A description of my blog. http://www.my-site.com 3017122124838399722 Why I Am What's Wrong with the World 2008/05/#3017122124838399722 2008-05-19 Since I started this blog about a year and a half ago, I've written a lot of absurd and offensive things. For example, I've suggested the Al Gore is the world's worst dictator. I've argued that the best way to avoid drowning when traveling with a Kennedy is to travel by boat. I've conjectured that the last item on the gay agenda is probably "drinks with Steve."

The funny thing is that nobody seems to get offended by these posts. The posts that people decide to get pissed off about are the ones where I say something that seems to me to be completely uncontroversial.

For example, one time I mentioned that I don't like being around ugly people. That post, as you may recall, earned me the name "f--ktard dingleberry."

Now am I wrong here, or is it a basic fact of nature that nobody likes being around ugly people? Saying that you don't like being around ugly people is about as controversial as saying that you don't like food that tastes bad, or that you don't enjoy Rob Schneider films. Before you scold me for disliking ugly people, try this little experiment: Go stand in the checkout lane at your local grocery store for five minutes. Imagine that you're throwing a pool party and you can invite one of two groups of people: the chubby troglodytes buying Alphabits and Doritos at the register in front of you, or the lovely folks staring warmly out at you from the covers of the 56 different womens' magazines that ensconce you in a cocoon of pouty lips and cleavage. Funny how your egalitarian principles suddenly take a back seat to aesthetics, isn't it?

I'm not saying this is an admirable trait, mind you. I'm not proud of the fact that I prefer beautiful people over ugly people. I think that it would be great if we lived in a society where magazines could put Nobel laureates and special ed teachers on the covers of magazines, no matter what they look like. Or, failing that, if we could somehow transplant the brains of the Nobel laureates and special ed teachers into the bodies of supermodels. Now that would be hot.

Another time I made the mistake of casting myself as a sympathetic figure in a disagreement that I had with Mrs. Diesel. The post was about the typical female trait of alternating between wanting their mates to talk to them for long periods of time about absolutely nothing and wanting their mates to know exactly what they are thinking without them having to say it. This is hardly a groundbreaking observation: Every married man has noticed that women love to talk pretty much all the time except for when they actually have something to say. I gave this as an example of male/female communications:
Woman: Hey, can you hand me that pencil?
Man: (Hands pencil to woman) Sure.
Woman: (Bursts into tears).
Man: Pretty disappointing pencil, huh?
That post got me called a misogynist and a sociopath, if you can believe it. Actually, I can kind of see the sociopath part, but misogynist? If it weren't for women, I wouldn't be able to tolerate people at all.

More recently, I wrote about the 19 year old neighbor kid who is digging trenches for my sprinkler system. Now if you can set aside my hyperbole about not wanting him to use the rototiller because he might eviscerate himself, forcing me to bury him in a shallow grave in the orchard, this post amounted to me explaining to this kid why I was paying him $8 an hour to dig trenches.

I don't want to get scolded by Suzy for explaining the joke, but to me the humor of that post arises from the fact that the answers to all of his questions would be crushingly obvious to anyone who has ever held any kind of job. Why do I have to dig trenches? You don't. Why don't you dig them yourself? Because I don't want to, and I have the money to pay somebody else to do it. Why are you only paying me $8 an hour? Because I can.

This post got a huge reaction. My good friend Glacial Spain Stumbled it, which led to several other people stumbling it. As of this morning, over 20,000 people have visited that post. That's TWENTY THOUSAND people. By way of comparison, I am one person, so if I visit a post, that's one person visiting a post. That post has gotten TWENTY THOUSAND times that many people visiting it. Crazy, right?

Most of the visitors got the joke, but a few were egregiously offended by the notion of me hiring someone to do something that I didn't feel like doing. One commenter said:
Yeah, digging trenches sucks. But so do you. You've got a kid sweating his ass off @ $8/hr for you, so that you can have a cheep sprinkler system and YOU mock him.... It's people like you, who demean honest working people, who give capitalism a bad name and who need a lesson or two in the art human dignity. But then, I'm sure that the painful experiences of others, is little more than a laughing matter, to the likes of you.
I take issue with this. It is not "little more than a laughing matter" to me. It is a laughing matter plus a cheap sprinkler system. That may not matter to you, but it's important to me. As for people like me giving capitalism a bad name... really? You don't think maybe the Enron debacle and the Bear Stearns bailout have me beat there?

By the way, I wasn't mocking him. He really did ask all of those questions, and most of them I answered to his face, more or less the way I wrote them in the post. He would grumble about how much digging sucks, and I would say, "You got that right. Why do you think I'm not doing it?"

I also took the time to explain to him that everybody has to work shit jobs when they are young. When I was younger, I pulled weeds, mowed lawns, moved furniture, worked on an assembly line, delivered pizzas, hauled lumber... pretty much every kind of crap job you can imagine. You know what I was doing four years ago today? I was unemployed after the dot com bust, so I spent my days cutting down almond trees for firewood in the hopes of making enough money to move my family out of the 900 square foot apartment we were living in. One time a relative needed a fence built in their backyard, so I spent a few days doing that. You know how much that job paid? If you said "$8 an hour," give yourself a gold star. I was 34 years old at the time. So please don't lecture me about exploiting the youth. I work shitty jobs when I need to, and avoid it when I can. Anybody with half a brain does the same.

There is one lesson to be learned from digging trenches, and it's that digging trenches sucks. I think I've done my part to help this kid learn that. Besides giving him lemonade and telling him not to blow his money on a new iPod, there's not much else I can do for him.

What I've learned from these comments is that the thing people are most offended by is reality. Well, not reality so much as someone pointing out the way things are. You breeze through the checkout lane with Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jessica Simpson and every other busty Jessica staring longingly out at you from the covers of magazines (women's magazines, no less!), but you get offended when I tell you that I don't like ugly people. You don't have a problem buying clothes at Wal-Mart that were made by some 12 year old in China making 16 cents an hour, but you bitch and moan about me not adequately mentoring my 19 year old ditch digger. He's old enough to vote, for Pete's sake! He could be drafted and sent to Iraq! And you're mad because I'm paying him to dig trenches? Give me a break.

Ok, this is turning into a bit of a rant, so let me leave you with my all-time favorite comment, also provoked by my trench-digging post:
this is actually very asinine... people like u are the reason why college is necessary, you greedy bastard.
I laugh every time I read that. Can someone explain to me what that means, and how it's an insult? Because I keep trying to figure it out, but I'm not getting anywhere.

I expect you back here bright and early tomorrow morning for the caption contest poll. Bring your shovel.


Ugly people are always welcome at Humor-blogs.com.

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