Last night the NFL held it’s annual Pro Bowl.  Unlike the all-star games of the other major sports in North America, this game is played at the end of the regular season and not in the middle of it.  Thus, this game has no significance whatsoever.  It doesn’t decide which conference will have home field advantage in the Super Bowl.  It has no bearing on players’ salaries (though they do receive bonuses for playing), and it doesn’t affect any team’s pick in the draft.  The Pro Bowl is so insignificant that the all-star players who play in the Super Bowl don’t have to play in the Pro Bowl.  As such, the players don’t take it seriously.  To prevent injuries, defenses are only allowed to play man-coverage with two defensive backs, and players are told not to tackle too aggressively.  The game is essentially reduced to a bunch of millionaires playing glamorized touch football.  The irony of the Pro Bowl is that it features the game’s best players playing the worst game of the season.  It’s so bad that watching the game makes me think that I could run the ball against these defenses, pass for 310 yards, and return punt returns for touchdowns.  The Pro Bowl sucks and makes me feel like even I could be a great football player, even though I don’t have an ounce of athleticism in my body.

Watching the Pro Bowl fundamentally describes how I feel about listening to music by Creed.

I started using Twitter for the same reason everyone else started using Twitter, and that reason was everyone else was using Twitter.  When I signed up, I immediately followed people I admired:  authors, musical artists, comedians, Google, athletes, and journalists.  But now, many of these people seldom update.  It seems like the only things that are occurring on my Twitter feed right now are (1) Jim Rome talking about how much he loves Twitter and (2) food trucks telling me where they’re parked.

It’s no coincidence that the rising popularity of Twitter and gourmet food trucks occurred simultaneously.  In fact, Mark Manguera should be honored with some sort of Nobel Prize for discovering a practical use for Twitter.  Manguera was the founder of Kogi Korean BBQ (a Korean/Mexican fusion food truck) and he famously used Twitter to tell his followers where his truck was at.  This was largely credited for beginning the food truck revolution.  Food trucks popped up from out of nowhere.  I now follow over ten food trucks on Twitter, with cuisines ranging from Filipino tapa bowls (Tapa Boy) to hand-crafted donut iced cream (Lake Street Creamery).  These food trucks inundate my Twitter timeline at least twice a day and try to convince me that I am hungry.  I chase them all around the San Fernando Valley and wait in long lines to eat food I don’t normally eat in places I don’t normally visit.  This is the cultural byproduct of new social media:  It makes us behave in ways which aren’t normal.

Here is an example: Perhaps the most unoriginal of the Los Angeles food trucks is the one that specializes in grilled cheese sandwiches.  This is a type of food that is so simple, boring, and easy to make at home that restaurants figured out a long time ago to not serve it.  However, this truck is one of the most popular in LA.  Why?  Because the goons that run this truck figured out that Twitter will make people do anything.  Everyday they tweet about how great the weather is for a grilled cheese sandwich (it’s always mild in LA) and post the location of where they are “melting”.  People flock to their location, wait in hour-long lines, and pay over $12 for a grilled cheese sandwich with tater tots.  This might seem overpriced, but you’re also paying for the experience of eating outside standing up with other curious yuppies who want to dine like eight-year-olds.

This may be the most important impact of Twitter.

When I was a freshman in college I lived in the dormitories.  The dorms at the University of California, San Diego were arranged in suites with six dorm rooms sharing a common living area and bathroom.  There were eight students per suite (two double rooms and four single rooms).  The demographic of my suite was mostly representative of the demographics of UCSD and La Jolla, California (the town in which UCSD is in):  four white guys and four Asian guys.  Across the hall from our suite was a girls’ suite, whose demographics closely matched ours.  We all got along well, but mostly we just got together to (in this exact order) watch Friends, study chemistry, get drunk on Boone wine coolers, pretend to like gangsta rap, and theorize about partying at a place called “San Diego State”.  This was, for the most part, the extent of having a good time at the most conservative research university in the the most conservative town in the most conservative big city in California in 1995.

There was one person in this assemblage of Asian and white students who didn’t hang out as much.  His name was Peter and he lived in the dorm room next to mine.  He was the archetype loner who rarely talked to anyone and mostly kept to himself.  When he did speak it was usually about something that no one cared about:  physics, his bicycle, or the fact that his Discman never skipped no matter how hard he dropped it.  He had no friends and wasn’t involved with any clubs or fraternities.  He wasn’t particularly nice, but he wasn’t overtly rude.  He was socially inept; one time he was laughing so hard at his own bad joke (that no one understood) that he farted.  He never mentioned any existence of a family.  Other than that he was just a quiet white kid with shaggy hair.  Oh, and he liked to wear trench coats and listen to Smashing Pumpkins’ Bullet with Butterfly Wings while locked in his dorm room all day long.

You may be thinking that I am heading toward a bad ending with this narrative about a weirdo named Peter.  He probably sounds like the kind of guy who spent all his time in his dorm room devising anarchic plans while listening to angry rock music.  You may think that he’s your prototypical mass murderer who carries semi-automatic weapons in his coat and shoots students in the middle of biology lecture.  Peter never did that.  As far as I know, he graduated with an engineering degree and went on with his life.  More important than the fact that Peter never killed anyone was the feeling that no one ever feared that he would.

That was the climate of college campuses fifteen years ago, but it’s drastically different today.  If my college experienced were transferred from 1995 to 2011, I assume that we would all be batshit scared of Peter.  Back then, weirdos were just weirdos.  Nowadays, weirdos are nutcases that people want to hide from.  On January 8, 2011, college dropout Jared Loughner attempted to assasinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords at a public speaking event in Tuscon, Arizona.  The shooting spree resulted in six deaths and numerous injuries.  Several people who went to school with Loughner said he was pretty much a weirdo and an outcast.  One classmate emailed her friends that she feared that he would someday shoot everyone in class, and another classmate said that she would often sit near the exit of her class for that very same fear.  School officials eventually suspended Loughner from school because they felt that he posed a danger to the students and faculty.  On April 16, 2007, college student Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.  Cho had a long history of depression and anxiety, in addition to a past arrest for stalking.  His abnormal behavior was a cause for fear among his teachers and classmates.  If Loughner and Cho were my dormitory suitemates in 1995, we would all think they were weird, but we would never have been scared that they would blow our heads off.

It seems like being in college now and being in college in 1995 are generations apart, even though it is only a difference of fifteen years.  What has changed?  If this is simply a sign of the times, then it’s safe to assume that we live in a more violent era.  I don’t think that this is just the natural progression of culture.  Like Jon Stewart recently said, I don’t blame political rhetoric for Loughner’s crime just like I don’t blame Marilyn Manson for the Columbine massacre of 1999.  It’s just not true.  What is true is that the students in college right now have spent the entirety of their adolescence under the umbrella of two wars.  One war doesn’t have a clearly defined goal, and the other war was won by us yet we don’t feel like winners.  Neither of these wars seems traditional or makes complete sense to grown-ups, but do they affect our children in any way?  If it’s true that our government is representative of the people, then we must also accept that a senseless and violent government will breed a senseless and violent society.

This is not to say that there has never been gun violence in school.  When I was in high school, there was always the risk of being shot by a gangster, but you were never really scared of these guys.  They would only shoot you if you said hi to their girlfriend or if you looked at them in a funny way.  Other than that, they were cool and would get you beer.  No one was scared of Peter, but today everyone is scared of someone.  Everyone is filled with rage, like rats in cages.

Everyone tells me that I should watch the show Entourage.  Without ever having seen the show, I can already tell that I wouldn’t like it.  Its entire premise seems to focus on whether each character can upstage every other character with witty one-liners.  This is annoying.  If I wanted to see witty one-liners, I would look up stand-up comedians and depressed hipsters on Twitter.  Also, isn’t Entourage just a male version of Sex and the City?  The only obvious difference is that Vincent Chase (played by Adrian Grenier) looks like Mark Sanchez and Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) looks like a horse.  What if SJP got together with John Elway and had a kid?  They could probably enter that thoroughbred in the Kentucky Derby, which is the biggest rip-off in all of sports. Every spring NBC tries to make me watch that “event” by billing it as the “most exciting two minutes in sports.”  NBC executives obviously have never seen Peyton Manning run the two-minute drill, the final minutes of game seven of the Stanley Cup Final, or ANY OTHER SPORT.  I’d rather watch the NBA playoffs.

So, no, I’m not watching Entourage.

Whenever my friends force me to recall my past relationships, what they are really asking is for me to tell them more stories about one particular girl I dated in college.  None of my current friends have ever met this girl, but they’re fascinated by her because for the entire time that we dated, I was seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was a total bitch.  For the entire time that we dated, I never noticed how rude, unhappy, bitter, and petty she was.  As such, they collectively refer to her as “that one bitch.”  They particularly like hearing the story about how she hated the sitcom Friends but never felt the need to stop watching it.  Every Thursday night she and I would watch the show and whenever a comedic moment happened, she would sarcastically yell at the TV, “HAHAHAHA.  THAT’S SO FUNNY.  God this show is so stupid.”  She would continue to pout like that and mock the entire show.  I don’t know why this didn’t bother me at the time.  It wasn’t until years later that I realized, with the help of my friends’ perspective, that she wasn’t very nice.

In any case, there is one thing that this bitch always said that kind of stuck with me.  Like many women, she was hypercritical about her age.  She liked to lament that, “Time moves as fast as your age,” meaning that the higher your age is the faster your life goes by.  This is probably an overly dramatic problem for a college coed, but I can certainly understand her perspective.  When I was eight years old time seemed to not move at all.  Second grade seemed like it lasted forever, and when summer vacation rolled around it seemed like those three months would never end.  Today I am 33-years-old and time does seem like it is moving more quickly; I’m not even certain that 2010 ever happened.  But I’m not sure if this phenomenon is occurring because I am older or because nothing is changing.  Let me explain.

On most weekday evenings I can find myself catching an episode of Friends on syndication.  Friends has been off the air for almost seven years, and since that show ran for ten years, I can find myself watching an episode that is anywhere between seven and seventeen years old.  This is an old show, but when I watch it, it doesn’t seem old.  The show has aged remarkably well.  An episode from 1998 still holds up well today in terms of the characters’ hairstyles, wardrobes, and even in terms of their dilemmas and everyday adventures (i.e. hanging out at an overpriced coffee house).  However, in 1998, watching an episode of, say, Growing Pains from 1985 (thirteen years earlier) seemed like watching old time television.  1985 felt aesthetically from another era.  The thirteen year gap between 1985 and 1998 is dramatically larger than that between 1998 and 2011.  From a scientific standpoint, we know that this is physically impossible because time is constant.  What we’re experiencing is that technology is advancing but cultural change is decelerating, which makes it seem like time is passing by more quickly.  Does that make sense?  How the hell should I know?  I’m not Stephen Hawking.

It’s already midway into the first month of 2011 and I don’t know where all the time has gone.  Everything feels the same.  I’ll be 34 in four months, but will that change anything?  HAHAHAHA THAT’S SO FUNNY.

I am of the belief that one of the best ways to probe the behavior of modern society is by reading blogs (watching TV is the other way).  I read a lot of blogs on topics ranging from entertainment to sports and technology to politics.   I read good blogs and bad blogs.  I read blogs by well respected and eloquent writers, and I read blogs by people who can barely use a QWERTY keyboard.  I read blogs by musicians, photographers, and art students, and I read blogs by sports pundits who will never play the sport they’re critiquing.  I even read Mike Florio.  Many times these blogs stir positive and negative emotions inside me, but I never let those emotions overwhelm me.  I never let it get to a point where I need to comment on the blog and either praise or crucify the blogger because I understand that everyone has a right to their own opinion, whether it is the same as mine or not.  Every blogger is just exercising their First Amendment rights, and that is why I fundamentally respect every blogger and his or her forum.  In a way, I kind of like every blogger. 

With that being said, I fucking can’t stand food bloggers.

Now, there are some good food blogs that I can understand.  These are the ones that post recipes, review restaurants, or just simply talk about food.  The ones that perplex me are the ones by so called “foodies.”  These are people who, I guess, have really strong opinions about food.  There is an unquestionable air of pretentiousness among them.  These are people who like some foods because they’re not popular.  These are people who write things on their blogs like “donuts are so 2009″ and “red velvet?  Ha!  I guess, if you’re like everyone else.”  Statements like these make me feel embarrassed, unfashionable, and dumb.  In all honesty, I really like red velvet cupcakes and I was completely unaware of the great donut fad of two years ago.

I suppose the disconnect between me and these food hipsters is that I still stubbornly view food as a necessity and not a luxury.  To me, being hypercritical about food is like being a snob about air.  It would be like someone from Bellingham, Washington making fun of downtown Houston’s air quality index.  However, clothing is also a necessity, yet fashion blogs don’t seem to irritate me.  I admit that I am somewhat conscious about my wardrobe, so I am pretentious in that regard to an extent.  But no matter how pretentious I become, I don’t see that as ever underscoring the fact that I eat to survive and, because of that, I respect all food whether it was fashionable last spring or not.

Maybe I’m the one who is out of touch with modern society.  Maybe the existence of food blogs means that food is now an American luxury.  It sounds like there might be a social and/or political explanation for all of this, but I’ll leave that for other bloggers to contemplate.  For now I’m going to take a walk outside and breathe Los Angeles’ smoggy air while I still can before someone criticizes me for it.

At some point around the middle of the last decade I stopped listening to pop radio.  This wasn’t an indictment on radio stations or pop music.  There are a lot of modern music radio stations that I like, and there are plenty of pop songs that I enjoy listening to.  However, sometime in the past ten years the traditional “Top 40″ radio station became “Top 15″ radio.  They’ve contracted their playlists to only include the most popular ten to fifteen songs of the past twelve months, and being that today’s most popular music artists mostly make unlistenable music, listening to “Top 40″ radio for any extended amount of time has become a sonic assault on human intelligence.

With that said, over the past week I consciously chose to listen to the local Top 40 radio station on my commute to and from work, which constitutes more than ninety minutes each day.  The reason I decided to do this was because one of my favorite singers has a new single and I wanted to hear her new song on the radio.  (Note:  I have heard this song plenty of times on the internet, but there is still some satisfaction in hearing one of your favorite singers on terrestrial radio.)  This song is What the Hell by Avril Lavigne.  (This may surprise some of you, but don’t attempt to judge me on my taste in music.  Avril Lavigne is better at what she does than you are at whatever it is you think you do for a living, so shut the hell up.)

This was like making a deal with the devil.  In exchange for hearing What the Hell on the radio, I would have to listen to music I don’t normally like.  So far, the devil is getting the better end of the deal.  I have yet to hear What the Hell.  What I have heard is countless hours of unbearable music from people who are theoretically musicians.  This has been an ungratifying experience.  These are my top ten observations from listening to this radio station:

1. I don’t know 70% of the artists on this station.  Many of the songs sound the same and sometimes I don’t even know when a a song ends and another begins.
2. Usher deserves more credit than he is getting, which means that his music shouldn’t be playing on the station I’ve been listening to.
3. The differences between LMFAO and BOB are negligible.
4. The Black Eyed Peas make good music, even though will.i.am is just a dork with a synthesizer.
5. I can hear Katy Perry’s breasts coming through my car speakers
6. Drake doesn’t rap.  He just rhythmically talks like a tool. 
7. Rihanna is awful.
8. As far as this radio station is concerned, rock music is non-existent.
9. There is such a thing as “real hiphop,” and Fareast Movement isn’t it.  They should do a “collabo” with Black Eyed Peas and call it “Collabo.”
10. I’m convinced that Lady Gaga has a bigger penis than I do.

I’m not the first one and I won’t be the last to state the obvious fact that MTV hardly plays music videos.   As of January 2011, the only time of the day that MTV plays music videos is for three hours very early in the morning when mostly everyone on the west coast is still sleeping.  The rest of the day MTV airs reality and game shows aimed at pregnant teenagers, New Jersey people, and homosexual college students.  This hardly constitutes “music television.”  The last music video I can recall seeing in its entirety on MTV was Bye Bye Bye by ‘N Sync, and that was way back when Carson Daly still gave a damn about children’s after-school programming.  In this age and time where it’s cool to be ironic, MTV programming is equivalent to why hipsters think Pabst Blue Ribbon is good beer:  it is what it is not.

The same can be said about MTV’s sister channel VH-1.  What started out as an adult-contemporary music video channel, it is now a bastion of pop-culture that plays on the nostalgia that old people (read: born before 1980) have for things not current.  Over the holidays I was surfing DirecTV and ended up watching an old Saturday Night Live episode on VH-1.  I was watching a Weekend Update segment from, I would guess, around 2001 with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon.  As they were wont to do, these faux news-anchors were acting like sarcastic baboons.  My wife, who was watching with me, laughed a lot and said, “Wow, this is actually funny.”

I should point out that my wife hates Saturday Night Live.  She doesn’t think it’s remotely funny; in fact she thinks that it’s insulting to anything with a functioning brain.  She’s not the only person who shares this sentiment.  Many people say that the golden age of SNL was in the 1970s with iconic comedians like John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Dan Aykroyd.  Current episodes of SNL are widely panned for being unfunny and overly contrived, and I suspect the only reason people tune in is because of its musical guests (being a musical guest on SNL is still a big deal). 

I agree with most people on this issue. I started watching SNL in the early 1990s with Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, and David Spade.  Those guys made me laugh.  Nowadays I feel that SNL isn’t really all that funny, and I’ve felt this way ever since the late 1990s.  However, when I was watching that old episode of Weekend Update last month, I was genuinely laughing, even though I suspected that I wasn’t laughing when I saw that segment when it first aired roughly nine years ago.  I clearly remember hating Jimmy Fallon.  What has changed?  Was Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon’s comedy ahead of its time?  Am I losing my mind?

A while back I read an article in which Lorne Michaels (the creator and executive producer of SNL) responded to criticism about SNL.  He said that SNL is not as bad as people say it is, nor was it as good as people remember it was.  This struck me as being surprisingly prophetic about everything. 

As a whole, we seem to be surprisingly cynical about the present.  We stress out about our jobs, we worry about feeding our kids, and we fear nuclear war.  Every decision we make is approached with skepticism.  Is this show funny?  Who should I vote for?  Will this affect who I am?  When will I die?  Instant information via smartphones and the internet has made the present a hyper-reality.  As such, we’ve become over-nostalgic for the past.  This is why 30-year-olds like watching VH-1 and why extreme Republicans like dressing up as 18^th century New Englanders.  Like Saturday Night Live, we’re under the illusion that the past was always better, even though it was probably the same as it is today.

Something about this makes me feel sad for the present, but then I remember that it is what it is not.

Today is January 11, 2011, but many people, mostly superstitious types, women, and radio DJs, like to point out that it is “1/11/11.”  I suppose that this is a lot of “1′s” in a date, which makes people want to romanticize its significance.  I’m not a warlock or a druid, so I don’t know for certain if there really is anything special about today.  So far the day has started off without anything noteworthy happening.  When I woke up the sky wasn’t black or red; it was normal looking.  The Second Coming is still on hold.  Drake’s music still sucks.  I was told to make a wish at 11:11, and as far as I know, I’m still not a triillionaire.  Maybe I should try again at 11:11pm.

The only reason I know that today’s date has a lot of “1′s” is because people can’t stop talking about it on Facebook and Twitter.  If these social vectors did not exist, I’m fairly certain that January 11, 2011 would only be appreciated for what it really is:  Tuesday.  “1/11/11″ (which is technically “01/11/11″) is really about nothing, which ultimately means that people on the internet can’t stop talking about nothing.

I’m back.  Let’s try this again before November 11.