Sometimes I think my kids will laugh at anything. (image via wikimedia)
I fell for it again! I was announcing my fast-food order in the drive-through line, and I didn’t stop myself from saying, “I’d like a number two meal!”
My daughter laughed. It’s true. My 16-year old daughter who prides herself on her maturity actually laughed when I said “Number two.”
She has been laughing at this number for many years. You’d think her sense of humor would change a bit as she gets older, and in many ways it has, but there are still some juvenile words and phrases that she reacts to.
In the video below, I talk about some of the words that have made my kids laugh over time. I wrote a lot of it in a blog post several years ago, but I guess some things will never change much.
(image via wikimedia)
Despite everything that had gone wrong so far, the date wasn’t a disaster. Yeah, Jenny liked Garth Brooks when I hated country music. Yeah, we went to a restaurant that Jenny’s ex-boyfriend managed. Yeah, my nose was runny at inopportune times because of the food. And yeah, the ex-boyfriend was sitting in my spot across from her in our booth when I returned from the bathroom.
Still, I had a couple things going for me. Jenny understood my humor. She made coke addiction jokes as I was taking care of my nasal issues. And she had astounding cleavage. I know I’ve probably mentioned it too much in this story (You can read about it here), but there’s a reason.
“Hey, Bob,” I said as I approached the booth. I tried to put some friendly inflection in my voice. “Thanks for keeping Jenny entertained.” I didn’t want to seem threatened by an ex-boyfriend, and I thought I had done a good job, but then a slight itchiness returned to the back of my nasal passages, and my nose twitched and I sniffed.
“Did the food get to you?” Bob asked proudly.
“He has a coke habit,” Jenny said.
I looked around the restaurant and spotted a couple other customers sniffing or grabbing water or laughing at somebody else suffering at the table.
“It looks like I’m not the only one here with a coke habit,” I said to Bob. His expression shifted. His smile disappeared, and he shot a glance at Jenny. Jenny looked startled. I’m not sure how to describe facial features of a startled person, but she actually seemed to flinch a bit.
Bob got up. “I’d better get back to… managing.” He glanced at Jenny again and then shook my hand quickly and left. I was glad he left, but I wondered if I’d said something wrong.
I was puzzled by the sudden shift in mood. What was the big deal?
“I meant other customers were sniffling,” I said to Jenny as I sat back down. “I didn’t mean that Bob had the coke habit.”
“It’s okay,” Jenny said, but I knew better.
“I’m serious, look around.” But she seemed dejected. I wondered if she still had a thing for her ex, or if she was genuinely the type to worry about hurting an ex-boyfriend’s feelings. I mean, she shouldn’t bring dates to a place her ex managed. And if the ex is going to be proud of giving runny noses to his customers, then he should be prepared for coke habit jokes. Hell, Jenny had even started it! I hate it when someone starts the joke but can’t handle the follow up. Of course, I couldn’t say any of that. As a guy, you just stew in it.
“It got cold in here,” Jenny said and pulled a sweater from her purse. At first, I sat in bewilderment, wondering how she could magically pull out a sweater out from her purse.
“Do you keep a rabbit in there too?” I asked.
She laughed as she placed her arms inside the sleeves and I was glad that she seemed to have her humor back, but then she started buttoning her sweater. I wasn’t all that concerned as she began at the bottom and worked her way up, but her fingers moved quickly and I almost shouted “Nooooo!” as she fit the final two top buttons into place.
What? I was almost outraged! The cleavage was covered. And then I noticed that the sweater was ugly. How could she cover such cleavage with an ugly sweater? It was a crime. I don’t remember the sweater’s pattern, but it hurt my eyes. Then I noticed she had a blemish on her nose. And my nasal passages had suddenly cleared up.
I wondered if I was allergic to her cleavage. I almost asked her to unbutton her sweater just to see if my nose would start running again, but there was no tactful way to do that.
I left a generous tip on the table and let Jenny lead the way out. Since she had gone silent and covered up, I wasn’t optimistic about the rest of the date. We still had a movie to go to, and movies could be catastrophic on a bad date. It’s true, you don’t have to talk during a movie, but you’re stuck, and a good movie is usually tough to enjoy. Still, I was prepared to go through with it.
“It looks like we’ll get to the show a little early,” I said as I opened the passenger side for her. “As long as traffic cooperates.”
But when I got in on the driver’s side, Jenny announced:
“I don’t feel like going to a movie. Just go ahead and take me home.”
Maybe I should have been glad that this date was almsot over, especially since she was covered with an ugly sweater. Unfortunately, I knew the awkward date wasn’t over yet. Next up would be the awkward drive home.
*****
To be continued in Awkward Moments in Dating: The Long Drive Home!
And in the meantime, you can read Awkward Moments in Dating from the start.
(image via wikipedia)
This is one of those topics that I have to be careful with. Stephen King is a great author who’s written a bunch of books that I like a lot. When I suggest (or outright state) that he has written some bad sentences, some readers/writers get mad.
To me, it comes down to a famous quote about writing attributed to Stephen King: “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs,…”
You might think that an author who says this would be precise with his use of that cursed part of speech, but he (and he admits this) can be just as guilty as any other author.
Even so, it can be fun to take a look at Stephen King’s most popular (and maybe greatest) novel to see how he uses adverbs in writing.
I’ve always said, if your sentence has a part of speech that puts you on the road to hell, then that must be a bad sentence. And as I demonstrate in the video below, Stephen King used a lot of adverbs in The Shining.
My dad always called this television character a prick. (image via wikimedia)
Prick is an underused word today. It rhymes with dick, and people laugh at dick when you say it, so sometimes people will laugh at prick as well. I called a public figure on TV a prick a couple days ago, and my daughter laughed, just because she had never heard me use the word prick in that context. The public figure probably deserved being called a prick. He makes a lot of money, says stupid stuff, and he can’t hear me anyway. If I’m going to call somebody a prick, it’ll be someone who can’t hear me.
I don’t know how the dictionary defines it (I write about what I think, not what the dictionary thinks), I think of a prick is an annoying person. A prick is not an overt threat or a danger, but you still would rather not deal with one. A real prick (a non-person prick) is a little pinch that might hurt a little bit but not enough to cry or scream in agony about. It’s barely annoying enough to notice.
A prick can also be a tiny male appendage. A human who is a prick is usually annoying, and calling him a prick implies he’s annoying because he has a tiny appendage. Guys with small appendages tend to overcompensate (so I’ve heard), and guys who overcompensate can come across as obnoxious and hence are pricks.
Prick rhymes with dick, and dick is considered by some as a bad word. Not every word that rhymes with dick is bad. Pick isn’t bad, but can have some negative connotations (especially when it involves your nose). Sick isn’t bad, but nobody wants to actually be sick. Quick is okay in most circumstances. Brick is good. Nick is a cool name and in a worst-case scenario a nick is still less annoying than a prick.
You have plausible deniability with the word prick. If anybody accuses you of having used a bad word, you can just say that you meant “annoying.” If the accuser thinks you meant little dick or guy with a little dick, that’s the accuser’s fault for having a dirty mind.
My dad would try not to swear in front of kids (he’d swear in front of me if I was alone, but he wouldn’t swear when my friends were over), but he’d say the word prick a lot. He never tried to stop saying prick in mid-word. He would stop for actual profanity. He might say “That motherfu…” or “Son of a bi…aarrgh!” or “piece of sh… son of a… darn it!” But he’d say prick out loud.
There was a character in the original Lost in Space television series that annoyed my dad, and whenever he saw that character on TV, he’d say, “What a prick!” and then leave the room. It took a lot to get my dad to leave a room.
The problem was that I wasn’t allowed to say the word prick, even when Lost in Space was on. My dad smacked me upside the head once when I said prick. I wasn’t even talking about him. I was talking about somebody my dad didn’t like. Even though my dad agreed that this guy was a prick, he didn’t want me saying the word. It was confusing. My dad said it with impunity, even when we had guests in the house, but I wasn’t supposed to say it.
I knew he was allowed to say words I wasn’t. He believed kids shouldn’t swear until they were 18 because they needed something to look forward to. I respected that (when he was around). But I couldn’t understand why prick was up there with the BIG WORDS.
If I had said one of the BIG WORDS, I would have understood the head swat. I mean, he didn’t knock me out over it. It didn’t leave a mark. He just didn’t feel like telling me not to say prick again. I understand not feeling like talking. I don’t swat my kids when I don’t feel like talking. I just grunt really loud. They get the idea.
Moms and dads had different punishments for those words that were in between appropriate and profanity (stuff like crap and dick). Moms would wash our mouths out with soap. Dads would swat you upside the head. I’d rather have the swap upside the head, just because it was instant. It didn’t really hurt. You weren’t going to get a concussion from it. Maybe if you got twenty of them at one time, there might be some temporary memory loss, but one wasn’t going to hurt. The soap in the mouth was worse. It tasted bad, and you had to admit (unless you lied) that your mom had just physically dominated you. That was more humiliating than the soap.
If you said the serious words, you might risk an actual beating (Child Protective Services wasn’t an option then), so you just didn’t hardcore curse in front of your parents. You had to rely on words like fudge or crud. And you couldn’t say prick.
I might try to bring back the word prick. That’s one thing this new generation misses. They have the internet, magic mobile phones and unlimited streaming, but they don’t seem to use prick in their vocabulary.
I write about The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen a lot on this blog. I’ve always resented it (it being The Corrections, not my blog). I never understood why it was so popular or why it almost won a Pulitzer Prize. It might be my fault that I don’t get it. If a book is brilliant and I truly don’t get it, I don’t want to blame the book for that.
I know I need to get over it. It’s been almost twenty years since The Corrections came out. Hopefully, this video will settle me down once and for all, so I can move on to other books and authors.
There’s some guy named James Patterson who writes about 15 books a year. Maybe I should complain about him every once in a while.
If you want to write a bestseller, he’s your topic.
In the last couple years, Donald Trump has sold a lot of books. I mean, he hasn’t written the books, but he’s the star of them. After all, you can’t have a bestselling Donald Trump book without Donald Trump.
It seems that every anti-Donald Trump book becomes a bestseller. Fear by Bob Woodward has sold more copies in its first week than any other book in Simon & Schuster history, and it’s already on its tenth printing. Before that, a reality star wrote a book about Trump, and it became a bestseller even though everybody hates the reality star. A former FBI director wrote a book about Trump, and it became a bestseller, even though people who hate Trump blame the former FBI director for helping Trump win. A porn star is writing a book about her experiences with Trump, and that will become a bestseller because she’s a porn star and the stories just have to be awesome.
I mean, you know the world will be disappointed if the porn star says that Trump just wanted to cuddle.
Donald Trump might get blamed for stuff that’s not his fault, but he also can take credit for stuff he didn’t necessarily cause. That’s the trade-off when you become a politician. In this case, Trump can boast that he’s saved the book industry. Book publishers have been complaining about stagnant sales over the last few years. Barnes & Noble is struggling. Streaming services are putting out so much content that people don’t have time to read. But now if a book company needs to spike sales, they can just publish a bunch of hit pieces on Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, this is one of those times when I wonder if my brain works differently from everybody else’s. I don’t understand why people who hate Donald Trump want to buy books about Donald Trump.
Don’t get me wrong, I have issues with Donald Trump, just like everybody else, but I don’t need to buy a book to find out bad stuff about him. I can just turn on any news channel or the radio or get on the internet and find out bad stuff about Donald Trump. I’m a cheapskate. I don’t want to spend $25 on a hardback book just to get something I can hear for free.
Besides, I can’t live my life being outraged by politicians, especially today. I see too many people consumed by outrage over today’s current events (which won’t stay current for very long). Each outrage against Trump is devoured the next day by the next day’s outrage, so every outrage is outdated the next day.
The same holds true for anti-Trump books. Each anti-Trump book gets outdated by the next one. It must be exhausting being somebody who is outraged at Trump all the time. Plus, it gets pretty expensive if you’re buying all the books.
These book sales have to tick off any political writer who is trying to write serious analysis about the Trump administration. Trump spends most of the day with business leaders or world leaders or rallies or golf courses, and all anybody talks about are rumors and tweets. There’s serious stuff going on with the tariffs and the Chinese and the North Koreans and NAFTA and it’s all connected, but the journalists who want us to rely on them for information are focused on stuff that is not necessarily serious.
Maybe Trump should open his own book store but not tell anybody he owns it (that’s probably illegal, but since when has that stopped politicians?). He could hire a bunch of authors to write nasty books about him, put them in his bookstore, and then pocket the profits. It’s a win-win. He gets his political opponents to spend all their money… on him. Most politicians have to use the IRS or the tax code to get that done.
Plus, this could help Trump compete against Jeff Bezos in their quests for world domination. Jeff Bezos has the Washington Post. Donald Trump could start the Trump Post. It sounds like the word compost, so late night comedians could make fun of it. But it would still make a lot of money. It would be so pro-Trump that even FOX News might get mad at it.
I don’t like writing about politics, but I have to sometimes because it affects books and publishing. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post (which is very political) and Amazon (which sells a lot of books, including mine), so it’s impossible for a book blogger to ignore it. Again, let me be clear about this. Even though I don’t like politics, I pay attention. I have my opinions. I vote. I’m aware of most of what’s going on, but I don’t get much/any of my Trump information from political books.
But don’t let me stop anyone from buying anti-Trump books (I don’t have that kind of influence anyway). If these books end up saving the publishing industry, then I’m all for them!
You never knew what (or whom) you would find in the stacks. (image via wikimedia)
A college sex comedy without sex sounds pretty lame, but that’s what my first semester at State University was like. My dorm roommate was getting some at least twice a week, and everybody (except me) thought it was hilarious. Whenever Kirk showed up with a drunk chick (he would be drunk too, so everybody was okay with it back then; there were no pre-sex mutual consent forms in the 1980s), I’d head out to the University Library to study/sleep for the night. It was open 24 hours, and there were lots of places to fall asleep without getting noticed.
Some people found quiet rooms or open areas in the lobby for study groups, but almost everybody avoided the stacks. Students would use the stacks for research when they had to, but otherwise, they stayed away. The shelves lurched to the ceiling and were filled with old dusty cobwebbed books. Once when I had curiously pulled one from the shelves, I had a sneezing fit and woke up a couple sleepers a few aisles away.
You always felt isolated if you spent too much time in the stacks. An urban legend even told the tale of a naked guy who would chase a terrified/disgusted coed around the top floor (where the most obscure books were) once a year, but the naked guy never got caught, so none of us believed the story.
It was a Friday, and Kirk had already declared he’d need the dorm room, so I was looking for a place to camp out for the night. I had just gotten off work (a telemarketing job that I hated, but it paid a lot more than minimum wage and there was a commission, and a Friday night shift meant that I was done for the weekend).
My voice was scratchy from all the sales pitches. I knew I wasn’t really going to study. I had a spot in a corner on the third floor where I could sleep just fine without being disturbed. I had a few comic books secured in a folder in my backpack. As soon as I pulled them out of the folder, Brenda popped out from behind a book shelf.
“So you did go to the comic book store today,” she said almost cheerfully.
“What, are you KGB or something?” I said while putting the comics back in the folder, even though they’d already been spotted.
“No, just good timing,” she said. “This is what I do when I’m bored on a Friday night, wander the University Library.”
“You shouldn’t be up here so late by yourself,” I said. “The naked guy might get you.”
“Do you think he’s real?” Brenda asked. She moved so close to me that I could smell the minty gum in her breath. “I bet it happened once years ago and now everybody exaggerates it.”
“I don’t think it really happened,” I said. “I think some guy probably walked out of a restroom adjusting his fly, and some girl freaked out, and the fly adjuster became the naked guy over time.”
Brenda pondered this. “That seems like a stretch.”
I thought about explaining that I hadn’t been serious about this theory, but I decided to commit. “No, back in the 20s or 30s or whenever, adjusting your fly would have been a big deal, especially if you made eye contact with a woman and then made a creepy face. He probably licked his lips or something. That would have been a moral equivalent of walking around naked today.”
“Do you spend time thinking about stuff like this?” she asked.
“I’ve never thought about walking naked in the University Library.”
Brenda’s mouth hung open. Then she said, “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
Crap, I thought. I hoped she wasn’t about to ask me out. She’d been hanging around me for the last few weeks, and I’d been trying to avoid her. It wasn’t that I thought I was too good for her. Back then, I had a lot of issues that made me unappealing to a lot of women. I just didn’t find her attractive, and I didn’t want a girlfriend for the sake of having a girlfriend.
“I’m probably designator driving,” I said.
“Your asshole roommate.”
“And a few other friends,” I clarified.
“You know where all the good parties are,” she said.
“Not really. I’m not the one who gets invited. I’m just the driver. But I get to go.”
“Maybe… when you hear about the party, do you think you can tell me about it?”
“There’s not a lot of room in my car,” I said. I wasn’t making that up. The back of the chevette scooter had room for three (officially), but we’d stuff five back there if we had to.
“I can get there myself,” she said. “I’m just bored. Dorm life is not what I thought it would be. I need to get out of that place, and I never know where to go, except here.”
I actually felt sympathy for her. Brenda spiked her hair and dressed cool, but she annoyed everybody. Then I finally understood why she was always trying to hang out with me. I knew all the cool people in the dorm. I wasn’t a cool guy, but I hung out with the cool guys. I was an honorary cool guy, even if I spent most of my free time in the University Library. I could have been offended that she only wanted to be around me because of my friends. Or I could have felt relieved that she wasn’t looking for a romantic entanglement. To be honest, I actually felt relieved.
But this was soon going to cause a problem that there was no way to foresee.
*****
To be continued. Or you can start here to read University Library from the beginning.
Is this novel really on a list for people who hate to read books?
Even though I read a lot, I’ve always had friends who hate reading. Don’t get me wrong. My friends can read. They’re capable of reading. It’s just that they prefer to do other stuff with their time. It doesn’t cause problems with our friendships. They don’t tell me to stop reading, so I don’t tell them they should read more.
But every once in a while, when they’re curious about good books, I have found that even my friends who hate reading have enjoyed the books on the list in the video below.
These books are not recent. They’ve been around for a while. I don’t recommend these books all at one time. I don’t even recommend these books for everyone. These are not MUST READ books.
These are simply good/great books for people who usually don’t like to read.
But enough about me! What books would you recommend to a friend who can read but doesn’t?
(image via wikimedia)
Years ago, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were promoted as community builders with a purpose of bringing people together. Yeah, we laugh about that now, but that’s how it was.
Soon, it became clear that data collection was a huge part of social media platforms, and most people seemed to be okay with it. After all, if you didn’t want your data collected, you didn’t have to use the services. Now it looks like the platforms are deciding what ideas are acceptable and what ideas aren’t. In some cases, social media platforms are banning users from these platforms altogether because of those users’ words and ideas.
Next week, the American Library Association is promoting Banned Book Week. Despite what the name might suggest, Banned Book Week is about NOT banning books. That’s the whole point. The ALA promotes books that have been banned in the past. The ALA thinks banning books is bad. Books have been banned in the past because of words. Books have been banned because of ideas.
Books don’t get banned much anymore because it is now established that banning books is bad. Whenever a community tries to keep a book out of its school or community library, the rest of the country mocks that community for its backwards thinking. It’s pretty well established that book banning doesn’t happen nearly as much as it used to.
Now it’s social media that bans ideas. I don’t want ideas banned in books or social media, not even bad ideas. The whole point of free expression is for people to figure out for themselves what ideas are good and what ideas are bad. It seems that instead of mocking social media for banning ideas, people (usually called outrage mobs) encourage it.
I’m intentionally being vague about which words and ideas have been banned from social media because once you get specific, people start lecturing me about why the bad word, idea, or person is bad. I understand that already. I’m talking about the principal involved.
I’m over 50 years old. I’ve gotten my college degree and have been working for over 30 years. I don’t need an algorithm and some 30-year-olds deciding for me what ideas are safe and which are dangerous. I admit, I shouldn’t even mention age. I don’t even need any 70-year-olds keeping me safe from ideas either.
Since I’m over 50, I’ve had a lot of bad ideas and said a lot of stupid things in my life. Sometimes I’ve even been told to my face that what I’ve said is stupid. I didn’t like being contradicted in public (nobody likes it), but I’ve also learned from it. I’ve reshaped my own ideas from arguing things out, hearing other people, and deciding which of their ideas are stupid and which ones made sense. Arguing is like a rough draft for thinking. You have to get through the garbage to find the stuff worth keeping.
When social media bans people for saying controversial things, offensive things, or stupid things, it keeps adults from making the decisions for themselves. That might be okay in totalitarian countries, but it shouldn’t be okay in the United States.
I know social media platforms are run by companies/corporations that (to some extent) can make their own rules, and I believe in that too. My issue is that these entities aren’t being clear in their terms of service what their policies are. As a platform user, I’ve read the rules and have seen lots of vague terms that can be (and probably are) enforced arbitrarily. I’m not sure shareholders (and various legal systems) appreciate unequal enforcement of rules.
I admit, some of my concern is selfish. I’m putting more content on different platforms now, and I’d like to know the rules. I’ve seen people lose content or get banned for silly offenses. One guy got suspended from a platform because he wrote a metaphor that was taken literally by an outrage mob (Whoops! That’s almost a specific example!). The outrage mob was probably just one person with a bunch of fake accounts, but it can still look like a lot of outrage, and it got the guy suspended.
I’m not worried about me getting banned or suspended (yet). My writing/content is fairly benign. I don’t go out of my way to provoke people’s emotions or stir things up. But I like to read that kind of stuff. And I don’t want somebody else deciding what ideas I can see. If social media platforms are going to continue shutting users down, I want them to be up front about why. What exactly are we allowed say? What exactly can we NOT say? Will these rules be enforced on everybody or just the unpopular users?
Maybe it’s just me, but banning ideas seems to be the work of control freaks. When I was a kid, the social control freaks tried to ban certain books and certain music. They couldn’t ban much, but they got ratings. Those control freaks from 20-30 years ago gave us those ratings systems that encourage kids to buy mature stuff. Now a new generation of control freaks has gained control of social media. And I don’t think ratings will be enough for them this time.
*****
Enough about me! What do you think? Should social media platforms ban users for unpopular (but legal) words and ideas? Why or why not?
Reading about Moby Dick might be more fun than actually reading Moby Dick.
Classic literature is tough to read sometimes, and a book that gets criticized for this a lot is Moby Dick. Even though there might be books that are more hated than Moby Dick, it seems to be the standard. People who don’t read much aren’t familiar with polarizing novels like Infinite Jest or Finnegans Wake, but everybody’s heard of Moby Dick. Even people who don’t read hate Moby Dick just because of what they’ve heard.
Throughout the course of my life, I’ve been pro-Moby Dick, and I’ve been anti-Moby Dick. Right now I’m ambivalent about Moby Dick. It’s best to write about stuff when you’re not feeling too passionate. After all, you need to see both sides of an issue to be fair. A little passion is necessary for good writing, but too much can make you sound crazy. I don’t want to sound crazy when I’m talking about literature.
Sometimes I tell myself “I’ll never have to read Moby Dick again,” and I smile. I mean, I’m capable of reading Moby Dick. I might decide to challenge myself one final time, and that would be great. Even if I decide to read Moby Dick again, I probably won’t enjoy the experience. If I read Moby Dick again, I might even hate it.
Dysfunctional Literacy 