How to Help Someone Out

There was one summer vacation when I was in high school when, for three months, I wouldn’t go to bed until Late Night with David Letterman was over (About 1:30 AM), then would sleep until noon.

Now I literally can’t do either of those things.

If I try to stay up late, I often fall asleep in my chair well before 11:00 PM, and I wake up before 7 every morning no matter when I went to bed. You hope you’ll get better at things as you get older, but I’ve gotten worse at staying awake, and at sleeping. Those are two fairly important things, and getting worse at both of them at the same time seems kind of problematic.

On an unrelated note, if I started a band I would call it “The Problematics.”

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How to Sound Like a Miserable Old Crank

The other day, Missy and I were playing Borderlands 3. I opened a chest and celebrated finding a really good, rare gun, and it reminded me yet again that these games are a form of gambling. They keep me playing by giving me hope that I might get stuff I want if I just open that next chest or kill that next boss, just like a casino does with that next card or spin of the wheel. The only difference is that I know exactly how much the game will cost, which is nice. The downside is that the rewards are completely imaginary, but for the most part the same can be said of casinos.

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How to Find a Mutually Beneficial Solution

Of course, Monty Python did reunite for some live shows. I started to watch a video of one, but I stopped a minute into the opening sketch. Terry Jones looked confused, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy it.

I saw the all-woman Ghostbusters, and enjoyed it. As we speak there’s another Ghostbusters waiting on a shelf for the world to be ready for its release. This one seems to involve kids. I’m uneasy about it, but I know that I will see the film eventually.

After the Ghostbusters kids have had their shot, the last logical permutation to try will be a sort of Grumpy Old Men with proton packs. There was a story floating around at one time that Bill Murray refused to do more sequels because he said, “Nobody wants to see old men chasing ghosts.” But maybe it could work if they lean into it and make that the joke.

Or they could try to get Wes Anderson to write and direct it. They say he’s the only one who gets a no-questions-asked yes from Bill Murray anymore. You know Tilda Swinton would end up playing a ghost.

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How to Capitalize on an Insight

Again with the wart saga. I’m surprised how many comics I did about such a disgusting health issue. Sorry about that. At that time, the two biggest things I had going on were my foot warts and the surprising success of my first book. I, of course, chose to write about the warts. It turns out I’d rather be embarrassed than sound like I’m bragging.

Unless you’re into foot warts, in which case it still sounded like I was bragging.

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How to Tell Someone They Are Being Rude

It used to be there were etiquette experts, people who would tell you the polite way to handle any situation. I think one was called Miss Manners. It’s tempting to assume they went away because people don’t care enough about being polite to read their advice, but I suspect most of them got out of the job because it required them to spend their entire day reading requests for help from rude people. You know that would wear on you. I doubt many of them bothered to say “please.”

Note from Missy: On that note, if any of you are in the market for a good advice column, I strongly recommend Ask a Manager.  Even though I’m self-employed, I still read it eagerly every dang day.

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How to be a Responsible Pet Owner

I did have to give my cat medicine, and sneaking up behind him with a syringe did make me feel like a monster. My love of the Hitman series of games didn’t help, as it’s essentially a game about sneaking up behind people with syringes full of things other than medicine.

There are some good laughs to be had in the idea of Goldfinger’s cat wanting to play with the laser. Mike Myers could have filled a good five minutes of an Austin Powers movie with Mr. Bigglesworth screwing up Dr. Evil’s laser-based plans.

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How to Understand Stereotypes

Once I saw an older guy in a two-seat Ferrari convertible wearing a Ferrari t-shirt and a Ferrari cap. This was not a great look, but it didn’t push things quite far enough that I wanted to make fun of him. He crossed that line when he parked in the pick-up lane at Ikea and started slotting flat-pack boxes into his passenger seat.

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How to Understand "Labels"

Once, in a former job, I attended a meeting where we were asked to break the ice by giving one minor detail that would tell the other attendees about us. I mentioned that I had just spent my lunch break watching part of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan on my smartphone. My intention was to tell them that I was a bit of a geek, but I ended up telling them that I was getting old, as over half of the people at the table had never heard of the film, as it had come out years before they were born.

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How to Manage Your Fear

Ric has a dark sense of humor, is clever, and is good with words. These are good things if you’re his friend and want to have a fun conversation. These are bad things if you’re his spouse and are trying to have an argument with him. Once, when discussing an argument he and his (then) wife had the night before, someone referred to Ric’s sense of humor as a “tremendous power” that he needed to “control.”

It was meant as criticism, but he took it as a huge compliment. He told me about it, and we started making jokes about fitting him with a muzzle designed like the X-Man Cyclops’s visor.

To this day, our shorthand for telling someone off is to “open the visor.”

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How to Figure Out What Went Wrong

People did get the characters of Rick and Kate confused. Looking at them, the shirt and hair colors almost matching didn’t help. In my defense, aside from their genders being different, she’s wearing a sweater while he’s wearing jogging shorts, which are like the opposite garments. You can’t see the shorts, but he’s wearing them. Trust me.

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