Yes, pointing out errors in grammar is petty. Yes, it does not make up for days of silence. But this is not an ideal world we live in.

During a little bit of actual work this morning I came across this:

The marketing hype of a site that outsources bookings for facilities in health clubs and the like. You know… business’s. BUSINESS’S. I think the thing that got me was that it was a header image. There’s something about rasterizing text that calls for a higher standard of quality in my (addled) mind.

Hey fucking neighbours who think it’s ok to have 3-4 friends over at 3 fucking a fucking m on a fucking Monday morning. What. The. Fuck? You may have shift work jobs (how nice for you) but where do you get off thinking it’s party time for the entire apartment building at that hour? Eat hot fuck!
Dead Robot

Hmmm… a different perspective. Now I’m starting to understand the feelings of the mysterious source of all that banging that night earlier this month when I checked into a hotel room with Rachel. At 3am. And she tested the beds by jumping back and forth between them. Destroying one of them. And flying head-first into the space between it and the wall adjacent to it. And not having the TV on. Or more than two people in the room. But still receiving a noise complaint by 3:12.

Rachel: (on the phone to the front desk) What? You don’t have bathrobes? Then can you send up extra towels? (hand over phone) They want to know how many towels.
Simon: We don’t need any extra towels.
Rachel: (into phone) Six. Send up six towels.

Three times this morning, while driving about getting things done, I encountered crossing guards. Dressed brightly. Helping children cross the street. At intersections. With traffic lights.

Back in my day they had crossing guards in the middle of busy four-lane roads, at nothing more than two white lines on the pavement, because they knew that kids would just be running across there willy-nilly regardless of traffic flow. One whistle blow was to tell the cars to stop (in case the drivers were blind and couldn’t see the safety pinny and the portable stop sign held aloft like an Olympic Flame that never managed to get all the way across the street), two whistle blows told us we could cross.

If we could learn these complicated rules, why is it that kids these days can’t figure out how to press a button and wait for a signal change? Isn’t this a critical ‘life skill’? Aren’t we better off if the children who graduate from having a parental escort* to going-it-alone without managing to develop this skill are removed by natural selection?

The moral of the story is: No matter what anyone says, any difference between “back in my day” and “these days” can be attributed to the fact that contemporary kids are stupider and we are, consequently, all doomed.

All my hopes and dreams were fulfilled the day I achieved 24/7 location-independent access to the internet care of my jerkberry. It’s like having your best friend (one who doesn’t particularly like you and has an obsession with porn) at your side at all times.

On Sunday morning in a taxi home I found myself engaged in my own (and now predictable) version of drunk-dialling. I’m sorry, but I still think emailing Kuwait from the back of a cab barrelling towards the trashy side of a blue-collar town at four in the morning is a little exotic. I’m sure that says something about me.

The problem arrives in the combination of the communications options presented by the jerkberry mixed with a drunk’s tendency toward carelessness. I woke up in the morning absolutely sure that the embarrassingly self-serving, “woe is me I’m so awesome and the world is so messed up” email that I thought had been sent to my de facto life coach doing time in the middle east for the crime of educating himself actually got posted to the ‘On The Road’ section of jerkspot. Though this was not the case, my inability to adjust my processes once I’ve identified a weakness guarantees you that one Sunday morning soon you’ll be more entertained than I had intended you to be.

The moral of the story is: Hopes and dreams invariably lead to soul-crushing humiliation.

After three months of trying I finally managed to get to work early this morning. On a Monday of all things! I got out of bed and didn’t immediately get back into it, braved a sad shower in a cold bathroom, and got to enjoy the quiet, dark early morning streets. I have two hours to structure as I see fit before the week officially begins and my responsibilities to others run everything else off the rails. And how am I using those two hours?

The moral of the story is: The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men gang aft agley. But sometimes on the day they don’t gang agley, you find yourself wondering why you thought it was such a good scheme to begin with.

I’d say be safe and I’d say be well and I’d say if there’s mess in your life just embrace it, but that would require me to at least tacitly acknowledge the fact that I think someone is reading this.

I don’t know if I love this, but I think I might. I know I love Shirley Bassey.

And besides, the front page was in desperate need of some imagery. Verbosity whut? Christ.

Now I’m not one to write a love letter on something as tedious and uninteresting as Facebook, but can we talk about Facebook for a minute? Perhaps you haven’t heard of it… it’s like Geocities but with more auto-growing cacti. And its “status” feature gets me down.

Being the original member of the “Petition to get Facebook to remove the ‘is’ from status” group (this is a lie) I was of course thrilled to discover recently (even though it was probably news in the 80s) that the ‘is’ (as in “Simon is something”) is now optional. But even without that sentence-mangler, my first instinct (and if this was a multiple choice test I’d have to trust that) is always to write something negative.

If I was a cultural anthropologist I might cast a wider net than just blaming the intrinsic characteristics of the status function. I might ask whether something about the Facebook experience brings me down, or if I am more likely to think of using Facebook to begin with when I am feeling spiritually bereft. Perhaps a status message killed my father once. But being exceedingly comfortable with confirmation bias, I choose instead to blame that damn button.

The moral of the story is: do not consult me if you have observations for which you’d like to accurately identify causal factors. Also, if you don’t have anything nice to say, Facebook.

It’s hard to talk about resolutions for two reasons. The first is that I’ve shied away from actually writing anything resembling a resolution down to avoid, I realize now, the concrete documentation of a goal. If it’s not written down who’s going to be able to say I’ve failed to live up to it on a bitterly cold January 17th morning? The difficulty then is evident — “talking” would mean “writing” would mean committing to the goal. Opening the door to potential failure.

The second difficulty is jerkspot’s resolution (you were not aware it was both autonomous and sentient?) to be less about the things in my head and more about the world outside it. Stop hating on reality, as it was deftly articulated to me last night. Funny how things fit together.

With that revealed, I am ready to commit to a resolution. And it’s to join the Get Your Life Together Club. An invitation was afforded to me during a commune with my soul mate just following the televised New Hampshire primary debates last night. (I was more interested in the cupcakes and making fun of physical attributes of candidates than the substantive content of this foreign political process, truth be told.) My understanding of this club is that it involves regular meetings of members so that they may have the opportunity to call shenanigans on one another as they begin the inevitable drift away from January 1st ideals. For my part, I will be making buttons and lobbying hard for the service of girly drinks during these meetings.

Honestly, is that not the greatest idea you’ve ever heard? Like weight watchers for the reality challenged. Particularly considering we all are totally on board with getting life together and are equally at risk of, like, not. Codependency. I mean, interdependent support with a common goal. Recipe for success.

And the difficulties only recently articulated are deftly dispatched. It’s written, because to avoid writing it down would be hating on reality. And that’s out. And this here resolute tirade is not all about what I’m thinking, but about a thought my soul mate developed with her sisterly partner in crime on which I am now pinning all my hopes and dreams. Score!

As a side note, I am also adopting the secondary resolution that was assigned to me by Avril: Do not disturb the sexy.

It was the wee hours of January 1st. You stole the cab I’d been waiting on for forty minutes. You were with two guys, one who reminded me of John Edwards and another one who looked like he was calling his mommy. I’d actually been following you around all night since I saw you hustling near the pool table at Pepperjack’s. You had that “stalk me around the city” sort of quality, and I thought between the hipster raveathon at Pepperjack’s, the uninhibited queer abandon at The Embassy and the cold and lonely trudge through the frozen wasteland of early morning Hamilton that I’d get a chance to talk to you away from your menfolk, but it wasn’t meant to be. I think we had something special. Comment me back if you feel the same. Maybe we can get refused service in an Italian restaurant together sometime.