People Are Still Eating Mini Muffins

I walked into class yesterday and the guy who sits next to me was eating mini muffins. Mini muffins.

I didn’t know mini muffins were still around. I thought we had left them behind with Fruit by the Foot and Gushers and brown paper bag lunches. Since elementary school, they’ve made occasional appearances at hotels’ continental breakfasts, usually paired with the meal-in-itself Jumbo muffin. I’ve also seen evidence of them in my mom’s mini muffin tins she keeps buried in the archeological drawer of disregarded things, with the Styrofoam tortilla holder and tulip shaped cookie cutters. I thought they had only been a fad.

His mini muffins were clustered together in a little package like fruit snacks and he would pop a whole one in his mouth with grape-like ease. I didn’t hide my bewilderment. Are those mini muffins?! He was excited to tell me that he had been craving mini muffins when his roommate called him from the store. “He asked me if we needed anything. Did we need anything? Toilet paper? Toothpaste? Milk? I don’t know. I didn’t check. I just wanted the muffins.”

What is it about mini muffins that is so appealing? I asked him. He held a mini muffin up to his eye level and went into detail about their high level of moisture, their crumb-less-ness, their sweet and glaze-y top and edges, their total surface area, and he said that every once in a while, he would even get a blueberry.

Backless

I was on Austin's famed 6th Street with a group of friends. We were going to an Indian dance party hosted at one of the local clubs. There was a long line to get in, because Indians love their Bollywood music. Walking through the line, we see a lot of girls styling fashionable outfits. Not a bad view. We take our place in the back of the line. Not a good view. Why? Because of the backless shirts and dresses.

Every one of these girls sporting the backless had bacne. And look, it was dark and there was a lot of commotion--so we aren't talking about a light blemish. I mean, one of these rotund women--her back was like the Pacific Ring of Fire of puss volcanoes. One glimpse of that and I was done for the night. I told my then-girlfriend that we had to go. She protested. She wanted to dance.* I told her my reason and she didn't understand. I calmly explained to her: What would happen if this pumpkin of a woman rubbed her bacne against my arm or something? I'd have to amputate. And then my ability to sexually pleasure my girlfriend would be greatly diminished.

She agreed that this was a weighty risk. We decided to rap our arms in extra Wal-Mart bags that I kept in the car. It was an okay night, but it was really hot in those plastic bags. I sweat through my favorite shirt. Fucking backless.

Some of you may think I am being overly harsh on women. No. Same with men. When I go to the gym, I often encounter these roided-out gym rats who wear some kind of ripped, cut-off up under shirt. Much of their back and inevitable bacne is exposed. It's awful. You know what's even worse. The other day in the locker room--this fucking meathead was naked and he was talking about his sacne. Yeah--that'll make a mess of your lunch.

*: See my previous post Women Don't Actually Like To Dance--They Just Like To Say They Like To Dance.

Love means showing it at least one day out of the year

Valentine's Day stands unique among other holidays in its ability to elicit very different feelings by its celebrators. Example, single men often feel the same sense of joy taken women do. Inversely, taken men may feel similar feelings of hopelessness single women may encounter.

Once we got beyond elementary school where Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Valentine’s were exchanged in class and we all got to chip our teeth on dried plaster Sweethearts®, Valentine’s Day became a day riddled with pressure. The vast majority of men that have found themselves in a committed relationship on this abject day know that some level of romancing and genuine expressions of love is expected.

These expectations I partially blame on (the eternal scapegoat) the romantic chick flick. The amount of romantic sentiment displayed in such films as, The Notebook, Say Anything, Casablanca, Love Actually, Love Story, Sleepless in Seattle, The English Patient, Titanic, and my favorite Pretty Woman is impossible to replicate in the real world.

This type of gross romance may be obtained if you happen to catch yourself in 1940’s Morocco fighting the Nazis, the two of you are separated by a continent, one of you is going away to their dream college, you have just one more night together, I just painted a naked portrait of you with the hope diamond or one of you has an incurable disease. Now it’s not as if ladies are asking for romantic overtures all the time, but if there is any day they are expected, its Valentine’s Day.

Guys shouldn’t look at Valentine’s Day as their shot to show how much they care or to finally woo her into trying that thing you saw online last week. This day should be looked at as, “just don’t piss her off.” I see it as a group of campers out running a bear. You don’t need to be the first to get away; you just can’t be the last. Or the high school basketball star who needs the 2.0 gpa to earn his scholarship, just enough is good enough.

On a random day in August, you hit her with that elaborate wine tasting weekend in Napa at a bed and breakfast and it will have twice the effective romantic quotient than it would on Valentine’s Day. A surprise weighs more than meeting an expectation.

This year I’m in the group of single men that feel free of the pressure to “not piss her off.” For me, it will just be another weekend crying with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s in my sweats.

Yahoo! It's Valentine's Day

Yahoo! News recently published an article about the Top 10 Things NOT to Do on Valentine's Day. Romance pioneer that it is, Yahoo! News addresses all the preeminent V-Day concerns: "Dinner, chocolates, roses, and candelight dinners." But because I know that not everyone is into dinner and candlelight dinners, I provide a brief appraisal of some of Yahoo! News's top ten Valentine's Day gaffs.

• DON'T sit at home if you are single. This is the worst thing you can do on Valentine's Day if you are single.

Actually, I thought the worst thing I could do was break into the local orphanage and prick parentless children with my AIDS needle, but apparently, sitting at home alone and watching every twentieth Cheese Nip fall in between my couch cushions is worse.

• DON'T compare. So your girlfriend got two-dozen roses on Valentine's Day and all you got was a single stem. Don't get jealous.

This advice is moot. If all you got for Valentine’s Day was a single-stemmed rose, then your boyfriend is 15 and you can count on his mom to give you some great home-baked cookies after she picks the two of you up from the movie theatre.

• DON'T make excuses to avoid this holiday. Maybe you can’t afford to eat at a nice restaurant. So what! Be creative.

I disagree. If you can’t afford to eat at a nice restaurant, you don’t deserve to be in love. Or healthcare.

• DON'T make other plans. You have 364 days in the year to meet the guys for a beer or watch a football game. This whole day should be set aside for your significant other.

Honestly, I’d love for this statement to be true. I’d love to have “364 days in the year” to get drunk with my friends. Unfortunately, I don’t really get 364 days of freedom after subtracting our anniversary, her birthday, and the 40 hours a week I have to work to pay for the gym membership she never uses.

• DON'T be typical. Guys, don’t just do roses and dinner at an Italian restaurant. It’s been done a million times. Please be creative!

Girls, you know what’s “creative”? Blowjobs.

Internet Rundown: Valentine's Day Edition

Here's a cute collection of bad date stories. And you thought your dating life was pathetic. [Marie Claire]

T-Mobile is giving away all of its smartphones for free for Valentine's Day! Except not really. Fine print FTW. [CNET]

Single people rejoice as an annoyingly happy couple is stoned to death. [The Onion]

A twelve-year-old girl finds a naughty message on a candy heart. I guess some compliments are less flattering than others. [KCRA]

Still looking for that great gift to show your Valentine how much you love him? Try a bomb threat. [Newser]

Speaking of love, who doesn't love Austin? Seriously, if you click on only one link this week, make it this one. [City of Austin]

Women Don't Actually Like To Dance--They Just Like To Say They Like To Dance

I go out with these friends of mine from grade/high school--all female. They were all sub-5s (out of the 10.1 "repeating" scale).*

So, we start out with a lame-ish house party. It wasn't terrible. There were huge speakers stacked on top of each other blasting classics like: Informer by Snow; Enter the Sandman by Metallica; and, of course, Tubthumping by Chumba Wumba. Oh yes, it was dress up too. Many shortish men wearing suits bought from Ross:Dress for Less. One guy didn't have a shirt on--he did have a tie on his bare hairy chest. It wasn't real chest hair. It was the Asian mustache of chest hair.

I didn't dress up. Why? Because my $7,000 suit is too good for the riff raff. C'mon! But also because my female friends--a.k.a., women--wanted to go out dancing.

We get ourselves to this bar. It's already about 12:15. I figure we got ourselves like an hour and a half to break it down. And I can break it down. But, apparently, by "dancing" women mean that they want to go to the bar, take 30 minutes to order drinks, sip the drinks slowly from a straw, then--when some Kei$ha song comes on--pump their fists twice and do some awkward scuba/ass shake move. Dancing: check.

This was no dress-up, house party. The bar had some musical class. They played: What About Love? by Heart; This Is How We Do It by Montell Jordan; and even some Rick Astley. I was rick roll'd. My female friends were not.

In summation, women do not like to dance. Women like to say they like to/want to dance.

Sub-rant:
Too many people say "That girl was a 10." nowadays. She wasn't a 10. Shut up. If you weren't ejaculating upon the sight of her, she wasn't a 10. Even if you were, it doesn't count if you were that creepy guy who sits in libraries. And it doesn't count if you just have no control over your release. But this is a losing battle. So now I have developed the 10.1 "repeating" scale. Because no one says "10.1 'repeating.'" Somebody will say 10.1, or maybe 10.11, or maybe even a 10.111. And that just means she wasn't perfect.

This Is So Sad

Hi. My name is Madeline and I don't like reading. I didn't think it was possible for this to happen to me. I'm an English major and a writer. I own over 200 books and exactly 139 classics including a first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls and every one of Austen’s insignificant pre-Pride and Prejudice works. I wanted to love reading. I tried to love reading. I pretended to love reading. I liked the way readers looked so intellectual sitting in studded brown leather chairs with their black rimmed glasses and turtlenecks. I especially liked the way they could look up from their weathered and annotated copy of Wuthering Heights to chew on the end of their glasses and talk about Heathcliff’s social position or the unreliability of Nelly Dean’s narration or Cathy’s larger-than-life metaphysical passion.*

Admitting it was the hardest part. I should have seen it coming when someone asked me to name ten books that have impacted me and I had to lie about four and make up two. Once I stopped denying it and became open with myself and others, I felt free. I found out there are a lot of other writers and English majors just like me. They said they know how I feel and they told me I’m not alone. Now I feel like I can relax and be comfortable with who I am and now I don’t feel like I have to be reading a book to wear a turtleneck.

*For these references, I searched “Wuthering Heights study questions” on Google. I’ve never read the book, nor do I know what it’s about.

A whale can generate enough semen to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool for every pool on Earth… ever

Earlier this week on my commute, I heard a story on the radio discussing the possibility of phasing the penny out from US currency. This debate comes about based on the fact that the penny now costs more to produce than its market value.

Aside from the monetary policy concerns, the story attempted to raise the stakes of this calamity by engaging the listener, me, to comprehend the massive amount wasteful pennies in use. The statement used to relay this was, “if you laid all the pennies in circulation side by side, it would circle the equator twice.” I don’t recall if it was twice or three times, but the fact that I don’t remember is where my point lies.

Whether I haven’t done enough traveling, or I didn’t pay close enough attention in my geography class, or I can only understand size by relating it to my penis, how many times anything can circle the earth is not only un-helpful but destructive in generating other moronic scales that fail to impart a better understanding.

A few examples are; it can travel to the moon and back twice, it could fill the grand canyon 10x, it has half the amount of water as the Pacific Ocean and it would weigh twice the amount of all of the iron on the planet.Provide me with a scale I can understand, perhaps the size of my house, or the length of my car, or the height of a basketball hoop. Unless I pull a Caine, a la Kung Fu and decide to traverse the earth on foot, I have no f’ing clue, in real terms, the size of the equator.

In protest I will start referring to the size of all objects on this "equator" scale. Sir, would you like a 6 inch or footlong sub, make mine a 1/131,479,800^th distance of the equator. Do you have these pants in a size that can circle the earth 1/26,295,960^th times? I was just looking for my shoes when I found a 1/157,775,760^th of the equator black studded dildo under my girlfriend's bed.

The Case Against the Serial Comma

The debate regarding use of the serial comma (aka: the terminal comma) is so clearly one-sided that it hardly needs me to spill ink on the subject. But I can’t resist:

To my readers, Mallory and Laura:
The serial comma is an unnecessary device that is used only by strict grammarians, the overeducated and nerdy people. Now if there aren't any rebuttals, questions about my writing style or comments, who wants to get some coffee, bacon and eggs and toast?