza), but upon closer inspection, the mix wasn't ready yet. Drat! Foiled again!

So we set to eating lunch. At one point, I go for a drink refill and notice that the Icee machines are ready to go. Sweet! I get one small cup of cherry Icee for me, one of Coke Icee for Kathryn, since those are, of course, what both of us most like. I set them down on the table in their respective places and go back to get napkins. I come back and Kathryn is laughing, saying "Are you joking? You're not going to drink all that cherry." I said, "Why not? I like cherry."

(I'm starting a new paragraph because this is the part where the story really takes off.) She says, "How in the world do you like cherry? Everytime we get Icees from Sam's, you always insist that we get Coke."

"Of course," says I, "because you like Coke more than cherry." "Nay," replies the wife, "I like cherry better than Coke." "Really?" "Really." "Hm."

Says Kathryn, "So you really don't like Coke better?" "No," quoth yours truly, "I prefer cherry." "Hm."

Anyways, I could go on and describe the part of the conversation where we candidly worked out our feelings on Blue Raspberry, but that's either another blog post in itself or not worth going into.

Wow. Who'd a thunk it? Nearly 8 years of marriage and we'd been doing this crazy little Icee dance, neither of us getting what we truly wanted, both of us trying to sacrifice a little to try and please the other person. To think that all this time, we could have both been savoring more of that frozen cherry goodness, instead of settling for less. Boggles the mind. Whether or not the lesson in all of this is, as the psycho-babblers love to put it, "COMMUNICATION!", I've certainly learned something about my wife, and I'll take it on serendipity.

Needless to say, this one has almost certainly already gone down in Wikipedia as the Great Peebles Icee Surprise of 2009, and will be told and embellished for generations to come.

LL Cute Joe

If you think the title is awkward enough (as in, some kind of self-proclaimed title), then get ready for the hot scoop of awkward that I'm about to dish up.

If you didn't quite get the cultural reference, I'm referring to this guy, whose alias, if you weren't already knowledgabizzle, stands for 'Ladies Love Cool James'.

If only I could (or was at least attempting to) make such a claim. No, unfortunately, after the events that just transpired about 20 minutes ago, here's the sad state of things: Ladyboys Love Cute Joe. More on that first part of the title a little later...

Tonight's occasion was made possible by a couple of gender-confused individuals who were leaving the video store at the same time that I was returning a DVD. The transcript is as follows:

Ladyboys: (waving and batting some fake eyelashes - well, at least they were enhanced in some form or fashion) "Hey Sexy..."
Me: (muttering indistinctly and avoiding eye contact) "Hi"
Ladyboys: (walking towards their car, which was also in my general direction) "Merry Christmas..."
Me: (maintaining the initial sense of distance) "Thanks"
Ladyboys: (now at their car) [Waving and batting eyelashes again]
Me: (in my car again about to drive off) [Noticing the waving out of the corner of my eye, I drive away with a the kind of quick wave and sideways glance usually reserved for newspaper salesmen.]

I'd love to say this kind of thing hasn't ever happened before, but it has. Kathryn and I were in Thailand on a mission trip the summer before we got married. We decided to get photos done, because Thai people get wedding pictures done before they get married as opposed to after, and we could get a great deal on some really nice pictures. So we drove an hour and a half across Bangkok to the shopping mall where the photo place was. The place was run by gay Thai guys, who Thai people call "ladyboys" (hence the alias and title for this post). We started getting ready. They spent over an hour on Kathryn's makeup (later, her mom didn't even recognize her in the pictures), and at least twenty minutes on my hair. At some point while they were either fixing my hair or taking the pictures, one of our Thai friends comes and tells us there are some more ladyboys outside the place, watching me through the glass (so maybe it was while we were taking pictures), talking about how cute I was. Brilliant. Of course, Kathryn and our Thai friend enjoy a plentiful handful of snickers at my situation.

Does this make me feel awkward? Yeah, a little bit, but nothing near the level of awkward experienced by a friend of mine when a Brazilian woman offered to have his baby for him (she had to say it through a translator) after a concert in Brazil (he was on tour with a musical group). Great story - maybe I can get him to blog about it.

Looking on the bright side, at least the ladyboys aren't offering to have my baby. Maybe I should ask next time.

In defense of emotional basket-cases

I've had this thing lately that runs through my head: what about people who are mental?  Crazy?  Emotionally unstable?  I have this real feeling of injustice towards them because it seems like life goes on without them just because they can't seem to get it together.

Partly this is a confession, as well, at perhaps some anger directed at God for feeling like maybe he's okay with the fact that some people can't handle responsibility (and are thus deprived of coming into their full humanness) and that he's content to let such people fall by the wayside.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, this post is autobiographical to a degree yet-to-be-determined by how long I can hold out before ending up in the quack-shack.

Sometimes it feels melodramatic to me to make such statements about my mental health.  At other times it seems as if I'm not quite capable of joking, as some people do to cope, about going crazy, and enjoying the joke.

Do I feel like God needs to somehow prove himself or his record on this to me?  As far as my record goes, I think I've pretty consistently been able to unmask my own ironies that disguise themselves as justified ranting and raving at the Almighty.  Which is to say, it kind of comes down to an issue of patience with me.  God never seems to be in much of a hurry to prove himself to me on the things I think are important.

I don't think that means I can't be a little bitter over our culture's worship of self-confidence and how it drives people just struggling not to lose it to appear as if they can conform to the popular idolatry.  Or at least, a little bitter over what I perceive as the church's possible complicity (to whatever degree) in this crime.  Really, maybe I'm just bitter because I know I'm not just the president, I'm also a client.

I mean, am I wrong about this (the cultural pressure to become someone that you and everyone else can worship)?  I seriously wonder if crazy people in other countries are nearly so famous in their cultures as we are, I mean, the ones here are in ours.

This may be one of those posts that far exceeds my normal levels of, "where in the world is he coming from?"  If none of these thoughts make any sense to you without the context, I'd be glad to share more of why I think I'm marginally insane with you some time soon.  Seriously.  After all, misery loves company, whether or not the feeling is mutual.

Recent highs and lows of life (rescued from the draft pile...)

(QUICK EDITOR'S NOTE: I INTENDED TO PUBLISH THIS POST WEEKS AGO, ACTUALLY JUST A DAY SHY OF A FORTNIGHT SHY OF A MONTH AGO, TO BE KIND OF EXACT. THAT'S BECAUSE THERE ARE PICTURES I WAS HOPING TO INCLUDE, BUT WHICH I HAVE NO WAY OF GETTING OFF OF MY PHONE. SO MAYBE LATER I'LL FIND A WAY TO GET THE PICTURES ON HERE. OKAY, I'LL STOP CAPS-SHOUTING AT YOU NOW SO YOU CAN READ THE POST...)

Pre(r)amble
Well, it occurs to me that there are basically two ways to start any blog post, assuming that you're me (other than with the word "Well," which is always a good choice). It's either going to be, "Life has been crazy lately," or "Life has been boring lately" - and everyone knows, of course, that there never is an in-between option. So, without further mucking about in hyperspace...

Life has been crazy lately. I'd like to share with you, in somewhat random order, some snippets from recent Joe-history. When they finally make a movie of my life, this will be the part where you think you can get up and go get a refill on your popcorn without missing too much. But then when you get back and whisper to your movie neighbor, "What did I miss?", there's no possible way they could catch you up to speed without missing something themselves. So you'll just have to read on for now.

160/50
On a recent camping trip I took with some guys (including him and him and another, non-blogging guy) to Inks Lake State Park, we explored a swimming location called Devil's Waterhole. I think I know why it was so named. Like a casino, the place draws you in and gives you that kind of reckless confidence that nudges you towards making internal statements like, "I bet I could do more. Why the hell not?" (Such things are quite likely to be said at locations named for the devil.) Only, here it wasn't about spending money you don't have (or soon won't), but about jumping off of cliffs and rocks and risking the physical health that you soon may not have. It was awesome. In retrospect, of course.

The first challenge was about a 20-foot cliff. I don't know if you have much of a sense of distance when you hear numbers like that, but 20 feet is a long way up. Consider that, in the normal course of your life, you are not often likely to jump off of walls that are taller than your own height, or even perhaps twice that. Well, this was in the neighborhood of three Yao Ming's high. The worst part about it all was how slippery the rocks were climbing up to this height. My non-blogging friend who went has been to other places in Austin for cliff jumping that he says are much safer, and where the bottom is deeper closer to the cliffs. Here you had to be sure to jump out far enough, or else you're hitting part of the rock formation closer to the cliff. Anyways, the place is fairly crowded, and kids probably less than a quarter of my age are jumping off this thing like there is a bed of puffy marshmallows below, so I couldn't make too much of an ordeal out of my first jump. So I jumped. A little while later I did it again, if for no other reason than I found myself trying to talk me out of jumping again. At times like this I just have to "man up" and silence my inner chicken.

Okay, now for the numbers. As you'll notice in the picture (that is, if I can ever get it transferred from my phone - anyone want to loan me a laptop bluetooth adapter?), one rock is significantly higher than the cliff I first jumped from. We estimated this at about 50 feet. Ay ay ay. (sp?) Two of the guys on the trip decided they were going to jump the tall rock, since we'd seen some other people doing it and not dying or exploding or anything. So they go up and jump. Great. Here comes the inner chicken again, clucking something about how I'd already proved enough manhood for one day. Stupid chicken. Yes, eventually I make my way over the rock. I start climbing. Right before I get to the top, there it is - BAM! That's the sound of my pulse kicking into high gear. I stop to check it. It's at about 160 beats/minute. FYI, btw - I rarely get up this high when I'm jogging. I step up to the top of the rock. Did the wind just pick up? I swear it did. I look down at my legs. They're shaking uncontrollably. I realize that the longer I wait, the harder it's going to be to jump, and also the higher the possibility that I will lose my balance and blaze a new trail down towards the water. So I jumped. About a week or two later, I hit the water. As I come up, I punch both arms into the air for the whole "did that guy just win a teenage karate tournament?" effect. And then I swim gurgling and sputtering to a place where I can sit down and bask.

Joe, the (sheet)Rocker
I've also been working with a very different kind of rock at our new house. Sheet rock. I'd make some kind of official pronouncement that now I am officially handy, but in the current place we live, I've also fixed a leaky washer drain, so this is simply a status that I am renewing, not recently acquiring. Honestly, there's really not a lot to say about this, other than that I really don't enjoy screwing it in. Or cutting it. Or hanging it. Or squatting to get the really low-to-the-floor screws. I think that about covers it.

I think it's an ungrounded myth that guys like power tools. I would offer that, more accurately, guys like power in whatever form they can find it. Kind of like women with chocolate. But power tools are really just a way to do more damage, faster. Noisier. And I'm not just talking about the swearing that follows the router's excursion away from the straight line. Neither am I excluding it.

No use crying over spilled coffee; no use throwing a trash can over it, either
While I'm on the topic of angst, it would be interesting to note that recently, on a frustrating morning of dealing with a handful of housing "decisions" (in quotes because they're really little stinkbombs disguised as situations that people have to deal with), I thought I'd pick up some Chick-Fil-A breakfast on my way home to pick something up before heading to the office. I arrived at home after smelling dark coffee and various forms of heated lipids wafting through the car's recirculating system, ready to chow down. As I'm adding the finishing touches to my coffee and preparing to replace the lid, one of my fingers (investigation still pending) knocks over the cup. Spilling every ounce of the coffee. Onto the table, chair, and floor. Did I mention that this morning had already been frustrating? Swearing ensued. (Some of you may be of the opinion that such action is of minimal benefit to anyone. I would disagree. In my opinion, this blog would be much less interesting if the story continued with, "and I thought to myself calmly and rationally, Self, you know, this really isn't such a bad situation at all - take inventory of how blessed you are and you'll see that this is no big deal.") I think I strung some words together that made very little sense being together, semantically speaking. I went and got a towel to mop up the mess, placing it on the floor. Feeling as though the situation was reaching a resolution too quickly, I promptly picked up our kitchen trash can and sighted in the perfect spot on the wall where I should heave it. "Yes, that's just the spot. Too far left and this might not work at all." Thankfully, at this point my hippocampus stepped in and told my amygdala that it would handle things from here.

The moral of the story? Sometimes being calm and rational will save you from having to clean up extra mess. But not being so makes for good story.

Ten things I hate about summer
1. THE HEAT.
I have an uncle who moved his family to Washington state several years ago (maybe some time while I was in college). What I heard was the reasoning at the time was perhaps he did it to help his allergies. I can't say that I don't find that kind of thing extremely appealing. I don't know whether he really moved for that reason (in a recent-esque conversation with a cousin of mine, I asked about why he had moved, and I received a rather dramatic response about how they just wanted to get away from family), but finding a climate more conducive to not sweating and sneezing sounds really good to me (I realize that there would likely be tradeoffs, but who doesn't want to live in a place where there's a drive-thru coffee shop every few hundred feet?).
2. THE ROACHES.
Seeing as the Brazos Valley only recently seems to be getting some rain after more or less months of little to no rain, perhaps only recently have the roaches been driven out of hiding on a larger scale. Bad grief, they've been crazy at our new house. I had actually forgotten how big they could get (our current property owner does a decent job of keeping the pest service coming, it seems). Silly me. Oh, and did you know that at that size, they make noise on hardwood floors and concrete (in the garage)? Sooooo creepy. Give me a 50-foot cliff I can 'man up' on (over an army of roaches) any day. But hey - roaches - don't take me for soft. Those of you I haven't already decimated, your time is coming. And you'd better beg for the spray if I have a broom within reach.
3. SWEATING.
Really, this one is pretty much a corollary of no. 1. But I didn't think it should go without mention. I'm pretty sure that, whatever my particular mix of Scottish and English and Polish (and someone told me there may be some Cherokee in there somewhere, I think), it wasn't intended for a climate like Texas. I'd go into details as to why I make this claim, but I am at least aware of this much, that certain things do not make for good blog storying.
4. THE WAY THAT THE AFOREMENTIONED THINGS MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO KEEP ACCURATE COUNTS OF THINGS, AND THINK CLEARLY IN GENERAL.
So I don't have ten things, but I do have a theory about summer. (Also winter.) Fall and Spring are my favorite times of year, being the seasons that the weather in Texas is most bearable and allows for that feeling that things are either cooling off or thawing out. It's those in-between times when the long hauls of sweating and shivering begin to fade from memory as they are eclipsed by times of refreshing, when you can walk outside and for a short time, breathe cool air and enjoy that kind of feeling that you want to make last as long as you can. I think of Fall and Spring more of transition periods. Obviously, Summer and Winter transition as well, but they feel less so since they lie in between the pendulum swings. Every second gets counted when pressure is applied. But who stares at their watch in those moments when you can simply be at ease? I think it's those moments that are like little peeks at the Kingdom. Brief glimpses of something that may not last very long now, but one day we won't have to settle for inevitable disappointment. One day, disappointment will be absolutely evitable. Come, Lord Jesus.

Reunions galore
Actually, this post is incredibly long already! I can tell by the fact that my own attention span is being stretched into some kind of funky yoga position. So this is a little taste of what I'll hopefully be posting soon. Tune in next time to hear a little about Kathryn's family reunion and my own 10-year high school reunion, both of which happened in the span of two weekends. There'll be laughs, wittiness, tangents, and of course, me taking every possible opportunity to magnify any of the stories which highlight my manliness. I can't wait, and neither can you! Blog atcha soon!

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)

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.