Month: August 2013

A couple answers to questions from e-mail! (Anonymity requested.)

Do you know car makes and models? Do you feel strongly about what vehicle you have (or would like to have), or are you more indifferent?

I’m not terribly knowledgeable about cars, no. I do like the looks of Subaru Outbacks, and some of the various SUV-type vehicles out on the road these days, and that will likely be the direction I go if and when I’m in the market for a car again (the added size will be nice for transporting a string bass around). Other than that, I’d like a decent stereo to which I can connect my phone or other music players, and one day I would love to own a car with working A/C. And mileage will have to be at least 30 mpg. That’s about it, though — as for the rest (aesthetics, color, styling of the interior), I’ll have to look around and see what catches my eye.

My current car is a 2003 Buick Century that I acquired from my unbelievably generous parents. I like it a lot, and my current plan is to drive it until it dies and/or falls apart. A car payment is a pretty large regular expense that I want to avoid having for as long as possible. (This is, of course, a changeable attitude based on when the royalty checks and movie offers for Princesses In SPACE!!! start pouring in. Heh!)

What pets would you ideally like to have? 42 cats? Cats and dogs? Exotic pets? Fish tank? Lizards? Hamster?

I’m fine with just cats, but I have a feeling that a dog is inevitable at some point or other. I’m not a dog person, but I don’t rule it out. The Wife and The Daughter want a dog, though. It’s gotta be a nice-sized dog, though. Not some annoying yippy thing that can fit in a purse. You know what dog I’d like, though? Verdell from As Good As It Gets. That was a cool dog.

I have a friend on Facebook (and Flickr and Instagram) who has a love-hate thing going on with her insane chihuahua. I want no part of that breed, as much as I love watching her dog’s bizarre psychoses from afar!

Exotic pets? Nah, no interest, although a fish tank would be nifty. We had a hermit crab for a while and I wouldn’t mind going that route again, as those are really low-maintenance. I don’t know if I’d want any kind of rodent, and I have zero interest in reptiles of any sort. I like to look at ’em, but owning one and being responsible for it? Nah.

From a different questioner: You seem less enthusiastic about sports every year. With the Pirates on the verge of winning and your Bills at least with new coaches and a rookie QB, do you find yourself getting into it again?

Meh. Next question comes from…oh, OK, I’ll revise and extend.

First, the Pirates: well, it’s nice that they’re winning. But it’s not like I’m watching games; my following of their fortunes consists of checking scores and standings. I can’t even name all the guys on their roster, and my sum total time spent each day checking baseball stuff is less than I spend reading the daily comics, and I read only four comic strips on a daily basis. (Five, on the three days a week that xkcd runs.)

As for the Bills…well, I’ve been thinking a lot about sports fandom in general over the last couple of years. It seems to me that any conversation on the degree to which we, as a culture, are wasting our time (here’s an example of just such a conversation) that doesn’t take sports into account as probably our single greatest societal time-waster, is likely missing a very big part of the point. In Buffalo, you cannot escape talk about the Bills and, perhaps even more, the NHL Sabres. I’d bet the a great percentage of the Buffalo area can name more members of either team’s roster than, say, the members of the Erie County legislature.

But anyway, as for my own personal feelings on sports fandom, I look at the Bills and their recent fortunes and I generally shrug. Now that NFL teams are winding down training camps, and getting ready for the regular season which starts next weekend, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a guy at work toward the end of last season (or maybe the season before):

HE: Watch the Bills the other day?

ME: Nah. They’re terrible.

HE: Yeah, but I still gotta watch ’em, you know?

ME: Why? I mean, really – they stink. Watching them is no fun at all.

HE: No, it sure isn’t!

ME: Yeah! So I figure, if it’s no fun to watch them, why bother at all?

HE: So you don’t watch them at all?

ME: Nope. Watched a movie instead. Call me when they start winning.

HE: Oh…so you’re a fair-weather fan.

And he said that last a little derisively. I had to admit that yes, I have become a fair-weather fan. I’m not interested in watching every game of a 6-10 season. I’m not interested in watching a team that’s been bad for years add another bad year to its already double-digit list of losing years. So yeah, I’m a fair-weather fan. I’ll like ’em when they win.

My question now is, what’s wrong with that?

And the answer is: Nothing, as far as I can see.

The idea of a ‘fair-weather fan’ is obviously derived from a ‘fair-weather friend’. That’s a friend who is only a real friend when it’s easy to be one. A fair-weather friend is with you when you have weddings or births or new jobs to celebrate, but they disappear when you have deaths in the family or you divorce or get fired or whatever. There’s an old saying that “When times get bad, you find out who your real friends are.” I suppose sports teams can say the same thing: “When times get bad – when we start losing a lot – we find out who out real fans are.”

But here’s the thing: fandom isn’t friendship. Never has been, never will be. There is true virtue in friendship, and there is special virtue in the kind of friendship that endures trials and stalwartly marks the bad times as well as the good. That’s just not the case with fandom, because with fandom, the personal emotional investment only goes in one direction. There is no virtue in being a fan, of anything, and by extension, there is no moral expectation in what one does in being a fan.

Another conversation I remember:

HE: I have tickets to the Sabres game tonight. Thank god it’s the end of the season and I don’t have to go to any more of their crappy games. I hate watching this team.

ME: Why go at all?

HE: [looks at me like I’ve just insisted that Earth is round and that Milton Berle was once President of the United States] They’re my team. When you’re a fan, you go support your team.

Erm…what?

The logic here, as best I can follow, is that if and when one’s bad team actually gets good and wins a championship, it’s going to feel so much sweeter for fans if they grudgingly stuck it out through the crappy years. It’s an odd kind of puritanical thought that pleasure must be purchased through voluntary pain. It’s of the same kind of mindset that I used to see when I worked in the restaurant business and people I knew to be regulars would come in and say things like, “Every time I come in here it’s a little worse.” I’m thinking, “Why come back?”

Why do we continue to force things upon ourselves that we have a strong reason to believe will be really unpleasant, in the name of “being a good fan”? Who the hell wants to be on their deathbed and say, “Well, my team still sucks, but I watched them suck each and every week?”

Yes, I’ve put in my time watching by football team stink for 13 years (a number which is likely to grow). I watched this team lose a game, at home, 6-3 whilst allowing the opposing quarterback to complete two passes. I’ve sat through well more than my fair share of crappy football games, and have finally come to this conclusion: if, four or five years from now, the Buffalo Bills actually win the Super Bowl, I will not feel the slightest bit of regret for having stopped watching them entirely for large segments of their Era of Suck. There will no Fan Cops on the streets that night, making sure that the revelers dancing beneath the streetlights are only those ones who have put in the correct amount of suffering through bad games. And when I die, there will be no Sports Fan Valhalla into whose golden halls I will be denied entry because I failed to watch each and every game when the Bills went 4-12 one year or because I didn’t tune in to every single Sabres game down the stretch in a year where they missed the playoffs and finished thirteenth in the conference.

At this point in my life, I’m pretty much done with the figurative wearing of hair shirts.

One last one: Do you always use a real pie? Why not whipped cream in a can, or Cool-whip?

Because I’m all about authenticity, man. Go big or go home. A thing worth doing is a thing worth doing right. And it doesn’t happen to me all that often, so when it does, it needs to be an event. Or something. The presence of a crust ensures most of the pie comes out of the pan, which means more stuff is on the face, which makes it look funnier, and it’s all about looking ridiculous. I mean, really — it sure ain’t about dignity, and as Star Trek‘s Ferengi have taught us, “Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.” Might as well go for pie-faced absurdity.

More to come!

Share This Post

Might as well nail a few more Answers, huh? Fair warning: one of these is to a pretty odd question that I received via e-mail from someone who apparently wants to remain anonymous (and not the one who usually e-mails me good questions like that, either).

Andy asks (shortening a bit): Am I the only person that doesn’t trust anyone with a hyphenated name?

Probably not, but I’m not one of them. I’ve never much seen the big deal of this practice, but I did once know a guy who was really offended by the occasional practice, on some kind of odd Biblical justification that struck me as being a bit odd. Taking a man’s last name when one marries is one of those practices that I think might make the best sense when seen in terms of avoiding confusion, as we expect surnames to denote family units. When you have a different one, it requires more verbiage to convey the existence of the family unit. “We’re the Joneses!” becomes “Hi, I’m Ted Jones, and this is my wife, Alice Rambaldi.”

But then I think, well, is it really that big a deal if one then can’t think of that family as “the Joneses”? Or is it just something we expect because that’s the way we’ve always done it? Ultimately, I guess I file this under “whatever the family wants to do is fine with me”. And I say “the family” as opposed to “the woman” because I did know a couple once where, upon marriage, they both took on a completely new last name, different from what they’d each had before. I’ve never known anyone else who did that, but they took a creative tack, so who am I to judge? It’s their family, their name. OK? OK!

Roger has a ton of questions, as always. Here’s an interesting one:

I was reading Mark Evanier’s column and he wrote recently: “The other e-mail was from someone who seems pretty happy Trayvon Martin is dead because, you know, he was a druggy gang member who probably deserved it. Martin may not have been guilty of something at that moment but he was foolish enough to go up against an armed man so he brought his death on himself. Or so this guy believes. I don’t think I’m going to consider him a friend any longer.”
Did someone’s politics/values/thoughtlessness ever end a friendship with you?

Yes, but not all that often. In fact, I can only think of one time, really, and it happened just this past winter, and it was the other person who jettisoned me, not vice versa. Go figure.

This person is an individual I knew in grade school. We weren’t good friends then, but we weren’t enemies either, although as kids can sometimes be, on occasion we strayed into adversarial territory. Nothing really major, if I recall correctly. But then, a couple years back, he friended me on Facebook, and I reciprocated.

One thing I discovered, that I didn’t remember from high school, was that this fellow is Republican. In all-caps. It was kind of strange, I thought – not his conservatism, but the degree to which he seemed, based on his use of Facebook, to define himself by his politics, because that’s virtually all he ever posted: Republican stuff, links to articles in very conservative media outlets, Republican photo memes, and so on. For a while he used as his profile pic a cartoon that had a cow’s arse in close-up, and instead of cow-patties, the orifice in question was emitting the famous Obama ‘O’ logo. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about here, and he was a pretty prolific poster, too. Lots and lots and lots of dispatches from Republicanland, each and every day, including global warming denialism and all manner of histrionics over the looming likelihood of “government completely taking over healthcare”, and so on and so forth. Basically, he made himself a one-stop shop on Facebook for Republican talking points.

Now, on Facebook, I’m pretty much the same as I am on this blog: rarely political, and only when something really out-of-the-ordinary jolts me into a political mood. I think about issues a lot, but I just don’t define myself that way. If you have one minute to get to know me, and I’m choosing the things I hope you walk away from that minute knowing about me, I’m fine if you only get a vague sense of my personal politics. Not so this other fellow: You will know what he believes. I mostly tended to scroll right past all the stuff he posted (and I have similar friends on the liberal side whose stuff I also tend to scroll right past, because I just don’t think Facebook is at all useful for delving into political issues), choosing to interact instead with his occasional post about a teevee show or music or football or whatever. And all was well.

Until last Decemeber, and the Sandy Hook shootings.

That was one of my moments, one of my times when I just couldn’t stay silent. I posted a few times that day, indicating that the awful event in Connecticut was my breaking point and that I was pretty much permanently moving my position on guns from “Not my thing, but rock on if you want” to “The hell with these damned tools for killing and our fetishization of them”. (I only make that point here to illustrate the tale, not to invite a debate in comments. Not interested. At all.) Well, my friend decided to post a response that wasn’t rude in any way. But still, it seems to me that there are times when you have to see how raw a person is and, well, maybe err on the side of not saying anything at all. So I responded back, fairly harshly, noting that I was not in any mood to hear from the gun-nut crowd and that when I wanted to hear his side’s talking points, I knew quite well where to go and find them for myself.

That did not please him, and after a bit of back-and-forth – which really, in retrospect, was not all that heated – he took his ball and went home. I was unfriended within the hour. I think what really set him off was my casual comment that I see lots and lots and lots of Republican stuff on my Facebook timeline each and every day (he was far from my only friend on that side of the aisle), and yet when I post a single thing advancing my political view on a day of extreme hardship, I was suddenly confronted by a massive case of the vapors. It was really odd. He wasn’t the only one to express dismay at what I said that day, but when I pointed out that apparently I’m supposed to listen to “All Republican all the time” without ever raising my hand to say something liberal, well, that was the end of that.

Since then I’ve become a lot more freehanded in my use of hiding stuff on Facebook. I still have only unfriended a handful of persons, and none of those were for politics. I like to think I have a good ability to get along with people on differing sides of the fence, although I do suspect that I, like most folks, may well gravitate more toward people of similar mindset to my own. For whatever reason, my classmate decided that we were too fundamentally unlike to interact in any way. That’s his call, and from my readings of political history, I’m honestly not sure that “the tone” right now is really any worse than it’s always been before, although there are troubling signs that give me pause, and I’m especially bothered by the fact that our political institutions really aren’t built well for the kind of strict political polarization that we have now. And yes, I do think that the Right in this country needs to come back to Earth at some point. But that’s for another day.

All right, that was awfully serious. So here’s the really strange question posed to me via e-mail:

How do you pee in overalls???

Erm…OK. I’m going to assume that we’re talking about, well, dealing with overalls in the bathroom, and not a more literal reading of that question. I’ve actually heard and read women complain over the years about overalls in the bathroom, to the point of actually dropping the shoulder straps in the toilet. Yeah…ewwww.

Well, the question’s there, so…well, here it is. Don’t unfasten the shoulder straps.

Huh? How does that make sense? Well, unless your overalls are super-tight – and they really shouldn’t be – this should work. You leave the straps fastened, but unbutton the sides, those buttons at the hips. Usually there are two or three of them, and once you undo all those, the overalls will be super loose. At that point, just lower the straps down the shoulders and shrug your way out of them, much as you would a jumpsuit or a pair of coveralls. Then just lower them like any pants. You can tuck the extra material from the straps into the legs or something, if you wish.

Yes, this does work. I’ve had to execute this maneuver myself when the facilities were, shall we say, not well-endowed for space. And in general, I find mucking about with a belt and all that other jazz on normal pants to be just as big a pain in the butt in cramped restroom quarters as bib overalls.

Annnnnnd, we’re done here. More answers to come!

(And if you still want to ask, feel free! Just not about bodily functions and how they relate to overalls. I think I’m done writing about that. Forever.)

Share This Post