Hat and Hoodie Update

I'm sure many of you were wondering about the current hat and hoodie situation that was going on since I haven't update the public in a few days. So here's the juicy scoop. 

I have successfully worn a hat every day since October 6th. It's possibly the happiest I've ever been. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. My streak of wearing a hat will stop at 55 days when I return to work. I'm most upset about it. 

The hoodie situation has progressed substantially. I've gone from just one black U of U hoodie that I've worn 16 out of 30 days, to now owning 2 black hoodies to rotate. I don't want to work my hoodies too hard. That leads to hoodie fatigue and hoodie burnout. Both are top causes for Hoodie Spontaneous Combustion Disease. It's always fatal. 

Now that you know what I'm wearing lately, you can go back to sleeping comfortably. 

Non-Zip-Up Hoodie

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a huge proponent of zip up hoodies. They make up about 80% of my Fall/Winter/Spring clothing choices. From the dark grey hoodie to the dark black hoodie, I have a plethora of choices to compliment my poor choices to combat seasonal coldness. Recently, I have rediscovered my love for the original pull over hoodie. No zippers. No mercy. Just protective layering from the elements. It's been the best 26 dollars I've spent recently. This hoodie functions on just about every level possible. It satiates my desire for the utmost laziness that I'm known for. Just put it over my shirt and I'm out the door! It practically doesn't matter what I wear underneath. I could be wearing a bra or a shirt that says "I Love Anime Girls." No one would know because I never take off my hoodies unless I'm extremely hot. Which is rare. I embrace the heat and soak it up like a sponge and/or desert reptile. But I feel there is a strange stigma with pull over hoodies. With the zip up ones, it seems to create the illusion that I carefully picked it out of my closet to match whatever I'm wearing, even if I wear the same one for many days in a row. With the pull over kind, it seems that people think that I'm some sad sack of shit who just recently gave up on life. Something about pullover hoodies seems to signal to the rest of the world that I am no longer taking care of myself and might also possibly be hiding food within its deep pockets. If I wear the same one every day, people just assume I'm dirty as fuck. And they wouldn't be wrong but how is it different from the zip up hoodie?

No one has an answer for that.

But suffice to say, I don't care. I have worn this hoodie as a pajama hoodie on my days off. A social hoodie when I'm out and about and a centerfold piece of my daily fashion choice. I haven't worn a hoodie like this since I was 16. And that one got stolen by a girl who didn't like me anyway. I don't think I've gone back to the pullover ones since. I believe it might stem from my general awkwardness of having to sometimes take it off in public. I risk having it pull up my shirt and blinding everyone in sight with my obscene paleness and currently unflattering physique. I don't want to see that. No one does. I don't blame them. But at this point in my life, I am embracing this next step in my lazy evolution. Victims be damned if I have to take this thing off in front of them.

They could never understand the convenient love I have for this sweater.

Age Appropriate Skateboarding

I walk my dog near a skate park a few days a week. It's fun to sometimes stop and watch people do tricks and practice. It reminds me of my time being a preteen/teenager skateboard wannabe punk. Those were fun times wandering to skate parks and other buildings that had some sweet stairs and rails. However, I would like to you remind you that I didn't make it big with skateboarding and do not do it as a lucrative living. Skateboarding is a lot like music, sports, and other forms of art or athletics in which only elite handfuls can make a successful living of it. Only handfuls of bands make it to the rockstar heights of AC/DC or the ideal thug rapper lifestyle. Major league sports may have thousands of players but many are lost to injury or do not have sustainable talent to progress in a certain league (Stay with me here, I'm going somewhere with this. I promise). Big name journalists, photographers and writers are the biggest grains of salt in bottomless salt shaker. Many wield a camera or a pen with hopes of being the biggest name. Yet only handfuls are household names or big names in their specific niche.

Skateboarding is the exact same way. Like various sports, writing, photography and other art forms, it's fun to do as a hobby. Some are lifelong hobbies and some are passing hobbies that come and go with age. Skateboarding is definitely transient. There are few professional skateboarders over 50. There are notable exceptions but they are EXCEPTIONS. It was the cool thing when I was young and all the young girls thought that careless grungy skateboarders were awesome. I was never one of those people. For I was rarely careless. I was the most up tight of all my friends, I attempted to be grungy but it wasn't the "hot" kind of grungy. I just looked like a misfit human in grunge attire. Some people carry out and live that dream of skateboarding professionally. And that's cool. I respect that. However, I feel there is a certain age where you can probably drop the idea of skateboarding professionally. Any age over 25 is probably an ideal age to stop trying and get a real job. If you've already made it by that point (and most professional skateboarders make it before that age and continue with it as a career) then good for you. You're the exception. For everyone one Tony Hawk or Bam Margera there is thousands of deadbeats chasing the skateboarding dream well into their late 20's and 30's .

So this is where I was going with all of this. Back to the skate park where I walk my dog. Once or twice a week there is a guy there who is easily my age if not older who skateboards there and hangs out with people at least 5-10 years younger. This in itself isn't egregious but it's a little weird. But on top of that, he brings his daughter with him who is definitely under 2 years of age. She sits there restless and confused as to why her dad doesn't pay attention to her while he hangs out with guys who look like they may not be able to legally drink. She cries and asks for him and he keeps telling her to hold on while he attempts trick after trick with no success. He wasn't very good at all. He had the look of a novice. He would skate back to his buddies and begrudgingly console his daughter while commenting about her "bitch mom" who couldn't even watch her for the day so he could skateboard. The most baffling are his remarks about when he "some day" makes it big skateboarding and he won't have to worry about anything anymore and he can pay for a babysitter so he can hang out and skate all day.

Dude, seriously? Are you fucking 10 years old? Are you still humming the "I don't want to grow up" song by Toys R Us in your head? Are you possibly retarded or just lazy? Probably just lazy but I'm not willing to exclude both as possibilities. I understand parents need hobbies and can't sacrifice everything. But the one thing you hold on to is skateboarding? You're almost fucking 30. Easily. How about you put down the board and pick up a job application. It's a little late to cling to your youth now. And what about that poor girl who somehow decided it was a good idea to sleep with you? Is she 18 and still thinks skaters are so hot? What a mistake for all parties involved. For the daughter who can't get her fathers attention so he can skateboard and live in Neverland. For the dad who may never grow up or give up on childish dreams. For the mother who carried a baby from a man that is incapable of facing reality. Now they are all inseparably intertwined. There is no winning situation here. In the movies, the dad would realize the foolishness and error of his ways. Get a job, go back to school maybe. The mother would be supportive but firm for the dad to do something besides skateboard, but still support the dream until it was harshly apparent that this wasn't the way. The daughter likes her dad's passion and picks up his mannerisms throughout childhood but realizes the reality of what her dad was and doesn't follow in his footsteps in chasing the stars.

But it's not the movies. This is the real world and the odds are always against us. That family is fucked and never had a chance because some 30 year old dude is chasing a preteens dream.



Remember kids. Safe sex.

Irritation Issues

If you're looking for a juicy blog about my dry skin or dry eyes, or there minor medical problems having to do with mild irritation you'll have to look elsewhere. Instead, you'll get a thrilling post about my general frustrations over a couple of stupid things. Additionally, I just want to call it irritation and not something about anger. I feel that "anger issues" and "anger management" are severely overused words and concepts. I'm not angry. Just annoyed at really dumb things. However, this will all sound coincidentally angry.

So I'm walking through a few stores in search of a heavy jacket for the winter. In this particular store everything is about 4 sizes too big. I know I've written about this before. The plight for fashion of the short and skinny white guy (This plight is indeed real). But this is getting ridiculous. There were plenty of sweatshirts, jackets, hoodies and such that were quite appealing to me. Unfortunately the smallest size they had as a medium. But even so, the mediums were huge. To be fair, I've never seen a small size in this store ever so I shouldn't complain too much. And it's not because they are sold out. (And no this wasn't a store for "plus-sized gentleman") They just simply don't sell them. Their key demographic is for tall, fat guys apparently. Every article of clothing in there was generally large to triple extra large. The crazy thing is, employees were restocking those sizes heavily because they run out of them in a week. You could argue that I shouldn't shop there knowing they don't carry my size and seem to exclusively cater to their planetary sized clients. You could also suggest something equally horrible such as "order the small online." I'm going to politely shoot down those suggestions with a mad scientist-sized ray gun of destruction. True, I shouldn't shop there knowing that, but would it kill them to stock something that doesn't drown even an average man? And also why order it online? I'm just not a wild child who can order something online without having trying it on first. (Side argument: you could also say I could return it if it doesn't fit. Fuck that. Once I have it, I'm too lazy to send it back. What a hassle for a lazy piece of crap like myself)

I was going to write about something else that annoys me, but I've decided to save that for another day because I'm lazy and tired of writing.

I bid you a good day sir or madam!

Dumb Quotes and Choices

I cannot put this out there enough. I'm really old. I am rarely not annoyed by today's disingenous crop of youngsters. I've been blown away by a quote that's been making the rounds on the interwebs lately. It goes as follows:

"Don't judge people for the choices they make when you don't know the options they had to choose from."

First off: Shut the fuck up.

Secondly: See first point. 

I hate quotes like this because they are meant to sound deep and also make us reflect on how we judge others in our day to day lives. However, this quote doesn't reflect real life. Granted, we are all sometimes faced with difficult choices. Sometimes all the choices we have to choose from are all bad, but we still have to choose. But often, we choose the least awful of these choices and we usually carry on just fine. These types of choices are rare but they happen. However, I feel there are MANY situations by which this quote does not apply. This quote gives sympathetic readers a scapegoat. A way out. An excuse. That the choices we make are not without consequences or responsibility. There is always a better option or a better choice; even if the "better choice" is a slightly less shitty option. In a black and white scenario, lets choose drug addicts. You can either do heroine or NOT do heroine. Rarely are there real scenarios where you have a gun to your head and you have to either die or inject yourself with heroine. Peer pressure sucks but it's not life and death. You can either do addicting drugs or not. There's no in between. Which still, I understand these are murky waters. People often turn to these drugs to escape a not so bright reality. But there is still a clear cut choice. Your option is to either do the drugs or not. There is an option to not start doing the drugs. In other scenarios that are just as murky, there is always the option to not have unprotected sex. There is always the option to not get into that fight. There is always that option to not abuse a person or living thing. Sometimes we know the options people had and they chose poorly. And we have to acknowledge that. That bad decisions are actually bad decisions. Instead we are afraid of holding people accountable. We just say "We don't understand." While that may be we don't understand it doesn't undercut what a bad decision looks like. 

I'm probably talking in circles and this isn't a cohesive argument. I just get bothered by this entitled bullshit. There are bad decisions. We are not all tortured artists on stage. Others are not trying to understand you in particular as if you are culturally significant. We all make bad decisions. We all fail to choose a better option sometimes. But when we choose poorly, we cannot look away and tell ourselves and others that we had no other choice and shirk the responsibility of what we did. It's up to us to learn from those mistakes. Unfortunately and often tragically, most people don't.