Slave to the System

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

I wake up between 6:15 and 6:35 every week day, without fail. I take a shower, get dressed, and scarf down a bowl of cereal before I am driven to school, arriving between 7:10 and 7:25 AM, every week day, without fail. I go to my eight classes throughout the day, knowing exactly where I'll be going next each period, and expecting lunch not at a particular time, but at a particular point during my schedule. Usually I eat at 10:45 and am not "hungry" until about 10:00--the last few minutes of my third period class. Even today, a day in which the schedule is shifted due to an assembly, I became hungry in the last few minutes of my third period class, and despite it being 9:45, feel that it's time to eat, right now. I know that I'm going to probably go to whatever club I have each day afterschool, then proceed home and do homework. I know that I'll probably have to do homework until 11 or 12 each night because I watch an hour or two of TV depending what's on, and talk on AIM or some such thing like that before/during I do homework.

Does that sound monotonous? Well, it is.

I'm not posting this for the sake of posting meaningless drivel about my life like someone would write on Xanga, most blogs, or their diary, I'm merely providing a real example of what society does to a person. We're all scheduled and perfect, especially in high school. It really turns into a Pavlov's Dog type situation to the MAX when a given person has had the same schedule for a semester or even a full year.

Being a slave to the system doesn't just entail near-perfection in scheduling of your immediate life, it includes other things such as a certain set of goals or beliefs. I know that pretty much everyone in my high school has a goal to go to college and then get a job after college. (Whether their parents are pressing that issue or if it is their own accord, it is no matter.) A majority of people will just end up majoring in something idiotic, then becoming a member of School Monotony 2.0 = Low-Level Corporate America. Not to stray too far, but, whatever happened to "Daddy, I want to be an astronaught when I grow up!"?

Looking around the hallways of high school, I see fellow slaves to the system. The typical student is an upper middle class, white kid with an element of preppiness to his character or apparel. (Not to say that African-Americans or Asians don't experience this as well.) This typical kid has a working level of insomnia and probably gets no more than 7 hours of sleep per night on average.

And look at the typical businessperson (political correctness is for shit, by the way), a middle to upper middle class person, who works to buy shit they don't need, and gets maybe 7-9 hours of sleep per night, just because there is nothign to do other than work and "relax after work." Potential similarity there? Just maybe.

I guess this is a plea for people who have the strength to break the chains of slavery, please do it. Become an astronaught, become a school administrator and change the rules so schedules fluctuate (just don't be a tool), or whatever. Just don't fall into the trend of working to consume. Working to consume. We are human beings, not animals. The sole purpose of our life is not to grow older, breed, nurture our young, and then die. There is a more to it than that and people who try to simplify life into terms like that are doing nothing but destructing humanity and turning us into the monkeys we watch in the zoo.

Bode Miller, a TRUE American Hero

I saw a commercial on TV the other day, it was sort of a public service announcement. The curious part? Bode Miller was on it. (Yeah, that same jackass from the US Olympic alpine ski team who is currently blowing every medal opportunity he has in the games.) Anyways, I sat earnestly watching this PSA, wondering what this guy had to say about life, reading, eating your vegetables, or whatever.

The specific message I don't remember, so I'll extrapolate it; "Nowadays, when kids are playing sports and they realize that they can't win, they just quit. They don't want to participate because they feel they aren't good enough. The grown-ups of this society have created this 'must be a winner' mentality, and it needs to be stopped. I'm Bode Miller, and I want to put an end to this." and then "joinbode.com" flashes on the screen.

Hmmm.. Let's think about this. What kind of role model is Bode? Well... he's being a laissez-faire dick about the Olympics, clearly not taking one of the greatest honors of athleticism and skiing seriously at all. He's super out of shape (yeah, watch the Super-G Slalom and tell me he's not, the poor bastard almost had a heart attack after his run down the hill - which eventually led him to sucky like 5th or 6th place).

The guy is living in an RV at the Olympics, not Olympics Village - a freaking RV. Oh, and in case you hadn't heard - he has drank before a race -- probably more than once. I have a public service announcement for you Bode - Skiing downhill at 90 mph after drinking can be dangerous to your health. Oh yeah, and don't say to the 60 Minutes interviewer "if you ever try to ski when you're wasted, it's not easy" if your intent is NOT to get caught up in media hype.

Yeah, and there's that tidbit about him being a total jackass. Case in point? He said, in regard to not winning (yes, 4/5 races run, and he's yet to podium, despite his pre-Olympics predictions and #2 World Cup ranking), "well, at least I don't have to drive my RV 25 miles down to the medal ceremony..." What kind of role models do we have for our children nowadays, really?

So, that being said, prior to writing this, I was intrigued by how this loser proposed to change the world, and the problems athat plague society, so I took a magical journey to his www.joinbode.com website. Boy, was it enlightening! First of all, the description on Google was the following:

Do you want to join Bode Miller? Do you want to join the brazen, the
unintimidated? ... Join Bode, but first, joining Bode Miller and experiencing the ...

Wow, that's not arrogant at all! What a totally awesome guy, I wish I could be as amazing as him. I fatefully clicked the link in Google and was greeted by a sexy black and white picture of Bode, looking profoundly up at the sky, as if to greet God's gaze down upon humanity, or maybe he's just a little hungover from last night and he's doing a poor job of hiding it.

I did a little searching around the website and I found two movies that constituted his “MANIFESTO.” Upon watching these-

- Sorry, I had to break for a bit to clean the chunks of vomit off my keyboard that resulted from me puking all over the computer during the process of watching these Bode videos. Yes, they are that bad.

Among the videos, one he talks about the topic of “Validation” and how it affects him. He comments that, “Yeah I have a lot of friends who are professional athletes or top level athletes who despite how great they are on the field- they still look for confirmation from other people – they still, after a successful performance, they need that feedback, they need it from other people. And I think that one of my strengths the thing that sets me apart, is that I don’t need that. When I believe I’ve done great by my own standards, I believe I’ve done great and I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

My personal favorite from his Manifesto was the one about training. He starts it off in a skintight suit leaning on a large barbell, probably to show his cut and bulging muscles. “The way that I approach my training is I exercise my right to decide my life for myself. It’s really a microcosm for the rest of my life. I address the issues I feel are important to me and I customize what I feel is the best way to address those issues, and then I do it. And then I allow myself to push myself 100%. I don’t want to rely on anyone else because I feed off the pride that I get from doing it myself and doing it right.”

I also clicked on the random barn on the flash page, upon which a snowmobile rides up behind it, you hear a crash, and then the rider-less snowmobile comes out the front of the barn. I can only assume that this is a representation of Bode when he tries to snowmobile after having a few (dozen) cold ones.

Inside the barn I found a motley of solid advice, such as “I think it’s ironic that in society these days, it’s accepted to be who you are sexually, or your occupation, or whatever. Nobody wants to judge anyone else too harshly. And in sports, it’s still all about winning – it’s not about participation. No one wants to let anyone define what makes them happy or how they do things in athletics. It’s all about winning, and uh.. Zero flexibility. I think it’s ironic and depressing and I’m determined to change it.”

Pretty much, you could have a Bodeism a day, because there are enough tidbits of bullshit on that website to last you for a lifetime. I’m fairly convinced that all Bode does all day is drink and think of new things to provide insights on for his crappy website. Must be why he sucks so badly at the Olympics.

You know, as badly as it sounds and as much as it goes against my Olympics-driven nationalistic fervor, I would prefer other countries to win (even Russia or something) in Alpine Skiing than I would Bode Miller. In fact, maybe for everyone’s sake he can just fade off the face of humanity, as opposed to creating bad media-hype and drawing the press away from the real athletes who actually perform well – like the entire US snowboarding team. (Hey, that kind of sounds like what Michelle Kwan did – took attention away from the men’s half pipe gold/silver win because she decided to quit, but that’s another story for another time. Or if you’re lucky, maybe never.)

Don't Try to Intimidate Me, I'm Not a Sesquipedalophobic

Two weeks without writing is really sucky. But if you're a true fan, read the DOI articles - namely the one about stupid questions (which is fairly similar writing style to what I write here). I've been kind of busy with those three articles, MUNUC, and okay, I'll stop bitching now, and continue.

Well, for the unintellectuals out there, Sesquipedalophobia is the fear of long words.

Have you ever been in a situation where you're listening to a teacher/friend/arch nemesis talking and you're following the train of logic (or lack thereof) and then you just hit a gigantic roadblock in their speech? This roadblock I speak of would consist of anything along the lines of an extremely uncommon, obsolete, or overly intellectual word that you may or may not have heard before.

I have news for you, if the answer is no, then you're one of these people that do this. These people basically read the dictionary, study the SAT word lists (despite them being too young or old to necessitate taking it), and subscribe to about 12 different "Word of the Day" e-mail lists. There's no other way that one would know words such as sevillitude, quintret, cynoside, descraw, and other crap that serves as nothing more than diarrhea of the mouth. These are just not used in vernacular, no matter how hard you try, they just aren't.

When teachers do this, it's really a distraction. Honestly, does this add to the general knowledge of the class? No, of course not. Most times in a regular classes kids will just yell out "Durrr UH, what is such and such a word?!?!" or in honors/AP classes students will turn to the person next to them and mutter something along the lines of "um.. WTH does that word mean?" In either situation, the message is lost due to the extremely ridiculous word choice. It's even worse when you ask "Uh.. What does lugubrious mean?" and the teacher says something to the effect of, "oh, that just means sad." Why didn't you just use the word sad or a more common derivation, jackass?

Honors students do this all the time too, especially when they think they are smarter than someone else or they are trying to be a smartass. It's a train of thought that goes something like this "Heh heh, maybe if I use the word persiflage (basically means meaningless banter) to describe the last 5 minutes of Johnny's presentation he'll feel like an idiot. Heh heh. Because he won't know what it means! Yeah, good idea!" If you haven't taken the hint, this is a common trend among intellectual asshole-types.

Frankly, there is no purpose when people do this other than to flex their weak intellectual muscle on unsuspecting victims. I'd have to say that this technique of bombarding people with archaic and uncommon words is a fairly common method of compensating for not knowing what the hell one is talking about, in which case it functions as a scare tactic or a "make them feel like an idiot so they lose their train of thought"-tactic.

(And by the way, for all of the people who read this who are the archaic-word using type, save yourself 30 seconds and don't look up the words I mentioned so you can use them on your friends, they're all made up.)

The Plague that has Consumed Us: MySpace

One fine morning about a week ago, I had the lovely kick in the nuts that is most easily described as the last words that I heard Johnny B (from WLUP 97.9 radio) speak before I left my car. Those fateful words, words that lead me to discover a fact that made me sick to my stomach;

I have a question for all of you teens out there - what is the attraction to the myspace website? It was listed as the 2nd fastest growing website by Google and has over 47 million visitors.

Now, I walked into school after those words and refused to believe them. It must only have 4.7 million visitors, after all... with only 300 million people in the US, there's no way that A. this website could have as much popularity overseas and in other countries, and B. that that many frickin people were consumed by this disease. But no. I checked the facts and was very disturbed. First of all, in this article on MacObserver, I discovered that in terms of "the fastest growing Web brands... MySpace came in at number two with 752 percent growth. Its visitors for November 2004 came in at 2.87 million, and 24.49 million in November 2005." Also some disturbing things I found include a USA Today Article with more disturbing facts and figures. But perhaps the most disturbing is this;

Edwards is so into MySpace that he and fellow high school senior Joyce Pace, 18, recorded an ode to MySpace — rewritten lyrics to the Black Eyed Peas' song My Humps— and posted it on the site.
"Whatchu gonna do with all them friends, all them friends that's on your page," the song begins. "I'm m-m-m-m-make them comment, make them comment on MySpace, MySpace ... OMG (Oh My God) its MySpace, MySpace."

Yeaah. Fitting, I suppose. A shitty song for a shitty website.

It's not just the fact that it's popular that makes me hate it (Yes, I have a myspace that someone made for me because they have nothing better to do evidently. I don't use it and only "sign in" when I'm curious to see who the annoying friend requests are from when they appear in my Gmail inbox.), it's the fact that myspace.com is such a broken website. The whole thing flat out sucks in terms of ease to use and quite frankly, it's a place for underage Internet prostitution rings and a location for pedophiles to hone in on their next target. ..shudder..

Girls use myspace to prostitute themselves by dressing like whores and taking "naughty" pictures of themselves. Yeah, I guess if you want to become a porn star, good start. Otherwise, you're a freaking 14 year old, that's disgusting. Just stop, please. Some people use myspace to "meet" others and start relationships... ookay. That's borderline creepy stalkerish.

People across the world; don't be coerced into a world of scumminess and despair. Don't use myspace. Do something else with your time. Even conversing with people in AOL Instant Messenger is more worthwhile than that...