Feeling Pissy

This is something I have wondered about basically forever: why, in virtually 100% of mens restrooms, is there a substantial amount of urine on either the toilet seat or on the floor directly in front of the urinal?

I've been peeing my entire life. Take it from me, aiming your urine stream into a toilet is not terribly difficult. It's not like you're trying to thread a needle and hit a tiny bulls eye from 50 yards away. Most times you don't even need to use your hands. You can just unzip and let it hang, and there's a pretty good chance you will urinate successfully.

So why are guys ALWAYS peeing on the floor? It's disgusting, on a lot of levels. The fact that I have to adopt a special stance just to avoid standing in a piss cocktail of the previous dozen dudes to use the bathroom before me is annoying. But on a personal level, I find this behavior insulting. It's like littering...when people know they won't be caught for degrading communal property, they are all too happy to go to town. I'm extremely disappointed by this mentality of my fellow man. We should be comrades. We all have to use the bathroom at some point or another, and we should take it upon ourselves to keep it as clean as we can for each other.

But no. Instead, apparently the prevailing thought process is to just whip our dicks out and mark our territory, and damn the poor custodian who has to come in and mop it up at the end of the night. Let alone the rest of us who are just trying to enjoy a meal or make a pit stop in an airport without having to avoid soiling our own clothing in some asshole's human waste.

This kvetch is magnified a thousandfold when I happen to be so unfortunate as to have to go #2 in such an environment. Not only do I have to suffer the discomfort of racing through a very private act while risking total strangers coming and going all around me, I also have to grit my teeth through the indignity of cleaning someone's urine off the toilet seat beforehand. And then hope to god that I got it all as I lower myself down upon that haven for disease and pestilence.

Who are you people? Why do you do this??? Show yourselves!!!

The Kvetcher Has Become the Kvetchee

If I may take a moment to publicly flog myself: I have now become something that for years I have hated. As a writer, it would always bother me to walk into a coffee shop and see the hordes of douchebags clicking away on their laptops. It seemed so pretentious to me, that in a town filled to the brim with wannabe screenwriters, all these people would venture out into public to practice their craft. I perceived it as a desperate, transparent attempt to be seen, as if they were hoping Jerry Bruckheimer would stroll in for his morning macchiato, notice the unshaven guy in a beanie using Final Draft on his MacBook, and tap him on the shoulder curiously. "I notice you're working on a screenplay," he'd say. "Will you tell me what it's about so that I can hand you this bag of money and make you famous?" I mean, why would these people choose to come to a place that is 1000 times more distracting than the quiet of their own homes to do something that requires a good deal of concentration? Never made sense to me. Thus, I mocked these people.

And now, as I focus my Kvetch Beam inward, I finally understand. You see, living alone and working at home has a tendency to drive one somewhat stircrazy. After I spent my entire day yesterday in my own home, talking to nary a soul, alternating between writing, doing pull-ups and playing Wii frisbee golf, I decided I needed to get out more. But to do what? Wander the streets? Go shopping for stuff I don't need? Alas, no. The conclusion I reluctantly came to: do my work in a coffee shop.

And so now, here I sit, at this very moment, existing as the quintessential asshole I spent so many years reviling: a wannabe screenwriter, sitting at the Coffee Bean on Sunset Boulevard, writing a script on my MacBook Pro. Forgive me, Past Ethan. At least I'm drinking my coffee black.

Attention Craigslist and Ticketmaster...

...and any other websites that require me to write the words I see on the screen in the box below to proceed: in order for me to correctly copy these words, they must be somewhat legible. I have no idea what this process proves to you, why correctly copying a meaningless word qualifies me to buy tickets or post an ad trying to sell a camera. But when you make it impossible to do so by presenting to me a "word" that just looks like an ink smudge with a couple dots above it, you defeat your own purpose. When I have to sit for minutes on end, debating if the symbol I'm looking at is a lowercase "g" or part of the uppercase "H" that preceded it, and then am told I'm wrong and have to start all over, the system has broken down. I have a pretty handy mastery of the English language. I can certainly copy words. Don't try and make me feel stupid for doing it wrong when you're the ones who can't present the material properly. Harumph.

Encino Mayer

Is it just me, or does John Mayer look like the bad guy from ENCINO MAN?

A Penny for My Thoughts

Included in some change I received yesterday was a 2009 penny. I didn't realize until now that they changed the illustration on the back of the penny. Whereas all my life the back featured the Lincoln Memorial, this new penny depicts Abraham Lincoln standing in front of the Illinois state capitol building.

Upon doing some quick internet research, I learned that there are in fact four new pennies for 2009, each one with a different illustration of something Lincolnesque on the back, to commemorate his 200th birthday.

I can't help but wonder...is this entirely necessary? I mean, at a time when we're in a horrific recession, the country so terribly in debt we're using numbers to quantify it that I can't even comprehend anymore, does the government really need to be spending any resources at all redesigning our worthless coins? Because you know this must have cost something: commissioning the new artwork, changing the money-making machine at the mint, whatever. Couldn't that be better put to use for something we actually need?

I know, it's probably a drop in the bucket compared to any amount of money the government spends on anything important. Still though, we just got done with the 50 different quarters, one for each state. And the Sacagawea gold dollar coin...that was a real hit, wasn't it? Those flamed out quicker than Von Dutch trucker hats. And now we have four new pennies to marvel over? Are we supposed to collect them like a set of Transformers movie tie-in Happy Meal toys? Enough with the new coins!

And while I'm on the subject, what are we still doing using pennies anyway? You know how much a penny is worth? Nothing. You need a hundred of them just to make up a dollar, the value of which is rapidly approaching the penny. Let's just round everything up to the nearest five cents and do away with this unsightly copper coinage. Lincoln's already on the five dollar bill; he won't miss being on the penny. Plus, he's dead.

Happy birthday Abe!

LA, You've Gone Too Far

Just got back from a morning constitutional up on Runyon Canyon, the popular hiking trail near my place, where I witnessed a new standard in pet wardrobe weirdness: two small dogs wearing dog-sized Snuggies. That's right. You can now buy Snuggies for dogs. I know they were Snuggies because I lowered my sunglasses so as to allow my eyeballs to pop out of my face and read the label on the miniature blanket with sleeves. It said "Snuggie."

Don't get me wrong, I actually like the Snuggie. I don't have one myself, but I've been tempted to purchase one over the phone, when the ad comes on TV late at night and my judgement is a bit clouded by a coocktail or two. They actually look pretty comfortable, and their commercials are hilarious. But only because of how ridiculous they are. Nobody actually wears Snuggies to the movies or baseball games. If they did, they might very well be institutionalized by their loved ones.

Which is why the dog Snuggie is just too much. In LA people do all sorts of weird things to their dogs: dye their fur, dress them in sweaters and shoes, etc. One time when I worked briefly as a dog walker years ago I had to walk a huge white dog that was wearing a white tank top that said "#1 Bitch" in pink letters (that was a fun day). But a blanket with sleeves? That's just going out of your way to show how bizarre you can be.

Apples & Orangutans

Friends of mine have heard this pet peeve of mine before, but I've shockingly had nothing to kvetch about the past week or so, and I recently heard this expression again somewhere out there in the ether. So here we go.

I hate the expression "apples and oranges." As in, "You can't compare the two. It's like apples and oranges."

Why does this bother me so? Well, simply put, the expression makes no sense. If ever there were two things you could absolutely make a comparison between, it's an apple and an orange. They're both fruits. They're both round. They're roughly the same size. In fact, they are extremely similar to each other. If I were to ask you to list your top five favorite fruits and then discuss the differences between them, there's a very good chance you'd be giving me an answer in which you'd be comparing an apple to an orange. You might also be comparing a watermelon to a banana. Or a kiwi to a plumquat. All totally appropriate things to compare to each other.

My point is, apples and oranges are in fact so similar, so very comparable, that to use the expression "it's like apples and oranges" when indicating that two entities are so dissimilar that they can't even be put in the same discussion, is ludicrous and makes whoever uses this trite cliche sound like an idiot.

Thus, I propose a new expression, something that pits two things against each other between which no logical comparison could ever be made. There are loads of possibilities; just pick out almost any two items you see. Clouds and stethoscopes. Milk and harmonicas. Cell phones and nipples. All those are examples of pairs of things that would be difficult, if not downright ridiculous, to compare to each other. At the very least, they make a thousand times more sense than using apples and oranges to illustrate your point.

But maybe my new saying would catch on faster if it incorporated part of the old one. So we'll keep apples in there. But instead of oranges, how about "orangutans"? Orangutans also starts with "O" - in fact, it actually uses most of the word "orange" (except the E on the end) - so you still have the same kind of alliteration as you did with oranges. Plus, everybody loves monkeys. And, most importantly, there are very few similarities between apples and orangutans.

So remember this new and improved colloquialism next time you say something like "You can't compare Saved By the Bell to Mad Men...it's like apples and orangutans!"

I'm really hoping this catches on.