Shyzer.com

In true Shyzer fashion, it took me around 3 days to type up this post. I started most of it on Wednesday, so that is why I’m talking about shows that play that night. And without further ado…

I am something of a perfectionist. If I am going to do or change something, I want the end result to be perfect. If halfway through I realize that it’s not going to be, well, I just cast it aside and figure that I’ll do it later. It explains why I have never changed the layout to this site and why I only post twice a week or so. My desktop is littered with text documents about Curt Schilling, The State of the Union address, historians viewing erectile dysfunction, the Atkins diet, man crushes, and many other ones where I started typing up a post only to stop because it wasn’t funny or insightful enough. And from judging by the low quality of crap that actually makes it onto this site, you can imagine how shitty they all are. I’m really only good at thinking of one or two great sentences. The problem is that I have trouble of thinking of anything good to surround the few lines I have with. So as I sat here watching TV and trying to figure out what in the hell I should type about, I began to think of how shitty and fake most popular television shows have become.

Normally at 9 on Wednesday, I turn on The West Wing. For the past few years, it has been one of, if not the best show on television. From the arguments they make, to the subtly humor, to the pure drama. But after watching it for the past few years, I started to get turned off by it. The show itself took a downturn when the main core of writers left the show last year and we were left with secondary replacements. But the thing that I hate most about it is how untrue it really is. Politics is nowhere near as exciting as it is portrayed to be in the show. Immediate results, straight answers, and the hero-esque trait of the characters are pure fiction compared to the real world.

First we had The OC. The O-fucking-C. This is what’s wrong with America. I’m sorry folks, but this is just pure trash. Who lives like this?! Who talks like this?! Whose friends look like this?! It’s such a fucking joke. I literally want to just hurl after watching 5 minutes of it. I move on before this post turns into the “Anybody who watches The OC is a fucking moron” rant.

At 10 we have Law & Order, or Law & Order Special Victims Unit, or Law & Order OJ Was Guilty Unit, or one of the other 50 million spin offs this show has produced. I like this show in moderation. It’s okay just to watch an episode or two once a month. But it’s just so fake. The police can break any law they want if they “really needed to” and the D.A. can magically get them out each and every time with JUST enough time left to prosecute, and convict!, the criminal. Name more then 3 episodes where the bad guy got off. You can’t, can you? Exactly. And the worse part of the entire series?! The opening scene. It’s a joke. You’ve always got some cleaning maids talking, or a couple taking a nice stroll through the park, or a few kids playing baseball in the road and then…GASP, some horrible acting as they scream “Oh my God…A dead body!!”

I then realized that The Mole was on tonight. And not that retarded, rip off On-line game that Mr. Tool himself started. I’m talking about the real thing.

Ah, The Mole. Easily, the ONLY reality TV show that I would ever appear on. Forget about The Real World. Forget about Survivor and Road Rules. Forget about Joe fucking Millionaire and the Bachelorette and Slut Paradise Island and My Fat Retarded Ugly I-am-a-whore-who-is-so-fucking-stupid-that-I-can’t-tell-he’s-an-actor Fiancé and all those other crappy reality TV shows. The Mole dominates them all by mocking them while actually being cool. For those of you who haven’t seen it (an judging by past ratings, I’m guess this is the case for most of you), the game is basically this: 10 or so people travel to some far and remote location, like Mexico, and compete in a few events each day to add money to “The Pot.” Events range from navigating human mazes, to rounding up chickens with sombreros, to defending a fort overnight from bandits with paintball guns. Actually the best game I’ve ever seen them do is . Anyways, throughout the entire game, one of the contestants who was pre-selected by ABC is secretly trying to fuck everything up and lose money for the team. So not only do the “real” contestants have to try and pass these goofy and funny contests, but they have to try and figure out who is fucking up their game.

Pretty easy, huh? Not so fast my friend. If it was this easy, then it wouldn’t be that hard to figure out who the Mole is. In order to try and throw off all the other contestants, everybody starts to screw things up so that people will start to think they are the Mole. At the end of each episode, the players all take a quiz asking questions about the Mole. The person who misses the most is kicked off and the game moves on. But the best aspect about the whole show is the underlying and unsaid agreement that throughout the entire season, they will make fun of other reality TV shows that try and take themselves seriously. They go in black rooms and melodramatically talk one-on-one with the camera about who the mole is to make fun of Real World. They make “coalitions” and never stick to them while mocking Survivor. And all the while the host is just fucking around with them and cracking jokes about every other reality TV show. It’s the only reality TV series that realizes what it truly is; a simple TV show that is meant to entertain and not be anything remotely serious. It’s perfect.

And with that, I am off to try and find something to watch at 6 AM on Sunday morning.

Finally, a funny Simpsons episode this season.

Girl: Did the salesman cut one in the car?
Guy: Yeah, and he turned on the radio to cover it up?!
They then get up and storm out of the dealership.
Homer: They’ll be back…..turns on radio and looks around.

Before I start, I have two announcements to make. First off, go check out The Gallery for some pictures of me and my siblings that I took over the holidays. Some of them turned out pretty good and I promised that I’d take more pictures, so there ya are. And second, my boy Stan has written and recorded a damn awesome song that you can find here. I highly recommend that everybody go listen to it and give Stan the props that he deserves.

Now onto the main topic I wanted to talk about. My Beard. During the process of growing it out, I’ve learned a few things about having a beard that I thought I would share with y’all. Some of them surprised me while others downright shocked and baffled me and I am hoping that someway or another, y’all can help me shed some light and understanding onto them.

The first thing I learned is that you have to remember after every single time you eat or drink something to wipe off your beard around your mouth. I can’t tell you how many times I sat in class and went to wet my lips, only to taste the cereal I had eaten hours before. Now while it was nice to get a little bit of food while sitting in class, the amount is so small that it doesn’t negate the fact that you walked around for hours looking like a fool with food in your beard. And when you think about it, having that little taste of food could actually be more torturing then beneficiary. When you are sitting in class, both bored AND hungry, to only be teased with the food that you can’t have, it’s tortue. It’s just not fair folks.

The second thing I learned is that the thicker your beard is, the more black people like you. Don’t ask me how or why, but all I know is that as time went on, black people became nicer and friendlier towards me. It made no sense at the time I discovered it and I still can’t figure out why in the world it is true, but all I know is that it is. If anybody has any idea or theories as to why this might be true, please don’t hesitate to pass them along, because I am still trying to understand this strange phenomenon.

The third thing that I learned is that my siblings laugh when I kiss or hug them because it tickles their faces. Nothing really surprising here, but I liked doing it since they hated it yet laughed when I did it.

And finally, the fourth and quite frankly, most disturbing thing that I learned is that they are getting smarter. Despite our many attempts to ignore and delete them in the hope that they would one day fade away from our lives, they seem to progressing at a higher rate then any of us have predicted. I am of course talking about spamers. Folks, ever since I updated my cam picture a few weeks ago with my beard, you wouldn’t believe the amount of spam that I have received offering to sell me beard trimmers, dye for when my beard goes gray, and chicks who dig doing sexually lewd acts that aren’t even legal in most states to guys with beards. Now while I’m nearly as bothered by the 3rd as I am by the first 2, you still have to understand what this means for us all in the long run. They are adapting, evolving, maturing. Today they can scan our cam images and tomorrow they learn how to just stare at us through our computer monitors.

Folks, I’m scared and I think you should be too. We need to do something about this. Immediately. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to trim my beard for those ladies.

After watching McNabb beat the Packers on Sunday, I will never eat Campbell’s Chunky Soup again for as long as I live.

So long Packers. You could have won when you had the Eagles in 4th and 26 and yet you didn’t drop ANYBODY back to cover deep, which they had to run. You could have won in OT when you got the ball and instead Favre decides to bomb it downfield to nobody. It was a fun season, but damnit, you sure did fuck up this game.

All I can say is come on Panthers, kick the Eagles’ asses.

Week 2

One of the nice things about being back home over the break was that most of my friends were back home as well, which is a rare occasion now a days. And let me stress that. By rare, I mean I can’t even remember the last time it actually happened except for when I lived there 3 years ago. Naturally, the first person that I wanted to hang out with was Chong since I hadn’t really been able to hang out with him for quite some time. I went over to hishouse pretty much every day that we were both back in town and all we did was watch football / TV / movies and crack jokes. It was just like the good ‘ole days. One day we were sitting around watching some college football and got the itch to go play, but since we couldn’t find anybody, we decided to just go out and throw the ball around. Before our driving days, we used to play 3 on 3 neighborhood football in the yard next to Chong’s. The people who lived there were NEVER home and they never took care of their yard, so they liked how we killed the grass so they wouldn’t have to cut it. As you know from some of my previous posts, I used to invent plays all the time and one our most classic plays was called the Big Ass, or BA for short.

See, the field we played on was….um…..irregular. The entire yard was going downhill, so if you were up at the top and running downfield, you could pick up some speed. Right in the middle of the yard was this gigantic tree and a BA called for Chong standing up at the top of the yard, bombing the ball OVER the tree, and me catching it as I pretty much stumbled down the hill. It was a high risk, high reward play that worked MAYBE 20%. So Chong and I decided to go for a BA for old time’s sake. We figured that we could nail a few and then go in for some dinner. Well 30 minutes later, we had yet to complete a damn BA and we were getting pissed. We soon realized that one of our problems was that the tree in the middle of the yard had grown quite a bit, which was causing Chong to have to aim the ball higher. However, we realized that our biggest problem was that we were extremelly out of shape. But 2 days and way too many attempts later, we finally began completing some of the passes. The downside, however, was that later on that week I couldn’t move for a few days since I was so sore. But I digress because this is was too fucking much as it is.

Another person that I got to spend a lot of time with was Jess. We were in town for about 5 days together and we ended up hanging out each night that she was home. Since we are both huge insomniacs, we were both up until around 6 AM or since nobody else stays up that late for some reason, we hung out each night and goofed off. It was great spending some time with her, especially since I rarely get to see her as it is now. I got to see Chloe too, which made me want a dog all over again, but I can’t have animals here in my apartment, so I need to just get over it.

Sunday was for one things and one thing only. THE PACKERS GAME! Chong and I had decided to watch the game over at his house. I knew Tommy would want to watch it with us, so I brought him over and all three of us sat down and got ready for the Packers – Seahawks game. I don’t remember that much from the game besides the 26 heart attacks that I nearly had. There was much cursing, much screaming, much moaning / groaning, much “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!”, and much “I can’t look, I can’t look, I can’t look…..” I was freaking out when we went into overtime, especially when Hasslefuck made his “bold” statement during the coinflip that “We want the ball and we’re gonna score.” The only unison scream from Chong, Tommy, and I all day came at that moment when we all screamed at the same time “FUCK YOU!!!!!” But when Al Harris made that interception and ran it back for a TD…I swear, I’ve never screamed that loud or hugged my brother like I did at that moment. God, what a freaking game.

To cap off my emotional roller coaster week back home, I got a call from my old friend Jeremy asking me to come play a friendly round of golf with the boys. Now before I go into detail, allow me to stress one simple fact. By “playing golf”, it is implied and understood that what we are doing is “making an excuse to get as many guys together without any females around and fuck off on a par-3 course with the golf carts, all the while making rude and inappropriate gestures, remarks, and possibly physical contact”. It doesn’t happen often, so I knew I had to accept the proposal and get my ass out of bed by noon. We had a pretty good size group show up: Me, Jeremy, David, Nhan, Ronak, and Nick. I, of course, ended up being given the hot pink golf ball, but what they didn’t know is that I had just dedicated my game to the search for a cure for Breast Cancer and with something like that on your side, you can’t lost. I also made an announcement that all I would donate all proceeds that I won to the search for a cure to Breast Cancer. I thought if I made up a fake little girl whom I’d supposedly met the night before and who might have inspired me to bring my A game that I might somehow pull a miracle out of my ass and “win” it for her.

Well that didn’t really pan out, but neither did David’s idea of driving the golf cart over the 7-foot pile of bricks, yet we all had fun nonetheless. I shot an impressive 43 over 9 holes, which is even more astounding when you factor in that for the 8th and 9th holes we couldn’t even see the course since the sun had gone down and the course had no lights. We had hoped that they might have installed some lights for us since we asked last year, but apparently we lost our sponsorship deal after failing to bring out the crowds we had promised NIKE, so the course decided against installing the equipment. They did however recharge the golf cart batteries for us free of charge, so we were able to joust for a few holes. Well, nobody else called it jousting since I was just sneaking up on people while the were setting up to put and rammed them with a golf club, but I think that’s just a technicality.

I ended up coming in 2nd place due to my mad skill and the eraser I had brought with me, but damn was it fun. I hardly ever get to see these guys whom I grew up with and after everything with Tan…well, it just feels good seeing and spending time with them.

After golf, some of us went out to eat and flirt with the waitress. Or at least that is what Nhan thought we were doing, but I’ll let that go for now. I did learn one thing while waiting on our dinner however. If an establishment ever offers free honey dipped bread rolls to Ronak, he will eat a minimum of 35 and then ask for a doggy bag and a fresh plate of rolls. A short time before dinner ended Nick was talking about how he wanted to go up to North Carolina to get a tattoo on his arm that said something along the lines of In Memory of Tan with his birth and death dates. Nhan and Ronak had to get going, but I wasn’t doing anything and since it was “for” Tan, I offered to drive him. We got pretty lost and the trip ended up taking somewhere around 4 hours, but we found the place and Nick got the tattoo, which I might add looks utterly amazing. I’ll take a picture of it whenever I can, but watching him get it made me get the tattoo itch all over again. I sorta came up with a sweet idea of what I would get after randomly thinking of that movie with Brendan Fraser and Joe Pesci from the mid-90s called With Honors.

But now I am back in Columbia, getting ready to return to my reality. Overall, it was a damn fun break, one in which I needed dearly. There were some parts which I wish had never happened, but such is life, or so they tell me. I’m back full time now, so everybody leave some comments, check in daily, and I’ll c-ya around.

Week 1

Well I left off at Christmas, so I’ll start from there. My mom asked if I would babysit the kids while she went to work and of course I said yes. It was pretty fun watching and playing with them all day, but for the love of god does Colton wake up way too early. Clay was awesome by waking up with him and watching him in the morning and letting me sleep in, but still, Colton needs to learn how to sleep in =) Monday was a pretty shitty day for me since I awoke to the news of Tan’s death and had to break the news to some of my other friend’s and try to make plans on how to get back to my hometown for the funeral, which was on Wednesday. My mom wasn’t getting home until Wednesday and so there was no way I was going to be able to make the funeral unfortunately, but his family was having his cremation ceremony on Thursday and so I realized that if I drove through the night on New Year’s Eve, I would be home by early that morning and be

The minute my mom walked into the house, I packed up my truck and headed out on the road. I didn’t leave until around 8:30, so my parents were kinda worried about me driving with a bunch of drunks. And trust me, there were quite a few drunks out on the road. I was tempted to call the police on one guy because he was going 40 MPH and swerving all over the damn road, but I watched him pull off the highway right as I was pulling out my cell phone, so I let it be. At about 11:40, every car on the highway pretty much vanished, leaving just me and the truckers, so I was making some damn good time. In fact, I made it into North Carolina by midnight and I was flying outside of Charlotte by 2 AM, so I was happy about the time I was making…

And that was until the moving truck in front of me exploded. That’s right folks, here I was making great time, singing along to whatever CD I had in at the time to keep me awake, starting to climb up a hill when all of a sudden this giant fireball erupted from the other side of the hill. I had no idea what the hell had just exploded, but I soon found out when I came up over the hill. A tracker trailer full of furniture was at the bottom of the hill just blazing from front to back. There were a few cars between the burning inferno and me and I was both amazed and sickened to see a few of them just fly by the truck. I pulled over onto the shoulder and called 911 and as I was explaining what the hell had happened and where exactly we were on the highway, an SUV pulled up and the driver sprinted up to the truck to see if the driver was alright. Apparently the driver had bailed out right after the truck caught fire and the man who had jumped out to help him brought him back to his SUV. Just as I got off the phone and the two men were arriving at the SUV, the trailer exploded again. This time I was able to actually see the explosion and it was pretty cool. The left side of the truck shot burning wreckage all over the highway. Right about then a highway patrolman pulled up and blocked off the road so that cars couldn’t keep trying to get by. Within a few minutes fire trucks finally pulled up, but since it was New Year’s Eve, they were a little short on firefighters and those that were there were just volunteers who had been out celebrating.

So there I sat, with a front row seat, watching 15 or so firefighters try to put out this ungodly huge fire with just two fire trucks and no fire hydrants around for extra water, so all they were able to do was spray the fire for a few seconds and then watch it and wait for it to just burn itself out. And while this was cool and all, it was 2 in the fucking morning and I had been on the road for hours. I figured that they would have the fire out enough to get traffic moving within an hour or so and god was I wrong. It took them 4 hours to put the damn thing out and I was going crazy. I was so damn tired and Tan’s cremation ceremony was only hours away, so when I saw them finally moving the fire engine in the left lane and walking out with light sticks to wave us through, I screamed in jubilation and went to crank my truck up. And that’s when my battery decided to fucking die and leave me sitting there stranded. It took me a few minutes to get the fire fighter to notice that I was stranded, but when I did, he came over and asked what was wrong. I told him that I needed a jump and he went and got a self-jumper from his truck and got me going within a few minutes. I thanked him and jumped in my truck and he went to close my hood. He slammed it down and it just shot back up. He looked at it weird and pushed it down again and again it wouldn’t latch. 10 minutes and 5 fire fighters later, we came to the conclusion that when I pulled the latch to unhook my hood the first time, the cord snapped and therefore wouldn’t latch back. So here I am, standing on the highway, having left my house 10 hours ago trying to get my truck’s hood to close. That’s when one of the fire fighters just grabbed a bungee cord, roped my hood shut, and said to get it fixed when I got to wherever I was going. I thanked them all and finally got moving. I watched the sunrise as I continued to drive home and finally made it home at like 7:30 AM. I was so fucking exhausted and knew that I shouldn’t even sit down, much less lay down, but you know me. I sat down to take a break and passed out on the couch.

Somehow I awoke at 9:30 on my own, but that meant that I wouldn’t have enough time to take a shower or anything. I had been planning on finding something to wear during that time I slept, so I hastily grabbed some pants and one of my brother’s shirts and ran out the door…only to see that the damn bungee cord was loose. So I had to attempt and rope the thing back shut without getting grease and soot all over my clothes. I managed to get it done in good time and jumped in the car and flew downtown.

I arrived just a few minutes late, but when I got there people were already coming out of the mortuary. I wasn’t sure why they were leaving, but once I got out of my truck, I ran into Jess and Nick and learned that everybody was going over to the cremation house. I got a ride from Nick and the ride over there was pretty sobering. Eric pretty much summed up the mood when he asked Nick if Michael, Tan’s little 5-year old brother, had come up to him yet and said:

“We’re burning my brother’s body today.”

We finally got there and I found Jess and walked in with her. It turns out that we had all been ushered into a small room, in which located at the front was a giant furnace. And standing there were 6 men loading up Tan’s casket into the furnace while a Monk stood around it, singing and praying in Vietnamese while the rest of us just stood there in shock, at least that’s how it was for me. The whole thing lasted maybe 10 minutes, but we witnessed them loading the casket and then turning on the furnace and the whole time, there were only three sounds coming from the room. The first of which was from the Monk, the second of which was from the furnace, slowly humming, and the third of which came from Tan’s mother as she stood there bawling and screaming out. I’ll never forget that scene for as long as I live and I really would like to elaborate on it more, but it’s not as elaborate as one might think it should be. The emotions I can remember feeling would be served no justice if I tried to translate them into words and the images burned into my mind could never be accurately reproduced, even if I had pictures. Just standing there listening to one of your good friend’s body being burned while his mother cried out in a language that you could not understand is something I had wish I never had to experience, yet am thankful that I did.

Once we got back to the mortuary, Eric told me that him and some other friends of Tan’s were taking the flowers from the funeral over to his crash site and so I followed them over. I gave Chong a call on my way there and let him know where it was and he agreed to meet us over there. When we got there, we set the flowers out and then just stood there staring at them for a few minutes. Nobody really knew of anything to say and so Eric asked if Jess and I wanted to go down into the brush and see where his car landed. It was about 200 feet from the road and once we got down there, you could clearly see which trees his car had hit and all the bits and pieces of his car that were strewn all over the place. Eric and Kelly made their way back up to the main road while Jess and I just stood there, quietly staring at the tree. With the only sound coming from the chirping birds and being surrounding by nothing more then trees and brush, it felt peaceful and surreal it felt, yet only days before in this same exact spot, one of my best friends laid there dead. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I went back up to the road and we all stood around and made small talk for a few minutes while people started to one by one make their exits. It was down to just Nick and me when Chong pulled up and came over to talk with us. He went down to the trees and came back up a few minutes later amazed by how far Tan had managed to jump his car. Nick and I were still just mulling around like zombies, not really feeling like thinking about Tan being dead when Chong said something along the lines of:

“Jesus guys, I still can’t get over how fucking far he flew. I can tell you this, he would have been damn proud of that jump and going out like that.”

That’s when Nick and I just burst out in smiles and realized that Chong had a point. Had Tan lived, no matter how horrible his injuries might have been, the only spin he’d have been able to put on it was how far he’d been able to jump his car and how none of us would ever come close to that. That’s the kinda of man Tan was. I know people overuse the phrase that their friends can always find the good in things, but when I think about it, I can’t think of a single time when Tan spoke negatively, whenever he did speak that is. If he couldn’t say something positive, he’d say something funny and let that be that while the rest of us tried to remind ourselves that we should think more like he does.

For the nest two hours we stood around the flowers and told story after story about Tan. I told every single one I could think of and it was funny how hours later I was thinking of tons that I had forgotten about. We probably would have stood around there longer reminiscing, but around that time swarms of bees had begun to flock to the flowers, so we left and went to get some lunch and talk some more. After that, I headed home to take a much needed nap and catch up on my rest…

So that’s what happened during the first week I took off from posting. I’ll post the second week tomorrow afternoon and I promise that it will be more cheerful then this one. Take it easy y’all.

Hey folks, just wanted to drop in and let ya know that I haven’t forgotten about Shyzer. I’m back home and it’s been a rough few days and I’ll be going back to school soon, so expect a long-ass post this Monday on the past week. Until then…