Oh right

We're on vacation. July seems like a good time to get back to this though. July...it's like June for men!

Something that is awesome:

Making yourself some strong tea to power through a paper at the last minute, and getting so absorbed in what you're writing that you forget to finish the tea, and then finding out twelve pages later that you still have a gulp or two left, and the bag has just been sitting in it for two and a half hours, and all the sugar has collected at the bottom; then drinking those last gulps and feeling like you can fly.

Oh my Jeebus. How delightful. After I finish these last pages I'm going to go box the first person I see on the street. Whoever it is, she's getting her ass kicked.

If I Could Be a Cartoon Character (Full)

(This is an expanded version of something I used on an app for a Columbia orientation program...but this version's flawless.)

If I could be any cartoon character I’d be Tommy Pickles (early nineties Rugrats, none of this All Grown Up crap.) Now I know what you’re thinking: Who would want to be a toddler? Well look past the walking-around-in-piles-of-your-own-feces situation and the demeaning dependence on bottled formula (breast feeding is for chumps, not for TV-G) for a minute and you’ll see.

Tommy had the ideal life. To start with, he was completely cognizant of his surroundings. Sure, he couldn’t talk to adults, but who needs them? They’re like kidneys. Wait, no, what’s that organ? The appendix, right! He could understand these tall creatures, and if he wanted to communicate he could speak with his friends or that clever swindler Angelica.

The best part of Tommy’s life, though, was his blissful ignorance. Knowledge is the most addictive metaphor of a drug available on the streets today. It’s a lot like crack, only you don’t have to go to Holyoke to get it. Once you get a taste of knowledge you need to know more and more. Once you have it you want to use it to help people and make the world a better place. If you’re completely immoral you can also use it to make a ton of money by screwing thousands of innocent people (see: Lay, Kenneth.) The downside of using this knowledge, however, is that everyone eventually discovers that there are so many terrible problems, which will never be even close to solved in our lifetimes.

Kenneth Lay's face can be found under "douchebag" in the dictionary. If it's not, you're reading the wrong dictionary.

Tommy Pickles doesn’t have to be overwhelmed with the terrors of our modern world. He is unaware that he is powerless to stop the millions dying of AIDS in Africa. He doesn’t worry about the institutional oppression that will one day prevent his friend Suzie from obtaining any sort of position of power, despite her superior intelligence. He doesn’t even have to worry about the fact that making real global impact requires the aid of multiple corrupt governments and corporation, which do everything in their power to hinder real social progress.

No, Tommy Pickles is focused on solving the little problems in life. He knows that if he can unravel one mystery, set right one injustice, that he can rest peacefully at night. Sometimes he’d also sleep peacefully during the day too. I miss nap time.

But why be Tommy and not one of his three pals? It’s simple. Chucky is always scared and overwhelmed by everything, exactly what I’d want to avoid. Every time the rugrats set out to do something Chucky overloads and tries to convince them not to. He’s a lot like the French, but only in the sense that he stands in the way of progress. Phil and Lil are the opposite. They’re always up for adventure, but they are simple thrill-seekers. They also eat worms, which is pretty gross when you think about it. Tommy is the leader of the group though. It is his sense of curiosity and right and wrong that led the toddlers to each discovery and accomplishment.

Of course, it’s not desirable to always be Tommy Pickles. If we all chose not to recognize the world’s most serious problems then we would have no desire to bring about change. There are moments, however, that I wish I could forget all that I’m helpless to solve both in everyday life and the greater world, and just focus on one, small, tangible thing.

Feminists: Grow a Pair

I'm a person with certain principles. I don't have many, but those I do hold I hold dearly and resolutely. For that reason I place a great deal of value on following through on a belief. This is why I love some feminists, and really disike others. The feminists I like are ugly, smelly, obnoxious, and embittered. The feminists I dislike are all others.

I honestly have a great deal of respect for someone who will make a concerted effort to destroy whatever attractiveness she possesses, all in the name of combating sexism. I'm serious. I think that's really commendable. Most people don't have the courage to do that. I'm sure there is a minority of women who have the misfortune of being ugly, smelly and obnoxious by genetics, not choice, but that doesn't diminish their accomplishment. After all, they're still bitter, and bitterness takes training. Trust me. I know. Nobody is born bitter.

Feminists who relish in their socially unacceptable image are the only real feminists. All the others are half-assed hypocrites, trying to have it both ways. A woman who dresses to impress men and demands to be taken seriously as a non-sexual being is essentially the same thing as a communist who wants to own property. It's a contradiction of ideology. If you want to end sexism, you can't want to be sexy. If you want to end capitalism, you can't want to have capital.

Call me cynical (and look like an idiot doing it) but I really don't think sexism can end until people stop using sex appeal as currency. Most so-called feminists simply aren't willing to do that. Almost nobody, male or female, is willing to do that. Why should we? Sex appeal is the best currency ever. It makes some people happy, enslaves most, and drives other to depression and suicide. It's got its own exchange rates from culture to culture, and even follows a pattern of inflation. It's just like money, only it's natural. Also, it has STDs, which are a lot like taxes. I say we embrace sex as currency and center our educational system around teaching people how to avoid its taxes. We really won't need to change much. Instead of math and economics, just teach kids to put on condoms. The failure rate of condoms is much less than High School dropout rates. This idea is great for everyone.

The people who benefit most from this idea will be the feminists themselves. They won't have any more phonies padding the ranks. All the girls who want to profit from sex will become enterprising, socially-acceptable prostitutes. The ones who want radical change will become ugly social outcasts with promising futures in shitty literature. The rest will just go on living their lives without thinking about it. Really, things will be more or less the same as they are now, only people won't try to deny where they stand, and everyone will quit bitching about it.

And wouldn't that be nice?

In the trees, you answer to NO ONE

Have you ever read that book called My Side of the Mountain? At my elementary school it was sort of required reading, along with Hatchet, On Guerilla Warfare, and everything ever written by Ayn Rand. Anyway, the book was about some misanthropic Boy Scout who decides to run away from home and live in the woods, evidently because his dad said he wouldn't be able to do it. I can only remember parts of it, but I seem to recall the kid befriending a truck driver and a hawk, which may or may not also have been a truck driver, and basically kicking all kinds of ass out in the wilderness while living in a tree. At the time I liked it a lot. But not anymore. That kid was a pussy.

When I tell you the kid lived in a tree, what do you envision? If you're like me, you immediately think of some rugged guy in an elaborate Swiss Family Robinson/Ewok Forest City, basking in the canopy and stroking a yard-long beard as he blows smoke rings from a pipe made from the femur of a grizzly bear. That is living in a tree. What this kid did was bullshit. He just slept in the hollowed out trunk. He was still on the wet, stupid, smelly ground. What a wuss. Even a girl could do that.

This kid really got it wrong. Why live in the woods if you aren't going to live in a tree? That's like going to the bathroom just to piss on the floor. I just don't get it. I mean, the kid was smart enough not to be a monkey, but not smart enough to act like one. And you know what else? After a few months he just left. He got sick of the woods and returned to civilization, and I think he ended up going to Brown.

But I'm not that stupid. When I go live in a tree, I'm going to do it right. I'm going to the redwoods.

I was watching the Colbert Report the other day, and, as usual, the guest was some old fart who looked like he just slithered out of a week-long adult swim fiesta at the municipal shit pool. But I immediately felt like an ass for thinking that, because he turned out to be awesome. He wrote a book about these yuppies who like to scale redwoods, because evidently they couldn't find any good yoga centers in the middle of the friggin' forest. As I understand it, the book is mostly erotica, but it's also got some cool information about the secret world of the redwood canopy that I've been try to tell people about ever since Ferngully came out. Only it turns out I was wrong about the fairies. There aren't any fairies. (Yet.)

Anyway, here is some of the information he had to share:

1. Nobody knows anything about the tops of redwoods, because almost nobody has the balls to climb up them.
2. The flora and fauna up there aren't even known to science yet, which means the names of all the little critters there are up for grabs.
   
3. Trees actually grow on trees. That's just cool.
   
4. Some trees have giant caves in them from ancient forest fires, and that means there are probably tree-bears just waiting to be battled. I bet they're green. If I find them first I can name them, too. I'd call them Bitchettes.
5. The animals in the trees have never seen the ground, and have never seen humans, which means they haven't developed the instinct to avoid us. That means I can both befriend the flying squirrels and easily catch and eat them.
6. The network of branches means that you can travel hundreds of miles without touching the ground using only a grappling hook.
   
7. The best parts of the trees are out of sight from the ground and the air above, which means nobody will find you up there and you can play music as loud as you want.
   
8. In the trees, there's no country.
9. No religion, too.
   
10. And the best part of all? Free wireless internet.

In short, it's paradise. So I'm going to live there. If anyone wants to join me, well, you can't. But I promise I'll write. I guess if in ten, fifteen years you still really care about finding me, you can go ahead and try. Just follow the anguished calls of the tree-bears. I expect it will sound sort of like Eli Moss.