You're Going To Be Fine

I read this entry online that claimed that there are some very successful people who hadn't gotten anything done by the age of 30. It was meant to reassure people reading the article, like myself, who hadn't really gotten too much done at the time they were reading the article and were looking for a way to not feel that bad about it. I suppose it worked on me, to an extent. I mean, I'm not 30 yet, but it is getting noticeably closer and I do constantly get the feeling that I should have gotten something done before now, or should have a plan for what I'm looking to do if I haven't actually done it. This work here, this pile of thoughts and theories that I am still hacking away at, perhaps this is what I am ultimately supposed to be doing. Or maybe not, and it is yet another distraction that will lead me, unknowingly, onto something else, and I'm supposed to be doing THAT thing instead.

Maybe I'm not supposed to do anything. I have of course considered it.

Let's say I'm not supposed to do or be anything great. Let's say I don't do something very good OR something horrible, and I just kind of drift along in this same way, feeling exactly like this, for the rest of my life... is it really all that bad?

Oh, it's tough to settle in life. I know it's tough to purely give up or to watch yourself get complacent and make real peace with it, and there are constant reminders that I've known others that have risen up past the level that I would be labeling as what I am content with. But I can also admit, there are people I remember, people I grew up with, that are way worse off now than they were back in the day that I knew them. Or people that I didn’t even know, that I still would really not want to trade places with.

This one guy in particular, I never even remembered his name. But I ran into him at the bar in my hometown a few times, this same bar on a Saturday night. The bar was called 'Flips'. Our group liked it because the bar was easy to get to, it was right off the highway. And it was away from what was considered downtown, for our small and nondescript town anyway. Which meant there was less likelihood of running into random people we used to know in high school, people we didn’t care to run into now. And it was just a good, straight forward, no gimmicks just decent bar, it was all we asked for in our early 20's. Our group of friends liked to do interesting and insane things on certain nights, and go to bars with crazy specials and amazing bands playing, but sometimes we liked to be near home and just go somewhere simple and almost boring for a breather.

That and they didn't always card.

Anyway, by this point in my life, I was of age and didn't really have anything to worry about on that front. I was able to be irresponsible in a legal basis, which wasn't quite as fun but was showing its perks. I was at the point in my life and in college where I thought that I had actually learned some things and could talk as such. Every twenty-one year old in a bar thinks they finally have something to talk about, why wouldn't I?

Anyway, like I said, I never got the name of this guy that I met at Flips, but I still remember his face. He had these reddish eyes, these scars across his cheek on one side, this scruffy but still somehow managed beard. He wasn't that tall, but had a large heavyset type build. But like the type that could very well have been some muscle in the recent past years and just packed some flab over it. Or maybe he was even then still muscular, it can be deceptive for some people. But the point is, it looked like the guy had seen better days. He was a bit older and seemed just run down. In fact, I seem to remember he usually showed up wearing a headband. What kind of dude wears a headband to a bar?

But either way, the guy was not too much of a schmuck if you talked to him. Which I did once. I was there with a good friend, Kyle, and we had neared the end of several rounds and were about to call it a night. And this guy overheard something we say or we respond to something we heard and we strike up a conversation. He was just a dude, just some chill guy who was also drunk on a Wednesday night like we were. We talked about sports, and a bit about the music that was playing. And it wasn’t anything weird.

But I did notice him start to mention things consciously. He mentioned he drove a Benz, much like the Benz I was driving of my dad’s that night. He mentioned he ran track at Grapevine High School, like I did. I mean, he did it like 5 times, stuff that was not in conversation and in a weird way. And Kyle noticed too. And we didn’t mention any of the similarities when they came up, but we both said later that it felt like he was trying to elicit a reaction from us. Like he knew that they were similarities somehow. It was eerie. And the eeriness was further compounded by the fact that the next few times I went to that bar, he was always there.

Now, on one hand, this could all be a coincidence, and not really that sketchy in general. Or this dude could have been a stalker or a con artist or just some weird guy in a bar doing weird wild shit. He could have been trying to set up a gay hook up with me, I don’t know. There would be nothing wrong with that if I was also gay and it didn’t come off as completely surreptitious. And that’s the point I’m making here. I grew up in that town, I knew people that either didn’t leave or left and their lives crashed and burned, and it could always be worse. I mean, I went through a rough period post-graduating college, where I couldn't get a real job and didn’t have any money or anything going on, but shit, I could be the guy at the bar trying to strike up random conversations with strangers to establish or feign things in common. I could legitimately be THAT guy. And I’m not.

Could be worse.

So I just thought I’d throw that out there, for some of you that see these facebook feeds full of your friends and family doing all these epic things. People are finishing up their Doctorates, moving to different countries, buying luxury houses around their luxury cars and that have access to park their yachts, people are even building luxury cars in some cases. If you’re seeing lawyers and doctors and film directors and hedge fund managers and Congressmen and astronauts (no, I haven’t got any friends trying to be astronauts...that I’m aware of), if you see all of these things that others are doing and you aren’t doing these things too, just remember a few things. You aren’t in jail. You aren’t paralyzed. Hopefully, you aren’t in so much debt that you’ll never get out of it. Most of you have some kind skill, something that can be further developed and used as a focal point of your future and your career. Some of you are attractive enough that you have a significant other or might one day find someone willing to put up with you. No one’s saying your life is perfect. But you’re alive. And you’re not just finished, you’re not destitute. You’re not making grilled cheese sandwiches over an open flame in an abandoned lot somewhere. You’re going to be fine. Just keep being, living, doing you.

I do wonder what that guy at Flips is doing to this day. I haven’t been back in years, he could still be there. He could be living in a van down by the river. He could be dead. He could also be preparing a corporate takeover of some software start-up and getting ready to buy his 3rd villa house somewhere exotic because he has money like that now.

Just do you. You’re going to be fine.

O'Hare Airport Ain't Big Enough For The Two Of Us

In the heat of the moment, a lot of us tend to make a bigger deal out of some situations than we should. And by that, I mean basically everyone makes a bigger deal out of basically everything that they deal with. It’s absurd how into ourselves we are today. The shit we need to put on Facebook to get people to give us some likes. And snapchat and Instagram and Twitter and MySpace (do people still use Myspace?). We take pictures of ourselves doing things, or then doing nothing but sitting in front of a mirror looking at ourselves and making that stupid duck face. We post videos of us doing dumb things, intermixed with other people we’ve never met also doing dumb things. Right now, you’re reading the inner ramblings of another person who’s literally writing this because he wants to. And thank you for that by the way, but it furthers this particular point. Everything is not as crucial as we probably build it up into our own mind.

Why do we put things on this level? Is it that we just want to believe that we are that important? Are we all just becoming narcissists that have to be constantly paid attention to, that have to chronicle our every move and thought to play to the masses like our own individual Truman show?

Yeah, pretty much.

It’s not so bad sometimes, either. It means we never have to feel out of touch with anyone that we care about (or don’t care about, for that matter). We can constantly be entertained, by just surfing the annals of social media until we find something that one of our acquaintances did, said, or reposted that piques our interest. It’s cheaper than cable and stranger than fiction. There’s always something weird that you can find out there if you look hard enough, and that makes it easier to always find the thing that you want to see or hear next. Which, in turn, gets you used to seeing and hearing what you want to see and hear, so you may grow dependent on just that. Not just the fact that you can literally seek out stuff that justifies the things that you already thought. I mean the concept that you are just that important, where stuff should be readily and constantly available to you, no matter what or when or where or how.

And look, I know I’m not exempt from this. It’s one of the burdens of technology. We start living our lives faster and we stop remembering how to do stuff. I always think of phones. We used to have to remember people’s phone numbers. Now, the only numbers I really remember are from my childhood because that’s when I had to know who to dial and I dialed so often. I used to be so excited to get home from school or from classes at college to go and play computer games. Now I play games constantly and think nothing about it. Remember when you used to have to carry around CD’s that you wanted to hear? Or tapes? Or you had to know how play music yourself?! Now you just plug in your earbuds, or you just say screw it and press play anyway. Let everyone in the room jam out with you, who cares? It’s all right there at your fingertips. You don’t have to wait. So why not get used to that?

This takes me back to my college days for a few reasons. The mid 2000’s is when social media really started to take off as a ubiquitous part of everyone’s life. It was when Facebook and Twitter really started to come alive, and when YouTube went from a site that you visit to a thing that you did. We use YouTube as a verb now, but it used to be right there with a few other ways to search for something, like Ebaum’s world. Remember Ebaum’s world? Me too. Kind of.

Anyway, between technology becoming cheaper and wifi becoming a more thing that every place had or should have, it was actually a good time to be a college student. I was probably in my third year of undergrad at UW-Madison. And I’m fairly certain I was flying home from Thanksgiving in Texas back up to Madison, which means like many other times, I had to go through Chicago O’Hare airport. I hate O’Hare airport. For the simple fact that O’Hare makes everything more complicated. I’ve flown through this airport as a connection and which 2 exceptions, every god damn time I go there I get delayed. Doesn’t matter what time of day, where I’m going, or what season and weather, it never seems to fail that I do not get where I’m trying to go on time. I actually get surprised the times that I get out of O’Hare and my plans have not been ruined.

I’ve had times where I was running through the terminal like one of the Home Alone movies. Missed my flight every time. I’ve had times where the weather had them cancel my flights and the airline bought me a bus ticket instead. On the way back from my recruiting visit to UW, I got stuck in the airport for 13 hours going through 5 different flights on the standby list. But the time that sticks out in my mind the most about the perils of O’Hare airport is the time that I almost got into it with this old Asian lady about a power outlet.

So on this particular evening in Chicago, I was still waiting for my next flight that I could jump onto for a standby. Because I was late getting in from Dallas and my flight left without me. Like I expected. I called it from so far in advance, I didn’t even bother doing my homework because I knew I’d have time in the airport. So that’s what I did. I had some history research and I had to give my analysis of a historic speech, and it was actually not that hard but it was going to take a long time so I had to make sure that I could sit in a spot and focus a good amount of time all at once to at least knock out one of these assignments. So I get of the plane and I walk to terminal I will eventually be flying out of, and I look for a peaceful place to get my work done. No such luck. My flight was not the only one that was late getting in, there was a shitload of people waiting for standby seats all over the place. The announcing speakers were constantly talking over each other about which passenger’s were up next and which gates were now switching and what times departures were now being pushed back. The weather was not even that bad overall, but it was crappy other places and the terminal was jam packed with people.

So the hallways with outlets and desks on carpeted floors that were usually quieter and not as heavy with foot traffic? Gridlocked, not just with occupants, but with people hovering, waiting for someone to leave so that they could claim the next spot. So were the food courts, so were the chairs outside of most of the gates, it was absurd. It was like we were all waiting for concert tickets, but no one knew where the office was going to open up. I had been walking for twenty minutes, trying to find anywhere that I could just set up shop and get to work, and I finally found a spot on the tile floor around the corner from my eventual gate. It was going to be a few hours, so I used my jacket as a pseudo cushion and set my laptop and notes up.

After a few minutes, this other guy came by and asked if he could use the other side of the outlet, which I obviously said he could. He was a nice enough guy, about my age, from New Jersey. And he’s got his stuff he’s trying to get done, and I’m working on my stuff, and everything is good. And that’s the end of the story, right?

I’m afraid not.

Ten minutes into me and Jersey Boy working on our stuff without interruption (I knew his name at one point, but I forgot it and it doesn’t matter), an elderly looking Asian woman walks up to me slowly. She has this long, purple jacket on, and she has a cute but unsure kind of smile, and she’s holding a laptop. I’m not even sure she is coming up to me until she taps me on the shoulder. I had my earbuds in, so I remove them to hear her out.

“Um, excuse me?” She managed somehow. “Can you spare the power to share?” Don’t ask me how I remember that particular phrase, I just remember that’s what she said. And it sounded like this might be the extent of the English that she knows. I try to explain that I need the power and that I’m working on something and that she has to find another outlet in this case. I glance over at the other guy, who’s just staring back at her, probably hoping he doesn’t have to give a similar justification. She doesn’t look at him, she stares at me, like eventually I’ll change my mind. And when I say she stared at me, I mean like two straight minutes, just staring with this uneasy grin. Almost like she was processing what I must have said. And then all at once, it turns to disgust. Like I flipped a switch in her somehow. And yes, it might have been when I got sick of staring back at her uncomfortably and put my earbuds back in. But come on, two minutes is a lot of time to stare at someone 3 feet away and have them obviously waiting for you to give in to their demands.

She walks away, and I look over at the NJ guy again, and we exchange this look like, “What was I supposed to do?” But I look back over at her as she’s walking off in a huff, and I notice that on her screen is a still shot of a movie. I don’t know for sure, but I feel like it was actually a scene from ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. And that almost pissed me off for a second. The nerve of this asshole, trying to get me off of my outlet that I had to scavenge for so she can watch one of the many medical dramas out there. I may have moved over for Scrubs, mind you, but not for Meredith Grey. I have my principles.

Anyway, we go back to our work. And that lasts about 5 minutes. And I’m just now getting into the groove of the work I’m doing, like it’s just getting productive, and I get this feeling that I’m being watched. I can’t explain why, but I just get this weird inkling. But I try to shake it off as I continue my speech analysis. But then I get the feeling again, and for some reason, I look up, and I see the Asian lady in the Purple coat walking slowly with another Asian lady, and they’re both glaring at me as they pass by. They are locking eyes with me as they move down the corridor towards the mini bookstore. I was a bit taken back by it, because I had almost forgotten that she existed, and now she’s back, and she has backup. But again, no big deal.

And then a few minutes later, I look up and she’s walking back across the walkway in front of us the other way, and there’s another lady, this one REALLY old with them. This woman had a cane, but she was more intent on locking eyes with me than on making sure that she was walking carefully enough to protect her one good hip. And then they all got smoothies, and came back and just kind of camped out right across from us. All giving stink eyes right at me as they sipped their Orange Julius’s through straws.

Now of course the Jersey guy noticed this too, and he looked over and said something to the affect of, “Dude, did you do something to piss off the Asian mafia?” And I said that I wasn’t sure anymore, and I told him that I’m pretty sure that the first lady was watching Grey’s Anatomy, and he laughed at that. “You and I might get our asses whipped over Ellen Pompeo?” And I say, “Yeah, this might get ugly.” So he says he’ll back me up if it really comes to a head or anything, which he hopes it won’t because this would be a really stupid thing to fight anyone over, under any circumstance. I tell him that I agree, and that we will hopefully be able to reason with them if they really can’t let this outlet thing go. And we stare back over at them for another minute or two.

And then we hear, “All passengers for flight 3477 to San Francisco can now begin boarding now. We are now boarding all rows, all passengers.” And one of the ladies whispers something to the main Asian lady in the purple, and they all just kind of snap out of it, and they hop up and leave. And that was the end of it.

I mean, this would have gone down as one of the dumbest things to fight about, period. A power outlet in a crowded airport full of outlets if you look hard enough. At least I assume that’s what happened. I may have disrespected her and not realized it somehow, or she may have not liked black people, it is possible. Maybe she was just overcome by the power of this particular episode and really needed to know what happened next. But all of these come back to the point that whatever she desired at that moment was obviously very important to her, as was it important to me to get my own stuff done rather than just get out of the way to not provoke someone who clearly needed to finish binge watching a season on a laptop. This was such a stupid thing that was a huge deal at the time, apparently. Seriously, who even gives a shit in retrospect?

Furthermore, why do we complain about traveling through airports? What happens after we wait for a while? Oh that’s right, we get into metal contraptions and fly through the sky! And it’s way faster and it’s really not that much more of a hassle than driving or taking a bus would be, and many times it’s less of an overhaul hassle, and we still complain constantly. Louis CK pointed this out too. “New York La Guardia to LAX in 6 hours. That used to take 30 years! And a bunch of you would die along the way, and people would put your hat on a stick where they buried you and keep walking. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got to California! Now you watch an Adam Sandler movie, take a big runny dump, and you’re there.” It wasn’t a 30 year trip, but otherwise, yeah, I have to agree. We’ve gotten used to complaining. And we’re probably not stopping any time soon.

I’m still probably never going to San Francisco again, when I think about it. I don’t need to run into that woman, especially if she doesn’t like how Grey’s Anatomy has turned out these past few years. Except she may not have actually been from San Francisco… Maybe I’ll avoid California for a while.

You know what? Screw her. I’ll go where I want. I hope I see her next time I go through O’Hare. Bring it on. I can handle the stink eye from old Asian ladies. I hope she has her whole family with her next time. Seriously, screw her.

And screw Grey’s Anatomy. Just because.

Caution, Wet Floor

I had this coworker a while back. We’ll call him Zee. Zee was interesting in a few different ways. I mean, this guy was just a hodgepodge of bad habits and sharing the wrong bits of information. He shared the details of he and his wife's Valentine's day. Or maybe it was the anniversary, either way it was a bit much to hear behind the counter during a work shift. He would go back and forth from trying to be everyone's friend and share a ton of his projects like his prog metal band or his sketch comedy group, and then would get overly serious and act like he owned the branch. It was weird being around him for a full shift.

He would tell you about how creative he was and all the things he wanted to do. And he would tell you how sure he was of his vision, and how creative he was, and how funny some of his ideas were. And then he would tell you a joke and it would be awful. Or better yet, it'd be a joke you'd heard before but he'd tell it wrong.

Like this one he tried this one time, I remember, his joke was , "What's the difference between Jews and pizzas?" Pause. "Jews don't scream when you pull them out of the oven. No, wait." He knew that he had screwed it up, but it actually made an otherwise bit of unnecessary racism actually funny to me. I was like, Jesus, what kind of pizzas do you have at your house? Like, what if that was normal, like you're sitting at your house and you just hear a random shriek from the kitchen, and the first thought in your mind is, “Hey, y’all makin’ pizza tonight?!”

Sometimes things are only funny because you had to be there.

There’s a phrase that hangs around a lot of jokes that people tell. The phrase is, “You just had to be there.” There are a lot of versions to this phrase, but they all amount to the same basic principle: This is an inside joke, that has context that you will not understand unless you know the people, place, or things involved. They are jokes that basically no one will find funny other than a select few people that know or experienced something specific.

Then again, inside jokes are kind of what all jokes are, when you think about it, because you have to know some kind of context for really anything to be funny. Context is the key. Whether you’re making fun of something or you’re referencing something ironically or you’re just being goofy, most of the time it’s only funny if you know what is being referenced. If I show you Abbott and Costello’s bit, “Who’s on first?” and you don’t know anything about baseball or what names people usually have, the joke doesn’t make much sense, does it? You have to understand the setting of what something is supposed to be before you can go into why something is different.

A pie and a face? Not inherently funny. A pie in the face? It’s funny to some people, kinda played out to others. Same with someone getting punched in the face. Some things just work with certain people, which may very well turn back to our own experiences, I don’t know. Obviously there’s no formula for figuring out what’s funny to which people, what stuff we should all find funny, blah blah blah. But as much as we laugh at things because they were going the way the joke is supposed to go, sometimes we laugh even harder at things that are going the wrong way. Yes, sometimes failures and screw ups are just as funny, or even funnier than the intended thing was supposed to be.

Things that you witness are usually pretty hard to explain why they were hilarious if you don’t have a way to fully relate what was going on or who was involved. Even a picture or a video rarely does the situation actual justice.

I’ll tell you a story now.

I was out with some friends of mine in college, and we went to this Mexican restaurant on the edge of campus that didn’t card. We went there because we were all underage, or only one of us had an ID, I forget how it worked. But we went there and drank, and we were too young to do it legally. The place was known for it’s margaritas. It was also known for serving underagers those margaritas. Believe it or not, the place is no longer in business. Before you ask, no, it was because they were busted for serving underage drinkers. They actually had huge shootout that happened there, too. Or whatever, I just know they closed years ago, that’s not the point.

I had just met these new friends, and was just getting to know them as they were getting to know me. But I was the new one in a group that had been around each other for a few years, and I was constantly caught off guard by them. For one, they were all Packer fans. I had come from Texas to college and was still a Cowboys fan. I didn’t know all the same people as they did, I didn’t watch all the same shows, I was in different types of classes, stuff like that. In fact, I remember being somewhat intimidated by these friends I had just made. They were all really smart and really passionate about what they were studying in school. Mitch and Dylan were studying engineering, Breah was a year ahead in Business school, Luca was building racing car motors, and Karen was into Veterinary science. Me, I was between majors at the time. I ran track and field at our school and I worked with Dylan at football games up in the club seats, but not much else was solid in my future plans. So yeah, that’s what I had to talk about.

But there was one thing I discovered at this Mexican restaurant that I could definitely do with these kids: drink.

We started in on those margaritas and we just did not let up. I think we got them in pitchers rather than individual drinks, and we basically each had our own pitcher by the end of it. And this was on a weeknight, I very clearly remember this coming on a night that I still had homework to get done before class the next day, this was not ideal. But it all just escalated quickly. It went from, “No, I’m not drinking” to “Well, I’ll have one if you guys are just having one” to “One or two more won’t hurt anything” to “Where the hell is our table? Do we still have our table?” These drinks were not playing around, I can remember that much. Their kung-fu was strong. There may have been some tequila shots too, not sure.

Anyway, we get up to leave. And we were, to put it mildly, 'feeling it'. It was sometime around November or December, because it was the first snow of the season, but it was this nasty rain slush that was coming down. Tough to walk in, tough on the eyes and face, it was windy too, so this just sucked to be out in. So what we did is cut through a building on the first block out that was on our way home, which allowed us to be inside for at least a little longer. This building had an art gallery that was actually open at the time, so naturally there were these classy types having a nice little cocktail mixer, enjoying fine art. And in comes 5 noisy drunken undergrads, talking shit about each painting like we know what era and techniques each of them entail. I’m not sure if we tried to stay and order drinks or not, I just remember that we were essentially ushered out of the building, as politely as possible. Or we just kept walking and didn’t try to stop, either scenario is equally likely. But this detour was notable for one other reason. I may have borrowed something on my way out.

When we left the building and began walking again in the slush again, a young couple was walking across the sidewalk, in front of us. I held up the yellow fold-up sign I had taken from the building that read “Caution: Wet Floor.” I announced the words of this to the couple, who turned around, surprised. Then, as politely as I think anyone ever could have been, they just waved and said, “Oh, thank you,” as if this was a revelation to them. Well, the rest of the group saw this and thought this was a ridiculous and completely unnecessary. And so we decided to keep doing it to everyone else on the way home. Basically, every passing person or group of people and every car got the same announcement of a wet floor. And with one exception, everyone was really nice about it, and said thank you. There was one couple that did look at us like we were nuts, which was probably the funniest part of all of it. But even passing cars just had people wave and laugh at us.

Why was this funny to me? Well, perhaps it was the fact that literally no one needed us to know that the ground was wet, and it was a goofy way of trying to feel better about crappy weather. Maybe it was the idea that I was hanging out with these brilliant kids, and yet they were all acting just as dumb as I was at the moment, and that years later I still talk with some of them about nights just like this. And again, maybe we were just really, really drunk. But this is one of my best memories from college and it came from something that probably makes no sense and isn’t funny if I tell you what happened with no context.

Guess you had to be there for it.