Pete Dodd Dot Com (.us)

I’m going to start this whole thing with a disclaimer, because I start every conversation I have with everyone with disclaimers or explanations or excuses or whatever.  It’s what I do and even though i know I do it, and I know it’s unnecessary, I can’t stop myself from doing it anyway.  So the disclaimer here is that I am very, very frustrated…  but, I know that I really have no one to be frustrated at but myself.  I mean, that’s kinda the point of everything im about to write.  But the bottom line is that i fucked up at work and now I am reaping the consequences.  I also know that bitching about work online is about as bad of a move as one could possibly make.   ANNNNNDDDD, I know that with my job in particular talking about it in public is generally a no-no.  In fact, it can be illegal.

This isn’t going to be illegal though, at least as far as I can tell.  If you don’t know what I do lets just call myself a social worker.  Or a caregiver.  Actually i guess caregiver is closer to the proper definition.  So, obviously, I can’t talk about the folks I give care to.  But that’s fine because this isn’t about them.  When it comes to my job, in regards to them, everything is great.  This is about everything else.

I guess the short version is that once a year you need to jump through a couple hoops to keep your “med certification.”   This has changed over time, but usually involves a test, sometimes it involves pouring meds in front of the nurse and getting quizzed on the drugs you’re giving.   The whole thing always seemed so silly to me.  I think the reason for that is that I started in this field in Vermont, which has much, much, much, much, much less bureaucracy surrounding everything.  On my first day on the job, my first day in the field, I was given a bunch of pills and told “give these to her at night.”

You know why that’s all I was told?  BECAUSE THAT’S HOW EASY IT IS!  But, we live in the land of the sue happy.  I live in the state where a few caregivers decided they wanted to go shopping  and they left the person they were giving care to in their car with the windows rolled up and that person died.  Everyone feels like they have to cover their ass from every possible angle.  So, if you want to give meds as a caregiver in CT you need to take a 40 hour course.  And then you need to do a huge test (I believe it was 80 questions… it was 8 years ago so my memory is fuzzy) and you have to fake giving meds in front of the instructor…  and then you go back to the house you work at and you have to give meds in front of your nurse there.  And then, even though you passed and you’ve had your work checked twice, you still have to wait several weeks until your med card comes in because if you try to dispense meds without it certainly the world will explode.

The absolute silliness of med giving is not my gripe however.  That’s just one in a long list of gripes about how we have become such an overprotective society that we’ve lost so much common sense.  And the thing is, if you suck at your job, if you are truly a terrible person and you are so preoccupied with other shit in your life that you are going to fuck up giving meds…  a 40 hour class WILL NOT CHANGE THAT.  So in the end it’s a pain in the ass for those of us who have a very basic capacity for critical thought, and it has zero effect on those that don’t.

I don’t even mean to go off on this tangent.  My issue is that I was supposed to take this test by this thursday and I didn’t.  My excuse is that I didn’t know.  I, like an idiot, thought that I had until the end of March.  I should have checked.  Double checked.  Triple checked.  But I didn’t.  I got a frantic call from my boss at 12:30 asking me if I had taken my med test.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  I was high out of my mind on codeine and already freaking the fuck out.  I was on my way to the oral surgeon to get two teeth extracted and two small chunks of my jaw bone removed.  This was a big deal, not  just because of the obvious pain, but because my anxiety disorder has kept me away from dentists for over a decade.  They scare the fucking shit out of me.  It’s not rationale, I actually don’t even mind the pain or the drills or anything.  But anxiety disorders aren’t rationale.   Anyway, I told my boss I couldn’t even think (because, really, I couldn’t) and got off the phone.  But as I sat in the surgeons room as he shot Novocaine into my mouth over and over (I swear it was like 15 shots) the adrenaline from what was about to happen to me kinda washed the haze out of my brain created by the codeine.   The surgeon called Arnee in to go over options to replace one of the teeth (I had a molar and a wisdom tooth removed –  he wanted to replace the molar, obviously).   We have no money so it was like LOLOLOLOL $4000, um no, I’ll live with a space there thank you.  But her being in there gave me the chance to ask her to call my boss.   This shit at work had officially started wearing heavier on my brain than the surgery that was about to happen.

The extraction was fine, by the way.  I mean it took him forever, he even commented on how i had some of the toughest teeth to pull he had seen in a while.  And the sound of his pliers cracking the teeth in half was somewhat jarring — but i couldn’t feel a damn thing so I actually didn’t mind the whole thing.  I didn’t freak out.  Cool.

After getting orders not to talk for the rest of the day I got out and called my boss and tried to plead my case.  I didn’t know!  If only someone had told me I would have done it!  It’s not like I knew and willfully decided not to do it.  In fact, a few weeks ago I made a special trip into CT just for the sole reason of getting a bunch of trainings done.  I was told at that point I was caught up on everything.  I also just a few weeks ago had my quarterly evaluation, where we talked about how I needed to do those trainings, but there was no mention of the med test.

Again, I know it’s my job to know.  If my boss were to read this he would be screaming at the screen “BUT ITS NOT OUR JOB TO TELL YOU WHEN YOUR STUFF IS DUEEEEEEE!”  And he’s right.  But it’s unfortunate.

On the new Bright Eyes album Conor sings the phrase “I wouldn’t waste another thought — on what is fair and what is not.”  He’s right, but I am going to waste thoughts on it, in fact I’ll probably waste several thousand words on it.

There are things I am not good at and there are things I do well.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true of 105% of all humans.  In my job, I am really good at bringing calm to situations that are otherwise frantic.  I am also good at keeping the atmosphere light.  I’ve gotten better at things like cooking and cleaning.  I am bad, however, at remembering things like trainings.  What ends up happening is that what I suck at becomes the obsession.  It’s not just me, this isn’t Pete Dodd specific behavior.  It’s just the way humans are.   I mean, I may actually be in the running for the husband of the year award, and most of the time my wife would agree with that, but if you catch her in the proper mood every single good deed I do won’t matter, what will matter are my weaknesses.  Did I sit with her last night talking her through a crying panic attack?  Yes.  Does that matter right now?  No, the fact that I suck at saving money does.  Did I suck at money last night when I sat with her?  Yes.  Did it matter then?  No.

Life isn’t fair.  Boo fucking hoo.  There are million of kids that will work their asses off this quarter at school only to get a C in gym and get reamed out for that C instead of praised for the A+’s in some sort of super math that their parents couldn’t even comprehend.  We are obsessed with the negative!  And that’s what is happening with me right now.  Everyone involved… my boss, the nurse, the people at the main office, everyone… they all know I suck at knowing when I have to do trainings.  They know I’m great at my job, they know that the guys I take care of are safe and calm and happy when I’m there.  But that doesn’t matter.  HE SUCKS AT TRAININGS!  HE MUST BE PUNISHED.

If at any point one of those people said “hey, Pete, you’re med thing is due March 3″ I would not be in this position right now.  But, again, for the 90th time, it’s not their job to tell me that.  So they didn’t.  And im sure they want me to learn my lesson.  Will I?  Time will tell, I guess.

So, the bottom line is that the administration is deciding over the next week whether to pull me off the schedule (without pay) until I take the med course again (which can be a few months from now).  It’s like being fired without the ability to collect unemployment.

I just feel so frustrated.  I know it’s my fault.  I know.  I know.  I KNOW!  But there’s this part of my brain, that’s still bathed in the idealist that teenage Pete Dodd was, that wishes the world was filled with people helping each other out.  When i started at my job I worked almost all of my shifts with this one girl.  She was a mom and she was great at the stereotypical (in the old fashioned sense) “mom stuff.”  She cooked, because the food she made was great, and the food I made was poop.  She cleaned because when she did it the house looked and smelled great and when I did it the house looked slightly less like a disaster (but a disaster none the less).  But there were things within the job she was not great at.  When one of the guys had a really hard time he needed 1 on 1 attention.  She hated doing this.  There were actually a bunch of situations like that — that she just wasn’t good at.  I was.  I would spend hours sitting in the guys rooms, helping them calm down, cracking jokes, generally trying to make people happy.  It was awesome, between the two of us we worked the perfect shift.  The guys were happy, emergencies were handled with as little stress as possible, the house was in great condition, the paperwork was filled out…

But then they took me off the schedule with her because we weren’t “learning new skills.”  First off, that wasn’t true.  She saw how I handled the guys, I learned quite a few things about cooking that i still use (bouillon cubes in the water that’s cooking brown rice…. mmmm).  But I get what they were going for, and over time I got better at that stuff, and she got better at my stuff.  But, to be completely honest, in the eight years I’ve been there I have never been part of a shift that did everything so perfectly.  We worked together 4 times a week, and everything was great.  If you look at the data taken from that time, I would be willing to be that behavior-wise the guys did best during that period.  But the obsession with our weaknesses meant that we had to be broken up.  And the house was worse off for it, even if it means I can cook a pork chop now.

This silly idealism would be great in everything.  Like if republicans were truly just worried about fiscal responsibility and personal freedom and liberals were worried about environmental conservation and social justice and both worked together, as each party’s strength is the other’s weakness.   But, no, that’s now how it works.  Democrats hate republicans for not giving a shit about the environment… and republicans hate democrats for putting all these rules in the way of them making money.

I’m 33 now… 2 months out from turning 34.  I’m married.  We will hopefully have children in a few years.  It’s time for me to grow up.  Life isn’t fair.  My wife is miserable a large chunk of the time because her mother’s grasp on reality is slipping.  My wife is also having trouble getting work sometimes (and working too much other times).   Im also rushing her to the ER with ovary pain.  And we’re spending weeks sleeping on her mother’s couch trying to take care of her which is mentally more than should be asked of Arnee.  I’m having teeth extracted and stomach pains so fucking bad that had my wife not been there I would have taken an ambulance to a hospital.  Fuck, I could go on, but it doesn’t matter.  This is life, this is what people do.  It sucks, but whining about it isn’t going to do a goddamn thing.  Right now, at my job, what matters is that I didn’t do this test.  All of my good deeds don’t count, no matter how much I wish someone would go “you know what Pete, you do a lot of good work, we’re gonna let this one slide, and we know you will be in the same position next year so since I’m good at scheduling I’ll make sure to give you a reminder call 2 weeks early next year.”   That, literally, is too much to ask.  Humans just aren’t willing to do that shit.  I need to grow the fuck up.

I will say this though.  This year has sucked, but without my wife it would have been a disaster.  There’s a reason that people with anxiety disorders are either alcoholics or suicidal.  I’m neither, and that’s because of Arnee.  I feel like she is the only thing holding me together sometimes.  I guess our marriage is what I was the ideal i was talking about in this post.  We fill in for each others weaknesses.  I comfort her through the really tough shit she is dealing with.  She takes charge and calls the dentist when i would just go on living in pain.  Even through all of the insanity of this year, even if that includes me getting fired (or “removed from the schedule”) I know i’m going to look back on our first year of marriage as a happy time.  Funny how that works.

The challenge:

I will not spend cash dollars USA money on videogames until december 25th, 2010… including applications for my iphone or ipad.    Except in the following cases:

A.  I can trade in games I have for new games.

B.  My Xbox 360 pretty much has a timer on it that will expire soon (probably), when that happens it will be replaced for a (hopefully) small fee.

C.  Money that is already on my PS3 account (since this cannot be refunded)

D.  I can and will accept all gifts.

The reasons:

1.  I buy a lot of videogames even when I have many I still love and need to finish (hereby known as the ‘pile of shame’).

2.  Arnee and I would like to save more money because I guess married people worry about the future and shit.

Why it should be easy:

1.  I have gamefly and can rent most games within a few days of their release.

2.  I have a network of friends and other avenues to get my hands on most anything.

3.  My pile of shame is at an all time high and I would really like to make a dent into it.

Why it won’t be easy:

1.  Videogames are like crack to me.

a.  I MUST own them on day one or they are dirty germ infested whores.

b.  I MUST always have new stuff, anything more than a week old is OLD FUCKING NEWS.

2.  Im used to buying what i want, when I want.

On paper it seems really fucking easy.  But, like, really, really hard.   Feel free to comment on whether you think i’ll be able to do it or if I will sail the failboat.

Republicans drive me fucking crazy.  Crazy.  They make me want to strangle kittens.  They are a maddening group of people.  And it’s not because of their actual politics.   I can actually see the appeal of an idealistic republican society that has low taxes, no government intrusion, people doing things for themselves.   I think that would be a fantastic world to live in.   The problem is that as far as I can tell they only want this world to exist for likeminded Christian white people.  And that’s when I ask Arnee to bring the box of kittens in because I have some strangling to do.

All of this chickenshit crying about a mosque being built on ground zero is what currently has me completely pissed off with them as a group of (white) people.  You see dickheads like Glenn Beck crying (and I mean literally crying) on Fox News because the big bad government wants to control everything and all our freedoms are being taken away and Obama is Hitler and soon all white people will be in gas chambers.  But then there are a group of people, a group of AMERICANS, that want to build a place of worship for their imaginary man in the sky (not to be confused with the white people’s imaginary man in the sky because he is, like, totally different) and this group that literally cries about freedoms being taken away now wants to take away this group of brown people’s basic freedoms.

I’m trying to reconcile this in my head but I can’t.   So Obama is taking your freedoms away and the government intruding too much.  Ok, I get it.  I think you’re fucking paranoid, but i get it.   Now there are a group of Muslims that want to build a Mosque near ground zero.  You same people want to take their freedom away and have the government (in this case, the courts) intervene and stop them.

WHAT!??!  WAHHAHHTHAHHTHET?!?!?   Do you not see the goddamn motherfucking hypocrisy here?   I mean for fucks fucking sake.  Really?!?!?

Also, the government is going too far intruding into our lives.  Right?  But also we should pass a constitutional amendment intruding into the lives of gay people.  They shouldn’t be allowed to marry, because that’s just gross, um – I mean because my imaginary man in the sky says it’s some sort of evil.  Evil love.  That’s the trickiest evil of them all!  It fools people into being happy and nice.  Someone grab some whiteout because we have a constitution to amend!

Stop living in fear of everything, republicans.  It’s embarrassing.   There are some Muslims in the world that are hiding out in caves and african villages plotting to kill us.  Yes.  This is a fact.  We should do something about that.   But there are also 100 million+ muslims who aren’t out to kill you.   Thinking they are is the same leap in logic that all christians want to blow up federal buildings because Timothy McVeigh was a christian.  I guess also by that rationale if someone built a christian church in Oklahoma City at the site of that disaster it would be in bad taste.  Right?  RIGHT!?!!?

No, of course not.  Because you aren’t afraid of christians (well, the black ones sing too loud at church, but they seem nice as long as they stay in their cities).

If we are going to debate actual issues, I am cool with you folks.  I think there is an honest dialogue that needs to happen.  Like I said earlier, there is much about conservative principles that I think has merit.   I would love to live in a world that took the best from each party where we didn’t have government or business’s intruding on our personal lives.  I mean, that is the basic philosophical difference between us, right?  Democrats want the government to do everything because we don’t trust corporations and republicans want the private sector to do everything because they don’t trust the government.  And the truth is that we both are probably right, neither the government or private sector is worthy of our trust.  Which is why we should be working together to find what actually works with each and go from there.

But we never actually talk about this shit, do we?  The Republicans are the party of “If Obama wants it we don’t.”  So I guess that ends the dialogue there.  And the democrats are the party of “omg lets have 9000 ideas about one topic and in the end just pass something totally watered down that no one likes.”   Both parties are terrible.  It’s unfortunate.

What is fortunate, however, is that most of it is mostly ceremonial.  I mean I hated Dubya and I like Obama… but really, is my life any different now that dubs is out and Obama is in?  Nope.  I mean, I did get a $10 a week tax cut.  Yeah… I can’t even sell that as my life being any different.  It doesn’t matter.  These assholes cycle themselves in and out and we have republican rule and democratic rule and they do things that they say is going to affect us but it never really does and it just goes on and on.  That’s fine.  That’s how political policy is.  And that’s especially how political policy in America is, the system is designed to make change monumentally slow.  So slow, in fact, that we can go from a dumbfuck like Bush to a “post racial” (gotta love that bullshit term) dude like Obama without it having any affect on our lives other than it giving us a new cast of characters to yell at as we watch fox news/msnbc.

I’m not arguing any of that!  I don’t give a shit if you are conservative.  You shouldn’t give a shit that i’m liberal.   All that I ask is that when it comes to issues that actually affect people…  and these are issues that a president or a congress really have no control over…  that you stop making your decisions based off of goddamn fear.    If you are going to argue for less government interference and more freedom it has to apply to more than Christian white people.  If you don’t see that… your head is planted too far up your own ass for you to be any use to modern society anymore.  It’s time for you to grab some automatic rifles and join some militia in ‘middle america’ and plot to take down the government.  Kinda like a few muslims tried to 9 years ago.  And when you do I’m totally going to protest your church being put in my city.

I tend to use this personal blog to talk about personal stuff and use PSNerds as a place to talk (literally… as in podcast) or write about videogame stuff.  But I wanted to put together some thoughts on this little indie game I’ve been playing lately and I kinda think it fits in more here than it does there…  even though here there are actually female readers.  The PSNerds only has one girl visitor and her name is my wife.  And girls don’t like videogames.  Or admit that they do.  Except my wife.  But she also farts a lot.

So this is not for you, girls who hate videogames!  Or maybe it is.  I dunno.

Anyway, there’s this dude over in Europe somewhere… Sweeden maybe?   The story goes (at least what I remember of it, maybe I’m making all of this up) is that he quit his job working at a corporate videogame company to work on an indie project so he could make something on his own that had a bit more soul to it.  He also enters competitions to make games in 48 hours and posts mesmerizing time lapse videos of it. He is large and has a beard, so you know he is good people.

Flash forward to today and he has a game up and running, called Minecraft, that isn’t nearly complete but he is selling access to the game (and all future revisions) for cheap now with a plan to up the price once the online play beta starts… and it will probably go even higher when it’s officially “released.”   I put that in quotes because I think this is the future of indie gaming, get something together that is fun to play and get people playing it early, which helps further fund your development of the game and also gets you a ton of feedback about what people like and dislike.  It’s fucking brilliant, actually.  He is getting paid while he makes the game, like he would at a huge development house, but he is making it on his own terms, by himself.

But all of this feel good indie-elitism aside, none of it would mean shit if the game was a piece of crap.  It isn’t.  In fact it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time.  Actually at this point it is barely a game.  The term sandbox gets thrown around videogames quite a bit, usually in a game like Grand Theft Auto where you have this huge, open world and you can do whatever you want.   Games like that can be quite fun, but they are missing the key piece that made playing in a sandbox as a kid fun…  building shit.    I mean, sure, pushing my little trucks around my sandbox was cool, but it was much cooler when i made a sand mountain and sand jumps to play on.

This is what Minecraft excels at.  You start the game as this little blocky dude in this huge world with absolutely no directions given as to what to do (the tutorial on the main menu is grayed out at this point, it’s likely going to show up in an update down the line).   As of now there is no goal in the game, except the meta-goal of every game: go have some fun.    So you start punching a tree with your blocky little hand and it breaks up into chunks and you collect the wood.  You then put the wood together to make a work bench.  Then with the work bench you start putting the wood together to make a pick axe.  Then you dig a tunnel into a mountain, collecting all the dirt and stone you break up as you burrow deeper.  And then you head back to your work bench to make better things with all the new stuff you got.   Then you take all your stone you got from your tunnel and you build a house.   Next thing you know it’s 4am, you have 3 houses, a tower, a series of tunnels and you have plans on building a huge walkway in the sky.

This just scratches the surface of what you can do in the game.  In fact, it’s probably quicker to make a list of things you *CAN’T* do.  Every week the developer, a young dude who goes by Notch, adds new stuff to build.   Want to make tracks and a mine cart for your tunnels?  Done.  Want to make a saddle and put it on a pig and ride the pig?  Done.   Want to make a bow and arrow and shoot cows, take their leather and make a hat?  Done and done and done.

The only thing missing right now is that you can only play it by yourself.   Communities have sprung up all over the place where people come together to talk about the game and share screenshots of the stuff they are building.  In fact, that’s how I found the game.   I frequent a message board called Neogaf (even though after like a year I still can’t even post replies on topics there) and saw a thread about the game.   After reading about two pages I headed over to minecraft.net, sent the dude $12 (what it comes out to after paypal turns the money into euros) and was playing on my own.   At this point I have like 5 bookmarks of different sites and message boards dedicated to people playing and talking about the game.

But all of that is well and good, but what I really want to do is play this game with my friends.   I want to build some crazy ass castle thing in one section while my wife (yeah, she’s hooked too) is building some crazy ass house with a giant garden somewhere else, and then one of my friends is building a tower into the clouds while another friend is killing all the monsters he can find while yet another friend is digging a hole to china, just for fun.   To me, this will be the essence of cooperative, social gaming.   There are monsters to kill (though you can play a mode without them) but killing them isn’t the point of the game.   Doing whatever you want is the point.  So if you get all your friends together on one server, some may want to work together to build something huge.  Others might want to build their own thing but let people connect tunnels or whatever to it.   It will be the mix of people all doing different stuff that will make it so neat.   Whenever I get sick of building something I’ll have so much fun just exploring the land to see what all of my friends have done.   When I wake up in the morning the first thing I might do is run over to see how far friend X got on the giant thing-a-ma-bob he was working on the night before.

The multiplayer beta (aka test… for those not up on videogame lingo) starts soon.  Sounds like it is a week or two away.  Right now the list of friends I have playing this game is low…  though I may end up also playing with people I barely know from any of those random sites I frequent.  But want to play with friends!  I’m even going to look into hosting my own server (a level of technical sophistication i usually don’t have – haha) so we can control how it plays and who joins us (aka keep out the random assholes who are bound to server-hop just to destroy people’s shit).

I am also really excited to see some more typical gameplay modes thrown into this sandbox world.   Like, I envision a game of capture the flag where there is a 1 hour section at the start where you build your own base (and stock up on supplies to mess up the other teams).   How fucking cool would that be?   Also, like I mentioned before, there are monsters in the world.  They typically only come out at night…  and they can actually be kinda scary (the sound is amazing).  It would be very, very intense to play a multiplayer game where you built stuff as usual but you only got one life.  When you died you were done.  I certainly wouldn’t always want to play this mode, but how intense would it be after you spent 5 hours building your fortress to see a monster trying to kill you knowing that if you die all of that work is lost.   I mean, I can’t think of a videogame that has higher stakes than that, other than online casinos where you bet real money (and one would be hard pressed to even consider that a videogame at all).

So consider this blog post an attempt by me to rope as many of my friends (both real life and internet) into playing this game as possible, hopefully all on one server when the multiplayer starts.   I’m guessing only like 3 people will bite, but I have such an extreme love for the game that I had to write it all out to make sense of it.  As for system requirements, I doubt they are even slightly high.  You can play the game in your browser or as a standalone download.  It’s a very simple (but charming) game graphically.   Any computer made this decade can probably run it, Mac or PC (but not iphone or ipad, dammit).

I guess I’ll finish with a few pictures showing some of the stuff I’ve been working on.  Everything in these shots I built, this area was just some beach and grass.

^^^Here is the inside of the first big building I made.  Over to the left I put my storage, work bench and oven.  Over to the right I breakdance.   Nothing fancy here, this is only like 2 hours into the game.

^^^The building to the left is the building you just saw inside of.  The tower to the right now has a giant stick figure man on top, i pretend he is the god we all pray to.  Coming out of that you see my high walkway that leads to another settlement that I don’t have pictures of.  Also, off the building to the left is where my huge system of tunnels is that i dig into to get all the stone and dirt I need to make this stuff.

^^^This is a giant hole I dug into the ground for no good reason other than that it was fun.   I then made a trench to it from the ocean and now it’s 1/4 filled with water.   This is all connected to my system of tunnels.

^^^And this is back to my original settlement of buildings.  This is after 10+ hours of work.  I dug out a hole about 10 layers deep in the entire area.  This is right on the water so I held all the water from flowing in with glass.  I also made the start of my tunnel system which is directly below me all glass, and you can see a glass bridge in there.   You can now see the stick figure we all pray to…  and i had a shitton of extra dirt so i decided to make a modern art masterpiece that took FOREVER to build but I am very, very happy with how it came out.   I also have 2 other huge, blossoming settlements on this map, all connected via air walkways and tunnels.   Eventually, 500 hours from now I want to have this entire map developed in one way or another.  And to think, this area was once just a beach and some grass….

So if any of this interest you, let me know.  I will also answer any questions to anyone starting out, as the lack of directions is a bit daunting at first (though it took me maybe 15 minutes to get Arnee up to speed with it).   Just hit me up via email, facebook or twitter.

In a move that should be surprising to no one at this point, the next post by me after I lashed myself for being a sarcastic jerk… is a video of me and Arnee being sarcastic jerks while we were out to eat last night.  We were sitting next to a couple obviously on their first date and we could not handle how poorly it was going.  Take a gander!

And also, if you are into videogames at all, or just want to see a 10 minute video of me talking about nerd stuff and making some weird noises for no reason, click click click this.

Anyone working in the field that I do has to do a fair amount of training on how to protect yourself and the person you are taking care of in the case of things getting a bit, um, hectic. It makes sense. A lot of the people I’ve worked with in my life have been prone to get pissed off and try to beat the shit out of me. So we get trained in how to defend ourselves in a way that makes sure that neither party is hurt in the process. One of the cool things about the place I work at now (and come September will be 8 motherfuckin’ years) is that during the very class that we learn the physical abilities to deal with this the instructor also spends equal if not more time on the mental part… specifically trying to set up everything so it never gets to that point in the first place.

During this training one of the things he always says is “sarcasm is a tool of the weak.” When I first heard him say that I was a bit taken back. I mean that sorta crushed my whole world. I love being sarcastic! I’m a sarcastic asshole. It’s my bread and butter combo. It’s how I get laughs. It’s how I start conversations with strangers. It’s how I deal with this terrifying world.

But the thing I couldn’t dispute is that he is right. He is absolutely 100% right, in fact.

Sarcasm as it’s defined by random house is:

1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
2. a sharply ironical taunt; sneering or cutting remark: a review full of sarcasms.

Now as much as I want to get sarcastic about #2 using the word in the definition, it would be hard to argue that either of those things are good traits to have as a human. Good defense mechanisms, sure, but defense mechanisms are used only to keep people away… there is nothing good about that. It’s used for things you fear or loathe. This is not a good thing!

But as you probably have noticed, there are many, many, many things on this planet that are deserving of sarcasm. Our political process, for instance. I’m talking more about the actual people in it, the divisiveness of the whole thing, the news media joining in the there are only 2 sides to the argument philosophy. The whole thing is really shitty and when someone is sarcastic towards that it’s hard to argue that they don’t deserve to be. But what’s really being accomplished by being sarcastic about it? I guess there is a bit of catharsis in the whole thing, but otherwise you are just adding to the chorus of bitching. And the last thing that chorus needs is more members.

I view the world largely through the prism of the internet. It’s my primary means of interacting with humans that aren’t my wife. On the internet everything is so fractioned off that it’s a bit absurd. Do you like the Playstation 3? Well I like the Xbox 360 so I hate you. Do you like the Android? Well I’m an iPhone guy so you suck. You are quoting Fox News? Well I’m a liberal and you are a fucking nazi for even thinking anything that place says is true. Do you like Twilight? Well I belong to a vampire fetish website and we kill and fuck the skulls of fake vampire lovers like you!

I don’t worry too much about humans or the planet. I just have the overriding feeling that everything is gonna be alright. Are humans polluting the earth? Yeah, but eventually we’ll kill ourselves and the earth will correct itself. Are kids total assholes? Yeah, but we were probably assholes too but in hindsight we think we were totally respectful. ETC ETC.. you get my point. When it comes to things I usually think it will work itself out in the end.

But it seems with this fractioning off that people are doing, filled with sarcastic rage against whoever opposes their tastes in pop culture and what fucking phone they use, is heading down a path that I don’t quite like. Eventually you are going to find a forum on the internet that has the rules “To post on this site you must like PS3, iPhone, be a liberal, hate dogs, prefer oral sex porn and enjoy a good pizza. If you don’t fit all of these requirements you will be BANNED!”

I guess even with this I think it will work itself out, but it’s annoying to go through. And I say this as someone who participates in it. I get really annoyed when people talk shit about iPhones. Why the fuck do I care about that?!?!?!? It drives me nuts that I even give a shit. I also am quite free with sharing my political views with people, like they actually give a shit about them. And even worse than that, i’m sarcastic about the things I don’t like or agree with. I take a huge shit on the things that other people believe or like because I don’t believe or like it.

That makes me an asshole (and it probably makes you an asshole too). But I realize this and it’s something that I’m actively working on. When it comes down to it none of this shit really matters. I don’t know why I spend time caring about it. It’s time I could spend working on something more productive, something that actually makes me feel good. I feel like I’m finally not afraid to be earnest with love and I can actually care about things, instead of pretending to hate and brushing everything off with sarcasm.

Award winning documentarianist Pete Dodd chronicles his and his wife’s voyage to Gamestop and to Duane Reade. This is bleeding edge material here, folks.

|1| Republicans are concerned about individual rights and fiscal responsibility. Democrats are concerned about social justice and keeping the environment clean. Both work together to make it all happen.

|II| Sports/TV/Movies/Music/etc aren’t businesses and instead are done solely for the love of the experience.

|C| Baseball has a salary cap.

|four| Wages are equal to the importance and quality of the work you do, not the amount of money you create for your boss.

|V| The US uses the metric system.

|eff| Fox News, MSNBC and CNN all went out of business.

|7| There is nudity on Mad Men.

|VIII| Steam and Skype are on all major consoles.

|NEIN!| Kurt Cobain didn’t kill himself, he made 3 more albums after In Utero and then he retired to the woods/mountains of Washington state. Courtney Love died in a freak plastic surgery tactical nuclear strike.

|X| Jetpacks. And robots.

Just wanted to update that I haven’t given up on this quite yet… It’s been hotter than a mofo, Arnee and I have been visiting all sorts of family and generally I’ve been doing stuff and not sitting in my apartment with a camera, a mario toy and a handful of vaseline.

I will be back soon though. After working this weekend im headed back to brooklyn for several days. Mario will make a comeback next week and I have a few other ideas brewing as well.

Happy 4th.