Unbridled Beauty
Uncommon purity
Unintelligible reveries
Unannounced fruition
Unabashed pride
Unaltered conflicts
Unrelenting doubt
Unequivocal ardor
Unreasonably obstinate
Uncalculated fidelity
Unspectacular normalcy
Undeserved stigma
Underrated strength
Unwavering loyalty
Unrequited passion
Unwavering certainty
Unlocated Grace
I’d like to take a minute and talk about the rare event where a man loves a man unconditionally.
Wait, that sounds gay. Let me try again.
When a man and a man really love each other…
Crap, that’s no better.
It’s hard to talk about male heterosexuals who love each other in today’s society. Somehow the formula has been unfairly mutated into Man + Man + Love + ∞ = Gay. There’s very little wiggle room leftover and that’s quite a sad state of affairs to me.
The mere idea of male emotional intimacy is one of the few remaining nuts that our society has yet to even crack. The term Bromance tries its best to soothe people and let them know it’s just two guys who feel so friendly with each other that they don’t mind opening up about anything. But it doesn’t work. If anything, it comes across as a comical, even clownish, term that’s used to pair two goofballs together who don’t quite fit in with the rest of us. It’s one step above Outcasts and synonymous with Weirdos.
I like the hope of one day having a best friend who knows everything about me and vice versa. I also like boobs (on women). Both are equally awesome and one day I hope people come to accept that.
It’s crazy how fast-paced life is right now. In the past two months alone, I’ve done more work on Hey, It’s Free than I did in the 10 months prior combined. My daily routine now consists of waking up, hunting for freebies, answering e-mails, trying to squeeze in a quick lunch, more e-mails, an interview here or there, manage the forums, work on a featured post, holy crap how is it bed time already? And yet I’m loving it.
As if that wasn’t enough, in the next month I plan on launching a new charity website, doubling up HIF, and re-launching an old website that I never fully developed. Plus there’s that whole social and family life that has to be fit in somewhere!
Thanksgiving was quite fun. I got to catch up with a few friends, find out that my little brother is far superior in shooting a gun, and relax a little bit. I’m excited about Christmas as well. This is always one of my favorite times of the year, cold weather be damned. Sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner with a table full of friends and family and sitting around Christmas morning laughing and joking with everybody are by far two events that I look forward to the most every year. I certainly start to appreciate them more with each passing year as well.
I’ve started to try and be a good friend as well. I sat down back in August during some random Olympic match and made a list of every person I hoped to still be friends with in 10 years. Then I circled the names of anybody whom I’d talked to in the prior two months. I think my list was something like 40 people with only three or four circles. It was a harsh reminder of how hard you have to work at actually maintaining friendships! There are still a few people I need to get back in touch with, especially certain family members, but I’m already pleased with the progress I’ve made. It’s one thing just to call somebody up and say “hey, long time no talk!” but it’s a whole other to actually keep the contacts going from that point onward.
Let that be a lesson, little Gooblings.
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these “sorry for not posting” posts, so I’ll try not to break the streak now. That said, I really don’t have much to say.
HIF has taken off beyond my wildest dreams. It was mentioned on The Today Show (still looking for a vid) and CBS’s Up To The Minute last week, as well as a gazillion local radio, tv, and newspapers. My personal favorite local news segment has been KOVR’s Saving with Dave segment, which used some stock footage of some random dude at a computer to represent me. HIF was also accepted into the prestigious 9rules network over a month ago (before any of this media play) and I have to say the day I woke up and saw that it’d been accepted, I practically jumped for joy. It doesn’t bring with it any huge source of traffic or revenue, but it’s an enormous thumbs up from a collective group of creative and talented individuals whenever they allow a new site into their club.
The New York Times might not be knocking down my door for an interview, but HIF’s certainly become a full time gig that consumes my every waking moment. I don’t want to jinx anything though, so I’ll just leave it at that and say that I’m earning more “on the job” training of how to run a big website than I ever learned in the past 5 years combined.
I’m heading to Orlando next weekend. It’s been a year since I’ve had a vacation. I’m trying to come to South Carolina for at least a week come November as well because it’s been even longer since I’ve seen my dad and buddies down there.
Playoff baseball has consumed my every second of spare time to boot. Busted suicide squeezes! Dominant pitching! Second biggest comeback in baseball history! My predictions being far more accurate than I could have hoped! Jaime Moyer pitching while collecting Social Security! The White Sox are no more! Good times all around.
And that, my friends, is everything I’ve been up to lately. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more freebies to hunt down.
I find my self continually wondering if I’ll ever stop being amazed by Lady Luck. When I’m 50 or 60, will I still find myself stunned by her sudden appearance? A large part of me hopes the answer is “hell no.”
After being turned down for countless jobs, learning far too much bad news, and being stricken by what medical professionals can only describe as Bubonic Plague, Ms. Luck decided to part the dark clouds of gloom and smile down upon me.
Last week, the November edition of ShopSmart magazine hit newsstands (yeah, I know November is two months away) and Hey, It’s Free was surprisingly mentioned as one of it’s top seven money saving sites on the Internet. (page 34!) For those of you who don’t keep up to date with the Freebie World, this is akin to an athlete being profiled in Sports Illustrated. The only way this could have been better is had they done a full page spread on HIF.
Words can’t express the amount of pride and validation that has bubbled up within me thanks to this surprise of surprises. My first national print mention! I’ve sunk more blood, sweat, and tears into that site than any other project in my life – including most relationships. At the very least, the bump in ad revenue and countless local news mentions was a lovely bonus.
And yet on the grand scale of awesome news learned during the month of September, that ranks a distant second. You might be wondering what possibly could top such a wondrous occasions? Did the Seattle Mariners offer me a job? Did Barack Obama ask me to join his foreign policy team? Even better.
Try finding out that I’m back on my mom’s free airline passes. For a year. Minimum.
Let that sink in for a moment.
I CAN FLY FOR FREE TO PRACTICALLY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD FOR ANOTHER YEAR!
I really don’t know how to put this to people. I’m a traveler at heart. I’ve spent the last three years of my life helping out my family and there’s no better thing in this world that I could be doing. But I can’t wait to get back out there on the open road. I’m at my best when I’m moving with the tide, flowing from here to there with no regard for the unforeseen.
World, here I come. But first I need to hit up New York. And Spartanburg. And Louisville. And Orlando. There are a few people I need to visit.
I just received a job offer. I think I might take it.
Five brownie points to whoever uses the title to figure out what country the job is located in.
I just uploaded a guest post to AdamJCohen.com, one of my buddy’s sites. Since I’ve been lazy around these parts lately, I figured I’d link to it and call it a day. Go read it, it’s not half bad if I say so myself. Possibly best of Shyzer worthy, if I wasn’t drugged up on wine at this point and thusly had the ability to edit it a bit semi-professionally.
I’d originally written a paragraph or two of it for a post here on Shyzer, but that never amounted to much. Go figure, huh? Still, I like it so much that I’m reproducing it here below since I question y’alls ability to click a link and read something on a secondary site. They say write to your audience and I’m pretty sure most of y’all are idiots! 
In hindsight, the pediatrician I saw as a kid wasn’t the kind of guy that instilled confidence or comfort in people, especially when it came to diagnosing them with medical concerns. He looked and acted like a lead character from Revenge of the Nerds. Sure, we all want a doctor who has a strong grasp on medical knowledge, but we also want somebody who looks old enough to shave and who could handle himself in a fisticuffs match with a ten year old girl. It was also blatantly obvious that somewhere along the way he’d clearly been told to work on his bedside manner. As a result, his attempts at small talk and calming banter were always over the top and uneasy. I’m not sure when I experienced my first awkward silence as a kid, but if I was a gambling man, I’d sure as hell pick his office as my best guess.
The story I got from him was always the same. He’d walk in, always fumbling with my chart as if it were made of butter, and break into a smile as he saw me. You could practically hear his brain talking and reassuring him that this would be an easy one. “Hell yes! He has a birthmark on his face! Phew, I can just mention that my brother has one and then get on with the examination!” How many times did I hear the story that his brother had a birthmark that covered half of his face? Beats me, but years later, I can’t remember his name or what his office looked like or even the sickest I might have been when I saw. But damn if I don’t still remember his brother had a birthmark that covered half of his face and it was the same color as mine and there were procedures to remove them if I wanted and did I mention it was the same color as mine and that it was on his brother, but not him because he wasn’t his brother and that ;lkjsdfk
Sorry, I slipped out of consciousness there from boredom.
I never notice my birthmark. Ever. I look in the mirror and either see nothing, since I’m not wearing my contacts, or I see a stunningly, amazing body that is ripped to perfection. Every few weeks I even notice that it’s time to shave! And anybody who has actually seen my body may now commence in shutting the hell up. But my birthmark? I literally don’t see it anymore. Which is why it took me a few paragraphs before I realized this article telling people how to live with a birthmark wasn’t satirical. Somebody actually took the time to write an article about living with a birthmark. Like it’s the same as living with autism or diabetes!
Hell, let me save you the trouble of reading the stupid thing. I can tell you how I live with a birthmark quite easily. I wake up, get dressed (I even wear pants if it’s a special occasion), go about my day, continue to be awesome no matter what, and then go to bed. How might I live if I didn’t have a birthmark? Um…I’d, um…yeah, I’m gonna have to get back to you on that one.
It’s weird too, because every time my pediatrician would launch into his speed rant, I’d hold up a hand and cut him short. Thanks, but no thanks. I loved my birthmark and I didn’t need any brochures about removing it. Yet here on Shyzer, spanning over 700 plus posts, I’ve mentioned my birthmark a whopping one time and even then it was a simple throwaway line to a bigger story. I’ve struggled to come up with posts for more than five years and settled on things from my brother commenting on the bubbles I make while peeing to the eating habits of Australians, but somehow my birthmark fell through the cracks. Yet you’d have to drag me kicking and screaming if you tried to forcibly remove it. Huh, go figure.
I didn’t even think there were any stories in my past where my birthmark played a central role, yet as I thought about it today, one by one a memory would flicker back into focus. I remember a bully in preschool, in a weak attempt to make fun of and embarrass me, once asked if it was where a tiger tried to kill me. I kinda threw him for a loop when I answered, “yes. That’s the scar from when I almost died.” Ten minutes later, I finished telling a harrowing tale of where a baby tiger escaped from his pen and almost mauled me to death. After that, the kids always gave me first dibs at playing with the blocks. Hahaha, even as a kid I was a sarcastic dick. There’s the story of the chick who once asked me if she could kiss and make out with my birthmark. Yeah, that was pretty much the end of that date. I almost wish I’d stuck with her just to see what other stories I might have gained from her clinical craziness. I even have a running gag with some of my friends where every time they see me, they point to my face and say I have something on it and we go through a much longer than needed process that is only funny to us where I try to wipe it off. Good times.
I guess I can understand the aforementioned article though. It’s not even that bad of an article. I guess the aura of a birthmark comes from the fact that 99% of people don’t have one. I can dig and understand that. More than 50% of people have boobs and yet I’m still mesmerized by them, so how can I be one to judge somebody who has questions about a simple birthmark?
For me, it’s pretty damn simple. It’s mine and only mine. The odds of me coming across somebody with the same colored eyes or haircut or shirt are astronomically higher than coming across somebody with the same red splotch on the same part of their face and being the same size. It’s part of my trademark, something that nobody can take from me, but that which is one of the few things I can proudly wear on my sleeve – er, face – for all to see. Even if I don’t see it myself anymore. Maybe this article was worth stumbling across after all.
As I sat down to type this post, I realized it’s already after midnight. 2:15 to be exact. Well to hell with that! I haven’t gone to bed yet, so it’s still my birthday damnit and thanks to WordPress, I can manipulate it to look at if this post went live at 11:59PM on February 7th 
I can already tell this whole 30 days of posting is going to be a task of epic proportions for me. There’s only so much one wants to share with the entire world and most of what I’ve ever had to say has been archived here on Shyzer long ago. Case in point: before I write any post, I come up with three extremely quick and rough ideas of what I’m going to write about. I just jot down three simple sentences about three random topics and then pick the one I want to talk about most and run with it. But since Shyzer is already 5+ years old, it’s gotten to the point where I need to search through it to make sure I haven’t already talked about it before.
So tonight my three sentences were about how I love birthdays, how I’ve grown to harp and nag myself over my age (and how much I hate the fact that I harp and nag myself over it!), and how I really effing hate my hair.
While none of those topics were sure to win a Pulitzer, that fact alone helps emphasize my point that I’ve run out of topics to write about. At least that’s what I’ve grown to believe. Yet here I am, creating a post out of nothing, mashing and juggling words to form some sort of cohesive, albeit weakly joined, narrative. But it’s working. Still. Even after five fucking years. That’s got to say something.
Going back and reading that second “done” post above was kind of enlightening in another way. That post wasn’t half bad. Decent writing, not too wordy, good story, even better message. And as I said during Shyzer’s fifth birthday, there’s a lot of crap I’ve written and forgotten about that’s not half bad. Why do I bring this up?
Thanks for the writers strike recently, many of the late night talk shows have been without their usual staff despite being forced to create new shows. As a result, you’ve got guys like Stewart and Colbert and O’Brien basically creating the jokes and the entire show on their own. (quick side note, if you haven’t watched the video where those three guys have a battle royal and pretend the beat the crap out of each other, you’re doing yourself a major disservice.) It can be painfully obvious that the shows are sans writers and none of their shows carry the same zip and level of quality as we’re used to, but at the same time it’s been almost encouraging. These guys are, in a much grander sense, doing what I’m doing here. They have an audience who expects to be entertained and dear God if they aren’t doing whatever the hell they can come up with. By mid-January they were all tapped out and openly stated so. Yet there they are, showing up on my TV on schedule, slugging it out and still giving it their all.
I admire the hell out of Ze Frank. Last year, he created brilliantly funny and witty videos day in and day out. Yet even he called it quits after only one short year and anybody who thinks that wasn’t a calculated move is fooling themselves. The cast of Seinfeld walked away from a 10th season not because they didn’t want to be paid another $10 million each, but because they knew they were out of good ideas. John Elway retired after winning two Super Bowls not because he hated playing football, but because there was nowhere to go but down. These people knew they only had so much, could only be tapped for so long, before they needed a break to replenish and refresh. That’s where the obscure nature of Shyzer comes into play. I can toil and write mundane and pointless crap all I want and it’s fine. I’m not on network TV nor do I have a following of 100,000 people. I can afford to suck and suck and suck as long as I squeeze out something decent every so often. Thus the challenge to create something for 30 measly days. I want to finally know what my suck to good ratio is.
Last year, Ze was 34. Seinfeld was well into his late 30s before he got started with the show. Colbert and Stewart and in their 40s and still able to create material on the fly. Before, I looked at them and though, “Dead God, how did they last that long? I’m not even 25 and I’m already tapped out of ideas!” But that’s not it at all. The more I do this, the more I realize how much crap they had to slog through before they found their voice and honed in on their river of talent.
And while I’ve got no idea when they started creating things, I can assure you it wasn’t much earlier than when I got started. So no, I’m not out of ideas, I’m still figuring out how to come up with and develop them. And at 25, I don’t think I’m so bad at it after all.
Now let’s see what I’m saying come March 6th 
Like I said yesterday, schools up here in Virginia have been closed since Monday. When you factor in that they’ll also be closed this coming Monday for President’s Day, you realize that the Gooblings were recently handed a 7-day weekend. And so far, they’ve each spent 98% of their time off indoors either on the computer or in front of a TV.
I hate to sound like an old codger lamenting about the “good ‘ole days,” but it’s easy for me to see how childhood has changed in the last 10 to 15 years. I was part of the last group of kids who grew up without some form of technology pervading my every waking moment. And this is coming from a guy whose dad bought an NES before anybody else on the block – just as much for him as it was for me. The same went for just about every other technology breakthrough over the 90s. Personal computer, big screen TV, high speed (56k BABY!) internet, you name it, we most likely were the first in the neighborhood to get it.
And yet even still, the majority of my childhood memories are void of complex technology or machinery. In elementary school, I didn’t touch a computer until 4th grade, and that was to play Math Blasters in Horizons class. After school was spent watching an hour of cartoons on FOX (who else remembers when Nickelodeon didn’t have any Nick Toons and Cartoon Network didn’t exist!? Just me? Okay…) before walking down the street to Michael Mace’s house to hang out. I do remember playing my fair share of Battle Toads, Ninja Turtles, and Zelda at his place, but even more of my memories from that early on in life are of me on my bike, racing around the neighborhood with my dog, just looking for something to do. Well, that, and playing in the woods where I found a dog bone and was convinced it was an Indian burial ground. In fact, that was my greatest asset as a kid. My imagination. God, the hours spent playing outdoors or with my Ninja Turtles or Ghostbuster toy gun. I may have played alone a lot as a kid, but I never felt alone after I let my mind run wild for a little bit.
By the end of elementary school and throughout middle school, my main after school activity was calling Chong to see if he wanted to “Play.” For us, Playing consisted of walking around and trying to entertain ourselves. Sometimes we’d find a house being built to Play in. Other times we spent our Play time chopping down trees in the woods in order to make a bridge over a 10 inch creek. Or even more often, Playing meant wandering around in people’s yards, down the nearby streets, along the abandoned railroad tracks, simply looking for something interesting and using our imagination whenever we found it. Yeah, we were older, but using our mind as a source of entertainment was still our key toy.
Sure, we played SNES and Genesis whenever we felt like it, but I can’t seem to remember playing video games for more than a few hours at a time, if that. They just weren’t that entertaining! You can only play so much Madden ’94 before you realize that it sucks. And I’m not trying to make it seem like I didn’t play video games as a kid. I played a lot. But only in relation to other kids back then! Before, I may have been a video game master, but compared to kids nowadays, I would be the kid who couldn’t figure out how reload his gun on Halo. In all honesty, I’d say only about 50% of my free time before hitting high school was spent either watching TV or playing video games.
I’d put the Goobling’s at about 90%, minimum.
So is that bad? Do I think their “generation” is failing at something? No, it’s simply a fact I’ve noticed. It simply make me wonder what their memories are going to be of when they get to be my age. I don’t see how they can be anything beyond video games, computers chats, and disappointing TV shows. I can’t help but feel like they’re missing out on something that I was fortunate enough to experience, something which is gone from kid’s lives forever.
I’m sure my grandparents said the same thing when TV entered my parent’s lives. And the same was probably said a generation earlier when radios began popping up into homes across the country. That doesn’t change the fact that they were right. Things did change and it’s the elder people who see it happening because they remember what it was like “before.” Are either generation better off or worse because of the change? I doubt it, but it’s still hard to watch it happen.
During a week long snow storm, God…I probably would have spent only enough time indoors to eat, sleep, and cure my extremities from frostbite. The Gooblings haven’t even desired to touch the snow. I can’t even think of a moment beyond dinner time when any of them haven’t been in front of a computer, TV, or video game. Literally. No forts have been built. No surprise snowball attacks have been made. No giant snowballs have been rolled into the size of a small car and placed in the middle of a road at the bottom of a hill for a pickup truck to slam into, which caused the driver to chase after us….
I wonder what my kids will say when my grandchildren’s generation welcomes the invention of internal brain computers or automated chore & homework completing robots or something along those lines. I bet they’ll lament over the days when their games were only played on TVs instead of in full life virtual reality rooms, which totally made them better and more hardcore. They’ll recall when Google searches were inaccurate at best and how information on the Internet only seemed to be organized or sorted until you actually wanted to find something and couldn’t no matter how hard you tried. Or even how they had to hide their porn stash in C:/My Documents/Important Files/Saved029/Computer Logs instead of downloading them directly into their brains, which…well I think my grandchildren will have the advantage there.
But my kid’s will be right. Just like I am. Just like everyone before me was.
We all have missed out on something previous generations had. But such is the nature of change.
