Big Dion

An Open Letter to Emmett Burns About Grammar

September 10, 2012

Mr. Emmett C. Burns, Jr.

District Office

3600 Oak Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland 21207

Dear Mr. Burns:

Have you, sir, no, comprehension, understanding or respect for the English language? How dare you write a letter so laden with such blatant grammatical errors, sir? How dare you?

At this point in our history here in the United States of America we are in a grammatical desert where elementary rules governing syntax, spelling and basic punctuation are being callously ignored and tossed out like so much garbage by many in our citizenry who really ought to know better. Basic knowledge of the difference between “there” “their” and “they’re” or the correct way to spell definitely or the difference between effect and affect has all but disappeared. But I expected better from you, sir. You are, after all, an elected representative of the great state of Maryland, an educated man and a man who is so demanding of others. I ask again, sir, how dare you?

Your errors would be obvious to even the most plebian grammarian, had you bothered even a cursory proofread by a third party (or even a second party). They begin at the opening of your letter and continue in gross fashion throughout it. Why would you think the word delegate needed to be capitalized? A delegate is not a proper noun nor is it an official title, the name of a city, state or country. Are you unaware of this or do you simply not care?

You then continue your reckless disregard for grammar on the very next line when you write, “Baltimore Ravens Football fan.” Why would you capitalize “football”? Is the team known as the Baltimore Ravens Football? No. It’s known as the Baltimore Ravens and you are a football fan or a fan of their football team. Either way, capitalization is not necessary and is simply incorrect.

You then go on to write “Same-Sex marriage.” What on earth would lead you to believe that “same-sex” would necessitate capitalization? Were you under the impression that same-sex was a brand name or trademark belonging to a company? Simply being a political issue does not make a term deserving of capitalization. This is a basic tenet of the English language and one of which you should be well aware.

Your grammatical errors continue throughout the letter. You capitalize “Football Team,” refer to Mr. Bisciotti as a “National Football Franchise Owner” and misuse the word “inhibit.” All of these errors were made in a two-paragraph letter that you explicitly (and incorrectly) label as being meant for the media with a “c.c. media” note at the bottom. Shame on you, sir.

Our children and the good people of Maryland deserve better command of the English language from their elected representatives. If you do not have such command of the language yourself, I ask you to please seek out a member of your staff to oversee future communication you make in written form.

Your poor grammar is both profane and injurious, significantly more so than the actions of Mr. Brendon Ayanbadejo. My eyes bled and my heart wept as I read it for all the people your lack of tact and reverence for our dear language will hurt. You are a despicable man and ought to be impeached from office for this chicanery.

As I am not one of your constituents, I will not demand your resignation or a personal apology. I ask only that you respectfully self fornicate, you retromingent carpous scallywag. The United States of America deserves better.

Sincerely,

Big M.F. Dion

Big Dion on How Love Is

I tried to watch “Rachel Getting Married” the other day on HBO. It’s that Anne Hathaway vehicle about a girl who gets out of rehab and then wrecks her sister’s wedding.

It looked like it had promise because Anne’s sister is getting married to a black guy, which was new and exciting, but then it quickly dove into that “everyday story of a family” bullshit that indie filmmakers love to make. You know, the quintessential movie about a week or a month in the life of a modern family that somehow represents all of our families in some way and isn’t really about anything and at the end of the movie nothing really happens. (Think “Little Miss Sunshine” or “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” those movies that people who are really into movies love because they “take chances” and don’t fall into the typical movie clichés, except it seems like without falling into typical movie clichés, movies are apparently two-hour vignettes about screwed up people who don’t do much but argue over esoteric nonsense that only those blessed few with a highbrow taste and intellect are able to appreciate.)

Then I watched the series finale of “The Newsroom,” and after I finished throwing up all over my house, I came to some conclusions about life, love and relationships.

SIDE NOTE: I’ve never been an Aaron Sorkin fan, but it’s mostly because I haven’t seen much that he’s done. I’ve never watched “The West Wing” or “Sports Night;” I saw one episode of Studio 60 and thought it was a little too into how clever it was. I thought “The Social Network” was good, but wildly overrated (SIDE SIDE NOTE: Can you put a semicolon inside quotation marks? Obviously the punctuation marks go inside the quotes, but I’ve never seen a semicolon used.) I digress.

My big problem with “The Newsroom” is the characters, and more specifically the romances between the characters. First, there’s the ugly blond who is Will’s intern and somehow magically gets bumped up to an associate producer on the first episode all while maintaining a romance with the show’s former senior producer. Then a new senior producer comes in and magically he falls in love with her too. It’s all part of this new “nerds win” philosophy or the Apatow version of the world where the hot girl goes for the nerd because he’s smart and has substance (and really the hot girl has substance too, she’s just been dating dicks all her life because she’s the victim of society’s mores and nerds are too scared to ask her out).

So this odd looking girl with eyes that are way too fucking close together and dirty, stringy hair has not one, but two senior producers vying for her affection, and of course she sticks with the better looking guy, the one who isn’t right for her because, you know, Jim and Pam can’t get together until season four.

Then there are the two black people on the show who have this terribly cliché back and forth, mostly about Obama. But they mind their place in the background and stay out of conversations between the important white people whose love lives we are rapt in and only show up to bicker in a clever way that shows they’re intelligent and not stereotypically black, but can still manage to keep it real.

Then there’s the Mackenzie-Will relationship at the center of it all, which could not be any more of a pathetic TV show anachronism. They’re former lovers who are brought back together by the magic of News Night 2.0 and by delivering quality, groundbreaking journalism in this age of fluff and frivolousness. First Mackenzie will have to date a couple of losers and Will will have to date some floozies and some girls who (on paper) are better than Mackenzie, but ultimately they’ll wind up together, sharing a kiss in some season finale down the road leaving viewers breathless and wondering if these two crazy kids can really make it work.

TV relationships always annoy me because they seem so completely ungrounded in reality. It’s so stupid and insipid and predictable and more importantly not real. TV relationships in the 21st century seem to all be hollow homages to the demigod of perfunctory infatuation masked as true love.

Last year, in New York when I met with my friend Ems, is when I first realized this. She introduced me to the man who is now her husband, and at first I didn’t get it. Ems is one of those girls who’s pretty in a way that even if she tried really, really hard not to be, she would still be. Think young Sinead O’Connor with long blond hair. Her new husband is not pretty. He’s kind of short, if memory serves, and is Eurasian (from Belarus) and kind of has no personality. I didn’t get it. And then I watched them together.

They work because he balances her. That whole “you complete me” bullshit from Jerry McGuire is real. It’s real in the sense that the person we belong with isn’t the person that’s most like us or the person who laughs at the same stupid shit we do or shares our idiosyncratic interests, but the person who completes us. It’s not the person who completes us in terms of who we are and what we want, but in terms of what we’re missing, which is something that oftentimes we don’t even realize.

Ems’ husband is just what she needs. He’s attentive and giving and understanding. She needs those things from a partner, but I would bet that if you asked her two days before they started dating, “What do you look for in a guy?” she would have said none of those things.

That’s the main thing I’ve noticed in the successful couples I know: the thing that makes them work is something they don’t entirely realize themselves. I’m sure if you asked her now, “What is it that makes your relationship with your husband work?” she wouldn’t say, “He pays attention to me when I need it and is understanding and loves me enough that he doesn’t make me explain myself.” But I’m pretty confident that’s what it is.

While I was in Denver a couple weeks back I went to my friend Kyle’s wedding. I was a late addition as a groomsman, I think because he figured I was the only person he knew capable of throwing a suitable bachelor party. There were four of us – one is religious and averse to strip clubs, another is married and lives in Wisconsin, one has a vagina and the other is me.

SIDE NOTE: He called the bachelor party I planned for him, “the best party ever.”

Kyle is a lot like me in the sense that he thinks it’s funny to question and contradict societal norms and he doesn’t really give a fuck what you think of him. He lives by the idea that those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. We’re also very different – he’s conservative, white, loves guns and really, really, really likes to follow the rules.

He also is wholly unmotivated by emotion or insecurity, which makes it hard to relate to people. I think it’s why we both have so many platonic female friends, as counter-intuitive as that sounds.

Also like me, on a surface level he doesn’t seem like much of a catch. He’s boorish and constantly makes misogynistic jokes that he’s only half kidding about; he’s far from loaded; he’s not flashy; his job isn’t impressive; and he’s not particularly motivated to become anything more than who he is.

But what Kyle needed was someone who could look past all of his wacky antics and outfits and his lack of giving a fuck and see who he is inside. Inside he’s a very traditional guy and has to be one of the most deeply decent people I know. He cares about others, he’s honest, he’s earnest, he has integrity and he’s the kind of person who will give you the shirt off his back. But you wouldn’t know this when you met him. You’d just think he was some goofy weirdo who made inappropriate jokes and had no brain-to-mouth filter.

I’ve known his wife for a couple years and what makes them work is that she appreciates him for being who he is and he appreciates her for appreciating him. Their love is quiet and intimate and there’s no show or ostentatious display, just this calm energy you feel when you’re around the two of them together.

For me, that, more than anything else, is the determinant of successful coupledom – does your partner put you in a better place? Not because you were anxious about where they were or what they were doing or because you missed holding them or vice versa, but does their mere presence make you a different, better and more whole you?

In life, I believe in four things: love, death, gravity and myself. That’s it. I believe in love because I’ve seen love. More importantly, I’ve felt love. It’s this amazing feeling of happiness and wholeness and uncertainty and immutable forgiveness and compassion that makes you do things that you swore you never would. It makes you rethink everything in your life you were sure of and have epiphanies that you aren’t entirely sure are real, but that you just go with because you can’t imagine going against them.

It’s really a lot like heroin. At first it gets you high and you feel euphoric and it changes the way you act and the way you feel and the way you behave. It changes who your friends are, how you dress and how you feel about yourself. And then at some point you just lose the ability to live without it. It becomes part of your ability to feel normal and without it you’re literally sick.

Also like heroin, you know the real shit when you have it. An addict can always tell when they’re being ripped off with some low-grade bullshit and they know when they’ve got the real McCoy. Love, like heroin, doesn’t make you better, it makes you worse. What makes you better is having the one you love and having them love you back.

That’s why relationships are so important. Love by itself isn’t enough, because it isn’t self sustaining. Love has to be maintained and taken care of and if two people aren’t hopelessly dependent on each other in ways they don’t and can’t fully appreciate, it doesn’t work.

My grandfather and my step grandmother have been married for more than 30 years. He’s black, she’s white and he was raising four black children from a previous marriage when they met, not to mention another he had from a relationship before that. And they got married in the 1970s.

Aside from the obvious issues that such a relationship would bring about, I don’t ever think I’ve heard him tell her he loves her or vice versa and I literally don’t ever think I’ve seen them kiss. He’s in his 80s and she’s in her 70s and the thought of them having sex is repugnant, but even if it wasn’t I can’t imagine they’ve done it in a decade. Despite a complete absence of everything we’re taught to believe about what makes couples and love and relationships work, they make it work and they’ve made it work for all these years through a mountain of bullshit I won’t even begin to divulge.

They’re in love. But more than love they have a relationship.

I think back in the day when people got married there was a real understanding that this thing was for life and the public shame, scorn and humiliation that went along with divorce was enough to get most people to put up with the bullshit and wade through it.

Today, that shame, scorn and humiliation are gone and marriage doesn’t really mean what it used to. Even though people are waiting longer to get married, the marriage itself means less. Marriage today isn’t about a lifelong pledge of devotion, it’s about proving to yourself and the people around you that the love you have is real and making sure they all know it. Everyone seems more focused on the love than the commitment.

But seeing Kyle’s wedding and seeing his wife’s sisters and her family completely accept him and see him the way she sees him made me believe that maybe it’s not all dress-up at this point.

Recently when I found out that Aaron Sorkin, creator and writer of The Newsroom, was dating Kristin Davis a.k.a. Charlotte York Goldenblatt. This is important for a number of reasons, but most importantly because I have never been as in love with any television character as I was/am in love with Charlotte York Goldenblatt. I love Charlotte York because she always, always believed in love. She wore her heart on her sleeve and never for a second doubted her worth or her conviction that everything would turn out alright if you just kept believing.

Sure, Charlotte is a blue blood from Connecticut whose parents would shudder at the thought of her bringing home a brotha from the streets. But if she could marry Harry Goldenblatt, convert to Judaism and adopt a little Asian baby, I don’t think shacking up with a black man with tattoos from the hood who is 20 years her junior is that much more of a crazy stretch.

So naturally, I lost all respect for Newsroom when they went after “Sex & the City” in the season finale. In that episode, ugly blonde AP gets splashed by a “Sex & the City” tour bus as she’s walking out of a restaurant while the “Sex & the City” theme song plays. After getting splashed, she goes on this rant about how things in real life don’t end up perfect like on “Sex & the City.”

But here’s the thing about “Sex & the City,” it never mythologized relationships or love. Relationships on “Sex & the City” were flawed, they were messy and most of the time they didn’t work. It was never a show about how love conquered all or about how things always came together in the end. Whether it was career or location or maturity or an ex, most of the time things fell apart. At the end of the day the moral of Sex & the City wasn’t, “love will always find a way,” it was, “falling love is hard, make sure you have good friends to catch you.”

Love is complicated, love is hard but most of all love is real. I hope it works out for Kyle and his new bride forever and ever. But even if it doesn’t, it was nice to spend a few hours at a wedding with two people who get it.

My all-Olympic SheCouldGetIt Team

The explosion and preponderance of hot female Olympians has been one of our favorite things about this year’s games. More than just ogling pretty girls, having attractive female Olympians speaks to the new normal of female athletics. Women who competed in sports used to all be homely lesbians, but now pretty sorority girls compete and they win. It’s exciting to watch.

That said, putting together our all-Olympic team was tough this year. As much Olympic coverage as we watched (way more than you), we’re still not sure we found all the talent out there.

Since handball and beach volleyball were our two surprise favorites of the games, we’ve decided to make the all-Olympics SheCouldGetIt team a handball team (because handball has seven players and seven subs, which allows me more flexibility than beach volleyball, which has two players and zero subs).

SIDE NOTE: After watching women’s handball, it seemed like the men’s version would be better. It’s like a glorious mix of basketball and lacrosse so naturally we assumed that bigger, faster, more coordinated men would be more exciting to watch. That’s not the case. Women’s handball is way more fun to watch and not just because there are some cute girls on most teams (none go beyond, though). The women are smaller so their game flows more smoothly. The men are too big and bulky and it slows things down and makes the movements awkward. I digress.

We’re very proud of our all-Olympic SheCouldGetItTeam. The starters are two tennis players and two beach volleyball players, along with a runner, a basketball player and a girl who throws things. The US is well represented (because we have the hottest women), but Europe, South America and Asia also make the list.

We would like it noted that these are all Olympians we spotted while watching the games, not girls we picked off of some “Hottest Olympians” list online. Also, full disclosure, we may be going through a blond phase right now. Anyway, without further ado, here are the starters:

Sabine Lasicki (Germany, tennis) Hot, thick, blond and German. You’ve got to wonder what kind of guys she’s into. Are German men intimidated by her thickness? Can they handle it?

Angelique Kerber (Germany, tennis) –Also hot, thick, blond and German. She’s Lasicki’s doubles partner on the German tennis team. Their chemistry really gives the team a kick.

Lolo Jones (United States, track and field) – She’s taken a lot of heat for getting a bunch of endorsements and then sucking in the actual Olympics. Those mean reporters even made her cry. But here’s the thing, it’s not her fault she’s hot and it’s not her fault that people want to give her money. To be great at anything, especially individual athletics, you have to have an irrational belief that you are the best. If you’re on that short list of demonstrable greatness, and fourth place in the fucking Olympics puts you in that echelon, you have every right to accept money and advertising from companies who want you to be the face of their brand representing Olympic greatness. That is to say that of course Lolo Jones thought she was going to win gold. Track and field reporters and enthusiasts knew she wasn’t going to win gold, but to be great you have to ignore all those people. People should really lighten up on the poor girl. And she’s funny.

Leryn Franco (Paraguay, track and field) – This is our team’s go-to player and MVP. She’s also a model, so she’s professionally good looking. Unfortunately, she’s not really very good at her actual sport. She didn’t even make the finals and ultimately finished 34 th at the javelin this year.

Marketa Slukova (Czech Republic, beach volleyball) – A friend once referenced a girl and said, “That’s how all women should look.” Beach volleyball players are how all women should look. They’re tall, toned and actually vary in shape quite a bit. Some are skinny like Kerri Walsh and others are round (not thick or fat, but round) like Marta Menegatti (who is also on our list), but they’re all really fun to look at when they play. That’s probably why this list has more beach volleyball players than any other sport.

Candace Parker (US, basketball) –Candace is the Beyonce of female athletes. She’s so unquestionably hot that sometimes you forget how hot she is. And also she’s married to Sheldon Williams, which no one really understands. It’d be like if Beyonce was married to Ja Rule or something.

Xue Chen (China, beach volleyball) –Who would have thought that China would produce one of the hottest beach volleyball players in this year’s Olympics? Beach volleyball players have to be tall and athletic and female, three things the Chinese are not really known to be.

Bench:

Catalina Ponor (Romania, gymnastics) – The only gymnast on the team and our 8-man off the bench (like a sixth man in the NBA). She’s pretty much the only gymnast of age outside from that old lady from the Ukraine who is like 40. It was nice to have a gymnast to crush on now that most Olympians are 14-year-old girls with tiny legs and impossibly huge shoulders.

Alex Morgan (US, soccer) – Don’t understand all the Hope Solo hype. Just don’t. Alex Morgan is so much hotter.

Liu Hong (China, race walking) – She makes race walking watchable.

Kim Glass (US, volleyball) – We weren’t actually fans until this photo shoot.

Alyson Felix (US, track and field) –Alyson looks like a really sweet girl. There was so much talent in this year’s Olympics her teammate Sandra Richards-Ross didn’t make the cut. She’s hot too.

Stephanie Rice (Australia, swimming) – This photo got her on the list. The fact that she put it on Twitter merited her starter contention.

Louise Hazel (Britain, track and field) –Louise and Stephanie Rice illustrate an ideal that we never thought was possible, that excessively muscular women can be sexy. It’s the new normal. Somehow despite a rippling six-pack, she’s still got a feminine body. She’s also gorgeous.

Honorable mention:
Becky Hammon (Russia, basketball) Christina Vukicevic (Norway, track and field) Jessica Ennis (Britain, track and field) Beatriz Fernandez (Spain, handball) Marta Menegatti (Italy, beach volleyball)
Ida Alstad (Norway, handball)
Jaque (Brazil, volleyball)

With apologies to my love, the now deceased Nora Ephron

To this day I’ve never seen “Sleepless in Seattle” or “When Harry Met Sally” or any of Nora Ephron’s other films, save for “You’ve Got Mail,” which was unforgivably terrible and made me want to spew green bile everywhere. But I will always love Nora Ephron for an essay I read my senior year of college. The essay was “A Few Words About Breasts.”

I loved it and after I found out she died last night, I read it again and I loved it even more. I loved it for the same reason that readers of “Esquire,” an unrepentant MEN’s magazine, loved it. It was so completely honest and vulnerable and (without being sexist, patriarchal or patronizing) adorable.

I fell in love with Nora. I fell in love with her insecurity, her brazeness (which isn’t a word, but should be), her wit and her intelligence. There’s something special about writing that allows you to see into someone’s soul and into their head that no other art form has and Nora was a master of it. I’ve been a fan since the moment I finished reading the essay for the second time and my heart sort of sank last night hearing that she died.

Of all the women I’ve loved and never met (Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem, Nina Persson, Nora Ephron, that’s it) I may have loved Nora best.

If you haven’t ever read it, take a moment to read “A Few Words About Breasts.” It will be, without question, the best thing you do today. After I read the piece, in college, I wrote my own response for my Personal Essay course. It got an ‘A’. It’s not nearly as good as hers and it’s actually kind of dumb, but it’s all I have to offer in the way of an elegy.

“With Apologies to Nora Ephron”

I truly detest the word boobs. It’s probably one of – if not my least – favorite words. I can’t stand it. It’s just such an ugly word.

I mean if you can think of an uglier word then by all means tell me, but I certainly can’t. The word repugnant is probably uglier than boobs, but repugnant is a spectacular word because it means repugnant. There is probably not a more prima fascia repugnant word in the universe than repugnant, which is exactly what makes it so extraordinary.

But the word boobs is an extraordinarily ugly word for a beautiful thing. I love breasts. The word breasts is kind of a funny word when said aloud (honestly, say it out loud, breasts) but that’s just because of the location of the esses, and any word with esses separated by a single consonant sounds strange (chests, vests, crests..etc. ad nauseam). The word boobs, however, is just ugly.

It’s ugly no matter how you look it at. On its face: boobs. Anyone that can honestly look at that word for its calligraphy value and not say it’s horrendously ugly should have their head examined. It’s ugly to say and it’s ugly to hear. Anytime I hear some girl talk about boobs, or even more disturbingly her singular boob, it’s like someone hit me in the genitals with a baseball bat. Even the word genitals is more appealing than boobs.

I’ve hated the word for a long time. I think it was truly ruined for me when a friend of my tenth grade girlfriend repeated it over and over again until I really got to thinking about it. Boobs. It’s just so very unattractive. It’s unattractive to hear, unattractive to say, unattractive to write and unattractive to read. Boobs.

I love women’s breasts. I’ve been an aficionado since I was 12 and my friend Michael scored us a copy of Juggs magazine, but I’ve always hated hearing people call them boobs. Tits, knockers, fun bags, melons, honkers, hooters, bazongas, chi chis, anything is better than saying boobs. You can’t truly appreciate a nice set of boobs. Boobs sounds like something you wipe off your shoe when you’ve been out in the rain too long, or something gunky you find underneath your bed when you haven’t cleaned you room in a long time.

Boobs don’t sound like the beautiful things that they are. Boobs don’t sound like the parts of the body that give sustenance to a newborn infant or the best accessories to that new dress you just bought. Boobs? Boobs can’t make a woman or change a man’s heart. Boobs?

Where did this word come from? I’ve been hoping and praying in vain for ages that someday people will realize how absolutely profane the word is, but so far to no avail. I mean, really, boobs? Have you ever heard anything quite so stupid?

The Atlanta Diaries: TFKs (Terrible Fucking Kissers)

(photo above is Minka Kelly, Leighton Meester and someone named Jessica Szohr. Courtesy of fuckyeahhotactress.tumblr.com)

I went out last night and got back into my old (bad) habit of making out with girls in public. It’s something I try not to do anymore because it’s so very freshman year of college, but I suppose we all have our vices. Some people smoke, some people eat a tub of ice cream, some people bite their nails, I make out with slutty girls in clubs. It could be worse.

This all happened at a club called MJQ. It’s a really cool place that sometimes sucks, but the concept is quite novel. You’d probably miss the place if you drove by it because the club is literally underground. The actual structure is just this shack-looking edifice and it’s only real purpose, I guess, is so that people who have never been there know where to go inside. So you pay your $5 to the guy sitting outside and walk down a hallway corridor that leads you to the actual club part.

SIDE NOTE: Normally I am unequivocally opposed to paying cover, but it’s the only way I’ve found to party with black people in Atlanta. I still haven’t been able to find a bar or otherwise free establishment that’s frequented by black folks where I can feel confident about not getting shot. Plus my tour guide for this place is of similar mindset and I live around white people and I work from home and I’m still not quite comfortable with putting up a Craigslist ad looking for black friends. So here we are paying cover.

I digress. The club itself is almost like a really decked-out basement with a bar in the middle and a tiny dance floor and an even smaller stage adjacent to it. Around 1 a.m. it gets packed. If you go on Wednesdays they play this crazy, unpredictably outré mix of music that can only be described as whatever the fuck the DJ feels like playing that night. Last night I swear I heard Slick Rick, the Cranberries, Wu-Tang, whoever sings 99 Luftballoons, The Go-Gos, I think there was even a Cardigans hearing (like a sighting…I don’t know if this works, but I’m gonna stick with it).

So I’m inside and I’m dancing with girls and I meet this one kind of cute, nerdy-looking girl who says her name is Katie. Katie was super excited to dance with me, like really, super fucking excited. Like I said, she was nerdy, but she wasn’t ugly. She kept telling me how good looking I was and how lucky she was to be dancing with me. Apparently she’s from Colorado, but she’s one of the Hill people that’s from the mountains and has no real social skills. She was in town visiting a friend or something like that. I asked her to be my date for a wedding I’m going to in August. She melted. We made out a little bit. She left.

Katie’s actual kissing technique wasn’t particularly objectionable, but her lips were. Her bottom lip was cracked and chapped to the point that I was seriously taken aback. First of all, you shouldn’t leave the house with chapped-up lips and even if you do, have the common courtesy to lick them before you kiss someone. Does she not realize her lips are chapped? I mean, I know she’s a Hill person, but they’re your lips, how do you not feel them being cracked? I could feel the dead skin, and it was just weird and nasty. Needless to say, I will not be bringing Katie the Hill person to the wedding.

This happened once before with a French girl I met in LA who didn’t speak English. I made out with her at this bar on karaoke night and her lips were so dry that I actually had to tell her to lick them. That’s when I realized she didn’t speak English. So I mimed it for her, she licked her lips, we went back to kissing, they got dry again, we stopped kissing, I mimed again, we went back to kissing, something happened, we stopped kissing, her friends took her away, I never saw her again. It’s always been a goal of mine to take home a girl who spoke no English, and this was the closest I’ve ever come.

Back to last night, though. After I left Katie, I went back to talking to these 21-year-old girls at the bar. Eventually one of them ended up giving me a faux lap dance and we started making out. Her problem was too much tongue. A note to women everywhere: kissing is not a tongue contest. You don’t win anything for sticking as much of your tongue in my mouth as possible. In fact, you lose.

I’ve had a pretty good run of kissers in the last 5-10 years. In fact, since I’ve been 21 there haven’t been too many terrible experiences, so last night was extra unpleasant. But I’m not even done yet.

Then there was some girl named Jackie who did the fish-out-of-water thing to me. I haven’t experienced this in years and its return was anything but welcome. The fish-out-of-water technique is when a girl opens and closes her mouth as many times as she possibly can while kissing you, like a fish when you pull it out of the water and it’s struggling for air. I will never understand why girls think this is cute or sexy or enjoyable. It’s not.

I think the problem is that no one has been able to sit these girls down – for a number of reasons – and explain to them what they’re doing wrong. (These girls also may have just been really inebriated. I’ve kissed some girls drunk and then kissed them sober and noticed a world of difference. That said, I get really inebriated and I still don’t kiss like a fish, so I’m going to err on the side of this being an overall, not just a drunken, problem.) So I would like to take a moment to tell all the women out there a few things about kissing. I’ve kissed a lot of women in my time – young and old, black and white, foreign and domestic – so you can trust that I know a thing or two about this.

1.       Kissing is like dancing and like with dancing someone has to lead. That someone is the man. The man leads. Don’t try to lead. Like with dancing, if you try to lead shit gets fucked up and nobody wins. I don’t know about other dudes, but I’m not following, so we just end up in a situation where two people are trying to lead and then people’s feet get stepped on and heads get bumped and everybody’s a loser.

2.       Following the same line of thought, you need to follow. You can’t just do your own thing. Again, kissing is like dancing. If I’m doing the waltz you need to be doing the waltz. You can’t do the mambo. I don’t care how much you like doing the mambo, we’re waltzing now. Get with the program.

3.       Most people would rather have too little tongue than too much. I personally am a fan of French kissing, but I would rather have a completely tongue-less kiss than tongue everywhere. That’s just unpleasant. If you suspect, even a little bit, that you may use too much tongue, tone it down.

4.       Eyes closed. The whole time.

5.       Sometimes biting is sexy, but don’t overdo it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been bitten by a girl in a way that was not pleasant. A note to biters (and this is coming from a guy who likes biting): you can’t just bite, there has to be some kissing in there too. Once I literally took a girl aside and had to explain this to her. I coached her step-by-step until she finally got it. Biting is not kissing. It can be a part of kissing, but not the only part. That’s just biting. I don’t want to just be bitten by you; I don’t care how hot you are. Also, try to keep the biting light. I want to feel it, but it shouldn’t hurt in the morning.

That new Chris Breezy video is fire! Which reminds me, we should talk about domestic abuse

I love Chris Brown’s new video. Breezy’s verse was cool, I loved the cameos from Snoop, Red and Meth, I love the way it was shot, I love the shout out to ‘90s fashion (whether it was ironic or not I’m not sure because everyone’s dressing like the ‘90s these days) and most of all I love seeing my girlfriend, the city of Los Angeles, in the background. I love this video.

Fortunately or unfortunately any positive mention of Chris Brown these days seems to necessitate a defense for supporting him despite his well-documented forays into domestic abuse. It’s always interesting how someone becomes the face of something. Like how Diddy’s son became a poster boy for privileged kids being given full scholarships to college yesterday, despite the fact that thousands of other rich, famous people’s kids have been given full scholarships to college for various reasons through the years.

Chris Brown’s poster boy status makes more sense. We all saw what he did to Rihanna, thanks to TMZ, and it was shocking. Then we saw his behavior afterward and then there was this and this. But it seems like in our culture it’s not the crime that counts, but how you react afterward. Note Casey Anthony and Dharun Ravi for great examples of people who were vilified more for their post-crime behavior than for what actually happened.

People like to pretend that they hate Anthony because she killed her daughter, but the real reason they hate her is because she was in a wet t-shirt contest days after Caylee died. People don’t hate Ravi because he shamed his roommate into killing himself, they hate him because he didn’t look sad enough in the court room after it happened.

(SIDE NOTE: $500,000 has been donated for George Zimmerman’s defense. That’s not directly related to any of this, but I felt like it was worth mentioning.)

The same is true for Brown. It wasn’t that he beat Rihanna up or that we saw how bad he’d beaten her, it’s that he wasn’t contrite and forlorn enough for all of us after it happened.

But more to the point, the whole Chris Brown-Rihanna incident could have led to a really adult and mature conversation about domestic abuse and why it happens, how it affects people and what factors cause men to be abusive and women to stay in abusive relationships. Instead there was some stupid war between #TeamBreezy and #TeamChrisBrownisaTerribleHumanBeingandShouldNotBeAllowedToLive (the second one is not an actual hastag). It’s all fine and good to support Chris Brown without defending what he did to Rihanna, although a lot of people seem to feel the need to do that (“she deserved it,” “she was attacking him,” “he was defending himself,” “that crazy bitch had it coming”), but I think it’s more important to look at his behavior and what it says about him and American culture at large.

Here’s the thing about men who abuse women: they aren’t normal people. Most men who abuse women are actually unstable and/or psychopathic. To wit, research suggests that about 80 percent of “both court-referred and self-referred men in domestic violence studies exhibited diagnosable psychopathology, typically personality disorders.

“The estimate of personality disorders in the general population would be more in the 15–20 percent range…As violence becomes more severe and chronic in the relationship, the likelihood of psychopathology in these men approaches 100 percent,” according to a report by Donald Dutton titled, “Patriachcy and Wife Assault: The Ecological Fallacy” (that I admittedly found on Wikipedia).

To put it simply, Chris Brown is crazy. I think his behavior following the incident and everything he’s done since then sort of corroborates that idea. It was particularly visible in his violent outburst at “Good Morning America” after Robin Roberts had the temerity (the TEMERITY) to even broach the subject.

There’s also a school of thought that suggests stress is what causes men to lash out violently at their domestic partner. More than the stress, though, it’s the fact that men who abuse women don’t know how to deal with the stress. They simply inculcate the stress and unleash it unexpectedly on an innocent victim.

“Our study suggests that violent behavior is a likely response among people with particular methods of evaluating and coping with stress,” said Kristi Williams, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University. Her study found that abusive men were likely to view stressful circumstances as personally threatening, while trying to avoid the situation or repress emotional responses.

Domestic abuse is also a learned behavior. Studies have found that nearly one half of abusive men grew up in homes where their father or step father was an abuser. The real problem is that no one knows what to do about it. There are programs for men who have been abusive, but what about programs for men before they become abusive?

This comes back to our societal ideal of what makes a man a “real man.” There’s this idea that a real man is stoic and that anger rather than sadness is the appropriate reaction to trying times and situations. There’s an entire school of thought and research devoted to how men respond to sadness with anger while women respond to anger with sadness. If (as a man) you’ve ever been so sad you punched a wall or broke something or (as a woman) have been so angry you started crying, you’ve experienced this phenomenon first hand.

So it’s society’s fault? Not exactly. To bring it back to Young Mr. Breezy, like most great artists he seems to be navigating a delicate balance of brilliance and insanity. A lot of that has led to the rapping and the tattoos and the increasingly erratic behavior. The disparity between the blind adoration and blind enmity that seems to be directed toward Brown seems to come from those who realize that he’s not of sound mind and those who don’t. I think that’s why so many people (and a particularly high number of women) are so passionately supportive of Chris Brown no matter what he does. People who are abnormal and outré and different see bits of themselves in him.

It’s easy to dismiss what he did as, “the kid made a mistake” and just as easy to vilify him for life as, “a monster.” But really, like all of us, he’s a complicated individual who has issues. We won’t ever understand his issues because we don’t know him.

But I suppose I’m talking to myself, because no one really wants to talk about domestic abuse unless we’re all agreeing that it’s bad. So let’s just listen to Chris Brown’s music. Cuz I can’t lie, Breezy’s got that hotness.

If you are actually interested, check out http://www.emergedv.com/

and http://www.mchenrycountyturningpoint.org/causes.html

No, Diddy’s Son Shouldn’t Have to Return His Scholarship, You Idiots

Well, it looks like Participation Trophy Generation Syndrome (PTGS) has struck again. People think that just because Justin Combs should have to give back his scholarship to UCLA just because hisDiddydaddy is a multimillionaire and because, what, he has a restaurant named after him?

It saddens me more and more every day that these pathetic people and their massively warped sense of entitlement continue to dominate discussions. The kid earned an athletic scholarship to a Division-I FBS university and he should have to give it back because his dad makes more money than yours? That’s the stupidest thing ever. Why does Justin Combs get a scholarship and you don’t? Because Justin Combs is way, way, way, way better at football than you are. In fact, he’s way better at football than you are at anything in your entire stupid life.

Scholarships aren’t just about the money. They’re about the achievement of being one of the best players in the country. It means something to be a scholarship athlete. UCLA doesn’t just give them out to anyone. People complaining about this have no idea how hard it is to be given this opportunity. But just to give you a sense of the odds, only 1.4 percent of high school football players are offered scholarships to play at the college level. One-point-four percent. That’s lower than the acceptance rate at Julliard, Oxford or Ringling Bros. Clown College.

While Combs isn’t exactly a beast at 5’9”, 170 lbs, he obviously did enough to merit national attention. He’s rated a two-star player by Rivals.com and he had offers from UVa., Illinois, Iowa, UAB, Wyoming and a few smaller schools.

Also, why doesn’t anyone complain when former NBA or NFL players’ kids are offered scholarships? Austin Rivers obviously could’ve afforded to pay to go to Duke. Howie Long’s son Jake could certainly have afforded to pay tuition at the University of Virginia. What about Bill Walton’s son Luke or Dell Curry’s son Stephen, should they have had to pay their way through college because their dads made millions?

Here’s the single stupidest part of the whole equation. Apparently “tax payers” don’t think their money should be going to fund this kid’s scholarship because he’s rich, but athletic scholarships don’t come from tax payer money. Athletic departments make millions of dollars from the slave labor of their so-called student athletes. They use that money to pay for scholarships.

The second stupidest part is that no one seems to understand Combs chose UCLA for a reason and the free education was a big part of that reason. If they withdrew the scholarship offer or told him he’d have to pay, odds are he’d take an offer from one of the other eight programs who have been recruiting him and would gladly pay his way.

I’d seriously love to meet someone who thinks this is unfair just to hear the reasoning behind this nonsense. When you work your ass off your work should be rewarded no matter who you father is.