I celebrated my 27th birthday yesterday, and did a lot of thinking about birthdays. The question rolling around my head was why do we mark the day we were born? All I did 27 years ago was be born, and as I remember it, I had very little to do with that. I’m fairly certain that the person who worked the hardest 27 years ago was my mom. Why don’t I celebrate my high school graduation every year? That was something I worked much harder on and something I’m much prouder to know I did. What are we celebrating other than making it around the sun again?

I think it has to do with probability. For a lot of people, it’s dumb luck. They’re TXTing and don’t immediately notice the walk sign, so that car running the red light just misses them. They decide to hike a new path and don’t get hit by the boulder that rolls down across the path they’ve been walking every day for the past six years. Their alarm doesn’t go off and they miss their plane that never arrives at its destination.

I suppose I have a somewhat predictable feeling about probability. I got cancer, which most people don’t get. I got leukemia, which most cancer patients my age don’t get. I got hemorrhagic pancreatitis, which most leukemia patients don’t get. I’m that .01% that you hear about on the drug commercials who get headaches, cramps, and/or hooves.

But I’ve also managed to hold onto a very different view of probability. I couldn’t get a diagnosis over four months in NYC, and finally came home to be diagnosed with leukemia a week before it almost certainly would have been fatal. Because I thought I’d broken my arm, I wound up at The Children’s Hospital, where I had seen my old orthopedist. While I hadn’t really broken my arm, I was bound to The Children’s Hospital at which, as an adult, my chances for survival from the pediatric cancer I had contracted were astronomically higher than they would have been at an adult hospital. My hemorrhaged pancreas was destroying my internal organs, and when my mom asked the doctors and surgeons at the U if I would be okay, they told her they’d never seen anyone survive that was in the condition I was in–but I did survive.

So, while I’m that .01% who might get headaches, nausea, and/or male pregnancy on the drug commercials, I’m also that .01% who has survived everything thrown at him. Maybe it’s dumb luck. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t know.

What I do know is that next year will be my golden birthday–I’ll turn 28 on July 28, 2011. But that’s certainly not the only thing that will make it special. It will be my first chemo-free birthday in four years. It will be a victory, just as these past three birthdays have been, and just as every single birthday for the rest of my life will be. Victory in the face of probability. Victory that I’ve made it around the sun one more time.

–Reid.

Have you ever wondered if a snake and a hamster would make good roommates? Me neither. Here’s some new Smosh:

Featuring a frog jumping around with a mouse on its back. What else could you possibly need to know? Mother Nature provided the animals, I provided the jokes.

–Reid.

I have always considered my personal YouTube channel more archival than promotional.

Nevertheless, my channel has spawned a minor hit. “Baseball Revenge,” a short sketch comedy video Jason, and I made with Matt the summer before college, was featured on Yahoo! Sports over the weekend. It’s the first video from my personal YouTube channel to be viewed more than 20,000 times. For that matter, it’s also the first to be viewed more than 2,000 times.

Here is “Baseball Revenge.” It is nine years old:

This is a very mathematical YouTube graph showing video views for this video:

You may not be mathematical enough to understand it. That green spike on the right is the day people viewed the video. The green line to the left of that, which runs along the bottom of the graph, represents the entirety of human history all the way back to November 19, 2008, a dark time during which no one watched the video.

 

I knew the video had been posted somewhere popular when I was notified that the number of comments had more than doubled:

Now there are four comments and even a (hidden) spam comment! Wow. To top it all off, none of the commenters are telling me I should get cancer and die. That’s a refreshing change.

 

There is a neat new feature on YouTube that, if a video has lots of views from a different website, YouTube automatically displays an “As Seen On:” title underneath the video. In this case, underneath this video, it says “As Seen On: sports.yahoo.com.”

Better Than The Machine doesn’t have any official YouTube “As Seen On:” links, although, I’m certain we would if the feature had been implemented way back in Twenty Ought Six.

If you’d like to check out any of the other videos in my archives that I do not believe will ever cross the 200 view threshold, let alone the 20,000 view threshold, mosey on over to my YouTube channel. Or don’t. If I’ve learned anything from this, it is that lethargy is the key to success. Write that down and look at it often, kids. Or don’t.

–Reid.

I wrote and did all the art for this, except for “Donald Duck,” for whom credit goes to my editor C.J. Arabia. Donald replaced Mel Gibson, who I had as the last entry. I will admit that rearranging some stuff was a good editorial decision… it plays better like this. I’ll get it on my own soon. Thanks C.J.!

–Reid.

As of today, Monday, July 12, I have only ten months of chemotherapy left to go and then I’m done. I wish I felt better today so that I could celebrate properly (whatever that means). Unfortunately, over the weekend the varicella virus decided to stop by for its annual vacation in my body. Just another reason to be excited that in less than a year, I should have some semblance of an immune system again. Woo!

I can’t wait to see the expression on varicella’s lipid envelope when it sees that “No Vacancies” sign next year. It’ll be priceless!

–Reid.

—————-
Now playing: Coldplay – Life In Technicolor
via FoxyTunes

I’ve got a new gig writing for humor website Smosh.com. Smosh.com is the homepage of a comedy duo called, as you may imagine, “Smosh.” There are more than 400,000 registered members on the site, which rakes in over five million hits each month. Smosh’s YouTube channel is the fourth most subscribed to channel of all time. For some perspective, Smosh’s channel has 1,624,405 subscribers while Better Than The Machine’s channel has a *ahem* respectable 2,866 subscribers. So the number of BTTM subscribers isn’t even close to seven digits yet, big deal! Millions of fans… who wants to have to respond to all that fan mail, anyway? Not… not BTTM… that’s for sure. Yeah…

In addition to a pretty steady stream of smosh from the famous-on-the-Internet duo, Smosh.com has a handful of comedy writers who also contribute articles to the site. I am now one of those way less famous-on-the-Internet writers. The material we write adds more funny content to just the site; it’s not written for, or directly linked to the two guys in Smosh or their videos. The pieces we write, though, are intended for the same audience, so we write in a voice that appeals to that audience. That voice is different from my personal comic sensibilities and, in many cases, is totally outside my sense of humor altogether. Which isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s quite a good exercise in adapting to someone else’s voice, which is a big part of being a professional staff writer.

I got this job entirely thanks to my very thoughtful friend C.J. Arabia. C.J. is the former editor of NBC’s DotComedy who gave Dave Burdick and me the opportunity and the support to produce The Guys in 3A.

I wrote this article (and Photoshopped the images) a few days ago. I feel like it’s approaching a good balance between my sense of humor and the senses of humor of the Smosh.com audience. It’s pretty silly.

What’s perhaps sillier than the article itself is that a lot of people seem confused as to whether this story, with the silly pictures and everything, is real. So let me just clear this up: the news about some lady winning the lotto for the fourth time is true. But the rest? Not true… to the best of my knowledge.

–Reid.

Facebook is having trouble importing my (and lots of other people’s) blog entries to “Notes.” By which I mean Facebook is not importing my (and lots of other people’s) blog entries to “Notes.”

All my hilarious and leukemic antics of the past month (and sporadically before that) are missing from Facebook, including, but not limited to:

-A trip to Washington, D.C. to spend Independence Day with my sisters that I slept through!

-Apple geniuses not only repairing my graphics card, but also going so far as to give my laptop a shiny new casing!

-Fun with foot-and-mouth disease, a very painful mouth and throat disease that only animals and very lucky humans like leukemia patients get!

-And who could forget my conviction as being a Russian spy?

Classic! And much of that stuff actually happened!

I changed some settings and am hoping this blog entry will automatically be posted on Facebook, rather than only linking back to reidlevin.net. We shall see. Oh yes, we shall.

–Reid.

—————-
Now playing: Taranchula – Moving Very Slowly
via FoxyTunes

I spent this past long weekend in Washington, DC, visiting my sisters and thus successfully continuing an unbroken three year run of 3R out-of-Denver Independence Days. I think it can now officially be considered a tradition. I’m glad to have been able to spend the holiday with them, even if I was sick and in bed most of my time there.

My laptop, like me, broke down in DC. This was of some note, as just two weeks prior, I had taken my laptop in to be examined (by a genius, no less) because the screen was blank sometimes when it should not have been blank. Like when it was turned on. That problem was attributed to my screen by the genius, “and definitely not to a specific graphics card put into specific laptops manufactured during a specific period of time in 2007″ (“what an oddly specific thing for this genius to say,” I thought to myself at the time). The genius took away my computer, so as to repair the screen “and definitely not some very specific graphics card like the one inside this super specific laptop” (“why does this genius keep talking about that?” I naïvely wondered to myself).

I got my laptop back, with a brand new screen, and used it only once before traveling to DC. The first time I tried to boot it up in DC, however, nothing happened. My first thought was, “I’ll bet this has something to do with a specific graphics card put into specific laptops manufactured during a specific period of time in 2007.” A more forthcoming genius in DC was only too happy to tell me the whole story. It turns out there is a known error with the specific graphics card I have in the specific model laptop I have that was manufactured during the specific time mine was manufactured.

I was less perturbed than I would’ve guessed I’d be, having had to give up my computer for what will end up being at least two weeks for a misdiagnosed known problem. I’ll chalk this calm reaction up to AppleCare and Apple’s “if it breaks, we’ll fix it no matter what (see terms and conditions for limitations of liability)” attitude. I have Amy to thank for talking my dad into AppleCare when, in an unlikely team-up event, she and my dad teamed-up and went shopping together to buy me a laptop when I was in the hospital in ’07-’08.

Oh, and somewhere in this recent ’010 timeframe, I got hired to write for a comedy website. But more about that later.

–Reid.
Listening to: “Hook” by Blues Traveler.
Painstakingly “typed” on my iPhone.