fake excuses

Sometimes, a situation calls for an excuse.

Sometimes, it calls for an excuse/blow-off.

"I have to wash my hair" used to be the token great excuse to both remove yourself from a situation and blow someone off at the same time. But that's been a little overdone. Here are some better excuses in the same vein:

Said sincerely, the result of these excuses will be the original result of "I have to wash my hair."

Here is the formula for making a new, better excuse:

Go for it! Make your own! Enjoy blowing off skeevy jerks everywhere!

meeting an ex

Meeting a significant other's ex is not very fun. It is true, she is always someone incredibly different from you.

(In my case, usually someone who does not enjoy fuzzy green hats or own a bizarre, misbehaving cat.)

It also never goes well, due to extreme awkwardness and the sneaky feeling that the ex might somehow be superior to you. However, while you are thinking all these negative thoughts, remember the theme of this meeting:

Quietly remembering that you are THE WINNER will help you avoid two prominent examples of natural, embarrassing, ex-induced behavior:

1) the sneaky lap-crawl

2) the monologue

These behaviors are not typical of the winner you are. Just be a nice, cordial, good person. If you start feeling insecure again, consider these analogies. The ex you are talking to probably falls into at least one of them.

Here are the explanations for these analogies:

Geocities: people are embarrassed to say they used it to build a website.
Wordpress: people are excited to use it to build a website now.
Dreamcast: Soon after purchase, people realize that it had no lasting value
N64: Despite time, people look upon it with fondness and nostalgia
Beanie babies: not awesome.
The fact that people no longer collect beanie babies: very awesome.

cooking

Cooking is weird. There are a bunch of things that naturally taste good, like nuts and berries and other fruits and raw vegetables. Or even cooked vegetables. But cooking seems to specialize in making totally inedible stuff taste really good.

The evolution of this art puzzles me.

It's almost as confusing as the evolution of beer.

Lately, some of my friends have been asking me about cooking and how one cooks well. I'm not really sure, since I don't consider myself to be a cook. But, from what I can tell, cooking just means adding as many tasty things as possible to something which is naturally untasty.

When I cook, I often must decide whether or not to add a particular ingredient. When this occurs, I ask myself: tasty, or untasty?

If tasty, I add. If untasty, I do not add.

There are some exceptions to this rule. One must use common sense: will this tasty go well with the current level of untasty?

Note: In the case of tasty bacon (pictured above), the answer is almost always yes.

loud noises

I have recently realized that I don't like noise. This is possibly because, when you add sound to anything that does not require sound, it immediately becomes more annoying.

Clearly, unnecessary sound is very grating. Unnecessary volume doesn't help things, either.

Once you notice that loud noises are annoying, you start into a downward spiral of anger and bad moods. You attempt to reduce the amount of noise around you, but that only makes annoying noises seem louder when you go outside.

There are not very many good solutions to this problem. Ignoring it is hard. Moving to a more quiet place is expensive and inconvenient.

You could try to blot out the sound using ear coverings, but that is a little conspicuous. Here are some suggestions for protecting your hearing, incognito.

No matter what you do, you will be existing in a happy bubble of noise reduction. You can once again be happy in the presence of noisy objects.

Of course, reducing your hearing can be dangerous. It can expose you to obvious dangers, such as not being able to hear a car coming when you cross the street. Plus, there are other dangers. If you are employing all three methods at once, you will certainly be living in a bubble of silence. You may think no one is talking about you, but that's only because you can't hear them.

Ignorance is bliss, people!

how to date a baker

Are you dating a baker?

Does your significant other enjoy making delicious desserts, rather than dinners?

Does your boyfriend or girlfriend bake elaborate cakes, delectable brownies, and perfect cookies, but then eat a frozen pizza for dinner?

If so, you may be dating a baker. Being a baker, I have some helpful tips for how to date one of us.


Keep a well-stocked pantry.
Flour! Butter! Sugar! Fine kosher salt (not coarse salt)! Semisweet chocolate chips! Keep these kinds of things around, and your baker will be drawn to your apartment like a bee to a field of wildflowers.

Learn to cook.
Many bakers don't cook. Cooking stresses us out with its wishy-washy imprecision. Chances are, if a baker is making a savory dish, it's not in the way that any normal cook would.

If you learn to cook, your baker will think you are awesome. You do something that the baker does not, and therefore are interesting. Since you cook, you also provide sustenance that a baker cannot provide for him or herself. If a baker is a monkey, you are like a banana tree. Basically, you are the best thing in the world.

Make sure your baker is not stressed.
Since baking well is fairly time consuming, some of us do it only when we have time, and many of us do it when we don't have time but are incredibly stressed. If your baker is making cookies at an illogical time, make sure to talk to him or her, to determine if something stressful is going on.

If you do so, your baker will think you are an incredibly sensitive and awesomely observant individual!

Also, don't be a dirtbag (general good advice for any relationship) by stressing your baker out on purpose just to get baked goods. I've never heard of anyone ever doing this, but I do wonder if it happens since so many bakers I know produce cookies when stressed. We are like some kind of oddly evolved animal with a TERRIBLE survival mechanism.

When purchasing baking things for your baker, use caution.
Baking is practically a science. The people who like it are precise about their ingredients and picky about their tools. If you want to get your baking significant other something for the kitchen, make sure to take requests before you go out and buy something. Otherwise, your baker will feel like a pirate who has received a not-very-piratey hat.

Follow these tips! Be good to your baker, and you can look forward to a relationship full of delicious cookies, amazing pies, and awesome cakes. Good luck!

injuries

Injuries happen. If you are me, injuries will occur regardless of whether I am doing anything dangerous or not.

For this reason, I feel like it is important to play a sport. Because, I don't like explaining how I get injured, but I also don't like to lie directly.

If I play a sport, I can just make statements about my life, and allow people to draw their own conclusions.

Sometimes, though, playing sports is difficult. In this case, I think it is important to acquire a potentially dangerous job or hobby that actually contains no danger at all.

That way, injuries created for no reason at all suddenly have meaning. Hooray!

migraine headache

Yesterday, I had the worst migraine headache I'd ever had.

I basically only get migraines when this happens:

So after I have finally finished my exam, or written that paper, or whatever else I was worried about, I want to be doing this:

But instead, my brain has me doing this:

The funny thing about my migraines is that they happen so infrequently that I don't notice the symptoms. It usually goes like this:

This has happened to me several times, and yet I still never see it coming. When it comes to migraines, I react the way I imagine a medieval peasant reacted to eclipses.

Watch out for migraines, people! Recognize the signs with this handy acronym!

kids are like cats

20-somethings are not always good with small children. This is a problem at large family gatherings like reunions or weddings. The kids know they are supposed to like you, because their moms say they should. However, they are suspicious because they haven't seen you in a long time.

In order to relieve stress of trying to both take care of kids and participate in family events, the moms might pass their kids off to you with a comment like, "Can you watch Billy?" or "You're good with kids, right?"

If you own a cat, you can answer with a resounding, "Of course!" Because kids are like cats.

For example, is a list of stuff my cat likes that my cousins also like.

1) Being ignored.
Trying too hard with kids and cats has the same result.

It usually ends with the smaller party hiding under a couch or in a closet. However, both kids and cats inevitably seem to drift towards the person at a family event who is least interested in them. So, you should ignore them. They will think you are the coolest person in the world.

2) Playing with things that are NOT toys.
According to my friends who majored in psychology, this has something to do with non-toys being "novel objects." Either way, kids and cats seem to want to play with everything except for the presents people have bought for them. Plus, they both love cardboard boxes and paper bags.

3) Climbing on people.
Kids and cats really enjoy using adult humans as their own personal jungle gym. Admit it-- if you were that small, you would too.

4) Giving weird presents.
My cat gets really offended if I don't accept his dead birds. Even if your cousin draws you something as strange as a dead bird, you should make a big deal over it. Otherwise, like my cat, he will spend all day being sad.

So, if you know how to make a cat happy, you probably know how to make a kid happy. Accordingly, if you know how to make a cat UNhappy, you know what NOT to do with kids.

DO NOT...
1) Force them to wear outfits
2) Expect them to do tricks
3) Tickle them
4) Give them stupid nicknames
5) Feed them after midnight

No wait... that's gremlins.

Summary venn diagrams!

 

the ninja turtle hypothesis

My favorite ninja turtle was Donatello. This is because Donatello was the smartest of the turtles. And he used a bowstaff, which was cool.

I hang out with a group of cerebral neuroscientists. In one of our conversations, we realized that almost everyone in the group favored Donatello out of the four pizza loving turtles. This led me to a hypothesis.

The type of ninja turtle you liked as a kid predicts the kind of job you will have.

This is based on the idea that you liked the turtle that was like you. People who liked ideas and inventions liked Donatello. People who liked leading a group liked Leonardo. Party-goers liked Michelangelo. Loners liked Raphael.

Here is my hypothesized correlation between preferred ninja turtles and jobs:

The Raphael correlation might surprise you, but remember that Raphael is the only turtle who truly strives for self-discovery, and who struggles with his own identity. He does not want to be a turtle. A person with a Raphael-type personality, upon maturing, is likely to want to help guide others to a similar level of maturity.

This chart is similar to my hypothesized correlation between preferred Hogwarts houses and jobs, although Slytherin does not fit.

These jobs make sense, because, each ninja turtle has a distinct high-priority goal and desired role in a group.

Most people I have encountered in scientific fields liked Donatello. Most people in business and politics liked Leonardo. As our generation grows up, the cartoon characters we liked as kids can actually begin to predict the people we want to be.

Kind of interesting and all, but thinking about this kind of thing has also unfortunatley changed the way I look at the ninja turtles.

Get a job, Mikey!

getting married is the same as colonizing mars

In college, we thought the idea of getting engaged was really terrifying.

This was partially because, according to all the Meg Ryan movies I watched as a child, finding your lifelong mate is supposed to be some amazing journey full of serendipitous circumstance. Like a chance-encounter-turned-masquerade between book-lovers (You've Got Mail). Or a slow realization of love for a life-long friend who keeps re-entering your life (When Harry Met Sally). And even if you end up with that person, THAT guy might be the wrong guy, and in fact the right guy is some dude on the radio you've never even met (Sleepless in Seattle).

Whenever I asked fellow movie-goers about why those two people in the movie ended up together, the answer was inevitably: "They are right for each other."

"'Right for each other?'" I'd echo in dismay, "I really have no idea what that means."

The answer? "You'll know when it happens."

The incredibly vague nature of this statement has led to a certain level of anxiety during first dates.

Also, it made me worry that if there hadn't been at least one serious, drama-generating fight worthy of amazing screen-time and great cinematography, we were NOT "right for each other."

Clearly, "right for each other" is an incredibly vague and stupid metric that has caused me some level of anxiety. I have come up with a more specific and better test.

First, a backstory.

I like to fantasize about colonizing Mars. When I was a nerdy child, I did not go to sporty outdoors camp like the rest of the kids. Instead I went to nerd camp and took a class called Astrobiology, where we talked about what it would be like to live in space and discover new life forms. We learned about things like the habitable zone, and the evolution of new life. We sculpted clay aliens. It was awesome, and it made me want to colonize Mars.

So, when I talked to my friends about marriage, I realized that marriage is basically like colonizing Mars.

Here is the situation:

You live on earth with everyone you know. And then people are like, "Oh hey, please go colonize Mars. We have everything set up for you, like a basic living environment and everything. You don't have to have any special skills to live there. And you can bring only one person with you."

The question you have to ask yourself is, who do you bring? Would you bring the person you are currently dating? Might you bring them, if things continued to go well for another year?

We always ask each other, "Am I right for this person? Are they right for me?" But that's super vague. That's not a real situation. Instead, I ask, "Would you bring them to Mars?" If you wouldn't bring the person to Mars, and you don't think you ever will, you probably shouldn't be dating them.