I swear the following incident is true: I am not making any of this up.
A few months ago I joined Match.com. From time to time I have tweaked the little introductory text that they let you post, where you’re supposed to describe yourself and what you’re looking for. Whenever you submit a new draft, they save it separate and apart from your existing, live copy, and they review it “manually” for approval. In a day or two they send you an email saying your “portrait” has been deemed acceptable, in accordance with their policies; it is said to be “approved” and goes live, and the earlier version apparently gets overwritten.
Wiseass that I am, I have a satirical opening: “Fun-despising yet unstable, stupid, fat, ugly, lazy, inarticulate […] unsuccessful nonprofessional seeks diametric opposite for a lifetime of mutual torture.” Then I say sorry, I couldn’t resist mocking the generic match.com profile, let me try to get serious, and I proceed to enumerate my many virtues. Elsewhere in my “portrait” under “education,” I say that I got some, and admit to occasionally enjoying using words like “perspicacious.” Elsewhere I mention that I have a 3.5-year-old daughter who means more to me than words can say.
Last time I submitted a new draft for approval, I edited a couple things, but I did not touch any of the above parts of the text. Instead of the customary approval message, I got a boilerplate email that said there was an “issue” and reminded me of their guidelines: no offensive vile nasty racist et cetera stuff allowed. So I wrote back to them: what is it in my draft that you have a problem with? Answer: they sent back the same boilerplate. So I wrote back again: yes, but in order to answer my question, you’re going to have to read it.
Meanwhile, I discovered that instead of leaving the previously accepted version of my “portrait” published, they had censored it outright. When you tried to access it, you got “We’re sorry, the Portrait you’re looking for could not be found. Please try another Portrait.” My, that will certainly give me a competitive edge over the rest of the Match dudes, don’t you think? But I was not amused, so I sent a nastygram through their web interface saying, inter alia, “if this is payback for questioning your unthinking overzealous misguided prudishness and political correctness, it seems a bit heavy-handed. Please make this right immediately, or refund my money pro rata as of the day you suppressed my profile. Your choice. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.”
Answer: call customer service during their business hours to address my “issue.” This was on a holiday weekend, so I had to wait a couple days to call them.
When the next business day came around, I called them and spoke to someone who identified herself as Teowon. She said that the self-deprecatory humor in the beginning had to go because someone might find it offensive. Really, said I? Do you know of any actual complaints that you’ve received about it? No, but that’s our policy. I said, well, I have gotten several positive comments about it and zero negative ones; it’s been complimented as “funny” and “refreshingly hilarious.” She said, that’s our policy. I said, you are gutting my “portrait,” this is the essence of who I am: funny. A funny guy. Get it? No one has complained, indeed people have said they like it. What’s the problem?
She put me on hold.
A few minutes later she comes back and says the line “I couldn’t resist mocking the generic match.com profile” has to go. No mocking match.com. Against policy. I protest again.
She put me on hold.
Next she comes back and says what does perspicacious mean? I explained it to her, then said, do you have a dictionary there by any chance? Why take my word for it? She said that was what they were investigating while I was on hold. I suggested she try using the Google define keyword and look it up.
She put me on hold.
Then Teowon came back and said, you can’t publish your daughter’s age. That’s against policy.
By now I knew for sure I was dealing with a semi-moron, so I said, OK, I will do your bidding, and you will provide me with the full name, title and mailing address of the highest-ranking executive in charge of customer relations at this company so I can address a letter to her or him and appeal my case.
She put me on hold.
A few minutes later she came back and declared that the entire text was now deemed acceptable and would be approved. This came as a surprise. I was pleased to have wasted only about half an hour, much of it wildly amusing. So I thanked her for seeing things my way and said goodbye.
The very next thing that happened was another email from someone named Ivan S., saying please call Customer Service. Savvy consumer that I am, I hypothesized that Ivan was responding to the complaint that I posted through the website, and of course the left hand has no clue what the right is doing, so just wait and see. Sure enough, soon thereafter I got the customary Your Profile Has Been Approved message, and all is well.
In the course of this conversation Teowon told me that she herself had been the one who evaluated my text and found it unacceptable. I suspect she had simply flagged it as no good, without specifying why, and could not remember why, so she had to search. Hence the long hold periods. Something had to be amiss, because she was objecting to parts that had been published for months and said nothing about the changes that had most recently been introduced. It would seem they aren’t — or at least Teowon wasn’t — running anything analogous to the Unix utility diff to examine only what what has changed since the last revision; every review is a de novo review.
Or maybe poor Teowon is just undertrained, or overworked, or just plain dumb, or some combination of the above.
Update: Fast forward to almost two years later. I don’t want or need Match any longer, being completely satisfied with my girlfriend — let’s call her Amy, to protect the innocent — whom I met on… match dot com, of all places! So I contact them and say I want my profile deleted. You can’t do that. You have to log in and turn off a boolean signifying “display” or “do not display” your profile. I refuse. My position is no, I want to withdraw totally and completely, I want to leave, walk, depart, exit, disappear. Get it? No, you can’t do that. It’s like a street gang. Once you wear the tatto motherfucker you are one of us for life.

I like it when I go to a bash terminal window and press my up arrow to browse through my command history, and find this:


oooo888888888ooobhhhhhhgggggggggfggggh0j;;;


because it means my three-year-old has been hacking around this place.

Psychotherapy is fundamentally a Good Thing. Here’s the essential reason why, in my humble lay opinion:  There is no other way to unload your problems to somebody who is (1) professionally bound to keep his mouth shut; (2) is trained and paid to listen, truly shut the fuck up and listen; (3) is nonjudgemental and reasonably objective, having no dog in your fight, and yet (4) has your best interests in mind. There’s no civilian that you know personally who can meet these criteria, because whoever knows you and your life personally is thereby involved in it, and can’t be objective.

What’s the downside? Let’s see, there’s the expense. No small consideration, depending on how shitty your insurance is and how pricey your shrink.

What else? Oh yeah, I almost forgot:  the stigma. I know a several people who assert that they’ve never been to a shrink but think they could benefit from one. So you ask them why don’t they go ahead and do it and they’re like, gee, I don’t know, too busy, not hurting bad enough. Maybe so, or maybe a bullshit rationalization. If it’s the latter, the likely true reason, IMHO, is that they are deterred by embarrassment, shame and stigma, even when they are in or close to a subculture in which being shrunk is supposedly no big deal, indeed almost de rigueur like some other hot consumer product. I think a lot of people are embarrassed to pick up the phone or hit a find-a-shrink website. Or maybe it’s painful to admit to yourself that there is more on your plate than you care to handle alone. So Step One, if you fit this description, is Get Over It. It’s nobody’s business but your own, so fuck ’em and go do what you gotta do to take proper care of yourself. No one should expect you to govern the People’s Republic of You without at least one good professional advisor on your payroll.

Step Two may be more challenging than Step One:  find a good one. Finding one that is both good and good for you may require some patience. You are the employer and they work for you, so keep auditioning shrinks until you find one with whom you feel completely comfortable. Some shrinks are a lot more equal than others, and one essential requirement is that they be your intellectual equal or superior. You are going to be having a lot of deep conversations with this person and if you aren’t on the same wavelength in this regard, it ain’t gonna work.

Once you hook up, make sure your expectations are appropriate. Shrinkdom isn’t a panacea. It is, at a minimum, a chance to unload your woes for a little while in a way that is clean and harmless. At best, it is a way to come to a deeper understanding of what the fuck’s up, which might actually turn out to be helpful.

This one is sort of oriented towards the gentlemen among my immense readership, but ladies, feel free to mentally edit the genitals on the fly, to suit your equipment.
We occasionally hear people deride something as masturbatory, the implication being clearly pejorative. Masturbatory, as in some self-indulgent, half-assed substitute for the real thing.
Not so fast, say I. Don’t be so quick to denigrate beating off, at least in the form that I am thinking of:
You stand there in that shower, hot water pouring down, soaped-up cock in hand, eyes closed, in a state of deepest concentration. You are transported from the here and now into an exquisite fantasy state, yet very much in the here and now, given the undeniable physicality of the moment. You are in a state of extreme arousal on one level, while nonetheless achieving a paradoxical relaxation as you release your mind from everything else and focus on this. (Besides, we don’t have all day to bust a nut.)
Such moments are more than mere jerking off, my friends. This is more like a combination of masturbation, meditation, and prayer — especially when you are in love, or at least infatuated, and that love is as yet unconsummated. Now the object of your desire is brought into the very shower itself, there with you, by the sheer power of your thought. Even the committed atheist would seem to be praying to the gods: please, please let this happen at least once before they put a toe-tag on me.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I could use a shower.

Hey guess what. It’s pretty simple.
Christmas shopping:  If you have to do it, get it done. If it’s isn’t 85% done by the first week of December, you’re fucking up. Get it done.
Stay out of the malls. This bears repeating so I will say it again: stay the fuck out of the malls. Shop online as much as you possibly can. If the package delivery is a problem because you don’t have enough servants to answer the door when the UPS person comes, rent a drop from someplace like PostNet, it’s worth it. Buy shit online and you won’t have to listen to “It’s a holiday season, it’s a holiday season, doo dee doo…” and maybe just maybe you won’t feel like slashing your wrists.
Spend some money on yourself. If you have to go on a consumption binge, blow some of that cash on some of that non-essential shit you’ve been denying yourself. The self-indulgence will make you feel better about all that generosity the season is coercing you into displaying.
Drink plenty of alcohol. Actually those are words of wisdom to live by year round, but they’re especially important during this bleak season.
Enjoy! Happy holidays everybody (-: !

My two-year-old daughter has a pretty good deal, if you ask me. My wife’s full time job is to take care of her, and she does a superb job of it.

That means young Gabriela has her own full time chauffeur, chef, personal assistant, wardrobe consultant, nutritionist, personal trainer, bodyguard, tutor, nurse, hair stylist, manicurist,
pedicurist, travel agent, social secretary, and a hundred other things that I can’t think of right now. Every day she is on some fabulous vacation with an extraordinary tour guide who handles everything seamlessly. Nice job, mami.

That’s right folks. Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get worse — airline travel in economy class now sucks more than ever, I have just determined after a round trip between Newark, New Jersey and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The seats have continued to get smaller and the rows closer together, while I have remained essentially the same size since 1983. The guy in front of you leans his seat back, and you can barely read your reading material, unless you like holding the text up to your nose.
With truly endemic obesity in the USA, most adults simply don’t fit in these little containers any more. Now there is an unwritten law that holds that the more corpulent passenger takes possession of the arm rest, which in any case is marginally adequate for a single, normal-sized human arm.
As a captive audience you are treated to movies that are not only mindless and annoying, but also violent. I would have raised serious hell if I had had my two year old daughter with me, because her mother and I have decided that she has decades ahead of her in which to see people being beaten, shot and otherwise abused on film and television; she does not need to start yet. It is outrageous that some no-mind in charge of programming the in-flight entertainment for Continental should take it upon (her|him)self to override our decision.
Oh by the way. The seats in the last row on some aircraft do not recline. Maybe this is common knowledge to savvy travelers and I’m a bumpkin. Wouldn’t it nevertheless be nice if the airline’s website would warn you about that when you’re making your seat selection? I had to find out the hard way on the way to PR and sit upright in my tiny seat for four hours.
Then they come around with “food.” On the outbound trip I asked them if they had any lethal injections, which they didn’t, so I said I’d pass. On the return trip they had “Philedalphia Cheesesteaks” for us sorry rabble. I didn’t have the chutzpah to ask them if they had any non-red-meat alternative. Out of sheer hunger and boredom, I submitted to the humiliation of eating it.
I did find useful a psychological trick that I’ve developed for such situations: assume you have died and gone to hell to suffer eternally. Then you will be pleasantly and genuinely surprised to hear the voice announce your initial descent to earth.

Who has time for this bullshit?

Here’s one of the fucked up things about that Atlanta shooting/escape incident: as I was listening to the accounts of how this guy busted out, I felt a brief, involuntary flicker of admiration for the man’s fearlessness and balls. Which should not be too surprising, if you think about the Hollywood violence-glamourizing cultural conditioning we are subjected to. Aggression is fascinating, let’s face it.
It isn’t hard to rework the screenplay enough to turn Brian into the heroic man of action. Despite his courageous resistance and awesome strength and fighting skills, Good Guy Brian Nichols is abducted by the Bad Guys and taken to Bad Guy Land, where he is framed for some heinous crime and taken to kangaroo court for a show trial. He must do something decisive and dangerous. The Bad Guys, in their arrogance and ineptitude, leave our Hero momentarily in the custody of just one guard — some sadistic female bitch guard at that. The Hero overpowers her and confiscates her weapon, giving her the skull-cracking she deserves in the process. Then he starts dropping bodies of other Bad Guys in the course of his incredibly daring escape, to the thunderous cheers of the movie theatre audience.

Have you ever had a tube of Krazy Glue die a natural death, that is, run out of glue? No. Neither have I. And just today I had a sudden insight into something that should have been pretty damn obvious during all my decades as an occasional Krazy Glue user. I always assumed that when my Krazy Glue tube became hopelessly clogged with a glob of rock-hard, dry Krazy Glue, and cutting the tip (again) with scissors no longer worked, and the Krazy Glue had to be reluctantly given up for dead — I always thought this was because of my own incompetence or negligence.
Well guess what. Are you ready for this? Sit down. I’m serious! Sit the fuck down and listen to me!
OK that’s better. Here’s the deal: the people that make Krazy Glue don’t want you to use your Krazy Glue until the tube is empty! That’s right: they want it to fail so you have to go buy anther one! So next time your Krazy Glue gets so thoroughly petrified that you have to discard it in utter despair, remember: it isn’t your fault.