The Best Joke I Have Ever Heard

So this isn't a story, but someone gave me the idea to write this as a blog entry, mainly because, as you will see when you read it, if you HAD met this guy, the meeting probably would have been blog-worthy.

So here we go:

George worked on the 15th floor of the Fleet Building right in the heart of downtown. He got to work every morning at about 9AM and left every evening at exactly 5PM. Most Fridays, when he got off work, he went to a little bar across the street, had a few beers, then went home.

This week, however, he heard about a brand new bar that opened on the top floor of the building in which he worked. It was, apparently, really fancy and George thought it sounded neat, having a drink on the 99th floor, so he decided to go there when he got off work on Friday, instead of his normal place.

Friday afternoon rolled around, George closed his computer, picked up his coat, and took the elevator to the very top of the building. He got off and walked into the bar. It was lavishly furnished, like a bar out of a gangster movie, but there were only two people in there, the bartender and one client.

Dial-a-Whore

Cell phones have a built in ability to tell you when you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. For example: texting and other activities. The cellphone will randomly throw in words and phrases you would never use as a way to deter you from focusing on other things while texting.

"I don't know why I texted you asking if you wanted to eat at the "candy coated sparkle garden" tonight! I was walking while texting! It's not my fault!"

Similarly, the phone warns you when someone calls and it doesn't think you should answer, it does this by saying "blocked ID" on the caller ID. When that happens… common sense says to ignore.

But I had received about 6 "Blocked IDs" in the last two days, so when another one came through, I decided I needed to answer.

If ONLY I had known...

"Hello?" I said.

aaaand... Silence! Why didn't I listen to you, oh wise cell phone!? This can't be good!

"Who's this?" a gruff, southern accent grates into my ear?

"Who is this?" I immediately asked of the voice… my subtext being: "Hey! You called ME, fuckwad!"

More silence. 

"Ok," I ask, attempting to resolve a conversation quickly spiralling into regret and anger. "Who were you trying to reach?" Now, when I asked this question, I wasn't expecting anything wacky, I was expecting to hear "um… mark, is he there?" or "tony's pizza", you know, something normal.

But it wasn't going to be that sort of day, I suppose.

After another brief silence, he finally asks: "Is this Jada… from the escort service?"

The Depressing Snot Parade

(It must be bodily functions week here at Why I Hate Everybody… check out this)

I don't know about you, but I don't usually just wake up sick. I remember when I was a kid, I would go to bed feeling fine, but then I would just wake up, out of the blue, at about 2 AM, slowly sit up and then vomit vociferously all over the place. 

Seconds later, because of some weird barf based sixth-sense that mothers are blessed(?) with, my mom would burst into the room and help me into the bathroom, while my dad was left with the task of cleaning up. No easy feat because vomiting from the top bunk has the same basic effect as filling a bucket with pink paint and three day old sushi and then just spinning around in circles until every surface is gratuitiously coated.

But as I got older, and moved from the top bunk, to the bottom bunk, to a bigger bed, back to the top bunk briefly when I was afraid of being attacked by fiddler crabs, and then back to a bigger bed, my illnesses started coming on more gradually.

For me, the sore throat is the horseman of my well-being's apocalypse. As soon as I feel the dreaded nasal-drip-pain I drop into panic mode. 

It starts rationally enough with me drinking some tea and taking Vitamin C, but as the soreness begins to radiate I start resorting to more and more outlandish remedies, up until the point that, even though I have been dipping ALL my candy canes in strawberry vodka and oreos, I officially have a cold. Observe:

Yup... even the lamp is against me.

Pissed about Pissin'

The act of peeing is a charged subject.

Now, I don't mean that peeing creates electricity, because if it did… BOOM, energy crisis over, for the love of God somebody call Al Gore! What I actually mean is that peeing, like many bodily functions that result in something firing wildly out of a person at high speed, is something that can cause other people who happen to be in the vicinity of said ejection, discomfort.

As a result, there are a few ground-rules in modern society that accompany Tinkle time.

Women, frankly, have it easy when it comes to peeing, just like with everything else. When women go to the bathroom indoors they are constantly protected by plastic walls, queens of their own tiny little urinary fiefdoms. It is men who have a hard time. 

Now, anyone who has every been to a sporting event or movie theatre will testify that men actually have it easy, based on the length of the waiting line, and while it is true that it is a more simplified process for men to actually saddle up and pee, there is something that stands in the way of the pleasurability of urinals.

Other men.

Why DO I hate everybody? (part 2) - On Hamsters and Kings

Life comes with three rules. They're not too complex, but they are set in stone:

1 - Everybody poops.

2 - Gravity pulls down.

3 - Human children will be given a pet hamster and something horrible will happen to it.

I'm gonna talk about that third one, but before I delve into the Romeo and Juliet level tragedy that is most hamster's lives. I need to first address another hamster related issue that, hilariously, plagues those tiny little rodents.

When children are given hamsters they are, understandably, excited. That excitement, which usually reads as: "OHMYGOSHOHMYGOSHAUGHHHHHHHAMSTERAUGHHHHHH", usually manifests in children giving their hamster the first word that pops into their heads for a name. 

Example: When I was given my little hamster, after totally flipping my shit, I decided on the perfect name for that 4 inch long glorified rat. That name was Spike. Or, as it read across the billboard in my 8 year old head:

SPIKE!!!!

HELL YEAH! The perfect name for a hamster. (The fact that Spike was a female never even threatened to change my mind.)

TITS!!!... now that I've got your attention... well... it's still a post about boobs...

I'm gonna bring this blog around to its roots today by getting back to my interactions with specific people. For those of you new to the experience, hopefully you'll find it pleasurable, for those of you who are used to this… well here we go again.

Over the summer I worked in Philadelphia leading tours and groups around Old City. One of the more fun tours we offered included the option of getting some drinks at a few local bars. It was basically a pub crawl, if you want to get technical.

But it was nothing more than JUST a pub crawl. Remember this… just a pub crawl... nothing more.

So in case you haven't noticed, or haven't decided to register this fact as being important (either way I'm not judging you), the great city of Philadelphia is in frighteningly close proximity to New Jersey.

GASP! The Horror!

Now, before I get hate mail. There are parts of New Jersey that are livable… well there are parts that are pretty… well there are… um… parts. We can all agree that there are parts of New Jersey. Hooray!

Apartment Living... in the THIRD DIMENSION!!!

Living in an apartment complex is a constant battle. While it is not as bad as living in a freshman dorm triple as a squirrly theatre kid sharing a room with two pink-polo-popped-collar guys who were clear aficionados of obnoxious freshman skanks, and who liked to let their drunk friends sleep (and barely avoid aspirating their beer vomit) in my bed while I was out, apartment living can still suck sometimes.

In fact, it's kinda like a 3D movie: you pay a lot more for it, it can make you motion sick, and you usually leave feeling cheated and angry.

Ok... maybe a stretch... but... meh...

Since I have initiated the 3D analogy I'm going to stick with it. We can assign a different dimension to each of the three psychosis-inducing elements of apartment life. But the truth of the matter is that shared housing frustrations usually manifest themselves in sights, sounds and smells.

The first dimension will be the X-Axis: 

Sound. I assigned sound to the X-Axis because of all the issues, it is the most eXasperating, eXcruciating and eXtremely pissed-off inducing of the apartment blues. Why in the name of Zeus' testicles do the people who live above me insist on making as much noise as humanly possible!?

I have asked the people below me if they hear us and, aside from a vacuum cleaner or the rare occurrence of my girlfriend's high heels as we head out the door, they have said we make no noise. So why is it that EVERY night at exactly 11:30, the people on the floor above me decide to train a heard of elephants to rearrange their furniture for about twenty minutes?

Elephants are SMART little fuckers, man. They should be put to better use than moving furniture back and forth each night.

Why I (don't) Hate Everybody... (part 1)

Well, Thanksgiving is over. I don't know about you, but I spent a very relaxing few days eating too much and drinking too much and then eating too much while drinking too much.

So, all in all, a productive, normal American holiday.

But it got me thinking. Sure it is easy to spend the entire time on this blog bitching and moaning and complaining about things, (it is also fun), but while I think that a lot of people like to hear that, there comes a time when I must be a little more friendly.

So I am going to start a regular section highlighting a few reasons why I don't, necessarily, hate EVERYBODY.

This story was told to me by a good friend and it is too amazing of a story to not pass along. I, personally, have never been to Amsterdam but I have been told that it is an amazing place full of art, culture and music.

I don't necessarily trust any of those accounts of the city, however, because every time someone starts into a story of how great Amsterdam is, that story invariably starts with "so I was tripping balls on mushrooms in Amsterdam when _________".