Burned Biscuits – A lesson we all should learn.

When I was a kid, my Mom liked to make breakfast food for dinner every now and then. I remember one night in particular when she had made breakfast after a long, hard day at work. On that evening so long ago, my Mom placed a plate of eggs, sausage and extremely burned biscuits in front of my dad. I remember waiting to see if anyone noticed!

All my dad did was reach for his biscuit, smile at my Mom and ask me how my day was at school. I don’t remember what I told him that night, but I do remember watching him smear butter and jelly on that ugly burned biscuit. He ate every bite of that thing…never made a face nor uttered a word about it!

When I got up from the table that evening, I remember hearing my Mom apologize to my dad for burning the biscuits. And I’ll never forget what he said, “Honey, I love burned biscuits every now and then.”

Later that night, I went to kiss Daddy good night and I asked him if he really liked his biscuits burned. He wrapped me in his arms and said, “Your Mom put in a hard day at work today and she’s real tired. And besides–a little burned biscuit never hurt anyone!”

Suddenly, the house shook violently, the bedroom wall collapsed, and a T-Rex burst into the room.

Dad screamed. Mom ran into the room and screamed. The T-Rex screamed back, surveying the room, ready for its next meal.

“What do we do?” wailed Mom.

“I know!” said Dad. He ran out of the room, and ran back a few seconds later carrying a basket.

“Take this, T-Rex!” he shouted. He hurled the basket at the T-Rex. The T-Rex saw the basket tumbling towards him and opened his massive jaws. Just before they closed, I saw biscuits come tumbling out. Mom’s burned biscuits!

The T-Rex chomped and swallowed the biscuits. Then he lowered his head, as if he was about to eat us next.

“He’s lowering his head, as if he’s about to eat us next!” screamed Mom.

Just then, the T-Rex stumbled to the left smashing a chair, then to the right, smashing my hamper. He let out a mournful cry, and then backed out of the room, his little T-Rex hands clutching his middle.

“Yay!” shouted Dad. “If anything could take down a T-Rex, it’s Mom’s biscuits!”

There was silence in the room. Dad looked at Mom, who was glaring back at him.

“Really?” said Mom.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve thought about that many times. Life is full of imperfect things and imperfect people. But what I’ve learned over the years is that learning to accept each other’s faults and choosing to celebrate each other’s differences is one of the most important keys to creating a healthy, growing, and lasting relationship.

So, please pass me a biscuit, and yes, the burned one will do just fine. And PLEASE pass this along to someone who has enriched your life–I just did!

Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle. Perhaps against a T-Rex.

I brought up this article in a conversation at a party last night, when it was said that Beyoncé should not have been so scantily dressed in her first solo breakout music video.

This line came from the article came to mind during the conversation: “It seems like everyone wants to get in on the action when it comes to giving women advice on how they should clothe themselves. Women’s bodies often get viewed as some sort of communal drawing board, open for commentary from every angle. This constant haggling and attention paid to appearance reinforces the fact that a woman is, above all, a sexual object who should be shrouded and/or displayed appropriately.”

The conversation question was this: Beyoncé probably thought she had to dress this way to sell albums, so shouldn’t she be dressed some other way, in order to communicate to other girls that no one should tell them how to dress?

I don’t entirely disagree, but I feel uncomfortable telling women they need to dress a certain way in order to tell younger women that they don’t need to dress a certain way. Somehow… that seems counter-productive.

Sure, you can say Beyoncé isn’t feminist enough, but an imposition of feminism seems anti-feminist, or am I misunderstanding feminism? Can a stripper be feminist? Can a porn star be feminist? Or does any choice that is beholden to men undermine any feminine power? That is, if I tell you that it is your role in society to eat a reuben sandwich, is it not possible for you to eat a reuben sandwich of your own accord and legitimately like them regardless of my expectations, or is such a choice not a choice at all but simply a subjugation to your societal expectation?

(NOTE: I am even more uncomfortable defining feminism, but I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with anything as trivial as reuben sandwiches.)

One comment was that someone like Beyoncé may feel she has choice, but, in reality, she does not. She is not fully cognizant of her free will and her choice because of the impositions upon her, so therefore these choices she made to shake her booty in a mini-skirt were obviously not choices of independence, or expressions of free will, or a true statement of feminine power. The implication being that one can say for certain that there are better choices she should have made that would appropriately demonstrate her true self and not demonstrate feminine exploitation.

I get it. There are poor choices. There are choices that demonstrate lack of self-respect, which is often then reflected in your fellow man as a natural consequence. This is certifiably true. But can I then tell you what you should do differently? Or that your choices as a famous female have anything to do with the choices of your female youth? That somehow, instead of being beholden to the desires of men, you are beholden to the expectations of feminism that you behave properly and put some god-damn pants on in your music video? After all, there are men and young women watching, and they might get the wrong idea.

I dunno. I just know that all this dressing down of Beyoncé made me really squirm, and I don’t know if it was because of the arguments that she cover up, or because for me personally, having her sing scantily-clad in a giant-size champagne glass sounds more interesting than having her sing in a tweed jacket behind a lectern. Or, even more appropriately, having the whole video be an analog waveform of the audio track, that a perfectly average-looking person (say Christopher Walken) points to from time to time, because shouldn’t it be Beyoncé’s voice that’s important?

As Tiny Fey says in Bossypants: “It’s complicated.” As she points out, women should on the one hand be inspired to make their own choices, yet there are choices women make that seem like the old tricks that ultimately undermine women. You want to support their ability to choose regardless of what people think, but then you think, “Well, certainly don’t make that choice.”

And then, as a man, I want to back up slowly from a group of women with my hands raised and say, “Look, y’all can do whatever you want and it’s not up to me. I want to be all enlightened as a man and stuff, so I have no stake in whatever you want to wear…. However, that dress you’re wearing looks totally adorable. That’s just a compliment! I’m not saying you need to ever wear it again and you didn’t hear it from me and Beyoncé probably isn’t that hot and you’re right it should be her voice that’s important and no I never implied you were jealous of her and the attention she gets for her looks because looks aren’t important and yes I totally agree with you that looks are very important so she should dress differently and yes you’re right it’s silly for me to have any stake in how feminism is applied because I totally agree that people should be empowered by their gender to speak their minds and I should probably stop talking now shouldn’t I….”

The long and short: if I ever have a daughter, no Beyoncé videos until this gets cleared up.

I’ve been struggling with building my personal website  for a long time. I’m sure a lot of people have stuggled with this, but I always feel like I have my fingers in so many pies, that narrowing a focus for a site has been kind of hard.

Eventually, I decided the solution was to put my focused topics on OTHER sites, and then make this site more like a portfolio portal.

But, of course, there are times when I just want to put stuff here, if only to document it and link to it from elsewhere.

Lately, this site has been focused on my art: music, film, books, short fiction. But then where do I put the nerdy stuff? Like, I think I totally just cracked the code on the problem with lack of frame-accuracy in the timeupdate event for HTML5 video tags. I could totally write up how I synced up nearly-frame-accurate CSS3 transformations with running video.

But of course, as a comedian and entertainer, the previous topic is neither funny nor particularly entertaining, except in its extreme nerditude. Or maybe I underestimate the nerditude of people who visit. Maybe I undervalue my creativity with something like coding an incredibly complex webpage. Maybe all my nerdery is also art?

Maybe I just don’t understand who visits. Maybe I don’t know my audience.

Or maybe this just points to me not always knowing why I write, and for whom I write.

Maybe this is a kind of mid-mid-life crisis. Jesus, am I only 6 years and 5 months from being 40?

I may have diverged from whatever I intended to write here today. But at least I wrote. For some reason, that feels the most important. To keep writing, even if it doesn’t make sense, even if I can’t logically tie it to other pieces of writing.

And, also, perhaps withholding any part of who I am or what I do from a place of personal expression just isn’t working anymore. Maybe it should all be here: nerdery, pontification, comedy, prayer, and Things That Were Too Long To Put On Twitter.

I’m sorry, what was I saying?

“We only have six minutes until the oxygen runs out,” said Barry.

“Six minutes?” said Don. “You mean six minutes until our lives are completely over?”

“That’s right,” said Barry. “Well, maybe not six minutes on the dot, and we won’t die right away. Probably we’ll lose consciousness and then die.”

“Still,” said Don, “that’s a very short time before it all comes to an end.”

“Truly,” said Barry. “It’s very strange to know that. Death always seemed like something mysterious, something that would just show up unannounced and take you away.”

“Indeed,” said Don. “We’ve lived all these days, thousands and thousands of days, billions of minutes–”

“You mean millions of minutes.”

“It can’t be just millions,” said Don, frowning. “How many minutes are in a year?”

“I don’t know. The computer is offline.”

“You can’t do simple math without a computer?”

“I could just as well say the same to you.”

“Then, how do you know that it’s millions of minutes and not billions?” asked Don.

“Billions just seems like too high of a number,” said Barry. “We’re used to seeing numbers in billions and trillions that we don’t think of how incredibly large a number it is.”

“Well, do we have pen and paper?” asked Don.

“I do,” said Barry, “but I was saving it to write some last words to my girlfriend.”

“Since when do you have a girlfriend?”

“Well, she’s not really a girlfriend, but we were lovers once, and I thought she would be touched to receive a note from someone who had died in such circumstances. Plus, the guy she’s with is a total jerk. When she hears on the news about the note I left her, she will examine her life and realize that that other guy is not nearly as good as a life with me would have been. She’ll realize that life is precious, and not to be wasted, and she’ll have one final fight with him where she finally sees his flaws as damaging to her own well-being. And then she’ll drive off in an old convertible with their dog.”

Don nodded. “That makes sense. So, what were you going to write on the note?”

“I was thinking of, ‘Dear Jennifer, sex with you was my favorite.’ ”

“Nice!”

“Do you think it needs more?”

“Why? You just said she was the best. Less is more.”

“Okay, cool. I just wondered if I should say something about feelings.”

“It’s all in the subtext,” said Don. “Don’t worry, she knows how you feel. You’re awesome, man.”

“Thanks,” said Barry. “You’re pretty awesome yourself.”

“Hey thanks,” said Don. “So… anyway, can we use the back of the paper to figure out the minutes per year?”

“Well wait, don’t you want to write something to someone you love?”

“Not really. I wouldn’t be out here if I was that attached to anyone.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Don?” Barry continued, after a moment.

“Yeah, Barry?”

“Were you waiting for me to ask you?”

“Ask me what?”

“You know… I mean, we’ve only got a few minutes left. It could be the last time we get a chance…”

“A chance to what?”

“To, uh… well, to um… ”

“What, Barry?”

“…Never mind… Anyway, there’s 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year.”

“What about leap years?”

“At this point, Don, I don’t think it matters.”

__________

Part 4 of the Holiday Story Series

Most people think there’s some kind of association of Thanksgiving with pioneers and stuff. Those people don’t know what they’re talking about, and you should probably tell them so.

In fact, it would behoove you to go up to them at a party and say, “Carl, you don’t know what the fuck you’ve been saying about Thanksgiving. I have it on good authority that it is not associated with pioneers and stuff. Fuck you and your American romantic myths!”

And then you’ll come back and read the rest of this story because that was as far as you had gotten. And then you’ll read this: sorry, dude, but I was just kidding. It’s all true. Thanksgiving was totally about pioneers and stuff.

And then you have to go back to Carl to apologize to him, hoping he’ll take you back, hoping that the love hasn’t died.

Thing is, it’s pretty rude to go up to someone at a party and say what you said. I don’t know if you have anyone to blame but yourself, and using such language to Carl’s face? What were you thinking? Also, the sideways damnation of American mythology also seems a tad unnecessary. What, you gonna start ripping on George Washington next? Well, fuck you and your judgment against stories that people hold dear. I don’t care if they have any grounding in truth. They help form a national identity by establishing a sense of common origins.

Bottom line: either you’re for collective myths or you’re for the terrorists.

By the way, I just wiki’ed Thanksgiving, and it totally was about pioneers and stuff.

Part 5 of the Holiday Story Series

Look, I was a bit rude when I started telling you the Story of Thanksgiving before. I probably said some things and used some language that I shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry. I don’t want to ruin anything, or be the bad seed at the party, so let’s just put it behind us and have a good time today.

I really am grateful for all of you. I am. I mean, I know I haven’t acted like it all the time, and we’ve had our differences, but it’s not like there wasn’t some give and take, right? I mean, we’ve all been there. Sometimes we just say things we shouldn’t have, and it’s the ol’ open mouth, insert foot, am I right? Like what you said yesterday, Carl. That wasn’t really well-received, but that’s okay, I got over it. I think we can all be the bigger man and get over stuff. Or, you know, be a better lady. I don’t want to leave out you ladies. I know you can stand to hear some of this.

What, Mom? Stop grabbing me. No, I’ve only had like two glasses. Three tops. Hardly any.

Anyway, I guess Mom wants me to shut up. Nothing new there. But you gotta love her, right? I mean, she’s our mother. It’s either love her or stick her in a nursing home, right guys? I’m just kidding you, Mom. Aw, come on, don’t look at me that way. You know I love ya.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Thanksgiving. It’s a time to be grateful, right? I mean, this was some pretty fucking awesome food. Sorry, I mean, “friggin’ awesome”, sorry about that, Mom. Just one small tad suggestion for the future. Can’t we all bring crock pots or something, so we can keep stuff warm? The food is so tasty; it’s just a shame that it seems like we always eat it kinda cold or at least lukewarm. I’m just saying, a few crock pots or plate warmers or something.

Mom, stop grabbing me. I’m trying to make a toast here. Ha ha, shit, I don’t even have wine in my glass. Carla, babe, can you top me up? Carl and Carla, that is still seriously funny. You should name your kids like Carlito and Carl–Carltrish–Carltoris… Get it? I’m trying to combine Carl and clitoris. What? It’s funny. Come on guys, lighten up. Alright, I’ll pour my own wine.

To all you sorry saps. Sorry you have to put up with me, but I’m grateful for it, because it means I get some pretty fucking awesome food each year. Seriously, love ya all. Especially you, Carla. Looking pretty fine, per usual. Love that sweater. Nah, don’t get up, Carl, I got this.

C’mon guys, this doesn’t work if you don’t raise your glasses with me.

Fine, screw it.