Entry 61: It Was a Good Friday

Where does Good Friday rank on the list of Fridays? Certainly it’s below Friday the Ice Cube movie, but it’s definitely better than Next Friday the terrible sequel. I’d probably put it somewhere between Joe Friday the detective from Dragnet and TGI Friday’s the mediocre chain restaurant (and my employer the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college).

[Although not the "real" Joe Friday, Dan Akroyd is the one I remember.]

Tomorrow is Easter. I’m not Christian, so there isn’t a whole lot for me to celebrate, but I do appreciate the long “break”. (Down Under you get four days off for Easter. Well, three days off for Easter and one for Anzac Day.) I put quotes around the word break, because I’ll be spending much of it writing a paper for work, so it’s time off from the office, but not really a break.

S has been away in Myanmar on a work assignment for a while, and she really wanted me to visit her, but it’s too much traveling for such a short visit. I would lose two full days in transit, and I probably would get very little done on this paper, and I need to make some serious headway on it. Plus, she’s coming home soon, anyway. I actually didn’t even know that I had this much time off until just a few days ago. That works against me with S, because she’s asked me many times to get my holiday schedule, and I still haven’t done it. All in all, though, I’d say S is disappointed, but understanding that I’m not coming to visit.

I slept in until 11:30 yesterday which is the latest I’ve slept in a long time. I was slightly irritated to have missed the morning, but my body needed it. I got almost no sleep last Sunday, and I couldn’t catch up the entire week. The reason I got almost no sleep on Sunday is because somebody in the boutique directly below my apartment forgot to turn off the stereo when they closed down shop. It was bumping all damn night. I tried turning on the fan to drown out the noise, and I tried using earplugs, but nothing worked. In fact, earplugs made it slightly worse because it blocked out all the noise except for the bass, so instead of music I just heard dull thuds, “boom, boom, boom.” Bass is like kryptonite to earplugs.

Anyway, the next day I called the shop, politely explained to the worker what had happened, and asked if, in the future, they could be sure the stereo is off when they leave. She was super apologetic and said of course. That was that. It sucked, but it was an honest mistake.

On a completely different note, I had a weird déjà vu experience a few nights ago. I was doing some sort of menial task, sorting laundry, I think, and I had a podcast called The Film Vault on in the background. They were discussing some movie whose name I didn’t catch. I wasn’t paying that close of attention to it until they played the movie’s theme song, and this avalanche of nostalgia came down on me.

From roughly ages 8-11, I was a big wrestling fan (the fake kind), and the song they were playing on the podcast was the entrance music for an old wrestling tag team called The Midnight Express. When I heard this song, it immediately took me back to that time period in my life. The feeling I got is hard to describe other than to say it was nostalgic and extremely intense.

[The Midnight Express.]

The movie they were talking about is also called The Midnight Express (which explains why the tag team used the theme song as their entrance music). It’s apparently mostly set in a Turkish prison and is supposed to be incredibly disturbing. I haven’t seen it, but now I’m curious about it and might watch it someday. Incidentally, it’s indirectly referenced in the comedy classic Airplane! (“Timmy, have you ever been in a Turkish Prison?”) Anyway, I linked to the theme song below. I like it. It’s got an eerie to feel it.



In political news, there appears to be renewed focus on the Sarah Palin’s-child-isn’t-really-her-child-but-her-grandchild story. By which I mean somebody on Facebook put up a link to an article about it. I read the article. There are some interesting points in it, don’t overall I’m not really buying it. Maybe I’m naïve, but I tend not to believe these conspiracy theories. Most of the time the “evidence” is really thin, and often the theorist uses flawed logic – it’s purported that A happened, I’ve looked into it and I can’t explain how A could have happened, therefore A probably didn’t happen. Ultimately, I don’t really care about this particular conspiracy. My opinion of Sarah Palin is already so low, that her perpetrating a massive lie to the American public barely moves the needle. It is interesting though how this story is way fishier than the Obama’s-true-birthplace story, which has been as debunked as it possibly can be, and yet the latter is much more well-known and prevalent in the media.

In comedy news, I watched a bunch of Mitch Hedberg clips on youtube the other night. Mitch was a comedian who gained a sort of cult following ten years ago or so. He died in 2005, essentially of a drug overdose. Drug use was at the heart of a lot of his jokes. I had heard about him from several people, but had never seen his act, so on a whim I decided to look him up on youtube. He was pretty funny. I recommend watching some of his clips.

[Mitch Hedberg.]

Two of my favorite jokes of his:

I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.

When I think of a joke I have to get a pen and write it down. If the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that the joke wasn’t that funny.

Inspired by Mitch Hedberg, I’m going to start ending each blog entry with five jokes, mostly ones that I come up with. Now, by no means am I going for Mitch Hedberg type laughs. I’m going more for the comic strip Luann type laughs. That is, you never really laugh at all, but you read it anyway because it doesn’t hurt anything, and you have nothing better to do.

(By the way, I’m putting the over/under at three entries containing jokes. That’s about how many I expect to get to before I get bored with this idea.)

First, some math-nerd jokes. The last two aren’t mine. People I know came up with them.

1. Remember those old bumper stickers “Mean People Suck”? I never understood those, what’s wrong with being average?

2. I wasn’t born in a hospital. I was born in a house. I’ve been thinking about buying the house when I get older, so that I can die in the exact spot I was born. People will say I didn’t do any work in my life.

3. Every dance is the robot, given a sufficiently advanced robot.

Now a joke about not being able to sleep that I came up with while lying awake Sunday night.

4. Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night, and I can’t sleep, my mind will wander to dark and disturbing places. The other night I had a rape fantasy. I fantasized that somebody was raping my goddamn neighbor whose music was keeping me up.

I know, I know, rape jokes aren’t cool. It’s a bit weird how rape is such a socially taboo topic, but it’s completely acceptable to talk about murder, a far more heinous crime. Case in point, there’s no literary genre called “rape mystery”. When I was a little kid, I used to love playing Clue – a board game based entirely around murder. Can you imagine how horrified people would be if there was a rape equivalent? “It was Professor Plum, in the frat house, with the roofie.”

And in honor of Good Friday, one about religion.

5. The problem with religion is that you can't pick and choose what you want to believe. It’s a package deal. And it’s not even a good package deal. All the rules were decided long ago, and it doesn’t seem like the deciders were very good at their jobs. If I had been in charge, things would have been much better.

“Hey Boss, we’re got a draft of the tenets of that religion we were thinking of starting.”

“Okay, great, let’s hear them.”

“Well, first off, we want to spread a message of love, we say, ‘Love thy neighbor.’”

“Yeah, I like that.”

“Also, we’re not a violent people, we want peace on Earth.”

“Yes, that’s good, as well.”

“And we want to help the sick, the poor, and the old. Care for those who cannot care for themselves.”

“Great, great. This all good stuff.”

“Then we were thinking that we could worship a crucified carpenter who came about from a virgin birth. You know, we could praise him and pray to him, and our best athlete’s could reference him during post-game interviews. Maybe every so often we could even have ceremonies where we drink wine and pretend that it’s his blood.”

“…”

“Boss?”

“Let’s just go with those first three.”

Religion is a lot like cable television. Many Sunday afternoons have been wasted on them, and for a few good channels, you sure have to buy a whole lot of garbage.

You’ve been a great audience. Thank you and good night.