A Pixelated Mind

I enjoy saying sentences that contain entire stories within so as to entice people into asking about them… then refusing to say anything. Often times people become angry, but this also works when people know the story I’m referring to and they laugh along. This is similar to my belief that sometimes punchlines make better jokes than the jokes themselves.

For instance:

• Remember that time I showed up for those classes for an entire semester?
• Or how about when my head was accidentally shaved by a pathologically lying, blond lesbian?
• This one time my mate Frank and I showed up to a random Astronomy class, took the test, and scored higher than anyone else in the class.
• Say, how about that time I had to be rushed to the hospital and my friends stopped to make a pizza instead of driving me there?
• And what about the time I drove 3,500 kilometers across the country by myself… in one go… and I did it four times?
• The middle two were from Pennsylvania to Texas and were decided on a 2:00 a.m. whim, weren’t they?
• And it was the Saturday right before that where you dressed up as a woman to sneak into a Sex Toy party and realized that men were obsolete.
• What about that time you kissed your lesbian best friend?
• Speaking of which, remember when you asked out a girl during a Gay Rights rally?
• Or when you became your mate’s archnemesis and didn’t set him up with the love of his life, despite the fact that you were the only one that knew how they felt about each other?
• Then when you accidentally broke into this same friend’s house in the middle of the night, cut your wrists, and had to be rushed to a hospital in a car that was blind, slow, couldn’t stop, and was one spark away from blowing up..
• Or when your mates broke into your old campus to paint the Black Panther that was prominently displayed in front of campus pink?
• What about when you dressed up as Santa Claus for the last day of school your freshman year of high school?
• Or when you were suspended two days after Columbine for… nah, you wouldn’t be interested…
• Then there was a bomb threat the one day you were suspended?
• Or when you and your mates had that hotel room and you accidentally destroyed three lamps, a bed, poked four holes in the walls and one in the roof, stole pizza from the school bus, threw a party in your friend’s room, covered as your friends snuck out to see their girlfriends, and then broke into the mini-fridge?
• What about the time you walked 30 miles in the desert, wearing all black, to get to a girl’s house only to find her dad waiting for you when you arrived?
• Or when your mate stole the fire truck?
• How about the night you kept your friend Jack awake for over 48 hours through a Harry Potter book party and a drive to Albuquerque only to leave him alone in an apartment while you went out with your friends– and then he couldn’t sleep?
• Or going on exchange across the planet on a whim?

there’s going to be more. Count on that.

The deadline for the next WTF! Carnival is now, now, NOW!! Send your submissions to submissions(at)pixcapacitor(dot)com with “WTF Carnival” in the subject line and I shall forward them to Seth. Alternatively, you could simply send them to Seth and cut out the middleman.

(the beauty of this is in the anonymity. See, I used up all my quips in my last goodie grab bag and now I have to come up with six out of thin air. See if you can find my terrible, terrible submissions in the next edition)

If you’re wondering, the rules are here: http://wtfcarnival.blogspot.com/

And here and here are some samples of what you should write.. If you wish to host a future edition, contact someone (anyone. Heck, contact yourself if you like).

I have a five year old cousin. We call him “Lexus” on the count that his mother kept talking about how she was going to buy a Lexus before she got pregnant then never again afterwards.

Lexus doesn’t have any cousins his age. His best friend is 3 and he can’t keep up. But then, I challenge anyone alive to keep up with this kid’s energy.

Lexus is a maniac. He’s not good at sitting and listening, reading, counting, or anything that doesn’t involve fun. And what’s worse, since he has no obligations, he has nothing to do but have fun… or at least try to.

Yesterday he was over and he kept pressuring me to play Star Wars Monopoly with him. (He doesn’t know how to play Monopoly and, to be honest, he wasn’t too keen on learning. He just wanted to play and this board had space ships.)

I’m a busy guy. There are eight e-mails I have to catch up with, four articles I have to write, dozens of introductions and blurbs to write, a viewspaper to restart, an address book to compile, a blog I must keep updating, friend(s) that keep seeking me out, a journal I have to write my memory in, and a half-dozen other– equally important– things to take care of.

But I made time to play with him. At least I tried. Part of what makes me so busy is my inability to finish projects before I start new ones. So I kept getting interrupted while we played and Lexus kept getting bored and running around, throwing things.

Enter my brother.

My brother is old now, but few people would accuse him of being mature. In fact, I can clearly remember my brother acting exactly the way Lexus acts now… when my brother was twelve.

Lexus throws dice and hits some pieces, knocking them off the board. My brother yells at him. To me this seems to be the utmost of hipocrisy, but it’s not.

My brother is a grown up now. He’s allowed. Sort of.

That’s what I say about adulthood creeping. I can tell Lexus all day about how my brother was exactly like him and how my brother also played around, but Lexus will always see my brother as a grown up who is old, responsible, and mature in the same way I always see my parents as that despite what my uncles say.

If it’s hard for a child to imagine something that seems so obvious to me, it must be torture for a grown up to not be believed in something that is so integral to their present existence.

So now everyone who was a brat when I was a brat is allowed to yell at my little cousin and I’m the only one who swallows his pride and tries to teach/play with the kid. And even I fail at that.

Poor Lexus. Twenty parents and not one sibling.

I remember when I turned 14… I was a sophomore in high school, I had just finished starring in my Drama club play. I was about to write my first viewspaper and have my first girlfriend (had I known how that would have turned out, I would have waited another 14 years. *ugh*).Before that, I remember when I was 10.

Age just happens. You hear that a lot, but it never quite makes sense until it happens to you. I remember as a child I thought that college students were so much more mature and ready to take on more work.

And yeah, we kind of are, but not really. I don’t feel like I’ve matured so much as adapted. I don’t feel much smarter than when I was 14 (in fact, I remember at 14 feeling much smarter than I feel now). I can probably do more work quicker, bear more responsibility, and be trusted a hell of a lot more, but so would any veteran of teenage warfare.

There’s no transition period, no realization. One day you just wake up and realize that not only are you as old as an adult and not only do you have to do as much as an adult, but you are also sort of ready for it.

Responsibility creeps.

Blogging etiquette. Some helpful tips for the aspiring blogger:

Don’t

• …steal posts or post ideas unless you can add to them in a significant way.
• …hold anything back. If you have people in the ‘real world’ reading your blog, tough. If you don’t want people knowing your inner mind, why’d you show them your site? Face it, when you show people your site you either want to boost your fan base or share something with them. And if you truly want to share something with them, why not make a page specifically for everyone? Write a suicide note (by the way, in researching this bullet point, I found my new favorite site. Check this out) and give them the link, or– better yet and less dramatically– make a decoy blog and let them read that (my decoy blog is Goosing the Antithesis .
• …hold nothing back. Sometimes we really, honestly don’t care. A little venting is fine, but etiquette requires you be at least marginally conscious of your audience.
• …write when you have nothing to write.
• …write two words when one will do. Or make your posts excessively long. Or hammer through a point that people got in the first sentence. Also, make sure you absolutely never try to attack redundancy by being redundant. That joke is so old it tripped over its breast and broke its hip.
• …go crazy with backgrounds, frames, html, or anything else that puts form over function. A pretty blog is one thing, but sometimes it can get ridiculous.
• …do poetry… unless you’re good at it, have something to communicate with it, or are doing it as a lark.
• …be a SPAM blog or do the job of one by falling for a pyramid scheme.
• …edit posts without letting people know. (For instance, if someone catches you not doing your homework on ‘Chanukkah,’ comment with a “thanks Seth, fixed the thing,” instead of fixing it and commenting with a “sorry Seth, I think you’re imagining things, I see no factual errors in my post.”)
• …steal bandwidth.

Do

• …trackback to other people’s posts if trackback is supported.
• …comment where available when something is useful, entertaining, or thought-provoking.
• …read this post.
• …respond to your readers.
• …blog regularly.
• …try new ideas.
• …tell people about yourself.
• …blog about good things sometimes.
• …anger someone. If you usually find yourself agreeing with the general public, you’re both wrong. I like to have one arch-nemesis at any given time, but it’s been a while since I’ve found anyone who was truly my match… or who realized that they were my arch-nemesis :-þ

Sometimes Do and Sometimes Don’ts

• …be purely useful, entertaining, or thought-provoking.
• …intertwine your personal life with your blog. (Unless it’s a personal blog, in which case: assume nobody’s reading it because– unless they want you, are bored a lot, or want to hear your side of the story without having you specifically tell them– nobody is readingwhat you write.)
• …try radical new ideas.
• …smile while you post.
• …blog while angry or sad.