I have made a decision. I prefer FML to MLIA because I prefer schadenfreude to other people’s ennui.

Not that I’ve run into particularly many heated debates on the matter, but I’ve noticed that most people tend to have a pretty definite opinion on which site they prefer, and, for whatever reason, seem fairly resolute about their choice. So I figured I should make up my mind on the matter (because what else would I do with my time as a first-year college student?), and as it turned out, it was harder to do than it sounds! Not because I was terribly torn between the two sites. More because I didn’t really care. When I learned about Fuck My Life way back in March or whenever, I read it religiously for about two weeks and then didn’t go back for a few months. It’s hilarious, but it definitely gets boring once you catch on to the general trends. Then I heard about My Life Is Average, and thought that maybe that would be more interesting, but I couldn’t get into it. Some of it’s quite funny, but because its spin is that life is average as opposed to hilariously shitty, some of it tends to have more of the “you had to be there” feel of an inside joke than it does the “oh man, did you hear what happened to so-and-so?”. FML is like those celebrity magazines you see when you’re checking out at the grocery store. You know you’re better than reading them, but that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy how juicy it is.

And that’s about all I got. This post is the result of me not having updated in a while, recuperating from the stress of finals week, and waiting at the airport for my flight back home. You get my opinion on stupid time-waster websites. That are hilarious.

I’m going to be incredibly original today and announce that I have a bone to pick with Facebook. Not necessarily Facebook itself, per se. I love Facebook. I mean, I’ve complained about Facebook in the past on this blog, but honestly, if Facebook was heroin, I’d be pretty screwed over. However, my current complaint about Facebook doesn’t actually have anything to do with Facebook, but rather its community.

You see, way back in ye olden days of Facebook (roughly two or two and a half years ago), one of my favorite parts of Facebook was running around looking for groups with funny titles and messages, like “Back in my day, evolution simply meant a more badass Pokemon”, “Automatic Doors Make Me Feel Like A Jedi”, “I Will Judge You If You Use Comic Sans MS”, “If you ever had a near orgasm from seeing the green check on WebAssign”, and my personal favorite back when it was a little more topical, “Fuck Iraq, We Gotta Catch Voldemort!”. And this isn’t to say that people aren’t making funny groups anymore. Last week I found one called “When I Die I Give My Friends Permission To Change My Status To ‘Is Dead’”. That makes me chuckle. But you know what doesn’t make me chuckle? When people can’t keep their Facebook groups and their Facebook pages straight.

See, you become a member of a group, but you become a fan of a page. Here’s an example I found roughly 20 seconds before I started writing this post (just to give you an insight into how the creative process tends to work on this blog). I found a page called “I change my date on homework so it looks like I did it earlier.” Now, that’s pretty funny, and I like that someone made this observation, but then they went about it the wrong way. This is the title of something that should be a group. Not a page. You can’t become a fan of I change my date on homework so it looks like I did it earlier. That’s grammatically incorrect! You can become a fan of changing my date on homework so it looks like I did it earlier. Or you could have made the whole thing a group!

Basically, I’d like to lay down  a general rule of thumb that I’d like to see adopted. If it’s the name of a page, it has to function as a noun. Yes, this means you have to dig out those arcane grammar skills you’ve tried to suppress the memory of and remember how to make noun clauses and how to use gerunds and all that fancy stuff, but, really, the alternative is a world where you log on to Facebook and read that one of your friends has become a fan of “I use my cell phone to see in the dark”. You can’t be a fan of that! That’s a sentence, not a noun! And what’s even worse is when you read something like “So-and-so became a fan of ‘We used to talk for hours and now we never even say hi’”. Come on, even if that followed the rule of thumb I just made up, how the hell could you be a fan of that? “Oh man, I love alienating people!”

So, to the peoples of Facebook who make pages for people to become fans of, learn what the word “fan” means, and learn how grammar works.

That’s about all I have to say about that. Back to 30 Rock and Spanish homework. Although I’d like to use this opportunity (“opportunity” meaning “I actually updated recently”) to inform that probably incredibly small demographic of people who a) read my blog, b) read A Softer World, and c) want a wallpaper based on this particular A Softer World to know that I actually updated that oft-neglected portion of the site with such a thing to fit your needs! Enjoy it and distress people in your immediate vicinity who glance over at your desktop!

Also, I feel the need to share this with everybody I can!

And that’s pretty much what Facebook is.

Like some people, I’m a pretty big fan of Twitter. Like a far greater number of people, I’m not a very big fan of doing laundry.

Let me share a story that manages to connect the two.

When I started college, one of the many new things I had to get used to was doing laundry. I’ve since gotten over it really being any sort of a hassle, but somewhere along the line, I managed to draw a new personal tradition out of it. For whatever reason, every time I’ve done laundry, I tweeted something about it that included the word “fucking.” Now, granted, this is not a very nice word. Most people should not say this word or should at least take some care in using it because a) most people don’t find it particularly amusing, and b) that pesky roughly age 13-17 demographic finds it entirely too amusing. But I felt like the daunting task of having to do laundry did something to deserve it. Sorting colors, waiting for a dryer to open up, swiping your ID or procuring an obscene amount of quarters. Not pleasant stuff. Of course, now it’s just funny. Especially in how a few of my friends have adopted this habit as well. I can earnestly say that nothing warms my heart in quite the same way as seeing someone else tweet something along the lines of “Time to do some fucking laundry! #fuckinglaundry”

Yes, that’s right. It even has its own hashtag now. It’s perfectly acceptable either to throw it in at the end, or to just incorporate it into your tweet, like one of my friends did rather expertly with “What time is it? #fuckinglaundry time!” Those are the rules. Either syntax is perfectly acceptable! Why would I tell you that they’re the rules? Because this is obviously a thing that needs to catch on on a larger scale! True, my blog doesn’t really get enough traffic (at least outside of you know what) to start a social revolution (Twitter revolution?), but it’s as good a place as any to get the word out! Or, worst case scenario, to share an amusing anecdote to serve as a filler post.

Now go. You know what you must do. Unless you don’t have twitter, then you should maybe click on a bunch more of my posts and bump up my stats a little bit to make me feel better.

I’m not really the person to bother to stay particularly up to date on the happenings on the internet, so for all I know, this might be old news, but a few days ago I rediscovered the joy of Mystery Google. Almost. The concept is simple and wonderful enough. It looks like Google, you type in your search term like in Google, except the results you get are what the person before you searched for. It’s a great concept, and I rather like it because if you keep using it for ten minutes or so, you notice enough trends and actually walk away with a rather naked glimpse at humanity.

I first discovered Mystery Google about a month or two ago, and typed in those normal, silly searches you used the first time someone told you about Google, like “hello”, and “funny”. Then when you get the search results for things like “<O.O>”, you realize that what’s even more fun that getting the previous person’s results is that the next person gets yours. Naturally, I typed in things like “the inescapable futility of existence” (and did some shameless self-advertising by searching for this blog), but lost interest pretty quickly, without paying much attention to what I was getting.

A few days ago, being the good college students that we are, we were messing around with Mystery Google, and this is when I started to really pay attention to what other people were searching for. For every handful of search terms most likely done by people showing Mystery Google to their friends and pissing them off with things like “Mary likes monkey balls”, we got the occasional “You are a good person.” Briefly motivated by this, we decided to try our hand at setting up positive searches for people too. We typed in “People need you.” We got search results for “edward cullen doggy style”. This was short lived.

So I guess you can kind of learn a few things about people from things like Mystery Google. People enjoy making fun of other people, occasionally inspiring them, and hot fictitious vampire sex.

Enlightening!

Today’s post was originally written as a satire piece for a currently unpublished issue of my school’s alternative paper, but seeing as how 1) it elaborates on my last post, 2) I’m reasonably certain I can use it both on my blog and in the paper, 3) it’s styled like something I’d write here anyway, and 4) it provides a little more clarity into why exactly I’m not updating very much right now and why you should never EVER buy a Dell, I’m posting it here. You kids have fun.

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Thrilled as I am that I’ve made it through my first month in college, the same can’t be said for my laptop. Last week my barely three month old Dell Studio 15 laptop decided that turning on was no longer something it was particularly interested in doing, and after another week of Dell sending a tech guy (twice) to ultimately not fix my laptop and then sending me an empty box, vaguely symbolic of my faith in the company, to send it back, it’s now sitting in the mailroom where FedEx picks it up the next business day and Dell probably fixes it in 2011.

It’s fitting how Dell’s commercials for their Studio series are lollipop themed, since the one they sold me was a lemon.

But as much as I’d enjoy bashing Dell for its incompetence (the Styrofoam cutout in their box didn’t even fit my laptop – learn the dimensions of your own products!), I’m much less thrilled with Dell’s inconsideration. They’re perfectly content letting their customers wait 8-14 days for repairs and playing that damn lollipop song while you’re on hold for half of the two hours you spend on the phone with tech support, but do they understand how inconvenient this is? I mean, sure, I can just go to the library to print out my homework and write papers and such, that works just fine, but going to the library ever other day to read the new XKCD? The new Penny Arcade? Clearly no one at Dell understands what a hassle it is to keep current with Questionable Content every day without your own computer you can read it on without feeling vaguely self conscious reading a giant, occasionally risqué comic in the library.

Now, sure, webcomics are one petty complaint, but then you have your tv shows. If you miss the new Office episode and don’t have access to Hulu or a sketchy Korean Youtube-knockoff to make up for it, then how are you going to be able to complain about how much worse the show gets every season? Not to mention how you’ll also have to do this in real life too, where you usually have considerably less anonymity.

It’s not even the absence of the internet that complicates matters, because even without it, you’re still going to have procrastinated enough to have to walk over to the library at 1 a.m. to check for that email your professor sent the class about what to bring to class tomorrow or to write up that paper or alternative newspaper article you put off to the last minute, and then when you suddenly have that internet access you’ve been cut off from all day, you know you’re just going to be on Facebook the whole time.

Oh? That’s right. The thousand pound gorilla in the hypothetical room. Facebook. I went there. It’s no secret we need instant access to Facebook nowadays. If you can’t constantly check Facebook to see if you’ve been tagged in any new pictures, then how are you going to know what you did last night? How are you going to write yet another status update complaining about how much work you still have to do or how you want to strangle whoever’s blasting “Boom Boom Pow” at this time of night? How are you going to play Farmville? Does Dell have any idea how many damn people are playing Farmville? Eight to fourteen days, my ass! I need to start playing Farmville!

It’s readily apparent just how great student need for a computer is, and if you don’t have your own, you either spend seven hours a day in the library, or you’re going down that proverbial creek without that proverbial paddle, or, worse still, you’re typing up your alternative newspaper article on your friend’s MacBook that half the people who listen to your story about your broken laptop inform you that you really should have gotten instead. In other words, don’t get a Dell, because Dell clearly doesn’t care about you getting to play Farmville with your friends.

Okay, I had to wrap this up really quickly because, well, I’m going to college and I can’t really take my personal library of books with me, so looks like I actually have to sit down and read a book!

So, yes, I finished Grapes of Wrath. And it was good, in all its Steinbeck-y brilliance. Of course, the world already knows it’s a good book, and the intent of this post isn’t to review it or analyze it, but rather to fill up space so it looks like I’m updating my blog simply describe my experience reading it, or… something. So, SPOILERS! Obviously.

After my last post about 3/4 of the way through, I worried that my favorite character, the ex-preacher Jim Casy, wouldn’t show up in the rest of the book due to being arrested and dragged off, but having read other Steinbeck (East of Eden), I shouldn’t have been all that surprised that he would. And then he’s around for maybe two and a half pages before he gets killed off, Tom Joad avenges his death, and spends the rest of the book on the run from the law. It’s a shame Casy couldn’t have stuck around all the way through, since I just loved listening to him talk and philosophize, but given how he’s the ironic Christ figure, it was more or less a given from the get go. On the plus side, Tom ended the novel by realizing Casy’s messages and vowing to take up his struggle, which is basically the only plus side the novel ends on. Obviously this wasn’t going to be a happy ending, since, like Steinbeck addressed in one of the novel’s alternating prose chapters, the cause of the issue wasn’t addressed, only the effects, so the Joads losing everything is basically the only outcome the story could have ended on. Although the last three pages supposedly ended it on a semi-uplifting note, but I just thought the thing with Rose of Sharon and the starving guy was kind of creepy, but, obviously, drastic times and drastic measures and all. I just don’t really see how it was supposed to be a symbolic light at the end of the tunnel, like Sparknotes suggested.

Thus making me sound like a terrible former AP Lit student.

So believe it or not, I actually do intend to keep this feature alive, partly because simply blogging about my reactions to a book I’m reading as I’m reading it seems like it could be pretty fun even if everybody who winds up reading the post already read the book anyway, and also because I really do need to get myself to read more often.

Anyway, right after I wrote about how the ex-preacher Jim Casy was my favorite character in my first Currently Reading, he went and got arrested and we haven’t seen him since. This is kind of a bummer. Granted, he set up a nice, ironic Christ motif for himself by taking the fall for Tom Joad, who couldn’t afford to get in any legal trouble what with having broken parole and all, but I’m definitely missing his insight, and I’m kind of annoyed that Tom doesn’t seem too bothered by his absence either, having, you know, gone to jail for him.

So the Joad family just made it to California the last time I posted, and the warnings that it’s far from the land of opportunity promised them have all come true, and although the Joads have actually been really lucky so far, all things considered, there’s clear signs they’ll inevitably lose what little gains they’ve made since their arrival. Again, I don’t know how the novel ends, not having read it before, but I can’t see it steering away from the powerful sense of impending doom Steinbeck has so heavily embedded in the narrative. The Joad family feels not too much unlike a time bomb, and though they’ve managed luck so far, I don’t think things are going to end well for them.

Without Casy though, my current most interesting character is probably Rose of Sharon, not because I like her a whole lot, but it’s interesting how while the rest of the family deals with the paranoia of making a living, she deals with the paranoia of her pregnancy. She absolutely freaks out whenever so much as a hyper-religious old lady comes along condemning such deplorable sins as dancing and acting and, I dunno… breathing, maybe. It’s kind of like her paranoia manifests everyone else’s. Makes me wonder if when she finally gives birth if that baby doesn’t serve some metaphorical purpose too?

Yeah, you might already know, but don’t tell me! I’m almost done!

What the hell happened to Pictures for Sad Children?

Not that I’m the kind of person so self-centered and arrogant that I’ll complain about so much as a webcomic taking a new direction I don’t particularly like, except… well, I kind of will. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about letting the guy do whatever he wants with his own works, what I’m getting at is more confusion over the changes being made.

I discovered John Campbell’s Pictures for Sad Children almost a year ago, which a number of my friends promptly hated me for. The so-called “comic” is a showcase of depressing, dark humor with characters incapable of getting anywhere in their miserable life (or afterlife) completely devoid of meaning. Being the cheery and life-loving fellow I am, I immediately fell in love with the comic’s nihilistic human condition and distressingly and nonchalantly terse diction and the defeatist “punchlines” coupled with it. I photoshopped a wallpaper from one of my personal favorites, and continue to use the original frame as my avatar wherever I find it fitting (as anyone who’s seen my Twitter can tell you).

However, over the past couple months, without any sort of explanation, Campbell has dropped the characters and story from Pictures for Sad Children and now each comic stands independent of the others, telling their own stories with their own characters. Again, it’s fine that he’s doing this, it’s his comic, and the comics are still poetically dismal and distressingly humorous, although they tend to lean far more towards the comic’s absurdest tendencies, but the experience feels somewhat muted, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why, when Campbell started selling a shirt (that if anybody feels like buying me because I have such a wonderful blog or anything…) reading “making one continuous mistake”. While each comic now creates its own, self-contained disaster of a human condition, before the story and its characters filled in the missing piece of the puzzle. With a continuity of their miserable existences, the dark humor became even more so. The tragedy didn’t end with each comic, but continued with the characters’ continuing existences, which couldn’t even be escaped from in death. Absolutely horrendous? Sure, but that’s what made it so brilliant. You could relate to the characters until you realized you couldn’t. That their lives were the perfectly imperfect versions of yours without any reprieve, which, whether Schadenfreude or the simple human magnetic pull to watch the nearest train wreck, creates an oddly blissful state of absorption, yet separation, from an overwhelmingly hollow existence.

And yes, I miss that. I’m absolutely insane.

As you know, if you follow this blog regularly, I was on vacation in Canada last week, and if you don’t follow this blog regularly, well, I suppose you got to avoid all the suspense from waiting to see if I’d actually update while I was away. As it turned out, there was about a week long gap between posts resulting from the lack of internet access, but, being the good obsessive young blogger with too much free time I don’t actually have, I’m ready to make it up to you.

Although I’m sure these could be found outside of Canada as well, I decided, after noticing the next item in a store, that this would be far too good a post to pass up, and so I ignored the glaring store workers and took pictures of what had to be some of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in a store.

For example, what exactly can one make of this?

I’m not sure which is better, just how helplessly phallic the nature of this thing is, or the fact that the box has the, um, “his” key holder with the (unintentionally?) strategically located keys, uh, dangling out and with the “her” holder, uh… yeah… just look at that box! Who designed that?

Speaking of questionable design choices… well, that’s what this whole post is about! Like this Christmas store we went into had a ton of, of all things, mermaid ornaments. I have no idea when mermaids suddenly became all Christmasy, but they were everywhere. And you know how you see those Santa ornaments where they have Santa depicted as a bunch of different things, like a golfer or a surfer or a plumber or something? Yeah, they did that with the mermaids too, and they were just as bizarre.

Yup. What’s more Christmasy than a Native American mermaid?

This is!

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmaaaaas!