Don't Ask Me Why I Dream About My Resume

this morning, i had a nightmare. there was no blood or death or anything like that. it's just that twitter had infiltrated the business world and all of our resumes were reduced to 140 characters.

and it was so, so much scarier than any nightmare i have ever had.

the cover letter was done away with altogether.

my resume had been sliced up and spat out in an uncomfortably blunt and less impressive manner-- like flour and whipped cream tossed in a pie tin and called lemon meringue. the twitterification process destroyed all of the profesional progress i had made in the last ten years; it tore out my "stellar interpersonal skills" and "computer savvy" capabilities.

there was no room for my camera sales experience or brand ambassador jobs. tour guiding and vacation-planning were all brought to their greatest common denominator and my one-paged resume fizzled down to one simple line and my cell phone number:

President Wishnack (12/22/84) looking 4 job that include talking 2 strangers. Exp in technology, vacations & dog food. 4152612630. @HiringAgent

and i woke up in a cold sweat.

intoxicated poop segment: part lxxi

because i frequently contribute to skull-a-day, i feel it only fair i'm stealing one of their fan-submitted photos for my own blog.

also, because in a lot of ways, i think my audience will appreciate (or at least expect) this a little more than their audience.

and yes, i'm a slightly embarrassed that i wasn't the one who submitted this poopy skull.

p.s. - thank you everyone who has been sending me an exuberant amount of poop-related material. it makes me feel supported-- like when you run a marathon and people are cheering you on during your last few yards.

To the Generation Before Us that Calls Us Stupid

you invented the internet and the learning system and the computers and it was your dream and never ours. we comply and we're now called stupid for doing so.

you say we take life for granted, that we don't know what it's like to work hard. but you gave us this wikipedia world we never asked for.

i feel a little betrayed.

in middle school we were taught wood shop, metal shop, cooking and even sewing. but i barely made it through the end of that two year school before the teachers all scrapped the idea of manual creations and started expressing the importance of the computer.

by high school even the poorest of poor families had to have a computer at home and actual knowledge became secondary to the ability to "look it up online."

at no point did the kids of that time sit down in a group and vote for a world of digital capabilities. somewhere up in the adult world is where that decision went down. it was the generation before us that made it so our futures would be digital.

all we did is what we were told and that meant adapting to it.

but now those same fools call us stupid?

do you older folk know what it's like to go through a break up with the existence of facebook? to have horribly misread text message fights?

for birthdays our inbox is filled with facebook notices, reminding us that one hundred former classmates wanted to say an ingenuine "happy birthday!" because a little prompt reminded them it was the right day to do so. and we spend a good five to ten minutes trying to delete all those spammy wishes.

happy birthday, digital today.

the generation above us took away the days when we could all sit around and just make conversation and replaced them with iphone apps and twitter. and while it was they who ruined the possibility of those good times, it is us who are looked down upon.

believe me, there are a few of us who fight for life to stay human, but you've made it such a difficult battle.

i mean, do you know what it's like to have facebook remind you that you have severely fallen out of contact with one of your friends and suggest you write on her wall-- even though she died two years ago?

and you know what? i defriended her because of that. digital today has caused me to defriend a deceased person.

you made this world for us and now we have to live in it. and hey, it's not that fucking great. i'd rather sit in a library and thumb through an encyclopedia to get my information. i'd rather call a friend on a land line or visit them at their house.

i could carve blogs into the sides of trees, i don't know. i mean maybe without the ease of the internet i would've actually gone and tried to actually become a writer rather than sitting around half-writing, half-watching youtube videos of funny animals.

maybe that last part is my own fault, but that's not the point.

i'm just getting real sick of being referred to as the lazy generation when this lifestyle was sculpted by the generation before us-- this was their dream except it came true for us.

Camel Snus

it's a known fact i spent months paying bills via focus groups more than once. some were more honest than others, but 90% of sin is caused by having to pay rent. (now that i've typed this, you can say you "read that somewhere" and sound credible. you're welcome.)

i spent time in an mri, having my brain scanned for the portion that controlled addiction and was paid $240 and a large, printable, poster of my brain going through withdrawl. i think being trapped in the mri was worse than the quitting of cigarettes before the study.

but most studies weren't as intense as that.

i spoke of starbucks coffee-in-a-can, video games and the personalities of alcoholic beverages and i did it all to pay rent at a place infested with nine kinds if spiders.

one of the studies i was a part of belonged to camel. those of us who either smoked more than a pack a day or pretended to were invited into a room on the 14th floor of a random soma building to play with magazine cutouts and crayola markers for two hours. no breaks. and no breaks meant no smokes for addicts.

but, the entire time, there was a complimentary tin of camel snus awaiting our lips and gums. the host had explained that we could not leave, but that the snus was all ours.

and we never tried it. we sat through the fiending rather than trying that tiny teabag of tobacco.

afterward, we were told the study was camel's doing-- that it was an attempt to see if smokers were particularly drawn to the idea of nicotine or smoke. they wanted to determine whether or not useless two-hour meetings might result in our in-taking snus or if we'd just like a cigarette.

we all, unanimously, chose smokes.

but they made snus anyway.

i'm not sure why considering the focus group made it very clear the idea would not sell. and since that day, i've seen free tins given away, coupons for discounted tins and now the advertisement above.

similar to camel snus, i don't generally pick up paper-websites from the street vendors, but i have friends who swear by them. inevitably, some of these papers find the end of their lives on my ikea coffee table. and while i don't read them very much (because i can't give up on the article when it gets boring and switch to something more interesting), these sfweeklys and examiners wind up abandoned in my house and sit around calmly awaiting the return of their owner. usually, no one ever comes to pick them up because they've already found a newer one and because i've already cut it to pieces for a collage.

oh, the life of a newspaper.

by the way, did you know web-surfing is a great mind exercise? especially for middle aged people.

but this advertisement caught my eye: "avoid the mainstream"

that is a dangerous thing to be said by a company marketing addiction. and, actually, it is "AVOID THE MaINSTREAM" as if to say, "we didn't capitalize that second-to-last 'a' because that would be too mainstream, and you know."

and there it sits, covering half of the sfweekly page, squeezed beside a depressed article of doctor syed and all of his evil.

conveniently completed with a small white circle that reads, "this product may cause mouth cancer."

i feel like that cancerous warning-filled circle sort of depletes the possibility of the catchphrase's success. i don't care what you say i should do if what you believe in might cause mouth cancer-- and while i may be weird, i know i'm normal on this one.

what's wrong with you, camel? why did you institute that focus group if you planned to ignore the results and create this snus nonsense anyway? i wonder what the marketing team is paid and if they're hiring-- because, damn.

p.s. i should mention i started smoking again. i know. we'll talk about it later.

Where I Come From

there was this competition called "reflection of the mind". it was an annual thing, not limited to drawing, but certainly limited to the classical forms of art-- writing, photography, etc. and my mom would always urge the family to enter the contest.

a few of us entered, but i think i was the only one who ever did it every year.

it was all because of an eagle feeding its babies. i drew this thing, i don't remember what the reason was, but i drew this eagle dangling a fish for her children and it won first place in the contest.

when you win anything, it's a sort of unwritten rule that you'll look like an idiot if you don't try the following year.

except every year that followed, the best i got was "honorable mention." getting honorable mention is less honorable than straight up not being mentioned. it's a fancier, more pitiful way of saying "fourth place," which is a slightly nicer way of saying, "the first one not to get a medal or prize."

i got honorably mentioned four years in a row.

and my mom would urge me to keep trying.

i was supposed to be the one who could draw in the family. at a time, my dad had made tracing illegal for me and would sometimes randomly approach me and force me to draw a roman gladiator from one of his seventh grade history books.

i hated drawing people.

once, he told me to draw a caricature of my aunt and when i said i didn't want to (because caricatures are something a young kid perceives as insulting rather than funny) my dad told me that by rejecting the offer i had insulted my aunt.

it's a backward world.

this battle with the reflection of the mind continued and at times i almost hated drawing. in the beginning, i really only drew to entertain myself-- i was never trying to win awards or compete with other people who took their work seriously. the pressure and the "honorable mention" ratings started to take the enjoyment out of drawing.

and then one year, i drew this really stupid looking frog on a piece of 8.5x11 paper. it was an ugly brown frog sitting on some equally ugly brown leaves. i forget the frog's actual name, but it's one of those species that blend in with things like dead leaves.

the theme that year had been, "open your eyes and see..." and i, half-assedly, took the theme literally and drew a camouflaged frog. sloppily.

and the fucking thing won.

it's easily the worst drawing i had ever entered and it should've never won. the judges had simply martin scorsesed me. they knew they couldn't keep giving me fourth place if i kept entering and so they let me win with one of my least impressive pieces.

and that god damn drawing got hung on my wall.

it always made me mad and i quit entering the reflection of the mind entirely.

but one year my mom approached me and said she knew i had been only drawing what people told me to draw, or assigned me to. she said she wanted to frame something i wanted to draw.

she actually wanted to me to... draw for fun again. just draw anything-- anything at all--and i'll frame it right up there with the winning drawings.

i totally drew spiderman.

and that drawing is still the one that greets you as soon as you enter our san jose home.

i love my mom for actually hanging a 24 x 36 color-penciled drawing of spiderman swinging through new york. there is no way she wanted a framed drawing of a marvel superhero on her wall. but she did it because she actually cared about me.

remembering that she asked me to do that makes me feel great.

and now i'm on my way back to that san jose house for her birthday with a hand-drawn card.

(not of spiderman.)

The Floppy Death

After the Apple G3, along with PCs, began shipping without the drives pre-installed the disks became virtually obsolete. However, the death of the format has only now become official with Sony’s decision. [...]

The 3.5 inch floppy was first introduced in 1981, and hit the height of its sales in 2000. [ via nydailynews]

i'm not sure why sony even announced the death of its 1.44mb carrier because until they had, i didn't realize the floppy disk was still around. it's like reading the news and finding out gary busey died-- i would have to pause and accept the surprise that he had not already died and then i'd have to wonder if i cared at all.

sure it's the pioneer of the portable memory front, but that doesn't change the fact it's better off one of those things that die quietly with no particular mention of it.

i actually know the man who invented the floppy disk-- and by "know" i mean i used to smoke weed and debate intensely with his grandson-- but the story goes that he received a $100 bonus for the creation before ibm pulled a "you invented it at work and therefore it belongs to us."

and while i believe the $100 was a total slap in the face, i do also find it sad and hilarious that the inventor out-lived the invention.

my fondest memory of the floppy disk was sitting down with brian and chris and labeling thirty of them pornographically. some would read, "XXX" but others were more in the horse-porn direction and they'd "accidentally" fall out of backpacks or grocery bags in public.

people were always pretty hesitant to help us pick them up.

oh well, the disk had a good run-- longer than the zip disk. and a lot of cool came out of it, anyway.

My Christian Experience (One of Many)

my first girlfriend was chinese and christian and our relationship was the dumbest experience i have ever had.

for the longest time she hid me from her parents and i hid her from mine. i'm sure both sets of parents knew something was going on considering this was during a time before cell phones-- back when you'd have to call the parent and ask for the daughter in your best upstanding citizen voice.

and when i finally met them they were unhappy that i was only half asian. and even more unhappy that the half of me that was asian was not chinese.

what's worse is i wasn't christian.

at the time, i really did like the girl-- even though i knew her parents would never get to know anything about me past my race and lack of religion-- and so i wanted to show her that her life was important to me even if it was different than mine.

so i went to her chinese christian church.

this was my first direct experience with christianity and, being a curious young man, i managed to get myself kicked out of the church most immediately.

the whole thing was awkward from the start and i'm less surprised that i had been kicked out and more surprised that i ever went in willingly. i was really fucking hungry and they were passing around that religious grape juice and those saltine crackers that are somehow meant to be jesus' blood and body (gross), but they wouldn't let me have any because i wasn't a "believer."

anyway, the pastor was explaining that lucifer was god's favorite angel and there came a day when lucifer essentially asked god a "why?" and was thrown from heaven.

believe it or not, i had never known satan was previously an angel-- let alone god's favorite angel. but this brought up a more important question in my mind:

"if lucifer was an angel that fell from heaven," i asked, "wouldn't that mean guys at bars across the world are accidentally calling hot girls the devil?"

the pastor just stared.

"you know, 'did it hurt when you fell from heaven?'"

and then i was kicked out.

i guess i should've seen that coming, but i had a habit of saying things without thinking and i was actually serious about my question.

the next week, i returned for sunday school and met a pastor named dean. he was really friend and much more personable than the original speaker. and he gave me donuts for showing up.

toward the end of his little class on love and forgiveness, dean took me aside and asked me for my contact information-- saying maybe we could go out and shoot some pool or get to know each other. he was, basically, reaching out to me because he recognized how horribly out of place i had been. he described the previous pastor's reaction to my lucifer question as "unchristian" and i liked that.

but when i gave him my name, something strange happened.

"as in... son of rich wishnack?"

"oh," i sputtered, "you knew him?"

"coach wishnack! he was my e.s.l. teacher when i moved here! wow... what's he doing now? is he still teaching?"

"well," i started. my dad had died two years ago at the time and i hadn't gotten comfortable with explaining that. but i tried-- and i tried to do it in the light of the religious surroundings. "my dad is... you know, he's up there."

i pointed at the ceiling, meaning heaven.

"oh?" dean looked confused, "but i thought your dad was jewish."

my dad couldn't be in heaven, no, because he wasn't christian. it was at that exact moment i knew i would probably never become religious and i would definitely never return to that church again.

and they didn't even have to kick me out that time.

i like this one.

The Reason I am not Clean

my bathtub was totally checking me out the other day.

Business Attire

my favorite thing about going to work on mondays is not just that it's technically my thursday but the fact i wear virtually the same outfit every single monday.

i have, possibly, two business getups in my closet so i start each week wondering if i should wear my pinstripe white shirt or my pink shirt.

sometimes i try to throw a curve ball and i'll wear a black tie with whichever shirt. i find that tricks people into seeing my clothes as an entirely different thing than the week before.

and so far, it's worked.

i'll come to work wearing the white collared shirt, black tie, slacks and blazer-- looking a bit like a mormon or like a standard ballpoint pen-- and i receive different comments every day.

"you look nice today!"

and the next monday, i'll wear that same costume again-- this time without the tie-- half the time without even washing the clothes since the last time i wore them. and i'll hear a new string of empty compliments and clever remarks as if i'd never worn the clothes at all.

"you look very blues brothery today."

the greatest thing is when a coworker asks me if i've gotten a lot of sleep recently, or had a good day because i look "really sharp" when in fact i feel mediocre and haven't showered in four days.

do you know the trick?

i shaved.

that's all it takes: a shave and a tie.

p.s. - carmen clawed the white shirt. now i'm down to just the pink one. it may be time for new clothes. and cat stew.

Hathaway 's Religious beliefs as " nothing "

Anne Hathaway was raised a Catholic
with what she considered "really strong values," and has stated she wanted to be a nun during her childhood. However, at the age of fifteen, she decided not to become a nun after learning that her brother, Michael, is gay. Despite her Catholic upbringing, Anne Hathaway felt that she could not be part of a religion that disapproved of her brother's sxual orientation.

In 2009, Anne Hathaway stated that she is a non-denominational Christian because she had not "found the religion" for her.

In early 2010, Anne Hathaway stated her religious beliefs as "nothing".

"The whole family converted to Episcopalianism after my elder brother came out," she told British GQ. "Why should I support an organization that has a limited view of my beloved brother?"

But Episcopalianism didn't really take either.

"So I'm ... nothing," she said. "Fck it, I'm forming. I'm a work in progress."

Anne Hathaway At The Silent Movie Theatre

Anne Hathaway At The Silent Movie Theatre In West Hollywood, California. U.S.A.

Los Angeles Premiere of "BREAKING UPWARDS" at Silent Movie Theatre April 8, 2010 - Daryl Wein, Zoe Lister Jones, Olivia Thirlby, Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett, Johnny Galecki, Grace Gummer, Gillian Jacobs, Lorielle New, Phoebe Price, Kat Kramer, Joshua Leonard.

'Breaking Upwards' explores a young, real-life New York couple who, four years in and battling codependency, decide to intricately strategize their own break up. Based on an actual experiment devised by director/actor Daryl Wein and actress Zoe Lister-Jones, the film loosely interprets a year in their lives exploring alternatives to monogamy, and the madness that ensues. An uncensored look at young love, lust, and the pangs of codependency, 'Breaking Upwards' follows its characters as they navigate each others' emotions across the city they love. It begs the question: is it ever possible to grow apart together?

Hathaway 's Religious beliefs as " nothing "

Anne Hathaway was raised a Catholic
with what she considered "really strong values," and has stated she wanted to be a nun during her childhood. However, at the age of fifteen, she decided not to become a nun after learning that her brother, Michael, is gay. Despite her Catholic upbringing, Anne Hathaway felt that she could not be part of a religion that disapproved of her brother's sxual orientation.

In 2009, Anne Hathaway stated that she is a non-denominational Christian because she had not "found the religion" for her.

In early 2010, Anne Hathaway stated her religious beliefs as "nothing".

"The whole family converted to Episcopalianism after my elder brother came out," she told British GQ. "Why should I support an organization that has a limited view of my beloved brother?"

But Episcopalianism didn't really take either.

"So I'm ... nothing," she said. "Fck it, I'm forming. I'm a work in progress."

Anne Hathaway At The Silent Movie Theatre

Anne Hathaway At The Silent Movie Theatre In West Hollywood, California. U.S.A.

Los Angeles Premiere of "BREAKING UPWARDS" at Silent Movie Theatre April 8, 2010 - Daryl Wein, Zoe Lister Jones, Olivia Thirlby, Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett, Johnny Galecki, Grace Gummer, Gillian Jacobs, Lorielle New, Phoebe Price, Kat Kramer, Joshua Leonard.

'Breaking Upwards' explores a young, real-life New York couple who, four years in and battling codependency, decide to intricately strategize their own break up. Based on an actual experiment devised by director/actor Daryl Wein and actress Zoe Lister-Jones, the film loosely interprets a year in their lives exploring alternatives to monogamy, and the madness that ensues. An uncensored look at young love, lust, and the pangs of codependency, 'Breaking Upwards' follows its characters as they navigate each others' emotions across the city they love. It begs the question: is it ever possible to grow apart together?