Lately I've posted a couple updates on Twitter of hypothetical situations I could picture myself in, like for example, wishing for a certain skill or ability or position so I could achieve grand and noble things by utilizing those skills, abilities, or positions. I realize now just how many of those situations are in my head, and I have to get them out somehow.
I wish I was a psychology professor, because every class meeting would be an "experiment."
I wish I was a musician, so I could frequent karaoke bars and do ironic covers of my own songs.
I wish I was a traffic court judge, so I could "issue the death sentence" for taillight violations.
I wish I was an ordained minister, so I co-- Oh, wait. I AM. (getordained.org) (You're welcome for that totally free advertising, getordained.org.)
I wish I was a pilot, so I could shout, "ABORT," over the loudspeaker system.
I wish I was a car salesman, so I could pack every trunk with a complimentary rabid woodland rodent.
I wish I was a vet so I could somberly tell animal owners that we didn't think their grandmothers were going to make it.
I wish I was an elementary school teacher, os I cuodl tache teh dsylcsexi ikds ohw to read.
I wish I was the person who painted billboards, so I could paint things like, "DID YOU KNOW: Petroleum jelly is great for your hair!"
Monday, February 13, 2012
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Why Dogs > Cats < Snakes, Shebears, and Other Birds of Prey
Because cats are ascended from Hell.
"Cats are my favorite animal." -- Rick Perry, O.J. Simpson, Satan
Cats are truly creatures of malice and deceit. They love nothing and scratch everything, and they will kill you and feed off your remains the very first chance they get. The only reasons cats haven't completely taken over yet are that, without you, the cat would have no litter box waste-removal service, and.. They don't have thumbs. But they're working on the thumbs, and then we are all screwed. Cats reproduce more quickly and more efficiently than we do. They stay pregnant for fraction of the time people do, and then when they have their nasty cat babies, they have MORE THAN ONE at a time. We are reacting to this crisis by domesticating and loving these furry mutants.
If you so much as move near a cat, cat thinks, "Now she wants to play, and I should immediately retract my claws and wreck her her life." Then they purr innocently and beg you to think that they are adorable, but this is a deceitful tactic. The second your heart fills with adoration and your mind with false security, it will initiate an attack.
I would rather encounter this:
than this:
Any day.
I feel sick just looking at it. Filthy little booger.
It's actually an evolutionary advantage for humans to be allergic to cats, so if that's you, you're one of the lucky ones. Eventually natural selection will ensure that all of us keep our distance. Antihistamine or not, it's just not worth it.
Even if you dress them like Pikachus..
They still hate you.
And what else could we expect, from the nephew of the tiger and the first cousin of Lucifer?
Disgusting.
"Cats are my favorite animal." -- Rick Perry, O.J. Simpson, Satan
Cats are truly creatures of malice and deceit. They love nothing and scratch everything, and they will kill you and feed off your remains the very first chance they get. The only reasons cats haven't completely taken over yet are that, without you, the cat would have no litter box waste-removal service, and.. They don't have thumbs. But they're working on the thumbs, and then we are all screwed. Cats reproduce more quickly and more efficiently than we do. They stay pregnant for fraction of the time people do, and then when they have their nasty cat babies, they have MORE THAN ONE at a time. We are reacting to this crisis by domesticating and loving these furry mutants.
If you so much as move near a cat, cat thinks, "Now she wants to play, and I should immediately retract my claws and wreck her her life." Then they purr innocently and beg you to think that they are adorable, but this is a deceitful tactic. The second your heart fills with adoration and your mind with false security, it will initiate an attack.
I would rather encounter this:
than this:
Any day.
I feel sick just looking at it. Filthy little booger.
It's actually an evolutionary advantage for humans to be allergic to cats, so if that's you, you're one of the lucky ones. Eventually natural selection will ensure that all of us keep our distance. Antihistamine or not, it's just not worth it.
Even if you dress them like Pikachus..
They still hate you.
And what else could we expect, from the nephew of the tiger and the first cousin of Lucifer?
Disgusting.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
A Great Emotional Reaction to the Great American Novel
Alright, so basically, I love reading and rereading and rereading and thinking about The Great Gatsby, and I have a lot of things to say about it. I have a few things in particular to say to anyone reading this that hasn’t yet read The Great Gatsby:
1.) You’re kidding, right? You can watch Jersey Shore every week, but you’ve never read THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL? Seriously, its American-ness is exceeded only by its greatness, and I have no idea what you’re waiting for. And,
B.) There are going to be some things in this post that will potentially completely ruin the entire book. With that being said…
I love The Great Gatsby, not only for what it says, but just as much for the devices it uses to say those things. Whether you read The Great Gatsby just for pleasure or for critical literary analysis, there are endless discoveries to be made within the story. Fitzgerald writes in a way that makes it possible to find some beautiful new secret hidden in the text every time you read the novel. Every page, every line has something more than what you see on the surface. Fitzgerald’s eloquence is just unmatchable. His command of language is astounding. There is another brilliant metaphor every time you flip a few pages.
And among those metaphors is the metaphor that looms over all of English literature like a challenge that no writer wants to accept: The green light.
Enter Jay Gatsby, our mysterious Hero. He’s way too young to be way too wealthy, and no one really knows how he got that way. Maybe it’s inheritance, but he’s actually probably a bootlegger, a drug peddler, or a German spy. No one actually knows crap about Jay Gatsby (apart from the fact that he throws the rockin’est parties in the whole West Egg). He is, as our faithful narrator Nick Carraway dubs him, Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. And boy, does he have everything. Except that he doesn’t. The first time we meet Jay Gatsby, Nick’s next-door neighbor, Nick spots him standing outside, looking out across the water, trembling, with his arms outstretched. Nick looks across the water and sees nothing more than a green light at the dock of an East Egg resident. It’s Daisy Buchanan’s dock.
Jay Gatsby may very well be Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, but he shares your ambitions. He is so hopelessly hopeful in the pursuit of fulfilling those ambitions that he has moved into an enormous mansion and thrown copious, extravagant parties. Just to impress some girl. The green light represents the object of Gatsby’s innermost desire—Daisy. His longing and his sufferings are so relatable that’s it’s nearly impossible for the green light metaphor to NOT tear your heart to pieces. It brings the reality of YOUR green light right to the surface of your consciousness, and you’re reading with your trembling arms outstretched toward your hopeless ambition.
Daisy Buchanan, as seen through the eyes of Jay Gatsby, is anything in the world but just some girl. Daisy Buchanan, to anyone else, is kind of just a wreck. She’s married to arguably the most detestable fictional character ever written. Tom Buchanan is such a filthy chump that he doesn’t even treat his mistress well, and Daisy has been miserable with that loser since even before they were even married. He wasn’t present for the birth of his daughter, and Daisy recalls that day in conversation with Nick at the Worst Dinner Party Ever. She expresses how happy she was to discover that her child was a girl, and she says, “I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” It’s obvious that Daisy herself is trying to be a beautiful fool, because that is the only way she can think of to get through life.
The Great Gatsby is full of extremely wealthy, horribly miserable people who have everything, but they’re always having a terrible time. They have enough money to buy cars just to get super drunk and wreck them. Jay Gatsby has enough money for a mansion, enormous gardens, and a pool that he stresses to Nick on several occasions that he has never even used. It’s just not enough.
During the first miserable social gathering of the novel, Daisy shares an anecdote with Nick about her butler’s previous job and how it relates to his nose.
“Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over tonight.” (LOL)
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be a silver polisher for some people in New York… He had to polish morning and night until it began to affect his nose. Things went from bad to worse until he was forced to give up his position.”
What this contributes to the novel is the lousy truth that, just as much as
wealth consumes the wealthy, it consumes the poor too. Everyone in the novel is just desperately and blindly searching for their green light in their Valley of Ashes.
Ah, the Valley of Ashes. The Valley of Ashes lies between the East and West Eggs and the city, and it is a mound of charred waste that masterfully represents the country’s moral and social decay. Overseeing the Valley of Ashes is a billboard depicting only a pair of bespectacled eyes. The eyes of Dr. T J Eckleburg. The novel says of the billboard,
“Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his business…. And then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under the sun and rain, brood on over our solemn dumping ground.”
MAN, isn’t that a spectacular metaphor for God and man turning their backs on Him. I’m just saying. That’s just too beautiful. (Also, during the 1920s when the novel is set, the Valley of Ashes was a real thing. Dr. Eckelburg, however, appears to be Fitzgerald’s independent creation.)
Now back to our hero Gatsby and his heroic ambitions! Long story short, Gatsby essentially gets exactly what he wants. He GETS WHAT HE WANTS, what he is LONGING FOR THROUGHOUT HIS ENTIRE FREAKING LIFE, and it isn’t good enough. He rekindles his romantic relationship with Daisy, a girl he loves so much that he actually tumbles down stairs when she is near. A girl he loves so much that he puts literally his entire life into going after her steadfastly. He gets her. He gets her, and then he complains that it doesn’t FEEL the way he hoped. It isn’t the same FEELING as when they were younger, and he insists that she assure him that she never once loved Tom.
WHY DO WE DO THAT!? Why? Why do we want something so much that it tears us apart, get it, and then decide that we don’t really want that anymore? The reality of it is that this doesn’t just happen in Jay Gatsby. Everyone does this every day, and I can’t possibly understand why. Seriously, she was your green light, you idiot, WHY would you act like it isn’t good enough?
Then, in the end, Mr. Jay Gatsby finally uses his swimming pool, and I’ll leave what happens next to the imagination.
Nick Carraway says at the start of the novel that,
“Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
I’ll leave you with the questions:
DID Jay Gatsby turn out all right in the end?
Why are the elations of men so short-winded?
Was Jay Gatsby’s journey truly heroic?
Most importantly, is your journey heroic?
(These are non-rhetorical questions that demand answers, and I encourage answering them in comments.)
Finally, I absolutely intend to name my first-born daughter Gatsby Jay Whatever, and yeah, I get that your kid’s probably going to make fun of her at recess, but at least she’ll be reading Byron while your kid tastes the grass and races caterpillars.
(Keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming article on caterpillar racing.)
1.) You’re kidding, right? You can watch Jersey Shore every week, but you’ve never read THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL? Seriously, its American-ness is exceeded only by its greatness, and I have no idea what you’re waiting for. And,
B.) There are going to be some things in this post that will potentially completely ruin the entire book. With that being said…
I love The Great Gatsby, not only for what it says, but just as much for the devices it uses to say those things. Whether you read The Great Gatsby just for pleasure or for critical literary analysis, there are endless discoveries to be made within the story. Fitzgerald writes in a way that makes it possible to find some beautiful new secret hidden in the text every time you read the novel. Every page, every line has something more than what you see on the surface. Fitzgerald’s eloquence is just unmatchable. His command of language is astounding. There is another brilliant metaphor every time you flip a few pages.
And among those metaphors is the metaphor that looms over all of English literature like a challenge that no writer wants to accept: The green light.
Enter Jay Gatsby, our mysterious Hero. He’s way too young to be way too wealthy, and no one really knows how he got that way. Maybe it’s inheritance, but he’s actually probably a bootlegger, a drug peddler, or a German spy. No one actually knows crap about Jay Gatsby (apart from the fact that he throws the rockin’est parties in the whole West Egg). He is, as our faithful narrator Nick Carraway dubs him, Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. And boy, does he have everything. Except that he doesn’t. The first time we meet Jay Gatsby, Nick’s next-door neighbor, Nick spots him standing outside, looking out across the water, trembling, with his arms outstretched. Nick looks across the water and sees nothing more than a green light at the dock of an East Egg resident. It’s Daisy Buchanan’s dock.
Jay Gatsby may very well be Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, but he shares your ambitions. He is so hopelessly hopeful in the pursuit of fulfilling those ambitions that he has moved into an enormous mansion and thrown copious, extravagant parties. Just to impress some girl. The green light represents the object of Gatsby’s innermost desire—Daisy. His longing and his sufferings are so relatable that’s it’s nearly impossible for the green light metaphor to NOT tear your heart to pieces. It brings the reality of YOUR green light right to the surface of your consciousness, and you’re reading with your trembling arms outstretched toward your hopeless ambition.
Daisy Buchanan, as seen through the eyes of Jay Gatsby, is anything in the world but just some girl. Daisy Buchanan, to anyone else, is kind of just a wreck. She’s married to arguably the most detestable fictional character ever written. Tom Buchanan is such a filthy chump that he doesn’t even treat his mistress well, and Daisy has been miserable with that loser since even before they were even married. He wasn’t present for the birth of his daughter, and Daisy recalls that day in conversation with Nick at the Worst Dinner Party Ever. She expresses how happy she was to discover that her child was a girl, and she says, “I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” It’s obvious that Daisy herself is trying to be a beautiful fool, because that is the only way she can think of to get through life.
The Great Gatsby is full of extremely wealthy, horribly miserable people who have everything, but they’re always having a terrible time. They have enough money to buy cars just to get super drunk and wreck them. Jay Gatsby has enough money for a mansion, enormous gardens, and a pool that he stresses to Nick on several occasions that he has never even used. It’s just not enough.
During the first miserable social gathering of the novel, Daisy shares an anecdote with Nick about her butler’s previous job and how it relates to his nose.
“Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over tonight.” (LOL)
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be a silver polisher for some people in New York… He had to polish morning and night until it began to affect his nose. Things went from bad to worse until he was forced to give up his position.”
What this contributes to the novel is the lousy truth that, just as much as
wealth consumes the wealthy, it consumes the poor too. Everyone in the novel is just desperately and blindly searching for their green light in their Valley of Ashes.
Ah, the Valley of Ashes. The Valley of Ashes lies between the East and West Eggs and the city, and it is a mound of charred waste that masterfully represents the country’s moral and social decay. Overseeing the Valley of Ashes is a billboard depicting only a pair of bespectacled eyes. The eyes of Dr. T J Eckleburg. The novel says of the billboard,
“Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his business…. And then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under the sun and rain, brood on over our solemn dumping ground.”
MAN, isn’t that a spectacular metaphor for God and man turning their backs on Him. I’m just saying. That’s just too beautiful. (Also, during the 1920s when the novel is set, the Valley of Ashes was a real thing. Dr. Eckelburg, however, appears to be Fitzgerald’s independent creation.)
Now back to our hero Gatsby and his heroic ambitions! Long story short, Gatsby essentially gets exactly what he wants. He GETS WHAT HE WANTS, what he is LONGING FOR THROUGHOUT HIS ENTIRE FREAKING LIFE, and it isn’t good enough. He rekindles his romantic relationship with Daisy, a girl he loves so much that he actually tumbles down stairs when she is near. A girl he loves so much that he puts literally his entire life into going after her steadfastly. He gets her. He gets her, and then he complains that it doesn’t FEEL the way he hoped. It isn’t the same FEELING as when they were younger, and he insists that she assure him that she never once loved Tom.
WHY DO WE DO THAT!? Why? Why do we want something so much that it tears us apart, get it, and then decide that we don’t really want that anymore? The reality of it is that this doesn’t just happen in Jay Gatsby. Everyone does this every day, and I can’t possibly understand why. Seriously, she was your green light, you idiot, WHY would you act like it isn’t good enough?
Then, in the end, Mr. Jay Gatsby finally uses his swimming pool, and I’ll leave what happens next to the imagination.
Nick Carraway says at the start of the novel that,
“Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
I’ll leave you with the questions:
DID Jay Gatsby turn out all right in the end?
Why are the elations of men so short-winded?
Was Jay Gatsby’s journey truly heroic?
Most importantly, is your journey heroic?
(These are non-rhetorical questions that demand answers, and I encourage answering them in comments.)
Finally, I absolutely intend to name my first-born daughter Gatsby Jay Whatever, and yeah, I get that your kid’s probably going to make fun of her at recess, but at least she’ll be reading Byron while your kid tastes the grass and races caterpillars.
(Keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming article on caterpillar racing.)
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