Ho Ho Ho
/
Nothing special here. Just a little Santa. Gracefully tap-dancing on the line between the adults and children at the annual gathering. While The adults are all chatting in one room I'm in the other one with the kids drawing Santas.
Reverse Beard Jenga
/Today I realized if I stick small objects into my facial hair my beard will hang onto them and I can store stuff in it. Obviously the only logical step from here is to stick a bunch of stuff in there and see how much I can fit before it all starts to fall apart. For science.
Thus a game known as the 'I realized if I stick things into my beard they will get lodged in there and stay put, I wonder how much stuff I could actually hold with my facial hair at one time?' game was born.
Renamed to 'Reverse Beard Jenga' for brevity.
I decided to use nails, because they have a nice weight to them, are a good size and shape for beard insertion.
Let's begin:
For this edition of Reverse Beard Jenga I'll be using these double headed nails that we use at my work in the winter because they are a perfect size, shape and weight. Also, because I had a pocket full of them in my coat when I came home today.
Ten nails in. My wife is standing next to me as I do this, judging me. She clearly has no appreciation for science, but I'll not be dissuaded by naysayers to important progress. That's how we got 100 years of Dark Ages.
20 nails. I'm starting to feel the weight of the nails at this point, but they're still going in there pretty easily.
40 nails. It's getting perilous in here y'all. It's starting to feel like if I move my face at all the structural integrity of the nail matrix I've created will fail and I'll start losing 'em.
Apparently impressed by my ability to hold a lot of stuff in my facial hair, Emily seems to have come around on Reverse Beard Jenga. She's gone from telling me I'm stupid for doing this and that I need to wash my beard when I'm done because putting a bunch of dirty ass nails into it is gross, to asking me how many I'm up to now every eight seconds.
I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I have 40 goddamn nails lodged in my beard and every time I have to answer you I feel like I'm going to shit them out of my face all over the table; so count along or back off lady!
60 Nails. That look of apprehension real people. At this point shit is getting TENSE. Each new nail has to be inserted with surgical precision for fear of knocking existing nails of out place. Each new nail is the equivalent of that part in doctor shows where the super advanced piece of equipment breaks and the nurses are all "You can't remove that man's brain tumor by freehanding that shit!" and the surgeon is all "Bish, watch me." and then sticks a ten inch needle into a dude's brain by ballparking it, gets the tumor out and somehow doesn't erase the guy's entire memory of 1992 and ability to work zippers. That's the level of precise hand/eye/beard coordination we're dealing with here.
74 nails. This was where we stopped. There was minute there where I thought I might actually make it to 100, but once I got to this point a couple of nails would fall out every time I tried to put a new one in. Once this happened a few times I decided the limit was reached.
Important work has been done here today. Questions were answered, science was scienced. Since no self respecting researcher would conclude his experiment without properly collecting the required datas; I put all the nails in a bowl and weighed them:
So there you have it. 74 nails, or nearly a pound can be safely stuck into my facial hair at one time. What a time to be alive.
Taking a Stand
/
I don't know that I quite understand those people who who are all "IT'S MERRY CHRISTMAS, NOT HAPPY HOLIDAYS!" while, I presume, putting one hand jauntily on their hip and wagging the pointer finger of their other hand back and forth in front of their face sassily before going back to living under the assumption that nobody who is different from them actually counts ever.
I mean, sure Christmas is -a- holiday in this season, but even if you are Christian and we operate under the assumption that as far as you are concerned any of the other religious holidays celebrated around this time can go fuck themselves, at the very least there is still New Years. Unless you are some sort of weird calendar denier, insisting on only saying 'Merry Christmas" is just incorrect logically.
People act as if saying "Happy Holidays" is the equivalent of looking directly into their eyes whist repeatedly punching a baby Jesus doll in the face with a pair of brass knuckles made out of dildos.
Meanwhile I'm over here desperately trying to avoid eye contact with strangers and going to the other entrance if I see someone with a little bell and a bucket in front of Wal-mart. I guess some people can "keep muh Jesus", others can wish each other a pleasant non-denominational seasonal greeting, and I'll continue to try not to interact with anyone. And so the world keeps turning.
Feels Good Man
/You know that feeling when something happens that makes the ODC part of your brain have 1,000 boners?
This was the highlight of my year.
I'm Named After a Dead Baby
/You know how parents do that adorable married people thing where they argue over the details of some event that took place decades ago? You know, when they both have a different recollection of something they have been debating for so long neither of them are actually upset over it anymore and they don't really even want to settle the argument because it's a fond reminiscence of their lives together?
We have those in my family too, except instead of being cute and heartwarming, you find out your mother named you after a dead baby she read about in People Magazine in 1988.
Allow me to elaborate.
My parents love to argue over how they came up with the names for my brother and I. My brother, for example, was nearly "Doyle" after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer. Thankfully they chose a different name, as to be named Doyle is to be condemned to a life of having to wear high pants and suspenders with no shirt while you challenge people to bouts of fisticuffs and moustache growing fights. Actually, that sounds kind of awesome...
I am 1000% sure this guy was named doyle.
As for me, both of my parents resolutely take credit for having chosen the name Matthew for me. My father, being a great lover of baseball says that his criteria for the name of his firstborn son was that he be named after one of the great ballplayers of the olden days. Thankfully he said he decided naming me something like Honus, Cy, or Tris would have been ridiculous in this century, so he decided on Matthew after famous New York Giant's Pitcher Christy Mathewson.
That story seems more or less believable, and at least he went with Matthew and not Christy. It would have been an absolute delight growing up if in addition to being a weird, unpopular nerd I also had a girl name.
All in all I'm fine with that as an origin story for my name. Legendary baseball player that your father idolizes is a pretty normal thing to have your namesake based on, I'd say. On a side note, not that this has anything to do with anything, but as it turns out Christy Mathewson was apparently a smokin' hot man-god:
You're welcome ladies, men who are into men, and men who are into women but can appreciate the jawline of goddamn Captain America.
Anyway, in opposition to my father's claim of "famous baseball player" as the source of my name, my mother's version has always been that she came up with the name and picked it because it meant "Gift from God". For the entirety of my life, that has been the only version of that story ever given during the countless debates between my parents over who picked out the names of their two children. No more or less elaboration than that. Just, "I picked it because it meant gift from God". Sort of boring, but fine.
That is until this past weekend when, during a family cookout the debate came up again and my mother dropped this little gem that she has somehow never thought to mention before:
Apparently the full story of where she came up with the name Matthew is that she read an article in People Magazine about some town that came across the dead, frozen body of an unknown baby, collectively took him in as one of their own, buried him, and named him Matthew because it meant "gift from God."
My mother picked my name after reading a story about some people that found a dead baby in the woods.
Skipping over the fact that this town apparently thought "gift from God" was the appropriate way to feel about about a frozen woods-baby, apparently my Mother read this article and the takeaway was "Hmm, the name they picked out for that tiny frost-hardened corpse has a nice ring to it."
Here's the real kicker. Thanks to modern technology and my expert ability to google "People Magazine, town names dead baby Matthew" I actually found the freaking article. My mother has searchable, verifiable evidence of her insane "picked out your name from People Magazine's story about a dead baby" being true. If you want to read something morbid feel free to click here to see it.
The thing is, the point of the article isn't even a tragic yet heartwarming tale of a community coming together to lay a poor lost child to rest. That part is like, a one paragraph intro at the beginning followed by a lengthy and legitimately upsetting article about how they identified the child two years after the fact and think he was killed by his father who somehow keeps having people close to him die suspiciously but has never been convicted of murder.
How a woman can go nearly three decades and not once during countless rehashings of the same argument think to include the detail that the source of her first born child's name was an article about the murder of a child is an enigma that I, or modern science may never fully unravel.
At the very least, we've got some new details to argue over whenever the discussion of who picked out the kid's names comes up.
If you need me I'll be in Therapy.
The Best Thing About Marriage
/Of all the varied and wonderful joys associated with being married or in a long term relationship, there is one that tops them all in my book. When you are married, you have a built in confidante for life. It is true gift to have someone you can tell anything without fear of judgment or having it repeated to anyone.
Now sure, you could use that liberty to open your inner most thoughts and fears to another person who would understand and continue to love you anyway, but we all know that shit is what Tumblr is for. If you are doing it right in your marriage, you have complete and uninhibited freedom to indulge in copious of completely unrestrained-no holds barred-if anyone else heard you vocalize the fact that these are your actual thoughts they would never speak to you again... shit-talking.
Why is the default facial expression in stock images of "gossip" a mixture of shock and horror? "Psst. I dipped my Bean-bag in your latte"
When you are married, you talk so much smack about everything and everyone with your spouse that it practically becomes a sporting event (I hear they are looking to put inter-spousal gossip in the next winter Olympics). When you've been together long enough, it gets to the point where you can predict exactly what your spouse is about to say as soon as you've wheeled your cart a safe distance away from the worlds slowest and most socially distressing grocery store cashier in history.
I now automatically hold up one finger for silence when ending a phone-call I had on speaker because I can tell my wife is about to start talkin' some smack about whoever was on the line and she doesn't wait to make sure the call is safely disconnected first if I don't stop her. It's happened.
Every single one of us is at least a little bit of a judgmental piece of garbage on the inside, even if we don't vocalize it. When you are married though, you don't have to keep it pent up; You have an outlet for those innocent moments of pettiness and self righteousness that you know are wrong and make you a terrible person but you can't help having for just a second before you wave them off:
Those moments when you just want to yell at your Facebook friend Becky that she isn't fooling anybody with those mirror selfies where she is sticking her hips really far backwards to make it look like she has a thigh gap no longer have die quietly in your soul. You don't have to keep it to yourself that a mutual friend's new boyfriend has the personality of a house plant and you seriously considered getting up and turning his chair towards the sun to see if he would start leaning that way. You have someone to tell when the woman who runs the self check out area at Lowes and always gives you unsolicited, condescending pet care advice makes you want to shoot yourself in the foot with a nail gun just so the foot pain from your new nail wound will distract you from wanting to throttle her.
Getting those thoughts out safely and harmlessly in an environment where you nobody is going to judge you or spill the beans on what a dumpster-fire of a human you are is absolutely critical to mental health.
A visual representation of my inner personality
The alternative is to keep them inside and allowing them to fester and mutate into some sort of freakish calcified lump of petty bullshit that causes your organs to fail. In fact. I'm 98% convinced that, that's what kidney stones are.
Don't get kidney stones. Trash with your spouse. It's the responsible thing to do.
Happy 4th of July. I'm Really Mad About a T-shirt.
/
Before I met Emily I was a lot angrier in general than I am now. I've always had what one might call rage issues if one were to use the term in the absolute loosest of senses. I basically hate everything, but have the aggression and backbone of a small girl so I rage less in the traditional 'violent temper and poorly balanced mental state' way and more in the 'impudent nerd rage that spurs a person to write a strongly worded blog post about some completely insignificant bit of minutiae that nobody else gives a thimble sized shit about' way.
If you are confused as to what I'm talking about, you'll likely understand when you get to rest of this strongly worded blog post about how I'm irrationally mad about a t-shirt I saw at a store..
I was going to start this post of by saying that one of the great things about Emily is that she really tempers that rage in me, but I if we're being accurate, it's not so much tempering rage as just keeping me from being too much of an anal retentive douche-dirigible.
In any event, in the years we have been together I have noticed that Emily has really mellowed me out when it comes to a lot of the stuff that I used to become pointlessly irate over. As the result of a steady combination of telling me to calm the f%$k down and general apathy towards my idiot tantrums I have come to realize that sometimes I can just let things go instead of obsessively needing to make the universe understand the injustice of something stupid or shitty being allowed to exist. ( Side note: Idiot tantrums would be a great title for my book.)
She's helped me realize truths such as: the percentage of my time I need to spend upset over the fact that the logo for those Speck iPhone cases looks like a puckered butthole is actually 0% as opposed to the 100000% of the time I spent upset over it before. ( But seriously though...like, how do people not see it?)
The point is, I don't worry about stupid crap nearly as much anymore as I used to, and generally I'm a much happier person because of it. There are still a few things I refuse to let go of, the Speck case thing apparently being one of them and another being the belief that every existing recording of that commercial they've been using since 1992 where you give your junk car to children or orphans or something that goes:
1800 KARS FOR KIDS,
K-A-R-S KARS FOR KIDS!
1800 KARS FOR KIDS,
DONATE YOUR CAR TODAY!"
should be put on a rocket and fired into the sun. Generally though, I'm much less furious at the world around me now than I was five or so years ago.
HOWEVER.
Sometimes I can't help myself. I see or hear something that just stabs me right in the same nerve that Kars for Kids and their underground chop shop orphan cartel or Speck's anus marketing campaign does. When that happens the only thing I can do to quell the fury is bitch about it to people. Luckily I have this website which nobody reads but gives me the illusion of spreading my thoughts to an audience thus allowing me temporary peace of mind, so strap in.
This:
Is a thing I saw in a store while Emily was shopping and I wandered off to look at other areas because I got bored.
I'm sure everyone here already sees what it is that made me stop and take a picture of this shirt, because you are all smart, productive members of society. But somebody f*#$ing made it which means at least one person out there is not in the loop, so humor me as I describe in unnecessary detail why this shirt is worse than having a jar full of bees thrown at your face.
There are any number of things about this piece of self expressionary torsowear to be upset over, but like I said, I've mellowed out over time, so most of it can be forgiven.
Clearly this particular article of clothing is intended to be worn 'ironically-but-not-really' by some giant dude-bro at a 4th of July party as he pays homage to the founding of this country by shotgunning beers and disrespecting women or something, but seeing as I wear cat-tshirts and loud floral print button downs myself, I'll not cast stones in my house of glass and poor fashion sense. And hey, I can appreciate a nice old timey historical portrait with sweet shades photoshopped onto it as much as the next guy.
I can even ignore the fact that the graphic is WAY too low on the shirt as if it were some weird pregnancy attire where you wanted the world to think your unborn baby was a sick party machine.
But Abraham Lincoln? Abraham- Log cabin living-slave emancipating-possibly vampire hunting- Lincoln?
What even happened? Did somebody just google "Presidential Bros", come up with that picture of A-bro-ham Lincoln and slap some text on it to meet a deadline? Any of the founding fathers would have been fine, but you'd at least think at some point during the six minutes it took to design that shirt somebody would have been like "Doesn't George Washington make more sense for a Fourth of July theme?" I'd even have taken "Hey, isn't this guy primarily associated with a completely different war and an entirely different period of American history than the one we are trying to reference?"
You've made a dumb joke shirt referencing America declaring independence in 1776, great. At least use the image of someone who was alive at the time for f*#k sake. Abraham Lincoln wasn't born until 1809 making him -33 years old at the time of the Declaration of Independence. That's like one entire Jesus worth of not being alive separating that guy from your shitty joke.
There has got to be some sort of process that this article of clothing goes through to go from being merely a twinkle in the eye of a historically illiterate graphic designer to on a hanger in Khol's for $12.99, right? How many people had to look at and approve this shirt for it to get to the point where it's in a store for me to take that picture? The answer is TOO F*#%ING MANY TO HAVE NOBODY BAT AN EYELASH AT THE FACT THAT THEY USED THE IMAGE OF A GUY WHO WAS BEHIND FIFTEEN OTHER GUYS THAT WERE PRESIDENT AND ALMOST FIVE DOZEN PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY SIGNED THE DOCUMENT THEY'RE REFERENCING.
And look, before the internet tars and feathers me, I'm aware that George Washington didn't sign the Declaration of Independence and didn't become President until 1789 which technically means he doesn't fit the "party like it's 1776" theme but he's clearly the most logical choice if we 're going to take some measure of artistic liberty with our douche shirt. It's not like anybody gives a shit who like, Samuel Huntington was, so for the sake of the thing making sense that could have been forgiven.
Clearly we don't give a crap about having any type of logical association among the images we put on our t-shirts so I've designed a few of my own:
Now that I've gotten that out of my system I'll get on with enjoying the long holiday weekend. Happy Fourth of July, try not to let the little things in life give you stress poops like they do to me, and f*#k you if you bought that shirt.
My Brother-in-law Has Mind control Powers
/
Emily and I visited Boulder Colorado to visit her brother Andy who was walking at graduation from Colorado University. He is finishing his PhD in Neuroscience, which means between his degrees and my soon to be- veterinarian wife, I'm looking more and more like a chimp with a pack of markers over here with my dumb cartoons. Not to mention I'm like, 95% certain whatever his degree is about means he can control people with his brain waves and chuck buses with his mind now.
According to him, even though he walked at graduation he doesn't officially get his PhD until he successfully defends his dissertation in a few months, so technically nobody is allowed to call him doctor until then. We all agreed to roll with it, partially because it’s the polite thing to respect his wishes and not give him a hard time, but also because he probably mind controlled us all with those brain powers into doing what he wants. Mainly the second one I think.
CU is so large that they apparently have a whole bunch of mini graduations over the course of a weekend for individual departments, which I guess is probably not all that uncommon unless you went to a school where the entire graduating glass was 2500 people like I did at which point you start to think it would just make more sense if they just texted everyone "Cngrts, u get 1 d-ploma, lol" and called it a day. The graduation ceremony for Andy's department was held in the basketball stadium and it was quite nice with the exception of two drawbacks:
First, I had to walk up and down the enormous flights of stairs approximately seven billion times as I was put in charge of the camera for the evening. My protests that I didn't want to be the photographer because if I took a bunch of pictures that were either blurry or had my thumb in them I would be solely responsible for ruining graduation forever were dismissed. Also my mother in law thought some seats on the opposite side of the gym might have been reserved for us and I had to go check it out. One week later, after making the pilgrimage and paying the Sherpa my last few dollars I found that the seats were in fact reserved for the Gersons. The Gersons, who never actually sat in those seats and I now hate forever because I had to walk up and down five miles worth of stairs just to look at their empty chairs with their smug little 'Reserved for the Gerson Family' signs. F*#%ing Gersons.
I can handle walking pointlessly up and down flights of stairs that seemed to have been constructed at an 84 degree angle in a stadium where the AC quickly failed to meet the demands of the crowd, but the thing was, including Andy there were a total of six PhD candidates. In contrast to this, there were approximately 2348542398563095823e10 undergraduates getting their bachelor’s degrees in Whogivesashitology.
Of course I don't mean that in the sense that their degree is pointless or they didn't accomplish something to be lauded for. I just mean that I, personally, don't have it in me to care. I nearly blew off my own college graduation due to my severe lack of interest in other people or their degree, the only thing that keeping me in my seat being fact that at some point someone would read my name over a microphone and a bunch of people would clap, because I am an ego-maniacal monster (also, there isn't really a way to just piss off after you get your diploma without making a scene). If the prospect of receiving my own diploma just barely held my attention you can imagine how much less of a crap I was able to muster for anyone in the University of Colorado Boulder's Psychology and Neuroscience undergraduate class of 2016 once the PhD group was done in the first ten minutes of the degree handing out portion of the festivities.
I'd like to say I did what reasonable people are supposed to do and sat there respectfully watching the hoard of undergrads get their degrees, but what really happened was less 'watching the proceedings through to the end like an adult who doesn't have the attention span of boiled carrots' and more "just getting up and wandering off five minutes into the sea of undergrads'. I swiped a piece of cake that I'm almost positive people weren't supposed to start taking until the ceremony was over and wandered around outside until everything was nearly done. I came back in at the end to get a few more pictures and set up to take a cool angle on the hat-throwing, which required I walk all the way down that god-forsaken flight of stairs again and then they didn't even do it which further enforces my negative feelings towards their general existence.
The cake was good though. I hope the Gersons didn't get any.
We were there for four days, so besides the graduation we did a bunch of hiking around in the mountains, as one does when one is in Colorado. I simultaneously love and hate hiking because it's a great outdoor activity where you can get fresh air, exercise and see some really amazing scenery, but in the case of many places we have been you're also walking on a narrow trail or climbing up rocks one foot from falling a million feet to your death at the base of a mountain.
I don't know this for a fact but I am convinced a person falling that distance onto a bunch of rocks would look a lot like when you ate those gummy candy snacks, Gushers, as a kid and you put one between your fingers and squished it until a blob of jelly splorched out the side. Except with entrails.
I fell head first off the top of one of those plastic spiral slides on a playground when I was six or seven, which in reality was probably a drop of like, four feet and I don't even think I got hurt, but when you are only 19 inches tall or however tall six year olds are it basically feels like somebody threw you off the top of your goddamn house. Ever since then I've been a little uncomfortable around heights.
Despite the traumas of my youth, a combination of wanting to experience the outdoors and not wanting to look like a little bitch while other people hike, a bunch of little girls with their parents skip past me, unphased by the terrain and a teacup poodle looks at me like I'm an asshole as he shambles by with his owner forces me to push forward whenever we take a trip somewhere mountainous.
By the way teacup poodle; You have four legs and a low center of gravity, so f*#k you and your judgmental attitude.
In any case, here are a bunch of perfectly nice photos of scenery that Emily and I ruined by standing smack in the middle of them, blocking the view.
You might think this is a candid shot when in fact I forced her to stand there with instructions to "Gaze majestically across the landscape" Until I could take a picture. The debate over what Emily considers a suitably majestic pose is one for another time.
There could have been 1000 bald eagles behind me, or a bigfoot, or another interesting thing. You'll never know because my dumb head is in the way.
do you ever become super aware of your hands whenever someone is taking a photo of you? If someone ever makes me pose for a photo and then takes more than .5 seconds to FIGURE out how to work their goddamn PHONE and just take the photo I start to lose it. Like... look at it. Its just there. doing nothing. Christ, I wish I had a hook hand.
One thing we hiked to was the site of the Crags Hotel, a hotel that was built in 1908 way up in the mountains that you had to ride a special rail car to get up to. It promptly burned down in 1912 because apparently they built everything out of asbestos and dry leaves back then. All that's left really are a couple of low stone walls and a fireplace which based on the condition of everything else that remains from the structure, I am 1000% convinced they rebuilt more recently and are just claiming is the original one from where the hotel was so people have something to take their picture next to.
PS
I saw this tree with a pair of boxer shorts hanging off them at the site of the hotel ruins. I'm not sure what situation leads a person to hike three miles up a mountain and then take off their boxer shorts and hang them on a tree but there you go.
Either somebody was banging up here at the ruins and left their shorts behind, had a case of the sweatiest balls in history and simply HAD to air everything out after the climb up, or my personal favorite: fancied themselves some sort of intrepid explorer, sumitting a mountain and planting their flag. Short on flags to play they made the best of a tough situation.
Whatever the scenario was that led to somebody hanging their underpants from a pine tree at 8000 ft, I imagine the trip back down the mountain, testicles jostling freely within their pants, could not have been ideal.
PS Also
On the way home we had a layover in Chicago O'Hare. All through the airport they have these giant posters of peoples faces. There was some sort of "don't be a douche/terrorist" message that they were supposed to convey, but I've forgotten whatever it was, so first off, poor job Chicago O'hare, douches and terrorists are probably just as unphased as I was by your weak attempt to ward them off with enlarged ethnically diverse happy faces.
More to my point, in every single one of those photos the way the lighting they used reflects off the subject's eyes makes them look like they are all goddamn lizard people in human disguises.
Jesus Hershall Christ, it's like he's going to rip off his meat casing and be a sixty foot python with arms like Dwayne Johnson before he tears off my head so his mate can implant a bunch of eggs down my neck hole into my body cavity.
If you happen to be reading this post and plan on sleeping ever again in your life after having seen these murder lizards from Chicago O'hare, good luck.
They'll be watching.
PS Also Also
I fixed their poster for them
The Most Interesting Dog in the World
/I recently found out that the beer company Dos Equis is going to be ending their "Most interesting Man in the World" ad campaign. You know the one. It started all of these memes:
I don't know if Dos Equis is looking for a new spokesperson, but I think I have a candidate for them if they want to reconsider extending their "most interesting" slogan:
Griff's favorite thing recently is climbing onto the backs of sofas behind people, laying down and proceeding to slowly flop lower and lower in between all the cushions so that nobody is comfortable and he can't get out without help.
On the bright side, I got this photo as a result.
And now, a million captioned versions of that picture that I made on a website that puts meme text on stuff:
