I use Tinder. I’m not sure yet whether that’s cause for celebration, alarm, or somewhere in between, but there you go. For the uninitiated, Tinder is an app that shows you women (or men) in your area. If you “like” them (i.e., you think they’re attractive, because you’re given almost no other information about them aside from that), you swipe to the right. If you don’t because they’re ugly and therefore terrible human beings, you swipe to the left. If that person decides you’re attractive enough to talk to, they’ll also swipe to the right and you get a notification. And then YOU HOP ON THE INTIMACY TRAIN, NEXT STOP: FUCK STATION.*

*Results may vary.

Anyway, while on Tinder, I’ve noticed a few things that I think are worth sharing. Here are some of my findings.

1. Marilyn Monroe and “Almost Famous” are quoted entirely too much.

I get it- Marilyn Monroe is a cultural icon. Her contributions in the field of being pretty and occasionally saying interesting things are unparalleled. And “Almost Famous” is a perfectly decent, watchable movie. (Just kidding, that movie sucks except for Philip Seymour Hoffman.) But almost every other profile has some variation of “I always tell the girls, never take it seriously and you’ll always have fun, etc. etc.” and “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best,” and it’s goddamned tiresome. Not to mention it’s misquoted half the time. Also, I’m fairly certain some of these girls are just making up quotes and attributing them to Marilyn Monroe. Enough.

2. There are five types of pictures found in nearly every girl’s profile.

1) Arm awkwardly positioned on the hip. I don’t know what purpose this is supposed to serve. A word of advice: unless you’re planning on standing like you’re shooting a promo poster for a shitty CBS sitcom for the rest of your life, cut it out.

2) A picture of her and her friends in a bar somewhere. I was already operating under the assumption that you had friends, I don’t need a class photo of your posse to verify it. The worst is when the girl has similar-looking friends, because then I honestly can’t tell who’s who. DIVERSIFY, PLEASE. Throw a redhead or a black girl or a wheelchair-bound woman in the shot so I can at least narrow down the list of potential suspects.

3) Pictures of pets/nature. This isn’t your Facebook page. You get five photos maximum to give people an idea of what you look like, and you want to burn three of them on pictures of your Pekingese and a really neat flower you saw in a garden? Thanks, Ansel Adams.

4) Duck face. GET BACK ON MYSPACE WHERE YOU BELONG.

5) Bathroom selfies. Are you using a Motorola Razr? Is this 2004? Every phone has a front-facing camera on it now. Spare me the bathroom shot. (Note: 90% of the time, the phone is blocking your face. Kinda defeats the purpose, no?)

3. It’s always incredibly awkward to come across the profile of someone you actually know. I immediately get weirded out, which makes NO sense. It’s a popular app, so it stands to reason that I’d see people I know, but every time it happens, I act like I just saw them in a porn. FANCY SEEING YOU HERE! [Unzips fly]

4. People can be assholes on Tinder. One girl started a conversation with “Where do u live and what do u do” (no punctuation, because #YOLO). I told her, and she blocked me. What the fuck, lady? I guess I appreciate the directness of your questions, but you could have at least said “Sorry, I don’t think it’s a good fit” or something. Now I’m gonna stalk you out of sheer spite. Hope it was worth it.

Which brings me to my next point: why Tinder is useful. Tinder occupies the middle ground between Match/eHarmony and the terrifying cesspool of Craigslist. (Using Craigslist for dating is like using roofies to get over your shyness. Nothing good can come of it.) Whereas Match and eHarmony exist for people who are actively interested in getting to know someone on a more meaningful level and building a connection and Craigslist exists as a resource for folks in the market for a new skin suit, Tinder serves a multilayered purpose. If you want random hookups, you can do that; if you want to get to know someone and try your hand at dating them, the option is available. Not to get all in-depth and hackneyed, but it’s a good representation of our instant-gratification culture. Don’t like someone? A simple flick of your finger and they’re gone forever. Like someone but they don’t like you? Onto the next, and within 5 minutes you’ll forget what that person even looked like. Bored with someone? Just murder them and dump their corpse in a river. IT’S ALL SO SIMPLE!

Eventually, people won’t even need to worry about approaching someone in a public place and risk face-to-face rejection. Why would anybody subject themselves to public humiliation when they can try their luck with someone way out of their league in the safety and security of their own home? It is for this reason that Tinder and other websites (except, again, Craigslist) are an attractive option to some.

Conversely, however, I think there’s value in putting yourself in the vulnerable position of approaching a stranger face-to-face and saying “Hey, I thought I’d introduce myself” or “YOU’RE HAWT AND I WANNA CRUSH YOUR PUSSY DURR HURR”; even if it doesn’t go your way, you at least gain something in that failure. Because of that, I don’t think the practice of bothering women in bars (or men, I guess) will ever truly fade. In fact, I’ve often found myself wishing I had the confidence and self-assuredness to do that, but I guess I don’t. All I can do is think of the worst possible outcome and freeze up in terror before nervously pulling out my phone. “JUST CHECKING FACEBOOK AT THE BAR, GUYS- NOTHING TO SEE HERE.” So to the asshole who pesters clearly disinterested women at bars/clubs/outdoor theaters, I say this: I may not agree with your methods, but I applaud you for having the sack to take a shot.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take pictures of a sunset and find some “Anchorman” quotes for my profile.

I normally try not to foist my musical tastes on others. Either they like my recommendations, which gives me a fleeting-at-best sense of pride, or they don’t, which makes me hate them and question everything they’ve ever stood for. But in this case, dear reader, I’m going to foist the fuck out of my musical tastes on you. (With an album that was released in 2011. Better late than never.)

Destroyer is Dan Bejar, who started recording in 1995 and has since made some badass music. (Side note: I love it when one person comes up with a band name. If he just used his own name, I’d probably never listen to him, because that’d make him sound folksy and I’m a finicky piece of shit. Good move, Bejar.) He’s also been compared to David Bowie, which I don’t get, but whatever. In all honesty, I’ve only listened to “Kaputt,” his most recent album, so maybe I’m not the best person to be singing his praises, but somebody has to. And make no mistake, “Kaputt” is a badass album.

I’ve long been a fan of weather-or-season-appropriate music; that is, I tend to categorize and listen to certain songs or artists depending on which weather conditions or season they fit best. And, with fall lurking around the corner waiting to ruin my mood like a fucking asshole, I thought now was as good a time as any to break this album back out. For the second year in a row, it doesn’t disappoint.

The album starts with “Chinatown,” one of the most outstanding songs on the whole goddamn thing. It’s not that the song or even the album are intense (they’re not), but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi about the whole deal. (Yes, I just used the phrase “je ne sais quoi” as a descriptor. And yes, I do feel like a dipshit for using it.)

From there, the hits keep on coming- “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” “Song For America,” and my personal favorite, “Kaputt.” I still remember where I was when I heard Kaputt for the first time, too: Durham, North Carolina, driving an Enterprise car near the ballpark in the fall. (Another quick aside: I hope Dan Bejar never kills himself, because Kara Walker will feel horribly if he does.)

Anyway, I’m not going to review the whole album, because there’s no point- those of you who want to check it out will do so, and those of you who don’t want to will hopefully get hit by a bus before day’s end. Besides, this isn’t Pitchfork (“This album struggles so hard to figure out what it wants to be, when all it has to do is be what it already is.”)

Enjoy the tunes.

I fucking hate being broke. I’m not talking about “I can’t afford this new suit! I’M SO BROKE!” broke, I’m talking about “I don’t know how I’m going to eat for the next five days” broke. On the one hand, I suppose it could be worse- I’m not homeless, after all. On the other hand…I CAN’T AFFORD THIS NEW SUIT.

Being broke is shitty for so many reasons. Hitting up bars is out, obviously, but even drinking alone puts a squeeze on the old purse strings. Plus, drinking alone is depressing for a multitude of reasons (I’ll get into that later.) Even the most mundane purchases put knots in my stomach, to the point where I have a mini panic attack. Getting a new MetroCard? KNOTS. Paying my gas bill? KNOTS. Buying groceries? FUCK ME MURDERSMURDERSMURDERS.

The worst part about being broke is the feeling that, despite your best efforts, it will never get better. After a while, being broke goes from a temporary condition to feeling like a permanent state of being- you come to think that all you’ll ever be is some poor schlub without a penny to his name. Even worse, you kinda start thinking you deserve it. “If I hadn’t bought that pair of shoes/that DVD/that porn site subscription, I wouldn’t be in this mess.” Which is totally fucked. I should be able to purchase all the porn I want! OURS IS A LAND OF FREEDOM AND PROSPERITY.

Exacerbating the whole situation is the fact that I don’t know how to improve my financial standing, so it all starts to get overwhelming at times. Which is why I don’t complain when I have to work on Labor Day, and it’s also why I drink alone.

If you have money, give me some or fuck off. (I don’t mean that. But seriously: gimme.)

I work in retail/customer service, because I’m a moron. I say I’m a moron for one simple reason: only a moron would willingly subject themselves to the amount of abuse I take on a daily basis. Now, if it were face-to-face, that’d be one thing; I love a good argument, and I’m happy to have one while standing in front of someone. Unfortunately, 90% of the shit I hear from customers comes while I’m talking with them on the phone. Yesterday, I had a guy tell me that, among other things, he would “see [me] in court” because there was damage on the car he rented that wasn’t there when he picked it up. Despite the obvious shortcomings in his statement (namely, I’m not going to end up in court, not to mention the fact that he signed a contract saying the car had no damage on it), it got me thinking: what is it that emboldens people to talk to another human so disrespectfully on the phone?

A large part of it comes, I suspect, from the anonymity factor- I’ve never met this guy before and will probably never meet him (unless we’re in court together), so he feels it’s safe to say whatever he wants to a stranger. And I get it, to some degree, but does that really make you feel better? Insulting some dude you’ve never even met? (Wait, I totally get it. That would actually make me feel a lot better.) Anyway, here is a list of phrases I hear on a regular basis that bug me; translations are included for clarity.

1) “Let me speak to your manager.”

Translation: “You’ve outlived your usefulness. Also, I think you’re a fucking idiot, and I’d like to speak to someone who isn’t.”

2) “Why would you offer a pickup service if you can’t pick me up in (some place nowhere near my office)? Is that good customer service?”

Translation: “I don’t know how to read a fucking map.”

3) “I’m not paying for (this thing I agreed to purchase), and I’m calling my credit card company. They’ll take care of this.”

Translation: “I’m under the impression that American Express = Supreme Court.”

4) “I’m writing a letter to the Better Business Bureau, and this company is going down!”

Translation: “I AM AN INSANE PERSON.”

My point is this: yelling at someone on the telephone, while cathartic, accomplishes absolutely nothing. In fact, it’s counterintuitive; if you yell at me, I’m less likely to help you and more likely to want to throw you down a fucking elevator shaft.

Don’t yell at people on the phone.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the NYC public transit system, allow me to paint you a picture. Whenever a train enters or leaves a station, the operators stick their heads out the window to ensure that there are no obstructions on the track ahead, that nobody is standing too close to the edge of the platform, etc. It’s an important part of their jobs, one that has probably saved countless people from injury or death over the years, and yet…it takes every ounce of my willpower not to stick my hand out and slap those people in the face whenever they ride by.

It’s not that I harbor any animosity toward the people working for the MTA; I just have the urge. It sounds really sadistic and weird, but I can’t help myself. I’ve actually daydreamed about what would happen if I did it- would they stop the train and call the cops? Would the conductor just grab my shirt and drag me alongside the train until I hit the wall at the end of the track? Do they carry guns or batons? Are they authorized to stop whatever they’re doing to beat the shit out of someone? Would I get tazed? So many possible scenarios.

I think about things like that far more than I’d care to admit. One time, I saw a woman standing next to a puddle (not just a regular puddle, a New York City puddle, where it’s equal parts water, garbage juice, hobo urine, and some type of blood) in a beautiful dress, hair perfectly in place, makeup painstakingly applied; she’d clearly spent a lot of time getting ready. And I thought to myself: I wonder what would happen if I just pushed her into that puddle? I’d never actually do it, but the idea inhabited my mind for an unsettlingly long amount of time.

Does that make me a bad person? I like to think that the line between daydreaming about stuff like that and actually doing it also serves as the line between good and bad people, but maybe I just think that to make myself feel better. I don’t know.

15 minutes are up.

Song of the Day:

Here’s where I’ll be posting a link to a song that I like. Fairly self-explanatory.

The Police: “Spirits In A Material World”

Don’t have Spotify? Your loss.

Oh, the aforementioned Ruff Ryders chain:

When I was younger, I went through a phase of trying (and I do mean “trying”) to culturally align myself with the black half of my heritage. I wore Fubu, Ecko, listened to every hip-hop CD I could get my hands on (including “Opposite of H2O” by Drag-On, which is embarrassing even to remember), wore chains (one of which had the Ruff Ryders’ “R” on it), pinkie rings, and a watch on each wrist and, oh yeah, I grew an Afro.

Yep. I also got cornrows, and that’s roughly the time my dad decided he’d had enough of that shit and demanded I take them out. It was an overcorrection on my part; I felt as though I neglected to appropriately acknowledge my racial composition (growing up just south of Boston will do that to you), so I just piled it on all at once.

The end result was that I looked like a fucking idiot.

My brother told me that all the time, but in my arrogance, I thought “Man, he’s just mad that I don’t wear Abercrombie like him. GATOR BOOOOOOTS, AND THE PIMPED-OUT GUCCI SUUUUUUUITS…” But he was absolutely right- in my haste to connect with black culture, I ended up looking like a parody of a black guy. Since I don’t look black, though, I really just looked like a fat white loser who desperately wanted to be black. (Note: Far be it for me to say what constitutes a good or a bad look, but this is always a bad look.)

Now, Miley Cyrus isn’t pudgy, so she’s got that going for her, but that shit last night? She looked like a 13 year-old girl telling her parents “I’M A SEXUAL BEING NOW AND YOU OLD STICKS-IN-THE-MUD NEED TO LET ME BE A REAL WOMAN NOW!” The weird faces she keeps making (which are some unholy punk rock/rebellious/drifter-looking-for-a-campfire hybrid) just seem like a really weird cry for attention. Or help. Probably help. But I digress.

It seems like she’s doing the exact same thing I did when I was 15, and I assure you, that’s the only thing I have in common with Miley Cyrus. She found a cool (? I think twerking is absurdly stupid, but whatever) part of culture, tried desperately to align herself with it, overshot the mark like fucking crazy, and last night was the end product. And that’s how you get Will Smith and his family to look at you like this:

Even Jaden Smith is embarrassed for her, and that’s saying something.

Anyway, Miley Cyrus is weird. I don’t care for her at all.

My hand is all fucked up. Here’s how it happened.

I got home from work yesterday and decided to engage in a rousing game of Frisbee. Two throws later, the frisbee was behind a fence, because I’m unable to play even a sport requiring no athletic ability.

“No worries,” I thought to myself, “I’ll just scale this 9-foot fence and grab it.” I scale the fence easily, then come to the realization that I now have to get off the 9-foot fence. In my haste to ensure a safe landing, I forgot to take my hand off the top of the chain link fence. I was reminded a moment later by the feeling of the fence entering my palm in two different places. Oh, and I didn’t stick the landing. I am just the fucking worst.

I hit the deck, fall down, and look at my hand- it’s already soaked in blood. Claret (I don’t want to write “blood” twice) starts pooling in my palm and dripping off my fingers. Now that I think about it, it’s kinda fitting that I gave myself a fucking stigmata trying to hop the fence to a church parking lot. I start looking for a way out; after all, I can’t go back the way I came. I find a gap in the fence that I really wish I’d noticed sooner, and I slip through, safe and sound.

So that’s the story, in case you gave a shit.

They say to be a good writer, you should write for at least 15 minutes a day. I’m not exactly sure who “they” are, but I don’t make the rules, I just play by them. So in honor of that requirement, here are some thoughts of mine.

I don’t like autumn. People think it’s great because it finally cools down, the leaves are changing, and football season starts, but I disagree. Autumn depresses me- the leaves aren’t “changing color”, they’re dying. Autumn is just a shitty placeholder between the dog days of summer and the (possible) winter wonderland ahead, assuming it actually snows and isn’t just some bullshit “wintry mix” that makes you want to swallow a knife.

Even the music I listen to gets more and more dreary as summer transitions into fall. After all, you can’t listen to Grover Washington’s “Mister Magic” in the fall, can you? (NO, YOU FUCKING CANNOT. It sounds weird, so do yourself a favor and don’t do it. Don’t even YouTube it until next May.) So I’m looking forward to The Smiths and Radiohead and about 6 months of eating out of sheer depression. But not savory foods, more like chocolate chip cookies that I didn’t space correctly on the pan so they turn into one giant, salmonella-infested-in-the-middle-yet-nearly-cremated-on-the-edges fucking disaster. I will still eat it, and then I’ll write about it. Fall turns me into Bridget Jones, I guess.

15 minutes are up. Whoever came up with that rule is an idiot, because I think I actually got worse.

As a general rule, the mindset behind personal blogging ranges from self-indulgent (at best) to openly masturbatory (at worst). Some people might say “What’s wrong with keeping a diary? I have the best of intentions! I’M JUST A ROSY-CHEEKED SO-AND-SO!”

Bull. Shit. A diary is a collection of your innermost thoughts. Your hopes, your dreams, your most intimate desires and fears. A diary is not meant to be read by all of your friends and family, and it’s not something you cross-post on fucking Facebook.

People tend to write blogs for one reason: because they like the attention. You can provide whatever excuses you’d like, but there’s really no other way to justify it. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. After all, I’m writing this with the hope that people will huddle around their computer screens to capture my words in the same way that families sat around shitty radios in the 1950s to listen to Orson Welles or whoever. My grievance stems from the fact that so few people are willing to call blogging what it is: an exercise in self-importance. You presume you’re doing the world a service by posting a recap of your Labor Day weekend (“GREAT TIMES AT LAKE WINNIPESAUKEE YOU GUYZ”), but you know that isn’t so. Even the people who write comments like “Wish I could’ve been there!” don’t really care, because if they did, they would have fucking gone. I want to call it a circle jerk, but I think a more accurate term would be a circular jerk (get it?!)- nobody wants to admit that they’re writing for the attention, and on the flip side, the reader doesn’t want to admit they’re reading it out of a sense of loyalty and being supportive.

So why did I start this blog? Well, mostly for the attention. But I also want to write about the petty annoyances of everyday life (hence the title “A Hopeless Cynic.”) In exchange for your readership, I promise never to share my dreams, thoughts, or details of my latest vacation unless I’m bitching about it. Sound good? Good. See you in 6 months when I remember that I started a blog and want to complain about something.