On the Subject of New Year's Resolutions

New Year's resolutions are stupid and here's why:

1. No one ever sticks to them. The number of people at the gym on any given day a week into January is pretty high. That same gym, three weeks into April is as empty as leper's hospital room. I would also wager that the number of Chantix prescriptions doled out, as well as nicotine patch sales, drops significantly as well. You think the same chode who decided to learn to speak Portuguese can say anything more than, "where is the bathroom" or "can you give me directions to the library" by the end of June? Most people are too weak willed or lazy to actually stick to their resolutions.

2. If you have to set a New Year's Resolution for yourself you've already lost the battle. If the thing you resolve to do were really so significant and important to you, wouldn't you have already done it? Face it, you aren't the best version of yourself that you could possibly be and clearly you're O.K. with it. Why waste the energy?

3. Setting a New Year's Resolution just highlights your faults and shortcomings. For example, if you resolve to read more books, you're just pointing out the fact that you've basically been wasting the past year of your life in front of the television, or computer screen playing WoW, or frequenting strip clubs, or whatever it is that's been keeping you occupied. If you vow to travel more, you've clearly discovered how boring and homogeneous your life has become and who wants to face that?

My advice to those who insist upon setting goals for themselves that revolve around the idea that a new year somehow wipes the slate clean and thus begins a new chapter in your life is simple; don't. If you want your life to be better then just do what you need to do to make it better. If you want to read more, then read more. If you want to lose weight then put down the kitkat and get on the treadmill. It's as simple as that. This way, if you do fail or give up, it's not like you joined the ranks of the fallen who broke their New Year's Resolutions.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Douchery

I'd like to preface this story by saying that I don't think ALL people who drive motorcycles are lunatic ass clowns who do stupid things which inevitably cause them to scramble their brains on the side of the road somewhere, but a large number of them are. Case in point:

I'm driving home tonight and there are two motorcycles behind me. They both move over into the right lane and proceed to play a game of catch-me-if-you-can with each other. On one bike is a guy and girl, the other, just a dude. So the single rider decides to start swerving his bike left and right, left and right, which, as it would any level headed defensive driver, makes me nervous. So I slow down and let them act like fools far ahead of me. We end up next to each other a stop light. When the light turns green, they gun it, I sit and wait a moment, then proceed.

The single rider starts doing tricks like he's Evel Knievel and gets himself into a side-saddle position with both legs hanging off the left side of the motorcycle. Well, as anyone could have predicted, he loses his balance (because he is NOT Evel Knievel) and careens suddenly, though not unexpectedly, into my lane. Luckily for him, I'd fallen behind after the light or I would have smashed right into the moron. And yeah, lucky for HIM because if I would have hit him I wouldn't have felt bad at all about it. He would have deserved it.

Anyway, he ends up on the opposite side of the street in the path of oncoming traffic. He tries to cut back over into my lane (again, if I had hit him I probably would have been doing him and everyone else in the world a favor)but he cuts too sharply and ends up doing a half circle loop kind of thing until he rams right into the sidewalk where he is thrown from his bike and lands on the pavement, his bike nearly on top of him. Ha, ha and ha! Don't worry; he was up and on his feet before I even had the chance to glance in my rear view.

I don't care how mean it might sound, but if you drive like an a-hole you deserve a helmet full of grey matter. I bet this douchelord ends up breeding too and passing on his stupid genes. The last thing the world needs is one more dolt running around.

Pointless in Seattle

I noticed that the toilet paper dispenser was crooked again today. Had to adjust it. Again. Got me thinking about things like time and life and people. Repetition is the only thing you can really count on. You have to breathe every day. Your heart has to beat. It just keeps going and going and going until it doesn't. And then what? Every day you get up. Every day. You turn on the faucet. You run your hands under the water, brush your teeth, take a shower. You get dressed, put your shoes on, go out into the world. And even when you don't, you're still breathing, your heart is still beating. Until one day it doesn't anymore. It's kind of like water cutting a path through stone. Again and again and again the water just courses over it until eventually, through sheer force of repetitive motion, the stone relents. Every. Single. Day. Hand on the doorknob, feet on the floor, toothpaste on your tongue, air in your lungs and that God damned toilet paper dispenser askew again.

We like to think we're unique. Snowflakes. But we're not. We're all just the same people doing all the same things, breathing and moving and buying and hating and (on occasion) loving. The years keep passing, wearing us thin, slowing our breath and our hearts until we relent like stone. Still, I suppose there's beauty in it somewhere, hidden in the tiny nuances that separate today from yesterday and in that shimmer on the horizon of tomorrow. The searing white dazzle of possibility. And yet, even tomorrow still brings the breathing and the beating and the manufactured frenzy of daily life. Until it doesn't. And then what?

Spreken Ze Shut Your Pie Hole?

So I'm at the gym today, in the zone, focused, sweaty and tired. I'm on the last 15 minutes of 50 minute workout on the elliptical machine when a 6 ft Amazon of a German chick gets on the machine next to mine and proceeds to call every person she knows and converse (shout) in German with them (on speaker phone, of course). I could hear her through my headphones. Suddenly my workout playlist sounded more like the B-side of a Kraftwerk album. Eesh. Not good. About halfway through I wanted to grab her iPhone from her hand and fling it across the gym.

Seriously??? And while we are on the subject, what's with the speakerphone phenomenon? I used to think it was annoying just having to listen to one side of an asinine conversation but, as it turns out, hearing both sides is twice as annoying and doubly stupid (especially if said conversation is in German and just sounds like a bunch of phlegmy yelling).

My point is, just stop. Trust me when I say you aren't interesting enough to broadcast your entire conversation to everyone standing within earshot. Nobody wants to hear it, probably not even the person you are talking to. And as for you, Gretel,
next time put a lederhosen in it.

No Rest for the Insipid

I believe that there are certain women put on this earth whose sole purpose is to remind me of all the things that I will never be. I will never be the girl who finishes a workout routine and looks fresh faced and sweat free. I will never be referred to as "the hot one." I will never wear five hundred dollar shoes with a backless Prada cocktail dress and I most certainly will never shine with that sodium vapor glow that causes men to crane their necks and honk their horns.

Most of the time these women exist outside my world. They live on billboards and between magazine pages. Occasionally they sit next to me at airports or stand behind me in line at the grocery store. During these brief encounters, when I am forced to suffer the discomfort of sharing space with these ethereal creatures, I console myself with the thought that soon they will be back behind glass, delicately pinned to pink velvet where the rest of the world can admire them. Every once in a while though, like this morning, instead of flitting back to their pastel world of lip gloss, shimmer powder and over sized sunglasses, they decide to hover.

So there I was, yoga pants and t-shirt, slightly sweaty and huffing from my morning jaunt, standing in line at Starbucks, eying an old fashioned chocolate donut, and there she was, standing behind me, smelling like peonies and grapefruit and dressed in that chic effortless way that you know really took hours to put together. She had all her pretty girl gear; bronze Makowsky purse, Gucci sunglasses, iPhone with a cotton candy pink silicone cover and the keys to a ridiculously expensive SUV.

After ordering her double shot, non-fat vanilla whatever, she proceeded to sit next to me in the only other open chair. Thank you, Universe. I pulled out my book and ATTEMPTED to read while she prattled on to the poor soul on the other end of the call about her busy week and all the things she had to do and how she had no time for sleep and whatever other OMG-worthy things that had happened to her over the past 72 hours. After 2 and a half minutes of, "and I was all... and she was all..." and "like, are you kidding me, she's my BFF," I had to call it quits before I slit my writsts with a cardboard coffee sleeve.

My point is, maybe I will never be any of those aforementioned things and maybe those kinds of women will always intimidate me on some level, but I will also never be vapid or ridiculous. So...there's that.

If Only Anvils Really Did Fall Out of the Sky

I'd like the world to institute a standardized test covering all the aspects of human interaction and common courtesy. If you take the test and fail, you have to enroll in a class that teaches these things to you. For example: It is NEVER OK to get up at 6:45 on a Saturday morning, put on wooden clogs and start performing numbers from Riverdance, especially when the odds are that your insomniac downstairs neighbor is trying to sleep. Now if after having taken this class you fail the test a second time, you are an idiot and an ACME anvil will deploy from the sky and land on your head repeatedly until it knocks the stupid out of you. Then and only then will you be permitted back into society.

Seriously? 6:45 in the morning? It never occurred to my imbecile whore of an upstairs neighbor that I MIGHT be asleep? We have wooden floors! There is no carpeted cushion of silence between her floor and my ceiling. It's bad enough that she click-clacks around all day and night like a Clydesdale in her hooker heels but now she's taken to folk dancing in them at the ass-crack of dawn. WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

The worst part of all this is that there's nothing that CAN be done about it. We aren't getting better. We are spiraling downwards, circling the drain. And I'm only talking about little, insignificant daily annoyances. Don't even get me started on the evil things we do to each other in the name of war, religion and general depravity. That is another rant for another day. Right now I have a strongly worded note to write and post on Clompy's door. I just hope that she can read. I'll keep it simple. There are plenty of monosyllabic words I'm sure I can come up with to express my feelings on the matter.

Nest Not Lest Ye Be Nested.

I think I'm suffering from some sort of weird psychological condition that is preventing me from furnishing my new apartment with anything more than a bed, computer desk and television stand. I desperately need bookshelves to house the multitude of books that I insisted on carting across three states and yet every time I go to make the purchase, I just can't. Either I don't like the size, the depth of the shelf space or the color or the finish, or any number of other ridiculous things that really have no actual bearing on the functionality of the unit whatsoever. It's the same when trying to pick out a nightstand or a chair or even mixing bowls. All I can think is, do I really want to accumulate all this stuff again? Part of the allure of moving here was getting rid of pretty much everything I owned and starting over. I have never been a minimalist. I enjoy buying things as much as the next American, but suddenly the thought of anchoring myself to a place with all the burdens of things that don't fit neatly inside 10 or 12 boxes scares the consumerism right out of me.

It sounds ridiculous, I know. I just can't seem to allow myself to connect to this place. I keep thinking about how easy it would be to just get up and leave if I don't acquire anything and then I wonder what the hell I'm doing worrying about leaving when I haven't even been here a full year. So why does the fact that I have so little feel so comforting? I've always been quick to get rid of things because I'm not very sentimental and I HATE clutter, but this is something else. Maybe I have Obsessive Compulsive Spartanism. Maybe I just need a good interior decorator.