10 Things, For No Particular Reason

1. Driving makes us bipolar. If there’s a roadblock coming up in my lane so I try to move into your lane and you block me out, you’re an asshole. If you’re in my old lane and try to inch into my new lane, but in that douchey way where you drive right up to the roadblock and then need to get over RIGHTTHISMINUTE, you’re an asshole. If you’re taking too long at a light or intersection, you’re an asshole. If you beep at me under the same circumstance, um, hang ON, give me two seconds, you are such an asshole. If I know you and you relate any of the above situations as having happened to you, the other person is automatically an asshole. Somehow we’re never the assholes.

2. There are certain lines from movies, especially 80s movies, that can instabond otherwise strangers, like “Ray, when someone asks if you’re a god, you say YES,” “I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City,” and “STRIKE FIRST STRIKE HARD NO MERCY SIR.” There are many of these that you could bust out with that would make me suddenly love you, but none moreso than, “Sesame Plexor? Oooh, she’s such a sleaze!” Anyone…anyone?

3. My eighth grade English teacher was probably my favorite teacher ever. He dressed like a crazy person and straight up looked like a monkey. He had us read The Most Dangerous Game and The Cask of Amontillado, both of which he infused with such goosebumpy drama that I’ve never forgotten them. He could read your cell phone contract to you and you’d be riveted. He hated redundancy and used to throw a book across the room whenever he heard the words “old adage,” because an adage already means old. I think of him whenever I hear someone say that.

4. I’m reading a book by a woman named Donna Tartt. I randomly grabbed something to use for a bookmark and realized later that it was a picture of a lemon.

5. When your dad’s friend’s wife is obnoxious and everyone knows it (she corrects people’s mispronunciations, works in some random HR job but acts like it’s the Oval Office, and has no children but will tell you how you’re raising yours wrong), you still can’t really express that to your dad in the way that you really want to, because, well, it’s your dad. You have to say something like, “Dad, I just don’t like her. She’s mean. You know? Remember the fourth of July?” It’s frustrating because nothing but saying out loud that she’s A TOTAL CUNT will ever feel satisfying.

6. It’s weird to think about the services that have become passe. Like video stores. I never saw that coming. When you see one now, it’s actually worth pointing out, like it’s an endangered species (“If you’re very, very quiet, and you look out the jeep window to your right, you’ll see the elusive Hollywood Video, a formerly docile creature, now in a violent struggle for survival…”) I just wonder what industry will be totally shut down next by some technology that never occurred to anyone and in the next breath no one could live without. Isn’t it bizarre to think that you’ll be in the middle of some random anecdote years from now, and one of your kids will pipe in with, “Wait, what’s a VIDEO STORE?”

7. I have no idea why some pop songs seem infused with the kind of mind-bending absurdity that somehow illuminates exactly what’s wrong with the world today, and others are like, yay, I love this one, turn it up.

8. I am fustrated by people who pronounce it fustrated. All of these people can say frugal, fruitcake, fraction, fragile, and fraternizing. There is no logical explanation for this.

9. I like to think that on an everyday basis, Obama speaks in the endlessly vague proclamations that he rocks in every speech, and how nightmarish it must be for his staff to try to decipher him long enough to actually make a to-do list. “Okay, sir, on Monday you have an 11:00 about demanding results from the government at every level, and then a lunch meeting about how we have to roll up our sleeves and bring change to America…”

10. My mom’s birthday is coming up and she told me that she wants night vision goggles. This probably tells you everything about my family that you need to know.