What I have been doing all this time

Though I've told some of you this in person, to verify I am in fact working two jobs right now, and they are completely different from each other in almost every way. Both these companies, however, shape a distinctive part of Nashville's identity in their own way.

The Adventure Science Center looks like a giant electric castle. It is pretty hard to miss if you are driving down any of Nashville's interstates (except 440 I think). I work the front desk, which means I sell people admission tickets/memberships and give people directions over the phone. Lots of sitting is involved. Occasionally I will run the flight simulator ride (BlueMax it is called), which is sort of like being inside a giant can of soda pop as someone shakes it up, except you are the one doing the shaking. I usually work from 9:30am to 5pm, and wear a red polo shirt with the Adventure Science Center logo on the left breast.

Bound'ry is a bar a couple blocks away from the Vanderbilt campus. I am a food runner, which means I stay in the kitchen until we get an order (or five or six) and then take the food the chefs have prepared, and deliver it to the correct table. This involves being able to balance several plates on a tray (or sometimes my forearms), and memorizing all one hundred of the non-sequential table numbers in the dining area. For this job, I usually work from 6pm to 10:30pm (unless I am closing, in which case it is much later) and wear a black collared shirt with black slacks.

I keep meaning to take photographs of either of these places, but never seem to get around to it. If I ever do, I'll post them here. Working two jobs leaves me little time for much else, so the infrequent blog posts will probably decrease further at least until school starts back.

A dead art form

It's recently occurred to me that there are no new jokes being circulated in my culture. Which is not say that comedy is dead, or that everything has stopped being funny lately. I'm not talking about Chuck Norris jokes or Saturday Night Live. I mean the witty question-and-answer gags or those absurdist anecdotes. I haven't heard a new one in ages.

Two drums and a cymbal fall down the edge of a cliff

Budump-chsh

I'm assuming you've heard this one, probably more than once. Why then has no one invented a single new joke (to my knowledge) in years? I feel like a good number of jokes originated from screenwriters who would put them in their scripts to break up a tense scene or to give a character a different dimensionality, and they would then spread as an oral tradition among the moviegoers' friends and their friends. I have a few suspects for the death of this idea:

1. Joke books. People who were incapable of being funny on their own in social situations would buy these things and study them like textbooks before going to a party or something. "Oooh look how funny you are" the partygoers would say and the joke distributor would get a little boost in self-esteem. These books were super-popular in the seventies and eighties, but then people realized that you can make limited profit selling joke books, so publishers just started compiling a bunch of used jokes instead of writing new ones to make money.

2. Gilbert Gottfried. Most stand-up comedians do not use the joke form I've described in their acts. "Something funny happened inside my brain when I was stoned" (Mitch Hedburg); "Boy the news sure is funny, aint it?" (Jay Leno); or "I can make funny noises with my lips" (Dane Cook). Gilbert Gottfried was always classicist joke-teller though. His forms followed the structure I've described above, but he always pushed the envelope beyond what could be told in general social settings. This is actually not solely Gottfired's fault. Jokes will just not spread as easily when they involve sexual organs or stereotyped demographics. Every time anyone hears a joke like this and says "I find that offensive," the joketeller and all those listening are discouraged from telling that joke again, which I think subconsciously discredits the medium as a whole.

3. Science. Remember in 2002 when scientist made a survey to figure out what the funniest joke in the entire world was? Whose idea was that? Anyway the winner turned out to be that one about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and that missing tent. I never thought it was that great, but who am I to argue with science? I think a lot of traditionalist joke writers felt the same way. Why write any new jokes if it's always going to come in second place to that damn Dr. Watson joke? Thanks a lot objectivity.