My Musings

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Thursday, November 21, 2002

Dan’s Sad Story

Those of you who have been with this blog for a while are probably starting to get annoyed by how self-centered it is. I mean, all I ever do in here is talk about ME, MY life, MY attempts to fiddle with MY blog, MY thoughts on various subjects of literally no importance, and so on. If someone who didn’t know me read this blog, they’d think that all I ever do is update my blog, try to come up with fitting adjectives for musical instruments, play in the band, run AIM contests, ponder the deeper meaning of the squirrels I periodically find lying dead on the sidewalk, and just generally complain. Which is pretty much true. And not very interesting. Hence, the compromise—while this blog will still remain very much about Boris, I will every now and then try to include things from other people’s lives—which are infinitely more interesting than mine—starting with this very entry, which you are now reading. Or at least, I think you’re reading it. I mean, how could you be reading these words without reading them? Well, I guess somebody could be reading this blog out loud to you. But would that count as reading? Hmm. You know, I think I just hit on a big topic here. Very big topic. We’ll have to discuss it sometime.

Later. Right now we’re going to discuss Chris. Chris is a great kid. He plays the bass, which is a sweet instrument, not to be confused with the bass drum, a crappy instrument, and definitely right up there with the piccolo on the list of instruments that should never have been invented. Chris thinks that saxophones are the Coolest, provided we’re limiting the discussion to just band instruments. Otherwise, he says, basses are definitely the Coolest. Clearly Chris and I have some conflict here. But there is one thing that we do agree on, and that is, namely, to quote Chris, that “flutes are the worst instruments ever.” I would also like to quote Chris on his opinion of piccolos, but that would be a little inappropriate here. Way to go, Chris! I’m with you all the way, buddy! Another cool thing about Chris is that he has, without a doubt, the second best AIM profile ever. The first place definitely goes to Dan, with his profile that…well, I won’t ruin it; you should just see it for yourself. I would post Dan’s screen name here except he gets really touchy about me giving away his screen name to people, just in case they turn out to be ninety year-old ex-convicts with a penchant for stalking 18 year-old boys or something. But if you know Dan, and you know his screen name, definitely try to check out his profile before he changes it.

Chris’s profile is one of those Sub-Profile thingies and it’s really neat. It has…well, lemme just open it up and see here…crap! Chris just signed off! Well, hopefully I’ll get most of it correct from memory. The 1000-something character limit imposed on normal AIM profiles (actually, it’s more like only 800-something characters; for more information on this shocking development, see “Final Contest Details” entry below) is gone in the Sub-Profile, so Chris can make it as long as he wants. There’s a little thing that generates a random Yo Mama joke on the front page every time you open it, along with links to a quiz, some quotes, a profile, and other cool stuff that I can’t remember at the moment. Also—this really made me tingle—there’s a “journal” thing that is frightfully similar to a blog, which Chris periodically updates with his witty entries. So basically a Sub-Profile is like a blog, except it’s much cooler and has more features and is conveniently stuffed into your AIM profile, and though Chris’s isn’t the first Sub-Profile I’ve ever seen, it’s definitely the nicest.

And finally, there’s a guestbook. This guestbook is the main reason I started talking about Chris in my blog, because undoubtedly one of the saddest and most pathetic things in this world of ours right now, right up there with world hunger and the AIM character limit, is that Chris’s guestbook currently has only two entries in it. Can you guess whose they are? Well, I won’t tell you. If you want to find out, you’ll have to add cbearfunk into your AIM buddy list and, the next time he’s on, look at his profile. Chris has told me that he is really very upset that nobody has signed his guestbook, and since my blog has a steady readership of about one people or so, he has asked me to advertise his profile here and try to agitate people to sign his guestbook. It doesn’t have to be fancy; you could just do “Hi I’m Ashley I have no idea who the hell you are but Boris says you’re cool and I trust Boris so here I am signing your guestbook bye!!!” And the nice thing about Chris’s guestbook is that, unlike my blog, once you’ve signed it, you never have to read it or look at it or even talk to Chris ever again—just one signature is all Chris wants.

Okay, Chris—I tried. Oh, and I forgot to tell you—advertisements in my blog are $5.00 per word, so if we do some quick calculations…fire up the ol’ word counter…let’s see here…370 words…ooo, what an even number…at five bucks a pop…that makes…um…how come I can easily find the differentials of logarithmic equations, but it requires an inhuman amount of effort for me to calculate 370 x 5 in my head?…grrr…and the sad thing is I’m too lazy to go get my calculator…37 x 5 is, I think, 185…add the 0…so Chris, you owe me $1850.00, please check my math, and since you’re such a great friend, I won’t charge you for the whole “Chris is a great guy” segment; that was on me. Pleasure doing business with you! If you don’t have cash, that’s okay, I take checks, make ‘em payable to “Boarass.”

And now we move on to the second non-Boris related topic of this blog entry, which is—he was briefly mentioned earlier—Dan. Dan’s awesome. He likes to spike his hair so that his head looks like a bunch of miniature plastic traffic cones are super-glued to it, presumably to attract girls, and, oddly enough, it sometimes works (more on that later). What’s most important about Dan is that he is the only person who, like I asked, left me a written record of his thoughts on musical instrument adjectives. There’s a lot I could say, but I’ll just let the record speak for itself:

Dan says: saxaphones [sic] are the coolest...i [sic] agree (although i [sic] don't agree that they are the stereotypical jazz instrument...alas the most frequently played jazz instrument is trumpet) [who cares? HE AGREES THAT SAXES ARE THE COOLEST!!!]
Dan says: as for trumpets...i [sic] think "best" fits better than "greatest"
Dan says: oh no wait
Dan says: "bestest" [most definitely not a word]
Dan says: yell yeah! [I’m assuming he means “hell yeah” here]
Dan says: but just ta [sic] let ya know, i [how many times is he gonna leave his “I” uncapitalized?!] always thought of saxes as much cooler than trumpets...i [groan] wanted to play them way back in 5th grade but...*sigh*...couldn't produce a single note from the damn thing [Dan, brother, I feel your pain]

But the real reason I bring up Dan is because I want to share with you guys an amazing story about what happened to him, which he related to me on Monday during bowling practice:

As some of you know, Dan leaves school at lunch to take a couple of post-secondary classes at Columbus State. Well, last Monday he got there a little early, so he sat down at a bench and got out some homework. There he was, innocently doing his homework, minding his own business, not trying to impress or impale anybody with his hair spikes or anything, when, all of a sudden, without warning, a green beam of light shot out of the sky and sucked him up into a spaceship where a bunch of blue Martians with rubber gloves began to…

Oops, wait, that’s from the other story that Dan said I WASN’T allowed to put in my blog. My bad! So, um, you guys didn’t read that. Yeah, so there he was, sitting on the bench, innocently doing his homework and so on, when, all of a sudden, this totally hot—and I mean TOTALLY HOT—90 year-old ex-convict with a penchant for…wait, wait, that part comes later. What happened then was this hot college chick sat down next to Dan and blatantly started checking him out. I can’t imagine that the bench was all that big, so I’m sure this created quite an awkward situation. Now, if this were me, I probably would have scared the girl away by, I don’t know, maybe faking a series of traumatic apocalyptic seizures, and then run home to write a blog about what happened. But Dan doesn’t have a blog, so this option wasn’t open to him. He had no choice but to rough it out and see what resulted. Dan coolly kept at it with his homework, all the while noting that while this girl got out a bunch of papers and pretended to do stuff, she was really quite awful at keeping her eyes (and her true intent) to herself. Moments passed. Glances were thrown. A few of Dan’s exquisite spikes started to melt and I think one of them fused permanently to his head. Finally, when the tense silence reached fever pitch, the girl slowly extracted a small scrap of paper, and then a pencil, and then she began to write, laboriously, a logarithmic equation that she had just been dying to differentiate all day. That’s right—her phone number. She took one last look at her latest catch, the cute mystery boy who apparently overdid it a little with the hair gel that morning, one last longing glance, and then, just as she was about to hand over the piece of paper that would inexorably change their lives forever, she turned into a blue Martian ex-convict and started eating Dan alive. Well, not quite that, but I wanted to somehow get across the magnitude of the horribleness of what happened next: she saw his class ring. Instantly, the tension that just moments ago could have been cut by a knife dissipated as though it had been smashed with a wrecking ball. A series of startled and disgusted expressions flashed their way across the girl’s face as she hurriedly packed up her stuff and left the bench, leaving Dan to sit there, alone, and cry.

That’s pretty much exactly how Dan told me the story, except for maybe some of the more obnoxious parts involving Martians, and definitely not the part about crying—Dan most certainly skipped over that little tidbit. But we all know it’s true, don’t we?

And the moral of the story is: don’t buy class rings! They’re a rip-off, they make a really loud annoying noise when you rap them against a wooden table AHEMdanCOUGH, and they don’t even have real gems. It turns out that the big blue thing in the middle of Dan’s is just glass. Crikey, for 300 bucks you think they could stick a real lapis lazuli in there or something. Plus there’s the fact that the single most beautiful opportunity to ever grace Dan’s life vanished into a steaming dog turd solely because Dan had his class ring on that day. Well, Dan wears it every day, though whenever we’re sitting around a wooden table I always wish he didn’t, but in any case he always does, so his grief right now is strictly traceable to the fact that he bought it.

Finally, Dan—don’t sweat it, man. There are other fish in the sea. Never mind that most of them suck while the others probably don’t want you. You started dating before some of us knew what a girl was, so you have nothing to be ashamed of. Heck, some of us haven’t even technically started yet. So don’t let setbacks like this one get you down, or like that one girl you went out with in sixth grade who eventually threw a rock at your house with a note attached to it saying, “Congratulations! You have just been dumped!” By the way, Dan, what exactly did you DO to her?! I didn’t know sixth grade girls could get so angry! But anyways—Dan, I’ll always be your friend no matter what, whether you’re going out with a hot college chick or a 45 year-old hairy housewife. On a side note, I was just wondering DAN OH MY GOD YOU IDIOT WHY THE HELL DIDN’T YOU GET YOUR ASS UP OUTTA THAT BENCH AND CHASE AFTER HER?!?!?!?!

.: posted by Boris 9:06 PM

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