I really need to work on my consistency. Here's last week's Friday Five:


What’s the most annoying sound in the world?

I'm betting a lot of people said their alarm clock, and I will happily jump on the band wagon. I actually am happy to have switched to cell phone alarms just to avoid that "ANGH ANGH ANGH ANGH" noise that my old alarm clock made. I no longer prescribe to the notion that the only way you can wake up is to have fear of God put in you.

Which of other people’s mannerisms do you find very annoying?

I hate when people phrase nearly every sentence in the form of a question, so all I ever hear is the pitch of a person's voice raising a bit at the end of every comment he or she makes. It just makes a person sound unsure of everything and that's really annoying.

What do you do that really annoys others?

I'm intensely forgetful and I often don't say anything when things bother me.

In what way has your own behavior recently caused you annoyance?

My forgetfulness comes back to haunt me pretty often, and I'm always very annoyed with myself when it does. I'll forget a deadline, or that I was supposed to run an errand, and then by the end of the day I'll realize that there was a pooch, and it has been screwed.

Who’s the most annoying person you know?

Larry the Cable Guy. I mean, I don't know him personally, but he's definitely tops in the annoyance department.

Zeebo Out.

Sometimes I wonder what makes us come up with the bizarre monikers we assume when we enter the world of the internet. We're presented with this realm where we maintain total anonymity, allowing us to present ourselves however we wish to appear. It's even better than your first day of college or work, because nobody even knows what you look like. You have one opportunity for everybody to learn something interesting about you, so I have to wonder why so many user names resort to the same old boring cliches.

LadiesMan3485
xxPinkPrincessxx
HappyJoyFetishMonkey_2

Okay, I made that last one up, but you hopefully understand the jist of what I'm talking about. Guys will inevitably choose a name that makes them seem like they get laid all the time, and women will pick something that they believe is kind of cute.

On the one hand, I understand the need to immediately identify yourself as male or female in a realm where a 35 year old guy in your local library is pretending to be 14 in order to talk to you, but on the other, it's just lazy. And I've been equally guilty in the past. Check out these fun doozies I used to use on forums and in videogames:

BladeMaster Lee
DragoonL

My desire in those days, obviously, was to tell the world that I'm a giant nerd who has never ever seen a girl naked. The amusing thing was, despite being very content with my choices, I'd make fun of the name almost constantly. I used to tell other folks on my forums that I couldn't lift a sword even if it was made of rubber and Andre the Giant was lending a hand. I quickly became a parody of myself, which is something I've become an expert at doing.

I settled on "LeeboZeebo" at some point in college. My friends and I had recently discovered Zombo.com, which we all agreed was deceptively brilliant. For weeks afterwards we would remind us that the only limit on our ability to basically do anything...was ourselves. I loved the clown-like colors and essential inability to click on anything. That sense of inflated self-worth was something I identified with, and I immediately experimented with ways to incorporate its name with my own. That was how I landed on my current moniker, and I've been using it ever since.

I think the best internet handles are established this way. Something personal, but not immediately identifiable. If you happen to be an accomplished player of first person shooters, I really don't think you should name yourself FragMaster3000. There are probably hundreds of players with the word "frag" in their title that happen to be playing the same game you are. It's just plain unoriginal.

My friends and I are also big proponents of the idea that you pick something and stick with it, so make the early choices count. I think all of my close friends have been using the same internet handles for nearly ten years. That, folks, is consistency, and it's the main thing that keeps me from adopting a new name. There was a period when I wanted to adopt the name "L2-Z2" but I felt it really would have been a step backwards. Plus, although I do love Star Wars, I'm not really a die hard fan, and Star Wars inspired names convince the true fanatics to come out of the woodwork and assume you know as much about star destroyers as they do. I'm still trying to get used to Midichlorians. I'm not even sure if I can spell it right.

So what internet handles have you gone by in the past? Don't be ashamed. The only judgments we will lay on you are the silent ones that last forever.

Zeebo Out.

Testing out text entries on my cell phone. Welcome to the future! Your alien overlords should be here shortly to throw you in a box. We can update from there!

I thought I might occasionally do the infamous "Friday Five" - five questions beamed in from space every Friday by big-headed midgets aboard a satellite orbiting our planet.

1. Would you return to high school life for a week? Why or why not? (If you're currently in high school, would you redo your experiences so far?)

No. No, no, no. I liked high school well enough, but I was going through a phase wherein I had begun lashing out at the entire world due to the crap way I'd been treated in the past. Non-nerds may not realize this, but sometimes if you push a person long enough, it turns them into a jerk. I was kind of a jerk in high school, and that phase didn't wear off until later in college. It was also a turbulent time in this young tyke's life as I was one of those uncelebrated "late bloomers" you always read about, and high school was also a period of multiple unrequited loves. I'd rather not relive any of that time period.

2. Who were/are you in high school?

I was a nerd, but I had a close grouping of friends, so at least I wasn't completely alone. I think I was pretty well noted for just generally being weird. High school was the time when I stopped caring what most people thought of me. I dressed how I wanted, ate what I wanted, and talked how I wanted. It was probably a little too much liberation for me to absorb all at once, in hindsight.

3. What was/is your favorite high school hangout? What did/do you do there?

I never actually went anywhere in high school. I would usually just hang out at my house, or I would go over to a friend's house, but we didn't have any specific haunt that we would go to on a regular basis. Senior year of high school I practically lived at my friend Colt's house, though.

4. What were/are your favorite three songs in high school?

"Miss Misery" by Elliott Smith
"Eleanor Rigby" by The Beatles
"The Wall" by Pink Floyd

5. What was the craziest thing you did in high school?

Probably getting completely hammered at my friend Joe's place, marking the first time I sampled "the drink" and my subsequent love affair with hard liquor which would haunt me for a while. I can remember moments of running wildly through the woods surrounding his house. That's the sort of thing that gets you knifed in horror movies.

Zeebo Out.

I have an irrational fear of strangers touching my underpants. It's for this reason that I feel like I can never hire a cleaner to come take care of our messy apartment. I just know that whoever comes over to clean is going to find some of my underpants somewhere - a place that I don't even remember leaving them, like behind the refridgerator, or hanging from a fan blade, or soaking with the dirty dishes. Then I have to somehow explain why my underpants are static clinging to the front of my TV. Why do I have these underpants all over the place? Do I collect them? Am I a nudist who just takes off my underpants wherever he feels like it? I'm not going to be able to explain that, man. I do not KNOW.

And what if the cleaning person decides to do laundry? Or just generally goes snooping around? Snooping around in my UNDERPANTS DRAWER. I'm going to have to buy a padlock for that drawer, and a padlock for the closet where we keep our dirty clothes. I'm not good at remembering where things are, so it's guaranteed that I'll lose the keys to my padlocks, and then I'm not going to have any underpants at all. I'm going to have to go Commando, and everybody is going to know it.

See, that's my other irrational fear - that people will know when I'm not wearing underpants. You're just going to look at me and recognize that I'm letting everything hang out in my pants. I mean, I don't normally do that, but what if I did, and then people are fully aware of it? They're going to think that I'm this sleazy dude that NEVER wears underpants, and wants people checking him out. I'm not going to commit one way or another to that. If you want to check me out, I guess I can't stop you, but I don't want you to think that I'm into the idea of you checking me out. And if you ARE checking me out due to my lack of underpants, I think you're getting a pretty shaded picture of me. That's not who I am, man. That's not the whole story of my life. Nobody is going to write on my tombstone, "This dude free-balls 24/7."

It just wouldn't be appropriate.

Maybe somebody should write, "Here Lies LeeboZeebo - He is Super Neurotic About his Boxer Briefs."

Zeebo Out.