Kardashian Barbie

A few weeks ago I made one of the best Internet discoveries of my life since Safari private browsing. OneMillionMoms.com is one of the leading Internet based opponents of freedom of speech, made up of Christian fundamentalist hate mongering theocrats who also happen to be worried mothers, adding fuel to the fire. Picture your mom. Now picture your mom but fascist. That's what we're dealing with here.

One Million Moms leads campaigns to have everything enjoyable removed from television and the Internet. This Christmas, they also participated in the American Family Association's blacklisting of stores that said "Happy Holidays."

The email I received recently, though, is one of their best (yes, I'm on their mailing list). Apparently, Mattel has made a deal with the Kardashians to make Kardashian Barbie dolls. Seems fitting to me. Now the Kardashians can be completely fake instead of just mostly. But OMM is against it. Here is their list of reasons:

Scenes and topics of discussion on their reality show(s) include:
• Nude yoga with a nude male yoga instructor
• Modeling in Playboy Magazine which gives mother the idea to model nude in pictures as a gift to her husband
• Discussion of sexual bondage
• Watching porn on their computers
• Suggestions of a three-some
• Excess alcohol consumption which leads to violence
• Arrest for DUI
• Married Kim strips in front of male friend to see if he looks at her to determine if he is gay or not
• Huge fights between siblings
• High volume of foul language


Well, let's look into this now. It may not seem like it, but a lot of these things adhere strictly to Christian Conservative values.
-Nude yoga with a nude male instructor - Hey, that's just women being properly subservient to men as it states they should in the bible. At least it's not lesbian yoga.
-Giving nude pictures to your husband - Easy. Loyalty to your spouse. They're married. This peep show is sanctioned by the Lord.
-Threesome - Here are 16 examples of polygamy in the bible.
-Porn - I keep hearing all this shit about how bad porn is. They want to ban it. But what about jobs? Do you realize how many people are employed by the porn industry? They go on and on about these fucking jobs. Now here's a huge group of people who have well-paying lucrative jobs, and it's not the right kind of job? Fuck off.
-Stripping in front of a dude to see if he's gay - Religion aside, that's just a good test, right? Do you know a better way? And so what if Kim was married at the time. That marriage was so short not even she noticed it. If you're aware of Kim Kardashian's marital status during the particular episode you watched, you're paying way too much attention. I think you might be the one with the problem.

Make note, if you go to the OMM website, you can participate in one of their letter-writing campaigns. However, they do not screen the letters before they send them out, so you can completely distort their message before you send it. If you read my blog, I trust you know what to do with this information.


-Joe

She's always a woman to me. And that's the problem.

I'm not sure how well this works written, but I'm trying to be a good 21st century comedian and "actively create content to increase my web presence and cultivate a following." And synergy.
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Why is it that every time I talk to a girl I feel like I should apologize to her?

When I explained this to a friend, she said I shouldn't feel that way because I'm cool and funny and mysterious. Ok, I'll keep that in mind next time I say "Hey, uh, what...where are you fr...what...uh...what's your name?" and then have nothing to follow up that tremendous start with. I don't get it, where's the mystery? "It's a mystery how you're so bad at this. You're an adult but you relate to women like you're 14. That's so...mysterious."

I think the problem is I'm a slow learner. So I was probably about 19 when I started to become comfortable around girls, but then I got into a relationship that lasted 3 years. Which is fine (not really), but it doesn't help in the not-sounding-like-a-fucking-idiot-when-I-talk-to-females department. So now I'm back where I started.

I just don't know what to say to girls. I don't know what it is. There's one girl I always sat behind in a class. One day I realized she's pretty cute and I've never really spoken to her. So I thought I should go for it. What's the big deal? I thought about what I might say. The only thing that came to mind was "Hey, girl." Makes sense, seeing as I'm an R&B artist. Then, in my fucking fantasy, where anything can happen, she gets offended and starts yelling at me for saying such a dumb offensive thing. That's the special and unique way in which I hate myself. So then I thought "Alright, I guess I shouldn't talk to her." Because I literally couldn't think of anything else to say but "Hey girl."


I think part of the problem is I'm obsessed with being original (Reader: Good one, Joe. We've all heard George Carlin). It's like a writers' room in my head.

"What should I say to her....maybe I'll just start simple. How about 'what's your name?'"
"'What's your name?' You can't just have a guy ask a girl her name. It's been done. What is this, the 90s?"

Even my own thoughts seem trite to me. "I'd really like to have sex with a girl." Wow, Joe. Real original. You're a fucking visionary. Put that one in the screenplay.






-Joe

If you like my jokes, you'll love my unfunny, depressing bullshit!

As I approach my (hopefully) final semester at any school anywhere ever again, I can't help but look back and think about how truly terrible the experience has been. Not just college, the whole school thing. Just was never for me.

Bad things have happened in my life. Nothing unbearable - I am a middle class white person in America. But I do have a severe diet-related autoimmune disease and several other food intolerances. I witnessed 9/11 at age 12. I've experienced deaths in my family and other types of loss. I've been in harmful relationships, and good ones that went away. And though some of these things are clearly far worse than school could ever be, nothing can compare to the intense, day-to-day psychological torment school caused me, and the depression and feelings of helplessness and worthlessness it led to. Not because it's school - I mean, it just fucking school. It's because I'm me.

And take note, it was never an attitude problem, a lack of direction, or the evils of occasional alcohol and marijuana use (I consumed exactly zero of these things before college). That's some dismissive bullshit people come up with when they don't want to put up with the kids who are "different." I liked school as a kid. But I lost interest, and I never got it back, because my interests and abilities were always outside of school. Even with music, I much preferred the music I did outside of school to what I did in school. School just became a place that kept me from enjoying what I loved.

In fifth grade they told me I had ADD. Wonderful, now we know what the problem is. Wonderful. Now I, the 10 year old, can take heavy mind-altering drugs and have a label on me that only draws attention to what makes me different from everyone else. All through my childhood I listened to people explain to me why it was important to go to a place where I feel stupid and alone every day of my life.

As much as you may go "Ugh, all this work to do for school!" all over facebook where everyone really wants to hear about that so very much, you're able to do it. You're able to focus on it, generally find it important in some way, and you have the ability to complete the work. And you get good grades. People tell me I have a bad attitude. Well the attitude gets pretty bad when you're told over and over you suck at something you never really cared about being good at in the first place and had to literally force yourself to work on at all. I have never entered a semester with a bad attitude. But I have never left a semester without a terrible one.

I'm doing this extra year of college right now because I have not been able to pass a math class and a science class. For my writing degree I don't want or care about. Math and science, so I can be called a writer. But scratch that, I passed the first science class I needed, with a D-. That's with hours of intense tutoring. Right now I'm barely passing Intermediate Algebra at a community college. It's my only class. I understand that math and science are important. But why are you making me do it? I'm not the one you want doing it. I'm really very very bad at it. They don't make math majors take comedy classes. They don't make them get on a stage and give them 10 minutes to get a room full of strangers to like them. Maybe art isn't as important as math or science in a utilitarian sense, but I'll bet every math major and science major and important smart person with a real job in the world goes home at the end of a full day of importantness and turns on the TV or reads a book or listens to music or enjoys comedy. Why do people refuse to see the value in these things?

But they don't teach unimportant things like comedy in school. So I had to be a writing major, which didn't make any sense at all for me. Why didn't I just drop out, you ask? I was scared. I've been scared into believing my whole life that if you don't finish college you just die. You go out in the world and just literally fucking drop dead because a college - a business that only values students that improve its own image - didn't give you a paper that says you're super special.

If you think I'm wrong, which is more than possible, please leave a comment regarding what I'm wrong about and how wrong I am.

-Joe

Letter to 7 Billionth Person

Apparently, the 7 billionth person may be born this weekend. I wrote him/her/herm a letter.
_______________________________________________________________

Congratulations!

I guess. I mean, you didn't have much to do with your own birth. It's a miracle (see: things that aren't real) you're even here, really. Your parents didn't use birth control, or it didn't work, nobody killed your parents, and it was your seminal representative who made it all the way to the egg. Even after that, you could have been flushed out, accidentally or...not quite as accidentally. No, I won't go into further detail. The point is, there were many, many ways you could have died before you were even born. But nonetheless, welcome to Earth and the human race (and so many more glorious ways to die!)

Before you start walking around and looking at stuff, please know we've done our best. Really, this is our best. I'm sorry. We had the best intentions. But really, if you think about it, everyone has good intentions. I mean, even Hitler thought he was doing the right thing. Who's Hitler? Um, I'll tell you when you're older. Which totally won't make it better. But here on Earth we like to let you think you're really happy for a while and then tell you later that it's all a lie. It's the best system we've come up with so far.

I wonder where you were born. Are you male or female? What color is your skin? You may feel like these things don't matter. But you'll learn.

Maybe you were born in China, in which case I'm amazed anyone noticed. We're all to blame for overpopulation, but shit, you people (I'm assuming. If not, "Those people") really take the rice cake! Sorry, that's humor. You'll learn about that (see: Jeff Dunham). If you are Chinese, I really hope you're a boy. I mean, I don't - they do, so I do, because if you're a girl I hear they pull some baby Moses shit on you. But, if you're a Chinese girl, you could be adopted by Americans, which would kick ass (see: America).

You might be European, which would be...tolerable. If you don't mind a socialist hell-scape of free medical care and open-minded societies. We probably won't bomb you, if that helps.

Perhaps you were born in an African desert to a primitive tribe of nomads. That's okay. We're all part of the human family. Now, whatever you do, try your best to get the fuck out of there. Trust me. It's no way to live. You could be in America, where the streets are paved. That's it. They're paved. And there are streets.

The great thing about Earth is you could be born in a poor country in Africa and grow up to be a successful, happy American (Note: America is the only good place). Everyone has the opportunity to move up in this world. We accomplish this by taking things from people who don't have very much and giving lots of things to people who have tons of shit. Trust us, it works. Basically, if you and all the other kids born alongside you in sub-rural Zimbabwe aren't investment bankers in 25 years, you're doing something wrong.

Hopefully, you were born in America, which is "the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth" (Sean Hannity, American professor and investigative researcher in country-ranking and deity preferences). Our government sucks and doesn't care about us, but we don't have to worry about it because we have other stuff to get upset about like Xbox Live and changes to social networking sites. We let people in other countries worry about our government.

But back to the issue at hand, you adorable little statistic. Seven billion may seem like a lot of people to you. Even too many. And you're right. The tough thing is, one of the only clear thoughts we ever have is to make more of ourselves. Sure, it started to get out of hand decades ago, but in our defense, we did completely ignore it. How could we have avoided the severely exacerbated problem we have today?

It should be noted that before the population got as out of control as it is, there were devised many safe methods of avoiding pregnancy, which one of the most influential institutions in the world fought against vehemently. Also, there were gay people, who literally could not have children together. We didn't let them get married. 'Cause, ya know.

Of course, you're not the 7 billionth person ever. Including the dead people, there have been at least like 100 billion people. We think. No one was really counting for a while, especially before numbers existed. Also evolution (which is real. Please think it's real) makes things a little confusing. As our early primate ancestors transitioned into us, there were probably a few really hairy guys for a while who made the count a little fuzzy (lol*).

But still, being number 7 billionish approximately is pretty exciting! I sincerely hope your place in a list doesn't remain the only interesting thing about you (see: Delaware). But seriously, enjoy yourself here. Don't live too fast. Don't live too slow, either. I didn't want to tell you this, but we realized recently we're actually slowly destroying the Earth, as we speak. We haven't stopped yet because some rich people aren't really into the idea.

I look forward to the day when you can understand any of what I've written here. I'm not sure what country you were born in, but I hope you can understand English. And irony.

Enjoy your stay!



*Lol means "Laughing out loud." No person who writes lol is ever laughing out loud.



-Joe

Has Anyone Seen My Temper?

When someone has an anger problem we say they have a bad temper. But when they get angry we say they lost their temper. Well if they have a bad temper, wouldn't it be good to lose it? If you have a bad temper I would think getting angry is more like finding your temper. "Oh shit, he found his temper. Let's get out of here." But we also say "He has a temper," and that means the same thing. Can a temper ever be good? We never say someone has a good temper. Then it might be bad to lose it. "Oh he lost his temper? That's a shame. It was such a good temper."


-Joe

Soul Mates: Do the Math

I don't believe in soul mates. And before you start crying for me, let me explain.

Compatibility is one thing. But when someone starts saying that everyone has one person placed on this earth for them, I have to stop and wonder, "Really? Who put them here?"

Well, God, of course.

Sigh. Okay, let's take a look at this.

So God created the Earth, what, 6,000 years ago? As long as we're playing make believe, let's go with that.  God creates the heavens and the earth - I guess he outsourced the rest of the universe - then he makes Adam and Eve. And I assume they were soul mates. I mean, I would hope, right? They were made for each other. Well, Eve was made for Adam, because men are superior to women and women were created to please men (citation: the freaking Bible).

Now Adam and Eve have kids. Cain and Seth find wives - one of many examples of deus ex machina in the Bible. God may be one hell (sorry) of an earth-creator, but he could use work on his creative writing. But the kids find wives. Now, were they soul mates? They were the first people to go find soul mates. Did humans have to develop their soul mate-finding ability? Or was it a natural trait? I guess if we're going with religion, everything is a natural trait.

And nevermind religion. How did this work before the Internet? These days some guy from Idaho meets a woman from Tokyo on Eharmony and they say "We're soul mates!" Well it's a good thing you were born in 1974 then, and Al Gore created the Internet, and a series of accidents happened that made you meet each other, otherwise this wouldn't have worked out so well. For a long time in our existence people didn't travel that much or move very far away from their homes. Were soul mates just born closer to each other back then, and when the Internet started God took some liberties and started putting them farther apart? Why? For fun? Is life just a big game of Find The Soul Mate?

Millions of people in history have had arranged marriages. Did they all miss out on soulmatedom? Or did the parents get it right every time? As you know, marriage was a sacred bond between a man and the widest-hipped 14-year-old girl money could buy.

And what about divorce? A lot of people think they've found their soul mate and then get divorced. Seems to me if someone's your soul mate, you would never get divorced. Can you think you've found your soul mate and be wrong? Would anyone want to get with you if your reason was "Well, it didn't work out with my soul mate, but you'll do"? Seems like kind of a shitty system.

Could it be that we're not that special? Maybe God just likes stories, and created us to tell them. Maybe we're just porn for God. Maybe we're porn for God, but God tells his wife he watches for the stories. Like a cosmic True Blood. Either way, it's much more likely than "He loves us and wants us to be happy."



-Joe

Cuba is so GAY

Corporations count as people, and men who like dicks can't enter a private legal arrangement.

That's true.

Think about it. Our government actually spends time arguing about how the fun parts you like should affect who you can visit in a hospital. You hear about this stuff and it sounds stupid, but really take a minute to picture it actually happening. A lesbian comes into the hospital:

Lesbian: Hi, can I visit my partner?
Receptionist: Sure. Oh wait, you both have vaginas? Sorry. Rules is rules.

And now Cuba is more accepting of gays than America. A marriage between a gay man and a transgendered woman is being counted as Cuba's first gay marriage. Because Fidel Castro's fucking brother is more progressive than Barack the fuck Obama. What is this world we live in?

Check out the article here, you worthless peasants.

Sorry, I didn't mean to call you worthless peasants. I love you guys. But not in like a "Let's move to Cuba" kind of way.

The most amazing part is that they felt the need to say "their marriage is not meant as a provocation." Should anyone ever have to say that? "Yeah, I'm getting married. But not to be a dick or anything. I know us getting married seems like a shitty thing to do to you, but really, we're not trying to be assholes or nuthin'. We just like fucking each other, and we wanna share healthcare or whutevs. That cool?"



-Joe