I’m not particularly proud of my last post. When I was watching the news during the day and laughing at all the poor commuters stuck on the road, it seemed like a solid post topic. I mean I lead a pretty uneventful life, and I’m grasping for straws here. Normal people can write about their lives and funny things that happen to them…but I don’t have a life, and 90% of the funny in my life is artificially manufactured from cycling through our (admittedly very large) rotation of Ferrellisms over and over again.

I got nothing!

So whenever I don’t have a good YouTube video to post up, I’m busting my ass trying to scrouge up something, anything to throw up here. For Odin’s sake, I just wrote like three hundred words about the contents of my wallet like five posts back. I’m fucking desperate!

…so desperate in fact…that I will now take you along on a ride, in a critical review of my last post, complete with director’s commentary. Like I said – I’m not particularly proud of it, and I’ll be pointing out the various flaws I’ve now been able to spot with a five hour night’s sleep fueling me.

Probably one of the top ten lamest sentences I have ever put up here in my long and illustrious career as a blogger.

I may have been a little brief and dismissive there, since the “accident” actually involves a man being crushed to death and two others being sent to the emergency room. I hesitated there – I should have either mentioned that and shown the appropriate respect to both the injured victim of unlucky circumstances or his poor family…or I should have gone the other way and made a terrible joke of extremely poor taste (ie. “Some TTC dude lost big time in the ultimate high stakes game of real life Jenga.”) There were only two options there, and I blinked and ended up in no man’s land.

Or maybe just “for the investigation.”

This is just an ugly stretch of writing here. Disjointed bits expressing factual events, and no real storytelling here at all. I’m looking it over again and it reads like an half-page essay a fourth grader wrote about his summer vacation. “We went to the beach. And the water was cold. I like the beach. And then we went home. I had a good summer vacation. I am a Beyblader. That is, one that Beyblades.”

That’s bush league, Yak. Real bush league.

Was this supposed to be funny? I don’t even remember anymore, I just want to die.

All that text…and just two sentences. This paragraph looks more awkward than a 9th Grade AV kid at a school dance. (In case you’re curious…no, I was not.) I mean…”like literally?” What the hell does that even mean?

I just used the word “like” in two straight sentences.

No idea why I unnecessarily linked to that news story there when I’ve already provided all the possible information you could get in the actual link description. A water main broke. On Lake Shore. That’s it. I think I did it just to make sure that absolutely none of you would doubt me, because in the end, I am a pathologically compulsive liar, and lying about old water mains leaking onto Lake Shore is something I actually do quite often.

Oh ho! An exciting twist to the story! I am so clever and witty.

I’m actually quite proud of how this bit worked out, believe it or not. I think that Persian army reference was well used and well timed, since we were coming off two straight 300 mentions.

Some additional trivia – I think it was actually closer to three hundred people on the platform than the aforementioned two hundred. But when I whipped out the 300 reference here, I was afraid that it would unintentionally clash with a “three hundred people” figure, and so I went back and revised it. The truth is often the first thing that’s sacrificed in the pursuit of a good story.

Too bad this isn’t a good story though.

…”that’s not my game”? No idea what I was going for there.

This was a great opening to actually segue into a bit about the whole “working from home” phenomenon I’ve continually encountered since working here.

But unfortunately, it appears I prematurely shot my wad on what was supposed to be a dry run, and now I have somewhat of a mess on my hands.

Apparently, people in cushy desk jobs whose responsibilities and workloads flucuate wildly from day to day (ie. myself) sometimes have the occasional option to just take care of their stuff at home and not even bother making the commute down. I guess the theory is sound, as more than the occasional work day is spent just answering emails and writing documentation – even the meetings have bridge numbers you can call into from somewhere offsite (ie. home).

Still…I didn’t even know you could do that until I got here – I don’t think the concept even existed in the places I worked at before if you weren’t upper management. I wish I could have done that for university though – “schooled from home” (“learning from home?”) – I could PayPal them a couple thousand dollars a semester, and in return I would receive an University of Toronto approved groin kick delivered to me online every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (and twice on Tuesdays and Thursdays).

The term “brown nose” is probably inappropriate here. I should have either gone with “eager beaver” or “suck off my manager”.

I probably shouldn’t have gone with the prior “University of Toronto approved groin kick” bit earlier, since now I’ve inadvertently put up two UofT jabs in the same post. Which is both unnecessary, and yes, admittedly somewhat unwarranted. It’s not like I was complaining about Richmond Hill High School (a harrowing ordeal that has left me with mentally and emotionally issues I’m still dealing with even now, years since I’ve even stepped foot in it) – in which case no amount of condemnation will ever be unwarranted. UofT was the evil stepfather that regularly beat me with a wrench, but I managed to suck it up and run away from home. One jab per post is more than sufficient.

But Richmond Hill High School is the clown that raped me as a child, and that experience has left me with so many profound and disturbing issues that I will never be able to become a functioning member of normal human society ever again. And no amount of therapy or blog venting will ever wash it away, although I can do nothing else but keep trying. I like to sneak in a shoutout to the old alma mater every other post to keep the wound fresh – it’s like picking at that mental scab every time the metaphorical blood clots congeal.

Too far? Okay, I apologize.

Some quick trivia regarding the making of this post…originally, I was going to go with “So instead of taking four hours to commute back home, I walked up fourteen steps to my room and blew through three new episodes of Entourage in the time it would have taken me to get home on a normal day.”

However, I didn’t want to really reveal such an intimate detail about my personal life as how many steps there are on my staircase, and so I opted for the simpler “laziness” line. But I’ve chosen to whip it out now just for the purposes of spicing up this director’s commentary special feature.

I was going for a sudden switch of pacing here, and I think the flow it creates works well. The implication this line gives is that for some bizarre reason that is not immediately apparent, there is actually a designated and regular time to view an old Bill Murray SNL skit from 1993. Not only that, but it was apparently time now to do that very thing. Which is – obviously – such a strange and fantastical notion that the surprise and shock it may elicit in the reader would surely turn into amusement, upon which time my glowing wit would surely be appreciated for being able to create something out of pretty much nothing.

And I absolutely love how Bill Murray has this ridiculous ability to somehow convincingly act as an overactor. It’s almost like sarcasm…but not quite fully right at that level yet. It’s like just real enough to be unsarcastic, probably by mere percentage points, if there had indeed existed some sort of quantifiable scale to detect sarcasm. The statement may seem paradoxical at first…until you watch him absolutely nail lines like “Some men use a gun. Some a knife. Others just use a big rock. I use a whip.” and passionately (but not actually) contest Phil Hartman’s claim to his father’s silver mine. Even that random appearance he had at the end of the game in Space Jam entertains me to no end.

The man is a genius, in on some sick joke that none of the rest of us know about.

I love this quote, but it suffers in this context, as it has no place in this post. That’s not to say it has no relevance – in fact, it has relevance, but not enough – just enough to make its placement very awkward. Yes, Bill Murray’s involved…but The Life Aquatic (or anything remotely aquatic or Esteban-eating-related) is not related to the post. Like before, I should have either gone the other way with a completely unrelated random quote, or done a better job finding one that was more relevant to the surrounding context.

Perhaps (keeping in mind the commuting/travel related topic of the original post) this would have been better suited…
“Do you know that you just charted us on a course through unprotected waters?”
“Yeah, we’re taking the shortcut.”
“But it’s outside I.M.U. jurisdiction. There isn’t any protection.”
“I know, honey. Look at the map. We go your way…that’s about four inches. We go my way…it’s an inch and a half. You wanna pay for the extra gas?”

The worst part about it is that if I ever found a better post to end with the Esteban quote (ie. one of you is eaten by a giant Jaguar Shark), now I’d be repeating a quote because it’s already up here. I’ve wasted one of my grenades/bombs/magics/big A-button attacks that I was saving for the boss, or at least the miniboss.

Thus you can see why I’m not particularly proud of this effort, and why it falls short of our usual creative standards. Just not particularly well crafted on any level – it’s sloppy and lazy, and just showing up to collect my paycheque isn’t good enough.

Especially since I don’t get paycheques.

“Is it the Jaguar Shark?”
“On the record, yes. Cut. Print both takes, Vikram.”
“Was I…just in the film?”
“Yeah. You’re gonna have to sign a release.”