If you are a musician, or singer, or performer heed this special advice…
It is not necessary to tell me you are in the house. I know you are in the house. I can see you (or alternately, hear you if I am listening to a recording). Announcing to me your presence will only perplex me. Did you think that I did not know it was you? Did you think that previous to this announcement the audience assumed you were a holographic image and that you were not in the house. If you are in the house (or on the radio) I know that you are in the house and you do not have to tell me. Also, you do not have to repeat it.
Additionally, if you plan to rock either the house or me you don’t have to actually tell me. Telling me that you are in the house and that you have plans to rock said house does not actually mean you can or will. I will immediately become suspicious of you and your motive.
When Coke spends a lot of money to tell me that it tastes different than Pepsi I know that the size of their lie is directly related to the amount of effort they put forth to convince me of such a thing. If Coke actually did not taste like Pepsi I would know it and you would not have to tell me. They both taste like your mom’s ass.
Armed with this simple knowledge of marketing, I feel confident knowing that the more you promise to rock the house, the less rocked I will feel. As a member of the audience I should not cheer your intent to rock the house or me, but I should only cheer the actual event of being rocked. Asking me to approve of your intentions might be fine once, but repeatedly it smacks of cold desperation.
The first rule of writing is “write what you know” and we know how often you break that rule.
The second rule of writing is “show, don’t tell”.
In your efforts to write a song, please remember these rules. Show me how you intend to rock me or the house. Actually do the rocking. Do not just repeat over and over that you are in the house and that you intend to rock it.
Next week we will discuss the use of simile and metaphor in songs using John Mayer as the bright shining example of everything that is wrong with the state of education in this country (and how it probably got that way because no one wanted to pay taxes because they wanted another garage).
Monthly Archives: June 2007
Pissed? Yeah
The problem with listening to the news all the time is that you get pissed off about things more often than say someone who watches American Idol.
Yesterday, NPR was telling all about the ‘Cheap Money Era‘ and how it was coming to an end. I could not find a transcript to the story so you will have to listen to it. The gist is that with all the cheap money available there was a flood of cash. Now there’s all this liquid cash and nowhere to invest it. So you have all these uber-rich people and corporations and whatnot sitting on all this cash and saying “man, what the hell am I going to do with all this cash? If I can’t invest it then I can’t make more money with it”.
Wow.
This morning I had to listen to a story about the infant mortality rate in Mississippi. The state with the highest infant mortality rate in the country was getting better, but since 2004 it has gotten worse. Poverty stricken and poorly educated women do not have access to even the most basic healthcare. A woman on Medicaid living in a deeply rural area will not see an actual doctor until she is about 8 months pregnant and only with someone advocating for her. Fewer and fewer doctors are accepting Medicaid and those that do are generally located in the cities.
How exactly does an impoverished woman in the middle of nowhere get to the city to see a doctor?
And then beyond the basic healthcare needs, these women don’t even have enough information available on how to take care of themselve or their gestating babies. In a state that regularly ranks near the bottom in k-12 education standards it is no surprise that huge swaths of the population do not understand what goes into a balanced diet or even what good nutrition might entail. Even if they DID know that, I’m still not sure how they would afford much of what they needed to eat.
We won’t even get started on sex education and birth control. Hell, even if they knew about it, it’s not like they’d have access to it.
It is stuff like this that so deeply shames me. In a nation where the biggest worry of the wealthy is what to do with all that excess cash, we still have people, large numbers of people, who don’t even have their basic needs met. Not only are their needs not being met, but they are in a cycle of poverty dug so deep they don’t even have the tools to escape it.
So I say a giant FUCK YOU to Laissez-Faire. A great big giant FUCK YOU to anyone who thinks that the best idea is to just leave these things to charity, to trust that they will just be taken care of. These things are not taken care of, they’re ignored. The poor and the uneducated are blamed for their decisions, for their circumstances and we say tough luck to you. The rate of return on investing in the poor and the uneducated is just way too low, I guess. It’s probably more adventageous to invest in those shoes with the roller skates in them or in oil. I hear the oil industry is set to make record profits again this year. AWESOME!
Am I being too simplistic? yeah, I am. I know that I am, but I also know that the gulf between these two articles I listened to is so deep and so wide and so shameful to every single person in this country that getting pissed off and being simplistic is not the worst sin.
I am ashamed and you ahould be ashamed and this shit needs to stop. We have no right to be proud or happy or smug in our circumstances when so many infants are dying for lack of resources when those resources exist.
It’s not that I don’t like any of you
Two weeks ago I was having a crabby weekend. I considered my options…human sacrifice, multi-gun rampage, heroin, turning the ringer off on my phone and doing crossword puzzles…
There we go. I turned the ringer off. Turning the ringer off is completely different than just ignoring my phone. I ignore my phone all the damned time. I hear it ring, I cock my head to the side and then say…meh, i’ll check later. This was a good method for a while but it meant that no matter what I was doing, if the phone rang I would have to stop and cock my head to the side and then make a decision to see who is calling and then make a decision as to whether or not I wanted to talk to the person on the phone. Don’t take this personally, I just don’t like talking on the phone.
If I chose to not even see who was calling, then the worry of not knowing who called would scratch at the surface of my brain until I gave in and checked the phone.
The phone causes a lot of stress for me. Technically, it’s just a phone and it should not cause me any stress, but it does.
So I turned the ringer off and forgot about it. It was the best thing I’d done for myself in years. Seriously, this reduced my stress in ways that ice cream or masturbating never could! I completely forgot I had a phone! I forgot that people wanted to talk to me! I just went about my business and did my stuff completely uninterrupted. Then I would remember my phone at like 11pm and go look at it and see who called and think, “oh nice, these people called me!”
I know it’s selfish, but sometimes you have to be. I can’t be INFP all the damned time.
So I’ve kept my phone off intermittently for the last two weeks. Of course the universe likes to drive home the point on occasion…
My current ringtone is me singing:
Why don’t you pick up the phone
someone wants to talk to you
answer the phone
someone wants to talk to you
doo doo dooot doo
dooo doooooo
It’s really irritating.
I left my phone on one day last week and of course I got calls all day. I got 2 calls (TWO CALLS) during my pelvic exam. Let me tell you something, you do not ever want to hear yourself singing when you are in that position and you certainly never ever want your doctor to be laughing while she’s in there. It’s really disconcerting!
So, to sum up, I’m not avoiding any of you specifically, I’m just avoiding the phone. Email me if you want me to respond. Later this summer, I’ll turn the phone back on.
stupid reactionary uneducated
There are moments when I am driving down the road listening to the news and I need to start screaming at the radio. I’m aware of how dumb this is, it’s not a two way transmitter (no matter what the foil hat brigade tries to tell me).
They want to ban certain dog breeds in Minnesota. I wonder how often I can use the word “asinine” in a post. Let’s not find out.
Banning specific breeds will do nothing to solve the problem. Nothing at all. The third paragraph of that article even illustrates that this really has nothing to do with facts or statistics, but with knee-jerk reactionism…the kind of knee-jerk reactionism that an uneducated constituencly loves. “You saw something troubling on a 45 second newsbite stuffed between the weather and jokes about hairstyles? You say they used scary graphics? Well, let me get right on that!”
Banning specific breeds for dog bites is a lot like banning alcohol completely for drunk driving deaths. These dogs themselves are not violent, their owners are. Their owners do not take the time to properly train their dogs, the owners may even be trying to make their dogs violent. You cannot blame the dogs, you must make stronger legislation to hold the owners responsible.
We do not blame the car or the alcohol, we blame the person who shrugged off responsibility.
And I say this even though I live in a neighborhood where every month I see a new wanna-be thug and their pit bull puppy walking around. I have seen guys jabbing and poking their dogs as they played so that they would become angry and aggressive. I have these thugs kick their dogs for pulling on the leash when they took them out for the daily thug strut. I look at each of these dogs and my heart breaks because I know that each dog has been handed a death sentence by its owner and it will never be able to plead its case.
I’ve seen these dogs out there. I understand the fear people have, but it is misplaced.
The dogs that are raised as such surely will have to be put down. I understand this. If you cannot trust that a dog trained to be violent will forever be non-violent then that dog must be put down. This is sad, but necessary. We do not, however, need to ban all dogs. We need to make the dog owners as responsible for the damage their dog does as they would be if they used a weapon on a victim. These dogs are raised to be weapons and should be treated as such.
The dogs that are not, should not be treated like this. Milo, Doti and Bela are and were the sweetest dogs around. They do no harm, they are well trained (or being trained). They are fun and gentle and rambunctious happy dogs. Under this legislation it would be a misdemeanor for Dena and Levi to have these dogs. That is wrong.
People need to stop being reactionary and start thinking for once.
boom-bah-latt
Friday hauled ass out of work to get home, grab maddie and get to the other side of town to the vet’s office.
Let me demonstrate for you the amount of driving I had to do
1) hold your arms in such a way that your left arm is down at an angle, perhaps 4 inches from your hip. Hold your right arm in the air, about 180 degrees from your left arm.
2) I work somewhere to the right of your navel
3) I live on your left wrist
4) the vet is on the middle finger of your right hand, right there on the tip
I did all of this on the day when they decided to turn the bowels of hell into a steam room but they didn’t bother to seal it very well. The land was covered in a thick hazy, steamy, humid heat. The AC is still broken on my car. The AC will get fixed very soon. I missed the exit and ended up driving about six inches past your middle finger and had to turn around and go back.
I was hot and crabby and I was damn fucking tired of the MPR member drive. Maddie thought she would express her discomfort by sitting in the back seat and panting wet dog breath on my face.
We got there, on time even, and she tried to figure out if she could actually fight the cat in the cat carrier. Ever since my mom’s cat tried to kill me and bury my body in the dirty laundry Maddie has issues with cats. She choce not to fight the cat, though it seemed obvious the cat wanted to fight her.
As a side note, I could not sit down as my butt was all sweaty and I did not want to leave a sweaty butt print on the bench.
Then the magic time came, we got in to se Dr Pierce Fleming, International Vet of Mystery! You know, whenever you go in to meet him he’s just regular. His name truly suggests he’d pull some crazy James Bond gadget out of his pocket and incapacite me while grilling me on my plans to take over the world. He doesn’t do that. He just does vet things. Don’t get me wrong, they are awesome vet things, but I haven’t yet seen him use his spy stethoscope, his nerve gas filled ear cone light looker thingy or even his secret rectal thermometer radio transmitter.It’s so weird that he would be named Pierce Fleming and not utilize his special spy tools more often.
On the other hand, he utilized much awesomeness and that is an acceptable substitute. We discussed Maddie’s condition. Not only did her infected feet come flaming back in but also she was losing patches of fur. The patched of fur are a staph infection that comes from the same staph infection in her feet. Okay. So that can be fixed. Our previous plan of “hold down this infection and punch the shit out of it until it dies a wet and gasping breath” did not work out as well as we hoped. We now moved on to Plan B.
Plan B involves trapping the infection in a cage and regularly poking it with a stick for the rest of Maddie’s life. We’re still going to beat up the infection with the cephalexin. Beat it up so hard it will beg for mercy. It will get no mercy. I will eat a giant turkey sandwich while it begs and I will laugh at the infection, spraying it with partially chewed sandwich as that is the most disrespectful thing I can come up with (maybe Pierce Fleming and I should join forces and he can catch the baddies and I can interrogate them…hmmm). At the same time that she is receiving the cephalexin for the infection, she will also be getting a lot of prednisone to help keep the swelling and inflammation down.
Once we get everything under control we keep doing the same thing for 14 more days. This is important. Even if everything looks perfect we still keep kicking the infection in the ribs. If you are a staph bacteria on my dog, I will be a total asshole to you.
After her 14 days we will then ramp the prednisone down and try to find the lowest dose we can give her that will still be effective on her feet. This is where things can get troublesome in my heart.
If we can get her down to 1/2 pill every other day there should be no long term side effects to her health, even if she takes it for the rest of her life. I know without a doubt she will need more than that. Long term usage of prednisone can cause some side effects that may tend to shorten a dog’s life. This is where we balance quality and quantity. Obviously I want my dogs to live forever and never leave me. Obviously I learned last November just how impossible that it. As such, I want my dogs to live the dog-happiest lives possible, I want them to not only be comfortable but to feel good. Last year when we treated Maddie her whole demeanor changed. She was happy. She brightened up, she was goofy and playful. She was enjoying her life.
And as a person who tries not to anthropomorphize her dogs as much as possible, I mean it when I say she was happy.
This is my goal. I would rather she have fewer happy years than more uncomfortable years. You’d think that would be obvious, but it’s hard to accept. It’s hard to know that you are going to choose a course of action that could shorten your dog’s life, even if you know that the infections make her miserable at least that was not something you chose.
Maddie had such a tough time of it before she came to live with us and my commitment to her is that for the rest of her life, she will be happy, she will be comfortable and she will live without fear.
Last night when I got into bed she laid down next to me and stretched out against my belly. I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her head and I knew I was right.
