Life lessons learned

Valuable lessons learned during a summer spent in quiet, monastic contemplation:

1. It is highly irresponsible to speed while driving drunk. You could get pulled over.

2. 4am soccer is better played in Bethesda traffic than barefoot on wet grass.

3. On that note, storefront windows resist soccer balls much better than Rvan's living room window.

4. If the need to escape arises, front royal, virginia offers a bevy of cheap, plentiful, presumably well-insulated motel rooms

5. "The Exorcist" was set there for a reason: Georgetown is pure evil.

6. While it is difficult to get fired from a temp job, believe that you can do anything you put your mind to

7. Tardiness with finesse is a virtue

8. Under no circumstances should you store magic mushrooms in the family fridge

9. For the truly astute, O.A.R. dangerously blurs the line between irony and sincerity

10. Contrary to popular belief, the backseat of a Taurus is not a favorable place to spend the night.

11. The South is best seen through a purple haze, majestic, but passing quickly by in a fast-moving car.

12. It's not too hard to write really solid hip-hop lyrics.

Rebels without a cause (seriously)

Every generation has its defining moment or faces a challenge to which it fearlessly rises, countering some great injustice which it is determined to banish for all posterity.

Our great-grandparents had, I don't know, like the potato famine or handlebar moustaches or something. Or grandparents dealt with the Depression (which I feel is cancelled out by the 20s, which were apparently fucking awesome, so that doesn't really count) and WWII, I guess. Our parents, so I'm told, fought for civil rights and peace in Vietnam.

But our great calling, our defining moment is, apparently, the Facebook Mini-Feed. In a bizarre display of the cutting-edge electronic interconnectedness of American youth, my middle school girlfriend of all people invited me to a 50,000 member strong anti-news feed or whatever group. That's just one of several and probably 10,000 more have joined in the last half hour. I've never seen so many students rally so quickly for a single cause. Except free food.

"No to Mini-Feed! Yes to excessive commentary about it!"

I'm mourning for our generation.

"I wish it were the fucking potato famine again," Dave Ferris says, stroking his handlebar moustache.

[note: I think the new feature is fucking annoying and I endorse every effort to make it go away, including sit-ins and looting.]

Born in 1920

Damnit Grandma Loki! For the last time, when I say "How you livin' Biggie Smalls?" you say, "In mansions and Benzes, givin' ends to my friends and it feels stupendous."

Is it that hard!??

P.S. Grandma Loki really does give me mad ends.

Career advice from my mom #1

[This may or may not be a series, but it should be, because there's about as much good career advice coming from my mom as from the Columbia Career Center, and that's no lie.]

Mom: "David, why don't you think about working for a generic corporation?"

Me [in the middle of spooning broccoli into my mouth]: "Huh?"

Mom: Like an insurance company. You can be a policy underwriter!

-FIN!-

A night at the Emmystifying reason why people give a fuck about this shit

This subject has been the source of embittered rants time and again, and I'm not bringing anything new to the subject, but it frustrates me that so much attention is lavished UPON WHAT GODDAMN EUROTRASH PIECES OF CLOTH CELEBRITIES COVER THEIR OVERLY PLASTIC SURGIFIED BODIES WITH at every awards ceremony! It's not that people take a casual interest in it; that's fine. It's a harmful diversion from daily life. But some people, and namely some people in the media, take it too far, with an overabundance of coverage which wouldn't be a problem if there weren't 50 million other subjects more deserving of commentary (even empty-minded commentary!), including a whole litany of social and political problems in our country and the world of which people are either unaware or indifferent because the media barely gives them a sidelong glance before racing over to drool over George Clooney's shoes or whatever. And, to be perfectly blunt, it seems to be less educated, more lower-class people who care about red carpet fashion, which is a shame, because they of all people should repudiate the worship of ultrarich celebrities who, frankly, couldn't care less about them, and start demonstrating more pride and self-interest in their own class.

When I'm finally invited to the Emmys, I'm going to wear a fly-ass shirt that is ubersexy and has the power to kill Joan Rivers.

Hallo, David. Dies ist die Start-Seite.

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Hallo, David. Dies ist die Start-Seite. Hier siehst du im Überblick, wenn es etwas Neues für dich gibt. Du kommst immer zu dieser Seite zurück, wenn du links im Menü auf Start klickst. Was möchtest du jetzt machen?

One of my more inanely fond memories of college was rampaging through facebook at the end of a drunken night, or actually often at the beginning of the night, and maybe on one or two occasions that was the whole night, just vodka and orange juice and a lot of clicking. Actually that never happened, thankfully.

The novelty of this wore off long ago, but this afternoon Rumit, who even though he lives in South Bend, Indiana now still won't leave me the fuck alone (just kidding Rumit), introduced me to Studenvereichins, which is European facebook, whose interface is an exact replica of our own, only with more racism, and tighter pants. Also it's written in German.

For anyone who can stumble blindly through the German language well enough to sign up, I highly recommend it. I have an unusual fascination with visiting and experiencing other schools. There is a unique kind of freedom and unaccountability I'm drawn to, in addition to the curiosity of peering into a world that's very similar to yours, but obviously different down to every person who occupies it.

Euro Facebook, as geographically and socially removed but nevertheless uncannily identical to our version as it is, is therefore a perfect outlet, or at least a perfect 20-minute distraction from job applications. (Sometimes I feel like this entire summer has been a perpetual distraction from job applications, even the going-to-NY-for-interviews part).

So we'll see where the following statement, under "Über sich selbst" (About Me), leads:

So it's like this. I get drunk and wake up and I'm on German facebook. Stuck in the vortex with all its incomprehensible spellings and alien characters like that B-looking thing, that makes me think of chocolate. The only way I can find my way back home to America is through a randomly plotted spasm of anonymous friending - I mean FREUNDing - until by some insidious miracle of 'social networking' I find a connection back home.

It's the ultimate test of whether this kind of technology isolates or unifies us. Now where's my fucking chocolate Germany.

The beauty of it all is that the same annoying social/sexual politics and other bullshit (based on a cursory glance of unknown people and an incomprehensible languag) carries over to the European version, along with all the details that really characterize Facebook. There's the self-conscious self-exhibition (like Phil Braatz here) designed to communicate either 1) one's high-octane party-hopping lifetstyle, 2) one's awe-inducing artsiness, or 3) one's recent trip to some place way cooler than you'll ever go (except on Euro facebook they just take a snapshot in the backyard). (And if you're really a douche you'll put a photo of yourself playing a drum on a Moroccan roof, hitting the trifecta without actually realizing that before writing this.)

Phil Braatz, Uni Konstantz, Germany, international hustla

Not being able to read German (90% of the registered users are apparently German) obviously impedes my ability to peer into this world, but in a way it's more interesting, to see the signs without the language. Back and forth wall postings, with their forced attempts at humor, they're cautious flirting, they're light-hearted inside joke-peddling. I didn't really look but I'm sure there are Gruppen like ours too: "I went to public ecole, PUTE!", "Examen ist fast so schlimm wie GW Bush," some Portuguese kids who hate Uggs and popped collars with the same fervent passion as we once did, and probably a "I'm from Oslo PROPER, not the suburbs!" group or two.

Still, there's something unsettling about this level of voyeurism, to think that some random American several thousand miles away can look so intimately at so many students in their own supposedly private university network. Of course, you only see what they want you to see, but between lists of friends, photo albums, wall postings (somewhere in Berlin or Leipzig or someplace right now there's a German Lynne commanding her boyfriend to schreibe on her Pinnwand....Pinnwand means wall, jerks), one can construct a pretty extensive character sketch of this stranger on the screen, imagined enough to be real. And upon perusing all these lives a feeling came back to me that I once experienced one evening at dusk, lost, for all intents and purposes, at some random technical college tucked away at the end of a bus line in Ostrava, Czech Republic, came back to me, as I stood in a place I would never have heard of much less set foot in if not for an unplanned 6-hour train layover on the way to Krakow, a feeling of distance and lonely curiosity and innocent intrusion, standing outside their dorm, hearing the murmurs of early Friday night escape through every open window, seeing unknown faces and silhouettes of strangers brush by the windows.


It prompts me to wonder (and of course these are unanswerable questions) whether people around the world are fundamentally the same or essentially different, and whether this kind of Internet voyeurism and manic social networking brings those people closer, or divides, compartmentalizes, categorizes, and isolates them.

I composed a song on the guitar today which, if you could expand its 4 mellifluous notes to three or four minutes somehow, may or may not be some kind of masterpiece.

I will not share it in written form here, for fear that someone may attempt to play it, and God will hear it, and be so touched by its beauty that, so moved by the idea of something greater than He, will unmake existence.

Sorry, I'm just trying to be responsible.

(Hint: its sound is similar to the Fanta jingle)

Craigslist Adventures: Blame Brian Drew

Earlier this summer, when I began working the front desk at an office downtown, I began the habit of perusing DC Craigslist, purely out of boredom, and only because whoever worked there before me had bookmarked the website along with all the ones I had to visit for actual job-related stuff.

However, since my pseudo-job did actually, in one way or another, revolve around finding similar ways to pass 8.5 hours, I spent a fair amount of time on the site and eventually developed the idea of writing a Craigslist-focused blog, inspired by the steady stream of weirdos and lost souls writing No, wait, actually the idea came to mind at the end of one Saturday night and the dawn of Sunday morning when I, drunk, lay sprawled over the scuffed leather armchair in my basement with an afghan over my face and Brian Drew, significantly drunker, rampaged through Craigslist mercilessly putting up posts of the most subversive quality.

So, this experiment will serve to navigate the terra incognita of anonymous Internet social networking and curiously exploit the lonely, the inarticulate, the trite, the exceedingly horny, the buyers and sellers of junk, and all types in between who have been drawn together by force that is Washington DC Craigslist.