When you play with fire, you usually don't get burned, but it does frequently end in property damage.

I recently dug up this little gem from a book project I was working on which shared the name of my blog. I plan to eventually publish many of these little posts and anecdotes into a humor book called “Letters From a Geek,” and this is one of the earlier entries into the project files. The rest were unfortunately lost to my hard drive crashes, but this one survived. I realize I have completely failed in my quest to post an update every day this week, but hey. Three posts in a week is better than I’ve done in months, so there’s that. I honestly think after this, the blog is going to become a once-or-twice weekly thing. But anyway! Here’s another fun tale from my childhood.

   

  It has become evident to me that in families containing at least two or more male children, at least one of them will be a pyromaniac. Even though I am a man, I cannot explain the kind of seductive power an open flame has on the psyche of a young boy. However, I do know it exists and that the only thing between that boy and arson is a clear plastic wall labeled “Common Sense.” It has also become evident to me that with any male children at all, common sense is anything but common. This observation is better displayed by my own immediate family than any other that I’ve met except maybe for my younger cousin, but we’ll get to him later.

    

 Even though common sense is something I’ve had a firm grasp on since early childhood, the same can’t be said for my younger brother Evan. From the beginning, he never seemed to grasp the concept that certain things were against the rules because we might actually get hurt or hurt something, and not just because our parents had some sort of rule-making quota to fill. This is probably the single aspect of life where the difference between us is most prevalent. If given a rule to follow, I will follow the rule. I may question the rule’s purpose, or the amount of sense it makes, or if we could be better off without it, but I follow it nonetheless. Evan, on the other hand, has always been of the mindset that if a rule didn’t make sense to him (or maybe just prohibited something he thought seemed fun) it really didn’t apply to him. And when you couple that mindset with his innate love of fire and the aforementioned male-child-pyromania syndrome, it’s a recipe for unfortunate experimentation. (Actually, unfortunate experimentation is a label which can be applied to the vast majority of a boy’s youth.)

   

  Fortunately for all of us, he didn’t take the douse-and-burn or the major criminal offense path. Unfortunately, I can’t count the number of times I walked into our bedroom to be greeted by the smell of the melting plastic remains of what was inevitably some small object which used to be mine (much to the dismay of his pet lizard whose heating lamp was being borrowed for other purposes). He did start with his own belongings, of course, but it wasn’t long before he melted through his own box of 24 crayons and realized he was out of his own stuff he was willing to experiment with. He swore up and down he never burned anything of mine, however. It was just a convenient coincidence that he happened to own a plastic army man exactly like the one that vanished from my drawer, or any number of rubber erasers which I’d obviously somehow misplaced from the plastic box on my desk. He eventually got over melting things on a heat lamp bulb which didn’t actually provide any visible open flame, but rather the somehow satisfactory feeling of destroying something, and thus moved on to the next best thing: aerosol combustibles.

  

   While requesting it under the deceptively innocent guise of keeping up their appearances at school, my brother and cousin spent many an hour spraying down their hands, feet, clothing, skateboards and in one particularly impulsive instance their heads with Axe body spray, and then lighting the respective areas on fire. Yes, folks, when one has run out of things to light on fire, the next logical step is to light oneself on fire. I quickly became accustomed to the smell of burning deodorant and justified my apathy and ignorance of the activity by assuring myself that at least they weren’t huffing it.

  

   I will never forget the day, however, when I walked out of my bedroom after a two hour-long session of Super Smash Brothers to find that the familiar burning smell from my brother’s room was a bit stronger than usual. Ignoring it at first, I proceeded to the kitchen where in the middle of fixing myself some lunch, I happened to look up and noticed a slight haze in the room. Upon further investigation, the haze was actually sweeping the entire house and seemed to be coming from the hall. As I entered the hallway on the way back to my bedroom (which for some reason provided a false sense that my brother’s activities would not affect me) I was greeted by my brother’s panicked face. He bolted from his bedroom and slammed the door shut as more of the haze poured from his doorway. We traded looks over a long moment, and in a decision which I both understand and regret, I chose not to ask why the house smelled like impending disaster and instead walked into my room and shut the door. That peace lasted all of fifteen minutes before without a word my brother opened my door, turned my ceiling fan to high and opened my window, then exited.

  

   With my last safe haven of blissful ignorance invaded, I decided to go and survey the damage to make sure that there was absolutely no way I was going to be blamed for anything in the coming storm when my parents got home. I found him running through the house with every can of air freshener he could find, spraying them liberally. It ultimately resulted in the house smelling as if someone had mistaken a potpourri arrangement for a fire pit. When I finally asked him exactly what was going on, his entire explanation consisted of “I burned something.” It was only when I decided to investigate his bedroom and found his entire bed flipped upside down that he decided to inform me that what he had burned was the entire underside of his bed. He had been using body spray to light little flash-fires on his skateboard when the flame followed the sinking aerosol fumes beneath his bed and ignited the fuzzy underside of the box. I said nothing, and returned to my room.

  

   Later, when my father arrived home and the house was still under a slight haze and still smelled like a Bath and Bodyworks warehouse fire, Evan explained the situation away by stating that he had “lit a piece of paper on fire with a candle”. Brilliant move there, explaining the smog, burned smell and the overlapping aroma of eight cans of air freshener. Either way though, even with knowledge of the obvious lie, my father decided he didn’t really want to know exactly what had happened and didn’t press the matter further.

   

  I learned two lessons that day: The first was that our smoke detector needed new batteries, and the second was that the instant he learned that the glass-bottle variety of body sprays could be turned into Molotov cocktails, I was moving out.

                                                                                                                                   -The Sarcastic Soul-

Jellyfish - An Episode From My Childhood

Ah, youth. A man’s boyhood is an important time of learning and developing of character to shape and determine the kind of man he’ll grow to be.

Unfortunately, my childhood is a large portion of my life which I would be happier to repress and never visit again. It still comes back to haunt me in quiet hours like some kind of vengeful spirit. However, as much as I hate to look back on it out of sheer embarrassment, I’m forced to admit that in retrospect, many of these somewhat traumatic events are actually pretty comical. This is one of them.

If you’ve never been to Surfside beach, anyone who has can tell you that you aren’t really missing much. It’s really only a beach in the basest sense of the word. It’s a place where ocean meets land, so it earns the title by default. A single visit would be enough to show you however that it’s really not much more than a glorified mud hole. The sand is really more like really gritty mud, and the water year-round is a lovely shade of dirty mop-water. I mean, I wouldn’t go so far as to ask to see my feet when I’m waist-deep in the waves or anything, but it would kind of be nice to see my ankles when I’m only ankle-deep. Regardless of the lack of visibility and sanitation, however, people still splash right out into those waves every year. I was one of those people until one fateful day in my youth.

I must have been in second or third grade, I can’t really remember which. My fruitless attempts to drive these memories from my mind have really only succeeded in scrambling my sense of age or time regarding when they happened, but the actual events remain clear as crystal. Anyway, the family had decided to take a beach day, so we packed up into the car with our sunscreen, various sand toys and beach chairs and headed out to the ancient wooden monstrosity that was Stahlman Park. The term “park” there is used fairly lightly.
There was a barbecue area off to one side, and there were a couple of playgrounds, but the actual facility itself was a large open room which was used primarily for weddings and church picnics. Most people really only used it for the showers and the easy beach access. It had been rotting in the sea breeze there since the 70’s, so the entire thing might as well have been one giant splinter.

Once we had gotten out to the beach and scraped aside enough seaweed to set our towels and chairs up, my brother and cousin and I began our usual beach day routine. First order of business was to dig a giant hole. Why? Because we were boys. There are few things more fascinating to young boys than digging giant holes to see what you can unearth, but since most fathers (including mine) frown on the idea of grabbing shovels and digging gigantic lawnmower-swallowing pits in the yard, the only place we were allowed to have at it was the beach. Once we hit the water table, we used the goopy slurry of groundwater, tar and sand to create all sorts of things like drizzle sandcastles and mudballs. …Actually, drizzle castles and mudballs are the only things you can make from it.

The next order of business is to try for the perfect balance of surface sand and water table muck to create the most stable mudball. The object was to make one that would bake solid in the sun and not break apart when you threw it at sandpipers and seagulls who got too close. At least until you got tired of waiting for them to get too close and started chasing after them instead. This game was always short-lived, however, because the parents would always put an end to it before much progress was made. I can only imagine their reasons behind it, but I’d imagine it had something to do with a combination of not wanting flying sand near their faces, and the knowledge that our mudballs would eventually and inevitably be turned on each other. I can’t help but imagine that it might also be the fear of what might happen if we actually did manage to pelt a sandpiper with a baseball-sized mudball and what exactly we would go about doing with it afterwards.
Naturally, the only thing left to do with a giant hole filled with something akin to quicksand is to bury someone in it. It was a process which left everyone involved covered in muddy sand and tar, and at least one of us buried waist-deep in a hole, trying to figure out how best to escape without losing his swimtrunks to the sandpit.

Now, as a child, I was somewhat more logical than my siblings and cousins. Their beach fun came unimpeded because they typically didn’t think too hard about their choices. I, however, thought about them a little too much. While I loved the idea of the beach just as much as the next kid, I was also unable to escape the knowledge that the beach was a giant collection of potentially painful hazards. First and foremost was the sun, which always managed to burn me no matter how much SPF Infinity sunscreen I was slathered with every twenty or so minutes, but somehow that danger was overshadowed by the many other hazards. The Surfside area is notorious for burrs in its grasses which are the size of playground gravel. One trip barefoot through the grass anywhere near the beach and your foot will look like you’ve been playing soccer barefoot with a cactus. Other hazards include the scalding hot pavement littered with shards of beer bottles and upturned crown bottlecaps, and of course, snakes in the saltgrass. However, aside from the constant worry over sharks, I’d never been too concerned over playing in the surf.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I was never really comfortable in the water out there. Something about the inability to see any part of my body was slightly unsettling, but I had a younger brother and cousin to keep up with and an image to maintain, being the oldest of the three. What I wasn’t prepared for that afternoon, however, was my first and most memorable encounter with a creature who has become one of my greatest nemeses on this earth:

The jellyfish.

A man o’ war jellyfish, to be exact. For those of you not familiar with your beachside demonology, the Portuguese Man o’ War or Bluebottle is not actually a jellyfish, but something known as a “siphonophore,” which is technically a collection of separate organisms which are incapable of surviving independently of the others. Regardless of technicalities, however, the little floating masses of goo and hatred look enough like jellyfish to me. Furthermore, in my encounter with one, I didn’t give a rat’s ass if it was or wasn’t really a jellyfish. Here’s how it went down.

I was swimming along, actually headed in to shore so I could get a coke out of the ice chest when all of a sudden, I felt something stringy wrapped around my upper thigh on my left leg. I figured I’d either managed to swim through a clump of sea weed, or my swimsuit was threading at the bottom, so I kicked around a little and it let go. As I got closer to shore, however, I noticed a particular burning sensation beginning to well up around my leg in that area. “Okay,” I remember thinking to myself, “I got stung by a jellyfish. I’ll just get out of the water. It doesn’t hurt that bad… Okay it hurts now… Okay, it really, really hurts now.” And before I knew it, my leg felt like it was on fire. When I reached the shore I was screaming and in tears, and I yanked up the leg of my swim trunks to find that the tentacles had clearly wrapped all the way around my leg at least twice.

Now, when I was regaling my elementary school secretary with this story on my daily trip to the principal’s office, I seem to recall some parts which may or may not have been true about how I battled an evil jellyfish while tossing around one-liners with all the wit my second-grade brain could muster. I believe it ended with me pulling it off of my leg (because in my mind, it was more like a stinging octopus thing) and throwing it as far away from me as I could. Then I showed her where it stung me and she gave me a hug and a coupon for the school store, like she did every day. She told me I gave the best hugs. I was proud of the fact back then, but in retrospect I’m fairly certain she thought I rode the short bus.

One part I definitely did manage to leave out of that version, however, was the part where I spent the next hour and a half in the Stahlman Park parking lot screaming bloody murder like a little girl as the salty air burned the living piss out of my already excruciatingly painful wound. Meanwhile, my father did his best to treat it. The first solution was naturally to pour some cold bottled water over it. While this seems logical at first, cold water actually intensifies the pain while hot water nullifies it. In addition to this, while salt water helps to relieve the pain and stop the venom, fresh water, such as the water found in water bottles, actually makes it worse. After learning that the bottled water wasn’t helping at all, the next step was to try vinegar which was oh so helpfully offered by a passing beachgoer. Now, vinegar is actually a fairly common treatment for jellyfish stings because it kills the stinging toxins. The Portuguese Man o’ War, however, is not a jellyfish. Pouring vinegar on a Man o’ War sting actually increases the delivery of the toxins and ultimately makes everything about it worse.

I was now in extreme pain.

Knowing of only one other remedy for jellyfish stings, my father set off to scour the beach for a bottle of meat tenderizer. Meanwhile, I was left standing by the car in the ever-blowing salt air screaming like a banshee and attracting the attention of just about everyone in the parking lot. Now, you can’t really fault my dad for leaving me there while he went for the meat tenderizer. He had the option of leaving his hysterical screaming child by the car, or carrying his hysterical screaming child around with him while he searched, which easily could have been misinterpreted as anything from child abuse to abduction.

Eventually the meat tenderizer was found and applied, and I wailed and sniffled the entire way home to the point of near hyperventilation.

Since then, I have been stung by at least one jellyfish every single time I have entered that water. Countless times on the legs, at least three times around the waist, once under my left arm, and at least twice on my neck. While I have yet to encounter a second Portuguese Man o’ War, I know they’re out there. Waiting. Looking to finish the job they started all those years ago.
Stupid siphonophores.

                                                                                                                                   -The Sarcastic Soul-

Leisure Activities.

In a new attempt to develop a habit of updating this thing more frequently, I’m going to try and post at least something every day this week (excluding Sunday, obviously.) For today’s post, here’s a look at what I do with my free time at home.

My upstairs neighbor has a very old bed with aging wooden slats, loose joints and an old box-spring mattress. How do I have such an intimate hypothetical knowledge of what this person’s bed is like? Because my upstairs neighbor has girlfriend or wife, and a hobby. And that hobby is to see how vigorously and borderline violently they can engage in certain bedroom activities. Very. Very. Frequently. And unfortunately for me, his bedroom is situated just above my living room.
Now, I’ve watched enough trashy daytime talk shows and Dr. Phil-type televised carnival freakshows to know that according to most people, a healthy sex life is key to a functioning, happy relationship. And I can respect that. But honestly, when it gets to the point where their leisure activities are more annoying to me than my beer-guzzling Broheim of a next-door neighbor’s rave music, there’s a problem. The only thing I have to be really thankful for is that my ceiling is evidently thick enough that I only get the creaking, and none of the “vocalizations” if there are any. (There probably aren’t any.) Though, quite honestly, given the amount of noise coming from that bed, I can’t be entirely sure he isn’t just stomping his mattress or vigorously practicing CPR.

However! As my therapists have told me I should try to do in potentially irritating situations, I’m trying my best to make the best of it. So recently I’ve begun developing a series of little games I like to call “Super Considerate Upstairs Neighbor Happy Fun Time Challenges.” Also, in case you didn’t pick it up innately, there is so much sarcasm dripping from that name that you could probably drown someone in it. Basically the way this works is, every time they decide it’s time to punish that poor mattress for existing, I try to complete a timed or score-based challenge before they finish. Probably not the most original idea ever, but it’s entertaining enough.

Here are a few of my Super Considerate Upstairs Neighbor Happy Fun Time Challenge games I’ve come up with so far:

Nerf Gun Shooting Gallery! The point of this game is fairly straight-forward. As soon I hear their bed start crying in agony, I grab my Nerf gun off the couch and quickly set up a series of targets (mostly empty Dr. Pepper cans) in various locations around my apartment. Using three clips of ammunition, each clip holding five darts, I try to see how many times I can take out all fifteen cans, reload all the darts into the clips, reset the targets and repeat the process before it ends. My record so far is about five. It probably would have been better, but I lost one of my darts and had to spend a long time looking for it.

Saints Row the Third Pedestrian Hunt! In this challenge, I load up my Saints Row the Third game on my Xbox and try to kill as many innocent civilians as I can before they’re finished. I honestly don’t have a high score memorized for this one because I typically lose count when I start using the chainsaw.

YouTube Comments Argument Challenge! In this super productive challenge, I use a mule YouTube account and head on over to any video containing religion, politics or someone’s favorite trashy song and try to stir up as much YouTube troll rage as I possibly can. I haven’t actually come up with a scoring system for this one yet, but it still counts. Popular strategies in this game consist of usage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, trolling atheists, asserting that the content of the video is “fake and/or gay” and of course, claiming that a nonexistent indie band’s electronica remix of their favorite power ballad is so much better than the original.

Account Banning! In this thrilling event the goal is to log into a popular site such as Neopets and hit the forums to see how many accounts you can get banned by the site’s auto-filter bot before the end of the glorified death-throes from the upstairs apartment. Unfortunately, as I’ve learned, Neopets is a bit of a spoil-sport for this one because they force new accounts to wait for 24 hours before they’re allowed to post anything in the forums. What they don’t prevent, however, is the creation of large amounts of mule accounts in preparation for this event which are all cataloged in an Excel document by password and associated email address for quick logins. It’s not the most time-efficient challenge, but it’s entertaining none the less.

Random Object Roof Pong! In this fun and interactive challenge, the goal is to throw, jab or slam increasingly large and disruptive objects against the ceiling to see exactly how far you can go before they pause for the sound. Start with something like a pen or a marble, and slowly progress to things like broom handles, beanbags, books, empty 2-liter soda bottles, filled 2-liter soda bottles, miscellaneous plastic items and more. It’s important to note that if you’re planning to play this particular game, I’d advise you to first lock your door, close your blinds and turn all of your lights off in case they come downstairs to ask what the hell you’re doing. In the event that this actually happens, simply creep to the back of the apartment and sit silently until they go away.

And finally, Mood-Killer Music Roulette! Many people use music to help set the mood when planning to torture their mattresses. In this challenge, you do exactly the opposite by creating Pandora radio stations to try for the most mood-killing music you can think of. While soft rock, smooth jazz or The Fray might be easy or pleasant to make love to, I would imagine that death metal, hardcore screamo and the soundtrack to the children’s show Yo Gabba Gabba might be slightly more off-putting. When you find a track you think is good enough to do the trick, blast that noise as loudly as you can until the squeaking stops. This method also encourages the aforementioned precautions of keeping the lights off, door locked and blinds closed. It’s also important to note how many noise violations your complex allows before you get into trouble.

I’m sure I’ll come up with more of these in the future, because I don’t forsee an end to this cycle anytime soon, but for now I’ll make the best of what I’ve got. My therapists would be proud.

                                                                                                                                   -The Sarcastic Soul-

Or maybe it's just me...

There are few things in this world which are more special and magical than a trip to the grocery store on a Tuesday night. Especially one like your local HEB or Walmart, because you meet the most special people and challenges in these kinds of places. And because I’ve been experimenting a lot with the second person point of view in my writing, I would now like to present to you:

How to Survive a Trip to H-E-B, by The Sarcastic Soul.

It begins with the initiative. This will be arguably one of the more difficult issues you will face in this endeavor. You’ll likely look at the clock, see that the store closes in two hours, and figure that rather than give yourself thirty more minutes to do literally anything that isn’t grocery shopping, you’ll go grocery shopping and get it over with. Assuming that you’ve managed to remember to unhook your battery from your car (whose obvious alternator problems you’ve been pretending not to notice) and it actually manages to start, you’re on your way to what will assuredly be a memorable evening.

When you arrive at the store, especially if it is either of the two aforementioned locations, you will be faced with your first real challenge: the parking lot. You will eventually come to accept as fact that no matter how obvious or simple it may seem to you, no grocery shopper in the world knows exactly how a parking lot works. You will of course possess what seems to you should be common knowledge that when turning into a single lane in a parking lot, one should first make sure that the cars are parked in a way that their rear ends are facing your front end. This should assure you that when it comes time to park, you must merely make a slight turn and coast comfortably into your chosen spot. However, the rest of the world’s shopping population of soccer moms, cell-phone users and men driving trucks they’ve taken every precaution to make sure is bigger than what you’re driving have all inevitably failed to grasp this concept. And sure enough as you turn you will almost always be faced with an irritated person who, already frustrated by the fact that they must evidently be expected to make a nearly 180 degree turn to use these parking spaces, will proceed to glare angrily at you because you have further inconvenienced them. Before you back up to let them go on their way, however, it is important to remember to check your rear-view mirror for the agitated truck owner behind you who, regardless of space available to them, will not be backing up to allow you such luxury. Another circle around the parking lot should do the trick.

Another important parking lot hazard to watch for is what I like to call the “20-yard line buzzard.” This is that shopper who will do absolutely anything to obtain a parking spot as closed to handicapped parking as they can get without actually handicapping themselves. Notorious especially in Walmart parking lots, these determined detriments to society are well known for their signature technique of backing up the line of waiting cars into the interstate while they wait for the suburban in the spot they want to vacate the premises so they can usurp the position. Minor details, such as the suburban’s obvious lack of room to move without hitting the buzzard’s car, or the deafening chorus of car horns behind them are irrelevant to this shopper’s agenda because obviously, these are other people’s problems. They’ll be damned if they have to park far enough from the door that they’re winded by the time they get there. These not-so-gentle giants frequently weigh in excess of three hundred pounds, and live primarily on a diet of empty carbs, daytime TV dramas and the souls of the innocent. They aren’t dangerous until provoked, however, so when attempting to maneuver around them after they’ve parked, it’s often best to allow these land-manatees to shuffle on through into the air-conditioning.

Once you’ve finally located your parking spot which is usually somewhere between the parking lot’s filling station and Narnia, you will encounter your next challenge: Cart selection. You will eventually come to accept a simple fact of life when it comes to shopping carts, and that fact is that there are three types of carts which exist at grocery stores: Carts with broken wheels, carts with broken wheels that make irritating noises you will never be able to fix, and carts which other shoppers have gotten to before you. You will always end up with the broken cart, despite all precautions. This is something you must accept. So when choosing your wire-frame nemesis for each new shopping adventure, there are some important features you must take into consideration. Feature number one to check for is child-seat basket condition. This small fold-out compartment at the front of the cart is actually intended for children, however the majority of shoppers with children have long since learned that it’s much easier to blatantly ignore their child’s screams of undisciplined fury when they aren’t positioned directly in front of their faces. As such, the seat has become more widely known as the spot you use for bread and eggs. It is therefore important to make sure that this compartment opens and shuts easily, and that both the wire frame and the plastic cover aren’t harboring any foreign sticky substances of questionable origin.

The second most important feature to check your cart for is maneuverability. When deep within the reaches of the produce sections or razor-thin aisles, it’s important that you be able to avoid obstacles as you shop. A shopper’s cart is constantly threatened by a menagerie of hazards such as spilled or toppled products, upended cereal boxes, or other people’s children. It’s important that your cart not have a severe pull to one side or the other, and must be able to make a complete 180 degree turn in the space of a store aisle for that inevitable moment when you realize that you’re not going to exit that side because the Brady Bunch has decided to occupy the entire width of your aisle, and the next two over. It is also important to note that, while not particularly threatening while on foot, the aforementioned land manatees have now gained possession of the store’s entire fleet of scooter carts and are mobile. Pushing top speeds of between three to five miles an hour, these cart-commanding cannonballs of sweat and bitterness won’t stop for any reason that doesn’t involve placing food into the cart, so prepare for evasive maneuvers.

Now that your cart is selected, you’re ready to go. Once you realize that you’ve once again forgotten to make a shopping list, you’ll probably decide that it isn’t worth it to battle the parking lot again and press on from memory. Now, when it comes to actually choosing which groceries to purchase and how many of each item, there’s a bit of confusion involved. There’s an old saying that you shouldn’t grocery shop while you’re hungry, because you’ll either buy too much or you’ll get nothing but junk food. While there is more than likely some truth in this, you’ll also find that when you shop when you aren’t hungry, you’ll bring home a bunch of food which you’ll later look at when you’re famished and wonder why the hell you bought all this crap. Either that, or you’ll underestimate your weekly or bi-weekly needs in terms of food and run out by the weekend (but never before you’ve managed to spend all that money you thought you’d saved on thrifty shopping). Instead, always shop on a mildly empty stomach. If you’re hungry, you know what you’re hungry for and what you actually want.

This is where things get interesting. Do you want pasta on Wednesday night, or do you want the lower-effort instant gratification of a Hungry Man TV dinner? Should Thursday be seasoned chicken breast with steamed vegetables, or should you buy four boxes of Tony Chachere’s Jambalaya mix and a stick of summer sausage? What exactly is the difference between Oscar Meyer and the bologna with the wax ring you have to peel off the sides, and why does the wax stuff cost so much less? All important questions. It’s best to take it aisle by aisle and decide as you go along. The dairy aisle. You need sandwich meat and milk. Preferably a gallon with an expiration date which isn’t conveniently set to four days before you actually need it for something. Canned food aisle? Canned soup is a trap. Half of a meal for the price of dinner with leftovers. No, you don’t need the Dr. Pepper 20-can pack. How did you get to the snack aisle? Might as well choose some chips. Maybe later, though, because right now the girl who’s stocking the drinks on the other side of the aisle is judging you for being here. Back to the pasta aisle. Keep walking, you still don’t need the Dr. Pepper 20-pack. Pasta sauce is expensive, boxed rice dinners are cheap. Decision made. Bread aisle time. Always choose store brand, with the thin slices. You get more sandwiches, and they don’t expect people to buy the store brand so they’re jacked up with enough preservatives that they could probably be survive a deep-space exploration mission before they mold. Bypass meats for now because a motor-cart is lurking nearby. Maybe you do need that Dr. Pepper 20-pack. How are you back in the snack aisle again? Oh well, the judgmental stocker girl is gone now. Grab your Doritos quickly and move on. Also, swallow your pride and pick up that buy one get one free coupon hanging there. There’s nothing undignified about getting a free bag of chips. And you’d better get one now, because when the scooter-cart pilot stops by here she’s going to pluck the whole stack so she can haggle with the cashier.

As you can clearly see, there are a lot of complicated thought processes that occur whilst shopping. However, none of these are quite as important a decision to your weekly life than the decision you will make in the cereal aisle. Choosing which box or boxes of cereal to purchase is a decision which will alter both your satisfaction in your morning meals, and those you choose to have while watching Top Gear reruns on History Channel at two in the morning. Once you have chosen, however, there is no going back on that decision and you’re stuck with it. You could throw it out, but that stuff is expensive. You have to ask yourself important questions. Brand-name, or store brand? Box, or bag? Should you go the mature route and just buy some raisin bran or corn flakes? Will the woman down the aisle judge you when you pass by with a box of Cookie Crisp in your cart? Can you muster a poker face at the register as the cashier lifts a brow at the “Kid Tested, Mother Approved!” branded brightly on the front of your box of Kix Berries? Is there a good enough excuse to buy Lucky Charms while the child next to you wails like a banshee because her mother just turned down that same box?

Finally, make your way to the check-out line. In Walmart stores, with the regular influx of people being so large, they have invested in self-check stations. The lines for these are rarely as long, if there are lines at all, and one might be deceived into thinking that they’re simply a faster way to check out. Or perhaps it’s that each check station area is assigned its very own self-check Nazi, usually a particularly disgruntled employee who wasn’t blessed with the social skills to be a greeter. The truth of the matter, however, is that these machines are evil. They scan poorly, they insist you touch everything to a plastic pad which rarely manages to deactivate the security device in whatever is in your bag that’s about to make you the center of everyone’s attention, and heaven forbid you’ve decided on a selection of produce, because now you have codes to punch in (which are usually wrong). It’s like a phone number, except more complicated because if it were a phone number it would likely be 1-800-Just-Scan-My-Damn-Canteloupe.

H-E-B, however, has no such luxury. They don’t believe in that do-it-yourself nonsense, and are determined to provide you with face-to-face customer service. So it’s time to find a lane and prepare to wait. One thing you will learn quickly is that, in the check out lane, there are few safe places to leave your gaze. While waiting for the person in line ahead of you to fish stacks of coupons which may or may not be outdated from their purse or wallet, you can’t just stare at them. So you must find another place to look. Unfortunately, due to some kind of poor design flaw, the majority of the box which makes up the lane is wallpapered with trashy tabloid magazines with a wide array of poor choices on their covers. Also, unfortunately for you, judgmental stocker girl from the snack aisle has returned and is now your cashier, so the last thing you want to do is solidify her preconceived image of you by letting her catch you accidentally catching up on the latest Hollywood divorce gossip or staring at a picture of some actress or model’s half-exposed boobs. Staring straight ahead is rarely a good option either, because aside from adding that look of impatience, it’s rude to stare at the total amount being shelled out by the customer in front of you. Decide it’s best to appear very contemplative about what kind of candy bar or pack of gum you’d like to purchase. She was already on your case about chips, it shouldn’t make matters too much worse to tack a Hershey bar or pack of Trident on top of that. Especially since you have no intention of purchasing candy, so when you decide not to it’ll just look that much better. Make little eye-contact as she scans your items, looking somewhere between bored, irritated and shoot me. Pretend to be very interested in how much you’ve spent, as if you have a ridiculously tight budget.

When all that’s over and the cart is loaded up with your bags, return to your car. Remember that the law which gives pedestrians the sanctity of a crosswalk is only a myth in parking lots. Assuming you reach your car safely, head back to the safety of your house/apartment/den/man cave and store them away. Make the decision not to go back for whatever you’ve inevitably forgotten. It’s not that important anyway. Crack open a Dr. Pepper and enjoy what’s left of your evening.

                                                                                                                                   -The Sarcastic Soul-

Happy New Year!

So a while back I ran across an interesting little fact. Statistically speaking, the seventeenth of January is the most depressing day of the year. Normally that would only be of minor interest and I’d glaze over it and file it away in that vault of useless information in my brain. But, as it happens, January the seventeenth is my birthday. So I had to find out if there was any correlation, because it really wouldn’t shock me if there was.

So I did some digging.

Turns out, among other things, the reason that January the seventeenth is statistically the most depressing day of the year is because that’s the point by which the vast majority of New Years resolutions have failed and people are just feeling pretty down about that. Now, about three years ago I made a New Years resolution to stop making New Years resolutions and it’s worked out pretty fantastically for me, but I can see how this can be very true of folks who lack my gifts of foresight and realism. New Years resolutions, as everyone knows, are little promises we make to ourselves that, beginning on the first, will help to alter our lives and ultimately make us better, happier people. Why we have to wait for the first of the year to do these things is beyond me, because as far as I’m concerned, if you’ve never been to the gym a day of your life or you’ve been binging on some addiction you’re planning to stop, the first of the year doesn’t make your slate any cleaner than it was the day before. Just sayin’.

Despite all that, however, it got me to thinking. People continue to make these things every new year, and every new year they continue to fail to keep them up for very long (say, about the seventeenth of January). So I decided to come up with a fun little list. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you…

The Top 3 Reasons Your New Years Resolution Will Ultimately Fail!

Number One: The first of the year is just the first of the year. It’s just another day, just like all the other days you didn’t kick your habit, go to the gym, lose thirty pounds or act nicer to your boss you hate. There seems to be some sort of misconception that the transition from the 31st of December to the 1st of January is some kind of mystical cosmic event that will empower you to change your life for the better in ways which you have been previously unable to. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. I understand the reasoning behind dedicating yourself to something like this because it’s a new year, and that Thursday in March the last time you thought about it was too far in to really count (or something, I guess) but the fact of the matter is, your body will still hate you for exercise, and it will still crave starch and unhealthy crap all the time. Your addiction will still be there and you’ll still be addicted to it, and your boss will still be an ass (unless his resolution was to be nicer to his employees, in which case you have a seventeen day grace period). There is no little mechanism in your body that’s going to say, “Oh, well y’know, since it’s the new year and all, I guess I can stop building up lactic acid that tortures you for working out, and maybe I can stop demanding McNuggets and Coke every day at lunchtime.” I’m not saying it isn’t possible for these goals to be attained. People do it all the time. But most people who make this kind of thing their resolution for the new year are under the subconscious impression that it will be easier to dedicate themselves to because it’s a resolution. It’s a crutch that will always snap beneath them and kick them in the face on the way down out of spite.

Number Two: New Years resolutions are the worst repeat offenders of the cardinal sin in changing lifestyles: Unreasonable goals. There’s an old idiom that goes something like “Always shoot for the moon, because if you miss, you’ll always land among the stars,” which essentially means “always aim really, really high because even if you fail, you’ll feel better for having tried.” Well, there’s a reason that “idiom” is only a single letter difference from “idiot” and while that reason is probably something more to do with a judgment lapse on the linguistics, I like to think it’s because idioms are a terrible way to live your life. More realistically, if you shoot for the moon, it just means that there’s a very long and painful fall below you when you miss before you crash resoundingly into the cement floor of reality. And you’ll probably hit a few trees on the way down, too. Let’s look at an example. A woman decides she’s had enough of being the human double-wide clogging traffic in the Wal-mart aisles, so she sets herself a goal to lose two hundred pounds. In a single year. As her resolution. Is this possible? Well, in today’s medical world where we have things like liposuction, companies that send you dietary meal plans with reasonable portions and an ever-expanding list of snake oil placebo- er, “dietary supplement weightloss pills,” sure. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that’s possible. Is it probable, though? Absolutely not. Chances are, our imaginary example woman will order some of those pre-made meal plan things, maybe pick up some placebo pills from her local GNC, go to the gym a couple of times in the month, and meanwhile she’ll continue to eat whatever she wants to outside of her meal plan. Because it’s what she’s programmed herself to do. Meanwhile, the days roll on and several outcomes arrive. Firstly, she probably won’t make it past the 17th on those pre-made meal plans because as anyone who’s tried them will tell you, they’re nasty. Real food (probably meaning the usual unhealthy junk she’s used to) tastes far better and costs far less. Second, if she does reach the end of the month, she’ll weigh herself and more than likely find that she’s lost a rather insignificant amount of weight. Discouragement will settle in and deliver the final coup de grace to her new years goals. The success of this goal will then ultimately fall to her income, because liposuction is really freaking expensive. And still isn’t a guaranteed success.

Number Three: The simple truth of the matter, regardless of what your resolution was, is that lifestyle changes are hard. And that’s what resolutions are. They’re lifestyle changes. Most of these decisions are made with the best intentions and usually backed by a little bit of alcohol, but the fact of the matter is it’s just so much easier to settle right back into the way we’re used to living. With new years resolutions, they tend to last as long as the excitement of the new year does. Which is about two weeks. Or a little under 17 days. When that’s over with, we’ve come to the realization I mentioned earlier that it’s just another year of our lives and whether we realize it or not, we fall right out of our resolution habits and back into our old habits. And when we realize that we’ve strayed from our resolutions, we sometimes try and run back to them but for the most part we just write them off as failures and go right on living the way we have been.
So when that magic seventeenth day of January comes around and you realize you’ve betrayed your resolution three times before the proverbial cock crowed, try not to sweat it so much. At least there’s next year. Unless you’re a Mayan, in which case you probably believe the world made a resolution this year to stop existing.

                                                                                                                                   -The Sarcastic Soul-

So uh... Nobody noticed that, right?

So, here’s a completely obvious and unnecessary statement:
I haven’t updated in a while. And by a while, I mean an entire week at the least. I could take this time to apologize for not posting and for being lazy and not writing anything for so long, but instead, I’ll give you an excuse!

I’m home for the holidays, at last. This last semester felt a lot more brutal than it actually was, but regardless I’m glad that it’s over. And in accordance with the huge sigh of relief which is the break, I have busied myself with doing absolutely nothing constructive whatsoever. This includes writing in my blog, as you’ve probably noticed. But hey. Chances are, by “you” I mean either someone I’ve directly given this link to or someone who has had this link given to them by a friend of mine. Translation: I’m fully aware of the fact that I have a very small following, if one exists at all. So you’ll probably forgive me! Because somewhere in my mind, smaller groups of people equate to a higher willingness to forgive. It makes sense in my head, don’t question it.

So now you’re probably wondering, “What have you been doing with all that time you should have been spending writing your blog for our entertainment?”
Well, the answer will likely come as no surprise to anyone. It isn’t that I haven’t tried to write anything. I have, believe me. But every time I’ve sat down to write, and even after getting a good amount written sometimes, I’ve been overcome by the overwhelming desire to do something else. Literally anything else that isn’t writing. This is exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to overcome with this blog, so uh… problem admitted. However, more importantly, at least 90% of the time the activity I have chosen to do instead of writing has been….

Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Yes, folks, I am a Star Wars guy. Not the over-the-top, believes in the Force, cosplays and goes to conventions type Star Wars guy, mind you. However, I have constructed a lightsaber which I’m quite proud of, proceeded to then take a picture of and photoshop a blade onto said lightsaber, and would probably happily discuss how it was better when Han shot first with you on a first date. (If you wouldn’t happily have that same conversation with me, don’t worry. We likely wouldn’t be on a date to begin with.) I love the Star Wars universe, (not the books because most of them suck) and no, I will not read your Star Wars fanfiction on DeviantART.

So you can only imagine my absolute unbearable joy when I found out that a Star Wars-themed MMORPG was going to be released this year. I followed the developments, I watched the cinematic trailers, I deeply envied the beta testers… The only word which can accurately describe my reaction to this game: Nerdgasm.
And now I have it. And here’s the story.

As I have mentioned before, I am a poor college student. I’m unemployed (save for a freelance job writing game reviews which I’m not technically paid for, don’t ask) and so I’m living a very limited life. As such, I was unable to afford the game when the pre-release was launched on the 15th. However, after acquiring a bit of Christmas money, I was able to pre-order…

…The day before the official release. Yes, I pre-ordered this game for the opportunity to play it one single day before the store-shelf release. And you know what? I didn’t get to play it until then. Because my computer’s memory was so full that it took literally all night long to download and install the game. After that point, though, it was all over. I loaded up my new addiction, and I was gone.
Class Selection time! Before we delve into this, let’s take a moment for a brief observation of gaming history. On the 23rd of November in 2004, the greatest scourge to ever strike the gaming world crawled from the dark pits known as Blizzard Entertainment. It reared its ugly head and smote the rest of the MMO world with an iron fist, stealing their subscribers and becoming the dominating force in computer gaming. They called it World of Warcraft. It implemented a two-faction system, something its fanatics were eager to praise it for (completely ignoring the fact that Dark Age of Camelot had done the same thing years before with its three-faction system) and thus created a trend among online games in which two-faction systems became the standard, because WoW did it and it worked for them. Similarly, SW:TOR presented me with a two-faction system. Light Side, or Dark Side. But really, how else were they going to do that? So all you WoW people who love to point out all the things BioWare took from WoW? Stuff it. Derailing rant aside, I created a Jedi Knight because I had to, out of principle (because it’s Star Wars! How can I not make a Jedi?) but then began to explore other options.

“So,” the game asked me, “Would you like to play a Force-wielding character with a lightsaber and some awesome melee combat abilities?” I pondered this for a moment. “Sure seems tempting,” I said.
“Well how about I offer you a heavy armor-wearing badass equipped with blasters, flamethrowers, jetpacks, thermal detonators and freaking ROCKETS fired from his wrists?”
“Hell yeah I wanna play that!” I said, as I immediately took the more sensible option and chose the Dark Side. Thus, my Bounty Hunter was created.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been playing this game for almost three straight days. And when I say that I don’t mean I’ve been logging in for gaming sessions between other things for days. I mean I have logged in when I woke up and logged out before I went to sleep. This is absolutely abnormal for me. I have played a lot of MMORPGs before in the past, and one thing I cannot do is grind. I cannot sit there and tirelessly drag myself through the character levels without getting completely bored of the game before a few hours are up. It’s for this reason that I have only ever maxed out one single character in an MMO. In SW:TOR, however, I have reached level 18 in just three days of play, and leveling isn’t exactly quick in this game. Why? The story. This game is highly story-driven and I can easily endure the quests and mobslaying for the sake of advancing the story.

So there you have it. That’s why I haven’t been updating.

SW:TOR is a hell of a drug.

                                                                                                                                   -The Sarcastic Soul-

At Least They Haven't Mutated Yet...

As a poor, unemployed college student, my diet is fairly predictable. I survive almost exclusively on sandwiches and ramen noodles, though I’ve also recently discovered the inexpensive miracle that is boxed jambalaya mix. It’s like 90% sandwiches, though.

So imagine my ire when I noticed one day that the better part of my single remaining loaf of bread had a small hole chewed into the package, and that some mystery creature had burrowed its way into the nearest slice and back through nearly the entire length of the loaf. Rather than risk stirring awake any number of weevils or roaches or whatever kind of bread bug could have been behind this, I decided instead to just throw the rest of the loaf away. It was stale by that point anyway because of the hole. And in doing so, I thought I had thrown out the pests as well.

I was wrong, evidently.

Yesterday I went to fix myself a sandwich, pulled out my brand new unopened loaf of bread, and found yet another hole. Fortunately, this time, the mystery bug only chewed a small crater into the crust of the nearest slice, so there were no tunnels. I just threw that slice away and started storing my bread on my stove top until I win the war I’m fighting with these little pantry monsters. This is only the latest assault the insect population around here has made in our ongoing battles, though. A few weekends ago around Thanksgiving, while my brother was staying with me at my apartment, I opened my cabinet above my stove to get some cereal and a roach like something out of Jurassic Park scuttled out on top of it. Interesting factoid: I hate roaches.

Now, let me clarify there. I am not afraid of roaches. There is no fear reaction induced by roaches for me unless they jump out of somewhere suddenly, and just about anything that jumps out suddenly will scare me. I do not like them, though. I hate them with a fiery passion because they have an incredible inborn ability to be exactly where you really don’t want them to be. Like inside your cereal cabinet, probably laying their nasty leathery little roach eggs in your box of frosted flakes.
Because nothing makes a balanced breakfast more complete than roach egg bits and protein-rich cockroach babies.

Another reason I hate them is because every time one of them manages to position itself anywhere within my mother’s line of sight while I’m at home, it becomes my job to kill it. Normally my solution to this problem is to sic my cat on it because she loves to chase them, however she won’t kill it. She’ll just chase it under the refrigerator or something and then becomes disinterested. Instead, I have to kill it. And if you don’t happen to have a can of Raid handy, the only way to do so is to smash it. This is another reason I hate them: There is literally no clean way to kill them. I realize that exterminators use chemicals which kill them in a non-smashy way, and I realize that a can of Raid does just about the same thing, but let’s face it. When an exterminator comes through, the roaches don’t just die where they are. They have to crawl out into the middle of the nearest public space and die dramatically there. For hours. You will never know how many roaches are in your house until you get a visit from the exterminator, and then they’re littering your floor like fall leaves. Raid is a quicker way to kill them, but you still have dead roach and sticky roach spray on your floor afterwards.
But of course, at least 80% of the time you don’t have a can of roach spray. It’s just you and a shoe. Your shoe, of course, because you can’t use anyone else’s shoe. Nobody else wants roach goo on their flip flops.

So here I was in my kitchen with Roachzilla staring me down from the top of my cabinet door, and the last thing I wanted was to smash him there. Now for some reason, I know that Windex kills ants on contact. A lot of things kill ants on contact, but Windex accomplishes it very quickly. I have no idea if it works the same on roaches, but I figured I’d give it a try. Unfortunately, I had no Windex on hand. What I did have was a can of Scrubbing Bubbles foaming tile cleaner. I figured that would at least do something, so I grabbed that.

When I arrived back in the kitchen, the damn thing hadn’t moved at all. He was just sitting there, giving me the little roachy stink-eye and daring me to try something. So I gave him a facefull of chemical cleanser.
It didn’t kill him, unsurprisingly enough, but it did blind the crap out of him. He barely even moved, actually. Just stood there and took it like a hoss. Though I imagine that might be because his eyes felt like they were on fire and his antennae were cemented to his back. So I sprayed him again. After about four bursts, I decided this was an ineffective tactic, so I picked up an empty washed-out jar I had on my counter and battled him into it.

Now, there’s something about being male which is instilled in us from early childhood that, when we have some small insect or creature trapped inside a container, our inner sadists come to whisper evil things in our ears. And don’t even start with that whole “Serial killers start by torturing bugs” thing because you know as well as I do there was at least one point in your childhood when you caught a bee in a gatorade bottle and decided it was time for revenge. Fortunately for Roachzilla though, I’ve long since learned to control such urges. Even if my microwave did look rather inviting. Instead I emptied him out in the flowerbed outside and he scurried away to a puddle, where he either proceeded to wash the liquid pain out of his eyes or drown himself to end his misery. I wasn’t able to tell which.

I won the battle, that day, but the war still rages. And one of these days, when we’re all crawling out of our underground bunkers to face nuclear fallout and post-apocalyptic wastelands, a giant mutated roach will find me. And he’ll say, “Let me tell you a story, friend. I used to have this cousin, Vinny. Thought he found paradise in a box of off-brand applejacks, but next thing you know some guy sprays him in the eyes with foaming hatred in a can. I think you and I need to have a talk, my friend…”

Unless Fallout: New Vegas lied to me.
                                                                                                                                   -The Sarcastic Soul-