The GIF of Personality

Emotions, for the most part, are what separate us from the Apes. They are a thick cross-section of our personality, and although many emotions are shared, they are also uniquely our own.


That used to be true to the truest extent of true. Then somebody got this idea:


FINDING A BUG IN MY ROOM



That thing above was called a "what should we call me" or a "how I feel when" animated GIF.  It's a tapestry of images that runs its course in a matter of seconds (depending on your bandwidth). The little file upload that has become so outlandishly popular that it is setting a new standard on what is viral, on what is possibly mindless, and it is making a big impact.


If you have received no fewer than 250 of these in your email inbox and/or Facebook newsfeed by this point, feel free to stand up and take the name of your deity in vein loudly.

Welcome to the midpoint of 2012, a time when instead of actually expressing emotions interpersonally, we convey how we feel through a series of animated GIF files and YouTube videos. Today we rely much less on words to express how we feel, and I don't know how I feel about that.


Email chains have become a rat race to see who can find the funnier GIF that someone else created before someone else finds it. It's a mindless juxtaposition for actually making an effort to make someone smile. And those of us that peddle these creations the most, come off looking like drones. Drones that appear to be saying "fuck it!, I'm not funny, but at least I know someone else who is!"

Don't get me wrong. I love memes, I love the newest pictures on Reddit, but I don't love them so much that I would use them as a catalyst to conversation as an alternative to... well... conversation. And I certainly refuse to treat my friends as dead horses by viciously beating their temples with this shitty form of new non-novelty.


Did you know that there are actually blogs reaping dividends off of this new niche? Here's one. Here's another. This is our new "claim to fame." Entire websites devoted to equivocating someone else's ideas to express your own.

Hopefully this is just a fly-by-night ridiculous little fad that will make people realize its lack of substance in hindsight. Because as a collection of online avatars with a pulse, I think we're much better than this. I think we're capable of being creative, and I still think that the 2% of genetic code that separates us from the Apes is a bigger chasm than it sounds.

Rome wasn't built in a day, but it was seemingly destroyed over night. A domino effect that brought down an entire empire. Another sad example of lemmings following each other off of a cliff.

The acute influx of these GIF files could be bigger than Farmville and Cityville combined. Screw fetching online lumber for your imaginary pole barn. Screw warding off child predators. This is the new problem at hand in cyberspace. Yes, sometimes they are funny, and yes they are usually appropriate, but the foundation of humor was not built on implied and predictable nuance. It was not forged with the work of other people being whored out to misrepresentation. It was from novel thought and effort-fueled creativity. It was from the purest of quick-witted conjecture that didn't have so much evidently obvious factual basis that it could just be sharp and immediately elicit laughter. It was for those of us who like to laugh because we can't help it... not because we're supposed to.

Let's not destroy the "Rome" that Facebook accidentally created. Let's propagate original thought, and let's actually express our actual feelings once again (without going to the point of making our subscribers think we have suicidal tendencies).

Let's pause our gait, and quit taking steps backward into becoming an idiocracy, and let's collect ourselves and take a step forward into becoming a free-thinking society.

Perhaps this is a call to revise the constitution of online interaction. A time to bring back original thought. Perhaps we have a revolution on our hands.

This is how I feel when I want to start a revolution




Dear Christ, now I'm doing it...

If the "trending now" powers that be don't buck this trend soon, our personalities will be completely and inevitably hijacked by what other people/notable figures declare how we should react. We'll become boring regurgitators of movie lines and scenes, and this overwhelming amount of GIF will become yet another non-renewable resource, and due to how compulsively we overuse the shit out of everything, it will eventually become the GIF that doesn't keep on giving.

Everyone Talks Shit

As our society approaches infinity, each and every person will have had something bad said about them by someone else.

It doesn't matter if it's a byproduct of personal inadequacies, or if the person being shit on is just a real piece of work, the odds of you talking behind someone's back will eventually approach dead-even sooner rather than later. Don't be afraid that you weren't immune.

Talking shit about someone while they're not in the room is one of society's oldest and most reliable social quaaludes. It's destructively soothing in the sense that it helps you calibrate your sanity. Exercising it too much will make you an asshole, but doing it sparingly for the sake of soundness of mind and preventing a simultaneously awkward/heated confrontation is nothing short of perfectly acceptable. Since nobody is perfect (not even Tim Tebow), and nobody is above a fair amount of criticism without being hypocritically critical.

Reasonable shit-talking is a hidden social norm (everyone does it, yet nobody acknowledges that everyone does it).

So many people tend to get up in arms in saying "don't talk shit behind my back," or lean on the adage "true friends stab you in the front." That's bullshit. You've done the same thing that you are accusing other people of possibly doing and you're just being a hypocrite. Yeah, true friends will 'man up' and be honest in their criticisms of you once-in-a-while. But that's the reason they're still your friend, because that's something they only do "once-in-a-while."

Our lives are not all on record within a court of law. We're not dealing with slanderous libel. Saying a few things about a buddy behind their back when it's a true and honest insight is just a way of vetting out fabricated ideas from true feelings about that person. I'm not saying you have free-reign to talk shit about every nuance you find in other people, but that you shouldn't double your guilt because you may have said something bad (yet true) in regard to another person. You're not a slime ball, you're a person. Probably a decent one too.


People need to vent about things while at the same time not coming across as ungrateful assholes. One of the best ways to accomplish this, is to confide in another friend. You don't want the person that annoys you ever-so-often to think that you bitch about everything, so you bitch about everything else to someone else, and it somewhat makes you feel better, and helps you tolerate the subject of your rant a lot better without irreparably distancing yourself from someone that gets on your nerves now and again, and becoming alienated over something that might amount to being trivial in nature.


Remember, this is therapeutic. Go ahead and give qualifying statements. Statements such as "he's not a bad guy, but..." or "I'd hate to say something bad about him, but..." So what if you sound like you're on the fence, and so what if you might think you're acting like a pussy. These are things that need to come out, one way or another, and it's better that they come out through a friend as an anonymous mediator than through a side-splitting stomach ulcer.



***



"I don't care what other people think" is something stupid people say to protect their ignorance. Or a flat out lie for most other people. Of course you care about what other people think, you're an evolving, changing person, and there's nothing wrong with that. What you should say is "I don't care what most people think," or "I don't care what some people think." There is nothing wrong with re-assessing yourself regularly.

All things considered, most people are reactionary and over-the-top prisoners of the moment. What they think of someone or something one day can dramatically change in the future based on whatever some popular newsfeed or quote-unquote trusted source says. So why subject yourself to their outward thoughts?


We would like to think we have most things under control, and we would like to think we have a grasp on what 'reality' really is. But at times we don't. And at times, it's very intelligent to admit that we have absolutely no fucking clue. If you could understand exactly where this world was heading, you probably wouldn't be reading blog articles from underneath the fluorescent radiance of your stuffy office. And you most certainly wouldn't need to be deriving any sort of "pep talk."


It's an unwritten truth that some people suck. Okay... most people suck. And it's sad to say, but safe to admit that we find comfort in other people agreeing with us as to the extent at which they suck. No matter how independent you think you are, we are a social species. We thrive off of interaction, and we tend to bolster ourselves through reinforcement of our opinions and feelings. This is the most concise reason as to why this behavior is not necessarily a bad thing.


Everyone talks shit, and its continued practice will most likely not change. There are probably people talking shit about you right now. But don't let it get to you, don't jump to assumptions, and don't take it personal. It's their opinion, and it's most likely just an emotional extrapolation derived from misconstrued facts (simply put). And just because they are talking shit, doesn't imply that you have to eat it.

Father of the Groom

Welcome back to another wedding season. The summertime ritual where you can't help but think to yourself, "holy shit, my buddy is getting married." It's a time to find a date, get a date, bring along the ole ball-and-chain, or clean up the sideburns and go stag. The heat is on.


It's time to bargain hunt the Mens Warehouse clearance rack, and redeem any Banana Republic coupons you've printed off from your Firefox browser. It's a ridiculous rat race at times, and that's only from your perspective. Just imagining what it must be like for the parties directly involved makes spending way too much on a suit, abandoning any future plans for that weekend, and purchasing an outlandish outdoor grill set from the gift registry not all that insane. It's the least you could do for the bride, the groom, and their immediate families.


And if you're just one of those people that doesn't typically carry around "compassion," let's explore this scenario and see if I can extract some.



The Father of the Groom versus The Father of the Bride

We all know that giving away your daughter's hand in marriage can be tough on the father. She's your angel, and you've been protecting her from men harder than any Marvel comic hero has ever protected their home city (alone or in tandem). But on the other side of the Chapel aisle is the giving away of the son to be married. This can be much, much, easier.


He's not your "Baby," and he's not your "pride and joy." If anything he's the result of sperm meeting egg in the back of a freshly vacuumed back seat adorned with empty beer cans and bargain champagne on a sloppy Friday night back in 1983.

The Father of the Bride looks forward to the relief that he's finally fended off all of the assholes trying to stick it in his daughter ever since she hit menarche. This is the celebration of the day where either the best asshole succeeded, or ideally, the best suitor has been found for the sacrament of matrimony.

The Father of the Groom on the other hand, sets the goal of drinking as much as he possibly can during the open bar, and can look forward to comparing his daughter-in-law to his wife during future light beer drinking heart-to-hearts with his son.


The Father of the Bride uses the antiquated and sexist cliche "I'm giving my daughter away."


The Father of the Groom wishes his son good luck on nailing his newlywed wife following the reception.


This is the one day that it is guaranteed that his son won't do something to completely piss him off, or disappoint him with yet another misguided decision.


This is the day when all eyes are on his son and future addition to the family, and it's not at all nerve-wracking from his perspective because he has been half in the bag since the photo-op back at the church.


This is the day when the Father of the Groom will be taking sips from a flask during the sermon, talking about Stephen Strasburg's 98 mph fastball with long lost friends at a buffet table over a few bud heavies, and getting cake all over his face in a suds soaked absence of shame.

The Father of the Bride will be drinking too, but he will be chasing shots of Crown Royale with antacids.


One father is a nervous wreck, the other, a train wreck.


For the Father of the Groom, this is where the rubber hits the road, and where his son's rubbers hit the storage closet. And while the father of the newly espoused spouse doesn't even come close to sharing this sentiment, the double-standard goes by both intentionally unrecognized and gladly embraced.


So here's to you this wedding season, the Father of The Groom. Crack open another Miller High Life, and toast to getting toasted on the day you're giving your son away.