Words of Whiskey

The overly-opinionated bantering of a highly-functioning alcoholic.

[oldjoey-blog]

Hate it

Democrat vs Republican is like me vs sex.  Sure, I could do it with plenty of individuals, but the plus and minus on both ends makes it hard to make a decision.  So when it becomes important, nothing usually happens.  And sure, every once and a while, some kind of agreement will be made and it'll be worth it, and it'll take two, three, maybe five or six years to see if it'll actually change my life and the lives around me in a major way... but if I just sit there thinking too hard about who I'm gonna bone, and if congress just sits there thinking too hard about which path to take, I'll never get laid and problems will never be fixed.  So please, America's elected officials, find compromise.  I can't go on like this forever.

[oldjoey-blog]

Go Out and GET IT.

Hi everyone, real quick before I go to my other job.

Yeah, I said my "other" job.  It doesn't pay much, and it's up there in the stress department, but it's still my other job.  I just graduated like many young Americans, and if you've graduated from a school like mine your last five (okay, probably four for you) years have been filled with professors placing a heavy emphasis on the job market's lack of ability to sustain the weight of our graduating class's entry to the job market.  But here I am, with two basic jobs, working 60 hours a week, waking up early every morning, and CONNECTING with individuals that will help me get my foot in the door to start a career.

Too many individuals are afraid to leave their comfort zones and become productive, economically contributing members of society.  I just don't understand.  I went for five years and graduated with a fucking degree in French.  However, due to my fraternity benefits and my drive and desire to always be learning, I'm in a great position to advance in today's society which has been so disaster-projected by the media that many are losing what was needed to jump back from the Great Depression, which is hope, faith in the system, confidence in our leaders, and drive.

I'm a citizen of the United States of America.  Yes, there are individuals here who will never have the opportunities I've been graced with due to the fact that drugs, violence, and the unfortunate reality of being born in a low-income/ghetto area will strongly impede on an individual's ability to rise in status.  However, if you've had the ability to go to college, or if you've graduated high school and gone on to learn a trade, and you can't get a job because you were too lazy and careless to learn basic politics, economics, and try to get a grasp on how business and markets work, you've got no one to blame but yourself for your inability to find work in this nation.  MONEY FOLLOWS PASSION.  Find something you like to do, learn how the outer factors around this activity can lead it to make you money, and watch as your passion toward the activity and the subsequent money you can earn doing what you love will make you a rich, happy, and boastful proprietor of the American Dream.

Get off your ass, and go out and get it.

And if you have blue hair, are dressed poorly and like a hippie/gangster, you have too many visible tattoos/piercings, then you're for the most part shit out of luck.  It's never too late to change.

[oldjoey-blog]

Do You Believe in Magic?

A lot can be said about physical feelings and conceptions; we feel hurt when we're dumped, we are angry when our sports team loses, and we smile when we see an innocent toddler smiling in his pull-ups chasing butterflies in mommy's front yard.  To the realist, feelings are merely sets of chemical reactions that are determined by sets of previous chemical reactions in a chain of cellular functions that were determined at a molecular level when sperm met egg to begin an individual's life.  While I can agree to a certain extent that biological functions are the reason for most of our actions, the diversity of the way we perceive things lead me to believe that we, the most advanced species on our bizarre planet, are subject to forces beyond any means of objective explanation.

This may seem confusing.  It may not even logically flow, but this is Words of Whiskey and I've been drinking.  What I'm insinuating with all this is that one word that we often scoff at or disregard, which may in a way ease the mind when dissecting the most intricate parts of life, is magic.  Think about the little instances in life that often go overlooked, and realize that magic is not a human fabrication, but an element that exists with every passing second as we move from one part of life to another.  Our life is BURSTING with magic!  How else could we explain something as simple as the reason we laugh when we see or hear something that our body takes in which makes our brain signal to a gland which subsequently secretes a chemical that makes our stomachs tighten slightly and temporarily eliminates our ability to breathe as we exhale carbon dioxide through precisely-placed cords that emit, at times, coherent statements?

If all of our thoughts are produced by electrical impulses passing through long, spindly nerve cells in the brain, then why is it we get feelings such as "butterflies in the stomach" when we feel a sense of emotional attraction to other individuals?  Why do we smile when realizing, during a trip to the store, that the purchase of this cooking pot for mom would be put to great use and convey a message of "you're important enough to me for me to spend money on you, because I love you," when money is material and created by man, and love is an unavoidable emotion to those who were lucky enough to have enough magic in their lives to be born with the necessary hormone-secreting tools to experience it?

Numbers, figures, analyses, hypotheses, theories, and ideologies are all fantastic means of empirically explaining many of the facets of our lives.  But with as fine-tuned as genetics are, and as remarkable as our human interactions and abilities to profoundly express the complexities that are often referred to as "thoughts," do we really think that magic doesn't exist? 

[oldjoey-blog]

Getting a Move On

Well,

I've graduated college.  It's been one week, one day, 12 hours, and 16 minutes.  And if there's anything I learned in college that has any value that is impossible to trump, it's the fact that time is the single most important concept that we can attempt to ever understand.

Time.  How can you define it?  It's nearly impossible because of the fact that there is no precise beginning and there is no definite end.  It is the essence of infinity, the space in which we exist, and the only determinant of the beginning and end of life.

We have many different ways to discuss time.  For example, some analogize their lives to novels, where their lives are separated into chapters, characters, social settings based on the zeitgeist in which each chapter resides, with a prologue that has to be written by a parent and an epilogue that would naturally be written by their offspring.  Turn the page forward, and you'll find new friends, new living circumstances, new financial peaks and troughs, new drama, and new beginnings.  Turn back?  And you'll see all of the old friends, old circumstances, old financial peaks and troughs, old drama, and old endings.  The only guarantee in our personal timelines is that every "word" written on these "pages" is irreversible when going back, and for the most part your next "words" are controllable as you move forward.  Our little chapter books exist in giant encyclopedias that come in billions of volumes as they are added into the history of the most advanced species on this world, man.

Given that the only constant in the equation is time, how will you, the modifier of all variables, leave your mark on the timeline?  Will you spend all of your time trying to burn pages that have been written and copied over and over in irreversible time?  Or will you consider and construct ways to make each consecutive page that you start to write more exciting, informative, wise and innovative than those that you may have written in haste previously?  The inevitable end is that some day, whether it be sunny, without a cloud in the sky and monarch butterflies fluttering around a blossoming lilac bush, or a day meddled by freezing rain, broken power lines, car accidents and school cancellations, we will all be dead.

I'm about to turn the page, but before I do, I will be damned sure I know what I am going to write on it.  I suggest you do the same!

-Joey

[oldjoey-blog]

Five Steps to Leaving a Legacy

Hi everyone, so I was shitfaced drunk at our senior drill, which is an event where the seniors are kidnapped and we drink a bunch of liquor, say goodbye to everyone, and make a speech at the end leaving words to be remembered by.  I guess I was hammered enough to articulate some beauty that lead me to post it to my tumblr, because I'm definitely still drunk.  Here you go:

1) Be respectable.  Everyone is going to have times where they're thinking irrationally and they say words that they don't truly mean.  As long as you're able to give a wholehearted apology and make it genuinely accepted by those who you're apologizing to, you should be able to leave a good taste in anyone's mouth rather than a bad one.  And as long as you do everything with a smile, people are going to appreciate you more for who you are.

2) Be honest.  No one likes someone who lies, cheats, steals, or uses another person or group's property without asking.  Liars are bad for this world, although they make great politicians.  If you cheat on tests, quitting addictions, or your significant other, than it is a telltale sign that you are not trustworthy and even though people may be nice to you face to face, they will always have a lingering feeling about you and whether or not they can believe anything you're saying.

3) Be a mediator.  No, don't be that little bitch in the corner saying "can't we all just be friends?" or "I don't know why we're fighting about this."  Let's face it.  You are going to run into circumstances where your friends are acting irrational and at each other's throats for reasons that are not exactly worth an argument.  But people make mistakes, and cocktails can lead to calamity.  At times, it will be your duty to fix their problems, or at least assist in the alleviation of the conflict.  Life is about problem solving, and there aren't too many better ways to prove that you're capable of solving problems than helping to restore a relationship.

4) Be you.  There is not one single quality that individuals on this earth admire more than someone who is able to go out every single day and not have to put a different face on to achieve their goals.  Your self is the most important part of you, it is how you are perceived.  I would never change who I am for any person, any job, or any event, unless I've learned from credible sources that there is a specific flaw in my personality that is harming my day-to-day interactions with human beings.  And if such a flaw were to arise, I'd address the issue and make the necessary changes to make my life and the lives of those who I interact with better and better everyday.

5) Believe in everything you do, and don't share secrets.  Secrets are the underlying force of a successful individual, and I'll explain why because it is confusing.  Your secrets, such as knowing and understanding people, having a one-up on someone around you, and your understandings of particular concepts are what set you apart from those around you.  They are what you've worked for, studied, and made an effort to learn and understand, and that is why they set you apart.  Success is not for everyone, it is for those who seek it and strive to make every day better than the last.  If someone seems lazy and doesn't understand it, there is nothing you can do about it.  Believe in yourself, believe in your secrets, and believe in your talents, and individuals will recognize it, giving you more respect and making people remember and talk about you when you've moved on to the next step in your life.

Having no enemies is not a bad thing.  It is a sign that you have a strong enough character to receive the respect of everyone around you, and that you not only understand people, but you understand that you are a driving force in your immediate network.  You make the world a better place, as cliche as it is.  

[yeahthathappened]

[alexdislexic-blog]

hmmm, didn’t know every single thing you do is suppose to be sexy. i guess whoever made this doesn’t shit, piss, fart, eat, cough, or sneeze. You don’t like smoking? SO DON’T SMOKE!  Nobody likes a fucking preacher.  

[jessieisthegirl-deactivated2012]

Swag is for boys

Class is for men

[oldjoey-blog]

Hey. I'm currently taking Business Communications and I have to do a presentation on how dependent society is becoming on social media. I was wondering if I could reference a few of your posts. I could do it anonymously if you'd like. If not, I completely understand. Thanks!

I'm flattered, of course you could reference my posts!  You'll have to let me know how your presentation turns out, that sounds like an interesting topic full of information and ideas you could include.  Good luck.

[oldjoey-blog]

Hashtagging

Does anyone else find it concerning that social media language has not filtered, but poured its way into mainstream conversational language?  Not five years ago would a common conversation contain a previously nonexistent word such as "hashtagging."  Now, it's not uncommon to hear someone say something completely hilarious and ridiculous such as "yeah I'd hashtag her" or "i'm gonna hashtag the shit out of this test."  Twitter has made the ambiguity of the English language far more noticeable and abundant than I'd previously ever considered possible.

For example, before getting twitter or before being around those who frequent it's digital depths, were you ever exposed to a conversation where it was completely normal for someone to say their own name, followed by the word problems?

Example: "I've been drinking all day. Joey Sienkiewicz Problems"

The room laughs, the guy who doesn't have any social media doesn't get the joke so he laughs after everyone else and everyone can tell he didn't get the joke so the moment acquires an awkward tail, and then the conversation goes back to probably sucking (unless you're my friends, because we hold unbelievable conversations regularly).

Not only does hashtagging and Twitter lingo manipulate the constantly-evolving English language, but the whole concept of "liking" something on Facebook has too.  The "like" button has, in a sense, completely eliminated the true meaning of the verb "like" by taking the action of clicking a button simply to show support for a brand or a phrase (For instance, I "like" yoga pants).  Whether or not I actually "like" something in real life, sometimes I'm obligated to "like" it on Facebook.  I's a crazy concept, when you think about it.

I also remember a time where when I "stumbled upon" something it was usually because I was drunk and tripped on some stairs... Think about it.

This is our language.

This is our world.

[oldjoey-blog]

Facebook, briefly

What’s Facebook doing to society?  Well, besides the fact that it’s revolutionized the language that’s been brought into everyday conversation since 2006, it’s destroying some lives while improving others, allowing people to obsessively stalk their exes without having any physical contact with them, and allowing individuals to connect with relatives and watch cute videos of the new baby playing with the overweight cat by the fireplace.

            Language changing, you may ask?  When’s the last time (before Facebook) you would walk up to someone and say “Yoga pants are awesome,” and have the reply be “I like that?”  It’s an absurdity to consider the fact that a photo album used to be a concrete, material item that could be held in their hand and only reviewed by a few people at a time as one person was holding the album, leafing through the pages and sharing laughs with their friends.  Now, we can hook up a laptop to an HDMI cable, pop it on the TV and have 55 people laughing their asses off at the drunken soccer girl passed out curled up around a toilet.  The only relevant thing to say is “tagged her!” which at one point may have been referring to something sexual as opposed to the modernity which merely means her name has been digitally connected to the photo by the click of a mouse.

            Break up with someone, and then get seen in a picture on Facebook with another girl in a week.  Your inbox will be flooded with a multitude of complex emotions that you no longer care to deal with, but there’s nothing you can really do about it.  Facebook is a jealousy breeder!  Not to mention the fact that my mom now knows I’m obsessed with sandwiches and the idea of having one being prepared for me by a lady is one of my deepest fantasies, so she’s always posting sandwich recipes on my wall.  Mom, don’t you think that’s at all creepy?

            As far as destroying lives; let’s say you screwed up your privacy settings and permitted that one picture of yourself doing the one handed keg stand in a pair of jorts that shows your butt hanging out to be viewed by the public.  Congratulations!  In that job interview you so obsessively harassed yourself into making, how are you going to explain that one to the guy in the white collar and black tie that’s inwardly laughing at the fact that you’re obviously not going to be considered for the position?

            Facebook is nothing short of an amazing technology that has revolutionized the way we think and work.  I love it.   

[oldjoey-blog]

They Make Me Feel Old

Younger generation college students make me more and more disappointed with the consistently weakening base forming below the aging population in today's world.  The amount of MDMA, LSD and other drugs I'm seeing people under the influence of at parties is disturbing, to say the least.  And I mean, that's not even the biggest reason why I'm so disgusted.  The bottom line, is I'm afraid of what's going to happen when such overwhelming groups of unmotivated individuals begin to take leadership roles in today's society.

I'm not saying that there aren't any individuals that won't find success; I have a multitude of younger friends who are going to be extremely rich, and I can tell that plenty of them, based off of intelligence, drive, and desire to challenge the system and defend their beliefs are going to be revolutionary thinkers of our time.  If you're offended when reading this, and can develop a concise, well-rounded and empirically-based argument that can prove me wrong, then you're the type of person whose presence I'm happy to say the world can be blessed with.

Yet, when I see so many more individuals losing touch with reality and falling in love with corrupted and dysfunctional media, I become more and more discouraged.  When I walk through a crowded mall and I see a group of beautiful girls all dolled up and looking sophisticated, and then they destroy the image of classiness with which they present themselves by mindless conversations and attention-seeking pitch-altered voices spewing mindless dribble, I can only shake my head and continue walking.  As I continue on this trek through the same mall, I pass by a group of young men, unshaven, hygienically misconstrued, and wearing clothing that was clearly purchased to give off a feeling of rebellion that they were not able to produce from sheer mental capacity. 

A lot of it begins with parenting.  Many parents are becoming exactly what they should not be - "friends" with their young children.  By failing to learn that the things about their parents they didn't like as a little kid such as discipline and rules were what brought them to their success, they aren't able to articulate these concepts to their children.  There are too many parents overly concerned with having their kids "liking" them all the time to put a solid foot down and stand their ground.  It's like the issue of coddling an infant; if you make it a point to comfort and soothe your baby every time it emits a cry, it's human instinct that will teach your child to cry all the time instead of learning how to sooth his/herself.

We can't solve problems for everyone.  People must be forced to think for themselves, act for themselves, and make their lives better.  The only real way to be considered a respectable and contributing asset to exist in this world is to make yourself and your contemporaries better.  This needs to be taught better at a younger age, or else I'm afraid we're going to run into a wall sooner or later.  Failure is the best lesson; while cliche, it's true.  We exist to use our superior minds and the tools they've helped us to create to learn lessons and continue to advance society.  Wasting time doing anything else needs not happen as often as it does now.

[hopoffmydicknowbroski-blog-blog]

[alexdislexic-blog]

I hate when people bitch about how football players make more than soldiers. Like, yeah, soldiers deserve to be payed more, but there really isn’t shit you can do about it. Soldiers are payed based off of tax money, we’d be a little screwed if each soldier got tens of millions of tax dollars....

[oldjoey-blog]

When I Graduate...

When I graduate from college, I will have lived with:

A jock lacrosse player that would sing to his girlfriend with his shirt off over webcam while I was trying to sleep

A man who had more epiphanies in a week than Nostradamus had in a lifetime

A man who had so many clothes strewn about his room that we were able to spell out the word "raw" in a clothing mountain

A man that would break more chairs a week than a "Biggest Loser" crew sitting on weak bar stools, and would rationalize every intense and insane action he performed by saying he was "raging"

A man who's idea of good music was rap that was so underground it was said he had to give Satan a handjob in order to bring it up to earth

A man who we once had to call "thunder fist" because he punched down doors instead of kicking them, the same man had "gelectrified" hair and was also a rejected American Idol contestant

The tallest ginger you'll ever meet who made some crazy plays at a bar and ended up getting me a job

A man that everyone called lobster, even though nothing about him or his skin resembled that of a lobster

A man who could change from Jekyll to Hyde at the mercy of a Keystone Ice (DAVE!)

An Asian that could write you a business plan in a night if you would enjoy a beer with him afterward

A man who's self-defense mechanism was to get completely naked and chase people around instead of physically attempting to harm anyone

A man who was known as "sketch" - a Dominican with blue eyes that would know more about your life based off what he read on Facebook than what he's learned from personal experience

A man who we simply called "housemate" - no one really knew his name, although he had a dog named Roscoe that would eat everything and shit everywhere

A crazy man who's name will not be mentioned

[oldjoey-blog]

Here's Something that Never Happened to You

To anyone who's ever had a crazy experience with a handle of Canadian Leaf whiskey, you will appreciate this story dearly.  Consider this setting: I was twenty years old, living in a four-person house known as "Tony's House," because that was the name of our hateful landlord who wanted nothing but for all of us to die in the car on our way back to our hometowns after we were done with the place.  It's wintertime, in Fredonia, New York where snow is just something you don't argue with, because it's as inevitable as death.  The break was coming up, and a friend of mine who had attended the University of Buffalo had decided to come down and rage with my fraternity and myself.  He gets to town, I greet him with a strong beverage, and we head over to the two-person apartment attached to our house, excited to get the night started.

This next part is kind of hazy, but I'm hoping a reader could comprehend or relate to the concept that no one really remembers how a party starts, and they all try to remember how awesome a part ends.  Let's just say three of us made the handle disappear and the whiskey was in our veins.  I vaguely remember walking downtown happy and smiling, while my visiting friend and the other rowdy gentleman who helped us polish off the Canadian Leaf were both punching the air, talking about getting in fights that night.  The last thing I remember is getting to the bar and thinking "there is no fucking way this is not going to get crazy..."

Like the flash of a camera, my setting changes.  I feel myself coming to consciousness.  It's quiet, and relatively cold.  I was saying to myself "I'm not comfortable, not comfortable at all, do I even have a pillow?  Shit, am I in someone's kitchen?  I hope no one is watching me right now... here goes nothing," I opened my eyes slowly, gazing straight up into the air.  The first things I see are  rusty, grease-stained pans hanging up on hooks attached to a plywood wall, accompanied by old knives, skewers, tongs and trays.  I was fucking terrified that I'd ended up a victim of Jigsaw from the Saw movies, that perhaps maybe he'd kidnapped me because I got shitfaced far too often and how much I loved life was needing a serious test.  I sit up, and slowly move my gaze towards my left.  A girl is passed out, within three feet of me.  Was she getting tested, too?  She stirred a moment.  Holy shit, she's Asian!  I remember thinking "holy shit, am I going to have to kill her?"

Then I realized that the door was cracked.  There was some light in this room.  Enough to see everything in my immediate surroundings... there was a refrigerator.  I opened it, hoping a bomb wouldn't go off or a cassette would start playing, and the refrigerator cooperated.  Inside I saw packages of hot dogs and hamburgers... and a peculiar unmarked jug that had a pinkish sauce-type substance in it.  "Am I going to be made into a fucking hot dog?"  The hair on the back of my neck stood up with the paranoid feeling that a night at Sunny's shithole bar was going to result in my cannibalistic demise.

I decided to see if my cellmate knew what was up.  I woke her up, and when she rolled over I had realized that I was totally nailing her earlier in the semester (a sigh of relief, unless she was the one behind all of this). 

"Where the fuck are we?" I asked

"I have no fucking clue," she muttered, "How the fuck did we get here?"

"No idea.  No fucking idea."

At that point, I decided it was time to man up and get to the bottom of this.  I slowly pushed open the door to reveal a rising sun and some buildings.  We were fucking downtown!  To my left was the bar that I'd walked into right before my recollection of anything else that happened that night was annihilated.  Around the corner?  Street Meat, the place that sells hotdogs, hamburgers, and the best fucking chicken pita you'll ever eat when you're shitfaced.  I had passed out with an Asian chick in a meat storage room.  Epic!

I made a phone call and a friend came and picked us up.  To this day, not one single person in this world knows how we got into that building...

[oldjoey-blog]

Awkwardly-Generated Insomnia

When I got home about two hours ago, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to head immediately to my bedroom, flip on the Daily Show with John Stewart, throw on the sleep timer and probably pass out in a few minutes.  But there was a recurring noise in the bathroom that kept drumming on my ears, kind of like how when you're trying to go to sleep but you've had too much coffee and all you can feel is your heart beating.  It turns out, it was the pump for the toilet (my bedroom is in the basement, which has a toilet that needs a little extra muster to get it to the pipes higher above).  The pump has a noise that's like a mix between a fart from Megatron and the collision of a door with one of those old-fashioned springy door stops that are supposed to protect the door and the wall from damaging each other.

Turns out, the sleepover that the little sister had with her preteen contemporaries had been quite detrimental to the ability of my toilet to function.  They probably used too much toilet paper or threw fake fingernails in there while discussing the past, present, and future love lives of Justin Bieber, which inevitably ends in a wonderful love story which would find one of the girls the eventual bride of that menace to society.  Regardless, this problem has happened before, so I unplugged the pump with the hope that the water would stop needing to be charged up the pipes, because this toilet has obviously been pumping for 24 hours and I'm sure that my stepfather is not going to be happy when he learns of this.

Luckily, one of the cats was refusing to let me fall asleep, insisting with hilarious facial expressions and the constant jumping around on my bed and hand-nuzzling that I was to keep him entertained until HE fell asleep, and not myself.  Right as he decided he'd had enough, we both started to doze off, when suddenly his ears pricked up, and he got up and ran out of the room.  I paused for a second; whenever he takes off that quickly, it means there's an interesting and unfamiliar noise for him to explore (naturally - it's a cat).  Within seconds my ears tuned themselves into a constant dripping noise... yes, the toilet was leaking.

I jumped up and ran in to see my bathroom floor taking on water faster than Jack did after Rose let him go in Titanic.  I knew I had to plug the fucking pump back in and deal with the noise, but how the fuck should I do that with water all over the floor and the cord just lying in it?  I wasn't trying to kill myself as the result of a few menstrual monsters trying to enjoy their lives as their bodies change faster than their emotional capacity to deal with it entails.  Luckily my college ingenuity stepped up to the plate - I ran to my room and looked for whatever the fuck I could find that was thick and didn't conduct electricity - VOILA! I knew that this giant orange "Number 1" Syracuse finger would come in handy!  I straddled the walls of the bathroom and picked the cord up, drying it off with the conveniently-located paper towels.  When it was ready, water just inches away from my feet, I stuffed the cord in and the water started to drain.  Success!

And now you have here an unfortunately anticlimactic story that arose from the insomnia that I've been battling as the pump continues to go off every thirty seconds.  I just had to give up and come upstairs, enjoy a ham sandwich, creep Facebook, and practice my story telling... 

[mc-xc]

[setbabiesonfire]

Literally all I thought about for years.

[alexdislexic-blog]

In my opinion, God isn’t real. Why are people killed every day? Why are people discriminated against? It all sets back to a fictional fuck called God. Because people can’t just live normally without completely questioning why we’re here and how we were created. Who gives a fuck, if you find out why, nothing will change, you’ll still be doing the same stupid shit you do every day. We were created by the sun from the Teletubbies, how’s that sound? Good? Good.