Blame the drugs...

for my lack of writing anything remotely interesting in the last 29023 years. And by drugs, I mean the ones I'm researching for work. But if I didn't have a job that holed me up at a desk for 10 hours a day, I sure as hell would spend all day and night writing. That's like my dream: win the lottery and then do freelance drug copywriting and spend the majority of my waking hours writing about sports. (My friends always say, "You wouldnt travel?" But I hate travelling with a firey passion of 10,000 [phoenix] suns.)

So this is why I don't get why BS, who admittedly has definitely earned his cushy job, doesn't write every Goddamn day. I know his wife just had a kid and all, but please. It's not like his job involves a.) going into work, b.) any kind of challenge, or c.) a real stringent schedule. From now when I don't feel like making deadlines at my job, I'm going to pull out this brilliant "in the middle of writing my book so cut me some slack" pretense.

Anyways, you know that scene in Swingers that goes something like this:

MIKE
Haven't you noticed I didn't mention
Michelle once today?

ROB
I didn't want to say anything.

MIKE
Why?

ROB
I don't know. It's like not talking to
a pitcher in the midst of a no hitter.

MIKE
What? Like, you didn't want to jinx it?

ROB
Kinda.

MIKE
I don't talk about her that much.

ROB
Oh no?

MIKE
I didn't mention her once today.

ROB
Well, until now. Tend the pin.

MIKE
The only reason I mentioned her at all is
to say that I'm not going to talk about
her anymore. I thought you'd appreciate
that.

ROB
I do. Good for you, man.

MIKE
I've decided to get out there.

Well, I think you know what I'm not going to mention not mentioning.
I thought you'd appreciate that.

In terms of teams/sports I don't care enough about whether I'm jinxing or not, the dallas-suns game is tonight. I think the NBA finals and the MLB playoff race in the tail end of the summer are the only 2 times of the year I actually subscribe to that college-business-major/Diane Keaton-esque middle-aged corporate tiger catchphrase: There's not enough hours in the day!

This always killed me in college. But I guess I was an English and Theater major, so I had an unfair advantage of, well, never having anything that came close to resembling stress. But that whole "who has more work" competition thing was so aggravating, as if someone was ever going to capitulate and say, Wow! I thought my 300 page thesis on economic philosophies was daunting, but your 15 finals that fall all in one day definitely has the trump card!

Speaking of inane competitions, my Dad has been consistently cracking me up every single day at work. He discovered this contest the New Yorker just started, and he's become 100% obsessed with it. And I know if I was quasi-retired, enamored of the New Yorker, and creative like my Dad, I would be just as consumed with this. But my dad (like me) usually can't do things in moderation. I'm honestly surprised he hasn't developed a computer program that generates winning lines or something. Or has hunted down Salinger and enlisted him as his muse. Because my Dad calls me at work like, "So...did you think of any lines for this week's contest?" I think the one he came up with for this week is actually really funny. To the point where I "lol-ed" when he told me. And how many times can you say that about the New Yorker?

But so anyways, because just thinking of captions isn't enough (as they say), my Dad has decreed there's an intra-family contest between him, my mom, me, and my 2 younger sisters: Whoever wins one of these things first, everyone else in the family has to chip in and buy him/her dinner.

I see 2 main problems with this:
1.) It's 100% insane.
2.) More importantly, it assumes that it's basically a given that out of the millions and millions of dryly clever Americans who enter this every week, one of us will eventually win. Obviously.

I talked to my sister about this, and she was like, "Does he realize that they probably don't even read all the entries? That they probably pick a random sampling and pull a winner from that?" Good point.

But I'm being dead serious when I say I'd rather my dad win one of these things than pretty much anything else right now, including but not limited to: getting a promotion, getting a good night's sleep, and a bunch of sports-related desires, too. I guess this is how he felt when he and my sisters used to play softball, and my dad came to every game and he just loved when we got into clutch situations.

Or more aptly, when I graduated college and the morning of graduation I realized I didn't have any shoes to wear (not to mention my sundress was like transparent under the sun, but the gown took care of that--awesome foresight), and I had to borrow this teeny wedge sandal things that were basically narrow enough to fit in the back pocket of my jeans. So that was fun, walking up to get my diploma and blankly shaking the dean's hand, etc, and forgetting everything about that big life moment, because all I remember was concentrating on not falling. And then afterwards my mom says to me, "Congratulations! You know, the whole time I kept thinking..." (here I expect something along the lines of "how much youve matured, how proud we are, how profound this day is, etc") "...that I don't care if I die tomorrow as long as you don't fall wearing those shoes."

I love my parents, but I think they've engendered a propensity towards very skewed priorities in me.

Back to watching market research. It's kinda like watching doctors go on Blind Date. Like all this teeth pulling and awkward conversation. I keep expecting these little cartoony things to pop up on the bottom of the video streaming like, "Why doctors are lucky their profession is attractive enough to lasso women, in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1..." (cut to Doctor mumbling some indiscernible one word answer about something.)

Ah well. I wish I was a tiger.

(A common lament.) TM Calvin and Hobbes