It is obscene to think of how many pictures I take of Leo, my eight-weeker. And I am saying this as a very judicious picture taker and editor. I post many photos on the Internet, but if they don’t fit a certain set of rules, they don’t make the cut. Here are some examples:
Formal “say cheese”-type poses
Blurriness (if used unartistically)
Funny faces (if exhibited unintentionally)
Take multiple pictures of a scene, use the best version
There are more, but I won’t bore you with those right now. What matters is that my tried and true ‘photo laws’ are being tested by parenthood. Even the blurriest picture sometimes makes the cut if there’s a smiling baby in the frame. Breaking another rule, I will take essentially the same picture 10 times but post all of them because Leo has a slightly different facial expression or pose in each one.
I am a conflicted man.
Maybe my cold, (amateur) photographer’s heart has softened with the arrival of my son. Editing down a batch of photos for the day used to be easy. I just applied the rules and posted the best stuff. Now I’m having a crisis when choosing between a shot of a smirking baby or a smiling baby.
Thank God for grandmas. I know I can count on them to look at every photo.
Let me start by saying that I love my mom dearly, and she is a great mother.
Her emails are very often come in the form of stream-of-consciousness thoughts spewing from her brain, and her brain works very fast, but not necessarily in logical order. Her emails provide me with a lot of information and often entertain me at the same time. Here is a poem I created using a paragraph from her most recent email, which (mostly) talked about baby names.
How do you like Braden…?
Thought of that the other day.
I’m dizzy can you tell.
I have been dizzy an awful lot lately which is scary.
The sausage still hasn’t come.
Anger
I am pretty sure this station JUST had a pledge drive a few months ago. And I gave them money! Why can’t these honey-throated eggheads make that money last longer!?
Bargaining
I don’t have to listen to this. Switching to another station.
Depression
All the other stations have commercials and annoying DJs. And the other NPR is also having a pledge drive. I really hate my life.
Acceptance
They have a point. In-depth coverage… news and analysis… pennies a day. Okay, you win NPR. Here’s my donation. You can send that tote bag to…
“On June 3rd, 2008, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle took part in what immediately became known as “the fist bump heard ’round the world.” Though it was an intensely personal and affectionate gesture of love and respect at a pivotal moment in Obama’s presidential campaign, it firmly placed the fist bump on the national stage.”
Taco Del Mar is selling a 5 lb burrito for $18. If you eat it within 30 minutes, you get a $20 gift certificate and some TDM schwag. At first, I maybe thought I could do that. But I was having trouble picturing a 5 lb burrito in my head. It seems like normal burritos are at least a pound… this one can’t be much bigger. But then I found this video:
I’ve taken food challenges before, and I’ve learned my lesson: NEVER AGAIN. At a large group dinner in college, I was coaxed into getting the mega Italian platter at a local restaurant. It had a pile of spaghetti, lasagna, a sausage, chicken Parmesan, sausage… it was $25 if you couldn’t eat the whole thing. I obviously couldn’t do it. I was stuffed before finishing my second sausage, and still had enough leftovers that sustained me for three days. And believe me… I love sausage.
I made everyone chip in $1 because I was poor, and they got some entertainment out of the deal at my expense.
I think I’ll be skipping this challenge. No thanks, TDM!
Too Beautiful To Live, a three-hour radio show broadcasting from Seattle’s KIRO 97.3 (and online in podcast form), was where I first heard about the Snuggie Pub Crawl. I wrote about it and sent them my post. They picked up on it and used it on their Monday night show as a jumping-off point, where they decided that they were “officially over the ironic embrace of pirates, bacon, and roller-derby.”
The hosts, Luke and Jen, play well off each other. The show is funny, eclectic, and plays a healthy dose of indie rock. Last week they had a funny interview with Michael Ian Black about his Twitter fued with Levar Burton. I highly recommend.
Here’s the segment from Monday’s show where my blog was discussed. The discussion starts at 28:30.
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The Snuggie is a blanket with sleeves. If you own a TV and watch it somewhat regularly, you have probably seen the irritating commercials for this product. If you want to waste two minutes of your life, and do not value your time whatsoever, take a minute and watch it now.
Now we’re up to speed.
Get this: the Snuggie phenomenon has sparked a pub crawl, where people wear their Snuggies while hopping from bar to bar.
Okay. But why? Just because it would be ironic and kitschy?
Please. Stop the irony. This form of humor has saturated our jokes and reached a level of ubiquity where it is no longer fresh and original. It is the lingua franca of boring.
Case in point: I needed a calendar for my cubicle. I went to a store with thousands of calendar choices. The store was called The Calendar Store. No irony in that store name at all. It’s brilliant. As I browsed around, my first thought was to get something ironic, like a kitten calendar. It would make everyone at work have a good laugh… for a week. But then what? I’d be looking at kittens for the next 365 days. I bagged the idea and picked up a calendar featuring old photos of New York City. Classy.
I dislike irony. But the hate will stop there. I may be tired of irony, but I’m also tired of people spouting hate about things they dislike. I like to turn negatives into positives. Rather than continue with the hate, let me make a constructive suggestion to all Snuggie pub crawlers:
Please, for the sake of my TV viewing, do not support the company that makes Snuggies. TV has enough irritating commercials that interrupt my weekly LOST episodes. I do not want to see more Snuggie ads. I want you to understand that I am very pro-fun and very supportive of doing weird and harmless things in public, but for the love of Ron Popeil, do something else.
Suggestions for Public Acts of Weirdness:
1. Gather a large group of people and start a dance party at a busy street corner. Better yet, start with one person, and build that as your group walks by and notices what’s happening. See if you can get people outside of your group to join in.
2. Keep the pub crawl idea, but stagger the arrival time for each person. The first person goes in, orders a drink, sits down. Second person comes in, acts like he wasn’t expecting first person to be there, and is really excited that he randomly ran into an old friend. Second person joins first person. Third person walks in, repeats this process. You could do this all night, in many forms. Have fun with it. When everyone is there, you can decide which pub to try next. Really be sure that people around you are listening to these “chance” encounters.
3. Repeat #1 in a bar or inside another public establishment.
4. Glue quarters down to the floor of a busy store. Sit back and watch. This is one of my personal favorites.
