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.

Brian Explains: Being Macho

Soap operas are the down-fall of women. I’m not saying that men don’t watch them, but most men find the melodramatic events in soap operas a tad too emotional to take. I’m not one of those men. I cry all the time. Gossip is one of my favorite hobbies, along side knitting and doing the dishes. (Pause) Okay, I’m lying. I rarely cry, hate soap operas and gossiping, and buy into most ideas of what “macho” men are supposed to do. There are a few “macho” things in which I don’t participate. One would be “hanging out with the guys.” I usually have one or two good friends (now that I am married, I have a good friend and wife in one). Getting together with a bunch of guys and drinking beer (another “macho” activity I avoid), talking about women, and complaining about your job is not what I was put on this earth to do. I was put here to hand out pamphlets that say “What?” on them.

A large activity of the macho set is watching sports. I myself can't really imagine anything more boring than watching a sporting event. I don't care what kind of sport, they are all boring. The one sport I can stand to watch, basketball, still denigrates into a boxing match every now and then. Hockey denigrates into a boxing match every other quarter or whatever time frame hockey operates under. If you love football, I am sorry for this next sentence, but you had to be told at some point. Football is the single most boring, idiotic, and cruel sport ever invented. It preys on the stupid and suckers them into thinking that a future in getting hurt makes sense. Boxing is the ultimate in stupid cruelties that they call a sport, but football disguises itself with strategy in order to make itself look like a sport with skill. One person has skill on the field and he is not actually on the field. He is on the side lines and calls himself the coach. It is as if he is a chess player who is playing with real people who really get hurt. What does he care? They are just pawns in his chess game.

The final “macho” item, though not the final of a complete list of machoisms of which I do not participate, is that being a man means not being able to control his want for sex, their rage, or their mouths. I have control over my body and my mind. A man that rapes a woman and says he just couldn’t control himself long enough to hear her saying “no” or a man that beats his wife and says that he just couldn’t control himself belongs in jail. On a smaller scale, the man who says whatever he pleases even when he knows it hurts or offends the women around him needs to live life in the shoes of a woman some time to appreciate their world. I realized long ago that women’s lives are much more in control and much more difficult than that of a man (except that whole getting beat up and ridiculed thing by other boys when you are younger). Women are more sophisticated than men, they live longer than men, and they deserve more respect than men. I have more to say on this issue (and probably will say more in my speech to the League of Women Voters), but not a lot of space left in this paragraph so I will stop the paragraph here. Well, on second thought, maybe I will stop it here.

Being macho seems more about proving to yourself that you are macho than actually about being macho. All the things that make up being “macho” are in your mind. I am sure many people considered the Village People macho and they may have been. They were all the male stereotypes of what being macho was all about. “YMCA” is sung at just about every sporting event and so is “We are the Champions” by Queen. I guess being “macho” is the new gay. “Macho pride” will be the new chant of the macho people. Who am I to judge? If they want to be loud and proud to be “happy” and macho, I say more power to them. Don’t expect me to march in the Macho Pride Parade, though. It’s just not my thing.

Brian Explains: Complaining

I love to complain, but I do it well so I’m allowed. My wife is also a good complainer. Some might say (myself included) she is an even better complainer. What do I mean by a good complainer? Some people whine when they complain. This is bad complaining. This is what most teenagers do and no one wants to be like teenagers.

The basic rule of complaining well is to be entertaining while you are complaining. By entertaining, I don’t mean you juggle and squirt water out your nose, I mean telling a good story. You make the complaint a joke. An example is: “I waited 50 billion years in line at the store when the lady in front of me pulled out a purse the size of a Buick full of coupons from the 50’s.” This is much more entertaining than the following example: “I went to the store, stood in line an hour, and got sore legs. Can you rub my bunions?” This is not entertainment; this is what my job would be in prison.

Comedians truly understand the art of complaining. People pay money to watch them complain on stage, on TV, and in the movies. It is a big business. Millions have been made by the top complainers. In some ways, you almost have to be born with a dirt covered spoon in your mouth to be a top complainer. Having things to complain about when you are a kid helps you develop the skills you need for a career in the discontented arts. A miserable kid is a funny adult.

The other part about complaining is knowing your audience. You don't complain about waiting in line at the bank while you are still there waiting at the bank. Everyone in line is just as annoyed about having to wait in line so hearing you complain about it just adds to the annoyance sandwich. When you get home or back to work, you can entertain them with your tales of stressful lingering. Be sure to mention the lady who pulled out her life savings in pennies.

Complaining is cathartic. It allows you to relieve the stress you received from the difficult experience you had. Just don't give someone else that same experience by recreating it depressing blow by depressing blow. The rule for good complaining is, if you want to tell someone what a bad day you had, be kind, don’t whine, and entertain. You might get a promising career out of it.

Brian Explains: Fear

Fears, fears, I just can’t get enough fears. I also can’t decide which fear I like best. It is as if I am choosing an accessory for my personality. Which color goes best with self doubt? This Halloween time, I thought I would examine fears. When you talk about fears, most people think of being trapped in a bank with goats wearing clothes who are trying to kill you (okay, that might just be me), but this time I will be looking at everyday fears.

I know I worry too much, but if I start to worry about worrying too much, the universe will implode. I am 40 years old (as of the writing of this article). I have no fear about revealing my age nor do I fear getting old. I do not fear death. Of course, a painful death is another bloody matter. (No, I am not from England. Why do you ask?). A fear of pain is healthy unless you plan on joining the cast of Jackass. If we all drove around with no fear of crashing, the roads would become a free for all crash-fest. I do have a fear of running into invisible cars on the road, but I will go over that subject when I talk about my irrational fears.

Speaking of fear, let's talk about school. Everyone has had that dream where you show up to class naked to a test for which they didn't study. In my dream, there was also a killer whale/teacher that surrounded my desk/boat that was trying to make me fall in the ocean/classroom so it could eat/fail me. My most horrified moments in class were during tests. The anxiety was not from the test itself, it was from the silence during the test. My stomach would make noises that I just could not stop to save my life. Sometimes I would have preferred death to the embarrassment of my talking stomach.  The rest of this paragraph is going to be filled with toilet humor. When I was a kid, I pretty much never saw the inside of the restroom at school. Grade school and junior high were a series of restroom horrors. One horror was the bully that usually hung out in the restrooms while he was ditching class. The other horror had to do with noise. If it was silent in the restroom, I worried about every trickle of water and noise that came out of my body. It is a restroom after all so there was definitely a chance that the noise would echo.

Hopefully, this article didn't sicken you too much. I removed the really gross parts about my restroom habits so be glad. I should have left them in to honor Halloween, but I am too lazy to go back and change it now. This is the final paragraph so this article is staying as it is. You can always read through it again and imagine the gross things I said so you can get into the horrific Halloween spirit. It will be like a written rerun. If you opt not to do that, I say goodbye to you. If you are reading the rerun of this article, I say thanks for the double read and goodbye.

Brian Explains: Change

I hate change. When I buy my hair gel at the local Quicky Mart, I hate it when I get a bunch of change back. All the pennies and nickels jingling in my pocket just wind up annoying me. I feel like a janitor with all his keys hanging from his belt jingling down an echoing hallway. Having said this, coins are not the kind of change I will be talking about. Therefore, in the next paragraph I will be talking about dealing with change in your life (as opposed to the change of life - which I will not be talking about).

As is said by people who want to tell you what to do, change is a good thing. Especially if you are a drug using alcoholic who likes to murder people, change is definitely something to look into. Without change, we would all live in the same house, drive the same car, go to the same job, eat the same food, and die the same death - being electrocuted by the toaster we should have thrown out years ago.

People who never change are doomed to repeat themselves. Today, the same thing as yesterday. Tomorrow, the same thing as today. Next week, someone might try to force you to go to a wedding, but you'll find a way to get out of it. When you drive to work, you drive the same way everyday. I can't drive the same way everyday because I need to avoid traffic on the freeways. I actually prefer driving different ways to work just to make it interesting.

Hoarders come to mind when I talk about disliking change. They fear change so they refuse to throw things out (along with not wanting themselves to leave the house). The goal of their mental game that is their life is to keep things from changing the least. You get bonus points if the nasty smell of your house keeps people from visiting you.

I am sure in a future article I will talk about the importance of routine, but this is not that article so get over it. Routine is important for your health and well being. You need to brush your teeth, shower, and play with your cats on a regular basis to maintain your health. That doesn't mean that those routines take over your life and there is no room for change, though.

Embrace change. Give it a huge hug and let change know you value it. Feed change everyday to make sure that your life doesn't starve to death from a lack of excitement. If you think the same way your whole life and never leave your house in Nebraska, you will die a slow and boring death. Get out of Nebraska and start embracing the change of scenery. You can only stare at cows in a field for so long.

Brian Explains: Boredom

Some people have a hard time being alone. I am not one of those people. I can be alone for hours and I always find something to do. The hardest part for me is deciding what to do. I guess this makes this an anti-explanation of boredom, but I do not understand how people can be bored. Perhaps they are just boring people so they need others around them who are exciting to make up for their boringness.

When I am alone at home, I usually feel quite guilty if I am not doing something either creative or productive. Many people have a hard time finding a single hobby. I had a hard time only practicing one hobby. I had an idea or thirteen on how to occupy myself between my music, painting, drawing, juggling, Lego building (hey, Legos are serious business), bicycling, skateboarding, swimming, sculpting, computer programming, writing, and movie making. As long as I have a brain that works, I can find ways to occupy it.

I always heard other kids complaining that they had nothing to do. I always had things to do - not because I had all the toys in the world (though I did), but because I had creativity. I could entertain myself with just a pencil and a piece of paper. I would draw, write, invent a new game, or build a paper town. My dad told me a story about spending all day building a town when he was a kid just to burn it down later in the day. That was creative and destructive at the same time. Kids, bored or not, are stupid.

I always liked toys that did not suggest how you were supposed to play with them. Not to pick on girls, but Barbies were quite suggestive toys. (Did you ever notice that when you say "not to pick on" something, that picking on something is exactly what you are about to do?) You might have a house for your Barbie, a car, or a boyfriend, but they are all real things with very little creativity involved. You create situations based on the real world, not a created world. When I played with Legos, the buildings, caves, people, creatures, and other things were all created from scratch. Situations were improvised in my head after I had created the imaginary set for the imaginary movie. When I hear about the things my wife did with her Barbies, I know there was more than creative stimulation going on in Barbie's house. My wife was a sick kid, but at least she wasn't bored.

Brian Explains: Lies

Traveling down the road of life, I see a computer sitting on the side of the road. It’s shinny, new, and smells of megabytes. I pick it up and press one of the keys. On the screen appears a single word. I stare at the word a moment and keep walking, leaving the computer on the side of the road. I walk, thinking of that word and what it means to me. Do I give it meaning? Does it give me meaning? I don’t think so. That would be weird. So what is this word that is resting itself upon my brain? Perhaps the next paragraph will help give you a clue.

Incidences have happened recently in my life that have forced me into believing in Scientology. All right, I am just kidding. Calm down. I am not much of a liar and never really did much lying growing up. (There's no reason to verify that with my mom. Just take my word for it.) Some kids learn that if you tell a lie, you can sometimes get away with doing things your parents don’t want you doing. If that kid can handle the disappointment, it might work for him or her. It did not agree with my personality.

I hope that last paragraph cleared things up about the word on the computer screen. What? You don’t know what the word was? Does riding on a short bus ring a bell? Maybe this next paragraph will clear the muddy dirt filled waters of your mind.

I never really did that much that needed a fib attached to it, so I never really lied that often to my parents (besides, I was afraid of that disappointment monster). Don’t get me wrong; there were many things I conveniently did not tell my parents. I went to two parties in sixth grade (my big year in life) that turned out to be make-out parties. I didn’t get a ride home from my mom and say, “You know what I did at that party, Mom? I made out with a couple of chicks." In grade school, this meant kissing and maybe giving the girl “special” hugs. I also did other things alone in my bedroom that my parents did not know about. There are some things that parents are better off not knowing.

If that last paragraph did not give you that elusive word that appeared upon the computer screen, then I give up on you. You need to go back to school. The next paragraph is your last chance.

Okay, I will now reveal the word that appeared on the screen. Wait, do you remember what it was? I completely forgot what I was talking about. I am not a liar, though. I really did intend on telling you what was written on the computer screen. Well, it was so many paragraphs ago; you don’t expect me to remember that far back, do you? I hope not, because it’s not going to happen. Maybe if you look back a couple of paragraphs, you’ll find it somewhere. Sorry I couldn’t help (or am I).

Brian Explains: Food

Food has had an interesting existence in man's evolution. We have always needed to eat, but what we ate hasn't always had the same importance. When humans walked the earth as cavemen, they didn't care if they ate buffalo meat or bugs as long as they ate enough to not starve. Cavemen were no geniuses, but they knew that their hunger pains were caused by a lack of food. Today, we have better working brains than cavemen, but we use them to come up with justifications for the items we put in our mouths. Food is a social event, a status symbol, an art form, and a personal statement. We don't just eat to get rid of the pains within our stomachs, we eat to get rid of the pains within our hearts. It is food therapy.

If you eat crap, you are going to feel like crap (and probably look like something resembling crap). If you eat healthy and nutritious food all the time, you are going to make everyone else around you feel like crap. And isn't that the point of living - to make everyone else feel like crap. (The preceding paragraph was brought to you by the word "crap.")

I am not saying that I have studied food and/or nutrition my whole life, but I have studied people my whole life. People search for meanings in everything (look at religion) and food is no exception. They want their next meal either to transform them into a ravaging hunk of a healthy muscle or to transport them to the land of the quenched tastebud people. I only give these two extremes to illustrate how most people think. Life should not be lived in the East or the West, but somewhere in Nebraska.

Ultimately, it's your choice to eat whatever you want. The only guidelines exist in your goals. If you want to be a couch potato, take two bags of chips and lounge in the morning. If you want to run a marathon, however, you need a psychologist (because you have to be crazy to run that far when all you get out of it is looking like a skinny, emaciated freak). If you are fat because of a glandular problem, buy some acne medicine. If your fat because you eat too much, you're probably eating too much sugar so you could still use some acne medicine.

But seriously folks, what you put in your mouth is a serious indicator of your longevity in life. Those people who say, “Well, I don’t want to live to be a hundred, anyway,” are kidding themselves. Their hundred is going to take place at forty-five. They’re going to get the same aches and pains as that hundred-year-old who ate correctly. To eat crap your whole life and be surprised when you get illnesses and ailments when you’re older is to live in ignorance. Don’t just eat food for how it tastes. Eat food for how it makes you feel. Wait a minute, isn't that the opposite of what I said a couple paragraphs back? Most people who are allergic to strawberries simply avoid strawberries. Conversely, if you feel sluggish after you eat certain things or certain amounts of things, stay away from those things or those amounts of things. That is all I have to say about food, I'm going to go have some strawberries. I'm alergic to them, though, so I won't have too many.

Brian Explains: Sleep

I have mastered the art of speaking within my own head (usually to myself). This is why I can not sleep at night. I have the art of brain speaking down so well, it forces me to think about things I wouldn’t normally think about. In my brain at night, I reenact events from the day, I debate myself through imaginary disputants, I write scenes to plays by acting out all the actors parts, and I solve the world’s problems (you're welcome). All when I should be sleeping! What a jerk!


I would truly love to never have to sleep again. This would solve my thinking problem quite well. I would have to come up with some kind of schedule that I stuck with to insure that I brushed my teeth, showered, shaved, and did the essential maintenance work on myself that must be done throughout the day, but I would be saving enormous amounts of time. I would have 6 to 10 extra hours each day in which to do things. “Things” would consist of whatever I wanted “things” to consist. While everyone else was sleeping, I would work on a song for 6 hours or on a story or script idea for 3 hours and have time to mow the grass with a flashlight attached to the front of my lawn mower. I would be the most productive human on the face of the earth. I would be the Stephen King (seeing as how he puts out a new book every 10 minutes) of everything I ever wanted to accomplish. If I didn’t have to eat, I could get even more done. I would never stop. My life would be a never ending series of productions and creations. I would not have to force myself to choose only one creative endeavor. I could do them all. Ha, Ha, Ha. I would rule the world. Of course, these are the thoughts I have when I am trying to sleep. Learn from me, do not do as I do. Just go to sleep.

Brian Explains: Hair

I’m not complaining, but I have troublesome hair. I have thick, curly hair. This is fine until you want to run your fingers through your hair. I can, theoretically, run my fingers through my hair, but I will have fro head if I do. I would be fine if I could travel back to the 70's. This is why I put shellac in my hair. I used to go into hair salons where mainly women went and they would all say, “Oh my god, I love your hair. I wish I had your hair.” What these ladies didn’t realize was that they were women (they skipped that day in sex education class). I am a man, a male, and hopefully the more macho between us. The top male movie stars of the world do not have this kind of “lovely” hair, Shirley Temple had this kind of “lovely” hair. I don’t need or want it. Why do I go on this long about my hair, because I have to stare at it everyday so the least you can do is listen to my babbling for a minute or so.

As mentioned before, I used to go to a hair salon, but don’t anymore. These days, I cut my own hair. I know what you are thinking. Stop it! Just listen. It started out because the person who was cutting my hair moved to another state. It later moved on to a money saving scheme. Eventually, it developed into a preference of style. People always complain when they get a bad haircut. This usually happens because of a misunderstanding between the hair stylist/barber and you. You said, “Cut it short,” but what is too short? Before you stop going to your hair stylist/barber, you should observe how they cut your hair and where they cut it shorter or longer (it’s good to pick a good haircut for observation so you don't continue last month's fiasco). The first time you cut your own hair, sweat may obscure your vision because you are going to be nervous about giving yourself a bad haircut, but, if you do it in layers (“just a trim” in barber language), everything will be okay. Start someplace that’s easy. I’ve found the sides of my head to be the hardest to do, so you might want to avoid there. Results may vary. You also might want to keep things even. Do as the barber does. Hold up the hair on various parts of your head and compare.

After having said all this, if you go to your hair stylist/barber for a lively conversation and you have extra money to blow on your head, keep up the good work. I’m not here to tell you how to run your life. I just want to give you all the suggestions for living you may not have thought of yet.

Brian Explains Brian Explains Life

All right, you are here. I don’t know where you came from or how you heard about this Blog, but you are here. There is no turning back now.


Why would I have a Blog that claims to explain something as complex as life? Why not? I have nothing better to do. We all have questions, but how many of us have answers? I got your answers right here. (It helps if you read this with a New York accent.)


This Blog will consist of videos, text enteries, pictures, and life lessons. Enjoy the crap that I have to share.