Seven Things I Don't Understand

Remember Angie Tempura, the snarky blogger character from Saturday Night Live who hates everything? She'd show up on Weekend Update and bitch about things that don't matter (when she wasn't doing data entry for Kaiser Permanente). She wasn't funny at all, and the actress who played her got fired after one season.

Well, I'm about to pull an Angie Tempura. Bitch, please.



I understand I'm in the minority when it comes to Lord of the Rings, but the appeal escapes me. I remember reading the books in high school, but who remembers anything from high school? All I remember is that the two gym coaches were caught boning in the locker room my senior year. When I saw the The Fellowship of the Rings in theaters, I fell asleep halfway through and when I woke up Enya was warbling and the movie was ending.

I watched all three movies a couple years later, thinking I'd missed out on something great and excited to finally be in the loop, but 560 minutes later I was still as confused as ever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the series is basically about a bunch of white divas with names like Aerwynénynrn and Elendireôelindryl who love to sing and who obsess over a piece of jewelry for the entire story, right?

 

Besides, the whole thing is totally unoriginal. They obviously stole dragons from Harry Potter, and Gollum was clearly based on Janice Dickinson, which is just plain rude.

(edit: I've been getting irate emails from people telling me the Lord of the Rings was written before Harry Potter. I know this. It's a joke. Calm down.)

Why don't people want to smell like themselves? People smell nice, most of the time. I remember several years ago when black pepper was really popular in perfume, and I remember thinking, "Who wants to smell like pepper? What's next, garlic salt? Mrs. Dash? Am I right, ladies? Is this thing on?"

I like the way wood smells, and I like the way spices smell, but I don't understand why people want to smell like cedar and sandalwood and peet moss.

 

I was an art major in college. Shut up. I know already. I'd rent full seasons of shows on DVD and watch them while I painted, and after about three months I'd watched every show in existence. Except for the crime shows. I'd held off on the NCIS's and the CSI's, but I was desperate for something else to watch so I gave them a shot. After a few seasons of various series under my belt, they all started to blur together and I realized I was essentially watching the same episode over and over again.

Each episode essentially boils down to this: the cops/detective/agents spend about forty minutes grilling the obvious culprit, who maintains his innocence the whole time, and then in the final sixty seconds of the episode he admits to it, and all the people watching congratulate themselves on knowing the whole time.

I'm definitely not generalizing at all when I declare every episode of every crime show ever follows this pattern:

 

Yogurt. Why. I'm sure I probably shouldn't have an opinion about yogurt, but it seems to be such a thing now. Commercials make it seem like such a treat. Jamie Lee Curtis keeps urging me to slurp it up. Is it even food? You can't really eat it, and it's not a liquid. It's essentially fruit flavored snot. People get so excited about yogurt and I can't fathom why.

 

Man, it feels so good to get that off my chest. Yogurt has caused me so much inner turmoil. I feel so free now. I can finally live.

My female friends tell me I don't get Sex and the City because I'm a man. "You don't understand what we go through, Adam. Sex and the City speaks to us." Maybe they're right. Maybe I need a uterus to understand. In 2007 I watched the entire series at the urging of a ladyfriend, and sat through every episode with a straight face, completely baffled. To me, the series boiled down to a bunch of WASPy broads who meet for brunch and complain about their super-active sex lives.

 

Basically the show breaks down into several parts. Sex, the city, brunch, and shoes. I like all those things individually. I especially like shoes. My Amazon wishlist consists almost entirely of Nike Dunk High Tops in different colors. So shouldn't I like a show called Sex and the City (plus Brunch and Shoes)? 

Zooey is adorable. She's like a creature from those Serendipity books. By and large she's pretty charming, but what's with the bangs? Zooey is approximately 70 percent bangs. It's like a hair shield. That thing is bulletproof. I can't help but wonder what that thicket of hair is covering up. What is Zooey hiding? My bet is either Klingon forehead ridges or a deformed Siamese twin face. Probably the latter.

I generally don't eat in front of other people. It's not a pretty sight. When I go out to dinner with friends, I'm always the first to finish my meal. I inhale food, like a pelican choking down whole live fish. I also don't stop eating until all the food in sight is gone. I'm like a roomba, methodically inhaling anything and everything. Why would I want to do that in a party setting? 

Plus, nobody my age ever throws successful dinner parties. It's almost always garlic bread and spaghetti, with a couple bottles of $7 wine to make the whole affair classy.

Other things I don't understand the appeal of: tapas, Sudoku, Halo, Downton Abbey.

And in an effort to balance things out, here's a short list of things I love: antler chandeliers, drag queens doing makeup tutorials on YouTube, potbelly pigs, and Banh Mi sandwiches. Also crime shows. I just started watching AMC's The Killing and it's already changing my mind about crime shows.