Tag: contemporary life

I Wish — The Home Game

i wish

There’s a dinner party game we’ve started playing at our house.  It very simple.  Everyone gets a candle, and everyone gets a bunch of grapes — red grapes in a stemmed glass work best (nudge, nudge/wink, wink.)  You light the candles and turn out the lights.  Then each person, around the table, makes a wish and takes a sip of their grapes.  There are only two rules – 1) After “I wish,” you can’t use the word “I” again and 2) You can’t use anybody else’s wish (not even reworded.)  The first couple of rounds are pretty ordinary – people wish for wealth, health, an end to world poverty – and there’s very little discussion.  However, as the evening wears on and the regular wishes get used up, people start to get creative.  This leads to explanations, questions and some very lively discussion.  Plus, it helps a lot when you have to open a second (or third) bottle of grapes.  Here’s a few recent tidbits — in no particular order.  They’re just ones I remember (somewhat edited) to get you started.

I wish people would stop using the word “authentic” to mean “I’m better than you are.”

I wish Social Media had different levels and a test so all the assholes had to stay with their own group and couldn’t bother the rest of us.

I wish liars would actually have their pants on fire.  It would certainly make elections a lot more interesting.

I wish dogs could talk.  But only when you wanted them to and not like telling the neighbours you pick your nose or haven’t changed your underwear.

I wish celebrities had to tell the truth when they’re interviewed, so we could find out which ones are actually nice, or stupid or whatever in real life.

I wish they’d put warning labels on people the way they do movies.  “This person contains a surly attitude, a malicious disposition and a juvenile sense of entitlement.  Vigilance and avoidance are strongly advised.”

I wish someone would write a decent ending to Game of Thrones.

I wish you could teleport your personality into the microwave so it cooks everything just the way you like it.

I wish college students would pull the stick out their ass and act like kids again.

I wish “iconic” wasn’t even a word.

And finally:

I wish some fictional characters were real — so you could hang out with them and find out what they’re really like.

FYI – If you haven’t guessed already, this is just a drinking game for smart people.

What Writers Think About

ideas

One of the cool things about calling yourself a writer is you get to do all kinds of things that everybody else calls bone-ass lazy.  Stuff like spending hours drinking coffee, taking long strolls through the Internet and staring off into space.  Wordy Wordsworth called it, “… powerful feelings: … recollected in tranquility” or something like that.  This “work” is essential for writers to hone their craft.  The serious upside is you get to discover all kinds of interesting facts, and you have time to come up with even more interesting conclusions.  Here are just a few things I’ve been pondering for the last couple of months.

There’s a town in Canada called Smithers — which means the people who live there are Smithereens.

On average, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world — even though a lot of them are standing below sea level.

Apparently, a huge bunch of people born between 1977 and 1983 are sick and tired of being lumped in with those terminally malcontent millennials.  They have decided to perform a generational Brexit (Genexit?) and want to be referred to as Xennials.  I can’t say I blame them.

In the future, people will look at their electronic devices and think “What a stupid icon for a telephone.”

Despite everybody and her friend claiming they broke the Internet – you can’t.  The truth is the Internet is no longer vulnerable to human attack: there are just too many servers scattered across the planet.  However, before you go all SkyNet/Terminator, 99.99% of all electronic devices are just dumb machines used for storage.

Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago in 1969.  That was 2 years before women got to vote nationally in Switzerland and 8 years before France quit using the guillotine for executions.  Weird, huh?

One of the earliest and most persistent symptoms of lead poisoning is irritability, so it’s interesting that statistics show violent crime (aside from armed robbery) has been steadily decreasing since lead was banned from automobile fuel in the late 1980s.  Coincidence?  Maybe. . .

For several years, universities have been adding puppies to their “safe spaces” to combat student stress and exam anxiety.  Whatever!  The weird thing is nobody is willing to talk about what happens to the puppies when they’re no longer puppies.  Creepy!

Over 100 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Wow!  And, according to the last time they kept records (several years ago) it would take you approximately 93,000 years to watch everything YouTube has to offer.  That is a lot of avoidance behaviour!

In the last 10 years, restaurant revenues, movie theatre revenues and department stores revenues have all declined — whereas the revenues of home delivery companies like Uber Eats, GrubHub, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have all dramatically increased.  If this trend continues, eventually millennials will never have a reason to leave their apartments.  And this is a bad thing?

Andy Warhol was wrong.  In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes of privacy.

And finally:

I think it’s absolutely hilarious that a generation raised on South Park and Family Guy spend so much time being eagerly offended by everything.  Irony is not dead.

Tune In To The Truth

tune in

We all think we know ourselves pretty well, and for the most part, that’s true.  However, since we can only look at ourselves from the inside, sometimes we don’t see the whole picture.  This is when the stylized version of our own private reality doesn’t quite match what the rest of the world sees.  Luckily, people around us are willing to set the record straight — and frequently do.  Here are a few example of how the world can tune us in to the truth.

You know you’re fat when people ask if you’ve lost weight. (Nobody ever says that to a skinny person.)

You know you’re a computer geek when the hot girl in accounting (who has never spoken to you before) leans over your desk and casually says, “Do you know anything about email?”

You know you’re old when people start saying, “Age is only a number.”

You know you’re not actually a valued customer when the auto-voice on the telephone says, “Your call is important to us.”

You know you’re rich when the car dealer doesn’t say, “So, how much were you thinking of spending?”  But you know you’re poor when the kid behind the counter at McDonald’s does.

You know you’re screwed when your lawyer says, “I’m a Sagittarius with Virgo rising.  What’s your sign?”

You know you wasted your time at university when the most common question at work is “Do I get fries with that?”

You know you’re beautiful when nobody talks about your personality.

You know you’re tall when strangers ask you about basketball.

You know sex is basically over when somebody says, “Ewww!”

You know you’re a pain in the ass when your family, friends, co-workers and neighbours all say, “Yes, I know you’re a vegan.”

You know the first date isn’t going well when the person you’re with asks for the server’s phone number – and gets it.

You know your explanation wasn’t good enough when the policeman says, “I’m going to need you to step out of the vehicle, ma’am.”

You know you’ve just asked a stupid question when somebody says, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.”

And finally:

You know your life is about to change when the stranger at your door is carrying a suitcase and says, “Hi, my name is Brenda Sue.  You met me at a party 8 to 10 weeks ago?”