Things That Don't Matter

Fuck if I know anything about them.

I have done my very best so far not to be one of those whiny teenage kids who complains about their parents constantly to everyone, and so far I believe they have not yet made an appearance in any of my writings. That has at times been very very difficult. Tonight it was too difficult, tonight was the last straw. At precisely 9:00pm this March the 23rd in the year of some people’s lord 2010 I bounded downstairs eager to watch the latest episode of Lost. In the living room I found my mom and two sisters watching American Idol, and they just had to watch this one last person sing. So I thought to myself fuck News Corporation and everything associated with them, minus The Simpsons and Arrested Development, except they cancelled that so once again, fuck them and I went to go get food while whoever this guy was sang. Let me take a moment here to complain about American Idol, it’s awful, end of story. If I want to here people sing I listen to the radio or better yet my iPod where I don’t have to deal with all that god awful pop/rap/whatever the hell it is that’s on the radio being perpetually interrupted by DJs as annoying if not more so than the music they play. I do not go watch TV. TV is for scripted drama/comedy. If somebody’s not writing it, it’s not any good, and even then it’s chances aren’t all that great. So my point is American Idol is stupid. What’s worst about it is that it airs opposite Lost, and because my incredibly annoying youngest sister, who I can easily see being one of the girls I absolutely hated when I was in middle school, loves it there is always conflict. I made it very clear to everyone in my family several months in advance that nothing, nothing was to interrupt my time in the living room from 9-10pm Tuesday nights. Surprise surprise when the start of the season comes round American Idol is in full swing and my sister is not willing to give it up. I managed to take control for the premiere but was forced during every commercial break to switch it back, and then of course was yelled at every time I switched it back again, this several times resulted in me missing parts of the show, and Lost is not a show one can miss parts of. This has occurred every single week so far. Tonight after I came back with food and the guy stopped singing I took the remote and switched it over to a halfway decent network just in time for the first commercial break. I wasn’t going to take any more of the flipping so I told my two sisters to get the hell out, and needless to say my parents had a problem with that. My sisters disappeared, my parents yelled, and the TV was turned off. I proceeded to sit on the couch and give them The Look of Death, which I think I’m getting quite good at, in the hopes that it would make them feel bad and let me put the TV back on. I think it did make them feel bad, but not enough to let me go back to watching, and by that point it wouldn’t have been worth it anyway. So now instead of watching tonight’s episode which was supposedly going to be an important one I’m up here writing this to keep me from breaking something. I know it might seem silly to be this angered over a TV show, but it’s Lost. You don’t mess with Lost, those are the rules.

Know what I hate? Like really really really hate? I hate when you plan something, start looking forward to it, and then it doesn’t happen. It’s even worse when you can’t blame anything besides whatever cruel being guides the universe (in retrospect that sounds very agnostic, I would like to clarify that I think agnostics are just atheists without balls. That sentence should read “besides the purely coincidental unfolding of events as determined by probabilities”). This happens to me allllll the time. It happens so often that it has had two very profound effects on me. Effect number one, I’ve given up. I rarely attempt to do anything, because chances are it won’t happen. Effect number two is that I’ve developed a sixth sense, I can tell when something’s going to fall through. From the very first moment that something’s suggested I get a feeling of whether or not it’s really going to happen. People are all talk, everyone’s always saying, “Hey we should do this sometime,” but will they ever? No. There are two very important words in that sentence, “should” and “sometime”. Those are words to look out for, if it’s not “will” and “at this specific time”, it’s not happening. Another thing to watch for is any uncertainty. If someone doesn’t give you an ETA, they’re not showing up. Hell even if someone does give you a specific time they’ll be somewhere it’s not a guarantee. I’m sure someone’s thinking “Well couldn’t that work the other way? A person might show up without giving a specific time,” and I suppose it’s a possibility, in the same way it’s a possibility that I could go buy a lottery ticket, win millions of dollars, and spend the rest of my life laughing at those who have to work for a living, suckers. The third thing, and probably the most deadly to any planned event, is the change of plans. The closer to the deadline this change occurs the worse, and should plans change more than once you may as well forget about it, that’s just the way it works. It’s very depressing, the things that fall through are always the things I really wanted to do, but that’s life I guess.

So the past four weeks (as of tomorrow) have been the most tumultuous, confusing, and at the same time wonderful weeks of my life, and of course I can’t write about any of it. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t told people I know about this site because it means that I have to think about what I say, and that’s not what the internet is about, although it would also mean not having much of a readership. And no, it is not anything illegal. It’s my excuse for not having done much of anything including update this site for the past month and that’s all I’m going to say. Although actually I’ve been much better about this recently, at least more so than over the summer. And now for something completely different: I found someone I hate almost as much as Rush Limbaugh.

No... me.

Glenn Beck is about the biggest media whore I have ever encountered (not size wise, that still goes to Rush). I don’t understand how anyone can watch his show without feeling sick to their stomach or bursting out laughing. A couple of weeks ago I was over at a friend’s house and flipping through channels we decided to put on Beck because we thought it would be funnier than the episode of South Park airing opposite on Comedy Central. Really, if he wants to be taken seriously he should probably give up on the shirt, tie, blazer, jeans combo, and also stop making faces and crying so much. The episode we saw featured Lord Christopher Walter Monckton who I thought looked like a frog and spoke less sensibly. He was on the show to talk about how a UN climate control treaty is the basis for a world communist government. He provided absolutely no support, rather spent the entire time predicting doom for the U.S. if our evil overlord Obama signs it. The guest who sat opposite him wasn’t memorable because his job was to be the “opposing viewpoint”, and on Fox “opposing viewpoint” really means less extremist, but fundamentally the same. When he wasn’t being shushed by Beck or Monckton he was expressing the same view just less assertively. This is clearly meant to create the illusion that everyone feels the same way about this, and anyone who falls for it is such an idiot I’m surprised they know how to turn on the TV. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that most episodes of Glenn’s program follow this same format of idiot guest vs. slightly less assertive idiot guest with Glenn Beck in the middle making stupid comments and crying. I’m afraid watching more of the show to confirm my theory could have adverse effects on my mental health. I sincerely hope that he really is just a media whore and doesn’t really believe what he says, because if he really does I find that a little scary. Unfortunately even if he just says stuff for the attention there are people out there who believe him, all those “real Americans” I always have to hear about. Am I not an American because I don’t agree with your opinion? It’s when I hear people like Beck that I seriously consider moving to Europe as an adult… and telling everyone I’m Canadian.

Hallways are the worst. They are just the most awkward place to be ever. I hate when you’re walking down the hall and there’s someone coming the other way who you just sort of know and you’re not sure whether you should say hi or nod or something. I also hate when you’re not paying attention and someone you know says hi and you don’t see them until they’ve gone past in the other direction and you worry that they might think you ignored them or something. That’s just the worst. What’s also the worst is the people who seem to think that the hallway is their own private make out spot. This is the absolute worst if you’re the only other person in the hallway with them. I also hate people who just stand in the middle of the hall and clog it up, or try to walk three abreast and bump into people going the other way. I also hate that you can’t walk three abreast because when you’re walking with three people one person either has to walk out front or behind and gets excluded from the conversation. That’s often me. You know something’s really the worst when it has multiple worst aspects, hallways suck.

Well, summer this year has been pretty much as I expected it to be, crappy. The first week was great, I was off on vacation without a care in the world. Then I came home. I have not as yet managed to find a job, and as a result my parents have decided to make life at home as miserable as possible, presumably to motivate me to go out and get a job. Even if I were to get a job I would still have to deal with the whole college thing, summer work for my AP literature class, and various other heavy thoughts that combine to create this heavy feeling in my gut which could just be due to the fact that I’m out of shape and overweight ujyh7n77777777777777777777777777777777n (head on keyboard). Admittedly, some of those heavy thoughts might be cured with money from a job, but I very much doubt that minimum wage is going to clear them up very quickly, so in the end getting a job would do very little to reduce the miserableness of it all. I feel overqualified for all these potential positions anyway, I bet I could destroy a company as well as any CEO out there (at least I think that’s their job, I mean that seems to be what they all do these days). In any case having a job would almost certainly be better than looking for one which just sucks. My mom never misses an opportunity to tell me that the jobs aren’t going to come to me, a sentiment I don’t fully understand. I like having things handed to me, therefore things should be handed to me, is there a flaw in that logic that I’m missing?

But I digress, I do have something I want to write about. The other day I saw this. If being stupid was a crime, everyone involved here would be put to death. Let me start with the girl herself, Megan Meier. Now, in any situation killing yourself is a pretty stupid and dickish thing to do, but killing yourself because someone on the internet you don’t know told you that the world would be better off without you? No one on the internet should ever be taken seriously, especially people on MySpace, and if you don’t know that then someone should cut your cable line, for your sake and ours. First, why the hell would you friend someone you don’t know? It’s the first thing every kid gets told not to do, why would you do it? Second, MySpace!? Myspace is for pedophiles and bitchy 13 year old drama queens who somehow have the very wrong idea that anyone anywhere wants to know anything about them, which I guess is actually a category this girl probably fits into. Third, this whole thing started because this girl was spreading rumors about the other one, that is so after school special, if you’re going to be mean to someone you could at least try to be original about it. Fourth, I can not in any way comprehend how you could care the slightest little bit what this person you don’t know has to say about you. If some person were to come up to me on the street and say “You know, I think the world would really be a better place without you” (I happen to know I make it at least 150% better), I would not immediately run home and kill myself. However, she did end up dead, and for that I guess some sympathy and respect are owed to her, even if just because the social convention is that you’re supposed to respect the dead, which is a totally stupid social convention, sometimes the dead people were assholes. The person I actually have the most sympathy for here is the other girl, Sarah Drew. Despite the fact that she is probably an even bitchier 13 year old drama queen she has a pretty awful mom to deal with and is stuck with the burden of what is sure now to be a pretty messed up rest of her life. However, I said most sympathy, which is a relative term, I really have very little sypmathy for any of them. This girl is still stupid for being so upset about whatever rumors he other girl was spreading that she felt the need to tell her mother and then involve herself in a revenge plot that resulted in the other’s death. The obvious worst person in this whole situation is the mom. What we have here is a serious case of helicopter mom, where the mom hovers over their child, like a helicopter, and it never results in good things. I mean, how old does this woman think she is? Parents are supposed to be the responsible ones who say, “If someone at school is bothering you, tell a teacher” or go with their kid to the school’s administration to resolve it. What on earth would make you think that you should instead make this other girl feel just as bad as she made your daughter feel? You are not thirteen and this is not an episode of Gossip Girl. I don’t even understand how a woman so obviously despicable could end up with a daughter in the first place.

I think quite possibly the whole problem stems from the first word of that news article’s title, Missouri. Bible belt states are the worst.

Wow, it’s been almost a month. I’ve been getting steadily worse about this and I’ll try to correct that in the future. The end of this school year has been a little hectic and every time I think about updating I think of something else I should be doing instead, then when I finish that I’m tired (as in, more tired than I normally am anyways), and I go to bed. The added complications of being sick, having my grandmother stay at the house for two weeks, and totaling the family minivan did not help much.

So anyway, I had a few thoughts I wanted to share quickly. Today is June 6th, the 65th anniversary of D-Day. Know how Google puts up the specially designed logos for special days like holidays and such, guess what Google’s celebrating today?

25 years too many!

That’s right, 25 years ago today Tetris was released, and I guess in Google’s opinion that trumps what is just about the most famous battle in the history of the world. In their defense, dead bodies on a beach twisted to spell out Google would probably not have gone down too well. Probably the best thing to do would be to have left it alone completely, because instead of just saying we really don’t care that today’s the 65th anniversary of D-Day this says we think this stupid annoying game with colored blocks is more important. I guess you could say that it’s the single largest and ongoing genocide against digital colored blocks the world has ever seen. But the fact of the matter is, Tetris is stupid, I wouldn’t play it if it were the only video game left on earth. It has no point and maneuvering those stupid little blocks around is annoying as hell.

On another note, a while ago I got Rockband and I wrote an entry about it. One of the things that I discussed in the entry was whether or not it actually teaches you how to play the drums. I have since then spent a considerable amount of time playing the drums in Rockband and yesterday got a chance to try my hand at a friend’s drum kit. The result: I did okay. I’m not going to say I was really good or knew anything about what I was doing but I could play some beats that sounded pretty okay as well as invent some while  playing along with music. I definitely could not have done it at all without having played Rockband. So, definitive conclusion: yes, Rockband will help you to play the drums. It won’t make you an expert, but you should be able to sit down and play simple stuff  pretty decently.

Wow, it has been a long time since I updated, (two whole weeks to be exact). I’ll try not to let that happen again, but I didn’t have school last week so I pretty much decided that any time I had in-between visiting colleges and driver’s ed stuff (test tomorrow!) would be spent doing as little as possible, hence no updates.

So, to the point, what the hell happened to Bush? Seriously, it’s like he’s dropped off the face of the earth. I mean, it’s awesome that he’s not in charge anymore making stupid decisions that make the rest of us look like idiots (a fair description of a large portion of the population actually), but I sort of miss him as an easy target for political humor. All the shows like The Daily Show and Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me are stuck making empty cracks at the Obama administration, which actually are generally directed at those who oppose it. Dick Cheney has shown his head a few times to make remarks about how much better (worse) things were when he ran the country (and commanded his own private army. No, I’m dead serious about that one), but I haven’t seen Bush anywhere. He boarded that helicopter at the inauguration and flew away into the proverbial sunset. It’s weird, I had a Firefox add-on that counted the days until he left office, but watching him leave, and in the time since, it just feels weird. He was the first, and up until a few months ago the only president I have ever been aware of. I loved to hate him really. Of course, since he’s been gone the republican party has done an excellent job of opening me up to a whole range of new things to be mad about. I thought I heard that he was going to write a book, most of them do. I have an excellent title for it: Where the Wild Nukes Aren’t, and the opening sentence could be, “It was the best of times, and eight years later it was the worst of times.” There’s lots of people out there who say that it’s not as much his fault as peope make it out to be, but I’m an American, and blaming just one person as the singular reason for a crisis is a heck of a lot easier than digging through complex issues and dividing up blame. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I don’t miss him at all.

I found someone I hate more than Sarah Palin. This article is also going to be a little bit about CPAC and the Republican party. Now I know it’s not really fair to judge the entirety of the Republican party based on what one loser hiding away in a radio booth spews from his mouth everyday, but you guys make it a bit hard for me when you make him a big speaker at a convention and cheer his every word. I took issue with just about every word that was spoken at CPAC, and not just the ones from Rush either. They had an NRA guy to rile up the shotgun wielding rednecks and homicidal maniacs, and some other losers to pound Obama’s spending bill which only has to exist because of all the stupid things the Republican party did when it was in charge. Let me go back to NRA guy for a minute because that was something I wanted to talk about. I know the Constitution gives us the right to bear arms, but I think that should probably exclude the right to bear multiple high powered rapid firing arms without any background check or waiting period or any training or at all. Also, another part of the Constitution is the part that allows you to change it to fit the times, that’s the only reason it still exists. And if you’re always going to fall back on the Constitution, you should probably know what it is, Rush. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is in the Declaration of Independence, not the preamble to the Constitution you dolt. I think Stephen Colbert said it best, “The vacuum in Republican leadership has allowed a mean spirited lard ass talk radio mind corpse to become de facto leader which is turning an already crippled party into a bickering laughing stock.” You know he once accused Micheal J. Fox of flailing around in his Parkinson’s disease commercials to exaggerate the effects of the disease and gain sympathy? Now I’m not big on celebrities starting foundations for diseases that they already have because it’s not so much charity as self help and you know that they wouldn’t care at all if they didn’t suffer from it but seriously Rush, how much of an asshole do you have to be to say something like that? The answer: one the size of Jupiter. Even the internet hates Rush:

Everyone agrees.

This is a real screenshot taken from the suggested search box that pops up while you’re typing in Google. Try it and see for yourself. They’re all pretty great but my personal favorites are numbers 3 and 8.

The Republican party is just a joke in general now, and I’m going to cash in on that. Anyone hear about Micheal Steele saying they needed to change the party’s image to match urban hip hop settings?

You know you want in.

These days it seems like Republicans keep trying to mimic the Democrats in order to gain support, talking about change and trying to be cool. There are several major flaws with this, first, if you’re trying to be cool then you’re not, it’s one of those things that you just have to fall into. Second, the Democratic party isn’t just about changing  just anything, it’s about reversing all the policies you put in place and taking this country forward, not backward, and it doesn’t seem like Republicans are ever going to warm up to that. Conservatives will always live up to their name and try to keep things the way they are, completely ignorant of the fact that the way things are right now sucks. Republicans keep going on about this spending stuff and it annoys the hell out of me. When times are tough the government is supposed to spend like crazy and get money flowing in the economy again. The government’s goal is not to save money, then it would be a business. Also all the bills that they always point out are ones on which I think spending money is totally worth it, way more so than this idiotic war we’ve got going in the Middle East.

I get angrier and angrier every time I hear these guys talk, I’m really glad I don’t get cable because FOX News might kill me.

So yesterday was that Wednesday when all the people of one of those christian denominations decide that they should give up television or pizza because some guy walked around in the desert for a while. For me, lent ranks third on the list of annoying religious practices. Right below the pointless torture and killing of millions of people and racism/discrimination, but just above pretentious spiritual attitude. I think that lent tends to be more of an inconvenience for those who don’t participate in it rather than those who do. I have a friend who once gave up video games so for a month every time I went to his house and said “Want to play video games?” because that was what we normally did he would say “No I can’t, I gave it up for lent, but you can if you want to.” Well great, if I wanted to play video games by myself I could have stayed home. Lent makes communication harder as people give up cell phones and email, things that have become essential to life in the 21st century, right up there with food and breathing. For the next month we will all have to endure these people. It only takes one in a group to put a stop to a fun activity because they gave it up for lent. I’ve never understood the whole concept of lent. So this guy you worship spent some time in the desert, why does that mean that you have to annoy people for a month? How about instead of depriving yourself of something which doesn’t do anyone any good you go out and help people, do community service or something. Community service is about the only plus there is to religion so how about you focus on that a little more than this pointless annoying archaic ritual stuff which I see as really just a less extreme version of what those “pain is the cleanser” people do when they wear belts with spikes on the inside and whip themselves.