Mild Amusement

First off, if you don't know what a mnemonic is, it's just a fancy way of saying, " something that helps you remember stuff ." I would have just used that as this post's title, but I got lazy, and I didn't want to type any more characters than I absolutely had to. Regardless, everyone has their own little ways of remembering things. Sometimes it's as simple as writing yourself a note, while other times technology can help (e.g., put a reminder in your phone). Either way, when it comes to remembering certain things, there are little tricks that can help every one. In my case, I have discovered that physically touching things can help. And if you know me at all, you can already tell that this is going to lead to some manner of amusement. I actually discovered this by accident. See, I'm not the biggest fan of sitting on my wallet when I'm driving. It's not that thick a wallet, but I have a long enough commute that it can be slightly annoying. ...

As should be fairly obvious by now to anyone who reads regularly, I am around little kids quite a bit. This leads to all manner of hilarity, because little kids are awesome . However, this also means that I have picked up a few mannerisms that help me deal with them in a healthy manner. For starters, I don't swear around them, I make sure to say "please" and "thank you," and I demonstrate what I'm doing around them so they can learn from it. As it turns out, that last one can lead to some pretty amusing results. You see, I had to dig a hole in the backyard in order to plant some new flowers back there. Normally I would do this when the kids weren't around, but circumstances dictated that I take care of it when the munchkins were around. Luckily, the ones who could reach the area in which I was digging were old enough to avoid falling in. Still, they were very curious about what I was doing, so they came up to me and asked, "what are you doing?...

I have a lot of female friends. I've never actively tried to make this happen, but that's just how it's turned out over the years. Most of the time, I don't think anything about this. I mean, what does it really matter? I can still play basketball or pick up football with the fellas, I don't do anything scandalous, and it's not like it changes my life in any negative ways. Well, most of the time. Every now and again, it makes things hilariously interesting. See, the big problem is that most people assume that a guy and a girl who are hanging out are romantically involved somehow. One of my oldest friends at work happens to be female, and people have been whispering about us for years. She's engaged and I have dated several other women during the time we've known each other, but that hasn't stopped imaginations from running wild. Heck, I went skydiving with my sister-in-law, and the instructor assumed that she was my girlfriend. Like I said, people m...

If you've never heard of the word "frenemy" before, it's a combination of the words " friend " and " enemy ." The basic idea is that the person in question elicits both positive and negative emotions. This has always seemed like one of those things that I would see on TV, but would never actually witness in person. Turns out I was wrong. I have now witnessed this phenomenon in person. I was visiting my sister a while back, and I was browsing through Facebook at the time. I came across a picture of a friend of mine who was wearing a shirt that my sister happened to own, so I pointed it out. My sister's initial reaction was something along the lines of, "cool, she's got good taste." However, the friend had modified the original shirt a bit; she'd cut it up to fit her style a little more. I thought it looked fine, but my sister was not amused. Quickly, her reaction turned to, "wait, what?" In hindsight, I should...

As I've mentioned before, I use Google Reader to track various RSS feeds . It helps me to keep up with various sites and stories that I find interesting and/or educational, so I like it quite a bit. On most days, I read my posts and go about my business. Recently, though, there was a post that made things anything but just another post on any other day. To begin with, the post that came up on my feed was from a site called "Clients From Hell." In hindsight, the title on the thing was "NSFW Work Opportunity," so I should've known that this was going to be awfully interesting. Now, I should also mention that I usually read my feeds while at work. So a post that says " NSFW " made me a little leery. Still, it showed up on my feed, and those posts are generally text-only, so I figured I'd take my chances. If you haven't already read the post, the story is about a guy who asks a designer to make his anatomy look bigger in a "risque pr...

A while back, I had dinner with a friend. This was someone I've known for a while, so we were both pretty comfortable around each other. That meant that no one had to pull any punches, and we both heard the raw truth when it came to telling our stories. Of course, that also meant that the conversation was infinitely more hilarious as a result. To begin with, I knew that she was dealing with some drama in her life at the moment (she claimed that it followed her around). I didn't quite know the source of all the drama, but I knew something was up. So, I asked her what was going on. I won't go in to the gory details, but she was dealing with someone who had once been a friend. Things had gotten messy for a while, and she had ultimately cut her ties with this person. Things didn't stay that way. The ex-friend had made something of a half-hearted attempt to reconnect, in the form of an email. Without being a gossip, suffice it to say that my friend did not think it was gen...

A short while back, I stopped by my friend's house warming party. I hadn't seen the guy in a while, so I was looking forward to catching up with him. As it turned out, there were a bunch of people at the shindig, so I got to talk to my share of his other friends. That would end up causing quite a bit of laughter. You see, both my buddy and his girlfriend played quite a bit of ultimate Frisbee, so many of their friends came from that social circle. So when I would ask someone how they knew the hosts, it wasn't unheard of to hear, "oh I played ultimate with one of them." It was interesting meeting this other social circle, but the best part, by far, was when I met one of them who happened to be a trainer of some sort. When she told me she played with the hosts, I replied with something along the lines of, "oh cool, not me, though. I don't play ultimate." Taking that as her cue, she launched into a one-woman game of What Does Sam Play Then? Mind you, ...