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.