so deep its picked up on radios in tunnels

[A note before we get under way with this little shorty: the inspiration for much of this came from one of the funniest radio shows that I’ve ever listened to – The Gay Beach. Look to the right there and you’ll see a link for it. If you have iTunes, you can get the podcasts and listen to them at your leisure or you can spend part of a Saturday afternoon listening to it live. Anyways, some of the disc-jockey stereotypes from DJ TedWard are just spot on. My favorite was the Super Bowl Weekend and the The Blizzard ’06 weekend that followed immediately afterwards. Favorite quote: “Me and Paul Hardcastle are gonna be out at the Queens Guitar Center tonight handing out bumper stickers. Paul’s gonna be making pancakes. That shit, is gonna be…the bomb.” It’s a lot funnier when he says it though, but you get the point. Anyways, one Saturday was being dubbed ‘Self-Improvement Saturday’. DJ Tedward: if you made that up yourself, you are brilliant. If you didn’t, it’s still really damn funny and it has forever changed the lives of my friends and me.]

Since, oh, March of 06 now, Self Improvement Saturday has been our battle call come Saturday. The ironic twist: Since adopting said battle call, we have never spent a Saturday actually improving ourselves. The very first self-improvement Saturday involved a boozy brunch, drinks at DBA, including a $25 glass of the Glen Livet aged 18 years, a rejected credit card at West Elm and, of course, copious Eddie to end the evening/morning. Satrudays since have sort of fluctuated in terms of intensity, but they've all been pretty much days filled with much drinking and debauchery. Of course, its all well and good on Saturday: sitting at the bar, laughing way to loud about everything and raising multiple toasts to all the self-improvement that we were engaging in.

But as I sat on the couch the next morning with a throbbing headache watching infomercials and sipping a Budweiser (cause someone once told me that alcohol in the morning will help take some of the edge off...to that I say: yeah right), I found myself cursing Self Improvement Saturday. More so, I found myself repeating the phrases, “I hate myself. Why did I do this to myself? I hate myself. Why? What was the point? Why not just go play in traffic and get the same experience in a much shorter amount of time and having spent far less money?” Basically having an Urban-Iccarus-like fall of the old Serotonin levels. Anyways, it dawned on my after a few hours of cursing myself out: I was bound to spend the whole day hating myself, aka self-loathing, aka Self-loathing Sunday. With that, I realized that with any stellar Self-Improvement Saturday, you will almost always find yourself in the grips of a Self-Loathing Sunday. (for all you retired Phish fans out there, i'll annotate that setlist style for you: self-improvement saturday>self-loathing sunday. phatty brah)

And it doesn’t get any better. As I lay in bed yesterday during yet another Self-Loathing Sunday furiously typing on the computer and eating Advil on the half-hour, I tried really, really hard to ignore the sunlight and beautiful weather outside. And the phone calls of people inviting me to do fun things in Brooklyn. And the phone calls of one L-Ren mildly annoyed cause I had been drinking for near on 48 hours and then was too drunk to pass out in bed with her the night before. But I couldn't ignore all that and I ended up hating myself, once again, all day long.

So, um, our advice…no, no, wait this isn’t really advice. Um…our warning…no, no, not that either. For what it’s worth (hopefully your enjoyment) live the HBCC way: Self-Improvement on Saturday and the realization that you’ll be holed up in your bedroom all next day for a fun and exciting Self-Loathing Sunday. Your body and brain and especially your self esteem will at least feel a little better than when you didn’t know about Self-Loathing Sunday and you spent all day trying to rack your brain and remember why the hell you feel so guilty about the excessive amounts of booze, drugs, rogan josh, bobsledding, sex, drugs, booze, partying, pizza, shoes, Sparks, booze, rock n’ roll, guns n’ roses, booze, and sleeping you partook in the night before. (Of course, if you have suggestions for how to battle the self-loathing, feel free to leave them in the comments section. We'll be glad to read them and loathe ourselves even more for not having thought of it them in the first place.)
sing the theme song: SIS is the way we roll/ we choose not to think about the partying toll/ wakin up the next morning/ with no memory at all/ of why we’re in bed naked/ with half eaten garlic rolls/ disgusting disgusting/ I hate myself/ loathing loathing/ where is my clothing?/ yeah