How to Welcome a VIP

I was a member of the Junior Grange. For those who don’t know, the Grange is sort of a cross between 4-H and the Freemasons. Our mom joined us up as a means of allowing us to socialize with other farm kids our own age, which is a good thing when your nearest neighbor is a half-mile away.

Junior Grange also taught me about parliamentary procedure. Each meeting involved a highly formalized meeting with specific roles and a structured order of events. The very first meeting I attended, when I was in something like the 4th grade, I was made Gatekeeper. I learned many valuable lessons about “grown-up business.” Primarily that it is stupefying boring, it usually accomplishes nothing, and that you shouldn’t ever agree to do something until after the person asking explains, in detail, what is involved.

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How to Figure Out Who You Really Are

Ric really did did take issue with me saying that he’s a defeatist, complaining, “I’m just profoundly negative.”

There are those who argue that you’re not really defeated until you admit defeat. To them I say that if defeat is something you have to admit, it clearly already exists. That argument rarely convinces them, or if it does, they never admit it.

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How to Say No

“Let me put on a Speedo and ride you to Thailand” is one of the best things I ever came up with.

If you think about it, Omnipresent Man could transport any object from any place, to any place, instantly, for free. That’s actually a tremendous power. At the very least he’d be great at serving subpoenas.

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How to Advise Someone Who's Moving in with Their Girlfriend

If you watch any episode of House Hunters, it seems like you’ll hear the phrase “happy wife, happy life” at least once. It’s usually said by a husband who does not look happy.

I’ve tried to come up with a male equivalent, but the only words I can come up with to rhyme with groom are broom, womb, doom, and tomb, so any poem made with them would be horrific, sexist, or most likely, both. I don’t want that.

How about this for an alternative: “Make each other happy, and you’ll both be happy”?

I know. It’ll never take off. It doesn’t rhyme, and it’s not nearly adversarial enough to be repeated on House Hunters, which seems to be a show built on the idea of taking a pleasant couple and pitting them against each other.

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How to Explain Another of Your Brilliant Plans

There is a Chick-fil-A and an In-N-Out within a ten-minute drive of my home. Many people would consider it un-American that I’m not having lunch at one of those places right now, but there’s only so much lunch one man can eat.

Many would consider the concept of placing any limitation on the concept of lunch un-American as well.

Wait a second. Chick-fil-A . . . In-N-Out. Maybe the key to great fast food is to have two hyphens in your name.

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How to Defend an Artistic Decision

I seem to remember this conversation going of on a tangent about how Ric’s failures are so glaring that one must view them through welding goggles or a pinhole camera to prevent the image of them being seared permanently into the viewer’s psyche.

Yes, we actually talk like that. Am I lying, Missy?

Note from Missy: Not quite like that. Usually your conversations are even more stilted and awkward. :)

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How to Cope With Your Feelings of Jealousy

A video game console

A stereo

A TV

A VCR

A camera – still AND video

A computer

The smart phone I own today is pretty much a combination of everything I wanted as a kid, except a BB gun and a go kart.

And yes, I would have fired the BB gun while riding the go kart, which is a hint as to why I never got either of them.

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How to Face the End of Civilization . . . Again

Yeah, I had a conversation with a coworker about the Mayan calendar, in which said coworker talked about how the Mayans were wiped out by the “spaniels.”

That particular coworker fancied himself a history buff. One evening he began to expound, at length, about how important the city of Constantinople was to ancient commerce. It sat in an important spot along the trade routes, so all of the important products passed through. My coworker began listing the important products. He came up with three.

“Silk, spices . . . poisons.”

It was at that moment that I realized that this “history buff’ learned everything he knew about history from playing the Assassins Creed games.

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How to Calm Down

I have this theory that the most fundamental ways to abuse power is to make other people pay for your mistakes.

I developed this theory after a conversation with a comedy booker who had accidentally scheduled two comedians to do one show, and was calling to tell me that I would be getting paid half what I was promised, because that seemed fair to her.

I was sure it did.

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How to Critique a Friend's Work

Actually, Douglas Adams and Hunter S. Thompson make good mismatched travelers in a road movie. Hunter insists on driving with the top down, but it makes Douglas’s tea cold, and the direct sunlight washes out the screen of his 16lb portable Macintosh. Douglas starts talking about time travel paradoxes after Hunter took mescaline and causes Hunter to have a bad trip. After several days of squabbling they find common ground and team up against their common enemy: deadlines.

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