Bits and Pieces: Christmas edition
Some people do spring cleaning. I do not. But I do get a bunch of little odds and ends for ideas that sound funny in themselves, but which won’t really support a full-length post. So around this time of year, when I get lazy, I toss them together and pretend that I’m doing it on purpose when in fact I have already mentally checked out and can really only think about eggnog, which is my favorite nog ever.
So here we go: My late-2008 bits and pieces.
I WAS CONSTIPATED, BUT APPARENTLY AM NOT ANYMORE
I’m signed up for these Google alerts. They let me know when stuff I might be interested shows up on the net. I have one set up for “the economy isn’t happening,” and a week or so ago I got one telling me that “Constipated Santa and the Great Swiss Christmas” was being featured on the Yahoo! page entitled “Everything about Constipated.“
Which was awesome. Constipated Santa has finally made the big time.
I asked my mom to get me a picture of CS so that you all could enjoy his stumpiness. There were some tense negotiations. At one point, she threatened to withhold the photo until receiving a photo in return — of her granddaughter wearing the hoodie Mom knitted for her that makes her look like a Jawa. Fortunately, I was able to deliver. So, you may now enjoy CS, and pity him. And us.
Unfortunately, I’m no longer up there. But there is a Yahoo group called “Constipated,” and the tagline is “Constipation relief. Women getting unblocked the old fashioned way!”
Yeah, don’t click on that link.
GAYNESS: TOO GAY FOR PRIMETIME
I submitted a few of my posts to both ezinearticles.com and associatedcontent.com. I did this in the name of profit because if a mere 1000 people view my articles on Associated Content, I get $1.50 and then I’m totally going to buy a snack-size bag of chips.
I submitted two posts to Ezine Articles. One was “Unfortunately Pants” and the other was”Christmas is Gay.” The first went through with no problem, but then this arrived regarding the second:
But this struck me as odd, because I don’t think I was engaging in hate-speak simply because I used the word “gay.” What if I had used the sentence, “Gay people are super cool and always wear really outstanding hats?” There had to be a mistake. So I responded:
But within a few days, I got this back:
I’m so sorry, my faithful gay readers. I have failed you. I apologize for my controversial use of a term that you use joyfully to describe yourselves. Next time I’ll try to write about the Mexican family that runs this really great restaurant nearby and pick on them instead, like maybe I’ll mention how hard-working and friendly they all are.
(Side note: I’ve discovered that in total, 12 people combined have viewed my articles, and that all three pieces are rated as three stars out of five. I’m so on a roll.)
I HAVE MADE OVER $5 ON MY ADSENSE ADS
In like a month. At this rate, I’ll reach the minimum $100 payout around August of 2010, and then we’ll all get naked and party down.
I’ve decided that AdSense sucks major balls on a site like mine. Nobody clicks on my ads because they’re not targeted enough. When I wrote about how I was no longer Robert Goulet, I got an ad for Robert Goulet’s biography. When I wrote about my baby daughter, I got diaper ads. When I wrote about Constipated Santa, I got ads for Kaopectate and anal irrigation. It’s all very incorrect. I picture a little Google monkey running the whole thing from inside a Wizard of Oz setup and getting all frazzled reading my blog.
I’m considering finding non-contextual ads and just placing the fucking things manually, based on what I imagine you all actually want. So basically I’m thinking hemorrhoid cream and old people porn. Stay tuned.
I’M OPTIMIZED FOR TESTICLES AND WEBELOS
I opened up my Analytics dashboard the other day and decided to check out what keywords people are using to find me on the search engines. And here’s what I got:
Honestly, what goes through my mind most here is curiosity. What compels a person to search for “constipated at Christmas”? I understand searching for constipation in general (and actually, I know of a good reference in the Yahoo! archive about that, especially for women), but why at Christmas? Does something different happen with bowels during the holidays? Do they clench shut in merriment? And who was searching for “osu testicle”? Because he spent nearly 7 minutes here, so it’s probably one of you reading this now. Reveal yourself!
But what amazed me most was the fact that I continue to draw a lot of traffic for the top-of-the-heap Cub Scouts honor “WEBELOS.” I noticed that I had a few WEBELOS hits a while back and attributed it to my Um… words post, and to a fluke. But 18 visits? Not a fluke.
What’s really awesome is that WEBELOS visitors fucking love me. On average, a WEBELOS visitor stays for almost seventeen minutes and reads nearly eight pages. That’s insane. And what’s more, the bounce rate of 0% means that they never leave. Hell, they’re probably still here right now, reading this.
To capitalize on what I’ve learned, I considered trying to optimize my site to pull in more of that loyal WEBELOS traffic (which is no surprise given that the LO stands for “loyal”) and announced that I was altering my website so that I could draw in lots of young boys, but I was told that it was a risque positioning angle.
I HAVE BECOME A CLICHE
Over dinner tonight, when my son was refusing to eat chicken fried rice, my wife told him, “You’re lucky you have food. There are kids in the world who don’t have anything to eat.” We’ve also yelled at him for running with scissors, talking with his mouth full, and jumping on the bed. Today I’ve decided that I’m going to tell him that I used to walk five miles in the snow uphill to get to school and that as long as he’s under my roof, he’ll abide by my rules. Then I’m totally going to tell him to get a haircut.
Thus completes my last post before the holidays, or, if you’re Jewish, my first post during the holidays. Merry Christmas to most of you from the Truant clan, and happy whatever to everyone else. Just remember not to eat the fruitcake, lest you get constipated at Christmas. Because there’s really nothing on Google to help you out with that.
Nerdvana
Now, I want to be careful to take personal responsibility in my life, and not to unduly blame something outside of me for any of the woes I’ve encountered. But with that said, I’m pretty sure that technology is entirely responsible for my past failures with women and my lack of a social life.
And to drive this point home, the other day it dawned on me that I no longer have any friends.
This was a shock, because “having friends” is something that everyone takes for granted. Which is really insidious, because taking-for-granted means you’d never think to ask yourself, “Do I have any friends?” in the same way most mothers wouldn’t think to remind their husbands, “Don’t give the baby any Kahlua.” You don’t get up in the morning and wonder if an invisible alien saucer is over your house, or if a hot dog has replaced your Achilles tendon.
And so you go through life assuming your tendons are not hot dogs, that the skies are free of saucer people, and that the baby is not drunk. And that you have at least some friends.
“I don’t have any friends,” I told my wife Robin one day over dinner.
“Yes you do,” she told me. “They just don’t exist.”
Oh.
Oh, that.
Literally speaking, this is untrue. My friends do exist, but they’re still not IRL friends. And if you were easily able to understand that last sentence, then congratulations… I welcome you to the world of the friendless. You. Lame. Nerd.
My last post was about how Christmas is gay (and the other day, I found myself donning now my gay apparel and it made me want to want to watch Judy Garland movies), and re-reading that post took me back to a conversation I had had with my gay buddy Nick. I’m not black. I’m not Hispanic. I’m not gay, and I’m not a woman. I’m not Jewish, Muslim, or part of a goat-sacrificing cult. I’m not old and I’m not young. I am smack dab in the middle of what passes for normal in this country, and that means I’ve lived an unassailed life. I told Nick that I could try all I wanted to understand what it’s like to have people insult and harass you based solely on your apparently incorrect choice of beard over boobs or vice versa, but that I would never be able to truly get it.
“What’s it like to be called a fag?” I asked. “Is it like if people called me a… a honkey?”
But even then I couldn’t stop giggling as I said it because honkey is a funny word. And slurs aren’t supposed to be funny — they’re supposed to be hurtful. So I knew I wasn’t getting it.
“Oh, Johnny,” said Nick. “You don’t think you’re a minority, but you are. Think about it. You’re a huge nerd.”
And because I am not actually very huge, I knew he intended “huge” to modify “nerd” and not “you.”
“Are you thinking about grammar?” he said. “You are, aren’t you?”
Hell.
It all came down upon me in a rush. I’ve blogged about grammar before. I’ve corrected people on grammar before. I’ve laughed about how a certain sentence’s structure was funny before. Can you believe they put quotes around “do not”? I’d say. And then I’d laugh, and nobody would understand why.
And the technology. Oh, the technology.
The non-IRL friends I was referring to are non- “In Real Life” friends, which means they’re Internet friends and, naturally, would understand that lame-ass way of saying it. And yes, I have Internet friends. A lot of them, actually, and I talk to them constantly. I used to burn my days on the Men’s Health forums, and then we pulled an online coup and started our own forum at Training Anarchy. I joined Twitter, started exploring the blogosphere, and met Chuck Westbrook. Then I met Havi and her yellow assistant. Then Mak0shark. DocHobbes. Jen Louden. Mad Asthmatic. Just this morning I emailed with Jenny the Bloggess and got some praise, and I’m all giddy about it because her writing is so funny that it quite literally makes me shit peachpits.
The vast majority of IRL friends I do have are far away, back in Toledo and Columbus. And let’s face it: they’re geeks too.
“Dude,” I’ll say to my friend Paul, “remember when you were a sysop on that old BBS with that guy back when you had that ‘fast’ modem and it was only 2400 baud and you had a 20 MB hard drive and we thought it was so awesome, and we were at that sysop’s BBS party watching Darkman and someone rang the doorbell of his apartment right when that guy stuck his finger in Darkman’s chest?”
“Ha,” he’ll laugh. “That was so prior to the advent of flash memory.”
I’ll remind him about the stunning ANSI graphics of Global War and Pimpwars, reminisce about the days of 5.25″ floppies and the debut of SVGA, and think fondly about how we used to write computer programs in BASIC that caused the Apple II’s in the school’s computer lab to flash “Water on disk.” And I actually wondered why I didn’t go on a second date until I was 19.
Today, all of my stories revolve around people who may in fact turn out to be 90 year-old Lithuanian midgets living in the basements of illegal zoos.
“I know this guy who gave both of his kids Mohawks,” I’ll tell Robin after a haircut discussion.
“Who?”
And then I have to admit: “TheGreatOne.”
And recently, I find myself talking in meme-speak. For those of you who have a life, a meme is a themed idea that replicates virally on the internet. Which is actually an explanation that is even less clear.
Example: Someone on a forum (it’s usually /b/) finds something interesting and creates an image. Like whoever decided to take a funny picture and make a motivational poster out of it:
And then someone else does it:
Then another:
And on and on. Possibly my favorite meme of all time is fail. And so all the time, I find myself witnessing a person floundering and say, “Fail.” Or someone will do something bizarre (typically, it’s me) and I’ll say, “LOL wut?” You start to ask for the “sauce” (source) of something you find. You refer to masturbation as “fapping.” You say, “I shit trains, now what?” You start to make reference to hazzing Cheezburger.
I find all this to be tragically funny, but usually people look at me as if I’m wearing a really, really funny hat. Like this one:
And like nine times out of ten, I’m not.
I have a wife now. And two kids. And a house, and two dogs — one of whom repeatedly bites me in the crotch. So family-wise, I ended up doing okay. And from time to time, even my wife will say, “Fail.”
But I still don’t really have many actual friends. You guys are it. Now, won’t that guilt you into sticking around and commenting on my blog a lot? No? Well, then, fuck you guys. I’m going to hang out with my Warcraft guild.
Christmas is gay
I was on a forum the other day when someone brought up the inconvenient hypothesis that saying, “That’s gay” might be offensive to gay people.
Typically, I’m a nonconfrontational offender. When I’m alone, I tend to think, “If someone is offended, that’s their problem.” It’s the same philosophy I use when eating meat. I love meat, but I have to pretend it wasn’t at one time frolicking in nature. I’ll let others kill for me, but if the apocalypse came tomorrow and I was suddenly required to kill my own food, I’d become a vegetarian. Same with offense. Once I can put a face together with someone being actually hurt, I often will pussy out and stop. Damn idiotic compassion. Knew I should stop following the Dalai Lama.
“There are worse things,” said my gay friend Nick when I asked his opinion, “but in a perfect world, I kind of wish that expression would just go away.”
Dammit. He was being cool about it, but the handwriting was on the wall. At heart, it bothered him.
He then added that his cousin keeps telling him how gay he is. She’s not doing it on purpose, either.
“She just can’t figure it out,” Nick told me. “Bless her poor, stupid heart.”
You’re probably wondering why I’m sweating any of this, but what you don’t know is that the gay arrow is among the largest and most powerful in my quiver. American Idol is gay, High School Musical is gay, Dancing with the Stars is gay, and the new Ronald McDonald is gay squared. There is no synonym to the way I use “gay.” “Lame” doesn’t cut it. “Dumb” doesn’t cut it. There is a certain particular species of lame/dumb to all of those things that implies that not only do they suck, but that they do so in a Bettie Boop wig, tap-dancing around with their penises tucked back between their legs.
“What if I’m not meaning for it to imply homosexuality in any way?” I begged. “What if it’s just a homonym that is actually an entirely different word, like ‘road’ and ‘rode?’ ”
“But it’s g-a-y, right?” Nick asked.
“A homonym that’s spelled the same way, then. Or maybe it could be g-h-e-y.”
“Look,” he told me, “use it if you want, seriously. Like I said, it’s not a big deal to me. But it will offend some gays, yes.”
Great. That’s like one of my black friends saying, “Well… I guess you could somehow justify referring to that hairstyle as ‘niggery.’ “
I sighed. “Times really do change. It’s funny – it was only 35 years ago that Carly Simon was able to score a major hit with, ‘You’re So Gay.’ “
“I don’t think that’s right,” he said.
“Well, between thirty and forty years, anyway,” I said.
Honestly, I think it’s all kind of unfair. Homosexuals annexed that word without notice. Overnight, it went from referring to a state of happiness and joy to one of wanting to have sex with dudes. Like, Liberace was always so bubbly and happy. In days past, you could have said he was gay. But then all of that changed.
And all of this at the gayest time of year. Revelers are gay. Tidings are gay. Hell, it’s December 6th, so thirty or forty years back, this was all one big gay season. “How are you today, Ted?” a man would ask his neighbor. “Very gay, thank you!” the other would reply. “I’ve never been so gay, in fact! And you, Roger – you’re also looking mightily gay. How’s the family? Gay, I imagine?”
As for us, we put up our Christmas tree today. While we were doing it, I made a point to think about how gay it was. I figured Nick wouldn’t mind. The true holiday spirit is one of universal gayness. This is the time of year that we can all be gay together as a people. We decorated; we hung tinsel; we listened to old music. If we wanted, we could even have roasted nuts over the fire.
I’m working on making peace with all of it. And Nick? He’s happy I’m trying.
“You should be my ambassador to the gay community,” I told him in the spirit of the gay holiday. “You know, help me sell some of my books across the rainbow border.”
“The cover art may need to change if you want me to do that,” he said, having seen the dog I placed on the cover of May Contain Nuts. “As it stands, your title implies an expectation that the book does not meet.”
I thought that was a funny thing to say, so I laughed and reveled in my holiday spirit of infinite gayness toward all mankind. I guess I can live without saying “that’s gay,” though I will indeed miss it. Perhaps I can find something less offensive, more universal.
But really, when you think about it, the whole situation is pretty retarded.