*If you read this, Patton, please sign a book deal with my new venture, Awkward Press. You’ll have to pay for printing yourself, but whateves.

March 23: Facebookemon

The term used for the collection of people, on your Facebook friends list, that you don t actually talk to or know in real life. Related to popular tv program and game pokeamon [sic], where the aim is to collect as many diffrent [sic] Pocket Monsters as possible.

Dave – “Hey, my friends collection is getting up to two hundred”

Steve – “How many do you really know? go admit it, most of them are Facebookemon”

John – “Gotta catch em all, gotta catch em all”

I refuse to believe that anyone has ever or will ever use the term “facebookemon.”

1) People who laugh at the pre-movie “Turn off your cell phone” warning: There are three major theater chains in LA, and they’ve run the same damn marginally-amusing warning video before their movies for as long as I’ve lived here. In one, an opera singer opens her mouth to sing, when she is interrupted by the ringing of a cell phone. In another, a guy who is talking on his phone in the theater gets zapped by some ray from outer space. The tagline reads, “Don’t annoy the evil space aliens. Turn off your cell phone.” Neither of these warnings are particularly amusing or well-constructed, yet almost every time I see a movie (which is often) at least one person in the audience will laugh, indicating that they have not been to a movie in at least the last 5 years and that they have an incredibly low bar for amusement. If this is you, please stop. It only encourages the theater chains to continue running these awful videos.

2) “Look”: I’ve written about this before as it relates to politics, but since I’ve become aware of it, I’ve noticed that all manner of people use the word “look” as a refocusing verbal tic. Example: I ask you how you plan to solve the economic crisis, and you say, “Look, it’s not going to be easy.” I equate it to my old pet peeve opening phrase (which thankfully I don’t hear very often anymore): “You don’t understand.” The impression it conveys is that I need to stop asking you stupid questions and accept your authority in this matter. It’s strange how one word can convey such an aggressive message, but it does, and it drives me nuts.

3) People who wear sunglasses at night: The only reason I can see for doing this is to hide your eyes, which are bloodshot from doing too much cocaine. If that is the only reason for doing something, than it is not a very effective trick. Because clearly, if you are wearing sunglasses at night, you are the type of person who hangs out with other people who know why you are wearing the sunglasses. No one is thinking, “he’s wearing sunglasses at night! He must be pretty cool.” They are thinking, “he’s wearing sunglasses at night! He must do a lot of cocaine.”

4) People who respond to only one request in a multi-request email: This is everyone. I know the solution, which is to only send one request per email. Still, it annoys me to think that humans are incapable of reading a single email and responding to it in its entirety.

5) People who call me “bro” who are not really my bros: If I’m your bro, please feel free to call me “bro.” If you are handing me my coffee at Starbucks, I am not your bro. Please call me sir.

6) Emoticons: you cannot make up for the fact that you’ve just written something incredibly rude to me by ending it with a :). And even though they are by now instantly recognizable, I still feel the need to turn my head at a 90 degree angle to read them. They’re ugly little horizontal pictures tossed into my clean world of vertical letters and I hate them.

7) Help file search boxes: it is nearly impossible to find the help you need by searching a help file. Even if the answer is right there, the search never seems to get to it. For example, do a search for “fast forward” in iTunes, and there is no result. One would think this would be a pretty common function on a device used for playing music. The cassette player I had as a kid had 5 buttons, and one of them was “fast forward.” The ability to fast forward to a certain point in a song is among the most essential services a music player can offer. Yes, I know how to do this in iTunes without checking the help file, but that’s no excuse.

8) People who dress their pets for cold weather: Dogs were genetically engineered to live in cold environments. They’ll survive. Please remove the coat and hat.

Then came Facebook. At the time I started hearing about it, it was just for college kids. I thought it would probably have been a cool thing to get into if I was in college, but I respected the fact that it was ONLY for college kids and didn’t have any desire to break into it as an adult. Then, they decided to allow high school kids to join. The network erupted in controversy, and I sided with the network. If I was in college, I probably would have had a similar response. Plus, just knowing the whole thing was started by a 19-year old who is now a billionaire kind of annoyed me. I don’t need to support this kid.

About a year ago, I started to get the pressure from my friends about joining Facebook. Now that I’m trying to restart my performing and blogging careers, I made the reluctant decision to try my hand at tapping into the social network scene. So, with fingers firmly clenched in annoyance, I finally signed up for a Facebook profile.

And I gotta say, I think I was wrong. Facebook is the first social networking site that has gotten it right. First of all, they’ve somehow managed to eliminate the problem of finding your friends … within minutes of signing up I had already been contacted by a ton of people I haven’t been in touch with for years. How? I have no idea. They found me. And for the most part, it’s people who I would love to know what they’re doing without the hassles of an actual human connection. Second, you have a ton of options to personalize your page without making it look all ugly and blown-out like a MySpace page. Third, the constant feed of friends activity is actually pretty addictive.

I don’t know that I’ll stick with it, but for the present moment, I must apologize to all my friends who have been bugging me to get a Facebook page and to whom I said “hated it!” This includes, but is not limited to: Jon Harmon, Jill Kleinbriel, and Mike Welch. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to start bugging all my friends who are not yet signed up.

Well, according to a fascinating article in the LA Weekly last week, it was all a sham. There is no such thing as toxic molds; it was all media-generated hype, like shark attacks and Miley Cyrus. Also, Ed McMahon is a total nut job.

Now, I don’t want to say that this article necessarily proves anything, but I was not even aware that it was up for debate. It’s been a great relief to find out I can stop sleeping in the Hazmat suit, anyway. If I choose to.

I get insurance through one of the companies I freelance with (I’m in the system as a part-time employee). It’s a good deal, because I’m only doing about 20 hours of work for them a week. Very kind of them to offer me insurance. It comes out of my paycheck, of course, but it’s still a lot cheaper than buying it on my own.

I discovered recently that they switched their plans. I mean, I knew they were switching their plans … we got extensive emails about it when it was happening. The cost of healthcare had gone way up, they said, and they could no longer afford the kinds of plans we were on before. I paid little attention, because like I said, I don’t really need to use my health insurance that often.

Well, I didn’t need to use my health insurance that often. One thing I’ve been getting into since I moved to California is acupuncture. I’ve had this pain in my shoulder for years that I never had professionally examined. Some time last fall I figured, all right, I’ve finally got health insurance, why don’t I use it? So I started going to this acupuncturist who told me I had some scar tissue built up that needed to be worked out. Things were going great … my shoulder felt better than it had in years. The acupuncturist called my insurance company – no problem, they said, as long as it was related to a physical ailment, I could get all the acupuncture I needed.

Then in April, my plan switched, and all of a sudden that unlimited acupuncture turned into no acupuncture ever because, after all, it’s not really medicine. Of course, like a fool, I didn’t investigate all the new plan benefits. So I went to the provider’s website to see just what was covered by my new plan. The only info they had available was a 2 page pamphlet with 3 different categories – doctor’s visits, inpatient, and outpatient. Each of these three things was limited to 5 visits. So, for instance, if I get in a car accident and lose all sense of feeling in my legs, I have 5 tries to get it back.

I thought to myself … this can’t be right. What if people have real problems that can’t be fixed within 5 sessions? I called the insurance provider and said, “hey, so, I’d like to get a big book that clearly explains all my benefits to me, please.” The woman I spoke with directed me toward the 2 page pamphlet. “Ok,” I said, “well, this doesn’t tell me much. For instance, what if I need to get psychological counseling? How many visits am I allowed?” “Outpatient services, 5 visits,” she replies. “Okay,” I said, “but what if I’m super crazy?” “Just a second,” she says. She comes back and says, “if you’re diagnosed with a serious mental illness, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, you are allowed unlimited visits.” “Great!” I answered. “Now, can you please send me the book that lists all of those exceptions?” “There is no book,” she said. “But if you want to know if something’s covered, call me and I’ll tell you.”

Now, I ask you … does this seem right? That the only way I can find out what services my insurance provides me with is to call the provider? The provider that makes its money denying people benefits? I mean, everyone knows our healthcare system sucks. I’m not blowing the lid off some hitherto unknown phenomenon. I guess I just didn’t realize we’re in such a bad state that people who have health insurance are only allowed to visit the doctor 5 more times than people who do not have health insurance.

As we waited, I struck up a conversation with this woman. Or rather, she struck up a conversation with me to which I reluctantly contributed. In lines and on airplanes I have a massive aversion to talking to the people next to me, a tendency that is surprising in light of the fact that my mom becomes instant best friends with anyone surrounding her in the grocery store checkout line. I think living in New York for 8 years left me with the belief that anyone who bothers to acknowledge the existence of those surrounding him must have some kind of serious mental illness. And at first, when I started talking to this woman with the gigantic rolly suitcase who spent the day getting autographs from minor literary celebrities (and minor celebrity-celebrities as well … she proudly showed me her “jump to the front of line ticket” for the Kevin Nealon signing later in the afternoon), I assumed that she must have some kind of serious mental illness as well. Luckily, she turned out to be a perfectly nice conversationalist who had a lot of interesting things to say about the publishing industry.

Somehow, as we were talking, the subject turned to our musical preferences. She mentioned that she stopped listening to music about ten years ago, when the “gangster rap thing started.” She used to be a big fan of reggae and early hip-hop, but she doesn’t like listening to music about killing people and degrading women. I quite like listening to music about killing people and degrading women, but I kept this information to myself. Sometimes it’s best to keep your cards close to your chest.

Anytime a conversation between two white people lands on the subject of gangster rap, it’s a pretty safe bet that one of the two parties will eventually find him or herself in uncomfortable territory. I felt a familiar sense of creeping dread as she told me her theories on how gangster rap was responsible for a dangerous culture of which we should be terrified. I tried to point out that there are positive things happening in the world, and she conceded the point with a great example.

“The other day, I was working downtown, and I saw a kid handing out free trees. And he was,”–her voice lowered so as not to inflame anyone around us who was not as culturally sensitive as we were–”black.”

“That sounds nice,” I said.

“It was,” she agreed. “And I thought, this is great. Why can’t we have more programs like this?”

“Programs where black kids hand out free trees?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That sounds like a pretty good program.”

Oh, white Americans. We loooove to be on a team, don’t we? I say “white” because for some reason, other races don’t count when we think about generational identities. One of the commenters has a nice point when he says that Gen X gets to claim hip-hop, which most would agree is the biggest cultural phenomenon we’ve seen since the advent rock n’ roll. But even though members of our generation invented hip-hop, it actually belongs to Gen Y, because they were the first white kids to appropriate it properly.

Personally, I don’t really give a rat’s ass what generation I belong to. I barely identify with my friends, let alone some guy in New York who writes for Radar Magazine who happens to have been born within the same 20 year window as me. And any attempt to define millions of people into one cohesive group tends to tell us more about the people doing the defining than the members of the group themselves. I’m sure there are lots of morons in their 20s right now. Whether or not they are bigger morons than we were in our 20s is strictly anecdotal. As people get older and start to feel like culture is leaving them beyond, they love to find ways in which the world is changing for the worst. I won’t deny that the country’s in a pretty shitty state, but I sure don’t see how we can blame the generation below us for that.

That being said, I would still leap at the chance to kick the Leave Britney Alone kid in the balls.