some rant...

as i was driving home today, i thought about how easy it would be for me to follow one person on the road that pissed me off to their destination and let them get the verbal beat down of a lifetime. i thought about that for a while as many drivers were doing stupid things along our routes. then i started to think of every asshole i have ever met; every douche bag i have encountered; every piece of shit person who no matter what a jerk they are, still gets what he/she wants. it sickened me. for as long as i can remember, i was always told to be nice to everyone, because someday, that one person i was mean to might be my boss. the fuck ever. i'm kind of tired of being a nice guy. i know too many pricks out there who have an awesome girlfriend/boyfriend or wife/husband that cheat, lie, are super arrogant (the list could go on) and are looked at as awesome people. what if everyone knew that he was cheating on her with that stupid bitch? what if he found out that while he was talking to her on the phone before he went to sleep, she was getting eaten out by some dude? what if? throughout my life, i have stumbled upon A LOT of dirt on people. for whatever reason, people vent to me about problems they have or have had with others. i never go prying into someone's personal emotions, cuz to be honest, i hate talking about my own. but when people start spewing information, i just let them speak their mind, keep it to myself (unless it is something that really does worry/concern me and may need better guidance) and just keep it in my back pocket about said person. there have been so many relationships i could have ruined. there are a few that i have. but i always think about the handful of people i know that are truly real. i think it's hard for me to be truly real at all times because of different surroundings...well...the same sort of surrounding, just a new area. i have grown up within the confines of the Christian community. the community that "prays" for each other. the community that "cares about where your life is." sometimes, i find that all to be a bunch of shit. a lot of "prayer groups" are usually filled with people who just need to be wrapped up in drama. a lot of those people who "really want to know where your life is" just want to tell someone else so they won't feel so shitty about their own trials. i sometimes just want to stand up in the middle of a church service and yell out, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE ALL DOING HERE!?" i really don't think you have to be in church to be a Christian. i've known people that have helped out at the church they attend for many years who became a Christian many years after they first set foot in the sanctuary. THAT'S BEING REAL! i don't know. i hate the thought of church to be honest. i have told many people that i would rather find a core group of people whose opinions i truly respect and sit with them and discuss "church" topics. "Oh but that's called church...where two or more are gathered in the name of The Lord is church." what the fuck ever. how does everyone know everyone else' heart? REALLY!? how do i know that the one person i choose to speak to about my thoughts about the God that i love, isn't just there to be able to learn some dirt about my past and maybe use it against me later? ugh...i wish i really knew where i was going with this but i just figured, "it's 11:00pm CT and i am bored as shit and just want to vent.

if you want to comment, go for it. you can even reply negatively, i don't give a shit. if you did read all the way through this though, thank you very much for your time. i do appreciate you reading this.

Sincerely,
Christian Olan

still not THAT funny...

I think, one of the hardest things for guy friends to do, is get each others' phone number. It's not like asking a girl. With a girl you can be smooth, calm, collected. But with a dude, it is pretty damned close to being gay. You can't just lead in with, "hey bro, let me get your number." It just doesn't work that way. You have to do some roundabout shit to get that guy's number. Maybe you have someone send them a text from your phone or call them from your phone and then you save it later. Maybe you are co-workers and can make up some bull shit reason to call them. Whatever we can do other than asking, "Can I have your number" to another guy, we'll do it.

kinda funny...but not really...

Well I am half Mexican and half Puerto Rican, so I should know A LOT of Spanish, but I don’t. And it was pretty rough hanging out with my grandpa because he doesn’t speak too much English; he’s getting a lot better at it, but…growing up I always thought, “I wish I was white….so my grandparents spoke English, fluently.” But one thing that he, my brother and my self could connect on was sports. But my grandpa’s a huge bandwagon jumper. But you would have thought he bled Chicago Bull red and black when Jordan was running the league. He only knew a few names, and had like one or two nicknames for players. He knew “Michael Jordan” just like any immigrant did. But he would call Dennis Rodman, “El Loco” which is loosely translated into, “the crazy guy.” But after those two, it got tricky. Everyone else was either, “the white guy” or, “the color guy.” So unless he was talking about any white guy in the league, it would take my brother and me about 10 minutes to figure out that he was talking about someone like Patrick Ewing, or Larry Johnson. But if it was a white guy, we could usually guess it was John Stockton or Jeff Hornacek because they were the only two white guys with a reason to be in the NBA.

Remember elementary school? Remember the glue that came in those containers that looked like the containers that camera film came in? And you had to apply that glue with that crappy little stick attached to the lid. The only thing worse than that stick was the little red one you got in “Handi-Snacks.”

Another thing about when we were all younger, that’s when you lose your “baby teeth.” I remember the dentist telling my brother and me to not eat so much candy or else we’ll lose our teeth. But she told us this before we started losing our “baby teeth.” So one day, I had no idea my brother had a loose tooth, and my brother took a huge bite from an apple and out came a tooth. WTF!? Here I thought that candy was gonna make us lose our teeth, but it was a fruit that was the cause. So I think from that moment on I thought to myself, “F*** that, I’m not gonna eat anymore apples if I’m gonna lose a tooth every time.” So that could basically explain my physique now.

My brother and I were on our way to a winter retreat for a youth group we help out at, and my brother turns to the rest of the guys and says, with a bit of surprise, “Christian always seems to find the best snack foods.” I’m thinking, no kidding. I mean, look at me. No one should be surprised that I know what foods are tasty. People should be more surprised if my brother tells them, “Christian was able to scale that wall like David Caradine from Kung-Fu.” That would even surprise me.

I enjoy watching Jeopardy, well, only the first round. The second round gets a little tough, and that damn “Final Jeopardy” round. First round you get answers like, “He wrote the song ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Who is, Mr. Rogers?’” Second round you might get an answer like, “This small country is about 1/20 the size of New York City and its national language is Italian.” Click, *Sportscenter song* And then that final Jeopardy round, give me a break. By the time that I see that the category is something like, “U.S. Relations” or “18^th Century Novels”, I’ve logged on to Facebook and have changed my status about 4 times.

I watch a lot of Seinfeld, so much that my brother and I have every Seinfeld season on DVD. There are interviews on all of them and I was watching one that gave me an idea. It was how Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld got their ideas. They carried a tape recorder everywhere and jotted down bits for the script. So I began doing this, but then one day I saw something that was awesome, so I bought a small camcorder, figured I’d film things too. Then I saw some celebrity and from that day, I started bringing a camera with me. So now I walk around and look like a cross between a Mexican kid spending his first time in the states and Paparazzi. Not a good look.

So my brother and I don’t have cable in our apartment; we don’t have satellite; we don’t have anything like that. We have some cheap little antenna he bought from who-knows-where. And every night, I am trying to get the best reception to watch Jimmy Fallon; so I stand there by the TV, moving the antenna around just trying to find that “sweet spot.” Every once in a while I’ll catch it, but as soon as I go to sit down, *static sound*. So I get back up and keep manipulating the damn thing. So now I am standing there, one foot off the ground, aluminum foil hanging from everywhere, catching bits and pieces of this show. And if I let out a laugh, the whole operation is done. One sudden move brings me back to just putting in a DVD that I have seen maybe fifteen times that month.

Another thing about the antenna and trying to find the best picture; some commercials will mess with you. Because not only are you not getting good reception, the picture is coming in, in black and white. I see this commercial the other night; Advair. If you’ve seen it, everything is in black and white except for when they show the purple inhaler. So for the first 30 seconds of this stupid commercial, I’m standing there sacrificing crystal clear picture, because as greedy as I am, I want color with it. And then “BOOM”, here comes this purple thing. So now I am back to finding the “sweet spot” I once gave up. Damn Advair.

Food allergies are tough. I have a few friends who are lactose intolerant. In fact, I think I have an acute case of it. Sometimes I get the squirts when I drink milk, sometimes I don’t. But I think back to when I was a kid. I definitely was then. I also like to think about the weird foods people are allergic to. Think back to when you had sleepovers, and that one friend was allergic to so many damned things that when your mom was trying to be the cool mom and get pizzas, she had to make sure: the sauce was Alfredo because the “sick” kid couldn’t have tomatoes, only half with cheese, pepperoni, and sausage, two pieces with nothing but pineapples, no sauce, just pineapples because the “sick” kids mom wanted him to have some fruit while he was at your house. Then that remaining portion was combination so your parents could get a slice. Then when word got around school about “sick” kid, he was never invited to anymore sleepovers. Not my fault, pussy should have toughed it out and had a tomato.

Whenever I have to take a dump in a public bathroom, I try to scope out the area outside of the bathroom. I look to see what types of dudes could potentially be using the facilities at the same time I am. It’s not some security issue; I just want to know if I am going to be a big inconvenience to someone who may need the handicap stall. If there’s an old dude or guy who is three times my size nearby, I’ll wait ‘til the next pit stop. But if I see no need to leave that stall vacant, it’s go time. I like having all that room to just relax and not have my knees so close in the regular stalls. When I drop a deuce, I like to just let gravity run its course. Sometimes I’ll lean back against all those pipes and just let ‘er rip. But usually, my method of destruction is this one; I’ll grab on to that hand rail and lock my elbow so I don’t fall forward or anything embarrassing and just let loose. I’ll even take a quick nap if I have time. But the thing that tripped me out was I used a handicap stall that had a hand rail on either side of me, and they went up. This was perfect for my method. So now I have double the stability because both elbows are locked and now I’m dropping stuff I had in 5^th grade. “Holy smokes, that smells like a Pizza Lunchable.”

Another thing about me and my bathroom adventures; in college, I woke up once at about 3AM or so. I go to the bathroom, just had to pee, but I still sat down because I was too tired to aim. So I’m sitting there peeing but I have my eyes closed because the light was a tad bit too bright for me. Well, by the time I was done and had reopened my eyes, the light seemed ever brighter. I thought to myself, “Were my eyes closed that tight? Is it actually brighter or am I bugging out because it’s 3AM?” So the next time I had to use the restroom, I turned on the light, thought about how bright it was, closed my eyes, opened them, and tada, it seemed brighter. I asked my roommates if they had noticed it as well, and one of my other roommates tells us, “Oh, they’re energy saver lights. They take a bit longer to get to their brightest, but they save a bit on energy.” But I figure, with all the time I had spent figuring out what the deal was with these lights, I might have saved our school on energy if they would have given us regular damned lights.

How is it that when you live in your first apartment, you seem to have every type of spice to season up a killer meal, yet you have no food to put it on? And somehow; no one knows; no one asks; there is either at least one more pack of Top Ramen still in the cupboard or there is just the seasoning for the Ramen in some drawer or a box with all your excess Taco Bell sauces or Domino’s crushed pepper. All of a sudden you see a silver packet that reads, “BEEF FLAVOR.” Who is only eating the noodles? Have you ever had a noodle with no seasoning? Of course not, but someone did.

So my brother and I were flying home from LA to Minneapolis, he loses his boarding pass somewhere between the bathroom and our gate. Some security guard tells him, “You’ll be fine as long as you know your gate.” Buuuull shit. We start boarding, I get on; he doesn’t. So he tells me that the guy at the gate is asking him all these questions. One was, (said in a bit of a demeaning way) “Well how did you get passed security?” Now, I am more known to give people attitude and especially at the wrong times. Had it been me getting the 5^th degree, I probably would have answered with, “I didn’t.” or maybe, “What security?” If I knew enough Spanish, I would have just rattled off some jibberish and really had a hell of a time with that guy.

1^st grade; Remember learning how to write? They give you that weird, newspaper-colored paper with turquoise lines. The top and bottom lines were like 3 inches apart. Why is it, that at a young age, all the words and letters you should/need to know are humongous, but as you get older, the stuff you need to know gets smaller and smaller. That’s why old people have those thick lenses; they’re not really that blind, those are magnifying lenses so the words look as big as they did back in 1^st grade.

Doing laundry sucks. I’m all for having clean shirts. But the fact that you have to put all your dirty, smelly, sometimes damp clothes in a basket; take it to this little room that has two huge machines and these shelves that are too high for anyone not in the NBA to reach; put detergent in there, sort certain colors from others. I don’t know why, the reds and blues might fight, and as history has shown, blacks and whites don’t get along too well sometimes. So then you have to find something else to do while you wait that half-hour to forty-five minutes; and why do we never know how long it really takes for our own washing machines? You know how long everything else in your house takes to do what it’s supposed to do, but everyone just guesstimates, “they should be done in like, I don’t know, thirty, forty-five minutes.” I digress. Then the dry cycle comes. You throw everything in, except that one shirt that says, “Tumble dry low with like colors.” but you figure, “Well, I can hang dry it tonight. I’m not trying to wear it until Friday anyway.” You get all of your clothes out of the dryer and everything is still a little damp. Then you think back, “Well all of these towels, sweat shirts, and jeans got washed well, why didn’t they dry just as well?” If you are putting clothes in the washer, and are pushing the clothes down to fit a few more things in, you have too many shirts my friend.

Why is it, that television show producers/directors and some comedians feel that when you have to show that someone is changing the channel on a TV, the remote “clicks”? I have never used a remote control that has ever “clicked”.

Toothbrushes; I hate buying a new toothbrush. But I had to recently. I started thinking about when the last time I bought a new one was, and I think Titanic had just come out in theaters. Anyway, I’m standing there, in the toothbrush aisle. Why are there like fifty different styles? They’re all the same design; long handle, angled head, a bunch of bristles, most of them white, some in the center that are blue or green. Just give one company the whole market. Anyway, I’m looking at this set of two, one for me and one for my brother; and now I am looking at the “strength” of these things; you got your soft, medium, hard, gum-cutting. So many damn decisions to make for something so simple, and if that thing hits the dirty floor of your bathroom, time for a brand new one and your back to the bullshit you had to deal with before. It’s a vicious cycle.

So I’m at these peoples’ house. It’s one of these houses that is so nice that you feel like you have to be as upper-class as the people that own the house. So we’re eating dinner and I felt a little something in my throat. So I told myself, “okay, make a really quiet cough, get this thing out of your throat and chew it a bit better.” So I go for the cough; success, until it got re-lodged in my throat and now I am border-line choking. So here I am looking like a jack-ass because I didn’t want to cough too loud and embarrass myself but then I go and douche it all up by getting the food particle stuck back in my throat and am coughing ten times louder than what I originally planned. Needless to say, I haven’t been back since.

Saw on Yahoo.com that a job that is so on demand still pays 60k a year. It was a Technical Writer position. Well, technically, I am a writer because I wrote this out, so, where’s my money?

The only time I like wearing long sleeves is when I am wearing a nice shirt and tie. If I get tired of wearing the long sleeves, I unbutton the cuff, roll up the sleeve, and BOOM!, I have a short sleeve shirt on. Sure I can do that with long-sleeve t-shirts or hoodies, but once you roll that sleeve back down, that thing makes it look like you are wearing a Snuggie that only covers your torso. The cuffs get all stretched out and you remember the times when you were younger wearing your dad’s sweatshirts and the arms being long on you and your hands being covered up. Except now, you don’t get yelled at to, “KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE DAMNED BALL, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

So I grabbed the mail recently and I saw that my brother was, “pre-qualified” for a credit card. You always see qualified, pre-qualified, or pre-approved but just once, I would love to see “over-qualified.” You never see it. Just once I want to open one and have the paper read, “Open your wallet because this card should have been in your wallet WEEKS ago!” And credit card companies are like pimps. They give you an amount of money you can spend but then they tell you that whatever you buy, you will owe them a little bit more to keep it around. If you don’t comply with their rules, they send someone to either collect the money or the goods. And either way, you’re about to get raped; literally and/or figuratively. But sometimes retailers know where you got that money. They know that it came from that pimp named Master Card, or Amex. And since you are friends with him, you must be a slime ball too so that money is no good. But if you know Visa, well then they might just have something for you in the back.

Remember “Destiny’s Child?” They started out with 4 members, then 3 and now it’s just…Beyonce. But even when it was the three of them, no one cared about the others. Beyonce even managed to write a song just about herself and exclude the other two; Bootylicious. I mean, Kelly Rowland had a nice dumper, but she was Booty-light. And that other girl…she was cute…

Why does going to a mechanic feel like going to a doctor? I don’t mean in the sense that they both fix things you rely heavily on, I mean their demeanor. I recently went to a mechanic to get my driver-side window fixed; it somehow came off the track and was stuck in the door. I get there, tell the guy the story and he starts taking the door apart and seeing where everything has gone wrong. Randomly, he asks, “When was the last time you had the oil changed?” What do you care buddy? I asked you to look at one thing. You go to the doctor and say, “My shoulder hurts really bad and I don’t know why.” He says, “Alright, take off your pants so we can get a better look.” WTF!? Are you serious, that is neither here nor there. Damned con artists.

Another thing about mechanics; they always look at you like you are saying one word over and over and over. You go in and say, “I think there is something wrong with the engine.” Now in their defense, that is a rather vague statement. So many things could really be wrong with the engine. However, you don’t really know, but it’s your best guess. What does the mechanic hear, “Help car. Help car. Help car…” So they are standing there, giving you a look of, “WTF are you trying to say? Use your words.” Obviously WE don’t know what is going on, that’s why we pay you way too much to fix the problem.

I use Netflix. Love it too. But every time I go to their site, I accidentally type, “netfliz.com” because the X and Z are so close. Usually I can catch it in time to fix the typo, but one day, I stumbled upon something. It was the Spanglish version of Netflix. All I see are Spanish soap operas and a few movies. I was on too long and accidentally got roped in to a 3 year contract, and ended up renting Tortilla Soup and Carlito’s Way because they were the only movie titles I could pronounce.

What up?

My name is Christian Olan. You can ask me whatever you want. Maybe I'll answer you, maybe i won't...