I know you’ve all been wondering my stance on this for a while, so it’s time I got it out in the open: I’m often ok with the secondary names of body parts or ailments that get used more frequently than the proper ones. For example, I like the fact that “Achilles tendon” is used instead of “calcaneal tendon,” as it’s a nice nod to the Greek mythology I enjoyed learning as a kid. Similarly, I can appreciate why we would lean toward using the bluntly descriptive “pink eye” over “conjunctivitis.” But when it came time to come up with a secondary name for the masses to use instead of rheum, the powers that be failed us all miserably.

What is rheum? See – its secondary name has already wiped the real name out of our vocabulary!  (So even with the power of the internet and upwards of nine whole readers, this post will amount to little or nothing. Yet I press on!)  Rheum, I’ll have you know, is defined by the experts at Wikipedia as the “thin mucus naturally discharged as a watery substance from the eyes, nose, or mouth during sleep…(that) gathers as a crust in the corners of the eyes or mouth, on the eyelids, or under the nose.” I don’t know about you, but I grew up calling that substance “sleep.” Wikipedia also suggests the painful-sounding “sand,” the odd compound word “sleepydust,” or the confusingly plural “sleepies.”

Sticking with the term I know and still unfortunately use to this day, how the hell did that ever get traction? Seriously, let’s think about this for a minute. Was the originator of this term just being poetic before people took him or her literally?  I think there’s something quite pleasant about the description of waking up with a touch of sleep still in one’s eyes…as long as it stays on that metaphorical level.  Otherwise, it’s just confusing.  Why name the substance after the noun that causes it to appear in the first place?  It’s like calling sweat “heat,” or referring to body weight as “food.”  It’s strange, right?   I sleep, and when I’m done with my sleep, I awake to…sleep?  I take it back, that’s not just strange…that’s bullshit.

For the past many years, I’ve selected books to read by one of two ways: Either it’s a book by someone whose writing I already know I like, or it’s a recommendation from someone whose opinion I trust.  Well I did something different recently, and there were mixed results.  While on the phone with the now-married Mike Honcho, we started talking about which books by author Christopher Moore we had not yet read.  After a minute, I pulled up his listings on Amazon and found a couple.  At the bottom of that page, Amazon made some recommendations for me based on the purchases of other people who had viewed that same page.  One in particular stood out for some reason.  Oh yeah, I remember why: it’s called Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere.  Intrigued (because honestly, who wouldn’t be?), I read the description and found myself laughing out loud at the synopses of the three novellas that comprise the book.  “What the hell?” I thought, and I ordered it for my Amazon Kindle.  (I specifically ordered it for the Kindle not just to get it right away, but because I didn’t think I’d want to have that title visible on a bookshelf in our house.)

So I read Rampaging Fuckers… and thought it was ok.  It’s over-the-top and absurd as hell (which I knew going into it), and I’d say I truly enjoyed a grand total of about 50% of the content.  The second story in particular (which is a kind of disgusting twist on the movie “Innerspace”) was my favorite of the three, even though its synopsis originally interested me the least.  In any case, all of this is prologue to a line I read and enjoyed in this book: “Kids today, they can’t even read unless it’s spelled wrong on a phone.”  It’s rare for me to put a book down in order to jot down a line that I like, but that’s what I did.  Well technically, I put down my book-storing mini computer in order to send an email from my phone to myself about a line that I liked, but that’s essentially the same thing.  Despite that last sentence that I wrote, I don’t consider myself to be a part of that “mass instantaneous information” group.  Sure, I send text messages to friends, but never in the “C U L8R” style.  And I’m in my 30s, so I had a nice chunk of life before people tried fitting everything in 140 characters or less. 

All that said, it’s hard to escape what communication has become to our society.  This was made abundantly clear to me a couple of days ago.  My friends Jon and Erin stopped by on Saturday to meet our new children, and they very sweetly brought over some adorable outfits as gifts.  The next day, my lovely wife put a thank you note out on the table for me to write, which I did right away.  About half an hour later, I was sitting on the couch when Jon came to mind for some other reason.  Immediately I thought, “Hey, I wonder if he got my thank you note yet.”  I’m apparently so used to emails and text messages being composed, sent, and received within a matter of seconds that it was a foreign concept to me that I would actually have to (gasp) wait for something to be picked up, mailed, and delivered.  “Oh no,” I thought, “Am I really one of them and didn’t know it?”  Dismayed, I shook my head and went back to the Scrabble-type game I was playing on my iPod touch with my friend Lisa.  Yes, it’s another form of instant technology, but at least it’s still a place in which “LOL” isn’t a real word.

This coming weekend is going to be very interesting for several reasons, but I’d like to highlight two of them in particular.  First, it’ll be my first Fathers’ Day weekend as a father.  Second, it’ll be my first Fathers’ Day weekend as a Father with a capital F.  Ok, technically I’m a minister, but that’s still pretty cool.  Yes friends, your main man P-Dawg is an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, ready to co-officiate fellow blogger Mike Honcho’s wedding this weekend.  I will be the most Jewish minister there, I imagine.  I’m excited and ready to rock the party, but I gotta say, becoming legally able to marry people was far, far too easy.

Check this out: I went to TheMonastery.org.  Easy enough to remember, no?  I clicked on “Free Online Ordination” – oh yeah, did I mention that it was completely free too?  Then there were five bullet points of instructions with which I had to comply.  Summarizing, they are: Put your real name, please don’t put a fake name, double check that you put your right name, don’t capitalize your name incorrectly, and really guys, don’t put a fake name.  Those are the regulations.  On the next page, I had to put my name (my real one, spelled and capitalized correctly), address, email address, birthday, and sex.  That was it; I’m not even close to kidding.

I was very pleased to see it was so easy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too easy.  Shouldn’t I be required to do more than that?  I was given a pretty awesome power, and that was the whole of the initiation process?  It’s way easier than buying a song in iTunes or even making a rental car reservation online.  Hell, it’s just about as easy as leaving a comment on this blog.  I couldn’t let go of the nagging feeling that I’d missed something or that I would show up to the wedding and realize I needed to complete some 8-hour online course, so I called the LA County Clerk’s office.  I waited on hold for a while before reaching a nice woman in the correct office.  I explained my worries, and she told me, “It doesn’t matter how you were ordained as long as you were by a religious organization.”  She went on to tell me that the biggest snag that people run into is by not filling out the marriage license correctly.  “Make sure you use black ink,” she said, “and you need two digits for the month and day and four digits for the year.  Otherwise the form is invalid and we send it back.”  “Oh,” I said.  “The marriage is still valid though,” she added, which was a bit of a relief.

So that was truly all I needed to do to be able to marry people.  This coming Saturday, I promise only to use my new powers for good – that is, I won’t sneakily marry unsuspecting couples on the dance floor, no matter how much fun that could be.  I’m debating whether or not I should add “Ordained Minister in the Universal Life Church” to my resume; since not everyone knows how retardiculously easy it is to become one, it might look impressive or give me an undeserved dignified air about me.  Either way, I’m very much looking forward to Saturday, and I know the whole wedding event will be awesome.  Oh yeah, and the other kind of fatherhood is fucking rad so far too.

So I’m sitting in an airport with time to kill, and how else would I want to spend my time besides writing down some thoughts on this here blog? Exactly.

Wanna hear something funny?  That’s all I ended up writing in the airport.  This page wasn’t appearing as I needed it to on my cell phone, so I abandoned the post before it even got going.  So now I’m sitting at home instead of in an airport, and I have the opposite of “time to kill” but still want to get some lingering thoughts out.  Here goes:

When I think about what’s wrong with our society, I usually point to two things.  First, “The Hills.”  “Famous” people who are only “famous” for being “famous” who do nothing but act like idiots but are somehow compelling enough for millions of people to watch. (Mind you, I’ve never seen the show but have seen enough of Spencer and Heidi that I want to gouge my own eyeballs out.)  Second, our over-litigious society that causes empty cups to warn us that it’s possible there may be hot liquids eventually placed inside them.  Well I think I may have a third, even though this is coming to me a little late.  How did it happen that a hip hop artist, upon being acquitted on gun charges, made a formal announcement that he was changing his name from “Puff Daddy” to “P Diddy” – and people just went along with it?  I remember watching that and thinking he sounded like a moron (especially since he already had, ya know, a real name) and that he’d be ridiculed non-stop.  Instead, a day later and he was being called “P Diddy” by various information and entertainment outlets.  This isn’t on the same level as the other two “what’s wrong with the world” items, but it still bugs me almost a decade later that his self-important fake-name-to-other-fake-name change was taken so seriously.

That’s it for now.  I hope to get my other thoughts out soon, so stay tuned.