Five Song Friday: Eat, Sit and Die
This Week: Dumb Men, Bird Liars and Brit Envy
If sitting is the new smoking, then I’m the Marlboro Man.
Or Patty and Selma from The Simpsons.
I’m Bruce in Die Hard. DeNiro in Goodfellas. Lauren Bacall in anything.
What I’m saying is that I spend a lot of time sitting down.
But that’s what happens when you write for a living.
That’s what happens when you work from home.
According to estimates, there are 28 million of you who feel my pain. My remote brothers and sisters. You know the drill.
You wake up and put yourself in a chair, pour coffee into your face and do the work.
Once in a while you take a break to eat a thing, or a bowl of things, and then get your bottom right back in your chair.
All day you live inside your brain and that two feet of space between your face and the screen. And you forget sometimes that you also exist from the neck down.
Hours can pass in a blur of typing and browser tabs and YouTube “research.”
You shift and squirm. Lean forward. Ease back. Feet up. Feet down.
You take PROPER POSTURE for a spin by sitting straight and squaring your shoulders, but… who are you kidding?
All of us work from home folks eventually default to two basic settings: SLOUCH and HUNCH.
It’s a strange existence.
Some days, my high-speed internet and three-monitor array make me feel like a god. With the click of a mouse I can summon anything to appear before me. Total and complete knowledge of the universe is at my fingertips.
Other times I feel cranky and isolated like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, bound to my wheelchair with the outside world limited to what I can see from my windows (but instead of cool murders, all I get is trees and stupid birds).
I know sitting is terrible. I understand that if I don’t do something about it, my spine will eventually dissolve and I will become a sentient puddle of goo.
That’s why I have a standing desk and a yoga ball.
I stretch and bend. I move around.
I even considered using our treadmill, but my home office is a renovated attic room. There’s a good chance that moving such a heavy piece of exercise equipment up three flights of stairs could kill me. And dying is what I’m trying to AVOID!
Still, I actively resist the urge to remain sedentary.
I will not stand by while sitting down slowly murders me.
Even though I’m convinced that Wall-E predicted the future of mankind, I’m not ready to trade my bipedal privileges for a space-age Rascal hover scooter.
But the struggle is real.
And I’m old enough now that sitting is just one of the dangers of my job.
Take my left elbow.
It hurts like the Dickens and all indications (and medical professional poker buddies) say that it’s tennis elbow.
Thing is, I don’t play tennis, so when I tell people I have tennis elbow, they look at me like I’m bragging. Or they look even closer at me and assume I’m lying.
To avoid the awkwardness, I just tell people that I have “shift-option-control elbow.”
“I perform a lot of complex keyboard tasks,” I say, while pointing to my arm brace. “And I got a little overconfident trying to insert one of those Scandinavian vowels.”
There’s my neck.
Once upon a time, turning my head from side to side didn’t make a noise like gravel in a slow blender.
And my shoulders, which used to be happy just hanging low, now keep trying to snuggle with my earlobes.
Frankly, it’s a shit show. The only sure future I see is me at my desk, grinding away until body parts start straight-up falling off Mr. Potato Head-style.
Maybe the rest of you guys have this figured out.
Maybe you spend the day walking in the sun-dappled forest, dictating blog articles into your smart glasses and clearing out your email inbox while doing tai-chi with haptic gloves.
Maybe you feed your daily tasks into ChatGPT, pimp out your leftover busy work to the lowest bidder on Fiverr and then book back-to-back hot yoga sessions.
More power to you.
I’m one of the dummies who still does it the hard way, poking and pecking at the keyboard like a hunchback hermit crab.
Sitting down like it’s no big deal.
Sincerely,
DJ CrankyPete
Five Song Friday 050
“Blah Blah Blah” - Girlpool
I know that even grown men are impressed by Taylor Swift’s ability to write a catchy and heartfelt diss track to all the dumb men who’ve let her down over the years. But this song is proof that Miss Swifty has been trying too hard.
Men are uncomplicated. The easiest way to shut them up and make them sad is to mock the way they sound. And, spoiler alert, everything we say sounds exactly like “blah, blah, blah.”
“Birdies Singing” - Kelley Stoltz
Did I intentionally follow up a “blah, blah, blah” song with a “la, la, la” song? No. But I’m not mad about it.
The only thing I AM angry about is the horribly inaccurate way that Mr. Stoltz has portrayed the sound of birdies singing. Not to brag, but I’ve heard LOTS of birdies singing in my day. And not a goddamned one of them has said, “la, la, la.”
“Kids Don’t Buy Groceries” - Hyattsvillain, XIXI
This is a sweet little song about how parents ruin children.
Kids don’t buy groceries, people. They are sponges. Empty vessels.
Let’s do better.
“I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” - Kate Fagan
I just want to say that this song resonates SO MUCH with me. I’ve worried for years about being TOO cool.
The good news? My daughter assures me I have NOTHING to worry about!
“Over My Shoulder” - I Am Kloot
This song makes me so angry that I’m not a British guitar player with a lovely voice. If I was? I would be walking everywhere with my instrument just strumming away and singing the heck out of charming, poppy shit like this.
I love the song, I Am Kloot, but you fill me with envious rage.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on YouTube Music
*NOTE: Unfortunately, YouTube Music did NOT have the Hyattsvillain song available. You can see the video here.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
“The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.” ― Lester Bangs