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I have also been corresponding with a friend who is looking for a job, which has resulted in many links offering resume and cover letter help.

All of this points to one sad fact: Google thinks I am an unemployed cat lady.

Option 1: The “Hang In There!” Kitty

Option 2: Dogs Playing Poker

Tough call, right?

Some time ago your publication ran a comic titled “Meet the Tofus,” which introduced readers to the characters of Silken and Firm. I was intrigued by the single-paned strip’s enigmatic brevity, and looked forward to learning more about this soy-based duo. I questioned what was behind Firm’s jovial façade, what dark past or burning passions lay just beneath his milky white surface. I was tempted by Silken’s lush prose—do I detect some sexual tension between this protein-packed pair? As I studied its many intricacies, I considered the comic’s potential. Meet the Tofus’ possibilities seemed as endless as the number of ways one can prepare the beloved meat substitute by which it was inspired.

Given my enthusiasm for Tofu’s inaugural installment, you can imagine my disappointment at the series’ discontinuation. How are readers to know what is to become of Firm and Silken? Your decision to cancel this popular comic does a grave disservice to those in your readership who have invested time in following the series from the beginning. Even in the cutthroat business of network television, producers of canceled shows are often given several episodes to tie things up. I do not think it unreasonable to expect your publication—nay, our publication—to afford its readers the same courtesy.

On behalf of the your loyal readers who were similarly enthusiastic about this exciting new comic (our number most certainly rank in the dozens to baker’s-dozens), I implore you to give Meet the Tofus another try. With a stable space in the back of the Gazette and uninterrupted biweekly installments, I’m sure others will join us in our love of these anthropomorphized cubes of bean curd.

And let’s face it—you could really use the content. The monthly meeting minutes just aren’t bringing in younger readers.

Yours Truly,

Chad

Maybe that’s why I ended up watching the entire Time/Life Soft Rock Collection infomercial the other day. Set in the den of an oceanside summer home on some anonymous island a world away from our crummy winter sidewalks, the commercial is hosted by Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock of the seminal snooze rock band Air Supply. Graham and Russell sit side by side on the couch, gushing about the nostalgic power of a good soft rock melody while hit after soothing hit scroll by at the bottom of the screen. It’s all rather mesmerizing…and to think that all ten soporific CDs can be mine for just $149. Had I not been so hypnotized by the sentimental sounds of Chicago’s It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry, I might have called to place my order.

To be honest, I was a little miffed by the content of Time/Life’s collection. Several years ago, in preparation for a prom-themed party we were hosting, I created my own mix of soft rock hits called A Magical Evening. From the first electronic drum beat of Lady in Red to the wailing saxophone intro of Careless Whisper, A Magical Evening was formulated to get you out on that gymnasium dance floor swaying awkwardly back and forth with that prom date of your high school dreams. It’s truly one of my finest achievements.

While A Magical Evening might not be a ten-CD set (and does not include a bonus CD if you act now), I do have one thing over those hacks at Time/Life. Unlike their carelessly assembled collection, A Magical Evening tells a story. This isn’t just a collection of songs; it’s a lifetime of memories, squished into a single playlist.

Now, since I’m mad at Time/Life, and because the cold is making me a little crazy, I present to you the story of A Magical Evening. I hope you enjoy.

It’s a Wednesday night at the local bar. He’s getting a beer with some friends and then—who’s that at the jukebox? It’s her. She puts on an Eric Carmen song and glances at him with Hungry Eyes.

It’s Valentine’s Day. They’ve been seeing each other for a few months now. Holding a box of chocolates and a dozen roses, he rings the doorbell. What greets him is the most stunning vision he’s ever seen. It’s the Lady in Red. Soon, they’ll be dancing cheek-to-cheek. In the coming days, he’ll proclaim his devotion to her. “Wherever you go,” he says in his raspy melodic voice, “I will be Right Here Waiting For You.”

But no one said love is easy. Since the day they met, he knew she was a wild one. “Who’s Gonna Drive You Home Tonight?” he asks her. But She’s Like the Wind. She can’t be tamed.

All seems lost, and he spends his days reliving what once was. ” Next Time I Fall In Love, I’ll know better what to do,” he tells himself. But each evening as he closes his eyes, he feels like he Just Died In Your Arms Tonight.

She reappears just as suddenly as she left. She’s ready to be together, she says, telling him over and over that Everything I Do, I Do It For You. But after so many Careless Whispers, can he accept her plea? Sometimes he feels All Out of Love.

But even a Total Eclipse of the Heart passes. After All that they’ve been through, he tells her, “I’ve Had The Time of My Life.”

They’re together. They’re happy. And they’re in love. Endless Love.

I didn’t know Mary, so her friend’s purchase did not strike me as particularly interesting. Just because I wouldn’t spend that much money on a car (unless it was going to make me feel young again, of course) doesn’t mean Mary’s friend shouldn’t. But wait… who’s Mary again?

I googled Mary’s comment and discovered similar ones all over the Internets. It wasn’t always Mary’s friend—sometimes it was Carla’s, or Bruce’s, or maybe Terry’s—and the car didn’t always cost the same amount. But the gist was always the same: someone’s friend bought a new car for some amount of money, and that was crazy. No email address, no links, no reason at all for sharing.

Weeks later, new comments started trickling in. “Nice site. Very interesting,” one said. Another offered the praise,”Great website with a lot of resources and detailed explanations.” And don’t forget, “Your website has useful information for beginners like me.”

Something was clearly wrong with this. If you’ve actually taken the time to look at this site, you know that it contains absolutely no information that anyone could consider useful—beginner or otherwise. And resources? Not unless you’re compiling a library of idiocy.

Of course, these aren’t just innocuous little compliments left by the occasional visitor. Each comment comes embedded with at least one link—usually pointing to websites hosted on converted oil platforms in international waters so as to sidestep pesky decency laws. Yes, that guy who thought my site had such detailed explanations was really just a computer with a tenuous grasp on the English language and a treasure trove of pan-species erotica. (Imagine the search engine traffic I’ll get from that last sentence.) And all this time I thought someone finally appreciated my “interesting comments.”

Aside from the annoyance of having to go through and delete such comments when they came in, this kind of spam amused me for some time. I wondered about the effectiveness of such thinly veiled advertisements. Are we so desperate for affirmation that we’ll unquestioningly accept any form of e-flattery, however obviously computer-generated it might be? That’s kind of sad. We’ve probably been this sad all along; having an Internet just makes it public.

The spam I get today is more direct. Most messages—and I get A LOT of them—contain link after link after link to gambling and adult websites that include terms whose meanings I lack the courage to infer. I guess flattery wasn’t getting them anywhere. Maybe that means we aren’t so desperate for attention after all. Or maybe “Mary’s” friends stopped buying cars and started hosting porn sites.

There is no better way to be reminded of all that you’ve forgotten than by studying for the GRE. I don’t mind studying the verbal section, since there’s a good chance that words like “opprobrium” and “impecunious” were never a big part of my life to begin with. But the quantitative section is another matter. This section is comprised of math that most of us learned by the 9th grade: fractions, exponents, basic algebra and geometry, and the occasional square root. Simple enough, if you’re in 9th grade. But for a guy who hasn’t had occasion to determine the area of a circle in well over a decade, this is a problem. And it’s a serious blow to the ego.

Adding salt to the wound is the trove of vacuous tidbits that insist on taking up valuable brain space in lieu of actual useful information. For instance:

- The secret code for 30 extra lives on Contra, a Nintendo game from the late 80′s (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, B, A, Start)
- Who played Merlin in the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun (Tim Robbins)
- Who sang backup vocals on the Huey Lewis song Hip to Be Square (the San Francisco 49ers)
- Most of the lyrics to a shameful number of bad songs

You get the idea. It would make sense to replace those Samantha Fox lyrics with one or two useful theorems, but that’s just not how it works. Instead, I have to plow through some lousy test prep book, constantly lamenting the hours I spent unconsciously scarring my brain with Club MTV (Downtown Julie Brown 4-eva!), all the while humming some crappy Richard Marx song. This is not how I imagined life to be.

On the plus side, if my test goes poorly, there’s always a career in Karaoke waiting for me. Remember, I can say “I’m drunk” in Japanese.

We all know how the Fox New Channel revolutionized television news by adding flashy visuals to its programming, which, for millions of Bruckheimer-loving viewers, made the news more watchable. Of course, other stations followed suit, and now any given news show looks more like an X-Box game than actual reporting. And it’s not just news: any given sports program now features robo-atheletes shooting rockets at one another, or astronauts working on an intergalactic scoreboard (this was seriously a graphic on Monday Night Football a few years back). Fine. I’m used to it. But the point is that it wasn’t always like this. Right?

And then this weekend, it occurred to me that all this nonsense, the Nintendo-ization of all things media-related, has been around longer than I realized—on FM radio. I haven’t listened to non-public radio for a long time, and over the years, I’ve pretty much forgotten what more commercial stations are like. But this weekend, having spent more than 8 hours in the car, I spent at least part of that time scanning up and down the dial, searching for a station that didn’t completely suck. After a few minutes, it hit me: why, why, why does every radio station—from one coast to the other, and across all genres—need to stop for station identification twice a minute? Whether you’re listening to “the HOTTEST of today’s hits,” or “timeless classics from yesteryear,” rest assured that you’ll be reminded of this over and over and over. Not only that, but so that you don’t miss them, these announcements will be sandwiched between sound bites that could have been lifted straight from a battle sequence in Buck Rogers.

I suppose that, when the first station out there—god bless them—started with all the blings and beeps and bloops, it got people’s attention. And I guess everyone else has to keep up. But for the love of God, it’s gotten out of hand. One minute I’m listening to Otis Redding, the next I’m on the deck of the Millennium Falcon. I can’t take this cultural whiplash.

You’d think that advertisers would feel the same way. How loyal can a potential customer be if he or she is so forgetful as to require station identification reminders once every few seconds? How could they possibly remember your commercials? Then again, if you’re looking to screw your customers over, I guess this demographic is the one that would let you do it over and over again. “You’re listening the COOLEST jams by today’s HOTTEST artists… SUCKER.” Now that’s a station I might listen to.

I’m not trying to sound curmudgeonly, since the fact is that I actually enjoy all of these things. There’s nothing wrong with a heaping plateful of disgusting nachos, or a commercial full of office monkeys. And though they’re generally pretty annoying, there’s a certain attraction to listening to sportscasters as they drone on about meaningless crap in order to keep things moving along. In fact, I find it kind of impressive.

I imagine that, in a lot of ways, being a sportscaster is like going on the same awkward first date over and over and over again. No matter how dull a game is, how much time is spent waiting on equipment repairs or instant replays, the sportscaster has to find something—anything—to fill in the voids. It’s a lot like two people out to dinner for the first time, nervously scrambling to make conversation for fear that a single moment of silence might make them acknowledge what an awful time they’re having. Sure, a duo of sportscasters has more to talk about than you might with that girl you met at Red Lobster (aside from your common love of Lobsterfest, or course), but the pressure to keep the banter going is still there. Where you might go on with too-long stories about your cat’s food preferences (and they are too long), sportscasters tell gut-wrenching tales about how the quarterback’s mother broke her finger in a surfing accident. Nothing against cats or elderly surfers, but in neither case do I really give a damn.

That’s not the only way sports broadcasts are like first dates. Like a guy trying to make a good first impression at dinner (and avoid awkward silences), commentators try to woo you with banter stuffed with wacky facts and stupid jokes. As a sports fan who has been responsible for many bad dates, I can tell you that this usually doesn’t work in either arena. Finding a girl who is genuinely dazzled by your encyclopedic knowledge of the life and times of Spiro Agnew (the only Greek vice president, you know!) is as likely as finding someone who can kick a 40-yard field goal in Green Bay in the month of December—something that, according to Monday Night Football’s inane statistics, happens very rarely.

In the same vein, sportscasters also use—and often misuse—the kinds of fancy words you might find in your Word of the Day email. It seems like each year a new one gets passed around sportscasters’ circles, and suddenly it’s everywhere. “Attrition” was popular last year, but “consternation” is very two-seasons-ago. And just the other day, a commentator described a game as “counter-opposite” (!!?!?), while another exchange went like this:

[Player looks pissed off about being assessed a penalty]

Commentator 2: And he’s not happy, either!

He certainly wasn’t.

As vapid as this kind of banter might be, it won’t stop me from watching. After all, it’s there for a reason, and it serves its purpose well: just like the stupid things we say on a first date, I know that all this mind-numbing chit chat is only meant to keep things rolling until someone finally scores.

Most junk mail gets filtered—appropriately enough—into my junk mail folder, but the filter is occasionally overzealous, so now and then, I delve into the junk bin to look for anything that might be important. Usually all I find are more offers for affordable impotence remedies, but I can’t help but laugh at some of the ridiculous names that populate the “From” field in these messages. Randomly generated by a simple program pulling words from the dictionary—and adding a middle initial for grandiosity’s sake—these fabricated monikers are proof that, after years of trite sitcoms and bad stand-up, humankind has at last reduced comedy to one simple formula. Here are a few of my favorites, pulled directly from my own email:

Spindliest H. Palpitates
Conjurer A. Watchword
Socialization T. Obloquy
Heinously T. Mimosa
Darkness E. Daisy

Conjurer A. Watchword could easily be a Harry Potter character, and that last one sounds like the name of a drummer who might have toured with Christian Death. It doesn’t have quite the same ring, but Heinously T. Mimosa reminds me of every hangover brunch I’ve ever had. The others read like the Mirriam Webster Word of the Day email. “Obloquy” isn’t exactly the kind of thing that gets thrown around in Parade Magazine, after all. And who knew that “spindliest” was a word? To think that all this time, I’ve been using “most spindly.”

My other favorite phenomenon of junk mail is, in an effort to evade filtering, the way some messages include several lines of text before getting to the point. Occasionally, I’ll recognize the text as part of a well known novel or, more humorously, great work of philosophy—my favorite being an excerpt from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Man. Other times, they read like a Japanese novel translated through Babelfish. I like taking both types and pasting them into Instant Messenger chats with random people who do not know me. Hilarous… and creepy. Maybe junk mail is good for something.