JON ZAL

Your front-row seat to my nervous breakdown

Life

I’m back … and I’m ready to handle it up!

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While recently looking at my blog’s incoming-traffic data, I discovered that someone had arrived here through a translation link … which, when clicked on, led me to the Spanish version of my website shown above.

Ever since then, I’ve been wearing a mariachi costume, downing tequila shots and spontaneously shouting “¡Arriba!” at all hours of the day and night. So, you know, same as always. The big difference, however, is that I now am insisting that everyone refer to me as Papà Arañazos. Por favor.

Gracias.

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We interrupt this embarrassingly prolonged silence to bring you an actual blog post

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“Hello? … Yeah, this is him. … I have a what? … A blog? Oh, shit, that’s right.”

Ahem.

Hey, you guys! How’s it going? Me? No, I didn’t die; I’ve just been trying desperately to make the minimum monthly payments on my Mt. Everest-sized pile of debt … and since my mad website-building skillz currently pay more than my mad blogging skillz, I’ve been focusing as of late on the former endeavor … which explains why I currently am in Boston attending An Event Apart, a conference for people who build websites.

The best part about attending the conference? My employer is paying for it. The second best part about attending the conference? I got to hit last night’s Red Sox game with my Dad.

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Zombie Dinner Party … with your chef, Dr. Hannibal Lector

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Before dinner

“Ugh. Brains,” I whispered to my wife after the chef announced that the third course would include sweetbreads.

“What?”

“Sweetbreads,” I whispered, “are brains.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding rather amused, though far from relieved. “I thought they were balls.”

Hey, they might as well have been balls, because guess what brains and balls both have in common? Neither one goes in my mouth.

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Mother Nature is a heartless wench who will turn your own children against you

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When I was a little boy, and thunder rumbled in the distance, my mother would react as though the approaching storm was an Afghani mortar attack instead of a minor weather event. Because of this, I spent much of my childhood reacting to thunderstorms in a similarly panicked fashion.

When my mother was a little girl, and thunder rumbled in the distance, her parents presumably reacted calmly … until that one time when the electricity went out during a storm, and they sent her to get from her upstairs bedroom something to play with, and she opened the door at the bottom of the staircase, and looked up to see that the second floor was engulfed in flames … because lightning had struck the house.

So she gets a pass.

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That trip to Mexico I keep meaning to tell you about, which almost didn’t happen because of my unrivaled ability to be a complete and utter moron

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About two hours into our flight from Philadelphia to Cancun, I discovered that I had committed The Biggest Fuck-Up of All Time … like, to the extent that I knew it would be best for my marriage if I just went ahead and threw myself out of the aircraft. Which was a shame, really … because everything had been going so well.

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I’m kind of like a superhero who saves people … except the people I save usually aren’t in any real danger other than that which I’ve conjured up in my own wildly neurotic imagination, but still …

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Last weekend, my mother-in-law treated me, my wife, our kids, our nephew and WW’s older brother to the Philly Pops’ annual holiday concert at The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts — or, as I like to call it, The Anxiety-Provoking Center for the Provocation of Anxiety in the Overly Neurotic Parent Who Fears the Accidental Falling from Great Heights and Subsequent Premature Death of His Children and Nephew.

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No, really: This job-search thing is like shooting fish in a barrel

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Pretty sure the fish in the metaphor are presumed to be swimming, but, still … live fish, dead fish … put ’em in a barrel and they’d be easy to shoot is the point, amirite?

OK, seriously: What’s with all the hubbub about high unemployment rates in this country? Because I’m still two business days away from my lay-off, and already the job offers are coming at me faster than I can keep up with them. You jobless whiners out there must be a bunch of losers; this job-search shit is even easier than kicking my kids’ asses at Candyland.

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