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February 25, 2007 >> Irony takes Birthday BeatsA birthday comes with an expectation of cruelty. In a twisted version of camaraderie, your birthday is supposed to be the site of some ultimate drunkenness. If you aren't throwing up or asleep in a bathroom somewhere, friends have failed you. Thus the Prairie Fires come out in force, and the Cement Mixers, and the Rocky Mountain Bear Fuckers, and maybe the Jaeger if female hearts are tinged with pity at the sight of your hideous inebriation.
Thus it pleases me when this concept falls in on itself in symmetrical irony - the man planning the demise of the birthday boy, in the end, becomes The Drunkestest. The Phoenix is a bird that rises from the dead, again and again, to battle the neverending hordes of squirrels that plague humanity. The Drunkestest is a demon that rises in every breast, sometimes unexpectedly, to animate wobbly frames: to slap strangers, spill drinks and projectile spit and vomit in a 180 degree arc. Sometimes the two - the Phoenix and the Drunkestest - collide, and rising again the next day requires a great deal of water and a trip to Subway.
Meanwhile the dude who was supposed to get his, the one with the birthday, ended up making out with some girl in the hip-hop room.
Posted by Chris at 07:45 PM >> Commentations (4) | Permalink
February 22, 2007 >> Memoirs of a Marker
I am tearing through a fat pile of essay proposals with a pencil right now, and some overarching suggestions come to mind. This may be helpful for those of you seeking to become a better academic writer, or even those who want to ascend beyond the point of moderate retardation which appears to be the status quo.
1. Read the fucking project hand-out. Read it once and then read it again. It has a list of things you should include in your paper, stuff like "clearly articulate your thesis" and "make sure you use more than one site of analysis" and "don't use MSN smiley faces to prove a point". It's a hand-holding list. When you submit a three-page stream of consciousness diatribe about how House M.D. is disrespectful to his patients because he is jealous of their working legs, you are slowly killing me.
2. They have these webpages, see, where you can find examples of how to cite sources. MLA, APA, whatever you want. PRINTING OFF A MACLEAN'S ARTICLE AND ATTACHING IT TO YOUR PAPER WITH A RUBBER BAND IS NOT THE SAME AS CITING.
3. You spelt my name wrong. And the prof's name. And your name. Q: How is this even possible? A: Microsoft Word spellcheck.
4. Once upon a time in undergrad, I wrote many a paper that was absolute bullshit. For the most part, these somehow passed rigorous academic inspection because I talked a lot about the "Internet" and used a lot of gigantic buzzwords I stole from this aforementioned "net". The end.
Kids, I can spot this crap from a mile away. Even name-dropping micro-macrosociology and hypermegaconflict theory doesn't change the fact that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and haven't for at least three paragraphs.
5. This reminds me of teaching seven-year olds in Korea: then and than are not the same word. They are different! Also alienation is not "alien nation".
And that's about the limit of my vile condescension, at least for today.
Posted by Chris at 05:18 PM >> Commentations (5) | Permalink
February 19, 2007 >> A fistful of lessons
Probably the world's best anti-anti-drug statement, this is what happens when the wee hours of the morning find us without any weed: Incestuous puppets demand their own hard-porn photoshoot!
Good thing nobody watches the Simpsons... anymore. The moral of the story is that you should give us drugs or we'll fuck with your childhood.
And this is what happens when you gamble and lose: you get to restack a sizable collection of pizza boxes into a pleasing installation piece. The moral here is that you should never move all in on a pair of Queens, kids! Clemens will get you with the straight every time, and then you will probably get your own art gallery showcase.
Posted by Chris at 09:29 PM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
February 13, 2007 >> Buy back in
Shamefully enough I had to purchase my way out of a mild depression-slash-psychotic tiny robot syndrome today. Buying to feel better about yourself... how did it come to this? Ah right. We've been convinced to attribute value to items of conspicuous consumption, and now we have the option of buying our self esteem one silver necklace at a time. Or DVD. Whatever. It's worse when you can see the fantastic mechanism at work, churning people into consumers, and then proceed to jump right into the gears yourself. And yet I still feel better.
I can't imagine what it must be like to have to buy a $500 purse every time you feel like shit. I got off easy by grabbing two books I've already read, making sure my ego knows I'm buying for display and ownership and not for, y'know, knowledge. I wasn't sure it would accept its consolation prize if I bought anything suspiciously approaching usefulness.
Just to make sure, I also ordered this iPod video thing I've heard so much about using the legendary impulse-buy power of the internet. With that kind of social capital, no depression could survive. An iPod could probably make you feel better even after just watching your family be barbecued and eaten by giant seagulls. In my case this purchase was frivolity, but also necessary: the iRiver I purchased roughly HALF A YEAR AGO has died in some sort of hard-drive-clicky-click mishap. Goddamn. The new iPod comes with a touching eulogy engraved on its back:
3 years, 3 MP3 players
What the fuck?
I am kind of hoping the engraving guys at Apple see this and add an extra line:
That's profitability, sucka
or
Why don't you go cry about it on your blog?
which I already happen to be doing.
Posted by Chris at 06:52 PM >> Commentations (9) | Permalink
February 12, 2007 >> How am I not myself?
I've had a sinking feeling in my stomach the last few days, whenever I try to talk or act or do something that should be me. "Should be me." Aren't I me no matter what I do? Isn't that, I don't know, some kind of understood assumption? It doesn't feel like it. It feels like I'm watching my body blunder around, unwieldy and new to the world, and my tongue expands in my mouth and becomes a foreign invasion, and my fingers move of their own accord and nothing feels right today. Or yesterday.
It's very unsettling. Like finding out you're actually a tiny little robot who has grown used to his control seat in the Clemensbrain, but the brain has risen up against you and decided to strike out on its own. But where does the robot go next? And how am I not myself?
Posted by Chris at 11:39 AM >> Commentations (0) | Permalink
February 08, 2007 >> Are you a violent white male?
Gender: We live in a patriarchy. I am a male.
Sexual orientation: We live in a heterosexual society. I am not gay.
Race: We live in a White-normalized world. I am white.
Colonialism: We live in the ashes of European empire. I am English.
Class: We live in a hierarchy of economic class. I am upper-middle class, a standard subject of consumption.
This, my friends, is guilt that one is born with. I suppose I could start fucking men to marginalize myself in response, but they're ugly. And hairy. Gross. Or I could make myself poor through a series of unsuccessful bets on hockey games, but I tend to win things when I don't want to win. Seriously. If I genuinely didn't want to win the lottery, but I played anyway because an international terrorist was threatening to shoot Chad in the face, I would probably win. And then Chad would be shot in the face.
I am a violent white male AND I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU ALL!!1!!1!
Posted by Chris at 10:27 AM >> Commentations (4) | Permalink
February 07, 2007 >> What if the Cyborg was really-real?
"Haraway's cyborg represents an erasure of boundaries between human gender, between organism and machine. The cyborg does not seek to return to its origin: it has none. The cyborg thus has no moral impetus to uphold social norms or ideologies. Essentially, it doesn't care about any of us."
The dischord of industry suddenly breaks through the plaster ceiling and halogen strip lights above. The sound is a light whirring, like a vacuum cleaner or an exceptionally powerful sex toy.
"Harawa... what is that? It sounds like someone's drilling."
WHRRRRRrrr
"Maybe it's the cyborg." Laughter! Laugh Out Loud!
Crack. A hole opens up in the classroom ceiling. Plaster flakes pour down into open mouths. A voice from above that doesn't care about anything, but it will nonetheless demolish universalities like it's a job. Bones too, if the Terminator movies were any kind of warning. Or Will Smith's seminal I Robot.
"THIS ONE WAS CONCEIVED IN 1985. IT IS RUSTY. IT WOULD APPRECIATE A CANISTER OF DOUBLE-YOU DEE FORTY."
Guh?
Post-humanity is here and the boundaries between theory and the world are very thin, a razor's edge made somewhat dull by Hollywood blockbusters.
Posted by Chris at 03:48 PM >> Commentations (0) | Permalink
February 05, 2007 >> The Inexorable March of Life
Whereby
Tim forgets to buy beer and instead supplies our Super Bowl party with boxed wine
instantly making it the classiest affair in sports-watching history.
I crash the Retro Rock Lounge in some hotel in Mississauga with Pac-man Eyed Girl
and her dad, a 60-something year old British man, plays cover songs by the Beatles and Eric Clapton. Wah wah waaaaah! A Scuttbaby pounds her tiny fists in rage to the beat of the music. Old Chinese men rock and old white men rock and an Indian dude with a t-shirt depicting the fearsome Metal Horns decimates my drunken face with "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World". My eyes are summarily opened to this bold new multicultural strain of part-time elderly rockers. It is cold outside and I run like a ninja. Three women in a minivan equals participatory action in the driving and direction-finding process; I have never in my life experienced such democracy in getting from one place to another. Democracy = arguing, terrifyingly abrupt lane-changes and cutting off transport trucks.
Microsoft Canada's Digital Ice House© is erected in Dundas Square; looks somewhat like the bastard child of an igloo and a circus freak-show tent
Inside, however, is pretty badass. An entire condominium apartment is represented by ice sculptures of things like chairs and dictionaries and fruit bowls. Approximate size of this frozen dwelling: about 200 sq. feet, which shows that Microsoft Canada has a pretty decent grasp of the average Torontonian's lifestyle.
Microsoft personnel lurked in every room, eager to impress the wonders of Windows Vista upon ice enthusiasts. One guy showed us Vista's "cool" new image organization system. You can add - get this - TAGS to pictures to make them searchable! Holy fucking shit! A demonstration. A picture of me and Steph was pumped into the machinery and tagged "Sweden" (NOPE!), "couple" (UH-UH) and "potential purchaser" (WHEE!). Of course, it's not Windows Vista's fault that I am a dirty liar, but basically every feature of the new OS that we were shown has already been done (Flickr! MacOS!). Vista just serves them up with a generous heap of visual masturbation.
This is the new look for the Windows Recycling Bin, except now it's called the Windows Arctic Compost Heap. It melts in the summer, making your files biodegradable and eco-friendly. Somebody watched An Inconvenient Truth!
Microsoft employees will acquiesce to bizarre demands to have an orgy on the ice bed, but only if you critically compare them to the competition first: "I heard you guys were the new Apple... Apple is cool. THOSE guys would get on that bed. And they'd give me an iPod." No iPod, but yes bed. I was impressed... could you use this rhetoric on other companies? "Well Pickle Barrel employee, I understand that food costs money, but just look at Apple's corporate culture!" I don't really see how that would work, but I'm gonna try anyway. Maybe we can talk about our feelings, even if I don't get anything for free.
Windows Vista is the operating system I'll have in three years when I buy a new PC. Apple is too cool for school, and I won't eat anything that already has a bite taken out of it.
Posted by Chris at 01:25 AM >> Commentations (4) | Permalink