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Saturday, 29 August 2009

As You Can See From My Name-Brand Clothing, I Am Not Poor

Just because I happen to live with my four brothers and sisters in my mom's two-bedroom South Side apartment, work at Taco Bell, and don't have a car, some ignorant types assume that I don't have much money. But, as you can clearly see from my $220 Fubu jacket and $95 Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt, I could not possibly be poor.

The kind of name-brand clothing I wear is very expensive. See these Karl Kani jeans? Eighty-eight dollars. Would I spend that kind of money on a pair of jeans if I were poor? Of course not. If I were poor, I'd think $88 was way too much to spend on a pair of jeans that, with the exception of a tiny Karl Kani logo embroidered on the front right pocket, are practically indistinguishable from a plain old pair of $25 Levi's. But I don't think that's too much to spend because, for a well-off person like myself, money is no object.

Sure, I make $5.90 an hour at Taco Bell, but that couldn't possibly be my only source of income, could it? If my total weekly take-home pay were only $175, why in the world would I spend practically that much on a Nautica sweater and pair of Timberlands? That would mean I'd have spent 40 hours slinging Chalupas just for that one shopping trip to the mall. That'd just be plain stupid. So, obviously, I must be rolling in dough. And I am. You can tell by my special non-poor-people clothing.

Yes, it's obvious that I'm not like all those other losers who are working at Taco Bell and living with their moms. No, I'm a player. Take, for example, my socks. If I didn't have money to burn, I certainly wouldn't spend $22 for a pair of basic white athletic socks with a teeny-tiny Calvin Klein "CK" on them, would I? Of course not. I'd need to save my cash to get my telephone reconnected, or to pay off my loitering fine, or to help out my mom with the grocery bill. But, luckily, I'm not in that situation, and everyone knows it just by looking at my clothes.

I'll admit it: A lot of people here on the South Side are poor. In fact, most of my relatives are poor, including my mother and all my siblings. Knowing that, you might assume that I don't have that much money, either. But just look at these Lugz boots. And look at this Sean John baseball cap. They prove that I'm in an entirely different social class from my relatives, as well as from all those suckers who ride the bus with me every day.

Except for Angela, that is. I met her Monday on the C-route. She clearly belongs to a higher class of people like myself. I could tell because she was decked out from head to toe in expensive gear: Fubu jersey, Pepe jeans, and Fila shoes, not to mention a big gold chain around her neck. Angela was holding her two-year-old son, but he obviously isn't placing much of a financial strain on her, as he was wearing a complete matching Abercrombie & Fitch outfit, which must have cost around $140. Recognizing how much Angela and I had in common, I asked her out on the spot. We went to dinner at Denny's that very same night.

Thursday, 11 June 2009

Tuesday, 26 May 2009

If you don't have any plans for the big weekend coming up, I've got a fantastic idea: Why don't you come join my family and me at our country house? You can spend a few days relaxing in the sun, taking walks through the vast and immaculately landscaped grounds, and feeling degraded and ashamed by your inferior station in life.

It'll be great! You can see all the terrific stuff we own!

No, seriously, I insist. And please, don't worry about bringing anything with you. We're more than able to accommodate your every need in a lavish manner you can't possibly be accustomed to, and anything you did bring would appear a bit laughable in the surroundings of our seldom-used, no-excess-spared second home.

Oh, please say yes. You can pretend to take it easy while actually riddled with debilitating social anxiety. We, if not you, would just love it.

I'll send a car for you. It won't be any trouble. And just to make you feel even more uncomfortable, I'll send the car at a time when you have to be at work. How's Friday afternoon? Because, in my mind, who would be working on a Friday afternoon? The uniformed driver will have to wait for hours, but don't worry. He won't complain. If he did, he'd lose his job!

From the moment he opens the car door, you won't have to lift another finger all weekend. Won't that be divine? You can just put your feet up and watch the lovely countryside whip by while you desperately try to figure out if you're supposed to tip the gracious chauffeur, or if that would be insulting. And once you arrive, you'll be greeted by our household staff, who can provide you with everything you'll need to be seized by a deep and abiding sense of socioeconomic guilt that can only come from having a 50-year-old man bring you iced tea.

Doesn't that sound like a fun way to spend your weekend?

I promise, you'll have a great time feeling envious of everything you see. Do you like movies? We have a private screening room that seats fifty.

I can see you're reluctant, but there's no need to feel shy. You can have the guesthouse all to yourself, sleeping in a bed that isn't nearly as nice as the ones in the main house, but is still far, far better than whatever flea-bitten mattress you're used to.

Pamper yourself! We don't mind. We're used to hosting lesser people, and trust me, we'll hardly even notice you're there.

Plus, you must meet my family. As rich as I am, they're even richer, and you can bet their facial expressions won't bear even the slightest trace of the condescension they'll feel toward you—if they bother to feel superior at all. Either way, they'll be painfully polite.

Come to think of it, we're having our monthly polo tournament this weekend. That would be terrible for you! Since you've never ridden a horse, we can have our professional instructor awkwardly trot you around in a circle behind the stables while the rest of us engage in sophisticated horsemanship you'll never in your life come close to achieving.

There are so many ways for you to feel silly and out of place. You could join us in a game of croquet and feel desperately awkward, or just have a drink while you watch and feel even more awkward! Or, if you'd like to just be alone for a while, there's a room bigger than your entire apartment that we hardly ever use, so you won't be disturbed except by your own constant, crippling uneasiness.

Oh, please, please say yes? It wouldn't be a weekend without you there feeling hopelessly inadequate. You won't be in the way at all. Just make yourself at home and pretend we're not quietly looking down on you.

It'll be so fun for us!

Wednesday, 20 May 2009

Graduation is an exciting time in your life, and like most exciting times, it's bound to be accompanied by a fair amount of awkward moments. While it's sure to be an unpredictable few days, we can absolutely guarantee that a few things will definitely happen:

1. One of Your Relatives Will Say Something Racist, Then Make an Apology That's Even More Racist

Most relatives are like Will Smith movies: You see them once a year and they preach to you for two hours about something anyone with half of a brain already knows. Unfortunately, there's always one relative whose world-view is a little behind the times, and when you've come to greet your family after graduation with some of your friends, they'll say something like, "We couldn't find you down there, then I saw that you were behind that big chinaman. There's so many of them! It's like they're takin' over!" Then, the Chinese family behind you will all turn their heads toward your family, causing your relative to say something like, "Nah, I mean takin' over in a good way, y'know, 'cause they're good at math and science and laundry and stuff."

2. Someone in the Crowd Will Have a Dumbass Sign

Graduations are like WWE events; There’s a bunch of people grabbing a mic and talking, and everyone in the stands is holding up a sign that only makes sense to the four people they’re sitting next to that helped them make it.    Usually it takes six people standing up to display the sign, and since they’re never sure when you’re coming on stage, and every graduate is dressed the same, they end up getting up and sitting down like they’re club goers at the jersey shore, and someone stepped on their shoe, then quickly apologized.

3. You Will Be Annoyed By Drunken Graduate Sorority Girls

Remember that group of loud, obnoxious sorority girls that ruin every college bar you’ve ever gone to by getting too drunk and talking loudly about how everyone else isn’t attractive enough to talk to them? Well somehow, they got to graduate too, and you’d better believe that they’re showing up completely plastered. They’re easy to spot, thanks to the hodgepodge of inside jokes puffy-painted onto their graduation caps and accessorized with all sorts of annoying, attention-grabbing glitter and pipe-cleaners and shit that only a drunken idiot would find cool.   If you happen to have the misfortune of being blind, and your echo-location skills don’t work in the crowded graduation hall, just listen for the high-pitched squeals of mindless whores stumbling over each other, and screaming incessantly to one another about how “their graduation robes are so much hotter than everyone else’s.”

4. Someone You Don't Really Know Will Introduce You To Their Parents

Remember that kid that you sat two seats down from in your Space Sciences class during the second semester of your freshman year? Of course you don’t, but guess what? He remembers you, and he can’t wait for you to meet his parents. Having your family visit for your graduation is a lot like finding a dead squirrel in your car engine: it’s really not a good thing at all, but you still feel obligated to show it to everyone that you come into contact with for a short time thereafter. The best thing to do when introduced to someone’s family is to smile, be cordial, and get the encounter over with as quickly as possible. Also, for some reason there’s about a sixty percent chance that the kid in your Space Sciences class is named “Kevin.” I don’t know why, but it’s true.

5. There Will Be A Large Applause for a Handicapped Graduate

No matter who they are, or what they did, every time a person in a wheel chair, or with a clear physical disability, receives their diploma, the crowd reacts like that person just sank a three-pointer at the buzzer in game 7 of the NBA finals. This is great, because if there’s one thing handicapped people like, it’s people applauding them solely because they’re handicapped. To really hammer home the point, the audience is tired from loudly applauding, so the next person who gets up, also graduating with the same degree, gets a reaction like it’s the ninth inning of a 12-2 Florida Marlin’s game and someone got a bunt single.

6. Someone On a Cell Phone Will Try to Tell Someone Else Where They Are

No matter how loud, or how large a crowd you’re in, inevitably, there’s someone next to you on a cell phone attempting to shout instructions on how to locate them like it’s the fucking climactic scene of National Treasure and if they’re not found within seconds, a lever will be pulled and they’ll sink into the earth, never to be found again. The worst part is, their instructions usually consist of giving non-descript clues like they’re playing a game of charades and they want people to guess “Chairman of the federal reserve": “I’m sitting next to a bunch of people in suits...a guy next to me has brown hair...um...I’m waving?!"

7. The Keynote Speaker Will Make a Horrible Analogy

The odds are pretty good that your graduation’s keynote speaker is going to be some obscure author or incompetent politician who has absolutely no way of relating to an audience of bushy-tailed, optimistic young adults. In order to compensate for this, the keynote speaker will make an attempt at an analogy of some sort, to try to bridge the gap between what they know and what it’s like to graduate right now. It’s impossible to tell exactly what type of analogy it will be, but there is one thing that you can be absolutely sure of: it’s going to be terrible. Don’t be surprised to hear something like this:

“In 1885, a whale hunting ship got stranded in the polar ice caps. In the dark of the arctic night, they found themselves hopelessly lodged in 30-foot deep glaciers. Despair was all around them, and within weeks, they were starving. Eventually, the whalers began eating one another, until one last, gluttonous sailor remained. He froze to death several days after, because, after consuming his fellow crewmen, he was now too fat to drag himself off of the deck of the ship. But what happened to the whales that the crew was hunting? Those whales survived. Just like you’ll survive…as college graduates.” (Enormous applause follows)

Monday, 18 May 2009

Fans of Lost, Fringe and the new Star Trek may have noticed a couple of recurring themes running through JJ Abrams' work, making us think that he's trying to tell us something. But what?
JJ Abrams is a time-traveler from a parallel Earth here to prepare us for some kind of upcoming reality shift. Really, it's the only solution that makes sense.

Think about it. Lost has turned into your weekly primer on the rules of time travel and what can, and can't be done by those sailing the silver seas of the chronoverse. Its creators have spoken before about how they've had to sneak in the more science fictional aspects of the show before this past season's all-out time travel insanity, in order to lure in unsuspecting, potentially sci-fi-phobic audiences, and that's clearly because they are the ones who need to be taught this stuff the most. Sure, most of us know our time travel rules - So much so that we suspect that even detonating a hydrogen bomb through the brute force of lost love isn't going to undo everything as much as cement a new timeline and bump the Lostees forward in time so that they can meet NotLocke - but not everyone is as... let's go with "educated," shall we? as us. Hurley and Miles' most important roles in Lost season 5 were to bring the newbies up to speed about what time travel is all about.

Fringe, meanwhile, dropped the pretense of being an enjoyable dumb-science procedural in the last few weeks of its first season, as soon as Walter wheeled out that chalkboard and started trying to explain the multiverse to us all. Now, I'm not buying the "And that's where deja vu comes from!" aspect of the explanation at all, but you have to take some of it with a grain of salt thanks to Akiva Goldsman's involvement; nonetheless, there's now a whole new audience out there who have discovered the idea of parallel Earths and Schrödinger's cat (Okay, maybe that one is better illustrated here), just as Lost has educated them about time travel.

And then we come to Star Trek, which demonstrates to the previously unaware that time travel + changing the past = parallel timeline. I mean, okay, so it really demonstrates that time travel + changing the past = everyone becomes a younger, hotter version of themselves, but you get what I'm saying. It's a movie that takes the lessons of Abrams' two television shows and puts them into something approaching practice... But for what end?

Clearly, Abrams' entire career to date has not been one of merely entertainment, but instead a cunningly disguised form of education in scientific theories unlikely to be taught in even the most liberal schools (Even Felicity ended with time travel shenanigans!). We may not know exactly why he is trying his best to make sure that as many people as possible understand the nature of time travel and parallel universes - Perhaps he's taunted us with an evil master plan that he intends to carry out when he tires of being called the new Spielberg - but the evidence is unmistakable. All we can do now is hope that interviewers in future will be able to ask him more pointed, valuable questions... before it's too late.