10:53 A.M.
First, I got up this morning and went right to the grocery store. This was because I needed to buy some fruits and some sort of allergy meds because the inner-cavities of my face were not messing around with all the itchiness.

Second, I’ve decided to add timestamps to these entries, because I want to.

So back to the grocery store. I needed to pick up some milk and eggs. I only buy the smallest thing of milk possible because the older I get, the more milk grosses me out. I hardly ever drink it, but use it in cooking and the occasional bowl of cereal.

And I needed eggs because I forgot to pick them up at the CSA on Friday. Do you need these justifications? No. But you got them.

Anyway, so I’m politely waiting for the dude with the giant truck cart featuring a little kid in the truck-part to move his ass out of my way. He was parked in front of all the eggs. I quite literally just waited there while his wife gathered three giants tubs of cottage cheese on the other side of the aisle. They had a baby and a little kid and were generally preoccupied with themselves. Whatever. I get it. I didn’t sigh or roll my eyes or make any noise at all.

But then the dude looked over his shoulder and saw me standing there. He did the most dramatic double-take and skedaddle I’ve ever seen, complete with a stuttered so-so-so-sorry! His reaction made me feel like some sort of green-faced angry Hulk. Seriously, dude, you were ridiculous.

I’m developing a Crackpot Theory on Mope Rock (e.g. Depeche Mode, The Smiths, The Cure) and Alt-Country & Country (not crap pop-country, but real country) and how that correlates to class. It’s in the beginning stages right now, but it has something to do with Mope Rock appealing to the upper middle classes more than the lower classes. And you probably have to add some sort of geography caveat on there. Like I said, it’s still in the development phases.

4 p.m. ish
The afternoon was filled with naps and reading and filling out about 281 different forms for a new contracting gig I’m starting in a few weeks. Lots of forms. More forms than I’ve filled out in a long time. Also, I have to take my first ever drug test. I would make some sort of crack about hoping I pass, but I’m such a square goodie-goodie that the joke would fall flat because of its ridiculousness.

Before family dinner I listened to the latest episode of Sound Opinions, hoping Greg Kot & Jim DeRogatis would make mention of the shitty timing of their on-air Jack White blow job last week. No such luck. Fuckers. What a damn disappointment.

9:31 p.m.

Family dinner was mostly uneventful (we had breakfast for dinner) until a commercial for the delicious Magnum ice cream bars came on and Sister #2 went into her speech about naming your ice cream after a condom. We’ve all heard this complaint about 831 times. Mostly, I ignore it because, well, it doesn’t matter. However, for some reason, today I had to butt in.
“I don’t think Magnum is a brand of condom,” I said. “It’s a size, like Trojan Magnums.”
“No,” Sister #2 said in her I know all the things I have a PhD tone. “It’s a brand.”
“No,” Sister #3 who usually never gets involved in our stupid arguments. “I think it’s a size too.”
“It’s a brand, ” my brother-in-law, Ben, piped up.
“It’s a size,” I said.

Sister #3 and I looked at each other smugly across the room as the married couple set to googling.

“I guess it is a size,” Sister #2 said, chagrined.
“AHA!” Sister #3 said, jumping off the love seat and raising her fist in victory. “The single women knew!”

And my niece got the last word:

Debate over condom brand names only happens at #familydinner

— Jaycie Kimball (@jayciekitty) August 12, 2013

The “It’s (Insert Day of Week) and I’m Boring” is a series that Christa and I do to pay homage to the beauty of old-school blogging. (I totally copied this nice explanation from Christa).

The post It’s Sunday & I’m Boring: The Theory Developing Edition appeared first on I Will Dare.

The mere fact that the SciFi nerds have a day where they can “reclaim” books that belong in their genre totally proves Crackpot Theory #29 whereby I call SciFi nerds a defensive bunch of crybabies. Well, I don’t call them crybabies specifically in that post but I was thinking it.

My friend Wolfdogg and I just had this argument about the book Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.

“This is a straight up SciFi book,” Wolfdogg said. “But you won’t find it in the SciFi section at Borders. There are writers who’ve done this type of story better stuck in the SciFi section, where mainstream and hip readers won’t tread.”
“But you assume that’s the conceit of readers and the mainstream and not SciFi writers/readers themselves,” I said. “Whenever I meet a SciFi geek and say I like Vonnegut they tell me it’s not SciFi.”
“Well, it is,” he said. “About the best of it as well.”
“SciFi geeks get all touchy when you say certain things are SciFi when they don’t want them to be SciFi,” I said. “And a really good, well-written book transcends genre.”

We continued arguing forever and I said the words “conventions of the genre” about 68 times. Ultimately, I forced Wolfdogg to admit that he totally gets all touchy and defensive for loving SciFi, thus proving my theory and then proceeded to make fun of him for getting all snooty about how Speculative Fiction is the term for the stuff he really likes.

So here’s my advice: SciFi nerds stop being such crybabies. It’s your whining and defensiveness and cockamamie schemes that make the genre you love seem less than. Truly loving something regardless of how it’s viewed by the population is cool. It’s the ultimate in cool. Love what you love and stop making excuses. Except, if you love VH1 reality shows, that probably deserves some defense.

The post The SciFi crybabies are at it again appeared first on I Will Dare.

The book clocks in at something like 430 pages (I’d go look but it is upstairs and I am downstairs). That’s a lot of pages, especially for a young adult novel. I blame J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer for this sudden proliferation of hefty tomes aimed at younger readers. I guess once they realized kids would sit through more than twenty pages, all bets were off.

Four-hundred is a lot of pages. It’s intimidating to even contemplate a four-hundred pager. When I approach a four-hundred pager I start to think to myself, “Self, do we really want to dedicate all our time to this. Is it worthy? We could polish off one normal-sized novel and two graphic novels in the time it will take to tackle this behemoth.”

That probably makes me sound like a lazy reader, when the exact opposite is true. I love to read. The more books the better is my motto, and when you start shoving a bunch of three-inch thick tomes in the lineup it starts to clog things up.

The problem with a long book is that the author really has to earn the right to so much of your time. When you write a big book you open yourself up to an extra critical eye. Is this scene absolutely necessary? What does this have to do the story? Are we almost there yet?

The same thing an be said about 3+ hour movies. Every minute counts and if you’re throwing in anything superfluous we’re gonna see it (do you hear me Dark Knight, do you?). And rock & roll songs over three or four minutes often come off as pure aural masturbation (I’m looking at you Colin Meloy and Jeff Tweedy).

Any artist who is producing work meant to be purchased and consumed by 21st century patrons should be extra wary of the amount of time they are asking of these people. We all know that we’re a culture with a severe case of ADD with the Internet, TV, our illegally downloaded mp3s, video games, work, life, etc. etc. etc. all vying for our time. It’s not like when the dead Russians (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) were writing and people’s entertainment options were limited to reading a book or going to bed.

But now? Now our time is valuable and anything with what seems like an extra note, minute, or page comes off as self-indulgent. As if the artist is masturbating all over our hard-earned free time.

And it’s not that I’m against long, difficult pieces of art. I’m just saying that maybe we have more long, not-so-difficult art that could be vastly improved with a little bit of editing and self-restraint.

The post Crackpot Theory #37: 5 minute songs, 3.5 hour movies & 400 page books appeared first on I Will Dare.

I want to gnash my angry monkey teeth at the world and kick it for not satisfying me.

Of course, having no idea what would satisfy me is not helping matters. I feel as though I am thirteen again. I don’t like anything — none of the food I know how to make, none of the eight books I’m in the middle of reading, nothing on TV, nothing on the radio, nothing nothing nothing nothing. I live in a house of lies.

Each day as the clock crawls ever closer to my bedtime I get even crankier because I feel like I have wasted the day. So I stop and I say, “Gee Jodi, what is one thing you could do right now that would make you feel good about the day?”

Lately that has involved: doing the dishes, redesigning this website, responding to all my e-mail, and that’s all I can think of at the moment.

But the past three days have been filled with never-ending crankiness. I’m just so frustrated. It’s making me feel feverish and scratchy, almost angry with no one or thing to be angry with or about. It’s insanity, and I’m blaming it all on the autumnal equinox.

There must be something about my inner willinilliness that does not groove with the earth’s balance around this time of year. This is what I have decided. Also that means come Wednesday things will be back to being imbalanced and I’ll be back to normal.

The post The equinox is bringing me down appeared first on I Will Dare.

Okay, I will admit upfront that I haven’t put this Crackpot Theory through the rigorous paces most of my Crackpot Theories are subjected to before the great reveal. But, well, I tempted fate by whining about being boring and unbusy which made me incredibly busy with no time for boredom.

This theory of mine has been bubbling in my chest for awhile, taking seed from my weekly Sunday podcast with the OxBoys. The OxBoys love “Star Wars” and most everything to do with it. They also love to tease me mercilessly about my Star-Warsless life. We discuss my apathy towards the movie at least once a month. I tease them about the thousands and thousands of dollars they waste (still) on the movie franchise.

I mean, really. Last week they were mooning over the Tauntaun sleeping bag and how they wished it was real (which apparently ThinkGeek is trying to make happen) so they could buy it. I asked them at what age they would stop buying Star Wars crap, and the claimed never while trying to convince me if there were some “girl” crap from my childhood that were as a awesome, I’d buy it too. Like a real-life, life-size My Little Pony.

Uh, no.

This all got me thinking about Star Wars and Watchmen and guitar solos and men.

I am convinced that men are incapable of realizing some of the stuff they loved so much in their formative years is crap. Not that it’s bad to love crap, but that doesn’t make it any less crap. It’s as though they are incapable of leaving behind those things, outgrowing them. It is their unrelenting fanboy allegiance to this crap that makes it so hard to trust their judgment when they talk about those things that I seemed to have missed out on 20 years ago when I was busy loving Glass Tiger and reading Sweet Valley High books.

Because men dominate the media, run Hollywood studios, and publishing houses we are continuously inundated with this crap repackaged, remade, or reissued.

And yet they are always, always, always disappointed when that which they loved when they were 12 turns out to be crap when they view it through their adult eyes (see: Indiana Jones movie, the last Star Wars trilogy, the Watchmen movie). Of course they blame it on writers or directors or what have you for not staying true to the story or staying too true to the story or some other thing that has nothing to do with maybe what they loved when they were a kid wasn’t so great to begin with. Maybe, just maybe, it is the source material.

Really, since when are teenagers renowned for their great taste in anything? I paid money to see “Howard the Duck” in the theater. I listened to the 45 of Jack Wagner’s “Weatherman Says” (intermittently cleansing my palette with a 45 of “Who’s Johnny”) until it wore out. And I can say without hesitation that I would not encourage anyone to seek these out because they are awesome.

Men can’t seem to filter their childhood loves through adult eyes. It seems as though they are afraid that by admitting that what they loved was crap means they can no longer love it. Which is total bullshit, because I just listened to “Who’s Johnny” four times in a row because I love that crap.

The post Crackpot Theory #17: Men let nostalgia get in the way of their critical thinking appeared first on I Will Dare.