How To: Job Interview

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How To: Job Interview—20 Easy-to-Remember Hints

  1. If showing up 5 minutes early is good, then 15 is better, and 30 is outstanding.
  2. Ask if there are any ghosts in the building or on the premises. This question sets a great tone of intrigue which will carry through the meeting. You’ll leave them wanting more.
  3. Wear extra clothes—more than necessary. Take a few items off during the interview, though not too many. Leave them wanting to know more.
  4. Tell a funny story. Practice the story enough that you can stop in the middle without finishing. Tell them you’ll relate the rest of the story after they’ve hired you.
  5. Ask about their policy on comfort animals. Tell them you have a pet snake, but it’s only considered poisonous in Australia.
  6. Tell them how often you feel sensations in your bladder.
  7. Talk about your family a lot! Elaborate.
  8. Make sure your ringtone is a cool one. Turn the volume up and have a friend call you during the interview. This trick will show them how important you are.
  9. If you don’t have tattoos, get some—-on your face! He who stands out, lucks out.
  10. Ask if they care what you do on break. Don’t elaborate.
  11. Tell them you never fail, but you know people who do.
  12. Instead of a resume, give them a copy of a completed application to another business. One good thing about this idea is that you won’t have to fill anything out more than once. Another good thing is that you show them you could potentially be the competition.
  13. Whether you’re a man or a woman, wear a necktie. Half way through the interview, loosen it. This will give everyone in the interview process an excuse. They want to relax too, but they don’t want to do it if they’re the only one.
  14. Compare the job hunt to hunting wild animals. Everyone likes to hear about hunting wild animals.
  15. Use lots of big words. Pompism=bossism. You’ll be promoted sooner than you think.
  16. Chewing gum will make your breath fresh.
  17. Bring samples of your work.
  18. When they ask, “Do you have questions?” Remember, cannibalism questions will leave a lasting impression.
  19. When they ask, “Do you have questions?”: If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? I bet they’ve never heard that question before.
  20. Bring snacks. Corn Nuts are the best! So loud! So delicious.

Comedy Queens (and the suicidal art)

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I’ve been cruising through some comedy material on Twitter. The funny lines make me laugh, which cheers me up, which keeps me from yelling in traffic, which makes the world a lovelier place. It’s all for a good cause. Humor keeps the world from imploding. Humor keeps the foul-mouthed from exploding.

There are a lot of comedians. The good ones are out there. You for sure have to be selective though. One unfortunate thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of women comedians who use the GIF (“Guys I F***ed”) attempt at humor. It’s super lame. While it might be done to shock people, or to make controversy, or even to get more male followers, it just doesn’t work as humor.

It may work as shock material. People who are shocked are usually out of their element in any conversation, but the same goes for abruptly crass people, the ones doing the shocking. Both ends of that human spectrum are awkward. Both types are awkward in a conversation, in a comedy act, or even on Twitter. And when you’re awkward, you push some people away. They either get annoyed at you or they just realize their set of personal boundaries makes it so they can’t hang with you. It’s not that they don’t appreciate you as a human, struggling to make life work. It’s that people have limits. You want to light a campfire, they might come around for the camaraderie; you want to set yourself on fire, they’re not going to want to watch that. Or smell it! Ugh!

The GIF attempt may work as controversial material. The irony of this article is centered on the controversial—-still, the fact of the GIF attempt being unfunny remains. The question here is how long can you remain controversial without eventually backpedaling on something you said?

The GIF may get a woman more male followers on Twitter, but they aren’t following her because her comedy routine is funny. They’re following her like a porn site. How much self-respect does a person have when they turn their funny into porn, even if it’s considered soft porn? (I dint give no details!) Keep in mind that it could also be considered soft comedy. Not quite porn. Not quite comedy. See how that works? They’re the same. Know what else is the same? Humor about flatulence. Fart humor is at about the same level as GIF. Puerile and naive, they both hit the maturity level we call prepubescent. If that’s as high as you can aim, well then, set up camp in the field of mediocrity.

Most of these methods strike me as suicidal. Not literal physical death, but comedic career death. How can you get a solid career going if you’ve alienated the majority of your potential audience?

Just to put it in perspective, maybe we could compare some of the greatest ladies of comedy: Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen DeGeneres, Tina Fey. Certainly not a complete list, but these are names that stand out. How many of these could you say did the GIF kind of humor I’m talking about?

The World’s Greatest Self-Improvement Catalog

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The World’s Greatest Self-Improvement Catalog is a book that’s going to be the best, most-read book ever written, but it hasn’t been written yet. Somehow I just haven’t found the right amount of motivation to finish it. There are countless books like it out there already to fill the gap until it is completed, so why try too hard, right?

  1. Something about results—We’ll start with results so people know we’re serious. Every business model contains results. Other models eat a single fish cracker for their daily meal. What does one model have to do with the other? The business model contains the beautiful model. See, we’ll get a beautiful model to sell The World’s Greatest Self-Improvement Catalog and people will be so mesmerized by her beauty they’ll buy the book for sure. It’s all about the sale, dude. Of course, this book won’t go into how to sell. That’ll be our secret.
  2. How to communicate alone—Everyone talks to themselves. Learn how to be an expert. Learn the best places to have introvert conversations. Learn how to talk into your cellphone camera. We’ll cover the basics of self-communication to further your lifestyle. We’ll go into even greater detail of the art of self-communication in a forthcoming book that will be hinted at heavily so you’ll be dying to buy it before it’s even on bookstore shelves.
  3. Know what other people want—Smoldering eyes. Fatness in the wallet. Curb appeal. High power in every machine. Offer them all they want. Offer them the moon. People love to hear what they want. They love it even more in someone else’s voice. Use your voice to offer them whatever it is you think they want to hear. Knowing what other people want is a skill you can only learn from this book. Too bad it isn’t published yet.
  4. Drug-sniffing dogs—It would be really cool to own one. If you can afford it, get one! Take your dog on walks around the neighborhood. Take your dog on walks around the airport. What does a drug-sniffing dog have to do with The World’s Greatest Self-Improvement Catalog? I don’t know. I just want one, so it seemed like a good place to include it.
  5. Problems can wait—Nothing’s so good today that it can’t be better tomorrow. Besides, if you wait, some problems fix themselves. Many problems are conquered by time. Many obstacles are overcome with patience. Patience is a rare trait, afflicting only a small percentage of society. If you could sell patience, I’d tell you to work on it. But I don’t think it can be bought or sold. Hold on there…that’s what this chapter will be about. We’ll talk about patience as if it’s something tangible, and something you can pass around. Brilliant!
  6. Set deadlines…for others—It’s petty and selfish to set deadlines only for yourself. Share. Share the responsibility. Share the pain. Share the determination to improve yourself in every way. How else would anyone make progress? Some members of society have greatness as an innate trait. Others have to learn it. And others have greatness thrust upon them.
  7. Meetings, meetings, meetings—You can never have enough meetings. Have you ever known a productive business without meetings? If one is good, more is better. Productivity is enhanced by sitting around talking about it. It’s a curious thing, productivity. Like balancing eggs, it gets the job done artfully and with purpose. What’s the purpose of balancing eggs? We’ll cover that in the next volume. Catalog number 2, here we come!

Balance for Health

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It has been said before (meaning I’m not the first to say), “People with good balance tend to be healthier than those with poor balance.”

This could be one of those epidemiological controversies. You have to ask yourself, “Are the people healthy because they have good balance, or do people have good balance because they have good health?”

A healthy routine of exercise could possibly contain activities which strengthen the legs and core and increase balance. A runner, a martial artist, or a skier would generally have good balance. But would you credit the balance for their good health, or would you say the balance is a result of the activity? In this case, with only these three athletes in mind, the deck is stacked for the activity, isn’t it?

Okay, so how about a swimmer? Swimming isn’t necessarily a foot-to-the-ground activity. The swimmers I know have really good balance though. Even if I selected only those who do swimming and nothing else, no running or other training on the side, they can still stand on one leg for a long time without falling.

Personally, I’m not convinced either way, especially since I have one friend who is a computer slave. He spends most of his days inventing things like robotizing his toaster oven to open the door remotely or making his doorbell say, “Welcome to the dark side,” in the voice of Darth Vader (James Earl Jones edition). Amazing inventiveness aside, his main source of exercise is walking—and not a lot of walking either. But I tested him, and he has decent balance. (The test consisted of me timing how long he could stand on one leg: “One one-thousand, two one-thousand…”) He has average balance.

I’m still not convinced of which is the side of truth in this controversy. I’m wondering if balance could be exercise in and of itself. To test the theory, I made my very own balance board. My uncle Kim had one of these when I was a kid, so I fell in love with the idea back then. It only served to increase my love of the balance board when I couldn’t play on it unless we were visiting my uncle. His balance board consisted of a small board with a large dowel as the fulcrum (very much like the one in the picture at the beginning of this article). When I made my own, I copied the idea, but I broke the fulcrum not long after the first try. It split right down the middle. While I was staring at this cool thing I made and wondering how to fix it, I realized it could have a single set of skateboard wheels in the middle, metal instead of wood. I tried that solution and it works fine. In fact, it has some motion front and back as well as side to side, so you really have to find your balance to work this creation.

My boy loves to play on it. He counts, “One one-thousand, two one-thousand…” and tries to beat his previous record. I’ve tried it, and so far I can only go for seven seconds before I touch down. The time increases the more I do it, so that has to be good, right? Well, since I’m still in the middle of the test phase, I can’t give any definitive answer on the controversy other than the fact that when I can’t hold my balance board steady for more than two seconds, my boy laughs at me. He laughs, then I laugh. And laughing is such a health boost I think its putting a slant into the results of my experiment.

No one ever said, “People who try to show off their balance board skills tend to have happy children.” But I might.

End of Summer

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It always happens. The cycle repeats. Times change.

Seasons come and go. We might wish we could slow it down, or even bring it all to a standstill. We wish we could make the summer stretch on indefinitely. But then…

…well, not everyone can live on the equator. Could you imagine trying to smash all the people of the Earth into the land around the equator? The closer you are to the equator, the more your year has summer-like weather.

There are changes near the equator too, though. Winds change. Oceanic currents change. The weather turns cold for those who live with thin, sea-level blood. 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the warm weather human feels as though he’s freezing. He wraps up in multiple sleeveless shirts instead of only one or none.

My personal GPS triangle is above the 40th parallel. Here we watch the weather turn trees brown and mountains white. But with summer’s end comes the end of summer sports too. We watch as the football lovers gear up for their pastime, while some of our favorite pastimes get put away.

Soon there won’t be any dry trails. Soon the mountain bikes will be hung in garages. Soon the mountain bike tires will get softer as the air slowly escapes. It will be months before they get hooked up to a pump.

Soon the ski and snowboard enthusiasts will be having their own brand of fun.

I might go down the mountain and hit the beach. Try a little surfing south of the 40th. Play in the warmer breaks. Would you rather do that than go snowboarding? I think I would. At least, this year; the sand seems more inviting than the slopes. Beach is compelling, ski lift is repelling. I’ll go down and play in the waves. Then when the waves get tiresome, I’ll head back home and watch for Spring to come.