The Daily Procrastinator

Science is more than your seventh grade teacher droning on about nematodes.  Science can be funny, and NCBI ROFL is proof.  Rectal salami.  The correlation between ass size and penis length.  Dolphin tattoos.  The possibilities are endless.

Read and enjoy.

Ah, prom night: the source of many exes.

Ah, Facebook: the place where the past meets present, sometimes with jarring results.  Childhood friends, recent colleagues and family members mingle in a “worlds collide” sort of way.  It’s a fascinating social experiment.

I was chatting with a Facebook friend/colleague recently when he asked me, “What’s your xCount?”  This was his own personal term — one that I must admit that I love — for the exes that have crawled out of the woodwork and once again made themselves part of your life.  

I scanned my list of friends.  ”I’ve got two… and a half,” I told him.  He told me that you can’t count anyone as a half, but I think that a prom date who appeared in pictures but actually spent the night sitting in the lobby outside the hotel ballroom qualifies as something less than a full xCount point.  And believe me, after that fiasco at 17, I was thoroughly shocked to see that he wanted to connect with me.

He had four full-fledged exes on his list, not including one whose request he rejected outright.  ”Sometimes, the requests are just too creepy.”  Many of my friends agree.  There was the one who was contacted by the guy who stalked her after they broke up.  Another got a request from the girlfriend who had certain… uh… shall we call them “unique” sexual proclivities?  And what about that guy you hooked up with after the frat party sophomore year?  From first loves to major heartbreaks, they’re all out there, and they just might be looking for you.

Who's in my inbox? I can't bring myself to look.

What prompts exes to want to get in touch again, especially those that you haven’t spoken to in a decade or more?  As for mine, I still have a good relationship — albeit separated by time and distance — with one of them, and accepted the second just out of a ridiculous sense of curiosity.  You know the kind.  They’re the ones whose request is met with audible talking back to the computer.  ”Oh my god, John Doe?  How the hell did he find me?”  These requests are met with a connection, a few obligatory messages back and forth, and the obligatory Googling of their name to figure out what they’ve been doing since the 90s.

His story was slightly different.  He had one with fond memories who had sent the occasional Christmas card, one who had been a complete WTF entry, and two who were clearly taking Google stalking to the next level.  ”I don’t mind connecting with them,” he said, “but it’s a little weird that they have to respond to everything I post, as though they’re spending their days just waiting for me to update my status.”  Weird, indeed.

It seems that nearly everyone has an xCount greater than zero.  An informal survey of friends reveals xCount numbers between 3 and 9, each bringing varying levels of discomfort and baggage with them.  One, however, through the benefits of a new married surname and a move to a new continent has managed to avoid the xCount concept altogether, and was stunned to learn that I had an xCount.  

“I mean it’s lovely that they want to get in touch and it speaks volumes about your effect on their lives ….and yet: eeeeek.  I always wondered if I was crazy/unfriendly for not wanting contact or if the crazies were the ones who did.”

There’s no shortage of posts about this very topic.  This one talks about being the one that’s obsessed with the ex on Facebook.  This one talks about the shock of seeing the photo of the ex appear in the inbox.  Yet another talks about why your ex should never see your Facebook account.

Should you friend exes?  Only you know for sure.  Of course, you could always accept their invitation, learn everything you need to know about them, and then stealthily “unfriend” the person, leaving them to discover your passive-aggressive acceptance and rejection at their leisure.  But does that make you more or less creepy than the creepy ex that you’re trying to avoid?

I spent a bit of time clearing out my spam folder tonight, and I’ve tried to piece together a little personality profile based on the emails I’ve received.

I’m rich.  Just this weekend alone, I won more than $27 million ($27,000,000) U.S. dollars through various internet lotteries and the gracious kindness of strangers who have willed me money.  This is far more profitable than my writing gig, and with far less effort.  All I have to do is contact a handful of individuals in various nations, and I’m betting that by the end of the month I’ll be set for life.

I’m cheap.  I have 27 unpaid item disputes on eBay.  How thoughtless of me.  While most just list random auction numbers without detail, some actually give insightful information.  I’ve evidently been bidding on everything from cars to — quite inexplicably — vintage Barbie dolls.

There’s irony.  Someone wants to teach me how to make millions on eBay.  Evidently they haven’t seen my track record of 27 unpaid items.  And I’m personally captivated by, “I hope you find my information helping you.”  Indeed I do.

I’m small.  It appears that in addition to everything else in my life, I have a very small penis.  Unusually small.  So small that I am unable to satisfy women.  ”Be the man she really wants.”  You mean without gender reassignment surgery?  This puts my crush on Felicia Day in a whole new light, doesn’t it?

I hope that this personality profile helps you to learn a little bit more about the person behind the TallGirl persona.

It’s real and coming soon to a bookstore near you! Why didn’t I think of this?

From Chronicle Books:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

In my head, I’m a rock singer.  No, not just in my head – I’ve been told too many damn times that I have a “good” voice to think that I don’t have talent in the vocals department.  Yeah, after church the compliments come rolling in, and my mom was always busting my chops about joining the choir back in high school.  But I’m a teacher now, and the opportunities to show off the vox just don’t present themselves.  Those talent shows the school puts on?  They’re for the kids, man, not the teachers.

So when Rock Band came out a couple years ago it was a siren call – here was my chance to live out my rock-and-roll dreams by fronting a band made up of guys who like playing with tiny plastic guitars while I show off some REAL musical talent.  I mean, if youtube’s any indication, any six year old can master Guitar Hero on expert if they put enough time into it.  I’m out of college, married with two daughters and a job; I don’t have the requisite time to master those five buttons (and anybody’ll tell you moving from Medium to Hard is a HUGE jump- I think the game needs some re-working). But Rock Band was different. Rock Band didn’t require manual dexterity.  Rock Band offered a mic.  Hell yeah, I was gonna be the Star Dog Champion.

Reality kicked in almost immediately. One, I’m not allowed to play XBox when my wife’s home, so time that I could’ve spent rocking out was instead spent watching the Food Network.  I have a feeling that kind of thing doesn’t happen to Sammy Hagar.  Second, the song lineup did not necessarily cater to my musical stylings.   And by that I mean there were songs I didn’t know on the list.  That makes singing the songs difficult, because singing’s about confidence, not trying to read the lyrics while matching the tone of your voice to a little arrow – and speaking of which are we sure the makers of Rock Band programmed the pitch right on some of these songs in the first place?  Honestly, there’s no way I score a 79% on “Detroit Rock City” – Paul Stanley ain’t that much of a vocalist, and I sound JUST LIKE HIM when I’m jamming to KISS’s greatest hits on the way to work.

Mainly, though, unlike Guitar Hero, this game is meant for more than one player – the game is Rock Band, not Rock Singer.  I’m not quite sure, but I have a nagging feeling there’s something slightly pathetic about standing alone in front of the TV belting out the lyrics to the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (but, dammit, those screams make me feel so alive).  But there I am, knocking out the songs at “Hard” and even turning it up to 11 (”Expert”) when the song’s a real rocker (metal horns flying as “Run to the Hills” blares out of the speakers).

So one weekend I invite some guys over to jam.  We set up the drum kit (whose “Easy” setting is a crock.  Drummers require more coordination than I’ll ever be able to exhibit) and connect the guitars and then they start asking who’s going to sing.  I say I will.  Their response of “You will?” deflates me a bit, but I know I’m getting 94% on most songs so they’re in for a surprise.

We start out with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and I practically ace it at the “Hard” level, and yet my bandmates don’t remark on my vocal stylings at all.  They’re looking for another song.  So we go on to STP’s “Vasoline”  and still no remarks.  Then one of the guitarists suggests we switch around, so I get a guitar and play bass while he sings Radiohead’s “Creep” and aces it.  Hell, anyone could ace that one, particularly on “Medium” where he was at.  He then goes on to sing “Interstate Love Song”, another STP, and I’m thinking I didn’t buy this game to play guitar.  “Medium” on guitar is friggin” boring, but “Hard” will lead me to fail out at some point before the solo on most songs.  So I’m stuck watching our new singer bound around my stage- er, my living room singing about leaving on a southern train on a Sunday afternoon, and I’m stuck playing a fucking plastic guitar and adding in background vocals while he gets the spotlight, the interviews, the magazine covers and all the women!

Man, the rock star life takes a toll, I’m telling you.  No wonder Dokken broke up.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator