Bullshit Holidays

      Welcome to the start of one of the many bullshit holidays we have in our great United States. I want to make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against Memorial Day itself. I like that we have a specific day of the year just to honor the men and women in the service who died doing their duty and also to honor people who served their country in general. My oldest brother is in the Navy and I know many other people who are in the service as well. I'd like to think that we'd honor them every day but that doesn't happen, obviously.
      What I don't like about Memorial Day is that so many people lose sight of it's actual purpose. The purpose of Memorial Day is to honor those who died for our country, as I said, not to give you a long weekend at the beginning of summer. Similarly Labor Day is not a holiday whose purpose is to give you a three day weekend at the end of the summer. Memorial Day was traditionally on the thirtieth of May but since that only makes a three-day weekend about twice every seven years Congress passed a bill, in true government style, to rectify this horrible error in judgment so that we got a three day weekend every year. The bill, passed in 1968, is called the Uniform Monday Holiday Act and it moved Memorial Day, Columbus Day, Washington's Birthday (often referred to as President's Day) and Veteran's Day (which was later moved back to it's original date after protest) to certain Mondays of the month in which they originally occurred. If you don't believe this shit or want more information you can look it up on Wikipedia.
      When was the last time, when you realized that Memorial Day (or one of the other monday holidays) was coming up and your first thought wasn't related to the fact that it's a three-day weekend or barbecuing or camping? Probably never. You've probably never glanced at the calendar in early May and realized that Memorial Day was coming up and immediately thought of the servicemen who died in Vietnam. I'm sure you have thought about what you would do with that time. Have a barbecue, get a home improvement project done, maybe just enjoy the advent of summer sunshine or even sneaking away on Friday or Thursday and going camping. And you thought of these things in spite of the fact that they have absolutely nothing to do with the designated holiday. Maybe- maybe your first thought was of the local parade your town might have to honor its fallen service members and veterans but most likely the first thing you thought about that wasn't the sad float full of empty chairs with a few scattered Veteran's of past wars sitting stiffly in their starched uniforms. It was probably about the brightly colored floats and maybe remembering when you were a kid and running to grab scattered candy.
      Luckily for you this lacking is not your fault. That's right. The blame can be placed solely on two entities- the Government and Capitalist America. The Government is to blame for being the horrendous, sprawling, bureaucratic entity that it is and wanting there to be more holidays for federal employees (the reason behind the Uniform Monday Holiday Act). Capitalist America, of course, is to blame because they like to turn the tiniest excuse into a giant commercial event. Anything to entice you to buy but especially tradition, children and patriotism. A solemn holiday full of starched uniforms and thoughts of death is much less likely to get you to buy something than three full days off from work or school is, after all.
      As I was writing the first paragraph an ad came on the radio that symbolized all that is wrong with bullshit holidays. It was a Lowe's ad that went something like: "We all know that Memorial Day Weekend is about having fun and getting projects done." No mention of fallen heroes in that tag line. Of course we all know that that's what three-day weekends are all about and please do note the excessive sarcasm. Of course we all work nine-to-five jobs that exhaust and bore us thoroughly and think of nothing more than taking advantage of a three-day weekend to finally paint the dining room mauve and then have a barbecue out back with our new grill. Of course there is nothing more to Memorial Day weekend than having fun and getting some home improvements done.
      So next year at this time, or when labor day rolls around, or tomorrow even I hope you'll all join me in feeling self-righteous and telling all of your friends that have cool plans what a bullshit holiday "Memorial Day Weekend" is in order to put a damper on their fun. Maybe you'll be less vindictive and put an emphasis on honoring our country's fallen heroes. Maybe you'll go to the parade to see the empty chairs. But at the very least I hope you remember reading this as you're water-skiing and that disorienting moment causes you to loose your balance. I hope this because "Memorial Day Weekend" is a bullshit holiday and I know what I'll be thinking about next year. I'll be thinking about people falling off water-skis or hitting themselves in the thumb with a hammer because I like to say that I'm not a very nice person.

Legally Blind Without Correction

      I am legally blind without correction. This is not something that usually concerns me. Lots of people are legally blind without correction. They will make some kind of notification on my driver's license about this. It is not a big deal. I'm certain, in fact, that you know some people who are also legally blind without correction. They are probably old. They almost assuredly wear thick glasses. It is not likely they worry much about their condition.
      I don't worry about it except for a few times a year when I have to go to the eyedoctor or my prescription level comes up in conversation or something of that nature. I don't worry about it because I wear contacts. If it means anything to you my contact prescription is negative eight and my glasses are very nearly negative ten in both eyes. I wear my contacts for about ten hours comfortably during the day and somewhere between two and six hours very mildly itchy or dry. I've never had any problems with my contacts. I know some people can't wear them because they're prone to infections or lesions or the other things my ophthalmologist likes to try to terrify me with under the guise of informing me of the dangers each year when I order new contacts. I wake up in the morning, open my contact case, pop the contacts into my eyes and get up and go pee. At night I take them out, clean them, put them in their case, read Dilbert comics very close to my face, and go to sleep. Contacts allow me more or less perfect vision and peripheral vision (unlike glasses which you can see the frames of and force you to turn your head to look at things).
      That's the reason I don't worry about my blindness. It's really only when you're legally blind to the point where they can no longer help you that you should be concerned. I can get glasses, I can get contacts even. And I'll be able to do this for some time. When I'm older I plan to get lasic surgery. So how little I can see when my contacts are out hasn't bothered me much. Until this past weekend.
      I'm sure you'd realized already that I was leading up to something. I usually am. Last week my nephew was sick again. Fever, runny nose, clingy syndrome (which probably indicates that he feels nauseous or gross and just can't tell us) and started to leak gross stuff from his eyes. He's not yet two and so obviously wasn't interested in cleaning gross stuff from his own eyes. When he went to the doctor they said he had conjunctivitis and a ear infection but that he was no longer contagious and could go back to daycare. He was given a prescription for immoxicillan that cleared up the eyejunk almost immediately.
      My brother and nephew's mother both somehow escaped contracting conjunctivitis despite the fact that it is very contagious. I did not. Friday I noticed that my left eye felt weird and maybe slightly painful but I didn't think about it too much even when I agreed to come in to work on what would have been a day off for me to cover someone else's shift. My shift, despite being short as shifts go, was miserable because my eye had started to leak crap and it hurt a lot. I looked up about conjunctivitis on the computer up front when my coworker was on break. It wasn't tough to conclude that I had it but what was much harder to swallow was that I should not wear contacts if I had it.
      When I came home after work I located my glasses and removed my contacts and threw them away. I was in pain and I couldn't see and I didn't bother trying with the glasses. I sat in the living room with my eyes closed and listened to stand-up comedy that my brother and my nephew's mother and our friend were watching.
      Since I couldn't wear contacts you might wonder why I didn't just wear my back-up glasses and continue as normal. Despite the fact that I have very carefully kept these glasses, they fit me and are not broken, they wouldn't actually do me much good. I've had this same pair of glasses since I first started wearing contacts around eight years ago. My eyesight has changed a lot since then. When I wore the glasses and blew up all of the text on my computer screen and sat very close to it I could just about pretend I could see. If I wore the glasses in the kitchen I could search for things in the cupboards but this very quickly gave me a whomping headache. Sitting at my computer with them on much less quickly gave me a whomping headache but the headache, once achieved by any means, was pretty much impossible to get to go away. If I wore the glasses while trying to walk I felt dizzy and nauseous and as though I might fall over.
      The ironic thing is that last time I went to the eyedoctor, this past February, he gave me a prescription slip with my glasses prescription so I could get myself a cheap back-up pair somewhere. I had actually tried to do this in the middle of last week but had trouble deciphering his handwriting and also discovered that my PD number was missing. I had my brother measure that on Saturday and ordered some glasses with his assistance but that wasn't really going to help me at the present time.
      I briefly, but only briefly, thought about going to the doctor. I didn't end up going. This was largely because I realized I had this friday afternoon when I was already at work and as one of the millions of Americans without health insurance I couldn't justify going in to anything other than the walk-in care that's open during the week. Which meant that if I wasn't better by monday I could go and spend money being diagnosed with an illness I already knew I had and get a prescription for immoxicillian which I didn't really want.
      Sans contacts because of illness and sans glasses of the right prescription I had to call out of work on Saturday due to blindness and felt very bad about it. I spent most of Saturday sitting in the dark in my room with my eyes closed, trying to ignore my pounding headache and listen to the Harry Potter Audiobook my brother had helped me download while I braided pieces of string together as I found it hard to sit still and "read" Harry Potter without doing something with my hands. I also puzzled over the familiarity of the narrator's voice until I realized it was the same guy who narrated a weird little kids show called Pocoyo which my nephew has a DVD of.
      On Sunday we went and did laundry. Which was an intriguing task sans contacts and occasionally removing my glasses from the top of my head and putting them on my face to puzzle out unfamiliar washers and dryers at a different laundromat than the one we typically frequented. Behind this one there was a park that we went to while the clothes washed. I did what I usually do when we go to the park. I sat on the grass and once or twice climbed the structure because I find this to be a fairly irresistible and safe thing to do even though I couldn't see it well.
      The weirdest part of Sunday was going grocery shopping. Again at a different store than we usually go to. When standing in the produce section I could see well enough to tell where the bananas were because they were very yellow and could not be mistaken for anything but bananas. But I couldn't tell you what brand of bananas they were so I didn't buy any out of the fear of buying some expensive yuppy brand. Everything else in the produce section was pretty much a mystery to me. There were a lot of green and brown things which I could probably have identified if I brought them very close to my face but mostly I walked around in blissful ignorance. I only wanted four things so I just followed my nephew's mother around and wondered what might be on the shelves around me. The only aisle I correctly identified was the wine aisle. It's hard to mistake the wine aisle even when it is just a fairly uniform green blur. It was the green and the lack of obvious variation that gave it away. I ended up actually paying in cash instead of attempting to run my card and nearly walked out without my milk because I couldn't see it.
      My inability to see took away my favorite activities. I couldn't watch any movies or bad television. I couldn't really play with my nephew. I couldn't walk outside. I couldn't use the computer without killing my eyes. I couldn't write. I could just about cook something simple that didn't require chopping. And I could not read. Without glasses the world blurred into a bland texturelessness that made it hard for me to tell where there might be script at all, never mind deciphering it. And I will tell you that this was a very boring, painful, itchy, goopey world that I would not want to revisit.

Selling Pornography

      A whole post about porn. Yeah. But I plan to discuss it in an entirely adult manner with no giggling or teehees (well, I hope I can make you laugh but I'm being serious) and you can bet that this isn't going to be a raunchy or sexually explict post either. I just thought I'd get that all out of the way from the very first so there are no delusions on anyone's part here before you start writing me angry anonymous comments or getting out the KY.
      When I talk about "selling pornography" I'm not talking about convincing children to buy it or advertising it or making it available to segment markets. I'm talking about standing behind the counter in a book store, ringing up a magazine, exchanging some money and hiding their shame in a white plastic bag and telling them to have a nice day as they walk out of the store.
      I feel like explaining a few things about the store in which I work. When you first walk in the check out counter is immediately to your left. To your right is a whole large section of the store devoted to displays of a lot of extremely overpriced crap that we call "gifts" because no one buys that stuff for themselves. Directly in front of you are two rows of displayers showing cards and racks where we pile up bargain books. Bargain books are books that we get that were roughly handled by the warehouse or are old hardcover editions of books that are now out in massmarket paperback. They are cheap because we buy them cheaply because the publishing company is only loosing money on them at this point anyway and they'd rather sell them to us than ship them back where they came from to be destroyed. In front of the check out and to the left of the bargain racks are all the shelves of books in their various sections. Along most of the left wall and the left half of the back wall are the ranks of magazines. The magazine displayers are all three-tiered with three to five dividers in each tier so the magazines are actually displayed standing up in a slightly reclined position so you can see most of the cover. Forgive me if I'm terrible at describing actual places in such a way that you understand what I'm getting at when I later make a reference to them.
      The top tier of sections three, four, and five of the magazines have a board at the front to cover up most of the magazines in those sections and that's where we keep the adult magazines. We have dozens of them. We have almost a dozen gay magazines alone. Bookstores like Borders, Barnes and Noble and their subsidiaries as well as other chains like the now defunct Bookland are too concerned with PR to stock anything more raunchy than Playboy so there are guys who go way out of their way to come to where the store I work in is located, well away from where the mall is located just to buy porn.
      Guys who buy porn are separated into two categories which are "ashamed" and "cavalier" depending on their attitude toward buying it. Older gentlemen pretty much invariably are not ashamed about buying porn. They come into the store and immediately go to the left of the store to look at the porno magazines. They get what they came for and come up to the counter. They sometimes buy other magazines which they initially use to hide the pornography magazines as they approach the counter. They do not do this because they are ashamed. I'm fairly certain they do it with a mild sense of class and maybe not wanting to disturb the usually female cashiers even though it's almost always obvious what they have given that nearly all of it comes wrapped in plastic. They usually do the "Hi. How are you?" Script just like they're any other customer buying a book.
      Younger guys are pretty much always ashamed. They come in for the porn but they don't want you to know that's the only reason they came in. They come in and they look at the bargain books or they go into one of the sections as though they're looking for a book. I can just imagine their mental monologue: "Hmm. Looking for a book on fish. Science section. There are the fish books. Don't have the book I want. Oh! But look over there. They have porn. Fancy that. Well, since I'm here and they didn't have that fish book I'll just go look at the porn." They never buy other magazines to disguise the porn. They come up to the counter, holding it, all ashamed and not making any kind of eye contact and set it on the counter. They never say anything to me and, if they're young enough looking that I would ask for their ID they invariably already have it out of their wallet and present it to me long before I would ask.
      Regardless of which category a man falls into none of them actually like to be seen looking at the porn. That's why we keep car and hunting and motorcycle magazines in the two tiers below the porn. That way if it's actually somewhat busy in the store the men looking at porn can pretend to be looking at car magazines if a woman or some other person happens to come into the isle with the porn. When the woman leaves the isle they can safely go back to looking at the porn. You know, since they're here and happen to be standing right in front of it.
      Women who buy porn on the other hand also have two categories. We have the category of women who come up to the counter with an armload of Nora Roberts, sudoku puzzles and a single pornographic magazine. They mutter under their breath or tell me conspiratorially that the porn is for their husband. These women are usually embarrassed about their purchase at first but relax after a minute when they realize that no one working there appears to care that they're buying porn. The other group of women are terribly embarrassed and ashamed and tend to explain to the cashier in a loud voice that they're embarrassed to get stuck with the duty of buying porn for a bachelorette party. I didn't think so many bachelorette parties were even possible.
      The other day a woman commented that she didn't think she'd be able to keep a straight face when women came in and bought PlayGirl. I told her that PlayGirl wasn't that bad. It's when someone comes up to the counter with a stack of magazines that runs about a hundred and fifty dollars and the titles are some of the weirdest ones we've got that I struggle to keep a straight face.
      A hundred and fifty dollars worth is probably only going to be about a dozen magazines as many of them cost twelve dollars or more. But in my state there's no tax on magazines so it'd be easy for them to add up their purchase price before they got to the counter and see that they're buying an absurd amount of porn. Maybe they do. I've yet to have anyone hear the total and ask to take off a few items. Maybe that's their porn budget for the month. All I know is that some weeks that's how much I get paid.
      And the magazines themselves range from Details, which is ostensibly a fashion magazine, to Badpuppy which is a gay magazine. We also have a range of magazines that have number titles. 18 magazine has eighteen-year-old girls in it. But what about 16+, 30+, 40+ & 50+? Sixteen is a dress size, the other ones are ages. We also have one called Heavy Metal, which is a magazine filled with weird sci-fi comic-like illustrated stories. We have Hustler, of course, and Barely Legal (owned by Hustler), and Taboo (also owned by Hustler). Also Forum, and Forum letters. And everything else from Allboy to Whorientals.
      You'd think it would be weird to sell pornography. You'd think it would be awkward or feel a little bit immoral or something. But it's not. It's actually hilarious. Seriously though, think about it. These guys come possibly way out of their way to buy a magazine that no other (regular) store in town carries. I like to ask them how they are today. They usually say something like "okay" but I know that this is probably not true because they are standing a few feet away from a nineteen-year-old who is selling them pornography. They spend more on porn each month than most of our customers spend on books. In a way it's kind of sad but at the same time I can't help but laugh.

Omnivore's Dilemma (or "I like to be pretentious and read Bestsellers")

      I thought of a third title: "In which I try to convince you to agree with my taste in books." Which, by the way, I am not trying to do at all so it wouldn't be a terribly accurate title. The second option isn't very accurate, either. Cheryl just likes to say that I'm trying to be pretentious when I read bestsellers and such. In fact, I read this for two reasons and two reasons only. Neither of which involve pretention or the fact that this fits in with my usual genre. My usual genre, just for reference, is science fiction and fantasy.
      The first reason I read this was because my friend had read it for one of his classes at Stanford (and yes, I do mean that Stanford) and recommended it to me, saying that I would enjoy it. I can't remember what I said to him at the time, possibly something non-committal because I didn't really read non-fiction much at all. I don't even watch the news. That probably would have been the end of it in all liklihood but the title stuck with me. Omnivore's Dilemma. And then the second thing happened. I figured that if I was going to break the rules of the store at which I work and read at the counter when I'd finished my other work I should read something intellectual and it just so happened that that day we'd gotten in a new copy of the Omnivore's Dilemma. And that's why I read it.
      At least. That's why I started to read it. I continued to read it because I was hooked from the very first page. Just like a good fantasy novel that I picked up and couldn't put down this book grabbed me almost from the moment I opened it and though I've long since finished reading it still hasn't let me go.
      Why should you read it, though? You want to know the answer to that question. And I'll answer, like many of the teachers you probably found annoying in school, with a question. Why do you eat? Do you eat because you have to? Is food just a fuel for your body? Do you eat because you enjoy it? Do you hate eating but do it anyway? Do you eat to comfort yourself? Whatever reason you have for eating you still have to do it and since you have to you should at least think about what it is you're putting into your body and where it comes from.
      Omnivore's Dilemma follows the course of not one but four unique meals back to their various sources. The book explores the golden sea of corn lurking in so many processed foods under mysterious names like maltodextrin and in things you wouldn't imagine contained corn at all. Like your steak dinner that was most likely raised on a giant Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation eating a diet of corn. He also talks about all of that organic food you see in supermarkets and what about your diet you should actually change if you want to reduce your carbon footprint.
      I could talk on and on about the subjects that the book covers. I could tell you how it made me feel and how it opened my eyes. I don't really want to do that. I just want to get you across the two biggest hurdles preventing you from reading this book. It's long. It's non-fiction. It looks like it's going to be hard to read. It's also not even out in massmarket print yet so it's expensive. In the store it's going to run you about sixteen dollars for a (as my father would call it) "big paperback" or that I have learned they are called in the industry "trade sized paperback". You can get it for less than six dollars used online. And it is definitely worth it no matter how much (or little) you pay for it.
      I will agree that it is long and it is non-fiction. It does contain some large words but none any longer than the ones on the back of your cereal box or the chicken nuggets you have in your freezer. The author also writes as though he's talking to you. The style is very easy to read and all the long words are typically explained immediately. For a book about food it has a surprising amount of action and the subject matter is so interesting and near and dear to all of us that you wont want to stop reading.
      So why not read it? It's interesting. It's pretty easy to read. It's a subject you are probably endlessly fascinated by if it comes in culinary form. You'll learn something. And you can go to Amazon right now and spend six dollars to get it. I even provided you with a link above so you have no excuses.

Pseudo-Vegetarian

      Vegetarianism is a tough subject. Being Vegan is even worse of a subject to talk about. There are only two sides to this debate. There are the vegetarians and vegans and there are the people who think vegetarians are stupid. I know exactly what you are thinking at this moment. You are either thinking that you agree with me because you are very obviously in one of the above groups or you are in denial that you are in one of the two groups and would like to claim that you support vegetarians but don't want to be a vegetarian yourself. There is no such thing. Vegetarianism is a moral argument. It's either moral in the sense that you care for animals and don't want them abused on CAFOs or it's moral in the sense that you think it's healthier for people to not eat meat. You are not allowed to be a vegetarian solely for the sake of the environment or to claim you would like to be a vegetarian in order to help the environment or to claim that you support vegetarians because they help the environment but you drive a prius so you've already done your part. That is not acceptable. Either you really do support vegetarians and actually want to be one but just don't have the willpower or you secretly mock vegetarians for not eating meat but no not admit this outloud probably because one of your deceptively strong vegetarian friends wold hit you if you did.
      Now that we've established that there are no other options you can either abandon this as boring or continue to read under the premise that this will be interesting as I continue to discuss the strange levels of being vegetarian. This post is mostly digression and not a lot of funny. It is a lot more funny if you live through the digression. You can be vegan or vegetarian, pretty much everyone knows that there is some kind of difference between the two even if they were not certain precisely what. But there are actually different levels of being vegan. By definition a vegan does not eat any meat or animal products such as eggs or milk. But many vegans also do not use animals products such as leather also. Some vegans take the term "animal products" to go as far as avoiding eating honey because it is produced by bees, certain vitamins because they are derived from animal products and even certain brands of wine and beer as they contain something called isinglass.
      And here we have an important digression. My first encounter with isinglass was in Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series where it was a kind of glass that was used. My mother told me it was mica, which is a mineral formation that can be broken into thin, transparent sheets. The kind of isinglass they put in your beer isn't the same innocent mica kind, it's a tasty (and when I say tasty in this context you should be reading it with a 'n' instead of a 't') and obviously unnecessary ingredient derived from fish bladders.
      Other vegans are happy to simply not eat meat, eggs or dairy and, like the rest of you beer and wine drinkers, presumably concentrate very hard on not thinking about what their beer contains. Then, after the extremist vegans versus the laxer vegans you have vegetarians. Vegetarian is an all-encompassing term for people who do not eat meat so people who are vegetarian but not vegan are often called lacto-ovo to indicate that they consume eggs and dairy products and possibly use leather and eat honey and such. But even those are a fairly decent distinction. But after that it becomes the kind of debate in which Warren G. Harding becomes the Republican candidate for president because they couldn't differentiate between the first two options and ended up going for the guy who looked like a president.
      Yes, I'm talking about Pescatarians or Pesca-vegetarians. Pesca-vegetarians eat fish. Most people would agree that fish are, in fact, meat but because the only meat they eat is fish and typically not a lot of that pesca-vegetarians become vegetarians in the minds of most of society who, frankly, aren't particularly intelligent because we've got them so busy trying to remember the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian that they see anything that appears to be a vegetarian to hold all of the morals of a vegetarian.
      And, I couldn't tell you the lines that pescatarians use when explaining to real vegetarians why they don't feel morally obligated to not eat fish but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that fish are ugly. It's hard to empathize with something slimy and cold that doesn't even breathe air. Fish aren't cute and they don't make noises or display intelligence and so they're okay to eat. That's what I figure, anyway.
      Then you have flexitarians. I don't even want to talk about them. They're some kind of absurdity. From what I understand as I have never bothered to look up a so-called definition for this term is that, basically, flexitarians are vegetarians who sometimes eat meat. In other words they get up in the morning (or maybe in the afternoon like everyone sane and internet-using) and say to themselves: "Today I will be a vegetarian. I will have cereal for breakfast, a salad for lunch and a nice vegetarian soup for dinner. I will eat potato chips for a snack because potatoes are, after all, a vegetable." Potatoes are not a vegetable. Technically, yes, but nutritionally, no. They are a starch and your doctor will tell you starches are bad. Except possibly in different terms unless you are under the age of twelve. Or a flexitarian wakes up in the morning and thinks: "I think I'm going to scarf down a hamburger today because I'm a flexitarian." And outloud I (having read their mind, of course) finish with: "By which I really mean I am an omnivore because flexitarian is one of the most moronic terms ever described."
      I am a flexitarian by all definitions I can discern. And by that I mean I am an omnivore. I am, at the very best, a lacto-ovo vegetarian but I'm not that pretentious, either. I do eat meat about once a week but I could forsee giving up meat entirely as I continue to do a worse job at deluding myself about the world and my body continues to function at less than peak capacity without one of my memorable organs.
      Out of my desire to distance myself from any real defining term and labels I didn't invent in general if my dietary habits come up I introduce myself as a pseudo-vegetarian. Ideally I would be saying this to someone who isn't totally sure what pseudo means and has enough knowledge of vegetarians to understand that there are several levels because they would then ask me what kind of vegetarian that was and I could respond: "Not a very good one." This is funny because pseudo means "fake" so a fake vegetarian would not be a very good vegetarian. No one has ever laughed at this joke. It's because this scenario has yet to happen. It's one of my advance-comebacks. I have still used this term to describe myself upon occasion and I have also used the phrase: "I don't really eat meat." The latter phrase comes up a lot more often.
      I have never claimed to be an actual vegetarian but on multiple occasions members of the general public who are, for the most part, (as you may recall) not particularly intelligent, have made what Malcolm Gladwell calls in his book Blink the "Harding Error" and referred to even me as a vegetarian. I remember a couple of days ago distinctly when we got a new book in at work and someone began to gush to me: "I know you're a vegetarian but you should see this book, Seduced by Bacon." And now, not only am I a vegetarian but for some reason vegetarians are apparently still supposed to be interested in cookbooks that focus solely on meat.
      So I've come up with a new comeback. If someone asks me if I am a vegetarian I will explain to them that of course I'm a flexipescalactoovovegetarian. I will make every attempt to say this with a straight face. If anyone asks me what this means I'll say I'm an omnivore, just like everyone else regardless of what my actual current eating habits include because being a vegetarian (and I don't mean not eating meat here, that's easy) is way too complicated.

The Explanation

       I'd like to start this blog off with a little something about me. I admire people who are good at witty comebacks and spontaneous responses. I've always admired people who have this trait. They're a lot of fun to be around and make for good company. These are the kind of people who are the so-called "life of the party". I've always wanted to be one of these people. I don't want to be the "that's what she said" kind of person who attempts to be witty. I want to be the genuinely funny people who can make up a joke or a silly song at a moment's notice. I haven't always been envious of those people but I certainly am now that I realize that it's just not in my genetic make up to be the funny guy who tells jokes. But I'm not bitter. I'm not bitter that I can't crack jokes or spout off a whole set of new lyrics for a common silly tune or any number of things that can get an entire room laughing. Not even slightly bitter.
       After all, why should I be bitter when I like to think I can tell stories? Being able to tell a good story is a good party quality as well, right? You end up reaching a smaller audience, certainly, but in general your audience can be just as satisfied as the audience of the funny guy. And that is the truth. Or, at least, that's what I tell myself. This may not necessarily be true and I make no guarantees so don't try this at home. It could end up severely injuring your self-esteem, bruising your pride, deflating your ego and generally decreasing your social status and self-view. I avoid finding this out by not actually telling any stories in real life. I mostly just repeat comic punchlines and things that I have read because my head is a vast receptacle for useless information. Please do not explain to me that telling stories is a terrible idea. I do not want to know. Kindly leave me to my delusions.
       Speaking of delusions, I seem to have digressed back from my tangent to my original line of thought. I can logically conclude that I will never be one of those spontaneous funny people. Logic does not stop me from deluding myself into thinking that I can convince people that I am one of those funny guys without actually being spontaneous. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and the solution I came up with to the problem of pretending to be spontaneous and funny is by thinking up comebacks in advance. I usually refer to these in my own mind as advance-comebacks, which is a terribly clever and witty name for them but just as appropriate would be the term "punchline" because I have to write the rest of the joke as well.
       I sit around and think of arbitrary situations that have the possibility of actually coming up in real life. For example I will give you a response to a situation that actually has come up and I actually have used. In a situation where someone asks me what religion I prescribe to (though maybe not in those precise words but something along that vein) I have come up with a good response. The situation goes a bit like this:
People are talking in a room. The conversation turns to religion. Someone asks me what religious view I have.
       I respond: "I'm either agnostic or a pantheist, depending on how you look at it."
       This response is entirely true. I am a logical, scientific person. I like proof of things. There is some evidence in the universe to suggest that there is something out there beyond human comprehension. It could be some kind of God. It could be multiple gods. It could be that everything in the world has it's own unique spirit. It could be that the world is a complex ant farm in the alien equivalent of a science fair and we just don't know it because the aliens are as much beyond our comprehension as we are beyond the comprehension of a hive of ants. I believe that there is something. And I believe there are a set of basic morals that we all, as human beings, should probably all follow.  This is the basic premise of being agnostic. You believe in some kind of higher power but don't necessarily believe in god. I do. And since I believe this I can easily believe in the basic premise behind any and all moral religions and claim that I am pantheistic. As a pantheist I believe in all religion. I don't necessarily believe in every aspect of each and every religion but I believe that it's plausible that any one of them could be the truth. And thus is my response formulated.
       But despite the fact that this response is very much like the kind of thing that the funny, spontaneous people I know would say, it's not actually funny. I had previously assumed that I could get away with not actually being terribly funny if I pinned down the witty side of the equation. After managing to try several of my advance-comebacks on various people I slowly reached the conclusion that my wit is too intelligent. Very few people quickly grasp the concept of pantheism and agnosticism being one and the same even after my explaining it to them. Most people don't even bother to ask what I mean. I do, usually, get a lot of puzzled expressions to which I often explain. But, as Scott Adams would say: "It's Not Funny If I Have to Explain It." Neither is it witty if I have to explain it, sadly enough.
       I realize that I am neither witty nor funny and there is a distinct possibility (which I deliberately persist in not testing) that I also cannot tell good stories. Yet I still can't help but continue to come up with the punchlines to bad jokes for situations that rarely if ever come up. I could say, in fact, that my life is a series of bad punchlines.