Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 415
February 24, 2014
For my daughter. And all daughters.
Advice To Young Girls: If you have a choice between being the thin one or the pretty one, choose to be the funny one.
Megan Sass posted this to Twitter on Saturday. I don’t know Megan Sass, but I love Megan Sass.
In a platonic sense, of course.
Megan is a writer and a performer based in New York City, so perhaps our paths will cross someday. If they do, I will introduce myself and offer an awkward hug. And if Clara is with me when we meet, I’ll be sure to introduce her to the woman whose words I’ll have read to Clara again and again.
February 23, 2014
The peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich
For people like me who hate mayonnaise (and there are many of us), foods like egg, chicken and tuna salad sandwiches are not viable options for us.
When I was a kid, my mother didn’t especially care about my hatred for mayonnaise. When the canned tuna fish was on sale, we were eating it, damn it. Initially, this meant tuna fish straight out of the can and onto Wonder bread for me. The result was a dry, bland sandwich, but even worse, it was impossible to keep the tuna inside the bread without the mayonnaise adhesive. Invariably, I’d end up holding two slices of bread in my hands with a pile of tuna fish in my lap.
In an effort to solve this problem, I began experimenting with alternatives to mayonnaise.
Catsup was not good.
Butter was ineffective.
Honey was a disaster.
Then I stumbled upon the solution:
Peanut butter.
Heat up a few tablespoons of peanut butter in the microwave or a sauce pan on the stove until it is warm and thin, then mix it with tuna fish.
It’s a protein-packed alternative that holds the tuna together nicely and actually tastes good, too.
I know you probably think I’m crazy, but years ago, a task in one of my A-Mattzing Races was to eat a peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich (the race’s theme was me). While not every competitor extoled the virtues of this combination, a handful did, and at least one continued to eat it in his regular life.
Tuna fish and peanut butter. Try it. And let me know what you think.
A death threat, courtesy of the Yellow Pages
The Yellow Pages is a telephone directory of businesses, organized by category, rather than alphabetically by business name and in which advertising is sold. The directories were originally printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages for non-commercial listings.
I mention this because it’s entirely possible for anyone after 1990 to have no idea what this ridiculous fossil of a bygone era is.
This year our Yellow Pages delivery person placed our copy, wrapped in its protective plastic bag, on top of our trashcan.
Just one step away from where it belonged.
Maybe next year, he or she will toss it into the trashcan and finish the job.
My friend’s Yellow Pages delivery person was not so kind. His text to me:
Snow blowing. Rolled over yellow pages that were buried under snow. Broke the snow blower. Had to shovel. Two hours. Who the !#$*# uses these !#$*# yellow pages anymore???? Who?!?!?!?
I responded by telling him that real men shovel their driveway.
His response:
I’ll kill you.
While it’s true that I don’t own a snow blower and shovel my driveway like a real man, there is also an older woman across the street with a snow blower who has been known to clear much of my driveway if the snow is especially deep. I don’t ask her to do so, but other than feigned assurances that I can manage on my own, I don’t stop her, either.
February 22, 2014
The Moth: Black and White in Washington
The following is a story that I told at a Moth StorySLAM at Housing Works in New York City earlier this year.
The theme of the night was Summer. I told a story about my pursuit of a girl while working in Washington DC and the unexpected and unfortunate turn that it ultimately took.
I finished in first place.
A silver lining to rapidly increasing climate change
This is scary stuff.
The one benefit to rapidly increasing climate change is that many of the naysayers and deniers will still be alive when all the polar ice is gone and coastal cities begin to disappear into the ocean.
At least we’ll be able to say, “I told you so” to the morons.
February 21, 2014
The average husband would choose the cash and time over well appointed fingernails.
I’m not criticizing the value of a manicure or pedicure. At least not at the moment.
If a manicure or pedicure makes a person happy, that’s a wonderful thing.
I’m not sure if I really believe this, but for now, I’ll stand by this statement so as to not confuse the issue. For now, here’s the question:
A friend told me that she was getting a manicure because she knows her husband likes it when her nails look good.
“Did your husband actually say this?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I know.”
I disagreed. While I’m sure that her husband thinks that pretty nails are pretty and finds his wife’s post-manicure appearance appealing, if given the choice between a wife with well-appointed nails or $35 (the price she quoted) and 90 additional minutes to spend with his wife, I think he (and most husbands) would choose the latter.
If you are getting a manicure because it makes you feel good, that’s great (at least for the sake of this post). But I have a hard time accepting the premise that most husbands (and spouses in general) would not choose the additional time and cash over the painted nails if given the option.
I think my friend is kissing herself if she believes that she is getting manicure for her husband and not herself.
Thoughts?
What the hell is going on in Kansas?
Kansas state representative Gail Finney has proposed proposed a bill that defines acceptable forms of corporal punishment in both schools and home as “up to ten forceful applications in succession of a bare, open-hand palm against the clothed buttocks of a child and any such reasonable physical force on the child as may be necessary to hold, restrain or control the child in the course of maintaining authority over the child, acknowledging that redness or bruising may occur on the tender skin of a child as a result.”
If this bill passes, teachers and parents in Kansas will be able to hold children down and hit them to the point of bruising.
What the hell is going on in Kansas?
Last week it was a bill seeking to impose Jim Crow-like laws on same-sex couples (which overwhelmingly passed in the House and thankfully died in the Senate), and now this.
If this were Dorothy’s Kansas, I suspect that she might be tapping her ruby red slippers and saying, “Anyplace is better than home. Anyplace is better than home. Anyplace is better than home.”
February 20, 2014
Everything happens for a reason, especially when your life is good.
When I hear someone say that “everything happens for a reason,” I remind them that they might find this to be a less plausible premise if they had been sold into sexual slavery as a teenager or forcibly recruited into a Somali militia before their tenth birthday or were dying of smallpox in a mountainous, isolated region of Afghanistan.
The belief that everything happens for a reason seems to be directly correlated to the quality of a person’s life.
The better your life, the stronger the belief.
This strikes me as rather convenient for the believers of this nonsense.
With all the pain and suffering in this world, “Everything happens for a reason” is a stupid thing to say and an ignorant thing to believe.
It belittles the genuine suffering that people experience that is beyond their control.
Advertising goes both ways.
My daughter didn’t see a commercial until she was almost three years old. Though we thought this moratorium was a good idea, it turns out that she is now completely susceptible to advertising.
She’s once asked Elysha what stain remover she uses and was dissatisfied with the answer.
She still doesn’t watch very much commercial television, but when she does, she wants just about everything that she sees on the commercials (though thankfully she doesn’t seem to form any lasting attachments to any of it yet).
But it’s not all bad.
Today she saw a commercial for Chuck E. Cheese. I braced for the request. It didn’t come.
I got curious. I thought for sure that she would enchanted with the images presented on the television. “Do you think we should go to Chuck E. Cheese someday?” I asked.
“Someday,” she said. “But the kids in that commercial are all look older than me, so it must be a place for big kids.”
That commercial just spared me at least a year of Chuck E. Cheese visits.
Advertising isn’t all bad.
