Great.

Last week of school and apparently I'm sick.

And that smell in my apartment is back.

Connexion?

Short Story

Being the end of the semester I've been doing a lot of writing. In between that I need to find something to do to relax, so of course, it's more writing. Not that this is a bad thing. The finished product might be crap, but at least it's getting put to paper.

Anyway, this story is a nice parody of my hatred of SUV owners. To clarify, I don't hate everyone who drives and SUV, or are SUV drivers by default assholes and bad parents. But I have noticed some patterns when it comes to people who drive big trucks. One, they all universally seem to have some kind of confidence issue, and the first thing I assume when I see a man driving an SUV is, "So you've got penis size issues then." Second, SUVs are a symbol of wealth, and as such people trying to fit into some kind of 'Merican Apple-Pies-And-Cash dream get one to prove that they are better than the rest of us small, foreign car driving peons. But the last thing is the most interesting to me. SUVs are hailed as the safest cars around, and a tendency to flip over when making a turn aside, they are. You, the driver, are half as likely to die in a head-on accident if you are driving an SUV. But, you are twice as likely to kill the person you hit. I'm quite sure most people who drive the things aren't even aware of this, but even if they were, they wouldn't care. They have the safety their fat-faced snotty kids deserve and fuck everyone else who gets in the way. Right, parents? Am I right?

Anyway, here's the story, in glorious PDF format.

I hate college.

I suppose that phrase is a bit overused these days, but I'm taking it wildly out of popular context. Apparently I'm some kind of genetic freak whose brain is malformed and because of this I get sick enjoyment out of learning things, Acquiring new knowledge is like having a sexy Hello-Nurse inject morphine directly into my spine. Yeah, it's that good. My GPA is decent and I get enjoyment out of writing, so why then would I say I hate college? There's the roommate thing, but anyone who knows me personally probably wants to kill me and/or themselves and/or bystanders with how much I complain about that, so I'll spare you. If I had to sum up my grievances in one word, and if I needed an effective transition to the next paragraph (which I do) I'd say the whole thing is very bureaucratic.

Literary fag stuff ahead.

It reminds me of the Vogons in Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the book.) In the sequence where hero Arthur Dent and company need to free one of their ranks from Vogon prison, they must fill out the appropriate form. The Vogons are not portrayed as evil so much as political, to an extreme degree, and the forms must go through an insane, painstaking cycle of being filled out, copied, filed, un-filed, re-filed, lost, found, buried in your grandmother's back yard, dug up, stamped, approved, seconded, and so on. And in the end the heroic company fills out the wrong form and needs to start the whole bloody process over again.

End literary fag stuff.

This is not unlike college. If you want to get anything done, such as change your major, you need to fill out a form and hand it over some bored student worker secretary who makes flying bastard's shit wages and couldn't give a flying bastard's shit about you or your flying bastard's shit major. And then you sit there picking your nose while you wait for aforementioned secretary to file the paperwork. And that's the beginning of the process. You need signatures of your adviser; it needs to be stamped by advising, and in the end it can always be denied. And God help you if you want a minor.

Almost nobody graduates in four years anymore. Counting time in Programming Trade School Dirt (PTSD), community college, time off, and odd jobs in between, I've been doing the college thing for seven years now. Seven years! It hurts my brain to think that nearly a full decade of my existence has gone to getting a bachelor's degree, and right at the time when the job market in this fucking country is so bad a B.F.A might as well stand for Bees Fucking you in the Ass. And this delay in graduation isn't due to lack of effort. Colleges seem to be spending less and less time hiring competent professors or worrying about how they are going to feed the growing numbers of on-campus students, who surround the food courts like brain-hungry zombies, and more into how they can monkey around with stealing credits from community college transfer ingrates like myself, who didn't have the sense to go to college directly out of high school. Maybe it's a kind of subtle punishment for the fact that I refuse to buy things from the grossly overpriced college bookstore or I don't pimp out the school's name on every fucking overpriced article of clothing that conceals my supple body. The fuck am I supposed do: advertize to people who have already decided to go to your college? I really fail to understand how I'm supposed to have school spirit when they insist upon beating me on the head with a blunt object and expect me to come crawling back like an abused housewife, saying through apologetic sobs, "I won't burn the steak again!"

Getting back on track: I use the word bureaucratic to mainly describe the credit-handling system. The old rule was that if you transfered in with an Associates Degree you got to send 64 credits over and start as a Junior, and that promise has been made good on. Of course it all falls to shit when you've got a graduation requirement system that resembles a Final Fantasy combat interface in terms of complexity, an credit allocation interface that you, the student, cannot access, and a management program that is about as friendly as Microsoft Excel using an Arabic language package. It reminds of the time before Martin Luther and the reformation, when John Wyclif translated The Bible into English and was burned at the stake for heresy because normal dirty shit-eating peasants weren't fit enough to interpret religion and had to take the pious Latin speaking Master Race's word for it. Sorry, I didn't warn you that there would historical fag stuff in this too. That being said, I don't actually know how my college's system works, and I've talked to three different professors and gotten three different answers, and what that does for me is, you guessed it, flying bastard's shit. I don't know if I need two classes or four classes, and whether they need to be core classes, cognates, or "At-Some-Distance" classes. Whatever the fuck that means. Additionally I need to know if I've taken enough "W1" or "Q2" classes, and if I've fulfilled the required R2D2 study hall and the C3PO lecture.

Okay, not funny.

I suppose the point of all this nonsensical late-night insomnia-fueled whining is that my English schoolboy's impression of college a place where you go to learn and get catapulted into that magical far-away place called the real world, riding the updraft of letters of recommendation and applause from your stern but overall supportive professors was bullshit. The college organization itself does not look out for the welfare of its students and most of them burden their professors with so much busywork that they last thing they have time for is actual teaching. And the last thing nailing the proverbial wooden outhouse with me still in it shut is that nobody is grandfathered into anything anymore. Apparently starting a given student in a track and keeping with it all the way through has gone the way of durable goods after the 1960s; making things that last is bad for economics. And that's what college is: a business. The students are like an unfortunate byproduct of the whole thing, an appendix to the large intestine, if you will. And when appendices get inflamed, some doctor just slices the little dongle off.

I'm done explaining my bad analogies; take that any way you want to.

If I did it...

And I did do it. Make a rotating banner image, not murder someone (but that is the joke.) Since this feature doesn't come standard with Blogger and I couldn't find an apropriate plugin, I found a way to get it working that a) doesn't require you to install anything new and b) works with any template. So here you, the public, are:

Step 1: Go to Dashboard --> Layout --> Edit HTML. You'll get a text box with a whole mess of code in it. In the Body section, find a div tag called "header." I believe it can be called something else in other templates; in the "Minima" template that I use it's called header. There should be a property to this called Locked and it is set to true. Replace it with false, and save the template.

What this does: The locked property makes it so you can't remove or change a given element. Setting it to false means you can move or delete it.

Step 2: Delete the header element. Note that regardless of whether it is there or not, it will set the title of your page, so before you kill it, make sure your title is what you want it to be. The title is what displays in the upper-left corner of the browser window, if you did not know. If you do delete the header without setting the title, you'll have to add it again, change the title, then delete it.

Step 3: Go back to Layout. Click the large "Add a Page Element" link at the bottom of the blog template. Pick "HTML/Javascript" from the list. Now you'll have a new element at the bottom of the page. Move it up to the top where the the header used to be. This will be your new header.

Step 4: Here is where it gets tricky. You'll have to add some Javascript to this, which I've provided below.

<script language="JavaScript">

<!-- hide from non-javascript browsers


images = new Array(3);

images[0]="<p align=center> <img src='Your First Image.jpg'></p>";
images[1]="<p align=center> <img src='Your Second Image.jpg'></p>";
images[2]="<p align=center> <img src='Your Third Image.jpg'></p>";

index = Math.floor(Math.random() * images.length);

document.write(images[index]);

/stop hiding-->
</script>
<noscript>Text version of your header</noscript>

What it does (JavaScript OK people can skip this): The Script tag tells the computer you'll be using script. "images" is an array, a kind of variable that has multiple values, that stores the locations of the images you want to use as banners. There is also a P tag in there to assure that the image is centered. You can change that property to "left" or "right" if you want your header on a specific side of the page. This example is set up so that there will be three rotating banners, but it can be as many as you want. Just remember that you'll have to make a new value for images for each banner, and that while the array has 3 values, images begins counting at 0, not 1. So if you had ten banners, images would be: images[0] through images[9].

The next bit sets "index" to a random number. The random function generates a value between 1 and 0, and if you multiply it by images.length, it will generate a number between 0 and whatever the amount of images you have is. Therefore, this line works with any number of banners, whether you have ten or ten thousand.

Finally, the document.write command prints the value stored in the image variable, and the number of the array is the random number generated by the math command. It actually prints the HTML code stored in the array.

Step 5: Close the script tag. The No Script tag at the end will display whatever text is inside of it if the browser does not support or allow scripts. It would be a good idea to put a text version of your header, or an image link to a default header in this case, because if the browser doesn't support JavaScript, the code won't work anyway.

So there you are. I hope whoever sees this finds it useful.

I am ... *yawn*

Characteristically putting myself behind on the movie curve, I saw I Am Legend last night. The otherwise nonfunctional DVD drive in my laptop decided to work so viewing it in my room was possible, and of course today the fucking thing is busted, which leads me to believe that it has something to do with ghosts. Anyway, I Am Legend.

I'll start off by saying that I enjoyed it, which is a break from the usual "intelligent" - and by intelligent I mean not paid for by Warner Bros. - reviews of this film. It was short, sweet, to the point and lacked any major plot holes which usually decorate Hollywood movies like big shiny flashy Christmas light that spell out the words plot hole. The story, for those who have not read the identically titled book or have not seen The Last Man On Earth or Omega Man, stars Robert Neville, a military scientist who proves immune to a human-created disease that wipes out most of the planet, and turns a good portion of what is left into "Dark-Seekers", a kind of speedy zombie with the vampiric trait of frying to death in sunlight. Neville lives in New York City and for the past three years has been trying to come up with a cure for the disease.

I said that I enjoyed the movie, but there is a pretty clear distinction between the first and the second half. Midway through the film a new character, Anna, appears, rescuing Will Smi - I mean Neville - from the Dark-Seekers. At that point, there is a miraculous sunrise and while Anna is questioning Neville, a big cross bearing the one and only Jesus takes center-shot. Anna claims that there is a survivors colony in the north, because the virus could not deal with cold weather, and when Neville asks her how she knows, well, God told her. From that point on, every sequence, even up to the finale, can be explained with the phrase, "God did it."

I don't particularly have a problem with religion in films, and I don't mind that Anna's character is a Jesus freak, but the movie validates it. Even Neville, who staunchly refuses to believe in God, has a conversion at the end. For a film that tries to so hard to be realistic, and spends so much time with panoramic shots of abandoned NYC, it breaks all of that work down in the end. That, just so you know, is not good film making.

I Am Legend did not strike me as a bad film, but it did strike me as a very lazy one. I mentioned before that it avoided major plot holes, but I didn't say anything about minor holes. Examples: A good deal of time is spent in Neville's lair: a townhouse converted into an armored fortress. In one shot, a gas-powered generator is shown, which readily explains why he has electricity. Fine. So how does he keep his lab powered? One gas generator isn't enough to provide power for a few computers, halogen lights, electronic medical equipment and a gene sequencer. Another example of laziness that leads to plot holes is how Anna came to find Neville. In an effort to contact other survivors, Neville broadcasts a message each day. Anna just happened to turn on her radio one day and hear is message. And yes, that is how it is explained: not, "I've been scanning different frequencies and heard your broadcast" or "I found a radio and used it" but "I've had a perfectly good radio this whole time and had to wait to hear the word from The Man Upstairs to turn it the fuck on."

I don't expect every movie to be Chinatown, but put some damn effort into it. Lazy might not be an elegant word that flaunts my massive writer's vocabulary, but it sums up I Am Legend perfectly. I can see where some would take this movie as Christian propaganda, but it is most certainly not a God movie. It replaces legitimate plot points with a series of coincidences, and takes the flow of the story out of the characters hands. The reason why Robert Neville is important is because he is Robert Neville, and saying that it doesn't matter because God sorts his shit out in the end means he could very well have been Robert Smith of The Cure. Or Ghandi.

I Am Legend might be good for a jump out moment or two, and some unintentionally funny Will Smith moments, but leaves the bitter taste of "So what?" in the views mouth. Or, eyes.

Can eyes taste?

What if they could?

That'd be weird...

Attractive Qualities

Since, it seems, God hates me, one night I decide to actually have fun I end up stricken with insomnia. I had a few drinks earlier, which is something that, as a rule, I don't do. Drinking is strictly a social endeavor for me, and one that I neither pay much attention to nor into which I put much effort. In this past year, I've been to a bar twice, and been full-blown honest-to-Shiva drunk once, not because I wholly wanted to be, but my roommates seem to enjoy me being social more than I do. I don't drink to accomplish things like: make myself feel better, remove inhibitions about talking to girls, or make myself look cool. As any human who knows anything about this planet knows though, there are people who do, and they seem to all be my age and concentrated in New Jersey.

Being a kind of English major and, for the first time, diving into creative writing, puts me into contact with some pretty unsavory fellows. By that I mean the type of twenty-something "I write deep fiction about heavy shit" kids (and yes, I can say kids), all convinced they'll grow up to be the next William Faulkner. Or Wallace. Take your pick. I use William Faulkner as my base because he was one of the many artists who was a raging boozer, along with other well-knowns like Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams and Jackson Pollock. All of whom were also famous assholes. One quality these kids have is the tendency to flaunt their drinking problems, all of which I believe are either totally fabricated or at the very least highly embellished. When I enter into conversation with Wandering Human #18 of the day, and they start rambling on about how they'll drink at 7 AM if the work schedule calls for it or how their writing process is to take a shot of [insert weirdly spelled foreign whiskey here], my eyes start to glaze over and I think a nice quiet life alone a few hundred miles outside of Anchorage, Alaska in an igloo with wall-to-wall cargo pallets and a pet Malamute named O'Mally where I do nothing but eat frozen salmon and snow all day is a perfectly reasonable alternative to present company. Flaunting is not an attractive practice and alcoholism is not an attractive quality. To the sane, it's a subtle way of saying, "I have no self-confidence and my beer intake should intimidate you" or , "Hi, I'm a cunt."

And after all (culture commentary ahead), this is just my pathetic generation's given way for individuals to drop their pants and swing their wangs around in a "Mine's Bigger Than Your's" contest which doesn't end in indecent exposure charges and a restraining order. One example of this is tanning. Melanoma is in season simply because it is a sign of wealth. Back in Shakespeare's time, tans were considered gross because, if you were tan, you worked outside, and if you worked outside, you were a peasant, not fit for the pasty-faced wig-wearing Latin-literate Master Race. Nowadays, most jobs are indoors, so being pale is a symbol of working too much, spending too much time in front of a computer, being "emo," or any combination of the bunch. Tanning tells everyone but the blind that you have the money to afford skin cancer. The same can be said about obesity in Japan. Until recently, the Japanese viewed being overweight as an attractive asset because it meant that you had attractive assets. Being fat meant you had the money to be fat; you could afford to shove sushi and noodles down your throat and were five steps and fifty pounds above those toothless, rice-gumming country yokels.

Being a booze hound satisfies all of these cultural needs. One of the reasons I limit my drinking is because that shit is expensive. Claiming that you drink every night is a nice way to separate yourself from poor fuckers who don't possess the means, sheer force of stupidity, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder required to be an alcoholic. It also takes care of self-esteem issues in the same way guys with tiny dicks make up for it by going balls-deep in debt to own a massive truck. It gives a sense of identity without having to go through all the work to have an actual personality.

At the core of this, I think, is the word subtle. Walking around shoving your drinking problems in people's faces is not a subtle activity, but the messages conveyed are. I've argued for a while now that my generation has fallen victim to the notion that personality replaces character. Sure, a bar-hopper can have a personality, and most of them do. You kind of need one to live that lifestyle. But what is the character of an alcoholic? An addict. A waste. And someone who genuinely dislikes themselves.

Man, O'Mally's a sweet name for Malamute.

Here we go again.

So this marks yet another attempt at me keeping a personal blog. I've never much liked the idea of blogs, but started keeping one to see if it would improve my writing ability. Or, at the very least, force me into some impromptu creativity to keep me writing. Every blog I've had, from an old site my best friend and I kept, to the one I tried to maintain on my MySpace, back when I had a MySpace, has failed. This was mostly due to me realizing nobody read it and losing interest. Ironic that I should land an independent study where all I basically do is blog.

I'm starting this one up because my writing for said study - a swanky little site called TheFhiz.com - has me doing a political column and my writing for it is ... sporadic. I'm the king of off-topic when it comes to that site, so I'm categorizing. Or multitasking. Or something. In fact, I never understood Internet lingo. Up until a few years ago I didn't know what "lol" meant. And just this month I learned what "imho" meant. The whole thing scares me. What these shortcuts do is reduce something like laughter into one universal symbol. It makes talking on something like AIM or texting easier, but it destroys a certain meaning in the language. What kind of laugh? Is it sarcastic or hearty? Honest or forced? Or even diabolical? "LOL" can't answer these questions.

So English is important to preserve, which I guess is what is at the heart of this blog. I'm told I write well, and I think in my largely dysfunctional brain that injecting good, and if not good, at least grammatically sound writing into the Internet might change something. And if not, it gives me another outlet to bitch about the misuse of language. Among other things.

So what else would I write about? Anything I guess. I'm an interesting person and I form opinions about everything, some of which may be valuable, most of which are just one person's opinion. But enough of that; here's the deal. You stick with this, and so will I.

"One-Free-Man?"

Play Half-Life 2.