@Randem

I’m glad the cold season is finally over. Not because I dislike the cold weather — I actually prefer it. But I’m glad it’s over, because I think if I had to walk behind one more frumpy chick wearing a North Face jacket and Uggs on my way to the train, I might have to stop and give her a piece of my mind.

This has got to be one of the lamest fashion trends I’ve ever witnessed. Ugg makes some nice boots, but you’d never know it by looking at what people buy! Why does every female between the ages of 18-35 find it so important to buy the ugg-liest boots ever made, and then wear them with everything? Is it me, or do these look like something you would expect a primitive tribal people to wear in the winter while hunting elk?

Even worse than the ugly boots, though, are the ridiculous North Face jackets, with their front logos on the back. News flash, people: it doesn’t look trendy, it looks like a screen printing mistake! The jackets really aren’t even nice — they’re cut in a generic, unflattering square shape that make skinny people look frumpy and frumpy people look fat.

What blows my mind is that North Face phenomenon isn’t restricted to the 18-35 crowd. Everyone under 50 is wearing this retarded camping gear on their grueling, arduous drive through the suburbs and into the wild, untamed concrete jungles where they brave the elements behind a desk. What is happening to America?

North Face jackets are actually so popular that they are a motivation for crime in and around the metropolitan DC area, and according to Silver Chips Online, a high school newspaper in Maryland, high school kids would actually throw bleach in people’s faces in order to conceal their identity and rob the wearer of their North Face jacket

So now that the warm weather has finally arrived, I can expect a sixth-month break from this unimaginative fashion trend, and welcome back the equally ridiculous flip-flops and surfer shirts with popped collars.

Quite often — more often than not, actually — when I use the restroom at work, I find myself rather put off by the amount of loose hair littering the top of the toilet seat. It leaves me wondering many unpleasant things about the previous person who sat there.

Here’s the thing: Hair doesn’t just fall out all day long. I don’t wake up to a hair covered pillow every morning. And even if you’re balding, the subject I’m discussing isn’t really the hair on your head, now, is it?

So for the quantity of loose (ahem) body hair I’m seeing to have been left behind from a single sitting, I have to wonder what the previous person (or people) are doing while they sit there to make their body hair fall out? Shouldn’t any loose hairs have already come off while they were presumably showering that morning?

And worse… this isn’t a train station, it’s a professional office. Do you have to leave that mess there? Couldn’t you, uh, clean up after yourself before you leave the stall?

Yeah… you read that right. Sure, there are some people who think Christmas is the evil, capitalist holiday, but those people haven’t really considered Valentine’s day.

Let’s compare: At Christmas, everyone gets to participate, even if they’re not married or romantically involved, whereas on Valentine’s day, only lovers get gifts. At Christmas, you get many gifts from many people and the good givers make up for the bad ones, whereas on Valentine’s day you get one gift from one person (if any at all) and if your lover is a lousy gift giver you’re stuck with it. At Christmas, the amount of thought that goes into a gift has meaning, whereas on Valentine’s Day it’s all about extravagance. It’s okay to return a Christmas gift for something in your size, whereas a Valentine’s Day gift in the wrong size has horrible implications. Do I need to go on?

What else? Valentine’s Day is cheesy and fake. Let’s take a moment to think about what actually happens on Valentine’s Day and how insulting it really is.

Flowers
Guys who never buy flowers for their lover will suddenly be rushing out en masse to buy red roses. Why? What about a red rose makes it good on Valentine’s Day? Hey fellas… did you know that most of your women don’t even like roses? Why not take a moment to learn what she actually likes, and give her that on Valentine’s Day? Maybe it’s carnations, maybe it’s irises… a good friend of mine goes ga-ga over gerbera daisies. Don’t give the same cheesy red rose that everyone else is giving.

Greeting Cards
Millions of men and women will flock to Hallmark stores and pay $5.95 for the right to sign their name to someone else’s declaration of love. Millions more will go to Walgreen’s because they’re too lazy to go to Hallmark, and millions more will go to Wal-Mart where the selection is lousy but the cards are cheap. For what? For someone else to do all the work of declaring their love, and writing it down on a card that you can then give away with your name on it. Seriously… if you love someone, you should be able to tell them so on your own, without the card.

Chocolate
This is the only Valentine’s Day gift that actually makes any sense to me. Why? Because chocolate contains phenylethylamine, which is the same chemical released by the brain when someone experiences feelings of love. Therefore chocolate is a very logical gift, because the chocolate can reliably produce the effect that you desire without you having to do any of the work! It’s brilliant! I mean, why go to the trouble of being charming and attractive when you can just feed a chemical to your loved one? Hmmm…. if only Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline could come up with an over-the-counter phenylethylamine pill…

Dinner
It will be impossible to find an open table at a restaurant this Thursday, because all those same millions of people will have reservations days in advance, so that they can spend even more money trying to prove they love each other. But how does an expensive dinner prove anything? Paying someone else to do all the work is not romantic. You want to prove your love? Cook something yourself. Or, for a really top-notch Valentine’s Day dinner, cook it together. Bump into each other in the kitchen. Get in each other’s way. Have fun. And save the money, too.

Jewelry
This is, by far, the worst of all Valentine’s Day gifts. This is the uber-expensive gift that a man gives to his female lover to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his love for her is directly proportionate to the size of his credit line. How do I love thee? Let me count the receipts.

Look, people. This day is all wrong. What you should be doing on Valentine’s Day is cooking dinner together, eating it with candles lit, and then snuggling up together on the couch to watch a sappy movie together. That’s it. Stop trying so hard to make it so big, because in doing so, you are taking all the actual meaning out of it and turning it into a show of extravagance.

Cards, flowers, and jewelry are all nice gifts, but all of them mean more when given on some other day. Why not give her a card because it’s the first Tuesday of the month? How about a diamond necklace as a Happy May 30th present? These gifts should NEVER be given on any holiday — and especially not on the Devil’s Holiday.

It’s only been a week since Apple announced the MacBook Air, and I’ve already had three people ask me for my iBook!

First, let me just make this clear to all my readers: I’m not getting rid of my iBook. Not yet, and not soon.

But more importantly, I’m curious what makes a person even think that it would be okay to ask their friend to give them a two-thousand-dollar computer… one that the person is still using!

Seriously, people. I want you all to line up your mothers in front of me, single file, so I can go down the row, one-by-one, and bitch slap them for forgetting to teach you manners! Seriously… I want to see a row of slappable mothers at my desk tomorrow morning.

You’re riding down in the elevator, and you reach the lobby. The doors open, and before you get a chance to move, there are a dozen people already pushing into the elevator before it’s even empty. It happens every day.

The crowd in the lobby doesn’t even wait to see if there are actually people on the elevator… they just see the doors open and start climbing in… only acknowledging your presence if they happen to bump into you on their self-concerned journey to the upper floors.

It’s rude. And I don’t stand for it. When I’m riding in an elevator, I stand directly in front of the door once I get near my destination floor. When the doors open I stand firm, blocking entrance for anyone who doesn’t give me space to exit.

We’ve all been that hurried passenger, anxious to get into the elevator. But why do some people eventually slow down and look while others never learn?

How might the various schools of thought answer this question? Let’s see…

Social determinism
The passengers who wait calmly must come from better homes and have higher education, whereas those who push their way into the elevator without concern for people trying to exit must come from broken homes with divorced parents, and have attended bad schools.

Environmental determinism
The patient people who wait for the elevator to empty must come from warmer climates, which formed lazy, relaxed attitudes, while the impatient people are from colder climates and have a more driven work ethic.

Evolutionary psychology
There were no elevators in the Savannah, so our minds are not evolved to deal with the conditions of vertical transportation.

Chaos theory
A pigeon flapping its wings in the promenade outside caused a chain reaction of events eventually leading to the urgency, or lack thereof, of passengers to enter the elevator car.

Freudian psychology
The lobby is a cold, scary place, and passengers long to enter the warm, womb-like safety of the elevator… no doubt due to some repressed sexual desire for their parents. The patient ones are simply repressing their oedipal sexual urges to penetrate the elevator.

Jungian psychology
Those who push their way into the elevator without empathy for the passengers trying to exit have very repressed shadow selves due to failure to admit their own failures, shortcomings, and weaknesses.

Pavlovian psychology
After being hit by the closing doors, or being left behind for not boarding the elevator fast enough, people eventually learn to enter the elevator as forcefully as necessary in order to get aboard and avoid negative stimuli.

Then there’s Randem Psychology. My theory is simple: those who push their way into the elevator, ignoring the passengers who try to exit, are inconsiderate, self-absorbed, rude. They’re assholes, and they need to be knocked down a peg. And that’s why I block the door and prevent their entry until they make room for the current passengers to exit.

It never ceases to amaze me how much people give away about themselves, all while thinking they’re pulling one over on you. It only makes stronger my argument for authenticity.

The latest example of this behavior, which sets me off on this rant, involves the guilty conscience and its effect on trust.

At an early age, I learned that people see the world as they see themself. Thus, a liar never believes what he’s told; a thief never trusts anyone else with his property; a cheater always suspects he’s being cheated; and so on.

What never fails to surprise me is that this is fairly common knowledge, and fairly easy to understand, and yet people continue to give themselves away.

It’s in the accusations, you see. When someone accuses you of something, your first instinct is to defend yourself. Repeated accusations become painful, because you feel untrusted and constantly defensive when you’re not guilty of anything.

But the trained mind can pick up on the subtle clue. When someone is constantly accusing you of something, it’s because that thing is always on their mind, most likely because they themselves are guilty of it.

When someone close to you is always accusing you of lying, it’s a good indication that they are probably a liar. When someone close to you is constantly accusing you of stealing, it’s a good indication that they are probably a thief. And when someone close to you seems to always be telling you that they don’t trust you, it’s a good sign that you should not trust them.

Holy cow. Why do they still allow these people to breed?

Okay, the author of this piece is out there, right now, polluting our gene pool… as are the idiots who were responsible for this person’s education. This is your anti-abortion crowd: people who’s family tree needs to be fed into a wood chipper!

I don’t even have to get into any discussion over religion or atheism. This goes beyond that. This is about education. This is about breeding. This is about letting the weaker members of the species die off in order to make the species stronger as a whole. Someone get this wack-job some cyanide. Please.

How many times in the past two days have I heard that phrase uttered?

Did you hear about that kid that shot that pig?

Whatever. Leave me alone. Why am I supposed to care about some boy shooting a pig? What’s so fascinating about this story? Yes, I understand that a 1000-point boar is obscenely large. Yes, I understand that the kid is 11 years old.

If the story were to stop there, I’d already be pissed off at the kid’s parents for putting a loaded gun in the hands of a kid, and I’d be even more pissed off at them for putting said kid in harm’s way to face a 1000-pound boar.

Yeah. If the story stopped there.

But what if we pay just a little more attention? What if we read on, and learn that this was not the ferocious wild beast we’ve been led to believe, but rather a farm-raised pig that was purchased just 4 days prior to being slaughtered. [link]

And what if we read on to learn that this wasn’t some brave kid who faced fear and bravely took out a giant beast coming to kill him, but instead it was a spoiled brat who was chauffered around a fenced-in hunting ground by his dad, who shot the pig nine times over the course of three hours before it died. [link]

This isn’t bravery, it’s sadistic. If you locked Rosie O’Donnell in a high school gymnasium and a group of children circled her on roller skates while shooting her with spit-balls, they would ALL be more heroic than this lying little turd.

A little advice to the women, from a man’s point of view.

• Neurotic, psychotic behavior is NOT cute. Don’t fool yourself into thinking “he’ll love me because I’m quirky,” because men are logical. We need things to make sense, and while you think you’re “cute and quirky”, we think you’re totally whack-job, psycho, nutball, head-for-the-hills insane. It’s not cute.
• Snooping is stalking. I know you think your man is amazing, and you want to know everything about him. I know you just can’t get enough. But clicking through every one of his friends on myspace and reading everything about them isn’t getting to know him… it’s what stalkers do. It’s scary, and it’s the reason we don’t tell you more. We’re afraid of where else you’ll snoop, and what new, irrational argument we’re going to have to diffuse.
• Possessiveness, jealousy, and being territorial are the same fucking thing. You can’t be one without being the other. These are all irrational responses to fear, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to deal with the real fear that is causing it.
• Accusations will blow up in your face. This is an important thing to understand. When you allow jealousy (see above) to get to you, and you start making accusations, this tells us one thing quite clearly: that you don’t trust us. But we men hate to be accused of something we haven’t done. If we’re going to serve the sentence, we may as well commit the crime. And when it’s done, you’ll wear it like a badge saying “I knew it,” never realizing that you caused it. Either you trust your man or you don’t… there is no middle ground.
• The man you’re with is not your ex. That’s why it’s called an “ex”… because it’s over. Don’t judge your man based on what the last man did. Otherwise, it leads to accusations (see above) and that just leads to trouble.
• When we say “no,” what we mean is “NO”. I understand that when you women say “no,” you’re really thinking “oh, I’ll eventually say yes, but I want him to keep asking,” but that’s not the case for us. We men are logical. We think things through before we make decisions… and we hate to close the door on options… so if a man said “no,” you can be sure that he’s considered all of that and he’s decided that the answer is no.

These days, it’s become fashionable to be a nazi right-winger. If you don’t watch Fox News, support the troops, and worship Jesus, this “you’re in the wrong country&rdquo. And whenever these radical fundamentalists encounter an idea that doesn’t match with their own, they write it off, and call you part of the Blame America First crowd.

Well let me tell you why I’m in that crowd… why maybe we should blame America first… why right-wingers love to hate me.

My Passport
On May 31st, I dug out my birth certificate and went down to the nearest post office that is listed as doing passport services. The State Department web site, where I found the information, said this office offered passport services Monday through Friday from 10am until 4pm. Well I went there on my lunch break (at noon) and was greeted by a sign on the door that said “passport services are only available from 10:00-12:00 and 2:00-4:00. So our government doesn’t even have any idea what its own operations are!

Okay, so I went back the next week at 11:00 and the sign was no longer on the door. Whatever. I filled out the form, got my pictures taken, gave the lady my birth certificate, and paid a bunch of money for expedited service. That was June 7th.

Well, my passport arrived June 29th, and I anxiously rushed over to pick it up, excited that I could now leave the country and go to all those places I’ve been wanting to go. But when I opened it, I found my name misspelled. Well, I was headed out of town, so I decided to deal with it when I got back.

The following week, I went back to the State Department’s web site and found the page that tells what to do if the information is incorrect. It said if the passport is 30 days old or less, you can send the passport back, along with a letter explaining the correction needed, and proof of the proper information — in this case, a photocopy of my driver’s license. So I typed up the letter, photocopied my license, put these things into an envelope with my passport and sent it all by USPS next day air, to make sure it got there well before the 30 days were up.

I then waited for two weeks. Anxious, I checked my mail last night and found an envelope from the State Department in Miami. Hurray, finally! Wrong. They put the letter, the photocopy, and the passport into an envelope, and added a checklist and a DS-5504 form and sent it back to me. The checklist says I need 2 new photos, I have to complete the form again, and I have to submit my birth certificate again… and if I want it in a timely manner, I should send this all by Express mail, and include a self-address Express mail envelope for them to send it back in.

So now, a passport that should have cost about $97 has already cost me in excess of $150 and now I have to pay for new photos and next day airmail both ways. And a process that can be completed in one day if you do it in person is now going to take a third month to complete.

And why is all of this? It because my name is Randall, but some ignorant, idiotic, illiterate piece of shit in Miami though that Randal was good enough. In actuality, I could probably fly all over the world and just tell them my name is Randal, and I’d be fine. But if I ever lost my passport and had to get a new one from the US Embassy, they’d start asking me a bunch of questions and I’d never be allowed back into the US. All because of some idiot in OUR government.

Lots of Room For Error
Now here’s the thing… Based on that, how can I ever trust any information that comes from our government? If they can’t spell a name right — even though they’re copying it directly from the birth certificate! — how can they get anything else right?

How can you tell me that Moussaui is a terrorist, when he might have a similar name to that of an actual terrorist, but since you spelled it wrong in the computer, he’s fucked and the terrorist is free?

How can you ensure me that the people getting tortured in Guantanamo Bay are guilty of anything at all, when they could be nothing more than victims of a careless typographical error?

Remember when we went to war because Iraq supposedly had weapons of mass destruction? And remember how four years later, we still haven’t found any evidence of that? Meanwhile, Iran has steadily worked at developing nuclear power and we know they have all manner of other WMDs. What if that intelligence was another case of typographical error? What if another careless government worker in some little office at the Department of State typed I-R-A-Q, when she meant to type I-R-A-N?

Summary
I read a lot of web sites — a lot of professional web sites — which contain spelling errors. I’ve read TONS of emails with spelling and grammatical errors. I’ve spent my share of time on instant messaging systems, and I’m quite familiar with text messaging on cell phones, and both are riddled with misspellings.

People don’t bother any more. Our education system has failed to teach us, and our free market has failed to make us care about our lousy educations. Yet people with poor grammar skills can get a job creating official documents for the US Government. Can you honestly tell me without a doubt that anybody else but America should be blamed for the state of the nation?

I’m not saying that a typo caused the war. Nobody can prove that, and it’s unlikely. But IT IS possible. That’s a reality that we need to face. It’s a reality that we need to change. And it’s nobody’s fault but ours, so yes… we should blame America first.