Vacation Tips

The wife and I are recently returned from semi-sunny Santa Barbara and, because you demand it, here are the answers to your questions.

1. Lots of fun.
2. The fires were never close to us.
3. Only once, but it was hot.
4. Shitty.

That last one, as if you didn't know, is the answer to "How does it feel to be back?" Because vacations are only fun while you're on them. When you're done, you don't get to be on "kind-of vacation."

So, I'm at work today and it's the usual bullshit. Woo. The morning, from my alarm to the moment I walked into the office, has been a steady decline and now -- an hour and a half in -- I am back at pre-vacation level funk.

There is a solution, of course, and it's one I think we should all embrace -- Torture Vacations.

Why do we spend a ton of money to go interesting places and do fun things when all we're going to do is come back and suffer through our real lives? Why not take a vacation that will make work seem better?

How many weeks of vacation do we get? I only had two this year. Two weeks of fun, surrounded by 50 weeks of mindless drudgery. It doesn't make any sense.

Rather, I propose we spend two weeks a year in a really awful place. The weather is too cold or too hot, the food is bland and bad for you, beds are uncomfortable, the TV only shows Fox News and your alarm goes off at 4 a.m. All your days would be spent doing data entry or waiting in line at the DMV or serving cheese fries to assholes at T.G.I.Fridays.

Coming home would be a vacation. Work would seem like a Godsend. I would have popped out of bed at 6 a.m. this morning energized and excited that for 50 weeks out of the year, I'd get to enjoy mindless drudgery.

Chambraigne

"Fetch daddy's hard plastic eyes so he can see the TV."

"How much hair do you have Space Ghost?"

"Oh, I don't know. Nine? Nine fat stalks."

Fuck insight, I'm just going to give you SGC2C quotes until we all die.

"It's like get a scalp massage from Lucifer."

"Things get easier as your brain dies, Bob."

Indeed it does. Indeed it does.

I am not a cell phone guy

My friend Nate has a theory about generations. At age 30-something, he contends that those who are part of his generation have seen the movie "Tron." Those punk kids with their ironic haircuts and Fall Out Boy music have not seen "Tron."

I am part of the "Tron" generation. I am also part of the "this dang cell phone" generation.

My first cell phone came in college, at the behest of my parents, who desperately wanted me to have some means of contacting the police while I was delivering pizza. It was a piece of crap and, true to form, I have been getting the same piece of crap phone ever since.

I am probably on my fourth phone now and this is the first time I've ever spent any money on it rather than just taking whatever they were offering for free.

Gone is the candy-bar phone with the big buttons and a screen that could be called "color" only if you felt generous about gray-blue, gray-green and gray-red.

My new phone slides open -- Oooh, fancy! -- and it plays music. It even hooks up to my computer so I can add songs without paying $17 a piece to download them.

It is the first phone I've ever owned with a camera. It seems like camera phones have been the norm forever, but I just never cared. This one is grainy at best. The pictures I've taken so far are exactly the kind you'd expect from a professional writer.

Sure, I've admired the nice phones before. I cannot lie -- the prospect of an iPhone very nearly had me sticking with AT&T -- but while others get new phones every few months, I am ready to spend the next two years finding reasons to hate what I've got.

Now my biggest challenge -- choosing icons for "My Faves." I know...it is very gay, but that's the name of the plan. If it was cheap enough, got decent reception and included free nights and weekends, I'd gladly sign up for a plan called "Two Guys Fellating Each Other While Wearing Pink Leather Jumpsuits."

It's also the first time I switched phone companies, at least voluntarily. We signed up for AT&T forever ago and were somehow switched to Alltel. When that contract ended, we went to Cingular, which promptly became AT&T again.

Now we're a T-Mobile family, which is good for the placing and receiving phone calls bit, but it sucks because everybody else I know has AT&T. Worst case scenario, though -- maybe I'll just hear from people less.