Saturday, November 26, 2011

Application Armageddon

My first deadline is now less than a week away—Thursday, December 1.  Dum, dum, dum!  But behind all of my lazy blogging this month, I’ve actually been catching up with my applications and I’m in pretty good shape currently.  After this one, I have due dates of December 5, 9, 15, and 31 before the January onslaught hits.  Hopefully, once I get this first app in the rest will follow in streamline fashion—hopefully.

This is actually a pretty good impression of me... after moving in with Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern when they got locked out.

And though I hate this and all other upcoming applications, the schools I’m applying to, and their dastardly deadlines, I can’t help appreciate the appropriate timing of these deadlines.  Now that Thanksgiving is officially over and the Christian, commercial, and secular worlds can finally sink their collective teeth into Christmas, what better time to introduce a ticking clock?  Think of any Christmas movie that you’ve ever seen—from Rudolph to Home Alone—there’s always some kind of countdown to Christmas where the characters need to accomplish something by Christmas morn, or at least hold on until then.  All I need now is a cartoony colander laden with black ‘X’’s to count the days down to the respective doom days—application Armageddon.  Hmm, really too many religious references in this post me thinks.

What does any of this mean?  It means I’m sitting around trying to clean up my writing pieces and struggling to put on the final tinsley touches on my statements of purposes, so instead I’m writing this post—sweet distraction.  But I shall return to my stupid work—some time, soonish—with a ticking clock in my head and thoughts of Macaulay Culkin throwing paint cans at Joe Pesci.  ‘Tis the season.  

Saturday, November 19, 2011

My Latest Rant


To my great shame, I missed posting last week—the first time since I began the blog in June.  To my dear, dear followers—all 10 of you—and to all others who follow this blog in secret, I’m sorry.  My bad.  My bad. 

But as I said, my time is tightly strained these days and my mind is not really oriented towards blogging; it’s oriented towards statements of purposes, finishing writing samples, online apps, and shuffling around schools’ admissions directory until I find the right person.  So in short, I’m all about the things that annoy me right now.  Here, in no particular order, are some more of them;

1.)   Khakis—every time I wear Khakis I feel like I’ve failed.  Wearing them is like wearing a tight, wrinkly white flag around all day.  12-year-olds wear Khakis when they are forced to.  Grown men, which I’m very similar to, should not have to wear them.  They’re the sign of someone who can’t really dress up—doesn’t have the cloths or the savvy—but wants to give it a half ass try, like the guys who “dress up” to go on Jerry Springer. I have to wear Khakis to work most days because I only own two real button-down shirts that go with slacks.  I’d much prefer just wearing jeans, but apparently those aren’t professional enough, although they are decidedly less sad.

FAIL.
2.)   Speeding Tickets—I think speed limits are a good thing and I’m not going to argue against them—it’s the speeding traps that I loathe.  We all know what’s going on here, I thought to myself as the cop who refused to look at my unbuttoned shirt, wrote me my ticket.  Worse yet is that if you want to pay the ticket in full and take the points assigned to your driver’s license, it’s a pretty easy procedure.  But try to keep some of their money and appeal and/ or accept driving school, then it’s a round-the-world adventure full of magical appointments and mystical forms that save you little money and add much wasted time and frustration to the whole ordeal.  In a month, I’ll have to burn 8 hours sitting in driver’s ed classroom with some interesting folks I’m sure, but at least I’ll get some good writing fodder.

3.)    Ashton Kutcher—What happened to this guy?  Remember Kelso?  Yeah man, Kelso.  That was a great show.  Now he’s selling cameras and doing his best to hide from Bruce Willis?  What happened to this guy?

4.)   Christmas songs on the radio… since November 1—Christmas creep they call it, but it really needs a name far less cute and more ominous.  Yuletide Armageddon?  Is Halloween, the candy cramming-est, Great Pumpkin waiting for-est, first real holiday of the season, really the only thing damming up the flash flood that Christmas has become?  I love Christmas, but the reason it’s special is because it only really exists in that magical realm between November 25 and December 25, or January 1, or January 7 if you’re down with the Three Kings Day.  Radio, you’re wasting my flava’!  Next thing you’ll be telling me is that all the kids would be buying Frankenberry cereal if it was sold year-round.  Hmm, touché, self…
You were my breakfast night light.

5.)   Captain Crunch is getting discontinued—Speaking of cereal, the Cap’n isn’t my favorite, but it just makes me feel good knowing it’s there—alright, all these things are really just minor annoyance compared to these grad school apps.  As soon as they’re done, I’ll gladly sit in driving school, wearing my Khakis, listening to Jingle Bell Rock (although by December that’ll be about right), sitting next to Ashton, not spoon-feeding him Captain Crunch.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Cruel, Sweet, Sweaty Distractions

Currently, grad school applications are the bane of my existence, and it’s funny how easily one can be distracted from one’s bane.  Facebook is the devil—that’s well known.  Gmail should remove the refresh application from the menu bar because apparently I have to click it every thirty seconds.  And Hulu, well there’s just no escaping from the latest episode of Law and Order SVU—the stories are frick’n ripped from the headlines, people! 

Drama at its best, don't tell me different
 These are all horrible distractions and I am a horrible person for giving them power over me.  But they all pale in comparison to the grand-daddy of all distractions for me: fantasy football.

Sports have long been the grand distraction from life for dudes, if not lady dudes and all dudekind.  They're an amalgamation of various rules, statistics, and actions, none of which make any sense from any “real world” perspective.  Take baseball, please.  If an alien race came to Earth and tried to understand the twisted, sweaty Rubix Cube that is the three-outs, three-strikes, infield fly rule game of baseball, they would probably just vaporize us out of frustration. 

The Wide World of Sports totally separate from the real world, and thusly, offers an escape from it.  The arbitrary stats and figures fans get from sports might as well be pertaining to city bus schedules—they’re just as worthless to everything outside of them—but they are also an investible distraction from everything outside of them.  Fantasy Football is just the natural evolution of this.  Watching football and mentally collecting these stats and figures is okay, but to use them to compete against friends, casual acquaintances, or mortal enemies takes the distraction to a whole new level.  Suddenly, the distraction is given additional validity. 

I loves the Fantasy Football, but I harbor no delusions about it.  It's the essence of trivial.  But if I didn't realize this, every female comedian is kind of enough to devote a portion of her routine to explaining it to Neanderthals like me.  Now I wouldn’t dream to contend the likes of Kathy Griffin or Whitney Cummings, but I would like to offer a slice of enlightenment pie to all of those pots calling kettles black out there, and it’s called celebrity gossip.

For every ESPN and Fantasy Sports chat room there is an E! Network and TMZ.  There is no difference between knowing how many yards Frank Gore rushed for against the Cowboys and what the details of Kim Kardashian's pre-nup.  Both are equally trivial, and to argue against either is even more trivial. 

     

                                                                    
But sports and celebrity gossip are unified in what they offer the world: a distraction from it.  Everything in moderation, to each his own, and blah, blah, blah.  The real take away here is that writing a blog is also a grand distraction--maybe reading it can be too?  Now if you’ll excuse me I have to finish my statement of purpose to Ohio State and decide whether I want to start Hakeem Nicks or DeSean Jackson this week on my Fantasy Football team.  Both are of equal importance.