My impression of every job application I've ever filled out

Tell us where you worked before, because we would never hire anybody who hadn't worked somewhere in the past. It's kind of like how it's a good idea not to date anybody who hasn't already had several meaningful relationships. It's just good common sense.

Are you willing to work really terrible hours, including overtime with no pay?

Are you willing to move wherever we tell you to, since it's not like there are a billion other jobs your could be doing if you just stay where you are?

Tell us about your education. It won't make any difference whatsoever, but we want you to feel like it's making a difference and you haven't wasted your life or anything.

Do other people think you're a decent person? We'll totally take their word for it.

Tell us what you think we should pay you. Because we are not going to tell you what we'll actually pay you until it's too late. This is completely fair.

Are you an illegal immigrant?

By the numbers

This is a writing exercise I found in this book I'm reading. It's where you create a list of numbers of things that apply to you, and in the end you're supposed to have a portrait of who you are or something. Let's go.

Number of times I woke up from a dream only to find myself in another dream last night: 3
Percentage of playoff basketball games I watched in the past week: 100
Number of songs in my iPod: 5780
Percentage of songs in my iPod I'm actually familiar with: ~46
Pictures I took at the beach yesterday: 15
Views of my most-ever-watched youtube video: 640
Different shades of color my son's hair has had in the year since he was born: 4
Times my facebook statuses were about basketball in the past week: 5
Odds I would set for Dallas defeating Miami in the Finals: 1-6
Number of times I spent New Year's away from home: 3
How sure I am that I want to name my daughter either "Dallas" or "Maverick" if they DO beat Miami: 1000%
Number of books I've read in the past year that feature Hobbits: 3
Age when I first learned how to whistle: 1
Age I taught myself to play guitar: 15
Number of problems that I have that are not a bitch: 99
People who read this blog that will get that joke: 1, maybe

Nostalgia is solipsism

So I was reading this stupid list that I clicked on for some reason. It's called 40 things that will make you feel old.

Now personally, I've seen a lot of these types of things lately. Lists that are just a bunch of "omg, can you believe how long ago this was?" xkcd did one. My personal favorite was this cracked.com list.

But this one was stupider than most. I mean, supposedly I'm the target demographic for this list, because I have clear memories of "Tha Crossroads" being a #1 jam and the premiere of Family Guy, pre-cancellation/comeback. But none of this stuff makes me feel old at all. Like, am I supposed to look at this and be like "Wow, I can't FOR ONE SINGLE SECOND believe Macaulay Culkin has hit the big three-oh!" or "It seems like just yesterday that people knew what the Macarena was!!!!11" When I look at those facts, all I can say to them is "Yeah, seems about right." (Although it did surprise me that Elijah Wood was only 18 when he did the LOTR movies; I could've sworn they used young-person makeup on him, still.)

Then I looked at this list and realized, this is only stuff that will make you feel old if you can't possibly conceive of any other experience than your own. Just because you were young when Seinfeld was on the air does not mean everybody was. There are people who were not born when the show ended, and guess what? They are going to grow old too. Lots of people were already old when that show even premiered. Did you think they were going to keep making new episodes forever? That only happened with the Simpsons.

You know what does make me feel old? Being married for six years. Having a one year-old child and another on the way. Watching my parents become grandparents. Watching my grandparents become corpses. Seeing my little brothers graduate. Seeing my little sisters get married. Having to spend money on my student loan. Working out at the gym and feeling sore for the next week. Eating a ton of sugar and feeling like crap afterward. Looking for work, any work. Blogging about stupid lists like these.

Pop culture? That stuff has a shelf-life that can be measured in weeks. I'm surprised that stuff isn't actually older than it is. So screw the Taco Bell dog. I feel young because he's dead and I'm not.

Youth is wasted

Some old guy once said "Youth is wasted on the young." This is supposed to imply that it's impossible to truly appreciate youth until you no longer have it. I would challenge this assumption, and even argue that the opposite is true: no one is better-suited for youth than the young.

As evidence, I would cite observational data: Have you ever seen a young person? They're running all over the place, trying to experience as many fun things as possible in the short amount of time they have. Children know instinctively they won't be young forever. That's why whenever you see a child at church, or in school, or some other place they don't want to be, they can't sit still. They have no patience. Every precious minute they're not playing and enjoying their childhood to the fullest is like torture to them.

"Towelie" is a season 5 episode of South Park that features a pot-smoking anthropomorphic towel. One of the running gags in the episode is the four kids calculating the number of consecutive hours they can continue playing video games before they have to go to school, or do any other activity that doesn't involve video games.

This desire to whittle one's life down to only the activities one enjoys most is emblematic of childhood. Only someone who has experienced so little time as a child can see the flawed logic in this approach to time management. For an adult, instant gratification all the time only brings eventual disappointment. Only children know how to appreciate that, because they intuitively understand another epigram that needs a few words cut out of it: Time flies.

We hates it forever

I have just read The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien to prepare me for reading all three LOTR books. These are my thoughts on it.

- Gollum is easily my favorite part of the book and he's way too good a character to only appear in one chapter here, which I guess is why Tolkien decided to make him such a major player in the trilogy. In fact, when I first started to read the book as an 8th grader, I think I stopped reading after his chapter.
- Bilbo is such a better character than Frodo. More resourceful, less whiny, and just more colorful in general. I can't see why Frodo even needs to exist in the first place. It would've been better to just have Fellowship take place shortly after the events in The Hobbit, and have Bilbo be the one who takes the ring into Mordor. It really sucks that Frodo is appearing in the upcoming adaptation from Peter Jackson, because this story has nothing to do with him.
- This must've been a pretty groundbreaking book at the time, right? I know it didn't invent the fantasy genre or anything, but I can't think of too many other books from around 1937 that did the whole "build the world, than have an epic adventure in it" thing which every fantasy series nowadays does. Or at least, I doubt there was any book that did it as well as Tolkien does here.
- The prose style is one that would bother me if I were reading a non-fantasy book, but somehow it fits perfectly here. I love how all the characters take ten sentences to say something that could be said with one (especially in the dialogue between Bilbo and Smaug) and the long-winded descriptions of what time of day it is or what that part of Middle-earth looks like really gave me a sense of being trapped in that world, with the characters.
- I'll admit, I didn't see the final battle at the end coming. For some reason I had the impression that this book was a much "smaller" story than the trilogy, just a simple "there-and-back-again" narrative about stealing from a dragon. Instead it's about the very nature of war itself, about how the actions of very few can lead to conflicts between many. That was a smart turn to take, especially since after the dragon died, I had no idea where the story could go from there.
- Has anyone ever seen the old cartoon movie based on it? I used to have an old VHS that had this and The Secret of Nimh copied from TV, but all I remember about it is what Bilbo looked like. I wonder if it's worth going back to check out.

Pump it up

I started lifting weights a couple of weeks ago, so of course I had to start finding songs that would complement that activity.

Weightlifting is a strange activity. It makes you want to hear music that doesn't sound like it's being played so much as it's being forced into your system with the crushing power of a billion decibels. Obviously your standard "rocking out" will not suffice.



And at the risk of going all old school on you:

What Beatles song would you kill yourself to?

I recently read "Killing Yourself to Live" by Chuck Klosterman and now he's the only guy I want to read. There's a part in the book (which is roughly a memoir about him driving across the country visiting the locations of famous rock star deaths and tragedies, while reminiscing about women he slept with) where he brings up a section from Elizabeth Wurtzel's own memoir "Prozac Nation", about how she would soundtrack her own suicide with "Strawberry Fields Forever".

In the book, this leads to a debate with a co-worker (Chuck was working for Spin magazine at the time) about whether the truly suicidal would bother picking out a song to die to. Chuck thinks that he would, and decides to go with "Tomorrow Never Knows", though he doubts it leaves him enough time to bleed to death.

So we know Wurtzel's and Klosterman's choices. This leaves the rest of us to answer the question for our own selves. I would probably be lazy and just put on my favorite Beatles song "Long, Long, Long".

But this presents a problem, because when I hear this song, I want to never die. So I'd chicken out. I would have to pick one I don't love quite as much. Maybe I'd go with "A Day In The Life". A little clichéd, with that line about a man who blows his mind out in a car, but what Beatles song isn't?

And I know it's got happy lyrics, but I've always found this song to be unbearably melancholy. It'd work.

Of course, if I wanted to go for the ironic/prankster-type suicide, I could always put this one on repeat: