A Great Dating Article (And My Silly Comments)

Mandy Stadtmiller is a really great writer. She’s also not a bad-looking woman. Anyway, I found out who she was through the wonderful world of Twitter maybe a year ago; and recently saw that the article I’m about to comment on getting retweeted quite a lot. If you’re a woman, you could do a lot worse things than put her in your reading rotation. I only directed that toward the ladies because she mostly writes for the ladies. This one here was an exception.

By the way, please read her whole piece here. It is far more entertaining than this will be (the link at the end of her commentary on #3 alone is worth it). I’m just listing the points (unless it’s necessary to include more, like with #2) and then saying what I think in italics.

A Perspective on Tyler Perry

Tyler Perry is a hero to parts of the black community, and the scourge of the earth to others (hello, Shorty New York). I'm going to leave my general...well, let me not say that. If I go on a rant about Tyler Perry haters - and the overlap between them and those who hate southern rap, et al - then I just do.

The one thing I'll say for now: funny how TP haters were saying "all he does is Madea: he needs to branch out" and so on...and then people found out he was playing Alex Cross and it's "he can't play Alex Cross: he needs to stick to the Madea stuff". He can't win for losing, and that says more about the haters than it does about Perry.

I haven't seen any of Perry's stage plays (actually, I saw parts of "What's Done In The Dark" at a cousin's house; but not enough to remember anything), but I have seen most of his movies. The crux of this post will be a retrospective on those films, and it will start now.

No Friend Zones Over Here

So, there’s this thing called the “friend zone”. I’ll assume that y’all know what it is. If you don’t, I’ll assume you can figure it out from the context. I have figured out within the past year or so that (with one possible exception) I will never be in the friend zone…or have one myself. I don’t want to make this too long (quiet, regular readers), but we shall see.

Favorite Songs of the Millennium (by year)

After this week, I'll get back to a weekly posting schedule. For now, though; a "music Monday" offering...

First, I'm using the actual millennium and not what most people seem to recognize. In other words, I'm starting in 2001. Second, as is mentioned in the title; this is going to go by year. Best song in one year might not have made the top 5 in another year (2001, for example, had a lot of great songs). Now that that's out of the way, let's go.

Why Twitter Is Better Than Facebook

This might be the first original thing (non-football) that I’ve written in two months. As such, let’s not have a delay.

1. People do things such as liking their own statuses (stati?) on Facebook.

May as well start with the tweet I wrote that inspired this piece. Can it get any more lame – and I don’t even say ‘lame’, which shows how lame it really is – than that? One would hope you like your own statuses and comments since you wrote them. That shouldn’t even be allowed. You can’t be your own friend on Facebook. Why should you be allowed to like your own stuff? It makes no sense. Mark Z. should have allowed for dislikes first…oddly enough, I did write about the value of a dislike button here.

2. My parents are on Facebook.

I swore this wouldn’t matter to me. Up and down: I was going to talk about everything in the same irreverent manner that I did before we became friends. Sigh. I forgot how much I used to talk about things I’d rather not discuss with them. There’s also the fact that they’ve given me reason to be wary: my mom got mad at me because I said something anti-FSU (which for me is almost natural) and my dad got mad at me for saying I was in Atlanta (the idea was that someone was going to rob me, even though only one person knows where I live and he didn’t know I was out of town until he called me the next day). I still talk about sports and politics on Facebook, but that’s it. I leave the personal stuff to Twitter, and that segues very well into #3.

3. “On Facebook, you lie to people you do know. On Twitter, you tell the truth to people you don’t know.”

One of my best friends told me this, and it’s true. Now, I’m not a liar. I tell the truth to a fault (ask my ex-girlfriends if you must). Shoot, the times I’ve “gotten in trouble” on Facebook have resulted from telling inconvenient truths. Fact of the matter is there are some truths that not everyone needs to know. Guess what? Lots of people know – and have room to judge – on Facebook. Twitter? Not so much. People respect you enough to not try you on Twitter, but they care enough to try to be helpful. Guess that leads to the next one.

4. I hardly know any of my Twitter peoples, as opposed to knowing just about everyone on my Facebook friends list.

I wish I knew more of my Twitter people, so it’s not that. It’s just that people from so many different corners of my life are Facebook friends of mine. Many of them are from stages of my life that I’ve clearly passed: high school, undergrad, even grad school to a certain extent. I’m not saying I’ve passed them by or anything close: what I am saying is that I’ve passed the stage of evolution at which they’ve seen me. I would say 90 percent of my Facebook friends see me as a person who I’m simply not anymore. It’s not their fault, but the interaction isn’t quite the same since there are different conversations going on at some level. The person they’re “talking to” is different than the person who replies. Sigh.

5. Facebook and Twitter have different functions, and I’m more interested in Twitter’s set.

This kind-of takes from #s 3 and 4, but it is what it is. Facebook helps you catch up with people you do know, and your network expands accordingly. All of my Facebook friends fit one of three descriptions: people I’ve known for five years, people who are friends with people I’ve known for five years, and people I know from College Town. That’s it. As you can see, there’s not much room for growth there. Twitter, on the other hand? Well, there are people from VSB (and connected people). There are people I know from CJ’s radio show (and connected people). There are, of course, people I knew beforehand. I also know people from talking about wrestling and the Hurricanes. Of course, Twitter also has a much more open process of network expansion.

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Now I’m at the point where the only times I’m on Facebook are when I publish notes and to read/answer the Joe Paul questions (subscribe to Joe and read his posts: well worth it). Twitter, though? I’m there for pretty much every waking moment. I can express myself more freely, and it’s much more entertaining. There are other reasons as well, but this has been long enough.

A Bean & A Beanpole

Kevin and Kobe. Kobe and Kevin.

They’re similar in a few ways. They’re obviously both stars. They both jumped from high school to the NBA. Both have won an MVP award. Both have won championships (it’s 5-1 in favor of the Black Mamba, but whatever).

They’re a little different too. They obviously play different positions. One plays on the east coast, the other plays out west. One spent his entire playing career with one team, the other split his career between two franchises.

There’s one thing about them, though, that I think links them. They’re the last two left.

The Dirtiest Secret In Politics

Ed. note: I originally planned on waiting to release this one until closer to the election, but given last night's debate and today's VSB post it made sense to go ahead and get this out.

I'm going to let y'all in on the dirtiest little secret in American politics: something that no one will ever admit to. One political party believes this truth would subjugate it, while the other will never say it because its truth shines a light on the very problem it says doesn't exist.

By the way, I'm going to use the party names here instead of referring to the ideologies. Even though the latter would be more accurate, I'm choosing this particular method of nomenclature for application purposes. It's a pretty simple concept, really. So, here goes:

Tis Better To Have Loved And Lost...

People always talk about how hard it is to get over a relationship. You're with a person, you love them, they love you, and then it just stops.

Of course, if something like that just ends then not only is it a tragic event - it was maybe precipitated by one, which if true serves to double down on the feelings one has to get through and get over.

I'm going to propose an idea, though: that it's harder to get over people who you don't get into a relationship with than it is to get over people you do date.

Standards and Preferences

Ed. note: As you all may have noticed, I've been away for quite a while. Almost three months since I've put an entry out. Lot's happened since then. Stuff is still happening. I didn't stop writing, though. Built up a nice little queue. It'll take a couple weeks to release everything. Here's the first of those 'reserve' entries.

I think I talked about this before, but it seems to bear repeating: there is a difference between standards and preferences. This is especially true when looking for “someone”.

People seem to get these things confused for some reason. Some want to call preferences ‘standards’ when they clearly are not. Can they be called ‘personal standards’? Perhaps. Before we definitively answer that question, let’s create a base.