Play Cole: The super spectacular video groove machine

What is Play Cole? What isn't it? It's not food or a monster. It's not a blind man's secret rage. It's not a raincloud or a puppy dog's breath. And it's not your kid sister's sticker collection.

No, Play Cole is actually a group of people who write, direct, produce, edit and act in short films. That group includes:

Jon "Won't eat eggs" Clarke
Andrew "Anybody hiring?" Torres
Me "You talkin' to me?" Me

I planned on writing something about how long we've been doing this (11 months), if we plan on doing more (yes) and what we hope to achieve (immortality). But I'll let the films speak for themselves. Hope you enjoy. We've got a bunch more in the hopper that we'll be posting ASAP.

Watch Play Cole now!

PS: Look for me in "Straight Man" and listen for me as the voice of God in "The First Commandment." Then, get tired of me as I camera-hog future Play Cole films. Viva la France!

Cataloging Christmas

Psaur has posted a cool piece written by Mike O'Shaughnessy called The Twelve Pages of Christmas. In it, Mike recalls the manic, post-Thanksgiving Gen-X'er joy of hunting through the toy section of a 1979 Sears Catalog. The catalog was a talisman for 10-year olds, offering four-color photos of every gadget and game we could ever hope to unwrap at 6:15 on Christmas morning.

After I read Mike's piece, I tried to remember the pages that got my pulse pounding. The genius of the Sears Catalog was in its scope -- the sheer range and number of gift ideas turning individuals into nagging automatons by attrition. I would stare at those pages for hours, circling items with my Bic pen as I nervously chewed the cap. Things I wanted got one circle. Things I really wanted got eight or ten emphatic rings of ink.

You could trace my pre-pubescent flounderings toward teenhood simply by sampling the placement of ink circles on the backs of catalogs from '77-'82, beginning with the Six Million Dollar man action figure and ending with a Real Electric Guitar. (I got the action figure, but my parents balked at the guitar.)

I couldn't remember any of the stuff I coveted in the catalog until I did a Google search (my 12,753th). Lo and behold, some guy has posted a 1979 Sears Catalog up on Flickr.

We all had our favorite pages. Here, mine would be the Sears Video Arcade Cartridge System (who named this??), a licensed Atari knockoff, and the two subsequent pages of game cartridges. (Actual copy: "These Cartridges reprogram the Video Arcade Console...to give you a new set of games." The copy writer must have been 50 and very, very confused by it all. See pages 651-653.

Close behind the Console on my list of most heavily inked pages was probably the page featuring the Atari 400 home computer (p. 654). Headline: "Put an electronic genius to work." All 16K of genius. Actually 16K and a cassette tape drive provided game quality that was leaps and bounds over the 4K or so offered up by the Console. My friends and I used to play around with the Atari 400 at the Fairmount Fair Sears.

I'd type:

10 Print "Brian"
20 Goto 10

And smile as my name scrolled endlessly down the screen.

Also on display at Sears' new computer department: The useless 2K Timex Sinclair, the Texas Instruments TI-994 and, shortly after, the Atari 800. The 800 had 48K, an optional floppy disc drive and a real keyboard. Oh, the text-based, fantasy adventure bliss!

Note: Nerd that I am, I have recently download a complicated set of emulators just so I can relive computer classics like Tunnels of Doom, Exodus: Ultima III and almost every Atari 2600 game ever made.

Another great set of pages: RC cars and gliders (pages 648-649). What was it about the concept of radio control that made me lose control of myself? I imagined mounting spy cameras on the glider and snapping aerial pics of unsuspecting neighbors, or filling the assumed bomb hatch with firecrackers that could somehow be ignited and released with the touch of a button, to rain down upon the heads of my enemies.

I finally did get an RC glider and was so excited that I assembled it in early January. There it sat, awaiting an early spring on the brown shag of my bedroom floor, until my sister stumbled onto it and crushed one of the the Styrofoam wings. I can still recall the sudden guilt in her eyes as she started to cry, just as I'm sure she remembers the startled outrage in mine as I started to cry.

The glider was dead before it ever got off the ground.

Luckily, my friend Mike got the same glider for Christmas and, being more patient, waited until the snow melted before assembling it. His dad took us to our elementary school playground one Saturday in March to send it on its maiden flight. The glider launched by means of a 25-foot rubber band that you staked into the ground. You then hooked the other end onto the nose of the plane, walked backward about 100 feet or so and released. The incredible tension created by the thick rubber band would catapult the glider up to 200ft, according to the starburst on the box.

That particular Saturday was windy. I think Mike's dad even suggested that we wait for a nicer day. But we were in no mood to be fucked with. Mike staked the rubber band into the half-frozen stretch of grass that separated two adjacent baseball diamonds. Then he picked up the radio control as we paced backward with the plane.

It was over so fast that the experience existed only as a flash of excitement and a moment of dumb realization. The glider took off, shot straight up to a height of around 75 feet, then looped back upon itself and took a nose dive straight into the soggy grass of left field. Both wings snapped forward, dropping the amputated fuselage onto its decalled back.

The microscope (622-623) was another big one for me. The model I got was a reflecting microscope with a 300x max magnification. It came with a set of stained specimens: fly wings, parameciums, onion peels. But the real fun was in trapping all sorts of liquids and bits between the frosted slides and peering into another world. Plant cells were all square and neatly stacked, like bricks with little brown nuclei. Amoebas were blobby and shifting. Blood cells clumped like Cheerioes.

At the other end of the spectrum: the telescope (621). The idea of seeing the rings of Saturn was too much to bear. I had to have a telescope. Had to.

Santa's out

I guess the theory behind low budge, viral advertising is that guys like me laugh and spread the word. Well, it worked. Here's a great series of ads for "mother" (whatever that is) that asks you to vote for "Chris Rodriguez" to replace Santa this year. Don't think these are necessarily new, but they're not as old as the awesome 70's art direction suggests.

Vote for Chris Rodriguez

Pizza man

I've worked for three different pizza shops in my life. My first Job was as a pizza delivery boy for Dominoes. My name tag read: "C. Manson." Nobody ever complained, unless their pizza was late.

I've made pizza, cooked it, cut it, sold it over the counter, delivered it, dropped it, stole it and threw it out at the end of the night. I know a little something about the pizza business.

When I worked at a pizza shop in the mall, we made the sauce in a big plastic bucket. After pouring in all the ingredients, we'd roll up our sleeves and stir it with our bare, hairy arms. All the way up to the armpit. We were actually trained to do this. When we were done, we'd use our other hand to slough off the sauce on our mixing arm back into the bucket.

Our boss, Angelo, encouraged us to use his office to have sex with any girls who were willing. He was the horniest man I have ever met. He told my friend Joe that, when he was younger, he fucked a rump roast. He actually bought a rump roast at the grocery store and checked into a motel with it. My question was: "What did he do with it when he was done?" I can only hope he left it on the bed.

I've had plenty of crazy pizza bosses. One was a coke head who used to line his office floor with pizza bags so he could crash during his shift. Another was a short, sweaty, stocky guy from Alabama whose enthusiasm for all things pizza bordered on psychosis. Another was an ex semi-pro pool player who used to have poker games in the back after we closed. One guy assured anyone who would listen that he had trained in special ops and knew all sorts of ways to kill a man. He had nicotine-stained teeth and awful, gamey breath.

Then there was the pudgy, buck-toothed galumph who used to give us daily updates about his new pet: a baby alligator that he kept in his bathtub. "It freaks my girlfriend out."

One day I asked him how his alligator was doing. "Ah, dude," he moaned, "You wanna buy an alligator?" It was getting bigger, he complained, and it kept him up all night with its 'barking.'

What did I know about any of these managers? I was seventeen: to me, they were adults.

Imagine a group of misfit drunks and potheads fishtailing around Syracuse, over lawns and curbs, through filthy, slushy side-streets, backing into parked cars, causing accidents and spraying shattered windshield glass all over West Genesee Street. That was our pizza delivery squad.

One delivery guy, Bob, was a 50-year old, 300-pound professional clown who looked scarier than John Wayne Gacy. He lived downtown, was a Mason, and drove a beat-to-shit Dodge Omni. Bob had a certain prisonyard authority about him. One time when he and I were washing pizza pans, Bob scowled at me and snapped: "Slow down, kid. You're fucking it up for the rest of us!"

Bob always had a little bit of coke on him. Once in a while, he'd leave a line of it on the sink in the employee bathroom and gesture to us with his head to go hit it.

At that same shop we had a manager and two assistant managers who would trade night shifts after the boss left. The assistant managers made less than the delivery guys. So they started to steal at night. Actually, we all started to steal. We'd type in a phone order, then delete it and write the information down on a piece of paper. Then we'd deliver the pizza, collect the money and split it with whichever assistant manager was working that night. Both the assistant managers' last names started with the letter '"R," so we called our little operation "R&R Pizza." We never got caught.

One night a drunk customer got all pissed off about something. I wasn't working that night. Apparently, he wanted to beat the shit out of this skinny, younger delivery guy we called Fergs. Fergs liked everybody. He wasn't really that bright, but he was gentle and friendly. I can't imagine what he did to make this drunk want to kill him, but the guy started chasing him around the parking lot and into the shop. Fergs ran into the back and the drunk started following him, only to be stopped in his tracks by Bob, the 300-pound clown. "You're gonna have to go through me!" he shouted, crossing his arms. From what I heard, the guy just sort of deflated and turned around and left.

I hung around the pizza business for too long. It was an easy gig and it paid better than a mall job. I delivered my last pizza when I was 24. A few years ago, I drove past the old pizza shop and discovered that it has since become a Chinese take-out joint. I wonder if there's still a skinny, faultering little line of coke, camouflaged on the white porcelain sink?

I will now attempt to make qner industries the #1 search result on Google for the phrase "buckle fucker"

OK, here goes:

buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker buckle fucker

It might take a couple of days to register, but join me in crossing my buckle-fucking fingers!

There was that one time

We shot squirrels with BB guns
We stayed up all night trying to build a video game on the TI994a
We egged houses, then ran away from cars we imagined were chasing us
We found mud-caked porno mags in a trash heap near the old big woods
We happened upon a hog nosed snake with a toad in its mouth
We got called into the guidance counselor's office for picking on a kid
We got called into the principal's office for picking on a lunch lady
We got put in a police car for messing up a construction site
We got put in a police car for lighting off homemade fireworks
We threw molotov cocktails into the woods, but they didn't work
We got drunk on a purple mix of liquor and ran around outside
We stood on bull hill with cups of keg beer and laughed about our teachers
We got chased off the golf course by rent-a-cops
We staged a pudding eating contest with one contestant
We did nitrous oxide balloons on a winter night
We dropped acid and yelled at a next door neighbor
We dropped acid and thought Al died in the back seat of a locked car
We sang karaoke at a sports bar
We took two girls to a motel using a fake ID, then got kicked out for jumping on the bed
We dipped coins in Basic H and thought it made them uncirculated
We stuck our fingers with a needle to look at the blood under a microscope
We sat around and came up with headlines for a tabloid newspaper
We watched endless episodes of The Simpsons, Seinfeld and Get a Life
We took the English club to a Stephen King lecture
We wrote poems and taped them up on the wall
We skipped class and watched Nightmare on Elm Street
We ran to the reservoir and did wind sprints at the top
We sucked weight by running up and down the steps in the pool room
We beat up a kid, then ran away from his older brother
We got up on the school roof and took a bunch of playground balls
We played four square at camp
We tricked a kid into eating jack-in-the-pulpit, then got chewed out by a camp counselor
We ate lunch at China House and goofed on the menu spelling
We burned all of our schoolbooks in a bonfire
We had a party with a bunch of sorority girls who mostly ignored us
We got chased by a cabbie
We got stoned and watched Fritz the Cat
We wrote fiction all day
We made a video tape of skits called "Missing Rob"
We went to the Poconos and filmed "Grandpa is a Mean Old Bastard"
We got in a sudden, drunken scuffle with each other a apologized the next day
We talked about beat writers
We went to a Dolly Parton restaurant and watched a staged battle between the North and South
We went to a seafood restaurant, and I afterward I threw up behind a fleet of trucks as you fell down laughing
We played evil Jenga with girls from work
We stayed up all night playing caps

You remember that, right?

Three short stories

Story #1: A crack in the case
Detective Eddie Fulman frantically pushed his way through the crowded police department and burst into Sergeant Brick's office.

"Sarge," he rasped, catching his breath. "I think I got a lead on that McGruder case!"

Sergeant Brick glared at him over a mess of paperwork that cluttered his desk.

"A lead?" he barked. "We caught that bastard three weeks ago! Where the hell you been?"

"Vacation."

Story #2: The mystery of the missing locket
When Sheila awoke, she knew something was amiss. She'd dreamt last night that a strange man in a black fedora had broken into her house and crept around the bedroom as she and her husband slept.

While she knew it was only a dream, Sheila couldn't shake the image. It had felt so real. Too real.

Wiping away the remnants of her fitful slumber, she sat up in bed and looked at her night stand.

"My locket!" she cried. "It's gone!"

Just then her husband walked into the bedroom. "I found it," he said. "You left it in the bathroom again."

Story #3: The greatest story ever
Timmy pulled the blanket up to his chin and smiled as his father closed the book.

"That was the greatest story ever, dad."

His father tousled Timmy's hair. "Glad you liked it. Now go to sleep."

Death of the joke

Remember when the joke was an American tradition? Up until around the mid-80s? No more. We don't have time for the pastoral, 20th Century structure of the joke anymore. This form of storytelling has gone the way of the Members Only jacket. Today, it's all quick observations and shock humor. The joke is dead. And I say: good riddance.

I always hated the joke. You had to listen and follow along with a phony grin of expectation as some putz took you through the build up. ("There's this salesman, right? Right?") You had to remember pertinent details. ("Did I say he had a wife? Well, he did; he had a wife, right?") Jesus, get to the point. This fucking joke's been going on for two minutes and I have my doubts about the punchline. Plus, the story's not so great. You're trying to tell me that a salesman with a buxom, nymphomaniac bride needs to spice things up by visiting a toothless gypsy?

Then there was that annoying change of tone in the teller's voice as he closed in on the punchline. (Here it comes!) And you sort of coughed out an obligatory chuckle, maybe repeating the punchline so the jokester realized that, yes, you understood and now wanted him to please stop bothering you.

I had a friend in high school whose father told long, rambling jokes that never seemed to go anywhere. After a while I realized that he just wanted to keep your attention for as long as possible. It was a form of control, disguised as a joke. I always felt like Woody Allen in Annie Hall during those times, when Alvy Singer had to endure that terrible comic in the checkered sports jacket. (How long can I sit here with this smile plastered on my face? Look at him, mincing around. He thinks he's so cute.)

My friend's father apparently considered himself a master storyteller, as opposed to, say, an insufferable prick. He'd even assume the voices and gestures of the many, many characters that inhabited his "jokes." It was an experience that was at once grotesque and mind numbing.

So now that the joke is dead, please let me be the first to dance on its grave. Goodbye, conversation ender. So long, homicidal thought provoker. See ya in hell, you stilted, empty-headed, watch check-inducing time stealer. You won't be missed by me.

It all reminds me of a story I overhead during a seminar in Boise. It seems there was this curvy blonde secretary, right?

Fancy pants words

This was inspired by an AIM convo I had with Dave.

Want to seem smarter than you are? Try dropping a few of these polysyllabic (5 consonants) power punches.

Juxtaposition: My favorite college word. I tried to get it into every paper I ever wrote. "Hemingway JUXTAPOSES Macomber with Wilson to punctuate the protagonist's impotence." Oh, I smell a B+!

Ululate: It means to wail. I haven't had the chance to use this one yet. Perhaps at the next funeral I'll lean to the guy sitting next to me and whisper: "She's really ululating up there."

Postmodern: PoMo for short, it's a true, blue buzzword of the hipster set. It's traditionally used to describe art that refers to and comments upon earlier or other works of art. But you can use it almost anytime, in any context. Nobody will call you on it.

Phallocentric: Used to describe objects or attitudes that are male centered, usually to the oppression or exclusion of women. College-aged feminists use it to describe their salad dressing.

Misunderestimate: A Bushism. Use it ironically when you're making a sarcastic comment about the President's inability to speak. Then pause and say: "Wow, that was very postmodern of me."

Gestalt: This one is probably falling out of favor, but it's still a good word to use when you're not sure what you're talking about. No need to define it here, just be sure that when you say it you hold your hands up as if offering your audience an invisible globe.

Mendacious: Means untruthful. Don't use it: Just wait for someone to say "mendacious lies" and note that they just said the logical equivalent of "truth."

Filibuster: It's what I hope the Democrats have the balls to do come January. Use it casually, like when someone is running off at the mouth. "You wanna stop filibustering, here?" It usually throws them off long enough for you to run away.

Voluble: Someone who talks a lot. Sounds a lot like valuable and can be used to score passive aggressive points against your boss. "I find your daily meetings quite voluble." Your boss will actually thank you.

Modus Operandi: The way someone operates in a given situation. Bookend it with "whole" and "if you will" to sound casual, like the phrase just came to mind: "That's his whole modus operandi, if you will."

NAME-ian or NAME-esque: As in Dickensian and Kafkaesque. Shows you're well read or tuned into elite culture. Make up your own combinations (Pynchonesque, Koontzian), just be sure to always precede the word with "very."

You know what? I've run outta steam here. Please add your own.

Groton Street, 1993

Those were the days of Nirvana and Lou Reed and Dinosaur Jr. and The Ben Stiller Show and GG Allen on Springer and In Living Color and William S. Burroughs and Dharma Bums and Paul's Brutarian mags in the bathroom and Jimmy's drunken, happy grin and the time I tried to convince Jen that not making your bed was more in tune with the entropy of the universe and therefore wiser, and she scoffed and that pizza shop across the street (Hollywood?), where I called Jim "disheveled and fidgety," and that later burned to the ground and Jack Danielson's, where you got free food on Friday's as long as you were drinking and Murphy's, with it's great Jukebox and the occasional party at the apartment with occasional girls and the scent of weed and Paul's macaroni-and-cheese-and-ground-beef and the Spin Magazine written by the cast of SNL, when the cast of SNL was cool, and Report to Hell and scraps of poetry covering an entire wall and that horrible kitchen that we all tiptoed through and that massive snowstorm that buried cars up to their antennas and gave us another reason to drink and those nights I drank too much and forgot how I got home and watching Jim smash his microphone stand on the raw, stained carpet and exclaiming that I want to try heroin and accusing Mike of dying his hair blonde and talking about Ginsberg in a bar full of meatheads and wrestling with Michelle on my bed in the afternoon and all the insanity of a long, rambling, breathless sentence that was coming to an end, but that we delayed a while so we could be the people we wanted to be just a little longer.

A post for men only.

Last Friday, I had a ten minute cab-ride conversation with a male and female friend about the differences between how women and men communicate. It's a big issue because, while we speak the same language, we don't process what we hear the same way. Not by a long shot.

I am presenting our conclusions here. Fellas, get your notebooks out. (That is, if you even know how to write, you insensitive jerks!)

Solutions are not the solution
When a woman is telling you about a problem, say, at work, most men make the mistake of offering a solution. "Why don't you tell your coworker to stop acting like that?"

Such knee-jerk offerings are often met with a heavy sigh and/or roll of the eyes. "You just don't get it, do you?" they reply. And we feel stupid, because, in fact, we don't get it.

My fellow idiots, the next time you find yourself at the receiving end of such a complaint, try the following:

Her: "Cindy constantly undercuts me in meetings. It makes me so mad!"

You: "I'm sorry to hear that. Cindy is obviously deranged. It must be hard working with a deranged person like Cindy. I can imagine you feel hurt by her actions, and I empathize with you. It would hurt me too. Let's take a moment to quietly feel that hurt together. You deserve better than that. Much better. I'm sorry if my voice cracked a little there. I just can't stand to hear about such injustice, especially when it happens to someone as wonderful and talented as you. Perhaps Cindy has a bad relationship with her mother. Tell me about your relationship with your mother."

Of course, you're walking a fine line here. Such a strategy can quickly backfire if she concludes that you are wuss or a sarcastic asshole. Which brings me to my next point:

Men are surface listeners, women are interpretive listeners.
Say you tell a guy friend: "I went to the store and bought some tomatoes that were on sale."

In all likelihood, he'll conclude the following: "He bought some tomatoes that were on sale."

Let's look at the same exchange with a woman.

Her: "So what did you do today?"

You: "I went to the store and bought some tomatoes that were on sale."

She might interpret this as: "He went to the store. That shows initiative. And he bought tomatoes, which means he knows how to cook. A man who cooks is a man who knows how to take care of himself and the people he loves. That's good. And the tomatoes were on sale: he's good with money! Unless he bought inferior tomatoes just to save a few cents. Would he do that if I were dating him? Would he dare try to pawn off some rotten tomatoes on me -- maybe hide them in a sauce -- just to keep a few nickels? What kind of a person would do that? A real man would get the good tomatoes. What a rat. He probably wouldn't make a good father. Next!"

And all this happens before you manage to blurt out your next Cro-Magnon sentence. Which might be something about socks or peanut butter, or some other inanity that we men find ourselves going on about.

Let's run through this tomato scenario again and see if we can improve the outcome.

Her: "So what did you do today?"

You: "I thought some more about how unfair it is that Cindy is being mean to you at work."

All this leads me to my point: Men are from Mars and women are from some other planet, like Jupiter or Mercury or someplace. I wish there was some sort of self-help book I could buy to help me sort these differences out.

That's all I have to say. A lot of this probably isn't news. Or even new. I may have heard these points on TV or in a standup routine. I don't know, I have a bad memory. Ladies, I hope I haven't offended you by posting this. Or offended you by calling you "ladies." I was just trying to share my feelings. Even if they were of the typically male chauvinistic variety.

Seriously, I'm sorry. No, you're right. I know. Yes, I am a jerk. I see that now. Next time I'll think before I...What's that? I didn't...But...