Grade Inflation

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

I feel like daytime TV is basically the epitome of sloth. A medium generally reserved for people who, for whatever reason, are sitting around watching TV in the middle of the day rather than working, daytime television caters to their perceived laziness with a parade of advertisements shilling labor saving products. Herbal supplements and miracle diets promise fast weight loss without having to exercise or watch what you eat, online dating sites make it possible to fall in love without leaving your computer, and for everything else in life, there’s ShamWow (as the man says, it’s made in Germany, and you know they always make the best stuff).

We’ve started to shift our responsibilities off of ourselves and onto other people and things in our environment. No longer is it our own fault that we’re fat, it’s because of a hormone deficiency that this pill can fix. The reason we can’t find suitable partners isn’t because we spend all of our time inside playing World of Warcraft, it’s because we haven’t been matched to a member of the opposite sex based on 29 dimensions that apparently determine happiness. The economy isn’t a mess because of our rampant speculation in the housing market, it’s because people haven’t been buying enough ShamWow towels.

This shift in responsibility is especially evident in higher education. An increasing number of college professors say that students will visit them during their office hours attempting to haggle a higher grade on one of their papers, arguing that they tried very, very hard and that the professor was unfair in giving them a C or a B- for what the student thought was a really strong effort. In fact, a recent study from the University of California, Irvine reported that a third of students surveyed expected a B simply for showing up to class on a regular basis. Just in case you’d forgotten, a B is traditionally defined as “above average.” So what this means is that a significant percentage of America’s future leaders and entrepreneurs think that they’re above average simply by virtue of the fact that they know how to show up to a specified location on time with some semblance of regularity. How about that for an ego problem – I’ve been called pompous before, but I’ve never assumed that my professor is going to give me a good grade because I made his or her class that much more awesome by coming in every day and just being me. To be fair, though, we students aren’t the only ones with this problem – President Bush showed up to work just about every day (when he wasn’t on vacation) and still seemed to fancy himself as an above average leader.

I’m mystified by the commonly held notion that professors “give” us our grades. They give us our grades in the sense that they pull out a marker and write a letter on the papers we hand in or calculate a percentage at the end of the term, but they make these decisions based on material that we create and give to them. Professors don’t “give” us grades – they look at our work and evaluate it against their standard of quality, and the grade reflects how close we came to what they were looking for. Sure, it’s tough to know exactly what a professor expects of you – thank God they print that sort of information on the syllabus. Effort does factor into the equation; it always takes effort to make something good. However, it’s also fully possible to expend a decent amount of effort and make something bad. The real trick, I suppose, is to make the effort in your classes to actually learn something, and then incorporate that effort into your essay writing and test taking efforts. Just because you spend a few hours on something doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good – take this column, for instance.

I feel like this problem is rooted in our upbringing, where we were taught that everyone was a winner and that, if we tried hard enough, we could do literally anything. As useful as these ideas may have been to our youthful psyches, they were perpetuated throughout our schooling and they evidently persist today in our world of grade inflation and deferred responsibility. The simple fact is that we can’t all be winners (as evidenced by the University of Washington’s football team) and that trying alone is not the one shot formula for achieving your dreams – if it were, half of the adults in this country would be astronauts, and the other half would be princesses.

If you want to succeed you do have to try, but you also have to learn and compromise. That means actively participating in your classes, not just showing up, and also learning to sacrifice some more of your leisure time to really go the extra mile on your term paper. It means eating right and exercising, not just taking a pill and hoping for the best. It means going out and meeting people, not entering facts about yourself into a web browser. As far as ShamWow is concerned, though, you can just keep on doing what you’re doing.

This One Time Alexander...

And believe it or not, we both have girlfriends now.

My best friend, Private Alexander Jasper, is leaving for Afghanistan today. Over the course of the next year, he’s going to jump out of planes, shoot guns, punch terrorism in the face, and capture the enemy flag. I haven’t seen him since last summer (he was in Salem around Christmas, but there was a blizzard so I couldn’t make it down – thanks, benevolent and loving God!) and over the course of the next year he won’t have phone contact with the outside, non-shitty world in which I live.

Alexander has always had absolutely horrible taste, which would explain why he was such a huge fan of this blog. Thus, as a sort of “Good Luck Stormin’ The Castle” gift, I hereby dedicate this update to the crazy shit Alexander has done in the eight years I’ve known him.

This one time, Alexander…

…came to school dressed as Chewbacca. It was our sophomore year, so I guess the third Star Wars prequel movie had yet to come out, but that wasn’t for months. Also, it wasn’t so much a Chewbacca costume as his father’s gorilla costume (Mr. Jasper is the sort of man who both needs and frequently uses a gorilla costume) repurposed with a Wookie-style bandolier. When I asked him why he was dressed as Chewbacca, Alexander looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Uh… It’s Thursday?” And he was right – it was Thursday.

…almost killed me with a slingshot. About three months after I’d first met him I was over at his house, which was on several acres of mud and weeds outside of town, and wandering around in the backyard. Alexander, about 50 feet away, put a marble in his slingshot and fired it at me, intending to have it hit my ass. Instead, a marble whizzed right past my ear at probably a thousand miles an hour. The damn thing could’ve killed me. Alexander just laughed, because he doesn’t really believe in death.

…didn’t show up for a movie on time. No, actually, this is inaccurate – Alexander has never once in his life ever made it to a movie theater on time. Shitty one-horse town that it is, Salem only has two movie theaters, one of which is nestled among the meth addicts and garbage of downtown, the other nestled among the meth addicts and crack addicts of Lancaster Boulevard, on the outskirts of town. Whenever we’d agree to meet at one of these theaters, Alexander would always, always wind up going to the other one. It was like he had their names mixed up, and maybe their physical appearance, too – I could say “Let’s see Hot Fuzz at the DOWNTOWN theater, the one covered in graffiti, across from the abandoned parking garage!” and then, 20 minutes later, I’d be waiting around at the downtown theater when I’d get the call: “Where are you? …Wait, what theater were we going to?” Once, in middle school, we went to see Monsters, Inc. He left to go to the bathroom during the previews, and just didn’t come back. After the movie we found him waiting in the lobby – turns out he’d gotten lost on the way back from the bathroom and gone into another theater playing Monsters Inc. that had started 20 minutes ago. He just sat with some strangers for the entire movie.

…gave me fiber advice in front of our entire Wellness II class in high school. The class was a joke, taught by a man who I feel certain was literally retarded (it makes sense – he was the wrestling coach, after all) and on that day we were, as usual, all sitting and quietly reading from our books. Suddenly, in the silence of the classroom, Alexander looks up and says, “Hey… Hey, Truman!”
I looked up, as did everyone else in the room. Alexander, sitting at a desk on the other end of the class, was pointing to his book.
“It says here, ‘To ensure soft and bulky bowel movements, ingest at least 5 grams of fiber per day.’ So, uh…” He shrugged. “I guess, if you’ve been having trouble with your bowel movements, maybe you should do that.”
Everyone just stared at either him or me. It was one of the most embarrassing and awkward moments in high school. You magnificent bastard.

…was trying to fart silently during his math class during a test. He did all of the necessary acrobatics with his sphincter that come with this sort of thing, and then attempted to let the gas out silently. Evidently he’d gone wrong somewhere in the process, because what ensued was a magnificently loud burst of flatulence, made even louder by the extreme silence of the classroom. Pandemonium ensued, during which the girl sitting at the desk in front of Alexander turned and looked at him, “like I’d just killed her dog or something.”

…jumped into his car in the parking lot of a bowling alley at 1:30 AM and fired up the stereo, which started playing “Safety Dance.” This was on Prom Night, senior year – and my senior prom was without a doubt one of the largest unmitigated disasters in the history of unmitigated disasters – when all I wanted to do was go home, set fire to everyone in my class, and maybe have a little cry, too. But it was there in the bowling alley parking lot, before we all parted ways, that Alexander started playing what was then our favorite song, and so he and I and Brent, the third member of our party, danced like asshats in an empty parking lot, being gawked at by meth addicts, hobos, and meth addict hobos. It was a great end to one of the worst nights ever.

…yelled, in a highly effeminate voice, “HEEYYYYY JOOOOOSSSHHHH!” to a classmate of ours in the middle of a crowded mall during Christmas shopping season. Josh gave him a dirty look and left. When Brent and I chastised him for yelling in such a way at our recently outed gay classmate, he looked shocked and said, “Josh is gay!? I was just… Y’know, doin’ that for the hell of it!”

…held an entire conversation in pantomime out of pure spite. During a party at my house, Alexander was having an animated discussion with another of my friends when Andrew, as self important and pretentious a jerkoff as ever has lived, asked them to quiet down so he could continue his conversation. Alexander’s response to this was to hold an elaborate pantomime conversation with his friend (this included miming fellatio and pretend-pissing on Andrew) which ultimately commanded the attention of the entire room and garnered a round of applause, completely obliterating whatever stupid shit Andrew was trying to say.

…went head to head with one of his peacocks. Alexander’s family owned a flock of four peacocks, which Alexander dubbed “The Skexies.” They spent most of their time walking around in a tight cluster and hooting at anything that struck their fancy. Every time I’d see Alexander he’d have a new story about The Skexies, namely, the exploits of Crackers, who Alexander fondly referred to as “The Stupidest Peacock in the World.” Crackers routinely got stuck on the roof or lost in the woods, forcing Alexander to go out in the rain and cold to get him back. Every time we nerds convened at Alexander’s house, he’d point out Crackers to us and say, “That’s Crackers – the Stupidest Peacock in the World!”
After about a year of this, we arrived at Alexander’s house to find that all of the Skexies except Crackers had had their wings clipped. When we asked him why this was, Alexander said, “Oh, yeah, I had to chase down all of the Skexies and clip their wings so they wouldn’t try to flap over the fence onto the neighbor’s property.” When we asked why Crackers wasn’t clipped, Alexander looked at his shoes and muttered, “He… He outsmarted me.”

…threw ranch dressing at a complete stranger. After a train trip with his family, Alexander was in the stall in the train station bathroom when his younger brother, William, came in and started doing everything possible to ruin the experience for him, namely throwing all available toilet paper rolls and handfuls of lather soap over the stall door in an attempt to hit him. His work done, William ran out, cackling, and when Alexander had cleaned as much soap as possible off of himself, he returned to find his family eating fish and chips in the train station food court. Seizing the opportunity for revenge, Alexander grabbed his Mom’s little container of tartar sauce and threw it at William, who Matrixed out of the way at the last second. The tartar sauce instead hit a complete stranger sitting at the next table. In the resulting chaos, Alexander’s mother tried to apologize to the bystander with the words, “Sir, forgive my son. He’s an idiot.”

…made me laugh harder than I ever have in my entire goddamned life. The facts are these: We were gathered around the cafeteria table one lunchtime when my friend Michael related that his father, a fireman/paramedic, had been summoned to a retirement home the previous day where there was an outbreak of the norovirus. Michael was worried that his father had brought the virus home to him, as he had heard that the norovirus causes violent and uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting.
Hearing this, Alexander’s eyes widened with awe and glee. “Oh my God!” He exclaimed. “If you had both at once you’d basically be on the floor spinning in circles!” To illustrate his point, he spun his finger around on the table, yelling “Auuuuuuuughhh!” to mimic the situation Michael was potentially facing.

And it was the funniest thing in the world. The funniest thing. I laughed for 20 minutes, until my stomach hurt and my eyes ran out of tears and my lungs burned and I started to hyperventilate. I have never before in my life laughed that hard at anything, and I doubt I ever will again. Being as peripherally involved with comedy as I am, I’ve made mockery out of quite a few things, but I have never laughed more hysterically or fully than I did that day, at the thought of one of my friends lying on the floor being spun in circles by the sheer force and violence of vomit and shit. At that time and place and mindset, that was hands down The Funniest Moment In Human History. And of course it sounds lame and juvenile now, laid out in black and white text on a page – you had to be there. That’s the beauty of Alexander: he truly is the king of You Had To Be There.

I get that this update probably wasn’t terribly interesting to the bulk of my readership. Understandable – you had to be there, and you weren’t. But with all due respect, this update wasn’t really for you. It’s for Alexander, the single funniest motherfucker I’ve ever met.

Give ‘em hell, old chum.

Truman Capps has improved his fiber intake now, thank you.

Smokehouse

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

A lot of the college changes that most people experience were especially shocking for me because I went to a stiflingly conservative Salem high school wherein nearly everyone was either Mormon, Republican, both, or a member of a Christian youth group that encouraged young lovers to save their first kiss for the altar. I was always sort of the odd man out at my high school (although for a while there it was looking like some of those youth group kids were going to beat me on the first kiss thing) and thus coming to the University of Oregon was a bit of a sensory overload. Atheists everywhere! Swearing professors! Premarital sex – willickers!

By far the most unexpected element was the high number of (tobacco) smokers here. I had expected in high school that I would encounter more smokers in college, but really, even two people smoking would be a lot more than I had seen in four years of secondary education. However, what I found exceeded my wildest expectations. All around me people were sucking on butts (cigarette butts – I don’t know about that other one, nor do I want to), from the guys on fixed gear bikes by the LLC right on up to my own professors and GTFs.

The biggest culture shock was when I’d see my friends from the dorms, cool, ordinary people whose company I really enjoyed, huddle around the smoking station, bundled against the cold, lighting up Camels and enveloping themselves in their own cloud. Twelve years of highly righteous and moralistically influenced public education had taught me that smoking was an activity exclusively reserved for Bad People, and that studies had proven that smokers were 30% more likely to tie women to train tracks and laugh maniacally. Needless to say, I checked the local railroad crossing often, just in case.

I’ve adjusted pretty quickly to campus smoking culture over the past year and a half – it looks to me like smokers are fairly ordinary people who happen to like smoking. There are the familiar sights – people squeezing the filters of their Camel Crushes to activate the menthol, feet smothering the dying embers of a discarded smoke, crowds of students outside lecture halls trying to finish their cigarettes before class, creating a sort of tar-scented mist for their classmates to walk through. In a way, the ever present smell of cigarette smoke activates nostalgic memories of New York and Paris, smoker-friendly metropolises where tobacco is far from the worst smell they have to offer.

Now that I’ve filled enough space with mildly amusing background information, allow me to start dispensing opinions.

First and foremost, I think that smoking is a filthy and disgusting habit. All nostalgia aside, after about five seconds of inhaling cigarette smoke I’m well and truly sick of it, and after more than a minute I start to get a sore throat and a headache. I’ve seen the yellowed teeth and the yellowed fingernails, I’ve heard the raspy, phlegmy coughs, and I’ve also watched my fair share of commercials where dying people with tracheotomies explain the blatantly obvious health risks of inhaling a scientifically proven carcinogen on a daily basis.

I imagine the Clean Air Project, a student group that has been fighting for two years to make the campus a “smoke free zone”, shares my views. If their demands are met, it would be a punishable offense to smoke a cigarette on any piece of University of Oregon property. They cite health concerns for the entire student body, arguing that it’s reasonable to ask smokers to smoke someplace else in the face of cancer risks.

I agree that secondhand smoke is dangerous. However, the anti-smoking forces have already won some decisive victories by banning smoking in or around University buildings. I agree with those actions, because I feel like secondhand smoke is considerably more dangerous when it’s circulating and recalculating in an enclosed air supply. But now that we’ve exiled smokers to the rainy and desolate spaces 10 feet away from our buildings, I feel like we’ve done about as much as we can to safeguard our health – forcing students and staff to leave campus to smoke a cigarette feels like adding insult to injury. The smokers will still be there once we leave campus, and if they aren’t there, then I guarantee you there’ll be exhaust from cars and buses to give us cancer. And if we get rid of the cars, we can always turn to the pesticides in the foods that we eat for our daily allotment of carcinogen. And if ban food then the only thing left to give us cancer is the Sun.

Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not advocating cancer. I think we can all agree that cutting down on legitimate cancer risks is a great idea. I just feel like the risk factor from outdoor secondhand smoke isn’t great enough that we ought to infringe on the civil liberties and individual freedoms of an estimated 20% of students and staff, especially when there’s always going to be another, more formidable carcinogen to take their place.

What strikes me about this proposal is how similar it is to the “smokers set fire to bunnies” stance taken by the schools in my hometown. Don’t dehumanize smokers just because they’ve made a decision that the American medical establishment has derided as totally bonkers. The choices they’ve made are theirs alone, and while their actions have some detrimental aspects toward bystanders, I doubt anyone ever started smoking just so he could get back at all of us nasty, nasty bystanders.

But members of the Clean Air Project expect little resistance, so maybe the ban will go ahead as planned. Let’s just hope that Barack Obama never tries to visit us again – our President, an occasional smoker, would probably have to take a page from Frog’s book and speak to us from a street corner off campus.

Iron Journalist

And better yet, they're ALL about CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY!

The thing about taking Info Hell is that more than any other class you have to be able to put up with tedium. Info Hell is not a difficult class per se; never will you be forced to completely alter the way in which you see the world or MacGyver a cure for cancer out of two aspirin and a Kleenex. Everything you need is out there, and there’s a whole lot of people on the University payroll who are willing to help you get it – hence the course’s official title, “Information Gathering.” But of course, as Morpheus says, “I can only show you the source document – you are the one who must annotate it.”

Information Gathering ought to be easy for me, being as I spend most of my time using the Internet to gather pieces of information (some of them nakeder than others). For a long time now my idea of a good time has been to log onto Wikipedia and just go exploring in that mighty, factually dubious theme park of knowledge. A couple weeks ago I spent a very enjoyable Saturday afternoon aimlessly surfing Wikipedia while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. The effect is not quite the same as watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon or smoking pot while listening to Dark Side of the Moon, but for me it was heaven.*

*The cool thing about listening to Dark Side of the Moon while on Wikipedia is that you can look up each song as you listen to it and read about all the hidden meanings so you don’t have to waste your time contemplating them. Take that, Roger Waters!

Info Hell isn’t that easy, though, because they won’t let us use Wikipedia. “Veracity of your facts is important!” They said, to which I replied, “But what if I just get a job at Fox News?” Regardless, the information we have to gather is hiding on a few more reputable but infinitely less awesome databases, such as EBSCO,* ulrichsweb,** and LexisNexis.***

*Electronics Boutique Searching Complete Orgasm!!, most likely from Japan.
**“Here’s what we do – take the sound a guy makes when you sucker punch him, then stick ‘web’ on the end. It’ll be the best database of publication information ever!”
***A seductive half cyborg alien secret agent assassin from the year 2121 (and probably Japan again).

Hello folks - this paragraph is going on vacation until March 11th at the latest.

But I think what I find scariest about the whole ordeal is that eventually, all of this is going to have to make sense. As much as I hate annotating, if all this class was about was finding sources and doing a two-page writeup about each one, I feel like I could do pretty well with it. Wikipedia or not, at the end of the day it’s still just poking around on the Internet for a few hours and then typing something about it, which is usually how this blog gets written. However, everything I pull together and annotate will eventually have to fit into a tightly structured essay that I write in the last week or so of class. If I use one more than the 32 sources necessary, I get zero points for the project. If I use one less, same result. I’ve been grabbing sources for weeks without knowing what my essay is exactly going to look like – I tend not to plan my writing (when I started writing this update, for example, I’d thought I was going to write about time management skills instead of Info Hell) and thus for me the thought of gathering together 32 sources and then having to use elements from all of them in an essay I haven’t even planned yet is a lot like that Iron Chef show.

You know what I’m talking about, right? They take the two chefs and give them a time limit and a bunch of ingredients (and one secret ingredient, revealed halfway through), and then they have to make some sort of dinner out of it. What worries me is that the timer is going to start and I’m going to realize that my ingredients are coconuts, Fritos, and mayonnaise, and then the secret ingredient that I have to use will turn out to be sautéed donkey shit.

To incorporate all 32 sources with slightly varying viewpoints, I feel like my essay is going to have to make some pretty huge jumps in continuity. I suppose my greatest fear is that my essay is going to read like Criminal Justice MadLibs.

This one, also. Thanks for your cooperation!

Truman Capps is going to try and annotate an entire season of Oz.

Chopper Attack

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

Let’s just get to the facts: I’m not paying for my education. Several years ago my grandparents started a trust fund to cover my college education and living expenses so that I would never have to worry about not being able to pay for school. At the start of every term I call my parents and tell them how much money I think I’ll need to pay for rent, tuition, and my uncontrollable hummus addiction, and within a few days that much money magically appears in my bank account. Sure, it may sound very nice, but my life is not without hardship – for example, there wasn’t enough room in my apartment for the tanning bed I got on Amazon, so I just have to walk to the salon like everyone else.

So yes, let’s face it – I am, in one sense or another, spoiled. I’m going to come out of college with no debt to speak of and I’ve never had to live off of Ramen for weeks at a time until my next paycheck came in (although to be honest, I really couldn’t buy very much Ramen with the paychecks I get here at the Emerald). I don’t take any of this for granted, of course, and I am living proof that an abundance of money doesn’t make a person wise, cultured, or even tolerable. If you still think I’m coasting through life on the good graces of my family, though, consider this:

If I were in danger of failing a class or in some trouble with the administration, I understand that calling my parents would be an option. However, if I were to call my parents and ask them to badger a professor on my behalf, I can guarantee you that they’d both take a few days off of work and drive down to Eugene just so that they could personally laugh in my face and tell me “No.” This is because while my parents are willing to fund my escapades in higher education, they’ve always made it clear to me that the escapades in question are mine and mine alone, and I’ve got to deal with the choices I make.

A mother of a college freshman in California, on the other hand, recently traveled to Cal Poly on her own to register him for classes, buy all his books, and meet with his academic adviser. In Texas, one girl’s mother lobbied university housing officials to change her daughter’s roommate, picked her classes, and maintained a constant email dialogue with her professors. And all across the country, colleges have begun to create entire administrative departments devoted simply to dealing with mothers and fathers who are unable to let go of their offspring. They call them “helicopter parents” for their tendency to hover around their children, and if current trends continue, college campuses everywhere will soon turn into a veritable “Apocalypse Now” of concerned guardians.

It’s really embarrassing being a member of the “Millennial” generation (people born between 1982 and 1995) because we seem to have gained a reputation for being whiny, immature, and self-serving – perhaps rightfully so. Parents who, 20 years ago, were hanging yellow “Baby On Board” signs in their Volvos to announce to the world that they had successfully reproduced are now taking a greater interest in college than their children are. While some parents claim that they’re merely protecting the money they invested in their children’s education, the National Survey of Student Engagement found last year that the higher the level of parental involvement, the lower the student’s grades turned out to be.

What these parents don’t understand is that their investment is only worthwhile if their child knows that he or she has to fend for his or herself. This is because the most important thing college offers is independence – for the first time, many students have the opportunity to decide for themselves between studying and beer, and while beer often wins, sooner or later the student in question will pick beer one too many times and learn a valuable lesson, all on his own. If parents are constantly involved – meddling, visiting, parenting – then the whole independence aspect of college is lost, and then it’s just a bunch of classes leading up to a cap and gown and a cheaply printed piece of paper.

This is the reason that your counselors always told you that it didn’t really matter what you majored in so long as you just went to college. What college primarily teaches you is how to manage time and take care of yourself; the educational aspect of it comes second. For example, our own Phil Knight majored in journalism – funny, I know, that a journalism major could find some measure of success or happiness in life – and went on to start a business rather than work for a newspaper. I’ll bet you anything that when he was in college, his mother wasn’t calling him every 15 minutes to see how his experiments with making shoes in a waffle iron were going – she was keeping her distance and letting him figure life out for himself.

So take it from me, the one with the trust fund: It’s fine to have your parents in your life. But what’s most important is that you’re living that life, and not them. Because at some point you’ll enter the real world, and it’s a lot easier to live on your own there if you’ve had a little practice in college.

Of course, recently Hewlett-Packard reported that an increasing number of parents have started calling the company to negotiate their childrens’ pay, so maybe you can just ride the gravy train until they die.

25 Things

See #4.

1) When at first people started doing these things, I laughed it off as one of the many social trends I don’t subscribe to, like emoticons or bathing. But I’ve been sincerely surprised at how many of these lists have sprung up on Facebook – it’s like the formulaic, list based bubonic plague. Hell, even Mike goddamn Whitman did one, and if ever there was someone who didn’t subscribe to social trends (especially bathing), it’d be that guy. But I’m not doing this out of peer pressure, no – I’m doing this because it’s incredibly easy. Writing a thousand words on any one topic is tough when your brain bounces around as much as mine, so when bulleted lists suddenly become popular in the blogosphere it’s like Christmas meets Hanukah meets the day that they do free Grand Slam Breakfasts at Denny’s.

So, uh… That’s number one.

2) I’ve never shaved with a straight razor. When I was reaching shaving age, my Mom bought my Dad an electric razor that had been in a James Bond movie, and Dad didn’t like it very much, so he gave it to me, and ever since I’ve been using it to shave all six facial hairs I am capable of growing. This is by far the classiest element of my life.

3) The male celebrities I would like to hang out with the most are Neil Patrick Harris, Bruce Campbell, Matt Damon, George Clooney, and Seth Rogen. In that order.

4) The male celebrities that would like to hang out with me the most are probably Carrot Top and that guy from the ShamWow commercials (but only if I promised to buy a ShamWow afterwards).

5) You know Sex and the City? I fucking hate that show. I feel like the most interesting stories are about misfits and losers who have some sort of strife to overcome, and yet year after year millions of lonely housewives and 15 year old girls would flock to a show about rich, skinny white women that reinforces the notion that the only way to be successful is to buy and screw everything. Arrested Development, which is also about rich white people, gets a pass because it isn’t an hour long Gucci ad.

6) Otters are arguably the greatest animal ever, because they just do not care. They’re like beavers, only instead of building dams they just sort of swim around and eat. If animals could smoke pot, otters would be hotboxing the bejeezus out of various marshes and wetlands.

7) I’d probably put throwing up on my list of least favorite things in the world, right next to “listening to Sarah Palin.” One usually leads to the other, interestingly enough.

8) People always give me crap because I say “for God’s sake” or “God damn it” despite the fact that I don’t believe in God. Yet I’ve heard those same people say “I want a new phone this Christmas – maybe Santa will get me one?”

9) I’m a big fan of chipotle. It’s like ketchup’s badass Mexican uncle who buys you illegal fireworks for your birthday and tells you dirty jokes when nobody’s looking. I’d put it on ice cream.

10) What I meant about the whole Santa thing back in #8 was that people still make passing reference to Santa despite not acknowledging his existence because he’s a major cultural figure, and I do the same with God. Was that unclear? I felt like I could have used a better metaphor.

11) I can’t watch 24 anymore. For one thing, I feel like it was getting really formulaic, but also it’s just way too intense. Remember that time Jack’s partner had the virus bomb strapped to his arm and Jack had to chop the guy’s arm off to get the bomb away from them? I mean, damn, girl.

12) I’m not impressed that you know all the words to all the songs from every Disney movie. You are not impressed that I list about a hundred favorite movies on Facebook. Let’s just acknowledge this and move on.

13) I have a scar on my inner thigh from a catastrophic wagon accident when I was in elementary school. So, uh… If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to get a look at my inner thigh, there it is.

14) I think it’d be a great idea if they made a fourth Indiana Jones movie. Mike and I already have this badass idea – Indiana Jones and the Iron Curtain. I don’t want to give too much away, but remember Short Round? Oh yeah, he’s back. And he’s a CIA spy working undercover in Chinese Intelligence. Freakin’ danksauce.

15) Blagojavich? Fuck that guy.

16) The problem with writing a novel is that when I mention it in an attempt to impress people, they’ll always ask what it’s about, and then I have to drop my eyes and mutter, “It’s, uh… A science fiction novel.” And then they go, “Oh,” and think less of me in the long run.

17) Futura is the single greatest typeface in the world. It’s elegant yet bold, beautiful yet tough. It has pride, but it does not boast. Futura drives a lovingly restored black Oldsmobile from the 1940s and supports independent film in the community. If Blogspot allowed it, this page would be swimming in Futura.

18) Coincidentally, I’ve got 18 sources annotated at the moment. More than half, but I still have to interview people.

19) I’m well aware of the typo in last week’s update, but I’ve decided to keep it in order to show that all men have faults, and even gods can bleed.

20) Facebook will routinely show me sidebar ads with pictures of sweaty, shirtless guys that say, “Meet Gay Christian Singles!” It worries me that maybe the ad placement script is so intuitive that it’s looked into my soul and has found out that at heart I’m a staunch Methodist who’s really into dudes, even if I don’t know it yet.

21) Sometimes, when I’m walking through the parking lot of the School of Music, I hear a three or four piece instrumental combo rehearsing nearby – a drum and bass and guitar, and maybe a keyboard. They tend to play laid back, low key R&B or rock riifs, and I like to pretend that it’s the soundtrack for a really boring movie about a guy walking through a parking lot.

22) Yeah, I know, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is Guns ‘N Roses’ most mainstream song. But did you ever consider that it’s got all that mainstream appeal because it’s just really awesome?

23) I can admit that Oregon State University is a worthwhile and decent school in its own way. However, I hate everything about Seattle Community College (the “University of Washington” to some) with every fiber of my being.

24) If I could have any superpower, it would be to make my life move in slow motion at will and have the second half of “Layla” play in the background.

25) I get that last week’s update was a bulleted list too, but I feel like this update is considerably stronger in terms of humor. It helps that I’m not nearly as tired now as I was then.

26) OH SHI-

Truman Capps loves conformity when it suits him.

Information Vacuum

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

Every night, like clockwork, I’m roused from my J202-induced stupor by an eruption of honking and angry shouting from the street outside my apartment. I used to run and look every time in case someone had been hit by a car (I don’t have a television so my entertainment options are limited, you see), but by now I’ve come to understand the source of the commotion: Someone, most likely a student, has walked into the street without bothering to see if any traffic is coming and very nearly reenacted a scene from Grand Theft Auto 4.

We college students are sort of lost in our own world a lot of the time. I conducted a little research (something that I had promised myself I’d never do when I first took this job) and found that of the 20 bicyclists I asked, some 40% had hit or nearly hit an oblivious pedestrian who had stepped out in front of them. Sure, the sample size is small, but I’m lazy and we’ve all seen at least one near-disaster caused by a walking student’s lack of spatial awareness. This is no rare or isolated issue.

What’s going on? Where do our minds go when we’re on the way to and from class? The same students who can hold an intelligent dialogue about Plato’s call for a philosopher king can leave class and five minutes later nearly blunder their way into the front end of a bike. The immediate culprit, of course, is technology.

I’m always amazed by the people who I see walking, texting, and listening to their iPods at the same time while I can barely take a sip of Diet Coke unless I’m standing dead still. We’re a high tech generation, and we so often surround ourselves with Dave Matthews in our ears and phones in our hands and potential emoticons in our minds that we lose track of what’s going on in the world around us, as the absent minded pedestrians in the street outside my apartment prove night after night.

This problem is bigger than any one college campus. This past July, the American College of Emergency Physicians issued an alert warning that texting while walking can – and has – lead to serious injury and, in two cases, death. A dozen or so states have drafted legislation to outlaw texting while driving, in part because in 2006 nearly 30 children were injured when a school bus in Pennsylvania crashed on the Interstate because the driver was fiddling with his phone. This, you understand, is how the robotic uprising will begin: First they’ll distract us pretty music and LED displays until we all get run over, and then they break out the robo-velociraptors to finish off whoever’s left. You may think I’m crazy, but consider this – for years, the principal distractions for our generation had been iPods and cell phones, up until they revealed the logical combination of the two, the iPhone. The machines are evolving. They’re getting stronger and more adept at finding ways to remove us from the physical world. However, I feel like our isolation from the outside world is broader than just spatial awareness issues.

When I’m at my house in Portland, I feel like I do a pretty good job of keeping abreast of current events. Given the fact that my parents are both Democrats, one of whom is a card-carrying member of the ACLU, National Public Radio is a mighty presence around my house. More often than not we have at least three radios tuned in to our local member station at any given time, making it impossible to escape the news. However, when I come down to school, it’s as though I’ve unwittingly entered an information vacuum. Down here, it took me a couple of days to find out about the Blagojavich scandal (by way of a forwarded Daily Show YouTube video, no less), whereas at home news of the incident would have come on swift wings, courtesy of the mellow tones of NPR’s Washington correspondent.

The information vacuum is widespread. Despite an abundance of radios, televisions, computers, and multiple free newspapers advocating multiple points of view, much of the world’s day to day goings on seem to be slipping by the majority of today’s college students. Why else would professors give quizzes over current events? Sure, the drama of the election permeated our lives, but it helped a lot that one of the candidates was a media celebrity who made extensive use of the Internet and had his own Facebook page.

We college students are isolated because our lifestyle keeps our noses constantly buried in our cell phones and our ears awash in The Decemberists (or whatever it is you kids listen to these days). After all, these are the tools we use to block out the campus activists, from Greenpeace to Planned Parenthood to Christianity, trying to get us involved in the issues of the outside world. It seems counterintuitive that in the 21st century, when communications technology is cheap enough that we can stay connected to the outside world at all times, we may well be more in the dark than ever because we use that technology to avoid the world rather than take part in it.

Our obsession with technology is unlikely to ever end, but the least we can do is use it to our advantage rather than our detriment. Maybe use your cell phone to check CNN in addition to ESPN once in a while, or download a news podcast along with whatever new song about sex Kayne West has on iTunes. Don’t quit using your iPhone entirely; just be sure to spend a few minutes with it each day keeping up on current events.

But for God’s sake, look both ways before you cross the street.

Questions For 1/31/09

Do not be deceived by the picture of the pencil. You should use a pen. The guy in this picture has no idea what he's doing.

You have 50 minutes. Please answer in complete sentences. Use blue or black ink. Do not use red ink. If you use red ink, an angel will get leukemia.

Red Robin
I’ve been to literally hundreds of Red Robins in my life, all around the world – from Eugene, Oregon, to Salem, Oregon, to Albany, Oregon, and I think I ate at one in Beaverton once, too. It’s one of the only things that haven’t let me down in some way.
Well, no, scratch that, I’d say just about everything has let me down in some way (the sequels to The Matrix, last year’s economic stimulus package, Colorado) and Red Robin is really no exception. The food certainly has never let me down, but the ambiance, man, they are just grasping at straws. Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, Red Robin – they’re all trying to be so lively and folksy and American, like a throwback to some classic restaurant that had been genuinely lively and folksy and American in the 40s until it went out of business and some meth heads burned the building down a few decades later. And I guess that’s cool, that they want to be like something that was great and unique back in the day, but there’s so many people trying now that what was once a really novel place to eat has now become sort of boring and played.
I mean, yeah, it’s amusing that you’ve got a plastic fireman’s axe hanging up over the door, and oh, wait, is that a group of waiters singing a birthday song and publicly embarrassing someone with a free sundae? It’s all well and good, but there comes a time when a man is ready to be done with the stuff on the walls and the toddlers and balloons and the forced jubilation and just wants to eat a fucking hamburger, you know?
My ideal Red Robin experience is this:
I walk into Red Robin and place my order with the first waitress I can find, paying in advance, in cash. I then walk two blocks south across wet pavement on a somewhat cold night to another restaurant with a name that is a proper noun of some sort (Rick’s, Ed’s, Bill’s, Dockside, The Place). The floors are heavily carpeted, the lighting on the dim side, and there are absolutely no children allowed. The food isn’t so hot, but I’ve got that covered. It’s my birthday, and the staff knows it, but they’re not going to sing or make a fuss or anything because they play it cool there. Ten minutes later, someone from Red Robin comes in, gives me my food, and leaves. And, excellent food in hand, I continue to pitch my idea for the MacGyver movie to Richard Dean Anderson.

1) Every Red Robin has the same décor – does Red Robin have a giant warehouse somewhere like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, only all of the boxes are full of pictures of Marilyn Monroe, sickeningly goofy art, and movie posters?

2) If so, how does that make you feel about America?

3) Remember how they used to have “The Kramer” picture from Seinfeld in Red Robin?

4) You remember how quickly those pictures disappeared after it turned out that Michael Richards was a crazy racist bastard?

5) Did you laugh? Because I laughed.

Extra Credit: Why did I see a poster for K-Pax in Red Robin tonight? I get hanging posters for film noir movies and real classics, but K-Pax was a forgettable movie about Kevin Spacey being a schizophrenic guy who just might actually be a schizophrenic alien. Is that the kind of pop culture we want to preserve?

Babies (As They Pertain To Movies)
It’s really inspiring that, no matter how stupid people are – how bone-ass, XFL loving, Git ‘R Done yellingly stupid they are – that they still just seem to inherently know how to have sex. I can’t really imagine how they’d figure the specifics out, seeing as most movie sex scenes are people wrestling under blankets throughout soft focus close-ups on the actors making funny faces. Porn, maybe? Or they could’ve gotten directions from their friends. They sure as hell don’t teach it in health class (I’m willing to bet that my health teacher Junior year probably watched XFL whilst yelling Git ‘R’ Done). It’s just really inspiring that even if you and your wife are the dumbest motherfuckers to ever live, you can still figure out how to reproduce.
You know how I know this? It’s because people keep taking their infants into R-rated movies – clearly, since these people have babies, they know how to reproduce, but since they seem to think it’s a good idea to take a tiny bundle of shrill crying and pooping and occasional vomiting into an area that demands silence and rapt attention, they are profoundly stupid.

1)Why would you take your baby with you when you go to see Benjamin Button?

2) Did you think, because he’s a baby at one point in the movie, that it would be a family friendly movie? Because, uh, newsflash – there’s violence and sex in there.

3) Or did you just think we’d all be cool with listening to your baby scream for half the movie?

4) Did you know how close I was to starting some shit with your deadbeat-parenting ass? No, I’m totally serious, I was this close to going down to where you were sitting and saying, “Hey, I think they’re still showing Beverly Hills Chihuahua down the hall – maybe you assholes should go see that.” It would’ve been awesome. I would’ve gotten a medal, probably.

Extra Credit: Rid Rock, seemingly unsatisfied with the fact that I’ve already taken him to task in my last two entries, is now starring in a National Guard commercial they show before movies in which footage of “him” “singing” is spliced together with shots of patriotic soldiers and, yes, NASCAR. Do you think that they’re testing us to see just how much we’re willing to tolerate in support of our troops? I think so.

My Job
This Oregon Daily Emerald stuff has been good so far. I’ve got a wider audience, I have interesting hate mail to put on my door, and they just refuse to stop paying me. Recently, the University of Oregon’s alternative libertarian newspaper, The Oregon Commentator, gave me props in a roundabout way for my article about community service. This is particularly impressive because the Oregon Commentator exists primarily to advocate alcohol, mock the Oregon Daily Emerald, and also write about the virtues of a free market economy if time allows. So in your face, people who say my stuff for the Emerald isn’t as good – sure, maybe you, my fans, don’t like it, but the people who built an entire page of their paper around making fun of me and mine sort of liked it!
But it’s been getting tougher recently, and traditionally When The Going Gets Tough, Truman Goes Somewhere Else And Watches TV. As an opinion columnist writing about campus life, I’m sort of restricted in that everything I write has to 1) Have an opinion and 2) Pertain to campus life. Seldom can I come up with something that fulfills both of those requirements, and usually when I do I’m so scared that my opinion will piss 20,000 people off that I’m unwilling to go with it.

1) Why can’t I think of anything to write about when there’s this whole big campus full of stuff happening? Is it my problem, or the campus’s?

2) What kind of opinion columnist is afraid of his own opinions?

3) Should I go to a party and have a Roofie Colada so I can write a hard hitting column about date rape?
(Extra credit for a “No” answer)

4) I imagine some Emerald and Commentator folks are reading this, seeing as I’ve mentioned the names of the papers a few times. What do you guys think?

5) Should I just pretend to have been date raped and write a column about it? That one sounds a lot easier.

Truman Capps kind of suckerpunched you with the serious bit at the end, didn’t he?