Neil Pasricha's Blog, page 193

#808 Coming home after a really long day to the smell of someone cooking dinner

Brain boggled, pants greasy, heels too high, or tie too tight?

Can feel your heartbeat in your temples? Does your bad breath taste like paint? Is your carpal tunnel syndroming? Because if so, Office Joe, then maybe it’s been a long day. Maybe you stapled too many TPS reports, got buried under too much homework, or had an inky run-in with a jammed photocopier at the end of the day.

But you scrape by, you scrape home, you scrape up to the front door — tired and sore, aching from war — as the sun sets behind you, the traffic jams behind you, and your stomach rumbles inside you. That bagel you scarfed seven hours ago is a distant memory but you’re much too exhausted to do anything besides dial for pizza.

And that’s what makes it so great when you pop open your door and catch a hot whiff of something sizzling in the kitchen. Even though your clogged-up, toner-infused brain can barely soak up anything more, you somehow manage to piece things together: Dinner me eat. Food yes now.

And suddenly there is new life.

Your lips slowly curl at the corners, your nose slowly sniffs at the nostrils, and there’s a faint and distant chime as your eyes flash a quick cartoonish sparkle. Yes, you’ve got new energy now so you kick off your shoes, peel off those sweaty socks, and let the saliva start to flow for some tasty eats cooked up hot and fresh by someone you love.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here, here, here, and here

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#809 The first day in new socks

Alright, let’s break it down.

New Socks Day is great for four big reasons:

1. Treat for your feet. Face it, your feet got it bad. Big toes get stubbed, dry skin gets rubbed, and bunions grow on your baby toe. Squeeze those caked and cracked pita-bread heels into tight shoes all day and you’ll soon agree: Your feet deserve to be treated like royalty. On New Socks Day, feet aren’t just forgotten warriors clad in an unprotective armor of toe-knuckle hair, bulging veins, and dry skin. No, they rise into king and queens — lovingly cloaked in royal gowns, bathed softly in soft cotton, and tenderly hugged in fresh factory fabric.

2. The Slip n’ Slide. New socks grease your feet and let you move with reckless abandon across the hardwood floors of this great land.

3. High-Quality Toe Jam. What’s more gratifying that painstakingly picking out massive chunks of toe jam at the end of New Socks Day? When I do the deed, I pretend I’m a top-notch surgeon in baby-blue scrubs, leaning over a sliced-open stomach in the middle of a high-stakes surgery and then, in a dramatic moment, I just start lifting out these bloody pliers again and again, yanking out glass shard after glass shard, as everybody in the viewing gallery jumps to their feet and erupts in cheers. Could just be me, though.

4. Clean Dream. Sure, today your socks may be bright white, but we both know they’ll never be this clean again. Tiny holes will grow, heels will brown or yellow, and the elastic will fray and rip away. One day you’ll hold a sock from the dryer up in front of your face and actually wonder if it’s clean or dirty. That’s when the Clean Dream is over and it’s time to go shopping and start again.

So next time you slowly peel on a fresh pair of socks, just smile because you know you’re in for a great New Socks Day.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here, here, here, and here

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#810 Returning to your cozy and comfy sheets after getting up to go pee in the middle of the night

Groggy and blind, you grunt and scratch your way back to your wrinkled sheet cave after an epic journey through the frozen bathroom wilderness.

AWESOME!

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#811 Getting off an airplane after a really long flight

BO clouds dissipate and float away, wailing babies quit wailing at the luggage bay, your cell phone works so you call friends up, say hey, and all your scrunched up, bunched up, hunched up muscles just relax as you stretch them out now, feeling A-okay. You’re out of the window seat, out of the aisle, you’re back on two feet, so just walk away and smile.

AWESOME!

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#812 When you’re drowning but just then a dolphin suddenly comes to your rescue

And suddenly you’re just hanging onto its back with your arms tucked firmly under its bottle nose, your face salty and stinging, your hair matted across your ears, as you’re whisked safely across the ocean on the ride of your life.

AWESOME!

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#813 Really elaborate museum gift shops

Because let’s face it: the best stuff in the joint is generally silkscreened on an XXL T-shirt, printed on a novelty oversized pencil, or reduced to a tiny plastic key chain. Monet coasters and Van Gogh posters stuff shelves by the front door so you can pop in and out real quick and say you saw the good stuff.

AWESOME!

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#814 All those cheesy theme songs from 80’s sitcoms

TV theme songs are a dying breed.

Networks flash zooming logos or three-second jingles in place of the overextended 60-second song explaining how Gilligan and crew ended up on the island or what Will Smith is doing in Bel Air. And sure, maybe they get a few more commercials in or maybe we’d fast-forward through them anyway, but there was something special about curling up on the couch under a ratty, old blanket and listening to these classics, week after week. Let’s count down five of the greatest:

5. Growing Pains. With old scrolling photos of all the main characters and beautifully cheesy crooning about how, as long as we got each other, we’ve got the world spinning right in our hands, the Growing Pains theme song was the sitcom equivalent of taking a stroll up Grandma’s Staircase.

4. The Golden Girls. My brother-in-law Dee summarizes this theme song in three words: old ladies hugging. Including side-hugs, shoulder squeezes, and group huddles, how many do you count?

3. The Facts of Life. This Diff’rent Strokes spinoff stars housekeeper Edna Garrett making a lateral career move into a housemother of an all-girls school. The Facts of Life told us bluntly that you take the good, you take the bad, you take ’em both, and there you have, the facts of life … the facts of life.

2. Perfect Strangers. Watch as Balki Bartokomous shirks his sheep shepherding shtick in Mypos and sails over to the US with an ‘America or Burst’ crate to live with his distant cousin Larry in Chicago. Gotta love his mom’s tearful hankie-wave and the classic Dance of Joy. These two really are standing tall on the wings of their dreams. Nothing’s gonna stop them now.

1. Who’s the Boss? St. Louis Cardinals second baseman Tony Micelli busts up his shoulder in one heart-wrenching slide into home plate. So he’s forced to leave Brooklyn in his big, blue van and ends up taking the road that’s hidden to score a brand new life around the bend. At the end of the trail is Angela, Mona, Jonathan, and a lucrative man-maiding gig.

Cornball theme songs from the 80’s were chock full of soaring crescendos and hokey lyrics about family values laid neat and tidy over fairytale plotlines and streaming images of group hugs and wacky hijinx. There was something so warm, comforting, and dependable about plopping down on the couch each week for that half-hour of good times with good pals.

So, to cheesy TV theme songs from the 80s we say: Thank you for being a friend.

AWESOME!

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#815 When you shove the person snoring next to you and it makes them stop

Just tap that elbow in the rib cage a bit, maybe pat the belly, or if you’re feeling particularly brave, give a big kick to the back of the knees while loudly whispering Shhhhhh in their ears. If that still doesn’t work, it’s time to roll them on over, and don’t worry: if they wake up, it’ll just be for a second and they’ll never remember it tomorrow.

AWESOME!

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#816 When the late-night food order arrives really, really early

Grumbling tums make the pizza come every time. Scope this scene:

It’s late at night, clock clicking past three in the morning, you and your friends are laying on a torn, potato chip crumb covered couch, sporting big grins, slack jaws, droopy eyes, and sweaty T-shirts. You’re half-awake but fully-hungry, half-cooked but not fully done, half-exhausted but fully up for ordering a giant, hot and steamy, late night pizza pie.

Someone suggests it and everybody wants it. And then it’s all over.

First you start picturing burning hot mozzarella sliding around on slippery tomato sauce. You dream of wet and glistening pepperoni, the corners black and crispy, little grease puddles laying in the folds. And you know, you just know, that pizza will taste delicious. Because how can it not?

See, we all know this ain’t your 6pm Dinner Order, where toppings are debated, phone numbers are looked up, and the table is set for dinner, complete with triangle-folded paper towels and a giant 2L bottle of Coke centerpiece.

No, this is the Late Night Scarf-It-And-Sleep Order. This is the one your doctor warned you about. This is the one that took out Grandpa. Yeah, this is the big ball of dough that sponges up everything else in your belly. It’s the only cure for rapid outbreaks of the Midnight Munchies, that empty, raw, growling feeling your gut gives you when it’s tired and confused and suddenly wants breakfast.

The Scarf-It-And-Sleep generally consists of somebody dialing whatever number is in their cell phone, ordering a plain cheese or pepperoni pizza without asking anybody else, and then just throwing it on their credit card because they can’t be bothered to collect five bucks from everybody sitting around playing Nintendo.

The only issue with the Scarf-It-And-Sleep is that even in the middle of the night you get told what you always get told. “That’ll be 45 minutes to an hour,” they say. And brother, you know and I know that you don’t want to be waiting an hour for pizza at three in the morning. Somebody might just crack and drink a bottle of salad dressing or eat a chunk of butter the size of a deck of cards, man. It’s a tense scene.

And that’s why it’s great when, once in a while, you get that surprise really, really early pizza delivery. When twelve minutes after you place your order, the doorbell rings and wham-bam, thank you gram, it’s here and it’s hot and it’s time to toss that greasy square of hot cardboard on the floor and just rip right into it like a pack of hungry lions around a dead zebra.

So this one goes out to the pizza chains that surprise us with an early delivery once in a while. Thanks for filling our bellies with your greasy goodness just in time for bed.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here, here and here

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#817 Doing something completely half-assed at the last minute and getting away with it

Just look at this adorable little rascal with his tiny puppy paw stuck in the toilet paper roll and all.

AWESOME!

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