Web Crush Sunday: Frankenstein Gets a Dog and Killing My Lobster Gets More Awesome, As If That Was Even Possible

Killing My Lobster is a San Francisco-based sketch comedy group that's been a hey-those-dudes-are-funny-and-damn-I'm-hot-for-funny crush of mine for almost a decade now. I wrote a story about them for a local magazine before I even knew what blogging was. I was tweeting about them in my head before Twitter even existed. (Back then, they were called "thoughts.") Most of their stuff is pretty San Francisco-centric, like the incredible Coffee Wars and Twilight Zone, but my new favorite is the geographically non-specific Frankenstein Gets a Dog. It's a cute dog. It teaches Frankenstein how to love and how to not be creepy around girls in bars. Everyone wins.

Fun fact: the park they use in the video was three blocks from my apartment in San Francisco. I used to walk there every day. When I bought Popeye's chicken to go sit on a park bench and wait for the dogs to come trotting over, that's where my puppy-bribing behind was planted. Hi, Alamo Square!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBxqO0mJ1AU&feature=youtu.be

Calzador: Dog of Mystery, Dog of Cheese

Last night, we were sitting on the couch watching Modern Family, because Modern Family is the funniest show ever and totally deserves couch time, when Sir Calzador of the Muddy Paws started systematically destroying his large stuffed alligator. It was malicious stuffed toy brutality and I almost couldn't watch because I'm a delicate peony who wilts at the first hint of violence. He may have been demonstrating his extreme displeasure at his situation in life - not eating cheese, not sitting in my lap - or he may have just decided it was high time the alligator went to a better place. Either way, it was disturbing. But if he has to be passive aggressive about his feelings because he's a dog and doesn't speak English, better his stuffed alligator than my favorite sweater. Don't worry, Calzador. Your body language is more than adequate for conveying your discontent. Pausing in your destruction of an alligator leg to glare at me balefully is particularly effective.

In other Calzador news, he's a big dog. Not an enormous dog, but big enough that his nickname is Pony and if he leans against my legs he'll knock all my 137 pounds forward if I'm not properly braced.

Calzador, posing for a crappy iPhone shot and wondering when it might be time for more cheese. You may also notice that the colors of my bedroom are the exact colors of my new blog. This was creepily unintentional.

Not a pony. But not small. Yet he still gets spooked by tiny yapping dogs that would easily fit in his mouth if he opened up wide and thought of England. The little dogs jump and make a lot of noise and this is how Napoleon won France, I guess.

Anyway, when we pass a miniature yapper, even an enclosed miniature yapper, Calzador picks up his pace and doesn't slow down until the yaps recede in the distance. We were walking around the neighborhood yesterday, Calzador was sniffing things and I was pondering things, when he darted out of someone's driveway like a rogue squirrel had set his tail on fire. I assumed there was a little dog on the loose, so I peered around the hedge. There was no small dog, just a cheerful Halloween display.

Yes, the dog - who we can assume is not under the influence of any horror movie/Halloween cultural conditioning - was terrified by a fake ghost in broad daylight. How is that even possible? OH, YOU SWEET ADORABLE PANSY HOUND.

So we go home and I dump half a package of shredded cheese in his food bowl so he can partake of that other American holiday tradition - over-eating to calm the soul.

What To Do When Everything Goes Wrong and Your Complexion Turns a Vile Hue of Oscar the Grouch

I'm having one of those days. One of those days when the power goes out and my back goes out and the dog keeps yelling at an invisible squirrel and things keep going wrong until I'm completely and ineluctably cranky. Is "ineluctably" a word? I'm not even sure. Note to self: Look it up before you press publish. Because I'm cranky, I was - predictably - feeling cranky about writing here. But I told myself I would write a post today and I'm trying to keep my promises to myself. Life tends to go better when I'm doing the things I say I'll do. Doing the things circumnavigates the slow erosion of motivation and self-esteem that comes with breaking my word to myself over and over again. Note to self #2: Don't do that.

THEREFORE.

Here's What I Tell Myself When I Need to Vanquish the Crank Monster and Get My Shit Done

In the end, it doesn't matter what you do so long as you love it. So don't worry about doing exactly the right thing all the time. Just love what you're doing. (Today you're allowed to just sort of enjoy it maybe.)

Do things faster. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be done. Plus, the more you do, the better you feel and the better you get at doing that thing. And let's face it, you like to be good at things.

Send money to someone who needs it more than you do. Heifer International, Kiva, Feeding America. There. The world is a slightly better place.

You don't have to listen to your brain today. Just gently shush it when it starts yelling at you in all caps about DOOM AND DESTRUCTION AND YOUR BANK ACCOUNT IS A DISGRACE AND SO IS YOUR HAIR and get on with your day. Bye bye, brain. I just gave you a vacation. Go lie in the hammock and read a book.

Pay attention to what's going on outside your own bad day. The world is highly skilled at providing perspective. I just looked up from my laptop for three seconds and, in that three seconds, the girl behind the counter offered a customer her own personal snack because they only sell sugar and the customer is starving but can't have sugar. "We don't sell them, but I have a banana in the back. You can have it if you want." A nice thing.

I also look at this. Love notes never fail to make me feel better, even if I was the one who wrote it. Especially if I was the one who wrote it.

(Hey, look. Ineluctably is totally a word. I even used it properly. A childhood spent reading books instead of engaging with the real world pays off again!)

Well, that was just a little blog post journey, wasn't it? From cranky to far-less-cranky-with-the-possibility-of-happy-sometime-today in - let's see - nine paragraphs. HOORAY. I WIN AT BEING CRANKY.

What do you do to stave off the bad mood? Seriously. I need more ideas.

Web Crush Sunday: My Drunk Kitchen Makes a Pseudo Rap Video About Food and Makes Me Seriously Consider Switching Teams

As you know, the internet is a magical place where web fairies regularly cause amazing things happen. Sometimes those amazing things end up on video and I end up watching them seven times in a row. Hence, Web Crush Sunday.

Everything I post will be from legit web crushes, people who, if I ever actually met them, would render me invisible because I dove behind a sofa when the glaring brightness of their awesome became too much to endure. All videos are carefully vetted by my own complex algorithm, where the number of friends I've emailed the link is multiplied by "Man, this is what the internet is for." You can't argue with math.

What I'm saying is, these are videos I like a lot and I think you will too.

My inaugural web crush award goes to My Drunk Kitchen because Hannah Hart is made of comedy gold. (Ice cream! Brunch! Pretentious-Ass Cookies!)

As if getting drunk and cooking and being funny wasn't enough, she went and made a rap video about food. And my whole life got better. Yours will too. Behold:

Twitter Love Bombs, CDs in Trees, and Doing The Nice Thing

Living in the world means you learn a lot of things. How not to spend all your money. How to get tomato stains out of white shirts. How to take care of yourself when you have the flu. How not to be a jerk. How to navigate around all your own little quirks so you can function well with other humans. How to use three remote controls in mysterious, magical conjunction to get the damn TV to turn on.

I've learned all of these things - and even more things! - with varying degrees of success. But the best one I've learned is...

Do The Nice Thing

Doing the nice thing is far more important than remote controls or white shirts or even not spending all your money. Because doing the nice thing makes people feel good. The remote controls and white shirts don't really need help with that. They're pretty happy being inanimate objects. But the people? They need attention.

When the heavenly light hits my scalp and the perfect nice thing occurs to me, I've found that it's worth dropping whatever I'm doing and doing said nice thing right then and there. Jumping on Amazon and pressing purchase. Writing the note. Sending the invitation. If I put Buy Awesome Gift for Friend on my to-do list, it keeps dropping down the list until said friend has purchased it for herself, moved away, or died.*

* No one died. I just enjoy melodramatic artistic license.

The first time I did the nice thing, I was having some trouble in a relationship. I was sitting at my desk at work, feeling mad and hurt and put-upon and all those other annoying emotions that crop up when you're trying to love someone as best you can but inevitably have awful feelings about them instead. Eventually, I started wondering why I loved him. A few seconds later, I thought it might be nice if I told him why. Happier for him because he gets a love letter instead of a girlfriend with a vengeful expression and happier for me because I got to stop stewing in my bubbling mire of discontent.

Yes, I was at work. Yes, I should have been doing other things. But that job is long gone, even the relationship is long gone - but writing and sending that letter right then and there remains one of the best decisions I've ever made. It lifted me out of the hurt and into a space where I could remember why I loved him.

Other Nice Things

Spending a morning sending Twitter Love Bombs instead of working.

(This time, I was self-employed so it was a totally kosher time management decision.This is one of the main reasons I want to be self-employed. So I can spend my morning sending people love notes instead of working if I damn well please.)

Hands down, this was the best morning's work I've ever done. I highly recommend the Twitter Love Bomb. They're easy, just direct messages to your favorite people stuffed with 140 characters of why they're awesome. Yeah, 140 characters isn't much, but it cuts down on the writers block. Kerrianne calls it the sucker-punch of sunshine, which remains the best description ever.

Put a CD in a tree.

This makes sense, I promise. When I was cleaning out my apartment, I loaded my last few CDs onto my laptop and got rid of them. I had a friend's band's album in my possession and, as one would imagine, hesitated to dump it in the Goodwill bag.

As I stood there, jewel case in dithering hand, I decided to do the first thing that popped into my head. I stuck on a post-it note that said, "Listen to this. You'll love it." and carefully perched the CD in the tree outside my door. When I went back outside a few hours later, the CD was gone. YOU'RE WELCOME, WHOEVER TOOK THE CD OUT OF MY TREE. YOU'RE WELCOME, FRIEND'S BAND THAT NOW HAS A NEW RABID ALBUM-SNATCHING FAN.

I'm pretty sure there are more - I mean, I hope there are more, because if I've only done two nice things in the last three years then I pretty much suck as a human being - but you get the point. You probably got my point seven paragraphs ago because you are a keen point-getter and also I like to talk a lot.

AT ANY RATE.

You might be really good about putting nice things on your to-do list and actually doing them, but I'm not. If you aren't either, I highly recommend dropping everything when that burst of inspiration strikes and getting the nice thing out into the world. You can usually knock off a nice thing in five minutes or less. Think about how much time you just spent checking Facebook. Yep. Me too.

The more you do the nice thing, the more you find other people who also do the nice things and the more your whole world gets better. Of course it does. You know how this works.

So if there's a nice thing that's been pinging or sproinging or niggling you, or doing anything else to you that's also not a word, I totally recommend making it happen. You'll feel amazing, the person who receives it will feel amazing, anyone who witnesses the exchange will feel amazing. ALL THE AMAZING. The world can use more amazing.

If you do the nice thing (or even just put it on your to-do list), I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Because I don't have a nice thing at the moment and I want to feed off your niceness like a serotonin-starved vampire.