I had a woman sit at my table the other day whose name was Happiness. I saw her drivers license and her name was Happiness Rae Something (I don’t remember the last name). Pretty cool huh? She tipped like crap.
I like when people do movie lines trivia. I like it ’cause it amazes me how people can remember movie lines. I just can’t do it. I’ve seen Anchorman so many times and yet my wife still corrects me when I do a Burgandy quote. I’m actually pretty pathetic. Here is an example of the kind of quotes I can/can’t come up with. Here is Ryan’s movie line trivia:

1. “Uh oh. I don’t think this is right”
2. “Hey, you over there!”
3. “It just might take three of us”
4. “I’m hungry”
5. “Whose up for some dinner?”

You see, it just doesn’t work. They’re ambiguous. They could be from any number of movies, and yet they’re all I can think of. Pathetic.

My wife’s mad at me for scaring her earlier. I wasn’t trying to scare her though. I just wanted to tell her that I loved her. I made her pee her pants. Almost. I made her heart beat rapidly…sounds like love doesn’t it? Love is a beautiful thing. All you need is love…wait…All you need is love and honesty…love, honesty…oh, and emotional stability…So there’s stability, love, honesty, and trust. Trust is a big one…and respect…love, honesty, emotional health, trust, and respect…and toothbrushing. Seriously, who can love someone who doesn’t brush? If you don’t brush you can’t be respected. So there’s trust, and then honesty, love, dental care of course, emotional health, and respect…love is such a beautiful thing.

I think it’s funny to pronounce some words wrong. Like “public” for example. It’s funnier to pronounce it “poob-lick”. Or it’s funny to pronounce words like “devil” or “evil” as they are supposed to be pronounced. They should rhyme right? Eeevil and Deeevle right? Or how about Monkey and Donkey. Good and Food. You get the idea. It’s actually quite intruiging once you get going. My favorite word by far though is still pooblic. Rock on pooblic. Rock on. Pooblic forever and ever amen.

Jess and I can’t figure out what we’re going to be for the great day of the devil! Here are some of our ideas. Let us know what you think:

1. Johnny Appleseed
2. Colander head (in this costume we would wear a colander on our head)
3. Male nurse (this one is for me…or her)
4. Robots ( We’ve got some masking tape and some bottle caps that we would tape to our body)
5. Androids (this would consist of us wearing our regular clothes but without any emotion)
6. Turner and Houch
7. A phone (This one would be tough to pull off. But I think we’d use our masking tape from the robot costume and tape a phone cord on us)
8. Life
9. Burt Reynolds (a carryover from last years list)
10. A wet blanket (we’d wear a blanket and then spray ourselves with a spray bottle…this could also be a mexican costume with a rather large poncho. It all depends on the blanket)

There are names for people like the woman who lives three doors down. I won’t mention them, but there are very good descriptive names.
You see, our dryer broke and won’t be fixed until Tuesday. In the meantime we are using the dryer on our floor. There are only seven apartments on our level and one washer and dryer, so it’s not that big of a deal. And I’m pretty sure that of those seven apartments, only five of them wash their clothes. Anyway, we put a load in the public dryer and dried it. But before our seventy-five cents were used up I went and checked it. It seemed to be dry so I thought I’d be economical and put another load in to finish of our three quarters. As one might assume, however, that load only got partially dry before our money ran out. So instead of just shoving in some more dough I decided to wash another load that I would then put in with the semi-dry clothes in the dryer. Cool. Sounds good…or does it?
When I come back in one hour later to add my wet clothes to my semi wet clothes (that had been sitting in the dryer all this time) I found that a neighbor girl down the hall was washing her clothes. The cycle had just started on the washing machine with her very first load, but not knowing that my clothes were in the dryer, she placed her seventy-five cents in the little slots in preparation for drying her washed load. I though for a moment and then decided that I would just neatly stack the quarters on top of the dryer while I finished my load. There might be some misunderstanding, but we could clarify it later. No big deal I thought…I thought wrong. When I went back in the laundry room an hour later (I kinda forgot about it), I found my two loads of clothes missing! Upon further inspection I found them whooshing around in the washing machine! That woman took my clothes out of the dryer, used a quarter and then put them all in the washing machine and started it! How vindictive is that? I could understand that if you were a mean person you might take those clothes out of the dryer, throw them on the counter, dry your clothes by finishing off the quarters that they had paid for their load, all the while pocketing the money that you were going to pay for your drying…but putting their clothes in the washing machine! Thats a jerk of a thing to do.
I haven’t seen her yet, but I’m going to heap burning coles on her head. Kill ‘er with kindness, thats what I’m going to do…and then when she’s not looking I’m going to put bleach in the washing machine.

Tis but a dream. It’s a quiet whisper that dare not be spoken loudly lest it vanishes. If you think about it too long it just might disappear, yet if you fail to plan, your plan has already failed.
You see, I grew up in a youth group that had annual talent shows. I then went off to school at a place that had a few talent shows a year. They are a part of my life. They are a part of my past. Are they a part of my future?
I’ve got a lot of feelings associated with talent shows.

1. My dream is to pee my pants on stage. I’ve always thought that would be funny.
2. If you think too long about any one skit, it ceases to be funny.
3. Serious skits are a no no. I understand that Jesus died for my sins, and that isn’t the issue. The issue is the timing. During a talent show we are celebrating joy, life, humor, all those godly good things. What we aren’t doing is taking a moment to ponder, nay, to meditate on Gods infinite mercy and grace. Don’t get me wrong, I like his grace, but his grace ruins a talent show! (Dear God, please don’t kill me. I hope you smell what I’m steppin’ in)
4. Anything that includes lip synching to Christian music doesn’t usually work.
5. You never know whats going to work. Some things sound like a sure fire hit and they crash. Other ideas sounds pathetic and yet when on stage they take a life of their own. Often the funnies things are the ones that are completely spontaneous.
6. Jr. High girls are rarely funny.
7. I’ve been swept off the stage twice in my life…ouch

Here is my own personal highlight reel:

1. I used to be in a band called RONM. We were good. I sang lead and percussion and soprano. We sang such classics as Sweet Fellowship, We are the Champions, and we once attempted to sing that one Jon Mellencamp song, you know the one “little diddy ’bout Jack and Dianne…” Lets just be honest here, though, we sucked…bad.
2. There is nothing worse than a hostile environment. Try being a college student assigned to work with a particular youth group that already has a hatred of college students (and quite possible even a dislike of Jesus). Our first week working with the youth group meant that we had to go on their youth group retreat. I felt like disappearing. It was a youth group of like 200, and only the jr high girls liked us…the jr high girls who enjoyed doing sign language. Anyway, we had to do something for the talent show. Bad news. They didn’t think we were funny, they thought we were stupid (seriously). And to make it worse, it wasn’t just Jonathan (who I lived with in Portugal. He’s very funny), Brian (check his blog out. He’s very funny and very random…and he types too much), and a couple of girls who don’t have a knack for being funny (they thought that they did…but they didn’t. Their idea of a funny skit was rewriting “hey hey we’re the monkeys” except we would insert our own names and such). In the end I threw on my billy bob teeth, my red fully body pj’s, and told the kids how to pick up women. It was ok funny. Next Jonathan and I sang a song that we made up on the spot. We took suggestions from the crowd and then sang. It was funny. And finally we gave in to the not-so-funny girl and did a skit that WAS NOT FUNNY, but it was amazing ’cause in the middle of the skit Brian just stops and says “this skit sucks. I don’t want to be up here…I want to be up on the mountains (I think he might of ripped off his shirt)…I want to be a lumberjack” He then broke into the Monty Python classic “I”m a lumberjack and I’m ok, I sleep all night and I work all day…”
3. Another hostile environment was, what Jonathan and I call, the summer camp from hell. We had been in Portugal for a few months. We didn’t speak Portuguese, we didn’t have friends yet, we sucked at futebol, we were not in a position to be funny. To make matters worse, it was the worst camp ever. What I mean is that there were all these problems, dissent, sex, disobedience, frustration, bitterness, etc. It just wasn’t working. And they asked us to host the talent show! Piss on that huh?! So what did we do? Well, duh, we did a dance routine to One Voice by Billy Gilman (remember, he was like four when he put out his first album). It was beautiful. I’m not sure they thought it was funny, but I sure as heck did…and that made it all worth while.
4. I’ve got so many stories and songs to tell you about, but alas this blog is too long and too dull to go on any further. For all you who have made it this far, thank you and god bless.

ryan

After watching Jess write her political post and then hearing my sister Tara’s comment that she thought that I wrote it, I thought it best to write my own political post. I want to show Tara what a true Ryan political post looks like. So lets get to it. Political post. Political post. Political post.

Bombs. Bombs. Bombs. There are bombs everywhere. NK’s got ’em. We’ve got ’em. Does Canada have ’em? You turn to movies and the way you spell potential success in a movie is with, what I call, the four B’s. Bombs, boobies, bad words/attitudes, booze. What is our world coming to? Where are we to turn? Conservative America told me to turn to Dick and Bush. Conservative America told me that Kerry was full of nastiness and all sorts of evil. Are they right? Well, where is America today? Portland and the Democratic party wants me to think that America is going to hell in a bush-made basket. Where does Ryan think that America is? Somewhere between Canada and Mexico right? No, seriously folks, we’re more in debt now than ever before, both on a national level and on an individual one. We’re loved by such countries as England, Portugal, and lets throw in Switzerland for fun just so that we can be sure to have all the wienerist (sp??), most pacifist countries in the western world. Those who hate us seem to be growing. And the list of those who hate us seem to be attaining nuclear power. You see, it all comes back to bombs. Bombs. Bombs. If I were Bush I’d bomb all the bombers before they could bomb us. Thats the answer mon frier…but first we must create our Nalgene protection. Yes, thats right, a Nalgene (those water bottles that can’t break) water bottle that surrounds the US and will protect us from Nuclear warfare! That stuff is hard. Trust me, it cannot be penetrated.
Where have all the cowboys gone? What ever happened to flying to the moon? Where is Christopher Robin’s house?
We produce enough food to feed the world, and yet people starve. Our technology multiplies daily, and yet few have health care. The answer that everyone is turning to is a government that spoon feeds you everything. Health care for the poor! Food for all! Socialism we cry! Socialism! The way I see it, we would be better off with Buggs Bunny and the Roadrunner guiding our nation. Those two stand as pillars of sneakiness, of intellect, of peace, and a healthy lifestyle. Seriously, BB was always eating veggies, while the RR sprinted everywhere. Good for them. Who needs 24 hour fitness when you can just get a pair of good running shoes and a carrot?
Lets open the borders and let everyone in. And I’m not talking about the bookstore folks. Lets get some of those people movers that you see at the airport, you know the ones, they are like escalators that don’t go up. We should put those at the borders that take them straight to the social security office, which funny enough here in Vancouver sits right next to Goodwill. If we’re lucky the Canadians coming over will bring their moose with them, while the Mexicans will bring us some tacos pastor (sp??). I love pastoral tacos. I love a good moose (except for Bullwinkle, talk about a dunce). No seriously folks, concerning the borders all we need is that Nalgene bottle. I’d like to see a Cuban float through that! But if I were in control I’d put a cap at both ends of America to let a few special Canadians (namely Mike Myers and Paul Shaffer) and a few Mexicans (namely that one president who looks like Peter Jennings).
And so, in closing, I would like to say that I voted for Bush. Why? Honestly ’cause Kerry reminded me of Bullwinkle, and we all know what I think about him. Bush seemed nice enough and he used to own the Texas Rangers. And as everybody knows, Jose Canseco played for them, and for that I respect Mr. Bush. You know what they say, “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…you fool me, you can’t get fooled again.”

Colin and Canseco in 2008!