Tag Archives: humor

Jan 05 2012
6 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Open Letters, Three minute read

I’m Unhappy About This Free Service

this is just how it turns up on my news feed. Is that weird?

Dear Facebook,

Recently I’ve been unsubscribing with remarkable pace from many so-called friends I am connected with on your social networking website. After debating for months over whether or not I wanted to hear about these acquaintances’ marriages, babies, or fun nights staying in with a blanket and cup of cocoa, I have decided against the mundane and released myself from hundreds of people and their accompanying facebook drivel.

I expected my newsfeed to become a haven, a place where I could go and see what was happening in the lives of people who are close to me and the interesting or laughable lives of others I am not close to. Alas, this has not happened. One reason is that as I unsubscribe from my facefriends, friends that lurk deep within my friend well have come to the surface, gracing me with one status update or a tagged photo before I try to recall who they are and then unsubscribe from them. This is obviously my fault. You didn’t force me to accept their friend requests or friend people after knowing them for one evening, after which we never saw each other again except for on the sidewalk where we both maintained awkward silence and averted our eyes.

However, another chief reason for my dissatisfaction with the “cleaned up” newsfeed is the garbage facebook continually highlights. I speak, of course, of the continual promotion of prof pic changes, the ubiquitous “so and so and 10 other friends changed their profile picture.” To be frank, I don’t care who changed their profile picture after spending hours and possibly weeks mulling over which snapshot succinctly captured their humor, beauty, or relationship status.

Actually, I can’t think of anything more uninteresting. It might as well read “so and so and all of your other friends used their computers today.” Honestly, what’s the purpose in knowing who changed their profile picture? Not only does it not reflect in the least bit any change for better or worse in their own lives—it’s quite possible to dig out a prof picture from happier months—it is anti-news. It provides no new information while making one feel vaguely anxious and insufficient: “Should I be changing my profile picture so I can appear to be moving forward in my life?” It is iceberg lettuce, the filler in Taco Bell meat, and worse than Yahoo! news.

Facebook, I know that you provide a free service. I know that I have trapped myself into a cycle where living without this service would be undesireable, if not impossible.  Furthermore, I realize that I am powerless against you and that you  will have your way with the facebook-using pawns and wreak whatever kind of layout changes and privacy destruction you wish. That’s why I’m not asking you to stop highlighting profile picture changes on my newsfeed. This letter is actually an urgent request that you do not harm me or my family once you take over the world. This profile picture thing is my only complaint and despite it I will always be loyal to you.

Your eternal and groveling servant,

Emily

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Jan 04 2012
2 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Stories, Three minute read

Gummy Dreams: Lisa’s True Story

just because they’re all gummy bears doesn’t mean they all look the same

What if a gummy bear was one of us, just a regular teenage mom trying to make ends meet? What if she had come from abroken gummy home, where dad ran off with a peach ring, and mom committed suicide by going hot tubbing?

What if the kids in elementary school called her dummy bear, gumtard, and sweet cheeks? What if every night of 1st through 5th grade she wept weird gummy tears before dreaming gummy dreams of a sweeter world? What if no one sat by her in middle school because of her pineapple b.o.?

What if she tried to go through a goth phase during freshman year of high school but had no facial features to coat with black makeup? What if no one asked her to the prom senior year because they didn’t want to be the one dancing with a gigantic 6 foot candy bear? What if her first love and father of her gummy cub said he wouldn’t marry her because he had fallen for a Sour Patch Kid?

What if, after she dropped out of high school, she was reduced to selling her body and being rented out for parties as a freak spectacle? “Mommy, mommy! Come look at the huge gummy bear!” The kids would say. Her name was Lisa.

One New Year’s Day, 3 years after dropping out of high school and after working a particularly grotesque New Year’s Eve party, Lisa decided she’d had enough of this life. She quit her job and got her GRE, passing the test with the highest score of the year. She made headlines that week: “Gummy Bear Mauls Test.” “Why couldn’t they use my name?” she sighed.

But the news caught on. Soon she was a local celebrity, attending mini league championships and appearing in car dealership ads. She started a blog called “Faceless” and it didn’t take long before she became a national celebrity after a youtube video of her in zumba class went viral.

Soon movie deals and invitations from talk shows were flooding in. She was already writing a book and starring in a wildly popular reality television series featuring her and her son called “I Want Candy.” Notoriety began to consume every second of her life. She grew weary from the fame.

She yearned for the days she would lumber home from school and spend hours reading and thinking about the absurdity of life. There was no time to think about anything anymore.

A few years after she had quit her rental job, she woke up another New Year’s Day. The night before was hazy and mostly forgotten, a collage of bright lights, glitter, and plastic. She gazed into the mirror and realized what she’d become: a true monster. That very moment she decided to leave it all, the celebrity, the cocaine, the lacquered friends.

She took her son and fled to a small but tolerant city in upstate New York, where people had heard of her but were too interested in living wholesomely to pay much attention.

Within a month she was signing the lease to a space where she was going to build her dream, a dance studio called “Bounce!” where women of all sizes were welcome. As she opened her front door after driving back from the real estate agent’s office, she exhaled deeply.

“I’m home,” she whispered, “Lisa’s home.”

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Jan 03 2012
6 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Modern Life, One minute read

Rejected from the Job Search

these boxes do not hold the key to your future. please look elsewhere.

Thank you for completing CareerBeam’s skill verification exercise. At this juncture, our special algorithm would have usually crunched your responses and placed you in one of six categories we use to classify all of mankind. With the knowledge of your category, the world would have been yours for the taking, success and fortune shortly following the completion of our quizlet.

Unfortunately, due to an irregularity in your responses, we are unable to process your information and provide you with the only thing that would rescue your future self from a failed life. The irregularity could have resulted from one of three circumstances:

a. You are wholly unfit for employment. Return to the cave from which you crawled and burden society no more.

b. You are the antichrist. We are legally obligated to tell you about this possibility while not revealing whether or not you are “it.” If your responses lined up with the predicted skill set of the Man of Sin, a team of US Marine exorcists will have been called to exterminate you. Please remain where you are.

c. You are not human. Most likely you are a forest or river spirit trapped in a human body. In either case, you have no place in the workforce. Please take our quiz “Finding your spirit identity” for advice on how to escape your fleshy prison.

Thank you for using Career Beam and we hope you consider us for all your future self-awareness needs.

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Jan 02 2012
6 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Three minute read

Country Music: Proud of Itself

wranglers at Deer Valley Ranch, the former vacation destination of our family

In many parts of the country, a fondness for country music brings a plague upon one’s career and friendships. Country music, outside its native habitat, is as popular as pungent body odor in small vehicles. It is to be masked and not spoken of, its producer’s cheeks reddening in shame and the rest embarrassed to be in the presence of such a foul substance.

Despite the widespread prejudice, country music actually isn’t all that bad. While growing up in OK, I listened to and resented country music all the time, since most of my family members enjoyed it and would play it relentlessly on the radio and at home. Years later at Boston University, this caused the bizarre sensation of both revulsion and pride whenever I heard a country song.

The revulsion resulted from years of carefully practiced loathing, and the pride came from me belonging to something different than the rest of my mostly coastal colleagues. Eventually I came to appreciate the twang-infested music as something unique to the specific subculture in which my adolescence was submerged and an art form that can be quite beautiful in those rare instances where it is done properly. And when it is not beautiful, it is generally hilarious.

Mostly for the ha-has, I’ve been drinking in the country music as much as possible during these short weeks in Oklahoma, but I have realized that a lifetime would not be enough to fully understand the breadth and depth of the genre. Where else do you find such tender descriptions of trucks, tractors, and other vehicles of labor? In this modern music wasteland, what other than country music will dare to describe innocent love in barns, hayfields, and blue jeans? What about all the myriad ways whisky, Jesus, and America are intimately connected with the problems one has while courting the farmer’s daughter?

What I most admire about country music, however, is its ability to admire itself. Since the dawn of the genre, it has been lauding the country lifestyle and the country way, in small towns full of simple, country men and women that like to do country things.

Songs like “I Got My Country On,” by Chris Cagle, “These Are My People,” by Rodney Atkins, “Where I Come From” by Montgomery Gentry, and “Where I Come From” by Alan Jackson, among many others, celebrate a rustic problem free, healthcare free lifestyle. In this highly fictionalized country world, there’s a lot of front porch sitting (AJ) with preacher men in cowboy shirts (MG). It’s where people do things with their own two hands (CG) and give this life everything they have and then some (RA). It’s a wonderful, wonderful, place, and anyone listening to this music would probably imagine a haven of small town goodness, unspoiled by the modern world.

While modernity may not have touched it, the world in which country music lives and from which it sprouts has unfortunately been spoiled by high divorce, obesity, diabetes two, and poverty rates.

However, I am confident that a genre with such hits as “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” “Jesus Take the Wheel,” and “Somethin’ Bout a Truck” will have the creative energy necessary to face this rampant decay with some great ho-down tunes that will get knees a poppin’, heads a bobbin,’ and boots a stompin’.

If you have any other winning country music titles, please feel free to pass them along and I’ll see you down at the barn for the next line dance.

Picture Credit: Trip Advisor

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Jan 01 2012
6 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Three minute read

New Year: Time to Fail

Notice the error in spelling “special.” I can make mistakes if I want.

Welcome to the New Year. Odds are you’ve already messed it up. As usual, you thought that this year was going to be different. Yet barely a day into it, you once again sullied the fresh snow of new opportunity. Now it looks as appealing as Mr. Sprick’s yard on a snow day, and he has 5 kids, a few dogs, and a mule. Have you ever seen how much mules pee? No one wants to look at that yard, much less do anything in it.

Now you’re going to have to wait a whole new year to get a fresh snowfall, and meanwhile you have plenty of time to consider all the ways you went wrong. Why didn’t everything change at midnight like it was supposed to?

One of the more glaring problems is that you have remained the same person. Your new, sequined dress and hair-do for New Year’s Eve didn’t make you lose weight, and you never looked like Gwen Stefani. Furthermore, whatever glamour hocus pocus you attempted wore off rapidly as the evening progressed, like it always does, leaving none for the morning after. You awoke New Year’s Day having retained many if not all of the habits and excuses from your former life of 2 days ago and you still find it difficult to do the things you should do and accomplish the goals you put off when today was tomorrow. Most unfortunately, you’re still yourself, and that has always been your biggest problem.

Another monkey wrench in your New Year’s plot is the fact you had one at all. There is nothing special about New Years. It is an arbitrary day assigned an arbitrary number that has arbitrary meaning in a society you were arbitrarily born into. There is no magic in it that will make your wishes for change come true, especially if you do nothing, as usual. Magical New Year’s fairy dust won’t make you the person you want to be. You can’t sprinkle it on a pile of books you want read or a treadmill you want results from or a human you want to friend and expect those things to happen. It’s just skin cells and dirt, like dust always is, like it was yesterday and like it will be tomorrow.

Perhaps one of your biggest mistakes was that you thought positive life changes can only be implemented on a specific date once a year. This is a common misconception, and you’re not alone in such convoluted thinking. However, research has shown that these kinds of changes can take place regardless of the date. Science has thus released us from the prison of miniscule timelines and disposed of our archaic excuses. Thank goodness.

And finally, you may have unfortunately bought into the idea that transformation happens instantly. This is a most inaccurate notion. A large pine tree grows in my front yard. It was not always large. It has grown over the past 15 years into a respectably sized organism, just as you have. Family dysfunction that has festered for decades will not disappear in a month. Bad habits you’ve practiced daily since college will not take kindly to being abandoned. You are still yourself, after all, and that includes everything you would rather not include.

So yes, you have failed to become a new person overnight, the person you should, can, and want to be. You ate another cookie, cursed in front of a child, or vomited into a friend’s shoe. Nothing has changed.

But don’t despair yet. There’s still hope, and it’s not because next year is another year, or tomorrow is another day. It’s because every day you have a million chances to right your wrongs and strangle your bad habits. You have a first, second, fourth, and eight hundred and sixtieth chance to get it right, and that’s just today, after which there will likely be a tomorrow. But there’s no reason to wait. Screw New Year’s Resolutions.

Lastly, I would like to apologize, as it appears I’ve just written an inspirational blog post.

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