that ted danson

today the tv was on and i was in the other room. i heard the voice of a familiar friend. i thought to myself, "is cheers on?" and went to check it out. it wasn't cheers. it was becker. that's when i remembered "becker's not a bad show!" then i thought about how i like ted danson on curb your enthusiasm and bored to death. and i realized, for the first time ever, i'm a ted danson fan. it was a weird thing to realize.

also, i realized, you know how some people who you know or even just see, you think they look like someone famous? like you might have a friend who sort of looks like tom selleck without the mustache. or you might see a guy on the train who looks a lot like harrison ford. well, i realized that i don't think i've seen ANYONE who looks like ted danson. no other human on the planet resembles this dude.

avocado seeds

avocado seeds look like tiny wooden dinosaur eggs, am i right?

ugh, mondays, am i right?

here's a scene from the hit movie "garfled: pig in the city."

INT. KITCHEN - MONDAY MORNING

Garfled: ugh. mondays are the worst.
Monday: i'm sick of you bitching about what day it is.
Garfled: ugh, where's my coffee? i want some fettuccine. i hate mondays.
Monday: you know, if you go through life hating mondays, you will hate at least 1/7 of your life.
Garfled: ugh. i'm going back to bed.

Garfled exits kitchen with a bowl of fettuccine.

Sean Arbuckled appears from his hiding spot in the cabinet.

Sean: i heard what happened, Monday.
Monday: just leave me alone, Sean.
Sean: it's not your fault you know. if he's not excited about his plans for today, that's his problem. it's not fair to blame it on a day of the week.
Monday: can it, Sean! i'm not in the mood!

Monday sneezes.

Sean: bless you.
Monday: that wasn't a sneeze! it was a cough!
Sean: sorry. it sounded like a sneeze.
Monday: (crying) it was a sneeze. i was just too embarrassed to tell you.

Sean and Monday hug.

Garfled walks by wearing sunglasses.

Garfled: i'm gonna catch some rays!

audience laughter, applause, fade to black.

mom

i know i've been talking about Thanksgiving a lot lately. but that's what's on my mind. Thanksgiving is a big deal in the United States and that's where i am right now.

anyway, my mom is awesome because she shipped me a bunch of Thanksgiving food that she made all by herself. and it is good. she is good at making stuff. and she is nice about sharing it with me. and for that, i am thankful.

hot dog salad

tonight, for dinner, i was making hot dogs. and i was thinking about how they cook better in the frying pan when you cut them up into small bits. i know this because that's how i cook them when i put them in mac n' cheese. but i didn't have mac n' cheese. and i didn't have hot dog buns. and i don't like using pieces of bread as hot dog buns. because come on. it's just not the same.

so i thought to myself: why not just mash it all up together? that's how it ends up in my stomach anyway. so i cut up the hot dogs into bits so they cooked better and i ripped up some bread and squirted a bunch of ketchup and mustard in there and mixed it all up. and, thus, the Hot Dog Salad was born.
it did NOT taste very good. i do NOT recommend it. but to be honest, i WILL probably make this stupid concoction again someday because i AM stupid.

SNAP (tiny card game)

as i mentioned in an earlier post, i won a tiny card game called SNAP at a thanksgiving party. i had never heard of SNAP, so i pulled out the card to see what kind of game it was. before reading the instructions, i figured i'd just look at the cards to see if the game was self-explanatory. the very first card i saw read "ride-a-cock horse."
i don't want to play this game.

another thing about thanksgiving

i forgot to tell you about another reason thanksgiving didn't feel like thanksgiving. i had to take my friend patrick to the airport that morning before i went to work. i was worried traffic was going to be an issue, so we left really early. on the way, we realized that normal people weren't working on thanksgiving. so there was almost NO traffic at all. and we got to the airport way too early. so we went to the burger king by the airport and had a disgusting breakfast. it was funny. it's funny to be eating at a burger king on thanksgiving morning. we had a ball. and talked about how we'd remenisce years later on that great thanksgiving morning feast we spent together in 2009 ... at burger king ... by the airport.

we didn't take a picture, but this is probably what we looked like.

this thanksgiving, i became a man

the title of this post is probably misleading. i'm sure most of you are thinking, "he got bar mitzvahed?" sorry to get your hopes up. no, i did NOT get bar mitzvahed. i'm waiting for marriage.

but i did have my first thanksgiving not at home. it was weird. and not weird. both at the same time! it was not weird because it just felt like another day. but it was weird because i knew my family was hanging out without me. and it was also weird because i realized this is what happens when you grow up. you sometimes miss holidays with your family. because you don't live in the same town as them. and you have a shitty job and you have to work on the holidays.

but the good news is: jon, from work, invited me to tag along to his thanksgiving potluck dinner in griffith park. it was cool. my friend, eric, gave me two guinnesses from his 6pack. a bunch of people i had never met gave me delicious food. we saw a deer and two coyotes. the cops shined lights at us. AND there were prizes! i won a pencil, a set of friendship bracelets, a duck made out of a basketball, and a tiny deck of cards that you can only play one game with.

i am thankful.

robo-dance team by p.rule

artist, musician, and friend to the animal kingdom, patrick rule, drew this picture. he left it at my apartment. i will now write an accompanying poem, by the same title:

Robo-Dance Team
poem by nic
illustration by patrick

Alone, they were fun-loving misfits
"let's get together," suggested Biscuits.
"That's not the way of the robot," insisted Todd.
Input agreed with a nod.
"Robots are loners," said Todd in his B-boy stance.
"That's true," said Input, "but we all do the same dance."

The other Todd thought that was a very good point
and he said, "let's light up this joint*!"
He and Input danced in a such a way
that inspired the others to dance with them and to this day,
they are a team.
a team of dancing robots.

*the dancefloor. not marijuanah.

happy thanksgivings

this is schoolpants's first thanksgiving. i am thankful for that. and i'm thankful for you. and i'm thankful for pants. because where would we be without pants? the garden of eden. and that place doesn't exist anymore. food for thought. speaking of food, who loves thanksgiving food? i do! hot dogs, cheeseburgers, garlic bread, mmm yum. i'm getting hungry just thinking about it!

just kidding. i was already hungry.

is this a smart purchase?

so i'm on ebay looking for some 1984 summer olympics memorabilia because: a) i like this logo

b) i like sam the olympic eagle
and c) i'm an idiot.

but i found this pin. it's sam the eagle, holding a shotgun, wearing shooting glasses, ear muffs, and a pouch on his belt that i can only assume holds whiskey and ammunition.
it's probably the coolest pin i've ever seen. but i've bought dumb stuff on ebay before and i've regretted buying some of it. i can't tell if this is a stupid purchase or not. i mean, how does one know these things? how does one KNOW?

funny thing about texting

here's a funny thing about texting: when i try to text the word "bitch," my phone guesses i'm trying to say "chubi."

more on brains (moron brains)

so also in this tv show on brains that i'm watching, they've talked about the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that makes you empathize with other people. psychopaths have screwed-up amygdalas. the amygdalas of psychos can be up to SEVENTEEN times smaller than those of a regular person! yet the rest of their brain is just as smart and normal as a regular person.

what a rip off! no wonder so many normal people are such dicks!

if there's that much of a fluctuation, i think i must have an extra big amygdala (maybe up to seventeen times bigger) and that's why i can't be a dick to anyone.

not that i want to be a dick to anyone. but. c'mon. some people deserve it.

brains! (zombie voice)

so i'm watching a television programme on BRAINS right now. HUMAN BRAINS. gross, right?
wrong!
brains are AWESOME!

anyway. i've got some people by the name of Wiltshire in my family. and in this TV programme, there was a dude by the name of Stephen Wiltshire who is this guy with a photographic memory. and he looks at cityscapes and then draws them.
that reminded me of this time my mom was telling me about my granddad (her dad). he worked for the railroad. he worked at the part where they turned the trains around to send them back where they came from... the end of the line, as it were. it was atop this big hill. it overlooked the whole town. he worked up there everyday, with hours of boredom in between trains turning around. anyway, he went and painted the whole panoramic view of the city on the walls of the basement of the house my mom grew up in. she said it was really good. and she said he was good at drawing characters from cartoons too. he'd see a character in a strip in the funny pages and he'd be able to draw it, right away.

it was a cool moment because my mom's dad died when she was pretty young. so she never talked about him too much. so that's one of the only things i know about him.
anyway, he might not be related to this Stephen Wiltshire on TV because the one on TV is black and the one picture i ever saw of my granddad made him look pretty white. but who knows? stephen and i are both like 2 generations from my granddad. i feel like there's a 82% chance we are akin.

my boat dream

i just realized i don't think i've told you guys about my boat dream. here it is: so i've been having this recurring dream for YEARS now. it usually takes place at my grandparents' lake cottage. i'm either on the boat or on the dock near the boat and i'm fully clothed and i accidentally fall in the water. the first thing that ALWAYS goes through my head is "my cell phone is in my pocket" and i try to get out of the water quickly, hoping my cell phone isn't ruined.

sometimes the dream takes place some place exotic and i'm cliff diving or something and then freak out about my cell phone. sometimes i fall into a swimming pool. a couple of times it has been a river.

sometimes i fall off a speed boat, a yacht, a raft. i've fallen off a rope bridge, a dock, a huge pier. i've even jumped out of a helicopter into water, i think.

but i'm always falling into a body of water. most of the time it's an accident. i never get hurt or anything. but the cell phone is always my primary concern.

also, in real life, i have NEVER accidentally fallen into a body of water OR ruined my cell phone.

WHY do i keep having this dream???

sleep cycle

i sleep at a different time, almost everyday. some mornings i have to work from 4am-9am, so sometimes i'll stay up all night, then sleep from like 9:45-3pm. or like some days i just sleep from 5am to 9am but then i take a nap from 3pm to 6pm. and some days i sleep for 12 hours straight and some days i don't sleep at all for two days straight.

i'm a weirdo. but i always kind of suspected it was a good thing that i didn't let my body tell me when to do stuff. but i was just reading wikipedia and they say otherwise. according them, sleeping during the day is pretty much worthless. i say that's hogwash. there's the wikipedia way to do it and my way to do it. and both ways work just fine.


the most important part of MY CYCLE is that you mix it up each day. throw a nap in there every couple of days. go a night without sleep from time to time. go 12 hours straight AT LEAST once a month. and coffee! don't forget to drink coffee!

uh oh, my baby's dumb

sometimes i worry that my daughter might be stupid.
just kidding. i don't have a daughter. but someday, i might have a daughter. and if she eats toilet paper, i'm not going to call her stupid. i'm not going to do anything. because if you want the truth, i've eaten some toilet paper in my day. i'm not gonna lie to you. i knew it was something i wasn't supposed to eat, but i did it anyway. i wasn't doing it to look cool or rebel against my parents. it was just something i wanted to experience, for me. the toilet paper felt soft. i had eaten bits of notebook paper in school - the notebook paper was too coarse for my liking - so i tried some tp. and you know something? it wasn't bad. i enjoyed it.

no monkey buisiniesis

i don't even get this joke.

sometimes i'm too weird even for me.

booyah

this BBC article says drinking is good for the heart. warning: if you're gonna read it, stop before the "binge-drinking" section. it's just there to make you feel bad about yourself.

hotel fun

i think a fun thing to do when you're in a hotel is: leave motivational drawings and messages in the little notepad in your room. be sure to do it a few pages in. if you draw one on the top page, the maid will probably throw it away and the next occupant of your room won't be able to find it and get pumped up by it.

cheer up

lots of bats have duck feet and small nipples and horns instead of ears. it's nothing to be sad about. it makes you more interesting.

friday the thirteenth

you know, i was just reading about gioachino rossini, the popular italian composer who wrote the barber of seville, and according to wikipedia, rossini regarded friday as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number. and he just so happened to die on friday the thirteenth. the thirteenth of november 1868, to be exact ... that was exactly 141 years ago today.

do you know what that means???

me neither.

skeleton key

i really like the idea of skeleton keys. a skeleton key is a key that can unlock anything that's locked. skeleton keys don't really exist except for in zelda and stuff like that. but i think it's a cool idea to be able to get into all these places that nobody's supposed to be able to get into. metaphorically, of course. i don't really want to be able to get into your apartment while you're not there.
unless i'm setting up a surprise party.
even though you say hate surprise parties.
even though i think everyone secretly loves surprise parties.
but other than setting up surprise parties, i would never use my skeleton key. it would just be nice to know that i had it, you know?
...or i guess if you accidentally locked yourself out. then i could save the day with my skeleton key and get you in.
but i bet people would abuse that. locksmiths would go out of business because everyone would be calling me to help them out.
i'd have to set a strict rule: my skeleton key is not used to help you when you lock yourself out.
sorry guys. them's the rules.

good thing he lived before the internet

i don't know if i've mentioned this to you guys before, but the ghost of our 16th president, abraham lincoln (pronounced "lean kin") haunts my apartment. it was a huge selling point when i was first considering renting this apartment. i thought it'd be cool to get haunted by him. i figured i'd try to befriend him, learn more about him, maybe eventually be able to come to him for advice, etc. but it's pretty annoying. all he EVER talks about is celebrity gossip.

you are what you email

you ever notice how you act like your friends sometimes? sometimes i talk just like my friend dave. sometimes i befriend strangers the way my friend kienan would. i accidentally copy a lot of my friends. tonight, i ate panda express for the first time EVER and me and some of my LA pals all imitated each other. it was funny. it made me realize we all have things we do. and we all sort of copy the people we admire sometimes. and eventually that's kind of who you are. you're like 90% stuff you saw and adopted from other people and your like 8% stuff you sort of figured out for yourself and your 2% chimpanzee DNA. so it's important that you're friends with good people and it's important that you're good people and it's important that you know a cool chimpanzee when you see one.

also tonight i realized that panda express is delicious and i'm a fool for waiting this long to give it a try.

email

i bet when whoever invented email, he/she thought that really important messages would travel great distances in an instant and save the day.
but really it's mostly just people saying silly stuff to their friends.

i don't owe facebook anything

today, facebook suggested that i make facebook better for my friend ben by sending him a message. i'm flattered that facebook thinks that a message from me would really make ben's facebook experience better, but my real problem with this suggestion is this: if facebook isn't good enough for ben, then that's facebook's problem. or ben's problem. i don't see why facebook is asking ME to get involved. i'm not on the payroll. if i'm making facebook better for someone AS A FAVOR TO FACEBOOK, then i want something in return. like a free t-shirt. i love free t-shirts. so until i receive my free t-shirt (or a promise of a free t-shirt), ben will be receiving NO messages from me.

i'm sorry ben. but this is a matter of principle.

made in the USA!

so a couple years ago, i shot a movie that required like 20 strings of christmas lights. so i ordered them online from this place called the christmas depot. and since then, they've been sending me emails. i would unsubscribe to the email list, but some of the emails are soooo funny. like this one. they're advertising their artificial christmas trees which are made in the USA. what better way to do this than with photos of families on christmas morning, a floating bald eagle head in front of the american flag, a crudely drawn political cartoon about heath care reform, a screengrab from a fake news show that says RECESSION, an unemployment line, a clipart that says TAXES, 6 fake trees, and a "babe" in a santa hat.

these images are supposed to support the fact that buying fake trees from the United States "matters."

maybe i'm just stupid, but i don't get it. i don't understand the question OR the relevance of any of the photos. except maybe the health care reform drawing. that makes me think of christmas trees.

i'm not a strong swimmer

i'm not a very strong swimmer. i took a swimming class in college because we had to take a couple of physical education classes. mine were racquetball and swimming. i like racquetball. it is fun. swimming is not. being in a pool outside on a hot day is fun. a lot of people call that "swimming." that's my kind of swimming. swimming class was not my kind of swimming. we just had to swim back and forth. it was so boring.
one time, after swimming class, i was eating lunch with my friends. i told them i had a rough morning. i said i swam too hard in swimming class and, subsequently, barfed in the pool and then the coach got mad at me because then they had to drain the pool and clean it so no one got aids and now i might fail the class.
my friends didn't believe me. but it was funny.

i worry about grapes

i feel bad for grapes sometimes, because, let's be honest, you know some of them just can't stand it.