People always told me that bars are dark and lonely

I'm revising a draft of a manuscript that I'm preparing to submit for publication. Today as I was doing so, I completely lost any writing skills that I once possessed, and wrote a sentence, but couldn't quite figure out why it didn't look right. So, I IM'ed my friend for help.

Me: Question: Are you not supposed to start a sentence with 'Although'?

Friend: ummm, probably not.

Me: I just had to break up a run-on sentence. I started the second one with 'However' instead.

Friend: That works.

Me: Works for me. Although, what do I know?

Friend: lol

A little while later:
Friend: I wanna go to the bar later!

Me: Although, do we have time?

Me: Although, the bar does sound kind of fun

Friend: um....STOP THAT

Me: Although, no!

Me: Although, I'm just going to start every sentence like that, whether it applies or not.

Friend: Well, then later you can say "although I don't know why, [Friend] still shoved a barstool up my ass"

Me: Although, I don't want you to shove a bar stool up my ass

Friend: Well, take matters to prevent it.

I look around the world and see that only stupid people are breeding

I am an arrogant bastard*. I tend to think of myself as smarter than most people. While there are those who would argue that this is hardly true, it's true in my mind, and that's all that matters to me. As is the case with most arrogant bastards, I have a bunch of indicators that allow me to know how much smarter I am than everyone else. Some of these are obvious, some less so. The list of indicators is long, and I won't go into all of them here, but I thought I'd share some of the most obvious ones.

I am smarter than you . . .

. . . if you spell the word definitely wrong (e.g., definately).

. . . if you misuse words in your writing (e.g., waste instead of waist).

. . . if you think to, too and two are interchangeable (same thing goes for there, their and they're).

. . . if you write that you "must of" done something wrong (instead of must have).

. . . if you use the following substitutions in your emails**: da instead of the, 2 instead of to, u instead of you, etc.

. . . if you say "liberry"*** instead of library.

Maybe I should have been an English teacher.

Also, whether it's fair or not, I apply a double standard****. I am much more likely to let some of these slide if you're someone that I like as opposed to someone I don't, or if you're a friend or casual acquaintance instead of someone I'm in a relationship with. I haven't kept it a secret that I'm a shallow person. A woman has to be attractive to pique my interest, but believe it or not, good looks alone aren't enough to keep me interested. That's where sense of humor and intellect come in.






*Anyone who doesn't believe me should go talk to my ex-wife. She'll tell you the same.

**It's one thing to do it in text messages, and another if you do it in emails. If you use them in text messages I'll only be mildly annoyed, but can understand if you think it saves you that much effort (even though it doesn't).

***See?


****Especially if I'm the one that makes the mistake, in which case I'm still smarter than you.

It's pencil rot

Silent Kid flew into town for the weekend. Since I was supposed to pick him up Friday evening when he got in, and since most of my friends are out of town for the holidays anyway, I ended up waiting at home instead of going out with friends after work. He called to tell me that his flight had been delayed, so I turned on the TV to kill some time. I flipped through the channels, and quickly realized there really wasn't anything on, so I settled on some trainwreck TV: I watched the final three episodes of A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila. Yes, I am ashamed of this (but Tila totally should have picked Dani over Bobby).

The next day Silent Kid and I went to the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace so we could go to the Virgin store. That store has closed since the last time I went there (as had two other record stores we tried to go to that day), so we really just did a lot of walking around for nothing (and I use the term 'walking' in the loosest possible sense of the word, given the fact that I can't exactly 'walk' anymore, it's more of a hobble since I'm so gimpy).

Anyway, as we made our way back through the mall, I mentioned something I'd seen on A Shot At Love that troubled me (aside from the TV show itself). In the corner of the screen, MTV would periodically put up a banner that read: "Having Tila withdrawl?", and then directed viewers to the show's web site for extra information, cast interviews, etc.

I told Silent Kid that it really bothered me that we've reached a point where you can't be sure whether MTV is misspelling 'withdrawal' in order to be cool, or if they really didn't know how to spell it and nobody on the editorial staff was smart enough to catch it. It is MTV after all.

He replied, "Yeah, well, you know what makes me angry?"

"What?"

"The name of that store right there."

I looked where he was pointing, and saw a shoe store named Shoooz.

English is dead.