Pop Pop for Beginners

In '94 I was listening to a lot of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. I think everybody was. Between Thuggish Ruggish Bone and Foe tha Love of $ being some of the most requested jams on The Box—and I being 13 years old—it was hard not to.

One of the joys of listening to Bone was trying to figure out what these guys were saying (as anyone who has attempted to transcribe and decode a verse by Bizzy Bone can attest). But one Bone line that did not require an attuned ear was “pop pop.” This one was obvious. Pop pop was the sound of gunshots, as in, “We rippin' them guts with buck shots, pop pop.”

Per George Gerbner, my friends and I adopted pop pop into our everyday communication. We said it when Craig knocked Deebo the fug out, and we used it as trash talk when playing Samurai Showdown. For us, this phrase functioned not so much as the sound of a firearm but as the ultimate synonym for "in yo face!"

Over time, my use of pop pop faded. High school, college, marathons. All pop pop-less.

Years later, in grad school and in need a break from reading about Derrida (who, like Bizzy, requires a lot of decoding), I threw on some Bone, as those who need breaks from Derrida often do. The voices of Krazie, Lazie, Bizzy, Wish, and Flesh took me back to my adolescence—a time when I read comic books that were not about philosophers.

With Bone back in my life, the Bone-izms returned.

“What’s that?” Marj asked, referring to the two-count slap as we drove over a speed bump.

“It’s my antenna hitting the roof. Pop pop.”

Moral of the story? Language changes. The word "awful" was once favorable. Pop pop used to be rap lyric gunshot—now, it’s one of Derrida’s undecidables. People use it to describe sounds their cars make (ok, I use it to describe sounds my car makes), and cereals use it as their last line of defense. Pop pop is both accurate and un-accurate*, and neither accurate nor un-accurate, at the same time, both in the shower and out.

*Un-accurate is a Meta term. If Derrida is allowed to make up words, so am I. Pop pop, Jacques.

Holiday Thoughts

They say that the holidays are a time for food, family, and hating the holidays. I don’t know who 'they' are, but I suspect 'they' are some of the same people who celebrate Christmas Eve with push-up contests.

When I was a sophomore in college, I wrote an essay about how Coca-Cola killed Jesus.

I’m not big on gifts, but when I do give something, you can be sure that it’ll have quantifiable educational value. That’s why this year I got my 2-year-old nephew a toy Hummer that plays “U Can’t Touch This.”

I wonder if Hammer celebrates Can’t-touch-mas.

For those of you studying for the Miller Analogies Test, know that peas are to Shawn Kemp as corn is to Gary Payton.

My mom triggered a 2-hour discussion about binary oppositions when she asked me who my favorite superhero was. Mom, you should know better.

A lot of these holidays happen every year. I think we would be better off celebrating these days once every four years. Madonna would probably disagree, but she probably doesn’t even like the Olympics.

Snuggie Hate Explained

A recent study shows that animosity toward the Snuggie is up nearly 7000 percent from three minutes ago. It’s even bumped religion and sports out of the number one and two spots of things not to bring up at the dinner table. So what’s the deal? Why do we hate on the Snuggie?

• We hate because we’re jealous. We want to be a Snuggie, but we can’t, so we hate. We did the same thing with 2Pac.
  
  
• We hate because we don’t understand. The Snuggie is the Interweb of this generation--we can’t even begin to comprehend how it will change the way we communicate, conduct business, or get our music.
  
  
• We hate because we like to dislike whatever the current decade will be remembered for. Hence, we hate on the Snuggie whenever we aren’t hating on skinny jeans, auto-tune, chicken, or hair cuts.
  
  
• We hate because we aren’t happy with Obama. Maybe he should stop wearing the Snuggie.

Now, if learning has taught me anything, it’s that we need to embrace some stuff. And the Snuggie is one of those stuffs. Plus, unisex fashion that encourages lots of couch time is very U.S. of A. Still wanna hate? Fine, be inpatriotic.

Time Management for Dumbies

Have you ever missed your morning train because you stayed up really late to finish a book on time management? I have. So trust me when I tell you that the secret of effective time management is having stuff to do. Once you have stuff to do, you can plan out your day by creating a timetable. For example, here is what my tomorrow looks like.

9:50 am: wake up in panic over whether I can still get Hotcakes

9:51 am: nap

11:00 am: watch Max & Ruby while monitoring Facebook for paranormal activities

12:00 Noon: eat breakfast

12:15 pm: shower

12:17 pm: affirm self through self-affirmations

1:17 pm: drive to work/eat

2:00 pm: hustle dairy products/eat x 6

11:30 pm: hit playground

12:30 am: approve ten-dollar deals from my jPhone/eat

1:00 am: mindstorm ideas like “Mini Bagel Bites” and “Bagel Bites, Now 25% Bigger!”

2:00 am: ghostwrite Too $hort proverbs

3:00 am: eat/eat

3:67 am: fall asleep promising self tomorrow is the day for Hotcakes

If your day isn’t organized like this, I suggest you miss a train.

Univercell Upgrade

I got a new phone this week. It was like buying a pair of jeans but twice as hard and reversed. Finding the right jeans is hard because there are buku options. Finding the right cell phone is hard because they only make them for business types and 12-year-old girls. So, unless you happen to be an iPerson, you’re stuck choosing between a device that looks like a cracked-out calculator that invited too many buttons to the party and accidentally shrunk itself with the company ray gun or the cutesy neon square thing that Hello Kitty uses to stay in touch with Goodbye Mouse.

I went with a knockoff iPhone. I call it my jPhone.

My Life Code

Livin’ the dream. Livin’ large. Livin’ and let livin’. These are the responses I give to those who ask how I am. But what do these phrases really mean? Are they just empty words? Conversation filler? Arbitrary vowels surrounding by lots of Ls and apostrophes? No, no, and maybe. But on the serious tip, when I say these things, I’m communicating my life code. Let me break it down for you.

• Livin’ the dream. If I don’t live the dream, the dream lives me. If this happens, I might as well forget my dream of taking over the family dream catcher business.


• Livin’ large. It’s the only way. Large is the new moderate. Forget the Greeks. I live in a world ruled by Hip hop and Starbucks, not right triangles and reason.


• Livin’ and let livin’, aka the Goldenrod Rule. I treat others like their endings mean something, not as robots.

These ideas have helped me through the most challenging of times. Give them a shot.

Soon to be available on shower curtains.

The Power of Theo

TheosoFest was a bit different than I expected. Get this. It was NOT a celebration of Theo Huxtable. Apparently, Theo is not short for Theoso. Still, despite the initial disappointment, I had an awesome time.

I started out my day at the Fest by attending a lecture on magic. And since I'm pretty smart, I know that the talk itself was a demonstration of magic. The speaker's use of terms like “astral” and “ethereal” to silicate oohs and aahs from the audience totally gave it away. I mean, that’s like, straight black magic. Trust me, I went to a high school in a suburb that had two Hot Topics.

After the lecture, I visited booths filled with healing crystal vendors, New Age chiropractors, and representatives from the religion of the Light and Sound of God. I wanted to get a toe reading, but the line was toe long. Instead, I got a psychic reading from a chain smoker named Linda. According to Linda, I’m an old-souled silent warrior who fought along side the Native Americans in many great battles and my life will really come together in 2014 once I’ve completed an online degree in spiritual facilitation. I know, she's good.

Once Linda and I returned to our respective realities, I almost drowned in a whirlpool of COEXIST stickers and Madame Blavatsky shrines. I didn’t drown though, because I two-wayed my spirit animal—a flying version of Grimace from McDonaldland—and he rescued me.

Grimace needed to refuel, so I fed him some plastic Indian food before piggybacking a flight to the most anticipated event of the Fest, the presentation “Bees: Why Are They Leaving? What Does It Mean?” Unfortunately, this presentation didn't have anything to do with the fate of the Wu-Tang Clan. That’s okay though, because the guy sitting next to me was a medium, and he channeled Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s future great grandchild—who then signed my 8 x 10 glossy of Theo with a zero energy Sharpie. Nice guy too, he only charged me 26 bucks. Oddly enough, that’s all the cash I had left.