But no, I can’t stand the stuff. The coffee I drink tastes like I bought it in a candy store. I wait like an hour after it’s brewed because it’s too hot… my tongue is sensitive.

I have a history of jobs that toy with me. Last time I went to my internship I almost died (literally (I mean, sort of literally)). All I did today was go to La Salsa and bring back food. 7 hours. That’s it. Just like every other job I’ve ever had, it looks like this one will stress me out to the breaking point for a couple of weeks, then I will sit and be bored the next couple of weeks. I’m putting the “grass is always greener” theory to the test.

But at least here some exciting things happen around me while I’m doing nothing. They’ve arranged the office so interns sit right across from the head of the company, so really cool people like Seth Rogan walk by our little half-desks. I’m learning a few general characteristics of movie people. I should keep track of them so I can compile their traits at the end.

1. They are loud.
2. They cuss a lot.
3. They disagree frequently.
4. They are very easily agitated.

I’ll continue to compile.

It’s funny walking around in this area at lunchtime because you can spot interns like tourists at Disneyland. They are the ones holding large bags of food and looking nervous. Interns ALWAYS look nervous. We are free labor, so we are extremely expendable and assistants who get yelled at have no one else to take their anger out on. So a wrinkled shirt, a messed up order, or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Interns are nervous people.

My teacher made a joke about the word “peckish” today. We laughed, but not because it was funny, but because my teacher with a doctorate didn’t know what peckish meant and made jokes about it anyway.

My other teacher asks questions and then scans the room. I sit on the side by his desk and I raise my hand, but he never scans far enough. He’ll be like, “Anyone… anyone?” I’m there raising my hand but he never gets to me.

I’ve determined (again) that about 75% of my schooling has been entirely useless. I think next time I write I’ll make a list of classes that mattered vs classes that totally wasted my time. It’s probably gonna be an uneven list, I’ve just spent four hours in an advertising class where we discussed the meaning of “demographic.” No offense, but if you don’t know what that means, and you are in upper division advertising… Get out. Leave. Try something else.

Go for something simple.

I get pretty nervous when I start a new job. I’m not that great at absorbing a ton of new information at once, and I’m nervous about that, so I’m not really listening when things are explained, which makes me more nervous, etc.

And since my hands shake all the time I am always afraid people will notice and think I’m so anxious I’m shaking. Which makes me anxious.

One of the assistants whose desk I was covering asked me to unplug a cord from under her desk. So I go under the desk and have a flashback of my first job in college, when I was asked to do the same thing. I had been pulling on the plug but it was stuck so I put my fingers on the sides of the power strip to pull it out and I hit the power strip reset. All the computers in that room went off, including the one on which my boss had been writing a very long email. To his credit, he didn’t get that mad and I didn’t feel awful after, and the computer had saved his work (thank you Jesus).

So I was all nervous about doing that, so I wouldn’t touch the power strip, because I’m pretty sure one of them would have thrown me out the window or shanked me, it seems like an intense place. Instead I accidentally grabbed the sides of the plugged and heavily shocked myself. For those of you who haven’t been shocked as frequently as I have: It feels like someone is slapping you everywhere, on all surfaces of your body, at the same time. I want to use the word electrocuted so you know how much this hurts, but according to wikipedia that means you died in the process and then you wouldn’t get to read the story at all.

I just got up and pretended like nothing happened while the muscles in my arm were spazzing. Luckily I don’t think she’d have noticed, although she probably would have just thought I was a stupid intern.

One of the other interns is from Spain. I told her that I had studied abroad in Argentina and she said we could practice Spanish. It took about two seconds before she was correcting my accent, which is clearly Argentine, in favor of the lisping dialect of Madrid. I’ve now had Spanish teachers from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Argentina, California, and Spain. The accents are starting to mush together a bit in my head, so all foreigners will have to excuse me and not insist that I speak their particular type of Spanish.

I feel like I’m really busy already and my semester hasn’t even started! I only have time to do this because class hasn’t started yet, and I somehow have to clear out my head from all the stuff that going on. So I’m working a job, a 20-hour internship, 16 hours of class, and the basically full-time job of producing this movie, which is getting bigger and bigger by the second.

My life has all of a sudden been taken over by movies. In my spare time we are working on choreography, or arrangements, or production details for Life is Not a Musical, and the next moment I’m sitting across a desk from the very people who have the power to take a script and make it a movie and their talking about this writer and that company and this script. So intense.

I bounce around between any of the bagillion things I’ve considered as a career, but I think things are finally starting to clear up. A few things are dropping off, which is actually a pretty sad feeling, but at the same time I know it’s for the better as I get closer and closer to what some very lucky people call a “calling.”

At least I’ve always been able to cross out a few fields, like oh, say, anything with numbers.

Things are beginning to get sort of confusing.

I hate it when I take a big gulp of water and I haven’t swallowed it yet, and then someone says hi to me. I can’t say hi back or even smile and by the time I swallow the allotted time for replying has passed. Then I say hi back and they always look confused. I come off as rude because I have poor timing.

About a year ago Hunter and I were in Florence sitting in front of the Duomo on our first night in the city. We had just walked from the train station to our hostel and I had/have never seen so many beautiful girls in one place, ever. Not wanting to waste one of our nights, even though it was late, we were determined to go out somewhere. We got some suggestions from the owner and he sent us to an area full of international students, to a little over-priced bar in front of that beautiful cathedral.

We sat down in the corner for some people watching. We were right in the thick of our traveling and we were exhausted from out train ride, so we were just sitting, even though there was a table of six or seven girls sitting next to us. After about 10 minutes a 23-27ish looking guy walked up to the 17-20ish looking girls. I both respected and pitied him for having the fortitude to take on the whole group with, “Hey, what’s up?”

The girls did that thing that groups of girls do, where they take an instant mental vote just by looking at each other. They silently voted that they weren’t really interested but would humor him anyways and one of the girls starting talking to him. He told them he was in the Air Force which, wasn’t a surprise as he looked exactly like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, except for the hair and confidence. So that left the jacket, white tee, aviators and a swagger that looked out of place without the 1980s to back him up. Conversation goes on, guy is struggling, Hunter and I are quietly enjoying the show.

That’s when Army Guy shows up. Army Guy, buzz cut and all, rushes up to the table with a concerned look on his face. Turns out he is looking for Pub Crawl Guy and he needs to find Pub Crawl Guy so he can get wasted and have fun tonight. Air Force guy is clearly sneering at “low-class” Army Guy and looking around at the girls trying to find someone who agrees.

Army Guy, having used up his opener, transitions roughly into, “So what are you girls doing tonight?” Turns out Army Guy doubled as Pub Crawl Guy. Or maybe he was just ready to pretend to be Pub Crawl Guy if it seemed to be working out. Since Air Force Guy had already staked out the table, Army Guy couldn’t get any traction going.

For the half hour Army Guy and Air Force Guy take turns going at the girls, who say very little but laugh and have telepathic conversations in their heads. Army Guy is hitting on anything that moves, while Air Force Guy seemed to have decided to dig in and go for this group or none at all.
Air Force Guy gets up to get another drink, abandoning his stakeout at a crucial moment when Army Guy was hitting on someone else. In the two minutes it took Air Force Guy to return, three average looking Italian guys walk up, say a few things in broken English, (which for the record tends to be way more successful than competent English) and all the girls, laughing and smiling the telepathic opinion of “Jackpot!” follow the Italian guys out of the patio and into the street where they take pictures for five minutes before they leave. It was just enough time for the Allies to notice they had been bested by the Axis before the girls disappeared around the corner.

Something weird happens when you fly. When you get on the plane you feel like you’re all from the same place, and as you fly everyone seems to switch from where you’re coming from to where you’re going to. A plane that seemed to be full of Los Angeles people coming to Dallas seems to change into Dallas people leaving Los Angeles. It’s like accents and attitudes appear out of nowhere. I had a pretty interesting flight from LA to Dallas. I was fortunate enough to be on the flight with the West Covina little league team travelling to Irving for a championship game. I was fortunate enough to sit right behind them. I was fortunate enough to sit across from the girl a year older than them that they instantly became obsessed with. Age 10 or 25, boys competing for a girl use the exact same techniques. Even among close friends, the go-to move is to throw everyone else under the bus. As the boys talked to the girl (who was mostly ignoring them (but clearly loving it)) they would get loud and obnoxious and eventually turn around. Every time this happened one of them would lean around the seat and quietly apologize for his friends who are “immature” and “really stupid” or “so embarrassing”. I eventually became more entertained than annoyed, and enjoyed all the material I was getting for future stories.

The flight got significantly more awkward when our flight stopped to let some passengers off. The 13ish-year old girl, clearly feeling like a player, got up from her empty row on the other side and moved right next to me, smiling. I quickly but I think politely moved from the middle seat to the window, crossed my legs and buried my nose in “Slaughterhouse-Five”, which I had bought in the airport bookstore before I left. It took about five minutes before she leaned over to me.
“These boys are pretty crazy right.”
“Haha… um, yeah I guess. It’s pretty exciting back here.”
“They’re pretty cool, I just met them.”
“Yeah um, you probably have a few more years of this coming.”
She laughed and the mothers of the boys, sitting in the row behind me, laughed as well. I continued, “Just remember, you can’t trust boys. Well, you can’t trust boys from California, find a nice Texan boy.”
I thought that was funny. The moms behind glared at me and sat back in their seats. I forgot they were California moms. Oops.
Having been polite enough in my mind, I ignored the girl for the rest of the in-between process until a pleasant lady who knew nothing about baseball sat in between us and started asking the boys questions about Puerto Rico.

Without being too specific, in Dallas I spent time talking with old friends, and that is one of the most wonderful things in the world. I consumed absurd amounts of coffee and pushed several restaurants to the limit by monopolizing a table long after we had finished eating. Me and Wes created hundreds of new jokes, which is sort of a problem, because they are already hard to keep track of. It was good and refreshing and exactly what I needed from Texas.

Flying into Lubbock for my sisters wedding was like culture shock. I was 1 of 30 people in the whole airport. The airline worker at my gate when I arrived quietly pulled open her drawer where she had a gossip magazine open to the middle and read while pretending to type on the keyboard. We went to my grandparent’s house and suddenly I was in the land of floral arrangements and relatives I’m supposed to recognize. Pretty much everyone in Lubbock is connected to my family somehow, so I’m used to spending most of my time there pretending to recognize people I’ve never seen before, who met me when I was 10… or 19, my memory is just as bad. I haven’t been with my family for awhile, so that was very good. We played Wahoo, a family tradition that involves more smack talk than a championship boxing match, and for the record me and Tucker dominated in the semi-finals. Dominated. I gave my little cousin Brett my tub of Legos from my childhood, which he loved, but if I was smarter I would have waited and given them to him for Christmas.

My cousin spent 10 minutes showing me each shiny button he had taken from my grandmother’s supply while my aunt was fixing a dress. They were shiny.

My Aunt Nicole, my cousin Tucker, and I spent a good hour of intense concentration trying to transform a Transformers toy for Brett that I had given him. I’ve done calculus that was easier than that. That’s a lie, I can’t do calculus.

Everyone says Lubbock is a grid, which is a lie. Grids don’t dead end and pick up later. Don’t argue with me, I’m decided. I got lost in Lubbock a whopping 4 or 5 times within 2 days. I think Lubbock knows how much I used to complain about going there and is getting back at me for being so whiny. At any rate I now have a very slight knowledge of the city, and plan on forgetting all of that immediately. Oh and my sister got married. I think my sister has done of those weddings girls go to and decide to get married at, because everything went so smoothly and turned out so well. It was as close to perfect as you can get and… well I suppose that’s all that should really be said about it.

Now I’m back in Malibu and I’m getting ready to… I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.

When I was in Argentina I was pretty lucky because my parents and sister got to come out and visit me. In Buenos Aires I lived with homestay parents, Carlos and Ana Maria Pinto. They had two kids who are moved out and they spoke like 10 words of English. Five of those were, “We are the crazy Pintos!”. On the flip side, my parents and sister speak no Spanish. None. Like hola and gracias and that’s it.

The first adventure was that my sister arrived early and I sent a driver that I knew to go pick her up. Argentines do this thing where they don’t care what language you speak, they will talk as if you understand Spanish. So the whole way to my house the driver was talking to my sister, who understood pretty much nothing. It’s about an hour long drive. She arrived with no mishaps and stayed in my room. My parents were going to arrive in the morning so I left my phone on and right by my face so when they called in the morning I would let them into the house. Apparently they arrived and I didn’t wake up. Crucial fact: Ana Maria never ever ever came into my room if I had the door closed. She didn’t even really knock. She would just kinda ask if I was in there and if I didn’t open the door she would just leave. She was very respectful of my privacy. So when my parents arrived she let them in and she knew they were coming and she had seen pictures so she knew who they were. But she never thought to wake me and my sister, and I had no idea they were here, I was asleep in my room waiting for them to call and say they had been picked up from the airport.

So apparently Ana Maria got them tea, coffee, and breakfast in the living room. My parents told me later that they had sat in the living room with her for about 15 minutes, trying to figure out how to ask her where I was and if they could go wake me up, while Ana Maria said hi, asked them about their breakfast, and said I was sleeping. This is of course, what my parents think Ana Maria might have been saying, because they actually have no idea. I woke up pretty confused to find my parents who I hadn’t seen in 4 months standing over my bed in South America waking me up and asking me to hurry up and get up because they had no idea what Ana Maria was talking about.

The trip was really fun, and on the last night my homestay parents had my real parents over for a traditional Argentine asado. We sat down over some huge chunks of beef, chorizo (sausage) and lots and lots of wine. Since no one but me spoke both languages, I had an intense translating job to do between the 5 people eating dinner. It’s a bit tiring, so eventually I stopped translating everything and would just make up something more basic to translate. Long joking stories became, “He told a funny story comparing chickens and young men. It’s funny. Laugh.” My job started getting easier, however, as we went through more bottles of wine, a bottle of celebratory champagne, and the traditional after dinner shots of lemoncello. My homestay parents and my real parents and sister began to talk English and Spanish as if they understood each other, but they still didn’t. They wouldn’t wait for a translation but instead both parties would go on with the conversation as if the other person had said something that made sense to what they were talking about.

Carlos: “A veces tenes que gritar un poco en un restaurante, cuando no hay servicio…”
Mom: “Yeah, haha, we loved that reustarant yesterday.”
Laugh laugh laugh…

They would tell each other jokes and the other person would laugh really hard. They may not have understood each other but it didn’t really matter, and it made my job a whole lot easier.

Right now my office smells like onions and the stairwell smells like wet dog. I wonder why wet dog smells differently than dry dog. That’s rhetorical, don’t actually tell me.

I have also prepared this small offering, knowing I would eventually run out of things to say. The past couple of weeks I have had to occasionally search for stock music on the internet. Stock music is music you don’t have to pay royalties on, you buy it and it’s yours to do whatever you want with it. Think on-hold music or elevator music. Some of the names and descriptions get pretty awesome. These are all 100% real from a professional music site. Enjoy.

“Bee Hive” – Insane bees with laser beam eyes take over the Earth as they communicate with ultrasonic synth squeals. Includes 10 looped sections.

“There’s Nothing Wrong With You” – A hopeful and inspirational piece that could actually convince you that you are okay.

“The Acid Lounge” – Inspirational break beats will make you twitch in your chair as old school meets the new school. Together they swing and groove with tenacity and authority.
(How does one groove with tenacity and authority?)

“40 Something” – Acoustic guitar with a positive feel-like your dog came home, your wife never left you and your truck works again.

“Love Hate Party World” – Party club-fluent styles play with funky lines and grooves. Retro 80s synths combined with cutting-edge neo-techno rave lines.
(Neo-techno rave lines?)

“Flying” – Soaring above a mythical land on the back of a phoenix.

“Nature’s Dance of Joy” – Joyful without screaming about it-happy without laughing.
(This title is extremely accurate, scarily accurate, trust me.)

“Acoustic Dreams” – Ambient acoustic guitar, strings and bongos layered with synths and uplifting piano. Highly melodic and memorable stylings break into a super-smooth-ass groove.
(Super-smooth-ass.)

“Freakin’ in the Land of Phat” – Supremely freakin’ electronic hip hop groove that will make your body spontaneously convulse.
(Is that like… a good thing?)

New movie reviews for: (500) Days of Summer, Public Enemies, Harry Potter, and The Hangover

We (we?) have some big plans (plans?) for between the wedding ending and school starting, so stay tuned.

I walk way to fast in confined spaces. This is okay out in the open, where there is room to maneuver. But in hallways and offices, I have become a hazard. Almost daily now I have a near-miss with someone in the hallway. They always apologize, but I’m pretty sure it’s my fault each time. Colin visited last weekend, and that dude walks fast. I imagine he runs into people all the time.

While he was here we went to Point Dume to walk around and Colin started exploring. I, being lazy and 40-at-heart, sat down on a rock to enjoy the view while Colin climbed all over things. This led to me frequently yelling things like, “No Colin, don’t climb that, you’ll fall down and die.” He would look at it again, and then look at me, and then look back. “Colin… no.” Then he would make an angry face and go play somewhere else. Also, we met a family of sea lions. Sandy kept yelling at us and I almost touched Sock Puppet, but sea lions don’t like people (and apparently they’re dangerous?) so we let Sock Puppet be.

The other day I was driving down the highway and I ended up cruising next to this nice cream colored Caddy. I looked over to see two Hispanic thugs and I could hear their music and bass (the two are separate) coming through the windows. They both had fancy looking bluetooth headsets on, and the one in the passenger side was making minute adjustments to his eyebrows in the pull-down mirror. I’m not gonna write a joke here.

I was at a gas station here in Los Angeles waiting for my car to fill up. It was probably 10 or 11 in the evening and there were all sorts of crazy people running around. It seemed like I could tell what people were up to just by the way they were acting. The SUV next to me was full of teenagers, definitely getting their one older friend to buy alcohol, and definitely on the way to a party. You could tell because they were way too excited, and all sort of looked nervous. The only other thing that gets that reaction is the Jonas Brothers and they had just left town, so I’m pretty sure it was underage drinking.

On the other side were the scene kids, probably about my own age. They all had cigarettes (because cigarettes are so cool). Most of them were wearing sunglasses or had them ready to go on their head (because sunglasses are so cool) and pretty much all of them were wearing V-necks (because v-necks are so cool). These people pretty much ooze cooler-than-thou like a high schooler oozes hormones, and I could literally smell in the air how cool they were. I was surprised though, because some how I couldn’t imagine cool kids getting gas. A menial task like gas-getting just didn’t fit the image. It would be better if when cool kids drove their cool cars that they just had an endless gas tank fueled by fashion and cigarette butts.

The best, however, were the two guys standing outside the little shop, talking. One was about my age and the other was probably in his 60s. They looked like that had been standing there all day, and were probably just gonna stand there for the rest of the night. It was like the gas station was their front porch. They were talking pretty loud so I could hear what they were discussing. It was an in-depth discussion about the ethics of Michael Jackson not attending his concert in England… Yes, the Michael Jackson that is no longer living. Now these are two straggly looking guys (I don’t think I needed to mention that necessarily, do people outside gas stations usually suit up?) but apparently they hold themselves to a higher moral standard than you or I, which includes attending our prior commitments from beyond the grave. And don’t tell me they didn’t know, because they mentioned it, in a this-isn’t-a-valid excuse way. Plus, if you think MJ coverage was bad where you are, try living in LA. I literally heard nothing else (not literally) for a week.

On an absolutely serious note:
The mayor of Los Angeles refused the idea that anyone should help pay for the city costs of Michael Jackson’s memorial (police, fire protection, overtime, road closures, etc.) and that the city should foot the bill. This is the city that just laid of thousands of teachers and cut summer school entirely. That man is an idiot. It takes all of my energy not to go on hateful rants about how this city and entire state are run by oompa loompas.

Some people don’t have this problem but most do. When you are waiting for someone. No one is ever on time anymore but we aren’t all equally late. So it always ends up with someone waiting for someone else. Like I said, some people handle this really well and they have no problem just standing there. Most of us, however, cannot handle this quasi-state. We think everyone is looking at us and wondering why we are just sitting there by ourselves. I mean, not very many people go out and do things on their own anymore. I can’t remember the last time I saw one person go alone to the movies or out to eat.

In order to prove all those judgmental people wrong, we all pretty much do the same thing. Pull out the phone, text someone, call someone, or my favorite, pretend to text someone. I know I’ve definitely gotten some “I need to kill 10 minutes” texts from people. They don’t say that, but you can kinda tell when out of the blue someone who doesn’t really talk to you texts you something like, “Hi!” or “How r u?”. You know it’s that, because the text contains no information. They don’t want to hang out with you so they can’t ask you about your plans. They don’t need to know anything, but they will probably try and come up with something that they crucially wanted to know. I will admit I’ve been guilty of this a few times, but generally opt to just stare at my phone as if something is happening. I don’t even fake pressing the buttons, I just stare at it. Surely… eventually… something will happen. You were probably doing that on Facebook when this popped up. Surely… eventually… something will happen.

Movies: I post an extremely late review of The Hangover.
Music: I feature one of my all-time favorite bands The Cat Empire.
Books: I update you one how badly I am failing at my reading list.

P.S. In the library the Humor & Wit section is followed immediately by “Modern French Literature”

P.P.S. It took me an absurdly long amount of time to type ‘P.S.’ because I kept putting the letters and dots in the wrong order.

P.P.P.S. I’m coming to Dallas at the beginning of August and I can’t wait to see all you Texans.

P.P.P.P.S. That made it sound I no longer include myself. I do. I am a Texan excited to see fellow Texans.

Even though I’ve grown up in this culture, sometimes it still shocks me. That’s an understatement, it shocks me a lot, but this time I think I actually thought, “I’m shocked.” It was when Michael Jackson died. I wasn’t shocked because he died, people I don’t know dieing doesn’t really bother me. But he had a cardiac arrest, someone called 911 and he went to the hospital. Five minutes later, everyone in the developed world knew. That is… amazing, and kinda scary. I was at work and I usually try and stay off Facebook, but I popped over to take a look and literally everything on the page was about his death (except for the persistent friend requests from people who went to my old high school that I NEVER MET… quit it). It’s like Facebook doubles as a new organization. I’ve learned more than that from Facebook. I didn’t know about how well the US was doing in the Confederations Cup. I didn’t know Billy Mays died. In fact I regularly use Facebook as a well to keep up with sports/sports teams I’m too lazy to follow myself.

“Facebook-as-news” has created a few different types of characters. Like a horoscope, you can judge the personalities of your peers based on their Facebook response to a major event.
(Disclaimer: all statuses and names are purely fictitious, and any resemblance to real life is probably coincidental. Or maybe I’m talking about you)

First there are your basics, the people who without shame post whatever is happening. Some take it further than others, adding a thought or a comment, “Jenny Apple OMG Legolas died!!! WTffff I’m so sad!!”, something like that. Other’s keep it simple and just let you know what’s going on, “Timmy Von Timothy USA is up by 2″. This person probably doesn’t put to much thought into their statuses (which is fine) or really thinks that you should be informed, and knows that Facebook consumes 90% of your time, cutting out news, newspapers, magazines…

Then you’ve got the people who act like they are indifferent, but you know, you know they want to say something, but everybody else already did it, so they can’t. These people are easy to identify. They haven’t read any of the most popular books, seen any of the most popular movies, and scoff frequently. They probably like foreign films (which sound really interesting when you talk about them, but are in fact, mostly boring). These people frequently post extremely obscure song lyrics so that you will know exactly how little you know.

After that you have my favorites. The self-reflexive, critical of society status posters. There status will reference what everyone else’s (that’s not a word) status says in a “holier-than-though” fashion. Then they might include a profound critique of society as a whole. “Fez LaChristopher wants to know why everyone has to talk about Jon and Kate+8 -_-. Our media is so shallow <3"

As I type this my computer spell checks me, something people are age are reluctant to admit we are absolutely dependant on. My penmanship is awful now, because I hardly ever have to write on paper, and unfortunately when I do the notebook paper doesn't put a squiggly red line underneath words I've misspelled. Google is working on this new spellcheck that can distinguished context. The example they use is you could write, "I've bean using the wrong can in my been soup,". Their spell check would be able to distinguish between the meanings of the words and correct it accurately, "I've been* using the wrong can in my bean* soup,". Now I might be the only one… But that creeps me out. Don't get me wrong, it's exciting that I can look forward to a future of doing LESS work than I already do, but spellcheck being able to understand my meaning, I have a feeling I'm going to be typing and it is going to correct it from what I'm trying to write to what I'm actually thinking. It's taking Freudian slips to a whole new level.

Old people sometimes have trouble adapting, and there are some more subtle signs than that they can't get the TV to turn on. Next time you are around your parents, listen to them talk on the cellphone. 9 out of 10 parents talk WAY to loud on cellphones. It's like they don't know that the signal can go that far, like they need to talk loud enough for the signal to reach all the way to Texas. After realizing this you notice it a lot. It was similar to when someone pointed out to me and my friends that if a group of girls gets excited and starts talking, they sound exactly like a group of chickens. Try it, I swear it's true.

I wanted to switch all the public computers I use at Pepperdine to Pirate English on Facebook. Immediately after having this thought, the next computer I sat down at had Pirate English. I'm so proud. I wonder who did it…

By the time I have kids, everything is going to be in 3D. Eventually it's going to be hard to tell a difference between screens and real life. I'm already preparing my "back-in-my-day" speech for my children. I'm gonna tell it every 10 minutes, they are gonna love it.

Pop tarts don't fit in the toaster right. They are specifically made for toasters, but to be able to remove them easily you have to put them in the tall way, so part of the Pop Tart doesn't get toasted. The other way you have to reach in and try not to burn your fingers and sometimes they fall apart on the way out. This is clearly a major deficiency in either Pop Tarts or toasters, and I love Pop Tarts so much that I'm going to blame toasters. I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with this problem.

The other day I went to get a burrito, and this group of 10-year old girls was picking up their sushi order. Since when did 10-year old girls like sushi? But then again, here in Malibu grown men wear Ugg boots and shorts to go to the grocery store. If all hell is breaking loose, I think the cracks started in Malibu.

I had other things to write about, but this importance of this point has been recently brought to my attention, and the fact that it supersedes the other things I wanted to mention should help illustrate how important it is. Girls, women, ladies… when you smell good, you blow minds. I was trying to make sure to say that right, because the point isn’t that girls really ever smell bad. The point is that when you smell good, we go crazy. Everyone knows how much smell is tied to memory and that can have pretty intense effects on a guy. The other day I was in a library (taking a nap, not getting a book) and a girl sat down in the chair next to the desk I was using. As far as I can remember I never saw her face, but I’m pretty sure that girl was the love of my life. I mean it wasn’t Abercrombie strength perfume, where when you walk by it tries to suck you into the dark abyss of electronic music and dimly lit rooms full of high school. It was just a subtle, average strength perfume.

Maybe I’m just not around girls who wear perfume very much, but that was like 5 days ago, and I have the memory of a fish. The point could be argued that don’t really have sufficient fragrance knowledge to make these statements. The extent of my information comes from a very passionate saleswoman at Perfumania who launched into a fragrance manifesto after Colin told her he usually just let people choose his cologne for him. In fact I would recommend you go see her if you are near the Firewheel Mall in Garland, but sadly she has re-located to New York. She had to move because she had been in Dallas to be near her boyfriend, but they had just had a pretty bad falling out. She was going to move to New York and see if that city could get her back on her feet and Perfumania was just a stop on the road. And no, I didn’t just make that up, that’s all true.

A Three 6 Mafia song came on Pandora.com (check it out) the other day and made me laugh. If you don’t know Three 6 Mafia is a gangsta (you can’t say gangster, it’s weird) rap group that won an Oscar for their song in “Hustle & Flow”. So now, their songs start like this: The beat started, you could hear the typical unintelligible talking at the beginning of the track. When the vocals finally come in, it starts with, “Three 6 9… Academy Award Winners!” I guess you can get street cred for that now, which means Lord of The Rings is ballin’.

I think I saw the most ridiculous looking idiot that I have ever seen yesterday (that’s a lie). I was driving home from Hollywood and I got behind a Z3 BMW convertible. Let’s start there. It was cold. Like, when you are driving you need a jacket cold, because the sun had gone down. To be fair, I was in a topless car, but that’s because it’s a huge pain to put the top of the Jeep back on so we just suffer through the cold and bundle up when we drive in the evening (translate: lazy). So I started noticing some other things, like his vanity license plate. Now if you get a vanity license plate, it better be hilarious, because otherwise you just got +10 jerk points. I guess it could be nice as well, maybe if it was a gift from your Mom and said LUV MOM. I think that could slide. Everyone loves their mother (except Eminem). But this said PRE MBA. I believe it was to indicate that he had purchased his fancy car before getting his MBA, and would like everyone to know that if he got that then, he was gonna be sooooo rich afterwards. Ladies, line up. Does that sound that ridiculous, no, pretty typical. But wait, there’s more.

We were on an access road, and access roads sometimes have funny lights. We were sitting at one (I was behind him) that had another light maybe 100 ft. in front of us. So our light turns green, and the second stayed red. You can literally take your foot of the break for 5 seconds and roll the distance. Not PRE MBA, he’s gotta fast car and he’s gonna go fast. For .3 seconds. For less than 100 ft. So he could slam on his awesome brakes in his awesome car with his awesome license plate. To be fair, he probably couldn’t see the light through his sunglasses at night. That’s right, sunglasses at night. At least he sticks with the classics. So with all of those pieces, what was missing? That’s right, pink button down.

Now I have theories on this, many of which were developed at a high school lunch table. In fact most brilliant things I know were developed there. No guy just wears a pink shirt. I’m not so closed-minded that I think it’s illegal or anything, but you’re definitely saying something. There are a few options. You can wear a pink shirt to show how above the opinions of others you are. 9 out of 10 guys think pink shirts are idiotic, and every guy knows this, so wearing a pink shirt is like saying, yes, I know you don’t like it and I don’t care. And that’s not a bad statement, rock on unique pink shirt guy. The other good reason is if you run out of laundry. Everyone has a few shirts, maybe they were gifts, uninspired purchases, whatever, that you don’t wanna wear. But you don’t throw it out because that one day you wake up and you forgot to do laundry, you can suffer through that day with that one shirt. You gotta do what you gotta do, totally valid. The final reason is you are a prick who has PRE MBA as your vanity license plate and you wear sunglasses at night.

My friend Landan showed me this service, vark.com. Aardvark is a service where you go in and select things that you know about. Then people can ask you questions like about those things, and you can do the same. Aardvark automatically directs questions to people who are knowledgeable about it. The idea is to have a more humanized way to search for answer that are too specific for Google. Questions can be anything from, “What do I get a 43 year old man who has everything?” to “Does anyone know where to buy a single grocery cart?”. I’ve been copying down a few of my favorite questions that have come up, in the open category, meaning the service didn’t know who to assign them to so everyone can give it a shot. I’ve fixed some language/grammar mistakes to make it readable…

[From ______ /38/M/Athens,GREECE
*getting even to a crook*
Does anyone know...a good way to get even to somebody who steal lots of money from you in a bad way?]

[From ______ /30/M/BuenosAires,ARGENTINA
*business*
Any success story on how to start to delegate your tasks and build a successful company by doing so?]

Forget University, why do you need a degree? Anytime you need to know a job skill, just ask Aardvark! It works for everything, from business to organized crime. Apparently in Athens there are good and bad ways to steal from someone. I bet PRE MBA guy went on Aardvark and asked how to be a tool.

Sorry this was late. Well it probably wasn’t late to you, but I’m trying to publish every week. So another is coming soon. No new movies reviews, but you can expect some soon. It’s actually a kinda expensive habit.

On the other hand, I’m adding two specific episodes of the podcast “This American Life” that you need to listen to. One is a report from Afghanistan from a boy who grew up in LA whose father becomes on of the new provincial governors. It is an amazing up close look from a kid our age who lives in both cultures. The other is about a girl who unwittingly becomes pen pals with then dictator of Panama, Manuel Noriega, basically the Saddam of that time. Please, listen to these, that are pretty amazing true stories. Check them out here.

New note: If I could grab a quick second here.
New podcasts: Teenage Embed
New music: Talib Kweli

Guys and girls express excitement in totally different ways, and I don’t know about you, but I think guys make a whole lot more sense. When a guy gets really excited about something, the typical reaction is something like a fist-pump, some quick pacing, maybe a growl and flexing every possible muscle at the same time. To me, this makes total sense. You get excited about something and you gotta burn off the energy you just created, so you walk around flex your muscles and make animal noises. Perfectly reasonable.

Now girls, on the other hand, are weird. I know there are lots of ways that girls express excitement, but I’m going to focus on what I think is the strangest: the self-fanning face tense-up hand-wavy thing. We never really think about this because you know, we’re excited too. But what exactly does taking your crazy hands and fanning your face like it’s about to explode have to do with being excited? Now that I’ve noticed this, it’s kinda an excitement killer for me. If I’m excited about whatever just happened and I see a girl doing that, I suddenly lose focus and wonder exactly what it is they are doing. What are you doing? Is your face hot? Is the best way to cool your face to wave your open fingers frantically in front of it? Does the clenched teeth have anything to do with the fanning, or is that just a side effect of the heat? How come in other heat-related situations you don’t perform the same ritual? See, excitement gone.

I work in an office full of cubicles where we pretend we can’t hear every word the other people are saying. There may be people one cube over talking about something, and conclude that they need to check in with me about it. But unofficial office protocol dictates that I can’t stand up, look over the tiny thin wall and say, “What did you need from me?”. Instead I have to pretend like I didn’t hear it and wait for them to finish. Then the person will come into my cube and ask me a question. I will then have to pretend like I don’t know what they are talking about until they explain the whole thing to me. Then I can actually know, and can act on what I already knew I had to do based on the overheard conversation 5 minutes ago.

I think my office bought some sort of magical cellphone killing paint for the exterior of the building. It really is amazing. One step inside, no service. One step outside, five bars.

Also, our water dispenser squeeks. It squeeks in the same way your teeth do when you have that perfect sized gap. It gets me every time. I get water and then I’m absolutely positive I’m somehow whistling on accident. Firefox wants me to spell squeek like squeak, but I’m not okay with that. Squeek is exactly what it sounds like. Not Squeak.

This doesn’t really have any sort of justifiable background to it. I don’t think I like any sort of music with steel drums. I was going to say I only like steel drums in Caribbean music, but then I realized I didn’t actually like Caribbean music. Steel drums are a cool idea, and I would have a blast playing with one, but in actual music, steel drums suck.

I do have sort of a topic for this, and that’s music. Mostly the suckiness of it. Of course this is a common topic for music snobs, but I don’t think this is a music snob issue anymore. Now don’t get me wrong, there is tons of really inventive and cool stuff out there, and a lot of it is popular. I’m just continually kinda shocked by exactly what takes the top spot. For example, Kanye’s new CD, widely regarded as his version of phoning it in. Let’s see what that actually takes…

Zane’s School of Musicolojizzle

Just take a listen to any of those auto-tuner filled songs. Next go to the nearest Mac (ugh). Pull up GarageBand. If you have a computer with a microphone, you have all of the tools neccisary to replicate Kanye’s new CD. What’s that you say, you don’t have much of a voice? Oh, that’s no problem, you’re gonna auto-tune your entire voice so you sound like a robot anyways. And great news, robots are awesome singers, and never go off key. What’s that you say, you’re a good singer? That might be a problem. You see for an auto-tuner to turn you into a robot, you actually have to sing bad. So do yourself a favor, and become tone deaf if you wanna have a hit single. Oh wait, you aren’t very good at rhyming? Well that’s the best part. The BEST rappers have several ways of coping with this, most of which involve raping the english language. That’s raping, not rapping.

Say you want to rhyme the word toaster with urban: “My best friend is my toaster, he is straight street so urban”.
Clearly they don’t rhyme. Try it. Toaster. Urban. Nope.

There are several ways to fix this.
1. Don’t say urban! The best and easiest way to rhyme is to rhyme the same word! It’s great.
“My best friend is my toaster, he is straight street so toaster.” Easy.

2. Mispronounce the word so that it sounds the same. This takes a little skill, but I’m sure you can master it with a little practice.
“My best friend is my toastuuuh, he is straight street so urbanuuuh.” You’ll be a pro in no time.

3. This is one of Kanye’s favorites, just rhyme the middle of the word. It doesn’t matter how silly this usually sounds; you’re a pop rapper! You sound silly anyways! Just toss the extra syllables into the next line, or say them under your breath.
“My best friend is my toaster, he is straight steet so very uuuuuuuuuuur…” Ban. See, works like a charm.

4. This is personal fave, and by far the easiest. Just tack on a rhyming syllable to the end of both words. There are many ways to do this, but it’s best just to copy someone else. That’s pretty much how rap works anyways. If you get good at this, you can freestyle for hours! Ladies will love you. If you are a lady… hood rats will love you!
“My best friend is my toastizzle, he is straight street so very urbizzle.”

Now with that last one you run the risk that people might not understand the original words. You could change it to say urbanizzle, but that sounds stupid, changing words is for squares. Leave it how it is! If you like your toaster so much, you probably like your toast and your urb too. Plus who cares about your audience, they’re all squares anyways.

That concludes your bachelors, masters, and doctorate in musicolojizzle, which is just like music, except it makes way more money.