Who Am I Again?

Kids, I'm (finally) here to tell ya... I'm officially a believer in the theory that it is entirely possible for a person to wear just too many damn hats in their life!  I wondered why I've been so exhausted and running on just about empty at all times lately.  Then, I saw a quick snippet of an infomercial over the weekend that sort of resonated with me and I thought I'd take a moment to share my realizations.

The commercial was for one of those "I'm up at two in the morning so I must need some kind of guidance in my life" self-help video series, but the tagline was what caught my attention.  It asked one simple question:  "Exactly Who Are You?"

Now let's be clear before I start meandering through the rest of this post.  NO I'M NOT HAVING A MIDLIFE WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN CRISIS!  Actually far from it.  No what grabbed me is that the list of things that falls into that question has grown quite immense lately.  I started to think about it and here's the list I came up with:

Husband - Son - Brother - Uncle - Friend - Manager - Author - Blogger - Powerlifter

 - Aspiring Chef - Gamer - Tech Nerd - - - - - 

What occurs(ed) to me is that there's absolutely not enough time on a daily basis for any of us to be all the things we want to be, well that is if you intend to do a remotely good job at all of them.  I think the challenge is going to come in figuring out how to balance everything and still remain productive at work and the like.

Or actually I could just shorten the whole thought process and cheat and ask a working single parent how they do it... 

Ain't Technology Grand?

Well once again boys and girls your buddy the CS is back to bitching, moaning, pissing, groaning, and just generally attempting to be a nuisance to anyone that will let me get away with it.  In other words...

THE LAPTOP FAIRY CAME BY AND I'M BACK ONLINE KIDDIES!!!

It's amazing what little can actually be accomplished on a laptop with a broken hinge and case. You would have never guessed it but believe it or not those darned things are actually somewhat allergic to getting dropped on their edges.  

Who knew?

Well let's see, that means that over the course of the last 16 months or so I've now sent an Acer and a Compaq to the digital happy hunting grounds.  Hopefully this Toshiba will see me through at least long enough to get the next book finished!

And while we're on the subject of technology, I'd like to jump overboard for just a moment and say my peace on the matter.  Folks, I love tech of just about any kind.  I'm a huge gadget nerd and I admit it.  It has lately, however, become very painfully and annoyingly evident to me just how much human beings seem to be moving away from the capacity to actually friggin' speak to one another in lieu of texts, tweets, posts, and other digital chicanery. It's gotten bad enough that I have a very good friend who (and yes he already knows this so it's not like this is really news to him) drives me completely nuts with his unwillingness to talk to someone on the damn phone.  He'd rather text.  And it's not just me... he does this with women he hopes to show his genitalia in a slightly less creepier than Jason-Mewes-with-devil-on-shoulder montage!  (Points if you get it, you Scooby Van driving Jersey freak, but move along if you don't.)  Maybe that's why I'm glad I'm nowhere near single nowadays.  I don't know how I'd function in a world where you have to text to get a little.  But then again I do sort of fancy myself a writer... hmmm....

(The next two pages of self indulgent diatribe are hereby deleted in an attempt to avoid the catastrophically devastating ass whipping my wife would deliver should she ever read what I just wrote. Just damn, son.)

And on that note we'll just move on along and pretend that didn't almost happen.

Have a great night kiddies.  The tools are back in hand and the words they be a-flowing.  Sleep while you can!

Dear Taylor Swift

Let's just go right on ahead and stomp on that ol' NSFW button, shall we?

(Hey, at least I had the courtesy to warn you in advance.)

Okay kids, it's officially reached that magical time where your buddy the CS had just about enough of yet another dumb ass.  Yep, you guessed it, it's time for a fan letter to little Ms. Taylor Swift.

Dear Taylor Swift,

Just so we're clear, the opinions and notions I'm going to include in this letter are directed solely to Taylor Swift (Inc.), the soulless, highly uncreative Disney-reject animatron that has been proliferating herself into our collective consciousness over the last few years.  I'm sure there's actually a pretty decent human being hiding somewhere in there and I don't want the vehement spewing of incendiary material that's about to come heaving over the wall to accidentally nail her with any splash damage.

I'll admit that at one time I was a fan.  The whole cute girl with a guitar and a slight country twang hooked me whether I wanted it to or not.  I bought in, I'll own up to it.  "Teardrops on My Guitar" even got a short story out of me.  You had some decent lyrics and some fairly catchy stuff going on there.  I even made a few mental comparisons to Faith Hill and found them to not really be out of bounds.

And then, well to steal a page from Dina Lohan (God help me for doing so), all I can ask is "Honey, what the hell happened?"

It seems like in a little less than the course of two years you went from making decent country music to revenge albums to get back at your seemingly never ending stream of ex-boyfriends.  And then you started apparently opening your mouth in public without a handler's okay in advance and it went straight to hell from there.  Not to be crass but come the fuck on sweetheart, "Baking and Fucking"? Really?  Are your serious?  Girl the only time the words baking and fucking should ever end up in the same thought, let alone sentence, is if you're wearing the same apron for both activities.  

As for the endless string of men, well, I have a little piece of advice for you Ms. Taylor that would unfortunately probably end your career but make you a much happier human being.  Have you taken a long hard look at the endless string of dipshit you've been letting between your legs honey?  I mean for chrissakes!  How many hipster vest and fedora clad douchebags do you need to fake an orgasm with to generate an album's worth of material?  Or did you hit your head a little to hard on the headboard the one time John Mayer bent you over doggy / tried to pretend you were the guy he really wanted to be balls deep in after all and you just fell into a bad hipster rut?  In any event, here's the cure you're in need of sweetie: find a real man to take you out, treat you well, then epically screw you're brains out until you're overcome with the need to go grab that aforementioned apron again and make a brother a sandwich.  Stop fishing off the same old pier and go after a real, normal guy.  I know a couple of volunteers, but sadly they all just want to sleep with you to get a breakup song written about them.  So far I think my favorite title I've heard was "He Put It In My Ass So I Broke His Heart" but I'm sure you're much more creative than a group of monkeys at the gym.

Am I being overly harsh? Bet your tiny but shockingly well formed ass on it dear. You're growing into your looks finally and you've got a lot of talent and potential for a very long career.  Sadly you're also showing grand potential as a cum gargling revenge spewing record hag who will spend her forties married to some dirtbag local politician while trying to remain relevant in Nashville.... oh never mind they've already made that television show.

Suffice it to say that you will never ever ever (you have no idea how much I hate that fucking song by the way) get me to buy another thing you put out until you learn to close your legs and get back to writing good music.  For fuck's sake girl, buy a vibrator like the rest of your ilk and get your shit back under control.

Sincerely,

The CS