I don’t feel like I’m claustrophobic, but one of these days I may end up randomly punching someone out while in a crowd.

I hate shopping.

Check that: I don’t mind shopping; I just hate putting up with other shoppers.

And now that stores and shoppers have banded together to ignore Thanksgiving and jump immediately into Christmas shopping season (i.e.: the crowds are out in full force), putting up with those shoppers is even more frustrating.

I’m a person who, while shopping, is constantly aware of the locations, walking speeds, and directions headed of pretty much everyone within a 20- to 30-foot radius of me. Well, how much I can pay attention to depends on the crowd density.

I can be so overly-conscious of what everyone else is doing, that, say, when I walk into a Wal-Mart, it feels like my vision goes from, like, that of normal human wearing contact lenses, to that of The Terminator, with, like, all the cool infrared and the little demographic notes about people in my vicinity.

Well, not totally. I don’t get the infrared part.

Anyway, so if you’ve never happened to notice this, let me tell you: the vast majority of people have no flippin’ clue what they’re doing while they’re out shopping and/or they’re just outright inconsiderate of anyone other than themselves while shopping.

And if you have never noticed, you might unfortunately be part of the problem.

All I’m saying is contending with people who are oblivious to everything around them makes trying to be considerate of them a frustrating undertaking while shopping. Most of the time I feel like I’m the only one in an entire store who’s paying attention to their own whereabouts and the whereabouts of others around themselves.

Two of the most annoying situations in my book are as follows:

[1] Following someone in a line of customer traffic who abruptly decides to abruptly turn around, forcing you to pull your cart back into yourself, lest you crash it into them.

[2] Being stuck in an aisle where people on both sides are so enthralled in what they’re looking at that they’re oblivious to the fact that they’re clogging up the aisle for anyone to get through, and that a mere step forward or backward by either would clear that problem up.

As annoying as those two are, there’s one thing that annoys me even more:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people walking directly towards me while not paying the slightest bit of attention to where they’re going. If I weren’t the one paying attention, they’d either walk right into me, or they’d realize what they were doing with only a second to move out of the way and not hit me.

Sometimes in those situations I actually almost feel like these people do see me, and it’s really just some kind of game of chicken.

Well, it won’t be so fun when grandma, or Mrs. Soccer Mom, or random emo high school kid ends up on the ground after a forearm shiver to the shoulder.

Take that!

How’s about YOU pay attention next time???

This is why I prefer grocery shopping on Friday nights and why I prefer making any trips to places like Wal-Mart or Meijer at, like, 3 a.m.

I don’t wanna grow up! I’m a Toys “R” Us kid! Wait… I grew up. Crap.

Today at work I had the urge to go to Toys “R” Us.

I really just wanted to run through the store, laugh maniacally as I grabbed random toys from the shelves and taunted the little kids longfully looking at said toys:

“HA HA! I’m an adult! I make money and can buy all the toys I want! You’re a kid and can’t buy ANY toys! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”

Okay, I didn’t really daydream of doing do that. I only just came up with that a second ago after I’d already typed this next sentence:

Well, I actually can’t say I had the urge to go so much as I really just was washed over by a feeling of missing my trips there when I was a kid.

(I’ll continue from there now…)

I would go shopping everywhere with my mom: the grocery store, department stores, the drug store, etc. But Toys “R” Us is where I went shopping with my dad.

He would take me there to buy old school Nintendo games. Early on, it was really the only place that had them; Wal-Mart hadn’t taken over the world yet, there were no Best Buys, and who knows if Target even existed.

All I know is my dad was just about as excited as I was everytime we went. Nintendo was brand new and I was just a first-grader drawn in to the charm of moving images on a screen that I controlled, and the hype of this Nintendo thingy. But judging by the amount of times my mom yelled at my dad to stop playing Zelda so I could have the Nintendo back, I think he felt similarly.

While we were able to share that joy, I always got the feeling my dad was was getting more out of it than I was. It felt like he was just excited to be there with me to witness my excitement and maybe take a little pride in that he was able to provide for me this one particular piece of joy and happiness.

Sure, I occasionally went to Toys “R” Us with my mom. And, sure, when I did go, I did roam the store looking at all the other toys I was interested in — namely the Legos.

But when I think of Toys “R” Us, I’m instantly drawn back to those moments there with my dad, sharing joy as he tried to do nothing more than make me happy with a flippin’ Nintendo game.

Everything was so simple then.

I miss that.

Home isn’t where the heart is. Home is where the refrigerator and the HDTV is.

Recently, I purchased new furniture.

New furniture as in, like, furniture from a furniture store and stuff.

I guess that, in conjunction with the fact that I just figured out how to make Rice Krispie Treats, makes me all domestic and junk. But, hey, DO NOT test me: I will not hesitate to tear a phone book in half on command and/or just randomly beat on my chest and let out a tribal scream of some sort.

Boom!

See? Domestication neutralized.

Well, except that I’d probably strain myself trying to tear the phone book apart, and my voice may sound more like a shrill scream of horror just prior to me wincing from hitting my chest too hard.

So, anyway, I learned two things from buying furniture store furniture.

1. Buying a mattress that feels like you’re sleeping on a gigantic stack of cotton balls is overrated. I mean, it sounds like the coolest thing ever and all — and it’ll feel like magical awesomeness in the store — but, like, dude, it’s not that comfortable. Well, not if you sleep on your stomach. And by you, I mean me. Or, actually, I.

So, anyway, you should go ahead and pick up the one-time mattress exchange thing if the furniture store offers it. Thanks to that, I got my nice soft-topped, yet firm, replacement mattress today, and after having laid on it a couple times since it got delivered, my body’s pretty much trying to accelerate the tiredness-ing process so it can have its first good night’s sleep at the new apartment in the few months I’ve been here as soon as possible.

2. Furniture deliverers are inconsiderate. First, they show up so ridiculously early that they don’t give you enough time to throw the piles of junk on your floor into your closet, and then they just go making assumptions about you and how you live. Things like, “Oh, I bet this guy wants his bed in the bedroom!” or “Hey, I think he wants the couch right across from the TV in that empty spot in the living room!”

All I’m sayin’ is at least ask first. Because maybe I don’t want my couch in the living room! Maybe I want it in the kitchen… did you ever think of that??? What do you think I bought the stain protection plan for???

Huh? HUH? Yeah. That’s what I thought. Don’t make me shake my fist at you. Now get out of my apartment. Oh, but go ahead and move the dining room table into the bedroom before you go.

Is the swine flu the regular flu to pigs? If so, what do pigs call the regular flu? And whatever happened to the bird flu?

It was flu shot day at work today, which is apparently a big deal of some sort.

By the look of the line for flu shots, you’d have thought the Bubonic Plague had made a victorious return to civilization and people were just dropping en masse on the streets or something.

All morning long, people were like, “Are you on your way to get your flu shot?” and “Have you gotten your flu shot yet???” and “Aren’t you getting a flu shot?!?!?!?!?” and “YOU’LL DIE IF YOU DON’T GET A FLU SHOT!!!!!!!! AAHHHH!!!!!!”

My responses, respectively, were like, “No, I’m just on my way to go get some water,” and “No, I’m not getting one,” and “No, I’m not getting one,” and “NOOOOOO!!!!! I STILL HAVE SO MUCH I WANT TO ACCOMPLISH!!!! I’VE NEVER SKY-DIVED OR SEEN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS OR EATEN HONEY SMACKS FROM THE STANLEY CUP OR STARTED AN ILLEGAL UNDERGROUND CASINO AND USED THE PROFITS TO START A LEGIT RENTAL CAR BUSINESS — BUT NOT LIKE HERTZ — MINE WILL BE MORE PERSONAL AND FRIENDLY!!!!!! AAAHHHHHH!!!!”

I’ve never been fond of flu shots.

I have my reasons.

Mainly, it’s just that my best friend’s baby’s mama’s cousin’s half-brother told me one time that the government uses flu shots to track the citizens because it puts these tiny microchips into the shots.

Dear Big Broseph,

I ain’t havin’ that. You ain’t duping me on that flu shot business, dude! But I’ll continue leaving my cell phone on at all times and using OnStar and not taking the proper precautions against spyware.

Peace,

Josh

So, anyway, without the use of the shot, I have my own ways of combatting the flu, including the following:

— drinking a ridiculous amount of water on a regular basis
— washing my hands every hour on the hour
— eating Skittles (they’re the world’s real wonder drug)
— punching the flu in the face if it gets near me
— constantly wearing a mask and rubber gloves while out in public or at work, and sometimes while I’m at home by myself

I actually have no real problems with Dudley Do-Rite.

Okay, so, like, I was chillin’ in Canada one day, right?

It was sorta like America, but not really. It was a strange land, where the people were unnecessarily polite, all the billboards were in English and French, Thanksgiving was on a Monday, and “SportsCenter” was spelled “SportsCentre.”

At one point, I even saw a Canadian flag hanging outside of a business. It was then that I wondered if I’d mistakenly traveled to an alternate dimension like you hear about on TV and in books.

So anyway, I was minding my own business walking around this one “city,” doing American things like carrying guns and punching people in the face when some dude came up to me on the street all like, “Hey, eh, you just can’t go around punching people in the face and carrying guns, eh…”

He called over a cop who happened to be on foot patrol around the city.

I played up the American charm with the officer.

He asked me if I happened to be carrying guns and punching people in the face. I flashed him a smile and whipped out the widely-known and internationally-revered U.S. $100-bill, of which I had many.

I said, “Here’s a Benjamin. Don’t harrass me again.”

Then I asked him where the nearest Tim Horton’s was at.

He told me it was only a few blocks away.

I didn’t happen to have a car at the moment, so naturally, being American, I stole one. I was just gonna hotwire one parked on the side of the street, but I was really hungry for some donuts, so I just carjacked some dude at the nearest stop light.

After I made my way to Tim Horton’s, the man who’d stopped me earlier and called over the officer entered, pointed directly at me, and loudly proclaimed there was an American in the building.

Most of the patrons cheered.

The man then yelled that he’d called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on me for carrying guns and punching people in the face.

I walked up to him, flashed one of my several guns, and punched him in the face.

At that point, the women at the Tim Horton’s were, well, of course, fawning over me. I made out with one of them briefly before I fled the store.

Upon exiting the building, I discovered a dozen Mounties on horseback waiting for me. They’d blocked off the car I jacked, so I pointed back behind them and yelled, “Look at that!”

They all turned to look, so I took off running.

After roughly 20 full seconds — or, more quickly than I’d expected — the Mounties realized what happened, so they gave chase.

Their horses were fast, but I was faster. Obviously. I’m an American.

I ran into a problem, though. After a few dozen miles of running, my energy began to run low. Afterall, it was Canada; their regularly-occuring blizzard-like conditions were sapping my American powers of awesomeness.

But since I’m from the midwestern U.S., and I’m used to ridiculously cold weather, I was able to dig a little deeper. However, then it hit me:

A car.

Literally.

A car hit me.

I had been running down a narrow sidewalk along a busy street when a car jumped the curb and knocked me down. I rose to my feet immediately, American-style, punched the car in the grille, prompting it to burst into a firey explosion, and then I resumed running.

The Mounties had gained some ground on me because of that, and I now had no choice but to seek rejuvenation. Only one thing would suffice:

a couple Big Macs.

Most of the Mounties had given up chasing me, but one of the younger ones with some guile was still on my tail.

As quickly and discreetly as possible during the chase, I ducked into a Burger King. I cut to the front of the line way more quickly than I normally would if I weren’t being chased by some Mountie with moxy.

I asked the man at the counter for a half-dozen Big Macs.

He yapped some reply about “Oh, this is Burger King” and some other nonsense.

I punched him in the face.

Immediately, he went and started cooking me some Big Macs.

The Mountie and his horse then busted through the door and charged toward me. I roundhouse kicked the horse in the face, laying it out completely. The Mountie flew off the horse and landed atop a stack of those cardboard BK kids crowns.

He got up, cracked his neck, and pulled out a hockey stick.

It was officially on.

I charged at him and landed a couple punches right in his jaw. He appeared dazed for a moment, but since he’d been trained in the ancient Canadian fight technique of “hockey style,” he regrouped quickly. He pulled my shirt over my face and landed a flurry of punches into my stomach and face before I managed to push him away.

My back was to the counter, but my American power of “hearing” allowed me to recognize the Burger King employee was returning to the counter with my Big Macs.

I did a backflip over the counter, knocking the BK employee into a 7-year coma. Before the Big Macs hit the floor, I managed to get them unwrapped and eaten.

My muscles grew and my energy level was revitalized.

The Mountie backpedaled and started running from the store. I lifted his unconscious horse over my head and then yelled at him as he fled the store:

“You forgot your horse!”

I threw his horse out BK’s front window and took him out.

The women at Burger King then began fawning over me and began asking me to make out with them.

After I made out with a couple of them, I told them I had to go.

“I’m busy. I’m an American.”

Again, people, what’s with the blue jeans?

Apparently if any given department at my job achieves 100 percent participation in having money taken out of our checks to be donated to The United Way, everyone in that department gets rewarded by being able to have a full week of ”jeans days.”

On jeans days, employees get to wear blue jeans, and, well, that’s it. They still have to wear a nice-ish shirt and some decent shoes.

This whole jeans week thing came up today, and my boss was saying he really wanted to reach 100 percent because he’d like to wear jeans everyday for a week at work.

This led to the following exchanges:

Me: “Okay, but what if I don’t own any jeans?”
My boss: “Well, you’ll have to go buy some to wear for that week.”
Me: “I don’t like jeans. I’ll just come into work dressed like normal those days. Or maybe I’ll come in wearing a full suit and tie.”
My boss, clearly not realizing that me not owning jeans in the first place already answers the following: “Then you’ll be the odd one out. Do you really want to be different from everyone else?”
Me: “I’ve never succumbed to peer pressure in my life. I don’t plan on starting now.”
My boss: “Well, when everyone else is contributing and trying to get a jeans day, then we’ll see about the peer pressure.”
Me: “Veiled threats of physical violence are not the same as peer pressure.”
A girl in my department: “Hey, Josh, I want to have a word with you after work in the parking lot.”

Me: “What if I choose to support a competing organization because I don’t like The United Way’s ideology?”
My boss: “Well, I can’t do anything about that. That’s just the charity the company chose to support.”
Me: “Charity? I already volunteer at a soup kitchen.”
My boss: “You can still contribute.”
Me: “I don’t actually volunteer at a soup kitchen.”

Me: “So, since I don’t own jeans, this whole jeans day thing isn’t really incentive for me. I need some other motivation to participate.”
Girl in my department who threatened to fight me in the parking lot during the other exchange: “Josh, I”ll buy you lunch for the whole week if we get a jeans week.”

So, that settles it: people apparently really like wearing blue jeans at work.

I’m not saying I will or won’t choose to have money taken out of my check to support The United Way, and it’s honestly something I am open to consider, even if just to help boost morale for everyone else in the department for one stinkin’ week. What I am saying is that trying to tempt me to donate by offering a jeans week isn’t really incentive to me.

But let me wear some baggy-ish cargos, and maybe a Busted Tees t-shirt and/or a nicely relaxed fit hooded sweatshirt, and I’m totally there.

However, I might actually be more prone to just dress as normal. At my last job, I got to dress more casually on a regular basis, and I found I was less focused at that job. That may or may not have something to do with that I really disliked much of my last job, but I will say I was more focused there on days when I was required to dress nicely to conduct interviews and stuff.

Or maybe they could just let me wear a Batman costume* all day. That’d be cool, too.

—————————————–

* The cool new one with the built-in abs, of course, not the ol’ skool TV show pajama-style outfit.

Life needs to be more like baseball, pro wrestling, and/or TV dating shows

You know what I need?

Some motherlovin’ theme music.

I don’t mean none of that “Oh, I love this song! It explains my life’s plight and resonates within my soul!” nonsense.

I’m talkin’ some music that just kicks in when you enter a room, like when pro wrestlers, boxers, and ultimate fighters approach the ring, or when a baseball player approaches the plate for an at-bat.

Like, for instance, somewhere around 8:05 a.m. at my office each day right before the stairwell door opens up and I step out of it, LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” just kicks in all throughout the office.

“Slam” by Onyx.

Ice Cube’s “Check Yo Self.”

Or any of a handful of DMX songs, preferably one where he’s barking and yelling.

You know… something to get you amped up and simultaneously let everyone know you’ve arrived.

Even before I took a step inside, everyone at the office woulda already done recognized.

And then the stairwell door would open up, and I’d come runnin’ out all swingin’ my arms and being like, “Let’s crunch these numbers, son! Let’s type on some keyboards and send some emails!”

Or, if I was in a more laid back mood, it’d be somethin’ like “Dre Day” or “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang” by Dre and Snoop.

Then everyone in the office would place their hands in the air and start waving them slowly as they started swaying slowly, and the door would open. I’d be all, like, standing there with my hands up and my head down. I’d start nodding and bobbing my head and I’d make a nice slow walk to my cubicle pointing at people in the copy room all along the way.

It wouldn’t even have to be just for work. It could be for when you come home from work, or when you go to show up for your kids’ parent-teacher conferences, or when you go to a Tupperware party, and, y’know, things like that.

This needs to happen.

However, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before I’d be entering situations to songs that made no sense, like something by Manheim Steamroller, the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo,” or “Party All The Time” by Eddie Murphy and Rick James.

I was debating between exercising and going to buy some Little Debbies. I decided to blog instead.

Each day at work, I squeeze in roughly five to 15 minutes per day to check my fantasy sports teams, make sure their lineups are set properly, and then maybe check out a headline or two on ESPN’s website.

Today one of my coworkers was telling me about some gigantic grocery store in Milwaukee’s south suburbs — aka, somewhere way too ridiculously out of my way to traverse to just to slap some cash down on some Hot Pockets.

Word on the skreets is that they’re opening another location of that grocery store up near my neck of the woods.

Upon hearing this, I was all like, “Oh, really??? Well, I’d like to confirm this news. But how will I ever do so??? Oh, I know!!! I can surfboard on the Information Superhighway!”

Google + (grocery store’s name) =

1. Google map location of the south suburban location
2. Store’s website
3. 4. 5. etc.: Irrelevant nonsense

“Oh, hey! Lookie here at search result No. 2! It’s the store’s website! Let me click this and learn more!”

REEEEE-jected!

My company’s internet filter went all Dikembe Mutombo on me.

The only other time I’d been blocked by the company internet filter was that one time after I’d just been hired and had tried logging onto Facebook.

But blocked from a grocery store’s website???

Umm.

Okay?

Five minutes earlier, I’d placed Marian Hossa on the injured reserve list for the Ecuador Esquimales (that’s my fantasy hockey team). I mean, I’m not complainin’ about that or nuthin’. Well, that Hossa’s on the IR, sure — afterall, that hurts my Esquimales as well as my real-life team, the Blackhawks.

But being able to check my teams? I ain’t complainin’ ’bout that at all.

Then, when I got home from work, I discovered, by way of an updated status and a series of subsequent comments, that one of the few coworkers I’m Facebook friends with had somehow spent pretty much all afternoon chillin’ on Facebook.

Does not compute.

Did I really just gain a lil’ respect for Lil’ Wayne? Oh no. Please help us all.

Yeah, so, like, I DVR’d the Lil’ Wayne edition of VH1’s resurrected Behind The Music, and I, like, totally got around to watching it last evening.

Ummm…

Y’know all that ragging on Lil’ Wayne I’ve been doing ever since I once heard John Norris call him “the hottest rapper in the game” (which was back in, like 2006 or 2007 or whenever that craptastic “Fireman” song he had out was being overplayed on the radio)?

Well, I kinda feel bad about it.

But not THAT bad.

Lil’ Wayne’s Behind The Music showed me that Weezy is, in fact, a person, too. He has feelings, he has interests, he likes taking long walks on the beach, he cares about his community, he walks old ladies across the street, he rescues kittens from trees, and he likes getting high on cough syrup.

Some of those things may or may not be true. I’m not sure which, though.

Really, nothing about Lil’ Wayne’s story surprised or impressed too much. He had some interesting things to say here and there; I’ll give him that. But just because I watched some special on him doesn’t mean I like his music any more. Or, really, at all.

That’d be like people who read biographies, books about various “issues,” or cookbooks with 100 different recipes for how to cook brussell sprouts, and then come away favoring the ideas they just read about, even when the ideas might not be so great.

Yeah, you may feel enlightened because you just invested time in a subject, but just because people take the time to present you information doesn’t mean that information you’re consuming is worthy of merit.

Anyway, I digress. Sort of.

The one thing, though, that struck me about Lil’ Wayne pertained to his approach to songwriting. This is where I actually gained some respect for him.

Apparently at some point in his career, he felt that the physical act of writing his raps down on paper before he recorded them was detrimental to his creativity. He decided to go the route some rappers do, and just freestyle/improvise his songs upon hearing the music without ever writing them down.

He took it a step further, though. Lil’ Wayne then went and recorded every last one of his rhymes from his rhymebook, be they potential songs, or just leftover ideas — just the to say when he was done that he had no more written material and also find the creative freedom in all that doing so meant to him.

Whether that was an impact of all the substance use/abuse he was indulging in, which I think is possible, it actually made sense to me.

The result has become Lil’ Wayne just sorta spitfire rattling/rambling the rhymes that come to his head when he hears potential new song music.

My normal response is to say that’s just lazy songwriting, because he’s not really caring for the song as a song. He’s approaching it with a blatant disregard for technical proficiency and in doing so kinda spitting on an entire genre whose foundation stands in part on actual flow and rhyme skills. But then it hit me that maybe he is caring for the song as a song by caring to be free in his own creativity as he creates it?

And then I was all like, “Oh, crap… if hip hop is painting, is Lil’ Wayne an abstract painter?”

I mean, sure he’s weird, sure he keeps getting weirder, and sure his songs stray from certain hip hop conventions, but does that mean it’s good?

I don’t think so; then again I also prefer more complexly and/or melodically rhythmic cadences and not rhyming the same word with itself. But that’s just me.

What I decided is that I don’t think it matters if I think he’s not good because he doesn’t meet certain hip hop technical standards, much the same as it doesn’t matter if bazillions of other people buy into his music — regardless of if they’re just buying the hype or whether they think his music actually has some sort of aural appeal.

I could say that all that matters is that he keeps making art and expressing his creativity or some similarly cheesy garbage, but I don’t really know if that’s what matters, either.

What matters — possibly — is that he’s his own thing. He does what he does. Just like Mos Def will do what Mos Def does. And Kanye West will be Kanye West. 50 Cent = 50 Cent. And so on.

You happen to like some. You happen not to like some. That’s just all it is.

I’ve been roaming around. I was looking down at all I see.

I struggle with being content in all that makes me unique.

I struggle with being content in all that makes me normal.

Sometimes I wish I were unique.

Sometimes I wish I were normal.

I have a hard time sometimes grasping certain basic life concepts so innately understood by pretty much everyone else ever. I blame my dad for that. He never mistreated me or anything; he’s just weird.

The lines between confidence and cockiness, as well as between humility and low self-esteem are really thin. Sometimes I can’t figure out how to balance.

I’m often jealous of people with visible talents — especially my musically-inclined friends. I’m fortunate to have some friends who’ve been blessedly predisposed with incredible singing and musical capabilities.

My visible talents are, for the most part, useless. However, if I were more outgoing and/or drank, they’d probably come in handy to provide a couple laughs at a party or something.

I tend to refuse to compromise myself, perhaps on occasion at the detriment of my own happiness, perhaps on occasion at the detriment of my own sadness, and perhaps on occasion at the detriment of nothing more than my own life education. I tend instead to settle for staying distracted.

But mostly I just really miss Hammer pants.