Shyzer.com

One thing I love about teaching kids is talking about them to other teachers. Preferably when they’re not around.

It’s almost a guilty pleasure that feels so wrong, it starts to feel right.

I just want it on record that I’m opposed to whoever came up with the concept of giving me beautiful weather one day after such a cold winter, only to snatch it back from me just as quickly. Yesterday it was 70 degrees with clear skies at 6:00 thanks to the new Daylight’s Savings time. 24 hours ago, I’m jumping on the trampoline with the Gooblings, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, listening to the dogs run around beneath us and bark in wonder as they try to grasp the concept of us floating above them.

Tomorrow? I may be pulling out my boats to go shovel the driveway.

I blame El Nino.

I promise when I’m finally on one of your shows, I won’t get up and walk off screen as soon as the interview is over. You can tell a lot about a guest who does that…well, actually, you can only tell that they never watch either of the shows, but that’s all we really need to know about them.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a long post over here on Shyzer, which is part purposefully, part circumstance. It doesn’t take a genius to know that “pithy” is not a word used very often to describe my writing, even when I’m aiming for that short, but sweet type post. I like to think I’m getting better at it though.

On the flip side, whenever I actually have had time to work on something, 9 times out of 10 I gravitate towards a project on Hey, It’s Free! and devote all of my attention there. Today while “teaching,” I made a list of all the projects I’ve got half complete on HIF! and that ultimately led to doing the same here for Shyzer. Who remembers this? I sure as hell do. I remember sitting outside on the deck or trampoline and trying to come write it all. I easily spent 15+ hours working on it - trying to research stuff I could turn into jokes, setting up the best matches possible, writing more then I even ended up publishing here on Shyzer…

And yet I never finished it.

Those last four words don’t even surprise me anymore when I say them. “I never finished it.” Shlyrics. Tens of thousands of words strung out between dozens of potential posts. The Religion Tournament. And this is just on Shyzer. Is it because I’m lazy? Do I enjoy just dabbling my feet in something new before growing bored with it? Do I start them only to realize they are going to suck and thus cut my losses?

I don’t know. I’m too lazy to bother thinking about it.

When it comes to substituting, one factor is a constant. The level of the grade you’re teaching is directly equal to the number of hours you’ll be prohibited from doing a damn thing while at the same time representing your level of happiness with the material you are allowed to teach.

If I have to talk about Christopher Columbus or explain how to multiple 8 by 4 one more day, I may just stab myself with a blunt spoon.

I’d totally hug this guy.

Digg.com has seen a bunch of quizzes pop up lately where people seem to take pleasure in finding out how little they know. Name the 50 US States. Name all the African countries. Name all the countries in the world.

Well fine, if people enjoy feeling stupid, then they can take my Goob’s Thought Quiz and find out just how futile it is for them to try and follow my train of thought! For best results, just don’t answer at all and read the “solutions” from start to finish.

TADA!

In my never ending quest for stupidity on the Internet, I was happy to open up my Hey, It’s Free! e-mail account and read this:

This is LoveU2Toleda@yahoo.com Your confirmation: #873890 Is a fake I check with WalMart about the $500 gift card, and quest what there is none. Now should I report you to the web and email address companies about you bigmama ? Or should we say Cynthia Gibbson. If you can\’t show me this $500 card by say March 1st,2007. My email should be ringing off the hook. Thanks for listening.

There’s so much to dissect in this short paragraph (and I use that word lightly), that it’s almost overwhelming. But what’s my favorite part? It’s not how guess somehow morphed into quest. Or how I caused her e-mail to “be ringing off the hook.” Or even how I might soon be reported “to the web?”

No, my favorite is that somewhere along the line I, Goob, master of awesomeness, somehow became Big Mama. And that alone totally made this e-mail worth publishing, complete with senders address and all.

You bend over to pick up a book and singe off an inch as it accidentally falls into the candle on your nightstand.

Maybe it’s time to pull out the bald look again.

Apparently I’m the only person who remembers the trailers for Babel that they played constantly when it first came out. They made it seem like it was some international terror suspense movie that would be entertaining to watch.

It’s not. And it’s not.

The problem was that the movie wasn’t anything like the trailers made it out to be. It’s a drama that goes on and on about how we can’t communicate with other people who have the same feelings, emotions, blah blah blah. It was basically three poorly connected stories going on at once. It’s as if I was watching three separate mini-movies that kept cutting away just when I started to tolerate them. To make matters worse, half of the characters acted as if they had a learning disability that put them on par with 4 year old with Down’s Syndrome. Just because you’re a fish out of water doesn’t mean you have to act like an idiot, despite what this movie tries to teach you.

In fact, you know it’s a shitty movie on the screen when you find that you don’t give a shit whether any of the major characters to live or die. What rubbish.