Breaking a Phone Addiction

I'm taking a break from my usual quirky silly blogs to write something serious. Well, there may even be high amounts of quirk in this blog (hard to go quirkless in a Holden "The Plant" Green blog), but this is something I've been thinking about today a lot.

I am an addict.

I'm an addict to a lot of things actually. Picking my fingernails and toenails (EWWWWW, you surely must be ewwwing). My phone. Facebook. Okay, that's pretty much all. I guess that's not a lot of things. But I am taking this opportunity to confess that I have these addictions, and I want to do something about my smartphone addiction.

Seriously... every spare moment I have, my hand reaches for my phone in my pocket, to check Facebook or new emails or some such lame thing that I really don't care about, but boy, just seeing that little red number one makes me SO EXCITED. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning after I silence my alarm is to check Facebook, and see what's trending in the news section. I spend far too much time staring at my phone while Rivers is running around being cute and I'm too busy to pay attention. Guys, what's wrong with me? What am I looking for?

Me staring with unbridled joy, excitement, and lusty
passion as my phone alerts me to the latest and greatest Facebook notification, which is
probably some person inviting me to play Candy Crush Saga. And boy, WHAT A
SAGA IT IS.

So right now, it's Wednesday night at 8:55 PM. I will make a plan for the next seven days that will include five elements:

1) Five minutes of Facebooking per day
2) With my spare moments of free time at work, my phone will be tucked away in a drawer, necessitating the need for me to wear a watch to keep track of time. I need a watch.
3) Absolutely NO checking the trending section on Facebook. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!
4) Absolutely NO checking Facebook first thing in the morning.
5) No phone use before bed (up to 1 hour) to improve sleep.

I will report every night in a really enthralling exciting blog post. ENTHRALLING.

I swear... I am not doing this to be up on a high horse. I HATE HATE HATE all those blogs that are so self-righteous and expect you to do some ridiculous thing to be as righteous as the blogger (like the stupid yoga pants lady). However, this seems like a good idea, and I'm sure a lot of people feel similarly, that phone addiction is a real thing and they want to take back control of their time. Anywho, we'll see if this works. Wish me luck. No. Wish me skill. And I love you all.

Beers On Me Guys

Saturday is a special day!

Here’s a recap of Saturn’s Day. So I had to go work at the Templum this morning for a few hours as a sub for my dad, who was laid up in the hospital yesterday and today. It was just a delight. I got to push the laundry cart around, take cards to the front desk 100 times to get them stamped, and just in general milling around the templum like the little Normans are prone to do. I also confirmed a lot of people members of the church as proxy, which, when you think about it, is kinda weird. But not really. But it still is, you know? Like, all the little dead people are just floating around waiting to be confirmed members of the church. Anywho, I was thinking about astronomy a lot as I was sitting around waiting for things to do. Just pondering the vastness of the universe, the great interstellar distances that we cannot fathom. And yet, this, this temple, this holy edifice, is the most sacred place in God’s universe. This little white building on this infinitesimally tiny planet floating around in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy amongst billions and billions of other stars and planets. COMMENCE HEAD EXPLOSION.

Anywho, then I visited my dad at the hospital, who is considered a fall risk for, apparently, a recent procedure he had in which he received a heart stent. The only thing is, this never happened. He has never had a stent put in. But that doesn’t matter. FALL RISK. So he had a sandwich for lunch, and he gave me half, and it was one of the BEST sandwiches I’ve ever had. Turkey, cranberry, and cream cheese. Oh, what a delight. Then Emily and Rivers came, and Rivers started screaming his head off, as he is prone to do. Then we left at some point, and went to a wedding, and there was a lot of wedding going on, the end, I’m tired of this post.

Thanatos, Demon of the Underworld

          What mood should this post carry today? Funny? Quirky? Informative? Entertaining? Depressing? A combination of any of those? Well, let’s write some crap down and see how it pans out, eh? First, I would like to talk to you about… space. Space really is amazing. It’s just amazing, isn’t it? The vast distances and sizes that are associated with space make my head want to explode like a supernova. I have recently become convinced that human brains are somehow connected in some weird way to stars, and every time someone ponders the meaning of the universe, or the length of time it takes to get across the Milky Way, or how much bigger the star Betelgeuse is compared to our own sun, or how hot the Big Bang was, or how long everything has been floating around up there, their head figuratively explodes, causing a 5 million solar-mass star to literally explode somewhere. I call it the “Head Explode Star Explode” Theory, and I’ve already proven it in my world famous lavatory.

          What is the mood now? A good mood? A goody moody? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? Let’s discuss one other thing that’s really gross. So in 10^th grade, I was in a German class. We had some foreign language festival, and for some reason, I was assigned to be a butcher. My idea of being a good butcher was taking hot dogs (that hadn’t been cooked or anything), stuffing them in hats in the shape of chickens, and then ripping them out of the hats when people walked by our booth, pretending that it was supposed to be chicken meat. This was followed by cutting up the hot dogs, dipping them in a puddle of ketchup, and then offering them to people. You may think I was trying to be funny, but in fact, I wasn’t, I thought it was just a great idea. Not a lot of people ate the hot dogs. I don’t know how many health codes I violated with this despicable behavior, but no one got mad at me, so whatever man. No one ever gets mad at me for anything.

          Especially you.

April 10th, 2016 - SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

[Names of certain individuals have been changed, namely, the one in the first paragraph]

QUICK! MUST WRITE. NOW. FAST. Before desire to write vanishes in a twinkling of an eye! Uh, uh, what happened today? WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED? SWEAR! Well, I worked. Like the apostate scum I am. Not too bad of a day. Von Hydramelladink (yes, that's a name) yelled "HELP! HELP ME! HELP! SOMEONE HELP ME!" a hundred times, from her room. It's a tradition! HEEEEELP!

I WANT AN NES VIDIOT GAME COLLECTION.

It rained a lot this morning and yesterday. Would you like to know why? Well, we had a "low pressure system" move in, made up of warm moist air. Warm air is lighter and less dense than cooler air (HENCE: LOW PRESSURE), so this particular warm air ascended to the stratosphere (or one of those spheres up there), then cooled and condensed (moving from a gaseous state to a more liquidy state), forming lots of puffy pink clouds, which promptly exploded all over us, spilling their wet rainy contents all over my face, and all over inside Emily's Miata, and at the same time, soaking my copy of "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, which, incidentally, is the book that taught me how this all occurs. If you're wondering how this was allowed to happen, well, I left the top down when I went in to work, not thinking in the slightest that a Rainstorm Massacre was ahead. The only thing I think about at these times is OH PLEASE, DON'T LET ME HAVE TO WIPE UP POO TODAY. PLEEEEEASE. HEEEEELP! NOT THE POO!

When I can't think of anything to write, I just number the pages in this journal. It feels productive. Like a productive cough, spewing up phlegm. Whoever decided that there is a letter "G" in "phlegm?" There is clearly no "G" sound. Why not just FLEM? In my opinion, "phlegm" is the most unnecessarily complicated spelled word in the English language. You know what would be gross? If it rained phlegm. PHLEGMSTORM MASSACRE. Can you believe this is all being written by a person who will soon be studying "molecular genetics" and "comparative vertebrate anatomy" and "biostatistics and the scientific method" in the coming months in his triumphal return to the Dixie State School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? SCIENCE. Gosh I hope I don't have to buy a lab coat again. Those things cost a lot. For what? So I can PRETEND to be a scientist? I LOVE TO PLAY PRETEND. I don't think that lab coat is going to protect you from a shot of carbonic acid to the eyes. Is carbonic acid a thing? I don't know. It sounded deadly. And acidic. And SCIENCE. No, for real, I couldn't think of another deadly killer acid. Just imagine some chemistry lab safety video where some idiot decides to conduct an experiment involving HYDROFLOURIDEXAMETHOZONIC ACID (that's the most deadly sounding made-up acid I could come up with) and he's WAY too cool for his safety goggles, and it EXPLODES ALL OVER HIS FACE. Why are we imagining this again? I forgot. I'm sorry. 

Randall's Wild Adventures in the Town Where He Resides

[writing prompt] You start training to run a marathon. Things are going well and you’ve developed a route that you like to run. One day you notice someone peeking out the window of one of the houses you pass, though you think nothing of it. But then the next day the peeper is back again. And the next day. Finally you decide to confront the peeper and knock on the door. But when the door opens, you are shocked to find out it’s someone from your past—who you thought was dead.

"Harry?!" I cry out in amazement. "Harry Jensen?! You're alive?"

"No," replies Harry, who I last saw sometime yesterday afternoon, and then he just kind of... disappeared. Well, we were just at my apartment, having a beer, and then he said he needed to go home. And so he did. And I never saw him again. Until now. At his house. "And neither are you."

"Whaaaa???" I say, as this new shocking revelation begins to sink in. Me? Dead? Preposterous! But deep down, deep inside my ascending colon and about halfway through my sigmoid colon, I know the truth. 

"Think about it Randall," says Harry, in that style in which Harry often says things. "All along, you've known this. All along, no one in your entire life has noticed you or said anything to you. No one has ever associated with you in any manner."

Part of me wants to shout at him NO! No no no no! That's impossible! 

"But what about that girl I took out on a date last week?" I reply. "You know, Stacy Hutchinson! I thought we had a really good time!"

Harry smiles, lowers his eyes to the ground, and shakes his head. 

"Randall, Randall, Randall," he says. "Didn't you notice that she was actually talking to another man the entire date? I know it sounds crazy... but there was another guy, right behind you, the whole date. I know the guy, he works down at Lipperman Draperies, a real nice guy. But you only thought she was on date with you. She was actually on a date with him!" 

"Okay, well, what about that job interview I went to a few days ago?" I reply. "I was the only one in the room there besides CEO Jimmy McBranahan! We had a conversation! He asked me about my family, about my past experience, really specific things actually. You're not telling me there's some crazy explanation for that, are you?"

"Oh, there's definitely an explanation!" replies Harry, and he immediately reaches up and pulls off his face, revealing... no... it couldn't be... 

"CEO Jimmy McBranahan?!" I cry. 

"Yes, Randall," he says, and puts his hand upon my shoulder, giving it one nice squeeze. "It was me all along."

"Boy, this is one crazy turn of events!" I yell. "Well, better finish my marathon training!"

"Yes," he replies, with a twinkle of his eye and a tip of his hat. Hey, where did he get that hat anyway? "Go forth Randall. Finish your marathon training. Then we'll get coffee."

"Oh boy!" I cry, and I'm actually crying this time, tears of the most intense joy, because... well... coffee?! With CEO Jimmy McBranahan? None of my marathon friends are gonna believe this! 

The End