Luke the dog is having a rough day.

Starting right about the time I moved to Seattle in 2007, Luke started getting chronic ear infections.  Normally, I just clean out his ears every couple of weeks, and that’s good enough.  (He HATES getting his ears cleaned, by the way.)  But this time, not so much.  One ear is fine, the other is quite seriously infected.

Luke also has really bad skin allergies.  That usually kick in right about this time of year, and plague him all summer.  He gets a bad, itchy rash on his stomach, then he chews on his skin, rips out big chunks of fur.  Then the wounds from ripping out his fur get infected.  This year, he’s got the worst case I’ve ever seen.

Both of these issues re-reared their heads in the last week.  And so Luke the Dog is in a pretty crabby mood at the moment.  So, I scheduled an appointment with a new vet whose office is directly across the street from my office, and I piled Luke into the car this afternoon.  We were going to get the ear infection taken care of, the skin allergies investigated, and while we were erstwhile engaged in the fun, we decided to go ahead with the vaccinations that are three months behind schedule.

It was SO. MUCH. FUN.  Let me tell you.

I walked out of the vet’s office $300 poorer, and with three bottles of pills, a topical spray, ear cleaning solution, an ear-infection ointment, and perhaps the most horrible thing ever invented by mankind (at least in Luke the Dog’s mind) the Cone of Shame. 

If I have ever seen my dog look more pathetic, I can’t for the life of me remember it.  Seriously.  I see-saw back and forth between laughing uproariously and feeling bad for him.  But mostly, I’m just laughing uproariously.  Every now and again, he’ll saunter into my studio/office (usually bumping into the doorframe for dramatic effect) and just look at me with these wounded eyes, as though asking how I could torture him so horribly.  At this very moment, he’s leaning against my leg, with his head tucked under the desk and the cone of shame scraping across the bottom of the desk and panting heavily.  He’s not a happy boy.

Hopefully, things will get better shortly.  By Monday I can start giving him his prednisone.  And by then, hopefully he won’t have to wear the cone of shame anymore, because, really.  This is just too pathetic.

It’s been an interesting (almost) week, to be sure.  I guess I hadn’t realized how pervasive Facebook had become in my life until I removed it from my life.  The first couple of days were a little difficult.  I found myself going to Facebook or Twitter automatically without even realizing it.  I’d click on the bookmark icon, and would watch the page load before I realized I was even visiting the site.  And if I’ve learned anything in my life, I’ve learned that once you reach the point of doing pretty much anything out of sheer habit rather than out of deliberate action, you’ve probably passed the point of moderation.

A few days went by however, and I actually felt better.  I noticed several things:

• I was spending FAR less time on the computer.  There were days at home when I didn’t even bother turning on my computer at all. 
• I used the internet far less frequently.  I had allowed the Internet to move from being a tool to being a destination.  Take Facebook out of the equation, and its appeal as a destination vanished.
• I was getting more accomplished around the apartment.  Several times during the end of last week and over the weekend, I found myself with extra time.  I spent more time playing the piano, cooking, and cleaning.  I didn’t stay up as late.  Some nights, I even went to bed early.
• I was much less stressed
• I was far less aware of what was going on in the world.  (Some people may consider this a good thing, others a bad.  I actually rather like not being riled up about anything and everything.)

I decided about four days into the experiment that I was pretty much swearing off Facebook for good.  I’ll still keep my account, and will check on it occasionally.  I’ve set up my blog to automatically post a link to my new blog posts on my Facebook feed.  But other than that, I’m probably not going to get involved with Facebook much anymore.

I  may still post on Twitter every now and again, but I’m not going to leave my Twitter client open all day long and check on it several times a day like I normally have in the past.  Nor am I going to click on every link that gets passed along.

I’m actually rather glad I did this little experiment.  I’m enjoying my break from Facebook.  I can’t say it will be permanent (it probably won’t be) but for the time being, I’m more than happy not to spent hours of my day on FB/Twitter/Links provided therein.

***

On a completely unrelated note, it snowed in Seattle today.  About 1-2 inches.  And the city has ground to a complete and utter halt.  I left work at 4PM today…about 1.5 hours earlier than normal, and I was one of the last three people in the office.  Everyone else had scampered home as soon as the snow started to stick on the ground.  They freaked right out.  Now, I’m pretty confident driving in the snow.  One thing that I’ve learned as I’ve lived in several places around the country: the people in Michigan know something about how to teach their children to drive.  They know how to drive in all kinds of weather conditions.  They’re courteous when they need to be, but can also be aggressive when they need to be. 

I was having a conversation with a co-worker about my frustration with the four-way stops on my way to work, because it seems like nobody in Washington knows the rules of the four-way stop.  He actually said to me, “I never learned those rules.  What are they?”  This is a man in his mid-30s.  He’s from the area, and he  never learned the 4-way stop rules.  Not. Okay.

• Pedestrians always have the right of way
• The first person to the intersection has the right of way.
• If more than one vehicle gets to the intersection at the same time, the vehicle to the furthest right has the right of way.
• If two vehicles approach opposite stop signs (north/south or east/west) at the same time, both my proceed through the intersection at the same time as long as both of them are going straight.  If one is going straight and the other is turning left, the one going straight has the right of way.
• Use your @#$@#$@#$@ turn signal!  IT’S NOT THAT FREAKING HARD TO TURN ON YOUR TURN SIGNAL.  If you’re too busy to signal when you’re driving, put down your cell phone, your chalupa, and your mascara, and drive.

Anyway (whew, that was a tangent) the roads are slicker than snot out there right now, and then it got super cold for here, so now everything’s frozen.  There aren’t salt trucks or very many snow plows, so the roads aren’t getting any better.  It’s pretty darn ugly.  I could handle driving on the roads, because I understand how to drive in the snow, but I don’t trust the other drivers around me.  My neighbor drove his car into the ditch trying to get out of the apartment complex, and over the course of the next five minutes, caused five other cars to also drive into the ditch because none of them were able to adequately adjust their driving to deal with the conditions.  So, chances are that I’ll be working from home tomorrow.  Which is fine with me.  All this snow really sets off my Christmas decorations.

***

I’m laying in bed writing this blog post, and my dog is laying at the foot of the bed expelling farts that are so foul that the plastic lid of my laptop is melting.

***

I’m a huge fan of impressionists and parody as a comedy form.  A friend of my posted this amazing video of a woman singing the song “Tomorrow” from Annie as several different “divas.”  Most of them were pretty good, but her Burnadette Peters was uh-ma-zing, and her Celine Dion was so spot on I could hardly believe it.  Also, this is very funny.

***

So, I read and watch a lot of very funny thing on the Internet, but I don’t think that, in my nearly 20 years of using the Internet I have ever read anything in my life that made me laugh as hard as this blog post.  Seriously, I think I’ve read it 18 times, and every time it makes me laugh so hard I nearly puke.  This is especially funny if you have, like, or are ever around dogs.  But it’s funny for everyone.  So, without further ado, the funniest thing on the Internet,

Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving

Here’s the deal:  Thanksgiving is still there.  It’s not going anywhere.  And, because of Thanksgiving, I get two days off of work, so I even recognize it as a real holidays (unlike Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, Pioneer Day, Halloween, Secretary’s Day, or any of those other stupid pseudo-holidays.)  I even LIKE Thanksgiving.  What’s not to like?  Great food, family (if you’re lucky), being thanksful.  All good stuff.  But I will NOT decorate for Thanksgiving.  I flat out refuse.

For starters, it is impossible to decorate for Thanksgiving without looking like you stepped out of the pages of Modern Amish Living.  As far as I’m concerned, the phrase "Shabby Chic" should be removed from the lexicon forever and ever, as should the decoration style it describes.  If I wanted my apartment to look like my grandmother’s barn, I would have decorated it that way.  I, however like things classy and modern.  And since I don’t have anywhere to put a piccaninny doll on an antique rocking chair, and I refuse to decorate with dried corn stalks, porcelain tchotchkes of Native American stereotypes, pilgrim caricatures,  and stuffed turkey plushies, there’s not a lot left over.

Secondly, any holiday that embraces the colors of yellow, orange, and brown for decoration purposes is a holiday that I can’t allow into my decor.  My color scheme is celery green and robin’s egg blue, with Espresso colored furniture.  If I were to start putting orange, yellow, and brown on top of all of that, my house would look like it ate the 1970s, got decorational indigestion, and then had diarrhea across the living room.  I won’t do it.  It’s not going to happen.

Third: where, pray tell, would I store all of my Thanksgiving decorations when I’m not using them?  Should I rent a storage locker at $60 a month so I can have a place to keep my Indian Corn and wicker cornucopia?  Yeah.  That’s worth my money.  Also, spending money on these decorations in the first place?  You’ve got to be smoking crack.  Which, come to think of it, may be the only way that most Thanksgiving decorations would look good in the first place.

Fourth.  Let me tell you about what my standard Thanksgiving usually consists of.  1) Wake up at 8AM and take the dog for a walk in the rain.  2) At 11:30, hop in the car and drive to a restaurant in Seattle.  3) Eat a massive meal, sometimes by myself, sometimes with one other friend.  4) Drive Home.  5) Take a Nap.  6) Sit around the apartment bored out of my mind, playing video games, or watching movies.  7) Maybe talk on the phone with my family.  Maybe.  8) Take the dog for another walk or two…usually in the rain.  9) Start playing Christmas Carols in anticipation of the most wonderful holiday of all time, when I will get to go home and be with my wonderful family and take a week and half off of work.  See, I don’t have any family here, and it’s far too much effort to try and get home for just the Thanksgiving weekend, so I usually do Thanksgiving alone.  I don’t mind it.  In fact, I’m rather used to it.  But I’m grateful I get to go home for Christmas.

Fifth: I never have people in my house for Thanksgiving, so why not decorate the way I want to.

So, to summarize, Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday in which we can reflect on the things for which we are grateful.  However, despite the wonderful meaning behind this holiday, the decorations are truly heinous.  I believe, as an ambassador of good taste (What?  Shut up.), that it is my duty to start a revolution.  We need to rename Christmas decorations to "Holiday Decorations."  That way, we can use them for Thanksgiving AND Christmas, thus removing the need for horrendous Thanksgiving décor.  Because, really, which would you rather be surrounded with when you eat your Thanksgiving dinner?

I love Thanksgiving, and I’m grateful for many, many things.  But one of the things I’m most grateful for is that I am able to put up my Christmas decorations for Thanksgiving, and I don’t have to decorate for Thanksgiving at all.

It’s starting to get colder outside, which means that my nemeses are now attempting to make incursions into my abode.  This. Is. Not. Okay.  I don’t want their kind anywhere near me. 

Anyway, a friend posted this on Facebook today, and I laughed so hard I didn’t know whether to crap my pants or puke.  Courtesy of The Oatmeal.

Because, seriously, what’s with all the cobwebs outside right now?  Are they trying to get their last meal? 

I really, REALLY hate spiders.

"What’s Early?" I asked.

"Before 5PM?" he responded.

"No, I should still be here."

"Okay.  I’ve got a meeting for the next hour, but then I need to talk to you for a little bit."

Then he withdrew.  And I started freaking freaking out.

I don’t know about most companies, but at Microsoft, when your boss schedules a 1-on-1 meeting for 5PM on a Friday afternoon, that meant one thing, and one thing only:  You were being "let go."  Or, to put it in true Micro-speak, you were "leaving to pursue other opportunities."

Why was I being fired, I thought?  We’re hiring people like crazy.  I just had a 1-on-1 with my boss four days ago and he said I was doing a good job.  I didn’t look at porn at work.  I never brought the dead hookers in my trunk into the office.  Shouldn’t they at least give me a warning first that I hadn’t been up to snuff?  How was I going to pay rent.  Rent?  How was I going to get the money to move my stuff back down to Utah so I could move back in with my parents while I tried to find some crappy job with a multi-level marketing scheme or credit card call center?  Because without a job, there was no way I was going to be able to pay rent, so I was certainly going to have to move in with my parents.

So, for the next hour, I sat in my office, unsure whether to cry, call my mommy, or delete the database for the entire system, because if I was going down, they were going down with me, dammit, all the while staring at my computer screen and not getting any work done at all.

When 5PM rolled around, my boss popped back in and said, "Do you have a minute now?"  I said that I did and I followed him, not to his office, but to a hidden little out-of-the-way conference room where, I was certain, nobody would be able to hear the stream of profanity that was sure to stream forth from my mouth at any moment.  He closed the door, beckoned for me to sit down, and sat down in the chair across from me.

‘This is it,’ I though.  I’m ready.

"Well, it’s time for bonuses.  And since you were only here for three weeks before the end of the fiscal year, your bonus is pretty small."

What?  I wasn’t being fired?  I made a mental note to go and remove the ticking timebomb left on the server’s main drive. 

At the end of our little meeting, I looked at my boss and said, "You know, when you wanted to have a meeting at 5PM on a Friday, I thought I was being fired." 

He looked startled for a moment, then said with a laugh, "Huh.  I hadn’t even thought of that."

Lucky him…

(PS – I would never ACTUALLY do any damage to the servers even if I had been unceremoniously fired.  It just makes for better dramatic tension in storytelling.)

It’s a beautiful outdoor amphitheater that seats over 2,000 people.  Being set in the southwest, Tuacahn plays up its cowboy old-west heritage.  In order to help turn this massive theatre in the middle of nowhere into more of a destination experience, they also offer a chuck wagon dinner each night, where folks who have bought their tickets to see the show can get a meal and enjoy the scenery.  One of my other jobs at Tuacahn was to perform in the little Preshow performance that took place on a small stage up in the plaza outside the theatre during the chuck wagon dinner. 

The show was extremely hokey, and not a whole lot of fun to do (which could sum up about 80% of my career as a performer, if I’m being honest), and so, after about a month of doing the show, I decided that I wanted to make a Christopher Guest-style mocumentary about the whole preshow experience.  Of course, I didn’t have any filmmaking resources, so I bought a small consumer DV camera, and pirated a copy of Adobe Premiere, (which I had never used before in my life) and I started interviewing the cast of the Preshow each night after the Preshow performance, but before the main stage show started. 

It wasn’t long before word got around, and folks were clambering to take part.  You know how it is with performers.  As soon as they get a whiff of attention, they start cycling around overhead like vultures over so much carrion.  I was interviewing costumers, stage managers, and friends who were in town to watch the show as audience members.  About two weeks before the end of the summer season, during which I would be leaving Tuacahn to drive to Tennessee to work at the Black Bear Jamboree, I took the hours and hours of footage, cut it all together in about three days of work, fitting it in before or after the show. 

My biggest challenge is that I had only interviewed the 40 people in the casts.  I hadn’t really asked a lot of leading questions, nor had I staged most of what happened.  Everyone there knew it wasn’t serious, and they fed me with a lot of great material, but there just wasn’t a unifying thread to the whole thing.  I cut together most of what I needed, shot a bit of B-Roll, and asked the "assistant director" who did a lot of the interviewing to do a bit of voiceover work.  I was then able to craft a rough story out of the footage I had.

I wasn’t perfect.  I didn’t have good audio equipment, so the audio is noisy.  It wasn’t a controlled set, so people were always walking into the frame.  I wasn’t familiar with the editing software, and there are a couple of continuity errors or incorrect B-Roll, but when it was done, I was pretty proud of it.  More surprisingly, someone (not me) convinced the theater management to let us show the finished product during the closing night cast party.

I was one of the proudest moments of my life.  There were probably 100 folks at this party who watched it, and the film got a standing ovation at the end.  I decided then and there that I wanted to be a filmmaker.  And like all of my big, life-changing decisions, I stuck with it for the 20 minutes it took me to drive from the theatre back to the hotel I was staying in for the night.  But I’ve always looked back on this little project with fondness.  It’s not perfect. It’s full of inside jokes that most folks wouldn’t get.  But it was something I accomplished that was well-received.  And as an artist, that’s always a great thing. 

I decided it was time to put the thing up on the interwebs for posterity.  I still have a DVD master of the thing, but the source tapes and files have long since disappeared over the years.  I just wanted to make sure that, if I ever had my house burn down, that I wouldn’t forever lose this thing.  So, I am proud to present, Preshow: The Mocumentary.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Since that day, I have never been without a TiVo in my life…except for that truly painful four months after I left hell Tennessee where I lived at home with my mom in Michigan.  It wasn’t the living with my mom that was painful, it’s that a) my parents to this day still don’t have a DVR, and b) my mother is incapable of correctly channel surfing when commercials are on.  She’s like a little kid who sees a bright shiny–she just flips to another channel and gets engrossed until a commercial comes on on that channel, then she’ll flip to a third channel, etc.  The woman has never watched an entire television show from beginning to end in her whole adult life.  It’s enough to drive me up the wall.  (HI MOM!)

Anyway, since that wonderful day 6 1/2 (!) years ago when I waltzed from the world of the commercial watchers into the much more sophisticated and urbane world of the television time shifters, I nearly never watch commercials.  If I can’t generate that satisfying little "bloop, bloop, bloop" sound and fast forward though 5 minutes of mind-meltingly stupid television advertising, then as far as I’m concerned, I’d rather not watch TV at all.

Every great once in a while, though, I run out of things to watch on my TiVo.  It doesn’t happen that often, but with the truly abysmal quality of most of the primetime television on this season, I will often find myself flipping the channel to Food Network or HGTV and just letting it play in the background while I cook, eat, or pack up my life for the 5,000th time into boxes and prepare to move once again not that I’m bitter.

It was during one of these times of television background noise that a certain commercial was brought to my attention.  And, my fellow Americans, It. Was. NOT. Okay. 

Perhaps you have seen this commercial.  It contains a couple of little animated bears hocking Charmin toilet paper.  They’ve, apparently, been in a whole series of commercials, and they look like this:

Cute, right?  Except in this particular commercial, a mother bear catches her young cub looking through a telescope at the ass of another bear who is sitting up in a tree and who, apparently , has toilet paper remnants stuck to said ass.  There are many, many things wrong with this commercial.  First, a voyeuristic child is using a telescope to spy on an adult going to the bathroom.  And apparently, is getting so up close and personal that he can notice mini TP dingleberries in the adult’s butt hair.  Secondly, the kid’s mother is RIGHT THERE.  Wake up, mama bear!  I don’t know about you, but if I had a kid who was so fascinated with watching the bathroom habits of the neighbors with a telescope, I’d have that kid in front of either a psychotherapist or priest so fast it would make his head spin.  But no, you just sit there and think it’s cute.  "Ah look honey.  Little cubby’s got a sick fascination with the neighbor’s toilet time.  Better call Dr. Freud!"

Apparently, this is not the only commercial where Charmin thinks it’s okay to go probing (ahem) through the annals (AHEM) of toilet paper posterior problems.  Thanks to YouTube, I have since seen a mother chasing her cub (who, by the way, has the most annoying giggle ever recorded) around the forest with a dustpan and broom to remove "leftover pieces of toilet paper."  Call me kooky, but somehow, I think that a hand broom and a dustpan aren’t really the best tools to take care of the problem of left over toilet paper.

And then there’s the commercial that spawned this screen capture, which I found by typing in the words "Charmin Bears":

Yikes.  I don’t exactly know what’s going on in this picture, I’m pretty sure this is probably how most gay porn films start.  "Hey coach, do I look like I have any extra toilet paper on my butt?"

Here’s my question, though: Is this really a problem?  I mean, let’s be honest here.  I’ve got a very screwed up digestive system.  I visit the bathroom more times a day than anyone I know.  I can manage to go through a truly heroic amount of toilet paper in a week.  I’ve never had problems with leftover toilet paper sticking where it doesn’t belong.  And I don’t use Charmin.  I use Cottonelle.  Exclusively.  And I have for a long time.  And I got to thinking: who, exactly, are these commercials trying to reach.  What’s the intended audience?  I’m set in my toilet paper ways.  And I’m certainly not being swayed into switching by watching animated ursine fetishists.

Then there’s this:

Seriously, Charmin?  SERIOUSLY?  I’m sorry, but I’ve been using dry toilet paper for nearly 30 years now.  I’m not going to start buying what are, in essence, baby wipes, even if the moron you’ve got doing your product demo is so mentally challenged he can’t get toothpaste off his hand with toilet tissue.  For experimentation’s sake, I was able to get it off my hand in a single swipe, and my skin didn’t even taste like toothpaste afterwards.  What’s your problem, dimwit?

All of this contemplation about toilet paper got my mind going.  First, I needed to gather some information.  Then, I needed to parse and mull on said information.  Then I needed to take a good long look at why the subject of toilet paper preferences fascinates me so deeply and investigate the myriad of other things I could have spent my mental currency on that would have made a positive difference to the world or my personal life.  But instead, I wrote a quick post in the middle last week to get some information about toilet paper.  And I learned some interesting things:

1. When it comes to toilet paper, there are generally two kinds of people:  Those who have a single brand that they stand behind with a religious furvor, and those who buy whatever happens to be cheapest.
2. Those people who buy specific toilet papers only because they’re cheap are horrible, horrible people, and we can no longer be friends.
3. Surprisingly, Angel Soft seems to be the most popular brand.  I don’t get it.  Compared to Cottonelle or the TP of the creepy bears, Angel soft just doesn’t compare. 
4. One ply toilet paper is universally loathed, and the only people who think it is appropriate to buy, even despite it’s very low cost, are the people responsible for purchasing supplies for companies who obviously don’t give a rat’s ass (no pun intended) about the physical well-being of their employees.  In fact, my employer, whose name rhymes with Nicroloft, buys toilet paper that is simultaneously so thin that you can see your own fingerprints through it and so roughly processed that it will give you splinters.  I’m sorry, but if I wanted to rub wood pulp across my sphincter, I’d go outside, pull down my pants, and rub my butt up against a pine tree.  For someone who has to go to the restroom as often as I do, (warning: overshare ahead) I have actually had the toilet paper at work make me bleed.  Now, when someone says, "that really chaps my ass," I know first hand what they means.
5. Toilet paper should always be hung with the leading squares coming up over the top of the roll.   ALWAYS.  If you do it any other way you’re wrong.  If you ever come into my house and turn the toilet paper over so it’s coming out of the bottom of the roll, you’re forever uninvited from my house.  Overhand only.

And finally, for the service of those readers who mentioned this in their comments, I would like to provide you a few rules about toilet paper etiquette which you must follow, at the risk of having your toilet paper privileges taken away forever.

1. If you finish a roll of toilet paper, it is your responsibility to replace the roll of toilet paper.  Failure to do so means that there will be no place in heaven for you in the next life.  Fail to replace the roll and go to Hell.  It’s that simple.
2. Replacing the roll means taking off the old paper tube, and replacing the roll completely on the dispenser.  It does not mean setting it on the counter.  It does not mean placing it on the floor.  It, under no circumstance, means simply placing it on top of the empty tube which your lazy rear end left in the dispenser.  Failure to fully replace the empty roll will result in severe beatings.
3. Please, for the love of all things good an holy, PLEASE leave at least one extra roll in the bathroom at all times.  Do NOT keep all your extra toilet paper out in the hallway closet.  Because if I run out TP in your house, and there’s not an extra roll in the bathroom, I will walk out of your bathroom with my pants around my ankles doing that bent-knee wide stance waddle so as not to cause any smearing.  Then I will waddle into your living room, sit down, and start dragging my butt across the carpet like a dog with worms.  You have been warned.

Now you know.

So, what did my mental foray into the world of toilet tissue teach me?  First, that toilet tissue is very personal, and that the way I do it is right, and the way everyone else does it is wrong unless they do it just like me.  That being cheap when it comes to toilet paper will only end in heartache.  That it’s really hard to find a decent way to refer to your own anus as a "Brown-Eyed Susan" without making it sound forced.  That the Charmin bears are freaky, and more than a little creepy, and most of all…

I need to start TiVo’ing more television shows.

I chose the latter.

And what, you may ask, is the thing that pushed over the edge from (relatively) sane, (barely) normal, suburban corporate life into my Tom Cruise-level of crazy?  I can promise you, you're not going to see this coming.  Are you ready?

…

Here it comes…

…

In August, I'm going on a 5-day backpacking trip through the Wind River Valley in Wyoming.

Serious.  I'm going on a 50+ mile hike through the Wyoming high country.  You can see several photos and a narrative at this website (which is also the source of the above photo).

On the surface, this may not seem like the standard definition of insanity, but let me explain why it is:

1. I haven't been camping since I was 15 years old
2. I didn't particularly enjoy it then
3. My idea of roughing it is spending a night in a Motel 6
4. There will be no electricity
5. Ergo, there will be no computers, cell phones, televisions, etc.
6. I have absolutely no experience on this kind of trip
7. I own no appropriate camping/hiking gear
8. It will be an elevations between 10,000 and 13,000 feet
9. I'm a lazy, lazy man
10. This will require pooping in a hole in the middle of nowhere outside in the open

One guess as to which one of those concerns me the most.  (Hint: #10)

So, what happened what this:  They say insanity runs in the genes.  I'm not sure exactly who "they" is, but "they" say that.  If "they" is correct, then I got my particular brand of insanity from my father.  Last summer, my dad, his Twin Brother™ and two other men went on a rather dangerous and difficult 8 day (I think), 85 mile backpacking trip along the Highline Trail in the Uinta Mountains of Utah.  He did this despite the fact that he is old enough to join AARP.  When dad got back from his trip, I spent a lot of time on the phone with him as he related his experience.  And my father is, if nothing else, a master storyteller.  He painted a picture for me that stirred my blood with excitement.  The trip was extremely difficult, but according to him, was a life-changing experience.  He described the nights with the skies so clear you could see the milky way stretch from one horizon to the other; of locations so remote, places so isolated that it was easy to forget that you weren't the last man alive.  He made me jealous.  I have never experienced anything like that.  The closest I get to experiences like that is when I take Luke to the dog park early enough in the morning that nobody else is out yet.

Also, this year, my little sister did something that was (to me) equally as impressive.  She hiked from one rim of the grand canyon to the other rim in a single day, a total of some ridiculous sum like 23 miles.  Her blog post about the experience got me going too. She managed to do something that was so difficult, but so completely rewarding.  It's almost like the two things go hand in hand.  Who knew?

So, when I went home for Christmas, dad showed me the pictures of his trip…and they were absolutely gorgeous.  And again I was jealous.  And then he did what he does every year: invite me to come along on the next trip.  I believe that he was fully expecting that, like every year since I was 14, I would make some smart-ass comment about staying in a Motel 6, and that would be that.  But his stories of the trail stirred something primal inside of me that has long been dormant/dead, and I got to thinking–"a dangerous pastime, I know".  I'm fairly certain that I took him off guard when I said that I wanted to go.

I think it's fairly unlikly that I will ever be one of those avid backpackers/hikers/outdoorsman.  Most of the time, I'd rather spend my weekend in my pajamas, sitting in front of my HDTV, and playing video games.  Or shopping.  Or going out to eat.  Or giving myself an appendectomy with a garden scythe.  But while doing those things (except for the appendectomy) are enjoyable, I feel like continuing to choose them over more participative activities is tantamount to throwing my life down the garbage disposal and flipping on the switch.  I'm young(ish), relatively healthy, and I want to experience life.  I have always assumed that I don't like backpacking, but I've never done it.  And maybe I'd really, really enjoy it.  Maybe I'll despise every second of it, and by the end of the trip, my dad will want to go all Abraham and Isaac on me up in the mountains because of my incessant complaining.  But I won't know until I've tried it.  There are enough things in life that I won't get to do because of time, money, fear, etc.  I don't want to give up what could be a life-changing experience (or a great new hobby) without trying it.

Plus, I just spent a butt-load of money on a new camera.  This seems like a truly excellent opportunity to do the kind of photography that most people don't even dream about. I mean, really, how often does someone (who isn't a photographer for National Geographic) get to carry a professional camera into the vast wilds for five days and snap photos like crazy?

So, I have agreed to go on a massive (for me) backpacking trip in August.  I get out of breath going up three flights of stairs.  My idea of exertion is making my bed.  This means that training started on Monday and will continue through August.  Training consists of:

• Losing 20 Pounds (See Resolution #3)
• Geting into Shape (See Resolution #6)
  • Cardio (Running, doing stairs)
  • Weights (Shoulders, Back, and Abs, especially…so I can carry a 45# pack)
  • Start eating real, natural food to fuel the process
• Begging, borrowing, or stealing as much equipment as necessary.  I don't want to start spending hundreds of dollars on equipment until I know for sure this is going to be a long-term hobby for me.  I don't need another money sink hole in my life, thank you very much
• Practicing hiking.  Start doing some day hikes on the weekends around the area.  Bring dog for company.

It's day four of the new routine, and I've already lost four pounds.  I've been running twice, except I can only run about a mile and a half, and now I have shin splints.  But I must persevere.  Because I'll be damned if I get out on the trail in August and I get my rear end handed to me by a couple of men old enough to get the senior citizen discount at Denny's.  I may be inexperienced, but I'm going to make sure that by the time August rolls around, I'll be ready.  Or I will have quit.  But either way, we'll know.

I'm really, really excited for this trip.  It hasn't even been fully planned yet, but I'm looking forward to it.  As I was telling my (insane) father, I'm scared to death of it, because it's so new, but it's also exciting.  I expect that it will be one of the more physically demanding things I've ever done in my life–going through puberty notwithstanding–but I feel like I really need to exert myself in a portion of my life.  I need something that will roust me from my ever-deepening rut and give me the motivation to get my act in gear.  I figure that there are few motivators more potent than the looming threat 50+ mile hike through the Wyoming high country with a heavy backpack and a couple of trash-talking geriatrics to get me headed down the right path.

And if I survive, I'll have a few amazing blog posts and (hopefully) thousands of pictures to share.

If I survive.

I dislike the term Mouth Breather as a derogatory term for one simple reason:  I am a mouth breather.  I sit at my computer screen with my jaw slack.  I have to replace my pillows every six months due to copious amounts of drool.  I often look as though I am the slack-jawed love child of an unholy union between two backwoods cousins in West Virginia.  But I can’t help it.  I breathe through my mouth.

There are several reasons for this:

1. I physically can not breathe through my nose without it whistling.  And which is more annoying?  A mouth breather, or a nose whistler?  I thought so.
2. I have been sick with bronchitis nearly 1/4 of my life from the age of 0 until I turned 25.  I used to get sick every single time the seasons changed.  I used to be able to call up my doctor and tell him what medication I needed.  ("Hey Dr. _______.  This is Matt Armstrong.  Could you call in a prescription for 21 500mg pills of Erethromyacin?  I’ve got bronchitis again?  No Keflex doesn’t work for my anymore, remember?  Well, Zithromax worked pretty well last time, but this time it’s just the lung congestion.  I’m not sure we need something as strong as Zithromax.")  It’s hard to breathe through your nose when it’s constantly filled with snot.  And anyone who says that I should just blow my nose and I’ll be fine has obviously never experienced what it’s like when I’m sick.  If I were to blow my nose every time it got clogged up, I’d look like this:

   

3. I’m fairly certain I have a deviated septum or something, because I can’t get a full lungful of air when I’m breathing through my nose.  So even if my nose didn’t whistle like Robert Stemmons on a concert tour, I still couldn’t breathe through my nose because I’d suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen.  (And it’s not like I need any more brain damage than I already have, thank you very much.)
4. One side of my jaw is about an inch longer than the other side of my jaw, so it sort of hurts to keep my jaw closed tight.  The fix: a very expensive surgery requiring splitting mandible on the short side of my jaw, extending that split, screwing the bones back together, and then wiring my jaw shut for six weeks.  While I can’t deny that that might make for a really killer weight loss plan, I’m fairly certain that my wonderful "insurance" coverage wouldn’t pay for that since my jaw being off center does is not equivalent to a sucking chest wound–apparently the only thing my insurance company actually will pay for.  (I’m really glad I pay so much money for health care that doesn’t cover anything at all. No.  We don’t need health care reform in the US…)  (Also parenthetically [I love parentheticals] this is why I can’t get braces to straighten up my nasty-ass teeth.  I’d have to get the surgery before I could get the braces, and I can’t get the surgery.)
5. Sometimes, when I get really engrossed in something–reading, playing a video game, looking at porn beating up hookers, writing a blog post, I forget that I am educated above a fourth grade level, and I just let my face go slack.

So, in conclusion: yes, I breathe through my mouth.  I also managed to get an MBA with a 4.0 GPA.  So please, before you denigrate someone by calling them a mouth breather as an insult, think of those of us who wish we weren’t mouth breathers, but have to be.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash my pillow cases.

Happy Thanksgiving!