I don’t have an iPod adapter for my car, so when I’m driving, I’m forced to listen to CDs, and since I haven’t bought a physical CD in years, everything I listen to has been burned from iTunes.

My playlists can generally be broken down into two categories: Angry Thomas and Sentimental Thomas.^* Metallica features heavily in my Angry Thomas collection, with special guest appearances by Altered Bridge, Brand New, and a few others. Sentimental Thomas is mostly a collection of Sarah McLachlan songs, with a smattering of other, mostly female, artists.

Anyway, for various reasons, I’ve had a lot of girls in my car lately,** and I’ve witnessed two nearly universal reactions from them. The first is kind of expected, and is usually a riff on the following:

“Is this a CD?”
“Yep.”
“Is it your CD?”
“Uh huh.”
“I… really didn’t expect you to own this CD. I expected more… ‘raaaaaargh.’”

The second reaction, though, is a bit stranger.

One of the songs on the last disc I burned is Kelly Clarkson’s Beautiful Disaster, the live piano version, and you can just shut right up with your snickering. The playlist is called Sentimental Thomas, after all, and if you think that makes me less of a man, come to the gym with me some time and try to finish my warm up. We’ll talk after you’re done vomiting.

Anyway, something very interesting happens when Beautiful Disaster comes on. Whatever conversation we’re having kind of trails off, and the girls, whether there’s one of them or four, become kind of quiet, and get this faraway look in their eyes. And then the chorus starts, and every single one of them, every single one, starts to sing.

Oh and I dooooooon’t know, I don’t know what he’s after, and he’s so beauuuuutiful, he’s such a beautiful disaster.

It doesn’t matter if the girl is the quiet English major type, the quirky artist type, or the punky… punk type, they all do this, at the exact same moment, like they rehearsed it or something. It’s almost eerie. I swear that you could take a CD player to a tribe that’s never even heard English, play this song, and watch the entire female population of the village break out into a melancholy refrain.

A group of friends went out to Wing Night at Cavallo’s on Tuesday night. After convincing the bouncer to let in some of our underage friends,*** we sat down and got to eating. A few minutes later, one of the girls looks over at the wall, gets a confused look on her face, and asks “did they set a world record here or something?” I looked around, confused, and said that I didn’t know. “Then what’s that sign for?” she asked.

The sign? It was for Guinness.

At least I guess I know that I’m the only one endangering their welfare.

Finally, if you’re a female and you’ve hit me within the last week or so, can you remind me why? I distinctly remember getting punched by a girl the other night, and while I can’t remember the context, I bet it’s a really funny story.

–
^* There is a third category, which I’ve dubbed Holy Thomas, which features a lot of Jason Upton and Hillsong United. This is deeply ironic, since I’m kind of evil.

** The primary reason being I’m a huge stud.

*** I’ve been endangering the welfare of minors since I was a minor.

A couple of friends have mentioned that I’ve been fairly absent from the Internets the last couple of weeks, and they wanted to know why the Tubes have been devoid of my trademark witticisms and scathing sarcasm.

The short answer is that I’ve been in too bad a mood to make fun of it all. Yeah, the Things That Make Me Angry? That’s me when I’m mellow. Lately, I’ve gone past “humorously agitated” and all the way to “genuinely upset,” and that’s just no fun to write about.

So, at the risk of further throwing the universe off balance, the Galvin Institute for Higher Sarcasm brings you yet another Thing That Don’t Make Me Angry.

I was still awake when the sun rose this morning, so I planned to sleep in a bit. Instead, I woke up at 7am, because something was doing its level best to bore a hole through my window.

I ignored it at first, but after fifteen minutes of “thwap, thwap, skitter skitter thwap,” I decided that I needed to find out what, exactly, was trying to invade my home. So I rolled out of bed and jerked back the curtain, and came face to face with…

A tiny little finch. He was sitting on the window sill, looking up at me like I had caught him trying to steal a cookie out of the cookie jar. He didn’t even fly away, at first, just kind of looked at me, hopped a couple of times, pecked at the window screen, and then took wing.

He was adorable, so I let him live.

Speaking of:

This is the most adorable thing I have ever seen. Which is a trick, because “slick green skin, that’s usually kind of moist,” isn’t that high up on the list of things I expect to provoke warm and fuzzy feelings. But this little dude manages to pull it off.

Well, okay, maybe this is the most adorable thing ever:

I mean, look at the tongues.

And in case you’ve got some kind of mammalian bias:

No, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sit in the corner and squee like a little girl.

“Thomas, you’re always so negative.” “Thomas, why don’t you do a post on things that make you happy?” “Thomas, every single thing you post implies that you’re one bad day away from committing murder, possibly on a genocidal level. That joke’s been done, and frankly, you’re kind of scary.” “Thomas, doesn’t anything put a smile on your face?”

Fine.

It’s summer, and I’m happy about that. And since The Google and The Digg seem to love Top Ten Lists, here’s a bunch of things that I like about summer.

1. I Can Shut My Heat Off This is the kind of thing you never think about until you have your own place, but as soon as you’re actually paying your own heating bill, the sound of the furnace kicking on becomes synonymous with the sound of money being lit on fire. It’s warm out now, and that means I don’t have to set fire to piles of cash to stay warm.

2. Ultimate Frisbee One of the best sports ever invented, and a great cardio workout, as well. Some of you may scoff at that statement; I assume said scoffers think of “Ultimate Frisbee” as something played by khaki-shorts and popped-collar-polo wearing college students in between classes. You, my friend, have been deceived. When we play Ultimate, it looks suspiciously like Rugby.

3. Volleyball Another one of the best sports ever invented. One of the things I like about Volleyball is that I can pretty much go all-out without the fear of hurting someone. Though I did smack a girl in the face with the ball once. And my teammates are kind of in danger, when I lunge for a ball. Also, I broke my ankle once, when I went up to block and the hitter came down on top of me. But other than that, it’s strictly non-contact.

4. Basketball. Not one of the greatest sports ever invented, but still fun. This also tends to end up looking suspiciously like Rugby. Or Judo. Pretty much anything except Basketball, which we all suck at.

5. Voss’ The best hot dogs on the planet, bar none. Even the buns at Voss’ a great; they cook them on the same skillet as the dogs, so they’re golden brown and kind of buttery. The food here is so good that people willingly wait in line for half an hour, just to get a hot dog or seven.

Thomas’ Special Summertime Tip: the best time to go to Voss is in the middle of the day, when it looks like it might rain. The line is usually pretty short then.

6. Of Wolf And Man Fun fact: Metallica wrote a song about werewolves. Of Wolf And Man is kind of my “I’m about to do something physically improbable” theme song. That comes up a lot more during the summer.

7. Bare Feet Mine, that is. You all can do whatever you like. When I used to do Karate, I trained outdoors, barefoot, all the time. Now that’s mostly limited to Volleyball and Ultimate Frisbee, but I still like the feel of grass between my toes. Or sand. Or sandy grass.

8. Cool Summer Nights This one is kind of oxymoronic, but one of the things I like about the hot summer days is the nights when it gets sort of cool. There’s nothing quite like a seventy degree night after a week of ninety degree weather. I guess this sort of falls under the “but it feels so good when I stop banging my head on the wall” category.

9. Longer Days In the winter, I’m usually at work before the sun comes up, and often don’t leave until it has set. Which means I can go for a few days at a time without actually seeing the sun. In the summer, though, I actually get the chance to go outside like a normal human being.

10. Bonfires Combining my love of all things burning with my tolerance of a very select subset of the human race, a bonfire is a great way to kill an evening. Also: s’mores.

Super Secret Extra Bonus Thing That Thomas Likes About Summer: Movies. This is the time of year, that magical time, when the cars drive fast, the guns are fully loaded, the explosions… explode, the average IQ drops by ten points, the air is filled with the smell of popcorn, and we all sit down, shut up, and watch mutants battle aliens for the hearts of supermodels with telekinetic powers.

Wolverine. Star Trek. Transformers. Terminator. Harry Potter. Public Enemies. ‘Tis a good time to be a fan of things that go “bang,” “boom,” “vroom,” and “crucio.”

Also, Word knows how to autocorrect “telekinetic.” That’s kind of awesome.