Officially Anti-Choice

It’s official.  We give people too many choices and it is getting on my last nerve.  Every clothing store, deli counter, car wash, and massage parlor seems to have a menu of options longer than the Magna Carta.  You can get your salad in a bowl or in a tortilla or deep fried and served in a cone of newsprint.  You can get 2 for the price of 3 or half a dozen for the price of 6, but only if you fill out some paperwork and leave a urine sample.  The problems that this modern reality creates are like the stars - too many to count and yet they all manage to appear every night with merciless consistency.

My chief complaint is that we have created ever growing number of options while humanity’s ability to make good decisions (or really any decisions) continues to deterioriate.  “Would you like olives on your pizza?” “Oh, you know, I hadn’t really even thought about that.  Let me take a few minutes with this line of people behind me to consider.  Do I like olives?  What are olives anyway, when you really think about it?  I’ll tell you what, can you put olives on half the pizza, but like, alternating slices?”  This is not final Jeopardy and Ken Jennings (or his pizza-ordering equivalent) is probably going to beat you at life anyway so you may as well go ahead and make up your mind.  

 

But there’s a group that is even more likely to get Darwin’d in the next go-round than the rubes who get stumped at Domino’s.  It’s not that these individuals get thrown for a loop by an unexpected decision (though heaven help us if one of them ever got his hesitant little finger on the big red button that would nuke the Russians).  These bottom feeders don’t even understand what they were there to do in the first place.  They are the ones who will wait in a 20 minute line at Starbucks only to get to the front and start thinking about which drink to order.  “You want to know what drink I want?  What is this, a Starbucks?  Oh, it is a Starbucks, my bad.  No no, don’t skip to the next person, I’ll decide rill fast.  Now let me see...do you guys have high-fat soy milk?”

Now there’s a subtle theme running through both of these examples that the most astute among you will have caught.  The sense of entitlement to infinite customization means that everyone feels they have license to negotiate with any poor checkout clerk with a credit card reader and a waning will to live.  Do you see that giant sign about the merchandise you are about to purchase?  The one that explains, literally in black and white, every detail about the terms by which you can part with your money in exchange for whatever trivial nonsense caught your eye in a rare moment of lucidity?  Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s the ballgame.  You may not use 30 Groupons (ha! remember when Groupon was a thing?) to make this shirt cost -$10.  And I’m sorry about that unfortunate combine incident but you may not get a pair of shoes of 2 different sizes.  And that discount is for senior citizens, not potheads about to wrap up their 12th semester of community college.  

I can hardly believe I’m saying this but I think we have finally found the one and only virtue of communism.  The toilet paper may have been rough and in short supply, but at least they didn’t have to wait in line behind some comrade demanding paper towels.

Eat Me

Now I know this post is going to ruffle some feathers, but I don’t want to chicken out and shy away from a critical issue that must be addressed. So before you start squawking, let me put a few things on the…ahem…table. I have nothing against picky eaters and even less against people with particular dietary restrictions. Some of the world’s heathen populations eat animals that Gd has commanded us to leave alone, like pork, stingray, and sometimes panda. I recognize that it is tricky to avoid going straight to hell when you’re in a place like Tallahassee (pun INtended) and I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of folks there trying to walk the path of truth and righteousness. However, with that big ideological-hypocrite-sized caveat out of the way, I submit to you that if you are one of these individuals, you have two and only two mutually exclusive options. I will list them in sequence:

1) Eat the food put in front of you.

2) Don’t eat it.

For my dear readers who like to play the role of my little inedible dancing monkey pets that I know some of you are, at this very moment, puttering and sputtering and trying to formulate a coherent sentence to try to tell me that my list is restrictive and ignores man’s capacity for freedom, flexibility, and adaptation. While you “chew” on that, the rest of us are going to proceed with an earnest discussion of why people who make fussy food requests at a meal that someone else prepared are societal bottom-feeders who should only ever be served gluten free dry bread and filtered tap water.

There are two main dynamics that get me hotter than a bottle of Sriracha. The first, coincidentally is the subset of the population that likes to compensate for their physical inadequacies by incessantly requesting hot sauce (or really any random condiment) when they’re out dining at restaurants (using that term loosely enough to cover McDonald’s). “Excuse me, waiter, this filet mignon is delicious but I’m still anxious about my inability to satisfy my wife. Can you please bring me a bottle of hot sauce so that I can prove to her that I’m a man capable of tending to her needs?” You know what comes next. “Mmmmm, (sniffle, choke) this red meat is delicious. And the lethal serving of Texas Pete’s brings out all of the red-blooded goodness (tears streaming down his face).” I’m not even going to address the cruel irony of being at once both pretentious (asking for some special ingredient) and classless (ruining a perfectly good meal with said ingredient that would have the chef rolling over in his grave…if he were dead). The focus of this discussion, and really life, is how the manner in which you eat your meal affects me. Of course we have the general awkwardness of not knowing whether we can eat our piping hot and well-prepared meals while you wait for the waiter (irony number 2) to run down the street to the grocery store and buy a bottle of whatever random thing that restaurant would never even keep in the kitchen because it’s so disgusting, or we should hurl dinner rolls at you so hard that you pass out and then we can eat our food in peace. Either way, we need a mechanism to force you to internalize the social discomfort you inflict on others. Fair warning, my preference is for plan B. The other big problem (here comes irony number 3) is that if you have such a sophisticated palette, why are we not at your house eating your food? My hypothesis is that someone at the table thinks your food tastes like dog chow…drenched in hot sauce. In fact, you may even think your food takes like dog chow drenched in hot sauce. In which case, you should just sit there, ashamed at your ham-fistedness in the kitchen and quietly enjoy your edible human meal so we do not have to spend the evening reliving the night you gave us all dry heaves.

On to the second course. If you have ever tried selecting from the in-flight meal options on an airline website these days (I know, airline food, right?), you know already exactly what I’m talking about. There is a stunning variety of the number of different kinds of –tarians who will only eat food grown in hermetically sealed hydroponic gardens by Austrian nuns in a Leper colony. I struggle to convey how precisely this situation captures the self-important, self-indulgent absurdity that has seized our communities. No one expects airline food to be tasty. In fact, I’ll bet that every mother on the plane has a stash of something she knows her kids will eat in case they wind up with the kind of fare that this woe-begotten traveler, uh, gotten: http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/2009/01/28/dear-richard-branson-best-complaint-about-airline-food-or-anything-ever/. But simply not eating a terrible meal is not sufficient for our fussy foodies. No indeed. They must have the opportunity to turn their noses up at precisely the combination of ingredients and degrees of dead flesh (don’t even get me started on the delusional hypocrisy of being pescatarian) that they prefer, under threat of unmeritorious nuisance suit. Apart from the selfishness of trying to turn every food experience into a made-to-order nutritional regimen, there is the much more important matter of cost. Every time you insist on special food accommodations, you increase the cost to the rest of us who would happily pay $100 less for a plane ticket and eat our rubber chicken in peace. A brief lesson in economics: chefs get paid for their time, the price of food incorporates the cost of the chef’s time, the cost of the ingredients, and the degree of WASTE. You are the only one who wants wheatgrass and kale puree next to your oat-burger and yet we all pay for the cost of throwing away everything that you don’t eat (because, of course, no one else wants to eat it).

My solution is as simple as it is implementable. If someone serves you something that you can’t or won’t eat, then don’t eat it. This will have the salutary side effect of making it easier for you to keep your yap shut. Problem. Solved.

Go F*nd Yourself

Let me get this straight, MTV is now promoting a new show where 20 year olds check things off of their bucket lists? Can this be right? What on earth wouldn’t be on the life-long “to-do” list of someone that has been alive for approximately 5 minutes? “Ok, we smoked a bong while watching a re-run of yesterday’s Tyra, cross that off the list.” Well, congratulations, MTV, you have officially green-lighted the most vapid and self-indulgent journey ever launched into the beef tripe of youthful American angst. Exhibit A: http://www.theburiedlife.com/.

To begin with the most infuriating aspect of the show, we should consider the unabashed egoism that attends this fiasco. Our…ahem…heroes, in their short little lives have accomplished nothing, contributed nothing, and learned nothing before setting out on a narcissistic path (see e.g. the camera crew following their every move) to personal fulfillment. Impatience is too kind a word for the gall that these children have, with the ink still wet on their equivalency degrees, to whine that their lives are without meaning. I’ll bet if they had to do even an hour of the kind of work most people in this world have to endure just to keep their families fed, they would find it satisfying enough not to have to wash their hipster-chic wardrobe in a muddy river filled with dung and tapeworms.

But this is all theoretical. Let’s run down a few of the most offensive items on the aforementioned bucket list:

1. “Become a licensed minister”: Over the course of human history, countless millions of people have been killed, tortured, or exiled because of their religious beliefs. But you know what would be a real gas? What if a bunch of unemployed attention whores boiled it all down to a five minute gag reel? That would be hilarious. And evidently, mastering the imponderables of human existence is easier than say “learn[ing] how to play an instrument” which remains on the list and incomplete.

2. “Start a dance in a public place”: I suppose one way to get a lot of people moving all at once would be to yell fire in a crowded theater. On second thought, though, this approach is sub-optimal since it would take years to process and appeal the felony charges. Better yet, it would probably be more efficient (and make television gold) for me and my jackass friends to walk outside our hotbox of an apartment, ’80s boom box in tow like DJ what’s-his-face, and just starting f-ing dancing. That would be so sweet. And then tons of other people would totally join in and for a brief moment, we’d forget about all that divides us and just be in the…moment. Yes, this is the perfect solution to world hunger and childhood diseases. Never mind the fact that if I put the same level of effort into an actual job, any actual job, I could probably make enough money to save an entire village in Africa. No, this will be way better, and something everyone should do, just once, with the few precious moments we have on this earth.

3. “Win and yell, ‘Bingo!’ at a Bingo hall”: Does anyone else not find this patently offensive to the people who actually frequent Bingo halls? As the balls drop out of the hopper, like the sands through an hour glass, so pour out the regulars’ hopes of crossing anything else off of their bucket lists besides getting through this particular game of Bingo. What cruel mocking it is to snatch this simple joy from their arthritic claws and turn it into another of MTV’s exploitation-paloozas in worship of youth and stupidity.

Well I have a bucket list of my own. If you’ll indulge me:

1. Cause a crowd of people to point and laugh at (NOT “with”) the jackasses on MTV’s “The Buried Life”

2. Watch the cast of MTV’s “The Buried Life” pick up garbage alongside the highway

3. Convince each member of the cast of MTV’s “The Buried Life” to get matching tattoos that say “I’m a complete tool” on their foreheads

Who’s with me?

A Thousand Words That Cannot Be Uttered in Public

Imagine that there are exactly one point six feet of space between you and your untimely demise at the hand of a steep cliff perched high atop jagged rocks battered by the foreboding seas below. You step gingerly along the way so as not to disturb any of the pebbles that might be the lynch pin holding together the teetering mass of earth beneath your feet. So far so good…now if you can just make it around this corner, you’ll have a wide plateau safely underfoot and you can relax and enjoy the view while you go to town on the ham and cheese sandwich warmed over in your backpack by a combination of sweat and sun. But just as you round the bend, you discover something blocking your way. Actually it’s two somethings. And it turns out that both somethings are wearing inappropriately tight pants cropped halfway down the shin. Both somethings are also sporting a healthy roll of flab under their inappropriately tight t-shirts and are held together by an inappropriate fanny pack strapped around their middle regions (and apologies for the redundancy…I know there is no such thing as an appropriate fanny pack…no need to write me letters). Then the most appalling cut of all, one something is holding a giant black camera in one hand and gesticulating vaguely with his other in order to get the second something to move just a hair to the right, that’s it, right there, perfect…don’t move. In fact, no one can move because this bizarre charade has taken up the entire path and an inch more to the right would have sent something number two to meet his maker.

For those who do not yet get the…ahem…picture, I’ll spell it out for you. I am fed up with tourists blocking crowded public streets to try to get a snapshot of their friend with the whole of the Manhattan skyline in the background. Invariably, one person will sidle up next to an important landmark. The other person, lacking opposable thumbs or a camera with a lens that can zoom both in and out will have to walk approximately one football field away to capture the breathtaking scene. The rest of us, who are just trying to make it to the Starbucks before we deck the next Greenpeace “intern” pestering us on the sidewalk, have to stand back a respectful distance while Ansel Adams consults with the art director in between frames. All of this effort wasted on a photo that is not worth anyone’s time, and more importantly, not worth my time. The same reason why people hate sitting through slideshows of your trip to the Everglades is the same reason why I have started to march right through these absurdly elaborate photo ops. The pictures are always terrible, no one cares, and I want some coffee.



Now we’ve cast the “somethings” in our little drama as European, but to be fair, this malady is not isolated to Europe. Indeed it has spread across the globe faster than either the Bubonic plague or a Coldplay-induced coma. We now see evidence of snap-happy, obtrusive shutterbugs everywhere from the northern (and southern, eastern, and western) regions of Japan to the icy tundra of Minnesota (at least this is what researchers have been able to gather from the t-shirts worn by subjects who appear to be suffering from the classic symptoms). This all begs a very crucial question. If we have learned anything from the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea, it’s that taking a picture of someone is a surefire way to steal his or hear soul and lock it away for eternity inside one’s camera. Why then do so many people persist in obstructing traffic to get the perfect shot of their jackass friend doing the YMCA in front of the Taj Mahal? What is it that turns amateur photographers into professional wastes of space?

Which brings us to Ashton Kutcher. I blame him for much of this epidemic. In particular, I blame the stunning features which make him so mischievously appealing in those Nikon commercials despite not having showered in several days (I’ll assume this is just to avoid awkward encounters in the hallway with his sixteen year old step-daughter and not due the fact that he could not find his way out of a wet paper bag unless Demi pinned instructions to his jacket). If he’s going to continue to peddle the fantasy that his particular camera takes off ten pounds of ugly, he better add a user agreement to avoid liability when I send the camera off the cliff right after something number two, just to make sure we capture the full impact.

I S*it You Not

Picture it, I’m at the sink in the restroom, getting my anti-swine-flu precautions on when I hear, “So I don’t know if you got my text message or not, but like Jen has VIP tickets to the Vince Gill concert tonight.” I think to myself, “I love Vince Gill but I don’t have any idea who you are or who Jen is for that matter and frankly, I have no idea where your voice is even coming from.” And thank goodness I did not say it out loud because before I could respond some unheard person beat me to the punch and next I hear, “ok awesome, we can get some beer and meet there at like 5.” And then it hits me. The disembodied voice is coming from the bathroom stall! And the voiceless respondent is on said pooper’s cell phone!

I never in my wildest imagination thought we’d have to address this but the [ahem…subject matter of this post] seems to finally have hit the fan. And while I am all for multi-tasking, we have officially reached the limit, as I will demonstrate with a little hypothetical. You are chatting with your friend on the phone making plans to get burgers after work. In fact, you can picture in your brain the juicy looking slab of ground chuck with just a hint Dijon mustard and grilled onion bunting peeking out the sides. Your mouth starts to water as you choose a time and location for this get together and make the presumptuous decision in your head to order fries AND onion rings for the table. Suddenly a worm hole opens up allowing you to defy the laws of the time-space continuum and actually see your friend as he is talking to you making plans to get hamburgers. Your cell phone drops to the ground and smashes into as many little pieces as the shards of your immortal soul when you discover that your burger buddy is taking care of business while he’s taking care of business. You are thinking of tonight’s tasty nouveau American and he is still working on getting rid of last night’s ill advised Mexican. This latest etiquette abomination has now cost you your love of hamburgers, cell phones, and the auto-flush feature on the American Standard, all in one…uh…sitting.

Of course we hold culprits of such offenses to human decency to account for their actions, but there is another co-conspirator that merits mention, and elimination. I’m going to place the blame squarely on the Real World and its misbegotten step child Big Brother. TMI does not even begin to describe the gaping hole in the floodgates of the participants’ shame. Watching people sitting around at a slumber party playing truth or dare seems harmless enough, just some engaging young people swapping jokes and stories and the occasional venereal disease. But cameras in the bathrooms? I can imagine few things more repulsive than calculating the amount of soap it will require our protagonists to wash off last night’s bad decisions.

At least the television version of the problem we’re discussing affords us the small comfort of clinging to the fourth wall. We can keep a safe distance on the other side of the glass and pretend that it’s all pretend, it’s all a fiction concocted to entertain us, it could never happen in our own existence. That is why it is absolutely soul crushing when we discover individuals like the one profiled above in person. He reminds us of the depths to which our species has sunk and we begin to question whether his life is really worth living. The answer dear-hearts is that in the real “real world”…it’s not. So for the future, I’d suggest hanging up the phone when you cross the forbidden threshold or else the disease you pick up from that toilet seat will be the least of your worries.

The Emperor's New T-Shirt

There is something of a delicious (read: appalling) irony of New York calling itself the fashion capital of the world. The latest trend apparently is to not wear any clothes. At least this is what I gather from the fact that no one seems to put on actual clothes anymore. The streets are filled with half-dressed do-nothings wearing wholly insufficient amounts of shirt. On a good day you can spot at least a baker’s dozen of these individuals sporting only a v neck undershirt and a keffia.

If we were inclined to give our sartorial offenders the benefit of the doubt, we might presume that they are such busy and productive people that they simply do not have time to put on clothes in the morning. If they’re not out of the house in fewer than the 30 seconds it would have taken to put on an actual shirt, the nuclear launch codes will fall into the hands of the terrorists. And of course by nuclear launch codes I mean excessively tight pants, and by terrorists, I mean people who wake up before the breakfast menu items are no longer available at McDonalds.

An alternative explanation is that New Yorkers are so post-fashion that no actual clothes could possibly capture their trail-blazing sense of style. The internal monologue goes something like this: “Wearing clothes is so April of 2009. Wouldn’t it be edgy slash borderline indecent exposure if I just walked around in my underwear? Yes, yes it would. I’m gonna do it, here I go, out the door, wearing nothing by my crocs and the wife beater I fell asleep in last night. [Shields his eyes as he walks outside into the 2 pm sunlight]. Hey, it’s working! People are really intrigued. I am so fashion forward that I’m giving these jokers whiplash.”

But the most likely explanation of all, sad to say, is that our friends on the metaphorical and physical island are mindless snobs who would wear anything “on trend” as long as it’s overpriced. See e.g. American Apparel. A metaphor about bridges and lemmings comes to mind, but I’ll leave that for you fully clothed readers to figure out.

Of course this forum is something of a how-to on manners and etiquette, our lack of a proper title notwithstanding, so those of you who have been following along may wonder how this discussion relates to the theme. The fundamental problem is simple: we do not want people walking around in their underwear because they are generally flabby, sweaty, and altogether disgusting. We know this is true and before you release your indignant guffaw, think back to the last time someone asked you to pose for a Mr. or Ms. can’t-pay-for-my-education calendar and then let’s move on. The more complicated issue then is the insufficient clothing worn by people who we might prefer to see with even less clothing. Walking around showing off the fruits of your exercise bulimia is an affront to all job-holding, red-meat eating Americans trying to get through the day without a constant reminder of the crippling self-consciousness. I’m sorry if your daddy didn’t love you as a child and if you want to shake your moneymaker in the privacy of a dark bar or hipster coffeehouse, that’s your business. But for heaven’s sake put some clothes on when you go out in daylight.

Fail Blazer

Ladies, I’m giving you the week off. There is an epidemic going on in this country that has been affecting only the male of the species so I would suggest that you quarantine yourselves while we purge the population of those that have been infected. It would probably be a good idea to tuck the kiddies into bed while you’re at it because this installment is going to be a bit “adult.”

Now gentlemen, I give you…your comeuppance. It seems that throughout your formative years, you were so busy learning how to spit and to calculate the elapsed time since the last airing of Sports Center that you never learned how to dress yourselves. Time and again I walk past an otherwise neat and earnest young go-getter only to shrink back in horror when I observe the sartorial atrocities he has committed. We are going to catalogue them from most to least egregious but you should note that these offenses are different only in degree (and yes, I am aware that, technically, there are no degrees of egregiousness, but I could do without the back talk). They all share the common characteristic of announcing to the world that you were raised by wolves.

Just the other day I almost bounced a young man from an interview I was not even conducting because I saw him marching toward his inquisition wearing a blazer and slacks of the same color. Those of you thinking to yourselves, “Wow, that sounds like a pretty snappy combo,” are beyond salvation and should consider occupations that require you to use no discretion whatsoever; perhaps a garbage man, or a senator. The problem is that by trying to make a “suit” out of “not a suit,” you project an image of being a lazy slob who will cut corners and cannot be bothered to observe even the most elementary of social graces. A prospective employer or client might wonder, if you are willing to patch this little ensemble together, what sort of duct taped, jerry-rigged mass of techno scrap you are going to produce for them with the money you were supposed to use to install a new network server. “Oh don’t worry sir, Linux works just like Windows only cheaper…of course it shuts down periodically and without warning but if you just hold the ‘ctrl’ key at all times, that seems to do the trick.”

The blazer bonanza is perhaps the gateway offense to the next issue on our agenda…vents and tags. Something on the Y chromosome must make the menfolk terrified of threads because it seems you cannot bear to cut anything that is sewn to the clothes you buy. I shudder to reflect on the countless cases of a vented jacket or overcoat still bearing the telltale “x” stitch holding the back in place like a glaring scarlet letter as an eternal reminder of your sin against good manners…eternal, that is, until you remove it. For those of you having trouble following this discussion, I will put it in terms that you can understand: the string holding the flappy thing together on your new suit is meant to be CUT OFF! The same goes for the label on the sleeve to remind you which has-been designer happened to have their shipment of merchandise on sale the day you went to TJMaxx. No one cares that your ill fitting duds were hand-crafted by Alfredo Linguine in Florence, China so just bag the tag and we can all move one with our lives.



However what I absolutely cannot understand is whether you have just been oblivious to the buttons under your short collar or were confused about their function. Normally, when you see a button and a button hole, instinct should take over and impel you toward social self preservation. But we must have found the missing link because I continue to see gents out and about without a care in the world and their collars flapping in the breeze. This is not the natural order of things. A truly well crafted collar will be stiff and have a slot for a small piece of metal or plastic to keep it straight and neat. Naturally, though, this is too advanced a concept for you so the good folks at the shirt manufacturers have simplified things. No need to keep track of extra components. The buttons are right there for your use, every time, right were they should be…directly under the holes into which you are supposed to push them (TWSS…but there’s no time, but she did, but there’s no time).

As per usual, I will not leave you without a solution. First of all, you should stop being such a tightwad. Get a little extravagant and make a trip to Filene’s Basement for a proper suit. It may cost you a little more than your usual $15 blue light special, but I promise you it is worth a couple of weeks of downgrading to Red Stripe from your usual PBR. Secondly, stop being such a lazy so-and-so. I know you have the manual dexterity of mentally challenged walrus but they even make special scissors for people like you now so there’s really no excuse. As for the shirt situation, just take one day and walk around your house gathering your shirts up off of the floor, or the back of the chair, or under the kitchen sink and button the collars while you’re watching PTI. Whatever you do, though, do NOT miss the third re-run of Sports Center. It always, ALWAYS has new information than it had the two times before.