Things you will never hear me say: "My stylist..."

I've never exactly given enough fuck to be bothered to spend copious amounts of time trying to make my hair look all perfect. If it takes longer than about thirty seconds, I'm probably going to give up and just go out with it looking however it did when I lost interest often much to the chagrin of my wife. And I can't even remember the last time I actually paid somebody to cut it. The closest thing I've ever had to a stylist was my friend Jess, who used to cut my hair into mohawks and dye it green or blue or whatever sometimes until she moved to Far The Fuck Away, and I started just doing it myself. Mostly, I use the four-year-old method, which is where you just sort of grab and cut until it's generally shorter. Except most four-year-olds probably don't ask their wife to fix the spots they can't see so that it doesn't end up looking entirely ridiculous when they're done.

Pretty much, this is how I decide when it's time to cut my hair: I wake up, shamble over to the mirror, and look at my reflection. If I look like me, it's OK, but if I look like someone famous, it's probably time to cut it. Eventually.

In other news, this is still not a travel update. That's tomorrow.

Here's what I've inflicted on the rest of the interwebs:
This stuff is made of awesome.
Snark + tumblr = stumblr.

And here's some stuff the rest of the interwebs have given me in return:
Snoop gets technical.
Indiana Jones: not so much on the tenure track.
I've started doing this.
North Dakota has about the fewest zombie apocalypse danger zones of any state. Who's surprised?
DOCTOR WHO COMIC MAKER. SO. MUCH. WIN.

I'm pretty sure I got the better end of that deal.

This isn't a real post, but I felt like I should do something to mark this important milestone. Or something.

Oh. My. Shit. Snark is two years old.

You'd think I would have accomplished more in that time.

Anyway, I don't have a real post for today, but here's the first thing I ever posted here, two years ago today (P.S. It's funnier if you imagine Lewis Black's voice when you read it):

Someone told me today that the Census Bureau has a PSA featuring Dora the Explorer. The first coherent thought I was able to have was “what the fuck?” I think that, first of all, if I were trying to decide whether or not to fill out my census form, and I saw a commercial in which a cartoon character from a children’s network tried to convince me to do so, I would throw it the fuck away. Then I would move to a country that took itself seriously.

I have to admit that I haven’t seen it yet–hence my ability still to type coherently–but I’ve discovered so far that it’s part of a campaign called “Children Count, Too,” which attempts to counteract the apparently common problem of parents who forget to count their young children when filling out the census form. Fair enough–maybe–but who are they marketing this to? Are there children filling out the census form? If so, this could help to eliminate the error of not counting oneself, a common mistake among children, especially those under the age of five, who HAVE NO BUSINESS FILLING OUT A FUCKING CENSUS FORM.

Or do they expect these children to take on the responsibility of reminding their parents to count them? If you can’t remember how many children you have, the answer should be zero, because you are a shitty parent.

We don't like to call it a "timeshare"; we prefer "vacation ownership."

Last Christmas, my wife and I put our names in one of those "you-could-totally-win-stuff-if-you-just-give-us-more-personal-information-than-you're-comfortable-with-and-let-us-harass-you-about-super-special-deals-until-the-zombie-apocalypse-happens-but-actually-even-after-that-because-then-a-zombie-shambles-up-to-your-door-and-instead-of-being-all-'bra-a-a-a-ains'-it's-like-'de-e-e-e-als'" things because we're fucking stupid why not? (Just keep reading; I'll answer that. Also, that's way too damn many hyphens.) Anyway, after that, we pretty much forgot about it, which probably would have been the best possible ending for the story, but when you're the kind of person who gets picked up by the short bus while hitchhiking (no, seriously), that ending is never a real option anyway.

It should be a sign when you get a letter that tells you that you have to call a phone number that tells you that you have to drive to the Happy Dipshit Resort in fucking Flint, Texas and sit through a 90-minute presentation in order to claim your prize. It was, but we chose to ignore it because who doesn't want a free trip to Vegas? Us, ever again.

Chapter One: "Mistakes Were Made."

At first, it kind of sounds like fun: you pack some snacks and drinks and take a few-hour road trip. And at the end, FREE TRIP TO VEGAS! Since no one has ever been to Flint on purpose, I drew you a map:

On your way there, you will pass:

• A rather seriously misnamed "mobile home" on blocks, with about 15 equally immobile cars in the yard.
• A restaurant called Maggie's with a sign out front that says "COED." (Don't try to tell me East Texas isn't progressive.)
• Some cows and trees, spaced very far apart.

Trust me, all this will come in useful later when you suggest that there's nothing to do in Satan's Asshole Flint, and your Vacation Ownership Representative gets all pissy and spits back "do you even know this area?" Yes, we drove through THREE FUCKING HOURS of it on the way here.

Immediately upon entering the building, two things become apparent to us:

1. This "resort" is exclusively for people who will never be invited to a country club.
2. We have made a huge fucking mistake in coming here.

There are screaming children all. The fuck. Over. We find the area that seems to have to fewest unsupervised banshee spawn and sit down by a table, except it's not actually a real table; it's a carpeted checkerboard with legs. A child comes running up, pushes past me, jumps one piece all around the board, then runs off again. In one corner of the room, there is a TV that cost more than most of the people here make in a month playing America's Funniest Home Videos on an endless loop. THE BOB SAGET VERSION. Next to me is Jake from Evil Dead II. Across the checkerboard from us is a skinny, bearded old man who looks like he would be more comfortable playing a banjo shirtless on the front porch. It's like a Cracker Barrel threw up in here. Jake asks me if we got VIP tickets, as though this were not asshat wankery, but a real thing that conferred some type of privileged status. This is most people's version of hell.

Forty-five minutes after being told we'd be going in right away, we're sitting in the Bullshit Lounge waiting for our Vacation Ownership Representative to show up so we can get this the fuck over with. We were expecting some Slick McDouche wearing a Rolex, so you can imagine our surprise when instead he turns out to be the self-proclaimed "best skateboarder in East Texas. No, seriously, just mention his name in Dallas and you'll see." What we'll actually see in a few minutes is that he should probably wear a helmet more often.

Chapter Two: "Something Witless This Way Comes."

Roughly the first ten minutes of our 90-minute* presentation involved rolling up every socially awkward sitcom character in television history into some kind of Mega Wank with logorrhea and a tenuous grasp of geography, and allowing him to ramble endlessly in the kind of way that would have given Miss Manners a seizure. The proper response to finding out that someone you're talking to has lost the relative you just asked about—no matter how far in the past—is to feel slightly embarrassed and say "I'm so sorry for your loss." Somewhat less acceptable is pontificating for FIVE FUCKING MINUTES on the deeper meaning of death. Seriously, he would not. Stop. Talking. About it. Twice we thought he was done, but then he started up again on some new tangent about "a better place," or some other clichéd bullshit. Then he asked us about past vacations and used some really sketchy match to show us how much money we would waste over the next 20 years. Also, he asked us where the Mediterranean was. "Um, it's between Europe and Africa. Unless we're playing Carmen Sandiego. Then it could be anywhere."

*Individual experience may vary.

A skeptical Jake appears!

Timeshare Salesman uses SKETCHY MATH!

Other things you don't do when you're trying to sell someone something (sadly, an abridged list):

• Use the phrase "man cave." Especially when describing the bathroom, and in conjunction with the phrase "do some paperwork."
• Proceed to shut your prospective customers in said bathroom together, then jump out from behind a wall with the "Surprise!" face and jazz hands when they come out.
• Use any of the following words or phrases: "jizz," "shitting bricks," "fuck."
• Smell like pot. Or try to blame it on the maintenance staff.
• Get defensive and try to argue with your prospective customer about how much they'll enjoy whatever the hell it is you're selling.
• Fuck around for so long that you take FOUR FUCKING HOURS to get through a 90-minute presentation, especially when another salesperson laps you more than once.

I tried to keep an open mind. I really did...ish. Unfortunately, even my patience runs out after the first couple of hours, so I just gave up and started fucking with him.

After making us list "five places you absolutely want to go sometime" for about the sixth time:
VOR: "Are you ready for this?" [He opens the door onto a tiny patio.] "Behold, your view of the beach in Fiji!" [It's a fucking parking lot.]
Me: "You've got a lot of cars parked in your ocean. All that salt water can't be good for them."

While showing us the camping area:
VOR: "You can even stay in a Lincoln log cabin!"
Me: "Is it made of real Lincoln Logs?"
VOR: "It's a Lincoln log cabin."

Chapter Three: "You Will Deny Me Three Times."

Finally, we return to the Bullshit Lounge for the coup de grâce (we fucking hope)—twenty more minutes about some three-letter company whose name I can't remember because my brain had actually shut off at this point, but which represents THE ULTIMATE INTERNATIONAL VACATION OWNERSHIP EXCHANGE PROGRAM! He flips through his encyclopedia of resorts, apparently intent on showing us every single one of the 5000 fucking places in the world we could stay for just $199 a month (not including meals or airfare) and circles his sketchy math a few more times, conclusively proving how fantastic it is. Meanwhile, my wife has turned into a Salvador Dalí painting on my shoulder. I actually say "yeah, circles don't impress me all that much." And anyway, we all know the steps to this particular dance.

1. Skate or Die makes us a terrible offer, in the hopes that we're absolute fucktards who actually bought any of the bullshit he just fed us interested. We're not.
2. He calls his "supervisor" over to see if she can offer us a better deal because she "has more authority to make a deal" than he does. She turns out to be a reanimated version of my Grandma Leone, with Flo-Jo nails. She tells me I have a "good Bible name" and makes an offer that cuts out about 75% of the "benefits" and about 15% of the price, and we suggest 5000 places she can stick it.
3. Zombie Grandma Flo-Jo sighs at us and goes to have a cigarette talk to her supervisor to see if she can get us an EVEN BETTER deal, which is "really not very likely," but "it can't hurt to try." Meanwhile, Stoney Hawk asks "do you guys know what you just said no to?" Yes, in fact, we do, and it's not unlike syphilis.
4. Magically, all of the benefits are restored, and the price drops to half of the original offer. This is presumably meant to be a fucking steal, so I carefully look at all the numbers, count on my fingers while mumbling to myself, and say that I think it sounds like a great deal. Then I look Grandma Pall Mall right in the eye and say "no" LIKE A MOTHERFUCKING CHAMP. Everyone walks away without even thanking us, and I tell Captain Cannabis "thanks for playing."
5. The Regional Supervisor, who is totally real and has nothing fucking better to do on an entire Saturday than frown at strangers who don't want syphilis, sends us to another building where we have to wait another hour  to be treated with full-on dickery for insisting that there will actually be room for both of us to come back to the prize room, even if one of us has to stand. Also, you can only take the free Vegas trip in the middle of the fucking week, in the hopes that you just won't go and then they won't have to pay for it.

Timeshare Salesman uses CIRCLES! It's not very effective.

But then, on the way home, we decided to stop at this tiny Mexican restaurant that had a little trouble with signs, but also gave out free margaritas on Saturdays. Apparently the moral of the story is that I will give away ten hours of my life for free booze and a trip to Las Vegas.

Good thing I brought my ASIA card.

FREE.
Also, I didn't have to wait four fucking hours
to find out I could only drink it on a Tuesday.

Easter: You're doing it wrong.

So, today is Easter, which is all about chocolate and jellybeans one of two days a year you go to church not Christmas.

To help you understand some of the differences between these two holidays, I've put together this half-assed handy guide.

AWARENESS

We spend months and months preparing for Christmas, but Easter sneaks up on us every fucking year.

This is how you find out it's Christmas:

October 31:
While staggering walking down the street dressed as a Slutty Sexy Something-or-Other, you glance in a store window and see a fiber-optic tree and some fake snow, which you promptly forget about once you black out.

November 1:
The faint memory of an unnamed horror gnaws at the back of your mind until you recover from your hangover and venture out, only to hear Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer playing in the mall.

Thanksgiving Day:
FOOD COMA. Today is the official beginning of the winter wealthfest holiday season. Probably, you put up your huge fuckoff cat toy Christmas tree this evening. Also, the Führer of the Socialist Liberals for Satan Party declares the War on Christmas (again).

The Day After Thanksgiving:
Today is the biggest fucking spend-orgy in the world. It's called Black Friday because you wake up in total darkness to savesaveSAVE on GREAT DEALS! and because of the black coffee you need to drink to drag your ass out of bed early enough to win at materialism. For the entire rest of the fucking year, you will hear so much Christmas music that you will actually begin to resent joy.

December 1:
You get an Advent calendar—one of those things with 25 little doors that's supposed to teach you Patience and help you count down to Christmas through cheap, shitty chocolate—and you open the door labeled "1."

December 2:
You tell Patience to go fuck itself and open doors 2-25 and gorge yourself on cheap, shitty chocolate. You don't need help counting down to Christmas because from here on out, your TV will tell you how many shopping days you've got left. Every. Fucking. Day.

December 24:
All regular TV programming is cancelled and replaced with a million last-minute shopping reminders that say ZOMGWALMARTAMAZONBESTBUYMACY'SFORTHELOVEOFGODBUYMORESHIT! At 6pm, you switch to TBS and watch A Christmas Story TWELVE TIMES IN A ROW!!!

December 25:
You wake up and distribute an entire The Price Is Right showcase to everyone in your house, just to prove you totally care more about them than other people do celebrate the birth of the Savior. YOU WIN AT CHRISTMAS! Probably, somebody mentions Jesus, and the name sounds vaguely familiar.

Usually, you find out it's Easter when you have this phone conversation on a Saturday evening:

Relative: So we'll be over after church tomorrow, probably around twelve-thirty, one o'clock.
You: ...the fuck for?
Relative: Easter. You know, ham. Chocolate eggs.
You: Um, shit.

Then you spend the next twelve hours frantically cleaning your house, because you haven't done it since they came over for Christmas.

THE PARTY

Unless I misunderstood, the whole point of Christianity was that Jesus came here as a human, tried to teach us not to be selfish douchetards, and then sacrificed himself to save our sorry asses. Without Easter, Christmas means exactly nothing. It's like if Superman ended as soon as he reached Earth. Nobody gets saved from anything, he just fucking shows up and then the credits roll. There's a guaranteed fucking Oscar winner.

It's like football fans having a huge party to kick off the season, with like 30 kegs of beer and celebrities and all that food that Jesus told us to share with the poor. Everybody's screaming and cheering and spraying champagne all over. Somebody throws Gatorade on the Pope. And your team hasn't even played one fucking game yet. It's the beginning of the season; nothing's happened yet. You're not even in the stadium. You're still tailgating. That's Christmas in America, every year.

Then, a few months later, it's the Super Bowl. You've played you ass off and fought your way through the playoffs. In the first quarter of the game, it's that scene with Lawrence Taylor and Joe Theisman, and you know it's fucking over. Your star quarterback will never even walk again. But then, somehow, right at the two-minute warning, he strides back onto the field and plows through everyone by himself to win the Super Bowl. This is what the whole season was for, and you were in the kitchen getting another beer. You're like "what happened? I only watch this for the commercials. We won? Whatever, yeah, that's great, I guess. Man, did you see that one with the Vader kid? That was awesome!" That's how we celebrate Easter.

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

The only thing that makes sense about this is that you can market the shit out of Christmas. We've latched onto this one throwaway line in the story about gifts, and it's exploded completely out of control. We've got advertisements like "Where did the Wise Men get their gifts? Well, if they were really wise men, they came to Macy's After Thanksgiving Sale for our fantastic Doorbuster specials! First hundred customers get a bag of myrrh and an MP3 player! Doors open 3 B.C. Don't forget, if you don't buy, Jesus will cry."

But you can't market Easter, because it's a botched assassination attempt. It's like celebrating John Wilkes Booth Day or Lee Harvey Oswald Day. So instead, we've just got pastel eggs and chocolate rabbits, because that was the best sales pitch anyone could come up with.

Anyway, happy Easter. Or if you don't celebrate Easter, then at least maybe you don't have to work today.

What's sad is that this is probably *exactly* how our future kid would learn to talk.

A few weeks ago, I had to do a factory reset on my phone because it suddenly decided to get half-my-media Alzheimer's and also to change all my alarm sounds from loudasfuck.mp3 to a quarter-second of a sound that may actually have been called "Pin Drop."

Of course, the conversation in the Verizon store went something like this:

Me: About a week ago, my phone started acting like a douche.
Verizon: Have you tried rebooting it?
Me: About four times a day.
Verizon: Have you tried the other reboot where you take the battery off?
Me: See previous comment.
Verizon: Have you installed any third-party apps? Because it's totally always their fault.
Me: It started exactly when I installed the software upgrade following your exact directions.
Verizon: Yeah, that's also somehow not our fault. We're going to do a factory reset, which will erase all your shit. Then you won't have to worry about your phone finding it!
Me: Yeah, I know. That's why I backed up all my shit before I came in here.

[Side note: factory reset fixed the alarm, but it still can't find half my pictures and shit without having to reboot. Each time. The HTC CrapShoot™, only at Verizon.]

Pretty much every day of my life, I'm trying to type completely normal stuff like "snark" and my phone is all "you must've meant SmarTone-Vodafone. I'll go ahead and fix that for you" (true story. Also: what the fuck?). But if I type something like "i'm" and expect autocorrect to capitalize it for me, it goes "wow, what a fascinating new word that's completely unlike the exact thing I suggested when you typed it! Let me add that to your user dictionary!" Autocorrect is a dick.

Although, sometimes it does get me.

Of course, the factory reset wiped out my user dictionary, too, but in the couple of weeks since then, these are all the words that I've taught it:

Amibrawla
ass
asshole
awesomeface
Brawla
cheesecake
crap
Dalek
damn
derby
dumbfuckery
eesh
FTW
fuck
fucked
fucking
fucktard
Grond
Hoolies
Hooligans
jammer
kilt
kofta
mattar
motherfucking
nerdpoints
OMG
ooOOO
palak
paneer
quoi
Sana
shit
Sontar-ha
TARDIS
Tennant
tofu
veggie
WTF
ZOMG

Based just on this list, you'd think that I was some kind of vegetarian roller derby nerd who spends all his time watching Doctor Who while eating Indian food and cursing. And you'd be pretty much exactly right. Way to go, my integrity.

If you say "online resources" again, I will punch you in the throat.

Remember how, in ancient Greece, if you were an insufferable douche, the people could get together and vote you out of society, Survivor-style? It's time to adopt that again. For the good of society. Among the first ones to go: people who ask you for help because they don't have a clue what they're doing, then proceed to ignore everything you say and just do whatever the fuck they were doing before you got there. Imagine a world where I never have to have this conversation again:

Her: I'm trying to find out how to search your website to see if you have something.
Me: OK, you'll start, of course, by going to our website. [I give her the URL]
Her: OK
Me: You should see a link to the catalog in the upper right-hand corner.
Her: I see "hours," "online resources..." Should I just go to "online resources?"
Me: No, that's not the right page. Look above that and to the right. It should say "Go to Catalog."
Her: I don't have what you have. [I assume that by this she meant the ability to follow simple instructions instead of banging around on the keyboard like a monkey writing a draft of Hamlet] Should I just go to "online resources?"
Me: No. You should see a search bar up in the corner. Just above that is the link you're looking for.
Her: I see the search bar, but there's nothing above it. Here, I'll go to the next page. [She starts reading off every link she can see on the page]
Me: What? Next page? There is no next—I have no idea what page you're on.
Her: I'm on page 3...
Me: Page 3? What the f—did you just do a Google search for the website?
Her: Yes.
Me: picardfacepalm.jpg

Also on the list:

• Hipsters
• Anyone who makes a commercial with a talking baby.
• People who say "I'm computer illiterate (tee hee!)" like it's a point of pride. Especially when they actually mean "do everything for me."
• Every website with a flash intro that you can't skip or obnoxious background music that plays at 900 dB.
• Anybody who refers to a room in their house as a "man cave." The correct term is "penis parlor." Also, you're a douche.
• Hipsters (again).
• The person at our old apartment whose car alarm would go off for about three hours straight every Saturday morning.
• The Corn Refiners Association. (I'm not going to stop drinking soda, but seriously, stop calling high fructose corn syrup "natural." You're assholes, and it insults everyone's intelligence).
• I would have put that creepy-ass mascot from Burger King on here, but apparently that's already happened.

This is by no means everybody. Who's on your list?

"Officer, there's a nutter in the park!" "Oh, it's a low-power vampire. They're no bother this time of year."

So, against my better judgment, I finally fucking read Twilight. It took me almost a year. Not because it was deep, or had tiny print, or contained anything even remotely intellectually stimulating, but because it was excruciating. Dear. God. In. Heaven. 500 pages of an awkward, irritating girl fawning over some asshole boy's body. This didn't deserve to be a novel; this should have been a note passed in study hall: "OMG, Edward is soooo hot!!!" The End. It's the sort of writing that would have given Mark Twain a stroke.

When she's not busy swooning, Bella takes every opportunity she can to remind us that she's so socially and physically awkward that she can't carry on a conversation or take three steps without falling over. Combine that with her complete lack of any instincts for self-preservation and it's nothing short of a complete miracle that she's survived even this long. Case in point: Edward is going to take Bella home to meet his glampire vampire family, and Bella is nervous because ZOMG, SHE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT TO WEAR! THIS IS THE MOST LOGICAL THING TO BE WORRIED ABOUT IN THIS SITUATION!

"It was hard to decide what to wear. I doubted there were any etiquette books detailing how to dress when your vampire sweetheart takes you home to meet his vampire family." (Ch. 15)

You know why? BECAUSE HE'S A FUCKING VAMPIRE! He doesn't take you home to meet his family. He takes you home to kill you by draining all the blood from your body. You should wear a steel turtleneck soaked in garlic. That is, assuming that Eerie Hymen Pest hasn't changed the mythology so that garlic just gives them the power to bounce off shit or something.

On that topic: (skip to about 3:15 for the most relevant bit)


You know what's the worst part of Twilight? He sparkles. HE FUCKING SPARKLES! Even though I knew about it before I read it, I couldn't handle it when this happened. Suspension of disbelief = OVER. I literally threw the book across the room and went to pour myself a drink.

But then, the other night, I saw this on TV and it made me feel a little bit better: Anne Rice and Craig Ferguson making fun of some unnamed glampire story. Any resemblance to other stories is, I'm sure, entirely coincidental (starts at 2:00ish):


Dear Stephenie Meyer, or possibly someone else, because we totally can't tell who they're talking about: When arguably the most successful vampire writer in history is making fun of you, you're probably not doing it right.

I promise that this is the last time I'll bitch write about Twilight, probably. You should really check out Reasoning With Vampires, though. Dana is hilarious, and gives us the sort of commentary on the series that Mark Twain might if he were still alive today. And way more crass. And proficient at image editing.

In other news, I'm two books into The Hunger Games. It's refreshing to read something, well, good. </plugs>