For the last four years or so I’ve been pretty preoccupied with success. I’ve been trying to figure out just what constitutes success, what different kinds there are and what types used to be and now are important to me--professional, commercial, personal, etc. I’ve been almost paralyzed with this sort of fear that I’ll never achieve the kinds of success I’ve decided to pursue, and I’ve lost countless hours of sleep trying to figure out ways I can prevent this failure. Some of those hours have been spent watching stuff; some have been spent reading things; some have been spent speaking with some of the people I hold dear and in the highest esteem as well as people I hope to never ever end up like; most have been spent thinking to myself, trying to plot out an ideal future (which is impossible to do by laying in bed and thinking) and frame my own definition of success and how to achieve it. This has proven to be pretty much impossible, because there are so many facets to becoming successful in the ideal way people wish for, and realizing that was probably the first step I took towards being content with the success I may someday find. Now that I’m uncomfortably close to transitioning from college kid to real adult, I’ve decided it’s a good idea to at least get some of my thoughts together and cohesive, so I can at least be happy.
For some reason, I’ve decided to share them with you.
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Everything has got to start with confidence. I can’t stress how important being confident is for basically every facet of life. If you feel like you’re a piece of shit, then other people are going to treat you that way, whether it’s your boss, girlfriend or some douche bag that wants to get your goat. If you want to be good at something, there’s a certain amount of other factors involved, but without a certain degree of confidence you won’t be able to reach your full potential, no matter how high your prowess or skill level.
Throughout my short life I’ve seen a great many guys date girls that are extremely far out of their league. More often than not, this was due to the guy’s confidence level. He was confident enough with himself to show the girl who he really was, and to do the things he liked to do, and inadvertently impressed the shit out of all of his friends (and even other guys that weren’t even close to being his friend, because they resented him for his success with women that they couldn’t understand).
Make eye contact. Eyes are so rarely ugly, and if they are people probably won’t tell you. People like to look eye-to-eye because you can tell so much about how a person is feeling by the way they look at you. This is unavoidable. Find a way how to master making eye contact without staring, though. Because staring can be creepy. The same thing goes with smiling. If you’re smile’s ugly and you’re older than 13 people probably won’t tell you, and will appreciate you smiling at them regardless. If you’re smile’s that bad, use some confidence to get a better paying job, get Invisalign for a few months, and smile your heart out. As long as you’re not doing it to the point where you resemble the Joker, because that is also creepy.
Everybody has flaws. Do not complain about these flaws, because complaining to someone about being fat, having an ugly smile, a man rack or anything else will not make them go away. It’s a lot better to accentuate your good traits than to draw attention the bad ones, and people will get annoyed as shit with you if you keep calling yourself fat. And if you are fat, go to the gym. If you’re fat because you have terrible genes, find something to divert people from your weight (which is easier said than done, I’m sure). When was the last time you heard somebody make fun of Zach Galifianakis for being overweight? Being self-conscious has rarely helped anybody with anything.
Communicate, because speaking and sharing things with other people is easily one of the most important things in life. Without communicating, people really begin to misunderstand each other. They still do when they’re communicating, but at least then they can understand why, and have a discussion about it. I don’t think I’ve ever spent someone who has spent their life almost completely in solitude that has felt successful and happy. I’ve never met any of these people, since they don’t communicate with the outside world, but I’ve read about them.
Find a friend or group of friends you can share your life with, and never let them go (this includes family, because the members of my family are some of my best friends, obviously). These are the people that will make you feel better when things aren’t going well, and they’ll supplement the amount of fun in your life to an extent that I don’t think most can comprehend. Never take advantage of these people or do wrong to them, because at the end of the day there isn’t one person in this world that knows for sure if there is a god or an afterlife, but nobody can deny that friends are real and important. Unless you’re a really big douchebag.
Stay in step with technology. This never used to be such an important thing, but if you don’t do it the world could leave you behind. There’s a good chance that, if you’re my age, your friends and family are or are about to be in places all over the world. We have the Internet and other methods that help people stay in touch, so you’d be stupid not to. This will also help you with most occupations. Some companies really get excited when you know how to use Microsoft Excel or Skype. Technology also allows people to stay connected with current events and popular culture, which make it so much easier to communicate with others. You’ll always have something to talk about, especially since Lady Gaga wears something stupid pretty much everyday of the week.
Don’t be too afraid to dance. Chances are you’re going to look like an idiot, but chances are nobody around you truly gives a fuck. In fact, if you’re not a public figure, most people don’t care what you do at all. Sometimes it’s alright to just go for it. It might pay off in an unforseen way, too. I’ve actually seen my friends win women over with their terrible dance moves, which is probably better than winning them over with free beer at the Kappa Felt A Thigh house.
Learn to recover from heartbreak and loss, and if you can do so quickly and without permanent damage, find some way to teach others how to do the same. Whenever you do get your heart broken--which will certainly happen to almost everybody at at least one time or another--think about the people that haven’t felt anything like that. This gives them nothing to compare love to, which may actually dull the sensation of true love, or make it unrecognizable. Feel free to go on your requisite bender and to embrace the bitterness left in your heart for a while, but try your best not to let it consume you. If it does, though, which often happens, get something from it. Do something you normally wouldn’t or couldn’t, just because you’ve got back time to yourself that wasn’t originally there. Go on a trip, whether it’s camping with your friends or to the strip club down the Interstate. There’s nothing that the road cannot heal, and it’s important to be able to know and embrace both elation and depression.
Be chivalrous. So few guys are anymore, and it’s a very important thing. Open the doors for women, give up your seat for them on the bus, pay for their dinner at least every once in a while. Bring them little meaningful gifts for no real reason. Write them love letters, or at least tell them just how much they mean to you. Also, attempt to make them laugh. Women seem to really like it when guys make them laugh. (This ties into the guys who’ve dated out of their league that I know. They are all able to make their girlfriends--and other people’s girlfriends--laugh incessantly.)
Just because you’re chivalrous, though, don’t be afraid to fight with women (not physically, please, because that usually doesn’t work out). Don’t let them walk all over you, or take advantage of you. They can be wily creatures, and to be truly successful you cannot allow them to completely run your life. Once someone becomes your sincere everything, you’ve got nothing else. (An example: This sort of happened to me a couple of years ago. I was so absorbed with this one woman that I completely disregarded my own self. There are many events and emotions I could site, but I’ll stick to one: While with her, I lost 12 pounds within about a month, and didn’t even notice. If that happened to me now, I would probably throw a party.)
Actually, don’t be afraid to fight with anybody. It’s extremely difficult to be successful if anybody is walking all over you.
Think for yourself, question authority and gather knowledge that will serve to help you form your own opinions. Don’t be a Republican or a Catholic or a crack dealer just because your Dad is. If you educate yourself on the pros and cons of being any of those and still think it’d be a good decision, then go ahead and go for it, I sure as hell won’t stop you (but if you choose to be a crack dealer the DEA might).
Argue very fervently with people you disagree with, but don’t disparage or persecute the beliefs of others. It’s always important to remember that there’s that constant chance that neither of you is really right. But still always try and win. Just win cleanly. Don’t try and convince someone that purchasing a houseboat would be a good idea by telling them they have a big nose. (Also, it turns out that this really might not be a good investment, but that depends on a great deal of things you can look up on your own if you’re considering buying a houseboat.) Base your arguments around being optimistic, pessimistic and realistic. All three are important and are appropriate for different things at different points in your life. Chances are, you’ll fuck up and be the wrong one at the wrong time more often than not, but that just keeps the arguments going and allows you to learn a little bit more, or at least to gather some things to consider.
Don’t be afraid to fight, argue or disrespect people who are older than you when it’s warranted. The notion that people should respect their elders simply because they’re older than whoever is supposed to be respecting them is one of the dumbest fucking things I have ever heard. You don’t need to respect someone or let them take advantage of you simply because they’ve been on the earth longer than you, because they had nothing to do with that. You had absolutely no control over when your parents decided to have sex. Remember that.
Exercise, get up early, eat right, stay clean, dress well. Put “sometimes” after each one of those things I just wrote.
Become your own commodity. Make yourself, as an individual, someone that is valuable to many people, whether it’s at work or in a social or familial sense. Make it so that if people can still live without you (which, let’s be honest, pretty much everybody probably could), they don’t want to live without you.
Put yourself in the position to be considered an expert on something. It doesn’t matter if it’s on books, TV shows and movies, zebras, Judaism or cool videos of goats on YouTube. It will make anyone feel good to be questioned on how to do something, or where to find something (unless it’s how to cheat on your wife or where to find lime to stop the stench coming from the closet where you’ve put all those deceased hookers).
Digest everything. Read books (they really do make you smart, or at least seem smarter than you really are, believe me), watch lots of TV shows and movies, learn about zebras and spend time in the outdoors, educate yourself on Judaism and laugh really hard at some YouTube videos. These are all ways to gather the knowledge that you don’t really find in most educational environments (unless you’re a journalism major like me, we are subjected to some really stupid shit that we’d be better off looking into at home and not paying for).
Don’t use the word “like” more often than you have to. It makes you sound similar to a valley girl. You don’t want to be like that. Ah, shit.
Learn to spell the word “definitely” correctly.
Give a fuck about things, but only to a certain point. You don’t want to be a tight ass, because it’s so much more difficult to have fun then. Remember that there’s a time and place to take things seriously, and that it’s a lot less often than most people think.
Shout really, really loud sometimes. Scream even. For some reason this is good for you, and it makes you feel better about things. Just make sure you’re doing it out of earshot of people who may worry or be frightened or both.
It’s okay to have habits, but don’t allow them to be stronger than you. If you’re doing something you don’t think you could quit doing if you absolutely had to, you should probably reevaluate some things.
Do something at the end of every single day that you can look forward to throughout the day. I don’t care what it is. (Unless it’s something really bad, then I don’t want to tell you to do that. Like choking yourself during manual stimulation or anything like that. Joining a fight club is certainly acceptable, though.)
Keep your own story moving, and keep it entertaining. Have the initiative to do this. No life is completely boring if you don’t allow it to be.
Sit outside by yourself in a beautiful place at least once or twice a year and just think about things. Ideally, you should do this on a starry night at a place you really enjoy going to be alone. I personally like to go to a park where there’s a really nice lake and a dock I can walk out and sit on. A girl took me there once when we were really young and showed it to me. She’s now a woman, and is probably closer to finding success than I am, so she knows things.
Don’t be afraid or ashamed to cry sometimes. It’s a lot like dancing. People don’t think less of you if you do it, even if you don’t look particularly good while doing it.
Help people who are less fortunate than you, and stick up for people who can’t stick up for themselves. Do this simply to do it, and not for any other motivation. Doing the right thing can go a long way.
Use “sir” and “ma’am” every once in a while. If you do, it’s pretty common for someone to tell you not to, because it makes them feel old (commonly women). If/when this happens, say “Oh, I didn’t know 25 was old.” Crisis averted.
Make a routine that you follow, and then break the shit out of it sometimes.
Compliment people. Tell them they have pretty eyes.
Travel a lot if you can.
Cheat on your taxes. Sticking it to the man gives a person the largest feeling of success possible.
And please, no matter what you do: Don’t hang out in the fucking fast lane unless you’re passing someone and there’s nobody directly behind you.
And try to be happy.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Stupid Sayings
There are a lot of cliche sayings and quotes out there. I guess some of them are decent and promote good things, but some of them are just so damn stupid that I can’t even wrap my head around it. You know what I’m talking about. The kind of things you constantly see on the Facebook “write something about yourself” boxes and “favorite quote” profile supplements and on AIM or iChat away messages. They’re things you’ve seen in print and heard over and over again, for years. Every time I hear one of these now I just begin to overanalyze them, and I think about how absurd some of them truly are. I’ve kept my opinion on these things to myself for a long time, because I’ve been hesitant to offend anyone that buys into many of them and publishes them all over the Internet (as I’m about to do) and on their fucking trapper keepers (mine says Love Conquers All!). I guess, though, I didn’t have much else to write about tonight, and felt that I’d share a few of my least favorite cliched sayings with you.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Who the fuck ever came up with this saying? It really makes absolutely no sense, not even metaphorically. My parents never got me a cake on or around my birthday and been like, “Here you go Scott. This cake is yours. You have it, but you cannot fucking eat it, do you understand me?” Isn’t the only point of having a cake to eat it (unless you’re on Cake Wars)? There is absolutely no point in having something if you can’t use it for what it was made for. Otherwise, it’s a huge waste. You don’t buy a hoagie and just stare at it until it gets moldy, and you don’t buy a television and then never watch it. I can kind of get what people are trying to say with this one, which is something like “You can’t always have things your way,” or something along those lines. Which is probably just exactly what they should be saying in the first place. Delicious baked goods have no place in such a philosophical conversation as “You can’t have a wife and be banging her sister in law” (Brodeur) or “You can’t drink 15 beers everyday and remain at your fighting weight for the rest of your life.” If you have a cake and you’re not going to eat it, don’t waste it. Give it to a homeless person or someone else that’s going to appreciate it. Do the same thing if you buy some shoes you’re not going to wear, too.
“From the bottom of my heart” Where I come from, when you really want something to resonate, you say it came from the top. But, for some reason, when people are talking about the heart, they use extra emphasis by saying the feelings spewing from the heart are coming from the bottom, which makes no sense to me. If somebody tells me they love me from the bottom of their heart, then wouldn’t that mean that the love they feel for me is probably toward the bottom of the standings, underneath that other guy, eating cake, new episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Ugg boots? If I’m metaphorically storing the strongest kind of love in my heart, then I’m probably going to stow it somewhere toward the top, where it won’t get lost or clouded over by other things, like Johnnie Walker Red or burritos from Qdoba.
“Love is all you need” No, it really isn’t. I don’t get this one, either. I mean, love is a pretty good thing to have. It’s an overwhelming and sometimes frightening emotion, and it has a huge place in both our psyches and within society as a whole. (Without love, we wouldn’t have all those ridiculous VH1 shows with Ray J and Flavor Flave and shit.) But, it’s not all that you need. In fact, I’m sure there are certain people who have gone through their entire lives without ever feeling love, people like Adolph Hitler and Ted Bundy. I’m not recommending living without love, but I’m saying it could be done. Also, if you’re in love or you love something, that’s not really all you need at all. Love isn’t even in that magical equation of three that people used to always tell me I needed growing up. I know that food and shelter were the first two, and I can’t remember if it was water or clothing that rounded out the list. I don’t know if water is included in the food category, but if not it’s definitely more important than clothing. People live in nudist colonies and never wear fucking clothes, and they’re probably having a great time. I think this saying is actually very damaging, because people listen to it and spend a very significant amount of time and energy avidly looking for love. That’s not something you can look for, it’s got to find you, I think. I could be wrong.
“Cheaters never win and winners never cheat” If you’re a baseball enthusiast, I encourage you to compare the amount of games you’ve won with Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi or anyone else who has used steroids (see: the entire fucking league). They’ve won. A lot. And they’ve made a lot of money winning, even if their testicles were shrinking. This can also translate over to real life. How many kids do you know that have cheated on a test and done better than you, even though you were being honest? You might feel like a winner, but I’d like to see you go into a job interview and be like, “Well my GPA isn’t as good as some peoples’ because I didn’t cheat ever!” How many people do you know that have gotten a job because they knew someone who worked at the company, even though they may not have been qualified as other people that applied? That’s a form of cheating, but those people ultimately win, no matter what you tell yourself.
“It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” I heard this all the time as soon as I started playing competitive sports, and even then I knew it was a bunch of bullshit, because the vast majority of people that play sports on an officially assembled team play because they like the sport and want to win. I couldn’t then, and still can’t now, comprehend how nobody, in all of the years this saying has been in existence, spoke up and said “Well, isn’t the way that you play the game probably the biggest factor as to whether or not you’re going to win or lose?” It seemed pretty obvious to me.
Now, I know that sometimes this is supposed to tell people that if they’re losing in the final thirty seconds they shouldn’t chop block the opposition or karate chop them in the neck, but why don’t they just tell people not to be pussies, suck up the fact that they lost, and not be a sore loser? Normally, when you lose it’s yours/your team’s fault. Why would you begrudge another team that did what you were supposed to do, only better?
But it is all about winning and losing, pretty much. Because that’s why games exist. If there was no way to crown a winner at the end of a football game, do you think we’d pay a bunch of idiots millions of dollars to just fuck around on a field for three hours? Would baseball players pump themselves full of physically and mentally damaging performance enhancing drugs if they weren’t trying to win?
“The pen is mightier than the sword” No, it isn’t. Say somebody that believes, from the bottom of their heart, that a person really cannot have their cake and eat it too, and they get really pissed at me for chastising their beliefs, so they come up to me on campus and gut me with a saber on Monday morning. I can’t stop a sword with my pen, no matter how smoothly it rolls across pages, and if I get knifed down, my words aren’t really going to be worth that much afterward anyway. People will only look back and say that I antagonized someone that really dug cake.
“Pain is weakness leaving the body” This is often used by the armed forces, a group of people I respect and would not want to fuck with, but I really don’t agree with this saying. Pain is pain. It fucking hurts, and it’s not because your weakness is exiting your being. It’s because muscles and bones and body tissue have nerves that respond to things that inflict pain. The nerves send these messages to your brain that say stuff like, “Why is this fucking guy doing 30 chin-ups?” or “Does this dude not know not to put icy hot anywhere near his genitalia?” or “Why doesn’t he stop punching walls when his girlfriend talks to other guys?” I mean, if you’re working out and you’re sore following that, then I guess the lactic acid could be construed as weakness leaving the body as you get stronger, but that’s about it.
“Be the change you want to see in the world.” This is a really popular one, and it was really fucking easy for Gandhi to say something like this, because people loved him. He could actually promote change. Most people are not capable or able to do these things. The kinds of changes people want to see in the world are on such a broader scale than what one individual can accomplish. Take me, for instance. I think one of the biggest changes I’d like to see in the world (besides more fast food restaurants offering breakfast all day like Jack in the Box or Bar Rafaeli falling in love with 22-year-old poor white dudes that write blogs) would be for some of those crazies over there in the middle east to get their damn minds right and stop thinking other countries are the devil, and to stop blowing up their own fucking bodies and killing innocent people just to prove some point that they probably don’t even fully understand. (Seriously, they tell these guys they’re going to get to have sex with 72 virgins in their version of heaven because they fucking blew themselves up. How idiotic is that? It doesn’t even begin to make any sense, but that’s religion for you, sometimes.) They’re pretty set in their ways, and I cannot be the person to change that. It is literally impossible.
“Nothing is impossible.” Okay. I’m not even going to provide an example or explanation here, because anyone with the cognitive abilities to read that bold print has already thought of something that would be completely impossible for them to do.
“If you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best." This one is so extremely popular with the ladies it’s disgusting. Basically, all this quote is good for is to give certain girls the mindset that they are allowed to act like raging bitches around their significant others, simply because when they’re at their best they are just so great and irresistible. What the hell is that shit? If you’re a girl and you’re reading this, then take heed. Do not use this quote anywhere that it can be linked to you. Just don’t do it. And don’t listen to it and think that the way of thinking that could accompany belief in a quote like that is moral or justified, and don’t think that any guy worth his salt would agree with it. It’s not that, if you’re going to be with someone in a romantic way, you won’t ever see their worst. I’m sure that’s part of it (from my experience), if you’re around that person long enough. But don’t embrace the fact that somebody might be a little bitch and let you push them around when you’re ”at your worst.“ It shouldn’t be about handling you, unless you’re a one person trainwreck. It should be about them trying to help you out a little bit and make you feel better.
If you’re not going to take my advice on this, that’s fine. I don’t care. You’ll end up with someone like Spencer Pratt or something. Just keep in mind that this quote originally came from Marilyn Monroe, a woman who was married and divorced three times before the age of 35. She also killed herself by overdosing on barbituates. Probably not the best person to be taking advice from on such matters. It didn’t really work out for her.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Who the fuck ever came up with this saying? It really makes absolutely no sense, not even metaphorically. My parents never got me a cake on or around my birthday and been like, “Here you go Scott. This cake is yours. You have it, but you cannot fucking eat it, do you understand me?” Isn’t the only point of having a cake to eat it (unless you’re on Cake Wars)? There is absolutely no point in having something if you can’t use it for what it was made for. Otherwise, it’s a huge waste. You don’t buy a hoagie and just stare at it until it gets moldy, and you don’t buy a television and then never watch it. I can kind of get what people are trying to say with this one, which is something like “You can’t always have things your way,” or something along those lines. Which is probably just exactly what they should be saying in the first place. Delicious baked goods have no place in such a philosophical conversation as “You can’t have a wife and be banging her sister in law” (Brodeur) or “You can’t drink 15 beers everyday and remain at your fighting weight for the rest of your life.” If you have a cake and you’re not going to eat it, don’t waste it. Give it to a homeless person or someone else that’s going to appreciate it. Do the same thing if you buy some shoes you’re not going to wear, too.
“From the bottom of my heart” Where I come from, when you really want something to resonate, you say it came from the top. But, for some reason, when people are talking about the heart, they use extra emphasis by saying the feelings spewing from the heart are coming from the bottom, which makes no sense to me. If somebody tells me they love me from the bottom of their heart, then wouldn’t that mean that the love they feel for me is probably toward the bottom of the standings, underneath that other guy, eating cake, new episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Ugg boots? If I’m metaphorically storing the strongest kind of love in my heart, then I’m probably going to stow it somewhere toward the top, where it won’t get lost or clouded over by other things, like Johnnie Walker Red or burritos from Qdoba.
“Love is all you need” No, it really isn’t. I don’t get this one, either. I mean, love is a pretty good thing to have. It’s an overwhelming and sometimes frightening emotion, and it has a huge place in both our psyches and within society as a whole. (Without love, we wouldn’t have all those ridiculous VH1 shows with Ray J and Flavor Flave and shit.) But, it’s not all that you need. In fact, I’m sure there are certain people who have gone through their entire lives without ever feeling love, people like Adolph Hitler and Ted Bundy. I’m not recommending living without love, but I’m saying it could be done. Also, if you’re in love or you love something, that’s not really all you need at all. Love isn’t even in that magical equation of three that people used to always tell me I needed growing up. I know that food and shelter were the first two, and I can’t remember if it was water or clothing that rounded out the list. I don’t know if water is included in the food category, but if not it’s definitely more important than clothing. People live in nudist colonies and never wear fucking clothes, and they’re probably having a great time. I think this saying is actually very damaging, because people listen to it and spend a very significant amount of time and energy avidly looking for love. That’s not something you can look for, it’s got to find you, I think. I could be wrong.
“Cheaters never win and winners never cheat” If you’re a baseball enthusiast, I encourage you to compare the amount of games you’ve won with Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi or anyone else who has used steroids (see: the entire fucking league). They’ve won. A lot. And they’ve made a lot of money winning, even if their testicles were shrinking. This can also translate over to real life. How many kids do you know that have cheated on a test and done better than you, even though you were being honest? You might feel like a winner, but I’d like to see you go into a job interview and be like, “Well my GPA isn’t as good as some peoples’ because I didn’t cheat ever!” How many people do you know that have gotten a job because they knew someone who worked at the company, even though they may not have been qualified as other people that applied? That’s a form of cheating, but those people ultimately win, no matter what you tell yourself.
“It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” I heard this all the time as soon as I started playing competitive sports, and even then I knew it was a bunch of bullshit, because the vast majority of people that play sports on an officially assembled team play because they like the sport and want to win. I couldn’t then, and still can’t now, comprehend how nobody, in all of the years this saying has been in existence, spoke up and said “Well, isn’t the way that you play the game probably the biggest factor as to whether or not you’re going to win or lose?” It seemed pretty obvious to me.
Now, I know that sometimes this is supposed to tell people that if they’re losing in the final thirty seconds they shouldn’t chop block the opposition or karate chop them in the neck, but why don’t they just tell people not to be pussies, suck up the fact that they lost, and not be a sore loser? Normally, when you lose it’s yours/your team’s fault. Why would you begrudge another team that did what you were supposed to do, only better?
But it is all about winning and losing, pretty much. Because that’s why games exist. If there was no way to crown a winner at the end of a football game, do you think we’d pay a bunch of idiots millions of dollars to just fuck around on a field for three hours? Would baseball players pump themselves full of physically and mentally damaging performance enhancing drugs if they weren’t trying to win?
“The pen is mightier than the sword” No, it isn’t. Say somebody that believes, from the bottom of their heart, that a person really cannot have their cake and eat it too, and they get really pissed at me for chastising their beliefs, so they come up to me on campus and gut me with a saber on Monday morning. I can’t stop a sword with my pen, no matter how smoothly it rolls across pages, and if I get knifed down, my words aren’t really going to be worth that much afterward anyway. People will only look back and say that I antagonized someone that really dug cake.
“Pain is weakness leaving the body” This is often used by the armed forces, a group of people I respect and would not want to fuck with, but I really don’t agree with this saying. Pain is pain. It fucking hurts, and it’s not because your weakness is exiting your being. It’s because muscles and bones and body tissue have nerves that respond to things that inflict pain. The nerves send these messages to your brain that say stuff like, “Why is this fucking guy doing 30 chin-ups?” or “Does this dude not know not to put icy hot anywhere near his genitalia?” or “Why doesn’t he stop punching walls when his girlfriend talks to other guys?” I mean, if you’re working out and you’re sore following that, then I guess the lactic acid could be construed as weakness leaving the body as you get stronger, but that’s about it.
“Be the change you want to see in the world.” This is a really popular one, and it was really fucking easy for Gandhi to say something like this, because people loved him. He could actually promote change. Most people are not capable or able to do these things. The kinds of changes people want to see in the world are on such a broader scale than what one individual can accomplish. Take me, for instance. I think one of the biggest changes I’d like to see in the world (besides more fast food restaurants offering breakfast all day like Jack in the Box or Bar Rafaeli falling in love with 22-year-old poor white dudes that write blogs) would be for some of those crazies over there in the middle east to get their damn minds right and stop thinking other countries are the devil, and to stop blowing up their own fucking bodies and killing innocent people just to prove some point that they probably don’t even fully understand. (Seriously, they tell these guys they’re going to get to have sex with 72 virgins in their version of heaven because they fucking blew themselves up. How idiotic is that? It doesn’t even begin to make any sense, but that’s religion for you, sometimes.) They’re pretty set in their ways, and I cannot be the person to change that. It is literally impossible.
“Nothing is impossible.” Okay. I’m not even going to provide an example or explanation here, because anyone with the cognitive abilities to read that bold print has already thought of something that would be completely impossible for them to do.
“If you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best." This one is so extremely popular with the ladies it’s disgusting. Basically, all this quote is good for is to give certain girls the mindset that they are allowed to act like raging bitches around their significant others, simply because when they’re at their best they are just so great and irresistible. What the hell is that shit? If you’re a girl and you’re reading this, then take heed. Do not use this quote anywhere that it can be linked to you. Just don’t do it. And don’t listen to it and think that the way of thinking that could accompany belief in a quote like that is moral or justified, and don’t think that any guy worth his salt would agree with it. It’s not that, if you’re going to be with someone in a romantic way, you won’t ever see their worst. I’m sure that’s part of it (from my experience), if you’re around that person long enough. But don’t embrace the fact that somebody might be a little bitch and let you push them around when you’re ”at your worst.“ It shouldn’t be about handling you, unless you’re a one person trainwreck. It should be about them trying to help you out a little bit and make you feel better.
If you’re not going to take my advice on this, that’s fine. I don’t care. You’ll end up with someone like Spencer Pratt or something. Just keep in mind that this quote originally came from Marilyn Monroe, a woman who was married and divorced three times before the age of 35. She also killed herself by overdosing on barbituates. Probably not the best person to be taking advice from on such matters. It didn’t really work out for her.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Random Thoughts: January
Sorry this is a little late this month. I’ve been really busy trying to figure out a way that I could turn having a blog that’s pretty much about nothing consequential into a job opportunity (I’ve had no success). I’ve also been trying to figure out other ways a kid can get a job with benefits if he’s a journalism major (I’ve had no success). And I’ve been really working hard on growing my hair out.
--To start things off, let’s talk about some rap music. I’ve been listening to rap a great deal lately, because I’m trying to expand my cultural prowess and I really respect how seriously amazing some of these guys are with words--especially if you factor in the amount of marijuana their lyrics tell us they indulge in, which isn’t really good for the brain I’ve been told. One artist I’ve been listening to (partly because he single-handedly saved that awful new Rihanna song about hardness that I was complaining about last month) is Young Jeezy. Quite frankly, that man confuses the shit out of me. I mean, he’s a pretty good wordsmith, but he’s a one trick pony. If you’re familiar with any of his work, then you know basically the only thing he talks about (with the exception of hoes and cars) is cocaine and dealing it. He likes to give the impression that, even though he’s worth millions of dollars because of his rhyming skills, he still deals heavily in the trafficking of cocaine. I suspect this isn’t true, and unless he’s one of the dumbest motherfuckers in the world, it isn’t (because he’s rich without it and draws about as much attention to himself concerning yay as Bob Marley did concerning smoking weed). So, I don’t get why he keeps fucking talking about it. It’s kind of annoying. I get that he definitely dealt in the coke trade when he was a young man, but why can’t he just let the past go? (I get that a lot of artists, most notably Notorious BIG, talked a lot about dealing coke, but it was always in the past tense. My problem is that Young Jeezy still likes to talk about being something that he clearly no longer is. It’d be like Dennis Rodman talking about how he’s still the greatest rebounder around, even though he hasn’t stepped foot on a court in years.) I used to piss the bed, but I don’t write blogs saying I still do, and you probably won’t see the ShamWow guy doing infomercials talking about beating up hookers or Roman Polanski making a movie about having sex with minors. Whenever you do something that’s not so admirable, you should not draw attention to it. So, I guess Young Jeezy feels it’s admirable to be a coke dealer, which I don’t understand at all.
--Do you guys remember when Sean Combs changed his name from Puff Daddy to P. Diddy? This was when he was dating Jennifer Lopez and had just been acquitted of murder charges. Apparently it was because he wanted to clean up his image, which is basically impossible to do after you’re put on trial for murder and are a celebrity (unless you’re Snoop Dogg, but more on that in a second). Just ask anybody that doesn’t live in Baltimore to say the first three words that come to mind whenever you say Ray Lewis. Murderer will be mentioned just as often as linebacker. I can’t say I understand Diddy’s move. I mean, think about it. Puff Daddy obviously implies that he likes to smoke a lot of weed (and I mean a lot, because you really have to enjoy something to make it your stage name I think, which is why my rapping name would be Orange Pop), a substance that is known worldwide to make people lazy, unmotivated and peaceful. I’m not really sure, but I don’t think people feel much aggression when they’re using that particular type of drug. So, if he would’ve just stayed with Puff Daddy, people would’ve just been like “Oh, that dude is high all the time. I don’t think he shot anybody. Frankly, I’m surprised he found the motivation to actually make it to that nightclub in the first place, and the only reason he fled the scene was because he heard gunshots and got even more paranoid than a sober person like you or I would!”
Snoop Dogg pretty much proves this. Nobody seems to remember at all that he was on trial for murder. Probably because he is so extremely public about his marijuana abuse. See what I mean when I was talking about these guys being good even though they’ve gotta be huge burnouts?
--Lil’ Wayne’s going to jail for a year because he had a ton of guns (machine guns!) on his tour bus that he didn’t have a license for. This just further adds to the whole laziness and paranoia thing that marijuana brings on. Apparently, Weezy is high as a kite like all day everyday, and I guess this made him too lazy to get a license to carry these firearms (or to join the NRA). He also had to have been paranoid as shit to have machine guns on his tour bus. I mean, it seems like every single person I know loves the shit out of that guy. I don’t know who on earth would want to shoot him except for like Toby Keith or something.
I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t smoke pot, unless you want people to think you’re not a murderer. And, if you do, don’t buy machine guns. Because that’ll put some seriously conflicting notions in people’s heads.
And that’s all I have to say about rap.
--I rip on Lady Gaga a lot, and some people get kind of pissed and don’t initially understand why I don’t dig her. I mean, I respect that she makes some seriously popular music and is apparently a very talented musician and that she should be recognized for these qualities. And she really hasn’t yet. She was snubbed in awards season quite frequently by Taylor Swift, which I disagree with. If you look at it objectively, which people should, Lady Gaga had four #1 hits in 2009. The last band to do that was The Jackson Five. How does a girl that writes songs about people being in love at the age of 15 or comparing two people to Romeo and Juliet--who fucking killed themselves--beat you out for Female Artist of the Year, especially when you’re writing songs about faking orgasms and not picking up your cell phone because you’re trying to get down at the club? (Two notions I can definitely empathize with.)
So, Lady Gaga is good, but I don’t like the way she dresses. I feel it is unnecessary, and girls fucking hate when I say that. I say it’s gimmicky. I actually put up a Facebook status when I saw what she wore to a recent awards show (I think it was the Grammys or something but I could be wrong) that said “Alright, enough Lady Gaga,” just to see the reaction I got. It was not very favorable on the female side.
Yesterday, I was finally able to come upon a male comparison for her when I was watching Pardon the Interruption, a sports talk show on ESPN. They were talking about US Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir, who is hands-down one of the most flamboyant men in the public eye today (he’s akin to a skinny, talented version of Perez Hilton). They were discussing the ridiculous outfit he wore in his previous night’s performance, and it definitely resembled a slightly-more-male version of something Lady Gaga would wear to the grocery store. My boy Mike Wilbon said Weir’s outfit was “undermining” because “when you have talent like that, it should simply speak for itself.”
And, with that, he took the words I want to say every time I see Lady Gaga performing right out of my mouth, except he is more eloquent.
--Technology is killing people’s intellects. I mean, people can get on blogs and write total non-sense right now and distribute it so a number of people will read it. I mean, you probably won’t really become smarter from reading what I’m writing this very instant. You could, though, be sitting down in a chair reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell or some other journalist who writes very interesting and also entertaining things. Instead of sitting down for six hours at a stretch pretending to kill people with the new Call of Duty game, you could be watching the news or a History Channel show about evolution, or even about the bible, whichever way you swing.
Until recently, I’d always taken solace in the fact that there were still people out there who didn’t rely on technology to the point that it was taking over their lives. The kind of people who still prefer actual physical books or newspapers to reading off of a computer screen. You know, my people (and I’m biased, because I want a job). This solace was dashed quite suddenly on the first day of this semester, when I was sitting in my first class. This class is based completely on reading short fiction stories, and classic ones. We have two anthology books for the class, and our professor gave out our first assignment with the syllabus during the class. It was to read a short story by Anton Chekhov (one of the most famous writers to ever live). A girl raised her hand and informed the professor that she hadn’t bought the books for the class yet, and that she might not be able to for a couple of days. She asked if there was anywhere she could find the story, and this began a debate that lasted about thirty seconds and included my teacher and a number of students over whether or not the book could be found on the Internet. I had to raise my hand, wait for them to quit talking and be called on. When I was, my teacher (who has got to be in like his 70’s and someone I figured would dig on books and not the Internet) my teacher actually seemed vaguely surprised when I said “I bet you could find it in the library.” Said library is located literally across the street from our classroom.
--Guys named Jack who make it into the public eye are often extremely successful. there’s Jack Daniels, Jack Kennedy (better known as John F.), Jack the Ripper, Jack Bauer, from 24, Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock and Jack Dawson from The Titanic, Jack Shepherd from LOST and Jack Mehoff from childhood jokes.
I know that all but two of those dudes are fictional characters, and that Jack Dawson wasn’t very successful if you measure success by living for a long time, but he did find true love. Also, I guess nobody really knows if Bauer or Shepherd are going to be successful since their shows are still going on, but people do know them by their television names more than their true names (Keither Sutherland and Matthew Fox).
Yeah, I don’t know where I was going there. These are random thoughts, after all.
--How do people not recognize superheroes in movies? This is something that has been bothering me for quite some time. I mean, in the Batman movies, he doesn’t even cover up his whole damn face. All he does is cover up half of it, and then lowers his voice about eighty-five octaves. And Bruce Wayne is one of the most well-known people in Gotham. I love superhero movies probably more than the average guy, but that’s just ridiculous.
--Have you guys seen any of those PETA advertisements where all these famous women get naked and show their asses and stuff? I have, and I’ve paid close attention to them. They all have to do with treating animals nicely and not doing cruel shit to them. Somebody should tell these ladies that they really don’t need to get naked to do these things, because the vast majority of people in the world aren’t cruel to animals just because they’re sensible and not sadistic. It kind of makes you wonder if these ladies are doing this kind of thing for recognition, which apparently happens more than you think.
--To start things off, let’s talk about some rap music. I’ve been listening to rap a great deal lately, because I’m trying to expand my cultural prowess and I really respect how seriously amazing some of these guys are with words--especially if you factor in the amount of marijuana their lyrics tell us they indulge in, which isn’t really good for the brain I’ve been told. One artist I’ve been listening to (partly because he single-handedly saved that awful new Rihanna song about hardness that I was complaining about last month) is Young Jeezy. Quite frankly, that man confuses the shit out of me. I mean, he’s a pretty good wordsmith, but he’s a one trick pony. If you’re familiar with any of his work, then you know basically the only thing he talks about (with the exception of hoes and cars) is cocaine and dealing it. He likes to give the impression that, even though he’s worth millions of dollars because of his rhyming skills, he still deals heavily in the trafficking of cocaine. I suspect this isn’t true, and unless he’s one of the dumbest motherfuckers in the world, it isn’t (because he’s rich without it and draws about as much attention to himself concerning yay as Bob Marley did concerning smoking weed). So, I don’t get why he keeps fucking talking about it. It’s kind of annoying. I get that he definitely dealt in the coke trade when he was a young man, but why can’t he just let the past go? (I get that a lot of artists, most notably Notorious BIG, talked a lot about dealing coke, but it was always in the past tense. My problem is that Young Jeezy still likes to talk about being something that he clearly no longer is. It’d be like Dennis Rodman talking about how he’s still the greatest rebounder around, even though he hasn’t stepped foot on a court in years.) I used to piss the bed, but I don’t write blogs saying I still do, and you probably won’t see the ShamWow guy doing infomercials talking about beating up hookers or Roman Polanski making a movie about having sex with minors. Whenever you do something that’s not so admirable, you should not draw attention to it. So, I guess Young Jeezy feels it’s admirable to be a coke dealer, which I don’t understand at all.
--Do you guys remember when Sean Combs changed his name from Puff Daddy to P. Diddy? This was when he was dating Jennifer Lopez and had just been acquitted of murder charges. Apparently it was because he wanted to clean up his image, which is basically impossible to do after you’re put on trial for murder and are a celebrity (unless you’re Snoop Dogg, but more on that in a second). Just ask anybody that doesn’t live in Baltimore to say the first three words that come to mind whenever you say Ray Lewis. Murderer will be mentioned just as often as linebacker. I can’t say I understand Diddy’s move. I mean, think about it. Puff Daddy obviously implies that he likes to smoke a lot of weed (and I mean a lot, because you really have to enjoy something to make it your stage name I think, which is why my rapping name would be Orange Pop), a substance that is known worldwide to make people lazy, unmotivated and peaceful. I’m not really sure, but I don’t think people feel much aggression when they’re using that particular type of drug. So, if he would’ve just stayed with Puff Daddy, people would’ve just been like “Oh, that dude is high all the time. I don’t think he shot anybody. Frankly, I’m surprised he found the motivation to actually make it to that nightclub in the first place, and the only reason he fled the scene was because he heard gunshots and got even more paranoid than a sober person like you or I would!”
Snoop Dogg pretty much proves this. Nobody seems to remember at all that he was on trial for murder. Probably because he is so extremely public about his marijuana abuse. See what I mean when I was talking about these guys being good even though they’ve gotta be huge burnouts?
--Lil’ Wayne’s going to jail for a year because he had a ton of guns (machine guns!) on his tour bus that he didn’t have a license for. This just further adds to the whole laziness and paranoia thing that marijuana brings on. Apparently, Weezy is high as a kite like all day everyday, and I guess this made him too lazy to get a license to carry these firearms (or to join the NRA). He also had to have been paranoid as shit to have machine guns on his tour bus. I mean, it seems like every single person I know loves the shit out of that guy. I don’t know who on earth would want to shoot him except for like Toby Keith or something.
I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t smoke pot, unless you want people to think you’re not a murderer. And, if you do, don’t buy machine guns. Because that’ll put some seriously conflicting notions in people’s heads.
And that’s all I have to say about rap.
--I rip on Lady Gaga a lot, and some people get kind of pissed and don’t initially understand why I don’t dig her. I mean, I respect that she makes some seriously popular music and is apparently a very talented musician and that she should be recognized for these qualities. And she really hasn’t yet. She was snubbed in awards season quite frequently by Taylor Swift, which I disagree with. If you look at it objectively, which people should, Lady Gaga had four #1 hits in 2009. The last band to do that was The Jackson Five. How does a girl that writes songs about people being in love at the age of 15 or comparing two people to Romeo and Juliet--who fucking killed themselves--beat you out for Female Artist of the Year, especially when you’re writing songs about faking orgasms and not picking up your cell phone because you’re trying to get down at the club? (Two notions I can definitely empathize with.)
So, Lady Gaga is good, but I don’t like the way she dresses. I feel it is unnecessary, and girls fucking hate when I say that. I say it’s gimmicky. I actually put up a Facebook status when I saw what she wore to a recent awards show (I think it was the Grammys or something but I could be wrong) that said “Alright, enough Lady Gaga,” just to see the reaction I got. It was not very favorable on the female side.
Yesterday, I was finally able to come upon a male comparison for her when I was watching Pardon the Interruption, a sports talk show on ESPN. They were talking about US Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir, who is hands-down one of the most flamboyant men in the public eye today (he’s akin to a skinny, talented version of Perez Hilton). They were discussing the ridiculous outfit he wore in his previous night’s performance, and it definitely resembled a slightly-more-male version of something Lady Gaga would wear to the grocery store. My boy Mike Wilbon said Weir’s outfit was “undermining” because “when you have talent like that, it should simply speak for itself.”
And, with that, he took the words I want to say every time I see Lady Gaga performing right out of my mouth, except he is more eloquent.
--Technology is killing people’s intellects. I mean, people can get on blogs and write total non-sense right now and distribute it so a number of people will read it. I mean, you probably won’t really become smarter from reading what I’m writing this very instant. You could, though, be sitting down in a chair reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell or some other journalist who writes very interesting and also entertaining things. Instead of sitting down for six hours at a stretch pretending to kill people with the new Call of Duty game, you could be watching the news or a History Channel show about evolution, or even about the bible, whichever way you swing.
Until recently, I’d always taken solace in the fact that there were still people out there who didn’t rely on technology to the point that it was taking over their lives. The kind of people who still prefer actual physical books or newspapers to reading off of a computer screen. You know, my people (and I’m biased, because I want a job). This solace was dashed quite suddenly on the first day of this semester, when I was sitting in my first class. This class is based completely on reading short fiction stories, and classic ones. We have two anthology books for the class, and our professor gave out our first assignment with the syllabus during the class. It was to read a short story by Anton Chekhov (one of the most famous writers to ever live). A girl raised her hand and informed the professor that she hadn’t bought the books for the class yet, and that she might not be able to for a couple of days. She asked if there was anywhere she could find the story, and this began a debate that lasted about thirty seconds and included my teacher and a number of students over whether or not the book could be found on the Internet. I had to raise my hand, wait for them to quit talking and be called on. When I was, my teacher (who has got to be in like his 70’s and someone I figured would dig on books and not the Internet) my teacher actually seemed vaguely surprised when I said “I bet you could find it in the library.” Said library is located literally across the street from our classroom.
--Guys named Jack who make it into the public eye are often extremely successful. there’s Jack Daniels, Jack Kennedy (better known as John F.), Jack the Ripper, Jack Bauer, from 24, Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock and Jack Dawson from The Titanic, Jack Shepherd from LOST and Jack Mehoff from childhood jokes.
I know that all but two of those dudes are fictional characters, and that Jack Dawson wasn’t very successful if you measure success by living for a long time, but he did find true love. Also, I guess nobody really knows if Bauer or Shepherd are going to be successful since their shows are still going on, but people do know them by their television names more than their true names (Keither Sutherland and Matthew Fox).
Yeah, I don’t know where I was going there. These are random thoughts, after all.
--How do people not recognize superheroes in movies? This is something that has been bothering me for quite some time. I mean, in the Batman movies, he doesn’t even cover up his whole damn face. All he does is cover up half of it, and then lowers his voice about eighty-five octaves. And Bruce Wayne is one of the most well-known people in Gotham. I love superhero movies probably more than the average guy, but that’s just ridiculous.
--Have you guys seen any of those PETA advertisements where all these famous women get naked and show their asses and stuff? I have, and I’ve paid close attention to them. They all have to do with treating animals nicely and not doing cruel shit to them. Somebody should tell these ladies that they really don’t need to get naked to do these things, because the vast majority of people in the world aren’t cruel to animals just because they’re sensible and not sadistic. It kind of makes you wonder if these ladies are doing this kind of thing for recognition, which apparently happens more than you think.
Tiger Woods, Y'all
Since Tiger Woods, world’s best golfer and amateur pornstar, is giving a press conference tomorrow to address his recent absence from golf and his stint in rehab for sex addiction (I think he went the sex route instead of the drugs/alcohol route because he wanted to stay in shape), I figured I’d post this little article I wrote a few weeks ago. It was published in Penn State New Ken’s student newspaper simply because my brother is the sports editor. I’ve been working on my networking skills. Some of it was changed for the print edition, though. (One of these changes I’m told was the 86ing of “sex-addicted Ambien freak”)
***
I’m sure everyone remembers the first couple of weeks after Thanksgiving, when Tiger Woods was getting so much media coverage that I can’t even remember any of the news events that were transpiring at that time that actually mattered.
He was, of course, getting all of this attention because he’d cheated on his wife with a very impressive amount of women. Actually, he was getting something like 10 times the amount of attention for being an unfaithful husband who was beaten with a golf club by his spouse than he did when he won the 2001 Masters and became the first golfer ever to hold all four major titles at one time (which solidified him as probably the greatest golfer to ever live).
The thing was, though, that I didn’t care at all whether Woods was faithful to his wife or was coupling with more women than I’ve even hugged in my entire lifetime, because that’s not the reason I know who the man is. That reason is golf (and Buick commercials).
This might make me seem like I’m very insensitive to the problem of cheating, but I assure you I’m not, and would never condone such behavior. I’m just insensitive to whether or not Tiger Woods is cheating, because it’s not even remotely my business, and the lack of marital bliss in his life has no effect on me whatsoever. The man doesn’t make millions of dollars to be a poster child for a happy marriage.
Think about it: If I was married and went and nailed 15 women, I wouldn’t even get an article written about me in any publication, and I know people will argue that this is because I’m not famous, which means I’m not really a role model on any large scale. This is true. This is also exactly why Woods shouldn’t get coverage for being a sex-addicted Ambien freak. We see all of the news about him cheating on his wife, and it doesn’t make us want to cheat on ours, but the media and the public must keep in mind that there are little kids who look up to their favorite athletes and strive to do the things they do (and I’m no exception, when I was in the sixth grade I wanted to get corn rows because I had a severe man-crush on Allen Iverson). This is why these things should be kept quiet.
By devoting so much copy and airtime to these athletes who make bad social/legal/familial decisions, the media effectively reverses some of the principles that have been pounded into today’s youths’ heads since they were extremely young: It’s not okay to cheat on your wife, but the best golf player in the world has done it. It’s not okay to cheat on your wife with your best friend and teammate, impregnate her and then have an abortion, but one of the best soccer players in the world has done it. (I’m speaking of John Terry of Chelsea and the England National Team. When news of his affair broke earlier this week, it came to light that a judge in England had actually given Terry an injunction to kill the story so it wouldn’t become a public spectacle, which is a ridiculous strike against free speech, but maybe a good idea. Obviously this injunction was overturned, or I wouldn’t know about these happenings.) It’s not okay to leave your wife for Madonna and eventually Kate Hudson—though this is arguable—but Alex Rodriguez, one of the best living baseball players and a winner of the2009 World Series, did. And it’s certainly not okay to smoke marijuana, because it apparently makes you stupid and will have negative affects on whatever you’d like to do with your life, but the greatest swimmer (and maybe Olympian) to ever live did.
Knowing these things about some of the world’s best athletes doesn’t benefit anyone, really. All it does is damage their reputation, and any sensible adult shouldn’t be worried about what an athlete’s personal life’s shortcomings entail. They should watch them play sports, and realize that they’re paid absurdly high amounts of money to do only that and nothing else, whether it’s fair or not. I can almost guarantee there has never been a sports contract that included a penalty for cheating on one’s spouse. If they do something wrong, it should be treated like it would be if a normal person did something wrong, which is to say it would get no attention. I realize the media is a watchdog and ambassador of truth and everything, but these kinds of unimportant things should stay under wraps. You know, for the kids.
And I guess I just spent this entire article giving them even more attention, so maybe I should practice what I preach.
***
I’m sure everyone remembers the first couple of weeks after Thanksgiving, when Tiger Woods was getting so much media coverage that I can’t even remember any of the news events that were transpiring at that time that actually mattered.
He was, of course, getting all of this attention because he’d cheated on his wife with a very impressive amount of women. Actually, he was getting something like 10 times the amount of attention for being an unfaithful husband who was beaten with a golf club by his spouse than he did when he won the 2001 Masters and became the first golfer ever to hold all four major titles at one time (which solidified him as probably the greatest golfer to ever live).
The thing was, though, that I didn’t care at all whether Woods was faithful to his wife or was coupling with more women than I’ve even hugged in my entire lifetime, because that’s not the reason I know who the man is. That reason is golf (and Buick commercials).
This might make me seem like I’m very insensitive to the problem of cheating, but I assure you I’m not, and would never condone such behavior. I’m just insensitive to whether or not Tiger Woods is cheating, because it’s not even remotely my business, and the lack of marital bliss in his life has no effect on me whatsoever. The man doesn’t make millions of dollars to be a poster child for a happy marriage.
Think about it: If I was married and went and nailed 15 women, I wouldn’t even get an article written about me in any publication, and I know people will argue that this is because I’m not famous, which means I’m not really a role model on any large scale. This is true. This is also exactly why Woods shouldn’t get coverage for being a sex-addicted Ambien freak. We see all of the news about him cheating on his wife, and it doesn’t make us want to cheat on ours, but the media and the public must keep in mind that there are little kids who look up to their favorite athletes and strive to do the things they do (and I’m no exception, when I was in the sixth grade I wanted to get corn rows because I had a severe man-crush on Allen Iverson). This is why these things should be kept quiet.
By devoting so much copy and airtime to these athletes who make bad social/legal/familial decisions, the media effectively reverses some of the principles that have been pounded into today’s youths’ heads since they were extremely young: It’s not okay to cheat on your wife, but the best golf player in the world has done it. It’s not okay to cheat on your wife with your best friend and teammate, impregnate her and then have an abortion, but one of the best soccer players in the world has done it. (I’m speaking of John Terry of Chelsea and the England National Team. When news of his affair broke earlier this week, it came to light that a judge in England had actually given Terry an injunction to kill the story so it wouldn’t become a public spectacle, which is a ridiculous strike against free speech, but maybe a good idea. Obviously this injunction was overturned, or I wouldn’t know about these happenings.) It’s not okay to leave your wife for Madonna and eventually Kate Hudson—though this is arguable—but Alex Rodriguez, one of the best living baseball players and a winner of the2009 World Series, did. And it’s certainly not okay to smoke marijuana, because it apparently makes you stupid and will have negative affects on whatever you’d like to do with your life, but the greatest swimmer (and maybe Olympian) to ever live did.
Knowing these things about some of the world’s best athletes doesn’t benefit anyone, really. All it does is damage their reputation, and any sensible adult shouldn’t be worried about what an athlete’s personal life’s shortcomings entail. They should watch them play sports, and realize that they’re paid absurdly high amounts of money to do only that and nothing else, whether it’s fair or not. I can almost guarantee there has never been a sports contract that included a penalty for cheating on one’s spouse. If they do something wrong, it should be treated like it would be if a normal person did something wrong, which is to say it would get no attention. I realize the media is a watchdog and ambassador of truth and everything, but these kinds of unimportant things should stay under wraps. You know, for the kids.
And I guess I just spent this entire article giving them even more attention, so maybe I should practice what I preach.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Man, I Hate (Certain Aspects of) College
I just finished the second day of classes for what should be (barring a major fuck-up on my part) my last college undergraduate semester ever. In fact, it’ll most likely be my last semester of any type of education ever (and you’ll infer why on your own as I progress), unless I attend nursing school after unsuccessfully trying to find gainful employment as a journalist or writer for the next couple of years. The probabilities of this happening are not really all that unlikely, and this route of action is literally something that my Mom has suggested to me on more than one occasion, probably because she’s a nurse herself as well as a woman who likes to take big metaphorical shits on my dreams.
I would like to say that I disagree with her, because after spending four years and more than $50,000 at one of the universities that is considered by many to be far above adequate in an academic sense, I think I should be able to get a job in an area I studied for. I should at least be prepared to hold a job in said area--and I am, but not because I went to Penn State, but because I’ve learned a great deal from actual internships and jobs in the journalism field (and didn’t have to pay my employers for this opportunity).
What I’m trying to say is that college is not even close to being worth what people are forced to pay for it, and in some situations isn’t even necessary. There are certain areas of study that college is almost completely pointless for, if a person is assertive enough to educate themselves and be assertive in trying to find jobs that will supplement their self-education, power of thought and need for experience in the field they hope to break into.
Some of the most successful people I’ve ever met or studied in my life didn’t go to college. My Grandfather is one notable example. He started working at grocery stores and built himself up to an owner of a major business. He also kills it in the stock market, kind of like Michael Douglas in Wall Street. He knows things about running a successful business that no business major I’ve ever run into could even touch, and this is just from learning from the people around him. He didn’t need some professor to tell him what a good investment was, or that if you want to keep your business going you need to find good employees and keep your shelves adequately stocked. He just learned from inserting himself into the kind of business he sought to become involved in, and it has worked perfectly. So much so, actually, that he’s been able to generously contribute a significant amount of money to what my education is paid for with. (An education where I have actually been required to pay for credit hours to take shit like Ballroom Dancing, Meteorology and high school level Algebra.)
Augusten Burroughs, the wildly successful author of the books Running With Scissors and Dry basically never went to school after he was 12 years old. Instead, he set out teaching himself about the advertising industry, then went out to California and got himself a job as an advertising copywriter.
These types of things used to be pretty possible, if not slightly common. People found their talents and perfected them themselves without the help of academia. I’m sure that, if society dictated it reasonable, there are plenty of people out there who could learn enough about their chosen profession in high school and through a number of apprenticeships (internships, something where they can be around people in their career and learn the ways of it while also helping the companies with some of their more menial tasks). Unfortunately, though, if a person wants to get a job in most areas other than basic manual labor, they must now have a college degree, and I think that’s a shame as well as a waist of time and money for a lot of people.
Now, I’m not trying to say that all people shouldn’t have to go to college, and far from it. I don’t want a fucking doctor that’s just been watching Grey’s Anatomy to give me heart surgery (and I probably wouldn’t even want relationship advice from him/her), and I wouldn’t let my friend Lenny represent me in a criminal trial just because he watches as much Law and Order as my Grandma. And, I guess I would give preference to someone seeking a job at a newspaper that had a college degree as opposed to someone who like to read a lot of books and magazines and papers but had only really written for their high school yearbook. This is probably because society has made me think this way, and I’d like to say I’d do otherwise, but it doesn’t fucking matter. The way things are now, college is basically essential, and nobody is going to change that at all. I have to accept that, and I do.
I do have a suggestion to make it cheaper and more bearable for everyone who goes: Make a person’s generally accepted tenure at a college two years long (2 1/2 to 3 absolute maximum). This would cut the cost of attending absolutely in half, and it will also pretty much cut the course load in half. At first glance this would seem pretty much implausible, but I propose completely cutting out general education classes. They’re in my “stupidest ideas ever” category, right up there with the decision to give Heidi Pratt a record deal and the Snuggie, and I’ve had to take 45 credits of them throughout my college career. If you take 15 credits per semester, which is probably about the norm, that’s a year and a half of your college education. And there are definitely a few more classes they could cut out of the core curriculum for a lot of majors that would eliminate the fourth semester. (A prime example of this is a Comm 400 class I started today. 400 level classes are supposed to be the most difficult. This class is called Mass Media and Culture. One of the two books I have for the class is called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. I have a class where one of our major talking points is fucking porn. Furthermore, we spent a good portion of an hour and 15 minute class playing a game called “Two Truths and One Lie.” In a college class. I think I could move on to a career in pretty much any industry--including adult entertainment--and be completely fine without that class. But I have to take it to graduate from my major.) That’d be two years taken away from the amount of school a person would have to attend and pay for right then. This would also allow campuses to cut down to a smaller size (since less students would be attending at any given time) and be less costly to maintain.
If this happened, fewer professors would be needed (and I don’t give a shit about eliminating those jobs, because the vast majority of professors I’ve had--with a few notable exceptions--have not been very dedicated to the aspect of teaching kids things at all, but only with their own research that they could be doing from their homes. Maybe then their research would be better, because they wouldn’t have a bogus teaching job to fall back onto if they weren’t putting enough effort forth.), and that’s fine with me. They sometimes rub me the wrong way. They often seem to think that they’re doing us a favor by teaching and giving us meaningless assignments that ultimately end up as final grades that could very well dictate the direction a person’s life is going in. It doesn’t seem like they realize they’re getting paid to perform a pretty easy job (it’s got to be easier than being a high school or elementary school teacher, for many reasons), and that they’re not paying us to sit in their class and listen to some of the insignificant things they blather on about.
So many teachers these days--pretty much all of them--make it a point to tell kids to turn off their phones during class, and not to send text messages or read the news on their Blackberries or whatever. They get all hot and bothered if a person comes into class late, whether it was their fault or not. They won’t even let you take a fucking nap. They want a person’s full and undivided attention, which I think is bullshit. I don’t want to say it’s a good idea to sit in a class and text someone the whole time, but I also don’t think the professors should be able to tell you how to behave at all as long as it’s not a distraction to the other people in the classroom. They want us to respect them (something I think should be earned and not given just because they went to grad school), and they want to essentially be our bosses, and this makes no sense to me. I wouldn’t get out my phone and start text messaging when my boss was talking to me, but that’s because he is my employer and the person that pays me money and gives me health insurance. I’m not paying him to provide guidance for me, but he is part of the company that is paying me, and is higher up in that company than me. As far as I’m concerned, professors shouldn’t really be considered bosses. They are more knowledgeable than most of the students, I’m sure, but their job is to provide that knowledge to people if they want to listen to it, not to make them sit in class and pay attention to every word they say if they don’t have to to be successful in that class, or if they simply aren’t worried about the results of that class.
It’s this same reason that I don’t think attendance should be mandatory. I have a class right now that I’m pretty sure I could do very well in, since it’s mostly reading intensive, but if I miss more than 5 classes I completely fail the course. That’s such bullshit. Especially because probably at least half of the students in that class are smarter than me and better with reading comprehension. These kids would only have to come to class on the days that quizzes were given if there wasn’t an attendance policy and the professor didn’t make them “pop” quizzes so people would show up and listen to him talk about a bunch of insignificant shit. Then, when these intelligent kids do show up to class and realize that their fears were true--that they were learning nothing from the professor’s lecture, they get yelled at for checking their e-mail on the phone or getting in a quick nap so they will be more alert for a class they actually need to concentrate in.
It’s like we should be the bosses, to a certain extent, but we aren’t at all. It’s kind of like being Michael Scott.
Now there are two arguments that I’m sure I might get from people about my idea to eliminate two years from school. The first will come from some of the professors who would be scared shitless if something like this was to happen, because they’d be axed from teaching a class about Love & Sex and not have anywhere else to turn because they majored in Greek Philosophy. The second will come from my friends that like to read this, and also like to live the kind of lifestyle that I do.
The first would be that general education credits are necessary because not everybody knows what they want to do or be whenever they come to college.
Are you fucking kidding me? If you don’t know what you want to be, then don’t go to college in the first place. If you’re that Hell-bent on going and figuring out what your calling is (and I haven’t heard many people that have found it because of an inspiring gen-ed class) then you can pay the extra money for those extra two years and be undecided about a major. The rest of us shouldn’t have to shell out inordinate amounts of money to learn about Astronomy when we want to be social workers.
The second would be that the social aspect of college is the time of a person’s life, sometimes, and really can’t be beat. This is because when you’re in college and paying a lot of money to waste a lot of time, you can go out and get hammered on margaritas on a Monday night and not worry about it. Not only are there a ton of your colleagues out doing the same thing, but it’s pretty much socially acceptable. I’ve heard so many people complain about graduating this semester and going into the “real world,” and I know they will tell me they want to drag out college for as long as they can, and a two-year cutoff would affect that plan very negatively.
To them I say do one of two things: learn how to get wasted and deal with a hangover and still attend to your responsibilities like the millions of functional alcoholics throughout the world do every single day, or take the $30,000 (and this is only tuition, not even living expenses or book prices) that you would be spending to go to school and move wherever the fuck you want. Then have yourself a two-year bender and don’t do anything else. That’s even better than going to college, right? And that $30,000 worth of spending money is more than enough to live off of for two years, unless you do more coke than Lindsey Lohan. Actually, if you did something like this, you could probably do some traveling and meet some pretty interesting people, and maybe even learn more beneficial things than you would if you spent two years taking gen-eds.
(On a side note, I guess an idea like this could fuck up college athletics, but the athletes that are really good don’t stay for four years anymore, anyway. And I guess we could allow them to stay for four years and take a master’s program in public speaking, so that way we could have ex-athletes-turned-commentators that could actually form sentences.)
To further prove my point that college is vastly overpriced and basically a gigantic waste in certain ways, I’ll resort to some of the mathematics I learned in 8th grade and got a refresher on at 19 because I needed to fulfill a quantification gen-ed requirement.
If you were to take a class worth three credits, and your tuition is $7,000 per semester (roughly what it is at PSU currently), the semester lasts 12 weeks (which it does pretty much universally, unless you go in trimesters like Ohio State, which apparently works well for Pryor) and you’re taking 15 credits (basically the norm), you’re paying $466.67 per credit. If it’s a three credit class you have three times a week, at 50 minutes per shot, then you’re paying $38.89 for each one of those classes, not including the price of textbooks. So, if you’re skipping one class, you can purchase a month’s subscription to some of the best pornography Web sites on the market (I did some research). And I’ll tell you what: you’ll probably benefit more from that when it’s all said and done than you would from going to one class for 50 minutes (it’s all about perspective).
I also looked up some ballroom dancing lesson prices in the area, and they charge $30.00 per person for a 50 minute lesson, and that’s for two individuals and not for a classroom full of clammy-palmed people you’ve never met in your life.
I’ve come this far, though, and have to finish this semester and graduate. It’s just difficult to think about how much money has gone into something that, if I didn’t absolutely need to go through it, I could probably have done without and not been that different or worse off (I’m talking about the educational part, not the social part). I guess I’ll just have to swallow hard and go with it, and hope someday some portion of it pays off for me.
I do know one thing, though. After I graduate and get those phone calls from people trying to get me to donate money as an alumnus to my alma mater, I’ll send them a copy of the softcore porn I’ve written the script for, to thank them for all that they’ve taught me.
I would like to say that I disagree with her, because after spending four years and more than $50,000 at one of the universities that is considered by many to be far above adequate in an academic sense, I think I should be able to get a job in an area I studied for. I should at least be prepared to hold a job in said area--and I am, but not because I went to Penn State, but because I’ve learned a great deal from actual internships and jobs in the journalism field (and didn’t have to pay my employers for this opportunity).
What I’m trying to say is that college is not even close to being worth what people are forced to pay for it, and in some situations isn’t even necessary. There are certain areas of study that college is almost completely pointless for, if a person is assertive enough to educate themselves and be assertive in trying to find jobs that will supplement their self-education, power of thought and need for experience in the field they hope to break into.
Some of the most successful people I’ve ever met or studied in my life didn’t go to college. My Grandfather is one notable example. He started working at grocery stores and built himself up to an owner of a major business. He also kills it in the stock market, kind of like Michael Douglas in Wall Street. He knows things about running a successful business that no business major I’ve ever run into could even touch, and this is just from learning from the people around him. He didn’t need some professor to tell him what a good investment was, or that if you want to keep your business going you need to find good employees and keep your shelves adequately stocked. He just learned from inserting himself into the kind of business he sought to become involved in, and it has worked perfectly. So much so, actually, that he’s been able to generously contribute a significant amount of money to what my education is paid for with. (An education where I have actually been required to pay for credit hours to take shit like Ballroom Dancing, Meteorology and high school level Algebra.)
Augusten Burroughs, the wildly successful author of the books Running With Scissors and Dry basically never went to school after he was 12 years old. Instead, he set out teaching himself about the advertising industry, then went out to California and got himself a job as an advertising copywriter.
These types of things used to be pretty possible, if not slightly common. People found their talents and perfected them themselves without the help of academia. I’m sure that, if society dictated it reasonable, there are plenty of people out there who could learn enough about their chosen profession in high school and through a number of apprenticeships (internships, something where they can be around people in their career and learn the ways of it while also helping the companies with some of their more menial tasks). Unfortunately, though, if a person wants to get a job in most areas other than basic manual labor, they must now have a college degree, and I think that’s a shame as well as a waist of time and money for a lot of people.
Now, I’m not trying to say that all people shouldn’t have to go to college, and far from it. I don’t want a fucking doctor that’s just been watching Grey’s Anatomy to give me heart surgery (and I probably wouldn’t even want relationship advice from him/her), and I wouldn’t let my friend Lenny represent me in a criminal trial just because he watches as much Law and Order as my Grandma. And, I guess I would give preference to someone seeking a job at a newspaper that had a college degree as opposed to someone who like to read a lot of books and magazines and papers but had only really written for their high school yearbook. This is probably because society has made me think this way, and I’d like to say I’d do otherwise, but it doesn’t fucking matter. The way things are now, college is basically essential, and nobody is going to change that at all. I have to accept that, and I do.
I do have a suggestion to make it cheaper and more bearable for everyone who goes: Make a person’s generally accepted tenure at a college two years long (2 1/2 to 3 absolute maximum). This would cut the cost of attending absolutely in half, and it will also pretty much cut the course load in half. At first glance this would seem pretty much implausible, but I propose completely cutting out general education classes. They’re in my “stupidest ideas ever” category, right up there with the decision to give Heidi Pratt a record deal and the Snuggie, and I’ve had to take 45 credits of them throughout my college career. If you take 15 credits per semester, which is probably about the norm, that’s a year and a half of your college education. And there are definitely a few more classes they could cut out of the core curriculum for a lot of majors that would eliminate the fourth semester. (A prime example of this is a Comm 400 class I started today. 400 level classes are supposed to be the most difficult. This class is called Mass Media and Culture. One of the two books I have for the class is called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. I have a class where one of our major talking points is fucking porn. Furthermore, we spent a good portion of an hour and 15 minute class playing a game called “Two Truths and One Lie.” In a college class. I think I could move on to a career in pretty much any industry--including adult entertainment--and be completely fine without that class. But I have to take it to graduate from my major.) That’d be two years taken away from the amount of school a person would have to attend and pay for right then. This would also allow campuses to cut down to a smaller size (since less students would be attending at any given time) and be less costly to maintain.
If this happened, fewer professors would be needed (and I don’t give a shit about eliminating those jobs, because the vast majority of professors I’ve had--with a few notable exceptions--have not been very dedicated to the aspect of teaching kids things at all, but only with their own research that they could be doing from their homes. Maybe then their research would be better, because they wouldn’t have a bogus teaching job to fall back onto if they weren’t putting enough effort forth.), and that’s fine with me. They sometimes rub me the wrong way. They often seem to think that they’re doing us a favor by teaching and giving us meaningless assignments that ultimately end up as final grades that could very well dictate the direction a person’s life is going in. It doesn’t seem like they realize they’re getting paid to perform a pretty easy job (it’s got to be easier than being a high school or elementary school teacher, for many reasons), and that they’re not paying us to sit in their class and listen to some of the insignificant things they blather on about.
So many teachers these days--pretty much all of them--make it a point to tell kids to turn off their phones during class, and not to send text messages or read the news on their Blackberries or whatever. They get all hot and bothered if a person comes into class late, whether it was their fault or not. They won’t even let you take a fucking nap. They want a person’s full and undivided attention, which I think is bullshit. I don’t want to say it’s a good idea to sit in a class and text someone the whole time, but I also don’t think the professors should be able to tell you how to behave at all as long as it’s not a distraction to the other people in the classroom. They want us to respect them (something I think should be earned and not given just because they went to grad school), and they want to essentially be our bosses, and this makes no sense to me. I wouldn’t get out my phone and start text messaging when my boss was talking to me, but that’s because he is my employer and the person that pays me money and gives me health insurance. I’m not paying him to provide guidance for me, but he is part of the company that is paying me, and is higher up in that company than me. As far as I’m concerned, professors shouldn’t really be considered bosses. They are more knowledgeable than most of the students, I’m sure, but their job is to provide that knowledge to people if they want to listen to it, not to make them sit in class and pay attention to every word they say if they don’t have to to be successful in that class, or if they simply aren’t worried about the results of that class.
It’s this same reason that I don’t think attendance should be mandatory. I have a class right now that I’m pretty sure I could do very well in, since it’s mostly reading intensive, but if I miss more than 5 classes I completely fail the course. That’s such bullshit. Especially because probably at least half of the students in that class are smarter than me and better with reading comprehension. These kids would only have to come to class on the days that quizzes were given if there wasn’t an attendance policy and the professor didn’t make them “pop” quizzes so people would show up and listen to him talk about a bunch of insignificant shit. Then, when these intelligent kids do show up to class and realize that their fears were true--that they were learning nothing from the professor’s lecture, they get yelled at for checking their e-mail on the phone or getting in a quick nap so they will be more alert for a class they actually need to concentrate in.
It’s like we should be the bosses, to a certain extent, but we aren’t at all. It’s kind of like being Michael Scott.
Now there are two arguments that I’m sure I might get from people about my idea to eliminate two years from school. The first will come from some of the professors who would be scared shitless if something like this was to happen, because they’d be axed from teaching a class about Love & Sex and not have anywhere else to turn because they majored in Greek Philosophy. The second will come from my friends that like to read this, and also like to live the kind of lifestyle that I do.
The first would be that general education credits are necessary because not everybody knows what they want to do or be whenever they come to college.
Are you fucking kidding me? If you don’t know what you want to be, then don’t go to college in the first place. If you’re that Hell-bent on going and figuring out what your calling is (and I haven’t heard many people that have found it because of an inspiring gen-ed class) then you can pay the extra money for those extra two years and be undecided about a major. The rest of us shouldn’t have to shell out inordinate amounts of money to learn about Astronomy when we want to be social workers.
The second would be that the social aspect of college is the time of a person’s life, sometimes, and really can’t be beat. This is because when you’re in college and paying a lot of money to waste a lot of time, you can go out and get hammered on margaritas on a Monday night and not worry about it. Not only are there a ton of your colleagues out doing the same thing, but it’s pretty much socially acceptable. I’ve heard so many people complain about graduating this semester and going into the “real world,” and I know they will tell me they want to drag out college for as long as they can, and a two-year cutoff would affect that plan very negatively.
To them I say do one of two things: learn how to get wasted and deal with a hangover and still attend to your responsibilities like the millions of functional alcoholics throughout the world do every single day, or take the $30,000 (and this is only tuition, not even living expenses or book prices) that you would be spending to go to school and move wherever the fuck you want. Then have yourself a two-year bender and don’t do anything else. That’s even better than going to college, right? And that $30,000 worth of spending money is more than enough to live off of for two years, unless you do more coke than Lindsey Lohan. Actually, if you did something like this, you could probably do some traveling and meet some pretty interesting people, and maybe even learn more beneficial things than you would if you spent two years taking gen-eds.
(On a side note, I guess an idea like this could fuck up college athletics, but the athletes that are really good don’t stay for four years anymore, anyway. And I guess we could allow them to stay for four years and take a master’s program in public speaking, so that way we could have ex-athletes-turned-commentators that could actually form sentences.)
To further prove my point that college is vastly overpriced and basically a gigantic waste in certain ways, I’ll resort to some of the mathematics I learned in 8th grade and got a refresher on at 19 because I needed to fulfill a quantification gen-ed requirement.
If you were to take a class worth three credits, and your tuition is $7,000 per semester (roughly what it is at PSU currently), the semester lasts 12 weeks (which it does pretty much universally, unless you go in trimesters like Ohio State, which apparently works well for Pryor) and you’re taking 15 credits (basically the norm), you’re paying $466.67 per credit. If it’s a three credit class you have three times a week, at 50 minutes per shot, then you’re paying $38.89 for each one of those classes, not including the price of textbooks. So, if you’re skipping one class, you can purchase a month’s subscription to some of the best pornography Web sites on the market (I did some research). And I’ll tell you what: you’ll probably benefit more from that when it’s all said and done than you would from going to one class for 50 minutes (it’s all about perspective).
I also looked up some ballroom dancing lesson prices in the area, and they charge $30.00 per person for a 50 minute lesson, and that’s for two individuals and not for a classroom full of clammy-palmed people you’ve never met in your life.
I’ve come this far, though, and have to finish this semester and graduate. It’s just difficult to think about how much money has gone into something that, if I didn’t absolutely need to go through it, I could probably have done without and not been that different or worse off (I’m talking about the educational part, not the social part). I guess I’ll just have to swallow hard and go with it, and hope someday some portion of it pays off for me.
I do know one thing, though. After I graduate and get those phone calls from people trying to get me to donate money as an alumnus to my alma mater, I’ll send them a copy of the softcore porn I’ve written the script for, to thank them for all that they’ve taught me.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Random Thoughts: December
I can’t believe another year has come to an end and a new one has begun. Actually, I can believe it, to be honest. Mostly because it’s happened to me every single year of my life so far, and it’s a good thing too, because if one year didn’t end and another one didn’t start I’d have no fucking idea how old I was. I’d only know that I definitely had a lot more chest hair than I did the last time I was checking myself out in the mirror, and they don’t let you buy alcohol based on the amount of chest hair you have. (Though I think that would add an interesting element to purchasing of alcohol. Let’s just say that most girls don’t have chest hair, and if they do it requires a great deal of examination to see if they do. If this were ever to happen, I think every guy in the world would probably want to work at a liquor store.)
I guess all I’m trying to say is that the only thing a new year signifies to me is the start of a new calendar year. People always talk about “starting over” with the new year, and I think that’s bullshit. I mean, you can’t really just start over in most cases. I mean, you wake up on New Year’s Day with all the same problems you had on New Year’s Eve. Ask someone with genital herpes or the inability to adequately drive a car. Neither one of those things just disappear. Ask someone with erectile dysfunction, which brings me to my next random thought from the past month.
--I was watching television earlier today, and I saw a commercial that I’ve seen many times. It’s one for Viagara, the drug that helps men that are probably too old and unhealthy to actually have sex anymore continue to have sex, and it shows a man in probably his mid-50’s to early 60’s. He’s walking down a sidewalk next to a reflective building and talking to his own reflection. He’s telling himself, or his doppelganger or whatever/whoever the fuck it/he is, that he’s hesitant to talk to his doctor about erectile dysfunction. Eventually, his reflection convinces him to do so, and you see a little clip of him talking and laughing with his doctor. It then cuts back to him talking to the reflection again, and they slap five--which means this man is giving a high five to a fucking building and probably scared the ever-living shit out of whoever was sitting on the other side of the reflective glass.
Now, you’re probably thinking this guy is a little fucked up because he’s talking to his own reflection. That is not a normal thing to be doing, but I think the first thing I noticed that I felt was even more abnormal than talking to yourself was this man’s hesitance to talk to his doctor about not being able to get a boner. Holy shit. If I woke up in the morning without a tent pitched and my bed comforter acting as a tarp, I would run screaming and crying to my doctor immediately. I wouldn’t even call ahead for an appointment. And if it was his day off, I’d fucking find him. Golf course, whatever, I’d find him. And I’d steal a prescription pad from my mom’s place of employment (she’s a nurse), interrupt him on hole seven, and make him write me a script for Viagara or Cialis or Horny Goat Weed or whatever was going to make me feel better. And we also wouldn’t be laughing during this conversation. Wow. I should get into advertising.
--I heard the new Rihanna song for the first time about a week ago. I realized immediately that she constantly talks about how she is “so hard.” I also realized immediately upon hearing this that there are a lot of distasteful jokes that could be told about Rihanna saying that she is hard, because she got the shit kicked out of her by a man earlier this year. I wouldn’t say or write anything like that, because hitting women is wrong no matter what. But, I will go ahead and say that she’s not hard at all, because she went back to the guy that beat the shit out of her. That’s not hard, and a terrible example to set for the very stupid and impressionable teenage girls that idolize her. I miss the days when people idolized women like Celine Dion. She knew what the hell she was doing. Marry an old rich dude. That’s been the paradigm for certain women for ages, and although I disagree with it, it’s probably better than running back to a guy that bit you in the face.
She also asks where them bloggers are at in the same song. I think the only thing more self-deprecating than actually having a blog is calling the people out that have them through a pop song. She’s basically asking people to make tasteless jokes about how she should’ve never thrown the Lambo keys in the first place.
--I went to a Penguins game with my little brother last week. It was the last one they’ve won to date, actually, when Evgeni Malkin had a hat trick. When he scored his third goal, my little brother looked at me, wondering if I was going to throw my hat. I immediately snatched it off of my head (so someone else wouldn’t grab it and throw it, because there are douchebags everywhere), and said “I’m not throwing this hat, I just bought the fuckin’ thing yesterday.” He also decided not to throw his, since it had been a Christmas gift the year before from our older brother.
This got me to thinking about hat tricks and just how stupid they are. I love going to hockey games and I love being a participating fan, but those tickets are fucking expensive, and I don’t think the people at the games should be expected pay more (the price of a hat) just because one of the players on the team did what he is paid millions of dollars annually to do. Whenever I worked at a grocery store and we would stock the shelves with three trucks worth of products in less than six hours, nobody would start throwing their hats on the floor. They would just start bitching about how there was no more buttermilk.
Who the fuck even drinks buttermilk?
--To go with my theme from the past month of watching TV almost constantly (holiday break and no job), I got to watch the last couple episodes of Glee a few nights ago. I love that show. In case you haven’t watched it before, it’s basically like a series version of the movie Grease (or I guess the High School Musical movies) where there’s definite plots and subplots, but there’s also a musical aspect. The kids on this show just break out into dance at the most random times, and I couldn’t help but think about how awesome it would be if this was the way the world really went.
I mean, even in the worst times, these kids are just singing and dancing around like a bunch of well-practiced idiots. It often comes with no warning. They just get going, and they’re always synced perfectly. I wish it was like this for me in high school. Like if we lost a huge basketball game and everyone was in the locker room all down-trodden and our coach came in and we just started this awesome acapella version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” I bet our chances of winning the next game--no matter who the opponent might be--would be significantly increased.
--I was having a conversation with one of my friends a while ago, and she told me that one of the things she looks for in a potential mate is their religious affiliation. She’s a Catholic, wants her spouse to be a Catholic, and wants to raise her children as Catholic.
Alright, whatever. That’s fine, I guess. But an attitude like that really conveys a kind of righteousness that could be blinding, I think. I mean, you have to consider the fact that there are 22 religions in the world that have at least 500,000 or more followers. Each one of these religions seem to think that they’re the one that is “right,” or else people would not follow that religion.
But we can’t all be right. What if the Jews are right? What if the Catholics are? What if it’s the fucking Rastafarians? Basically, nobody knows what religion is the absolutely right one, or even if there is one that’s the right one. That’s why I don’t understand why people get so hot and bothered about marrying outside of their religion. I just want to marry someone that is a good person. They can worship the flying spaghetti monster if they want to. I’d rather marry a girl that’s a Buddhist than a Catholic that has a questionable moral standing.
I mean, it might be better if you marry someone outside of your religion. That way your family will have a better chance of being right. If/when you get up to the pearly gates at the time of rapture and your Neo-Paganism spouse was the one that ended up being right, they can at least try and vouch for you being an upstanding citizen that didn’t lie, cheat or steal.
--I’ve heard Kelly Clarkson’s song where she professes that she doesn’t hook up a few times recently, and all I can think is “Well, yeah, why would someone want to hook up with you anyway?” She makes good music, I’ll grant her that, but so does Tracy Chapman and I don’t want to get down with her. I mean, Kelly Clarkson just isn’t attractive. Not anymore. She used to be. I’m trying to find a politically correct way to say that people probably don’t want to hook up with her so much anymore because she really, um, let herself go. I mean, if this was Victorian England then people probably would want to, because chubby and pale were very attractive back then (and I actually have an idea for an entire entry based on that and how I wish society was that way today, but we’ll talk about that at a later date), but that’s not really how it goes now, and I guess it can’t really be helped.
I’m not trying to say I have a problem with women that are overweight, because I don’t. I mean, I love women; I have all their albums. I’m just saying that if you do let yourself go, don’t try to take your anger and frustration out on men by writing a song that alleges they all want to bang you when the real truth is that they may have used to but don’t want to anymore. Or they want to get with you simply because you’re a celebrity. If I’m going to sit around and drink beer and eat fried jalapeno poppers all day, I’m going to accept the fact that girls might not find me that attractive once I put on forty pounds. I’m not going to write a song acting like I didn’t want to get on women in the first place.
--The 2009 Oxford American Dictionary word of the year was “unfriend.” Like to unfriend someone on Facebook. I’d like to make a remark now about how technology is taking over the world and how social networking might not be the best thing for people to be immersing themselves in, but the truth is that I’ve immersed myself in it. And, without it, pretty much nobody would read this damn thing.
--J.K. Rowling should fight Stephenie Meyer for potentially ruining young adult fiction for eternity. Then Anne Rice or Neil Gaiman should beat the shit out of her again for ruining occult fiction for eternity. Then Bram Stoker should come back from the dead and beat her ass again for taking his invention and distorting it to the point that it’s barely even recognizable anymore. I just can’t make peace with the fact that one of the best stories ever told about a creature that couldn’t go into the sun because he would fry to a crisp and die inspired some lady to steal most of his ideas and change them around, so that the same breed of creature can now go out in the sun, but just sparkles. Fuck, Twilight is frustrating.
--I don’t get why people put “living” in the activities on their Facebook profiles. In general, that is a given.
--I was watching the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show with a great deal of concentration early in December, and I had a hard time figuring out what the huge appeal of it is. I mean, obviously there are beautiful women strutting around in very extravagant outfits of lingerie, which I won’t argue with. That’s something most straight guys would like to see, and some of us even mark our daily planners for such an event (my mom even reminds me every year to watch it). I just don’t understand why girls like to watch it so much. I wouldn’t watch a fashion show for guys unless I wanted to buy the stuff they were wearing, and I’ve been inside a Victoria’s Secret on a few occasions and have never ever seen huge ass wings or any of the other shit that those ladies wear during those shows. I just don’t get the purpose of putting on a fashion show for a bunch of stuff people can’t even buy. I thought you had those things so people could see your clothing lines and would purchase them.
It’s almost as confusing as that new show Jersey Shore. Everyone watches it, but for all the wrong reasons.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that the only thing a new year signifies to me is the start of a new calendar year. People always talk about “starting over” with the new year, and I think that’s bullshit. I mean, you can’t really just start over in most cases. I mean, you wake up on New Year’s Day with all the same problems you had on New Year’s Eve. Ask someone with genital herpes or the inability to adequately drive a car. Neither one of those things just disappear. Ask someone with erectile dysfunction, which brings me to my next random thought from the past month.
--I was watching television earlier today, and I saw a commercial that I’ve seen many times. It’s one for Viagara, the drug that helps men that are probably too old and unhealthy to actually have sex anymore continue to have sex, and it shows a man in probably his mid-50’s to early 60’s. He’s walking down a sidewalk next to a reflective building and talking to his own reflection. He’s telling himself, or his doppelganger or whatever/whoever the fuck it/he is, that he’s hesitant to talk to his doctor about erectile dysfunction. Eventually, his reflection convinces him to do so, and you see a little clip of him talking and laughing with his doctor. It then cuts back to him talking to the reflection again, and they slap five--which means this man is giving a high five to a fucking building and probably scared the ever-living shit out of whoever was sitting on the other side of the reflective glass.
Now, you’re probably thinking this guy is a little fucked up because he’s talking to his own reflection. That is not a normal thing to be doing, but I think the first thing I noticed that I felt was even more abnormal than talking to yourself was this man’s hesitance to talk to his doctor about not being able to get a boner. Holy shit. If I woke up in the morning without a tent pitched and my bed comforter acting as a tarp, I would run screaming and crying to my doctor immediately. I wouldn’t even call ahead for an appointment. And if it was his day off, I’d fucking find him. Golf course, whatever, I’d find him. And I’d steal a prescription pad from my mom’s place of employment (she’s a nurse), interrupt him on hole seven, and make him write me a script for Viagara or Cialis or Horny Goat Weed or whatever was going to make me feel better. And we also wouldn’t be laughing during this conversation. Wow. I should get into advertising.
--I heard the new Rihanna song for the first time about a week ago. I realized immediately that she constantly talks about how she is “so hard.” I also realized immediately upon hearing this that there are a lot of distasteful jokes that could be told about Rihanna saying that she is hard, because she got the shit kicked out of her by a man earlier this year. I wouldn’t say or write anything like that, because hitting women is wrong no matter what. But, I will go ahead and say that she’s not hard at all, because she went back to the guy that beat the shit out of her. That’s not hard, and a terrible example to set for the very stupid and impressionable teenage girls that idolize her. I miss the days when people idolized women like Celine Dion. She knew what the hell she was doing. Marry an old rich dude. That’s been the paradigm for certain women for ages, and although I disagree with it, it’s probably better than running back to a guy that bit you in the face.
She also asks where them bloggers are at in the same song. I think the only thing more self-deprecating than actually having a blog is calling the people out that have them through a pop song. She’s basically asking people to make tasteless jokes about how she should’ve never thrown the Lambo keys in the first place.
--I went to a Penguins game with my little brother last week. It was the last one they’ve won to date, actually, when Evgeni Malkin had a hat trick. When he scored his third goal, my little brother looked at me, wondering if I was going to throw my hat. I immediately snatched it off of my head (so someone else wouldn’t grab it and throw it, because there are douchebags everywhere), and said “I’m not throwing this hat, I just bought the fuckin’ thing yesterday.” He also decided not to throw his, since it had been a Christmas gift the year before from our older brother.
This got me to thinking about hat tricks and just how stupid they are. I love going to hockey games and I love being a participating fan, but those tickets are fucking expensive, and I don’t think the people at the games should be expected pay more (the price of a hat) just because one of the players on the team did what he is paid millions of dollars annually to do. Whenever I worked at a grocery store and we would stock the shelves with three trucks worth of products in less than six hours, nobody would start throwing their hats on the floor. They would just start bitching about how there was no more buttermilk.
Who the fuck even drinks buttermilk?
--To go with my theme from the past month of watching TV almost constantly (holiday break and no job), I got to watch the last couple episodes of Glee a few nights ago. I love that show. In case you haven’t watched it before, it’s basically like a series version of the movie Grease (or I guess the High School Musical movies) where there’s definite plots and subplots, but there’s also a musical aspect. The kids on this show just break out into dance at the most random times, and I couldn’t help but think about how awesome it would be if this was the way the world really went.
I mean, even in the worst times, these kids are just singing and dancing around like a bunch of well-practiced idiots. It often comes with no warning. They just get going, and they’re always synced perfectly. I wish it was like this for me in high school. Like if we lost a huge basketball game and everyone was in the locker room all down-trodden and our coach came in and we just started this awesome acapella version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” I bet our chances of winning the next game--no matter who the opponent might be--would be significantly increased.
--I was having a conversation with one of my friends a while ago, and she told me that one of the things she looks for in a potential mate is their religious affiliation. She’s a Catholic, wants her spouse to be a Catholic, and wants to raise her children as Catholic.
Alright, whatever. That’s fine, I guess. But an attitude like that really conveys a kind of righteousness that could be blinding, I think. I mean, you have to consider the fact that there are 22 religions in the world that have at least 500,000 or more followers. Each one of these religions seem to think that they’re the one that is “right,” or else people would not follow that religion.
But we can’t all be right. What if the Jews are right? What if the Catholics are? What if it’s the fucking Rastafarians? Basically, nobody knows what religion is the absolutely right one, or even if there is one that’s the right one. That’s why I don’t understand why people get so hot and bothered about marrying outside of their religion. I just want to marry someone that is a good person. They can worship the flying spaghetti monster if they want to. I’d rather marry a girl that’s a Buddhist than a Catholic that has a questionable moral standing.
I mean, it might be better if you marry someone outside of your religion. That way your family will have a better chance of being right. If/when you get up to the pearly gates at the time of rapture and your Neo-Paganism spouse was the one that ended up being right, they can at least try and vouch for you being an upstanding citizen that didn’t lie, cheat or steal.
--I’ve heard Kelly Clarkson’s song where she professes that she doesn’t hook up a few times recently, and all I can think is “Well, yeah, why would someone want to hook up with you anyway?” She makes good music, I’ll grant her that, but so does Tracy Chapman and I don’t want to get down with her. I mean, Kelly Clarkson just isn’t attractive. Not anymore. She used to be. I’m trying to find a politically correct way to say that people probably don’t want to hook up with her so much anymore because she really, um, let herself go. I mean, if this was Victorian England then people probably would want to, because chubby and pale were very attractive back then (and I actually have an idea for an entire entry based on that and how I wish society was that way today, but we’ll talk about that at a later date), but that’s not really how it goes now, and I guess it can’t really be helped.
I’m not trying to say I have a problem with women that are overweight, because I don’t. I mean, I love women; I have all their albums. I’m just saying that if you do let yourself go, don’t try to take your anger and frustration out on men by writing a song that alleges they all want to bang you when the real truth is that they may have used to but don’t want to anymore. Or they want to get with you simply because you’re a celebrity. If I’m going to sit around and drink beer and eat fried jalapeno poppers all day, I’m going to accept the fact that girls might not find me that attractive once I put on forty pounds. I’m not going to write a song acting like I didn’t want to get on women in the first place.
--The 2009 Oxford American Dictionary word of the year was “unfriend.” Like to unfriend someone on Facebook. I’d like to make a remark now about how technology is taking over the world and how social networking might not be the best thing for people to be immersing themselves in, but the truth is that I’ve immersed myself in it. And, without it, pretty much nobody would read this damn thing.
--J.K. Rowling should fight Stephenie Meyer for potentially ruining young adult fiction for eternity. Then Anne Rice or Neil Gaiman should beat the shit out of her again for ruining occult fiction for eternity. Then Bram Stoker should come back from the dead and beat her ass again for taking his invention and distorting it to the point that it’s barely even recognizable anymore. I just can’t make peace with the fact that one of the best stories ever told about a creature that couldn’t go into the sun because he would fry to a crisp and die inspired some lady to steal most of his ideas and change them around, so that the same breed of creature can now go out in the sun, but just sparkles. Fuck, Twilight is frustrating.
--I don’t get why people put “living” in the activities on their Facebook profiles. In general, that is a given.
--I was watching the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show with a great deal of concentration early in December, and I had a hard time figuring out what the huge appeal of it is. I mean, obviously there are beautiful women strutting around in very extravagant outfits of lingerie, which I won’t argue with. That’s something most straight guys would like to see, and some of us even mark our daily planners for such an event (my mom even reminds me every year to watch it). I just don’t understand why girls like to watch it so much. I wouldn’t watch a fashion show for guys unless I wanted to buy the stuff they were wearing, and I’ve been inside a Victoria’s Secret on a few occasions and have never ever seen huge ass wings or any of the other shit that those ladies wear during those shows. I just don’t get the purpose of putting on a fashion show for a bunch of stuff people can’t even buy. I thought you had those things so people could see your clothing lines and would purchase them.
It’s almost as confusing as that new show Jersey Shore. Everyone watches it, but for all the wrong reasons.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Christmas Songs
It seems like it starts earlier and earlier each year. The celebration of Christmas. Well, more the anticipation of Christmas, actually. If you’re anything like me, the anticipation of the holidays can actually be just as stimulating and exciting as the actual holiday. I feel like I’m always more enthusiastic on Christmas Eve as opposed to Christmas day, probably because right after Christmas there isn’t much to look forward to. (Unless you’re like my little sister and were born on the day after Christmas, which is a birthdate I don’t think I’d really want to have. Jesus’ birthday is a pretty difficult act to follow.) I think this is why I’ve always been an advocate of playing of Christmas tunes before Thanksgiving, which defies conventional wisdom. It used to be some sort of unwritten law that true Christmas festivities wouldn’t begin until the day after Thanksgiving, when people flock to the malls at ridiculously early hours and all of the light music stations begin playing exclusively Christmas music. I’ve always sought to shatter this status quo, and so I was out of my fucking mind excited when I was driving home for Thanksgiving break last month--six days prior to Thanksgiving--and turned off my iPod (because my musical tastes are so depressing that if I listen to it the entire three hour drive home I start to get an urge to drive my car off of a bridge and begin to question my own sanity) to switch to the radio. When I was seeking through the channels, I came across Pittsburgh’s WISH 99.7, the station that my girl Delilah is syndicated on in the area, and they were already playing a Christmas song.
Now, I don’t remember what song it was that I first heard. But I do know that right after that one they played “Little Drummer Boy,” and then after that they played “Silent Night.” I didn’t know what was going on, but I fucking loved it. Then I heard an advertisement alerting me to the fact that WISH was already playing Christmas music all the time. I did a little fist pump in my car, and started hoping they’d play Trans Siberian Orchestra song (more on that later) before I pulled into my driveway--but they didn’t, so I had to play it on my CD player when I got home and was unpacking. And yes, I do own one of their CDs. After that, I went out to the kitchen to cook some food, and popped the Charlie Brown Christmas CD into the really loud sound system we have in the dining room. My mom came home and questioned my early festivity, and I told her that Christmas was getting started fucking early this year. I told her about WISH playing all the Christmas music, and also that I would be listening to almost exclusively holiday-themed music from that point until Christmas day (I say almost exclusively because sometimes I still like to sit in my room and listen to depressing songs, like the 15-year-old inner-emo kid that I am).
I was frightened that I would get sick of this music, and that it might ruin it for me in the future, especially since there aren’t many quality modern Christmas songs coming out anymore. But, I’m a man of my word, and am happy to report that my ceaseless absorption of Christmas music has yet to turn me into the Grinch or this weird dude my mom knows that wants to tell his 4-year-old son that Santa Claus isn’t real (which is completely untrue).
One thing it has done, though, is make me really analyze these songs, just like I do with anything else that I listen to frequently. It’s not really ruining them for me, since I know that holiday songs aren’t really supposed to be searched for hidden messages, but merely enjoyed because they make you merry and shit, but I still do think about it. You can’t really help it when you’ve heard “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for about the 43rd time in less than a month.
So, I have some thoughts about some of the more popular songs I’ve been hearing. And I’d like to share them with you.
The Twelve Days of Christmas: When I was younger, I never really gave a thought to this song at all. It was just cool because you got to keep repeating shit over and over. I never really thought about the items that one lover was giving the other until this year, when I realized that almost all of them were completely absurd. In fact, I’ve studied the list of gifts given over a period of 12 days, and have come to the conclusion that the only ones I would want would be five golden rings (Cash4Gold.com pays a holiday bonus), nine ladies dancing and maybe the eight maids-a-milking, but that one is kind of vague, so I’d have to get a little more information on what exactly was going on with those servants. I can tell you one thing, though: I would not want 11 pipers piping (unless they were smoking something from their pipes), or 12 drummers drumming. That shit is extremely loud, and I don’t have room for 23 people playing instruments in my house. Think about it. If you woke up on Christmas morning to a fucking drum line in your living room, would you really want to date the person that sent those to you anymore? If I were the one singing this song, I would replace “true love” with “first love,” because as soon as some broad sent me 10 lords-a-leaping, I’d have my personal information on Facebook changed to single, interested in women and looking for random play/ whatever I can get.
The rest of the gifts consist of edible livestock and aviary creatures, which I don’t really need because I have access to a grocery store where I can find meat that is already killed and prepared to the point that all I have to do is throw it in the oven (same reason I don’t hunt).
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: I’m not sure what came first, this song or the movie, but both carry the same message as far as I’m concerned: Rudolph is a fucking reindeer, and he’s a million times better at burying grudges than I am. He’s not only the most famous reindeer of them all, but he’s also the most selfless.
Allow me to tell you how it would’ve went down if I was in Rudolph’s shoes (hoofs?). If I would’ve gotten chastised from my early childhood about a physical deformity (red nose, obviously), and pretty much cast out of society as I knew it, I would’ve become pretty embittered. I would’ve met that dentist named Hermey and probably plotted some kind of plot to fuck up the rest of the reindeer. I probably would’ve employed the help of that huge snow monster too. I sure as shit wouldn’t have immediately gone into service for Santa to save Christmas without throwing down a few requests.
Okay, maybe I would’ve, just because saving Christmas would be a pretty important calling that, if one had the opportunity to participate in, they probably would. I definitely wouldn’t have been as fucking chipper as Rudolph, though. He was slighted in a big and unjust way. Nobody should be rejected for physical characteristics, and Rudolph’s immediate concession and joviality with having the responsibility of guiding the sleigh is pretty unrealistic. If I were him, I probably would’ve acted like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies: I would’ve agreed to help, because it seemed like something I almost had to do, but I wouldn’t have been fucking happy about it, and I wouldn’t have been too nice to the others along the way. I would’ve probably pulled off the salvation of Christmas, then come back to the north pole and developed an expensive drug/drinking problem. I’d sit in the bar all day and talk about how one year I’d save Christmas for two reasons: to make all the little good boys and girls in the world happy, and to spite those fucking prick reindeer that used to rip on me.
Baby, It’s Cold Outside: I never really got too into this song until this year. The only version I could pick out was the Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey version. (By the way, Nick Lachey is making a pretty tight comeback. I’m watching a new show called “The Sing-Off” right now on NBC. He’s hosting it. It’s basically an “American Idol” kind of deal, except with acappella groups, and Ben Folds is one of the judges. It’s funny, because Spencer and me were just talking about where that guy went, and said he should be like Mario Lopez and start to host shit. We’re clairvoyant. Anyway, I’m glad to see he’s doing better than Jessica Simpson. He deserves it after she cheated on him with Dane Cooke.)
Anyway, it just occured to me this year that the dude singing in this song is a hardcore creep. I mean, listen to it closely, and you’ll figure it out. The girl’s talking about how she has to leave because her parents will be worried about her and stuff, but the guy just keeps talking about how it’s too cold for her to leave, and that she should take off her coat and just keep boozing with him. I mean, it’s obvious that this dude is trying to get the girl ripped and get himself laid. I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually put a little something in the woman’s booze to get her a little submissive (the girl even asks “say, what’s in this drink?” at one point during the song).
Date rape is not what Christmas is about. I mean--at the risk of sounding absolutely awful--Mary had her kid on Christmas without ever having even gotten laid, right?
Keep it in your fucking pants, James Taylor.
Wonderful Christmastime & Happy Christmas (War is Over): I hear both of these songs by former Beatles members every single year, and I’ve always been a little split on which one I like better. I really amped up my thoughts on this a couple of weeks ago when me and a bunch of my friends had a huge debate/argument that lasted days over which band/artist made better music in a lyrical sense, Kanye West or The Beatles. (We tend to have these arguments a lot, because people have a hard time separating actual talent from a person’s shortcomings as a person--someone actually tried telling me that Taylor Swift was more talented than Kanye West a few weeks ago. I mean, just because Kanye West got up in front of thousands of people and hated on some teenage pop/country star doesn’t mean that he doesn’t write some of the greatest lyrics ever. Just like because millions of young women adored the Beatles doesn’t mean that they weren’t overrated or were the greatest lyricists of their time, because they obviously can’t hold a candle to Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger.)
I’ve always given Lennon’s song the edge, because when I was younger, my mom had this holiday themed screensaver/icon setting on our family computer, and everytime you double-clicked on something you would hear McCartney singing “wonderful christmastimeeeeeeee,” and it drove me fucking crazy. I’m sure part of this also has to do with the fact that I’ve always been a bigger fan of Lennon than McCartney, for reasons I don’t even understand. I spent a lot of time trying to decide which one I liked better (and tried to leave Yoko Ono out of it, since she pretty much marked the end of an era which makes me immediately feel spite for her), and at the end I just came to the conclusion that both songs aren’t really that great at all.
I’d rather listen to “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey any day.
Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24: Trans Siberian Orchestra is one amazing band, and they make holiday music that is comparable to nothing else out there on the market. This song, in my opinion, is the band’s best work. It’s definitely their most popular. Every time I hear it, I get this powerful mix of emotions. I’m almost overcome with the Christmas Spirit, but I’m also ready to do something extremely epic. If I was ever put into some kind of scenario where I had to fight terrorists that had taken over a shopping mall on Christmas Eve, I would want this song to come in when I was loading all of my weapons and preparing for my last desperate and heroic seemingly-suicidal surge against those haters, I’d want it to be this song.
Seriously. Listen to it once, and see if you don’t imagine yourself cocking a shotgun and saying something like, “Silent night, my ass. Let’s get merry.” Of course, you’d be saying this while crouching right behind the plastic baby Jesus’ manger in the mall’s fake nativity set.
I should write scripts.
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus: I had to save the most bewildering and ridiculous for last. This is a song that is usually received good-naturedly, and I don’t know why. I mean, it’s about a kid’s mom cheating on her husband with a fat dude with a long dirty white beard (that mommy allegedly tickles!) in a red and white suit. Also, Santa Claus is obviously married to Mrs. Claus, and has been for an astronomically long time. Actually, longer than pretty much any couple I’ve ever known. The fact that this man is going astray while he’s traveling around the country masquerading as this great guy that gives a ton of shit away is pretty unsettling (it’d be Bill Gates or Oprah cheating on their significant others). And, if you think about it, if Santa is getting fresh with this one lady underneath the mistletoe, wouldn’t logic dictate that he’s making time with ladies all over the fucking globe? It wouldn’t be irrational to think that Santa is hooking up with American, Asian, African, European, Australian and Russian women all in the same night, thus completing a gigantic chunk of my bucket list in less than 24 hours. Think about it. How many homes do you think Santa is breaking every Christmas Eve? And the little kid singing the song says, “Oh what a laugh it would have been if Daddy had only seen Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.” Are you fucking kidding me? This kid must have a strange sense of humor if he would’ve been laughing at his dad trying to pull a morbidly obese man in black leather boots from the fucking chimney.
I don’t understand why people are giving Tiger Woods so much attention. All that guy can do is golf. He’s not known as this guy that gives toys to every good boy and girl the world over once a year. I mean, if you ask me, Santa is the one that should have his own Gatorade flavor. Well, at least I thought so until I heard this damn song. And this whole thing’s not going to help the children of today at all. No wonder so many people are obese and cheat on their spouses. It’s because they idolize Santa Claus.
Now, I don’t remember what song it was that I first heard. But I do know that right after that one they played “Little Drummer Boy,” and then after that they played “Silent Night.” I didn’t know what was going on, but I fucking loved it. Then I heard an advertisement alerting me to the fact that WISH was already playing Christmas music all the time. I did a little fist pump in my car, and started hoping they’d play Trans Siberian Orchestra song (more on that later) before I pulled into my driveway--but they didn’t, so I had to play it on my CD player when I got home and was unpacking. And yes, I do own one of their CDs. After that, I went out to the kitchen to cook some food, and popped the Charlie Brown Christmas CD into the really loud sound system we have in the dining room. My mom came home and questioned my early festivity, and I told her that Christmas was getting started fucking early this year. I told her about WISH playing all the Christmas music, and also that I would be listening to almost exclusively holiday-themed music from that point until Christmas day (I say almost exclusively because sometimes I still like to sit in my room and listen to depressing songs, like the 15-year-old inner-emo kid that I am).
I was frightened that I would get sick of this music, and that it might ruin it for me in the future, especially since there aren’t many quality modern Christmas songs coming out anymore. But, I’m a man of my word, and am happy to report that my ceaseless absorption of Christmas music has yet to turn me into the Grinch or this weird dude my mom knows that wants to tell his 4-year-old son that Santa Claus isn’t real (which is completely untrue).
One thing it has done, though, is make me really analyze these songs, just like I do with anything else that I listen to frequently. It’s not really ruining them for me, since I know that holiday songs aren’t really supposed to be searched for hidden messages, but merely enjoyed because they make you merry and shit, but I still do think about it. You can’t really help it when you’ve heard “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for about the 43rd time in less than a month.
So, I have some thoughts about some of the more popular songs I’ve been hearing. And I’d like to share them with you.
The Twelve Days of Christmas: When I was younger, I never really gave a thought to this song at all. It was just cool because you got to keep repeating shit over and over. I never really thought about the items that one lover was giving the other until this year, when I realized that almost all of them were completely absurd. In fact, I’ve studied the list of gifts given over a period of 12 days, and have come to the conclusion that the only ones I would want would be five golden rings (Cash4Gold.com pays a holiday bonus), nine ladies dancing and maybe the eight maids-a-milking, but that one is kind of vague, so I’d have to get a little more information on what exactly was going on with those servants. I can tell you one thing, though: I would not want 11 pipers piping (unless they were smoking something from their pipes), or 12 drummers drumming. That shit is extremely loud, and I don’t have room for 23 people playing instruments in my house. Think about it. If you woke up on Christmas morning to a fucking drum line in your living room, would you really want to date the person that sent those to you anymore? If I were the one singing this song, I would replace “true love” with “first love,” because as soon as some broad sent me 10 lords-a-leaping, I’d have my personal information on Facebook changed to single, interested in women and looking for random play/ whatever I can get.
The rest of the gifts consist of edible livestock and aviary creatures, which I don’t really need because I have access to a grocery store where I can find meat that is already killed and prepared to the point that all I have to do is throw it in the oven (same reason I don’t hunt).
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: I’m not sure what came first, this song or the movie, but both carry the same message as far as I’m concerned: Rudolph is a fucking reindeer, and he’s a million times better at burying grudges than I am. He’s not only the most famous reindeer of them all, but he’s also the most selfless.
Allow me to tell you how it would’ve went down if I was in Rudolph’s shoes (hoofs?). If I would’ve gotten chastised from my early childhood about a physical deformity (red nose, obviously), and pretty much cast out of society as I knew it, I would’ve become pretty embittered. I would’ve met that dentist named Hermey and probably plotted some kind of plot to fuck up the rest of the reindeer. I probably would’ve employed the help of that huge snow monster too. I sure as shit wouldn’t have immediately gone into service for Santa to save Christmas without throwing down a few requests.
Okay, maybe I would’ve, just because saving Christmas would be a pretty important calling that, if one had the opportunity to participate in, they probably would. I definitely wouldn’t have been as fucking chipper as Rudolph, though. He was slighted in a big and unjust way. Nobody should be rejected for physical characteristics, and Rudolph’s immediate concession and joviality with having the responsibility of guiding the sleigh is pretty unrealistic. If I were him, I probably would’ve acted like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies: I would’ve agreed to help, because it seemed like something I almost had to do, but I wouldn’t have been fucking happy about it, and I wouldn’t have been too nice to the others along the way. I would’ve probably pulled off the salvation of Christmas, then come back to the north pole and developed an expensive drug/drinking problem. I’d sit in the bar all day and talk about how one year I’d save Christmas for two reasons: to make all the little good boys and girls in the world happy, and to spite those fucking prick reindeer that used to rip on me.
Baby, It’s Cold Outside: I never really got too into this song until this year. The only version I could pick out was the Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey version. (By the way, Nick Lachey is making a pretty tight comeback. I’m watching a new show called “The Sing-Off” right now on NBC. He’s hosting it. It’s basically an “American Idol” kind of deal, except with acappella groups, and Ben Folds is one of the judges. It’s funny, because Spencer and me were just talking about where that guy went, and said he should be like Mario Lopez and start to host shit. We’re clairvoyant. Anyway, I’m glad to see he’s doing better than Jessica Simpson. He deserves it after she cheated on him with Dane Cooke.)
Anyway, it just occured to me this year that the dude singing in this song is a hardcore creep. I mean, listen to it closely, and you’ll figure it out. The girl’s talking about how she has to leave because her parents will be worried about her and stuff, but the guy just keeps talking about how it’s too cold for her to leave, and that she should take off her coat and just keep boozing with him. I mean, it’s obvious that this dude is trying to get the girl ripped and get himself laid. I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually put a little something in the woman’s booze to get her a little submissive (the girl even asks “say, what’s in this drink?” at one point during the song).
Date rape is not what Christmas is about. I mean--at the risk of sounding absolutely awful--Mary had her kid on Christmas without ever having even gotten laid, right?
Keep it in your fucking pants, James Taylor.
Wonderful Christmastime & Happy Christmas (War is Over): I hear both of these songs by former Beatles members every single year, and I’ve always been a little split on which one I like better. I really amped up my thoughts on this a couple of weeks ago when me and a bunch of my friends had a huge debate/argument that lasted days over which band/artist made better music in a lyrical sense, Kanye West or The Beatles. (We tend to have these arguments a lot, because people have a hard time separating actual talent from a person’s shortcomings as a person--someone actually tried telling me that Taylor Swift was more talented than Kanye West a few weeks ago. I mean, just because Kanye West got up in front of thousands of people and hated on some teenage pop/country star doesn’t mean that he doesn’t write some of the greatest lyrics ever. Just like because millions of young women adored the Beatles doesn’t mean that they weren’t overrated or were the greatest lyricists of their time, because they obviously can’t hold a candle to Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger.)
I’ve always given Lennon’s song the edge, because when I was younger, my mom had this holiday themed screensaver/icon setting on our family computer, and everytime you double-clicked on something you would hear McCartney singing “wonderful christmastimeeeeeeee,” and it drove me fucking crazy. I’m sure part of this also has to do with the fact that I’ve always been a bigger fan of Lennon than McCartney, for reasons I don’t even understand. I spent a lot of time trying to decide which one I liked better (and tried to leave Yoko Ono out of it, since she pretty much marked the end of an era which makes me immediately feel spite for her), and at the end I just came to the conclusion that both songs aren’t really that great at all.
I’d rather listen to “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey any day.
Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24: Trans Siberian Orchestra is one amazing band, and they make holiday music that is comparable to nothing else out there on the market. This song, in my opinion, is the band’s best work. It’s definitely their most popular. Every time I hear it, I get this powerful mix of emotions. I’m almost overcome with the Christmas Spirit, but I’m also ready to do something extremely epic. If I was ever put into some kind of scenario where I had to fight terrorists that had taken over a shopping mall on Christmas Eve, I would want this song to come in when I was loading all of my weapons and preparing for my last desperate and heroic seemingly-suicidal surge against those haters, I’d want it to be this song.
Seriously. Listen to it once, and see if you don’t imagine yourself cocking a shotgun and saying something like, “Silent night, my ass. Let’s get merry.” Of course, you’d be saying this while crouching right behind the plastic baby Jesus’ manger in the mall’s fake nativity set.
I should write scripts.
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus: I had to save the most bewildering and ridiculous for last. This is a song that is usually received good-naturedly, and I don’t know why. I mean, it’s about a kid’s mom cheating on her husband with a fat dude with a long dirty white beard (that mommy allegedly tickles!) in a red and white suit. Also, Santa Claus is obviously married to Mrs. Claus, and has been for an astronomically long time. Actually, longer than pretty much any couple I’ve ever known. The fact that this man is going astray while he’s traveling around the country masquerading as this great guy that gives a ton of shit away is pretty unsettling (it’d be Bill Gates or Oprah cheating on their significant others). And, if you think about it, if Santa is getting fresh with this one lady underneath the mistletoe, wouldn’t logic dictate that he’s making time with ladies all over the fucking globe? It wouldn’t be irrational to think that Santa is hooking up with American, Asian, African, European, Australian and Russian women all in the same night, thus completing a gigantic chunk of my bucket list in less than 24 hours. Think about it. How many homes do you think Santa is breaking every Christmas Eve? And the little kid singing the song says, “Oh what a laugh it would have been if Daddy had only seen Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.” Are you fucking kidding me? This kid must have a strange sense of humor if he would’ve been laughing at his dad trying to pull a morbidly obese man in black leather boots from the fucking chimney.
I don’t understand why people are giving Tiger Woods so much attention. All that guy can do is golf. He’s not known as this guy that gives toys to every good boy and girl the world over once a year. I mean, if you ask me, Santa is the one that should have his own Gatorade flavor. Well, at least I thought so until I heard this damn song. And this whole thing’s not going to help the children of today at all. No wonder so many people are obese and cheat on their spouses. It’s because they idolize Santa Claus.
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