Brian Explains: Freaks

Freaks are all around us. It is easy to say that someone is a freak if they have a third leg or tree bark skin. I saw the movie “Freaks” (from 1932) years ago and was fascinated. I wasn’t fascinated because of the sideshow performers in the movie, but more that the sideshow performers allowed themselves to be in the movie. Now, I realize that being in that movie was probably good for them. They got paid for being in the movie and reached at least a certain amount of fame from it. Being a “freak” allowed them to make a living for themselves and their families. It is no different from the freaks that are in the movies and on television. The true freaks are in Hollywood. All the top stars are freaks. The more freakish someone is, the bigger the star they are (though, there are exceptions to every rule - even the one I just created).

Some people may not agree with my terming these Hollywood-types as freaks. My definition of a freak is anyone who has some distinguishing characteristic about themselves that sets them apart from other people. Some freakish qualities consist of what most people term talents while others consist of physical characteristics. Even brain power can distinguish someone, though, this is a rare rarity for the public to be interested in such higher pursuits without some other freakish qualities also being apparent. "Freaks" is the all-encompassing term for all those qualities combined. Just as love is hard if not impossible to define, so the term freak is easier seen than defined.

As I write this, I realize that I have several freakish qualities that it takes to become a star. In other words, I am quite the freak. My main qualities are in areas of rarity, but I do have a few major freakish qualities of my own (that I keep in a cage by my TV). Utilizing the dictionary, we (you and I on the journey of discovery) find that "freak" is defined as "something very queer or unusual" and as an "animal, plant, or person that has developed abnormally." Jack Nicholson, one of my favorite freaks, was born on April 22, 1937, on a Thursday. Whether his parents knew that he would achieve total freakish fame can only be guessed at by other freaks and non-freaks alike. I am guessing that they knew he was not normal from his voice and unique looks.

Perhaps if more people embraced their freakish qualities, they would feel better about themselves and other freaks. They wouldn't feel the need to sit in front of an audience on a talk show being stared at just to get their 15 minutes of fame. Your unique qualities are the things that make you distinct from other people. If we were all the same, we would all have just typed this sentence in this article on this day as I just did. Unfortunately for you, only I can claim ownership of the freakish qualities that it took to create this article. Okay, I understand many other people possess the unique qualities that it took to create this article, but I was the only one who used my freakish hands to actually create it.

Does everyone want to be a freak? Does everyone want to be liked? Does anyone? (Which question am I questioning?) Some people don't want to be freaks merely because they don't want to stand out from other people. I understand this, but I still feel (deep down under my arteries) that everyone wants to be a freak of some kind or another. They may not admit to their freakish side and they may not appreciate their freakish qualities, but they exist. Then again, what do I know. I'm just a freak.

Brian Explains: Time

I have a never-ending series of weird and scary things that I do. One of my abilities is to wake up seconds before my alarm clock goes off. I go hours without looking at the clock and I have managed to time it perfectly a chilling amount of times. My internal clock works overtime even when I am sleeping (reason 1389 why I have a hard time sleeping at night). I play and write music, which might have something to do with my connection to time. I have developed good timing to play music, which translates to a good understanding of timing in life. I don’t usually lose track of time. I own time and it does my bidding. Time is my bitch.

When I was a kid, my cousin was unable to tell time on an analog clock. In case you are in the same club as my cousin, an analog clock is a clock with hands and a face. A grandfather clock and Big Ben are analog clocks. Digital clocks (the only clocks my cousin ever knew) just tell you the time in digital numbers. I prefer an analog clock mainly for doing time math. If something is 6 hours away, it is on the opposite side of the clock. Count up or down from 6 hours and you can count just about any length of time by 3 hour increments. I prefer carrying a cellphone rather than wearing a wristwatch because I don’t need to stare at a clock every few minutes. I look at clocks quite often, but I at least get a rest when I am walking from place to place where I can just rely on my inner clock.

Military time is another helpful mathematical time tracker. 17 minus 8 hours shows that an 8 to 5 day is actually 9 hours out of your life that you will never get back. I don’t always agree with the military (especially their love of early morning hours), but a 24-hour clock makes sense considering there are 24 hours in a day. To convert military time to regular time, you simply subtract 12 hours. I usually think of the time as 2 hours and go to the hour that makes sense. To go from regular time to military time, you add 12 hours (or 2 hours). Consider this paragraph your invitation to be drafted into the armed forces. Before you head off to Canada to avoid the military time draft, just move on to the next paragraph.

My wife and I have been to Europe twice in our lives. Just as I find it hard to sleep much of the time at home, I could not sleep on the plane to Europe or the plane back. We both experienced the jet-lag when we arrived in Europe and when we arrived home. Because of the jet-lag, my concept of time was off from my normal timing. I had bad timing like you would not believe. The change in time threw our whole regular routine into shambles. When time is thrown into chaos, your life is thrown into chaos. Eventually, your timing regulates. The moment you get used to European time, it is time to return to your home time.

I thought it would be appropriate in this last paragraph to discuss late timing. It is one thing to be late for things on your own time, but it is another to be later for things involving someone else. Lateness is an insult to those around you. You are saying that whatever you were supposed to remember was not important enough to involve planning for it. Unless you are 5 years old, you know by now how long it takes you to prepare for going somewhere. Plan ahead and be on time. Before I am late in putting out this article, I will just say that time is easy to master, but hard to control. It gets on my nerves and is the greatest thing I crave (next to money). Learn how to deal with time and you will learn how to deal with life. After all, timing is everything.

Brian Explains: Television

The subject of my article this week is something that is near and dear to my heart. To this day, it is the friend that helps wake me up in the morning and the companion that puts me to bed at night. It comforts me when I am sick and even helps me exercise so I do not get sick in the first place. I am of course talking about my maid, Alice. If you understand the reference in the last sentence, you also know that I am actually talking about television.

My taste in television shows has always leaned more toward comedies and animation than dramas and news. The serious realities of adult life have not beaten my love of comedies or animation out of me. I have seen every episode of the Simpsons and plan to keep watching it until it is yanked off the air in 2015. Watching psychics on Oprah taught me that I am psychic. I enjoy watching documentaries and behind-the-scenes shows as well. I watch American Choppers and L.A. Ink, but I have no interest in riding motorcycles or getting a tatoo. It is like watching a soap opera without all the fakeness. It is a view of people's lives that I do not normally see.

Something that I have never enjoyed is watching sports. I had a time when I watched tennis and I will sometimes watch basketball, but I never really care about the outcome of the matches or games. When I was a kid, I played baseball for 1 1/2 seasons. I played 1/2 a season because I wasn't good and took myself off the team when the assistant coach yelled at me for not getting hit by the ball (the only way I could get on base). I actually hate watching football (the American version for my three international readers). I disagree with the sport morally (just like I disagree with boxing) and the game play bores me. I also do not understand why anyone has any loyalty to any team that they are not playing on. Most of the players of a profesional football team are not from the area where the team plays their home games so why do people root for one random accumulation of people over another? Before I go too far down the road of this subject (when I should just write an article about sports), I promise to get back to television in the next paragraph.

The two things my wife and I watch concerning football are the Superbowl commercials and the halftime show. We never watch the Superbowl live. We record the show and watch it later so we can fast forward past the boring game and get to the funny commercials. I hear people saying that they would like to watch a show, but they won't be home when it is on. In this day and age, that is the equivalent of saying, "I would love to remember this moment, but I don't have time to pose for a painting. VCRs, DVRs, and TiVos have been invented. You no longer have to watch live TV. In addition, DVDs, Blu-rays, Netflix, video rentals, video on demand, and many other services give you many other options for watching what you want when you want. If you say you do not know how to program your recording device, I think your television watching privileges should be revoked.

For my second to last paragraph, I would be incorrectly representing my television life if I did not mention Forensic Files. It is a show that plays late at night on TruTV and it is my wife's favorite show by which to sleep. The show usually follows a murder that is solved using forensics. This is what my wife has chosen to be our lulliby. Death and murder are not exactly bedtime stories, but I have gotten used to them. I am probably just bored with the stabbings, shootings, and stranglings (oh my).

Television has changed a great deal from when it first appeared in the late 1920s. It switched from being analog to digital, comes to us through a cable, satellite, or computer, and connects to everything from a Blu-ray player to an interactive video game system. The idea of television is simple. You watch moving images on a screen. What you watch on the screen is the complex part. I watched a Marx Brothers movie on Netflix the other day. It was as if I was watching the future and the past at the same time. But as Oprah has taught me, the past and future are merely what you make of them in the present. Actually, it might have been SpongeBob SquarePants.

Brian Explains: New Year's Resolutions

New Year's resolutions come just once a year, but they can be broken all year long. I have never really participated in New Year's resolutions. I would sometimes jokingly mention that I was going to resolve to quite doing something or start doing something, but I was never seriously intending to keep the resolution. When I resolved to pickle more things one year, I gave it up after I pickled my breakfast cereal. Others have had New Year’s resolutions around me and I didn’t take their resolutions seriously either. In the next paragraph, I resolve to talk about my resolution to resolve my resolution making. Actually, I already feel like talking about something else so I will.

Resolutions come in many shapes and sizes. Some people resolve to lose weight. Others want more money or better time management skills. I may want more sex, but my wife may want less sex. We all have different goals in life. Most people just want to improve themselves in one way or another. They see the new year as a chance to reinvent themselves. I am one person today, but tomorrow I will literally and figuratively change who I am. Some people make up their New Year’s resolution ten minutes before the new year arrives. Usually, alcohol is involved in the decision and that is never a good decision making position to put yourself. The good news is that you probably won’t remember what you resolved to do in the next year anyway.

The real question is why do people make New Year’s resolutions? As with every other motivation in human existence, we are governed by fear. We fear that next year will be the same as the past year. A resolution is just that. You promise yourself something that you may keep, but probably will not. Don't resolve to do something, just do it (I am not a spokesman for Nike and resolve to never be one). Waiting until an arbitrary day to say that change is coming only cements the fact that you are not doing that thing right now. Just wake up one day and decide that this is the day you are going to change something in your life. When you say I am going to eat less fatty foods starting on the 1st of the next year that is too general. Tell yourself that today is the day you are going to dust off the treadmill and tomorrow is the day you are actually going to jog on it for ten minutes.

Your resolution changes depending on whom you are talking. Your mom doesn’t hear the “have more sex” resolution and your friends don't hear the “spend more time with your cats” resolution (unless your only friends are your cats). We mainly tell others what we think they want to hear. If your doctor tells you to eat less donuts, you tell him or her that eating less donuts is exactly what your resolution will be for the new year. Your audience informs your resolve. If you tell your friends at the local bar that you are going to quite drinking in the next year, you probably won’t be invited to any of their New Year’s Eve parties.

My basic suggestion for New Year’s resolutions is make them only if you know that you probably won’t be following them a week after New Years. Try making a new minute’s resolution. Promise to start doing the things you need to do in the next minute. Spend the next minute playing with your cats instead of sitting on your couch watching reruns of The Housewives of Alaska. My resolution for the next year is to have more decisive endings to my articles. To that end, I say squirrel.

Brian Explains: Toys

This Christmas time, I thought I would talk about an important issue that we must examine at this time of year. It is an issue that affects us all when we reach a certain age. Are we children, teenagers, young adults or the most dreaded of all – an adult? You are walking around thinking fun-filled happy toy thoughts and suddenly non-child thoughts start entering our minds. You once knew how the world worked - the one who dies with the most toys wins. Now you question who you are. You see the world differently. Before, it was obvious what was the best toy – the bigger the box, the better the toy. Now, the smaller the toy, the more money it will cost. When I was a small child, the box was my favorite toy. Just as the world changes over time, so did I.

Our perceptions when we are children change when we “grow up.” I can remember the last time I got toys for my birthday. First, I must explain one thing. My parents gave into whatever was on my mind. I didn’t like getting toys (or the dreaded clothes) that I didn’t want so I always took my parents to the toy store and picked out what I wanted. There was very little surprise involved in the process. It was the way I liked it. I was in Junior High at the time of my last “toys birthday.” I went to the toy store determined to buy or have my parents buy toys and did just that. I was a little wiser in my purchases than I had been in the past. I actually economized on the gifts. I knew I was only getting so much money for gifts so I got the smaller Star Wars Ewok vehicle instead of the larger, more expensive Ewok village. I remember thinking at the time, “I refuse to give up buying toys just because I am older. I don’t want to grow up. I want to be a kid forever. Get your wand away from me, Time!” I played with the toys so little even a year after I had gotten them that you could barely tell I had taken them out of the boxes. That little kid inside me refused to believe that getting older meant doing without toys. Toys were my life. What was I going to do with my time? This was why teenagers are so crabby. They stopped playing with toys and had nothing to do. I was becoming a crabby teenager! If this continued, I would be one of those cranky adults sitting around worrying about bills all day. The teenage years were the years that people waited to receive their bills. Your childhood was gone and toys were a forgotten memory.

As we grow up, the idea of what constitutes a toy changes. Legos and building blocks were my favorite toys as a child. Later, computer games took over my interest when I got a little older. I was a creative child and am still a creative adult. If I could create something from scratch, I could entertain myself for hours. The next step in the toy evolution is action figures. They are usually set in a certain pose. Some assembly may be required, but there is no creativity involved in building the toys. You can be creative with scripting the actions that the action figures would take, but much of the creativity of older toys gets taken out. Creativity gets suppressed as we get older because we don’t allow ourselves to be badly creative. If you ask children about specific aspects of their creations, you will get creative, but not necessarily logical answers. You need to allow yourself to create beyond sense and logic. Eventually, you can take the creative ideas and organize them into logical stories and story ideas. Every author, screenwriter, and actor was a creative child that didn’t let his or her creativity die.

When talking about toys, you have to make the distinction between girl toys and boy toys. Girl toys are boring and stupid and boy toys are interesting, creative, and great. Not that I have a bias about what toys are better, but if you look at Legos and Barbies next to each other, the difference becomes clear. Legos are a 100% creative toy where as a Barbie was an action figure with such lofty aspirations as finding a man (Ken) and getting married so she can live in the Barbie mansion. You didn’t build a car or build the house she lived in, you or your parents bought the car and house. Life was just as mundane as everyday life. The creative script of Barbie’s life had more resemblance to a soap opera than a creative exercise. My wife always complains about having to buy toys for boys. “Boys toys are so boring,” she usually yells as she rolls her eyes. Admittedly, some boys only want toys that they can destroy. I was not one of those boys. Girls also didn’t all aspire to have Barbie marry Ken. Some girls built their dollhouses, built the furniture in the house, and created the fashions for the dolls. There are creative boys as well as creative girls. For some reason, girls lose the creative aspects of childhood more than do boys. It doesn’t have to be this way, but you definitely see more men in creative jobs than women.

Creativity doesn’t have to die when we stop playing with toys. Some of us manage to keep our creativity into our adulthood and still play with toys. I still receive Legos from my wife at Christmas because I still like playing and creating. The toys I play with now are more sophisticated and expensive, but I still enjoy the simple toys the best. Give me a piece of paper and a pencil and I can create anything and everything from scratch. My creativity today has everything to do with the toys I played with as a child. If you are giving toys to someone or receiving toys this Christmas, rejoice in the fun and creativity that is growing in the world. Toys make the world a better place. Teenagers make the world a crabby toyless place with no fun or creativity. Give a teenager a toy today and make the world a better place tomorrow.

Brian Explains: Men and Women

Men and women are the same in many ways. We are both humans, have feet and hands in the same general area, and have heads that are tied to our bodies with skin string. We are so similar that you cannot tell in which category some people fit. There are a couple physical differences between women and men, but, rather than make this a sex education class with charts of ovaries, I’ll move on to the next paragraph where I will explain the meaning of Christmas . . . I mean, the difference between men and women. I will focus on the inside. No, I am not talking about the ovaries again. I am talking about the female and male brain.

If you have ever hung out with women for more than two minutes you know that they are auditory creatures. They love to talk and it is their primary form of communication to others of their kind. They also choose to communicate with the opposites of their kind in this manner. Men are visual creatures. We remember things as visual images and communicate more with visuals than do our opposites. Men can watch a movie and tell you what happened scene by scene. Women can hear a conversation and tell you exactly what was said sentence by sentence. If a man and a woman watch a crime take place in the same room, the man will notice the visual information and the woman will remember any conversations that took place. Both sides are needed to get a complete movie (with visuals and audio) of the incident.

As a child, I was bullied often enough to worry everyday about being bullied. Not that is has to be said, but my bully was usually a boy who was slightly older than I was. Girls didn’t have to deal with bullies. Most of the time when they saw a bully picking on someone, they thought it was just stupid boys that were messing with each other. Admittedly, they did have to deal with a kind of bullying. Their bullying came in the form of being socially shunned. The social shunning was worse than the bullying as far as time. A bullying would usually last a few minutes while a social shunning could go on for weeks. A very cruel trick to play on a social creature is to not speak with her. I don’t remember all the bullying that took place in my life, but most women remember when they were shunned and who shunned them.

Men are thought to be aggressive monsters who only think of sex and meat (sometimes in the same visual moment). Women are thought to be timid creatures who only think of marriage and clothing sales (always in the same auditory moment). This is as bad the stereotype as all Irish people being drunks who like to fight. As soon as I finish my Baileys, I will finish yelling at my neighbor and start on my article that disputes this stereotype. Not all women are the same and not all men are the same (except when it comes to thinking about sex). Some women act like men and some men act like women. I don’t follow any sports, but my wife loves baseball. She watches hours of TV, but I listen to hours of music and podcasts. As with any generalizations, they only work in general. For specifics, consult a specific woman or man near you. You’ll get a longer explanation from the woman, but less details from the man. Of course, I don’t know these things for sure because I only heard most of this stuff from others. It just sounded like “blaa, blaa, blaa” to me most of the time. Probably some woman was talking about it.

Brian Explains: Hoarding

Stop Hoarding the Insanity

If you haven't seen any of the shows about hoarding, you owe it to yourself to watch one. The basic premise of every show is that the person who the show is about cannot let go of things. "Things" include both physical and emotional things. It is the emotional baggage that compels them to keep the physical things. In other words, they are psychologically damaged. In other other words, those people are nuts. This is the part of the show that you owe it to yourself to watch. You feel much better about yourself because these people are so much worse than you.

Just as I have a little OCD, I think I exhibit some of the tendencies of those who hoard. My wife and I recently went through our future family room to clear it out so we could actually use it someday. We were definitely hoarders in that room. Part of the definition of a hoarder is having to clear a path through your stuff so you can walk. We fit that definition. Most of the items were junk that we just threw out. We still need to go through the rest of it and make more room in the room in order to consider it a room we would use as a functional room. Do you room what I’m saying?

When I was a kid, I would save the boxes from my toys. I still have some of the boxes and many of the toys. I understand why people want to keep objects that mean something to them. I’ve gone through the boxes of my childhood memories and had hours of reminiscing about the toys and other objects that took me right back to those more innocent and simpler times. Memories are merely the objects of your mind. You can store as many objects as can fit in your head and you don’t have to create a walking path. When I look at the objects of my childhood, I don’t think about the objects themselves. I think about the memories that those objects bring up in my mind. I can throw away the physical objects easily, but it would take one of those memory erasers from Men in Black to lose my memories.

My dad was a definite hoarder. He would save coffee cans, tissue boxes, toilet paper centers, Styrofoam, Atari 2600 video game consoles and games, enough 3-½ inch floppy disks to tile a roof, and boxes of assorted paper. He had reasons in his mind for keeping all of these objects. Admittedly, he would at some point actually use many of the objects he kept. One of my friends asked my dad if he had a couple coffee cans to use as drums in a percussive composition we were working on. My dad disappeared for a couple minutes and came back with 10-15 various sizes of coffee cans. It was a proud day for my dad. All the years he spent collecting those coffee cans was worth it. When we had to clear out my parents’ house, I had to clean out all of these objects. If nothing else, don’t become a hoarder for your children’s sake.

Hoarding is not something that is apparent to people unless they visit the hoarder’s house. It is a hidden disease like alcoholism. Only family and close friends know about what goes on behind the front door of their house. If your parents or other family members are hoarders, go to them now before it gets too late. If you wait too long, you are going to be the one who has to clean up after them. If you are the hoarder yourself, start throwing crap away now before it is too late.

Brian Explains: OCD

Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is defined by Merriam-Webster as a “psychoneurotic disorder in which the patient is beset with obsessions or compulsions or both and suffers extreme anxiety or depression through failure to think the obsessive thoughts or perform the compelling acts.”  I don’t mean to brag, but I have several forms of OCD.  One form of OCD that I have is the ordering the items in my kitchen sink.  The last sentence was the teaser for the next paragraph.  I really should have ended with that sentence and come back next week with an article that continues the setup.  That would make this week’s Brian Explains Life article just a tad short so I will go ahead and continue the story in the next paragraph.  Besides, with these added sentences, I feel I have teased you enough.

And now, the much anticipated paragraph where I explain how I organize my kitchen sink.  The left side of the sink is the inbox.  Whatever is going in the sink starts there.  Usually, I just use that side of the sink to wash off the dishes, etc., of any debris on them.  They are then placed dry and in order on the right side of the sink.  What is the proper order of items on the right side?  That’s a very good and important question and I am glad I asked it.  When you put cups in the sink, the forks, spoons, and knives get put inside them.  Dishes get placed on their side in ascending order from smallest to largest with the larger dishes being on the edge of the sink.  The largest bowls or containers get placed on the bottom of the sink with subsequently smaller bowls or containers placed on top.  Container lids or other large flat items (like a cutting board) should be placed on their side in the back of the sink.  You might have more of one type of item so you will have to perform Tetris-like moves to get them all to work together.

If others in your household do not follow the steps in the past paragraph, it is best to freak out and tie them to a chair so you can explain the whole process to them.  I have never actually done this when my wife, Patti, ignores my rules, but I show my disdain to her actions by rolling my eyes and correcting the horrendous sink faux pas by placing the items in the sink myself.  Patti has her own form of OCD.  One form has to do partially with the sink.  If I take a knife out of the drawer and I meant to take a spoon, I cannot put the knife back in the drawer even if I only raised it a few inches out of the drawer.  It has been contaminated by the outside the drawer air.  You have to put it in the sink unused (in a cup, of course).  And don’t get me started on how she eats.  Well, since I already began talking about it, I will set forth the rules of a proper dinner plate.  All food items must be separated by enough space for the food to not touch.  Food must be eaten in order and one item at a time.  If you have spaghetti and meatballs, the spaghetti must be eaten first and then the meatballs.  The best meal for her would be separate plates for each item.

I would like to apologies to my wife for the last paragraph.  Everything I have said was true, but I shouldn’t include her in my explanation of a psychological disorder.  I should only use myself and other people I don’t know as examples.  Celebrities are always good targets.  Speaking of which, here are a list of celebrities and their OCD activities:

• Howard Hughes became a recluse and wore tissue boxes on his feet near the end of his life, becoming a social recluse.
• Howie Mandel cannot shake hands with anyone due to mysophobia (the fear of dirt and germs).  He bumps his fist with people instead of shaking hands.  I call him a germaphobe.  I’ll explain germaphobes in another article, but not in the middle of a list of celebrities with OCD.
• Howard Stern could not turn on his car radio without tapping the dial a certain number of times with his right hand.

I could name other celebrities with OCD, but I have a form of OCD that only allows me to list people who are named Howard.  I think we all have some form of OCD in our lives.  There are many disorganized and chaotic parts of life that need to be put in check somehow.  Our mind wants to control the world, but it cannot.  OCD is the mind’s attempt to control the world.  It is considered a disorder because controlling the world is a fantasy.  You can’t control the world so you overly control yourself.  Just as I can’t control my wife, I realize I can only control my own behavior.  I will now use my control over this article before it becomes too much like a life lesson.  I don’t want to become the afterschool special of the blog article world so I will end this article in the next sentence.  I don’t really have anything to say in this sentence, but I set it up as the last sentence so here is one last thing I have to say.

Brian Explains: Planned Procrastination

The main philosophy of planned procrastination is why do today what you can plan to do tomorrow?  I believe I started the beginnings of this philosophy in high school, but it truly blossomed in College.  I have a degree in English Composition that I am putting to great use by writing this article you are reading.  When I was in grade school, I did many book reports on books that I did not actually read or barely read.  The art of skimming a book and coming up with some BS for an essay on the book seemed to come naturally for me.  In high school, I was able to write original BS for which I got praised even more than the BS essays about someone else’s book about BS.  I decided that the BS skill could serve me well in a degree that may as well have been called an English BSing degree.  I always thought it would have been much more poetic if I had received a BS when I graduated rather than a BA.  Of course, I never really cared for poetry.  I saved the only two poetry classes that I was forced to take until my last semester at college.  One was reading poetry and the other was writing poetry.  As with everything else in my educational life, the BS poems that I wrote in minutes just before the class received much higher grades than the ones I spent days on making sure the pentameter, syntax, and rhyme (oh my) were just right.

How can planned procrastination help you?  Let me answer that question by asking you a question.  What could it hurt?  Give it a try.  You’ll like it.  Let me give you an example.  You are sitting at home and you get a phone call from your aunt asking you if you remembered that she invited you to her house for her birthday party in an hour.  You say, “Of course, I’ll be there.”  You hang up the phone and think, “This is why I didn’t want my aunt having my home phone number.”  After you calm down, you realize that you really only have a half-hour to get a present because it will take you the other half-hour to get out of bed, get dressed, brush your teeth and hair, and drive to your aunt’s house.  You go down to the closest store that sells cards, gift bags, and miscellaneous knick-knacks and slap it all together in your car.  As you are slapping it together, you realize that the card you bought is actually a “Get Well Soon” card.  Thinking quickly, you write inside the card something about being sick of birthdays or some BS like that.  You take the gift to your aunt’s house and she goes on and on about how creative the card is and how she always wanted a cactus shaped pot with a cactus in it.  Your family has an odd, but very real vote about how you are the greatest living relative and you live happily ever after.  What does this story prove?  Nothing really, but it does show that the procrastination (even though it really was not planned) did have a positive end result.

Who can benefit from planned procrastination?  Oh, just a small segment of the population known as everyone!  People spend hours, days, weeks, and even months planning things that are going to take place in the future.  People plan vacations, job interviews, and parties for what?  I say they are planning for big headaches, hours of frustration, and huge amounts of disappointment.  Why?  With planned procrastination, you let your subconscious mind take over.

Other people just want to help you organize your life by creating lists.  I am not offering you things you need.  I am offering you something you want – more time!  Have you ever thought to yourself, “I’d like to go to the movies today, but I have those things to do.”  Take that list of things to do and throw it out the window of tomorrow because, as I said at the beginning of this article, why do today what you can put off until tomorrow.  I know I said something along those lines.  I could look back and see exactly what I said, but I have a life to live.  I have to quickly finish this article so I can publish it in a few hours.  Now that’s planned procrastination!

Brian Explains: Perfection

I fear criticism for some reason and I don't know why. I grew up in a house free from biting analysis of my every word. Many times, the fear was not knowing if what I was working on was what I should have been working on in the first place. In my creative moments at home, working on an animation or drawing, writing a story, or creating a piece of music, I usually end a project before I consider it finished. If I take the time to show someone the progress on one of my creations, I usually preface it with great explanations of why it is not perfect.

I don’t like mistakes. I don’t like knowing I messed up, feeling like a failure, or being proven to be imperfect. Out it comes. I am a perfectionist. There are many of us around. Most of us remain in hiding until a mistake is made. Then, we leap from our stations in life and spring into perfectionist prevention mode. We want to know why the mistake was made, how we can prevent it in the future, and who knows that we made the mistake. Survival dictates that others must not know of the mistake. Preventive measures go into affect, but sometimes someone else finds out about the mistake before you do or your preventive measures don’t get implemented soon enough to prevent the word from getting out that you . . . I can hardly say it . . . made a mistake! Once the word gets out, you go through the stages of post imperfection. The first stage is denial. You look for anything that indicates it was actually someone else’s fault and not yours. Next comes the self-hating stage. You can’t believe you made the mistake. You must be an idiot to have made such a huge error. You shouldn’t be allowed to do what you messed up on ever again. It is the end for you and that faulty activity. Finally, you accept your failure (this could take weeks for a persistent perfectionist). You can try to prevent it in the future, but you there is no denying that it happened. Killing yourself would only be the biggest mistake of your life and the blundering trend is becoming redundant. It takes approximately 2-3 weeks for your perfectionist status to be reinstated. In the end, all that can be done is to focus on the future when you can consider yourself a perfectionist once again.

If you are not a perfectionist, consider yourself lucky. Every perfectionist realizes that perfection does not actually exist. We who are perfection hunters are not shooting for (or at) perfection, we just want to get as close to perfection as we can. You can hear a song that you think is perfect from beginning to end. I assure you that the artist who created the song can point out every mistake and flaw that exists in the song. Some artists would say that it is the flaws that make the song special. I would rather have an interestingly flawed life than a boringly perfect life. I feel like I could have said more about perfection than I have in this article, but sometimes you just have to consider something done before it is actually perfect. I think this last sentence is pretty darn representative of my thoughts on perfection.