You Know Your Cat Is Your Best Friend...

When you file into the bathroom together, go to your respective receptacles and share a morning pee with each other. Everyday.

Best Guests

I just had four friends from Chicago short noticedly stay at my house this past week. At first I was a little, "Ah shit, What did I agree to?" But then became obsessed with finding the perfect cat litter.

The first night we hung out they bought me dinner.

The second day we hung out- they allowed me to take them surfing. Aka- I got to go surfing on a weekday- aka their vacation became my vacation.

They stuck Harold and Kumar into the DVD player while cooking a delicious meal and made me a vodka soda with lime.

They cleaned my kitchen leaving it in better shape than when they arrived.

They invited me to Napa to drink more vodka sodas with lime, eat more delicious food- we're talkin fresh oysters from the seaside, insisted we go wine tasting, and supported my decision to buy apple flavored Licorice.

Really the Award goes out to couch surfers who know how to treat couch owners. God bless ya!

Why is my ear hecka wobbly?

Yesterday, as I was lining my students up from recess, I heard a horrified yelp from the back of the line. I looked back into the small face of my newest student,let's call him Jorge - Fernando, yelling in a panic "WHY IS MY EAR HECKA WOBBLY!?!"

I let him touch my ear to assure him that everyones ears are hecka wobbly. He then started to squeeze his ear into a pair of lips and began talking to me. "My ear is talking," he said and filed into the classroom.

This is why I love my job.

Robin Williams, You Have It All

When making my Top 5 Most Perfect Movies list I considered the movie Hook. But then I watched it on the USA channel at my parent’s house in Minnesota for the 8 millionth time. And you know - as much as Dustin Hoffman virtually disappears as an actor in his genius depiction of a poetic yet bumbling drama queen of a Captain Hook and that infamous imaginary food fight has lead me to experiment with food coloring on mash potatoes and scour the earth for a glass of BoBo- the movie is kind of annoying. I really hated Peter Banning’s sappy 10 year old son crybabying over how his dad never watches him play baseball and that weirdo scene where Julia Roberts turns into a life size princess Tinkerbell and tries to get into Robin Williams' pants. Of course RU-FI-OOOO was a 1991 wet dream and a half and the lost boys were a charming amalgamation of thoughtful raggamuffinry, but all in all, Hook was far from perfection. It is, HOWEVER, a pretty darn good Robin Williams flick.

Robin, Robin, Robin. So many movies. So many Laughs. So many tears. Love him or hate him- the dude has skillz. Therefore I came up with the best and worst of Robin William’s oeurve. Note: Half the movies on the Goddawful list I have not seen but am fully confident in their excruciating dreadfullness based on trailers and general life experience.

Top 10 Most Brilliant Robin Williams Movies

1.) Ms. Doubtfire
2.) Aladdin
3.) The Birdcage
4.) Death to Smoochy
5.) Deconstructing Harry
6.) Dead Poets Society
7.) Hook
8.) The Word According to Garp
9.) Good Will Hunting
10.) Patch Adams

Top 10 Most Goddawful Robin Williams Movies

1.) August Rush
2.) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
3.) Night At the Museum 1 and 2
4.) License to Wed
5.) Jumanji
6.) One Hour Photo
7.) Old Dogs
8.) Fern Gully
9.) Insomnia
10.) Patch Adams

I’m not gunna lie- I fricken love RW. He’s a nutjob and I wish we were roommates. We’d sit around drinking absinthe all day doing character monologues back and forth until we woke up the next morning singing “You Never Had A Friend Like Me” while washing the dishes. Oh, What Dreams May Come!

Top 5 Most Perfect Movies

Perfect? What on earth could that mean? The idea of the perfect movie first occurred to me several months ago when I attended a Movie in the Park extravaganza in San Francisco. The feature was…dun dun duuuun…Back to the Future. A park filled with an urban gathering of the Mcfly generation was, as expected, the best possible way to see Back to the Future for the 15th time and despite the fact that I was sitting on some random pipe in the ground and some exhibitionist couple were violently sucking face two inches in front of me, I had a marvelous time.

I left thinking, “What a perfect movie!” Every single minute mattered, entertained, and delighted. From Crispin Glover, Michael J Fox, and Leah Thompson to Christopher Lloyd RIP- (Wait, did he die?) the acting was SPOT ON. Even Einstein the dog was on point. The details were impeccable- Anyone remember the ululating Libyan terrorists? THE POWER OF LOVE!? I could go on.

What I decided makes a perfect movie are the following elements:

A.) Not a minute is wasted on superfluous scenes intended to showcase the leading actor’s talent (or lack thereof), extraneous plot developments, or overdramatized landscape panning.
B.) Each actor owned their role in a way that nobody else could.
C.) The soundtrack enhances the concept of the film without becoming the centerpiece of its momentum.
D.) The plot is seamless with scenes that are coherent but not overly predictable.
E.) Every time you watch the movie, you notice some new detail that’s extremely funny, telling, or well...perfect.

Enough reasoning. Here is my Top 5 Most Perfect Movie List:

1.) Ferris Bueller’s Day off
2.) Back To the Future
3.) The Sandlot
4.) The Fugitive
5.) Close tie between Ace Ventura Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber

Clearly, I am a product of the Mcfly Generation. Feel free to add or debate this list with your own experiences in Perfect Cinema. Goodnight and Good Luck.

Helium Article # 1

In my wisdom teeth removal recovery period I have joined a website called Helium.com. It's some kind of information sharing self-publishing article generator thing. It provides article topic titles and you go nuts writing away.

Today I chose the topic: Online Dating Mistakes Men Need to Avoid

Here it is:

As someone who treated online dating like a sport for about 5 months and went on at least 40 dates, I consider myself an expert on the online dating mistakes of men. Here are the top five things men should consider as they enter the ether world of love:

1.) How accurate are your pictures?

The very last date I went on and the reason why I quit online dating was because my date grossly misrepresented himself in his online pictures. Not only was he overweight, beady eyed, and poorly dressed, but he had a terrible personality to boot. Now if you are an overweight, beady eyed, poorly dressed man with a terrible personality, please present yourself that way. If you find a lady that’s into that sort of thing, you will know it’s real. Sell yourself in any other way and you’ll be wasting your time and money on a woman who will turn you into a cautionary online dating tale faster than you can say McMuffin Breath.

2.) Do you need a therapist more than you need a girlfriend?

At least 30% of the dates I went on were pro bono therapy sessions wherein I reassured, understood, rationalized, and talked down the saddest men in the world. Yes. Life is hard. But it’s a lot harder to find a hot girl that gives a hoot about your bummed out sack of broken dreams…on the first date.

3.) Are you as funny in real life as you are on paper?

How many times did I LOL when reading a potential suitors profile? SO MANY! How many times did I LOL in a face to face? Not at all. Never. Nope. I even had a guy ADMIT that he is funnier on paper. Most women don’t date paper, so step up your face game or chill out on the Mr. Witty profile man.

4.) Eager Beaver?

I know its super exciting to be out with a fantastic lady with a cool phone, but really try not to make 5 future plans with her after ten minutes of waiting for the first drink to kick in. If you think she’s the cat’s pajamas and all you want to do is touch her arm, take three deep breaths and try to hold out for the next 15 or so minutes to pass. If you have to touch her, be subtle: No weirdo hand on the lower back. If you need to tell her she’s pretty make a comment about her necklace. Do not go overboard on the compliments and please, whatever you do: hide your boner at all costs.

5.) Open up.

Number one most obnoxious thing a guy can do on a date is be a total dud. We ladies would much rather have a horror story than no story at all. I once went on a date with a guy who had just gotten back from a trip to Brazil. I thought, “Great we’ll have so much to talk about! Traveling, cultural/social observations, bachelor party shenanigans, ocean creatures!” Imagine my disappointment when all the guy could squeeze out of his Brazilian excursion was that he ate a lot of beef and went rock climbing once. I also found out that his job involves a lot of paper shuffling and that he works out until 9 o’clock three days a week. Womp Womp. The ability to elaborate is key to keeping an intelligent woman’s attention. It gives us more fodder with which to psychoanalyze you and subsequently decide if we want to see you naked or not. There’s a fine line between sexy mystery man (only exists in foreign movies), and short-answer bad conversation dude (all too common). Try not to be the latter.

Yeah Well, Life's Not Fair

Remember when you were a kid and Jessica Fairbanks, your best twin-name friend/nemesis, got to ride the pretty tall white horse named Dakota, and you got stuck with the fat old flea-bitten fart of equine genetics named Ralph. And how you expressed to your mother that,"It's not fair!"? and she responded with something to the tune of, "Yeah Well, life's not fair (YWLNF)." And how in that moment YWLNF was least desirable pentad of words you would ever ever want to hear?

Then when you got older and found out that indeed life IS NOT fair and that its' injustices both small and large are not only ever-present but yet to come. And that if you said "It's not fair," every time something was not fair you would be a miserable/infantalized adult with no friends and an equally disgruntled parrot named Lady?

Yes, life is full of inequalities- My students make sure to remind me of this on a daily basis. I try as little as possible to drop the YWLNF line of them, but sometimes it's all I got. I started thinking- What can really truly justify the YWLNF line. Less- "My boss is a prick loser and has out for me" and more "Life's a bitch and then you die"- I came up with a list.

1.) Having extremely abusive/shitty parents
2.) Innocent Bystander Casualties
3.) Extreme Psoriasis
4.) Colostomy Bag Necessity
5.) Severe Wheat/Gluten Allergies- seriously, what.
6.) Genocide
8.) Dirty drinking water
9.) Underdeveloped/absent sexual organs
10.) The fact that nearly 99.9% of the population will never get to go to outer space.

Sometimes you'll hit a kid with YWLNF because they're upset that they got the blue frisbee instead of the green one. Then other times you have to explain to a 7 year old that the reason they are not coming back to the same class next year is because their crackhead mother, with her own abusive background, exposed them to so much severe emotional, chemical, and sexual trauma at the age of 3 that their current guardian can no longer take on the challenges of caring for such a damaged child, and that they have to be shipped to another city where their Child Protective Services case was first opened, and entered into the foster care system, where they will not know anyone, will gain an even deeper sense of abandonment than they already have and have to rely on the failings of the under-funded Social Services to survive past high school.

But you can't really say YWLNF to a kid like that because they already know- and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it- I guess that's what makes certain parts of Life truly unfair- - the inability to change them