Posts tagged 020221
Getting what you want

In the third season of AMC’s Mad Men, ad exec and perpetual little boy Pete Campbell whines to his wife after an insufficient promotion, “Why can’t I get anything good all at once?”

It’s an attitude I can relate to…and probably many other people throughout history, considering we have proverbs like “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” and other colloquial exhortations to be grateful. Still, sometimes we want what we want, when we want it. What then?

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What's at the top of the endless list?

As I look over my misspent life — in those moments when it feels like I’ve had a misspent life — I can come up with a long list of things I wish I had done, and nagging regrets about the things I did.

Some of these things are impossible to do anything about (damn biological clock), but some of them are things I can begin to resolve today, if I would stop being so morose.

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Advice on advice

My Brother, My Brother, & Me, a long-running podcast from brothers Justin, Travis, & Griffin McElroy, bills itself as “an advice show for the modern era” (Justin always pronounces it “modren”).

But this is not an advice show. It is a cleverly executed improv comedy show. The brothers field listener-submitted requests for advice along with selected Yahoo! Answers questions, offering deeply outlandish solutions to the problems presented. For instance, a question from a server in a restaurant about how to accommodate a guest who orders something that isn’t on the menu leads to speculation that perhaps the guest is a ghost who must return every week to the same restaurant until he is given his requested meal and is then gratefully “banished to the hell dimension” in a puff of vapor.

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