It’s hard to exist.

I’m struggling with existence again. As usual. It’s so lame. And it’s also the least lame thing ever.

An old friend texted me a few minutes ago saying, “I hear you’re some kind of comedian now.” And I texted back, “I’m not sure what I am. What are you these days?”

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I was riding the subway on Monday, and I was eating a turkey sandwich. The turkey sandwich part isn’t so important, except that the train was crowded and I was dropping lettuce on myself and I felt sort of bad, but not that bad because the woman sitting next to me was eating an apple.

In an attempt to avoid eye contact with any Q Train passengers who might be watching me eat, I started studying advertisements. One in particular caught my eye. For a few reasons:

1. It was for a book and I like those.

2. The concept for the book turns the author into a whore.

3. I’ve long thought about writing a book just like this. Well, sort of like this:

“Publisher’s Weekly” ascribes this book to the “stunt-blog memoir genre”. There is a gimmicky feel to this genre, but it can be done really well! I don’t care if Oprah plugged it, I really enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. Shit was inspiring. I also enjoyed Danny Wallace’s book Yes Man that inspired the Jim Carrey movie I didn’t see.

But as far as stunt-blog memoirs go, this has gotta be one of the most stunt-bloggy of them all. Maybe I’m just upset I didn’t think of doing it myself. I mean, how can you really go wrong when the backbone of your stunt-blog memoir has these kinds of stats:

IF OPRAH WERE… A NATION her 51.4 million weekly viewers and magazine readers would equal more than the population of Canada (33 million), Spain (40.3 million) or Argentina (39.9 million).

IF OPRAH WERE… A PILE OF GOLD she’d be equal to 24,000 14-karat gold bars.

cnnmoney.com reported in January that Oprah ranked second only to Google as the biggest brand newsmaker of 2006. Behind Ms. Winfrey were Amazon, eBay and iPod.

IF OPRAH WERE… A NATIONAL ECONOMY what she’d pump into the U.S. economy would be slightly more than the GDP of the Bahamas. See more here.

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The only thing left to do now, now that I’ve accepted I’ll probably never figure out the big existential questions, is figure out what to spend 365 days of my life doing that I can convince a publishing house will make a memoir and make them money.

Actually, my old friend texted back to tell me what she is these days, and it sounds like the perfect title for a stunt-blog memoir: Nomadic Barista.

Solace For The Lonely Arizona Fan Left With Empty Beer Cans and Bowls Reeking of Dried Up Bleu Cheese Dip

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl last night. I was working, but even if I’d had the night off, I probably would’ve been re-watching my Kate & Leopold DVD or something (it’s been awhile). Still, I was halfheartedly rooting for the Cardinals for a couple of reasons.

1. They're red and they're gorgeous.

Come on, it’s like the little red bird versus the big, bad Philadelphia steel industry. It would’ve been epic for the bird to win. Pigeons will always be my favorite, but the cardinal is probably the runner-up. I have one of those traumatic kindergarten memories of raising my hand during class. The question was “Can you name a bird?” (I’m guessing). And this was a huge deal because I was painfully shy growing up. But I guess at the time it seemed important to prove that I could, in fact, name a bird. Anyway, once called upon, I proudly named, “Cardinal.”  The teacher stared blankly at me and asked me to repeat. I repeated. She still didn’t understand. Something hits you to your core when you know the teacher is wrong and you’re right. Forget insubordination, fuck the possibility of afterschool detention–I KNOW THE CARDINAL IS A BIRD!  Finally some other in-the-cardinal-know classmate helped me out, but yeah. No wonder my participation grades were always “Satisfactory” or “Need For Improvement,” instead of “Great” or “Outstanding.” 

Second reason: members of the Arizona Cardinals crossed the street in front of me one time when they were practicing at Northern Arizona University. They held up traffic for a good five minutes. I was all like, “Hey, make like a cardinal and get the fuck outta the way.”

Still, instead of watching the hoards of muscular, pigskin-wielding men last night, I caught up with Friday night’s 20/20. Who needs a social life when you’ve got Martin Bashir and John Stossel?

Radar Magazine names #46 on its 100 Worst Places to Die list as “Easing into a hot tub with John Stossel”:

Agree to disagree.

I was pretty excited about Martin Bashir’s investigation of “The Science of Seduction: Why Him? Why Her?,” but it didn’t end up being all that groundbreaking. I could’ve watched You’ve Got Mail! and come to the same conclusion: something is wrong with the dating game. Bashir interviewed a biological anthropologist who teamed up with Chemistry.com to test theories she’s been developing in her meth lab. Bascially, she thinks people can be broken up into four basic personality types: Explorer, Director, Negotiator, or Builder. Explorers are drawn to explorers, builders to builders, BUT directors are drawn to negotiators and vice versa.

The investigation seemed pretty geared toward the upper middle class heterosexual yuppie types. Part 3 is worth watching, though–it’s all about arranged marriages and how successful they tend to be. Also, you have to register which is a pain, but you can take that doctor’s personality test here, and if you do, please share the findings. I’m primarily a Negotiator and secondarily an Explorer. Famous Negotiators include Oprah, Leo Tolstoy, Katie Holmes, Bill Clinton, Hillary Duff, Mohandas Gandhi, and Charles Darwin!

I now feel ready to meet my proverbial Tom Hanks on the proverbial Empire State Building. Wish me luck.

Wish I Was Named After A Fatty Food

Note: I’m watching the Live Your Best Life webcast on Spirituality and turns out…the guy I call Reverend Bacon in this post is actually Reverend Beckwith. Sorry.

Oprah’s doing a whole week of episodes dedicated to the theme “Live Your Best Life.”  Today’s episode was Spirituality 101.  I called my mom during a commercial break to tell her to watch, and it was cool because she was ALREADY watching.  Which isn’t all that weird, since she watches it sometimes.

I’m not a big Oprah fan, but today’s show was a nice little therapy session.  It left you overcome with the feeling, “Yes, everything will be all right.”  People skype’d in with questions for her panel of expert spiritual people–one woman was on the brink of losing her bakery and all of her assets along with it, another woman was angry about her mom’s cancer diagnosis, and one man accumulated debt instead of accepting his gay identity.  Then Oprah played clips of past shows and past guests that had served as “spiritual teachers” for her.  My favorite was this guy John Diaz who survived a horrific plane crash.  He was the most composed, level-headed dude.  The least likely dude to be convinced of anything after watching an Oprah course on spirituality.  The least likely dude to listen to anything that Reverend Bacon here has to say:

(Diaz on the left, Bacon on the right, in case it needed clarification.)

But Diaz had the coolest story about his plane crash. 

“Two years ago, John Diaz was here talking about surviving a horrific plane crash,” Oprah says. “What he said that day is something that I know so many of you who heard it will never forget.”

After the plane crashed, John says he saw people strapped into their seats, burning. As he watched, he says he noticed what appeared to be auras leaving their bodies, some brighter than others. “I thought, ‘The brightness and dimness of the auras were how one lives one’s life,’ so to speak,” he says. “That’s one of the major things that really has changed within me … I want to live my life so my aura, when it leaves, is very bright.”

So that’s my basic goal for 2009–douse my aura with lighter fluid and throw a match.

That said, Thursday you can catch Suze Orman for Money 101 (did you know she’s a lesbian??)  and Friday’s episode is Sex 101. 

Speaking of Sex 101, the porn industry is asking for a federal bailout?  That’s cool…