Mild Amusement

Every now and then, some random TV show will have a fight between a man and a woman because the toilet seat was left in an inconvenient position for one of the characters. Everyone immediately recognizes the argument, because it's one of those silly little arguments that pops up all over the place. It's not all that important in the long run, but there is a surprising amount of thought that goes in to this debate (for example, look at how many hits " toilet seat up or down " returns). In my case, however, I deal with a slightly different version of the same argument. Well, to be fair, it's not really an argument. Despite growing up with both men and women in the house, I can't remember this ever boiling over in to an argument. If a guy found the toilet seat down and he didn't need it that way, he flipped it up and did his business. If a woman found the toilet seat up, she flipped it down and did her business. No one whined, and everyone proved they were...

First of all, if you don't know what burpees are, consider yourself lucky. Burpees are a form of exercise, where a single repetition involves transitioning from a push up to a jump. The motion involves both a strength component (the push up) and an aerobic condition component (going from flat on the ground to jumping in the air), so doing a bunch of these gets tiring, very quickly. I know a guy who owns a CrossFit gym that gives these out as punishments. Yeah, they're no fun. These days, I don't do as many  CrossFit workouts   so I don't do as many burpees. Still, there are two things about me that you should keep in mind: 1) habits die really hard in my case, and 2) I do things the hard way . So, when I felt like I'd been slacking off on exercising as a whole recently, I woke up one Saturday morning and made myself do burpees. One hundred of them, to be exact. I remember someone telling me she could do that in less than ten minutes once, so I tried to hit that t...

A while back, one of the Mild Exes and I broke up. It was messier than I would have liked, but them's the breaks. It was actually a pretty amusing story (a juicer figured prominently), but in keeping with the "don't air dirty laundry" rule, I'll refrain from telling it here. However, people's reactions to the story are fair game, since I'm not divulging state secrets in the process. More importantly, they were freaking hilarious. Remember, all of these came off the cuff pretty much immediately after hearing what had gone down: Friend 1: "You're right, it's a fun story, though I think it needs a little less profanity" Friend 2: "Really? Because I think it needs MORE" I couldn't help but burst out laughing at this. I'm not going to lie; I felt like high-fiving that second friend immediately afterward and declaring her my best friend for the week. Friend 1: "Where do you find these women?!" Friend 2: ...

Every now and then, I like to jokingly complain that this whole adulthood thing sucks. Usually, this happens when I have to do something boring at work or when I have to pass on something fun in favor of taking care of an errand. There is a grain of truth in this; being a functional adult means accepting responsibility, and responsibility occasionally means having to do things you don't like. Still, it comes with the territory, so I accept it and move on with whatever it is I have to do. Obviously, this is not a unique view. There are literally billions of others on this planet who intuitively know and understand this. However, there are times when this can be applied in very creative, and very amusing, ways. The simplest, and most obvious, example of this comes with little kids who have been taught to share. Even if you've never seen it in person, you instinctively know that most little kids don't like to share. They eventually get over that, but the first few times that...

As I like to mention, little kids can be ridiculously awesome. I've mentioned it at least six times before (the last time was here ), and it's no less true today then it was the first time I mentioned it. However, sometimes, they are more awesome than others. This, my friends, is a case of extra awesomeness. So, rather than describing several witty remarks like I usually do, I'm going to devote the entire post to a single exchange. Trust me, it'll be worth it. To begin with, the cable went out at my house a while back. I knew just enough about the cable boxes to try a few basic troubleshooting steps, but none of it worked. The end result was that the we couldn't watch anything but the basic channels on TV, and we had to have a technician come out to fix it. The technicians don't usually come out on the weekend, so we had to make an appointment for them to show up in the middle of a weekday. That meant that the kids would be around when the technician showed up...

No, this isn't going to be a rant about how much I get annoyed by other people doing silly things. That just doesn't come from the right place. Sure, it might be (darkly) funny in the right context, but it encourages all sorts of behavior that I'd rather not encourage. However, this is going to be a post about an off-hand comment my sister made that absolutely cracked me up. It'll take a bit to build up to the punch line, but it's a good one, trust me. With that said, let me start with something of an unofficial motto of mine: do things the hard way. I don't mean that I have to do every last task in the absolute hardest way possible; mowing the lawn with a pair of nail clippers would be difficult, but there's no point in doing it that way. No, I mean that when I'm faced with a choice, I almost always choose the tougher road. More often than not, it's the right thing to do. I rarely want to do things that way, but that's precisely the point. If...

I've mentioned before that getting sick is a source of amusement for me, largely because of the kids and the reactions I get from people at work. Well, it looks like I underestimated just how much laughter illness can cause. Yup, the whole process of getting sick managed to generate some (mild) amusement. First of all, my brother got a pretty bad case of strep throat, so he had to miss some time at work. He is also around kids quite a bit, so it's not uncommon for one of those "vectors of infection" he works with to get him sick in some way, shape, or form. In this case, he managed to contract a case of strep throat. His supervisor, however, was far more concerned about the work schedule than the fact that he had a really high fever and could not keep himself out of bed. She said she was going to make him come in later that day (to which he roughly said, "you're not understanding. I cannot come in to work today."), and then she insisted on a doctor...