Snowzilla vs. The Blog Monster

I'm prepared.

I'm scheduled to be off today and tomorrow from my full-time job, and a rare extension from my part-time box/spy job. So I'm inside.

I did a load of laundry this morning.

I've able to avoid the bedlam at local supermarkets, where fistfights are breaking out over in the express lane. In my fridge I have:

* 13 bottles of water

* 3 bottles of Coca-Cola

* Turkey cold cuts, American and cheddar cheese.

* An extra Burger King Chicken Sandwich (they are currently buy one get one free at The King right now).

I also have cereal, Tostitos, Triscuits, ramen noodles, and Reese's Peanut Butter Hearts and Eggs in the cabinet.

I went out to Wal-Mart and bought new snow boots. The ones I have currently have lasted me for three years, through Halloween and April Fool's Day blizzards, Tropical Storm Irene  and Stormzilla Sandy. That's three years of diverse storms and my boots have finally bowed to the crazy New England weather. They were a great value for $34.87 and I bought the same brand this morning.

I am watching the news on TV and, on the Internet, one of my childhood favorite movies, Gamera vs. Monster X.

There may be power outages, call-ins to work, cars skidding into the house, or some other blizzard craziness. But I'm ready, Snowzilla. Bring the noise.

Super Bowl 47 Predictions

Because of my irritation that the Patriots lost, and life getting in the way, I haven't been paying attention to the endless, two-week buildup to Super Bowl 47. What I do know is that the 49ers and Ravens are both very good teams. I can see this either going either way, with Ray Lewis going out as a champion or with Colin Kapernick putting on a display of excellence and causing a sea change in the way teams try to move the football on offense.

There are, however, a number of great prop bets, over-unders on things that really have nothing to do with the game. I am not in Las Vegas right now, but I'll offer my own book of predictions:

First touchdown: I'm going way outside the box here, even though it probably won't happen, because it's more fun that way, 49ers G Mike Iupati, on a recovery of a Frank Gore fumble in the end zone.  

Number of mentions on CBS about how two brothers are coaching against each other in the Super Bowl:  374

Number of camera shots of 49ers backup quarterback Alex Smith looking moody and disgruntled on the sidelines: 23

Number of tweets about how "The #PuppyBowl is better than the #SuperBowl": 54,312

Number of Super Bowl commercials worth the cost of advertising: 1

Number of Super Bowl commercials that fall flat: 136

Number of consecutive hours Ray Lewis and deer antlers trend on Twitter: 13

Number of times CBS' Jim Nantz utters the phrase "Ray Lewis, playing in his final NFL game": 17

And, oh yeah, before I forget:

49ers 34, Ravens 24.

Me, Sexism, and the California Raisins

My current GMail status update is "books, check 'em out!" after a friend and I reminisced about an old California Raisins commercial from when I was younger.

This is a recent development (i.e., within the past 24 hours) and it wasn't long before someone saw my GMail status and accused me of being sexist, apparently in a fit of dyslexia from substituting a different letter of the alphabet in place of the "k" in books.

I have several thoughts about this.

1) I am not sexist.

2) While there are always exceptions to the rule, books are generally not sexist.

3) In fact, this person is probably more sexist than me.

3) This person has a filthy mind.

4) This person needs to pay more attention when creeping on people's social media statuses.

My Cousin Eric

One of my earliest memories of my cousin Eric was when he was 3. My aunt and uncle were over, and Eric spent the day following me around the house. Everything I did, he wanted to do. Everything I touched, he put his hands on. Because of a laundry list of issues, he barely survived childbirth, and as a result early in life had trouble speaking, so when he called my name, “Cousin Phillip” came out as something like “Cousin Quiquop.”

I was much more socially awkward as a kid than I am now, and while I don’t remember exactly how I said it, after an hour or two of having an extra shadow who couldn’t pronounce my name right (or simply call me Phil) I turned to him and said something like, “Will you leave me alone?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my mom, who made a beeline to me and pulled me aside.

“Stop being mean,” she said. “He’s following you around because he looks up to you. You’re the oldest cousin. You need to set a good example for him.”

At that moment I felt like the world’s worst cousin.

Since then I’ve tried to set a better example. And though I haven’t always succeeded, I’ve had a lot of fun with Eric over the years. We played street football in front of my grandfather’s house, where it was his mission to beat me deep on a post pattern, and eventually, when he finally got the better of his older cousin, it set the stage for the leveling of the playing field and some epic one-on-one battles that would’ve made a matchup between Randy Moss and Darrelle Revis look like a game of patty-cake. We argued about our respective house rules for the game of Asshole. We went out to bars and partied and took turns designated-driving each other home. Once he helped me move a sofa into my apartment. It was a difficult to negotiate the angles of that particular apartment, and we decided we couldn’t celebrate any other way than with beer and vodka. He gave the red Solo cup its due long before Toby Keith. We celebrated and complained about the opposite sex. We cheered when the Boston sports teams won championships and threw stuff at the TV when they lost. This past Thanksgiving we watched the Patriots pummel the Jets, and when New England scored 21 points in a span of less than a minute I turned to Eric and said, “This could get ugly.” And he responded, “You mean it isn’t already ugly?” And I laughed and had to post his comment to the Twittersphere.

His difficulties at childbirth meant he had his bouts with illness throughout his life, but time after time always pulled through. A couple of weeks ago I was scrolling through Facebook and noticed he was sick again. And I didn’t think twice about it, because he’s always been a warrior and always pulled through.  

Last Monday I’m running the store I work at because the manager is on vacation. My cousin Elena calls me. She’s a texter, not a caller, so I know something’s up. But I can’t take the call because I’m in the middle of work and I have 11 other things to do, so I bounce it to voice mail.

Two minutes later she calls again. And that’s when I get the sinking feeling in my stomach.

I call her back on my way home and my intuition is right – he’s probably not going to make it. I want to drive out to Brigham & Women’s to see him. I’m not a doctor and there’s really nothing I can do to help. But I’m an only child so the cousins are as close as I’ll ever get to having siblings of my own. Factoring in traffic and the bad weather and trying to find parking and/or waiting for the T, it’d take me at least a couple of hours to get there and that’s probably being generous. I get home and I can’t move. It’s snowing out, and I’m battling a nasty flu bug, and I’m exhausted.

A couple of hours later, Elena calls back and it’s the call I don’t want to take. Eric’s passed on. Again, I feel like the world’s worst cousin, because I’m at home instead of the hospital.

It’s taken me a week to write this, even though I knew exactly what I was going to say from the beginning. I think part of it is because deep down inside, I feel like if I write this, then it’s final and irreversible, even though I know that’s a silly way to think. It never truly hits me that someone has passed away until after the funeral, because there are always pictures of the person all around you and after the funeral is when you realize this person is never coming back.

Today I found the inner strength to finish it. I like to think it was Eric telling me it’s OK. Because that’s the kind of guy he is. He'll be missed, and yet he'll always be around.

Walking the Walk

Apparently I have a distinctive walk.

I am not announcing this without evidence. I say this because recently I walked into a room and someone shouted from the next room, "Phil!"

"How did you know it was me?" I asked.

"I can tell it's you from the sound of your walk."

Having a walk that people recognize on sight is enough to make you paranoid. You become self-conscious and start thinking about the way you walk, which makes your walk that much more distinctive, for the wrong reasons.

It's another thing to have someone say they can tell your walk because they can hear it. Are my boots wicked loud?

It's a good thing I'm not a spy. I'd be a lousy one.

Twitter & Me

I have a dysfunctional, love-hate relationship with Twitter.

I love it because I have random thoughts while watching TV and it allows me to express these thoughts. I've become a serial livetweeter of NFL football and reality dating shows.

I hate it because random people will follow me, and then I follow them back, and I get subjected to relentless tweets about their business/agenda at the rate of 100 tweets per second ("Maximize Income From Your Tweets! Would Earning $1,000 a Week from Tweeting Be Enough For You? Find Out How You Can Get 75,000 Followers On Twitter!")

I bring this up now because I just crossed the 100-follower plateau on Twitter. One of the things I'd like to get back into this year is building a platform for myself. It seems like increasing my Twitter followers would be consistent with that.

In the past, the people who mass-tweet about getting 75,000 followers a week on Twitter would get on my nerves, and I would stop following them, and they would stop following me. I'm sure I annoy people with my livetweeting "#Seahawks 24, #Redskins 14" or something similar. (In fact, one of my best followers tonight called my chronic livetweeting of The Bachelor "appalling." And he's right. It is appalling. I am appalling.)

I'm going to be more patient with Twitter. Bring on the overtweeters. I wish I could unsubscribe to someone's Twitter overposts, the way you can unsubscribe to someone's Facebook news feed when they chronically post narcissistic pictures of themselves or political statements.

But in Twitter, like in everything else in life, I have to take the good with the bad.

On Behalf of All the Massholes, I Apologize

At my part-time job, in between running around like a spy with boxes, I observe a lot. It's a good job for people-watching.

For example, I'm doing my thing with the shopping carriages when I hear a car horn honking madly. I turn around because I feel like I just missed a road rage incident, and I see some guy in he road, who apparently nearly got hit by a pickup truck. He's pissed. He's also, I can gather from the accent, from the South. He sees me, and I can't remember what he said verbatim, but it was something about how people here in Massachusetts aren't much for hospitality, which is true.

I shook my head and said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It wasn't you."

"I know, I'm apologizing on behalf of my state."

The thing that makes this all the more bizarre is the guy in the pickup truck in question is also cranking this song at full volume.

Two things have become clear to me thanks to this incident.

1) I frequently need to apologize on behalf of the state of Massachusetts

2) If you're cranking soul ballads while involved in a road-rage incident, you deserve to be sentenced to death.