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.