Category: What’s wrong with you?

Dear Diary …

So we’re about to enter that time of year again where I always ask myself the same question … “Where the heck do all these people come from?”

I don’t get it. We spend 11 months out of the year with the same crowds and traffic patterns, and then all of a sudden in the month of December it feels like there’s about a million more people crawling all over the place.

And I’m not talking about crowds at the malls or something … that makes sense. It’s holiday shopping time, so of course people are doing more shopping than normal. But suddenly there’s also a huge line at the drugstore, Taco Bell, and pretty much just everywhere you turn … people.

Who are these people? And where are they the rest of the year?

I go out and drive around at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday in July and it’s dead, but make that same drive on a Tuesday in December and suddenly there’s people all over the place.

Who are you???

And where do you go in January?

Do you live in caves up in the hills and you only descend to Christmas ornaments and peppermint flavored things? And is that what you live off of when you hibernate for the rest of the year? I wanna know the answer to the mystery!

And while we’re talking holidays, can I just go ahead and give the eulogy for Black Friday? Cuz it is dead.

Now … not that I was ever gonna be one of those people shoulder-blocking old ladies out of the way for a $20 television, but I will admit there was some charm to this big huge shopping day where everybody got crazier than a cuckoo clock and the deals were insanely awesome. Again … I wasn’t going out there, but I did at least like to hear about it.

But now? I’ve already been hearing for two weeks … “The Black Friday deals have already started and go ALL month long!”

Well then guess what? That means Black Friday don’t matter anymore cuz it’s the same at 29 other days.

You had to ruin it. You had to get all greedy and try to get more sales. So you scaled it back to Thanksgiving. And then … you scaled it back to the Monday before Thanksgiving. And now it’s the whole month.

Well … rest in peace Black Friday. You’re dead.

Till next time Diary … I say … Goodbye.

Dear Diary …

I’ve said this before, but clearly nobody is listening, so I will say it again … just louder … PULL UP!!!

That’s right … pull up. When you’re at the ATM and you’ve gotten your money … PULL UP. Don’t sit there … “Hey let me put this money in my wallet. Oh … then I gotta put this receipt somewhere. OK … Put the car in drive.”

No … no … no … no … NO!

You do all of those things AFTER you pull up and get out of the way, cuz I’m sittin’ here behind you twiddlin’ my thumbs. Oh don’t mind me … I have ALL the time in world to live by your schedule.

When you’re at the drive-thru … pull up!

I was behind a woman the other day at the drive-thru … and all I can assume is that it was the first time in her life that she had been to Taco Bell, because that’s what it felt like waiting behind her.

SO … many … questions.

Why so many questions?

“The number 4 … what’s in that?”

Ummm … the things on the screen next to the number four? How ‘bout that?

And God bless the person working the speaker, because they then asked the worst possible question … “Can I get you anything else?”

I know it seems like an innocent question that you could ask a normal human, but this was a cyborg who had never used a drive thru before because her response was …

[[SILENCE]]

Yeah this went on for a really long time … I’d say at least 10-15 seconds before she replied …

[[PAUSE]]

“Nah”

Nah??? After all that you deliver a “nah????”

Again … I understand that your life is absent of all meaning and urgency, but some of us wanna shove a beefy Frito burrito in our throats thank you very much!

And finally Diary … If you’re my wife … and you park in our driveway … PULL UP!!!

Look … I love my wife. She’s the love of my life … smart, beautiful, great Mom, business woman … but this chick leaves me hangin’ in the driveway all the time.

You see Diary … we have a driveway that has one row in, but then it splits to two spaces at the end so we can park our cars side by side. The only problem is … she never pulls her car up.

OK … not “never” … but enough times that I come home from work … and there she is … right in the middle of the driveway. “Oh I didn’t know you’d be home yet!”

Yeah … well … I am. And because she’s pulling back out soon to go back to work … now I gotta park on the street like some sort of peasant … or … get back outside and move my car when it’s time to go. Both of those are completely unacceptable first world problems, thank you very much.

Even worse are the times I get home first … park in my spot … only to wake up in the morning to have my car blocked in. Now I gotta play valet driver and move both cars … which at 4am … is torture. (Actually, everything at 4am is torture, but you get the point.)

“Oh I was going to move it later. I forgot.”

Here’s an idea … just PULL UP and park it in the spot to begin with!!! Why are we not just doing that?

Does your car feel happier parked in the middle of the driveway or something? Does it get scared all parked up in the corner?

And I’m sorry … but this is also a HUGE double standard here, because we all know darn well if me … the MAN … was the one doing this all the time … I would be considered the worst husband in the universe. But because she’s the one doing it, it’s more “Aw what’s the big deal? Just move your car and deal with it.”

No! I don’t wanna deal with it! You want equal rights? (And I absolutely agree that you should have them.) Then you gotta PULL UP in order to get ‘em.

Till next time Diary … I say … Goodbye.

Dear Diary …

We all have different hobbies, tastes, and interests. That’s pretty obvious, right? So then why in the world do so many people feel the need to open their mouths about things that they aren’t personally into?

“Never seen an episode of Game of Thrones in my whole life. Don’t care to either.”

[SLOW CLAP]

Oh I’m sorry … I just assumed you were expecting some sort of standing ovation for your impressive declaration of awesomeness.

Last time I checked, “Game of Thrones” didn’t have 260 million people watching it every week, so clearly there are humans in this country that aren’t tuning in to it or “This Is Us,” or “Walking Dead,” or whatever the heck it is.

You don’t watch something? Big freakin’ whoop. But don’t be posting about it like you’re some kind of TV martyr that’s better than the people that do. Something tells me you aren’t reading the encyclopedia during that hour of free time in your life or figuring out how to bring on world peace, so just shut your snackhole and let these people enjoy the things they enjoy.

And while I’m at it … If I post a story about a celebrity, there’s no need for you to reply “I have no idea who that is.” Well congratulations to you, Lord Uninformed. Oh and just in case you were wondering, there IS this thing called “Google” if you wanna find out who the person is.

Moving on Diary … What kind of alien lived in your house before you did? I ask this, because there always seems to be the most bizarre, other-worldy decisions that were made. For example … when you go down to the electrical panel in a house, that thing is NEVER labeled correctly. “Living room” is never the living room, “master bedroom” is a light bulb in the garage, and so on and so on. Not to mention the four or five random unlabeled breakers that are seemingly attached to nonexistent parts of your house. Who labels these things?

And then there’s there’s the products and the fixtures … In my last house the light bulb went out over the oven, so I went to the store to buy a new one. Guess what … of the 247,000 lights bulbs they have at the store … not a single one was the one that fit my oven. It wasn’t even on the internet! THE INTERNET!!!! The place where I can by 20 year old jugs of Crystal Pepsi or a statue of a cat drinking a margarita … but no light bulb replacement for this oven.

Where did they buy this oven … Yugoslavia? How is this even possible?

And yet this seems to happen every time you need a refrigerator filter, or washing machine part, or whatever … your model is magically the model that has weird shaped everything and doesn’t work with anything offered at the store. How did we even make these things in the first place, and why are they always in my house???

Till next time Diary … I say … Goodbye.

Dear Diary …

Here’s something I don’t understand … EVERYBODY says they’re busy. Ask anyone, “Hey how’s everything going right now?” …

“Oh man … I’m really busy right now.”

Or better yet … ask them to do something …

“Oh man … I’m REALLY busy right now. Sorry I didn’t get back to you right away. Busy busy busy!”

Hmmm … OK …

I get it … everybody thinks they’re busy. And hey … I think I’m busy too. So it all makes sense. But what I don’t understand is … despite CLAIMING they are busy … everybody else sure does seem to like to take up MY time. So how can they really be THAT busy when it seems like all they ever wanna do is have long meetings and boring phone calls with your friend Zack Jackson?

For example …

I had to sit on a phone call last week for work. A LONG phone call. An hour going over all these fancy bells and whistles and functions of our new K92 Radio app. (Download it by the way, because I’m SUFFERING for you enjoyment so DOWNLOAD IT!!!!)

Anyway … I get done being shown all features and blah blah blah … and at the end of the hour the dude says …

“OK … I’d like to go ahead and schedule a follow up call so I can show you the rest. It’ll take about a half hour.”

AHHHH!!!! NOOOOOO!!!!

No more calls. No more times. You had an HOUR. If I can’t learn it in an hour … I DON’T WANNA LEARN IT!!!!

These are things I can’t stand … I call them the “Time Suck Sagas” because they NEVER seem to end.

Think about the times you’ve had something go wrong in your house, and it just becomes this Time Suck Saga. You spend an hour hunting down a person to come to the house, service person comes out, and either they can’t find the problem or don’t have the proper part to fix it. So then it becomes ANOTHER time … and that time comes and goes and the thing still isn’t fixed … and then it’s ANOTHER time … and on and on and on. Hanging over your head and refusing to go away.

Diary … I have an electrical issue in my house with a couple plugs … years … YEARS this thing is going on. Nobody can fix it … they just all say “hey let’s spend a ton of money and rewire the whole house.” NO! Don’t wanna. You find and fix the ACTUAL problem.

It’s all just one giant time suck.

Not to mention the fact that any time you try to have a service done … they’re late … or they don’t show … or they push you to another day.

And they always say, “Sorry .. I got real busy on another situation.”

You know what? Just ONCE … I wanna be this “other” situation. Why are they always ahead of me in the pecking order? You be busy with ME … not them!!

Till next time Diary … I say … Goodbye.

Dear Diary …

This is it. I am over it.

This has been used as an excuse for far too long, and it’s time for it to stop.

You are grown ups. It’s time to take responsibility for your life and stop using “I overslept” as an excuse.

Now let me be clear. Sometimes it DOES happen, and can be a total accident, but oversleeping should only happen to a normal person about one time a year. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking to all of you that use the “overslept” excuse about once or twice a week.

And there’s various varieties of you offenders.

First, it’s the “I sleep through all of my alarms” people.

The story here is always the same. It’s some person that sets 27 different alarms that go off every three minutes, and yet somehow they still manage to turn each and every one of them off and go back to sleep.

And to me … the solution is simple. Just wake up. That’s it. No other tip or trick. Alarm goes off … get up.

“But I’m just so tired and my body wants to go back to sleep.”

I’m sorry … that doesn’t work for me. It’s time to put your big boy and big girl pants on and get up anyway.

Cuz guess what? I wake up at 3:30 every morning, and it suuuuuuuucks. But I do it, because that’s the time I WAKE UP whether I like it or not.

“Do you ever get used to it?” NOPE! But I do it anyway.

Look … I know you don’t WANNA get up. Nobody does. Too bad! Not an excuse.

Another offending group of people are the “I turn my phone off at night” people.

This one is less for oversleeping and more the person who conveniently is never available when you’re in a situation and you need them. You call them 600 times, text them another 600 times, and you never hear back until conveniently three hours later they say … “Oh sorry, my phone was off.”

No. You don’t get to do that anymore. You’re a grown up and with a grown up job and grown up responsibilities. Trust me, I don’t wanna call any of my coworkers at 5am, but sometimes there’s a problem and I NEED to.

“But I’m sleeping!”

Oh well!!

When’s the last time life always went exactly the way you wanted it to?

Hey … in a perfect world none of us would ever have an alarm and we’d all live at the beach and be independently wealthy and the whole universe would get along. But this ain’t a perfect world.

Plain and simple … wake up. No more of your sleep excuses. They’re done.

Till next time Diary … I say … Goodbye.

Dear Diary …

Ladies … I am here to save you today. Save you from having to have a difficult discussion with the men in your life. I’ll do it for you. It might hurt their feelings for a little while, but the good news is they’ll just be mad at ME. Not you.

You can just play dumb and say something along the lines of … “Yeah … I mean … he said it … but actually … maybe you wanna give it a try?” That’s your approach you can take.

So here it is … men … listen up …

For the love of God and all that is wonderful in this world, would you please go buy yourself a second pair of shoes and stop wearing those sad sneakers all the time?

Guys … I know you don’t realize it because you’re … well … guys … but women pay attention to the shoes you wear and it counts for A LOT.

So when you’re walking around town, and work, and the club, and everywhere in between with your same sad pair of 1987 white New Balance sneakers, you are giving off the raw sex appeal of a virgin who still lives in his Mom’s basement.

Dude … seriously … burn those shoes and start over. They’re barely good enough to be lawn mowing shoes.

“Whatever … I don’t care about shoes.”

That may be true, but that’s not the point. SHE cares about shoes. And you care about what SHE thinks, don’t you? You wanna see a naked lady again at some point in your life, right? Well then trust me on this and get yourself at LEAST one pair of halfway decent shoes because your current K-Mart fashion ain’t gettin’ the job done here.

There you go ladies … you’re welcome. And when your man comes home and starts askin’ questions, just blame me for the whole thing.

Moving on Diary … can I just ask a big picture question here …

Who … on this ENTIRE planet is still watching infomercials?

Now you would assume the answer is “nobody,” but if that were the case, there wouldn’t be any infomercials on TV anymore, and they are still there. So that means SOMEBODY is watching and buying this stuff.

Let me give you a peek behind the scenes here at the Mornin’ Thang Broadcast Palace. We have a TV in the studio, and every morning it’s on some kind of news channel. And I hate the news. All it does is highlight everything bad in this world and make us all think things are never going to get any better. But I have no choice.

Because what I WANT to do in the wmorning is watch food. People making food, talking about food, eating food. Food is the ultimate happy place, and that’s how I think everybody should start their day … happy.

Here’s the problem … the Food Network … still to this day … shows INFOMERCIALS all morning instead of cooking shows. You’ve gotta be kidding me!!! That’s better programming than using actual shows with real humans?

Who in their right mind is watching these things? You can watch basically any show or movie you want at any time, and you’re sitting there watching Cindy Crawford’s Beauty Secrets instead … what is wrong with you????

Stop doing that. I need those to go away.

Till next time Diary … I say … Goodbye

Dear Diary …

I think I’m to the point now where I’m just going to tell people not to get me gifts anymore. And this isn’t some high and mighty “I have everything I need, please give to the less fortunate.” I DON’T have everything and I need, and I DO want more stuff, but now my gifts don’t even end up being gifts anymore, so there’s really no point.

What am I talking about? This …

Now when you’re an adult, it’s really hard when somebody puts you on the spot and says, “So what do you want for your birthday?” I mean, when you’re five years old you can immediately launch into a laundry list of things you want. Heck, I think my son started his Christmas list for this year roughly around 2pm on Christmas Day last year. There’s ALWAYS something you want when you’re five.

But when you’re an adult, it’s a lot harder. Especially because a lot of the things you want that are on the top of your head are just too dang expensive to be a gift.

“Hey want do you want for your birthday?”

“A car. I want a car.”

And yeah … that doesn’t really fly unless you’re married to guy who owns Facebook.

So really what I thought would be the perfect gift for me would be Amazon gift cards. That way if I did see something I wanted, I could just order it with my gift card. Or … if I wanted a really high ticket item, I could just collect these various gift cards, let them add up, and then use them.

Yeah … that would be a perfect plan. If I was the only person on earth. Problem is … I have family. Family who have access to my Amazon account. And they take my gift card. Every … single … time.

This year I got a $25 Amazon gift card for my birthday. Guess what I got myself?

A remote control car for a kid’s birthday party, and then with the remaining balance my Mom took it and bought a cookbook.

What the hell man?

“Oh I think maybe I owe you money … it said something about there being a credit on your account?”

Uhhh … yeah. That was mine.

Here’s the part that drives me crazy … you don’t HAVE to use the gift card balance. You can always opt out of it and pay in full. But they never do that. They just take my gift card and say “Oh … sooorrrry.”

And look … I understand that in a lot of ways this makes no sense at all, because you can easily just argue, “Yeah well you still have that $25, because otherwise you would’ve paid money for that kid birthday gift,” but I think you and I both know that it never actually FEELS that way if I go and buy something else after the fact. The gift card feels like free money. The gift after the fact does not.

I seriously might need to just set up my own secret secondary Amazon account. I’m not cheating in my life. I’m not lying about anything. I just need to hide all my gift cards from everybody I know . Otherwise I ain’t never gettin’ another present again in my life!

Till next time Diary … I say … Goodbye