Blood Pressure Blog

Ever since I started at my new job, I’ve done all my duties pretty much from home. Getting into the swing of work was initially challenging, especially since nobody breathes down my neck watching me screw up Python scripts probably written by a 1^st grader. Like numerous tech companies, several additions and subtractions to staff have occurred, and ever since work from home, meeting my new coworkers has been extremely difficult. However, on the few times I do visit the office, I get the chance to meet a few new people, all masked, meaning the only thing I can see is the person’s eyes. Now, I’ve been told by 22-year old elementary school art teachers with degrees in plagiarism and dating-app instructions that the eyes are the keys to the soul. Well that advice must be total horse shit, cause how can I tell people apart when I can’t even tell if I work in a place that makes consumer electronics or nuclear missiles? Therefore, I’ve hatched a perfect plan to be able to reintroduce people to each other, taken from French customary social traditions, is that the US should adopt cheek kissing as a form of personable introduction.

My first concern is for people coming back from quarantine, and especially those that feel out of touch with how to socialize and be around people. Since each person’s comfort level with the pandemic is different, this determines whether you’ve maintained social distancing, or broke custom like serial midlife-crisis victim and Goldman Sachs CEO Dave Soloman by DJ’ing house parties for crackheads in the Hamptons. Therefore, a baseline must be established such that those who’ve been social and those that haven’t should be able to start socializing again on a level playing field. The only method I see for this is to introduce a new social custom of cheek kissing/bumping. Since this is a new custom, each person will take time to learn the nuances of this move. However the benefits of this switch highly outweigh the consequences. First, because of a new greeting mechanism, all sorts of social structures within groups of friends is broken, and here at Blood Pressure Podcast, I pride myself on not just “stopping the wheel, [but] breaking the wheel”. Old people and those with simple communicable diseases are also put at a rightly disadvantage, being put in a place where government likely ends up repurposing No Child Left Behind and shipping them off to Monaco to be put in luxury reeducation camps to learn from where this tradition actually started. Therefore, we pay homage to Christian Pulisicicicicic’s strategy of leaving the US to learn elsewhere to avoid playing for the bottom-feeding MLS.

My second concern is for the general sanity of America. As we’ve explored earlier, the human body craves contact, and the lack of such can create general angst in any individual. Therefore, I’m one for exposing people using psychological principles to something that they might fear or be reconditioned. We need to convince ourselves that we should face our fears and not become soft, because if we fear something, then we are stuck. Therefore, immersing ourselves to something that we’re not used to is the only way out of this rut. So, maybe we convince people that this new rule change won’t turn Main Streets around the US into Brazzers.com freeware. Maybe we can convince all the “Thanks Obama” idiots and corporate-healthcare simps that’ll use their caveman brains to somehow blame Michelle Obama’s podcast for the rise in COVID cases. 

There obviously must be some form of training aspect with cheek kissing every stranger you meet. Fortunately, the only way at least 75% of Americans learn anything is through low-def YouTube videos narrated Indian people, hacked together with the Honey Boob Boo equivalent video editing software. Therefore, we elect training capabilities to Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy. He has the perfect (insert tech mumbo jumbo here) necessary while being able to illustrate on a white board the perfect angle of attack to cheek bump a person exactly 6 inches shorter without making it awkward by slamming my jaw into a stranger’s eye socket. I’d also like to elect the help of the Florida Gators Head Coach Dan Mullen, because he lets his wife kiss each of his players before a game, making this the biggest alpha move to show your student athletes that a guy in his late 40’s who’s paid millions of dollars to wear a $5 visor on the sideline actually has the more testosterone than a squat rack.

The current situation of friendly greetings in the United States is a fraud. Hand shaking might be the least hygienic thing we do, as roughly 69% of men don’t wash their hands after using the restroom. Not only is this disgusting, but it proves that statistics FUCK. Apart from lack of hygiene, shaking hands is just plain weird with everyone – with guys, shaking hands is the world’s shittiest try-hard competition to see who’s the biggest Chad, versus shaking a girl’s hand is like introducing yourself to the personification of overcooked spaghetti. Personally, I don’t want to have to defend my man card every time I meet someone who graduated from the Trump University of Handshaking by actively trying to send me to the ER.

Therefore, the choice to switching to a cheek kissing society is obvious. We can live in the past with outdated customs, or move confidently to the future as we begin this new decade. Unfortunately, with the (rise)² of COVID cases, several people will believe that this strategy is a slow moving disaster as predictable as every single plot point in movies featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Fortunately, the methods I’ve outlined have at least some merit, and are definitely worth exploring if you’re a bored college student in his 20’s or Tom Brady.

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