Category: anti-humor

I am a Cookie, It’s Good Enough for Me

RilalyLeave a comment

“Do you have any cookies other than chocolate chip?” I asked the cashier of a popular sandwich chain.

“We don’t,” he said with a smile. The smile appeared to accept the complaint for what it was, but it also asked me why I was just being difficult. ‘Why would you want anything other than chocolate?’ that smile asked me. ‘It’s delicious for criminy’s sake!’

Age has taken away a few of my favorite things (more on that never) and chocolate is one of them. I get minor headaches whenever I eat it, but those minor headaches carry the implicit warning that the more I eat the worse the headache. I farted around found out that my body was serious, serious as a head attack.

I usually simply say no thanks when people offer me some, but some people won’t take no for an answer. ‘Why don’t you want any chocolate?” they ask. ‘It’s delicious for criminy’s sake!’”

When I tell people why, they feel bad for me. Their sympathy is not directed toward the headaches, but the idea that I will no longer be able enjoy chocolate as much as they do. “I don’t think I could do it,” some say with a self-deprecating smile.

“Of all the things age has taken away from me,” I tell them, “I probably miss chocolate the least.”

“How could you not miss it the most?” they say with the same look that that cashier gave me.

“I used to go to the candy aisles at gas stations to pick from their chocolate selections,” I tell them. “Now, I move down the aisle to their non-chocolate ones. It’s easier than you think.”

Prior to that forced transition, I had no idea candy aisles at gas stations were 90% chocolate, not counting gum. The selections at various get-togethers are about 95% chocolate, and the desert items on a restaurant menu are nearly 100% chocolate. Now that I was on the outside looking in, I wondered if we all loved chocolate this much, or if it reminded us of our grandmother, and all of the confections she used to bake, and all of those glorious smells. Did it become such a staple in our diet, because it reminds us those days at the pool with all of our friends, or do we just love it that much? Some questions are complicated that require scientific research, and some are simple. The simple truth about chocolate is we like eating it, because it’s delicious for criminy’s sake!

“It’s all about the chocolate,” a friend of mine, who used to be an event planner, said. She learned the hard way when she offered her client “cookies” for their event. She neglected to inform her client that her cookie offerings would not include chocolate chip cookies or any chocolate. She just listed cookies on the menu items, and her client signed off on it

“Nobody wants sugar cookies, peanut butter, or oatmeal raisin!” her client screamed. “My attendees were like, where’s the chocolate chip cookies? They blamed me for this, not you. We were expecting chocolate chip cookies, chocolate strawberries, chocolate pastries, and even a chocolate fountain. You didn’t give us any chocolate? What kind of outfit are you running here?” 

A poll suggested 35% of respondents said chocolate chips cookies were their favorite cookie, and almost half (46%) said they ate chocolate chip cookies frequently in their childhood. My guess is the latter number was skewed by the vagueness of the question. If the pollsters asked the specific question, “For those of you who had the capability, or permission to eat cookies on a regular basis, how many of you ate chocolate chip?” By better defining that question, me thinks that 46% number might double.

After a couple incidents, my mom learned to preempt our disappointment when she brought cookies home. Before opening the package, she’d tell us that the cookies weren’t chocolate. She had nothing against chocolate. She just thought we might want some different every once in a while. We didn’t, we wanted chocolate. We were disappointed, but she knew if she told us beforehand that we wouldn’t be so angry to find out there wasn’t any chocolate on the way.

That forced transition away from chocolate informed me that we don’t want chocolate. WE WANT CHOCOLATE! If someone doesn’t learn how to soften the blow that there won’t be any chocolate, we’re disappointed, confused, and outraged. “Who do you think you are? What kind of outfit are you running here?” I don’t know if this has always been the case, or if I only see it now because of my new perspective, but it is all about chocolate.

***

We don’t need a different perspective to know that the chocolate chip “cookies” of our world dominate rooms. They are the beautiful men and women who walk among us. We see what happens when they walk down the hall, or into our corporate meeting rooms. If we’re able to view reactions from the outside looking in, it can be quite humorous to watch reactions to them.

Some of us cringe, as we try to deny them entry in our space by telling everyone how awful we think they are, but when they talk to us, we feel an unusual and embarrassing blush come on. They can make us feel, “I can’t believe I’m admitting this,” special for just a moment. Some of us smile and laugh at everything they say, even though we just talked about how we hate them seventy-five minutes ago.

I don’t know if this is endemic to the human being, or if cicadas, squirrels and amoebas share our reactions to the beautiful beings of their species, but I’m more inclined to believe it has something to do with cultural conditioning. The chocolate chip cookies of our society appear to have it all, and as hard as we try to make dents in their impact, no societal cynicism can tear down that wall. We’re not talking those store bought, dry, and crumbly cookies that look so appealing on the shelf, because they’re manufactured and marketed so well. We’re talking the individually wrapped, freshly-baked variety that most sandwich shops offer as a side-item. We’re talking about the type of chocolate that appears so moist that we swear we can see our reflection in it. They’re the most popular, the prettiest on the shelf, and the definition of quality by which all of the others are compared.

Most of us grew up other thans who saw the power of beauty, natural athleticism, and money in our cookie-cutter in our world. We watched those chocolate chips cookies fly off the shelf, and we wanted to be them for just a moment, just to know what it felt like to be a chocolate chip cookie. After learning the harsh realities of the never-will-be’s, we learn to live the life of an other than, until we convince ourselves that we’re a don’t-wanna-be. Our people, along with the cynical comedians, don’t encourage this. They prefer the ‘if you can’t beat them, hate them’ route. Hating them is supposed to make us feel better about ourselves, but it never does. Instead of correcting the course, we double down. We tell one another these lies to help us help others appreciate our gifts and our other indefinable traits to elevate our status from other thans to better thans.

Chocolate chip cookies don’t have doors slammed in their face, or that’s what we tell ourselves. We externalize our hatred to try to minimize our struggle. Yet, we had opportunities, fewer by comparison, but we had some. How many paths were available to us? Did we choose the one we’re currently on, or was it thrust upon us?

Adaptation to the limits of being an other than often requires creativity, and creativity comes and goes. We can also feel it fade with age. Our bountiful brains were once filled with fantastical ideas about how the world could work, and how different it could be if it was different. When that didn’t work, we doubled down, almost in rebellious reaction, until we stepped beyond the border and lost our anchor. Stephen King developed odd theatrics, but he maintained a common man premise from which the spectacular rose. We learned from that, and we adapted, but we were so creative that we could grow a little too creative at times. When we finally found our niche, we enjoyed it, but a niche is a niche, an “other than” as it were that rarely produce a chocolate chip in our nacre formation.

That frustration leads us to wonder how many chocolate chip cookies are 100% pure, and how many are tainted? We take what we want to take from everything, and we want to believe that our favorite chocolate chip cookies were wholesome? The cynics would say that the only 100% pure chocolate chip cookies are those that came from our grandmother’s oven, and the rest are all tainted in the manufacturing process.

“Nothing is pure, and nothing is absolute! You still admire that chocolate chip cookie? Did you know he cheats on his taxes, steps out on his wife, and his children never felt close to him?” This is the cynical side of the “other thans”, and I’m not even sure if those nattering nabobs of negativity truly enjoy twisting their handle bar mustaches in this manner. They enjoyed doing this in high school, we all did, because it made us feel better to know more than the simpletons who believe in nouns, but when does continuing to do what we did in high school becomes so high school?

“There are matters where this matters, but we’re talking about a television star from a television show. Why don’t we just let that guy enjoy his chocolate chip cookie in peace,” we say.

“BOO!” they say. “I’m not going to let that television star off the hook, because that he wasn’t the wholesome cookie he portrayed, not in his personal life.”

“Our friend needs to bake an other than?” they say. “Everyone bakes chocolate chip cookies. He needs to try something different?”

“But everyone loves chocolate chip cookies,” we say. “They’re delicious for criminy’s sake!”

***

As an other than, we learn to use our personality to create something that serves a purpose. We then do what we do, until we reach that “Why am I still doing this?” question. Then we reach a point where we’ve answered every possible question we can think up. At another point, beyond that question, we realize that as confusing and disjointed as all this can be, it’s us. It’s who we are, what we are, and how we conduct ourselves. It’s our element, and how we conduct ourselves when we’re in our element, and until we reach a point where we can all learn how to bake bakery fresh, chewy chocolate chip cookies, through some sort of genetic modification, driven by AI, we’ll be forced to admit that we cannot all be chocolate chip cookies.

Some people actually prefer peanut butter cookies, sugar, oatmeal raisin, and all the other thans. I’ve met them. They don’t develop biological reactions to chocolate later in life. They just prefer an other than, because they find them delicious. They’re anecdotal evidence that not every person in the world prefers chocolate, but if you’re a restaurant, a gas station, or an event planner, you know it’s all about the chocolate.

We all have moments when something other than chocolate chip cookies appeal to us, but do we ever look back with regret that we didn’t try harder to be a chocolate chip cookie in a chocolate chip cookie world? Do we regret not pursuing their ingredients for success, success, SUCCESS? Some of us not only moved past all the resentment and regret, we moved into a middle ground of our own choosing. We’re the ones they call one strange cookie. We not only accepted this idea that we’d never be chocolate chip cookie, we embraced it. Some characterize this midlevel existence as a stuck-in-the-middle one, with its own unique level of suffering, but we chose to view it as us being baked differently. We used our ingredients to come up with something different. I’m not claiming that I built a better cookie, and I can’t say if it’s worse, but it took me a long time to reach a point where I can say it’s mine, “I am a cookie, and it’s good enough for me.”

Eradicating Boredom, Losing Creativity: The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Distraction

RilalyLeave a comment

“I’ll never be bored again!” I said the day I purchased my first smartphone. I said that in reference to one of the very few games we play that has no winners: the waiting game. With a smartphone in hand, I thought I could finally resolve one of my biggest complaints about life: waiting.

“We’re not going to live forever,” we complain when someone is involved in the life and death struggles of a grocery store price check. Most of us don’t take out our life expectancy calculator to figure out how long we’re going to live, or to calculate how much of our lives we’ve wasted waiting in line, but we all love sharing that snarky joke about the guy complaining to the clerk that the price tag said asparagus cost $3.47 as opposed to the register’s reading of $3.97.

We’re all waiting for something, all the time, but what makes us angrier, waiting for something to happen, or doing nothing for long stretches of time? We’ve all experienced our frustrations inch their way over into anger, then boil over into rage, and we’ve all experienced that sense of helplessness when it happens to us. With a smartphone in hand, I correctly predicted that I could avoid falling into that trap of claustrophobic silence and inactivity by filling it with something, something to do with my hands, and something is always better than nothing in the waiting game.

Promptness is About Respect

The waiting game is not selective or discriminatory. Everyone from the most anonymous person on the planet to the most powerful has to wait for something, but there’s waiting and then there’s waiting. The waiting game is all about power and the lack thereof. When we’re stuck in line, at a restaurant, waiting for a seat, we experience a sense of powerlessness. We’re so accustomed to having power over our own life, as adults, that when we find out the wait time for that restaurant is forty-five minutes, we exert that power by walking away. When we find out every decent restaurant in town has a thirty-to-forty-five minute waiting time that sense of frustration sets in, and we eat at home. When someone we love leaves us sitting in that restaurant for a half an hour to forty-five minutes a sense of helplessness creeps in when we realize that we’ve accidentally put ourselves in a position of dependence yet again.

I don’t know if everyone feels this way, but I replay a Madonna quote in my head. “If you have to count on others for a good time, you’re not doing it right.” When I’m sitting in a restaurant with patrons passing me, looking at the vacant side of my table, I realize I’m counting on the wrong people in life, the narcissistic, irresponsible, and disrespectful people I count on for an enjoyable lunch. If they leave us there long enough, by ourselves, we’ll start to dream up all sorts of motives and agendas for their tardiness. That frustration can lead to anger and a level of teeth gritting and grinding that damages the expensive and painful dental work the impatient we’ve had done. 

I know that the search for what could tip me over into some form of mental illness is over when I am on the other end of the waiting game, and I eventually hear, “What is the big deal, I was only a couple minutes late, and I had to …” They usually fill that void with utter nonsense that we cannot disprove, so we just let it go. 

Life happens when we least expect it sometimes, and sometimes we’re going to be late. If we respect the other person, we call, text, or email us to inform them we’re going to be late, but that would be respectful on our part. That’s really what we’re talking about here, the respect or lack thereof, on their part. If we respect our employer, we show up on time. If we enjoy the company of someone we’re dating, we show up on time, or early. It’s about respect, the lack thereof, and narcissism. And when they show us this lack of respect, quality friendships can be tainted and temporarily damaged, and dissociations with associates end what could’ve become a friendship. We overreact to such slights, and we know it, but it all boils down to the fact promptness is all about respect.

The Eradication of Boredom

When we’re immersed in the maddening waiting game, the mosquito paradox comes to mind. Anyone who has ever had a beautiful day at the park ruined by a scourge of mosquitoes has asked why scientists don’t find some way to bioengineer an eradication of that relatively useless species? Biologists, with a specialty in mosquitoes, provide arguments for why we shouldn’t, but when we’re swatting, slapping, and running from the scourge, we develop seven counter arguments to every one of theirs. The only vague but true answer we’ll accept is “Anytime we mess with nature, there will be consequences.” We’ve all heard that in relation to the mosquito, but what about waiting and the resultant boredom? Boredom is a naturally occurring event. What could possibly be the consequences of eradicating boredom? We’re not talking about that simple, “I don’t know what to do to pass the time” boredom. We’re talking about levels of boredom that takes us to the edge of an abyss that stares back at us, until it roars to the surface and frightens everyone around us.

Some of us loathe the boredom inherent in the waiting game so much that it whispers some scary things about us to us, but when it’s all over, it dawns on us that something happens to us when we spend too much time in claustrophobic silence with nothing to do but think.

How many useless, pointless thoughts have we had in such moments? We flush most of those thoughts out of our mind after it’s over, as we will with that which our body cannot use, but some thoughts collect, mate, and mutate into ideas that we can use. How many of our more meaningful, somewhat productive thoughts had hundreds of useless, pointless parents conjugating during the waiting game? 

***

The child and I often talk a lot about how relatively boring things were when I was a kid. This involves me recalling for him what we did for fun, and how we thought those things were so much fun at the time. “We had to do these things,” I say when I see his face crinkle up, “because we were all so bored.” These complaints could be generational, as I often hear the previous generation describe their youth as “Such an incredible time to be a kid,” and they were raised on farms! I’ve been on farms, trapped there for huge chunks of my youth, and the only thing I found incredible about it was how incredibly boring it was. It takes a creative mind, more creative than mine, to believe that being raised on a farm is an “incredible” time.

“It’s all about perspective,” they say, and they’re right. If we don’t know any better, skipping stones in a pond and fishing can be a lot of fun. We rode our bikes around the block a gazillion times, and we thought that was an absolute blast, and then we played every game that involved a ball, but they all seem comparatively boring when compared to the things kids can do now. We could argue all day about the comparisons, but they do have better things to fill the empty spaces. Yet, what happened to us as a result of all those empty spaces, and what happens to them as a result of mostly being devoid of any?

How much of our youth did we spend sitting in chairs, looking out windows, waiting for something to happen? Some of us did something, anything, to pass the time until the event we were waiting for could happen, but there were other times when we just had to sit and wait. We’d sit in those chairs and think up useless and pointless crap that ended up being nothing more than useless and pointless crap, but how many bountiful farm fields require tons of useless and pointless crap per acre? 

We have cellphones and smartphones now. That’s our power. That’s how we eradicate boredom. “4.88 billion, or 60.42%, of the world population have cellphones, and the number [was] expected to reach 7.12 billion by the end of 2024. 276.14 million or 81.6% of Americans have cell phones.” We don’t ever have to be bored again. 

We have game consoles. “The Pew Research Center reported in 2008 that 97% of youths ages 12 to 17 played some type of video game, and that two-thirds of them played action and adventure games that tend to contain violent content.” These kids may never have to face the kind of boredom I did as a kid. We didn’t even have an Atari 2600 in our home when just about every kid we knew did, and it wasn’t because our dad wanted to prevent us from becoming gamers. He was just too cheap. So, we were forced to do nothing for long stretches of time.

When you’re as bored as we were, the mind provides the only playground. “Is there something on TV?” There never is, and I don’t care how many channels, streaming services, apps, and websites we have, an overwhelming amount of programming is just plain boring to kids. We could go out and play, but when you’re from a locale of unpredictable climates, you learn that that is not possible for large chunks of the year. The only thing we can do, when we’re that bored, is think about things to do. I invented things to do to pass the time, but they could get a little boring too.

Filling the Empty Spaces 

“You’re weird,” is something I’ve heard my whole life. I’ve also heard, “I’ve met some really weird fellas in my time, but you take the cake,” more than a few times. That’s what I did when I ran out of things to do. I sat around and got weird. Your first thought might be, “Well, I don’t want to be weird, and I don’t want anyone thinking my kid is weird either.” Understandable, but what is weird? Weird is different, it’s having divergent thoughts that no one has considered before, until they grew as bored as we did. Weird is rarely something that happens overnight. It takes decades of boredom, and it takes a rewind button of the mind, replaying the same thoughts over and over, until we’ve looked at the same situation so many different ways, on so many different days that we’ve developed some weird ideas and abnormal thoughts about people, places and things around us. This is what happens when we stare out windows too long, looking at nothing, wondering how the world might look different if it was weird, strange, or just plain different. It’s what happens when someone lives too long in the mind, and their peeps start worrying that they’re not doing it right. 

Some weird, strange, and just plain different thoughts led us to think about the difference between success and failure. Success is a short-term game that will mean nothing tomorrow if you’re not able to back it up, so you better enjoy it while it lasts, because if there’s one thing we know about success, it has a million parents and failure is an orphan. We also realize that, in those dark, quiet moments we spend alone, looking out the car window on the drive home, that failure does define us. Athletes and business people say, “Don’t let failure define you,” but it defines us. Some remember those moments, and some will never forget, but what we do shortly after failing will define us too. The thing that plagues us is, “Was that moment of failure an irreversible blemish?” and when we’re left staring out the window at nothing, it can feel like it is. Some will never forget, and we know who they are, because they always remind us who they are, but most forget. As any trained public speaker will inform us, an overwhelming number of people will forgive, forget, and dismiss errors. Most people aren’t paying near as much attention as we think, and most people aren’t dying to see others commit errors. When we’re left alone for long chunks of time, replaying moments over and over, we can make the mistake of thinking it’s the opposite. 

“Reach for the stars,” they say. “Become the next Albert Einstein, Vincent van Gogh, Isaac Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci, fill your empty spaces, and reshape your world.” It’s great advice, and we think about how we should try to be better today than we were yesterday, and we shouldn’t spend those dark, quiet moments obsessing about trivial notions we consider our limitations. As we sort through those famous names, we ask how bored were they, when they were kids? Those guys had nothing to do either, when they were kids. They didn’t have movies, TV, devices, or consoles to occupy their time. As boring as it could be to be a kid in our generation, we can only imagine those previous generations were just itching with boredom back in their day, and they were so bored that they dreamed up some things that laid the foundation for everything we find interesting now. We can imagine that most dismissed them as dreamers and daydreamers that wouldn’t amount to much, and they ended up conjugating all of those pointless and useless thoughts into something that ended up reshaping our world.    

No matter how much we daydream, or dream up interesting thoughts, most of us will never actually reach those stars. Yet, something happens to us when we’re so bored that we think up weird and interesting thoughts that will never amount to anything. We accidentally, incidentally, or just by the natural course of filling empty spaces become more interesting. Thinking so much that we think too much could lead us to divergent thoughts that some people find so weird, strange and just plain different, but that can lead them to ask us about matters that they consider trivial, relatively unimportant, to important. Our unique perspective often attracts people to us, and it could lead us to have more friends, which could be one of the primary reasons we should consider inserting more boredom into our kids’ lives. Our kids might not know who they are, or who they could be, if they find artificial ways to avoid ever sitting in front of a window with nothing to do but think about everything. Even if they never make it above the lower-to-middle stations in life, they might learn how to make life more interesting, and they might accidentally figure out how to enjoy their lives better, and in the process of being so bored, they might learn how to become happier, more interesting people. 

DDTY: Don’t Do This Yourself

RilalyLeave a comment

2020 was a huge year in the DIY (Do-it-Yourself) industry. We spent so much time inside, isolated, that we spent record amounts on DIY tools and accessories to accommodate what we thought might be our new reality. We spent so much time inside, isolated, that people who rarely used a tool were now purchasing power tools. Faucets, kitchen cabinets, and toilets were flying off the shelves. Home Depot saw a 20% increase in net sales, and Lowe’s saw a 24.2% increase. We spent record amounts on DIY tools and accessories to accommodate what we thought might be our new reality.

I thought it might be a revolution in individual empowerment, but the number one answer given to pollsters on this subject was “[I] finally having the time for it.” Translation, I always knew how to do this stuff, I just never had time for it before. The numbers reflect that, as DIY industry numbers have plummeted since 2020 back to normal, but those of us who didn’t know what we were doing before COVID, but learned it within, took our first bite of that apple and found the flavor empowering. We found fixing things ourselves less intimidating after seeing an oaf with a mustache on YouTube explain that insulating our attic and changing our garbage disposal can be accomplished in ten easy steps. 

Bob Peters didn’t know anything about plumbing, HVACs, appliances, or anything else in his home that required fixing. Anytime he had a problem, he just called an expert. Mr. Peters would’ve loved to fix his belongings in the beginning, but he never learned how to do it. His dad was probably less informed and less experienced in fixing things that he was, and Bob spent the first twenty years of his adulthood living in apartments. After purchasing his own home, Bob knew he was physically capable of fixing his fixables, but two minutes after opening these things up, he felt overwhelmed by the idea that an idiot like him could do it.

“One huge part of intelligence,” Bob often joked to friends and family who encouraged him to fix these things himself, “is knowing your limitations.”

Bob Peters wasn’t an idiot. He worked hard, and his hard-earned expertise, in his arena, was valued and well-compensated. He didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to Do-It-Yourself (DIY). During COVID, the individuals weren’t as overwhelmed as the certified, licensed experts. The wait times were insane.

“I understand your frustration, but if you knew what we were up against, you would understand.” The resultant desperation led Bob to discover the oafs with mustaches on YouTube. These oafs were licensed plumbers, certified HVAC guys, and former and current employees at the companies that manufactured the appliances Bob owned. They were experts in their field hoping to make some side money in the YouTube universe. They taught Bob that he no longer needed Mike the plumber, Leo the HVAC guy, and Craig the fix-it-guy to fix everything in his home. He could do some of this himself. The idea that an unlicensed, uncertified individual could fix the small things in his home “by following these steps” was a revelation to Bob Peters, and the only question left for him was how far do I take this? 

We’re not licensed plumbers, yet we can fix some of the majors, and most of the minors, in a little under an hour with the assistance of the ideal YouTuber. Bob even found that messing with electricity isn’t as scary as he thought it was. He maintained a healthy respect for electricity, but that healthy respect was a healthy fear prior to an oaf with a mustache informing him that as long as he followed “these necessary steps,” the electrical world wasn’t as foreign and scary as he thought it was.

The problem for Bob was that as healthy as his home, and now his car, were now through DIY maintenance, he could never maintain his own health. “How far do I take this?” he asked himself when he experienced yet another setback, a level of pain that suggested he was going to have to endure yet another emergency room visit. 

Bob’s life devolved to seemingly endless trips to doctor’s offices, rushes to emergency rooms, and some hospital stays. The routine was so demoralizing, painful, and tedious that in the midst of Nurse Nancy attending to him yet again, he said, “I just have this feeling that this is my life now.”

Those employed in health-related institutions gain knowledge, wisdom, and a level of expertise from books, professors, and personal experience, but they are methodical sorts who can leave a fella waiting, in pain, for thirty-to-forty minutes. I know what you’re thinking, a thirty-to-forty wait isn’t such a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re in excruciating pain, each click of the minute hand feels endless. These doctors and nurses further complicated Bob’s life with all of their monitoring. They suggest that they need to keep us, sometimes overnight, to monitor the effects of our medicinal and procedural treatments. Bob Peters just got sick of the whole shebang, and when he experienced yet another flair up, he wondered “How far can I take this DIY stuff?”

He’d been through the process of having a catheter inserted into his nether region so many times that he joked, “I could probably do this myself at this point” to Nurse Nancy the last time she helped him through the painful procedure. He repeated that joke, in his head, as he waited in the hospital room that last visit, as they monitored his levels. He then repeated that joke to his friends and family when they asked how his last visit went, and he ended up repeating that joke so often that when he experienced another flair up, he began seriously contemplating it. Even though his friends said, “You’re not seriously considering this are you?” He said no, and he meant it, but now that he was in need yet again, and he thought about going through all the typical procedures again, he began seriously considering it. 

The beauty of YouTube is that they list for us the bullet points of most DIY projects. Most viewers at home were so uninformed we didn’t even know there were bullet points and finding them proved an empowering revelation. The one caveat that experts list for anyone considering YouTube-style DIY fixes is that oafs with mustaches often don’t cover variables well. 

Bob came to our attention after experiencing just such a variable. He consulted a YouTube video that instructed him how he could insert a catheter from the comfort of his own home. The oaf with a mustache covered the basics, the principles behind it, and a number of caveats and variables, but he neglected to cover whatever led to Bob experiencing what he called “a warm rush of liquid” that occurred shortly after he inserted the catheter. 

“I didn’t hear a pop,” Bob told Nurse Nancy, “But that warm rush of liquid concerned me, and I’ve been urinating blood since. And, it ain’t stopping.” Although he managed to drive himself to the emergency room, Bob characterized his pain as a ten on the pain scale. “I always characterize the pain I feel as a ten, don’t we all, but the pain I’m experiencing right now gives me new perspective. I’m going to go ahead and edit all those previous pains as sevens now.”

Fearing the worst, Bob suggested that Nurse Nancy have the doctor, “Check to see if I punctured one of my testicles.” Those in charge of making preliminary guesses, guessed that Bob didn’t do anything as drastic as that, and he probably scratched something or popped a boil of some sort, but they knew that without further analysis, the possibilities were endless.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the details of this furthered analysis, but suffice it to say that Bob found an answer to the question, “How far do we take this?” As a relatively new advocate for Doing-It-Yourself, Bob probably sounded like an evangelist on feelings of empowerment inherent in being able to fix your own fixables. Even after his episode, he would stand behind the DIY sword and shield, but he would encourage those of us who ask ourselves “How far do we take this?” to ask one crucial question: “What’s the penalty for error?”  

Bob would probably add that even in the age of oafs with mustaches on YouTube, AI, and the resultant sense of individual empowerment inherent in fixing it yourself that there is still, at this point in human history, as of yet devoid of superhumans melding with AI, a need to avoid traveling in areas we don’t belong. As much as the not-easily-intimidated crowd hate to admit it, there is still a need for knowledge and expertise in certain arenas. There is still a need for professional analysis, waiting on those with firsthand knowledge, experience, aptitude, and all of that monitoring for the effects of all of the above. What’s the penalty for incorrectly installing a garbage disposal? What are the penalties for making errors in trying to fix an HVAC, their electricity, or their plumbing? “Go ahead and pay attention to all those ‘Don’t try this at home’ disclaimers that oafs with mustaches list on their YouTube videos before they start in,” Bob might add, “because some drains are more intricate, delicate, and indispensable than others.”