JayarJackson

1.                  Don’t try to always call a good friend for entertainment value to pass otherwise boring time, they’ll eventually catch on, and might get offended.

As everyone in the country knows, LA traffic sucks.  “What the hell is that old lady thinking?”  “When are you gonna GO??”  “Damn, there’s an entire car length between that guy and the car in front of him, the gas pedal is on the right, fool!”  In order to avoid these uncontrollable outbursts of anger, I’ve discovered that many disgruntled LA drivers that are sick of listening to the same 5 songs on the radio have chosen to call and talk randomly with friends in order to pass the 2 hours it takes them to travel the 25 miles home in rush hour.  There is a reason that LA passed the law that restricts us from yapping on the phone without a hands free earpiece. 

Sure, we may come off as if we’re so important and handling so much business that we have to constantly talk while driving, but in reality, 9 times out of 10, that important looking person sitting on Interstate 405 in his Mercedes is talking to his best friend about the last episode of “24” or how much he hates his idiot bosses at work.  If you’re this “important person” that gets the bright idea to use your friend as absorption for your babble, make sure you try to mask it or else your calls will begin to get ignored. 

I soon found out that I was the court jester that kept a few friends entertained at one point in my life.  If they’d only attempted to hide their intentions a little better, I might have not started giving them the silent treatment. 

If the same person calls you every weekday at the same time of 5:15pm, and every conversation begins with the sound of a car’s seatbelt alarm beeping, you may want to reanalyze their affection.  When the conversation seems increasingly pointless and belabored, with uncalled for interruptions from your friend inexplicably yelling “get off my ass!” when they’re not talking to you, then they’re probably venting at the Range Rover driver that thinks tailgating will move traffic.  Once 2 hours has passed and their interest in your day immediately turns to “Ok, I’ll talk to you later,” you should understand that they’re happily home and the reason your ear is hot from a cell phone being smashed against it is that you’ve just been played.  Put on your clown hat and prepare new material for tomorrow’s drive home. 

 

2.                  The worst thing you can say about another person’s car is that “it gets you from point A to point B.” 

It seems that everyone wants to drive an impressive looking car, especially us men.  We know that it can draw attention and make us look better.  Maybe we can rev the engine, blast the stereo, and speed around a few turns just to get women to look.  Every time reliability enters the conversation, the seemingly complimentary gesture sounds more like an insult telling us how ugly it is. 

Ladies, if a guy is telling you all about his car and how it has multiple features, and has power-controlled this and that, don’t try to add to the attempted bragfest with the overused, “Well, as long at it gets you from Point A to Point B, that’s great!” 

Telling an overly car-conscious guy that his new ride simply gets him from point A to point B is like telling a woman that as long as her new dress covers her butt and her chest, it doesn’t really matter that that hotter girl with the better body is wearing the same one.


--JJJ

1.                  Guys are so irrationally freaky when it comes to their fantasies; we don’t realize that some of what we dream about making a reality is simply INCEST!

 Girls Gone Wild, a couple of female college roommates making out for the first time, Katy Perry’s song, “I Kissed a Girl.”  We fellas have an obsession with women hooking up for reasons beyond my understanding.  Although few like to admit it, most of us are illogically drawn to these displays of exhibitionism simply because we think that eventually, the girls will soon invite us in on the action.  Now, if these women are actually the lesbians that men drool over and are actually into each other, why would they want to invite a guy in on their intimacy?  When we’re hooking up with a girl we’re interested in, do our minds begin to think, “Hmm, this would be much better if another guy was nibbling on my ear.”  Despite the rare cases that this fantasy becomes a reality, we double our bet and think, “Wouldn’t it be even hotter if I hooked up with twins?” 

To that increasingly idiotic thought I realized that if this were to come true, we’d be witnessing and contributing to incest, or in this case, “twincest!”    

Why is it so hot to imagine jumping in the middle of a couple of Asian twins, but so nasty to think about a brother and sister hooking up?  Because the majority of my fellow man are helpless imbeciles, that’s why.  So before you try to talk a cute set of Swedish twins into illicit behavior, imagine kissing your twin brother. 

 

2.                  Looking for a roommate feels like an even more uncomfortable personal ad, trying to attract someone through cyber space. 

Living in the expensive city of Los Angeles almost always requires having a roommate unless you’ve hit the ground running with enough money to foot the bill yourself or you’re highly successful at an early age.  With so much relocating throughout the city amongst us young folks, roommates come and go with great regularity.  Now that my last roommate is moving out, I’ve found myself searching for a new roommate the random way.  While there are plenty of search tools like roommates.com and craigslist.org, the information we put out there about ourselves is probably very similar to something people put on match.com. 

As I wrote about my situation and what kind of place I’m offering to share, I couldn’t help but to try to sell myself as a great person, an excellent roommate that is positive, fun-loving, and sociable.  With the competition writing witty phrases about how they should be chosen, I felt obligated to convince all those strangers that I’m the best pick out of the thousands they might come across.  Pictures seem to help but so many questions arise: “Should I even include a picture?  And if I do, why am I including a picture?  What are they looking for when they see me?  Why am I even checking out what my potential new roommate looks like?  Wait, why is HE including a picture of himself?  As I stare at this dude online at work, do my co-workers think I’m perusing men online?  When I look at a picture of a potential female roommate, what am I looking for?  Cute, but not my style?  Maybe ugly so that if she drops her towel as I’m heading to the bathroom, there won’t be any awkwardness. 

Oh forget it, I’ll just pay the whole rent and not eat, I hear having the liberty of walking around in the nude is exhilarating! 



--JJJ

1.                  Everyone puts their foot in their mouth at some point, so ignore the awkward silence of realizing you’ve done it and move on. 

I notice many things in people; styles of clothes, the way they walk, the looks on their faces.  I keep my thoughts and opinions to myself when I’m alone, but when I have a good friend or family member next to me and I’m in a comfort zone, I’m compelled to share these sometimes brutal truths. 

The next time you find yourself ready to point out someone with an annoying appearance, make sure your company doesn’t share that same look you’re ready to clown on.  So when you see the guy with the tribal tattoo around his bicep that doesn’t go all the way around the back of his arm, take a peek at your friend’s arm before regrettably spewing, “Look at that douche, if you’re going to get the most common tattoo in the world, at least be man enough to get it all the way around your arm!!  I’d never be friends with anyone like that!”  Your boy just might have the most awkward look on his face while trying to hide his half ass tribal symbol that he picked out of a tattoo book, next to a fortune teller shop on the strip of Venice Beach. 

When you and he are scrambling for something else to say to break the silence, just let it go and try to lie to him by saying his is different and you actually like it. 

 

2.                  Text messaging has taken over everyone’s life, (including mine) simply because it avoids having to talk longer than I’d like to or right at that time.  But…how do you know when to end a long texting conversation?

We don’t do it to look cool, especially since it doesn’t look cool.  We sometimes text message for the convenience and peace of mind from that dreaded 2-hour phone conversation with someone that is using you as a source of entertainment while driving home in traffic.  We’ve all looked at the caller ID and “damn, I don’t have time to talk to this fool for 2 hours straight!”  The saving grace from being a rude friend is to instantly text back, “What’s up?” with the hopes that they’ll assume you’re too busy to actually talk…like humans.  Now you’re still a good friend and your ear doesn’t have to get hot from the phone, making you wonder if you just pumped tons of radiation into your temple causing brain cancer in your future. 

But now that texting has gotten so popular, stress from texting etiquette seems to rear its ugly head, there’s no escape!  How do you know when to end a written conversation that has now taken up that hour you were just looking to save?  This is supposed to be quick and to the point, where did these super texters come from?  And now that you’ve responded to their first few messages, they pretty much know that you’re not as busy as you claimed to have been by ignoring that first call. 

You can give all the “wrap it up” signals you want in your texts, but a determined talker turned texter never catches the hints.  You try to not progress the conversation any longer with messages that elicit a response.  Some favorites to truncate the ramblings are, “haha” J or a simple “yeah” to a long winded story about an entire day of activities seem to never work.  Once I get these responses, I shut down my mini keyboard so I won’t be the nuisance I complain about. 

--JJJ