LETS GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER

January 26, 2009 at 6:50 am (life) (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , )

My professor says during our first class, “Now, I am well aware the biggest complaint about coming to school here is that this is a commuter college. Nobody has the chance to get to know anybody.” I had, and still have, serious issue with this statement. Biggest complaint? Obviously she hasn’t reviewed my complaint file. The fact that nothing in the school has been up updated since 1977? Complaint. The fact that they chose brown and orange as the main color scheme of the building interiors? Complaint. The fact that this professor was wearing brown corduroy pant, a brown stripped suit jacket and brown suede boots? COMPLAINT! The fact that I don’t know the names of any of these morons sitting in the room next me? Couldn’t care less. Honestly, I could not care less.

I have no interest, no desire in fact, to know that Gale is a twenty-seven year old mother of four coming back to school to major in Sociology. Sociology? Yeah, okay good luck Gale but how does that change my life? What benefice does that offer to the development of my future intellect? None. Absolutely none.

Despite this, we are all forced into playing the “get to know each other game.” We have to play the game lest we should look like non-conformist. No, we don’t want that do we? No heaven forbid we look like non-conformist. That’s what college is all about, it’s not about finding yourself and education; it’s about learning you better damn well do what you’re told and like it or you will never get anywhere in life. This, this being the main reason I have gone nowhere in my twenty-three years of life on this planet. If you don’t play the “get to know each other game” you will look labeled a Nazi. It’s not written, but an unspoken fact of life. It’s during these times I always wish I had one of those suicide pills tucked away in my pocket. You know the ones they give potential prisoners of war ?The one to take lest they should meet some ungodly torture. Yes, that pill. I want it. I want two, one for backup, just incase the first one fails to do me in in a timely manner.

This getting to know each other game was by far the most bizarre I have met with in the whole of my college career. We had to “interview” other students in the room using personally invasive questions, then present what we learned about the other student to the class. You know, questions you would never ask a complete strange: “What was the name of your first love?” “Do you sometimes find yourself having an inconsistency in the texture of your stools?” “If you had to choose, hardcore girl on girl porn or softcore milfs?”

It’s so ridiculous; it’s things like this why I have so seriously considered going on the pill. Prozac seems to the only logical answer for numbing the agony and stupidity that encompasses so much of my daily life. I feel things like this, the get to know each other games that is, won’t bother me so severely when I’m packed full of pills. I have always believed in better living through chemistry.

There is a few things that have hindered me from going forward with my chemically enhanced life. On the one hand there is the life crippling, agonizing depression that has caused me to sleep though much of my twenty second and twenty third years of life on this planet. One the flip side we have my penchant for vodka. Rum. Gin. Listerine. I’ve done a great deal of reading up on the subject and it seems to be heavily advised that one not mix the two together. If I choose Prozac, I would have to give up the drink, and I feel that is the only thing keeping me alive at the moment. The exterior of my body is a complete mess, but I have taken great care to pickle my internal organs with liquor, thus preserving them for decades to come. And then still I have to wonder. I have to wonder if they advise not mixing the two because it poses any real health risks or if it is similar to the reasons they tell you not to mix pain killers and liquor: because they want to ruin your good time. Vodka on the rocks and a Lortab? Dinner is served.

Sometimes people will say to me, “Michael, don’t you think you share just a bit to much of your personal life on the internet?”

Here it is: I feel I am like a casino. We have all seen shows that go “on the inside” of casino security on the Learning Channel or Discovery Channel. We all think, “Wow, why are they blabbing all their security secrets on national television for everyone to see?” The fact of the matter, as we all know, is they are showing perhaps less than a tenth of the actual behind the scenes operations. They show us exactly what they want us to see. As do I allow you into my life seemingly unveiled, but everything you know one way or another is what I want you to know. And you know very little. Very little indeed. It’s important to keep some mystery about yourself otherwise people grow bored. It’s why they don’t post the ingredients on many of the items at Taco Bell. Full knowledge of something can transform it from delicious and tantalizing to hormone injected beef on a preservative laced tortilla jammed full of processed cancer cheese. I don’t want you to think of me as processed cancer cheese.

- Michael

Permalink Leave a Comment

THE PROBLEM IS

October 17, 2008 at 6:22 pm (Uncategorized) (, , )

The problem, really, when cut down to the bare bones of the situation, is that I’m completely insane. It’s true. For example, the great deal of thought I put into the concept of where I live. Usually when asked, people can give a straight forward answer. “I live on 444 Oak Drive” they say.

I on the other hand, I really don’t know where I live. I know where I’m told that I live. You live in a state shaped like a little mitten they might say. But do I really? I’ve never been to space; I’ve never been able to look down and see it for myself. For all I know I live in a state shaped like the left side of Marlin Brando’s face. Or a spork for that matter; for all I know the entire planet is a giant cube. We don’t know; all we know is what we are told.

But then one has to ponder, what might those in power have to gain by telling us the earth was spherical when it is in fact a cube? There would have to be some logic behind deceiving the entire human race into believing the earth has merely two poles, not eight corners. But what could this reason be! It is a reason I simply cannot fathom it, but, when I discover it, you dear readers will be the first to know.

There is so much we believe that we just take at face value. America is the greatest country in the world! Is it really? I can tell you for a fact that our cheese isn’t doing much for me. I’m no connoisseur of course, never claimed to be, but judging from the list of names I feel I have more a taste for something along the lines of a Bel Lago or Bierkase; nothing like cheese that reeks of Limburger, I always say.

Serial killers tick me off, but not for traditional reasons. What really gets me going is why none of these people learn and continue to bury the bodies in the crawlspaces of their homes! It’s the first place the police are going to look. They won’t check the attic, look for secret passage ways, they’re going right for the door to the crawlspace to see if anything looks suspicious. And you darn tooting when they find a food sticking up next to the sump pump, they’re going to start asking a few questions. “Are you aware there appears to be a foot clogging the drain in your crawlspace Mr. So and So” may be the first in a long line of questions, followed by “as this home is in your name, may you happen to have a clue whom the foot in question may belong to.”

It’s only after they find the foot that they head for the fridge. If they saw nothing suspicious in the crawlspace, they may as well just let you be. But now your whole set up is going to unravel. The heads in the refrigerator, the boiling pot of eyeballs and the testicles in Ziploc baggies stowed away behind the peas in the freezer. In your mind, Mr. Serial Killer sir, this may all seem just normal routine, the glazing of buttocks in honey and the like. The law will, of course, disagree.

It just ticks me off. There is really nothing new under the sun these days, everybody copying everybody else. Where is the originality? Where is the creativity, I ask you? Even recording artist have gotten less creative, which I never thought to be possible. They’re so lazy they have completely given up copying other people’s music, now they just copy their own. I was listening to Beyonce’s new single and kept thinking that it sounded like another song I had heard before. The song I was thinking of was the last single off her previous CD which sounded exactly like the second single off her first CD. Same beat different words. Apparently she didn’t feel like wasting the time to bring in producers, she just said fuck it we’ll change the words and use the same beat. That is why I have stopped supporting much mainstream music, these singers get so big they think they can just throw out crap and people will eat it up! Well I will have you know, Beyonces of the music world, I am on a crap free diet these days. I will have you know that until you can come up with something a little more inspired than lyrics that repeatedly urge me to ‘pat [my] weave’ I will have no part in it.

I’ll give you that Alicia Keys is mostly original and talented, but I won’t buy another one of her CDs until she quits with the acting; her or Beyonce. You know, it’s called pick something and stick with it ladies. I’m not going to be a doctor, a fashion designer, a journalist, a nurse and a veterinarian all at the same time, I freaking picked one of the above. You sing you’re a singer, period. You act you’re an actor, period. I don’t want to see Beyonce when I’m at the movies and I don’t want to see Lindsey Lohan when I’m browsing at FYE. And I never want to turn on my TV and see Brooke Shields selling me a Volkswagen! I don’t know what that is all about, or who thought it was a cute idea, but it’s clearly stupid. Those commercials are the biggest waste of air space since Fox News launched in 1996.

I guess the real moral of this story is: be original, be yourself. Do what you do, then and only then, will people respect you for the person you are. It might bother people, offend people, but at the end of the day, you’re the one who has to look yourself in the mirror and live with who you are. I just haven’t figured out exactly how many drinks it would take before I can do that without cringing.

- Michael

Permalink Leave a Comment