In the category of news that could be good or bad, we’ve got the following entry: Sarcasmo is out of the house and into gainful employment.
Good because, hey, he’s out of the house and actually out there earning a salary, interacting with people and gaining valuable experience with being responsible. Bad because he’s doing that instead of being off at school learning to be irresponsible, but still earn good enough grades to look like he’s responsible.
Sarcasmo is back at home for a while so he can figure out what he wants to do with his future. Let’s just say that life at a university off on his own didn’t agree with him.
After all the emotion and stress I had with letting him go, I’m finding it’s even harder to have him come back home. In the short time he was gone, I found that I’d grown to like having only two young dudes to be responsible for on a daily basis. Now I’m back up to cooking for five every night.
Since we’re no longer legally obligated to have Sarcasmo under our roof (he’s over 18, you see), we’re having a hard time letting him just loaf around the house. So he got the message that he had to take some courses at the local community college and go out and get a job. We’re going to start collecting rent. Of course we are.
Make it too comfortable living here and I have the feeling we’ll see a permanent presence start grafting itself to Sarcasmo’s room.
With the economy as bad as it is, there’s people actually qualified for work who are having a hard time getting employed. Which makes Sarcasmo’s getting a job seem even better.
He’s off to grace the fresh-food section at a local Harris Teeter with his joyous presence. He went in on Monday to fill out the paperwork necessary to work. We’re still not sure if he’s going to be working with fruits and vegetables or deli or something along those lines, but that’s the section where he’ll be working.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how this works out. Sarcasmo’s not the most social person in the world, but this will necessitate him actually interacting with new and different people. Should actually be good for him. At least I hope so.
If you dudes watch tv (and, would you be dudes did you not), you’ve no doubt noticed the following commercial screaming off your screens so many, many times.
After watching it the first time, I actually had to rewind the tv and watch it again. While, on the surface, I’m sure the folks who created the commercial like the sound of that, it wasn’t because it was so good. I just couldn’t believe any company could be so stupid as to run a commercial like that.
Here. Take a look and I’ll be right back to talk about it.
Yeah, so there’s that. I’m not even going to get started on the obvious misogyny of the whole thing, but let’s talk stereotypes. There’s so many in such a short period of time, I’m not even sure where to begin. Women only like romantic, smooshy movies. Men only like testosterone-fueled action movies. Really? No, not really.
The strangest thing I get out of the commercial is the implication that drinking a diet drink somehow makes you less of a man. As if there’s something wrong, something “limp” about drinking a coke with no calories. That’s bad, you see, but we put in 10 calories for our coke because we’re MEN! None of that wimpy healthy drink for us! We’re MEN! No one, no one at all, in the entire approval process thought this was a bad idea?
I get that this is supposed to be funny and ironic and all that. I get it. Really I do. But they’re wrong. The only thing I found myself laughing at was the poor people who actually came up with this ad.
Because, you see, here’s the big reason this ad is so wrong. In the majority of homes, women do the shopping. So a coke that advertises itself as not for 51 percent of the population has already lost a significant customer group. And if they don’t like it, they’re not going to buy it for the males in their households. So that’s a large portion of the remaining 49 percent gone as well. What? Dr. Pepper’s target demographic is the tiny section of men, aged 18-40, living alone? That’s a pretty small demographic.
Sure, predicating sales on a model of exclusivity can work, provided your business model is geared toward high prices selling at a lower total amount. But Dr. Pepper, like every other coke company in the world, has a business model geared toward selling large amounts of product. I just don’t see that happening.
So, really. What’s wrong with these dudes?
*or possibly fewer. Or maybe more. (Definitely fewer. A lot fewer.) I picked the title before I started writing. Bad habit. Sorry. I’ll try to get over that. And I’ll try to get over using all these *s. I understand they can be annoying. So. No more of those.
**Not you you. I was talking in general. And to the commercial. And, well, obviously I just blew the resolution not to use the * but I think it was understood that I was talking about not after this post. I mean that would be pretty silly of me to promise not to use something and then use it right after. I mean I’d have to be some sort of idiot dude to do something like that. And I’m not. Really.
All of which actually made me think of the singing brother and sister combination, The Carpenters. Before you go making thin jokes and other distasteful stuff like that, let’s just agree that what happened to Karen Carpenter was bad and then move on. Right?
For a certain type of music, they’re actually pretty good. I mean, muzak with lyrics is a pretty difficult thing to get done. And they did it well. They also can make the aural equivalent of a bad day sound pretty good.
So get your mellow on, dudes, and give a listen to The Carpenters.