So here’s the deal: I’m tired of working for a living and want to start writing for a living. In order for that to happen I need to start writing for people who have money. While I don’t doubt the financial stability of any of you good people (except you, Hustedt), none of you have been exactly throwing support checks and tax-deductible donations my way either. So, seeing no patrons on the immediate horizon, I will be taking an indefinite sabbatical from Five Minute Answers to pursue other, more profitable endeavors.

It’s been a lot of fun writing this for the past six months, and – who knows – perhaps I will return to it one day. But it won’t be anytime soon, so you can save yourself the 5-10 seconds you spend every week coming over here to see if anything new is up. I’m pretty sure I’m Facebook friends with all of you, so you’ll know if/when FMA starts spitting truth again.

In the meantime, I’ll leave the site online so you are free to peruse the archives and relive some of the life-changing moments we’ve shared. What we had was real and no one can ever take that away from us.

Also, brace yourself for the latest literary venture from Kent Woodyard Industries going live on the Intertron on 11/1/10 (not quite as cool as 10/10/10, but still, there’s a lot of ones and zeros in it). I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but here’s this: it will be the single most mind-blowing thing you’ve seen in the five years since Ok Go did that thing with the treadmills. Seriously, that good.

Thanks again for reading, linking, and commenting. It’s been a hoot. We’ll meet again, you can count on it. And if that day never comes…keep your ear to the grindstone.

hugs and kisses,
Kent

What it lacked in two-pieces, and guys who sound like Darth Vader/Mufasa, The Town more than made up for with my other action movie essentials including, but not limited to: depictions of armed robbery, nun masks, a car chase involving a minivan, Boston accents, John Hamm, and one of those interrogation scenes where the cops are really letting the criminal have it and they’re telling him how he’s gonna go to jail forever cause his friends have already ratted him out and how he better confess or they’re gonna give him the chair and right when you think the perp’s about to crack he leans back in his chair, smiles, and tells the cops to go eff themselves and you realize that they got nothing on him and he’s totally gonna get away with it.  I love that.

There’s a lot to love about The Town, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.  I’m here to share a thought I had while watching the movie.  The thought was this: why is it that movies set in Boston always make the city out to be a terrible place filled with equally terrible people?

I’ve never been to Boston.  But I would like to check it out someday.  It seems like a nice enough place and my friends who hail from there have nothing but great things to say about it (usually involving the adjective “wicked”).  By all accounts Beantown is a beautiful place.  But there’s a different story being told at the movie theater.

According to Hollywood, Boston is populated exclusively with abusive fathers, alcoholic mothers, multiple felons, pregnant prostitutes, crooked cops, orphans, and the criminally insane most of whom make their living as dock workers, janitors, bus drivers, hookers, or hobos and live in 50 year-old row houses which have been cut up into ratty apartments where they do nothing but drink Sam Adams, smoke Marlboros, neglect their children, and watch Red Sox games on fuzzy black and white TVs.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Consider this list of movies where the residents of Boston are depicted as depraved, depressed (emotionally and economically), or just plain douchey.

• Boondock Saints (1 & 2)
• The Departed
• Good Will Hunting
• Mystic River
• Gone Baby Gone
• The Town
• Shutter Island (Boston Harbor)
• Edge of Darkness
• Legally Blonde

It took me maybe twenty seconds to come up with that list.  And those are just the ones I’ve seen!  I’m sure there are more.  A Yankees fan, for example, would probably want to add “Fever Pitch” to the list.  A Lakers fan would surely find room for Game 6 of The 2008 NBA Finals on the list.  But you get the point.  If God were thinking about raining fire on Boston unless he could find 10 college graduates, the city would long ago have been reduced to the level of post-Truman Hiroshima.

I’ve known enough native Bostonians to confirm that the rumors about them having a hard time with the letter “r” and an equally hard time completing a thought without help from the “F-word” are true.  What I cannot be sure of is how many of them have a hard time completing a day without robbing a liquor store, shooting a cop, punching a hooker, or kidnapping a family member.  Having never been there myself, I have no choice but to rely on the reports of others.  And according to Messrs Damon and Affleck, the answer is: all of them.

Just a thought…

Fantasy football represents the latest in a long history of things created by nerds which were then appropriated by normal people to use as we see fit.  Facebook, pop rocks, and Death Cab for Cutie are a few other examples.  Whereas fantasy football was once the realm of people who were bored with Dungeons and Dragons yet still confused by human interaction, it has now been embraced as an acceptable leisure activity by whole legions of men who occasionally speak to women and have never seen Tron.  Even more surprising are the scores of young women – Dakota Fanning and Malia Obama among them – who have joined fantasy leagues, though it is speculated that most have only done so in order to have an explanation for their repeated Google searches for “Mark Sanchez + fantasy.”

Since fantasy football is both mainstream and divorced from reality you may have already guessed that I am an enthusiastic participant.  In fact, having enjoyed a modicum of success in a league last year, I made the questionable decision to join two leagues this year.  This pretty well guarantees I will spend more hours of my week thinking about fantasy football than I spend on, for example, sleeping.  And in no way is that depressing.  I look at fantasy football the way I look at eating a Double Down from KFC: probably not the healthiest addition to my life, but a damn good time while it’s happening.

For the people who've always thought bread would taste better if it was meat.

Like all the best things in life (i.e. money, alcohol, women) fantasy football has the power for both good and evil.  Similar to the Double Down, there are strong reasons to do it (cheese, bacon, chicken, do I need to keep going?)  and strong reasons to avoid it (temporary paralysis as your body attempts to process what you’ve put inside it).  I provide below, for your consideration, an analysis of the best and the worst thing about fantasy football.  In so doing I hope to help you make an informed decision about whether or not fantasy might be right for you next season.

CON: Stress.  From September until January fantasy football is the source of perhaps 95% of the stress in my life.  For those of you with families, jobs you care about, or cars worth more than $4,000 I realize this may sound ridiculous, but stress is stress; I don’t care where it comes from.  The problem with fantasy football is that you can no longer care about your team.  You have to care about every team.  Sunday afternoons are no longer as simple as “if the Packers win, I’ll be in a sociable mood.”  Now it’s “if the Packers win AND Randy Moss gets at least 8 catches AND Phillip Rivers doesn’t throw an interception AND Tim Hightower gets at least two touchdowns AND Greg Jennings gets over 100 yards AND the Philadelphia defense holds Detroit to less than 10 points AND none of my players get injured AND my fantasy opponent underperforms then and only then will I be in a sociable mood.”  If that sounds stressful, imagine the bi-polar mess I become when the Packers are playing the Eagles and I need the Packers to win for me to be happy about life but I need the Eagles defense to recover four turnovers for my fantasy team to win.  I imagine it’s probably a lot like George Bush Sr. felt during his son’s presidency.  He loved his son, but he also loved America and only one could come out on top.

PRO: Ball busting. Fantasy football provides an excuse, venue, and opportunity to make fun of your friends.  This is significant because ball busting is for guys what watching Oprah is for girls (i.e. all we ever want to do.)  It is through the breaking of balls that modern men establish their place in the social order.  It is also in this way that they let everyone know how ridiculously, astoundingly straight they are.  Basically, guys don’t feel right about themselves if they’re not making one of their boys feel worse about himself.  Fantasy football helps this process along by mixing sports, latent athletic insecurities, and message boards.  It’s the perfect storm of trash talking.  I’ve been in leagues where the actual football was an afterthought when compared to the time and energy spent drawing attention to the fact that your opponent has a tiny package.  This may seem extreme, perhaps juvenile, but when you consider the fact that a man’s self-worth is inextricably tied to the performance of his fantasy team, it will begin to make sense.  Guys like fantasy.  Guys love football.  The one thing they like better than both is telling their friends what a buncha homos they are.

Fantasy football stresses me out like nothing else in my life.  But it also affords me the opportunity to ridicule one of my buddies for drinking Bud Light Lime, having sex with dudes, and just generally being super gay.  And for that, it will always be worth it.

On the one hand, you live closer to pretty places and pretty people than 95% of Americans.  On the other hand, you are 95% more likely to know a Raiders or Lakers fans than the average American.  On the one hand, you can go entire fiscal quarters without seeing a cloud.  On the other hand, you are governed by people who don’t know what a fiscal quarter is.

As a reluctant transplant to the west coast, I am absolutely and unashamedly a member of the abovementioned “conflicted majority.”  There are times, like when I’m at the Shamu show at Sea World, that I love it.  But there are other times, like when I look at my pay stub, that I hate it.  And there are still other times, like when I hear Katy Perry singing about the girls here, when I hate myself for loving it.

This new, semi-regular FMA feature will focus on the latter two events.  It will highlight the several dozen moments in any given week when I am forced to ask, “WTF, California?” and promise myself that I’ll move at the earliest opportunity.  You want to feel good about California?  Watch Entourage or listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  You want to know why you should never, ever, for any reason, girl, job, or dream move here?  Read on.

The CA Proposition 65 Warning.  WTF, California?!

Back in 1966, the Surgeon General, in one of his more mean-spirited moments, mandated that all cigarette packs be labeled with a friendly reminder to smokers that their chosen mode of relaxation is killing themselves, their children, and the other people eating at Denny’s at 2am.  This warning was good enough for pretty much everyone but it didn’t satisfy the meddling moms in the California statehouse.  They thought we needed a warning label for everything in the modern world which could conceivably cause harm to a human.  Because, as the saying goes, just because you don’t light it on fire and put it in your mouth, doesn’t mean it won’t kill you.

Thus was the CA Proposition 65 Warning born.  At taxpayer expense this warning was written, printed, and posted everywhere and on everything that wasn’t already covered with Obama bumper stickers.  I pass by three on the way to work every day: one on my neighbor’s car, one on my apartment complex’s electronic gate, and one outside my Starbucks.  The language changes slightly from one application to the next, but it usually goes something like this:

“This area has present chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, cold sores, and genocidal impulses in laboratory animals.”

It is a Surgeon General’s warning for breathing.  Having not been present for the spirited, and highly rational debate which I’m sure preceded the passage of this bill, I cannot be sure how it was determined that California residents needed to be told that putting their face near the exhaust pipe of a Chevy Silverado is probably a bad idea.  What probably happened is someone realized that being alive in post-industrial America is generally a pretty unhealthy thing to do.  From there, they extrapolated that a person who died before the age of 120 could claim that her life had been prematurely ended by all the poisonous tap water she had consumed in the years before Britta filters were invented.  It could then be claimed that the state had a responsibility to inform this citizen that the modern world was killing her and, failing to do so, bore the responsibility for her and all other premature deaths resulting from mankind’s decision to stop living in caves.

I get it.  I think it’s an unconscionable waste of time and money and I think it’s demeaning that someone in Sacramento thinks I need to be told not to inhale whatever gas is coming out of the nearest manhole, but I can at least understand how we got here.  Also, having grown accustomed to these warnings over the past year, they don’t piss me off as much as they used to.

But then, just when I was ready to set aside my beef; just when I was ready to let my annoyance with the CA Proposition 65 Warning die, I ran into this at an Albertsons last week.

The fact that a person considered this sign necessary, that taxpayer money was spent to have it made, that seconds – maybe minutes – of a person’s life were spent making it, and that an Albertson’s employee was required to spend even 10 seconds of his life posting it blows my freaking mind.  You want to know why California is $35 billion in debt?  I’d say that sign is Exhibit A.

WTF, California?!

This is body boarding.  Needless to say, Jack Johnson won’t be writing an album about it anytime soon.  But this is the aquatic hobby I’ve chosen for myself, and – being acquainted with the less-than-badass imagery it calls to mind – I am here today to explain myself.

First off, if you think boogie boarding is in any way similar to what you’ve seen the special ed kids doing with kickboards in the shallow end of the public pool, you need to watch this video.  I’d like to see a five year-old with floaties take on one of those monster waves.  (Note: Seriously, I’d love to see that.)  Of course, all that flipping and 360ing and getting barreled looks nothing like the kind of body boarding I’m doing.  I’ve only been at it for a month.  Most of the time I look exactly like a retard with a kickboard.

But I’m getting better.  It no longer feels like the ocean is trying to murder me.  The ratio of time spent under water to time spent gasping for breath above water is swinging in the right direction.  I’m getting better at changing out of my boardshorts while standing next to my car without flashing my man-bits to passing motorists.  Things are looking up.  And that is one of the primary attractions of body boarding: it doesn’t take much to be good at it.  Contrary to surfing where you have to do things like pay attention and stand up, all a body boardist is required to do is lie on his stomach, face east, and wait for a wave to pick him up and hurl him toward the beach.

Body boarding is to the ocean what tubing is to lakes and sledding is to mountains.  You get all the excitement of wakeboarding and snowboarding with none of the effort.  Which pretty much makes it my perfect sport, because if there’s one thing I hate it’s effort.  And if there’s two things I hate it’s effort and exercise.

That’s the tricky thing with hobbies these days; most are just exercise disguised as games.  As if I can’t tell what’s really going on just because I’m holding a bat/racket/crossbow!  With the increasing popularity of sports like football, soccer, and laser tag it’s harder than ever to find a hobby which can be enjoyed without breaking a sweat.  And since I have a principled opposition to breaking a sweat, being tired, and all other symptoms of unnecessary movement, it is becoming difficult to find an excuse to leave my apartment.  I mean, if I wanted to move around a lot, would I have taken a job that requires me to do nothing but sit in a chair and move my finger muscles over a keyboard for eight hours a day?  No, I would not have.  I would have continued working as a Target manager where I was required to use my legs more than I was comfortable with.

The problem with living in Southern California and hating exercise is that people out here aren’t really cool with that.  If you don’t want to spend every spare minute doing something outside they assume you’re sick or sad or some kind of deviant.  They constantly invite you to come out and chase balls around courts/fields/abandoned warehouses/etc without ever thinking, “hey, maybe if I got a dartboard and/or hot tub Kent would be more excited about hanging out.”

Body boarding is my answer.  Thanks to body boarding, I can now accept invitations to do things outside.  When one of my roommates says, “hey Kent, we’re going to the beach, you wanna come?” instead of thinking, “man, that sounds like a lot of work, I think I’ll stay here and watch the rest of this Meryl Streep movie” I think, “yeah, that might be nice.  I’ll sit on my floatie board and maybe catch a nap out there.”  And so I go.  I flop around in the surf for a couple hours.  I catch a few waves.  I pray for a shark attack somewhere down the beach, cause how awesome would that be?  And then I go home, content that I made the most of my day without trying very hard.

So I’m going to keep riding my boogie board.  I’ll probably never be able to do a flip on it.  Shoot, I’ll probably never be able to steer it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is: I have a hobby which can be done both outdoors and in my sleep.  It isn’t much, but it’s all I have.  So don’t you judge me.  Laugh at my flippers if you want.  Hit me with your surfboard if you must.

But don’t you dare judge me.

For the better part of the past two decades, mine and Brett’s relationship was one of, what I’d like to think was mutual, respect and affection.  I thought he was the coolest.  I thought his accent was sweet.  I thought his Wranglers commercial was sweet.  I thought it was sweet that he used to be addicted to Vicodin.  I thought his wife was hot.

But then, without warning or provocation, he went all Tiger Woods and abandoned the only people who have ever loved him in order to shack up with the NFL’s equivalent of a Perkins waitress: The Minnesota Vikings.  As has been well-documented on ESPN and Jared Allen’s Twitter feed, Brett has spent most of the Obama presidency joining, rejoining, retiring from, and thinking about retiring from the Minnesota Vikings.

For most of the sporting public, the annual Brett Favre Retirement Fair has been nothing but fun.  It has the fame mongering of Jersey Shore, the high stakes of Mad Men, and only slightly less substance abuse than both.  At the very least, it is more watchable than the Little League World Series.

Not so with me.  For me, it has been like watching my father contemplate on national television whether or not he loves me anymore.  When dad decided to run away with the homely blonde girl with the braids from across the river, I was the one left sifting through the rubble of the last fifteen years of my life.

I wanted to hate Brett.  Lord knows, I tried to hate him.  I bought an Aaron Rodgers jersey.  I disparaged him to anyone who would listen.  I got addicted to Vicodin just to prove I could beat it faster than he did.  None of it worked.  He was still Brett Favre.  He was still the best there ever was.  He was still roughly four times the quarterback Eli Manning can ever hope to be.  Even as he dismantled the Packers (twice) last season I couldn’t hate him.  How do you hate a 40 year-old grandpa who can throw a perfect spiral 30 yards downfield?  That’s like hating a sunset wedding on the edge of the Grand Canyon.  And that’s not something I’m prepared to do.

I love Brett.  He may be a whiny little diva – and he most certainly is that – but I can’t help but love him.  You want to know how much I love him?  This much: I drove to San Francisco this weekend just to see him.  I spent 12 hours in a car (round trip).  I spent over $200 on hotel, food, gas, ticket, homeless street performers, and chowder bowls.  I slept 3-deep in a tiny bed at the Holiday Inn.  I bought “tailgating supplies” near the stadium in one of the sketchiest grocery stores I’ve ever seen.  I wore an Aaron Rodgers jersey to a Vikings/49ers game which paved the way for me to be called “faggot” by several dozen people I’ve never met. (Note: interesting that this is the go-to insult in San Francisco.)  I didn’t get to bed until 4:30am on Monday and I was expected at work by 8:00.  

I did all of this to watch Brett Favre play in a game that didn’t count for a team that I hate.  He was in the game for four plays.  Two passes, one handoff, and a sack.  That’s it.  All told, it took less than five minutes.  I spent most of those five minutes holding up four fingers and screaming things like “pay your respects” and “make the playoffs and we’ll talk” at some guy in a Michael Crabtree jersey two seats down from me.  Brett spent the rest of the game on the sideline and I spent the rest of the game trying not to get stabbed by increasingly belligerent Niners fans.

You wanna know how I know I’ll always love Brett?  I’d do it again in a heartbeat.  $200 for five minutes with Favre?  Worth it, totally worth it.

My message to octogenarians and their ilk is this: you need to learn how to use computers.

It was cute for awhile.  Your fear of the digital world was almost endearing at first. We all had a laugh when you said, “who glued this typewriter to my television?”  We couldn’t help but chuckle as you wrote your name in Microsoft Paint before getting bored and wandering off to look for some cottage cheese.  You were so innocent, so ignorant – childlike in your amazement and helplessness.  You were funny.

Well the joke’s over, Grandpa.  Your campaign against all things computer has now moved past amusing and settled somewhere between annoying and enraging.  Those typewriter-TVs have been with us for thirty years now.  You need to learn how they work.  They’ve been around longer than most of your grandkids.  You know how to work your grandkids don’t you?  You give them candy and in return they sit quietly while you tell your Dust Bowl stories.  Computers are no different.  You give them sequences of letters and symbols and they give you jokes about house cats that you can send to your extended family via electronic mail.  What’s so hard about that?

Here’s what’s so baffling about your persistent techno-ignorance: you, or at least most of you, are aware of computers’ potential.  You’ve seen what they’re capable of.  You’ve heard fantastical tales of spreadsheets and power points.  Someone once told you that if you punch the right buttons at the right time and in the right order, you can convince your computer to mail consumer products to your house.  Crazy right?  Actually no, it’s not crazy.  It’s reality.  It only seems crazy because you’ve spent your life as a computer owner changing your desktop background and sampling screensavers.  As a result, you have a hard time opening email attachments and the home shopping network is starting to look like a science fiction movie.

I don’t want to be insensitive.  I know getting old isn’t always as fun as Regis Philbin makes it look.  You guys have a lot to deal with.  You’ve got your routines and your habits, your collections of state-themed shot glasses and your model trains, and the modern world is constantly screwing things up for you.  You don’t have the time or the energy to master a foreign technology.  I get it.  I’m sure when I’m seventy and kids are putting lift kits and 12” subwoofers on their hovercars I’ll be just as confused and crotchety as you.

But that’s then and this is now.  And right now, I want you to figure out how to operate “that one program that looks like a piece of graph paper…What’s it called? Excellent?  Accelerate?  Yeah, that one.”  The computer is the most powerful tool ever invented, no disrespect to your John Deere riding mower.  The internet contains more information than all the world’s libraries combined.  To take those tools and do nothing with them but play 25 games of Free Cell is like being handed a time machine and using it to visit yesterday.  It’s wasteful to the point of being offensive.

This is especially true for those of you who are still attempting to participate in the working world.  A Windows 95 user sitting in the safety of his own assisted-living apartment is one thing.  A guy using a floppy disk in a corner office is something else entirely.  He’s irresponsible, maybe even dangerous.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars are lost every year on people like this.  People who insist they “have a system” and swear that computers will never work as well as filing cabinets do.

The jig is up.  We’re on to you.  We know you don’t have a system.  We know you don’t have a “way that works for you.”  What you have is a fear of hitting “ctrl + x” because you’re afraid your document will never come back.  You have a suspicion that the secret world government will use your internet history to steal the 5,000 piece puzzle you have framed on your wall.  You have computer-literate subordinates who come behind you and transpose your work into an emailable format.  I am one of those subordinates and I’m tired of it.

I feel like a carpenter’s apprentice watching his boss drive nails with a rock because he doesn’t trust hammers.  Think of computers like that.  They’re hammers with on/off switches.  They’re tools, plain and simple.  They weren’t created by aliens and sent here to enslave us.  They were invented by Al Gore and sent here to make your life easier.  Ignore them if you want, but know that if you do, there will soon be 13 year-olds who are better at your job than you are.

You think computers are the devil.  I get it.  But they’re also not going anywhere.  What was it that Rev. Jesse Jackson said about the devil, “If you can’t beat him, join him?”  That sounds about right.  You’ve been fighting technology for three decades now.  You’re not going to beat it; would you please join it?  The sooner you do the sooner you can get back to filling your birdfeeders and shooing kids off your front lawn.  I’m ready for that, and I know you are too.

Thank you for your time.

(Note: If you’re reading this on a computer, it appears you are already making headway.  Congratulations.  If your grandchild has printed this out and taped it to the front of your desktop, you’ve still got some work to do.)

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I am not bitter about this.  I don’t feel that my development has been stunted because I know more Starbucks employees than I do gang members.  I don’t feel my worldview has been somehow dimmed because I can speak intelligently on the difference between Lowe’s and Home Depot but can’t tell you how to make “purple drank.”  My parents felt it important that my 2^nd grade teacher have a higher IQ than me and that my ride to school passed car dealerships instead of trash can fires.  So they moved me and my brothers to the suburbs.  As a result, I have never participated in a drive-by or eaten at Popeyes.  Woe is me.

While my affection for suburbia runs deep, I’ve also spent enough time in 7-11 bathrooms to realize that the suburbs aren’t perfect.  Chick-fil-A isn’t open on Sundays.  The Wendy’s by my apartment took the Junior Bacon Cheeseburger off the dollar menu.  Some movie theatres still don’t have stadium seating.  I think you’ll agree, suburban living isn’t always a cakewalk.  And even when it is a cakewalk, it’s probably not a delicious Baskin Robbins ice-cream cake.  So what if we have driveways and garages?  Life is still hard; doesn’t matter if you live on Twisting Oak Terrace or Martin Luther King Blvd.

That said, there is one thing the graduates of Malcolm X College have that me and my friends in the Whole Foods dining area do not: excitement.  It goes back to those drive-bys and trash can fires I mentioned earlier.  While not always pretty or pleasant, life in the hood is at least more dangerous than life in the burbs.  Which means it’s more exciting.  Which means it’s more fun.

After five decades of neighborhood watch associations, responsive police departments, and unnecessary stoplights at inconsequential intersections, city planners have all but eradicated danger from suburban life.  Rare is the problem that cannot be solved with a trip to a Wal-Mart Supercenter.  Rarer still the crime which cannot be prevented by taking away your kid’s BB gun.  There is precious little to be afraid of in the suburbs these days.  The pit bulls are on leashes.  The fevers are medicated.  The crust gets cut off our sandwiches.  The suburbs are like a PG version of the real world.  And, as anyone who’s ever watched The Departed on FX can tell you, the PG version is never as good.

The soft, cuddly nature of suburbia is a detriment to those who live there.  Mankind was created for struggle.  It’s part of who we are.  From the cave men days to the college dorm room, man has always been at war with his surroundings.  The timeless tales of human achievement that we love so much (i.e. The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, etc) are replete with danger and near death experiences.  Life was not meant to be spent supervising self-propelled mowers and arguing about property lines.  It was meant to be spent in terror and confusion, half-naked but fully alive atop a mastodon as you prepare to jam your spear into its brain.  The suburbs could do with a few more mastodon hunts.

In the absence of any real threats against my life, I have had to become more proactive in my approach to finding peril in suburbia.  It’s not easy, but it’s out there.  For example, during college my roommates and I convinced ourselves that the mailman who lived next door was a psychotic killer who subsisted mostly on squirrel meat and human flesh.  It seemed a bit of a stretch at first, but the more we talked about it the more believable it became.  Finally, when I spent a night awake in bed, terrified because I was convinced that the mailman was burrowing through my bedroom wall, I knew it had all been worth it.

Creating terrible lies about your neighbors is one way to make the suburbs more exciting, but there are others.  For example, both my drivers license and my car tags are expired.  I’ve known about this for awhile, yet I refuse to renew them.  This is partly because the DMV makes me wish I’d never been born.  But it’s also because a routine traffic stop could result in massive fines and potential imprisonment.  You think that knowledge adds a little intensity to my morning commute?  Absolutely it does.

That’s the great thing about finding adventure in the suburbs: you usually have to break a rule to do it.  Danger and rebellion – two for the price of one!  Has it been awhile since you’ve lived in constant fear for your life?  Leave your car doors unlocked when you’re stopped at a red light next to a sketchy hobo.  Have you grown unfamiliar with the bittersweet pleasure of abject terror?  Try leaving your cell phone on when your plane is taking off.  The knowledge that a single text message could kill you and everyone with you might be just the jolt your system needs to wake you from your suburban stupor.

Am I suggesting you recklessly endanger your life?  Of course not.  Well, okay, yes I am, but do it within reason.  Don’t go doing something crazy like leaving your garage door open overnight or driving to the city after dark.  That’s just stupid.  There’s a fine line between death and daring, but that’s where you need to live.  You want to get the feeling that you could lose your life at any moment.  But you don’t want to actually lose it.  Then you’ll just be dead and that’s no fun for anyone.

Be smart about this.  Should you climb around a half-constructed parking garage like it’s a jungle gym?  Yeah, that sounds good.  Should you drive by a police station firing your BB gun out the window?  Probably not.  But maybe.

You’ll figure out the rest as you go.

(An article of clarification: By “grown-up” I mean any and all human persons over the age of thirty-five.  I also mean any person between the age of twenty-three and thirty-five whose life includes any two of the following: a spouse, a child, a mortgage, a 401k, a crock pot, a graduate degree, a pet cat, a mattress valued at over $700, frequent flyer miles.)

Most people entering the grown-up world have a skewed impression of what they will find there.  This is because, for the first two decades of our lives, our interactions with adults are always on their terms.  They teach our classes, coach our teams, preach our sermons, and sire our siblings.  They dress better than we do, cry less than we do, and use words like “dilapidated.”  In this way, they are able to convince younger generations that they are mature, responsible citizens who have figured stuff out and generally have their lives in order.

Well, after two years of eavesdropping on secretary gossip hour (aka “lunch”) and being cc’d on catty email exchanges, I can report that grown-ups categorically and unequivocally do not have their stuff [sic] together.  Look past their business casual attire and improved vocabularies and you will find most working adults to be as petty and insecure as your average fraternity pledge.  It’s shocking and more than a little disappointing.  I was told the drama and backstabbing would end after cheerleading camp.  Apparently not.  Turns out the “grown up” in grown-up is almost as big a misnomer as the “Dr” in Dr. Phil.

Being a young professional is like that one Thanksgiving when you finally realized that your family was way more messed up than you thought.  Before that you sat at the kids table with your cousins and entertained yourself by pouring water on your leftovers and trying to get your little brother to drink it.  You had no clue what was going on at the adult table, but no one was yelling so you figured everything was okay.

Then you became a teenager.  You got promoted to the big table and realized (1) you were now expected to eat the food on your plate and (2) your aunts and uncles made the contestants on Jerry Springer look refreshingly well-adjusted.  When you were young and oblivious, everyone seemed so happy, so…normal.  Then you figured out what sarcasm, passive aggression, and “daddy issues” were and you realized everyone was most definitely not normal.

Uncle John’s a drunk.  Aunt Mary’s an instigator.  You’re not sure what your older cousin Bryan is, but you overheard something about “blah, blah, blah – addicted to pain pills.”  By the time the pumpkin pie is served you’ve stopped asking about the family tree and started planning your emancipation.

The same dynamic is at play from the breakroom to the boardroom.  When you are hired by a company, you are permitted to see behind the curtain and into the grown-up world.  It’s assumed that you are “one of the guys” and, therefore, it’s safe to drop the charade.  No one has to maintain the pretense of professionalism anymore because you’re in on the secret.  You know it’s a joke; you’re not going to tell anyone.

You see emails and realize your supervisor doesn’t know how to spell the contraction for “you are”.  You sit in on conference calls and figure out that that guy down the hall is a vindictive, tactless little prick.  You go out for post-work drinks and realize your Uncle John – who works in sales – is still a drunk.

No one’s getting stuffed into lockers and corporate cars don’t get shoe-polished nearly as much as they should, but, in all the ways that matter, the interactions at most offices have yet to graduate from high school.  The name calling has evolved from “douche” to “downsized”, and the dirty jokes are based on experience rather than speculation.  Apart from that and the double Windsors, there is little to distinguish the average corporate director from his eleventh-grade son.

I’m not saying grown-ups are bad people.  They’re just that: people.  They’re messy.  They’ve got baggage.  They see more of themselves in the contestants on cable TV dating shows than they’d like to admit.  I’m not upset about it and I don’t blame them for it.  So they’ve been on the earth for forty some-odd years.  So what?  Does that mean they should know how to compose a grammatically correct email or make an effort to conceal their outright disdain for one another?  I don’t see why it should.

It does, however, mean I’m going to have to look a little harder to find someone I want to be like when I grow up.

Since 25 is widely regarded as the age by which college graduates are expected to have their acts together some of you are probably wondering how I’m holding up.  The short answer is: better than expected.  The long answer is: Katy Perry and Scarlett Johansson are both 25 and if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

In fact, 72 hours into my twenty-fifth year, I am pleased to report that it is not half the joyless post-post-adolescent moonscape I anticipated.  Not yet anyway.  Though I am now expected to be able to do adult things like apply for a car loan, write an RSVP, and hold my liquor, I am also three years younger than the average eHarmony user and that – I suppose – is something.

I do, however, have one complaint I’d like to bring against 25.  It is this: turning 25 is the first “milestone birthday” that is not accompanied by an increase in freedom or the introduction of new vices into my life.  I mean, technically I guess I am allowed to do some things today that I could not do last week.  I can rent a car.  I can run for congress.  I can…nope, that’s pretty much it.  And that’s my point.  Who gives a crap about that stuff?

When compared with all the fun that comes with turning 16, 17, 18, and 21, the “privileges” that come with turning 25 seem so insignificant as to be almost offensive.  It’s like when I was growing up and my dad would pay me $2.00 to mow our gigantic back yard.  I was like, “Either pay me a fair wage or tell me I have to do it for free.  Don’t patronize me with this pittance like I’m some Bangladeshi lottery winner.”  I feel the same way about the token milestones that come with turning 25.  Either wrap them up with everything else that happens when I turn 18 or tell me I can never do them.  They’re not cool enough to have their own year.

The problem is, this deficit of party favors continues with pretty much every birthday from here on out.  With the exception of 65, every big birthday from here to the grave is special only because it ends in a zero or five.  While I can appreciate a multiple of five as much as the next sixth grade graduate, you’ll excuse me if I don’t soil myself with excitement.

This is why people get so depressed about turning 25, 26, 27, 28…okay, pretty much every age after 24.  They have successfully survived another year on the planet and all they have to show for it is more body hair and the growing fear that they will probably never play a sport professionally.

Why have we allowed this to persist?  Hasn’t anyone realized that it is contributing to midlife crises and adult obesity?  Isn’t it time we create more allowances and privileges that can only be enjoyed after achieving a certain age?  The birthdays of our late-teens and early-twenties were fantastic because we were given something better than presents: we were given permission.  Permission to drive.  Permission to see movies with nudity.  Permission to smoke and drink and abuse the poor sucker who’s driving us home.

Why let it stop at 21?  Why not sprinkle the other decades of life with new opportunities and open doors?  Or at least permission to experiment with dangerous, potentially habit-forming narcotics.

For example, what if we let 35 year-olds do shrooms?  Unless they’re a member of the Rolling Stones they’ve probably tired of nicotine and alcohol by that point.  Plus, they’ve probably got several kids and a spouse who is 25-40% less-attractive than (s)he was when they were married.  If that’s not a person in need of a mind-blowing trip, I don’t know who is.  In a similar vein, can someone explain to me why people over seventy are not permitted to smoke marijuana?  Let’s fix that right away.

We should require that you be 25 before you are permitted to leave the country.  Not only would this stimulate the lagging summer-internship industry, it would also stem the tide of American virginities being left in European nightclubs.  Everyone wins.

What if we created a special traffic lane only accessible to people aged 30-55 with a speed limit 10 MPH faster than the other lanes?  These are experienced drivers.  They know how to tailgate effectively.  If they’re drunk, they’ve probably got a system for how to drive drunk safely.  Let’s let them go faster!  (It should go without saying that women of all ages will be forbidden from using this lane.)

A few other ideas:

• No one under the age of 42 is allowed to read Nietzsche.
• Once you turn 50 you can order McDonald’s breakfast anytime you want.
• On your 66^th birthday you are permitted to murder one (1) non-endangered aquatic mammal.  Preferably a dolphin.
• After your 78^th birthday you can urinate in public parks and outdoor shopping malls.
• If you are over 100 and are still able to get out of bed, you are permitted to do whatever the hell you want.  Period.

Those are just a few suggestions to get the ball rolling.  Feel free to mail your own ideas to your congressman.  Let’s get this taken care of.  My 30^th birthday is right around the corner, and if someone doesn’t hand me something crazy to smoke when I get there I’m going to be seriously depressed.