Did we really need that?

Last night, I went to the mall for dinner around 8:30.  When I got there, I remembered that I had a couple paychecks that I hadn't had a chance to deposit.  (It's the Summer...I don't have a lot of free time, and I have no free time when banks are open).  There's a Capital One bank with ATM machines there, so I grabbed by paychecks, as well as another check I had, and made a plan to deposit them after dinner.

So, it's around 9:30 when I finally make it to the bank.  It's obviously closed, but the ATMs are still open, so I figure I'll just fill out a deposit slip and put the checks in the envelope at the ATM.

I head right for the little table and start filling out the deposit slip when Danielle sees a sign on the ATM that you don't need to do it that way anymore.

You see, in my day, we told the ATM how much money we were depositing.  Then we put that money in an envelope and the machine processed the deposit.  However, now we're apparently in this amazing future world where instead, I just put a stack of checks in the ATM machine, it scans them, and tells me how much they add up to, then I confirm the deposit, and a new generation of people that don't know how to add on their own can be created.

So, my first impression is "Wow, that's awesome.  It's the future!!"

Then I put my stack of checks in, the machine sputters for a bit, then returns them and says that it can't make the deposit at this time.

Perhaps, a minute later is when this stupid POS will start doing its job, so I try it again.  Sputter, delay, returned checks and another slip saying it can't make the deposit.

"Maybe it can't read them?  Maybe just try one" Danielle suggests.

Makes sense, let's give it a try.  Or maybe it's just this machine.  I'll try the other one, since there's another machine right next to it.

So, I go through the whole process again, which includes inserting my ATM card, entering my PIN, pressing the button for 'deposit', then 'to checking', the 'confirm' that I'm ready to insert my checks.  This time I only put in one check. 

Again, it sputters.  Then I get this error message:

"We are unable to return your check at this time."

Then the machine goes black.

I'm not even shitting you.  This seriously happened.

I was not on TV.  No wacky host jumped out to tell me I was punked.  No horns went off that I was the big winner of some bizarre ATM game. 

Nope, the machine took my check, told me to go fuck myself, and went to sleep for the night.

So, I'm left without a check.  Without a receipt of any sort stating that it took my check.  And no indication whether it actually counted the deposit.

I ended up having to insert my ATM card three times, enter my PIN three times, push the series of buttons to choose a deposit three times, and the super scanner failed all three times.

Technology...you suck.  And did we really even need that?

Painting a Nursery

You ever see those lovely commercials, where a husband and wife are playfully and lovingly painting a nursery for their soon-to-be new arrival.  Well, here's the reality:

• Your wife is not gonna be there, because the fumes from the paint are "harmful to the baby."
• It's gonna be like 100 degrees in the room because it's hot out and you need the windows open, plus there's no blinds because you needed to remove them in order to paint.
• Because it's so hot, you're only wearing a pair of shorts, but you're still sweating your ass off
• Paint is getting everywhere because the roller spits little mists of paint all over your hand and face.  And somehow you got paint on your toes, and left a bunch of marks on the floor?
• You know after covering half a wall that you're going to have to put on at least a second coat, which means when you're "done", you're at best halfway there.
• You're already 3/4 of the way through the only can of paint your wife bought you and you're still not done with the first coat, so guess who's going to Home Depot...on a Sunday...to get more.
• And after you complete all of this painstaking labor, you know the little jerk is gonna piss, shit, and draw all over the walls in crayons or something all before he's three years old.

Where's that commercial, Behr???

Top 10: Having a Baby

My posts have been few and far between over the past couple years, but I'm hoping that as a journal to myself and other expectant fathers, to be posting more over the next year or so.  And yes, you read that right, the J-Man is expecting a little baby boy in August. 

So, in light of this incredible news and some changes around the house that I've been noticing, I give you a new Top 10 List.

The Top 10 Way You Know You're About to Become a Dad
10.  A "crib" is no longer a cool term for your house.
9.  The 20% Off coupons you get from Bed, Bath, and Beyond in the mail are now like gold, to be treasured.
8.  You even know that the Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons work at Buy Buy Baby
7.  After years of praying, your wife's boobs, are in fact, growing
6.  Instead of glancing at the attractive woman pushing a stroller at the mall, you're looking at the stroller to see which kind it is.
5.  You know that Graco and Chicco are not new late night hot spots.
4.  Your wife has gone from not farting in front of you, to telling you that she hasn't pooped in four days.
3.  A sonogram picture is your facebook profile picture...wait, no, please don't ever do this.
2.  You know EXACTLY when your wife's last menstrual period was.
1.  It's Saturday afternoon, your wife is out of town, your friends are at a bar watching sports, and you're painting a nursery.

And now, back to painting.  Ugh.

A New Era

So, while starting this blog back when I did was a bit ahead of the curve, I have finally crumbled under all the talk and jumped on the backside of the curve that is Twitter.

I'm not really sure exactly how it works right now, but I made my first tweet, complaining about how they put "Washington" into songs on the local radio stations. It truly irritates me, and while I'm actually a big fan of "The Good Life" by OneRepublic, I find myself shutting off the song when it comes on the radio because I know they really don't have "friends in Washington", they're in LA...and I'm fine with that. Don't change the song, radio stations. It's stupid.

But I digress, back to the point at hand.

So, since I have found myself becoming more and more lazy when it comes to writing full blog posts, perhaps my future is in writing little tidbits about the stuff that cross my mind, right when it crosses my mind. My hope is to get something along the lines of my "Brain Farts" but broken down into individual one liners. We'll see.

For those that know how to use twitter, I'll try to hashtag some of my funnier ones, and probably some of my not-so-funny ones as well, with #dirtyfilter or #brainfarts. And when I'm just bitching, like the radio thing, I put #angryjew.

It's a new era, I tell you. Let's see how long this one lasts. I even put a link button the site.
#thishasepicfailwrittenalloverit

Rapture?

So, apparently the world was supposed to end or something yesterday. At least that's what I saw on the internet and throughout people's facebook statuses, etc. And that got me to thinking...who makes these predictions? And what makes their prediction worthy of growing to the point where millions of people were talking about it? Did they pick Animal Kingdom to win the Kentucky Derby last week, and as a follow up to their predicting masterfulness, decide that yesterday was the end of the world? The streak apparently ended at one there.

In any case, I felt that since the world didn't end yesterday, I would let you know when the world is actually going to end. I know, I know. How do I know? Well, that's very simple. You see, I once predicted the Kentucky Derby winner three years in a row, and I also predicted that the world was not going to end yesterday. So, since I'm on a bit of a streak, I figured I'd go with it. To add some credibility to it, I also happen to watch a lot of Nat Geo and History Channel, and seem to pick up on patterns pretty easily. And what's the world but a bunch of complex patterns being repeated, over and over again.

So, without further ado (and sorry, this is not a funny post), I will inform you that the world is going to end:

Slowly over the course of the next 19 months.



You see, it's foolish to believe that anything catasclysmic will occur that will wipe out the Earth at one set time short of a meteor of substantial size hitting the planet. Instead, the Earth will slowly adjust to the alteration of the gravitational pull of the Universe aligning over the next 19 months with a series of earthquakes, volcanoes, superstorms, and other natural disasters until the world as we know has been altered and the climate system and axis of the planet is changed.

Based on what we've been seeing over the past year or so, it would seem that Japan, Iceland, and the Caribbean will likely be the ones first affected by the shift, with all adjacent areas affected by the resulting tsunamis, ash clouds, and superstorms created by all the molten ash and heat sent into the atmosphere.

My recommendation would be to look to the past in order to realize where is a safe place for refuge. And where did there appear to be great civilizations in the past that are mysteriously vacant and the land seems inhospitable? Nazca in Peru, Egypt and the surrounding desert area, and of course, the predictors of the next alignment, the Mayan areas of Mexico.

My reasoning is if there has been any realignment in the past, it would have wiped out large areas or buried them under the sea. These areas have not had this occur, instead, the land just become inhospitable, turning to desert or extreme jungle. When the shift occurs, assuming it's a cycle and not a lineal adjustment, then we can assume (or hope) that these places will return to being fertile areas under the new climate, and will also be safe from flooding since they have remained above sea level.

So, there's my prediction. As I have mentioned earlier, I did predict that the world would not end yesterday and I also once predicted the Kentucky Derby winner three years in a row. I also predict that I am going to get out of bed now and brush my teeth to begin my day. So, I'm on a roll. Sorry, Earth, 17 months is it. Start moving, people.

Don't Mind Me

So, in a perfect segue from my last post, I thought I would share this tale of "a pain in my ass" since, despite its embarrassing aspects, ends in a humorous exchange.

A couple Fridays ago, I went to go see the Dan Band in concert. Great show, it was actually the second time I've seen them perform. If you don't know who they are, they're the "Total Eclipse of the Heart" guys from "Old School." In any case, I went with a large group of friends, and the show started at 8 PM. Yeah, I know...who does that? We followed up the concert with a trip to a bar in Adam's Morgan, and next thing you know, I've been drinking pretty hard for a stretch of 6 hours.

At my advanced age (well, guess it always was this way), all this alcohol means one thing, I'm gonna have the shits. And like fine clockwork, I'm three shits into the day by noon on Saturday. It's getting raw downtown (sorry to get graphic, this post's only gonna get worse) as I proceed to take two more in the next couple hours.

I bounce back nicely with some Gatorade, and going about my normal day, but the following day, I'm out playing in my football game and my ass is seriously itching me. The itching continues, and sure enough, looks like I have a hemmorroid.

Now, I've probably gotten three hemmorroids in my entire life, and most of the time it's just a mild itching or irritation that I deal with and eventually it goes away. So, I figured this would be the same situation, and just lived with it the rest of the day. And Monday. And Tuesday. By Tuesday afternoon, it's actually hurting to move around, which was new, so I decided to pull the old Austin Powers and determine if, in fact, Preparation H does feel good...on the hole.

Sadly, not the case.

Instead, we've got blood!!! Oh shit, what the F is going on with my ass!!???

I quickly stop using the Prep H and pray for a miracle. But I continue to bleed. By Sunday of the following week, I'm starting to freak out (don't google medical ailments, there's a lot of crazy shit out there) and I do what I rarely ever do, I schedule to see a doctor.

And after all that lead-in, here's the funny part of the story.

So, I head to the doctor on Tuesday morning, and tell her (yeah, that's right) of my symptoms. She decides she's gonna need to take a look so we go to a different examination room. Since she can't apparently be unsupervised with her hands on my ass, another woman in the office is called upon to join the show. Swell.

This other woman appears to be something like a receptionist, but at this point, I really don't give a damn. The doctor instructs her to show me to the room, which is towards the end of the hall. As I walk into the room, there's a second door on the wall to my right and a third door on the back wall that leads to bathroom. In the center of the room, there's a long table, and next to that is all the doctory stuff and tons of lube. Swell.

The doctor tells the "receptionist" to lock the other doors from me, and then tells me to undress and put on a paper blanket, that's folded on the exam table, then she heads out of the room to go do something. The "receptionist" walks over to the door on the right and locks it, then awkwardly fiddles around before exiting the room and closing the door we all entered behind her. Alone in the room, I look towards the open bathroom door and wonder why the doctor said "lock the doors," yet the "receptionist" only locked the door on the right. It's just a bathroom, so I just go about my business, drop my pants, and sat down on the table with the blanket over me.

It's really thin, so my junk kinda showed through, so I tried to lift my legs up a bit, but the blanket was kinda small, so my ass and balls were likely showing. After fiddling for a few minutes, the doctor knocked on the door, I angled to the side keeping most everything covered for the time being, and in she walked with the "receptionist."

After some banter, I lay on my side for the inspection, in a borderline fetal position, with this tiny loin cloth dangling over me as best it can. It is at this moment that I realize why the doctor said "door(s)".

I hear a door opening sound from the bathroom, which is currently wide open and directly in front of me. Within 2 seconds, there's a 70+ year old woman with gray hair, that I remember seeing in the waiting room standing there, looking at me. Unsure what to do, I did what came naturally, I waved and said:

"Hi there, you can go and close that door."

Thankfully, that awkward moment passed without too much incident. Meanwhile, the doctor begins berating the "receptionist", I'm still sprawled out on the table, and with a flush of the toilet, the old woman nicely reopens the door, before exiting the bathroom through the other door she entered.

Oh yeah, don't mind me.


(That's the end of the story. So as not worry anyone, I'm fine-ish. I ended up going to a surgeon on the doctor's request later that afternoon to have a bloodclot removed and biopsied from my ass. If you never have this type of procedure done in your life, consider yourself the luckiest person in the world. I have never taken so much Vicodin, and still I felt pain. A true pain in my ass)

Your Standard Late Night Genetalia Humor

I know it's been forever, but I had a few funny moments in the past couple days that I wanted to write down so that I wouldn't forget them and so others could read/hear them.

And what else would these final lines have to do with, but genetals. It seems that any respectable night out drinking with friends, this time to celebrate someone's farewell from the DC area, always finds a way to turn to talk of boobs, butts, balls, and bulges. (I know, it was a stretch, but I had a nice trend going).

So there's a bunch of us, all sitting around when someone brings up whether anyone has ever felt fake boobs and how they feel compared to real boobs. Despite my wife sitting right next to me (yes, I'm married now. It has been a long time), I decide to field this one, having had the privelage of feeling two and a half sets of fake boobs in my life (not counting strippers). You're probably thinking to yourself, "a half" and you're just gonna have to keep guessing.

But I digress, after a quick description, and some cross looks from the ladies in attendance, I felt it best to throw out what I felt was a great metaphor, though it was lost on most of the people since we were about 4-6 drinks in by this point...thus my poor decision to field this question in the first place, but I'll get to that. So here's my metaphor:

If someone gives you a glass of orange juice and a glass of apple juice, you can quickly tell that while they're both juice, they're not quite the same. And you can also tell very quickly which one is which. So if someone asks you to compare them, you really can't. I can tell you that this orange juice is better than other orange juices I've tasted, or that I prefer orange juice to apple juice, but you really don't directly compare them.

And that, my friends, is the difference between real boobs and fake boobs. And it is also the original derivation of the term "compare apples to apples."

So, despite this brilliant metaphor being lost on most of the people in attendance, what was not lost on my wife was the fact that I described what fake boobs felt like. She did not find this humorous in the least, and countered that I would not appreciate hearing about her feeling one of her exes penises, to which I countered:

Um, if you hooked up with a guy who had a prosthetic or otherwise enhanced penis, I most certainly would want to hear about that. That's freaking crazy. You only hear about that in porn.

Again, she was not amused.

Moving forward in the night, we somehow get onto the topic of male grooming habits. And from there, it naturally segues into the topic of "manscaping."

For those of you that don't know what this is (and I only recently learned this term after I was confused by the Dos Equis commercial where he doesn't know what this is), manscaping refers to trimming of your pubes in some way shape or form. I haven't figured out if it means shaving it, sculpting it, trimming it, or what, but it has something to do with cutting it in someway. Anyways, I've surprisingly had several friends throw out in passing that they shave the business or otherwise clean up down there, and my immediate response is always, "Why?"

And once again last night, the same answer was given to me:

"Oh, it makes your dick look bigger."

And to that, I had this reply:

"Exactly how big were your pubes??!!!"

And this one pretty much ended my night. A metro ride and some sleep later, and it still amuses me.

Fast forward to this evening and I'm driving with my wife when she apparently scratches herself on her inner thigh. I catch this out of the corner of my eye, and we have this exchange:

Me: What you doing scratching your junk?
Her: I'm not scratching myself and I don't have any junk anyway.
Me: Sorry, what are you doing scratching your junk drawer?

And we laughed. Because you see, well, you put your junk in the...well, you get it. It's just your standard genetalia humor.

A Christmas Story

Sorry for the extreme gap in writing posts. I would imagine this is gonna be the case for my blog, if I even continue writing in it at all, but when some funny stuff occurs, I'll try my best to put it up.

So let me take you back to this past Christmas Eve. I spent the week up in Western PA with Danielle's family, which was a first for me. This would also be my first Christmas away from my immediate family.

Having grown up in a predominantly Jewish household, our exposure to Christmas was primarily through our grandmother, who was Methodist, and through "Santa Claus" visiting when we were children. Over the years, we figured it was easier to exchange gifts on Christmas Day as well, even when Santa had gone the way of the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny.

Nonetheless, Jesus and the religious side of the Holiday was never a part of our celebration.

And so this Christmas Eve, when Danielle said it was a family tradition that she and her parents go to church for midnight Mass, it was going to be another first for me. My first time at a non-Jewish religious event.

So there I am, sitting between Danielle and her father, about six rows back from the front, and the ceremony begins. A rousing rendition of some song is played using only bells, and the mood is quite jovial all around.

The pastor begins to speak and begin the ceremony by lighting the five candles. Forgive me for my ignorance as to what exactly they mean, but I am certain that the final candle he was to light was called the Christ candle, symbolizing Jesus Christ.

He lights the first candle with an aim and flame, and then proceeds to light the other three surrounding candles using the light of the first candle, much like my typical Hannukah lighting. And then he goes for the Christ candle to complete the act.

But it doesn't light.

He tries again, but to no avail.

And then once more, before exclaiming that we are having technical difficulties.

He places the lighting candle back into its spot and reaches for the aim and flame, hoping for better results.

Alas, the results are the same.

And that's when I look down at Danielle. And she looks up at me. And I point to myself, and mouth the words, "It's my fault."

We laugh silently and as I sit there, uncomfortably aware that the Christ candle would not light on this the night of his birth, I play out the scenario, that I am glad did not occur, in my head (though I could easily see occurring in a Ben Stiller movie):

The priest looks up from his stand, aim and flame still in hand, frustrated by his inability to light the sacred Christ candle to begin the service. He addresses the congregation, and asks simply and sternly,

"Excuse me...Is there a Jew among us?"