Truly Comcastic

Wooooohooooo!

Before I even start this update, let’s acknowledge that Michael Jackson died a couple days ago. He started out eccentric and then gradually moved into downright creepy and weird, but he was genuinely talented and it’s a shame to see him go. Sentiments similar to these have been gumming up the airwaves an awful lot recently, which, thanks to Comcast, has been even easier for me to notice.

As I mentioned last week, my family recently bought one of those specialty Comcast DVR boxes, because without it we would be unable to receive digital broadcast signals and, thus unable to watch Wipeout, which is arguably the most beautifully crafted and intelligent summer replacement show of all time. This considerably changed our TV watching experience around here.

My family has been a longtime adherent to basic cable, which gives us access to the major networks plus a few other channels that we absolutely can’t live without, like Spike, BET, and Country Music Television. If you’ve ever heard the saying, “5000 channels and nothing’s on,” it’s even more true when you only have about 60, because out of those 60 channels at least three are home shopping, two are in Spanish, four are variations on C-SPAN on the local, state, and national level, five are public access showing religious programming/Aryan Nation Adventures, and one is video of Earth from space as recorded by the International Space Station, which is only interesting if there’s a hurricane or a meteor shower. This leaves you with stuff like SciFi, which has been straight up bullshit since they cancelled Mystery Science Theater 3000, Oxygen, which implies that women are the only people who need to breathe, and The Golf Channel, which in spite of my letter writing campaign refuses to show Caddyshack on a continuous loop. American Movie Classics (AMC) defines “classic” as “whatever movie we have the rights to show” (hence why Ghostbusters II and The Birdcage are classics), and TNT may as well rename itself “Home Improvement Network” between 12:00 and 5:00 PM.

So already I’ve got it pretty rough, what with the poor selection of TV channels in the climate controlled house I live in rent free with no job, but what makes it worse is that the TV Guide channel allows you to see the awesome stuff showing on all the other channels that you don’t have. It’s like being a kid in a candy and Brussels sprouts store, and you’re only allowed to have the Brussels sprouts, but then there are 768 types of delicious candy that you have to watch everybody else eating. Some of the candy tastes like commercial-free presentations of The Dark Knight while it’s still in theaters, other types taste like Flight of the Conchords, and a fair number taste like pornography with ambiguous titles. But you can’t eat them – enjoy your Brussels sprouts, which taste like Andy Griffith on TVLand.

But now, we have the Comcast box, which gives us access to Comcast InDemand, which we had never used before. My Dad’s fascination with technology keeps us pretty up to date on all the latest gadgets (many of which involve lasers, none of which are in lightsaber form). However, the ability to press a button and have a movie beamed right onto your television screen is still a shocking novelty to me. I look really closely at the box sometimes to see if I can spot the little men inside who illegally torrent the movies online and play them for us, but I haven’t found any of them yet.

Of course, you have to pay for a lot of the best stuff available on InDemand, but the content that’s free is almost better, in a way. Sure, AMC shows crappy movies for free, but most of those are crappy movies that everybody’s heard of, and they’re censored. The “Free Movies” section on InDemand is a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of movies you’ve seen in dark corners of the video store or in cardboard bins at Safeway but have never been willing to spend 99 cents to see. Right now, there’s a movie freely available on InDemand called Robot Holocaust. The mind boggles! Is it like Schindler’s List, but with robots? Are the humans perpetrating the titular holocaust, or the robots? Ordinarily, these questions aren’t enough to make me rent a movie, but now all I have to do is press a button and then I just don’t even have to worry about what I’m going to do for the next 83 minutes!*

*It is thanks to OnDemand that Mike and I were able to watch Starship Troopers for the first time since either one of us was in middle school. We picked up on a lot of stuff this time around that we hadn’t realized a few years ago – the humor in a futuristic army with guns that uses a strategy of “run up within 10 feet of the aliens and shoot them,” the brilliance of Neil Patrick Harris being in the movie, the fact that poor writing can make even Neil Patrick Harris look like a bad actor (“We’re going back to P!”).

Really, though, none of the new TV available to me is any more entertaining than the old TV I grew up on – there’s just more new fluff to be distracting. But really, that’s what television ought to be, anyway – a distraction (said the guy who made his own TV show). Whenever it’s been a rough day and you’re tired of taking active part in the world around you, TV is there to tell you it’s okay and show you tits and explosions for a few hours until it’s time to go to bed.

And let me tell you, in the walking nightmare of my life what with the getting up at noon and playing video games and not having a job, I need the comforts of TV all the time.

Truman Capps will never say “Comcastic” again.

The One About Books

Because a book just isn't as good if you can't swallow it whole.

Recently, while attending a Mormon wedding (long story), I bumped into an old English teacher from my high school who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. We exchanged all the usual pleasantries, her asking me about college (“Why yes, actually, I am still a journalism major. Yes, I agree, that is a shame.”) and me asking her about high school (“Kids are still crapping in the urinals, huh?”). However, it didn’t take very long for her to use her womanly powers to deliver a question that completely disarmed me and forced me to lie in a vain attempt to save face.

“So, what have you been reading lately?”

At first I laughed and said I’d been reading my textbooks, but of course, that wasn’t true, so I mumbled some stuff about the Vonnegut I’d been reading last summer and called it good. English teachers! Even after you graduate, they’ll always know how to make you feel guilty for not broadening your literary horizons as much as you should. The same thing happened to me last summer, when another former English teacher (I have a lot of former English teachers) pointedly asked me if I’d ever finished reading David Copperfield, which he had assigned my class to read roughly 18 months earlier. To answer now, no – I didn’t even make it halfway. SparkNotes was very informative.

Stephen King once said that you don’t have any hope of becoming a good writer if you don’t spend at least four hours a day reading and four hours a day writing. That statement always nags at me after I spend five hours playing Grand Theft Auto IV and half an hour pounding out a shoddy and hastily written blog so that I can free up my evening for more Grand Theft Auto IV. I’d love to dismiss Stephen King’s words, but the fact of the matter is that he’s about the only writer whose books keep me coming back time and again – thus, there is a good likelihood that the man might know what he’s talking about. The literally hundreds of books he’s sold might also be an indicator.

Reading is by nature more difficult than other forms of leisure. For example, my family recently acquired the Comcast Digital TV Magic Box, which has given us access to about 30 more channels plus the vast wonders of OnDemand (which I will cover in a separate blog). This means that whenever I’m bored, there’s always going to be some sort of interesting content beamed straight into my house; content that requires nothing of me save for the fact that I sit still and look at the only appliance in the room that is talking to me. Video games are a step up, as they present me with a wide variety of problems to solve, usually by shooting people in the face (although I will on occasion run them over with a firetruck). However, in both cases you’re still looking at a screen and pushing buttons – your own imagination is disengaged as you either look at somebody else’s (on television or in a movie) or actually go play around in it (in a video game).

Reading, on the other hand, is all about recognizing letters and forming them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into pictures. Sure, it happens instantaneously (if you aren’t a business major), but it still eats up a lot more brain activity – and I don’t know about you, but when offered the choice between some brain activity or minimal brain activity, I always go for that second one. As somebody who wants to be a writer, that’s an absolutely horrible thing to say/be.

In hopes of changing this, I went to Powell’s (the local mega-bookstore) and bought three books for a total of roughly $30. My hope had been that the significant investment would guilt me into finishing everything I’d bought, instead of reading half (or less) and then abandoning it, as I did with the fourth Harry Potter book and, believe it or not, The DaVinci Code. I vowed that I would not lose interest in any of my purchases and would read them all in full.

I was so zealous about this that I wound up reading my first purchase, The Forever War, in less than 24 hours, which sounds really great and pat on the back worthy until you realize that I paid $14 for a book which I just as easily could have read in the store. The good news is that I liked the book, the bad news is that I don’t know if I’m going to read it again. Of course, cultural edification doesn’t come cheap.

I had anticipated my second purchase, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, as a more enjoyable experience than it actually was. The book takes Jane Austen’s novel and seamlessly adds “ultraviolent zombie mayhem” in 19th century prose; protagonist Elizabeth Bennet is a ninja zombie hunter who trades barbs with Mr. Darcy when she’s not beheading zombies or sparring with her trainers.* I slogged through 115 pages, and I’ve come to the conclusion that while I’m very enthusiastic about the zombies, they’re only one third of the book’s subject matter, and I’m just not as interested in prejudice, pride, or any combination of the two. Yes, the zombie battles are great, but there’s a lot of Jane Austen between them. It’s like eating Lucky Charms – you bought it for the delicious and festive marshmallow, and while the marshmallow is good, you’ve got to wade through an awful lot of bland-ass Cheerio-lookalikes to get there.

*When The Girlfriend first saw this book, the title was partially obscured. “Pride and Prejudice!?” She exclaimed, holding out some hope that I might not be a lost cause. “I can’t believe you’re getting this!” Then she picked up the book and saw the full title, and her face registered the expression of extreme disappointment that I’ve come to know so well. “Oh. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Great, Truman.”

I had hoped the third purchase, a detective novel called A Drink Before The War (written by the guy who wrote Mystic River), would be a good time and a fast read, but it instead felt like it was written by somebody competing in a “talk like a detective” contest. The pages were so thickly laden with streetwise jargon and crime slang that I was halfway scared that the individual words would beat me up and take my wallet. Also, the protagonist was a tough-as-nails detective of the “Jack Dynamite” variety, which I always find hard to relate to.

Three books purchased, two of them abandoned despite my best intentions to the contrary – pretty bad showing for an aspiring writer. My consolation is that I have high standards, and that as two thirds of my purchases didn’t meet with them, I’d be better off looking for books I actually want to read instead of forcing my way through stuff I don’t care about (just like I did back when I actually read my textbooks for school). I suppose the real trick now is seeing whether I actually take the initiative of going and finding something I do want to read, or just use my elitist “high standards” excuse and keep shooting people in the face.

I mean, in video games. See, I was connecting it to the earlier thing.

I don’t actually shoot real people in the face.

Truman Capps grudgingly acknowledges that he stole the name “Jack Dynamite” from Zero Punctuation, but a name that great only comes along once in a great long while.

On The Mall

It's like an M.C. Escher drawing with stores in it!

The transition from Salem to Portland has been a pleasant one, but there have been plenty of culture shocks as I experience things in Portland that Salem outright lacked – viable public transportation, an abundance of locally owned restaurants, culture, Burgerville, Democrats, parks, etc. However, what has been most arresting about my time in the big city has been the malls. Oh, the fabulous, fabulous malls!

Sure, there were large spaces in Salem that could be referred to as malls. In downtown Salem we had the Salem Center, which consisted of a few large department stores joined by skybridges, along with a food court and the requisite Hot Topic and Honeybaked Ham Store, entities which are seemingly incapable of existing outside of a mall.* It was quaint, really, in a very Salem sort of way – as though some entrepreneurs had seen a mall on TV and attempted to recreate it on a smaller scale. There were overweight security guards and warring tribes of punkish 8th graders, sure, but it was more like a Hasbro mall playset than a real mall. For a long time, I thought that was what malls were like.

*Also, the Excalibur Cutlery Shoppe – I’ve seen a lot of those places in my life, and they’ve always been in malls. Why is that? If you’re going to buy a replica samurai sword, why is it that you can only do so within walking distance of an indoor fountain and an Orange Julius?

Eugene prepared me a little, but not much. Students at the University of Oregon have two options for malls – Valley River Center, a mall near the highway that is somewhat larger and somewhat classier than Salem Center, and Gateway Mall, a mall near the Interstate that has been known to cause unborn children to weep tears of blood. Valley River Center has upscale shops (like, for example, Excalibur) and wide open hallways. Gateway Mall, on the other hand, is all of the worst things that a mall can be.

Approaching the front door of Gateway Mall, one must contend with a mob of sullen faced teenagers who have come to the mall in search of something to do and found that fun is yet another product not sold there. Muscling through the crowd and entering the building, you’re assaulted by a cheap second run movie theater on the right and a food court on the left, which is dominated by a large and vaguely sinister circus type ride wherein kids are strapped into a compartment that looks like a smiling frog, hoisted up about two stories, and then jerked up and down a bit. The deeper you go into the mall the more confounding things you’ll see – a cushioned pen filled with screaming, mostly unattended toddlers, a vending machine that sells glow in the dark crosses, and a sports bar targeted at NASCAR fans. No, I’m serious – the bar is part of some chain of NASCAR oriented eateries, and what’s worse, it’s smack dab in the middle of the mall. If you can think of anything more depressing than going to the run down mall by the Interstate to get drunk and watch NASCAR, then I’m pretty sure you should go to work writing for 24.

So this was my training before I got up to Portland – quaint little malls, some better than others, some white trashier than others. However, two days ago I visited Clackamas Town Center for the first time in my life, and it rocked me in a manner best befitting a hurricane.

The Girlfriend and I have had little luck finding jobs in our immediate neighborhood, so on Friday we packed up a bunch of resumes and went to Clackamas Town Center, the nearest mall, assuming that it would be a veritable whirlpool of potential employment. I had known that Clackamas Town Center would be a bigger mall than I’d been to before, but I didn’t truly appreciate how big until I saw that the parking garage outside was taller than 90% of the buildings in Salem. Even more interesting was the fact that they even needed a parking garage, seeing as the parking lot itself was large enough to occupy two time zones.

We entered the mall at about its midsection, and when The Girlfriend explained that that the mall extended “basically forever” in either direction, I felt kind of overwhelmed by all the choices. Which way to go – left, or right? Should we start at the top and work our way down, or start at the bottom and work our way up? Did we have enough food and water for the entire trip? Was there a store where we could buy donkeys to ride from one end of the mall to the other? Imagine my shock when I found out that there was still the entire “West Village” to explore; a plaza filled with expensive restaurants and tonier stores (including – you guessed it – Excalibur Cutlery Shoppe), as well as The Promenade, another complex across the street that in and of itself is larger than Salem Center, as well as perhaps the very city of Salem.

To walk through Clackamas Town Center is to have the very spirit of capitalism knock you down with a sledgehammer and then dangle its balls in your face. There are stores on either side of the hall and kiosks in the middle of it, where employees scrape together what little remaining enthusiasm they have to anxiously ask how you’re doing and if you’d maybe like to buy a new iPod shell today. Wall space not occupied by stores is occupied instead by giant advertisements that go above and beyond the call of duty, such as the wall-spanning Aquafina ad that included an Aquafina vending machine built right into the wall, or the ad in the food court for a home remodeling superstore which included two glassed in examples of the finest bathtubs money could buy.*

*I’ve decided, by the way, that if I ever want to kill someone I’m going to stick them in one of those bathtub exhibits, trapped behind a pane of glass, forced to slowly starve to death while watching crowds of overweight children devour Carl’s Jr. a few feet away.

And the pretzels! My God, the pretzels! What is it about the mall experience that makes people crave pretzels? During my time in Clackamas Town Center I could’ve sworn I saw at least two Auntie Annie’s pretzel shops, as well as some mysterious competing pretzel shop (Creepy Uncle Monty’s, featuring their signature “Thanksgiving 1998” pretzel, which shows up late smelling like alcohol and cheap cigars). What about walking through miles of climate controlled economic splendor makes a person want a piece of dough wrapped up in a crazy way and covered in cinnamon?

Maybe it’s the screaming kids – of course, if that’s the case, then they’d do well to start selling liquor at pretzel stands.* Children truly have the run of Clackmas Town Center – they move in packs, devoid of supervision, eager to get underfoot. At one point, I rode an elevator up to the second story. When it arrived, I was all ready to leave the elevator when the doors opened and a literal tidal wave of children stormed in. As they did, several of them glared at me, as if to say “What the hell are you doing? This is our elevator.”

*Of course, at Creepy Uncle Monty’s, you can get your Thanksgiving 1998 Special with a 32-ounce Peppermint Schnapps in a commemorative Burger King cup, along with a side of Marlboros.

If any of the managers to whom I handed applications at the mall are reading this, please don’t take my cynicism toward mall culture as a sign that I’m a bad worker. All I’m saying is, if I ever go missing after my shift, check the trunk of Creepy Uncle Monty’s car.

Truman Capps could not quite bring himself to apply for a job in the food court.

Rejected (Now With Boobs!)

In my economics class this year, we “learned” about how banks supposedly create money. I put the word “learned” in quotation marks because I quite honestly can’t tell you how they make money; I just seem to remember our GTF interrupting my Tetris game for long enough to tell us that the process of depositing money in a bank puts into motion a series of coincidences and magical tomfoolery that, in one way or another, creates $10,000 where there once was only $1000. I’m sure at least one of my readers actually knows how this works and will want to share it with me in the comments section, but be forewarned that if it involves any math at all, I’m not going to read it. In fact, I can almost guarantee you I won’t read it unless it involves a car chase, so, y’know, try and work around that.

What economics did teach me is that the Internet is a lot like a bank, in that it creates humor out of images that would otherwise not be funny. For example, someone could deposit a seemingly innocuous picture such as this one…

…And within months, the result would be this:


Same cat, more comedy. In fact, this cat was more or less the Patient Zero of the lolcat epidemic, which began years ago in the dark recesses of the 4chan message boards, where a favorite pastime is the search for obscure and disgusting pornography, and has now been watered down into the Hallmark Channel of the Internet. It’s like if the Sex Pistols turned around and did the soundtrack for the next Shrek movie.

The point is, the Internet routinely brings out the humor in otherwise forgettable images. However, I have recently found what is simultaneously the funniest and the saddest image on the Internet, all without the help of diligent photo manipulators or cutely misspelled text. It contains hope, despair, chivalry, dismissal, and Megan Fox in a low cut dress.



For the purposes of the blog, I’ve doctored up the picture like so:



1) Let’s not mock this guy. Let’s not ask how old he is, or question whether he actually thinks this will work, or speculate as to just how long and lonely the night following this moment was. Because, gentlemen, we were all this guy once. When the first Transformers movie came out, I’ll bet you anything that every man watching Megan Fox flounce around the screen in her little outfits would have grabbed the nearest rose and done exactly this same thing had they found out that she was in the vicinity. Of course, a lot of us got over it, but hey – maybe this guy didn’t. And I mean, there’s nothing explicitly wrong with that. Furthermore, we’ve got to keep in mind that this picture captures this poor fellow’s realization that what he had hoped would be the happiest moment in his life would in fact be the saddest. And I can safely say that we’ve all been there too – fortunately, when I had that moment at my senior prom, there was nobody there to take a picture of it.

2) Is it just me, or does Megan Fox stand out even more when she’s surrounded by normal people? I wish I could know if her face looks like that because she’s in the middle of saying something, because of multiple plastic surgeries,* or because she’s wearing her game face (the game in this case being Completely Ruin One Of Your Fans’ Lives). Really, though – how hard would it be to just take the rose and smile at him? I mean, look, she’s only got like four million bodyguards who could hold it for her. Hell, even take the rose and set fire to it in front of him, but don’t just leave him there holding the damn thing!

*Speaking of plastic surgery, she appears to have recently done a little transforming of her own in the whole boobs region. Like, her boobs transformed into silicone monstrosities. Because they were in disguise earlier, as… Normal boobs. All I’m saying is, insofar as Megan Fox’s knockers, there’s more than meets the eye. **

**I’m really sorry, Jenna.

3) Sure, it’s just three hands, but look at everything it says about the moment. The bodyguard in back is fully prepared to karate chop this kid out of the way, while the bodyguard out of frame appears to be physically dragging Megan Fox to the nearest helicopter, from whence they’ll call in an air strike on the entire area, just to be sure they won’t have any more trouble with that flower-toting ruffian.

4) Despite his seeming intent to elbow the poor little guy out of the way, you’ll notice that this bodyguard isn’t even looking at kid (the red line represents his eyeline, not a laser being fired from his eyes*). Not only is Megan Fox ignoring this guy, but so is her hired help, even when they’re elbowing him down into the gutter with all the other plebians.

*Even though this would make him a much more competent bodyguard.

5) I have a gut feeling that this woman in the background, beaming ever so brightly, is in fact the kid’s mother, who had perhaps given him a ride here and was eagerly watching to see just how well his master plan went. From the glee in her eyes I assume she can’t tell that this is not the life-enriching experience she’d thought it would be. Soon she will realize that it’s going to be a very long and awkward ride home.
6) What are you doing here!? What part of the entourage are you?

7) I don’t really get the point of this tattoo. Does she look at it and ask herself “What Would Marilyn Do?” If so, would the answer be “Throw on your ice-queen face and brush that kid aside?” I don’t think so. I think it’d be more along the lines of, “Go fuck Kennedy again.”

8) Is the towel for wiping away the splattered remains of this kid’s dignity, or perhaps to absorb her own tears when she realizes what she’s become?

This picture is, in its own way, a work of art. If it could be rendered in oils, I’d damn well hang it on my wall – it’s sort of symbolic of the celebrity’s distance from their audience, or how callously they regard them, in spite of MySpace pages and Twitter accounts that try so hard to reach out to us.

It’s also probably not going to do the floristry industry any good.

Truman Capps had damn well better get some hits after posting a blog with the words “Megan Fox” and “boobs” in it. Maybe if he adds “Megan Fox lesbian kiss” he’ll get even more traffic.

Rejected

Half the fun of having this blog is finding out what Google Images returns for my searches. For the record, these happy people represent "employment." Don't search for "rejected" unless you want to see a picture of a woman with three boobs and a picture of a French lady with a tumor growing in her nose that... Look, just never use the Internet.

If ever you’re in a screwball comedy movie and you’re being chased, I highly recommend that you jump over a fence into the nearest backyard/junkyard. Yes, there will be a Rottweiler and it will probably want to eat your face, but never fear: It’ll start running toward you and go as fast as it can with every intention of eating your face, but at the last second its chain will go taut and it’ll get yanked back right before it can do any damage. I’ve seen this in, like, at least three movies.

I felt sort of like a movie Rottweiler when I went down to Carl’s (the local burger joint where I spent all of last summer making milkshakes) two days ago. I had gone in over spring break to ensure that I’d be able to get my old job back once school was out for summer, and my old supervisor assured me that, yes, all I had to do was come in once I got back to Portland and they’d put me back on the schedule. So, when I went two days ago, I had every intention of eating the face of continued summer employment. I was running as fast as I could, figuratively speaking.

So when my supervisor told me matter-of-factly that they’d already hired a bunch of people for the summer and they weren’t sure if they were going to have room for me, yeah, it was sort of like the whole chain thing. With one hearty jerk, all of your plans for the immediate future are gone, and you realize you’re back to square one. Namely, I’m in the same place I was at the beginning of last summer – I need a job. Only last summer, I’d known in advance that I’d need a job, so I’d canvassed my neighborhood ten weeks ahead of time during spring break. Also, no global economic meltdown. God, that Rottweiler has it easy.

I can understand if things were a bit unclear for the people at Carl’s – I mean, all I’d done was go in ahead of time and confirm that I’d still have a job, and they said yes, and then I asked if hiring was slower because of the economy, and they said no, things are about the same, and I said great. I mean, sure, they did basically guarantee that I’d have a job waiting for me and dissuade me from putting out applications elsewhere, but of course, they could’ve just been playing Punk’d: Home Edition. It’s a lot like regular Punk’d on TV, only instead of celebrities it’s honest and hardworking (yet still beautiful) people, and while on the show everything is okay afterwards, in this version they’re basically stuffing a dead skunk with dogshit and throwing it through the victim’s window while he sleeps. And then nailing all the doors to his house shut and setting it on fire, and shooting anyone who leaves the house. And then giving Terminator: Salvation a high rating on IMDb.

Not okay, Carl’s. Not. Okay. I swear to God, I would boycott you if your food wasn’t so fucking delicious.

Yes, those of you who know me will point out that I’m a spoiled bastard who doesn’t have to pay for his own education, so why should I even worry about having a job? The fact of the matter is, money is money, and it’s always good to have more of it. Also, without a job, what the hell am I going to do this summer? I already beat Gears of War 2, so there’s that off my list. Also, I can’t spend the entire summer sleeping and watching TV, because I don’t have anybody to feed me grapes while I do it. I suppose I could hire somebody to do that, but to be able to afford it I’d need to have a job, so once again I’m back to square one.

The very nature of job hunting feels somewhat unnatural – you’re basically going around asking people to deprive you of free time and potentially make you miserable. Of course, until they think of a better way to keep people from starving to death, it’s probably the only option. The Girlfriend has been looking for a job herself recently, and out of lack of anything else to do (like work, for instance) I’ve been tagging along. Most places she goes into, the proprietor is very polite about telling her that they have already hired their summer staff – this does not bode well for me, because if she, who is far more pleasant and hygienic than I am, can’t get a job, what are my chances?

The sad fact of the matter is that private school kids – namely those scoundrels from the nearby Reed College – get out a good month before all of us state college slackers, and thus have a jump on the job market. Seeing as their fancy-pants, prestigious education is going to put them significantly ahead of the rest of us after college, the least they could do is back the hell off and let us have a shot at the crappy summer jobs. Of course, if this economy holds up, being significantly ahead of the rest of us for post-college job opportunities means landing a second interview at Goodwill while everybody else doesn’t get a call back.

Time and again, “Don’t Know What You Got ‘Till It’s Gone” seems to be the 80s power ballad that best encapsulates my feelings. Last summer I had two jobs that kept me working seven days a week, both of them within three blocks of my house, during a time when I thought that the economy was bad. Now I’m looking at the Subway across the street and wondering if I have what it takes to stand on the other side of the sneeze guard.

Maybe I’ll try to beat Gears of War 2 again.

Truman Capps hopes any potential employers reading this know that he is, in fact, a hardworking individual who is never sarcastic on the clock.

On Journalism

I want to be this kind of journalist. I'll never be this kind of journalist.

So, I’m not going to work at the Oregon Daily Emerald next year.

I’d be lying if I said that working at the Emerald has come into conflict with my lifetime goal of being universally liked by everyone, forever. To be honest, I never expected to get a lot of hate mail to begin with, being as I generally advocated moderation, but apparently the University of Oregon has a pretty strong “fuck moderation” movement going on. It could also be because my fact checking was, at times, spotty, which is apparently not okay in journalism. My bad!

The problem with writing about campus life is that you’re basically shitting in your own pool every week. A guy who writes about international politics isn’t quite as much in the hot seat, because if he says Kim Jong Il is a prick he isn’t going to get a nasty letter about it from the man in the tracksuit himself. However, when I write that I think the Pacifica Forum is a hate group, their collective response is to fill up the comments section after my article with posts about how they’re not a hate group and how much they hate me (and also, for old time’s sake, the Jews).

What I found out pretty quickly was that the stakes in this game are significantly higher than I had initially expected. When I applied at the Daily Emerald, I turned in a couple of old blogs of mine, my reasoning being that they’d discern that I generally wrote opinionless drivel and would hire me if that’s what they were looking for. So I guess I was sort of surprised when I found out that I had to come up with a new opinion every week in my job as an opinion writer.

So, yeah, that was definitely my first mistake – applying for a job I felt unqualified for. I would recommend against that one in the future, kids.

I’m used to writing a blog that something like 90 people read, most of whom are my friends, relatives, or students at my old high school. If I make a generalization on here about where a person can and can’t carry a gun that is (charitably speaking) inaccurate, my uncle might have the wherewithal to do the research and point out the error, but that’s about the end of it. When I did that very thing in the Emerald, I drew the ire of people from across the campus and the country and got a royal bitch slap from the drunken libertarians down at the Oregon Commentator.* All because I was blatantly wrong about one fact.

*If any of the Commentator folks are reading this, it’s been a real honor pissing you guys off this year. Your blog is top drawer and your print edition makes excellent use of that picture of the guy with puke coming out his nose.

That’s just the thing though – when you’re writing for a paper, you can’t be blatantly wrong about one fact. It’s not okay, and then you aren’t a good journalist, which looks pretty bad when you’re a journalism major. Of course, I’ve never wanted to be a journalist, so it’s okay for me to be bad at it – but as a matter of common courtesy, I should probably quit stinking up a legitimate newspaper with my attempts at comedy. I suppose if there was a comedy newspaper on campus I could write for that, but unfortunately all we’ve got is The Comic Press, which has about as professional a layout as my middle school paper but with considerably less talented writers.

It’s not that I don’t want to be factual (although I do want to write fiction, which is the opposite of fact), it’s just that I would rather be factual on my terms. At the Emerald I had to find something pertaining to campus life every week that I had an opinion on, whether I was particularly interested in it or not, and then write about it. The more I did it, the less I liked it, and the less effort I wanted to put into it, and it’s never a good idea to cut corners on fact checking when you’re putting your writing out in front of a pretty damn large community full of many devoted gun owners. If I’m going to write something and toss it out to the wolves like that, I want to be writing about something I care about, something that I’ll want to do meticulous work on, something that I have time to seriously refine. Yes, I imagine one day I’ll author quite the treatise on why they shouldn’t have cancelled Firefly.

I’m going to miss the Emerald. The offices were on the third floor of the student union, in a cramped space with small windows which faced the setting sun, and when I’d go in to edit in the evenings in spring the windows would be open and the whole room would be bathed in golden light. The people were friendly, helpful, and amicable, and when I’d sit there among them on those evenings, watching them bustle around as they prepared the next day’s paper, I could practically taste the journalism.

I loved that, but I don’t deserve it, because I’m not willing to earn it. I had a great time sitting around up there, palling around with the Emerald staff and pretending like I was a real journalist, but at the end of the day I was the guy who dreaded his deadlines and always looked for the quick, easy, less-controversial topics to write on. That’s the kind of journalism that allowed our last president and his cronies to go to war and get rich on our dime while people on Wall Street played Monopoly with real houses – I don’t want to be that guy. Hell, I don’t even want that guy to exist.

Journalism needs better people than me. Say what you will about the Oregon Daily Emerald, but having spent a year with them I can tell you that those people seriously give a shit about journalism. They’re committed and they work hard. I signed on because I wanted a larger audience to whom I could make dick jokes.

I’m still a journalism major because I think that there’s still a place in that world for me; namely in magazines, the newspaper’s cooler and glossier cousin who drives a Porsche and gets laid all the time. Doing feature stories or writing about movies is right up my alley, and David Sedaris does for The New Yorker basically the same thing that I do here, only he has a large audience, he’s talented, and he has sex with men.

My time at the Emerald was valuable – it taught me that I didn’t want to be an opinion columnist. Arguably the most important thing I’ve learned in college so far, and it didn’t cost me a dime.

Truman Capps will miss that sweet $60 a month…

El Fin De Espanol

Well, not anymore!

The nightmare is finally over.

After four years – good lord, was it really four? – of nonconsecutive Spanish torture, I’m finally done. No more conjugating, no more oral presentations, no more staring blankly at the diet pill ads on WordReference.com as my brain shuts down in the preparations for an examen. No more tildes over the lower case Ns, no more accents over the I but not the E. No more watching Spanish language short films, catching every third word and attempting to discern the plot through observing the characters’ actions instead of trying to understand their words. No more going to class and looking at the clock for fifty minutes, only to find that the clock will teach you very little about Spanish, and even less about patience.

I used to have the high minded idea that, once I’d completed the two years of a foreign language that are mandatory for Bachelor of Arts students, I would continue in my study of the Spanish language. As I saw it, there couldn’t be anything wrong with speaking a second language, and it could be a real character (and, more importantly, resume) building experience. As a journalist who could also speak Spanish, I figured that there’d be loads of opportunities available to me on Telemundo! if I couldn’t find any English speaking jobs. Of course, the more Telemundo! I watch, the more I doubt that even Spanish speakers can understand what the hell is going on there.

Let me just say this: If it were possible to speak a second language without having to do a whole bunch of extra work, I would totally do it. But that’s the thing – it really isn’t. They’ve basically got a different word for everything. So honestly, when you hear that I’m now giving up on Spanish, know that it isn’t because of any failure on my part, but rather a failure on the part of the Spanish language to be endlessly accessible, interesting, and easy. I mean, come on – there’s like sixteen different conjugations! Don’t you think that’s overdoing it just a little bit?

Building my Spanish vocabulary was a lot like my attempts to build grand LEGO fortresses as a kid – my plans were lofty and well intentioned, but in the end I would get distracted and things wound up half-completed and forgotten, and then maybe the dog would eat a couple pieces too. With each new term of Spanish this year, I came into class resolving to finally start reading every night and doing all my homework. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t take me long to realize that I could get by just cramming for the tests and keeping my fingers crossed on the pop quizzes. And then, at that point, Spanish became challenging for me not in the sense of “what can I do to learn this language” but rather “how little of this language can I learn while still getting a grade that convinces the school that I’ve learned this language?”

The answer, it turns out, is “very little.” In terms of learning a new language, I’m not so great, but when it comes to finding new and innovative ways to cheat the system and avoid learning a new language, I am basically the Mozart of sloth. As much as I hate math, I used a little of it and quickly figured out that even if I got a D on the majority of our 15 point pop quizzes I could still easily pull a B in the class if I scored high enough on our exams, projects, and presentations, which were scattered through the term like lumps in the viscous gravy of optional homework and neglected reading. Also, every term in the 200 level Spanish sequence this year followed the same syllabus, so by the end I had mastered the course curriculum.

Of our three essay-based examenes, I would usually do really well on the first, as it was still early enough in the term for me to think I was actually going to try. By the second one, I’d be so cocky about my good score on the first that I’d let the work slide and score lower in the B range, which would lead me to resolve to study very hard for the third exam. However, by the time the third exam rolled around in dead week, I’d be so burnt out that I’d study even less for it than for the first two. And yet, Bs.

I wrote a column for the Emerald about grade inflation which pissed off quite a few students and earned the praise of a few administrators. To the students who thought I was blowing the whistle on their meal ticket – trust me, I ride the curve just as much as anyone else. To the administrators who may find it hypocritical that I’m gleefully recounting my experiences exploiting a system that I’d said was in need of change – this doesn’t alter my opinion at all; I’m just enjoying the free ride while I can.

Apparently Spanish isn’t that difficult to learn compared to English, so keep that in mind before you judge me as lazy – I learned to speak English, one of the hardest languages, when I was a toddler, and I didn’t have the benefit of textbooks or dictionaries. I learned the whole thing by ear, such was my passion for language, and I think I deserve due recognition for that. Don’t ask me for an encore presentation, because that’s not how I work – David Blaine only levitates like once per episode, remember? It’s very stressful.

I am a lot of things – verbose, right-handed, tall, hungry – but bilingual is not one of them. My priorities, I guess, lie elsewhere. Residents of Latin American countries (about which I now know quite a lot, thanks to the cultura section in my textbook) and all speakers of Spanish, please don’t take this personally – it’s not you, it’s me.

Truman Capps still can translate “Feliz Navidad!” if you ask him nicely.

A Fight Better Left Unfought

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

I don’t know if you’ve heard the news, but currently America is at its least religious. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, released earlier this year, a record 15% of Americans claim to have no religion at all. Now, people with no religion make up a greater percentage of the US population than any other religious group save for Catholics or Baptists. Across the board, nearly all religious denominations have been facing decreasing membership, to the point that New England, once a Catholic stronghold, has now even eclipsed the Pacific Northwest in terms of the percentage of its residents who don’t subscribe to any particular religion.

Despite the Pacific Northwest’s reputation as one of the less-religious parts of the country, the University of Oregon is not lacking in terms of religious fervor. Between our stalwart Jesus Guy and various evangelists who make the rounds through campus every year, it’s evident that amid a nationwide decrease in religious adherence there are still plenty of people trying to keep numbers up. The reactions are usually mixed; I don’t often see too many people gobbling up free Bibles or listening to most of the preachers who proselytize by the amphitheater. Some visitors are more tenacious than others; last year, an evangelist followed me up 13th street, asking me if since I didn’t believe in God I also didn’t believe in gravity. Or there were the people who brought a bunch of kids and had them run around offering free scriptures to passers by; serious competition for the Free Hugs people. However, it is Brother Jed – the Michael Jackson of campus evangelism – who always appears to have the greatest effect.

In case you didn’t notice Brother Jed last week, he was the one with a large sign declaring that homosexuals, rebellious women, and Mormons are all on the fast track to Hell. He was also the one surrounded by a thick ring of students, many of them jeering or earnestly debating his claim that the only thing Mexicans contribute to society is burritos. The situation was made even more awkward by the fact that Brother Jed and his crew had set up shop right next to the Planned Parenthood table by the amphitheater; as it turns out, Jed and his crew aren’t too keen on abortion, either.

Say what you will about Brother Jed’s message, the man knows a thing or two about showmanship. He raises his voice, he makes hand gestures, and he has colorful visual aids that make colorful implications about popular elements of our culture (like porn and masturbation). Some say that you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar; Brother Jed seems to have discovered that you attract more flies by throwing shit at them. Sure, the flies will be angry, and they’ll interrupt you and try to outwit you using facts or their own personal interpretation of the Bible, but the flies are still there regardless.

This is no coincidence; Brother Jed refers to his in-your-face style of preaching as “confrontational evangelism,” which has been adopted by other campus evangelists as a means to hold a prolonged discussion of theology and culture while maintaining a large audience. As one of Brother Jed’s contemporaries explained in an interview with the University of Missouri’s awesomely named newspaper The Maneater, a confrontational evangelist can figure out what issues are important to his or her audience based on which inflammatory comments the audience is rebuking, and is thus able to tailor his or her sermon accordingly.

When a female critic during Brother Jed’s recent appearance was unable to answer one of his questions, he reportedly replied, “I don’t know why you can’t answer a simple question. I don’t know if it’s because you’re a woman or because you’re just ignorant.” This is a remarkably close-minded and stupid thing to say, and if I heard an elected official or a widely respected public figure say it, I’d be pretty pissed off. Coming from Brother Jed, though, it doesn’t bother me, because I know that at heart he’s really all about the attention.

Brother Jed is trying to get the word out there any way he can in an America where some feel that religion is dying out. He’ll say whatever it takes to draw a crowd, because at the end of the day Brother Jed is a salesman trying to peddle Jesus as aggressively as possible. If you disagree with his methods, arguing with him is only going to affirm the effectiveness of those same methods by drawing a bigger crowd.

If Brother Jed really offends you, just walk away – it’s the most harmful thing you can do to him.