On Friday nights, I like to get home from work and change into pajamas.  Then I make dinner for myself, drink a beer, and watch TV.  I’m usually in bed by 11.

Why, what do you do on weekends?

It’s just that I’m up so early during the week and I still have to work on Saturday mornings.  About six years ago, I had three jobs and spent most of my non-work time partying.  Getting one to three hours of sleep per night was normal to me, and I was still young enough to function that way.  Well, there was that one time I was awake for 48 hours without the benefit of drugs, and by the end of it, I was hallucinating people walking into the road while I was driving home.  But that was pushing it for any normal person, and since those days, I’ve calmed down considerably.  If I have a choice between stumbling home drunk at 3am only to get up in four hours for work on a weekend and going to bed early, getting a full eight hours, and not feeling like a hungover zombie the next morning?  Latter, please.  You’re out of your mind if that seems unreasonable.

After work on Saturdays, I’m motivated by two things:

1. Hunger
2. Knowing that if I’m going to do anything at all that night, I have to either take a nap or consume heart-stopping quantities of caffeine

Hunger is easy to fix with takeout, because if I’ve just been serving other people for 8 hours, I’d like someone else to wait on me for a change.  Naps are usually out of the question because it’s difficult to relax what with the shooting pains in my legs/back/feet and all.  So I caffeinate.  I find some coffee, sit on the couch with my fianceé Netflix Instant on the Wii, and drink strong coffee until I have to be somewhere so as not to disappoint my friends.

Tonight’s movie isn’t even halfway through yet, but it’s paused on the most gigantic pubic bush I have ever seen on a woman, and that’s saying a lot because my dad used to have a box full of 1970s-era Playboys.

Perhaps I should explain.

The title of this (ahem) film is The Workshop, and the writer/director/narrator, some semi-creepy British guy who is a photographer and had one hit single in England (to be fair, though, I may have had one hit single in England because everyone on earth can do it) goes to a self-help workshop near San Francisco to find himself.

Yeah, find himself.  I’ll get back to that in a second.

Anyway, this workshop is run by some guy named Paul Lowe, who looks like a daft hippie who enjoys speaking very slowly in front of a room full of other daft hippies.  Paul Lowe has apparently found himself already and is very good at helping others find themselves, as well.  I’m only 17 minutes in so I’m not sure of everything that’s involved with the process, but as far as I can tell at the moment, finding yourself involves being naked a lot.

Everyone in this goddamn movie is naked.  They spent a ton of money to come to California (no, really, because a lot of these people are British for some reason) and ask Paul Lowe to help them find themselves.  I don’t have a ton of respect for daft hippies, but if there’s one thing they’re good at, it’s getting other daft hippies to pay for useless shit.

Which brings me back to finding yourself.

I’m not claiming to be the most well-adjusted person in the world.  I know that I’m deeply flawed and nowhere near as cool as I act like I am, and that I probably have an awful lot to learn about things, life, and whatnot (although life is not whatnot and it’s none of your business, Anthony Michael Hall).  That said, though, after about two minutes of serious thought over whether or not I need to find myself, I’ve decided that finding myself is completely unnecessary.  So is knowing who I really am, which also seems to be one of Paul Lowe’s goals.

Look, I hate to be the bearer of the most obvious news ever, but if I’ve been living with myself for 28 years and still don’t know who I really am, I probably don’t deserve to find out.  That would make me one hell of an unobservant moron, and perhaps the self I was looking for would not want to know me.  I wouldn’t be able to blame them.

It seems to me that the people staring at Paul Lowe with probably stoned googly eyes aren’t really looking for their true selves; they’re looking for selves that don’t really exist.  They’re looking for better, smarter, more interesting selves, because they’re sure these selves are in there somewhere, and maybe they require more public nudity to show up.  But in my opinion, if you’re willing to spend thousands of dollars to sit around in some weirdo’s ashram and pretend like you’re not in a sex cult when you so very obviously are, there’s not really anything so better, smarter, or more interesting about you.  You are not special.  You are not unique, not really, at least no more so than the rest of us.  You are a daft hippie.  You need to stop treating Paul Lowe like Daft Hippie Jesus and go back to making vegetarian chili for visiting Deadheads.

And you, woman with the gigantic pubic bush doing leg lifts in the communal shower, you need to take a hedgetrimmer to that shit because it is terrifying, and the only excuse you could possibly have is if you live in Norway or somewhere similarly arctic and it’s keeping you warm.