I Have Lots of Questions…Number One…How Dare You?

When I speak to the organ grinder, I don’t expect the monkey to answer. So why is it that whenever someone has the opportunity to interview a living legend in front of an audience the baboon with the cue cards ends up doing most of the talking? I got to witness just such a display the other night at a talk by Elie Wiesel (and if you don’t think he’s a living legend, I’m blackballing you from the island). Here you have a guy who has probably taught humans more about humanity than anyone on the planet, and the jerk asking the questions is all like “Oy, if you think that’s bad, let me tell you about some farshtinkener delicatessen in Brooklyn.” Now listen you cradle-robbing blowhard, no one cares what you have to say so kindly shut your gob.

This episode brings to mind an episode of Katie Couric’s daytime dramedy a few years back: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&brand=&vid=ce93bf2c-9fde-4c96-945c-1cdaa941c1eb. Katie, what are you doing?!? You are sitting across from a national treasure and you cut off her sentences? I have a news flash for you (pun INtended), when the flaming ball of failure that your primetime show has become finally runs out of gas (pun INtended) and is replaced by a gameshow where people compete to see who can belch the loudest, folks will still love Maya Angelou and they will still not give a rat’s patootie about whether you like corn.

Sad to say, though, the outrages committed by the appointed moderators are only the tip of the iceberg. I know we’ve all been held hostage in a Q&A where there’s too much Q because some A has decided his BS doesn’t stink. Every weirdo with a fanny pack and an ax to grind bellies up to the front of the line to give his or her view of philosophy and world events as if the honored speaker is going to say, “You there in the hemp pants, that’s the most brilliant question slash alternative short lecture I’ve ever heard! Will you co-author my next book?” If that ever actually happened, I’d probably wet myself. Fortunately, you’re more likely to hear the guy go “I don’t really understand you’re question and we’re out of time anyway.” Thus, my drawers are dry, your face is red, and we all live to pester each other another day.

But it boggles the mind that people could be so self-absorbed and slash or so oblivious as to steamroll over the words of thinkers so much smarter and more eloquent than they. I’m even more surprised that these folks abide this kind of indignity. Although, I suppose it is because they have charitable and generous souls. I do not suffer from this affliction so I’m going to give it to you straight: if I ever catch you horning in on the few short moments that an audience has with our most beloved public figures, I will clobber you over the head with your own microphone. Then at least you’ll look as foolish as you sound.

This post has been brought to you by the letters Q and A and by Dennis Prager and Kelly Kapoor.

Into the Drink

My drunk friends always tell me, “alcohol is a social lubricant.” I always tell them that I want to see what dictionary they are using because the last time I checked, spilling a 40 down the front of your shirt doesn’t facilitate anything. I suppose it removes a barrier between me silently judging you and me sharing a full-throated critique of the hot mess you’ve become after barely sniffing your preferred lube, but I doubt this is what you were going for. So I feel that this is an opportune moment to dispel some of the myths surrounding the greasing qualities of booze.

Alcohol transfers people to a parallel universe, divorced from reality. Like the good people of Lake Woebegone, all the men are strong, all the women are beautiful, and all the STDs are in remission. But once you put the cork back on your Garrison Keillor fantasy land you come crashing back to reality where all the men are unemployed, all the women are fugly, and that itchy burning won’t go away. And the kicker is that no one will ever know just how shameful your walk home the next morning really was because any pictures of your fugly, unemployed one night stand will have been magically deleted from your camera…or if you’re lucky, you’ll have spilled some social lubricant on it and it will be fried.

This raises the broader issue of waste. There are children starving in third world countries and you have gone through three digital cameras in two years because you get all butter fingersy around any drink with vodka and something fruity. And that doesn’t even begin to address the outrages your cell phone has suffered. It’s a wonder no one has picked up one of your lost cell phones and used it to stalk you or send you cancer or something. They totally could because you leave your cell phones everywhere. Heaven help me I cannot understand who you need to be calling at 1 am with a lime ricky in one hand and a ciggy falling out of the other. I guess you could say that alcohol speeds up the process by which you part with your money, but again, I don’t think this was what you had in mind.

Then we have a flotilla of awkward social encounters that will cause you even more angst than the drawer full of Plan Bs in the bathroom. Do you remember going up to that attractive person and waxing philosophical about how super-awesome it is to live rent-free in your parents’ basement and play video games all day? How about the drunken text message to your ex that came out like garbled Morse Code except for the one coherent sentence that you managed to mash into the keypad with your fingers which was “I m drnk…”? It seems that social lubricant only works well at sending you into a shame spiral that you won’t even discover until you wake up the next day with a raging headache and vomit in your hair. You’ll listen to a series of voicemail messages that start out extolling your wicked awesome drunkenness but will steadily deteriorate as friends ask you to call them back when you get up to make sure you lived through the night, and finally, the rehab clinic calls to tell you there’s a van waiting outside.

I raise this issue here not because I care about emotional toll that drinking takes on you; I could not care less about you. Rather, drunkenness is a problem because you are no fun to be around when you’re drunk and I have no interest in babysitting some sloppy disaster at the bar. You are smelly and incoherent and take up a lot more space when you’re sloshed and I am in no mood. If we add up the costs of the externalities you impose when you drink, the total would be enough for Sally Struthers to save an entire village. The bottom line, here, is that it is not polite to get so lubed up that you turn into a puddle of deadweight loss for humanity.

Peep Show

I paid zero dollars for this newspaper and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some mooch read it over my shoulder for free. It’s not even so much the mooching that bothers me; I was probably going to just throw the thing nonchalantly on the ground after I was finished anyway. What really steams my milk is the invasion of personal space. At one level, I do not need all of your carbon dioxide and methane gas creating a thick smog right over my head. At a deeper level, how do I know you’re not going to shiv (see: shank) me? Lurking up behind a person to catch a glimpse of the latest Doonesbury cartoon is not worth the awkward standoff between us and our carefully sharpened sporks, I promise.

Also, let’s not forget the space invaders that come with instructions:
“Wait, I’m not finished with that page.”
“Hang on, scroll down to the bottom real quick.”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re reading this filth.”

If I’m looking at something and I know you’re there, it means I have made a conscious decision not to talk to you. When you interject your two cents, you have not only broken the fourth wall that was so tenuously supporting my sanity in the first place, but also severed whatever loose thread of an idea was holding my reading material together, allowing me to learn something in the process of ignoring you. At least make it worth my while to have you ruin my day if you’re going to do this and share something enlightening. Usually though, people like to use a topical snippet from my reading material to drag me kicking and screaming into the social quicksand I was trying to avoid in the first place. “Speaking of the Pope, my mother had a bunion the size of my fist removed the other day.” And eureka, we’ve found something more noxious than your personal gas cloud.

Sticking your big bazzoo right behind a person’s head is also a safety hazard. If I were to read something hysterically funny and rear my head back with uproarious laughter, I might accidentally break your nose sending small pieces of shattered bone back into your brain where they would cause you to stop living. I would feel just awful if that happened and goodness knows I have enough guilt issues without pulling a Marsha Brady on your schnoz.

I think the biggest problem, though, is that your surreptitious spying is a proxy for behavior in which even you would be too embarrassed to engage. You would never walk up to a stranger and ask, “Hey, can I borrow your laptop real quick so I can check the box scores from last night’s baseball match?” But this is exactly what you’re doing when you sneak a peek in public. And lest you think I’m the only one getting all hot and bothered about this problem, the good folks at 3M (who brought you Post-It Notes, and Scotch Tape, and the letter M, and the number 3), also saw a social malady that needed a cure: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ComputerFilter/Home/. So I suggest you take a hint before I find a way to whittle a Command Hook into a throwing star.