Nobody likes believing people are bad. "I'm sure he's not a bad guy, though I don't really know him." "I'm sure she's not really a hobag, though I don't really know her."
I remember talking to a cop before, and she was telling me that with most people, once you get them down to a one-on-one situation they end up being pretty decent people; they just turn into assholes in groups.
But sometimes, people are just little shits.
What the hell is up with this comment spam? Every day I get at least 5 pieces of comment spam, if not 10x that many because some random spambot decided it'd be a great idea to plant a piece of comment spam in every single entry. And here you thought spam was just for email!
There was this one case where people decided they'd had enough spam from this one guy (I forgot his name, but he's the #1 spammer in the US), so they put his address on a whole bunch of magazine inserts and signed him up for all sorts of bizarre promotions and whatnot. His mailbox (the one outside his house) was completely flooded with junk mail, and he had the gall to complain about it. Bloody wanker.
So now I'm going to be a complete hypocrite and give a random suggestion to embarass someone you don't like who lives in the residence halls. Find the nastiest, raunchiest, most twisted magazine you can ("The Hairiest Incestual Interracial Beastiality Loving Midgets," for example) and order a subscription to their room. Be sure to request the uncovered edition, since many of the shadier publications are aware that their reader base consists of people who just Don't Want Others to Know. You can be sure the mail room staff will be laughing it up, and your friend (or ex-friend) will never want to go there to get their mail again. You can be sure the mail room staff will be sharing it with their friends, too, and before you know it, your once-friend is now "the sickest mofo on campus" to everyone else.
On a completely random sidenote, I spent an hour at work today trying to break my supervisor's bike lock with a Bic pen. It's the latest rage. It didn't work.
I have a hard time telling when somebody's being serious and when they're being sarcastic when I read their writing. From what I'm told (and the responses I tend to get), apparently I have a hard time making it clear when I'm being sarcastic and when I'm being serious. Maybe it has to do with me having a tendency to make flippant remarks that I don't really mean and say just because...I feel like saying it.
Changing the subject completely, it's hard to write well when you aren't passionate about the subject. For the most part, I really don't care about anything right now, so my writing's tanked completely as well (not that there was much of a plunge for it to take before, but now it's even less than what it was before).
Poor writing irritates me, and I knowing I'm producing more noise in an effort to get more signal isn't sitting too well with me.
So! I will instead write a few things on my list of "Things Which Make a Girl Attractive."
1. The ability to write well. This is usually a good sign the girl will be interesting to talk to.
2. Nice hands (I've said before that I can forgive a lot for a nice pair of hands; this is still in effect)
3. Altruism. Altruistic girls are great, so long as it doesn't go overboard.
4. Slim. Fat is no good. I've also come to conclude in recent years that I'm not a fan of big breasted women. B/C is good, D is too much for me, A I can deal with on a case-by-case basis...but they better be really engaging to talk to
5. Kind. This goes with altruism, nice girls are good. Vindictive and vengeful is not.
There are other things on the list but these tend to come up most frequently and make the biggest impact. Leave comments if you know of any girls like that who are single, looking to date, and are not crazy (or pretend to be crazy...that tends to get on my nerves pretty quickly) :D
When my friend Dickson came to visit a week or so ago he said to me "What happened to you Randy? It's like Berkeley's sucked the life right out of you."
Yeah, somewhere or other it feels like I've just stopped caring.
One of these days, I'm going to find a way to reinject some sense of life into me.
There was a time when admitting you were gay would lead to a social backlash against you. A time when you had to congregate with others who were gay and have a parade so you could say to yourself "look, I'm not alone! I'm not the only freak!"
Times change, and now it's almost pop to be gay.
But society has to hate on somebody. America just wouldn't be American anymore if there weren't any hate. We export the finest, uncut pure hate in all the world. Not a drop of ether or bleach to be found in this land. Sometimes, we import hate too. Sometimes it comes in a black viscous substance from the Middle East.
And since we all need something to hate on and be in the closet about, we have the in the new generation: anime fans. Be careful not to admit that you're an anime fan, or risk the social backlash of being labeled "one of those way too hyper people who spew really poorly spoken Japanese words like 'genki' and have the sort of pronunciation that makes Gilbert Gottfried sound like a bubbling brook in the midst of a summer heat."
Everybody hates anime fans. Anime fans hate anime fans. They congeal in conventions and rub their sweaty, unshowered bodies with one another as they have a heated debate (which just makes them sweatier) about why THEIR series is the best ever (and how they understood everything that happened in Evangelion, even though everything they say is wrong).
So remember kids, do your duty as an American and hate hate hate on the anime fans. Do your country justice and provide them with the finest hate that even the Nicaraguans in all their uncut glory can't compete with.
Sometimes, I feel like a prostitute.
It goes a little something like this:
A resident decides on a time that's convenient when I (or my coworkers) are available, and an appointment is set up. I go over at the appointed time (on time, always on time because it's ever so important to be punctual), and we do our thing. We don't really need to know each other's names, and even if we do introduce ourselves it's oftentimes so ephemeral that we won't remember ten minutes later.
Sometimes we'll talk while we're doing it. Sometimes it's a fascinationg conversation, like when I talked for a half hour with a girl about various classical composers and which ones we liked for their style of composition. Sometimes it'll be empty chit chat on the classes they're taking or I'm taking and neither of us really cares but we try to fill the silence with a sound to stifle our individual discomforts.
When I'm done dancing my dance and they're done with theirs we part with a smile and a wave. Should we meet on campus we carefully avert our eyes and pretend to be engrossed in the particular cloud formations of the day (even if it's completely overcast) and walk on by, ignoring the other's existence. But they know and I know that there was a moment when we connected, we simply do not dare to voice the thought aloud lest its reality sink in upon us.
On the other hand, one of my apartmentmates who also did the job sees it as being a doctor. He's a much lighter fellow than me.
I work in the dorms here, wandering around the dorms helping poor confused residents with their computer problems. I've been blessed with the opportunity to run into more porn ads, offers to buy Russian brides, and herbal Viagra peddlers than homeless people on the streets of Berkeley.
For the uninitiated, that's a lot.
My job puts me in close contact with the residents, seeing how I have to go to their rooms to help them with their problems and get them up and running again. Sometimes I get really cool residents (like this one room which has not only offered to bake us brownies, but has also delivered...only to have one guy usurp them all *raises fist of anger*), sometimes I get really uncool shady residents (like this one guy who wanted me to tell him how to pirate massive amounts of music without getting caught), and sometimes you get residents that aren't always quite...all there.
Today, I had the fine opportunity to be exposed to the engaging conversation of a room full of freshman girls; the kind that think the question of whether or not they should ask that oh-so-cute boy down the hall for his phone number could dramatically influence the direction the rest of their lives take. Ignore for a moment that he's probably gay, and if he's not then he's probably just bought in to the whole metrosexual thing and will probably buy into the next thing the TV (or his equally easily bought friends) tell him to do.
All nastiness aside, this brings me a bit closer to my point: The vast majority of us are completely, totally uninteresting. The things that set us apart from one another are trivial and superficial. So you joined a frat; so have hundreds of people before you. So you play piano; so does every other Asian kid on the face of the planet (even the retardeded ones, trust me).
People talk the same way, say the same things, and oftentimes seem to think the same way. I hoep I'm not just getting jaded and cynical when I get bored talking to someone almost immediately when I realize they have nothing to say. For that matter, I don't know if it's really fair to hold it against them. The course of the lives of most of us is not fraught with peril, most of our parents don't beat us or neglect us, most of us subscribe to some form of religion or another (that by itself makes a lot of people really boring really quickly), and we all mostly do the same things. We watch movies, we go to school, we work, we fall in love, and we have messy break ups filled with I-hate-you's and you're-a-fucking-sluts.
There really isn't all that much room in the rhythm and the flow of our lives for diversity. It's not about this being the disease of "that group of people over there," but the group I'm a part of. When I think about what sets me apart from other people, what makes me different and unique, and what makes me interesting I draw a blank.
During a course I taught two years ago, I asked people in the class to go around and say their name and something interesting about themselves. I offered to start; I said: "Something interesting about me is that there is absolutely nothing interesting about me."
I lied. Being completely uninteresting is pedestrian, the flavor of the generation.
But there seems to be a mini-solution to this problem. It's been another long day at work, so I'll write more about it when I'm a bit more coherent.
Think about it.