Tag Archives: humor

My problem with pens.

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Originally posted on April 17, 2017

broken_pens

I have a house full of old, nonworking pens.  It’s not because I want them.   Keeping up with pens and throwing away old ones is one thing I never seem to bother keeping up with.    Whenever I need a pen, I can never, EVER find a working one.  I have dozens of old markers that no longer have any ink in them, tens of cheap ballpoints I got for free somewhere with no ink in them and non-working clickers; I even have dried up pen refills with no actual pen to cover them.  I have Sharpies with their nubs worn down to nothing.  They all sit forlornly in old coffee mugs around the house.

People can’t understand why I can’t find a working pen when I need one.  They look around at the mugs of pens in every room and on every available surface, and they also know I have drawers full of pens (as well as old phone chargers, paper clips, rubber bands, broken push pins, paid bills from 2003, business cards for businesses I’ll never use or have never heard of, a broken lighter with Y2K joke on it [no joke], and all the other detritus most of us wind up gathering somehow without any effort at all).   I almost always wind up having to borrow their pen — if they’re carrying one — and I can see them just shaking their heads in bemused amazement.

I have the same problem with pencils.  I have at least a hundred pencils — all with broken points or sharpened down to an inch or so (and still sporting broken points) — and not one sharpener.   So the pencils I own are utterly useless.   Maybe I should install a sharpener on the wall, like the one we kept on the basement stairs while I was growing up (I’ll never know why it was installed on the wall of the dark basement stairs, as if it was something to be embarrassed about).

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At least with the Internet, I rarely need a pen.  But sometimes I do.  There’s still the occasional form I need to fill out, or the birthday card I need to sign (I hate e-cards).  Sometimes I have to leave post-it notes to myself on the bathroom mirror that say things like:  BUY A PACK OF PENS TODAY!  Hah.  I never learn.   I never go out and buy a pack of pens for these moments.  The one time recently that I did buy a pack, I somehow lost all those pens.  But the old, dried up, broken ones stuck around like unwelcome guests.

And they MULTIPLY.  You know that portal that’s hidden in the back of your washer that sucks your socks into an alternate universe?    Well, I think there’s another portal — a reverse wormhole — from that same universe that spews broken old pens into ours.  Maybe it somehow transforms our socks into pens.  You never know.

Why don’t I just throw away all those broken and nonworking pens and pencils?  Honestly, I don’t know why.    It’s not sentimentality,  and it’s not because “maybe one day I will use them in a multi-media project where I can glue them to a board with all the other useless junk in my drawers and call it art.”  ” No, I think the reason I don’t weed out all the old pens and pencils is pure laziness.   The idea of going through all those mugs and drawers full of broken writing implements and testing them isn’t something I want to spend my day doing.

So the pens stay, and I continue to search in vain for a working pen when I need one.

Anyone want some of my old broken pens?

Cynicism is Killing Our Democracy: The Donna Brazile, Edition

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Here’s a humorous and snarky but all too true look at why cynicism is killing our democracy.  There is salty language here, but read it anyway.

CalicoJack's avatarThe Psy of Life

We are drowning in cynicism. Cynicism is killing us! Cynicism is destroying our way of life! Honest! You’ve gotta believe me.

And the poster child for cynicism murdering American democracy is the whole Donna Brazile accusations of the Clinton campaign of kidnapping the DNC and hiding the nomination from Sanders just as he was scooping it up in his hot little hands.

A quick aside: This post is one of an interrelated series on (a) the corrosive toxic effect the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s use of chaos and misinformation  (Deflecting to Clinton), (b) the ways social media is changing our culture and interactions (Brain Hack: the Looming Disaster), and (c) how all this is likely to affect the future of our country. The series includes posts and memes. Unfortunately, it means that general information like the Illusion of Truthiness (with appologies to Stephen Colbert)is…

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10 years ago.

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90slife

Why the Republican Party is like a Ford Pinto.

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flyingfordpinto

I can’t believe I actually found a picture that perfectly illustrates Rachel Maddow’s analogy — that was used in a completely different context.  (Picture credit: Drivetribe.com)

Not only is Rachel Maddow, anchor on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show (now the MOST popular primetime cable news show, overtaking everyone else because of her courageous in-depth research on the Trump-Russia investigation), scarily smart, she’s also wickedly funny.

She was interviewed in Rolling Stone magazine for the June 27, 2017 issue by Janet Reitman, and here’s what she had to say about the Republican and Democratic Parties:

I’m not a huge fan of the Democratic Party.   I’m also less interested in the Democratic Party as a topic — the Republican Party is much more fascinating to me…I’m like a sociological student of the Republican Party — even absent Trump.   There is a robust, well-funded, decades-old, superorganized, focused,  competent conservative movement that exists outside the Republican Party that yanks the party’s chain whenever they want to.   The Republican Party is like an old burned-out husk of a Ford Pinto that blew up ’cause its gas tank was in the wrong place, but it’s attached to a giant jet engine.  The Democratic Party is like a Honda Civic.  It putters through the world in a predictable way, and you like it or not depending on if you find small, unpowerful things cute.  But the Republican Party has this incredible propulsion and no way to steer it.

I can’t think of a more accurate description of both parties.  Maddow is referring, of course, to the unlimited corporate funding that funnels into the GOP, with the Koch Brothers at its helm.   Seriously, Maddow is one of the few things keeping me sane these days.   She’s a beacon of truth in a sea of misinformation and Trump-enablement in the mainstream media.   She’s not afraid to actually go where few others dare to tread and is still able to make me laugh.

America the beautiful.

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americathebeautiful

Eclipse 2017

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This is so true.

Credit:  Keith Knight/Patreon 

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Bugs have terrible boundaries.

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ant

I’m hooked on a blog I found a couple of months ago called WaitbutWhy.   It’s a blog for people who like science and geeky stuff and think about the same kinds of weird, random, shower-thought sort of things that I do.    Some of the stuff its author, Tim Urban, writes about will absolutely blow your mind, such as this incredible article about how to fit all 7.3 billion people on the planet into a building that would fit in a space smaller than Manhattan’s Central Park.  Yes, it can actually be done (but it would be terribly cruel!).

Some of his posts are hilarious because they’re so true and relatable.   In my last post I mentioned that bugs (ants, to be specific) can be beneficial to the environment because they help break down dead material, but let’s be honest here — Do any of us really LIKE bugs?

They invite themselves where they are not wanted.  They walk on our food and spit in it and lay their nasty eggs in it.   They violate our bodies without our permission, sometimes painfully or causing unbearable fits of itching.   They hide inside our bedcovers and crawl all over us when we’re trying to sleep.  Some bugs have an unsettling way of flying in your face repeatedly.    They won’t take no for an answer.  They look like microscopic monsters or aliens from another planet.   Their nasty dead carcasses can be found all over your windowsills, your floors, in your bed, inside your refrigerator. They are stupid (moths fly straight into electric lights — how have they not gone extinct yet?).  Moths burrow inside your clothing and chew holes in them.  Roaches and mosquitoes carry diseases.   Termites can bring down your home (and during their horrifying spring swarms, they obnoxiously drop their wings after having sex — all over your hardwood floors.  (I know, because this happened to me — I spent two hours vacuuming them all up while crying and whimpering in terror).  I wrote about that awful experience in detail in this post about my weird phobia.  Here is an excerpt.

The worst experience I ever had with my phobia was the time we had a termite infestation. I was home alone at the time, watching TV in the living room and something made me look across the room. Something weird was happening on the hardwood floor. It looked like it was sort of…undulating. I got up to investigate and saw what appeared to be THOUSANDS of ant-like insects walking, flying, and DROPPING THEIR WINGS ALL OVER THE FLOOR. I started shivering and crying as I frantically went to go find the vacuum cleaner. I couldn’t think straight. Whimpering in terror, I had trouble plugging the damn thing into the wall because my hands were shaking so badly. In a panic, I sucked up every last one I could see, but MORE KEPT COMING OUT OF THE WALL. I didn’t know they were termites–I didn’t know about the “swarmers” (the termites who mate in the spring and have temporary wings until they mate) until Terminex told me that’s what those were. THOSE UNHOLY FLYING FAKE ANTS WERE HAVING SEX ALL OVER MY LIVING ROOM FLOOR!

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Sorry.

Urban wrote a post about all these ways that bugs ruin everything, but what really stuck with me was his correct observation that —

Bugs have terrible boundaries.

They do, and maybe that’s why we hate them so much.  More than anything, I despise bugs (okay, I know technically most of them are insects, not true bugs) because they have zero sense of where you end and they begin.   Just like those predatory boundary-violating narcissists who make our lives a living hell and never seem to go away. 

In a post I’ll write later tonight or tomorrow, I’m going to describe the wonderful day I had tubing on a local river yesterday.   Everything was perfect — except for the hundreds of dragonflies swarming and hovering everywhere, persistently landing on our bare skin.   Swarming all around us — and mating in the air while they did so!  Do you have no sense of modesty,  Mr. and Ms. Dragonfly? Having sex in public.   In the air.  No shame, those dragonflies.   They all have abominable boundaries! So maybe I’m just jealous, because having sex while flying seems like it would be heavenly!

dragonfliesmating

I have nothing against dragonflies.  As far as insects go, they are generally pretty inoffensive.  Yes, they are big and kind of prehistoric looking (they scared the bejeebus out of me when I was younger).   The sight of their large outstretched transparent wings is slightly unsettling to me (though I have no idea why).  But I like them.   They don’t bite.  They eat mosquitoes and other annoying bugs that do bite.  They are also very pretty.   I have a love/hate relationship with dragonflies, and I guess the love wins out because I have a tattoo of one on my right shoulder.

I like dragonflies, but I like them from a distance and in limited numbers.  I don’t like swarms of them flying all around me, landing on me, and making love right in front of my face.

Good thing that didn’t happen when I was young, because I would have died from panic. Over the years, I overcame my phobia to the point where my feelings about dragonflies are mainly positive, although I’ve retained a bit of my old fear that snuck up on me yesterday when they were all around me and I couldn’t get away.  I dealt with it by pretending I was Spyro the Dragon with magical dragonflies protecting me.

“Get out of my yard!”

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One of the funniest signs I ever saw (taken by someone else).

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Fragile.

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fragile

17 ways you know you’ve become a news junkie.

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newspapers

It sure seems a lot longer than four and a half months since Obama was president, doesn’t it? Like maybe a whole decade or twenty or even a hundred years ago.   With so much insanity bombarding us every day that has dire implications on our lives and those of the people we love,  it’s easy to feel like a Bobblehead toy that keeps getting sucker-punched by hard, cold reality.  These days, you might get trolled for even believing reality is real.   I think for many of us, staying glued to the news is the only way we feel like we stay connected to what’s real (even if that reassuring feeling of groundedness is just an illusion) .

Our favorite pundits and news anchors and commentators are the heroes we look up to for some idea of what unspeakable dangers might be coming down the pike.  You just never know anymore.   Things really could get THAT BAD.   Conspiracy theories don’t exist anymore because they’re our new reality.    Hyperbole is dead.     Anything that you can imagine, no matter how unimaginable, very probably will happen — and we’d better be ready for it when it does.   History itself seems like it’s become oddly pliable like wet clay and might even dissolve completely if we don’t stay constantly plugged in.   Let go of that lifeline for one minute or one day or a week, pretend like it’s the old days when you pretty much ignored current events and didn’t know (or care) what the difference was between a filibuster and a gerrymander, and you might fall into a bottomless void where reality doesn’t exist anymore and then it’s all over for you.

So, after fifty plus decades of not really giving a damn about current events or politics and being only intermittently and mildly interested during important historical moments such as Watergate, the Challenger Explosion, 9/11, the housing crisis, or even the OJ Simpson trial,  I’ve become a news junkie.    In fact, it’s reached the level of an obsession (I am an obsessive sort of person anyway).   I soon realized I wasn’t alone.  Suddenly, we’re a nation of amateur pundits and political commentators.    While we may annoy or disturb those few folks who are still blissfully oblivious and don’t follow the news,  one good thing can be said for this national obsession:  while we may have slept through high school civics class and had no inkling of how government worked before, now we can write entire dissertations about how government works — now that it no longer does.

So without further ado, here are 17 ways you can tell you’ve become hopelessly addicted to the news.

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1. Rachel Maddow (or Lawrence O’Donnell or Chris Hayes) is your latest crush.

2.  You feel like the talking heads on TV are your friends.

3.  You keep checking your phone during the day for new tweets or Facebook posts about the latest debacle being unleashed from the White House.

4.  The President gives you that same wary, uncertain, triggered feeling that your ex did, and you have to keep checking to make sure he hasn’t taken away your healthcare or started World War III yet.

5.  You check for new tweets during your bathroom break.   All the President’s most outrageous tweets (which is most of them) are like cigarette burns in your memory.

6.  You scream profanities at the TV every night.

7.  You obsessively Like and share every article you find about the most current abomination or opinions that fit yours pertaining to said abomination.

8.  If you have a blog, all your posts start to be opinion pieces about the political situation.   At first you try to make them fit the theme of your blog somehow, but after awhile you don’t even bother with that anymore.

9.  You can’t tell the difference between a Saturday Night Live sketch and whatever political debacle the sketch is parodying, because reality has become as insane as anything a comedy show can come up with.  Real headlines are indistinguishable from headlines in The Onion.

10.  You wrote a song and called it “A Comey in the Curtains is Worth Two Spicers in the Bush.”

11.  You look at strangers and in your mind, decide if they are Trump, Bernie, or Hillary supporters — and judge them for it.   Or if someone is a jerk to you, you label them as a fan of whatever politician you hate the most and judge them even more harshly than you would have because of course, only a total jerk who supports X could do such a nasty thing.

12.  You actually care about what happens to the people employed by the FBI

13.  You find James Comey sort of sexy.

14.   You let off steam by troll-tweeting Trump even though you know he’ll never see them.

15.  You spend time reading comments on Breitbart News to try to understand how the other side feels — and you just can’t.

16.  You finally decided to subscribe to the New York Times because certain people think it’s failing (even though you know it isn’t).

17.  You have hours-long conversations debating whether it’s MSNBC or CNN that’s veering into Fox News territory.

If you can stand to tear yourself away,  I highly recommend taking vacations from the news and having news-free days just doing things that make you feel good.   Your sanity depends on it.   Chances are, taking a break won’t be fatal.  World War III probably won’t start while you’re watering your petunias or reading a spy novel on the beach.  And if it does, you’ll probably never know it hit you because you’ll already be dead.  It’s not as if you could really do anything about it anyway.