I recently encountered a dilemma of great proportions. Every man, during the course of a day, needs a role model. Someone that they can think of, and say "I need to live up to that man's standard." Of course, most of us fail miserably as we try to attain that goal. But reach for the stars, I suppose. Anyway. You see, my problem was that I realized I could no longer throw my full support behind one candidate for supreme Alpha male-ness. I am torn between which figure I should consider to be best, and try to live up to. That can't happen. Each male has to have their own idol, that they throw their full support behind. Now, it doesn't have to be the same idol, but the full weight and authority of their manhood has to be behind the decision. Casey, drawing a name out of the air, might prefer something like ULTIMEN, wheras others might prefer tradition figures, like Batman, or Superman.

 

I, however, cannot choose between three. On the one hand, we have James Bond. Dashing and debonair, no woman can resist his wit and charm. That's when he has time for women. Mostly he's beating the shit out of the Russian army with his PP7 (which does lose him points, actually, as it turns out the gun is in reality a woman's weapon.) and commandeered soviet tanks. In Soviet Russia, car drives you. With his plethora of awesome gadgets that can do everything from remotely drive a car, to making women instantly orgasm, Bond is one of my top pics.

 

Then we have Dr. Jones. Not only does Indiana dabble in the most interesting of subjects, history, but he constantly has sex and kills Nazis while doing it. He also shirks his boring duties and responsibilities, ie teaching and grading papers, in favor of more intriguing and better selling ones, like sex and killing. Thatta boy, Indy. He doesn't use the cool gadgets like Bond, but he more than makes up for it I think. He has that old fashioned whip he does everything with, and when he needs to fight Nazis, he doesn't teleport them to jail or some shit using Q's latest gadget...no, he punches them in the face until they stop moving. And I think he punches them even more, when the camera isn't focused on him. Let's not forget the sex. Dr. Jones has lots of sex with women he's never met, doing us all proud.

 

Before I move onto my next hero, I just connected some dots. A lot of the woman Bond sleeps with turn out to be enemy agents. A lot of the women Indiana sleeps with turn out to be enemy agents. The moral of the story? Women will always backstab you, so fuck 'em while you have the chance.

 

Moving on, Sam Fisher will always have a place in my heart. He's not as conventional as the previous two men, in that he's relatively new, and not many people will know about him. The enlightened few, however, know that even though he has no sex, and in in fact married and has a child, he is still a great man. One of the things that makes him so great is that you can actually be Sam Fisher using the video game. Rappelling down the side of a building to smash through a pane of glass and execute the General inside gets a man off faster than a hooker ever could, no matter how good at hand jobs she says she is. There's something very satisfying about snapping a man's neck after telling him the good news was that you saved a bunch of money on your car insurance by switching to Geico.

 

It will be really hard for me to settle and pick one of these greats...It would be nice if I could combine all three, into some sort of Alpha-male superhuman. After watching a video with Dr. Indiana James Fisher, however, I think nothing would be quite as beautiful.

As a result, I suspect that myself, along with hundreds of thousands of other men, would be inclined to gouge their own eyes out, since nothing like the combined power of those three men would ever be approachable in beauty or grace. He would be able to bring Soviet Germany and Nazi Russia to their knees, simply by announcing his presence. No...no, it is best we not consider things that are too good to be true.

 

I suspect I will have a hard time deciding which I should support, but I will pick one. And it will be a sad day, because when I choose one over the others, a little bit of myself will die.

So rather than go back to your traditional school (for now, at least) i'm trying to opt for a much more interesting path. Linda actually got me to thinking about it, and after a little bit of pondering, I decided it would probably be really fun, and beneficial, if I were to teach english abroad. For one month i'd go to a school in Prague, to get my certifications. Going to Prague for a month would be pretty sweet in itself, but after that i'd leave for any country of my choice to teach for a year. I'd be hired on by a public or private school, or a business. I'd either teach in Eastern Europe or in Asia, as that's where the highest demand for Native speakers is at. I'm thinking i'd stay in the Czech Republic, or go to Japan. One or the other. The hard part now is trying to convince the parents. They are constantly coming up with new ideas about why it's going to be difficult for me to do this, all for my own benefit. Examples include how much people outside the U.S. hate us, to the fact that the school is a sham and will rip me off of all my money and leave me for dead in a Czech alleyway. They also brought up the North Korean threat, but I told them that Japan knows how to cope with getting nuked. They're used to it. However, I think i'm slowly bringing them around and i'm pretty sure i'm going to be able to do this. I'm pretty goddamed nervous, but I think it will be very exciting, especially being on my own.

 

Now, being the International Emmisary from the various groups I belong to, I have my obligations to add a few extra bits of information on to any classes I teach. If I were to be in Japan, it would of course be to tout Microsoft as supreme. I'd have to test the waters first, though, seeing as I think the Japanese people might not like Microsoft. I think in Japan I would find Nerdvana, where Nerds a million times worse than myself exist.

 

I would also have to explain to them the evils of American women, who eat your soul and and blah blah blah. This isn't as funny as I thought it would be, so I drew this picture.

Masterchief is the only person able to fight back, i'll teach them. Hell, maybe I can even start a new Religion in Japan.

 

But the scoop is basically that if things go the way I would like them to, i'm going to be gone for a year and a month, thousands of miles away in a foreign country. I figure that none of us ever end up doing the things we want to do, so why not just say 'fuck it,' and do them? So here I am. Hopefully.

 

 

 

Having read about last night's meteor shower, and recently about La Palma, I decided to take things into my own hands. We're fighting the wrong terrorists, here, Mr. Bush. Granted, watching on live television as bombers pounded the shit out of supposed enemy positions was pretty damn cool, (by the way, next time please pick an enemy who can fight back? I mean, the Germans put up a pretty good fight back in WWII, and even the Vietnamese held us off at the cost of approximately 2 trillion deaths, but Iraq? It was barely a firework show. Might I suggest next time we go for Russia, since they've got nothing to lose and will go all out on us, or perhaps China?) but I think we're fighting the wrong enemy here. Our real enemy is Mother Nature. Aside from the fact that Mother Nature is a girl, she causes nothing but trouble for our country. So we really have no choice but to wage war on her. As a mother of nature, not a girl.

 

I for one have stepped up to this challenge. How do we go about fighting a woman as powerful as Nature? Quite simple. Brute force. If nature is going to throw stuff like huge waves and meteors at them, then we need to imploy some Shock and Awe tactics on her. Behold:

I'm not normally one for bragging, but that is a fierce robot. With something like this, we could destroy waves and meteors and hills and flowers and sun, you know, all those things about mother nature we don't like. I even colored it that nice, pastel color because honestly, in the evolving world, man robots that aren't metrosexual and in touch with themselves will get left behind. So the robot gets a fresh new paint of coat after every use, to make sure that it looks as nice as it fights. Personally, I would have preferred we have a ninjaesque character attack mother nature from behind, but this just wasn't financially plausable. Mother Nature is a big woman. So instead I came up with this scenario:

I just put some people on that wave surfing because I guess that's what people do on big waves. I don't really know. But more importantly, notice how my robot is kicking nature's ass. Even that cool little helicopter I drew isn't really as cool as the robot.

 

After I finished fighting Mother Nature, and she wasn't a problem anymore, I guess i'd hire out Robot's services. I could like challenge people to fight Robot, and then steal the money in their wallet once they lost, and I could create a Robot Escort service for the ladies. What lady wouldn't want a robot protecting them when they go do whatever it is that women do? Not only would it be lucrative, but i'd get to meet the ladies. You know. Because I'd be driving the Robot. I could have some old school rock music in my robot, to make me seem like a badass, and then if I played by cards right maybe i'd switch over to one of my Barry White  CDs to set the mood, and once that happens i'd be all set. Awww yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

 

Man. I can't even wait.

 

 

 

 

 

So Casey and I are sitting around a few days ago, trying to find a topic to talk about other than how much we hate women, how stupid people are, or video games. Casey eventually comments on how few fish I have, for such a large fish tank. I give him the usual spiel, about how I had so many more fish, but lost them all to various causes. Bubbles had an unforunate accident with an old filter system, and ended up stopping the filtration process for two days before I realized his remains were clogged into the fan. Drop was eaten alive by one of my aptly named Convincts, who terrorized the denizens of my aquatic world. And then my African Knife Fish...my <i>awesome</i> african knife fish was slowly tormented by that same convinct, his single sinuous fin ripped to shreds over the course of days, until he grew weaker and weaker and weaker, and finally died. Then that convinct too, was removed from the tank as I performed sweet justice via capital punishment to him, while his partner-in-crime watched, so I would be assured he knew what fate awaited him were he to take up murderous ways. There hasn't been a murder in my take since.

 

From this topic of conversation, we started talking about chinese fighting fish, and how it would be kind of cool to watch them fight an actual duel, rather than a cold blooded murder. We were both silent for a while as we contemplated the beauty of a fish fight, when I remembered something I saw on TV, once.

 

"Know what would be even cooler than fish Fighting? I saw it on TV, once. If have two ant farms, and you connect them somehow, then the two colonies will <i>fight."</i>

 

He didn't believe me at first, so we did a little bit of research. And low and behold. Ants will not only fight, they'll wage war. Our ant colonies would have perfectly functioning economies, with civilizations that we would help rise. And at the height of our powers, we would connect our two powers, and then put all of the food in one centralized location. And then we would watch the power struggle.

 

It turns out that not only do ants fight, they have different <i>strengths</i>. Some ants have their razor sharp mandibles, while some ants actually have stringers on their back, to paralyze enemies. Still more ants actually have a <i>poison spray</i> that they throw onto their foes. Some ant species can't even raise their own young, or gather their own food. All they can do is kill. Like the Aztecs of Antness, all they can do is kill, not even support their own civilization. They kill off the soldiers of the other ant colonies, and then enslave the worker ants, forcing them to collect food and care for their young. We'd be watching our ants battle with completely different tactics, all with the same goal. Total Ant Farm domination.

 

Of course, Casey and I would need to raise up our ant farms before we fought. Casey would sit in some dimly lit cafe with his ants, listening to mellow live music, while he talked to his ants about how stupid President Bush was while feeding them cappuccinos. His ant farm would be a Scandinavian paradise, where no ant wanted for food and most ants sat around all day, you know, chillin'. Society and culture would prosper.

 

I suppose things would be different on my side of the camp. My ants would go through great privation as I weened them off of the joys of life. I'd seclude ants two together, and leave them with no food, until they had to eat one another for survival. The winner would be the strongest and most deserving ant.

 

I think a fight between one of my ants and one of Casey's ants would look a little like so:

 

Our ant battles are going to be of epic proportions. We even thought we were some of the first to pursue this idea, but it turns out the Germans beat us to it. They actually fill fishtank sized terreriums with $200 ant colonies for the express purpose of watching them annihilate one another.

 

Damn this is going to be awesome. 
 

So, I just got back from Europe. Learned a couple of things. Never fly Italian airlines. Don't drink soda and then run. Always be on the good side of the mob. And that we are terrible people. Of course the trip would begin with misfortune, the prestigious italian airline service, Alitalia, losing my luggage for two days. Everything went smoothly from there, or as smoothly as it can in a country where every harsh sentence in their terrible language is a death threat. The best example of this is a German man calling his children to heel in a louder than normal voice which left Sarah wide-eyed and afraid. He wasn't even looking at us, and he wasn't even yelling, but those children were at his side instantaneously, and I was left wondering how the Germans could have ever lost any war with people that talked like that. And the food...By god, the German food. It's everything you've heard. We went to one of the best biergartens late one night, and after some initial confusion stumbled upon a huge, wide open area filled with picnic table after picnic table. People filled these tables but lightly, until you got right next to the bar. Then it was packed. Sarah and I went through the line for food, and I got one of the two things they had left, a pork leg, while Sarah got some sort of hamish looking cut. The leg was so deep fried in fat that I literally had to peel a crust off of it to get at the meat. I also purchased a stein of German beer. You have not seen a mug of beer until you've seen a German stein. Sarah could barely hold it steady enough to take a sip, with two hands. There was so much, that when I had 3/4 of it, I think Sarah was afraid i'd be drunk, or at the very least buzzed. At some other point I also bought something called a Doner. TO make one, they slow cook a massive chunk of meat at least two feet high and a foot in diameter on a spit, and then take some sort of cutting thing and shave the meat off, putting it into your sandwich. We saw nothing to discourage the stereotype of German food while we were there. I think we even saw a group of chicks drinking to get rid of a hangover.

 

Moving off topic a little, children, especially foreign ones, are satanic. I remember one lovely german train ride, where some British/italian kid, I don't really know because all he did was scream intermittenly for the two hours train ride. Or the young British boy who told his parents in a yelling, shrill voice, "You don't even want me, why don't you just kill me, you don't even want me!" The joys of childhood. Sarah and I were so close to killing children in cold blood so many times After getting lost in a medieval city and needing to ask a German man who spoke no English directions to the Bahnhof, the rest of the trip was relatively uneventful.

 

We took a night train to Venice, where we shared a cabin with two other people, one of which sat up for half the night just staring at Sarah. It's probably a good thing she was up on the top bunk. Venice was a hot, muggy, pigeon infested maze. The map our Fuhrer gave us was shitty to no end. Because of this it was rather difficult to find out hotel, since the map told us we were at the hotel when in fact we were at some sort of church. I was a little afraid for my life after looking at how...irritated Sarah was, at me.

 

Venice was quite beautiful though, excepting the fact that if you wanted to get from point A to point B you just set off at a walk and hoped you got there, the twisting streets were so confusing. No street names. Just the occasional canal or bridge name. And it was so god afwully hot there...I shit you not when I saw 80% of our spending money went to drinks and ice cream, to try and keep us cool. It got to the point where if one of us even felt a little brush of a breeze, we'd stop instantly to try and cool off, and we grew to fear and respect the sun god, and are still unwilling to speak His name lest we attract His attention.

 

One point I shall note is that it is simply impossible to tell which men are gay and which are not in Italy. For the most part even Sarah never ventured a guess, seeing as the entire country has been metreosexual for the past 300 years. Pink pants and shirts, every head of hair worked with some fancy gel, everyone had some sort of swaggering walk.We heard an Italian waiter singing along to "It's Raining Men," for godsakes. Italy is a place women bring their men on trips so that the ladies can have an affair under the pretense of vacation.

 

On one of our train rides from Venice we nearly had a Eurotrip experience, when an Italian businessman came into our couchette and sat down. Thank Christ he didn't say "Scusi," or we would have lost it. As it is, as soon as we went through a tunnel and the room was cast into pitch blackness, we both tensed up. When we came out of the tunnel our eyes were locked and we had some difficulty not laughing. Friggen Italian men.

 

Our train to Rome was hell, seeing as out of 12 plus cars, our train car was the only one without air conditioning. It was brutally hot, but we thought the entire train was like that. So when I started the long trek to the restaurant car, I was expecting more of the same. Not so. The rest of the train was cool and tranquil, with little harpists playing in the corners, and bubbling fountains framed by frescos of voluptuous and frollicsome nymphs, and every car had it's own nun, silently radiating approval from her seat at the rear. At least that's what it felt like to me. Except for the nuns. They really were there.

 

Going to the movies with Austin for now, and then it's work so i'll talk about Rome and our experiences with the Mafia and shatty airline service later. There's supposed to be some sort of get together, tonight?