sorry, but making it to your business meeting/pilates class on time does not trump saving someone's life

I bet ambulance drivers have a pretty dim view of humanity.

stand and deliver

I was completely unprepared for the speech class I took my freshman year of college.

First I just want to say, it was totally not my fault. In high school speech, we could do no wrong. We chose frivolous topics, and never did any research whatsoever. We'd throw some silly presentation together at the last minute and the teacher would be delighted and say she admired how much effort we put into it. For the "informational speech," a guy stood in front of the class and read--word for word, in complete monotone and without looking up once--an article he tore out of the newspaper, a summary of a baseball game. He got a "C."

So you can easily see why I thought my college class would be more of the same. Not to mention, some of my friends in other speech classes were doing fun speeches with little to no research. But not my class. Noooo, we were supposed to do a series of speeches on one topic, and get this, it was supposed to be (gasp!) something of substance. Stuff like censorship or euthanasia. Topics that (gasp!) require research.

I've never been a big fan of research, and you have to remember that this was back in the olden days before you just looked everything up on the Internet. Back then you had to go to this place called the "library" and read these things called "books." The whole process was terribly time-consuming. So while I struggled to come up with something I knew enough about that I could avoid doing research, the other students were crafting creative and thought-provoking presentations about subjects that were actually relevant and meaningful.

One very cheerfully earnest young lady did a series of speeches in which she explored which was more likely to give you cancer: an apple that had been sprayed with pesticides, or a can of Diet Coke.

I wish I could remember what she ultimately concluded, because that would sure be an interesting and useful thing to share here.

in case you're wondering, no, I'm not much fun to watch TV with

I may watch more than my fair share of sports-related television (and by "watch", I mean "be in the room while sports are on") but I end up absorbing a lot of advertising that is targeted toward guys. And I've noticed that these commercials are firmly rooted in fantasy, while ads marketed to women are more reality-based.

Commercials geared to men are all along the lines of "You can hang out on a beach full of scantily clad women/drive a shiny sports car along an abandoned mountain road/grow a full head of hair again/become grotesquely muscular."

Women, on the other hand, have to put up with crap like "You just mopped the floor, and then the kids and the dog came running through the kitchen, leaving behind muddy footprints. Oh, dear."

Really, marketers? Is that the best you can do? These ads have to be designed by men. Who else would presume that while guys get excited about fancy cars we are swooning over mops?

obviously(ish)

Goodwill sent me a postcard. Seems they just opened a new donation drop-off place nearby. On the card they listed a few things that are not accepted, such as stained or water damaged items, large appliances, and…animals?

I had to check it again, just to make sure I didn’t read that wrong. Nope, “animals” was on the list. For real.

This tells me that on more than one occasion, somebody has tried to donate their pet to Goodwill.

Sure, that makes sense. My first thought upon entering any thrift store is, Hey, I wonder if they have any hamsters or kittens in today?

Or maybe people mistakenly believe their donated items go directly to help those in need. Which makes more sense, because everyone knows that when you’re down and out, what you really need is a dog to feed.

oh, the pressure

Such an enormous amount of stress comes with this first blog post on a new blog. Blog. Blog blog blog blog. After you say the word "blog" several times, it doesn't seem like a real word anymore. I wonder if that's because for so much of my life "blog" was not a real word.

What is it about this first blog post that brings out the perfectionistic tendencies to the point of paralysis? How many days have I stewed over  exactly what I might say to get the ball rolling here?

The first post should be the easiest. All I have to do is get it out of the way. Hardly anyone ever reads the first post anyway. By the time I have any traffic here whatsoever, there will be plenty more recent posts. Posts with content. Posts that are actually about something besides themselves.

That's it. This post needs to get over itself. All it is about is being the first post. If this post was a person I would totally not hang out with it, because it is completely self-obsessed.

Post post post post post post. Yeah, any word that you say over and over just starts to sound weird.