1. You have the opportunity to go back in time and stop yourself from hooking up from anyone you’ve ever hooked up with. How many of these hook ups do you stop yourself from?
2. What would be worse: people thinking you’re a flaming homosexual or people thinking you’re dating a morbidly obese person?
3. If you could sacrifice 25% of your intelligence to be 100% more in shape, would you do it? (You won’t lose your fitness by not working out)
4. Take the person you are most attracted to (celebrity, friend, cousin, whatever). Now let’s say this person looks exactly the same as they do now, but they are mentally retarded. You have the opportunity to have sex with this person. Do you do it?
5. What is your threshold for the number of friends a potential hook-up has hooked up with before you can no longer entertain the thought of hooking up with this person?
6. Would you rather be guaranteed a date with a different person every week for the next 2 years knowing none of them would ever call you back or just take you chances on your own?
7. If you were blind would you marry a person you liked and everyone said was one of the most beautiful people they’ve ever met (they aren’t lying) but their voice sounded like Gilbert Gottfried?
8. Could you work as a low level Wal-Mart employee if you were paid $150,000 a year? If you tell anyone you make more than minimum wage, you are fired.
9. You are in a car with no air conditioning and it is 107 degrees Fahrenheit outside. In order to roll your windows down, you have to blast Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” on repeat as long as your windows are down. You will be in city traffic for 2 hours. What do you do?
10. If it turned out every song ever written by your favorite band were metaphors for incest, would you still listen to their music?
11. Say you have a DVR/Tivo that can only record one show at a time. You are going to a brother/sister’s wedding and there are 3 things on tv during the wedding you want to see: the series finale of your favorite tv show, your favorite sports team playing in a national title game, or the announcement of lottery numbers for which you have a ticket. You have a 1 in 10 chance of winning $10 million from the lottery. Which will you record? (You can hear about the game or show later but never can you watch them if you don’t record them, and you can hear whether your numbers came up, but you won’t be able claim the money unless you watch the show yourself)
12. Would you rather author a critically acclaimed novel under a penname for which you can never take credit for or write a book under your own name that is blasted by critics but is equally successful commercially as the first book?
13. Imagine the FCC censored you life. If your friend said “fuck you” you would hear “*beep* you” while everyone else heard the uncensored version. When you saw someone naked (or yourself) their genitalia would be blurred out. To uncensor your life, you have to pay $20 a day (about $7000 a year). Once you sign up for this, you have to pay every day for the rest of your life and can only sign up the day you become censored. What do you do?
14. Imagine it were discovered that all pro sports were like pro wrestling—everything was predetermined and set up. Some of the plays and occurrences in the games would be spontaneous, but the outcomes of the games themselves were already set. Would you continue to watch sports?
15. Imagine you meet your alleged soul mate. This person is perfect for you in every way and you fall for each other head over heels. The morning of your wedding after 3 years of a serious relationship, your spouse to be confesses they had a sex change 5 years ago. What do you do? This person also plans to tell all of her friends and family and yours too after the wedding, since they won’t need to hide it anymore on account of having a loving spouse.
16. Imagine you could see what your life would be like if for the first 25 years of your life you had worked as hard as you could at everything (school, jobs, relationships, etc.) You are age 30 when you get this opportunity. Would you want to see this or decline the offer?
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Under The Pretense Of My Pretensiousness
Pretty much everything is overrated in some regard, but I would have to say there's a lot of things out there that are grossly overrated to the point that everyone becomes afraid to admit that they don't like that movie/book/idea as much as everyone else supposedly does. If we could all just come out and admit we're pretending to like something more than we are, we'd all be much better off. We would be saving ourselves from agonizing discussions about the pseudo merits of something completely mediocre. I hope to update this list continually (there's a seemingly infinite amount of things that I think get way more credit than they deserve), but here are some of the overrated things in life that especially infuriate me:
The Simpsons
It’s been on seemingly forever (20 seasons) and with the release of the movie last year it appears to be just as popular as it’s always been. Most people I know that watch it say they’ve been watching it for as long as they’ve watched TV and list it among their favorite shows. The only problem is the show just isn’t that good. While its had it’s share of clever references to literature, history, and pop culture (which interestingly I think these references probably go over the casual viewer’s head), I find the show to be uninteresting and not really funny at all (somehow I was conned into watching the movie on DVD. I don’t think I laughed once). Yet despite this consistent mediocrity, long-time fans continue to stand by the show and eagerly await its coming seasons. To these fans, The Simpsons is like the friend they’ve had since childhood who is kind of a fuck-up but since they’ve been friends so long, these numerous shortcomings are overlooked. To these fans, The Simpsons is always “getting ready to go back to school to finish their degree” or “going to try out a new job.” If everyone could just admit the show has worn it’s welcome and it should finally bow out, we’d all be better for it…….All of those fans have to have a least an inkling of this though deep down, right?
Juno
Now you have to understand, I’m not saying this wasn’t a good movie. In fact, I was thoroughly excited to see it and went to see it during its opening weekend. Though I didn’t care for the extremely contrived deux ex machina ending, I thought the movie was ok and I can see how people would genuinely like this movie. The problem with Juno, however, is that it is an indie movie (the use of this term can be debated, as nowadays the term “indie” has really come to connote a genre rather than the term’s actual denotation). After seeing and liking this movie, viewers who exclusively mainstream develop what I call ‘the indie-movie complex.’ When you take a likable movie and put this alongside the enticing indie mystique, people begin to think its really hip and trendy to call Juno one of their favorite movies. They like an indie movie—naturally, this makes them smart and edgy. To me, the “indie movie complex” first developed with the release of Garden State (which sucks in my opinion). That movie really had no value but because it was indie and had a decidedly different feeling about it, people latched on to it.
Nirvana / Kurt Cobain
The quintessential grunge rock band. The best grunge rock band ever. I’m fine with saying all of this, primarily because grunge rock is awful. There’s a reason the genre has evolved into better things. Most (actually, nearly all) of the band’s undeserved credit stems from frontman Kurt Cobain, who, for reasons I will surely never understand, is considered a ‘genius’ by the masses of angry teens and twentysomethings. I’m going to sound like an asshole for saying this (and that’s because I’m an asshole) but just because he is dead doesn’t grant him genius status. So what makes the man a genius? The man’s songwriting is not comparable to any of the other universally great (i.e. Lennon, Dylan) and people can hardly emote with his themes. I mean honestly, how does one identify with the lyrics to “Rape Me?” People point to his diary that supposedly oozes with his radiant intelligence. I haven’t read it (and never will), but I’m willing to bet it’s peppered with more “rape me, rape me again, anally penetrate me, etc.” Cobain and co. were fortunate to only release a couple albums and disband, or people would have probably grown weary of their one dimensional sound and told them to shut the fuck up already. All the best flameouts die before they flame out, because no one wants to kick a dead man while he’s down, 6ft. down to be exact………well, except for me.
Grey Goose Vodka
Why not right? Let’s talk booze. I think about 1 in 9006 people under the age of 75 drink vodka on the rocks. To these few, the $50 for a fifth price tag might be worth it. I’ll grant you that. But to the rest of you out there dropping the cash for the “ultra premium” vodka? Step down off your highball glass and buy a handle of Smirnoff for half the price. Instead of the using the saying “you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig” that I’ve heard too many times in reference to politics (Obama, analysts, probably McCain…you’re all guilty of employing this tired metaphor) why not say “you can buy a $50 bottle of vokda that is endorsed by rappers worldwide, but it’s still vodka.” If it costs three times as much, it better taste three times better and be three times easier to drink. But it isn’t, because it’s vodka. If you roll into the club with your bottle service, by all means flaunt your bottles of ‘Goose since that’s about its only advantage over other vodkas—people will think you’re a baller with that bottle in your hand. If you’re not in dire need of enhancing your image through the service of a bottle, then don’t waste your money.
The Simpsons
It’s been on seemingly forever (20 seasons) and with the release of the movie last year it appears to be just as popular as it’s always been. Most people I know that watch it say they’ve been watching it for as long as they’ve watched TV and list it among their favorite shows. The only problem is the show just isn’t that good. While its had it’s share of clever references to literature, history, and pop culture (which interestingly I think these references probably go over the casual viewer’s head), I find the show to be uninteresting and not really funny at all (somehow I was conned into watching the movie on DVD. I don’t think I laughed once). Yet despite this consistent mediocrity, long-time fans continue to stand by the show and eagerly await its coming seasons. To these fans, The Simpsons is like the friend they’ve had since childhood who is kind of a fuck-up but since they’ve been friends so long, these numerous shortcomings are overlooked. To these fans, The Simpsons is always “getting ready to go back to school to finish their degree” or “going to try out a new job.” If everyone could just admit the show has worn it’s welcome and it should finally bow out, we’d all be better for it…….All of those fans have to have a least an inkling of this though deep down, right?
Juno
Now you have to understand, I’m not saying this wasn’t a good movie. In fact, I was thoroughly excited to see it and went to see it during its opening weekend. Though I didn’t care for the extremely contrived deux ex machina ending, I thought the movie was ok and I can see how people would genuinely like this movie. The problem with Juno, however, is that it is an indie movie (the use of this term can be debated, as nowadays the term “indie” has really come to connote a genre rather than the term’s actual denotation). After seeing and liking this movie, viewers who exclusively mainstream develop what I call ‘the indie-movie complex.’ When you take a likable movie and put this alongside the enticing indie mystique, people begin to think its really hip and trendy to call Juno one of their favorite movies. They like an indie movie—naturally, this makes them smart and edgy. To me, the “indie movie complex” first developed with the release of Garden State (which sucks in my opinion). That movie really had no value but because it was indie and had a decidedly different feeling about it, people latched on to it.
Nirvana / Kurt Cobain
The quintessential grunge rock band. The best grunge rock band ever. I’m fine with saying all of this, primarily because grunge rock is awful. There’s a reason the genre has evolved into better things. Most (actually, nearly all) of the band’s undeserved credit stems from frontman Kurt Cobain, who, for reasons I will surely never understand, is considered a ‘genius’ by the masses of angry teens and twentysomethings. I’m going to sound like an asshole for saying this (and that’s because I’m an asshole) but just because he is dead doesn’t grant him genius status. So what makes the man a genius? The man’s songwriting is not comparable to any of the other universally great (i.e. Lennon, Dylan) and people can hardly emote with his themes. I mean honestly, how does one identify with the lyrics to “Rape Me?” People point to his diary that supposedly oozes with his radiant intelligence. I haven’t read it (and never will), but I’m willing to bet it’s peppered with more “rape me, rape me again, anally penetrate me, etc.” Cobain and co. were fortunate to only release a couple albums and disband, or people would have probably grown weary of their one dimensional sound and told them to shut the fuck up already. All the best flameouts die before they flame out, because no one wants to kick a dead man while he’s down, 6ft. down to be exact………well, except for me.
Grey Goose Vodka
Why not right? Let’s talk booze. I think about 1 in 9006 people under the age of 75 drink vodka on the rocks. To these few, the $50 for a fifth price tag might be worth it. I’ll grant you that. But to the rest of you out there dropping the cash for the “ultra premium” vodka? Step down off your highball glass and buy a handle of Smirnoff for half the price. Instead of the using the saying “you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig” that I’ve heard too many times in reference to politics (Obama, analysts, probably McCain…you’re all guilty of employing this tired metaphor) why not say “you can buy a $50 bottle of vokda that is endorsed by rappers worldwide, but it’s still vodka.” If it costs three times as much, it better taste three times better and be three times easier to drink. But it isn’t, because it’s vodka. If you roll into the club with your bottle service, by all means flaunt your bottles of ‘Goose since that’s about its only advantage over other vodkas—people will think you’re a baller with that bottle in your hand. If you’re not in dire need of enhancing your image through the service of a bottle, then don’t waste your money.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Opposition to Opposites.
Opposites attract. I know this. Everyone knows this. The problem with this mantra is that it is all too often employed as an excuse for two people of the opposite sex who probably can’t stand each other to pointlessly pursue meaning. Think of if you took two people you know who share very few interests with each other and you introduced them. According to this grand theory, they would instantly be attracted to each other (does this make any sense at all?). Let’s humor ourselves and say they are legitimately attracted to each other and begin to spend time together. How long does this attraction last until one has had enough of the other’s seemingly appalling interests and can bear no more?
Some people think that people act like magnets. You place opposing magnets together and they stick together. Forever. What most people are not aware of, however, is Newton’s Law of Reverse Magnetic Repulsion. You see, though opposites initially attract each other, the energy needed to perpetually bind these two opposites eventually exhausts and results in the opposites repelling each other. So the saying really should be “opposites attract, then repel.” This makes much more sense to me, especially in terms of people.
…….Ok, so maybe that last paragraph was complete bullshit and there’s no such thing as reverse magnetic repulsion. But there should be a principle like this, right? After the initial attraction, the differences between the two sides become increasingly apparent until this collection of oppositions proves intolerable. Upon this realization, I decided to disregard any of my urges to pursue someone who I had a 95% chance of eventually loathing.
Sadly, with most people, the idea of opposites repelling after an initial spark means the more you know about a person the less you are going to like them. Is it perhaps better to preserve this preliminary attraction to someone by taking pains to avoid knowing them? You probably thought he/she was great until you realized you fundamentally disagree on what to do with your lives or that you discovered what was to you their fatal flaw. Life is all a series of disappointments and one day, you pick a life that has disappointed you the least and resign yourself to that.
The trick is to realize how mediocre this world truly is. Living behind the distortions of optimism will only lead to more innocence shattering moments that should have all occurred as a child. Once one truly believes that they possess the divinity to change someone they wholly solidify their inevitable failure. You will never be able to change someone, so what is the point in starting with someone you know you would want to change things about?
Opposites don’t attract. They hate each other.
Some people think that people act like magnets. You place opposing magnets together and they stick together. Forever. What most people are not aware of, however, is Newton’s Law of Reverse Magnetic Repulsion. You see, though opposites initially attract each other, the energy needed to perpetually bind these two opposites eventually exhausts and results in the opposites repelling each other. So the saying really should be “opposites attract, then repel.” This makes much more sense to me, especially in terms of people.
…….Ok, so maybe that last paragraph was complete bullshit and there’s no such thing as reverse magnetic repulsion. But there should be a principle like this, right? After the initial attraction, the differences between the two sides become increasingly apparent until this collection of oppositions proves intolerable. Upon this realization, I decided to disregard any of my urges to pursue someone who I had a 95% chance of eventually loathing.
Sadly, with most people, the idea of opposites repelling after an initial spark means the more you know about a person the less you are going to like them. Is it perhaps better to preserve this preliminary attraction to someone by taking pains to avoid knowing them? You probably thought he/she was great until you realized you fundamentally disagree on what to do with your lives or that you discovered what was to you their fatal flaw. Life is all a series of disappointments and one day, you pick a life that has disappointed you the least and resign yourself to that.
The trick is to realize how mediocre this world truly is. Living behind the distortions of optimism will only lead to more innocence shattering moments that should have all occurred as a child. Once one truly believes that they possess the divinity to change someone they wholly solidify their inevitable failure. You will never be able to change someone, so what is the point in starting with someone you know you would want to change things about?
Opposites don’t attract. They hate each other.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Making Life Cliche.
We’re all running around trying to project images of intellectualism and worldliness when half the time we’re just being self-righteous and pretending to transcend the status quo and being someone worth something. We try to exude our self-perceived intellectual prowess, thinking we have some grasp of the metaphysical that those lesser couldn’t possibly understand, but half the time it’s the lucky idiots that turn this entire goal of being respected on its head. We put these words together, forcing them to at least appear aesthetically pleasing to our eye and perhaps no one else’s. The biggest fraud is no one has words that can really express what they mean and rely on the permutations of word combinations to try to make it look good if they can’t find the winning combination. We’re driven completely by what others will think, but our most emotionally invested attempts to expose our souls are found in these very pages, safely kept from judgmental eyes. What is it to know someone? Do you look towards a collection of trivial knowledge, a standard of time spent with another person, a person you can safely confide in? I’m not really sure if anyone completely knows me, but oftentimes there are people I understand better just by seeing a look in their eyes than people I have known for years. Is this a failure of the lack of adequate words, or simply our fear of becoming vulnerable?
Thursday, September 4, 2008
A Boethian Apocalypse.
I have always wanted to live the perfect day. Every night when I go to bed, I think about all the decisions I made and how a different permutation of decisions may have made my day much better (or worse). To put it in painfully simplified terms, I wish my life played out like a fucking Choose Your Own Adventure book. As belittling as that sounds, it’s mostly true.
Take just the last 24 hours of your life, for instance. You could have started looking for a new job to quit the one you hate, confessed your undying love to the object of your affection, or started to break a bad habit. Every second of the day is really just another iteration in the chaos theory of life and in the last 3 seconds I probably just sent everything in the wrong direction and fucked up by day. We’ll never know. What I do know, however; is that I have never and probably will never win a Choose Your Own Adventure book on the first reading. There’s always the notion of the winning combination, but never the belief that you’re going to guess it out of thin air.
I’ve heard the phrase “I live my life without regrets” from far too many oblivious and naïve people. I would love to meet a person who wholeheartedly embodies this mantra just so I could relentlessly pester them into admitting that they regretted doing something. Does anyone really live for a few hours without thinking of something they should or shouldn’t have done? If I failed to help them find something they regretted, they would sure as hell regret meeting me at least. By the end of my lifetime, I hope to have done 27 things that I didn’t regret, but I fear this goal is far too ambitious.
My inability to fathom living a regret-less life probably stems from my pseudo-destructive over-analysis of every aspect of my life. (As I write this, irrational fears about the previous sentence being too wordy materialize). This is why I will never gather the conviction to get a tattoo. I can almost guarantee you I would find a reason to hate it within a year and would spend quadruple the amount I got it for to get it removed (The removal process, of course, wouldn’t fully erase and I would be condemned to a life as an indecisive Hester Prynne). Being the fatal person I am, I am almost certain that my mind is programmed to search for flaws. This proves to be supremely disastrous when you are also a perfectionist. How can one live this mythical perfect day when one also spends half their day trying to figure out what has already gone wrong? I am now beginning to regret expressing my desires to even conceive the idea of a perfect day.
I really do think Groundhog Day is one of the most depressing movies ever. Great, Bill Murray figured out the way to live that day just the right way so that everything worked out. This took him 4372 tries (an approximate figure). Now, imagine if tomorrow you woke up and had to the chance to live a day over again. I’ve let so many people slip through my life and permitted so many indecisions to stagnate my boring existence to count, and if given the chance, would should sure as hell attempt to combat the passivity and pursue something other than just getting to the next day. Of course, this couldn’t all be fixed in one day—I know I would probably overzealously screw up my day right from the get-go in an act of overcompensation and want to try again but probably wouldn’t get the chance.
Lou Reed thinks the perfect day involves drinking Sangria in a park and going home or going to the zoo and then the movies. While Lou Reed is an extremely talented artist and this song helped establish his solo career post Velvet Underground, it also makes him sort of an idealistic idiot. I do not care how much you love spending the day with the person you love, but days as simplistic as the ones you describe staunchly contrast with the definition of ‘perfect.” If a day at the zoo is the best you can do Lou Reed, I fear you may have spent your faux-perfect day with the wrong person.
Traditional rhetoric suggests “every day is a new day.” This is true (in its most basic form), but the fact that said day is “new” also suggests that it is no more familiar to you than the previous day when you woke up. Tomorrow, I will wake up knowing I am going to work from eight to five. This is not new at all. I know what I will do tomorrow, save for a few details. I suppose tomorrow will be technically ‘new,’ but it won’t feel like it.
It appears the only way to be completely satisfied with life is to pretend. You can either:
a) obliviously declare that you would change nothing about your life
b) self-servingly cower behind empty mantras
c) somehow live every day 4372 times (again, an approximate figure) or until you get it right, which ever comes first.
Unfortunately for me, I am none of the above. The perfect day I have mythologized so ardently in the last paragraphs will never show itself. Perhaps I will go to bed believing I played everything just right, but I will wake up the next day only to find the proverbial fly in the ambrosial ointment. Philosophy offers no consolation.
Take just the last 24 hours of your life, for instance. You could have started looking for a new job to quit the one you hate, confessed your undying love to the object of your affection, or started to break a bad habit. Every second of the day is really just another iteration in the chaos theory of life and in the last 3 seconds I probably just sent everything in the wrong direction and fucked up by day. We’ll never know. What I do know, however; is that I have never and probably will never win a Choose Your Own Adventure book on the first reading. There’s always the notion of the winning combination, but never the belief that you’re going to guess it out of thin air.
I’ve heard the phrase “I live my life without regrets” from far too many oblivious and naïve people. I would love to meet a person who wholeheartedly embodies this mantra just so I could relentlessly pester them into admitting that they regretted doing something. Does anyone really live for a few hours without thinking of something they should or shouldn’t have done? If I failed to help them find something they regretted, they would sure as hell regret meeting me at least. By the end of my lifetime, I hope to have done 27 things that I didn’t regret, but I fear this goal is far too ambitious.
My inability to fathom living a regret-less life probably stems from my pseudo-destructive over-analysis of every aspect of my life. (As I write this, irrational fears about the previous sentence being too wordy materialize). This is why I will never gather the conviction to get a tattoo. I can almost guarantee you I would find a reason to hate it within a year and would spend quadruple the amount I got it for to get it removed (The removal process, of course, wouldn’t fully erase and I would be condemned to a life as an indecisive Hester Prynne). Being the fatal person I am, I am almost certain that my mind is programmed to search for flaws. This proves to be supremely disastrous when you are also a perfectionist. How can one live this mythical perfect day when one also spends half their day trying to figure out what has already gone wrong? I am now beginning to regret expressing my desires to even conceive the idea of a perfect day.
I really do think Groundhog Day is one of the most depressing movies ever. Great, Bill Murray figured out the way to live that day just the right way so that everything worked out. This took him 4372 tries (an approximate figure). Now, imagine if tomorrow you woke up and had to the chance to live a day over again. I’ve let so many people slip through my life and permitted so many indecisions to stagnate my boring existence to count, and if given the chance, would should sure as hell attempt to combat the passivity and pursue something other than just getting to the next day. Of course, this couldn’t all be fixed in one day—I know I would probably overzealously screw up my day right from the get-go in an act of overcompensation and want to try again but probably wouldn’t get the chance.
Lou Reed thinks the perfect day involves drinking Sangria in a park and going home or going to the zoo and then the movies. While Lou Reed is an extremely talented artist and this song helped establish his solo career post Velvet Underground, it also makes him sort of an idealistic idiot. I do not care how much you love spending the day with the person you love, but days as simplistic as the ones you describe staunchly contrast with the definition of ‘perfect.” If a day at the zoo is the best you can do Lou Reed, I fear you may have spent your faux-perfect day with the wrong person.
Traditional rhetoric suggests “every day is a new day.” This is true (in its most basic form), but the fact that said day is “new” also suggests that it is no more familiar to you than the previous day when you woke up. Tomorrow, I will wake up knowing I am going to work from eight to five. This is not new at all. I know what I will do tomorrow, save for a few details. I suppose tomorrow will be technically ‘new,’ but it won’t feel like it.
It appears the only way to be completely satisfied with life is to pretend. You can either:
a) obliviously declare that you would change nothing about your life
b) self-servingly cower behind empty mantras
c) somehow live every day 4372 times (again, an approximate figure) or until you get it right, which ever comes first.
Unfortunately for me, I am none of the above. The perfect day I have mythologized so ardently in the last paragraphs will never show itself. Perhaps I will go to bed believing I played everything just right, but I will wake up the next day only to find the proverbial fly in the ambrosial ointment. Philosophy offers no consolation.
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