Month: February 2018

Nowadays, this feeling gets experienced less and less every passing second. With smartphones being omnipresent in society, there’s really no need to ever have to think about the answer to a question.

Just look it up.

But picture, if you can, the days before smartphones were everywhere… or, if you’re friends with me, picture hanging out with me somewhere and me saying, “No wait, don’t look it up just yet!”

We’ve gotten into a good conversation about this movie or where that basketball player went to college or some thing that happened when we were all in 7th grade together.

If it’s a small group of people, there’s always going to be the one person that can’t possibly imagine a universe wherein they’re expected to wait for more than fifteen milliseconds to know anything. How on God’s Earth could they not look it up? Better question, why would they not look it up?

I’ll tell you why: so they could struggle and feel the unquestionable joy of saying, “The Super!” twenty minutes later, long past the point where anyone gave a shit. The question of course was, “What was the name of that movie with Joe Pesci where he plays basketball in Harlem?” No one knows, except you. Only problem is, your memory isn’t as good as it used to be because you’re no longer 12-years old or you’ve been drinking all night. Or both.

Regardless, you know two things to be true…. The first is that despite your temporary amnesia you do know the name of this movie and the second is that you know you could find it out instantly… but that’s no fucking fun.

So you soldier on, a warrior of an older generation that prefers slower speeds and harder work for the same payoff in reality.

But, when mental lightning does strike and you’re gifted with that freeing of the mental energy you’d been spending on trying to think of that movie… you’ll know you spent your time wisely.

Polar Opposite of this Feeling?: That interim period where your group has moved on to talking about something else and you can’t even contemplate participating because all you can think about is that fucking movie title.

This one probably never would have made the list if I did this all between the ages of 12 and 17.

I was never a great sleeper, but I certainly didn’t give a shit about where I laid my head nearly as much as I do now.

As currently constructed (and I know I’m only getting worse by the day), I’m sensitive to light, sound and movement. Basically, I need to sleep in a temperature-controlled, perfectly silent, perfectly still hyperbaric chamber… that also happens to be large enough that I can roll around multiple times and not have any issues.

Oh yeah, I am a mover when I sleep. I’m a real joy to rest with.

Anyway, this is all to say that at this point in my life every time I go to sleep somewhere other than my own bed, it’s all I can do to not think, “That is one less good night’s sleep you will have in your life. I hope you’re happy.”

Sometimes it’s worth it (staying over a girl’s place) and sometimes it’s not (staying over a girl’s place). Whether or not the reason you’re staying somewhere new is a good one is  irrelevant.

What’s important is that you’re no longer on a futon or a hotel bed or a friend’s couch or a spare bedroom or some new chick’s bed with her cat… you’re in your bed, with your shitty pillows and your unmade set of sheets.

It’s catered to your exact specifications… which is why you’d probably prefer to never leave.

Polar Opposite of this Feeling?: This is obvious, right? Sleeping in someone else’s bed. But, to give an example I’ll expound upon the cat thing from a paragraph or so ago. I slept over this girl’s apartment maybe 2 years ago at this point. It was a fun evening after our third date, she was a cool girl and everything was, at worst, fine. It turned when we actually began the legit sleeping portion of the evening. She had an air conditioner that sounded like it was running off a Model T engine, a cat that she refused to keep in the bathroom and allowed to crawl all over us and sheets that made steel wool feel soft. I pretended I had something to do at 5 in the morning just so I could go home and sleep.

I’ve written a lot, in this space, about traffic. In fact, in looking specifically into exactly how many times I’d written about traffic in this list I discovered I’d done the same feeling, worded differently, twice.

The feeling of being stuck in traffic that suddenly starts to move was so wonderful to me, I placed it at both 60 and 103. There’s even a feeling about watching jerkoffs in traffic finally get caught for being… well, jerkoffs.

But this feeling is better than all of those for one simple reason: you’ve avoided the worst part.

Traffic is, by any measure, awful. No one enjoys it, no one likes it, no one prefers it. It’s awful in every conceivable way.

Most feelings on this list revolve around that moment when the less-good thing stops or finally turns into the more-good thing.

This feeling is the absence of that less-good thing entirely and going straight into the more-good thing.

And what’s more, you know the less-good thing is still out there plaguing other people but you were smart enough, cagey enough and by golly lucky enough to not have to deal with it this time.

Good for you.

Polar Opposite of this Feeling?: Thinking you’ve avoided traffic, you’re really starting to cruise where ever you’re heading… and you run right smack into a whole brand-new mess of traffic.

I’ve never intentionally stolen anything.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Once, after a softball game in the city, I stopped at a Jamba Juice and grabbed a water from the open-air fridge while waiting on line. I chugged it all before I could even place my order and without thinking I tossed the bottle into the trash.

So yes, technically, that was stealing. I never paid for that bottle of water and never told the place I had it.

But outside of that, never intentionally.

The reason I throw that qualifier in there is because once I stole something and didn’t even realize I did it. Because I plainly am not some hoodlum stealing things on the daily, this little story that follows is the illustration of the rare fun and fleeting joy of getting away with something like this.

Summer of 2006… I was about to leave to study abroad in London for the semester. Because this was taking place during the Stone Age, I went to the local CD/record store to buy myself one of those CD booklets for the trip (I needed something to hold my dope mixtapes, sonnn).

Anyway… while buying the booklet, I perused the store to see if any new stuff had come out that caught my eye. Looking up and down the “New Top 20” section, I checked out a few that piqued my interest for a bit but there was nothing noteworthy. So, I resolved to just purchase the booklet.

Upon leaving the store, a UPS or FedEx delivery guy was trying to get in so I held open the door for him and even helped with a box or two he’d left on the sidewalk.

I mention this last part because when I got back to my car, I realized I’d never put down one of the CDs I was looking at from that Top 20 rack (the Method Man CD pictured above). If they ever reviewed footage of that day, I must have looked like the calmest thief in recorded history. I literally left the store and came back in with stolen merch multiple times, calm as could be (because I had no idea it was in my hands still).

Of course, at that point I kept the record and moved on with my life. Sure, it’s basically petty shit.  But hell, they overcharge us all the time, why can’t we get one back every so often?

Polar Opposite of this Feeling?: Getting caught? I’m not sure what else could possibly go here.

Even writing this post is getting me so fucking jacked I can’t stand it.

There’s so many ways to approach this I’m not even sure where to start.

How about this? Watch this and tell me you don’t want to fuck someone up.

Or this. Seriously. The first thing that happens in this video is a guy literally getting ripped from his truck. Let’s go.

I could go on for literally hours with videos that get me super jacked, but I’ll spare you. Songs, clips, highlights, movies. Sometimes combinations of all the above.

But that’s the beauty of it. It can literally be anything and you can go from where I am now, on my couch writing this up, to completely hyped in a matter of moments.

I know I said, literally sentences ago, that I was done with the videos… but just one more, for illustration purposes.

What follows is a clip that is, on its face, extremely boring. It’s less than 30 seconds long, features a “highlight” of the most boring team in pro basketball doing the most fundamental thing they do (having their best, most boring player shoot a regular, non-contested jump shot). There’s words on the screen flashing along as the clip progresses which even tell you how boring the highlight is.

So what gets me amped? The music. “Shook Ones” by Mobb Deep drums murderously in the background and revs my engine. This clip gets me so hyped I barely have the focus to finish this post.

That probably did very little for you and I totally get it. But I know a version of this video exists somewhere out there in the ether for everyone.

If you haven’t already, stop reading this and go watch or listen to that thing. You deserve to get hyped.

Polar Opposite of this Feeling?: Getting all jacked for something, like an intramural basketball game, only to arrive at the gym and be told you can’t play that week because the floor is too wet. Or the ref didn’t show up. Not speaking specifically or referring to ZogSports.

 

This may very well seem like the same feeling as this one. Or at the very least, its inverse which makes it basically the same.

And to those haters, I say this: good on you for paying that close attention to this list.

(Note: If anyone actually noticed the similarity between these two feelings I’d be blown away because I can’t imagine anyone gives enough of a shit about this whole thing)

However… to the matter at hand… there is a difference between these feelings.

Number 86 is more about the surprise. You’ve been alone or without great company for a decent stretch and you get the fun reveal of someone important in your life being there for you. There’s also the convenience factor that’s been added: it’s now incrementally easier for you to get home.

The most important thing is that you didn’t expect it. The joy you’re feeling from this one is the suddenness of it.

With this feeling you’re the one bringing the joy. You’re on the other end of this surprise, you’ve been missing this person and planning how to greet them when they arrive.

Essentially, it’s like gift giving. If you get more satisfaction out of giving a great gift than receiving a great gift, you’ll totally understand this feeling.

If you’re a gift-receiver person… well, keep doing you, dog.

Polar Opposite of this Feeling?: Arriving at airports as I always do… alone and with no one waiting for me. Single life, son.

I participate in online dating.

In doing so, you come across all sorts of pictures and one-liners and questions. Men and women fill out profiles that ask questions about their preferences in any number of ways and the answers are pretty wide-ranging.

One thing you will not see on anyone’s profile is that their “Happy Place” is waiting in a line. Or that “you should message them if…” you love waiting in lines. Or that “something people find hard to believe about them…” is that their favorite thing to do is wait in a line.

No one likes lines. We all fucking hate them. Yet somehow, there is a decent segment of the population that is more OK with them than the rest of us.

Me personally? I’d rather go without than wait on the line. It’s one of the main reasons I enjoy working odd hours: no one is around when I need to do shit, thus, no lines.

These people that get up early to wait in a line for hours to get the newest donut/crepe/bagel/sour patch kid flavor… get the fuck out of here.

So the idea of being able to get that thing, whatever it is, that you know typically has a line without having to actually wait on one feels like you’ve won the lottery. It honestly doesn’t even matter if you’ve got anything else to do. The rest of your day is irrelevant: what matters is that you don’t have to spend it waiting in a line.

Polar Opposite of this Feeling?: Being in a short line, thinking you’ve got it made, only to be behind someone that causes any number of the following issues that delay the process: paying with a check, causing a fuss about a coupon, asking for a manager, asking for something behind the counter, returning something, causing a fuss about a credit card issue.

For some reason, when I was a kid I started a collection of Hard Rock Cafe pins.

To this day, I’m not quite sure how or why this began.

Regardless of the answer to either of those questions, it was a foolish collection to start because it’s almost impossible to finish. There’s a seemingly endless amount of those restaurants and there was no way on God’s earth I was ever even coming close grabbing them all. Hell, if it was just a collection of Hard Rock pins from the USA, I’d likely never finish that.

This is all to say that this is the type of collection I’m talking about. Finishing a collection that takes time and money and effort and more time and more fucking time. Like anything else, the effort makes the reward sweeter.

I’m not sure that I collect anything else that could be considered part of a series, so this feeling has likely passed me by. But that doesn’t mean it has for the rest of you.

So go out there, hoarders among us, and keep collecting.

Eventually when you die, your progeny will have to throw away your “hard work” but until then… keep it up. It means something to you, if nothing else.

Polar Opposite of this Feeling? That moment when you realize you spent tons of money and time on a collection you’ll not only never finish but wouldn’t know what to do with even if you did.

What a fleeting feeling this is, no? How quickly it evaporates and the difference between being in the pocket of this one and just outside it with no chance to recover is almost impossible to tell in the moment.

The true value of leaving on a high note doesn’t measure up in all groups. Generally speaking, if you’re the alpha in the group it typically isn’t a big deal for you to have that ‘on top’ moment. You know you’re gonna get the rock passed back to you again, the coach is going to draw up the shot for you regardless of how it all goes down.

But let’s say you’re at a work meeting wherein you’re one of the lowest ranking people in the room… or, despite being in your 30s and being well past caring about how cool someone is, there’s still that guy or girl you want to impress in a non sexual way… or, you know, any dating situation.

In any of those, this conversational joy can arise.

Unlike most of the feelings on this list and particularly those located higher on the list, the greatness of this idea isn’t just how rare it is but rather how quickly you can dance into the exact polar opposite of the feeling and how bad that can be.

It’s truly a matter of timing. One more joke, one more off-color comment, one more anything really and you could lose the momentum.

For someone like me, with a tendency to drone on and on and an inability to self-censor, it’s far easier for me to blow way past the line and never leave on a high note. Greed kicks in and you start believing your own press clippings, that if you could get to this one high note, of course you can do it again and again.

And to be clear, there are those silver-tongued enough among us out there that can dance with the devil in the pale of the moonlight. But, for the rest of us, the pocket is small.

You get in, you get out.

A handful of years ago, I had my wisdom teeth taken out.

All four, clean sweep, right at once.

I was having some irritation, knew they’d need to come out eventually and decided to do it before it got any worse.

The actual surgery and recovery from said surgery wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting. A day and a half later I was totally fine and basically pain-free. I assumed, incorrectly, that this was the end of the story.

Unfortunately, a small side effect of the removal of those teeth was that there seems to have been some shifting that took place, ever so slightly, in the back of my mouth.

The impact of said shifting?

Every single time I eat anything, if I’m chewing on the right side of my mouth which I eventually will wind up doing, I get an enormous piece of food wedged right in there.

It happens literally every meal, I cannot avoid it. At this point, I’m used to it and have floss in multiple locations (backpack, desk at work, car, home).

But sometimes I’m nowhere near any of these safety zones. Sometimes, I have to wait hours until I am comfortably within distance of floss.

That piece of pulled pork or wedge of carrot or (honestly anything, because after a while, it’s all irritating) has been grinding away at me for hours, and finally, with one easy swoop I get to feel total relief.

I honestly even like looking at the chunk on the floss before I rinse it down the drain. There’s some weird conqueror-conqueree-type-shit going on there, can’t explain it.

Polar Opposite of this Feeling?: The interminable wait between that bite and that floss.