Toilet bowl stains are a fact of life. 

Big billowy dustballs are going to pool under the couch, crumbs will form communities on your kitchen counter, flyers and junk mail will pile by the door and, let’s just face it, once in a while your place will just stink.

But hey, it’s not you, it’s us.

We’re big, bulky animals who’ve been living in the world’s caves and jungles for a few hundred thousand years, and just recently we’ve tried moving into a prim and proper world of freshly waxed floors and central air conditioning. We fart, burp, and spread dirt across the floor. We sweat, shed skin, and shower dandruff all over the place.  Sure, we wear pants, read the newspaper, and brush our teeth, but beneath it all we’re still just hairy animals who scratch ourselves a lot.

Of course, when guests come visit, most of us try to distance ourselves from our roots.

We perform the Doorbell Dash and run a Swiffer over the floor, light a candle, and wipe down the bathroom. We trade bad breath for mouthwash and sweatpants for fresh pants. We ditch our cave-selves and freshen up our place for company. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with all that.

But how good does it feel when you just, you know, don’t? How good is it when friends visit and you don’t lift a finger? I say when your visitors don’t command a freshly-scrubbed toilet, they are your Cave Brothers and Sisters. They know you for what you are and they don’t judge you, because they have hairballs on their bathroom floors and piles of dirty shoes at their front doors, and they think that’s perfectly fine.

These are your closest family and your closest friends. People, if you visit somebody’s place and they don’t clean up for you, consider yourself lucky. It means you’ve got some great friends who are relaxed and comfortable being themselves around you. And that’s 100%

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here 

There are a few types of Frisbee tosses out there:

1. The Sideways Roller. Even the best frisbee tossers can’t avoid the occasional Sideways Roller. This is when the frisbee hits the ground almost immediately, and then rolls away in a sharp, spinning circle. For some extra points, it’s always fun to chase it around and around and then half-heartedly give up and wait to see where it stops.

2. The Boomerang. Oops, too high, way up in the wind there. Careful though, that thing’s coming back, straight at your throat.

3. The Fancy Fudge Up. After a few tosses, someone might get cocky and attempt a novelty forehand throw or under-the-leg toss. These usually end up flying way off into the distance and then rolling into the sewer. Don’t get too cute out there.

4. The Laser. A classic sharp, shooting toss right at the chest of your partner. They can usually catch it without moving an inch, but might jam a finger or two in the process.

5. The Flying Saucer. And lastly, the highlight of the day, everybody. It’s gotta be that Flying Saucer. A nice, airy toss that just seems to pause in mid-air and slowly hover down into your waiting hands, like a spinning plastic angel from heaven.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here

Okay, straight up: you know those big kettle drums you see in the symphony? The ones being pounded with padded drumsticks by a bald guy in a tuxedo? Well, the sound of rain from inside the tent feels like living in a kettle drum.

Now, let’s be honest. The best thing about the sound of rain inside the tent is that it means you’re inside the tent, not outside in a thick and wet T-shirt, on your mud-splattered hands and knees, trying to hammer some plastic stakes into the mushy ground. Yes, putting up a tent in the rain is pretty high up there on 1000 Annoying Things, a non-existent netherlist which also features #1000 Walking into spider webs and #999 When someone says the punchline to the joke you’re telling.

The sound of rain from inside the tent feels safe, secure, and sort of comforting. After all, you’re out in the elements, safe from the elements. You’ll get the marshmallow roasting sticks later, you’ll build a fire tomorrow, but for now it’s just time to lay back on the bumpy sleeping bag, put your hands behind your head, and smile.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here

Stress level goes up.

Stress level goes down.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here

See ya later, pins and needles. Welcome back, blood.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here

When it’s a dark, summer night, and you’re cruising around town, bass thumping, head bumping, rocking out in the backseat, let me ask you something: what feels nicer than slipping your hand out the window and letting that cool breeze wash right over you?

If you said not much, baby, then you got it.

Listen up, Auto Industry — to get our summer groove on, we need those backseat windows to drop down all the way. None of this half-way, quarter-way, all-the-way-but-an-inch business. We won’t have it. We The People need that non-stop, all-drop window. Window makers, you heard it here first: stop stopping, start dropping.

Because there’s nothing quite as frustrating as a window that stops short. Have you ever tried to dangle your arm out a stopped short window? Welcome to a world of cut-off circulation and cold, blue hands.

Also, think of the poor children. The poor nauseous, carsick children sitting in the backseat on a swervy freeway. A world of car windows that don’t drop the full drop is a world of hot, splattery, autumn-colored doors. I know it’s not pretty, but you know it’s the truth.

Backseat car windows that go down all the way make life a little bit sweeter. They blast us with wind, let us rock out with our elbows out like the front seat crew, and give our spinning stomachs the occasional sweet relief it needs without messing up the ride.

So let’s ask the car companies to give us all the full roll down. We deserve it. We can handle it. And let’s be honest: no one’s going to throw the baby out anyway.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here

After a lot of pinching, tweezing, and biting out pops that annoying little sliver of wood, leaving behind only a tiny, satisfying puncture hole.

AWESOME!

 

Photo from: here

Ever tried to turn on someone else’s TV?

Brother, we both know that’s a tough slog, probably involving a couple of these fine moves:

1. The Brand Name Match-Up. You stare at three identical-looking black remotes on their coffee table and play Sherlock by matching brand names. You eye the Panasonic logo in the corner of the TV and search for the Panasonic remote on the table. Elementary, my dear Watson.

2. The Walk-Up. When you can’t get anything to turn on, you toss all the remotes on the couch in a fit of frustration and just walk up to the front of the TV to search for the Power button. This works until you want to watch a movie and can’t find TV/Video or Input button on there.

 3. The Out Of Order Lecture. Your buddy walks in the room and flips out when he sees you pushing buttons and Spanish subtitles scrolling across the screen. “What did you press first?,” he asks, ripping the remotes out of your hand like puppies you happen to be strangling. “You’re doing it all out of order!” He might throw in some sarcastic jabs at the end too like “How could the TV work without the cable box?” or “No, no, no, you have to flip the Input switch on the Universal first. Idiot!”

If you feel this pain, then you know how rewarding it can be when you finally master your TV remote. You don’t see yourself changing, but one day you look in the mirror and notice you’ve become an Channel Surfing All-Star. And that’s something worth celebrating.

First you ace the ups and the downs and then you ace the number pad, even after the little nipply thing wears off the 5. After you get that, there’s no stopping you. Mute, input / output, sleep, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to look and your TV watching efficiency zooms through the roof. Nobody flips channels like you. Nobody cranks the volume when someone starts vacuuming like you. And nobody pushes Mute and answers the phone in one ring like you.

Nobody can touch you, baby.

You made it.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here

The first website I ever visited was Yahoo.com.

The whole sordid affair went down in the mid-90s on a school trip to the Science Center. While other kids from our class learned how paper was made or watched Imax films about the Amazon, my friends and I raced to a dim room at the back stuffed with clunky computer monitors sitting in a big circle. See, we had read ads in the paper about a new exhibit showcasing the Informative Superb-highway and we wanted to experience the straight dope first hand.

Unfortunately for us, geeks from other school districts were keen to surfboard the internetwork as well, because the room was jam-packed with sweaty nerds in long lines waiting for a small half-hour turns to ride the wave.

Well, we waited and waited and waited and eventually scored a yellow, plastic stool in front of a big screen. Giddy as schoolgirls, we decided to begin expanding our minds and broadening our horizons by researching the hit TV show Baywatch. This was because we had many questions about the show.

Now remember — this was the mid-90s here. Cell phones looked like briefcases, encyclopedias filled home libraries, and young kids with dirty faces stood on street corner soap boxes hocking the evening edition on your way home from work.

In these dark times, the only website any of us had heard of was Yahoo, so after spending ten minutes finding and opening Netscape Navigator, we typed in yahoo.com, hit enter, and began waiting for this new dawn of civilization to drop down upon our young and eager heads.

But first …

… there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

Just a blank screen in a dim room filled with nerves, teen sweat, and yellow, plastic stools. We waited and prayed until eventually heart-pounding teasers dribbled out at the bottom of the screen. “Contacting server,” it pledged robotically first, which sounded promising until it updated itself with only “Connecting to server” a couple minutes later. Then a few minutes later “Transferring data” had finally begun, and big red pixels slowly began dropping into view.

But it was too late.

Our half hour was finishing up.

Yes, our big dreams and wild ideas of this magical fantasyland on the other end of the wires dissolved into a page full of text, broken image links, and a complete lack of Baywatch. We walked away that day broken hearted.

Some of us cried.

But now, up here in 2009, when I look back on that long bus ride home, I smile because it reminds me of how far we’ve come. Websites load in the blink of an eye, mp3s zip home in a few seconds, and giant video clips of skateboarding accidents download to our monitors in no time flat.

Watching something download really fast sure does get your juices flowing, doesn’t it? As those little bar-graphs fill up, you just rub your palms together and cackle like a madman. I mean, things are just so good now. It’s gotten to the point where David Hasselhoff can appear shirtless on your screen without you even noticing he’s coming.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here, here, here, and here

Sure, maybe the collar’s stretched out, the iron-on’s wearing off, and a moth chewed a few holes in the back, but how good does that translucent, tight-fitting second skin feel when you squeeze into it and rock it down the street?

AWESOME!

Photo from: here