Note to Self #12

Hitting "snooze" on your alarm clock will make you late for work.

Good Morning!

I don't have any right to complain. My misery is entirely self-imposed and it would be disingenuous to wax sentimental about my plight. Did I just use the conditional? Let me rephrase with more accurate grammar: I will be disingenuous as I wax sentimental about my plight.

Evenings are a soft landing. You can miss your bedtime by an hour or two and pay no immediate price. Sleep isn't like mom in that it forgives easily when you don't call. Mornings, on the other hand, are harsh. Commitments made at a less sober time can be pressing and the snooze button only provides so much relief. The light outside only gets brighter as the reality of life's travails dawn with the new day. Mornings are a daily Monday; a regular reminder of the curse of time.

Then there is the bed. Beds are like relationships in that they are really easy to get into but terribly hard to get out of. I've invested quite a bit into making my bed a hospitable place to rest and recharge. I've got a firm mattress, a pillow and I even washed my sheets once. Getting out means leaving behind a cardinal comfort. If you're a heavy guy like me, your body creates a form-fitting mold in the mattress that is so inviting, you'd listen to Nancy Pelosi if it meant curling up inside.

Anyone who is cheerful in the morning be cursed. Smiling within two hours of waking up is like cracking a joke at a funeral. Coup de don't do that. Whilst the normal world is wiping the sleepies out of our eyes, you have to be a danged whippoorwill. Why weren't you so much fun last night?

But mornings can be cheated. At least, that's what I told myself three days ago, when made a soft landing on my evening and stayed up past the godly bedtime. I had to be at work for the early shift at General Mills the next day, but that didn't keep me from fooling away the early morning hours, answering email, surfing the net and doing pretty much what you're doing now.

When I finally cashed it in, my face had the tired rigidity of a corpse. I didn't worry about it; that's why they call it beauty sleep, right?

You know in the movies, when the main character gets out of bed, how the only thing that is at all out of place is a few wisps of their otherwise perfectly coiffed hair? That morning I woke up looking like The Joker. Or maybe it was Sienna Miller without her makeup (you don't want to know). My alarm buzzed and my radio turned on to my favorite sports analysts, who seemed much to chipper for 6:00.

I have an old person problem. When I wake up, I can't get back to sleep. Some of my friends can snore away hours and hours of their lives one morning at a time, but not me. The buzzing alarm is the finale to all my sweet dreams.

Thanks to the miracles of modern chemistry, I managed to survive the day. It actually turned out pretty normal - or as normal a day as a proud derelict with a humor blog can have. So encouraged was I by the feat, that I tried it again the next night.

If I was Sienna Miller without makeup the first morning, I was Queen Latifah on day two. This morning was day three and I am beginning to see why you can't cheat mornings. I have this amazing new skill. I can stare at a clock and watch time pass and actually be entertained by it. My new favorite facial expression is the slack jaw and I have some severe contact lens problems, but the biggest problem is what I'm going to do tomorrow.

My friends now await their 1 AM GTalk messages and I am reconnecting with the night owls in my life. I can't pull the plug on all of them now. I have a big cyber meeting with my new buddies at World of Warcraft tonight, but if I attend I'll be Dick Clark tomorrow morning. Time can be so cruel!

Hire FCN!

If you watch televised news, you may have seen the picket lines forming in front of the formidable buildings of Hollywood production houses as a few hundred writers went on strike this week. If you don't watch the televised news, you may have read the same in any of the plethora of news articles on the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike.

If you don't read the news (an understandable sentiment given how dark most news stories are anyway) and instead get your take on the world exclusively from FCN (equally dark, I'm afraid), here's what's happening in Tinsel Town:

500 hundred people with super cushy jobs and excellent benefits, some making as much as $5 million a year, are upset with the current state of TV and film writing. It's unclear exactly what they don't like about it, but they're really fired up. Control central for the WGA (7000 West Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048) printed off a bunch of snazzy signs for these disgruntled millionaires to tote around and single handedly ground the humor, film and TV writing industry to a halt.

For writers, the slogans the strikers came up with were downright pedestrian, almost like generic AFL-CIO fare; they were the kind of prefab garbage the automakers might use. One would think writers would have a message that is at least halfway creative like "WE WRITERS BE STRIKERS," but the two signs I've seen so far say nothing more than "ON STRIKE" (doh!) and "UNFAIR IS UNFUNNY." Actually, sir, we in the real world find your disappointment with a $400,000 paycheck to be the height of hilarity. It's something like the laugh we get from seeing a pie thrown in Curly's face.

Here at FCN, we think the only thing we think is atrocious is having the funny stuff pulled off the TV. As avowed derelicts, television content is very important to us and the negative impact of the WGA's decision is reverberating across the fruited plain. Jay Leno had to broadcast a rerun last night and his jokes, which were just barely funny the first time, came off even flatter. David Letterman was forced to actually think for himself and Stephen Colbert held his dumb look for much too long.

Speaking directly to the strikers, your strike has a ripple effect throughout the entire entertainment industry. We all know Jessica Alba can't say anything smart without a writer; how dare you expose her? What will Patrick Dempsey be without a script? How will Ang Lee churn out his garbage movies without a half decent writer? I'll wager George Clooney will be a shadow of his Sexiest Man Alive glory without your eloquence; do you even care about the Cloonster and his injured girlfriend? Will you force all of Hollywood into a vicious choice between Larry David style improve and reality TV? What a terrible dichotomy! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!

As usual, FCN comes to the rescue (dun dun dun!) and has a perfect solution for all involved. Why not hire the FCN staff to do the humor writing? We aren't members of any union and would happily work for half the price of the WGA folks, although the studios would have to give us some free DVDs and Mommy G would have to approve the projects. We've shown we can write great love stories, action adventure and everything in between. We've done character development, thematic work and educational. We have even dabbled in current events humor, a resume item that we would highlight when pitching our skills to the late night humorists.

Plus we're unknown. You wouldn't have to give us top billing in the credits and it will be a few years before we begin making extreme demands and start going Hollywood. Just give us a chance and we will prove to be as jocose as any WGA writer. You can take that to the bank - or at least the picket line.

So come on, WGA. We're waiting.

You did what?

As most of you are probably unaware, I recently procured gainful employment. In an effort to reform my derelict self and prove to the world that I can actually perform meaningful and productive labor tasks at the directive of an employer, I joined the ranks of the California work force. A couple weeks ago, I began my position as Assistant Cereal Technician for General Mills (Or is it Assistant to the Cereal Technician? I get the two confused).

I still live with my parents, sleep in my clothes, take extended shaving, shower and general cleanliness vacations, skip class, make crank calls and generally behave like a poorly adjusted derelict, but now I have a job.

My job requires me to stare at hundreds of thousands of bite sized chunks of Wheaties cereal and watch for any irregularities like rampant mold and fungi, discolored clumps, soggy morsels or, and this is particularly disturbing, pieces of uncooked human and animal flesh. If I see anything, I write it down and make a report of my findings in the evening. If the problem is especially egregious, I have a button that sends my boss a signal asking him to come down and scoop the offending material off the conveyor belt. Most of the time, though, he just lets things go by.

My boss is a stickler about alerting the media and he does all the talking when the health inspectors arrive, which has been only once so far, but that visit was precipitated by more job training than I had had to that date. My technical job description reads "batter mixer," but really I'm the last barrier between you and the Wheaties microbes.

Breakfast of champions, my pinkie finger. Don't think about that too hard.

While this new job cuts a terrible blow to my idle time, it has some distinct advantages. First, I get free cereal. I can take home for myself anything I flag as below General Mills' impossibly ignoble quality standards. Second, the pay is really good for a job that has me doing little more than sleeping in front of a conveyor belt.

The strangest thing about working all day is coming home to discover all the things that are different about your life. It's one thing to be away at school during the winter and spring months, but family life can change radically in the weeks before school begins.

The other evening I came home after a slow day at work, pulled my wallet and keys out of my pockets and plopped down at the dinner table to wolf down a few bites of suspicious cereal. Reginald, a family friend who uses our house as shelter from the elements, wondered into the room and made an announcement:

"I spent over fifty bucks today on clothes."

"Goodness, Reginald!" I sputtered from behind a moldy chunk. "That's more money for clothes than I will probably spend the rest of my life, unless of course these jeans tear. What on earth were you getting?"

"A red scarf." My curious look prodded him to continue and he added: "For the YCL meeting on Friday."

"YCL?"

"Young Communists League." I stopped chewing, allowing an unidentified food-like object to slip through my slack jaw and into my bowl with a plop. A communist, in my own house? Was being a communist the in thing these days or was Reginald being an outlier?

"Yeah. Anyway, I'll need your car again tonight."

"Again?" I didn't recall giving permission for the first time.

"Oh, you hadn't heard? I took Luce out the other day. You know Luce, right?" Click, bang. In my mind, Reginald was pasted against the wall with a .45 slug between his eyes. Luce wouldn't go out with me but she would be seen in public with this good for nothing Commie? I would definitely be calling Luce about this. But wait, she'd prohibited that. I was stuck. Reginald and Luce would get married and have a dozen little commies. They would take over the earth and establish a new world order. I would be their Godfather and have to reign in my emotions every time I saw the two of them together.

No longer hungry, I pushed my food aside and answered, "yes, I know Luce."

Reginald forged ahead. "Sorry about your pants."

"What?"

"The grass stains should come off with the application of a little force and detergent, but those grease stains are there to last."

I looked down at my pants and noticed for the first time that my best pair of jeans had been ruined. I hadn't noticed the problem when I put the pair on in the morning but now I could clearly see streaks of green and black laced across them. I'd been at work all day and nobody had said anything.

"Reginald?" I leaped forward to seize the derelict in front of me who had abused my absence to toy with my life. He dodged deftly and ran for the door, swiping my keys with him. A few moments later, I heard the soft roar of my car and the crash of our neighbor's trash can as he sped away, probably to join Luce at the young communists meeting.