I’m sure you’ve heard someone say they’re going to give something “the ol’ college try.” Frankly, I’m not impressed by that. If my memories of college are any indication, “the ol’ college try” involves attempting said task for about fifteen minutes, then giving up, ordering pizza, and inviting some friends over for beer and late-night video game marathons.

Maybe I went to a different college than everyone else.

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Have you ever gone into a room looking for something, say the TV remote, and you can’t find it? You know it’s there somewhere, you just had it, just saw it, but now it’s become invisible for some reason. Your significant other walks into the room and you turn to him/her for help. “Have you seen the…” and then you trail off and mime pushing the button on a TV remote with your empty hand.

Why do people do that? You’re looking for something you need, you don’t have time to waste on an impromptu game of Charades. I have fun with it. If someone’s looking for, for example, a pair of scissors, and they ask me if I’ve seen them, trailing off and miming a pair of scissors cutting with their fingers, I just shake my head and say, “Sorry, haven’t seen a starter for a ‘63 Chevy,” and walk out of the room. Leave ‘em with the knowledge that not only are they still missing an item, but they also clearly suck at Charades.

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The fiancée and I went out to dinner the other night. Nothing fancy, just hit the Olive Garden for some breadsticks and pasta. Beats cooking. So we did our wait in the lobby and finally the little buzzer thingie went off to let us know our table was ready. They took us in the back and gave us a booth. As we sat down, I noticed a couple sitting in the booth behing my fiancée. Nothing remarkable, just noted there were people there.

So we look at the menus, pick our dishes, start devouring salad and breadsticks. I’m talking to the fiancé and, looking past her head, I notice that the man seated behind her, with his back to us, has an iPod-style earpiece in his ear. I roll my eyes, figuring he’s one of those cell-phone douches who never takes his combo earpiece and mic off in case he has an important call and can’t be bothered to stop shoveling food into his face before disrupting everyone else’s dinner. But at least he’s not talking into it now. In fact… he’s not talking at all. I realize he hasn’t said a word to his companion the entire time we’ve been here.

Now I’m intrigued. I keep an eye on the duo and, sure enough, neither of them are talking. Understand, this isn’t some elderly couple who have been married for nine hundred years, heard each other’s stories over and over, and just have nothing else to say to one another while waiting for death. This is a youngish, mid-30s couple who should still have lots to talk about. Yet here they are, at dinner, completely ignoring each other. Looking closer, I see that he’s not wearing a single cell-phone earpiece, but a pair of earphones. Is he listening to his iPod at dinner? In a restaurant? Man, his wife must be super-peeved. Wait… I can see, barely through her long hair, that she’s wearing headphones, too. These two came out to dinner just to listen to music?

Now that shows the problem with jumping to conclusions. I had the situation totally wrong. Turns out they did not come to a restaurant just to listen to personal music players. They actually came to Olive Garden to watch movies. By craning my neck a bit, I could see that they were both watching movies, he on a PSP, she on an iPod. Each person was holding their device in one hand and eating with the other. And I had to wonder: Why? Why would you go out to a semi-decent restaurant, with a loved one, and then just stare at an electronic screen the entire night? Why not just order dinner to go and eat in front of the TV if you’re so desperate to watch something? Could they just not agree on what movie to watch? Can you be so tired of someone’s company that you can’t even suffer through a single dining experience without an electronic diversion?

They left slightly before we did, having never spoken a single word to each other. The waitress even had to wave to get their attention when it came time to pay the check. I watched them walk out, no longer staring at their devices, but still wearing their headphones and not speaking. I reached across the table and took my fianceée’s hand. She smiled back at me and we were quiet for a while, too.

Somehow, that was okay.

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I’m still seeing a lot of those giant ribbon magnets on people’s cars these days. You know the ones. They’re shaped like the little pins all those celebrity doofs wear on the awards shows to display their support for some cause or another. This is a fad I thought would have vanished long before now, just like Baby on Board signs and suction-cup Garfields, but it persists, spurred on by people’s deep desire for anonymous motorists to know what they believe in.

The one I’ve been seeing the most is this huge yellow ribbon that says “Support our troops.” OK, I’m at a red light behind you, I see your magnet… now what? What, exactly, am I supposed to do at this stage? Support the troops, right, got that. How? How would you recommend I do that? For that matter, what are you doing? Besides spending a couple bucks on a mass-produced magnet that gives money to some company cashing in on patriotism, I mean. You think driving to McDonald’s with a magnet on the back of your gas-guzzling SUV is helping the troops overseas? You really want to support the troops? Send ‘em plane tickets home. I think they’d like that better.

You know what I’m waiting for? When people get tired of this magnet craze in a little while and they all take them off and discover to their horror that they still have a magnet-shaped mark permanently embedded into their paint. A silhouette where the dirt and sun haven’t affected the paint the same and will always be visible until they repaint the entire car. That’s gonna be a lot of fun. Hey, maybe the car-painting companies are the ones making the magnets.

I could support that.

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I have an idea for a new restaurant that is going to make me rich. My restaurant is going to become the default destination for couples everywhere. Not for the ambiance, not for the food, not for the price, but for the name.

You know the drill. It’s Friday night, you’ve both worked your eight hours, neither one of you wants to cook, there’s nothing in the fridge that looks good, so you start discussing places to go eat. And the conversation always goes like this:

“So, what do you want?”
“I don’t know. What do you want?”
“I don’t know… Italian?”
“Enh, I had Italian for lunch. Chinese?”
“Not really in the mood for Chinese. Mexican?”
“Too fatty. How about Thai?”
“Essentially Chinese. American?”

And on and on it goes, and by the time you do finally settle on a place, it’s an hour later, you’re both starved and cranky, no one enjoys their dinner that much since you both feel like you settled on the other person’s choice which is mathematically impossible, and a little more magic dies from your relationship. There may be a divorce.

But I’m here to change all that! How, you ask? With a restaurant that serves most basic genres of food and has a simple name: I Don’t Know. This is going to save so much time and more than one relationship. Now the conversation can go like this:

“So, what do you want?”
“I don’t know…”
“Perfect! Get in the car!”

And the discussion is over. The decision is made. Boom. Done. Finito. And your significant other can’t even get upset because they picked the restaurant! It’s perfect! And with my restaurant serving most nationalities of food, they should be able to find something at least edible so they don’t even feel cheated.

If this takes off, I plan to open a chain of eateries with names like What Do You Want, You Decide, and What Are You Hungry For.

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Two people meet through chance, notice each other, start a relationship, and fall in love. They marry and, despite the statistics, remain married. Luck allows them to copulate at the proper time of ovulation. Of the billions of sperm released, one completes the harrowing journey and manages to fertilize the egg. Continuing the streak, the egg manages to grow and develop normally, avoiding defects, mutations, abnormalities, and miscarriage. The child is born without mishap and enters the world healthy and perfect.

Through a mixture of parental intervention and dumb luck, the child survives its infancy without incident. Likewise, its early years of learning to crawl and walk are marked by several close calls but no lasting harm. The child does not fall down steps, choke on food, consume household cleaners, play with electrical outlets, or pull anything heavy on top of itself. A childhood of tree climbing, bike riding, skateboarding, fireworks, unsupervised swimming, experimenting with power tools,rough horseplay, BB guns, full contact sports, and general mischief yields only a series of minor cuts and scrapes.

Teen years of underage drinking, shaky driving, schoolyard brawls, more full contact sports, risk taking, hell raising, and other youth activities likewise fail to bring any real damage. Drunk drivers, killers, animal attacks, natural disasters, traffic accidents, electrical mishaps, and fires all manage to find other targets. The simple fact of being alive is in violation of odds so astronomical as to be amazing.

Some of these people eventually kill themselves.

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Let me just make sure I got this straight:

If someone dresses up in Hobbit robes, wears Klingon makeup, or sits in line overnight for tickets to the next Star Wars movie, they’re automatically a basement-dwelling geek with no life and deserving of ridicule for their fascination with an imaginary universe.

If someone dresses up in an official Dallas Cowboys football outfit, paints their face up in the Cubs’ colors, or sits in line overnight for tickets to the next Lakers game, they’re a man’s man with a healthy interest in sports and deserving of admiration for their loyalty and devotion to the team.

And these two things are nothing alike. Is that how that works?

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