let's make lemonade

Hello, friends! Rob here.

I'm always blown away when I post more serious editorial updates like the previous one or the one where I said nazis are bad and the response is mostly positive. I probably shouldn't be too surprised, because for all the credit I get for sticking my neck out and speaking up, I tend to take relatively safe positions here, plus I'm on my home turf. Nevertheless, I'm always floored when the collective response isn't "BE QUIET YOU HORRIBLE DINGUS," followed by a mass boycott of our music, followed by my summary dismissal from the band, followed by me dying under a bridge.

When you publicly take a side in anything- politics, sports, Beatles vs. Stones, Edward vs. Jacob- you're bound to find some people who disagree with you, because that's how stuff works. It's been true every time I've written something contentious here, or posted it on Facebook, or shouted it from the passenger seat of a moving car or whatever. That's not only fine, it's kind of the point. I'm not just trying to collect high-fives from people who agree with me (although agreement high-fives rule and I enjoy them immensely). I hope that the things I say will challenge those who disagree with me, and I welcome being challenged in kind as long as it doesn't devolve into senseless name-calling and I don't get owned super hard.

But what I thought was odd about my last post is that most of the dissenting comments (admittedly a small sample size, because again, home turf) accused me of being immature- like this whole "sexual assault is bad and men get away with it all the time" thing is just an adolescent phase I'm going through. This may just be my youthful naïveté talking, but if the crux of your rebuttal is "you'll grow out of it someday, junior," then you're gonna have a hard time convincing me I'm wrong because  I've pretty much already tuned you out and am currently rolling my eyes so hard that they might actually pop out of their sockets.

At what age will I begin to see things your way? 40? 50? Does it happen all at once, or is it a gradual thing? I received plenty of positive feedback from people who are older than me and have families and stuff- are those people okay? And here's the weirdest part: I already grew into my current world view. Go back ten, maybe even five years, and yeah, I probably would have described myself as "approximately liberal-ish I guess," but I was a far cry from from the virtue-signaling SJW snowflake you see before you today.  Back then, I would have seen a lot of my current views on social issues as trying to fix stuff that wasn't broken.  But as I've gotten older, I think I've become a better listener, and I know I've made more of a concerted effort to expose myself to views and experiences that come from outside of the safety of my (here we go) numerous societal privileges and to try to understand people on their own terms. I like to think that that comes from a place of empathy and understanding. If maturity is the opposite of that, then eat my shorts; I hope I never grow up.

Anyway. Cooking wine is just wine that you drink while cooking, right?

BAND STUFF:

I don't know if it's just because it was our first time on national television or if it's the manifold nature of the show, but to my mind all of the TV shows we've done since Today have been relatively tame behind the scenes. Even Ellen, whose in-house DJ ran dance parties during commercial breaks, paled in comparison to the circus that is Today. Most of our television experiences have gone something like this: We enter a large building through a deliberately nondescript door. We are issued temporary credentials. We run the song a few times to get the sound and the cameras right. We sit in a green room that clearly wasn't meant to accommodate the small army of band, crew, management, publicity, and other assorted humans we've brought with us. We take turns getting our faces dusted with powder to keep our foreheads from shining under the studio lights. We wait a little more. We play our song. We go eat dinner somewhere and fly home the next day.

I swear, I'm not trying to downplay how cool it is to get to be on TV shows hosted by people like Ellen and Conan and Kimmel and Colbert, all of whom I've been watching since I was a child. I still haven't gotten past the dissonant sensation of watching a video of Conan O'Brien introducing a band- something I must have seen a hundred times as a kid- only I was in that band. It's like an out-of-body experience. I'm not saying I'm over it by any means. I'm not that jaded yet and I hope I won't be for a good while. But there hasn't been as much of a detailed write-up since we did Today because there hasn't been as much to write up. When I was little, my parents used to ask me about my school day and I would almost always answer, "I had fun and that's all." The same can be said for Colbert. That I can think of little in the way of specific details of the experience that were worth relating does not make it any less special a day.

Verizon just did this suspiciously chill thing they do every few years where they offer a substantial upgrade to my data allowance at virtually no cost increase. This time it was to jump from 7 GB/month to unlimited for like three more dollars. I'm not trying to shill for my wireless carrier, I just wanted to set up the following screenshot of my probably-now-redundant data usage tracker:

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. I don't even log on to the wifi at my own house anymore. I'm sure this is exactly what Verizon wants, and that I'm playing right into some trap that allows them to generate a ten-billion-factor consumer profile in order to increase the monetizational efficacy of ads thrown in my face by 0.003%. DON'T CARE. I'm gonna start using my phone as a wireless hotspot just to watch Netflix on my laptop. If I've already signed away my very autonomy and privacy, then I might as well get my money's worth.

Anyway, that's the end of today's words. Say a prayer for Surf Boy, wherever he is.