Happy 4th of July. I'm Really Mad About a T-shirt.
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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.
