The Gooch On...

...Finally Having Something Interesting to Post

2008-01-04T14:26:00.000-08:00

About 14 years ago I was hired by a friend to do the announcing for a pro wrestling show he was promoting in San Jose, CA. This included holding the microphone when the performers were being interviewed. In doing a youtube search recently to see if I could find any material on one of the performers from that show, I was surprised to discover... myself (just after the 5:00 minute mark).

(Some off color language is used, so careful if you are looking at work)

...The Object of Her Affection

2007-02-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

It’s interesting how our own personal experiences tend to shape our perspective of events. Everyone is buzzing these days about the wild story of the astronaut who traveled 900 miles in a diaper to confront a romantic rival.

And all I could think when I heard the story was, “Why hasn’t anything like this ever happened because of *ME*?”

Seriously, I can think of all of one time in my life where two women actively competed for my affection. I was 14 years old on an overnight Jewish youth group retreat. Late Saturday night I was sitting on a couch with Debbie, a not all that bright (she was in the slow learners classes) but very cute blond, when I found myself flanked on the other side by Gabby, who wasn’t as traditionally attractive as Debbie but far more intelligent (she had skipped a grade), who made it clear she was there to fight for me. After a couple hours of this delicate balancing act, Gabby finally whispered to me, “I’m going to get up now. One of us has to go…one of us has to”, effectively removing herself from the competition. Probably a good thing too because Debbie let me kiss her with tongue and go under her shirt later that night, which seemed far less likely to happen with Gabby.

That was nearly 20 years ago. To date, nothing like this has ever happened to me again. Sure, I’ve dated a number women over the years, even had long-term relationships with a few. But nobody has ever deemed me a prestigious enough catch to really be worth going crazy over.

Nobody I’ve broken up with has ever seemed to find the event to be all that traumatic. None of my exes have ever come to the realization after we were finished that I was a prize worth treasuring and actively fought to get me back. No one has ever had such an obsessive crush on me as to do anything to cause embarrassment to herself. Heck, even Gabby, from the story above, seemed to more or less be over it by the next morning.

When I heard the story of the love-crazed astronaut, I couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of the guy who was the impetus for her behavior. Sure, we can laugh at some details of the story – her traveling the whole way in Depends undergarments, her ridiculous “I just wanted to talk with her” alibi, etc. But it must be a huge ego boost to know that an otherwise intelligent, decorated, professional woman was perfectly willing to degrade and humiliate herself and throw away a brilliant career all for the chance just to be with you.

But aside for one isolated event from before I even needed to shave, I wouldn’t know. As Rod Stewart once said, Some Guys Have All the Luck

...Toilet Training

2007-01-28T18:08:00.000-08:00

...Leaving the World a Little Better Place Than I Found It

2007-01-19T11:19:00.000-08:00

Early on in my career, a veteran sales rep from my industry advised me never to let the job become too stressful. After all, he reminded me, “It’s not like we’re doctors. We’re not saving lives here.”

Fundamentally this was sound advice. A gentle admonition to always keep things in perspective.

Still, I couldn’t help but find his advice a little depressing. It served as a confirmation that what I do for a living really isn’t all that important. There is a part of me who really envies doctors, firemen, policemen and teachers. Or anyone else who has a job where they can honestly claim to make a positive contribution to society every time they clock in. Selling expensive audio-visual toys, by comparison, simply doesn't seem as noble.

On the other hand, I could be grossly underestimating the value of my profession to the world at large.

Yesterday my phone rang off the hook as I was called incessantly by various people from various companies, all of who were depending on me to facilitate an emergency rush order. If I hadn’t been successful in making the proper arrangements for a particular piece of gear to arrive in Las Vegas by early this morning, the Justin Timberlake concert may not have gone on as scheduled.

Others may save lives, fight crime or stimulate young minds. But how many can claim to have helped bring sexy back?

...My Cheating Heart

2007-01-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

One of the funniest scenes in the movie Election comes when the Matthew Broderick character, a married high school teacher, shows up at the home of his best friend’s ex-wife with the intent of starting an affair, but instead finds himself attacked by a swarm of angry bees. In the context of the movie this was supposed to demonstrate the type of luck this character was used to experiencing, however, it seems to me you could just as easily call it karmic payback for attempting to cheat on his wife.

I’ve had a couple experiences like that myself. When I moved down to Southern California I was still involved in a serious relationship with my college sweetheart, going on 3 years. Even though it was never said outright, I think we both assumed once our lives were a little more settled (she had a semester left before she graduated, I was just starting out my career) we’d get married and start a life together.

This didn’t stop me from messing around on her just a couple weeks after I moved (discussed previously here). I was out with a group of friends from work, bar hopping in Long Beach. I hit it off with a friend one of my co-workers had brought along and in short order we were making out pretty heavily. When the group I drove out with was ready to head back home, this woman requested I instead stick around with her. When you let your ride home for the night take off so you can spend additional time with a woman you’ve been tongue-kissing for the previous few hours, I think it’s pretty obvious what you’re intending.

Walking back to this woman’s apartment, she came up with the ill-fated idea that we should first stop in at another bar for “one more drink”. No sooner had we sat down than this woman struck up a conversation with the guy sitting on the other side of her, who she eventually determined to be more to her liking. It was obvious I was going to get screwed in an entirely different way than I had originally anticipated.

On the SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR, 40 mile cab ride back to my apartment, I comforted myself with the idea cosmic forces had intervened to prevent me from cheating on my girlfriend. Because that’s a lot easier to digest than “I just got totally rejected, degraded and humiliated”.

I had an eerily similar feeling yesterday watching the playoff game between the San Diego Chargers and New England Patriots. After a lifetime as a 49ers fan, I recently changed my allegiance to the Chargers (discussed previously here). Unceremoniously dumping the team I’ve been rooting for since I was 7 years old, the team I was such a big fan of as a kid it became an annual tradition for my dad to take me to a live game at Candlestick the Sunday closest to my birthday, the team I watched win 5 Super Bowls throughout the 80s and 90s, all because I didn’t have the patience for them to go through their current “rebuilding” process.

I don’t remember exactly which point in the game yesterday – maybe when Eric Parker fumbled a punt return, perhaps when Drayton Florence inexplicably headbutted a Patriots player after 3rd down, resulting in a 15 yard penalty and fresh set of downs, or possibly when Marlon McCree intercepted a Tom Brady 4th down pass only to fumble the ball, returning possession and better field position to the Patriots – I got to thinking maybe this was my karmic punishment for being disloyal to the team I grew up with. How else do you explain how a team who was so dominant throughout the regular season essentially hands a victory to the opposition?

Maybe it’s time to take that old 49ers sweatshirt out of mothballs.

...High School Redux

2007-01-11T11:27:00.000-08:00

I’ve had this fantasy lately about getting the chance to do high school all over again.

I was one of those classic underachievers: The type of student who had the intelligence to prosper in the classroom, but due to a complete lack of interest in homework or studying, consistently found myself on the brink of failure. I exasperated my parents and an infinite number of teachers over the years, all of who could see I had the potential to thrive in school if only I would put forth the effort.

Part of me wants to blame it on the school system which, as designed, seems set up to kill any desire anyone could possibly have in learning. Seriously, who in their right mind decided it was logical to expect teenagers to spend 7 hours a day stuck in a classroom, only to be told to then spend several *more* hours at home working on the same material?

The hole in that theory, of course, is that there are many students who do just fine in a traditional school setting, which points the finger back in my direction.

Part of my problem, and this is something I still struggle with, was that I had the bad habit of being a “pleasure first, responsibility later” type. Regardless of how much homework I came home with or whether or not a big test was coming up, if a new issue of “Pro Wrestling Illustrated” came in the mail or a good episode of “Three’s Company” was on, that came first. If there was time left over for schoolwork, so be it, but it was never my top priority.

It also took me a long time (well after high school) to understand that challenging myself, doing something that was difficult for me and overcoming the obstacle, could be a pleasurable experience. Instead of buckling down and putting extra effort into the classes I struggled with like math and science, I instead focused my energy on the subjects that came naturally to me, like English. If I sat down to work on my math homework and didn’t understand how to do the problems at first glance, I just wouldn’t do them, period. It never occurred to me that if I just persisted and didn’t give up I would eventually get the concept.

Then there were the normal teenage issues that distracted me from my schoolwork. Namely, obsessing over when I would finally get to see a girl naked somewhere other than Cinemax at Night.

It just seems like I completely wasted my high school years by not putting forth the effort I was capable of. I suppose things turned out ok for me anyway, but it would have been nice to have been in the position of choosing between a variety of prestigious colleges to attend instead of having my choice limited to the few where I barely met the minimum entrance requirements.

Part of the reason I’ve been consumed with this is because my company focuses heavily on the K-12 education market, meaning I often find myself on sales calls at various high school campuses, which always seems to serve as a reminder of my own high school failures.

I wish I had the chance to give high school another shot with the maturity and diligence I’ve developed as an adult. I’m convinced I could be an “A” –student, even in the subject that are tough for me like science and math, if I put forth the effort, stayed focused and remained persistent.

Or I could just be deluding myself.

A couple days ago I arrived early for an appointment with a math teacher at a local high school. Seeing me outside, this teacher was kind enough to invite me in while he finished teaching his class.

I thought it might be fun to try to follow along with his lesson. The problem he had written on the screen didn’t look so hard at first glance, but in short order I was totally confused by the numerous variables, a graph with lines I couldn’t comprehend, positive and negative numbers being subtracted and added to each other according to rules I didn’t understand.

I didn’t feel too bad though, because I knew this instructor taught classes of varying levels of difficulty. I figured I must have wondered in during an advanced class like Trigonometry or Calculus. To confirm, I inquired after the bell rang what class I had just witnessed.

“Those were my freshman. That was Algebra I.”

...Resolutions

2007-01-01T17:24:00.000-08:00

Only one so far for 2007:

No More Buying "Some Assembly Required" Gifts for Christmas

Such as this:

Vital Statistics:

Day Project Started: December 30th

Day Project Completed: January 1st

Number of times during assembly process I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry like a baby: More than I'd care to admit

Number of times during assembly process I was convinced my marriage was not going to survive the assembly process: Same as above

Event most responsible for delay in assembly time: My putting two pieces together backwards which caused final pieces to not fit together properly, requiring a massive de- and re-installation process that added several hours to the project

Upon project completion, amount of time my stepkids spent playing basketball before returning to Guitar Hero 2: 15 minutes tops

...Ebenezer Gooch

2006-12-23T09:15:00.000-08:00

I’ve always found great humor at the large number of non-Jews who assume the Christmas season must be an incredibly lonely and depressing time for those of the Jewish faith. Like many perceived “handicaps”, those who don't suffer them often seem far more concerned about the negative side-effects than those who do.

As a kid, I have little recollection of ever feeling left out during the holiday season. Sure, I may have been singled out a little when my classmates made red and green construction paper decorations in class while the one or two other Jews and I made ours out of blue and white.

Otherwise, I thought the Christmas season was great. No school for a couple weeks, our own present-receiving holiday to celebrate and a chance for the whole family to see a movie together on Christmas day. When I moved down to Southern California in my early 20s, friends, feeling sorry for me, would often invite me to celebrate Christmas with their families. I always appreciated the kindness of the gesture, but honestly, the idea of having a day off of work with no responsibilities, where I was free to vegetate by myself in front of the TV all day without guilt or any other expectation of what I should be doing was something I looked forward to all year.

If anything, I suspected us Jews had it pretty good during this time of year. We got all the positive benefits of the holiday season (paid time off/no school) without the negative (spending an entire day atop a rickety ladder hanging up Christmas lights then repeating the same procedure a mere couple weeks later to take them down, buying an overpriced, messy tree that you spend hours decorating and then throw out all in less than a month, dealing with the absolute insanity of overcrowded stores and packed freeways virtually all of December, negotiating the highly sensitive “where to spend Christmas day” issue without offending anybody).

Having married outside my religion, I now get to experience Christmas in a more traditional fashion. At the risk of sounding more Scrooge-like than is probably appropriate this close to December 25th, what was once a suspicion is now a confirmation.

Off to do some last minute shopping. Happy Holidays everyone.

...The Unstated Competition

2006-12-17T23:45:00.000-08:00

Is there a name for the psychological condition that causes you to be perfectly happy when good things happen to complete strangers, but makes you secretly wish people you actually have a personal connection with never have anything good happen to them that could possibly be construed as doing better than you?

This is one of those topics I hesitate to talk about, not only because I’m sure it reflects poorly on my character, but also because it is the type of topic that tends to lead people to spew out the worst kind of hippy-dippy, artificial, feel good, “Just Be Happy With Who *YOU* Are” positive self-affirmation bullshit that may sound good on paper but never really makes you feel any better in real life.

Back in September I learned that Yul Kwon, who graduated from my high school two years after I did, was going to be appearing on this season’s contest of “Survivor”. At the time I thought it was kind of cool to see a hometown boy represented, even if I honestly couldn’t say I had much recollection of him beyond somewhat recognizing the face when I looked back at an old yearbook.

I have to admit I beamed with pride throughout the season as Yul was consistently portrayed as one of the most intelligent Survivors ever to play the game; thinking this somehow validated my own intellect as a graduate of the same educational institution. Even though, to be fair, he graduated valedictorian of his class, while my grades were more of the “just good enough to not get held back” variety.

From everything I’ve heard and read about Yul he seems like a perfectly ethical, smart, charitable, civic-minded individual destined to make a positive impact on humanity. So why was I sitting on the edge of my seat tonight with clenched fists and a rapidly beating heart, desperately praying for the final tie-breaking vote to go in Ozzy’s direction? Because Yul’s victory caused me to acknowledge a topic I know ultimately is silly and unimportant, yet nags at me constantly: “How Successful Am I As A Grown-Up Compared to the People I Went to School With”. In Yul’s case, objectively, the answer would have to be, less

...Nonsense

2006-12-13T16:19:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I am reminded why I decided to start my own small business with a couple of close friends and to never again work for a large corporation. This would be an example of a reminder:

About eight years ago the medium-size, West Coast-based company I worked for got bought out by a company in the Midwest. The company who bought us out had the idea of buying up literally dozens and dozens of different companies within our industry to create a national powerhouse. Their plan was to (albeit artificially) create the appearance of a huge sales juggernaut by taking the annual revenue of many individual companies and combining them into one big number. The hope, of course, was for that company to in turn get bought out at an inflated price by an even bigger company. As is the case with most corporate buyouts, things worked out real rosy for the various business owners who received millions of dollars to sell their individual companies and then got to stay on board in well-compensated upper-management positions. For the average employee however, things didn’t tend to work out quite as well.

Locally, our office merged with about four or five different companies who had previously been our competitors. With an overabundance of salespeople, if you were lucky enough to keep your job at all, the chances of being able to keep all of your good accounts were slim; the chances of having your geographical sales territory slashed in half was great.

The company decided to start having an annual sales conference for the entire nationwide sales staff - a sort of combination “Rah, Rah” session and trade show.

In anticipation of the first such event, which was to be held in Atlanta, all of the West Coast sales staff received an email from Nancy, the wife of one of the bought-out owners of our division, containing an attachment with two lyric sheets. In an attempt to demonstrate the boisterous team spirit and enthusiastic loyalty of the West Coast Sales Team, Nancy had taken it upon herself to write two songs for us to sing to the rest of the company at a big formal dinner/dance that was going to be held during the convention.

Unfortunately, the company who bought us out was known primarily by its four-letter acronym, making “YMCA” a logical melody to use along with her lyrics (complete with unique hand gestures representing each of the letters of our company’s name). The lyrics she came up with were beyond corny:

”No Rep, Does It All By Himself
It Takes Teamwork -
That’s the ---- Way”

The cheesy lyrics were just the beginning. Our lyric sheets contained explicit instructions of the exact point in the song where we were to venture out into the audience to recruit sales reps from other regions to join us on the dance floor, which was supposed to culminate in the entire company cheerfully singing and dancing together in unison.

I can see why Nancy was so giddy about this idea. After all, her husband had made something like 25 million on the merger. The rest of us weren’t exactly as excited. As evidenced by the fact only two other people joined her onstage for what turned out to be a truly awkward sight to behold (think of the worst, but completely earnest, karaoke performance you’ve ever seen). It went really bad. Bad enough that we didn’t get to hear the other song she had written, “Livin' the Projector Loca”. I’m totally not creative enough to have made that up.

...The Name Game

2006-12-08T14:25:00.000-08:00

I have the misfortune of having been born with a terrible last name. I know almost everybody thinks his or her last name is bad, but mine really is. A simple removal of one letter and replacement with another turns my last name into a term nobody wants to be saddled with. (In the hope of keeping at least some sort of anonymity on here I am not revealing the name except to say the altered version is a synonym for dork or geek.)

As I’ve gotten older I’ve sort of come to terms with my last name, but growing up it always seemed incredibly unfair to have a last name that served as a virtual “kick me” sign. When you’re a kid there are only a millions different reasons kids can find to pick on you; my last named was like handing them the ammunition to assault me with. There were points in my life where I seriously questioned whether any woman would ever agree to marry me solely because I couldn’t imagine anyone who would in their right mind voluntarily take my last name. I already feel guilty for giving my young son a last name that virtually guarantees teasing once he enters elementary school.

Still, I guess things could always be worse:

Nicky Butt

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

2006-12-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

From Yahoo AP News:

Flatulence forces plane to land

Tue Dec 5, 9:07 PM ET

It is considered polite to light a match after passing gas. Not while on a plane.

An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing Monday morning after a passenger lit a match to disguise the scent of flatulence, authorities said.

The Dallas-bound flight was diverted to Nashville after several passengers reported smelling burning sulfur from the matches, said Lynne Lowrance, spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority. All 99 passengers and five crew members were taken off and screened while the plane was searched and luggage was screened.

The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal a "body odor," Lowrance said. She had an unspecified medical condition, authorities said.

"It's humorous in a way but you feel sorry for the individual, as well," she said. "It's unusual that someone would go to those measures to cover it up."

The flight took off again, but the woman was not allowed back on the plane. The woman, who was not identified, was not charged in the incident.

...Information That Would Have Been Far More Valuable 30 Seconds Earlier

2006-12-04T11:59:00.000-08:00

(My wife, to me, as I was brushing my teeth the other night): “[Our Two-Year Old Son’s Name] was playing with your toothbrush earlier. I’m not entirely sure what he was doing with it, but I thought you should know”.

...Trends

2006-12-01T15:21:00.000-08:00

Don’t you think if aliens came down from outer space they’d think it was really weird that one of the hottest trends of the past few years is watching other people play cards?

...Pledging Allegiance to New Banners

2006-11-29T09:16:00.000-08:00

This past weekend marked 10 years since I moved from Northern to Southern California. Though I didn’t initially plan the move to be a permanent one, within that time a number of events have unfolded that have solidified Southern California as my “home” and Northern California as a place I visit a few times a year. I bought my first, and then second house in the area. I started a Southern California-based small business. I married a Southern California native whose entire family lives here. I had a son born here.

But it’s only been recently that I finally embraced the truest test of being a Southern Californian: Rooting for the local sports teams.

Sports team loyalty is the oddest thing. In virtually any other situation, we’d ridicule a person for being intensely loyal to a large corporation. I mean, can you imagine how weird you’d think a person was who only used Aquafresh toothpaste; flatly refusing to ever purchase any competing oral care products out of intense, undying, passionate loyalty to GlaxoSmithKline? Or how odd would you find it if someone continued to eat at the same restaurant day after day, despite an ever-decreasing quality of food, service and decor just because they’ve always eaten there and didn’t want to be accused of being a “fair weather diner”? Or would you ever be afraid to buy a different brand of laundry detergent than you’re accustomed to using out of the fear that long-time users of the product would consider you a “bandwagon jumper” or “Johnny Come Lately” to the product?

Yet with sports we seem to lose all of our common sense and demand blind, unthinking loyalty to large corporations whose only interest in us is how much money they can separate from us and our wallets.

I did my best to remain loyal to the San Francisco Giants and 49ers throughout my time here (not so much the Golden State Warriors, who have struggled just to be mediocre for most of my lifetime so altering my loyalty to an exciting Lakers team with Shaq and Kobe happened more or less immediately upon arrival). I tried to keep up with the 49ers by watching them on those rare Sundays when their games were televised in this area (a rarer and rarer occasion by the year as the Niners became less and less relevant as a playoff contender). I even had the misfortune of being what seemed like the lone Southern Californian rooting for the opposing team during the 2002 World Series between the Anaheim Angels and San Francisco Giants; going through the indignity of having to listen to “my” team ridiculed daily on local radio and having to endure the humiliation of hearing the wild cheers and hollers of my neighbors when the Angels made a miraculous come from behind victory in Game 7 to win their first ever World Series.

Ultimately, though, it just didn’t work out. Probably for the same reason most long-distance romantic relationships ultimately don’t end up working out either. Because regardless of how much we try to believe in overly romantic notions like “love will conquer all” or “love knows no bounds”, the truth is we tend to underestimate the importance of physical proximity. Sure, you may feel like you have some sort of deep spiritual and emotional connection to someone who lives 3000 miles away and you may try to believe your love is so incredibly powerful that the distance doesn’t matter. But a phone or IM is just no replacement for a warm body next to you at night or a person to kiss before you leave for work in the morning or a hand to hold at the movies.

That’s kind of what I found with sports teams too. I could be a 49er or Giants fan in theory, but really I’d just be rooting for a set of colors. I need a team whose every game I can watch on TV or listen to on the radio, whose players I can be familiar with because I’ve followed every game on local TV and read about them in the local paper and whose games I can attend live without having to arrange a plane flight or long-distance car trip. I’m sure the owners of the San Diego Chargers, Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim don’t care about me any more than the owners of the Warriors, Giants or 49ers did. But at least they’re around.

...A Defense of Celibacy

2006-11-16T14:59:00.000-08:00

Things They Don't Teach, But Should, in Sex Ed:

When you have a toddler he will naturally be drawn to your computer keyboard, which can lead to an accidental reactivation of a long-dormant AOL account, leaving you with several hundred dollars in non-recoverable fees.

...Fixed Fights

2006-11-13T17:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve long suspected that Iron Chef America is about as authentic as professional wrestling. My suspicions arose as soon as the show debuted with a “Battle of the Masters” tournament, featuring the new American Iron Chefs doing battle with their counterparts from the original Japanese program. By coincidence, I’m sure, the Americans just happened to win every battle.

So my B.S. detector was on high last night when Iron Chef America featured a special, heavily-promoted tag team battle between Bobby Flay and Giada De Laurentiis vs. Mario Batali and current it-girl Rachael Ray.

My instincts told me there is no way in hell Rachael Ray, with a brand-new high-profile talk show and having become an entire multi-million dollar industry all unto herself, would agree to participate in such a contest unless she knew ahead of time she was winning. And lo and behold, she did.

Detective Gooch, at your service.

Advice from Gooch Part I

2006-11-09T10:13:00.000-08:00

A note to those who feel compelled to walk around with their bluetooth wireless headsets permanently attached to their ear, regardless of whether they are on a call or not:

You look like a tool.

...Lessons in Government

2006-11-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

Overheard at the gym last night

(Male, I’m guessing late teens/early 20s, speaking to his girlfriend as they are watching the election results come in on the TV monitors in the weight room): “The governor also has a seat in the House. So he runs the state and also represents the state in the Senate”

...Ideas

2006-11-06T09:57:00.000-08:00

Good Idea: My wife taking my not-so-subtle hint about what I wanted for my birthday and getting me great, plaza-level seats to a San Diego Chargers game

Unforeseen Circumstance: Being seated next to the drunkest human being I have ever seen on Planet Earth (which I say not for effect or humorous exaggeration, but because I have truly never witnessed anyone in person who was this intoxicated – a level to which can only be achieved by a true alcoholic who has the tolerance to keep drinking well past the point where the average person would have long before passed out).

Bad Idea: Deciding that out of all the possible scenarios for dealing with this situation (ignoring him, complaining to stadium management, trying to look for different seats, etc.) “trying to keep up with him drink-for-drink so he wouldn’t seen as annoying” was the best one.

Good Idea: Having arranged for a babysitter beforehand.

...Reevaluating My Legacy

2006-11-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

A simple google search of my real name reveals (in this order):

A) A link to my posting history on the Wrestling Classics Message Board

B) A link to a letter to the editor I had printed in Salon in reaction to an article they ran about the war between the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling

C) A “thank you” credit given to me by a site called The Wrestling Armpit for providing them with content for their “Famous Wrestling Quotes” list

And that's about it.

...Ego

2006-10-31T10:22:00.000-08:00

You know what I’ve never understood? People who make their own homemade pornos.

Seriously, what on Earth could possibly be more narcissistic than saying to yourself, “You know what would really turn me on? Watching……ME.”

...The Aging Process

2006-02-21T12:36:00.000-08:00

Even though I have certain grown-up responsibilities like a house payment, car payment, partial ownership of a small business and a 1 ½ year old son, I don’t generally think of myself as old. Statistically speaking, barring some major catastrophe or unforeseen illness, I still have far more life ahead of me than behind me. Physically, I’m in far better shape today than I was in the “prime” of my life. I spent much of my late teens and early 20s as a regular smoker and in my first few years following college graduation a combination of lack of exercise, bad eating habits and a slowing metabolism caused me to get a little fat. It’s only been within the past 6 or 7 years I’ve really been good about eating healthy, not smoking and exercising regularly.

Still, every now and again I have an experience that reminds me I’m not as young as I like to think.

Yesterday my wife and I were sitting in front of a gas station, the designated halfway point where we were to drop off a friend of my younger stepson from our old neighborhood back to his mother. As we were watching people walk in and out of the attached mini-mart, my wife was commenting on how you know someone is trashy when they go to a gas station for the sole purpose of buying an individual tall boy beer. I was all set to agree with her, until I remembered how in college, when finances were always an issue, my friends and I would buy 40 ouncers quite regularly because they were pretty cheap and you could drink two or three of them and be all set for the night. It must have been the sentimentalist in me, but talking about those memories made me have an intense craving for an Olde English 800, my drink of choice back in those days. I walked into the gas station with the intention of buying 2, since I was sure I would need at least that many to catch any whiff of a buzz, but decided to be more responsible since I still had to pay bills and take out the trash before the day was over, so I only bought 1.

I started in on my drinking as soon as I sat down to pay bills, thinking it might make me feel slightly less depressed about the process of watching my checking account slowly deflate. About a quarter of the way through the bottle I had to confess – I was pretty drunk. Four hours later I was still struggling to finish the whole thing (I wanted to make sure I got my full $2.29 worth), taking the final few gulps while already lying in bed.

This morning I didn’t need any alarm to wake me up – the massive headache that felt as if someone was living inside my head hammering at my eyeballs was enough to do that on its own. If I didn’t have an appointment this afternoon that would be difficult to reschedule because of a business trip to Arizona I’m leaving on tomorrow I would have definitely considered calling in sick. On my drive in I kept looking over at an empty Starbucks cup and wondering exactly how much vomit it would hold if traffic were bad enough to where I couldn’t get off the freeway in time.

All the time I couldn’t help but think, “All this misery just from one beer”. I mean, I realize college is where people tend to do their heaviest drinking and thus is generally the period in which they build up their highest tolerance to alcohol. I remember once doing 14 kamikaze shots in one night with my roommate, a feat impressive enough that an alumnus who was in town starting buying our shots for us he was so blown away by the fact we were still upright.

I don’t expect to be able to drink like that anymore; obviously that would just mean I was a drunk. But I used to be able to go through several 40 ouncers a night and still make it up in time for World Lit without looking the worse for it. It was quite the shock to realize I can no longer even have 1 without a major hangover. What can I say – I guess I’m not as young as I used to be.

...Happy Endings

2006-02-17T16:49:00.000-08:00

Occasionally, I worry I’m too negative. Part of the cause for my concern is realizing when I look back at my life, many of my happiest and best memories are not of times where something really spectacular happened to me, but instead are memories of times when something I really didn’t like ended.

I can’t express strongly enough how much I used to dread the month-long stays I had to endure every Summer at Jewish sleepaway camp. With religious services every morning, prayers before and after every meal, mandatory Hebrew and Jewish studies classes nearly every day, swimming lessons in a freezing pool and disgusting food three meals a day, perhaps you can see why this wasn’t the most appealing way for a kid to spend his Summer. But I don’t regret having attended Summer camp, because without it I could have never experienced the euphoria of the camp session finally ending and actually getting to return home to finish off the Summer engaging in the activities I actually did enjoy – watching “Chico and the Man” reruns and catching up on all the pro wrestling storylines I had fallen behind on the previous month.

I’ll never forget the pure joy I felt after completing my last final exam my Senior year of high school; knowing I was done with the monotonous 5-day a week, 8:00AM-3:00PM public school schedule forever. Four years later I was equally ecstatic when I graduated from college, realizing I would never again have to deal with homework, essays or the constant stress of knowing there had to be *some* kind of studying I could be doing.

After working in sales at the same company for six years, I don’t think I’ve ever felt such an immense sense of relief as I did the day I gave my notice after accepting a position with a competitor. One of the most frustrating parts of working in sales is that there are always so many outstanding issues surrounding you on a daily basis – unhappy customers, products on backorder, projects gone haywire, etc. When one problem finally gets resolved there’s always another to take its place right away. While the other job didn’t ultimately work out and I actually found myself crawling back to my old company on hands and knees within a few months, the feeling I had that one day of an immense burden being lifted off my shoulders, finally having a clean slate after years of having the same nagging issues constantly haunting me is something I’ll always remember fondly.

When I got married, sure, I was happy to commit myself permanently to someone I was wildly attracted to and to have finally found someone who accepted me and loved me despite all my faults and weaknesses. Yet I have to confess I think I was equally excited knowing I would never again have to spend such an exorbitant amount of time strategizing how I was going to get laid next.

Finally moving into our new house this past weekend after a nearly 10-month wait for construction to be completed was a wonderful moment. Not because it is truly *our* house, not one that has been already lived in by several families before us, not because every last detail of the house from the flooring to the window coverings to the countertops were all personally picked by me and my wife (as opposed to inherited from the previous owners) and not because it’s twice the size of the home we’ve been renting or the starter home we owned previously so we no longer feel cramped. No, it’s because for the foreseeable future, I will not have to go through the tortuous, miserable, backbreaking process of moving again.

...Honesty: Is It Really The Best Policy?

2006-02-14T16:51:00.000-08:00

One of the more interesting aspects of human behavior is the way we tend to protect each other from hurt feelings by intentionally failing to tell the whole truth a lot of the time. I’m sure everyone has had the experience of going out on a date with someone who you have no desire to ever see again. But rarely do people actually say, “Frankly, you’re just not good-looking enough for me” or “You know, you really have one of the least interesting personalities I’ve ever come across”. Instead people generally come up with a more polite, if far less honest, generic excuse like, “You seem nice, but I’m not looking to get into a long-term relationship right now” or some similar response intended to dull the sting.

I do this myself instinctively sometimes. As I was walking out of the grocery store the other day some guy approached me trying to sell a newspaper subscription, to which I immediately responded that I already received home delivery. A total lie, but I figured this way it would make him feel less personally rejected than if I had just told him I had no interest.

On my blog, I’ve always been amazed at the fact the comments I receive in reaction to my posts have been overwhelmingly positive. Sure, when someone who used to comment a lot stops showing up I can guess maybe they’ve lost interest in my writing or when a particular post receives far fewer comments than normal, maybe it wasn’t my best work. But never has anyone actually outright said, “Your writing pretty much stinks” or “That attempt at humor really fell flat”.

Because we tend to protect each other with flowery language and doublespeak, it comes as quite a shock when we are spoken to bluntly. Such as today, when after I had completed a sales demonstration to a group of teachers at a local school, the department head who arranged the meeting said to me, in no uncertain terms, that in his opinion our demo pretty much sucked.

Another interesting aspect of human behavior – Upon hearing this, instead of thinking, “I really need to reevaluate how we can present this product more effectively”, my first thought was, “That guy is an idiot”.

...Living in the Moment

2006-02-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

Besides a bigger than average nose, the most stereotypically Jewish thing about me is my bundle of neuroses. The ability to look at every situation from a “worst case scenario” point of view. This probably explains why I’ve always been a big fan of Woody Allen movies – I’ve always been able to relate to the main character.

Just recently I made arrangements for my family to spend a week this Summer at the Disneyworld Resort in Orlando. Instead of eager anticipation of what should be an incredibly fun and memorable week with my family, all I’ve been doing is worrying, as I do every time I’m required to travel by aircraft, about how in the world I’m going to handle two 4 ½ plane flights within the same week. I’ve always had a healthy fear of flying – I remember being 8 years old, and getting ready to go on a family trip to Israel. I figured it was unrealistic to expect to actually make it through such a long, trans-continental flight, so when I prayed to G-d I didn’t ask for us to have a safe trip, I made what I thought was a much more reasonable request that we not crash until at least the final leg of our flight, from Paris to Tel Aviv, so we could at least prolong our lives for a few additional hours.

Come to think of it, the first sign of my anxiety disorder may have come a few years prior to this, as my family still teases me about the time we were driving up Mt. Diablo and I spent the entire trip telling my dad “May the force be with you” as I peered off to the side of the road and saw the very long fall ahead of us should our car veer off the side of the cliff.

I’d like to think I’ve become more rational with time, but, if anything, my paranoia has only gotten worse. Just ask my wife, who I’m sure had second thoughts about her choice of a spouse on our honeymoon flight to Cancun, when despite a Xanax I spent the entire flight fighting off panic attacks by tightly shutting my eyes, gripping my armrests for dear life and drinking, literally, 12 bottles of water (thank heaven we were seated right next to the lavatory) due to the fact my intense fear tends to cause my throat to close up and drinking water is the only way to assure myself I can still swallow properly and won’t suffocate to death.

During one of the Summers I spent at sleepaway camp as a pre-teen, my counselor informed me that my parents had contacted the camp to rearrange my return schedule, letting me know I was to take a different bus than originally planned. Despite receiving a letter from my father confirming this change in itinerary, I nevertheless couldn’t help but imagine the possibility of being stranded at a strange location with nobody there to pick me up and take me home, a fear that disturbed me to the point I woke up in the middle of the night and barfed all over my bunk.

I remember successfully begging my dad to take me to wrestling matches the first time the WWF came to the Bay Area in 1983. Once we got to the arena, the first thing I did was ask my dad if we had to stay the whole time, suggesting we leave prior to the main event. I figured the chances of some sort of riot occurring were high and seeing as how my dad got us front-row tickets I thought we’d get trampled for sure.

A little over 8 years ago I purchased my first car, as in the first car I picked out myself and paid for with my own money. While there was some initial excitement - I distinctly remember yelping out a pretty loud ‘WHOOOOOHOOO!” on the drive from the dealership back to my apartment - this elation quickly turned into intense regret. Not that there was anything wrong with the car (which actually lasted me until this past Summer), but because I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world I let myself agree to a car payment that was sure to put me in complete financial ruin. By the end of the day I was one step away from curling into the fetal position and weeping myself to sleep.

At the hospital where my son was born, their policy is to give the baby time alone with his or her parents following the birth, as opposed to immediately taking the baby away to be weighed and measured. Which was nice policy in theory; I’m glad the first moments of my son’s life were spent being held by me and my wife as opposed to shoved onto a scale. But they took a really long time coming back to the room to take his measurements, so instead of having joyful remembrances of my son’s first night on the planet the majority of my memories are of me stressing out, pacing back and forth, constantly peering out of the room to see if anyone was headed back in our direction, bugging my post-partum wife by asking her over and over again, “Do you think they forgot that they haven’t taken his measurements yet? Do you think I should call the nurses station to remind them? Well, do you? Do you? What do you think?”

Less than a week away now from moving into our dream house after nearly a years wait, I’m finding that whatever possible joy I’m supposed to be feeling is being usurped by nagging fears. Immediate ones like, “Will everyone who agreed to help us move this weekend remember to show up?” to more far off ones like, “What if I screw up painting the inside of the house and end up getting paint stains on the carpet?” or “When will we have the money to properly landscape the backyard, preferably with a pool?” I'm sure someday I'll have a proper perspective and will realize how wonderful what I'm going through right now is. But I'm guessing not anytime soon.

...Shorts

2006-01-31T14:04:00.000-08:00

*I’m going to go out on a limb and guess the majority of women who complain men are overly superficial and only care about a woman’s physical attractiveness are not, on the average, all that hot.

Also going out on a limb, I’m going to guess that most of the men who complain about women being money-grubbing gold diggers concerned only with how much money is in a man’s bank account or how nice of a car he drives generally don’t have a whole lot of money or drive a very nice car.

*A joke that has reached its “Sell-by” date: Any joke involving a person who orders an extremely fattening meal and then orders a diet cola

*Regarding the James Frey controversy – I find it ironic how people get up in arms because an author embellished some facts to make his book more entertaining, yet nobody seems to care that the majority of those notoriously bad auditions you see on “American Idol” are obvious plants or that many of the supposedly trailer-trash, inbred folks who appear on “Jerry Springer” are actors. And to think people used to make fun of me for watching wrestling.

*Portrait of the Misogynist as a Young Man: I got a Princess Leah action figure for Chanukah once and started crying because I didn’t want an action figure of a girl

*My Proudest Moments Since Becoming A Father:
2. When my son learned to walk
1. (tie) A. When my son started requesting to be read to by throwing books at my wife or I and saying, “BOOK!”
B. When my son walked over to the baby gate in front of the stairs and said, “Poop?” and it turned out he had, in fact, crapped his pants.

...Interviewing Tips (Sales Edition)

2006-01-27T00:28:00.000-08:00

We’ve been conducting interviews over the past couple of weeks for an outside sales position. I try to be sympathetic towards the candidates, seeing as how I’m only a few years removed from being on their side of the desk myself. I’m also well aware of the worst-case scenario of being a small business owner - knowing I could very well be back on the job interview circuit someday too.

Still, I can’t think of a single interview we’ve conducted where I didn’t have to suppress the urge to roll my eyes. With that in mind, here are my unsolicited, but hopefully helpful tips to anyone seeking a position in outside sales.

Don’t Look Like a Freak

I’m aware people often go through experimental phases with their appearance, especially during their formative years. I had a mohawk when I was 14, long hair throughout college, multiple ear piercings until my early 20s. The nice thing about all these expressions of my non-conformity is they were all easy to ditch when I was ready to conform to the role of a professional business person. All I had to do was take out the earrings and get a haircut.

I realize tattoos are all the rage now, almost to the point where getting one ironically makes you seem less like a counter-culture individualist and more like a blind crowd follower. I’m not opposed to tattoos, but I would strongly recommend, if you are considering one, to think long and hard about placement and the inherent consequences thereof. Because no matter how hard you try to cover it up with an expensive suit and tie, I can clearly see if there is a tattoo protruding out of your dress shirt and continuing its way up your neck. Seeing as this is a business to business sales position where you will come into contact with CEO’s of corporations, principals of high schools, college professors and high-ranking military officers, it is probably best your appearance not remind them of the guy who stole their car at knifepoint.

Don’t Tell Me Some Ridiculous Minimum Amount I Need to Pay You As a Guarantee Before You Could Even *Consider* Taking This Position

We are hiring a salesperson. By definition, that would imply the person who takes this position has far better than average skill at selling things. One of the reasons most sales positions are largely commission based is it tends to be a classic “win-win” situation for both parties involved. It’s good for the salesperson because he or she can continually increase his or her income the more he or she sells, giving him or her limitless income potential. It is good for the company because if a salesperson is getting rich as a result of earning high commissions, by extension the company is making a lot of money as well.

When you come into an interview for a sales position and say upfront you would be unable to accept any offer that doesn’t include a substantial guaranteed salary, all we hear is, “I have absolutely no confidence in my ability to sell anything, so what I’m going to do is try to bilk you out of as much cash as I can before you realize I suck at selling and fire me”.

Any reasonable business owner is cognizant of the fact it takes a few months for any professional salesperson, no matter how good they are, to build up a sales funnel and start closing orders. We are also aware that during this process you still have bills to pay and would need some form of income to do so. No reputable company would expect you to work strictly on 100% commission from day one. We would be more than happy to work out some sort of reasonable base salary to get you through those first few months so you don’t go into foreclosure on your house or get your car repossessed while you’re waiting for your first batch of orders to come through.

But if you tell me you absolutely, positively, in no way, shape, or form would be able to survive on anything less than $80,000 (or more) a year in guaranteed salary, all you are saying is you have serious doubts about whether or not you possess the skills required to earn that dollar amount in commission based on your sales. Therefore hiring you to sell for my company, while quite nice for *YOU* financially, will actually come out as a net loss to the corporation, which would just be dumb. Plus, if you are really, truly earning such a healthy income at your current job, why are you looking to leave? See, you’re probably a liar too.

Don’t Advertise the Fact You’re “Just Seeing What’s Out There”

My business partners and I sacrificed everything we had and took the biggest risk of our lives by starting this company. You are not going to endear yourself to us by acting blase at the opportunity to work for the company we built from the ground up.

If you are mostly happy at your current job and just sent out a few resumes to see what other kind of opportunities are floating about, that’s fine. I did this with some frequency when I worked for other people. It’s good not to be complacent. But consider our position: We are conducting interviews with several different candidates. Who do you think is going to interest us the most - the person who genuinely seems to buy into our company vision and really wants to be part of the team, or the person who stares at us blankly throughout the interview waiting for us to get to the pay and benefits part, then asks three-quarters of the way through, "So, what is it you guys do exactly?"

Don’t Think Any Employer Is Going To Fall For The “I’m Considering Other Offers” or “I Have a Lot of Other Interviews Lined Up” Line

Think of going out on a job interview as dating. If you were out on a date with a young lady you were hoping to end up in bed with, would you at any point during the evening say, “Just so you’re aware, I have several dates with other women lined up this week” or “Before you make me an offer to come up to your apartment, I should let you know another woman I’m dating has offered me anal and a blow job and is just waiting for me to accept”? Of course not. Why? Because a woman wants to feel special. She wants to feel like you are genuinely interested in her, not like she is just one of a few dozen women you’re playing the field with. By advertising the large number of women you are casually pursuing, you are not going to make this woman feel pressured into sleeping with you any faster to head off the competition, you are going to cause her lose interest in you and search for someone who is more interested in her specifically.

Same concept applies here. Of course we know you didn’t put all of your eggs in one basket and may have sent out resumes to other companies and may have even received a few callbacks. Your fallacy is thinking our desire to hire you is going to increase based on your rubbing our face in this fact. Trust me, our company would not be where it is today if any of us were of the intelligence level to where we would actually fall for this classic high-pressure, faux sense of urgency sales tactic.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That's all for now. I’m sure I’ll have more advice to offer as the process continues.

...Being a Member of the Club

2006-01-18T23:30:00.000-08:00

Several years ago I shared a flirtation with the black receptionist at the office I was working in at the time. Nothing too serious ever came out of it; no secret trysts in the supply closet, no magical movie moment where passion overcame us to the point where I dramatically swiped all papers and documents onto the floor so I could take her right then and there on top of my desk. At the time it all seemed very exciting - she was married and we often seemed right on the verge of taking the relationship to next level if only one of us would have the guts to make the suggestion, so there were always those all-important plot elements of danger and suspense. With many years of hindsight to reflect back on this time it is now clear to me we were just a couple of people who had fairly mundane, boring jobs we weren’t especially enthused about and this was as much of a way to make coming into work every day more interesting as anything else.

Yvonne constantly made comments about me being an “honorary black man” or how I had been born the wrong color. How she came to this conclusion, I’m not sure. Though I was born in ethnically diverse San Francisco, the majority of my childhood was spent in the whitebread suburban community of Walnut Creek, graduating from a high school where blacks represented 2% of the student population. At the time I met Yvonne I was living in Laguna Beach, itself not exactly a melting pot of racial diversity.

To Yvonne my credibility was earned entirely because of my, if I can toot my own horn for a second, very impressive grasp of the characters and plotlines of various 1970s black sitcoms. Not only the more well-known programs like Good Times, The Jeffersons, Diff’Rent Strokes or What’s Happening!, but also some of the more obscure shows of the era - That’s My Mama, anyone? Far from giving me any sort of street credibility, I would think if anything all it shows is I very likely wasted my entire childhood in front of the TV and probably would have benefitted from getting outside more often. I think it also impressed her that I had a pretty good working knowledge of Stevie Wonder’s catalog, having purchased his greatest hits collection, The Original Musiquarium not too long before I met her.

Going out to lunch with Yvonne one day, she asked me if I knew what the term, “Scrub” meant, to which I replied in the negative. “It’s a black term”, she informed me. “It’s a guy who doesn’t really have a good job or any money, who spends all his time hanging out on the passenger side of his friend’s car hollering at girls on the street trying to get them to hook up with him”.

I felt as if I had been granted access to some elusive club with an exclusive membership. I was ecstatic at the prospect of being on the cutting edge of pop culture, being able to use a new term in conversation before it became mainstream. For an equivalent, think about how cool it would have been if you had been able to casually drop the term, “YOU GO, GIRL!” long before it was appropriated by every uncool white girl on the planet.

On my drive home that evening, I heard a brand-new TLC song playing on the radio entitled “No Scrubs”.

Ancient black secret, huh?

...Explaining My Absence

2006-01-05T10:56:00.000-08:00

It’s not that I’ve become burnt out with blogging, it’s just that I don’t want to become a bore. No offense, and I don’t want anyone to think this is a thinly-veiled criticism of anyone in particular, but as an avid blog reader, I have to confess I always find a blog a little less interesting the moment the blogger in question goes through a *MAJOR LIFE EVENT*, like having a baby, becoming engaged, getting a new job or anything else of that nature, because inevitably the *MAJOR LIFE EVENT* becomes the dominant topic of the blog and 99% of the time it is the type of thing that A) most other people have already gone through at some point so it isn’t exactly revelatory or enlightening information and B) is the sort of thing that is infinitely more interesting to the writer than the reader.

I am fully aware that other bloggers need not check in with me for approval before coming up with topics, and hell, for all I know it might just be a personal taste thing with me. Other readers might really enjoy hearing about the lack of Sweet `n’ Low in the coffee room at somebody else’s new office or whether or not somebody they’ve never met is going to have a sit-down dinner at his or her wedding reception or go for buffet-style.

To be fair, I feel the same way about my real-life friends when they go through a similar event. I can’t tell you how many friends I’ve lost to the home-improvement craze. Formerly fun and interesting friends who upon purchasing a new house can talk about nothing except what color they’re thinking about painting the bathroom or how exactly they plan on having their kitchen cabinets redone with a different finish. A good friend of mine is about to become a father for the first time, as in possibly within the next couple of hours. I’m extremely happy for him and his wife, who have been great friends to me for a long time, but I’m sure I’ll get just as bored listening to the daily tales of changing diapers and how his kid sort of made what appeared to be a smile today as I notice he and others get when I share similar tales of how cute and clever my own kid is. I mean, let’s be honest: don’t a lot of people tend to think that their life experiences are somehow universally interesting when in truth they are never going to be as interesting to anyone else as they are to themselves?

Not wanting to be hypocritical, i.e. creating the very kind of posts that bore me to tears, I have spared you for the past few months because as the move-in date to our new house gets closer and closer (beginning of February), my life has become full with things like picking out tile patterns, debating the virtues of various carpet fibers, deciding if we want all stainless steel appliances or all black ones, deciding on loan structures, hoping buying a new car this past Summer isn’t going to screw up my credit report and throw the whole deal off the table, wondering if we should spend a little more on window coverings now and have the price worked into the loan or if it’s worth spending a little less but paying cash, driving by every week to see how the building is coming along, dealing with the disappointment of learning about the inevitable delays that pushed our original move in date back over a month, etc.

I will be sure to check back in when my life allows me to get back to being the monumentally fascinating individual you’ve all come to expect.

...Fate, Destiny and Coincidence

2005-09-29T17:17:00.000-07:00

I’m about as cynical as they come as far as believing in concepts like “fate” or “destiny” or the supernatural. I read something not too long ago that gave a great explanation of the concept of coincidences and the tendency of many people to make far too much out of them. Think about how many events in your life DID NOT involve coincidence. How many times did the song you had in your head NOT happen to be playing on the radio as soon as you turned it on? How many times did you stub your toe, but your twin brother halfway across the country DID NOT feel a similar pain in his toe at the exact same moment? How often have you thought about someone you hadn’t heard from in awhile and DID NOT have that person suddenly e-mail you out of the blue?

In short, we experience such an infinite amount of non-coincidental moments during the course of our our lives that it only stand to reason every once in a blue moon the alignment of the stars will be such that it appears a significant coincidence or fateful moment has occurred, when really is was just kind of luck of the draw.

I suppose one could take a really romantic view of how I met my wife and chalk it up to fate and destiny. After all, if I hadn’t accepted an entry-level customer service job in an industry that had nothing to do with my college major, if I hadn’t made a rare impulsive decision a year later to take a promotion/transfer that sent me to Southern California and if I hadn’t stuck around at the company long after I sensed it was on a downward spiral towards bankruptcy I would never have met my future wife (who I met in my final year there) and never had the exact same perfect, wonderful, funny baby boy I have today. Were these events part of some master cosmic plan someone had in store for me? Maybe. But more realistically, I can’t help but believe these, and most of life, were a series of random accidents that in this case happened to work out nicely on my end.

Several years ago, my then-girlfriend’s mom got remarried after having been widowed for several years. During the ceremony a live deer could be seen through the window sitting in a patch of foliage next to the church. I was sitting next to two of my girlfriend’s friends during the ceremony (she was the maid-of-honor) and both started discussing the possibility of the deer being the reincarnation of my girlfriend’s stepdad, Maury. Now, to use the proverbial cliché, these two weren’t exactly rocket scientists to begin with, so I just chalked this up to their being sort of goofy. But after the ceremony, as I was standing next to my girlfriend, one of her mom’s friends walked over with tears in her eyes and excitedly asked, “Did you see Maury outside during the ceremony”? Pretty soon virtually everyone in attendance was talking about this event as if it were a matter of fact. This included many highly educated and intelligent people. As if there could be no other possible explanation for the sudden appearance of this deer other than it being the reincarnation of the bride’s former husband giving his blessing to the marriage. Other explanations like the fact the church was located in a mountainous area with a heavy deer population. It wasn’t so much the fantastical nature of what these people were suggesting that bothered me. It was the fact they had to consciously choose to ignore the more sensible, logical scenario to buy into it. Actively choosing to believe a dreamy and touching, but obviously fictional, idea.

I think it’s comforting for people to believe there is some grand, powerful force guiding their destiny. I guess it’s a lot more poetic to imagine some sort of cosmic fate is what caused you to meet your soulmate rather than acknowledging he or she just decided to settle for you because of a lack of better available options. I remember at my last job a few of us had to snicker when a co-worker claimed God had spoken with her that morning and told her it was ok she was putting her son in daycare. I believe in a higher power, which I know may contradict what I’ve written here, but sometimes tells me he, she or it has better things to do than discuss babysitting schedules with an Orange County administrative assistant.

I think it’s difficult for some people to wrap their minds around the idea their life doesn’t necessarily have a meaning. It’s not so fun to think that your parents had sex, you were born and a bunch of random events occurred that didn’t have any larger significance or greater purpose. So some people choose to believe these far out, highly questionable concepts like “FATE” and “DESTINY” because the alternative, thinking that your life is just a series of unrelated moments, is too upsetting.

Or maybe I’m totally wrong. Among the reasons my blog activity has been light at best in recent weeks is because work has become outrageously busy and stessful to the point I'm convinced taking up smoking would only improve my heart condition. As a small business owner, I guess this falls into the category of “Good Problems” (having more projects on our plate than we seem to have the manpower to execute) rather than “Bad Problems” (not having enough sales and worrying we might go out of business). But this does little to assuage the contact headaches (literally and figuratively), lack of sleep (averaging about 3-4 hours a night at best due to the constant tossing and turning and a brain unable to shut off) and the feeling someone is rapidly turning a bingo spinner inside my stomach. Combined with having to make all the final decisions on upgrades to our new house (“upgrades” being code for “highly overpriced things that will prevent the interior of your house from looking like shit, which you can bet it will look like if you go for what comes standard”), let’s just say I’ve seen better days. Every moment is a Maalox moment recently. I could use a break.

While I like to think my musical tastes are highly eclectic and varied, with my CD changer currently featuring artists as varied Steely Dan, Weezer, Stevie Wonder, Green Day and Mel Torme, the one genre of music you won’t catch me listening to ever is modern country of the Martina McBride, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, Faith Hill sort, the type that is really soft, cheesy, light pop but branded under the "Country" label. But this morning I was flipping channels on the radio and stopped when I heard some familiar pro wrestling theme songs playing. This was a segue into a contest a local country station was running where if you could answer a certain number of trivia questions about pro wrestling correctly you win two tickets to see WWE RAW live. This being one of the few areas where I consider myself something of an expert, I frantically dialed over and over hoping to be the elusive “Caller #10”. Several busy signals and redials later, I was. As I expected, I breezed through the trivia questions with ease and won the tickets.

How can that not be fate? Just happening to land on a station of a musical genre I absolutely detest the split-second they are running a contest that tests your knowledge of the one area I actually have higher than average expertise in and having my call go through at the exact right moment to get the chance? That can’t just be random dumb luck, can it?

Fate or not, I does present its own sort of problem. Two tickets, one me and two stepkids who both love wrestling. Maybe destiny will step in and help me figure out that part.

...Why You Shouldn't Try to Talk All Tough

2005-09-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

I hope I don’t wind up on some House Un-American Activities Committee or FBI watch list for mentioning the following incident, but this morning I was stopped at a red light behind a truck with a bumper sticker that read: THESE COLORS DON’T RUN.

I’m not going to mock anyone for their patriotism; I don’t think any person should be made to feel ashamed or ridiculed for having pride in their country. Yet I have to confess to having been confused by the sticker because in looking at it, I couldn’t make out what the text was supposed to refer to. Upon closer inspection, I saw a faded blue square with some white dots inside of it a few inches to the left of the text, but between the two was a long stretch of plain white background with only the faintest hint of what at one time I’m sure were red and white stripes. I don’t know if it was sun damage or rain damage or age or what, but one thing was for sure: The colors had *TOTALLY* run.

...Coming Full Circle

2005-08-30T15:48:00.000-07:00

My first full-time job after college was as a low-level customer service representative. Even though I got bumped up to sales within a year, I have always felt solidarity with people in similar customer service positions because I know what it’s like to work at a job where you’re guaranteed to undeservedly be on the receiving end of hysterical rants from irate customers on a daily basis, all for a salary that isn’t even enough for you to move out of your old bedroom in your parents house. I still get defensive when I hear people tell customer service horror stories where some poor customer service rep is inevitably portrayed as dumb, incompetent and apathetic. It makes me angry because I know this very likely isn’t the case; the problem lies in the fact that too many companies ironically give the least amount of authority to help customers to the department whose sole purpose, theoretically, is to serve the customer. I can’t tell you how many times I just wanted to scream into the phone, “Listen, I’m so low on the totem pole here I cover for the receptionist when she has to take a shit and I’m the guy who’s responsible for taking out the trash every Thursday. Do you really think I have the power to change long-standing company policies just because you asked me to?”

By far the worst aspect of the job was dealing with the company’s sales reps or “internal customers” in bullshit corporate lingo speak. Part of our job was to assist sales reps with things like inventory checks or giving them the status of their orders when they were out in the field and unable to access such information themselves. That wasn’t so bad. What was miserable was the fact most sales reps tended to extend our job description into the “pass off all the shit I don’t feel like doing myself” department.

I’d get sales reps calling me at 4:00 in the afternoon asking if I could have an order shipped overnight, even though our deadline for overnight orders was noon. Of course the decision wasn’t up to me (and they knew the decision wasn’t up to me) – it was up to our warehouse manager. But why call and pester him yourself when you could instead pass off the chore to me and then make me the fall guy if it didn’t happen? My favorite was when sales reps would send up orders with no actual part numbers and only the vaguest of descriptions, yet still expect us to instinctively know what product to send to their customer. One particular incident that stands out was when a sales rep sent me an order for a part described simply as “SHIPPING CASE”. Yeah, that really narrows it down, especially considering we carried literally hundreds of different equipment cases. Several voicemails to him later, trying to get him to be more specific as to what he was selling, I finally received a call back not with the information I needed, but to give me a severe tongue lashing for holding up his order. I really wanted to complain to management about the way he talked to me, but I knew the score – he was a guy who brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year of profit to the company; I could realistically be replaced by just about any semi-competent person with a pulse who happened to walk by the building. Whose side do you think they were going to take?

When I was promoted to sales I was absolutely ecstatic. Some of the excitement was for all the expected reasons: more money, a snazzier title, getting to move to Southern California into an apartment just minutes from the beach. But more than any of that, what made me so happy was knowing the period of my professional life where I was required to be somebody else's bitch was over forever.

Today, I am Vice-President and part-owner of a company that will do over a million dollars in sales this year.

And just yesterday I was instructed by one of my business partners, Kevin, to make him a shipping label.

This wasn’t the first time this has occurred. I swear I am in no way being compensated by United Parcel Service for what I’m about to say, but I couldn’t be happier with the ease of use of UPS’ web-site in terms of how simple and easy they make it to ship a package right from your computer. All you have to do is log-in, type in the address you're sending the package to (or, if you’ve already sent a package to the location before it will remember the address for you), enter in the weight and dimensions of the package, pick how you want it shipped (Ground, overnight, etc.) and your label is ready to be print.

Yet somehow Kevin, who works out of his house, cannot be bothered with learning how to do this. Admittedly, the guy is somewhat computer illiterate, but this is something I’m pretty sure I could teach my 1-year-old baby to do within an hour. When he made his first request for a shipping label a couple of months ago, I tried to be assertive by giving him instructions on how to do it himself instead of simply saying, “Yes”. I went through the motions, giving him our username and password, telling him where to click to get to the “Ship Package” page, etc. He sort of pretended to listen and then called my other partner, Bob, and had him do it instead.

It makes no sense. What is the logic in having Kevin write me an email with the address, weight and dimensions of a package, then have me log onto UPS.com just to enter in the exact same information he just gave me, print out a label and then fax the label back to him, when if he did it himself at least half of these steps could be avoided? It’s just seems like the height of laziness that he refuses to learn how to do something so incredibly simple. Ok, I realize in the grand scheme this is kind of petty, and Kevin is actually a good guy at heart who I like a lot personally, but here’s the thing of it: I came all this way just to go back to where I was at the beginning.

...The Marketing Geniuses Who Came Up With That One

2005-08-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

I’m sure some comedian already has a routine on this, but what’s up with pet food manufacturers advertising their products as “great tasting”? (Here’s just one example). Our puppy is strictly forbidden from going upstairs due to her propensity for eating cat turds straight out of the litter box. When I was a kid I begged my parents to let my golden retriever, Bart, sleep in my room, only to have him proceed to barf all over my bed. Not a major problem, though, since he went ahead and ate it all right back up.

Clearly, it doesn’t appear as if dogs have particularly discriminating tastes, so to advertise a product on the basis that it has a “great taste your dog will love” seems a bit disingenuous. Kind of like promoting a new beer with the promise it “provides the great buzz your alcoholic will love”.

Reminds me of a funny story: When I was maybe around 9 or 10, I came home from school one day to find my older brother sitting in the back room ravenously munching away on an afterschool snack. I mentioned to him that our parents had bought a new brand of dog food for Bart.

“I know”, he responded, his mouth still full of food. “It’s disgusting”.

...A Very Fast Year

2005-08-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

There’s this great “Leave it to Beaver” episode where Beaver and a group of his buddies all buy sweatshirts with pictures of these really grotesque-looking monsters on the front. The guys all promise each other to wear the sweatshirts to school on the following day. Of course, Beaver shows up in his sweatshirt the next day only to discover all of his friends have backed out on the plan, leaving him to take the fall for a glaring violation of the school’s dress code.

I had a very similar experience not all that long ago. I was out with a group of friends celebrating my 30th birthday. Several dirty martinis into the evening I found myself making a drunken pact with two other couples, who had gotten married within the same general timeframe as my wife and I, to start trying to have babies right away. The logic was that it would allow our wives to commiserate since they’d all be pregnant at the same time and our future kids would have built-in playmates (obviously inebriated thinking since none of us live within 30 miles of each other).

Considering the years I spent in a fraternity, you’d think I’d know better than anyone not to take late-night drunken promises seriously. Yet there I was by the end of the month with an expecting wife. What can I say, I guess I’m just super potent. Meanwhile Couple #2, nearly two years later, are still without child, while Couple #3, to their credit, did follow through on the plan, just a little while later (they’re expecting a baby boy this January).

Writing about my first year of being a father is tricky. On the one hand, the connection between a parent and child is intensely personal. At the same time, I’m sure my own experiences are no different than the billions of others who’ve had children before me, making it difficult to say anything about the experience that won’t come off as trite or cliché.

Little Gooch, thank you for the best year of my life. Happy Birthday.

...Perspectives: Married vs. Single

2005-07-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

I’m probably stating the obvious, but the more fun you had when you were single, the harder it is to adjust to being married and having a family. Sometimes it’s very difficult to wrap my mind around the idea that 5 years ago the average Friday night would find me dressed to the nines getting throw-up drunk with a large group of friends at some really fun bar or club, while today the average Friday night finds me picking up take-out because both my wife and I are too tired to cook, losing the battle for control of the remote and often falling asleep on the couch at around 8 o’clock to the sounds of “Drake and Josh” or some Playstation 2 game in the background.

I’m not whining, it’s just that I've had a hard time coming to terms with the fact the free-wheeling period of my life is over; that I now have real grown-up responsibilities that keep me homebound on nights when others are out living it up.

Thankfully, I think I’ve turned a corner. On the final night of our vacation, my parents graciously watched the kids so my wife and I could go out on our own for a few hours. Walking through the MGM Grand, we noticed the line to get into Studio 54 was quite long. Continuing on through the hotel we were shocked to discover that same line kept going on and on and on, literally several hundred bodies deep. I just didn’t understand it.

It must take a minimum of at least a few hours to even enter the club. Once you’re in, it must be even MORE crowded than it is on the outside, meaning it is likely going to take you forever just to get a drink, you’re going to be all scrunched up against everyone else in the club with no breathing room or personal space whatsoever and it’s going to be too loud to talk to anyone or even hear yourself think.

A few short years ago, I have to admit, you very likely could have found me gladly waiting patiently in that very line. Today, it just seems ridiculously stupid to go through all that effort, waiting and inconvenience all for the very, very slim possibility that you might get some play. Glad it’s someone other than me doing it these days.

...Hiatus

2005-07-08T16:27:00.000-07:00

Don't worry. Not quitting. Vacationing.

...Myth Busting

2005-07-03T07:09:00.000-07:00

I've always been fascinated by the "Great Lie" theory. The idea we'll believe just about anything if we hear it repeated often enough. Think about it for a second: How many beliefs do you hold to be true - political, religious, personal - just because you've heard the same thing repeated over and over and over until you stopped questioning it?

How many people developed their political opinions based largely on having listened to Rush Limbaugh every morning for years and assuming everything he says is fact? How many people think their religious beliefs are "correct" because that is what they've always been told in church or synagogue? I don't doubt for a second that had I been born to Christian parents instead of Jewish ones my belief in the resurrection of Jesus would be entirely different than it is today.

The HBO documentary series Real Sports recently revealed there is zero documented scientific evidence proving any link between prolonged steroid use and liver failure/heart problems. Yet how many of you reading this are thinking there has to be something fishy about that story since you've always been told otherwise?

Last night my wife advised me against letting the dog lick my face considering that within the previous 24 hours she had eaten both the fallout from an exploding diarrhea diaper and cat puke.

Hey, if the dog wants to earn her keep by pitching in on the grossest of household chores, I'm all for it. But kindly spare me the bullshit about dogs having cleaner mouths than humans, ok?

...Memories Good and Bad

2005-06-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

At 31, I’m probably still a bit young to get overly nostalgic for my lost youth. In fact, there are few people on Earth I believe more deserving of a sock in the mouth than relatively young people who feign shock at getting slightly older (“I can’t believe I’m actually turning 26! That’s so OLD!”).

However I do have enough consistent responsibilities in my life – taking care of my family of 5, the new house I’m purchasing, running the company I co-own – to make me occasionally long to relive certain periods in my life when my everyday burdens were fewer. Times when simply having pure, unadulterated fun was a much higher priority than it really can be now.

What gets me through these occasional blue periods is reminding myself of all the past experiences I wouldn’t want to relive. For example, college was a whole lot of fun. Who wouldn’t want to relive those 4 years of constant partying and random sexual experimentation? But would it really be worth it if I had to sit through that entire dreadfully dull semester of Geology for a second time? Hardly. And I certainly wouldn’t want to have to write my Senior Thesis again.

Watching my stepsons go through what is likely the most carefree period they’ll ever have in their lives, it’s hard not to long to be a kid again. But there’s no way in hell I would want to relive those 4 miserable Summers spent at Jewish sleepaway camp either. The one where they made you eat stale pieces of bread at almost every meal just to force you to have to say the Birkat Hamazon afterwards. Yeah, that’s great fun when you’re 9.

All those doctor appointments where I had to sit in the waiting room for 2 hours and the exam room for 1 just to have a 5-minute check up. The long plane flights when I forgot to bring a book. The miserable temp job I had shortly after graduating college where I had about 30-minutes of actual work to do per day that I had to try to stretch into 8 hours, all without my own phone and a antiquated computer that *ONLY* ran a particular inventory tracking program (so no Internet or email). 4 separate visits to traffic school.

I found myself getting surprisingly emotional as I went through the final walk-through of our now “old” house Saturday night, making sure we didn’t leave anything behind. Walking past the kids bathroom I nearly had a mini-breakdown knowing I was looking for the very last time at the bathtub where I used to have the immeasurable pleasure of watching my baby boy experience absolute pure joy every time I put him in the water. That got me to thinking about bringing him home from the hospital 10 months ago; watching him as a 2-day-old sleep in the family room, in the bassinet we just recently gave away to our friends who are expecting a child in January. Which led me to think about coming home from the hotel the day after my wife and I got married – opening the presents which seemed to take up the entire living room. I could go on and on about all the memories contained in that house – a very modest 3 bedroom that we outgrew almost from day one. But I’ll spare you since I’m aware such memories are obviously far, far more interesting and meaningful to the one who experienced them.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to relive any of the memories I have of living in that house either. Because if I did, I would also have to re-experience the process of moving this weekend. And that’s just about the shittiest memory I can imagine.

...The Best of Year One (Part 2 of 2)

2005-06-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

The Things You Don't Talk About
The one thing I didn't bargain for when I married a divorcee with children is just how crazy, hectic and poverty-inducing the Christmas Season would prove to be. It's not like I can't understand why. All logic, reason and sensibility aside, who wants to be known to the kids as the house with the shittier presents? Trying to find some humor in an otherwise stressful situation, I thought of the idea for a quick, little, funny post where I would mention, from a Jewish perspective, how silly the whole Santa Claus concept seems since it transfers all of the credit for your hard work (and financial sacrifice) onto a fictitious character. As I sat down to write the post I got the idea that it might be funnier if I started off with a more sincere discussion of religion in general before I finished off with the ridiculous punchline. Turns out it's just like they say - nothing sets people off quite like politics or religion. This post, which was supposed to just be a quick joke, led to my receiving well over twice the comments I ever had previously.
Cultural Relativism

Tequilla Shots Goggles
I'm no prude, but I am absolutely shocked by how openly some people write about their sex lives on their blogs. I guess to me it just seems odd to the degree that past a certain age pretty much all of us have done it; it's not exactly a taboo subject. Is it really shocking or all that interesting that someone occasionally has sex with their wife or husband or girlfriend or boyfriend? In other words, just talking about sex for the sake of it really doesn't interest me. Talking about sexual experiences that were completely humiliating and cringe-inducing on the other hand...
The Rest of the Story

Gym Wars 2005
What a great thing a blog is. A forum for all of your pettiest bitches and complaints. Truth be told, considering how bad I've been about going to the gym lately, I've probably come to resemble some of the people I complain about in the following post. At the risk of tooting my own horn, (and I'm aware that this is a classic "that and $2 will get you a cup of coffee" scenario), this was a featured post at LA Blogs
Space Invaders

Israel Revisited
Like many bloggers, I'm sure, there was a time in my life where I fancied myself a future best-selling novelist. That was until I took a creative writing class in college and discovered that I was physically incapable of coming up with any original ideas and instead fell into the trap of writing thinly veiled autobiographical fiction where I simply retold actual events from my life but changed the names of the people involved. Kind of like this blog. A slightly different version of the following post was my one attempt at "fiction" in the class. Keep in mind I went to an *EXTREMELY* ultra-liberal, politically correct university. The very notion that someone would ever endeavor to travel halfway across the world with the intent of having intimate relations with members of the opposite sex sent shockwaves throughout the class. One classmate called me a "true vulgarian" in his critique of my paper. The version presented here is far tamer than the more sexually explicit version I presented to my class 13 years ago. What is it they say about guys at 18?
Making Out in the Middle East

A Piece of History
One of the indirect reasons for starting this blog was my wife's pregnancy. While pregnant, my wife tended to go to bed really early, leaving me to find new ways to keep myself entertained in the evening. Thus the birth of not only a son, but also, "The Gooch On..."
Little Gooch

Ok, enough with the sentimentality. Tomorrow is our final day of packing and Friday we move. If I come out the other side somehow intact, I'll blog again.

...The Best of Year One (Part 1 of 2)

2005-06-09T20:24:00.000-07:00

I can't say for sure when my blog's anniversary is. I deleted my first post because I suspected that a friend who was mentioned in a not-so-flattering light within the post had discovered my blog (He hadn't, I mistook him for my wife who worked at the same company at the time and thus had the same domain address). Also, it was pretty dumb. So while I can't narrow down the anniversary to an exact date, it's sometime around now.

The idea of picking out my own favorite posts from this blog seems more than a little obnoxious. Comparatively speaking, it's roughly the equivalent of laughing out loud at your own jokes. Then again, what is a blog, really, if not a self-centered, self-absorbed ego-fuck? Plus, I have exactly one week to get my entire house packed up and moved into our new rental, so there's not going to be a whole lot of time for new posts. And it's rerun season anyway. So let's revisit, in no particular order, great moments in "The Gooch On..." history. I'm breaking this up into two posts since many of these are a little on the long side and that's way too much reading in one sitting.

The Forgotten Post
Unlike the faux humble claims of some of my fellow bloggers, I never had any illusions that I was writing "for myself". I wanted recognition for my great wit and clever wordplay from Post 1. Which is why I whored for comments immediately, making lots of unoriginal, marginally funny comments on other people's blogs in hopes that doing so would lead traffic back this way. And for the most part it worked. Except for this post. This is the one post in this blog's history that never received a single comment. What the fuck? Trust me, if you knew the guy, it's hysterical. I know this for a fact because when my sister, who knew the subject in question, discovered my blog this was the first post she mentioned:
A Bizarre Form of Social Retardation

Toilet Humor
One of the great things about having a blog is the way it creates an entirely new audience for some of your oldest stories. For example, my real life friends tend to roll their eyes whenever I begin retelling the incident discussed in the following post. Not because they don't think it's funny, just that it's less so after they've already heard it for the 2000th time. What can I say, I love toilet humor. Shoot me:
How I Rid My House of Pests

Work Posts
Upon entering the blog-o-sphere, I quickly discovered that many of the most popular blogs were the ones that dealt exclusively with the unique occupation of the writer. Whether it was behind the strip club door stories from TJ's Place, tales from the perspective of a bouncer at two of New York's most popular nightclubs or the adventures of a real life Texas police officer, well-written, vocation-specific blogs appeared to guarantee a large readership. Being the part-owner of a small business, I considered for awhile having this blog focus exclusively on the daily adventures of running my start-up company. Problem is A) Compared to the aforementioned professions, tales of running an audio-visual-technology-systems-integration company might appear a bit dull in comparision, B) While I very much enjoy what I do for a living, the last thing I want to do with the few free hours I have away from the office is spend it writing about work (Same concept as how I used to hate it when I'd get home from school and get asked by my parents how my day in school was) & C) There is always that irrational fear of the .01% chance that one of my customers or vendors will discover my blog. But I managed to get a couple decent work-related posts in here. Here's one about my old boss/now business parter, Bob:
Unique Learning Disabilities

and here's one where I rant about all the shithead customers I've dealt with over the years:
How Customers Can Be Sleazeballs Too

The Gooch Manifesto
A lot of bloggers like to use this forum as a means of spouting off their political opinions. Not to be judgemental, but to me these type of posts too often come off as Rush Limbaugh-lite (or Al Franken-lite depending on which side of the politcal fence the blogger sits on). Which is why when I write about my views on the world, they tend to be of a far more mundane variety:
What I've Learned So Far Part I and Part II (nearly a year later, it looks like I was wrong about the American Idol thing considering the pretty girl won this year's edition. Also, a historical note, since writing this post the then-Anaheim Angels become the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. A piece of history right here on "The Gooch On..."

...Talent and Lack Thereof

2005-06-07T16:59:00.000-07:00

So it turns out I don't have any good skills at backing up a pickup truck with an attached trailer.

But I can name the first 25-30 WWF Intercontinental champions, IN ORDER, from memory.

See y'all on the flip side. Off to Vegas. For work. Seriously.

...Non-Rose Tinted Glasses

2005-06-01T23:09:00.000-07:00

Some movies are timeless classics, eminently viewable by just about anyone at anytime. Others tend to get more dated, meaningful only to a select group of people who happened to be of an impressionable age at the time the film was made. To people like me, whose formative years were primarily the 1980s, no films quite define our generation like “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club”. Yet I’m sure those people who were born either 10 years before or 10 years after me see nothing particularly special about either of these movies since they are so inherently 80s, and thus probably difficult to relate to if you weren’t a teenager during that time.

Memories can be like that too. When the recent “Did she or didn’t she” scandal regarding Paula Abdul maybe or maybe not schtooping a former “American Idol” contestant made headlines, I was reminded of a classic 80s memory that occurred at the height of Abdul’s career as a pop star.

I can even narrow down the date to sometime between October 7th and November 6th, 1989, the time period in which my buddy Gordo turned 16, received his drivers license and first car, but before I did the same.

After school one Friday afternoon Gordo and I celebrated our long awaited freedom from begging our parents for rides by taking his shiny new Honda Accord on a cruise to downtown Walnut Creek. Passing by a bus stop, we were flagged down by two very sexy girls, about our age, who asked if we could give them a ride home.

Now, just being in the same vehicle with two girls this attractive was sort of a gift in itself. Icing on the cake was arriving at the requested destination and being asked if we’d like to come inside.

This is where the quintessentially 80s memories come in. Prior to 1989 I had never heard the term “Straight Up” uttered in conversation, and come to think of it, I haven’t heard it much since. But in 1989, when Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up” (Straight up now tell me do you really want to love me forever/Or am I caught in a hit and run/Straight up now tell me/Is it gonna be you and me together/Are you just having fun) spent several weeks at #1, the term became all the rage for a time. As much as I anxiously awaited the get naked and have sex part of the afternoon that clearly appeared to be on the agenda, I couldn’t help but get annoyed at the hotter of the two girls tendency to respond to just about every piece of conversation with, “Straight UP!”. As in:

“I hate getting homework over the weekend”.
“Straight UP!”

“I think it’s stupid that you have to be 21 to buy alcohol”
“Straight UP!”

Irritating for sure, but a small price to pay for what was sure to happen next. And this wasn’t just overly optimistic wishful thinking on our part either; they really did seem to be interested. They kept modeling different (and progressively skimpier) outfits for us to help them decide on one to wear to the carnival that was going to be taking place at their school that night, at one point not even bothering to go into the bedroom when changing tops, just letting us see them right there in their underthings. What would *YOU* have thought was about to happen?

Which is why is was so incredibly disappointing when the same “Straight UP!” hotter girl said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m going to have to ask you guys to leave. My mom is going to be home soon”.

They sort of semi-invited us to the aforementioned carnival, letting us know where it was and what time it started but not actually giving us any exact indication of when or where to meet them specifically. We did go, searched high and lo, but never did run into them again.

This was the first, but most definitely not last time in my life where what I thought was an absolute Sure Thing (another very underrated 80s movie, by the way) turned out to be a total dud.

Like the time my junior year of college when Angela, a girl with long, flowing blond hair and a stunningly beautiful face, who just on looks alone always seemed so far out of my league that I never even bothered pursuing her, informed me after a party that her roommate was out of town for the weekend and asked me back to her dorm room to spend the night. Little did I know her invitation to sleep with her was meant to be taken literally. Easy for her. Not as easy with a loaded stick of dynamite in your pants.

Or the time just a few weeks after I first moved down to Southern California and went out with a group of friends from work to spend the day in Long Beach. One of my co-workers brought along a friend of hers, Sally, who I bummed a cigarette off of after a few hours of heavy drinking. This quickly progressed into a conversation about her undying love of and passion for anal sex, a long makeout session, and a request that I stay behind with her after the friends who I drove in with were ready to take off back to Orange County.

I’ve always been the kind of sports fan who prefers it when my team is winning by a lopsided score, something like 17-1, as opposed to a close game where the outcome is uncertain. I'm not one for stress. Which is why this situation was so much to my liking. Not even a month in SoCal and I already had a guaranteed hook-up. Except for the part where the woman in question, on the walk back to her apartment, decided we should stop in at one more bar first. Where she met a guy she apparently determined to be more to her liking. Want to know what it costs to take a cab from Long Beach to Laguna Beach? $75.

I guess you could call this a quintessential mid-90s memory as this was one of my last trips to the bars before California enacted a strict non-smoking ban, making it infinitely harder to pick out the sleazier girls. But I prefer just to remember it as a quintessentially fucked up one.

...How Not to Use the Internet at Work

2005-05-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

When my business partners and I decided to start up this company one of the first things we did was set up a working relationship with two of our former coworkers at our previous employer. The four of us all came from a sales background, while these two worked on the technical side, so it was a perfect arrangement. They could get their own fledgling company off the ground by doing the installation of the equipment we sold, while we could offer installation services even though it wasn't a skill any of us possessed ourselves.

At least that’s how it was supposed to work. After the first few months, Bill, who was the technical guru of the duo, either A) contracted facial paralysis B) Went nuts C) Moved to Rhode Island without telling anybody D) All of the Above or E) Some Combination of the above. That left us with only Jim, his partner, far less technically savvy than Bill, who was more of a “follow what the other guy tells you what to do”-type. Using him as a solo guy presented all sorts of problems, not the least of which being all of our jobs started getting screwed up because he really had no freaking idea what he was doing. There was also his semi-out-of-control temper and propensity for having a total meltdown anytime he discovered we had used any other installer but him for a project (despite the fact he was often unavailable to work according to our schedule), plus the fact he often tried to bill us the same two man rate he charged when he worked with Bill, even though he was clearly only one guy.

For the sake of the business we eventually had to stop using Jim altogether, replacing him with far more capable and qualified installers. But it wasn’t the last we ever heard from him.

I hope this doesn’t offend anybody, but when I meet someone who has reached middle age (loosely defined here as somewhere in your mid-40s) without ever having been married or started a family and whose career has never progressed passed the entry-level/ journeyman stage, I start to wonder about what has happened in this person's life to have gotten them to that position. Add in the fact Jim lived in a remote mobile home park way out in the boonies, had two heart attacks before the age of 44, was openly in the process of obtaining a Russian bride he had found over the Internet and you would be safe in assuming that Jim creeped me out a little bit.

During our early, more optimistic period when we were convinced our working relationship with Bill and Jim would be a long-term one, we got each of them an e-mail address with our companies domain name to make it easier for us to communicate with them and to make it less obvious to our customers who may have needed to contact them that they weren’t actually our employees. When we stopped using Jim for our installs, we shut down his email address and had all of his messages forwarded to one of us.

Turns out the guy was a total perv. We found out after we received the bill to renew his AdultFriendFinder membership. Curiosity got the better of us so we looked up his profile. He wasn’t one to mince words. He was looking for “dirty talk, erotic email or just plain old sex”.

He must still be sore at us for not using him for so long, because in a desperate need for more hands to help us tackle our ever-increasing project load, we called Jim not too long ago to see if he was available to assist one of our other installers on some upcoming jobs and he never called us back. Which sucks, because I was really interested to hear if he had ever found it.

...Further Rumors of My Demise

2005-05-19T16:24:00.000-07:00

The one promise I made to myself when I started this blog was that I would never turn it into one of those blogs where most of the post were posts apologizing about the lack of posts.

It won’t be the first promise I ever broke.

With having to look for a place to live for the (at least) six months until our new house is finished (and strategizing the actual moving process), doing all the required repairs to our current house so that our buyers don’t back out at the last minute, deciding on (and figuring out if we can afford) the upgrades we want to make to our new house, all while trying to manage a huge project at work that appears to have reached the clusterfuck stage, my time has been occupied with a hobby far more addictive than blogging. A skill my people have been perfecting for generations.

Worrying.

...Rumors of My Departure

2005-05-02T05:51:00.000-07:00

I hate to use the "I've been very busy" or "Real life has gotten in the way of blogging" excuse, as they both always seem vaguely insulting to me, the implication being that the people who have actually been diligent about updating their blogs have no life and have just been sitting around with their thumb up their ass, which of course isn't the case.

But just in case you were wondering what I've been doing for the past few weeks:

Buying a New House
When she was pregnant, my wife mentioned that with another body soon to be joining the household, we were going to have to look seriously at purchasing a larger home. I indulged her, responding in such a way that showed that I both totally agreed with her while at the same time making no commitment to do this within any sort of timeframe besides "someday".

But realizing that real estate prices, particularly in Southern California, don't tend to go down as you procrastinate, we felt compelled, despite the fact we were "just looking", to take advantage of a very good deal we found on a brand-new home over twice the size of our current one (well, good deal by California standards, I'm sure the price we paid would get you something resembling Buckingham Palace anywhere else in the country).

Ironically, one of the requirements of purchasing this house was that we sell our current home right away, even though the new home won't be ready, optimistically, until January. I guess they (the builder) want to make sure you'll have all your money ready when they start escrow on your new house and won't have any last-minute excuses to back out. So we bought a bigger house because we need more space, but for the next 6 months or so we're going to have to move into an apartment that is considerably smaller than what we're living in now.

Making a Very Brief, Guest Appearance in Northern CA to Celebrate Passover with my family

Baby Gooch's First Seder

To be honest, I'm not sure my son fully appreciates the plight of the Jews under the rule of the Pharaoh in Egypt

Baby Gooch eating the Haggadah

Getting a New Addition to the Family
One of the most attractive aspects of my wife's personality is seeing what a wonderful, caring, loving mother she is. Having said that, I'm not sure she's ever fully forgiven me for not producing her the baby daughter she always dreamed about.

I guess she was determined to get herself a little princess one way or the other.

Added to the list of things I always said I would never do and then had to recant, which also includes working in sales, marrying a woman with kids and moving to the Inland Empire:

Get a little shit dog.

...Missing Out on Part 2

2005-04-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

Probably a good nine years ago, when I was still living in the Bay Area, some friends and I went to Cobb’s Comedy Club, which at the time was located near Fisherman’s Wharf. As anyone who lives in or has visited the San Francisco area can confirm, this area of the city is virtually devoid of free parking, requiring you to park in a heavily overpriced parking garage. The rates are completely outrageous, being located in the heart of the city’s biggest tourist trap.

At the risk of contradicting a recent post, I can understand why someone might consider it important to get his or her parking ticket validated in a situation like this. But only within reason.

The line to exit the parking garage was long that night, but that’s not unexpected being in a popular part of San Francisco on a Saturday night. It was the fact the line wasn’t moving at all that was causing concern. Obviously something out of the ordinary was going on.

All became clear when the on-duty parking attendants attempted in vain to coordinate a massive repositioning of cars backwards and sideways so the vehicle currently at the payment booth could pull back into the garage.

As the line of cars numbered well into the double digits this request was met with much frustration, anger and hostility. It was late, we were tired, the two-drink minimum was taking it's toll, we just wanted to get the hell out of there and on our way home.

Finding out the reason why the owner of this vehicle had requested to be allowed back into the garage only served to add fuel to the fire. Seems he had been out on a dinner date and had forgotten to get his parking ticket validated by the restaurant. I have never seen such a horrified look on the face of human being as I saw on his date that night.

I guess this is the writerly part of me. The curiosity about human behavior. For all these years one question has nagged at me constantly – Did they end up staying together or was that the dealbreaker?

...Minority Opinions

2005-04-14T11:54:00.000-07:00

· It seems inherently selfish to me to hold up a line of cars behind you while you wait for someone to back out of a parking spot. The rest of the world needs to stop just because you don’t want to walk a few extra steps?

· What is the point of a housewarming party really, beyond the thinly-veiled “Look at what we have that you don’t” statement it makes?

· I can’t think of a single “Eagles” song that I find pleasing to my ears. I switch the channel every time “Hotel California” comes on. Is there a more overplayed song in the history of rock music? How can we miss you if you’ve never gone away?

...Legitimate Reasons to Move to Canada

2005-04-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

My favorite quote from the old "Fat Albert" cartoon goes something like this:

"You're like a high school in the middle of the night. No class."

If I could paraphrase, "Citizens of America, you're like a glass of water. No taste."

It's bad enough that this show is a consistent Top 10 hit, while the brilliant and hysterical "Arrested Development", not only the funniest show currently on television but perhaps one of the greatest sitcoms of all-time, is on the brink of cancellation. But I've come to accept that many Americans are just sort of stupid and therefore prefer comedy that is cliché and formulaic to comedy that is edgy, clever and actually funny.

What I can't accept is that a majority of Americans prefer the musical stylings of this ugly, talentless, woman-beater

and this marginal, vanilla Clay Aiken wannabe

to this guy:

Then again, why should I be surprised? After all, they suck while he has a beautiful voice and polished performance skills. Of course he didn't get any votes.

...The Bottom Line Price

2005-04-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

One of the negative side effects of political correctness is the equally extreme backlash it has created. It seems we’ve reached the point where if you *EVER* admit to taking offense at *ANYTHING* you run the risk of being labeled an oversensitive whiner with no sense of humor.

Not wanting to be known as easily offended, I’ve often kept my mouth shut on those occasions when people have made comments in my presence that perpetuate negative stereotypes of Jewish people. I remember back in college complaining to a group of friends in my car about what I thought was an excessive fee to park at the river.

“Stop acting so Jewish” was one friends advice.

Never mind that I was far from the first person ever to complain about the high fees to park in what amounted to a pile of rocks; if you want to talk about cheap, how about the rest of the crew in the car, none Jewish, who didn’t exactly rush into their pockets to split the cost with me?

During my career in sales I’ve lost track of how many times my peers have “politely” apologized in advance to me before making comments like, “I’m sorry, Gooch, and don’t be offended, but I have a distinct feeling Customer X is Jewish the way he/she keeps haggling with me over price”.

A little over a year ago, when “The Passion of the Christ” was first hitting theaters and causing controversy over what some people perceived to be anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews in the film, my business partners and I got into a discussion about the topic which ultimately led into a larger discussion of stereotypes, prejudice and political correctness in general. Ryan and Bob, who had both seen the film, claimed to not understand what all the hoopla was about since neither saw anything in the film that could possibly be construed as anti-Semitic. They argued that people today seem to get offended too easily and need to develop thicker skin. I responded that having not seen the movie, I didn’t have an opinion regarding the specific complaints against “TPOTC”, but that it did seem a bit rich to me for people in a majority group to determine what people in a minority group could and could not get offended over. In particular, I mentioned how I didn't think it made me a humorless crank to not find it funny when people made jokes about Jews being money-grubbing tightwads.

Later on in the discussion one of my partners asked me a very intriguing question. He asked if my anger was directed at the population at large for buying into the “Jews are cheap” stereotype or if my anger would more appropriately be directed at other Jews for so often behaving in such as way that caused people to see the stereotype as an accurate one.

I firmly believe that if you look for a specific behavior in a select group of people, chances are you’re going to find it. I have no doubt that there are several members of the Jewish faith who are tight with their money. But I would argue that you could just as easily find an equal or greater number of non-Jews who are similarly frugal, it just doesn’t register as memorably because it’s not part of a known stereotype. As a real-life example, I brought up the fact that out of the four us who co-own our company, I was the only one who caused eyes to roll when I expressed concern over how much something was going to cost, even though I didn’t do this with any greater frequency than my other partners.

Sometimes you have to defend yourself when you feel you’re being unfairly attacked. Other times, the term “When you’re dead, lie down” seems appropriate.

Note the last name of the host of this show.

I’ll be on the ground.

...Picking Up Babes

2005-03-28T12:53:00.000-08:00

I went to college with this guy Steve. Unlike most of the people I write about here, Steve is actually his real name, not a pseudonym. I sell him out not because of any sort of dislike, but only because it’s kind of important later on.

Our fellow fraternity brothers came up with the endearing nickname of “Vermin” for Steve due to his frequent and unapologetic hookups with just about anyone who was vaguely willing and possessed a vagina. To understand the depths of Steve’s lechery, just imagine how poorly you must have to behave to get fellow members a fraternity, a social organization whose primary function is to get young men drunk and laid as often as possible, to look at your behavior with universal disapproval.

Steve’s various pick-up methods became the stuff of legend. Two of his most common were:

1) The Cute and Unusual Pet Method
Steve was the owner of a smelly but irresistible ferret who was kept in his bedroom on the bottom floor of the fraternity house, below the house’s main living room/socializing area. This hook-up method entailed engaging a young woman in conversation just long enough to develop a level of comfort to where Steve could eventually ask, “Would you like to see my ferret?” He’d then bring the girl downstairs to show off his furry friend. If all went as planned, he'd get to see hers in return. While Steve was ridiculed unmercifully for the corniness of this approach, it's effectiveness is exemplified by the fact our fraternity house soon welcomed a second ferret and a whole family of chinchillas.

2) The Intellectual Method
I hope this doesn’t come off as sexist, but for attendees at an institution of higher learning who were supposedly representative of the best and brightest young minds in America, I saw a lot of college girls fall for some pretty stupid shit. Just one unrelated example - another fraternity brother, Aaron, was an Art-Photography minor who was able to easily convince large numbers of attractive young ladies to gladly pose for him in the buff under the guise of “helping out a young artist”; photographs I believe eventually ended up as community jerk-off material in the fraternity house.

There also seems to be a universal law of academia that states all college girls must fall for at least one supposedly “deep” guy as a requirement of graduation. This method of picking up women worked especially well for a guy like Steve who wasn’t likely to ever wow anyone in the looks department. With a body that could only be achieved through lazing around on the couch watching TV all day eating snack food, and a personal style that can only be described as “Fonzie-esque” (slicked-back hair, jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket, the only deviation being the once in a blue moon when Steve would replace a white t-shirt with a green or black one), Steve’s appearance alone didn’t turn any heads. But as a philosophy major, he could play the “Faux Intellectual” card better than just about anybody. A particular incident that stands out for me was on the drive back from Lake Tahoe where a few of us had joined some sorority girls on a Spring Break ski trip. Steve, being uncharacteristically quiet, was asked by one of the girls, Sally, why he was so silent that morning.

“I was just thinking about the book I plan on writing. It is going to be in the form of a science fiction/adventure novel but its theme is actually the philosophical concept of deciduism – whether or not we control our own destiny or if our destinies are predetermined”.

It took weeks for my backseat to completely dry.

If either of these methods failed Steve would just resort to the more direct approach of asking, "Are you drunk yet?" Tacky as hell, but at least honest with its intentions.

Some of Steve’s ideas were just stupid, though. My fraternity always threw a freshman orientation party the week preceding the new school year as a way to "recruit potential pledges". To be honest, getting a head start on meeting and wooing all the new freshman girls had a lot to do with it as well. At one such party, two girls who Steve and I had spoken with throughout the night independently of one another asked the two of us if we’d mind walking them back to their dorm. Honestly, I think they just wanted to be safe on what was a dark and unfamiliar path. But being boys, Steve and I of course took this request as, “Hey guys, howsa `bout some sex?”

Back in their dorm room we were making what we assumed was some pre-doing-the-nasty small talk when the phone rang. It was a new friend these girls had made, someone from another dorm asking what they were up to.

“We’re just in our room hanging out with a couple of the fraternity guys from the party, [my real name] & AUSTIN.”

Now I am not so naïve as to not understand that sometimes a woman will look at criteria other than the quality of a man’s soul to determine whether or not to sleep with him. But somehow I have a hard time believing that there exists a woman on this planet who would find a particular man worthy of giving her body only to determine that his name was too plain and/or common and change her mind. Or alternatively, I seriously doubt any woman has ever found a man otherwise unworthy of her bed but found herself unable to resist his unique and cool sounding name. Steve obviously thought otherwise, figuring “Austin” increased his fuckability quotient substantially vs. "Steve". Considering he came home with yours truly that night, I guess you could say it didn’t work.

Maybe if I had told them my name was Gooch…?

...The Lack of Easter Eggs Delivered to the Bay Area in 1995

2005-03-24T22:36:00.000-08:00

10 years ago the first night of Passover fell on the night before Easter. Which was convenient because it allowed my then-girlfriend Kari and I to drive down from school on Friday, attend my parents Seder on Saturday night, then hit her mom’s Easter party Sunday afternoon on our way back up North.

My sister, who had graduated from the same university I was attending and still lived in the area, joined us along with her then-boyfriend/now-husband, Chef. While Kari and I, being students, had fairly flexible schedules, my sister and Chef both had jobs, meaning we couldn’t begin our journey until Friday evening after they were finished with work.

Several hours into the trip, either my sister or Chef pointed out a shortcut to me, one I had heard about before but never knew exactly where to catch, that allowed you to bypass much of the heavier traffic on the 101 and cut several minutes off the last leg of the drive. The only way I can describe the shortcut, which was actually quite a pretty drive during the daylight, is that it looked like someone had paved a small road into the middle of the forest. Visibility was not great on this night because it was very late, there were virtually no other cars on the road, the lights on my tiny Ford Escort were not especially powerful and the road didn’t include any sort of streetlights.

So you can understand that I really had no way of preventing the premature demise of a certain animal, one who was never taught or chose to ignore the look both ways before your cross rule, who decided to hop right in front of my car within a timeframe that didn't allow me to stop or swerve in time to avoid a collision. I like animals and all, and yeah, I kind of still feel bad about the whole ordeal despite the fact I’m confident a jury would be forced to determine that there was just no way, barring divine intervention, that a car can avoid hitting something that jumps right out in front of it at the very last second.

Enough with the justifications and on with the repentance:
Easter Bunny, I’m sorry.

...Going Bananas

2005-03-22T12:42:00.000-08:00

Years before I was born an event occurred that has been forever cemented into our family lore. As I didn’t even exist at the time of the incident, this is all second-hand info as retold to me by my older brother, H.L. Apparently H.L., then 4, was protesting the eating of a banana because of a common occurrence in bananas – a gross looking brown spot. My father, at his absolute wits end trying to get my brother to eat, exclaimed, “JUST EAT THE BROWN, EAT THE BROWN”.

This event was apparently so traumatic for my brother that not only did it cause him to permanently swear off bananas, it also caused him to swear off all other fruits and vegatables, period, as well. He’s really a miracle of modern science and perhaps proof that grown-ups have been lying to children for years about the dangers of not eating your veggies and ingesting too much junk food. At nearly 40 years old his diet remains a strict regimen of red meat and various Hostess products, yet he has never experienced any health problems whatsoever (though I do wonder if his complexion, with has taken on a distinctive red hue in recent years, is the result of not getting enough nutrients or perhaps the beginning stages of scurvy). His convictions are pretty strong. Every year at Thanksgiving my mom practically makes the rest of us swear in blood that we won’t reveal to H.L. that the rolls he enjoys by the dozen are actually made with pumpkin.

I don’t want to be critical of my father, especially considering it’s his birthday today (Happy Birthday, Dad), but my tendency is to believe my brother’s version of this story, if only because A) he has a photographic memory and can tell you specific details of the most mundane events from over 30 years ago and B) my dad has never really denied it.

Whatever the case, this story has been repeated to me so many times from my brother that I too have developed a completely irrational banana intolerance. While food aversions may be normal in some people, it is rather odd in my case since I tend to be an extremely adventurous eater otherwise, often to the point of driving many of my friends and most definitely, my wife, to the point of absolute disgust. There is no sandwich on earth I enjoy more than the pastrami, swiss cheese and tongue at Nate `n’ Al’s, I consider it a rare, delectable treat when I’m able to indulge in some tasty chicken feet at Dim Sum (more than once being told by the waitstaff that I was the only white person they’ve ever had order that particular delicacy) and found myself completely confused a few seasons back on Survivor when an Asian contestant was ostracized from the rest of her tribe after they got grossed out at watching her eat a chicken heart, since doing the same has always been a normal part of cooking a whole chicken in my house. But give me a banana, a completely normal staple of the average, healthy American diet and I will recoil in horror.

I think my disgust comes from two factors. One, I find it unacceptable that every time I peel open a banana there is a high probability of finding an unsightly brown or black blemish that is questionably edible. What other food has such a statistically high possibility of finding something so gross on it? Second, there is just no mistaking a banana’s similarity, in both shape and consistency, to a big, white turd.

I recently decided, after probably a good 20 years, to confront my banana-phobia head on. It wasn’t a conscious decision as much as we had run out of apples in the house and bananas were the only available fruit left. I took upon the task with much fear and trepidation. Is it ok to eat the brown spots or should they be discarded? What about the little white strips that sort of come halfway off when you peel the banana? How do you tell if it’s ripe?

Putting it into my mouth, I felt like a girl giving oral copulation for the first time. I had to fight my gag reflex so as to not spew up the turkey sandwich, cottage cheese and baked chips that had made up the rest of my lunch. I felt queasy biting into the banana’s mushy texture, giving me the distinct feeling of biting into a crap.

Then it hit my taste buds. I’ve got to admit, they’re not bad. After having one more recently without incident, I am more than willing to welcome bananas into my regular diet. But I won’t eat the brown.

...Pains in My...

2005-03-08T12:41:00.000-08:00

I preface this by admitting that I am about the world’s least reputable source on any issues relating to science. I got a “D” in high school Biology and would have surely failed high school Chemistry had a good friend of mine not obtained a copy of the answer key to the final exam, allowing me to strategically place the correct answers onto the 3x5 card we were ironically allowed to use as a “Cheat Sheet” for equations and formulas. The only science course I took in college was a G.E. required Biology class that I took during the Summer, which tended to be far less challenging than during the regular Fall and Spring Semesters, and I took the course Pass/Fail so as to not screw up the good cumulative GPA I had built up.

However, I think I’m on to a great conspiracy theory: The pain reliever industry is a sham.

I suffer from fairly frequent debilitating headaches, usually brought on by one of the following factors: Not having coffee in the morning (or not having enough), going too long between meals or having my contact lenses dry out on me.

Like most people, when I feel a headache coming on or when the pain becomes too much to bear I take aspirin or Ibuprofen. I’ve tried virtually every brand, have tried increasing the recommended dosage and have even tried higher mg prescription medication. I think I took more of my wife’s post-giving birth pain medication than she did.

It never works. Like yesterday. I was in Palm Springs with one of our technicians trying to fix a long-standing issue in a system we installed for one of our biggest clients. Somehow we managed to fix the customers problem, but in doing so, created a newer, larger problem that took hours and hours to get right again. We couldn’t just break for lunch and leave them with an unusable system, so we worked continuously until the problem was fixed, which meant not eating until nearly 4 PM, when the damage was already done. To make matters worse, I had decided that morning to give my own car a break from yet another long drive and instead took the new work van we just purchased a week or two ago. Which was fine, except we’ve recently discovered the van has a previously unforeseen issue of making an obscenely loud, eardrum shattering rattling/banging noise anytime its speed exceeds 60 MPH. I would have been pleased to return to the office and be able to get back into my own car, except I remembered that I had thrown the propane tank in the back of my Explorer because it needed to be refilled, which meant I had to hear that bouncing and crashing around the entire ride home.

I had stopped at a gas station to buy 2 extra strength 500mg Bayer before leaving Palm Springs. It was probably 2 ½ hours between my taking the aspirin and returning to my home. My headache, if anything, was worse by that point. The aspirin, as usual didn’t do shit. In fact, I can think of no time in history when I’ve had a headache, took aspirin, had the headache disappear and was able to get on with my normal routine.

You know what made my headache disappear last night? The only one surefire cure to any headache I’ve ever had? A nap. Although I guess last night’s can’t really be defined as a nap since it went from about 6PM to 7AM this morning (I was reminded again last night that I married the most wonderful woman on the planet who happily took over my usual evening take care of baby duties so I could recover).

But I guess there’s no money in “TAKE A NAP”. Seriously, barring hardcore painkillers like Vicodin or Codeine, do over the counter pain relievers ever work? For anyone? What a fucking scam.

...Singing the Praises of Me

2005-03-04T11:17:00.000-08:00

I’m all for people feeling good about themselves. But I’m also aware that there is a distinct difference between high self-esteem and a grossly inflated sense of self-worth.

I subscribe to an industry magazine aimed at small business owners like myself. I don’t read the thing from cover to cover every month, but religiously turn to the back page where my favorite column is located. It is written by a long time industry veteran who provides both technical and managerial advice based on his years of experience in our field. Most people would probably find his column somewhat of a bore since it is rather esoteric, tending to deal specifically with our particular niche industry.

One month, however, he decided to expand his scope and write a column that would be useful to business people regardless of industry. He shared an experience from his own life that I guess he figured was a useful metaphor for the larger world. Not surprisingly, the hero of this story was himself.

He was in an airport with only a short amount of time before his flight was scheduled to take off. Not having eaten all day, he decided to grab a quick bite at the McDonalds located within the airport. The line was long and moving very slowly, due to only one register being open. This fellow went up to the front counter and asked if it would be possible for them to open up another registerer to help speed up the line. His request was granted and everyone got their food and made their flights.

My hats off to the guy; I’m sure had I been waiting in this line and was forced to decide whether or not to go hungry or miss my flight, I would have been very appreciative that someone was willing to step up so I could both make my destination on time and enjoy a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. But it does kind of seem wee too minor an event to base an entire column around. Is having the guts to complain about a slow McDonald’s line really a useful metaphor for how I can better run my technology integration corporation? To paraphrase Freud, sometimes asking a McDonald’s manager if they can open another register to speed up the line is just asking a McDonald’s manager if they can open another register to speed up the line.

I mean, just last week I found a pair of car keys in the bathroom of a Togo’s and returned them to the counter. But you don’t see me writing a whole blog entry on the deeper significance of this act to the world at large now do you?

...Wife Swapping Strategies

2005-02-28T09:49:00.000-08:00

I promise this is not going to permanently turn into “The Gooch On Dumb Things in Movies” blog, but this has been nagging at me for the past 24 hours.

"Consenting Adults", a small, forgettable thriller from the early 90s, notable only because it starred Kevin Spacey before he became a household name, was on HBO yesterday. Whatever potential this movie had to be entertaining was lost on me when I first saw it over a decade ago because I found the key plot point that sets the film in motion to be so profoundly ridiculous and unbelievable. Since the entire rest of the movie requires that you buy into this completely goofy premise I just couldn’t enjoy it. Tell me if you think I’m crazy:

The Kevin Spacey character convinces his next door neighbor, played by Kevin Kline (for a very mediocre movie, the film did have a very impressive cast), to swap wives for a night. What is unique about his plan is his confidence that they can do this without their wives knowledge. He theorizes that all couples sometimes do it in the middle of the night, when the wife is oftentimes sort of half-asleep to begin with, and thus, too tired to even really notice if the person having sex with her is a man other than her husband. And Kline, hesitant to the idea at first despite his growing attraction to the Spacey character’s wife, finds he is unable to argue against this airtight logic and readily agrees.

Now, I think anyone who is in a long term relationship, or at least anyone who’s comfortable enough in their relationship to be honest, will acknowledge that when you’ve been with the same person for a significant amount of time, not every single time together is necessarily a highly passionate, memorable encounter worthy of inclusion in “Red Hot Amateurs XXXIV”. But I don’t think I'm being overly egotistical to think that even at my most forgettable my wife might vaguely notice if the person noodging her for a little late-night sleep-aid after she’s already started to drift off was someone other than me.

At least I hope.

...Living a Sitcom Cliché

2005-02-24T13:41:00.000-08:00

My most common gripe when watching a TV show or movie is the lack of realism. Nothing can more quickly take me out of the plot and cause me to lose my ability to enjoy what I’m viewing than having to suspend my normal brain function and sense of logic to try to justify something on screen that I just can’t buy as possibly occurring in real life.

This can take shape in many forms. I understand that with some genres, like science fiction, you sort of have to be able to accept a certain alternative reality, and I’m ok with that. I can accept a universe in which there exists a Superman. A universe where a person is able to completely conceal his identity simply by throwing on a pair of glasses? Now that’s just dumb. It just seems like lazy writing to me.

Being married, I have to watch my share of romantic comedies. I don’t hate them on principle like some guys do, but was immediately taken out of “Maid in Manhattan” when the Jennifer Lopez character was shown to live in a very respectable, quite nice house on the salary of a hotel maid. Maybe if the movie had taken place on Mars. In New York, I don’t think so. I liked both the book and movie versions of “Mystic River”, but was upset that an otherwise gripping story was ruined at the end by one of those ridiculous, highly unbelievable scenarios where the police “just happen” to conveniently show up at the exact right place at the exact right time to catch the killers the split second before they were about to perpetuate yet another horrific crime.Don’t even get me started on car chase scenes that in real life would end up with fatalities in the dozens or at the very least a traffic ticket for the characters involved. Or any TV show or movie based in Los Angeles where the characters are able to find free, available parking right in front on whatever business establishment they are looking to frequent.

I’ve always felt a certain sense of superiority because of my refusal to just shut off my brain and accept the most implausible scenarios in TV and movie plots. But occasionally I will experience an event that makes me realize that perhaps I am the one who is foolish and that situations I’ve always passed of as the most ridiculous of sitcom clichés can very easily occur in real life.

My friend Hannah used to work in the marketing department of Macy’s. Her whole job more or less consisted of helping to put on Macy’s Passport, an annual charity fashion show that raises money for HIV/AIDS research. A benefit of having a friend who was so intimately involved with putting the show together: Free tickets not only for the show itself, but also to the exclusive dinner before the show where top local restaurants offered several menu samplings that would have otherwise cost a small fortune and, most appealing of all, a pass to the invitation only post-show after-party at the Hollywood Athletic Club. Let’s see - free gourmet food, free liquor and the chance to party with a bunch of models. Tough decision.

Hannah provided me and my friend Scott with two tickets each, so there were four of us altogether. Scott and I had been (and still are) good friends since college, where he was the president of my fraternity the year I pledged. I think one of the reasons my friendship with Scott has endured over the years – from college to nearly 4 years of living together as roommates in my mid-late 20s through being each others respective best men at our weddings which occurred 6 months apart – is because we’ve always had different taste in women. Our friendship has never been threatened by our falling for the same woman. My interest in women tends to be from the neck up while his tends to be from the neck down.

Since that statement can be taken more than one way, I should specify that Scott tends to be the type who is more interested in what a woman’s body looks like than in what her face looks like, which has often resulted in him dating very in-shape women whose bodies didn’t contain an ounce of unnecessary fat, but who weren’t anything special in the face. I guess you could call him a Classic Butterface (But Her Face) Man. Alternatively, I’ve always found that a stunning, beautiful face can make me easily forgive imperfections on a woman’s body.

Because of our differing tastes, I looked at it as simply par for the course when, at the afterparty the night of the show, I returned from a visit to the bar to find Scott out on the dance floor with, in my opinion, a rather hideous-looking Asian woman who, to her credit, had a pretty amazing, tight little body. I just credited it to his preference for a good body over a pretty face combined with a particularly bad case of beer goggles (we all had done a pretty good job of taking full advantage of the “free drinks” situation). And since I had in the past seen both of our other friends who were with us that night, Leo and Manoje, cavort around with women who were less than beautiful, I found it to be a bit hypocritical for the two of them to be laughing so hysterically and uncontrollable at Scott. Those in glass houses…

Both Leo and Manoje appeared to be quite shocked at my rather stoic reaction to Scott’s dancing with a fugly girl. It should be noted here that when I say, “dancing” I’m not speaking of moving to the music in a rhythmic fashion in the same general vicinity of one another, or going by Catholic school rules of staying a yardstick distance apart. Scott and his new friend were clearly in the pre-sex ritual of the dance floor bump and grind. Lots of touching of parts. Too bad Scott didn’t notice the tube of lipstick in her pocket.

“Gooch, you do realize that’s a dude, right?” Leo asked me, still puzzled at my lack of dismay in Scott’s choice of dance partner. And lo and behold, there it was, a clearly visible Adam’s apple.

When Scott came off of the dance floor for a quick breather between songs, the three of us, realizing that to let this go on any further would just be cruel, took Scott aside to let him know he had been dancing with another man. Scott laughed off our assertions, saying, “Hey, I know she’s not hot, but she’s a great dancer. Beats holding up the wall like you guys are doing (a good point, I must admit)”. Clearly he thought we were poking fun at his dance partner’s lack of beauty, not lack of vagina. What can I say; he is an only child and has the stubbornness to prove it. Shortly thereafter, Scott made his way back onto the dance floor with the same partner. But not for long. He may not have believed us, but I guess came around to the idea after his new friend whispered “Are you gay or bi?” during a particularly sensual moment on the dance floor.

Even though Leo and I have repeated this story a number of times, including in front of Scott’s wife, I still feel we’ve never given Scott the proper degree of shit over it that is deserved. I mean, really, how often does the ultimate sitcom plot, the “Guy Almost Goes All The Way With Girl Who Turns Out To Be A Guy” storyline, actually come to life? This seems to me to be the equivalent of having been struck my lightning or having won the lottery. At the very least I shouldn’t have edited it out of my Best Man speech.

...Denial

2005-02-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

At his wedding a few years ago, a good friend of mine confided to me how excited he was to have sex with his bride that night. Seems she had decided a few months previous that the two of them should cease having relations with one another in the months preceding their matrimony in order to make the consummation of their marriage seem all the more special. At the time I thought this to be the most colossally dumb idea I’d ever heard. These two had been dating for over 5 years and had lived together for 3. I couldn’t imagine that there were any positions or orifices that had been left unexplored, and it just seemed ridiculous to me to try to set up an artificial scenario where they tried to make something they had already done thousands of times somehow “meaningful”.

But I’m man enough to admit that I may have been wrong on this one. In honor of his six-month birthday tomorrow, Baby Gooch is getting his first babysitter. And Mrs. Gooch and I are going to do something that we used to do all the time, but haven’t had much chance to do since he was born. See a movie aimed at grown-ups. In the theater.

I don’t think I’ve been this excited since I saw my first pair of bare boobies.

UPDATE: Baby Gooch, one day shy of 6 months

...A Very Special Valentine's Day Edition

2005-02-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

The closest I’ve ever come to living like a rock star came during my junior year of college; the year I spent living in a fraternity house. Our house was in the unique position of being technically off campus, so we were not under the university’s jurisdiction, but physically located right across the street from the campus library and a very short walk away from the freshman dorms, making our house the most desirable location in town when it came to revelry and hijinks. It was not uncommon, even on nights where no official parties were being thrown, to have large crowds gather at our doorstep in hopes of finding some sort of hedonistic activities in progress.

My bedroom was adjacent to the main living room, the epicenter of most of the wild activity that occurred in the house. While an occasional inconvenience, particularly on nights when I had a major test to study for (making the house’s proximity to the library nothing short of a godsend) or when I just felt like hitting the hay a little early, it came with incredible benefits as well.

Interesting how the weirdest things can change a person’s fortune. After having had a steady girlfriend for most of my freshman year and an at least respectable dating life the first semester of the following school year, the second semester of my sophomore year I became absolutely convinced I had been involuntarily sprayed with female repellent. I couldn’t get a date to save my life. I began seriously considering consulting with a dentist to see if I had a particularly bad case of chronic halitosis that nobody had the heart to tell me about and also thought about getting some sort of a part-time job to pay for the nose job I was convinced would make me more attractive to the opposite sex. My female woes were only made worse by the fact my roommate at the time had just started dating a new girl that semester who he fucked often and loudly. Nothing like the sound of balls slapping ass to remind you that you’re not getting any.

But move me into the most high profile room in a popular fraternity house and you’d think I was freaking Wilt Chamberlain or something. It was a very good year. I’m humble enough to acknowledge that my luck with the ladies that year possibly had as much to do with the fact that the ladies in question thought sleeping with me would gain them access to our parties without having to pay the standard $5 cover charge as it did with their uncontrollable animalistic desire to jump my hot bod. All I know is that I’ve never quite experienced anything like this before or after. I mean, I’ve had other periods in my life where I’ve had a pretty active dating life, but it always took a decent amount of work on my part. This one year of my life all I had to do was make sure never to venture all that far away from the living room.

I think I’ve generally always had a pretty good sense of being able to appreciate the here and now. As I watched many of my buddies couple up into exclusive relationships, I knew instinctively that I would have plenty of time in my life to do the serious, one-on-one relationship thing, but the timeframe in which you can be as promiscuous as you want without being thought of as a total pig because of it is pretty short. Far from feeling envious of my coupled friends, I failed to understand why at the prime of your life you’d waste so much energy and take so seriously relationships that weren’t likely to last more than a few months. I ended up not taking my own advice later on that same year but that’s another blog for another day.

Suffice it to say I was quite happy with my single status and having the time of my life. But when Valentine’s Day rolled around that year, as I sat around the fraternity house, alone, watching as so many of my fraternity brothers, whose committed relationships I looked down upon every other day of the year, receive well thought out gifts and smooches from their respective sweeties, an immense sadness began to come over me. I did get a box of cookies that year from a female friend who sometimes doubled as a friend with benefits, but I got the impression she was something of a Valentine’s Day junkie who got gifts for just about everyone she knew (even though she brought the cookies to me, the card was made out to the fraternity as a whole which was probably appropriate in more ways than one), so it did nothing to absolve my depression of feeling as if nobody thought of me as someone special.

Before calling it a night I thought to check my mailbox. As I went to college in a very small town, the chances of anyone being so formal as to mail a card or gift as opposed to simply hand delivering was pretty slim, but out of desperation I thought I’d give it a shot. In my box, I found a nice surprise. Granted, I was 20 years old, but I was nevertheless touched that a certain someone still thought me special enough to write a nice card to and even go so far as to send my favorite Valentine’s Day treat – a gigantic 7 oz. Hershey’s Kiss.

What special lady had such a high opinion of yours truly? Who else: Mama.

To good Jewish mothers everywhere (and good goyish ones too) and especially one in the East Bay who probably stopped reading this at the “balls slapping ass” comment, Happy Valentine’s Day.

...Nepotism

2005-02-11T13:19:00.000-08:00

If you're tired of looking at the picture of the wrestler, why don't you do yourself a favor and read the terrific post currently up at my sister's blog

Have a nice weekend!

...The Surreal Event of the Day

2005-02-07T16:27:00.000-08:00

Event Sequence:

- Learned via a wrestling news website (leave me alone) that a small-time pro wrestling show took place over the weekend minutes from the house I grew up in

- Out of curiousity, since I was unaware of the existence of any professional wrestling promotions in Contra Costa County, visited the home page of the company that put on the show

- Clicked onto the "Superstars" page of said website

- Discovered, much to my surprise, that one of the promotion's "Superstars" was a fraternity brother of mine in college

...Things I've Learned Since Starting My Own Business

2005-02-07T13:06:00.000-08:00

1) People tend to look at the "No Soliciting" sign attached to the door of your office as a suggestion rather than a rule.

...Liquor

2005-02-03T13:20:00.000-08:00

The well's running a little dry. In lieu of a new post, how about a picture of me really drunk a couple of years ago? This was a party my then-roommate and I threw at our old apartment. I had just started dating my future wife and threw the party more or less as an excuse to get her over to my place. It worked.

...Shorts II

2005-01-28T16:14:00.000-08:00

* Being Jewish, I never had to deal with the heartbreaking loss of innocence that comes with discovering Santa Claus isn’t real. The closest comparable experience I can think of was when I stood in line with my dad at the Hertz Rent-A-Car booth at the Seattle-Tacoma airport and realized that standing directly behind us was bad guy pro wrestler Harley Race peacefully traveling with good guy pro wrestler “Jumping” Jim Brunzell.

* Something I’ve never understood – Customers who will spend thousands of dollars on a product or system without question, but will bitch and complain endlessly over a modest shipping charge.

* Another moratorium request: The term “I need this done/I need to have this yesterday”. It is overused to the point that it no longer indicates any sort of urgency, only the users lack or creativity.

* Another thing I’ve never understood – people who eat at fast-food restaurants or shop at discount places like WalMart and then actually have the gall to complain about the quality of the service. Those people don’t make shit, you know they don’t make shit, what the fuck were you expecting?

* The one period in my life where I can admit I may have let me ego get a little bit out of control was when I was in my college fraternity. There’s just something about watching groups of people subject themselves to mass humiliation and gross indignity, such as eating bananas covered in crunchy peanut butter out of a toilet while blindfolded, all for the great honor of getting to hang out with * YOU * that tends to inflate a persons sense of self-worth

* I’ve also never understood political party loyalty. I simply can’t believe that anyone just happens to agree with all of the points of view of one political party and just happens to disagree with all of the points of view of the other. I think some people just like to feel like they belong to a group.

*In general, my taste in women tends to be pretty mainstream, but for whatever reason, Julia Roberts has never really done it for me. The most unbelievable part of “Closer” to me was the notion that anyone would voluntarily leave Natalie Portman for Julia Roberts.

* What I've learned from blogging: Women like to talk about sex a lot. Men are more just into doing it.

* Have a nice weekend.

...Movie Clichés

2005-01-25T11:55:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on "Cellular"

If I see one more action/thriller/horror movie where the antagonist has the protagonist in a vulnerable situation and could easily kill him if he so desired, but inexplicably decides instead to talk the protagonist’s ear off, thus giving the protagonist the valuable time needed to think a way out of the situation, I’m going to drink a bottle of Drano and put myself out of my misery. It amazes me how tolerant some people are at having their intelligence insulted. If you watch a movie that contains a scene such as this and justify it with the lame “it’s just a movie, it’s not supposed to be realistic” line, I’m sorry, but you’re a tool. Unless you’re my wife. Then we just have different tastes.
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The Fallacy of the Talking Killer (credit the late Gene Siskel - 4th one down)

...(Even More Of) What I've Learned So Far

2005-01-18T13:50:00.000-08:00

The most nonsensical thing on Earth: Single-person bathrooms marked with a “Men” or “Women” indicator. If only one person can go in at a time, why does it matter what gender the pooper or peeer is?

1) When you’re single, the most annoying people imaginable are those married people or people in long-term relationships who determine that just because they happened to find someone desperate enough to settle for them that they now have some special insight or expertise on affairs of the heart and are always giving out unsolicited advice on how you too can meet * your * special someone. 2) When you’re married, the most annoying people imaginable are your single friends who go on and on about how deeply in love with, how much in common they have with and how spiritually connected they are with some person they’ve been dating for like a month 3) When you’re a parent, the most aggravating thing imaginable is listening to the child-rearing theories and philosophies of people who don’t have any.

People who claim not to like babies, cats or puppies are often just trying to get a reaction out of you.

A big accepted myth is that anyone who listens to NPR is a left-wing liberal. Some people (like yours truly) just don’t have the patience for commercials.

When you’re young and exhibit shyness, people look upon this unfortunate condition with sympathy and understanding. When you’re a grown-up and exhibit shyness, people assume you’re a stuck-up, snooty, snob.

With some exceptions, I’m sure, women who keep their virginity into their 20s do so by choice. Men who keep their virginity into their 20s have simply been unable to find a single person on Earth willing to have sex with them.

We have now reached the point where one of the biggest things you can do to show your individually is to *not* get a tattoo.

The single greatest status symbol of our current generation is being busy. Whenever anyone is trying to impress you, they’ll always talk about how busy they are. The most shameful thing a person can admit to is having some free time on their hands.

There is a certain personality type whose greatest goal in life is to attain some sort of management position, not because he or she has any new, fresh or creative ideas that could help his or her company run more efficiently or more profitably, but simply because he or she is egotistical enough to simply want the word “Manager” in his or her title. That and they want to be able to boss people around. The world would be a far more pleasant place is all such people were rounded up and forced to slide down a 20-foot razor blade into a vat of boiling acid.

...Shorts

2005-01-12T13:34:00.000-08:00

*Sometime within the next month or two will mark 4 years since I began dating the seductive temptress who ultimately became known as Mrs. Gooch. Amazing how time flies. It seems like just yesterday I was sneaking out of my apartment bedroom late at night so I could bury farts into the couch without her hearing.

*I know I’m a little old for this, but when I’m at the gym I sometimes find myself drifting off into Fantasyland where I imagine my workout is being videotaped for a television montage highlighting my training regimen prior to challenging for the World Heavyweight Championship at Wrestlemania. I usually envision either Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” or Scandal’s “Warrior” playing in the background. Then I look around and notice that even among the regular Joes at my local 24 Hour Fitness, I’m on the smaller side, which causes me to drift back towards reality. So then I imagine that it’s actually the Cruiserweight title I’m challenging for.

*I hate to break it to those who still cling to the fantasy that they will one day be thought of as a “cool” parent, but it’s just not in the cards. No matter how many names of current bands you know, how well you stay on top of current fashion trends, etc., your kids are still going to think you’re a dork. Example: The other night I was making something of a spectacle of myself as I listened to Green Day on my portable CD Player while doing the dishes. What can I say – it’s a great CD. My older stepson, age 10, stopped to inform me that Green Day was a “teenager” band. He said this not in a “…and wow, you sure are a cool dude for listening to them” way, but in a “…dude, give it up, you’re way too old to be listening to that stuff and doing so just makes you look pathetic” kind of way. Never mind that I’ve been a fan of Green Day since before he was born and the members of the band are all older than me. Once you reach the point of having to use facts and figures to prove your still with it chances are the battle has already been lost.

*Can we put a moratorium on anyone asking that, “Why is it you need a license to have a dog, but ANYONE can have a child?” question? First of all, you didn’t think it up so nobody thinks you’re either deep or enlightening. This question got old around the same time pronouncing Target as "Tar-zhey" did. Plus, what exactly are you suggesting? That when two people have unprotected sex without a “license” we take away the baby that was created and placed it in a teensy-tiny cage and if not adopted within a week send it to be destroyed? Yeah, that sounds much more humane.

*I’ve taken to listening to classical music on the way into work in the morning as a means of relaxation so I’m not so full of stress and anxiety before I even walk into the office. I listen to it again in the afternoon to help calm and soothe me so I’m actually somewhat tolerable to be around once I get home. Listening to this incredibly beautiful, powerful, complex music, it really makes you realize how most all other music pretty much sucks in comparison. And it makes me sad that I just assumed for the previous 31 years of my life that classical music was an art form for snobs and elitists. Although the fact that the station I’ve been listening to has regular updates on what's happening in the world of wine probably doesn’t do much to erase that stereotype.

* I’ve touched on this before, but the more I think about it, the more obnoxious it seems to me to have any sort of political bumper sticker on your car. I’m totally non-partisan about this too. I just have a hard time believing that in the last election, for example, there was anybody who was at a loss as to who to vote for who then came across a “John Kerry `04” bumper sticker and said to themsleves, “Well, now that's decided”. Similarly, I doubt that anybody who holds the “Pro-Choice” position on the abortion argument has ever seen a car bearing the “IT’S A CHILD NOT A CHOICE” bumper sticker and said, “Geez, I've never really thought about it like that, I now officially change my position”. So, really, at the end of the day, all a political message bumper sticker is is a big advertisement of your own political beliefs. Which seems to me to be the absolute height of egotism because why the fuck do you think I care about the political leanings of some guy (or girl) I don’t know?

...Other People's Fantasies

2005-01-10T13:16:00.000-08:00

What do you do when all of Southern California is being pounded by storms and a newborn baby has prevented you from seeing any grown-up movies for the past 4 ½ months? Rent DVDs of course.

I finally got around to seeing "Garden State". I liked it. A solid *** out of **** in my book. Interesting characters, good acting, funny and often moving.

But I had one major problem.

For those who don’t know, Zack Braff, of "Scrubs” fame, not only stars in the film, but also wrote and directed it as well. Now, maybe as a guy I’m not the best judge of other guys’ looks, but I think I can say with some certainty that while Braff is a pleasant enough looking fellow, he is not in the Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Colin Farrell, Orlando Bloom mold of a person who is famous primarily because of how good-looking he is.

There is a scene early on in “Garden State” where Braff is among a group of people at a party who get high on ecstasy and decide to play a friendly game of spin the bottle. A montage of the game is shown, with the men and women (or women and women depending on where the bottle lands) giving each other quick, friendly pecks on the lips. This is until a young, sexy, luscious nymphet spins and lands on the Braff character. She then proceeds to get up, straddle Braff’s lap, and heavily make out with him, tongue and all.

It should be noted here that her character did not know the Braff character prior to the party, nor did they speak to each other before playing the game, so there is no possibility she could be attracted to him for reasons other than purely physical ones. And while I guess you could blame the ecstasy, as I mentioned, all the other kisses given during the game were friendly ones, not deep throat expeditions like this.

It just completely took me out of the movie. Admittedly, I’ve been accused on more than one occasion of being somewhat of a drag to watch movies with as I’m one of those people who has a very difficult time “suspending disbelief” and feel compelled to mention out loud all the stupid parts of a movie where reality is betrayed. I guess I just don’t like having my intelligence insulted. But I know I’m not being weird about this, because even Natalie Portman, the film's co-star, calls Braff on this during the commentary track of the DVD.

I mean, I think all of us guys, whether we admit it or not, fantasize about having women who are far out of our league throw themselves at us. Heck, I’m happily married to a wonderful, beautiful woman, but there is still a small part of me that likes to think that the reason Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt broke up is because Jennifer could no longer live in that sham of a marriage knowing that her heart rightfully belongs to the guy in the right hand corner of this page. But at least I don’t charge you a $3.99 rental fee to read about that shit.

...Space Invaders

2005-01-04T16:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve grown to really detest January. Every year at this time my local gym is invaded by the New Year Resolutionists who for the first two or three weeks of every year choose to hold onto the overly optimistic belief that this will be the year they’re finally going to change their lifelong habit of eating too much and exercising too little and make their body go from disgusting to desirable.

I guess I’ve just become jaded to it. Yeah, I know there is always that one person in a hundred, the Jared from Subway type, who is actually able to make a permanent lifestyle change and will stick to a plan of healthy eating and regular physical activity, but these types are far outnumbered by those who go to the gym for the first few weeks of January buoyed by the fantasy of how much happier their life will be once their body more resembles The Rock or Jennifer Garner’s rather than Chris Farley or Sally Struthers’, but quit after a few short weeks upon realizing that getting in shape takes a lot of real hard work, commitment and sacrifice. I know this because at this time every year I start to see all sorts of new faces at the gym and just as soon these new faces disappear and it’s back to the same familiar crew.

I don’t mean to sound so harsh. I don’t really give a shit what people look like – I have friends of all shapes and sizes. And it’s not like I’ve never broken a New Years Resolution. Chances are I won’t be sticking to that one about spending more time this year reading the classics while spending less time following the search for the next American Idol.

But I’m so sick and tired of having my life inconvenienced the first few weeks of the year by the people who further overcrowd my already overcrowded gym based on the fantasy that they’re going to succeed with the same goal they’ve failed with every year previous. Maybe I’m too picky, but I prefer to get my exercise on the weights and machines within the gym itself, not on the 20-minute walk I’m forced to take from my car to the gym entrance because these wannabes have overtaken all of the available spaces in the parking lot. I’m a fairly patient guy; I understand that when you go to the gym during peak hours your going to have to occasionally wait for equipment. But when a full additional hour is added to my workout time because of the extra traffic caused by those who like to fool themselves the first few weeks of every January, well, that’s just kind of annoying.

So, have a great 2005 and stay the fuck out of my gym.

...Alien Life Forms & Other Creatures

2005-01-01T21:59:00.000-08:00

A funny thing happened on the way to meet Make Mine Mike

A.
You’d think with all the years I’ve been in sales, having to constantly tell customers “No” (“No, I can’t lower my price”, “No, I can’t throw that in at no charge”, “No, you can’t return the product you bought from us a year and a half ago for a refund”), that this ability would somehow transfer over to my personal life . No such luck. This has always been a problem for me. A few years ago I found myself attending perhaps the geekiest event known to man - an “X-Files” convention. Why did I go? My friend Leo invited me and I didn’t want to hurt his feeling by turning him down. The only event on Earth I can think of that could possibly match this in terms of pure nerdiness is a Star Trek convention. While I never did attend one of those, I did once spend hours and hours at the Las Vegas Hilton ogling the Star Trek exhibit housed there, even though I’ve never actually sat through an entire episode of Star Trek in any of its incarnations. Why did I go then? My roommate at the time, Scott, wanted to and I would have felt bad making him go by himself. Don’t even get me started on the number of terrible movies I’ve seen, ones I had absolutely no interest in watching to begin with, all because some friend of mine invited me and I just couldn’t bring myself to say no. I’ve actually taken to not answering my home telephone for fear that if I do one of my friends is going to end up making me commit to some event and I will be powerless to decline.

B.
I find it fascinating how some people can function as seemingly normal members of society - owning homes, working at a trade, paying bills, voting, etc., while, for all intents and purposes, they are completely and totally insane.

C.
I’ve had a work-related errand I’ve needed to run for some time now, which required picking up some equipment from one of my company’s subcontractors in Orange County and then running this equipment up to a customer in Los Angeles. This also provided a great excuse to finally get together with Mike. This subcontractor runs an audio-visual repair operation out of his garage. I imagine it must get a little lonely sitting there all by himself every day. I guess I take it for granted that I spend most of my workdays alongside people who double as my good friends.

It is simply a given that when you pick up equipment form this fellow that you’re going to have a difficult time getting out of there within any sort of normal timeframe. You just have to plan your day around the extra 30 minutes or so you’re going to spend there while this guy talks your ear off. I remember years ago an old college acquaintance, a rather shy person who was a friend of a friend, relocated from Southern CA to the state of Washington. Describing the difficulty he was having in meeting people in his new hometown, this person stated that from the time he left work in the afternoon until he returned the next morning, he made no use of his vocal muscles whatsoever. I always picture this subcontractor in a similar scenario, not speaking to any other human beings except for when we occasionally drop by to pick something up.

I thought I might actually get out of there quickly Thursday morning, as it appeared I came at an inconvenient time and figured he’d want to get me out of there as fast as possible. He looked like he had just gotten out of the shower, answering the door in sweatpants and no shirt.

While he was writing out our invoice he must have noticed me looking around, trying to figure out where the voices I was hearing were coming from.

“I taped some TV shows to my computer last night. I’m going to burn them onto DVD’s with some video editing software I just bought”

He then proceeded to describe this new software in detail, how he was able not only to make his own custom DVD’s, but was also able to create his own menuing system, create his own chapters within the DVD’s, etc. Then, of course, came the kicker:

“You wanna come check it out?”

Now, what a perfect opportunity I had to say “No”. I was working. I could have easily said, “Geez, I’d love to but I’ve really got to get this stuff back to our customer.” Hell, my wife called me on my cell phone in the middle of all this; how easy would it have been for me to pretend the call was work related and use it as an excuse to get out of there?

Instead, of course, I said, “Sure”, and proceeded to enter the small room attached to his garage. I was shown a series of small samples of the 30+ hours of custom DVDs he’s produced, carefully edited from hundreds of hours of televison programs he’s recorded, all of which serve to prove the existence of aliens. The footage was enhanced by his own live commentary introducing each piece:

“... they found a cow in the middle of a field that had been cut from it titties to it’s, uuh, you know, it’s pussy.. But there was NO BLOOD. Aliens.”

Pulling out another DVD from his collection, he explained that if you study the bible close enough, you can find evidence of aliens.

“You know where they describe ‘Chariots of Fire’ in the bible? Well, they only say ‘Chariots’ because there was no word for ‘vehicle’. If the word ‘vehicle’ had been around they would have said ‘vehicle’. The Chariots of Fire were actually alien spaceships.”

Peering over at the cabinet that housed his homemade DVDs, I couldn’t help but notice that when he’s not studying UFO’s and Alien Life Forms, he is most likely watching one of the many pornos that are not too well hidden within the same cabinet. I look at stumbling across somebody’s porn collection (or, more specifically, knowing what they use the porn collection for) the same way I look at catching somebody taking a shit. In other words, I know, intellectually, that it happens, but I don’t need to see the physical evidence.

I’m all for taking one for the team, but I think I’ll be sending one of my partners the next time we need to pick something up from this guy.

******************************************************************************

Mike gave a very accurate description of our meeting on his own blog. What can I say about Mike that hasn’t already been said by the other bloggers who’ve met him before me except to say that I agree with the others - Michael’s on-line persona of being hysterically funny, highly intelligent, thoughtful and extremely friendly is, if anything, just a scaled down version of the real-life Michael. We met for lunch at 1:30 and didn’t end up leaving the restaurant until nearly 4:30. It occurs to me that this may have been one of the only times in recorded history where two people who knew each other only through the Internet met in real life without the intention of having sex. Our meeting even featured a surprise guest appearance via phone fromAJ who also lived up to his well-deserved reputation as everyone’s favorite “nice guy” blogger

Mike mentioned at the beginning of lunch his plan to cease operations over at Make Mine Mike. I’m not going to lie to you - I was a little bummed. I don’t even remember if I mentioned this to Mike or not, but his was one of the first blogs I discovered upon entering the Blog-o-Sphere, and I believe he was one of the first people to ever comment on this site when it was a mere 2 of 3 posts old. I’ve used Mike as something of a blogging standard for myself, in that I’ve used his posts as the goal of what I’d like mine to reach someday in terms of writing quality. Mike, I completely understand your reasons for taking time off and I think it is the right decision, but Blogland is going to be a little less interesting because of it. Good luck and keep in touch.

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays

2004-12-24T14:32:00.000-08:00

A sincere thank you to all who have stopped by since I started this back in June. So glad to have "met" you.

Gooch

...Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

2004-12-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

My former boss and current business partner, Bob, is a great guy who I respect and admire, but he’s one of those people who has the annoying habit of always taking the “Devil’s Advocate” position, often debating you over things you know he actually agrees with you on just for the sake of debating.

Case in point:

Our company, considering our small size, sells a pretty incredible amount of product for D., a small manufacturer out of the Midwest. We’re a good fit for each other – their product line has fairly limited distribution, making it easier for a small company like us to compete in the market, plus their line comes with other strategic advantages (like super long warranty periods) that make it an attractive product for our customers and us. We’re an attractive reseller to them because they know that, being small, we have a limited number of lines that we represent so their product will always be pushed heavily by us, unlike some larger dealers where D’s product line is just one of several dozen carried and thus more likely to get ignored.

But more so than anything else, it is our great relationship with Jeff, who manages our account at D., that has caused us to embrace this product line so heavily. Jeff is just an overall good guy. He is reasonably honest as far as salespeople go, calls often just to stay in touch and to see if there is anything he can help us out with and will always bend over backwards for us if we have a special request or need something in a hurry.

Because I so firmly believed we shared such a great, mutually beneficial relationship, it came as somewhat of an insult to me at this time last year to find that in appreciation of our terrific year in sales with his company, Jeff had sent my partners and I one of those generic Hickory Farms beef log packages to share between us.

Before I come off as sounding eternally ungrateful, I should explain that we had purchased an extraordinarily high quantity of product from Jeff’s company that year, meaning a great deal of profit for D. as a company, and by extension, Jeff personally. This was a classic case where I think it would have been less insulting had Jeff purchased us nothing at all, rather than buy us the most impersonal gift possible, a gesture that only signified that Jeff put absolutely zero thought, effort (or money) into the purchase.

What bothered me most was feeling like I had to appear somehow full of gratitude and obligated to push D.’s product even harder than before just because Jeff went through the absolute minimal effort of buying us a log of questionable meat product and a few stale crackers. By coincidence we placed a relatively large order with D. a day or two after receiving the beef log package, resulting in a phone call from Jeff who commented, “You guys sure do appreciate that gift I sent you, huh?” It was real hard to bite my tongue on that one.

In the grand scheme of things, I really didn’t take this all that seriously, but I did jokingly mention to my business partners how tacky I found the gift to be. Bob of course had to take the opposing point of view, attempting to convince me that not only was the beef log package an incredibly kind of thoughtful gesture on Jeff’s part, but also a great and wonderful gift in and of itself. The fact the beef log went entirely untouched for weeks afterward didn’t do a whole lot to further his argument.

A perfect opportunity to call Bob’s bluff came just a short time later. Our account manager at a different vendor had given us a lead that ultimately turned into a six-figure sale for us. We all thought it would be a nice gesture to send this particular account manager a gift to show our appreciation for the great lead. My partners all started throwing out rather pricey gift ideas, like a new tool set, expensive video equipment, etc. I suggested a beef log package (around $20). Bob started to protest, suggesting that a beef log package might seem a bit chintzy considering the size of the sale. I reminded Bob that it was he who had enlightened me to the wondrous joy that is a beef log. I’m sure you’ll all be surprised to learn I’m still waiting for my thank you note from this particular vendor. Nor have we received any more leads from them, come to think of it. NOTE TO SELF: Don’t sacrifice potentially lucrative sales just to prove a philosophical point.

To Jeff's credit, his gift-buying skills have improved greatly over the past year (or maybe it's just because we had an even better year in sales) because we all just received individual bottles of wine from him. The twist-off cap leads me to believe this may not be the finest of vintages, but hey, it was a nice gesture. My business partners must really appreciate all I do around here too, because they got me this:

...Goochin' On: Extended Dance Mix

2004-12-16T23:02:00.000-08:00

Meta-blogging
*Over the last few days I’ve noticed a significant increase in the number of daily visitors to this site. Perhaps it’s mere coincidence, but this coincides with the bombshell announcement from Sloth that she will not be continuing to regularly update her wildly popular "Slow Adventures in Slothville" blog. Like anyone else who puts their writing out there to be read, I appreciate the increased readership, but can’t help but feel a little bit like the girl who only gets hit on after her better looking friend has already picked a guy to hook up with.*

Name Dropping
*My college sweetheart, Kari, ran into Peter Tork of the Monkees on a few occasions. It’s a long and boring story, but the short version is that her mom was very into singing and was heavily involved with a local community chorus and by extension was somehow involved in an annual a capella competition that Tork participated in as a judge. In my years of dating Kari I found it highly amusing how she would so often try to work her connection to this most minor of celebrities into conversation. Her preferred device was the "make a confusing comment that leads to a follow-up question" method, i.e. when someone would mention the Monkees Kari would respond with something along the lines of, "Yeah, that Peter Tork sure is a jerk", leading the original commenter to ask,"Really? Have you met him or something?" and thus giving her an opening to share her story. Seeing as how rarely the Monkees tend to come up in daily conversation, I guess it's possible that I may recall this as happening far more often than it actually did.

I bring this up because with the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events film opening up tomorrow, I find myself in the conflicted position of not wanting to look like a name-dropper by mentioning my very vague connection to the writer of the ASOUE series of books, but would feel equally weird pretending that it doesn’t exist. So:

I went to preschool with Lemony Snicket’s younger sister. Our families become close enough friends (particularly our fathers who both worked in the same industry) that we continued to see them occasionally throughout the years, though I don’t think I’ve seen Daniel himself since his sister’s Bat Mitzvah which was, geez, probably 18 years ago. Our relationship is such that I’m sure he would never recognize me by sight and probably not immediately by name, but I bet I could probably get him to remember our connection within a minute or a minute and a half if I explained it well enough.

I wonder if Mr. Handler brags to his friends about his very vague connection to the writer of "The Gooch On..."* That was a joke, for the sarcastically impaired.

Building a Better Boy
*A running joke between my stepsons and I is how I suffered through an abused childhood because my mom would never allow me to have an Atari, Nintendo or any other sort of video game console. It’s funny, my parents for the most part were incredibly easy-going, but that one thing - the notion that video games were a useless, mind-numbing waste of time was something my mom felt very strongly about. I can still get a rise out of her at the mere suggestion that she buy a Playstation game for either of my stepkids when their birthdays come up.

Today, as an adult, I guess I’m somewhat ambivalent on the subject. In looking back at my childhood, I can say that at no point do I remember ever feeling deprived or wanting because many of my friends had game consoles and I did not, but at the same time it’s not as if I spent the time I would otherwise have been rotting my brain playing video games on any particular worthwhile activity like reading Chaucer or teaching myself how to speak Italian. I think it just caused me to spend more time watching wrestling.*

Dry Spells: An Analogy
I think a very legitimate comparison can be made between the dry spells that a person occasionally runs into in his (or her) personal life and a sales slump that often occurs in a salesperson’s professional life. During both, there is a tendency to make far more out of what in any other circumstance would be considered neutral or insignificant statements or gestures. For example, a supermarket cashier’s, "How are you doing today", the same one she gives to anyone who happens to walk through her line and the same one that would usually go completely unnoticed, can be twisted into a "Hmmm, she wouldn’t say that if she didn’t want me now would she?"

Likewise, during a sales slump a professional salesperson will often obsess over accounts that any impartial observer can clearly see has very little interest in actually buying anything. This would have been a good theory to remember before I headed out to Las Vegas on Monday. We were no more than twenty minutes into the drive when simply in the interest of making conversation I asked my business partner, Kevin, who has been going through a terrible sales slump going on a year and half now, how the appointment with the Las Vegas client had come about. I expected him to respond with something about the customer calling him to arrange the meeting because of a project he (the client) was anxious to move forward with. My heart sank when Kevin instead responded that he had left numerous unreturned phone messages and emails for this potential client before finally getting through and practically begging the client to allow us to travel out to Vegas to demonstrate a product for him.

Now, this type of aggressiveness may be considered good salesmanship in some circles, but when you’re traveling 500 miles round trip to meet with a client it’s preferred that it be for an actual, legitimate sales opportunity, not the result of someone agreeing to see you only to avoid further harassment. Turns out they’re probably going to buy something from us, but not a dollar amount high enough to really justify the trip. Not that I don’t appreciate the opportunity to order $10 scotch and sodas at the Ghost Bar at the top of The Palms.

Going back to my dating analogy - this business trip, while fun, was the equivalent of starting out a night thinking you have a real shot at a menage-a-trois with two hot women who are willing to do anything, including anal, and then realizing that even in the best case scenario the most your going to end up with is a hickey.*

...Irony

2004-12-13T12:01:00.000-08:00

Guess where I'm going on a business trip later today?

Sin City.

Guess what type of customer I'm going to meet with?

A Christian school.

First lesson they teach their students - Move out of Vegas.

See ya Wednesday.

...Cultural Relativism

2004-12-08T10:49:00.000-08:00

Coming from a “minority” religion, I’ve always tried my best, albeit often unsuccessfully, to be open-minded about religious traditions different from my own. I’ve long been of the belief that most religious practices probably seem rather cult-like to those who don’t follow them.

I am completely comfortable in a synagogue service, but I would imagine the whole experience would seem not unlike joining the Moonies to the uninitiated, as they saw a temple full of people chanting in a strange foreign tongue, alternatively standing up and sitting down like robots at the beck and call of the rabbi.

Earlier this year, my wife and I determined that it would be a good idea to expose the children to religion as a means of helping to reinforce the moral and ethical values we try to teach in our home. Being in a mixed marriage and seeing as there were 3 of them and only 1 of me, that pretty much meant we were going to church.

We chose to attend an outdoor Easter service held at a park not far from our house. I tried my best not to be judgmental, but it was challenging. Being used to my own non-proselytizing religion, it was hard not to feel like I had mistakenly walked into an Amway convention the way I was constantly instructed by the minister to spread the gospel to my unsuspecting friends and family. When we were asked to turn around to find a neighbor we didn’t know and introduce ourselves, I had just about reached my corniness boiling point. The situation wasn’t made better by the fact we were in plain sight of some very appealing playground equipment that my stepkids kept asking permission to play on. When my younger stepson, then 8, upset at our denying his request, rolled his eyes, folded his arms and exclaimed, “I FREAKIN’ HATE CHURCH”, I knew ours was an experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I left the service that day feeling rather superior, until I reminded myself that at that very moment the majority of my family was living on a strict matzo diet because of something that may or may not have happened thousands of years ago. I guess no religion has a monopoly on silly customs.

Except there is one area where I’m pretty convinced us Jews got it right. As a kid, all 8 present-receiving nights of Hanukkah, I knew exactly where my bread was buttered.

As a newbie to the Christmas tradition, I, for the life of me, will never understand the logic behind the concept where you, as a parent, drive yourself to the brink of absolute destitution buying gifts for your children and then, BY DESIGN, receive absolutely zero credit for your generosity and instead intentionally convince your kids that the presents under the tree were brought by a mythical fat old man in a red suit who had them manufactured in the North Pole. No offense, but that’s just stupid.

Don't Make Me Do It Without the Fez On

2004-12-06T10:16:00.000-08:00

In the category of "Now I Think I’ve Seen It All", I was watching the latest edition of HBO’s new documentary series "Pornucopia: Going Down in the Valley", where I was made aware that there exists a video where a grossly overweight woman (I’d estimate between 400-500 pounds) is covered in flour, allowing her partner to “search for the wet spot”.

...An Addendum to my "Things to be Thankful For" List

2004-12-01T11:10:00.000-08:00

I suppose it is inevitable that the spectacular eventually becomes the mundane.

Take sex for example. I remember being in high school, when sex occurred for me, at best, sporadically, and thinking how much happier my life would be if I was in a relationship where I could have sex whenever I wanted.

I bet that version of myself would have been quite disappointed in the 18-year-old me. My college girlfriend had come up from the LA area to stay with me for a few days during the Summer while my parents were out of town at a cousin’s wedding. One afternoon after she had just finished taking a shower, she came into the room I was in, walked over to where I was sitting and started to slowly hike up her towel – an obvious invitation for some sex. But my favorite wrestling newsletter had just arrived in the mail, so I chose to decline. It wasn’t that I had gotten bored with sex; it was just that it was happening often enough for me that it simply wasn’t that big of a deal anymore

Professionally speaking, my first year out of college, when I was working a dead-end customer service job alongside people who I’m not sure had even finished high school, spending my days doing what amounted to data entry, I knew that the one thing that stood between me and professional happiness was a position in sales. Not only would the pay be much better, but it would also bring what I truly desired which was the respect, admiration and high-esteem the position brought with it.

When I was finally offered a sales position within the company, I did earn all those things I had hoped for, but also found the job was often stressful, the pedestal salespeople were put on was not nearly as high as I had imagined, and that when you earn more money, ultimately it just means that you end up spending more money. I would never have traded my new position for my old entry-level one, but it didn’t quite live up to the spectacular fantasies I had imagined in my mind beforehand.

Likewise, for years I dreamed of owning my own business. Working for other people, I was often frustrated by silly restrictions on my ability to sell, like territorial limitations, having no control over the marketing that could potentially increase sales and the huge corporate bureaucracy that made it near impossible to ever get anything done.

Don’t get me wrong. Every day I count my lucky stars that I don’t have to answer to a moronic boss, that I now look forward to Mondays instead of dreading them and don’t have to ask permission like a 1st-grader if I need to leave early or want to take a day off.

But even owning my own business has a certain sameness to it to the degree that eventually it just sort of becomes like any other job minus a few annoyances. There are definitely the days when 5 o’clock can’t come fast enough or when I look at the piles of paperwork on my desk and wish I could have some low-level job where one mistake on my part wouldn’t send the entire company into shambles.

So it is nice when something happens to break up the normal routine and remind me of how lucky I am.

Yesterday, I had a sales call at a company that manufactures lube. Sometimes it’s good to be me.

The Three Faces of Gooch

2004-11-26T22:32:00.000-08:00

4-Eyed Gooch (Age 13)

In hindsight, smaller frames may have been a good idea.

Gooch at 15

A supplement to my recent "Making Out in the Middle East" post. Taken right before I boarded the plane for Israel.

Long-Hair College Gooch

A couple months shy of my 20th birthday. Come on, ladies, don't you kinda want to run your fingers through it?

But wait, there's more...

Order now, and get a bonus picture of Gooch with a mullet, ABSOLUTELY FREE!!

Tonight, On a Very Special "The Gooch On..."

2004-11-23T15:25:00.000-08:00

If my life were a sitcom today would have been a good Thanksgiving episode. An issue arose at work within the last few days that threatened to ruin my Thanksgiving holiday. Yesterday afternoon it appeared as if the problem had been solved. Then this morning not only did I learn it hadn’t, but it was worse than I originally thought. Then it looked like it was fixed again. Then it wasn’t.

I am a firm believer that we are as heroic as circumstances cause us to be. On this episode, Gooch learned that when called upon, he can indeed be a problem-solving hero. And what lesson could one be more thankful to learn on Thanksgiving?

We’ll be leaving tomorrow morning for the Bay Area in order to spend the holiday with my family. Good news for you – that is where my most embarrassing pictures are housed. May be time for the obligatory “Funny Old Pictures of Me” post.

Have a good (and safe) Thanksgiving everyone.

Gooch

...Making Out in the Middle East

2004-11-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

When most Americans think of Israel they usually envision one of two things – a country that is invariably involved in a war of some sort or a place where men dressed in long black suits wear funny hats and pray a lot. So it may come as a surprise to non-members of the tribe to learn that to an American Jewish teenager, Israel is looked at as the Mecca of debauchery. You see, #1 It is a tradition for America Jewish teenagers to go on a youth trip to Israel between their sophomore and junior years of high school and #2 Israel has no drinking age. Therein lies the humorous irony of these youth trips – parents send their children on them in hopes that their kids will experience a spiritual journey that will forever solidify their Jewish faith, while most teenagers anxiously agree to the trip knowing they can spend the majority of a Summer getting wasted on their parents dime and quite possibly, get laid. I know it’s why I went.

Upon arriving in Israel we wasted little time in making our way to “The Underground” a popular Jerusalem nightspot so named because to reach the nightclub portion of the establishment requires a trip down a flight of stairs, technically leaving you “underground”.

An immediate disappointment to me was seeing that the group of guys I was out with took no time in congregating around the girls from our own Bay Area youth group. You have to understand that the majority of girls who were on the tour with us were girls I had known for years through Hebrew School and synagogue. It seemed like a colossal waste to travel halfway around the world only to hook up with the same girls I could hook up with back home.

This dilemma was more or less solved for us when the girls from our trip were approached by a herd of Israeli soldiers. Think the “Do you mind if we dance with your dates?” scene from "Animal House". I guess given the choice between soft, pimply-faced, immature American boys and dark, muscular, macho Israeli men, it’s not hard to see why we got left in the dust.

Now poised to do some serious skirt-chasing, I pushed and shoved and fought to strategically place myself next to my long-time friend Danny Katzenberg. This was quite a change of pace for me. Danny and I had been friends since pre-school, but somewhere along the way towards adolescence Danny had turned into a major junior Casanova. I swear, literally (and I do mean literally) every girl I knew who knew Danny had a major league crush on him. Just goes to prove the Chris Rock theory of 90% of the women going after the same 10% of the guys (and then proceeding to complain about the lack of good, available men). Worst of all, it isn’t like it was undeserved. In addition to being unbelievably handsome, Danny was a super nice guy too. There was no way to compete.

I had drifted away from Danny as we’d gotten older for two reasons. First, I was extremely turned off by the group of hanger-ons who tended to follow Danny around like little puppy dogs. Future “Yes-Men” of America. I’m assuming these guys figured that either some of Danny’s magic might rub off on them or that they may be able to pick up some of his leftovers. That type of hero worship just seemed kind of pathetic to me. Also, I theorized that strategically it just didn’t seem wise to be so closely associated with someone that desirable. Same theory as to why you probably wouldn’t open a Sizzler next to a Ruth's Chris. However, on this particular night, when the chance of scoring was actually a legitimate possibility, all my theories kind of went out the window. I figured the least I could do was attempt to be within Danny’s general vicinity so I could be guaranteed to be where the action was.

And this is how I found myself standing with Danny atop the staircase that led to the dance floor. Now, either Danny’s male prowess had been vastly overstated or my negative energy was so powerful that I was sucking all the life out of him because there was nothing going on besides us just standing there. I had honestly never been to a social outing with Danny where he wasn’t flooded by hordes of girls. You could just imagine what it did to my self-esteem to see that the one time I’d ever seen Danny completely lose his magic touch happened to be when he was hanging out with *me*.

We must have been planted there for hours before we were finally approached by two stunningly beautiful girls who pleaded, “WILL YOU SAVE US?” Apparently these two were not nearly as impressed by the aggressive flirting of the Israeli soldiers as were the girls from out own tour group. By saving them, they meant would we go out and dance with them to make them look sufficiently taken. We happily obliged.

Unfortunately, the amount of time we'd wasted just standing around came back to haunt us. We couldn’t have been dancing with these girls for more than 5 minutes when Rob, another guy from our group, grabbed Danny and I to tell us it was near midnight (our curfew) and we needed to hurry back to the youth hostel. Later on in the trip we would come to realize that many of the “rules” were made just so our parents back at home would feel more comfortable about sending their kids off to a foreign country without their supervision, as they were very liberally attended to. But this being our first night, we weren’t willing to take any chances.

Later that same week, our tour group had the opportunity to visit the historic Wailing Wall, one of the holiest sights on the planet. Traditionally, visitors to the Wailing Wall write down a personal prayer to stick within its cracks. Nearly 16 years later, I still remember the prayer I wrote down that day: “Please let Danny and I run into those two girls again sometime before we have to go home”

Should you ever get the chance to visit Israel and have the opportunity to put your own prayer within the cracks of the Wailing Wall, I would recommend against it. It’s a hoax.

...Confidence

2004-11-16T13:58:00.001-08:00

If there is any sort of sadistic quality to my personality it is the joy I get out of watching overconfident people being brought back down to Earth. I would feel bad about this not-so-tender-hearted aspect of myself were it not so obvious I am not alone. How else do you explain the crazy popularity of "American Idol", particularly the first few try-out episodes where people with truly horrendous singing voices look like deer in the headlights, appearing genuinely surprised and confused as to why they were not chosen to be the next Christina Aguilera or Justin Timberlake?

I never know whether to feel sorry for these type of people because of the way they are forced to create their own fictional world to live in as a safe haven against the truth, or to be disgusted at what often appear to be truly massive egos immune to anything resembling reality. Generally I choose the latter.

Like when I was first transferred down to Orange County to take on a sales position. I’m not sure I had even finished unpacking my boxes when a woman in my department (the previously discussed Susie) tried to enlist me as part of her coup to get rid of our boss, Deena, and replace her with herself. Now, Deena was big-time coo-koo; it was obvious from Day 1 she was not long for the company. But why Susie, whose sales numbers held the ignominious distinction of consistently being dead last in the company, thought she deserved or had earned the right to run an entire sales department, I have no idea. Instead of receiving the promotion she was so positive she deserved, Susie was first given a demotion to sales assistant and ultimately, fired.

I got to thinking about all of this last night as I left the gym. I experienced an awkward moment where I arrived at my car just as some guy was sticking a flyer onto my windshield. I have to give the guy credit, his marketing strategy is a good one – arrive at the gym at "rush hour" (6 o’clock-ish) when the gym couldn’t possibly be more stuffed with people and flyer the parking lot with an offer of one-on-one personal training. And to answer the questions posed on his flyer – Yes, I am tired of waiting at crowded gyms, Yes, I am looking for V.I.P. treatment and Yes, I do think my workouts would improve with private training that provides that extra push I need to succeed. I’d be all set to sign up, except, get this – the guy offering the training is kinda fat.

Anyway, if any of you are interested in how to please a woman every time, just drop me an email.

...The Dealbreaker

2004-11-09T14:34:00.000-08:00

At this time four years ago I was dating a woman, Cinn, who appeared on paper to be my perfect match. Which is to say she was attractive (she looked a lot like Minnie Driver), roughly my age and Jewish.

She had a couple of annoying qualities that I found somewhat difficult to tolerate, but not dealbreakers. For one, she had two pet bunnies she talked about incessantly. I couldn’t have a conversation with her on the phone without being given a running play-by-play of every movement in their cage (“Awww, Petey’s giving her KISSIES”).

Second, she still lived with her parents. Now, I lived in Orange County at the time as well, so I am completely sympathetic to anyone who decides to take advantage of free rent as an alternative to the OC’s ridiculously overpriced real estate market. But it got kind of silly having a girlfriend who needed to call Daddy with a made-up story about her car breaking down every time she wanted to spend the night at my apartment.

Cinn was kind enough to treat me to a visit to Universal Studios for my birthday that year. While we were there I stopped in at one of the shops to look for some kind of stuffed animal to buy for my nephew, whose birthday was (is) just three days after mine. He was turning 1. As I looked around I casually mentioned to Cinn that my nephew had Down Syndrome.

Without skipping a beat, Cinn asked me, “When you see a child like that doesn’t it make you not believe in G-d?”

To this day, I have no idea what kind of reaction she was expecting out of me with that comment. Like, was I supposed to respond, “Why yes, I find my nephew so incredibly grotesque and disgusting that I hereby renounce my faith”???

Anyway, fuck that bitch and Happy 5th Birthday Bug.

Love,

Uncle Gooch

...It's All About Me

2004-11-03T21:27:00.000-08:00

I hope you don’t think me arrogant for starting off today’s post with a quote from, well, myself, but it seems rather appropriate, if not all that profound.

From this blog on July 13, 2004:
It is stupid, when discussing your favorite sports team or political party, to refer to them as “we”. As in “We have a much better defense this year” or “We should win this election in a landslide”. If you haven’t been invited to any of the meetings, it’s “them”, not “we”.

Now onto more pressing matters:

Dear President Bush,

Congratulations on your recent re-election.

In honor of your victory, as a way to help jumpstart the economy and also, as you claimed was so important for America during your campaign, to help small businesses succeed, I have a modest proposal for you.

I spent no less than six hours commuting today in order to meet with a potential client, a division of the US military, regarding a fairly substantial project they are looking to move forward with. Even by Southern California standards, that’s a pretty major shlep.

As the leader of this great nation I was hoping you might be able to throw a white Jew from the suburbs a bone (preferably kosher) and, like you did with Haliburton that one time, give them the ok to no bid this contract so all my hard work won’t be for naught should a competitor beat my price by $.50

After all, you wouldn’t want this little guy to starve now would you?

Thanks in advance.

Gooch

...A Non-Partisan Political Post

2004-11-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

You know how sometimes you'll be watching, say, a baseball game, and the score is something like 9 to 4 going into the bottom of the 9th, and yeah, there's a chance the home team can still win, but everyone kind of knows that chance is pretty fucking slim? But the television announcers still try to make it sound like it's anyone's ballgame because they don't want you to change the channel?

That's kind of how I feel about the coverage of the presidential election right now.

It occurs to me this post may sound really dated by the time I wake up in the morning. Sorry about that.

...As Time Goes By

2004-11-01T17:21:00.000-08:00

Among the many petty things that serve to annoy me to no end is the concept of instant nostalgia. Perhaps this concept is best exemplified by the recent "I Love the 90s" special on VH1, where multitudes of C and D-List celebrities waxed nostalgic and shared their misty-eyed memories of things that, you know, JUST FUCKING HAPPENED.

But I may be forced to eat crow on this one. After successfully putting the baby down for a nap the other day (my wife was out spending some much deserved and needed time getting pampered at the nail salon), I started rereading some of my old blog entries.

Let’s be honest. I’m hardly the most prolific blogger out there. I probably average, what, 2 posts a week? Not due to disinterest; I’d love to blog more. But as my sister so eloquently wrote about recently, one of the drawbacks of being a happily married blogger with kids is that my life tends to lack the sort of daily drama that makes for compelling reading. I mean, I suppose I could do daily updates about how I got up, went to the gym, went to work, came home, changed a few shitty diapers, helped with homework, did dishes, watched a little TV and went to bed. But would anyone want to read that?

And it’s not like I’ve been doing this for all that long. I started my blog in mid-June. 5 months at a rate of about 2 posts a week does not a large body of work make.

Nonetheless, here I was, getting all emotional as I rediscovered some of the gems of blog entries gone by. Hey, there’s the one I wrote when I fucked up my left calf right before leaving on a trip to the Bay Area for 4th of July. There’s my one and only attempt at a serious post where I wrote about how I miss living in the Bay Area a little bit. How `bout that one about my ex-coworker, Susie, who once took a massive, stinky dump in my old apartment? Can never go wrong with toilet humor. Awww, there’s the one where I announced I was taking a blogging break because the doctor told us the baby was going to come any day now. I could even see where my missing first post, ironically about how many of my friends have gotten really dull and boring ever since they got married and became home-improvement obsessed, would have gone had I not deleted it fairly early on in my blog’s history because, to be honest, it was kinda stupid.

We’ll always have “The Gooch On…”. They can’t take that away from me.

...Where Everybody Knows Your Name (and Measurements)

2004-10-28T14:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a sales appointment I had scheduled with a police department in what I guess is now being called “The OC” was cancelled at the last minute (as in right as we were pulling into their parking lot) when the Lieutenant who arranged the meeting had to rush out on an emergency call. I had this great spiel all prepared and then some nimrods had to go and attempt to rob a jewelry store and hold its owner hostage.

While it made for something of a wasted afternoon, it did give my partner, Bob, and I the opportunity to revisit on old hangout of ours, The Swinging Door. This was the default after-work bar of choice for the employees at our former job due to its location barely a block away from our old office.

Having been a regular patron of The Swinging Door from when it first opened its doors in 1998 through just a few years ago when my old company moved our office to another city, I couldn’t help but feel a little like a proud parent when I saw it had recently been named one of the “Top 20 Dives Bars in the U.S.” by Stuff magazine. Its success can be solely attributed to their simple but brilliant marketing strategy, which can best be described as “Never underestimate the desire of the average American male to have incredibly beautiful women acknowledge his existence”.

The bar, which is female-owned (she is the one on the far right in the picture from Stuff) exclusively hires extremely hot, porn-star/stripper-looking women to work (in very revealing outfits) behind the bar. For example, she was our bartender yesterday. Kind of like Hooters, but far more intimate and less commercial.

The average guy (read: most), in the course of his daily life, not only has little to no chance* ever to date women who look like this (*except maybe if he makes over 500K per year), but would likely have difficulty getting any such women to even give him the time of day. But come to The Swinging Door, and not only are these women forced by necessity to talk to you, they’re actually likely to flirt with you a little bit too. Maybe even call you “Sweetie”. I have no idea what kind of tips these women make, but I’m guessing they make out pretty well. Something has got to be paying for all those fake tits.

Personally, while I’ve always enjoyed the bar’s laid-back, casual atmosphere and very reasonable drink prices, I’ve never been as excited about the bartenders as most of the guys who frequent the place. Not that I can’t appreciate the sight of a beautiful woman. I’m married, not dead. It’s just that I hate being condescended to. I will admit that I tend to get a little oversensitive about stuff like this (and definitely overanalytical), but I get offended by the notion that these women think it is so rare that anyone who is both A) Female and B) Attractive talks to me that when it does happen I will become so incredibly mesmerized that I'll lose all sense of logic and start throwing money around like a madman. Probably the same reason I’ve never been all that big on strip clubs.

As you can imagine, the patronage of The Swinging Door is decidedly male, I guess for the same reason I would never frequent a place where all the bartenders looked like Chippendales dancers. Who wants to look that shitty in comparison? In fact, it was extremely rare to see any women in the place besides women from my old company, who went there only because of its proximity to the office (and because that’s where everyone else was going). Lucky for me, one of those women was my wife. It’s where we met.

...Gooch Mitzvah

2004-10-23T23:45:00.000-07:00

I’m conflicted as it regards my belief in the existence of Heaven. Intellectually the concept is pretty difficult to swallow. It just reeks of something somebody made up one time and many other people chose to buy into to make themselves feel less freaked out about dying. But on the off chance Heaven really does exist, I do try my best to have my good deeds outweigh my bad ones.

I’m also firmly of the belief that there are some good deeds so powerful that one incredibly selfless act has the power to counteract 100 more minor indiscretions.

Tonight I agreed to let like 6 kids have a sleepover at our house.

St. Peter, I’ll take a Scotch on the rocks.

...My Fifteen Minutes (Almost)

2004-10-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

So I tried out for a game show about two years ago."The All-New Scrabble". Not to be confused with the old Chuck Woolery-hosted "Scrabble" game show from the 80s that bore no resemblance to the actual Scrabble board game.

My incentive to try out was two-fold. First, I live only an hour or so away from Los Angeles and figure you have to take advantage of the unique opportunities living in this area provides you. Second, I had just started my own business and was living on practically zero income at the time. A nice influx of cash would have come in real handy. I was actually disappointed to learn the grand prize was a brand-new, shiny Ford Expedition, though I guess I could have sold it and ended up with the same result.

I passed the initial written test they give you that is supposed to weed out the complete dumbshits. Believe it or not, it was pretty hard. Half the test was answering obscure trivia, the other half was solving word puzzles. Apparently the way “The All-New Scrabble” works is you earn your Scrabble tiles by correctly answering trivia questions, hence the format of the test. Supposedly they make the test so difficult for a reason - the theory goes that when you’re on camera and under pressure you’re going to lose about half your brain power due to nerves anyway, so it probably helps to have a decent amount to spare. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I passed. I don’t think my very fragile ego could have handled the humiliation of performing the Walk of Shame out of the room had I not.

Next was the mock game mode where all of us remaining hopefuls were pit against one another in a pretend game to see how we’d fare. Like father, like son, I guess. Years ago my dad, who is a certified Really Smart Guy (member of Mensa, graduated from high school @ 16, is a very good guy to have on your team when playing Trivial Pursuit) flew down to L.A. to try out for "Jeopardy". Their test is *really* hard. Of a group of about 50-100 people, my dad was one of only about six to pass.

This is the part where he choked. Not only did he have a difficult time mastering the art of ringing in at the proper time; he failed to prepare himself with an “Interesting Tidbit“ to share during the “Get to Know Our Contestants” portion of the show. The best he could come up with was that he participated in Rotisserie Baseball.

His other problem was that he, like me, is of the “show our excitement on the inside” variety of people. Stoic. Even on a subdued show like “Jeopardy” he was deemed too unenthusiastic and was constantly being reminded that he needed to appear more animated. Despite the moral victory of making it to the final round of the Contestant Search, he never did make it to the show.

Having had an extremely brief (as in one night) career as a professional wrestling play-by-play announcer, I thought for sure my “Interesting Tidbit” was unique and interesting enough to ensure my spot on the show. Except they didn’t ask me about that. All they asked is what I did for a living. I figured having just started my own business was fairly interesting as far as careers go, but I guess that goes under the heading of “Stuff That is Interesting Only to Me”. Apparently working in the audio-visual-technology-systems-integration industry isn’t all that fascinating to the rest of the world.

Also, did I ever mention my lack of hand/eye coordination? Or, more appropriately, brain/hand coordination? I knew the answer to every question that was asked during my mock game, but unfortunately so did the very bubbly young woman I was competing against. I successfully rang in only once during the entire game. All I remember is that the answer was “Origami”. I don’t remember the question. Once you answered your question correctly and earned your tiles, you had something like 30 seconds to make your move on the Scrabble board. Did I mention I’m not great under pressure? I’m usually a fairly decent Scrabble player, but I’m the type that takes a long time between moves. Given the short amount of time to play and with too many anxious eyes planted on me, all I could think of was to add an “s” to the end of a word already on the board to make it plural.

I think this may have sealed my fate. The producer temporarily stopped our game to use my move as an example for the rest of the group. An example of how moronic it was. How, like in the Scrabble board game, you are allowed to do fancy moves like combine letters to where you are actually spelling two words at once (horizontally and vertically), a move I had missed, and how doing so might make for a far more exciting game than just adding “s”’s to existing words.

Like my dad, I never did get a callback. But, then again, to date I haven’t seen “The All-New Scrabble” on the air yet. So I still check the answering machine messages pretty regularly.

Fuck Me Gently With a Chainsaw

2004-10-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Life has not always smiled upon me. But sometimes it has thrown me a bone here or there.

As I’ve written about previously, within my first month of college I found myself dating a blond, stunningly attractive, Southern California-bred, big-chested beauty, Kat. I would love to be able to share some kind of ultra-romantic, dreamy, straight-out-of-the-movies tale of our love affair, but, sadly, there is no such tale to tell. All signs that ours was a doomed affair were evident from Day 1.

Our first official “date” as a couple was to a large Friday night beach party. We came to the party together; she left shortly thereafter with a friend of hers and a car full of dudes, none of whom happened to be me. Clearly they were not off to a Checkers tournament. I spent much of the rest of the night pondering that whole “It is better to have love and lost than never to have loved at all” quote. Another goofy platitude to place in the bullshit pile.

As I searched around for a large, heavy object to attach to myself and proceed into deep waters, a girl, Tabitha, who I recognized from the floor below mine in our dorm, walked over and asked if I’d like to dance. As luck would have it, my roommate was out of town this particular weekend, leaving me our room all to myself (and guest).

Tabitha was attractive enough. But it’s amazing how one’s standards raise after getting a taste of the good life. After drinking Dom Perignon, can one ever really go back to Cook’s? If Kat was filet mignon, Tabitha was a nice, tasty, juicy burger cooked just right. Perfect 90% of the time, but disappointing if you were expecting filet mignon.

She had two other strikes against her. One was she dressed funny. I’m not sure if this was a conscious decision on her part to buck trends and prove her individually by creating her own unique style or if she was just clueless. She wore outfits that didn’t seem to fit together properly. Standard for her was to wear a long, heavy, green skirt with a black leather biker jacket.

Also, and I know of no way to say this politely, she had weird boobs. Imagine a rubber band cut with scissors so it is in the form of a straight line as opposed to a circle. That was what her nipples looked like.

The following night we attended our school’s football game together and then went back to her room. I thought for sure I was getting some. Instead, she started in with a long confessional about how she didn’t want this just to be about sex. She then put some CD on (the song of which escapes me) and asked me to join her in a slow dance. Alone in her room.

I think everyone has his or her own fine line of where the romantic crosses over into the cheesy. That was mine.

Meanwhile, I went on a one-man smear campaign, making sure anyone who would listen knew conclusively that Kat was a big-time slutty ho. Bush-Cheney, Kerry-Edwards? They ain’t got nothing on me. The flaw in my theory, of course, was thinking that any 18-year-old guy would look at the fact there was an extraordinarily hot woman within their midst who was more than willing to sleep with just about anyone as a negative character trait. But I digress.

Tabitha was a sweet girl. To give you some insight into her personality and character, the only time I had spoken to her prior to the beach party was in our dorm’s laundry room. The ratio of dryers to students was something like 1 to (a number over 100), so it was not uncommon to find your clothes removed against your will if you committed the sin of leaving them unattended in a dryer for more than 5 minutes after the end of its cycle. Most people just took your clothes and left them in an unruly heap. It was to be expected. Imagine my surprise to walk into the laundry room one day to find Tabitha neatly folding and separating my laundry for me and apologizing vociferously for having taken them out of the dryer before I had a chance to retrieve them.

Obviously excited about our blossoming relationship, Tabitha cornered me one evening in the cafeteria to ask permission to bring a group of her friends to my dorm room the following night to give them an opportunity to meet and get to know me.

Coincidentally, later that same night Kat chose to confront me about my aforementioned smear campaign. She had obviously been planning her opening line for some time, as it was clearly delivered from memory.

“Are you truly an asshole or do you just act like one?"

Truth be told, given that she had at least a week or two to come up with this, I thought she could have been a little more creative. After all, she was a Journalism major. But it was delivered in front a group of my friends, so it had its desired humiliating effect.

As is often the case in fiery relationships like ours, we were making out about 20 minutes later.

The next night, as promised, Tabitha came to my dorm room with a receiving line of her friends. I remember putting her off with some line about a big assignment being due the next day.

Seeing as we all lived in the same dorm, it didn’t take long for Tabitha to discover I was back with the same girl I had spent so much energy railing against. I became accustomed to being the recipient of her nasty scowl every time we crossed paths.

We are defined, at least in part, by the choices we make.

And on and on and on…

...Self-Indulgent Navel Gazing

2004-10-09T17:06:00.000-07:00

Julie H. asked:How did you wind up with/ choose the nickname "Gooch"?
It is an ode to the often mentioned, but never seen tormentor of Arnold on my favorite sitcom of all-time, “ Diff’rent Strokes”. I started using “The Gooch” moniker a few years ago for any on-line activity where I was hesitant to give out my real name.

The Dave asked:If you were an insect about to hit a windshield at 90 mph, which one would you pick and why?
A bee. At least I’d have a chance to say I went down fighting and maybe stung someone on my way out.

With your time left, please expand on the duality of mankind.
I’ll have to get back to you.

Snick asked:How did you and Mrs.Gooch meet?
At work or at a bar, depending on how you look at it. She came to work for the company I was with at the time, but our positions didn’t interact and we worked in different parts of the building so we didn’t see each other much. We “met”, as in actually talked to/got to know each other one night when a group of us went out to drinks after work.

Catt asked:Why did you start blogging? How'd you get into it? What's the attraction for you?
The short answer is my sister started a blog and it seemed like a fun idea. Also, I am a former English major who now works in a completely unrelated field that I very much enjoy but that doesn’t allow much room for my more creative side. This blog provides that.

Tara asked:Ritz or regular saltines? and why?
Ritz for taste, saltines if I have a hangover and feel throw-uppy.

Also, what was your wedding like?
The usual...guests, vows, food, dancing, drinks, a little nookie.

Esther asked: vanilla or chocolate?
Chocolate

Sloth asked: Could you scratch my itch, please?
Depends where it is. I’m married.

Mike asked: 1.How's baby Gooch?
Very well, thank you

2.Do we truly have any control over our destiny? Is time a series of vectors radiating infinitely from every single point, or are they merely arcs leading back to the same ultimate conclusion?
Some, but not complete and a little of both.

3.What's for dinner?
Stuffed pork chops (don’t tell my mom), cream cheese potatoes and sugar snap peas. One of the added benefits of my wife staying at home since the birth of Little Gooch is that she’s turned into a regular Martha Stewart. Every day I come home from work to find new nicknacks decorating the house and a different gourmet meal being prepared. Actually, to be more accurate, she’s turned into a regular Rachael Ray, since I think that’s where she’s getting most of her recipes from.

April asked: What is your biggest talent?
You know what’s sad? I can’t think of anything on Earth that I possess more talent at than the average person. Unless you count knowing a lot of minute trivia about professional wrestling and 70s and 80s sitcoms as talent.

RLB asked: How are your wife's kids (did you adopt them? If so, your kids...) treating Gooch, Jr.?
You have to keep in mind my stepkids are (soon-to-be) 9 and 10, so any free moment they have that isn’t going to school, doing homework, going to soccer/karate practice, Cub Scouts, etc., is usually spent outside doing something with their friends. So a lot of the time I think they forget he is around. But when they are home they are surprisingly sweet with the baby. Ironically, my younger stepson, the one my wife and I were very worried would be jealous and resentful at no longer being the baby of the family, seems far more interested in his new brother (as far as holding/feeding him) than my older one.

Vadergrrrl asked: How many girls have you slept with?
I haven’t even had that conversation with my wife; you think I’m going to do it here? Plus, anytime the answer is "more than a few" people always assume you're lying or bragging anyway.

Let’s just say it's enough that I don't worry about ever going through a mid-life crisis someday where I realize I got married without playing the field enough. I do, on the other hand, as I think I mentioned in another post, kick myself at having stayed faithful during certain long-term relationships that didn’t end up working out, and sometimes try to calculate the hypothetical additional notches to my bedpost that could have been added had I been blessed with 20/20 foresight.

Anne asked: Maryann or Ginger?
Neither. They’re both old enough to be my mother.

Harriene79 asked: Are you the one on the pic found at the upper right?
Yup.

Pup asked: 1. Flying or invisibility?
Seeing as I’m afraid of flying and doubt I would be any braver even if I could do it myself, I’ll take invisibility.

2. Who wrote the book of love?
Not sure about the book. I’ve always thought Woody Allen made the best, most honest, movies about love - “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” in particular.

3. What's one thing (material thing) that you wish you had but don't?
Well, as of this writing my Ford Explorer has nearly 200K miles on it and was just returned to me after an overnight stay at the repair shop, so a brand new Hummer H2 has never seemed quite as appealing..

Kim asked: 1. I have a leaky faucet, can you give me some home repair advice?
Yeah, don’t ask for my help.

2. If your wife gained 50 pounds, would you still love her?
No offense, but I hate this type of question because it requires that you answer either
A) In the way that is sure to garner the desired “Awwww” response, and make you come of as sweet, loving and romantic as possible
or
B) Honestly

3. How tall are you?
6'

Leese asked: 1. I'm with Mikey. How's Baby Gooch?
See above

2. Coming up to the Bay Area anytime soon? Would love to meet Mr. and Mrs. Gooch and kids.
We’ll be up for Thanksgiving. Not sure of exact dates yet.

Cybelle asked: Beatles or Elvis?
Beatles, though I”m not particularly passionate about either, having been born a generation or so too late.

What do you do when no one's looking?
The same thing every other guy on Earth does when no one else is looking.

Aimee asked: Do you breathe under water in your dreams? Do you fly in your dreams?
I have never breathed underwater in my dreams. I have flown in a few.

Sarah asked: do you pee in the shower?
No, but as my brother-in-law, Chef, noted later in the comments I used to have a roommate who was quite open about doing that with regularity, which grossed me out to no end seeing as we shared a shower.

ever wonder if Jesus was the real deal and secretly check in every once in a while?
No. I’ve never claimed to be the world's best Jew, but I’m not a turncoat.

Whoooooooo are you? Tell me who the fark ar you?
Gooch

Jack Smyde asked: Hey Gooch, what's your secret?

Here’s one - I never learned how to drive a stickshift

Sloth asked: Does your baby sleep through the night?
He has once or twice, but not with any regularity yet. He is only getting us up about once a night now though, instead of twice like before. You’d think this would be a good thing, but instead it just makes my wife and I fight over who has to feed him, since it is a one or the other thing now, as opposed to taking turns like before :-)

Does your heart feel twice as big when you look at wee Gooch?
I find that I’m kind of stuck at the amazement/disbelief stage, where I find myself completely in awe of the fact I actually created this living, breathing, human being.

Do I look fat?
No, butI don’t know that I’ve seen a real recent picture.

Varla asked: Do you now say to baby Gooch "Goochie goochie goo!"?
I would be lying if I didn’t admit that has occurred more than once.

Ask the Gooch

2004-10-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

A hectic schedule this week will keep me from posting any fresh material for a few days.

So I thought I would rely on the ultimate blogger shortcut, the "Ask Me Anything You Want and I'll Respond To it in My Next Post"-post. Answers will likely be posted Wednesday or Thursday.

Have a good week everyone!

Gooch

...Have We Read My Blog Lately

2004-10-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

Is there anything more annoying than when people use the term “we” when they really mean “you”?

One of my partners, who is otherwise a really good guy, is especially bad about this. He’s always asking stuff like, “Can we call (insert vendor) too see how quickly they can ship (insert product)?”, “Have we invoiced (insert customer) yet?”, “Is there any way we can call (insert vendor) to check on status (of our order)?”, “Have we called (insert customer) to schedule installation?”

I hate the condescending passive-aggressiveness of it, the way it implies that the asker is somehow a partner in whatever task he’s requesting be performed when in actuality he’s just trying to dump it all off on you.

I don’t mind the work, I just hate the notion that I need to be coddled.

Or I could be overthinking this.

...The Sound of One Gooch Clapping

2004-09-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

My senior year of college I was heavily involved with my fraternity and was also in a serious, steady relationship with a girl who practically lived at my apartment. I look back at these days fondly, but I remember at the time feeling sometimes overwhelmed by the lack of *me* time. So I started a tradition with myself.

Every Monday afternoon while my roommate was at work, my girlfriend was in class and there were no fraternity events scheduled, I would drive over to the local burrito stand, order a monstrous chicken burrito (if I was stoned I’d sometimes order a couple of tacos as well) and a Pepsi and brought it all back to my apartment to eat while I read the latest issue of "Entertainment Weekly". I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I looked forward to this event every week.

I guess I’ve always liked to have these solitary traditions with myself. When I was 9 my parents sent me off to Jewish sleepaway camp for a month, something I hated every minute of not because I didn’t make any friends (I did) and not because the camp didn’t offer lots of fun activities (it did), but because it ruined my daily “Watch `Chico and the Man’ reruns at 11AM” ritual. I have my priorities. And I did get discouraged.

10 points if you’re not confused by the previous sentence.

...A Few Small Repairs

2004-09-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

I am nothing if not realistic. I pride myself on living in the real world as it actually is, not some idealistic fantasyland of my own creation. So am I aware that what “sounds” good is not always the way things actually are. I’m sure that if I were to peruse the profiles at any random Internet dating site, I’d see lots of profiles stating that “I am interested in meeting someone nice, sensitive, intelligent and with a good sense of humor”, and while that is all fine and good, experience has shown me it is rare that the good-looking guy loses the girl to the kind and sensitive one. I’ve also worked in sales long enough to know that despite the platitude that “money can’t buy happiness”, earning a large income can allow an otherwise ordinary guy to date women who would ordinarily be way out of his league. At my last company you could always tell who the top sales reps were by the respective hotness of their dates to the Christmas party.

And I’m more than aware that despite whatever changes have occurred in gender roles over the years, most men are still attracted to women with stereotypical feminine attributes. For example, as much as it often annoys me that my wife’s beauty regimen makes us perpetually 3 hours late for everything, at the end of the day I have to admit I enjoy being married to a woman who likes to look pretty, smell nice, and dress well.

On the flip side of the coin, there is definitely an element of truth behind the porn fantasy where the suburban housewife is so turned on by the plumber who heroically rides in to fix a problem for her that she decides to fuck his brains out. I’m not so archaic as to not understand there are many women out there who are more than capable of handling such things themselves, but this does not take away from the fact that a man’s ability to perform these tasks in a competent manner can only make him more attractive to the opposite sex.

If you ever want to hit me where it hurts, to pinpoint my deepest insecurities and self-esteem issues, just bring up my complete lack of talent in this area.

I don’t think I lived a particularly privileged childhood or anything, but ours was a house where you called someone when anything went wrong. My mom kept strings of handymen fully employed just by consistently having them do major and minor work around our house, leaving me without the opportunity to develop any “do-it-yourself” skills. We always had a gardener so I never learned how to mow or edge a lawn.

I was able to keep this deficiency hidden throughout most of my 20s, when I lived almost exclusively in apartments. It was known only to the various maintenance crews of the apartment complexes I lived in, who I would call to help me with everything from repairing a broken garbage disposal to fixing a closet door that had come off its tracks.

When I bought my first home all was exposed. I gave mowing my own lawn the good college try, but having literally no experience in this area, it always came out looking like a bad haircut. My wife had previously explained to me what a waste of money hiring a gardener would be, but after seeing the results of my labor she flip-flopped her position quicker than a politician.

Worse was the fact many of my close friends happened to buy their first homes right around the same time I bought mine. Unbeknownst to be, these guys had been secretly hiding “Mr. Fix-It” skills that made me look all the more pathetic in comparison. Countless times over these past few years I’ve had to experience the degradation of listening to my friends explain how they just repainted half the rooms in their house, retiled their bathrooms, installed ceiling fans, replaced sinks, planted sod in their backyards, built decks, etc., while their wives absolutely gushed at the extreme masculinity possessed by their husbands. I felt so bad these were services I simply couldn’t offer to my own wife. I often felt like just handing over my balls and tapping out.

A typical repair scenario in my house is exemplified by the following situation that occurred last week:

We had a leaky faucet in the kitchen. My first inclination was to ignore it hoping it would go away. When our tile threatened to ruin amid the river that was quickly developing on the kitchen floor and as the smell of mildew started to permeate the house, I could no longer avoid the issue. I took out my tools and went to work, but in all honestly, my incompetence in this area is so complete that I may as well have just grabbed a scalpel and tried to perform open-heart surgery. Not only did my attempt at repairing the faucet not fix the problem, it appeared to actually cause a second, more pervasive leak, requiring an immediate call to a plumber.

Does it come as a surprise that the plumber ripped us off? That he claimed there was no way to fix the leak and the only solution was to replace the faucet altogether? Most guys in this scenario could have easily called his bluff by replacing the faucet themselves. But that would require knowing how. Or having the aptitude to learn. My sweet, long-suffering wife stayed quiet to spare my feelings, but I could see the look of disappointment in her eyes as I committed hundreds of dollars to a project that could have been easily avoided if I had anything resembling normal masculine skills in this area.

To regain some of my lost manliness, I chose this same day to replace all of the locks on the house myself. I was able to complete the task, but I’m not going to lie to you – based on the quality of workmanship, I don’t like our chances should someone decide to break in.

R.I.P.

2004-09-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

The Big Boss Man
(1962-2004)

If you ever take a trip down to Cobb County, Georgia, you better read the signs, respect for law and order.
You'll serve hard times.
You'll be serving hard times.
You know the Big Bossman'll make ya walk the line, you better watch out boy or you'll be serving hard times.

He carry's a big stick, a ball and chain too, if your looking for trouble, he'll be coming after you.
You'll serve hard times.
You'll be serving hard times.
You know the Big Bossman'll make ya walk the line, you better watch out boy or you'll be serving hard times.

You'll be serving hard times.
Serving hard times.
You know the Big Bossman'll make ya walk the line, you better watch out boy or you'll be serving hard times.

Hard times. Hard times.

You know the Big Bossman'll make ya walk the line, you better watch out boy or you'll be serving hard times.

...Where I'm Going, Where I've Been

2004-09-16T08:53:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had that experience where you're about 3/4ths of the way through a really good meal and you find yourself getting kind of depressed because you know pretty soon you're going to be done?

That's how I feel as I find myself getting near the end of this:

SIDE NOTE: I got contact lenses shortly before my freshman year of high school; something I will always be thankful for as it made high school a far more pleasant experience for me than I'm sure it would have been otherwise. But there was definitely a period in junior high where my thick glasses gave me an uncanny resemblance to Bill Haverchuck

Lucky for me, my depression was eased when this arrived in the mail yesterday:

As anyone who knows me personally will surely attest, I'm about as far removed from being a touchy-feely, emotional type of guy as you're going to meet. But as I sat last night with my two stepsons, ages 8 & 10, who usually roll their eyes when I try to share with them the music, movies and TV shows of my youth, and watched as they laughed uproariously at a perfectly timed, "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?", well, who wouldn't shed a tear?

...A Smorgasbord

2004-09-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

A good reason to quit smoking: Even though your nose has grown accustomed to the smell, no matter how much mouthwash you use, how many times you brush your teeth or how much perfume or cologne you put on, all the non-smokers can still smell it on you. And who wants to be remembered as the person who stinks?

The ying/yang of my life: Stopping at the grocery store today, I actually found a parking space right in front of the store. This happens to me about once every 5 years. Leaving the store, I forgot where I parked and had to walk around and around before finding my car.

Something that will either make you like me more or hate me: Call me a party pooper, but I have an instinctive dislike for any music I can imagine large groups of people giddily singing, clapping or doing a synchronized dance along with. Hence my distaste for virtually all of today’s “pop” country music.

Something that is repeated all the time to the point most people buy it, but is generally bullshit: You can’t judge a book by its cover. I’m talking figuratively here, not literally. I’ve found that my first initial impression of people generally tends to be right in the long run.

Something to ponder: If I had never met my wife chances are I would still smoke dope pretty regularly.

A confession: Maybe it’s immature, but I find great humor in knowing that every person I run across during the course of my daily life has likely sat down to squeeze out a turd within the previous 24 hours.

Choosing just one: If I was truly the last person on the face of the earth and no longer had reason to care about my appearance, I think I would live on a strict M&Ms diet. They’re good.

Stating the obvious: People are rarely looking for an honest answer when they ask if they look fat.

New Dad Faux Deep Discussion: I find it fascinating that newborns have absolutely no language skills. That means it must be impossible for them to think, since they have no language to think with. That's trippy dude.

How to piss me off:Use that “What Happens in (insert place), stays in (insert place)” line on me. Like, what the fuck did you think I was going to do, go babble it to everyone?

A slightly misogynist tendency of mine: I find it difficult to not take a person just slightly less seriously after I’ve seen them naked.

...Early Morning Goochings

2004-09-08T01:03:00.000-07:00

I have a massive fear of death to the degree that just thinking about the fact I will one day cease to exist can send me into major panic attack mode. Ironically, when this happens, I feel like I’m going to die. No amount of logic (“You won’t be around to worry about it, so what’s the big deal?”) or sappy platitudes (“If you spend all your time worrying about dying, you aren’t going to do much living”) or religious beliefs (trying to convince myself there really is such thing as Heaven) does anything to help. When I was a kid I comforted myself by imagining that by the time I grew up medical science would have improved to the point where living forever would be the norm.

I’ve yet to hear an adequate explanation as to why you are expected to tip in accordance with the price of your bill when you eat at a restaurant. Is it somehow harder to carry a plate holding a $40 lobster to a table than it is to carry a $5 cheeseburger? I can see tipping based on the size of your party, but tipping based on price doesn't make any sense.

Isn’t it a bit disingenuous when people complain about athletes not playing “for the love of the game”? Seeing as sports is how these guys make a living, this comment to me is just as ridiculous as someone chastising me for not doing my job for the love of selling integrated audio-visual technology presentation systems that help people communicate information in large groups. I mean, would you criticize a Wal-Mart employee who argued with his boss for proper compensation, working conditions, etc. At what salary level do you lose the right to complain when you don’t think you’re getting what you deserve?

Something I fear worse than death? Confrontations. I’m the type who won’t tell the waiter when he screws up my order, won’t speak up when I think I’ve been overcharged for an item at the grocery store and at this very moment I’m working up the guts to go back to the mechanic who fixed my car to tell him the same problem has reoccurred. I think it all boils down to a deep-rooted fear of people associating me with being a nuisance to them.

The few times I’ve shaved my goatee most of the people who I’m close to have encouraged me to grow it back claiming I look better with than without. While I tend to agree, I get a little offended by the underlying message behind the suggestion: Your face looks better when a good percentage of it is obscured by hair.

I haven’t lost all of my jealous tendencies. The first and biggest fight I ever had with my wife came just a few months into our relationship, almost 4 years ago. We had run into her most recent ex-boyfriend at a restaurant/club and I couldn’t get her to agree with me that he was fat.

I am a proud American, but I consider it a sign of the overall lack of taste and intelligence of the American people that the consistently brilliant "Scrubs" isn’t by far the highest rated show on television.

When I was single, I never knew how to react when I’d see a really good-looking guy with a mediocre-looking woman. Should I be happy that one of the better players in the game had left the competition, making it easier for guys like me to play? Or should I be mad that the guy just screwed up the curve?

I’m not just fishing for compliments when I admit that yes, I’ve had the fantasy about being a porn star before, but no, I’m nowhere near big enough to even be considered for a position.

I could retire tomorrow if I had a dime for every sitcom that ever had a scene resembling this -
PERSON A TALKING TO PERSON B
Person A: Person C is the biggest blowhard, idiot, low-life, good-for-nothing, untalented, useless, egomaniacal, is...standing... right...behind...me, huh?

A source of much guilt for me is the fact circumstances prevent me from spending as much time as I should around my dogs.

It was recently revealed to me that I have something of a friend of a friend of a friend connection with the drummer of Hoobastank . Actually, it’s more of a son of a friend of a brother-in-law type connection. While I’m on the subject, I saw No Doubt at a tiny club in Berkeley about the size of my living room in the Summer between my junior and senior year of high school (1990). The main thing I remember was that guys were stuffing $1 bills down (then brunette) Gwen Stefani’s pants.

...Goochin' On

2004-09-01T15:34:00.000-07:00

I have never, except for maybe in high school, exaggerated the number of women I’ve had sex with. I just count things that are questionable to make the number higher (oral, times when I couldn’t “finish”)

I’ve come to grips with the fact the mere sight of me does not strike fear into the hearts of men

Like George Constanza, I would prefer that a woman think I’m good-looking but have a bad personality, rather than think I’m so-so looking but with a great personality

My theory on marriage: Regardless of whatever problems, disagreements and annoyances you may have with each other, if the sight of each other naked still gets you worked up, everything else will work itself out

I don’t think I have a substance abuse problem, but looking back at my life thus far, most of my fondest memories are of times when I was drunk, stoned or both

I tend not to worry about having more than others as much as I don’t like to think that others have more than me

Among the jobs I applied for as my college graduation grew near was as a WWF play-by-play announcer. I guess it goes without saying that I didn’t get the job. But someone from their HR department did call me. I think that was because I sent them a letter threatening to sue when I noticed they had hired a new announcer after writing me a form letter saying no openings were available

I enjoy watching other people’s relationships as an outside observer, mainly because during the course of any romantic relationship, people show some signs of insanity, and that’s always a little bit fun to watch.

I have an immense, probably irrational aversion to anything schmaltzy to the point I continually root against the Cubs or Red Sox because I know I would never be able to stand the gooey sentimentalities that would be spewed forth if either team were ever to win the World Series. I guess I don't like a good underdog story.

I have a lot of good college stories from my fraternity days, but I don’t like to tell them as much as I used to now that I’ve hit 30, because it feels kind of Al Bundyish (repeating the same stories of your glorious youth over and over and over)

It’s hard to not feel some regret at having stayed faithful during relationships that ultimately didn’t work out.

Maybe you don’t notice it so much from my blog, but in real life I have a lot of weird little personality quirks that I hope my son doesn’t pick up. My wife must wish for this too as she keeps telling me not to act weird around him.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have worked harder at baseball. I could never catch a fly ball, and once we moved to fast pitch from T-ball I had a hard time judging balls and strikes, but I was a fucking awesome pitcher if I do say so myself. No one in my Little League could figure out how to hit off a leftie like me. I think the life of a Major League pitcher would have suited me just fine.

I like Metallica to the degree I own a few of their CD’s and have seen them in concert a number of times, but I don’t admit this to many people because I don’t want to be confused with one of those weirdos whose obsessive fandom is at the point they read Metallica’s lyrics as their own personal philosophy.

People who claim it is a double standard that men who sleep around a lot are called “studs” while women who do so are called “sluts” are full of shit and they know it. Unless you’re Brad Pitt, getting laid takes some work if you’re a guy. If you’re a woman, provided you’re under 200 pounds and remember to brush your teeth, you can pretty much get it whenever you want it. Is it so strange to be more impressed by someone who can kill a bear with a pocketknife than with someone who (to overuse an already overused cliché) shoots fish in a barrel?

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on things romantic, but I’m pretty sure that any relationship that can be described as, “I know he/she has a wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend, but he/she doesn’t understand him/her like I do” isn’t ever going to lead to anything that you look back at fondly years later.

Ever though I was raised in a relatively religious Jewish household and although I will always consider myself Jewish, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that one of the nice things about being married to a non-Jew is that I get to actually participate in the Christmas season instead of feeling like an outsider for all of December.

My first job out of college was as a customer service rep for an audio-visual products company. It sucked in the sense that I went from 4 years earning my degree in English Literature to processing orders for transparency film (the stuff you put on overhead projectors). I comforted myself with the idea that I would write a book based on my experience that would be a take off of “1984”. The end of the book would have the main character genuinely excited and happy about earning an extra $.50 for each additional box of transparency film he could sell. That was an actual incentive program in my department. And the $.50 was split among the whole department, you didn’t get to keep it all to yourself. And I do mean $.50, not $50.

I’ve never told anyone about my blog, not because I’m super secretive or anything, but because I’m conducting an experiment to see how quickly it will take members of my family and my friends to discover it. So far, only my wife has found it and I think that was probably just because I forgot to clear out the cache on our home computer.

...Getting to Know Me

2004-08-27T10:07:00.000-07:00

THE WAY MY LIFE WORKS

- When I have a great tan, am dressed to the nines and have been religious about keeping up with my workout and diet regimen, I will not run into anyone that I know. When I’ve put on weight, am pale as a ghost and am wearing clothes that are years out of style, I will run into numerous people who I haven’t seen in years.

- My relationship with my stepchildren can be playful, loving and sweet 95% of the time, but if we have a knock-down, drag out, voices raised, tear-inducing fight, it will ALWAYS occur the night before they go to their dad’s for the weekend, making it their final memory of me before they come home.

- Sales that I’ve been desperately trying to close for weeks or months will inevitably come in when I’m on vacation, allowing one or more of my partners to take all the glory

- The plumbing in my house will fail around the same time the TV remote breaks and all of our cars are in need of repair

- If I have an important meeting with a client in the morning, I will spill coffee on myself on the way over. It the meeting is in the afternoon, I will be wearing my lunch.

BAD THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED TO ME

- In two separate long-term relationships I have been caught with porn in the VCR. That’s always a fun one to explain. I’m not a porn addict or anything, just very forgetful

- At a previous job I had one of those things occur that I always thought only happened on TV. I had just finished leaving a voicemail for one of the sales managers when I immediately proceeded to bitch and complain to my cubicle neighbors both about this woman herself and the team of losers that she managed. My neighbors freely joined in the conversation. Then I realized I hadn’t hung up the phone completely and all of our conversation had been left on the sales manager’s voicemail.

- I once let my then-girlfriend talk me into writing a nasty letter to my college fraternity because they had neglected to send me an invitation to the fraternity reunion (this was the year following my graduation). Turns out, nobody really got formal invitations, it was just kind of word of mouth. Anytime you write a nasty letter it’s probably best to throw it out as opposed to sending it. Even if you’re in the right, the chances of the recipient saying, “Boy, that’s a good point, I’ve been wrong all along” are pretty low. Nearly 10 years later, I still cringe when I think about having sent that letter.

DEEP DARK SECRETS

- I get a little upset when I think that anyone who I’m really close friends with makes more money than I do

- Related to the above, my wife and I have a bad habit of disparaging others good fortune. For example, a couple we are close friends with live in a beautiful home that is nearly twice the size of ours. We can never describe their house to others without saying something to the effect of, “Their house is great, IF you don’t mind living way out in the boonies”.

- I don’t think you ever truly get over someone who dumps you 100%. If I ever want to put myself in a bad mood, I think about my college sweetheart, who I dated for about 4 years, fucking other dudes

- Even though I co-own my business with 3 others, meaning their success is my success and vice-versa, I get a little jealous when one of them gets a really big sale