Como se dice "Morning Person?"

Wow Internet, you've really outdone yourself this time. First Google Image Search result for "spanish," ladies and gentlemen.

Every morning so far this term, I wake up and swear profusely, because my alarm goes off at 7:05 AM, and when you’re waking up at what for a college student may as well be the very butt-crack of dawn, there isn’t much else you can do but swear. Sometimes, I attempt to roll out of bed the wrong way and wind up crashing into the wall, like I did this morning, and sometimes I get all the way down the hall to the shower wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts when I realize that I locked my keys in my room, like I did this morning, and some mornings I shower for too long and wind up having to beat cheeks across campus so as not to be late, like I did this morning, and some mornings I come to the uncomfortable revelation that I’ve woken up as Ben Stiller in his typical role of the nice guy who gets all the world’s crap dumped on him, like I did this morning. My wang has yet to get caught in my fly, which I count as a plus, but I also don’t see myself hooking up with Cameron Diaz in the near future.

And why do I get up at 7:05 every morning? Unlike some people, who get up early and do strange activities involving physical exertion to improve their physique, I get up early because I have to go to the building on campus furthest from my dorm so I can take part in my 8:00 AM accelerated Spanish class. Now, when you hear ‘accelerated’, don’t get the idea that I’m some sort of linguistic genius who can whip out a brilliant blog entry in either English or Spanish, because that’s not the case. The way you should think of my accelerated Spanish class is the same way that you should think of your grandma accelerating her 1961 Ford Falcon: moving a little faster than the sidewalk (AKA Spanish 101), but not by much.

I qualified for accelerated Spanish (Spanish 111) by taking a placement test which told me that my two years of excruciatingly boring high school Spanish were not enough to clear the language requirements at the University, but they did qualify me to take a slightly higher level Spanish class. The problem was that by the time I was allowed to register for classes, the following happened:

Truman: “Hi there! I’d like to register for Spanish 111!”
University of Oregon: “Um, yeah... That’s not going to happen. All three Spanish 111 classes are full.”
Truman: “So even though Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the country, you’re not willing to hire enough professors so that the students who’re paying literally hundreds of dollars to come here can learn it?”
University of Oregon: “That would really cut into our ‘Locker Room Juice Bar’ fund.”
Truman: “That hardly seems fair.”
University of Oregon: “You’re right, you know that? You’re right. Just wait here. We’re going to take all of your money, date your ex-girlfriend without asking if it’s cool with you, and then poop in your bed. Go Ducks!”

Fortunately, over Christmas break a few people dropped out of the 8:00 AM Monday-Friday Spanish 111 class, and I was able to beg the professor to let me in. It was a matter of necessity, of course – the 10:00 and 1:00 classes were fuller than a remarkably full bucket of water, and as Spanish 111 was part of a two term sequence, I had to get into it this term or I’d have to postpone my Spanish studies by a year. Even so, it hurt to wheedle a professor into letting me hang out with him and 25 of his student buddies every morning, because I value my sleep. For me, asking to get up at 7:00 every morning for ten weeks is like asking to go to El Paso every morning for ten weeks. If you’re in high school, I bet you’re laughing at me for not liking to get up at 7:00 every morning, because of course you get up at 2:30 AM every day so you can go to jazz band and then your AP Craft Jewelry study session. If you are laughing, feel free to come down here and discuss it with me – just make sure you’ve got a hall pass and a note from your mother so you can leave school. Good day to you, sir!

I feel sorry for my professor, because he’s really enthusiastic and good at his job, and he’s teaching to a class of 26 people who would set fire to Dave Matthews with an armload of iPhones and puppies if it meant they could go back to sleep. Spanish has always been an awkward class for me because it’s par for the course that you’re going to have to partner off with a complete stranger and converse in Spanish. Listen: Out of the 26 people in this class, easily 19 are girls. Since everyone sits in a different spot every day, each boy will inevitably be partnered with a girl the majority of the time. Now, if you know me at all, you’re no doubt aware that I can hardly say more than three sentences to a girl without violently jamming my foot into my (or, in some extremely awkward cases, her) mouth – and this is in English, a language that my high school gave me an award for being so good at! So how can I be expected to learn anything when I’m forced to talk to a girl I’ve never met before, in a language where I have a vocabulary of maybe four words tops, when my face still hurts from rolling into the wall by my bed not more than an hour ago?

Furthermore, the conversation topics we’re given aren’t necessarily the sorts of things I’d want to talk to a complete stranger about, regardless of gender or language. A prompt like Habla de su familia (Talk of/from/about your family) is a little forward for a couple of complete strangers who are still half asleep, don’t you think? How about some small talk, like Vas Los Sopranos anoche? (You see The Sopranos last night?) or Yo quiero Dennis Kucinich (I love Dennis Kucinich).* Whenever I do hablo mi familia, the astounding whiteness of our names throws off the casual Spanish speaking accent I’m trying to cultivate. Names like Eugene, Kelsey, Nancy, Eddie, and Judy stick out in the Spanish language like the callous and one dimensional characters from my science fiction novel would stick out in The Great Gatsby. They’re like linguistic speed bumps: You’re trucking along, saying everything correctly, when suddenly you have to forget all that you know about what consonants have different sounds lest you humiliate yourself by pronouncing “Judy” as “Yoodie”.

*I know that this sounds a lot like the Taco Bell ad, but “I love” translates practically the same way as “I want” (and honestly, I think a Chihuahua saying “Yo quiero Dennis Kucinich” would have done his campaign wonders). Also, the word for marriage, “casado”, is only a letter away from “cansado”, which means “tired.” For a romance language, Spanish seems to have some pretty fatalistic notions about affection.

But I keep getting up every morning and going to Spanish, because it’s very important to me that I learn a second language. You see, if I didn’t take a second language, I’d have to take a math class, and at that point I'd be better off moving to El Paso, getting elected mayor, and spending every day for the rest of my life rolling around on the blistering hot, dusty, loogie ridden streets of the city while being curbstomped by Hannah Montana.

Truman Capps wants to dissuade you from telling him how funny it is that he, who the University considers Mexican, is bad at Spanish. If I come up with new content twice a week, the least you can do is try to be original once and a while. Honestly.

HAY GUYZ, ITS SNOWING!!

Wut.

If you’re the sort of person who randomly shouts “It’s snowing!” to get people’s hopes up, I want you to punch yourself in the face right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Maybe do it twice, just to make sure you get all the stupid out. No, I’m kidding, stupid that severe can’t be removed by punching. But if you are the sort of person who does that, today would’ve been the one day you could’ve done it without being a complete attention whoring moron. You know, you should probably punch yourself again, just for good measure.

I woke up this morning to the sound of yelling outside my window, which is nothing new, because apparently the parking lot behind Hamilton Hall is the shizz as far as drunk shouting matches go. But this morning, instead of “I’M SO DRUNK RIGHT NOW” or “TRUMAN’S BLOG SUCKS”, I heard people just hooting and yelling for protracted periods. Pissed off that people should be drunk and yelling at 10:30 AM, I opened my blinds to see what all the fuss was about and found that, lord almighty, there was snow on the ground.

Being as half of my readers now hail from such exotic locations as Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Switzerland, you’re probably looking at my picture and thinking, “Pah! Big deal! You posted a low res picture of the two inches of snow outside your dorm! I live in a freaking igloo, and that’s in the summer!” But the thing is, in Oregon it’s a big deal anytime it doesn’t rain. If the sun comes out, it’s a party. If the rain stops, it’s a party. If it rains scorpions and HIV positive blood, well, it might not be a party, but we’d still be secretly excited for a brief respite from water rain. And then, snow? Snow is the granddaddy of all great Oregon weather events, because it actually gives you cause to go outside and have some fun. You can’t go sledding in blood and scorpions, and you can’t have a blood and scorpion fight*, but snow pretty much makes everything a playground.

*This is untrue, because you totally can, and it’ll probably be the climax of the new Rambo movie, which I think is stupid, in case you’re wondering.

In elementary school I, like all other kids everywhere, was completely enamored of snow and would freak out whenever I saw it start to fall – this included when snowflakes would come down and then melt on the ground, which is the cruelest thing weather can do to an eight year old. When it would start to snow during school, all the kids in my class would instantly stop paying attention and stare out the window at it, trying to will the temperature down below freezing so we could all go and live out wild Calvin and Hobbes style sledding adventures. This was much to the chagrin of our teachers, many of whom were old enough to have been very accustomed to the snow in Missouri before getting on the wagons and coming out to the Oregon Territory. “When I was your age,” one jaded, angry witch of a substitute once told us, “I was so tired of snow by this time of year that I didn’t even care what it did.”* Screw you, lady! Just because you’re lame and boring doesn’t mean we have to be too.

*This was Mrs. Herella, who we all secretly called Herella DeVille. She wasn’t really mean, she was just… Annoying, and not a good teacher. One of my saddest memories from elementary school was when all 30 students in my 5th grade class clustered around the door to the classroom be let in at the beginning of the day, and it was Mrs. Herella who opened the door, and everybody started screaming when they saw her. That poor woman.

Snow at the University of Oregon has turned all the people who were once too cool to look like they were having a good time into 5th graders again. Most people at U of O either come from other places in the Willamette Valley, where snow is rare, or from California, where snow is just a synonym for cocaine and nothing more, so this is a pretty big moment for all of us. Already some guys have broken a window with a snowball, and a few dozen very anatomically correct snowmen are standing guard on the lawn outside my dorm.

There isn’t a moral to this blog for two reasons – 1) There isn’t a moral for snow, and 2) I’m bored and I freaking want to play in the snow. So all of you East Coast/Europe people who think snow is a boring, day-to-day occurrence, try to think of me with my friends, making an ice penis for our Oregon snow hippie. Hopefully it’ll make you smile.

Truman Capps wants the university to cancel classes tomorrow, and maybe for the rest of the term.

Treatises On Birth Control

"I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, and she said "No"." - Woody Allen

It seems that with each new school I attend, the administrators get more and more candid about how much sex they assume I’m going to be having. In middle school, I was forced to attend, with the rest of my classmates, a multiple-day sexual education class called Students Today Aren’t Ready for Sex, or STARS, or STARfS if you’re a precocious seventh-grader who thinks he’s God’s gift to third period Language Arts (and I was). High schoolers would lecture to us for half an hour or so each day about all the nasty diseases you would get from having sex, and tell us stories about girls who got knocked up and dropped out of school and spent the rest of their lives working at McDonald’s and cursing their horrible luck of not having anyone to tell them that the only good nookie is safe nookie. However, while the STARfS people would explain to us the various methods of safe nookie, they were sure to stress that no nookie whatsoever until marriage was preferable and foolproof, and I seem to remember that the course ended with us signing a pledge saying that we would wait to have sex until marriage.

As a wise man on the Internet once said, “LOL IRONY”, because of course a good number of people in my class violated that pledge in the following years, some of them quite prolifically, and with multiple people, and sometimes on school property. I don’t remember if I was every really vehemently in favor of abstinence, but I do remember some trepidation when I signed the pledge. In seventh grade, I considered it a good day if a girl touched me – and brushing past in the hall totally counted – and so when I completed my STARfS training I was pretty sure that knowing how to properly put on a condom wasn’t going to be of chief importance to me for a good long while. I wrote my name down on the pledge because I wanted an A, but in the back of my mind I knew that if a chance for nookie presented itself in the future, I wasn’t going to let a Xeroxed paper cutout be the deciding factor.

In high school, things became a lot more no-nonsense. Due to my crackerjack knowledge of the human reproductive system I was able to test out of freshman Wellness I and didn’t have to take a health class until my junior year. Now, if you’re in high school and you’re reading this, I’m going to explain to you how things work. There are some people who are passionately devoted to education, and those are teachers, and there are some people who are passionately devoted to making your senior year miserable, and those are Sprague High School administrators, and there are some people who are really, really good at coaching wrestling and absolutely terrible at teaching, and those people are health teachers. Mr. Cox was my health teacher, a slow witted man who would pronounce “also” as “alt-so” and during one lesson referred to the penis as “the tool,” which begs the question of whether it’s a screwdriver or a power drill, which was why I very nearly wound up getting kicked out of class. Despite not having much aptitude at anything but teaching boys how to put on leotards and “wrassle,” he was pretty good at reading health information to us straight from the book, which was how we got a refresher course on condoms, birth control pills, and the menstrual cycle, which is even more fun the second time around. Abstinence didn’t come up at all. It was sort of like Santa Claus for adults, I guess – when we were young, they enjoyed believing that we’d all heed their advice and exercise restraint, but by high school they all remembered what they’d been up to at that age and just gave up on the wishful thinking. Despite the fact that our teachers had woke up and smelled the hormones, a staunch contingent of parents refused to, which was why condoms weren’t freely available in school. To make up for this, my parents offered to put a basket full of condoms in our bathroom for me, which was not only a waste of money considering my less-than-prolific dating record in high school but also highly embarrassing when one has Catholic friends.

But then came college, and God bless you, sir, should you get a girl pregnant in college, because you would really have to be trying hard. In this day and age it would be a veritable Ocean’s 11 of the human anatomy to successfully make a baby because you can’t swing a cat on a college campus without hitting a pile of condoms and/or spermicidal lube, unless you’re at BYU or Liberty University, where the abstinence dream lives on. They give out condoms for free in the health center here, and the University has people hand out goodie bags with condoms in them on holidays (I got a black Halloween themed condom when I was just visiting the school last year, and you’ll be glad to know that I still have it, waiting in my desk for its day of glory that may well never arrive – not unlike a nuclear missile in its silo or Dennis Kucinich, also in my desk). There’s so many condoms on hand that the housing department, in its infinite wisdom, is organizing a “Condom Fashion Show,” in which people create clothes out of condoms, which is a sure sign that some people weren’t paying attention when STARfS taught us how to use the things. But it’s not just condoms, either – while birth control from the male side of things is fairly straightforward (“Put this on your wang so she won’t get pregnant!”) female birth control tends to be much more complicated and mysterious (“Using a horse bone knife, strip the skin from the papaya and let it simmer in Holy Water all night under a full moon, and once you rub the resulting paste in your hair, you will not get pregnant. Probably.). I was picking up a prescription at the health center and I noticed not only a wall sized poster showcasing the literally hundreds of types of birth control on sale, but also a single bottle on the counter, labeled “Vaginal Contraceptive Foam – 50% More Foam Than Leading Competitor!” I can’t imagine that there’s a whole lot of competition in the contraceptive foam market. I mean, when your product is called Vaginal Contraceptive Foam you’re pretty much just trading on the name right there. You know, Women, say what you will about sexism or poor role models in the media or body image concerns, but at least you get foam.

Sure, I’m glad that everyone (and by everyone I mean “Americans attending a major university”) has access to free birth control, but in the end I wind up feeling sorry for the people who manufacture Trojans. I mean, c’mon! You’ve been in a 7-11: Trojans are expensive! And by expensive, I mean that they cost money, whereas the condoms in the health center don’t. By all accounts, it would seem that Planned Parenthood is trying to put other birth control manufacturers out of business by underselling – nay, dumping! Seriously; why buy the condom when you can get the Vaginal Contraceptive Foam for free?

In the course of writing this article, Truman Capps found out that Trojans are manufactured by a company called Church and Dwight, neither of which is a name that he associates with sexual activity.

I Know, I Know, I'm Late, Shut Up

Hi there, I'm Internet celebrity Truman Capps, and I've let you down.

"Ohh, Truman" - and I'm doing an impression of my Dad here - "If you're really serious about writing, you should be updating your blog twice a week." Well, yeah, that's all fine and dandy until you go to a late night college party and are unable to excuse yourself to write a funny, poignant update about something. Yes, I didn't update tonight because I was the designated driver at a raucous, booze soaked party - I'm a horrible, neglectful blogger and you should never forgive me for it. Sure, I started to write an entry this afternoon, but then my friends wanted me to come over and hit the video games before a big social event this evening, so I did that, and then there was the social event, and then the after party, and now it's practically three AM and I'm already behind schedule with writer's block and a mildly amusing, half finished update about the health center. To make up for this, I'm going to post for you a piece that I wrote for the Oregon Marching Band's newsletter for our trip to El Paso. If you're in the OMB then you've already read this, and if you've got a problem with it then we can settle it via knife fight. For the rest of my readers, though, this should be a pleasant trip down football season memory lane, from a time before I was jaded by my hatred of El Paso. Don't worry, folks, I'll never go to a party again. Enjoy!

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LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE
A Bowl Game Rundown By Truman Capps

Let’s just face the facts: we all wish we were going to the BCS Championship or the Rose Bowl instead of The Sun Bowl, which is sponsored by the kind of deodorant that doesn’t “turn a nice girl naughty”. But I don’t think any of us realize how lucky we are – there are a lot of bowl games out there, 27 to be precise, and a disturbing number of them really, really suck. So that you can be thankful for our trip to El Paso, I’ve taken the liberty of ranking the top five worst college bowl games. Count your blessings.

#5: International Bowl – Toronto, Canada (Payout: $750,000)

Have you ever been enjoying a mild Oregon winter and suddenly said, “Hey! I want to go to central Canada in late December!” Yeah, me neither. This is the International Bowl’s inaugural year, and it’s the first post-season college bowl game played outside of the United States in nearly 70 years. This year’s game, which pitted one unknown football team who nobody cares about against another unknown football team who nobody cares about, was played in front of an audience estimated by fans at 25,000. This, in case you were wondering, is why we don’t play college football outside of the United States: Americans are the only people who care about football!

#4: Humanitarian Bowl – Boise, Idaho (Payout: $750,000)

The Humanitarian Bowl is the longest running cold weather bowl game currently in operation – but who cares? I’ve met a lot of people from Idaho and they’ve said some nice things about Idaho’s fishing and skiing and resorts, but not a whole lot about the bustling nightlife, which apparently consists of “Y’know, driving around… And stuff.” On the other hand, Idaho senator Larry Craig is currently battling allegations that he was soliciting sex in an airport bathroom, so I guess there’s one way to spend your per diem. I know the OMB has a limit on hookers, but how about senators?

#3: All Praise Be To Our Glorious Leader Bowl – Pyongyang, North Korea (No payout, capitalist swine!)

Who ever said Communists aren’t ready for some football? Although it’s been in operation for several years, the APBTOGL Bowl has had some trouble finding teams willing to play. This could be because of a little-publicized postgame event in which the losing team is executed by firing squad after leaving the field. Sports experts agree that this tradition is why South Muncie Bible Academy’s football program never recovered after their 2003 loss to North Korea Tech.

#2: 7th Circle of Hell Bowl – Banks of the River Styx, Hell (Payout: Souls of the damned)

Thanks to a recent sponsorship contract with home team University of Hell, the 7th Circle of Hell Bowl will now match the UH Fightin’ Brimstones against a team from the realm of the living every year. This is a rough game for the away team, what with the sulfur jets on the field and the eternal torment and all. University of Hell also fields an impressive football team that includes wide receiver Jack the Ripper, running back Lee Harvey Oswald, and Heisman candidate Judas as quarterback. Head coach Vlad the Impaler is also reportedly eager for the death of O.J. Simpson, expecting him to be a great addition to the team. This year, University of Hell plays Notre Dame.

#1: Emerald Bowl – San Francisco, California (Payout: $850,000)

I was back at my high school during the break, and some acne faced, snot nosed freshman in an OSU T-shirt came up to me and said, “So, what did you think of the Civil War game?” “It didn’t really bother me too much,” I said. “Because, after all, U of O is going to a higher ranked bowl game.” The kid just muttered something like “Oh” and walked away. True story.

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Truman Capps enjoys pulling out canned rerun entries like this, because neglecting his fans is his favorite thing ever.

The Fools, They've Gone Too Far!

Enough is ENOUGH!

Have you seen the commercial for Colonial Penn? I can’t find it on YouTube, but if you watched it you’d probably need a double dose of Metamucil just from the sheer AARP vibes radiating off of it. Two old ladies are sitting at a kitchen table, watching a miniature TV, when a commercial for Colonial Penn comes on, featuring Jeopardy!’s Alex Trebeck. “Oh!” One of the women says. “This is the commercial I told you about!” They proceed to watch the commercial while periodically discussing what a great deal on senior citizen life insurance Colonial Penn gives. It’s like an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, only they took out the funny parts and replaced them with the sort of story you’d probably hear from your grandma (“So Edna and I were scrapbooking the other day and you’d never believe it, we saw a commercial with that nice man from the Jeopardy show! Did you know that he was Canadian?”). I’m all in favor of spicing up advertising, either with better writing or boobs (I’m not picky) but Colonial Penn has failed to meet my rather exacting standards. I think a good commercial is a memorable commercial, one that brings something interesting and lively to the table. Instead, I’m sitting around watching TV, on which two old ladies are sitting around watching TV. It’s the lamest infinity money can buy.

Of course, it serves me right for complaining about one commercial within a commercial, because not half an hour later did I see something so horrendous that it drove me to my feet so I could shout, “This is so going in the blog!” In yon commercial, we can finally find conclusive proof that corporations have given up on even trying to hide their desire for our delicious, delicious money. What starts out as a trailer for yet another sub-par movie featuring my man Samuel L. Jackson morphs seamlessly into a commercial for computer-TV interfaces, to Windows Vista, to a plug for Serena Williams, to a plug for Andre3000 (whose hit groove “Hey Ya” puts him ahead of the other 2999 Andres as far as I’m concerned), to a preview of Serena Williams’ new tennis video game, to a plug for her new line of designer clothing, and then back to a trailer for yet another sub par movie hoofidy ploofidy blah blah Samuel L. Jackson.

Here’s what I think happened: Some ad exec read my blog and noticed that it’s very easy to get me ranting about commercials and greater American consumerism, and decided that he was going to provoke me by making God’s gift to capitalist whoredom: a promotion of a tennis star and recording artist wrapped in a thin layer of software advertisement, all of this rolled up in a flaky movie trailer crust and crammed between two freshly baked slices of greed. Granted, most things are better in sandwich form (e.g. ice cream), but this is ridiculous! It’s not enough that we’re subjected to advertisements on buildings and buses or in newspapers, magazines, books, movie theaters, on our food packaging, on certain beaches in New Jersey, on T-shirts, and in movies, but now we’re seeing advertisements inside other advertisements! It’s like opening a 7-11 in a 7-11! I don’t suppose I should have expected much from the society that put cameras in their phones and movies on their iPods* and Thomas Kinkade galleries in places where people with brains can be offended by them.

*David Lynch thinks it’s “such a fucking sadness” to watch a movie on an iPod. Coincidentally, I think it’s a pretty big sadness to make me sit through two and a half hours of Mulholland Drive for one measly lesbian scene. I said good day!

But, I mean, really? Is this how we’re playing now, Mass Media? If I saw this sort of crap on Futurama I’d give it a very hearty laugh! The thought of a commercial so long that it warrants its own flippin’ commercial just naturally lends itself to either lighthearted comedy or consumerism-run-amok tragedy. Now that we’ve crossed this line, the line of ‘easy now, lads, one commercial per commercial’, all bets are off. What’s next, taping video billboards to barnyard animals? Product placements during church services? Something… Something with poop? Like, poop based… Poop advertising? It may sound juvenile, but remember, people, they aired an ad within an ad within an ad within a movie trailer! They’re calling all the shots! They’ve captured our bridge! John Doe has control of the game!

It’s no secret that the only reason anybody puts up the money for cultural edification the likes of 30 Rock is because they want to sell advertising between shots of Tina Fey’s beautiful face and razor sharp wit. I suppose that with television experiencing such a revolution in quality, what with the Heroes and the Lost and the Desperate Housewives and the My Name Is Earl and the CSI and the The Office, that commercials would have to pull something crafty to keep up. Maybe that’s how the universe stays in balance - every time the forces of creativity do something awesome, the forces of consumerism have to pull up alongside them to keep things in check, kind of like that writer’s strike dealio that I can’t talk about without grabbing my sock full of batteries and looking for the nearest MBA. So maybe one day they will bring back Firefly, and they’ll show new episodes seven days a week, but in return we’ll all be forced to receive a permanent IV of Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper.

Truman Capps doesn’t think that adding more adjectives to the name of your soda will make it any better.

You Know, For Kids

+ Hannah

I consider Hannah Montana to be just one more signpost along the road to humanity’s doom (other such signposts include American Gladiators and the sanctioned use of synthesizers in high school marching band competitions). Every so often, something becomes popular that in my estimate really has no business being popular, and its resulting popularity drives the rest of the world beans-up-the-nose crazy in their clamor to possess it. Case in point: Tickle-Me-Elmo. People went nuts for that! Why, though? If you poked it, it trembled and made giggling noises – I could get the same results with a Jell-o mold and a tape recorder for a damn sight cheaper, but on Black Friday there were parents beating each other up in Toys-R-Us for the thing! Might I reiterate, why, though? Tickle-Me-Elmo did only one thing! Had I been a four year old who was presented with a Tickle-Me-Elmo, I would’ve given my parents a harsh tongue lashing for giving me a toy with such limited prospects for play.

Hannah Montana is the Tickle-Me-Elmo of the 21st century – a broad statement, considering that we’ve only completed roughly 8% of the 21st century so far, but should the world go crazy for a Tickle-Me-Truman doll sometime in the next 50 years, I’ll be happy to eat my words on this one. The tweenybobber pop star’s latest endeavor has been the Best of Both Worlds tour which so far has been an unparalleled success, with tickets selling out about as quickly as tickets to Elvis and The Beatles concerts back in the day, according to industry experts. Parents desperate to appease their Hannah Montanaphile children are going to great lengths to buy the neigh impossible to find tickets. Some parents stay up all night at Ticketmaster.com, waiting to buy at the very second tickets go on sale, while other parents pay thousands of dollars to scalpers or pretend that they’re war widows.

Oh, what, you didn’t hear about that last one? Priscilla Ceballos, a 25 year old mother of three from Texas who apparently drew her eyebrows on with a brown Magic Marker, helped her daughter write an essay about her father’s death in Iraq so that she could win tickets to see Hannah Montana. It’s all very sweet and tragic until you consider that the girl’s father, Jonathon Menjivar, is alive and well and has never been in the military. The press discovered this minor detail only a few days before the daughter was due to receive the tickets, triggering an outpouring of loathing for the woman willing to parley our country’s greatest diplomatic and military blunder of the past 20 years into an evening of fluorescent pink, girly fun. Now, of course, your first instinct will be to blame the mother for all this, but when you think about it, if Mr. Menjivar was a dead soldier like he was supposed to be, his daughter would have fulfilled her lifelong dream of worshipping at the altar of Hannah Montana – now who seems like a bad parent? Mrs. Ceballos, the feckless, lying curmudgeon that she is, first used the excuse that she had lied by accident, assuming that the contest had been to write a compelling fictional story, which is a lot like a bank robber saying that he thought the money in the vault was for anybody to take, or a murderer saying that he and his victim were just playing a friendly game of “See how many times I can stab you before you bleed to death.” Under additional scrutiny, Mrs. Ceballos began playing the martyr, lamenting that she had made a bad decision in her quest to be a good mother and, due to the considerable bad publicity caused by her actions, has been forced to move out of her home and shut down her Myspace page. In her appearance on The Today* Show a few days ago, she said that, “It was not my intention to mislead.” I have to call BS on this – I think it was exactly her intention to mislead. Very few people say things that aren’t true when they don’t want to mislead people, because four out of five liars agree that lying is the very best way to mislead people.

*Because how better to punish a bald faced liar than to put her in the limelight on a nationally televised TV show?

Children grow into adults, and then as adults they have children, and in their crazed quest to win the approval of their children, parents will regress back into childishness themselves. Kids have always fought over toys on the playground, and then a bunch of them grew up and fought over Tickle-Me-Elmo in toy stores so they could be good parents and give their kids what they wanted. Kids will tell outlandish lies to get what they want, and sure enough, Mrs. Ceballos first pretended to have a dead husband, and then pretended that she had thought she was entering a fiction contest – all so she could get tickets to a concert by a performing artist who targets preteen audiences. And how was she punished? Well, for one thing, she had to get rid of her Myspace.

Truman Capps finds the notion of rubbing Elmo until he trembles just a little bit pedophilic, and wonders how many Tickle-Me-Elmo recipients will go on to appear on To Catch A Predator.

We Don't Need No Stinking Content!

Which bloodthirsty dictator are you? :D:D:D:D

Despite the fact that I make it look so easy, it is in fact kind of tough to think up mildly funny and relatively thought provoking things to write about every week, and so a few days ago, at a loss for what to write today’s entry about, I turned to Google. Google, hand in hand with Wikipedia, is where atheistic geeks go to find life’s answers in lieu of the Bible or friends. It’s the manhole cover over the festering sewer of the Internet, and by prying it off of the ground with a Mozilla Firefox crowbar and sticking your head inside you’ll probably find at least one of the answers to your questions, as well as some kid’s Nerf gun fan site.

I Googled the term “things to blog about”, and the first site I found was Blogthings.com, so I figured I was on the right track. What I was hoping for was an indexed list of interesting topics that are easy to make light of and write metaphors about, but what I saw reminded me that I’m in the minority by actually creating my own content for my blog. Blogthings.com provides you with everything you’ll ever need to get around actually writing. It’s an archive of cute add-ons for your blogs – polls and quizzes* to let you determine what your prom style is, or what 2004 hit song you are, or how Texan you are. All of these are burning questions that I’m glad we’re devoting our time to, and did I mention that there’s currently a genocide going on in Darfur?

*So since when did quizzes become fun again? I seem to remember everybody hating quizzes in high school, and I’m pretty sure I still hate quizzes now, but it seems that everybody else can’t get enough of these timewasters. One of the quizzes on Blogthings – I’m not kidding – is “How evil are you?” Don’t you think we could figure this out for ourselves, Internet? I mean, if a person really, truly is evil, then the voices in his head telling him to kill hookers are probably also telling him how evil he is. What I find really disturbing is that the quiz isn’t called “Are you evil?”, but “How evil are you?”, implying that there are, I don’t know, degrees of evilocity, and all of us are somewhere on the evil scale. I consider myself four dead orphans’ worth of evil, but the anonymous wanker in my hall who seems to like slamming his door as hard as possible at 3:30 AM is probably about 15 dead orphans’ worth.

Y’know, one of the earliest blogging sites was Livejournal.com, which kickstarted blogs as an online diary of sorts where people publicly posted thoughts that common sense dictates should best be kept in a locked pink My Little Pony notebook. The impression was that the blogger makes entries about him or herself, and the bloggie reads them and learns something about the blogger – for example, and I’m just throwing out ideas here, maybe he likes anime. That’s the way blogs are supposed to be. You come here, you find out that I’m determined to be cranky and cynical about everything, you go to Snively’s blog, you find out that he’s a genius with a disturbing amount of time on his hands, you go to The Aspiring Liter and you find out that she doesn’t update very often. But now, with all these add-ons from Blogthings, there’s blogs in which every update consists of a sentence and a quiz, and now the blogger only exists so that the bloggie can find out color his or her toenails should be.

Blogthings advertises itself as a place to find quizzes that “will give you a good idea of who you are.” The quest for identity has been something that’s consumed human beings for thousands of years and has traditionally been a process that includes career changes, drugs and alcohol, listening to Pink Floyd, and divorce, among other things, but now we can axe all that garbage because we’ve got quizzes to find our identities for us. While most dystopic science fiction doesn’t apply to modern society yet, the thought of a simple test to determine one’s place in society seems to be taking shape now that there are entire websites devoted to people testing themselves to get advice. So remember – if we aren’t careful, in ten years our children may well be forced to find out what kind of cheesecake they are.

Truman Capps is waiting for the “Are You A Replicant?” quiz, wherein if your test results are positive, an aging, alcoholic Harrison Ford comes and tracks you down.

Back To School

Sorry, but it's not like that at all. Not even a little. I'm sad too.

Oh, and I was so happy that I finished fall term on December 3rd, and here I am paying the piper. While all my private school friends get to lounge around for another week, in a few hours I’ll be boarding a bus back to Eugene so I can start winter term. Literally hundreds of people have asked me if I’m excited, and I guess I am, but I’m also scared for some of the same reasons I was scared before I went down to school at the end of the summer: 1) Oh snap, what if I have boatloads of homework now? and 2) Oh snap, what if I’m not as smart as I enjoy pretending I am?

All of my friends are excited to go back to school because they, with their newfound college independence, are chafing under their parents’ rules and regulations (which I’m lead to believe are “lame”). Now, as with most adolescent problems, this doesn’t really bother me, because my parents are so easygoing that my home life isn’t too different from my college life. In college I spend most of my time playing video games and surfing smutty websites, and I do pretty much the same thing at home, only I’ve got a private bathroom and shower and no homework to distract me. I mean, who wants to walk away from that? Even if I were the type to stay out all night with my friends getting totally crunk, my parents probably wouldn’t be all that angry about it so long as I did so responsibly. About the only thing I could do to really piss my parents off would be to start attending Bible study or vote for Mitt Romney.

But I have to go back, and I’m not saying that I’m not excited at all, because there’s a lot of fun stuff about college. I’ll meet a whole new crop of girls who don’t want to go out with me and get a chance to load up on chicken Caesar salads again, plus I’ll finally be able to find out whether it was a bad idea for me to leave a half eaten container of hummus in my fridge for the entire break. It’s also a lot easier for me to make funny blog entries when I’m at school. In college, interesting things happen to me on a daily basis (that is, if you find band gossip interesting), and it’s easy for me to whip up some wordy crap with run on sentences about whatever strikes my fancy. At home with my parents, though, I seldom leave the house because I don’t have any friends in the neighborhood, and so the only stuff I have to write about are my parents, and if I’m going to post on my blog about my parents then I might as well grow my hair down to my shoulders, dye it black, wear eyeliner, gain 50 pounds, drop out of school, write freeverse poetry, play World of Warcraft, go to anime conventions, shop at Hot Topic, see The Corpse Bride, change my name to Skyler or Josh or Seth, complain about how nobody understands me, and start dating a high school sophomore with a history of cutting.

Never will I feel more materialistic than when I go from home back down to school. Right now I’m taking my duffel bag, which is so stuffed full of clean clothes that I can barely close it, my marching band uniform, a backpack full of books, DVDs, and Christmas gifts I received, and both my trumpets. The fact that I’m doing this on a bus makes it that much harder, because taking the bus is really only one cut above walking on your hands when it comes to efficient or comfortable travel. Riding the bus to Portland after the bowl game, I made the mistake of trying to use the bathroom while we were in traffic, which would make for a pretty entertaining and challenging arcade game, but in real life it’s more like trying to fill a glass of champagne without spilling it while jumping on a trampoline.

Ah well. School, like life, goes on. I don’t suppose I could exist much longer like this anyway, living it up with no responsibilities and all my wants and needs catered to. Proust (or, more directly, Steve Carell at the end of Little Miss Sunshine, because any 19 year old who claims to read Proust is probably lying) says that only in stressful, trying times can a person see his true nature. He’s probably right, but I think most of us would be willing to give our true nature a miss if it meant we could sleep in ‘till 11:00 and spend all day playing Team Fortress 2.

Truman has made a possibly foolhardy decision, and will now be updating twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays. Watch and see if he’s creative enough to be funny two out of seven days!

On Travel

...sucks.

So this weekend I went to El Paso* with the Oregon Marching Band, so I could pep up the crowds and help our football team win, which they did.

*This isn't a blog where you go to learn life lessons. If you're looking for them, you probably shouldn't be on the Internet, because as I've previously mentioned, looking for something worthwhile on the Internet that isn't bizarre pornography is about as productive as shooting yourself in the face on the off-chance that the bullet might be made of delicious gravy. All that aside, I'm going to impart one piece of advice, perhaps the most worthwhile information you'll ever get from me: Never, ever, ever go to El Paso. Maybe you think it wasn't so bad because, being with the band, I got an all expenses paid trip. To put things in perspective, getting an all expenses paid trip to El Paso is like getting an all expenses paid kick in the face, only a kick in the face doesn't last three days (unless you're in a Chuck Norris joke). You know that crappy part of town where there's a lot of strip malls and all the houses are run down and everything has bars over the windows? Those are all little clones of El Paso, except better, because I'm willing to bet they're not prone to temperatures of 20 degrees at 10 AM and 80 degrees at 2 PM, dry enough to make your hands and lips crack and bleed, or dustier than the inside of a vacuum cleaner. Did I mention that it's right next door to the city where hundreds of women have mysteriously been murdered in the past decade? I'm serious, just... Just don't go to El Paso. If you're reading this and you live in El Paso, I'm really sorry. For all I know, I could've only seen the very worst parts of your city, and maybe everywhere else the streets are paved with garlic and there's huge statues paying homage to Kurt Vonnegut, but for the plain and simple fact that I'm not as funny when I'm politically correct, I've got to say that I unabashedly hated being in El Paso. So sorry.

The Early Bird Catches The Worm, And We Hate Him For The Example He Sets

The people in charge of the band made us report to Autzen Stadium at 4:00 AM so we could get on the buses that would take us to the charter plane at the airport. Once we got to the airport, we waited in the terminal for an hour until our charter plane showed up. I'm actually really glad that we did that, because if people don't make me do stupid things then I don't have anything to write about, and who needs extra sleep before a big exhausting weekend anyway? Sure, yes, I get it, we had to make sure there was plenty of time so that the plane didn't leave without us lest there be some sort of snag, but... But it was a charter plane! Had we slept for another hour and then hit some sort of snag in security, that plane wouldn't have taken off at 7:00 anyway without the people who paid for it! But instead, we woke up at 4:00 AM! So that we could go to El Paso! Do you know what that feels like!?

Airplanes Are Not Roller Coasters

When the airplane is landing, don't hold up your arms and cheer like you're on a roller coaster. Why not? Because you're not on a roller coaster. As a general rule, if it's something you'd do at a theme park, it probably doesn't have any place in normal society. Would you get your picture taken with a giant mouse walking around on the street? Would you pay $7.00 for a small Diet Coke at a normal restaurant? Would you get into a decaying, rusty machine operated by a greasy hillbilly if it wasn't the Tilt-a-Whirl? No, no you wouldn't, because that would not be a very smart thing to do. But then again, if you hold up your arms and cheer while the plane is landing, you're probably pretty stupid anyway, so I guess you would be willing to pay a few hundred dollars to get on a roller coaster ride that has a mildly exciting beginning, a dead boring three hour interlude with a drink service and showing of Hairspray, and a mildly exciting ending followed by El Paso.

Mysteries of Sonic Revealed

If you live in Oregon, you've probably been seeing commercials for a fast food drive in called Sonic for your entire life, and you've probably always been wondering why the hell Sonic is paying for ads in states that don't even have a Sonic. Likewise, you may have heard the rumors of the Sonic that now apparently exists somewhere in Hillsboro, a shimmering fast food Shangri-La of sorts. Well, if you can say anything about El Paso, it's that they were kind enough to put a Sonic right close to the hotel we stayed in, so a few friends and I went and tried to see what all the fuss was about. Sonic, I think, is a Venus Fly Trap sort of enterprise - they lure unsuspecting out-of-towners to their restaurants, befuddle them with a highly technical ordering process, and then merely wait for the confused consumers to starve to death while pondering how to eat at a drive in when they have no car. At that point, they take the bodies and make them into Soylent Green Shakes, only one of the 168,894 possible drink combinations Sonic advertises. Fortunately, we outsmarted them and figured out that you had to push a button and say what you wanted, and then eventually they'd bring it to you from inside. And I've got to say that overall, the food there is pretty good. Not worth going to El Paso for, but if you're in Hillsboro and feeling lucky, I'd say you should give it a shot.

School Starts In Less Than A Week

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. I might actually have to do work next term, which will severely cut into my Team Fortress 2 time. This is almost as bad as El Paso...

Truman Capps has been riding Greyhound buses, sleeping on couches and floors, and living out of a single duffel bag for the past six days, and now feels at peace with his inner hobo.