Expectations Vs. Reality

I recently got a guitar and have been attempting to learn to play. I’ve seen Justin Bieber play guitar. Taylor Swift. The Jonas Brothers. I figured, how hard can it be?

I thought I would be like this:

Instead I was more like this:

This got me thinking about expectations versus reality.

Expectation: I am an intelligent person so therefore I will be rewarded for that.

Reality: These people have a near billion-dollar empire and are not even literate.

Expectation: I’ve been working out. I think I can pull off a swimsuit.

Reality: “OH DEAR GOD. WHAT IS THAT THING?”

Expectation: I spent 4 hours studying for this test. I should be ok.

Reality: What the f@ck is this? Am I even in the right classroom?

Expectation: I’m going to take a picture with my friends and it’s going to look super cute.

Reality: We’re all going to pose with our hands on our hips and a huge fake smile on our faces while we take fifteen of the same photo (all of which we will, of course, post on facebook)

Expectation: I am only going to have one Mountain Dew today.

Reality: I only had one 12-pack of Mountain Dew today.

Well, maybe the last one is just me.

Tis the Season

In the midst of toxic political rhetoric, unprecedented partisanship in Congress, over-the-top political correctness, and a crippling national deficit, it’s easy to forget what this time of the year is about.

For those of you thinking I was going to say “presents,” not only are you wrong but you are shallow bastards who need to go to church ASAP.

This is the time of the year for Santa Claus.

You know, that morbidly obese man who wears a red fur suit, rides on flying reindeer, invades our homes for milk and cookies and leaves some crap under the Christmas tree which has a partially peeled off sticker from Toy’r’Us?

Yeah, that’s Santa.

Before we get further into this: yes, I am aware that Santa isn’t real. My mother and father kindly crushed that fantasy for me in the same night they told me the truth about the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

To be fair, I should have figured out the Tooth Fairy a lot sooner considering that the fairy that visited my house seemed to be quite a bit stingier than the one that dropped off 5’s and 10’s at my friends’ houses.

Stingy

But back to Santa. Where in the hell did this myth get started? I went to a Catholic elementary school so I am well versed in the story of Saint Nicholas putting crap like an orange in some kid’s dirty shoe but how did we get from there to here?

Oh, Saint Nick... you shouldn't have. You really shouldn't have

Now Santa is carrying around flat screen televisions and xboxs and ponies. I just don’t see the connection.

But, if we insist on feeding this myth to our children, I propose it’s time for an upgrade.

First, Santa needs to ditch the reindeer and sled. I don’t know if he’s ever watched National Geographic or the Discovery Channel or even Dora the Explorer but reindeer don’t fly and they certainly don’t have noses that light up.

On a side note, Santa lives at the f-ing North Pole with elves and a magical herd of reindeer but he needs his special-needs reindeer to guide his sleigh in the fog? Ever heard of a flashlight, old man? Better yet, just use FedEx.

Anyway, I’m suggesting Santa get his hands on an fleet of airplanes so he and his elves can cover more ground faster. Then his reindeer can get back to doing what they do best: playing reindeer games and generally not giving a f about anything.

Reindeer: they really DGAF

Second, Santa needs to slim down. We try to teach our children to eat healthy foods and be active yet their favorite person in the world is a fat ass with high blood pressure who survives on milk and cookies. Come on Santa! Get your shit together. Let’s face it: he doesn’t make the toys. The elves spend all year in sweat shop-like conditions making toys for about 15 cents an hour. That means Santa basically does nothing for 364 days of the year. The least he could do is go to the gym a couple times a week.

Still a few pounds away from that target weight

Lastly, Santa needs to reorganize his business plan. We all know that money talks. 99.9% of fights/arguments/wars are directly or indirectly about money. That being said, how does Santa survive? He makes no money throughout the year and gives everything away. Is this the message we really want to teach our children?

            “Here you go. Work as hard as you possibly can all year but you’re never, ever going to see anything from this. Enjoy!”

Bahumbug, I say.

The only alternative to this, as I see it, is to stop perpetuating the legend of Santa. And I know just the person to help: Dick Cheney.

I hear he gets his strength from the tears of children.

So these are your options: a modern Santa for modern times or a super-powerful Dick Cheney.

Option A

Option B

How To Study For Finals

I’ve been busy studying and what not.

Mainly “what not” with a little “studying” on the side.

Anyway, here’s a list of my fail-safe ways to ace your finals and not go crazy in the process

1. Time management.

            The most important thing about studying for finals is to know how to properly procrastinate. What I like to do is start studying about a week before so that I trick myself into thinking I have plenty of time. The first day or so of this “studying” is simply going through my notes and tearing out all the pages of doodles and drawing up a few note cards. I really like to use notecards because I have the illusion of doing something useful with my time but I’m essentially copying what’s already in my notes onto a smaller piece of paper. Up until the day or two before the final, I take my notebooks and books and note cards and liter them around my body so I feel like I’m accomplishing something. Then, I like to read over my note cards with a look of utmost concentration on my face. I really feel like I’m getting something out of it even though I couldn’t tell you a single word I'm reading because I’ve been listening to Tegan and Sara (remember us?) on my iTunes.

            This method is awesome because the day or two before the final you think to yourself “HOLY SH!T MOTHER F@CKER I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING” and buckle down and actually study. Works like a charm.

2. Take breaks.

            I know a lot of people that study for hours and hours at a time without taking a break (*cough* my roommate, Michele) I, unfortunately, am not a mutant creature born in a tragic lab accident with radioactive elements (don’t worry, Michele, your tail is hardly noticeable). Since I can’t study for hours on end, I built myself a rewards program. For instance, if I read ten pages of something boring, I allow myself to go on facebook for 10 minutes. Or if I make an outline for an essay I have to write, I get to mess around looking at funny pictures on pophangover.com for 30 minutes. Or if I review a few important theories for a class, I let myself watch a movie. Or if I study two note cards, I reward myself with no more studying for the whole day.

            Or something along those lines. 

            You just have to  find a way to keep yourself motivated to study and if that means doing things that aren’t studying… Well, do what you have to do.

 My roommate, Michele. Don't laugh at her.

3. Never say “no”

            Maybe you, unlike me, have some self control and will power. Maybe you normally don’t allow yourself caffeine or fatty foods or don’t let yourself stay up after midnight. Studying for finals is your chance to partake in all of these things. I typically only allow myself to have 2 cans of Mountain Dew a day (ps if you’re saying “ONLY two???” I would like to wave my middle finger in your direction). During finals though, I need to be able to stay up and focused for hours (as noted in tip 2; pophangover.com won’t search itself). The best way to stay focused and study is to give in to absolutely any whim you have. That means I’ve been mainlining Mountain Dew for the past week and I’ve never felt better (minus the weird twitching in my leg, constant throbbing headache, and blurred vision in my left eye—unrelated, I’m sure).

4.DGAF

            Ah yes, the old college fall back. The best way to not get worked up about finals is to simply not give a f@ck. I typically DGAF about most things but, during finals week, I spread my DGAF umbrella to include pretty much everything.

So I have a two hour cumulative final which is 40% of my final grade? DGAF.

So my sociolinguistics final requires that I am prepared to write long essays on six possible topics even though we will only write on two? DGAF.

So I need to write an essay comparing and contrasting four unrelated authors (compare: they are all dead. Contrast: everything else)? DGAF

See, don’t you feel better already?

The Pierre City Pool

Just to clear the air, I didn’t write a blog specifically for today. I’m a little busy with end-of-semester preparations. But, fear not! Earlier this semester I had to write a prose piece with no dialogue about a location. What location could be better than the place that has been home to some of my happiest times? Aka The Pierre City Pool!

If you can get passed the cracked floors, decades of water damage, and numerous insect infestations, the Pierre City Pool is actually a pretty charming place. After all, it’s not every day that you come across a still functional sixty-year-old outdoor pool; especially when it is a pool located in the frozen tundra of South Dakota. But, there it sits in all its ancient glory. It has all the slightly unsettling feeling of a building gone to seed yet neither the pool patrons nor the pool itself seems aware of this.

Walking in the doors of the office to pay the obligatory $1 entrance fee, you are almost struck blind by the sheer brightness of the colors splashed across the wall. If you were in a giving mood, you could assume the walls were painted in this seizure-inducing manner to bring light into this concrete abomination of a building but it would be more accurate to say it was a desperate attempt to cover the fact that the original paint (probably lead based) was chipping off the walls. As if this were not enough, the building reeks of chlorine, industrial strength cleaners, and the more sinister smell of warm urine. To be fair, I’ve never been to a pool where there wasn’t this smell but the Pierre City Pool has a particularly persistent blend that seems to burrow into your nose and ferment there until everything you encounter for the next week becomes associated with the sour smell of old piss.

Retreating further into the dank recesses of the pool, you can never be sure what you’ll find. Various food items have fallen on the floor and dripped on and stepped on mercilessly until they resemble a generic yellow mush or—if allowed to sit for a few days—a greenish glob of furry, slimy mold covering what used to be overly processed food. Attracted to this concoction of contaminated cuisine is a steady stream of ants, which are apparently impervious to every insecticide, pesticide, or genocide on the market. In fact, they seem to derive an unnatural strength from them and steadily march their mutated masses to the gargantuan globs of green goop, carrying whatever they can back to their toxic nests to feed the next generation of super-ants.

The floors too are dangerous. Worn down from years of wet, bare feet running across them, they are shiny and slick. At least once a week some unsuspecting patron slides on the floor, smacks to the ground, and screams to high heaven on the way to the restroom. The restrooms are lit with long florescent lights that always seem to be on the brink of burning out. The flickering combined with the desperate hum of the lights as they try to carry on adds to the creepy ambience of the bathroom. With rusty stalls, leaky toilets, and something that must have once been a mirror but is now a dull, hardly reflective surface that reduces everyone looking at themselves into a cross between Joan Rivers and Andre the Giant, the bathrooms of the city pool are the kind of place that one avoids on principle—and for fear of catching some incurable disease.

Once outside the pool house to the actual pool, conditions do not improve much. The cement surrounding the pool has buckled and settled so many times over the years that it looks like an abstract structure made by a drunken artist without a level. With the huge dips, sharp lips, and inexplicable chunks missing in the concrete, it is a miracle if you make it to the actual water without ripping off a toe in a gruesome accident.

The pool itself is nothing more than a glorified hole in the ground. It’s covered in cement and a bright blue paint, which attempts to trick the patrons into thinking the water is clean and pure. In various places there are large cracks that have been half-heartedly repaired with either some sort of putty or industrial strength rubber cement. If you can overlook these rather large structural defaults and want to actually enjoy your afternoon at the pool, good luck. There isn’t a whole lot to do. While the pool was originally deep enough to justify diving boards, the few feet of cement poured in an attempt to fix the huge cracks in the bottom of the pool resulted in a maximum depth of six feet. Due to this embarrassingly shallow deep end and the large lip that sticks over into the pool, there are also no back dives, no flips, no pushing, and, essentially, no fun.

There is one slide in the prime depth of 3ft. Everyone falls into one of two categories; either you are too short and almost drown coming off the end or you are too tall and pound your feet, ass, or head on the bottom of the pool. The slide is from the old school of construction where safety was not a concern. There is an eight-foot vertical ladder leading to a 1½-foot by 1½-foot platform, which you must maneuver your ass onto if you want to go down. From there, the slide quickly plummets in an almost vertical drop before leveling off just in time to shoot you into the water.

Even with all of these faults, day after day, there is a line of little brats screaming their heads off with excitement. When the doors open, they rush in throwing their money on the counter and sprint out to the pool, discarding articles of clothing along the way. In this moment, the pool is no longer a dilapidated pock on the landscape but Pierre’s own version of Disney World; the happiest place on earth.

Christmas Letter from the Make It Stop Foundation

Friends. Family. Cherished acquaintances. Secret adversaries. Random people who stumbled upon this blog and have already been drawn in by my charm.

December is International Bieber Fever Awareness Month.

Ever since 2008, as small group of people called Make It Stop (MIS) has been fighting the spread of an epidemic known as Bieber Fever. As of yet, there is no known cure but, this December, by donating $5 to MIS, you can save a child’s life.

What is Bieber Fever?

The origins of Bieber Fever are well known, even if the intricacies and the ultimate cure elude us. In 2008, a young lesbian young boy with the hair of an angel was discovered on youtube.

 One is a lesbian and one is Justin Bieber. Guess which?

In a short amount time, he was one of the biggest stars in the world. In fact, his rise was so meteoric that some have suggested Bieber has ties to certain Russian crime syndicates or is a member of the Illuminati. While neither report has been “proven” by real “journalists,” Justin Bieber’s camp has not denied these charges leading many to believe he is hiding something in that gorgeous hair.

Is this a confession?

Since his rise to the top, numerous men, women, children, and tween girls have fallen victim to Bieber Fever. Symptoms are numerous, varied, and sudden making it all the more difficult to treat.

 A mass case of Bieber Fever

Bieber has released a number of songs in the past few years, each raising his popularity and exposure. Attacks of Bieber Fever seem to happen the most immediately after a release of a song and doctors are working to find what it is that induces this tragic disease. Is it the afore mentioned hair? Is it the silky smooth dance moves? Is it the fact that he talks like gangster from the hood when he is, in reality, a skinny white kid from Canada? Or is it perhaps his lyrics?

Lyrics like:

“Baby, baby, baby, no / baby, baby, baby, oh” -Baby

“Eenie, meanie, miney, mo / catch a bad chick by her toe… ‘cause shorty is an eenie, meanie, miney, mo lova”- Eenie Meanie

“Me plus you, I’ma tell you one time (repeated 3 times)”- One Time

“But I’ma be under the mistletoe / with you, shawty with you”- Mistletoe

These lyrics have confounded some of the greatest minds of our time. Is there some sort of subliminal message or dark magic woven into these lyrics that causes people everywhere to contract Bieber Fever?

We don't yet know.

What you can do to help

Unfortunately, there is no known cure to Bieber Fever and it is estimated that once every 7 seconds someone, somewhere in the world is afflicted with this disease.

Think about that. Once every 7 seconds.

That person could be you.

We aren’t asking you to donate much. All we ask is that this December, you remember the very real threat Bieber Fever poses to us. So please, help.

Donate $5. Donate 5 cents. Donate $500. Just whatever you do, please donate.

Then, share our message with those you know.

The only way to stop the spread of this disease is to raise awareness.

A voice shared is a life saved.

 Please help.

Happy Holidays from your friends at MIS

The Truth Behind El Excellente “Dora the Explorer”

This past Sunday, I spent an hour watching Nickelodeon’s Dora the Explorer. And what an hour it was.

My roommate and I watched “Dora’s Enchanted Forest” which is a misleading title because it isn’t actually “Dora’s” forest. More accurately, it’s King Unicornio’s, a unicorn (10 pts for Nick for originality). Actually, if you really want to get into specifics, the forest belongs to everyone. At least, that’s what they sing in the song at the end. But leave it to that little bitch Dora to take ownership.

It's all MIIINNNNEEE

And Dora. Can I just talk to you for a moment?

You are so f@cking needy.

First, you leave home. Your parents are probably frantically waiting by the phone for you to call. They’ve got an Amber Alert out and neighborhood search parties formed and here you are, running around God-knows-where with a monkey. Normally, I’d be ok with you doing all of this by yourself but what really pisses me off is you can’t go more than three seconds without asking me a question.

First I have to get your map out and memorize the route and repeat it to you because apparently you can’t read a map yourself. (Maybe it’s just me but if I identified myself as an “Explorer,” I’d probably have basic navigation skills like map reading)

 Damn it, Dora. Do it yourself.

After I get your map and repeat the instructions to you, we get to a fork in the road. In the distance down one path is the cornfield we are supposed to go through and on the other path is some sketchy-ass windmill aka something that isn’t on our map. At every single fork in the road Dora stops, looks at me, and asks where we’re supposed to go.

I DON’T KNOW, BITCH. MAYBE TO THE CORNFIELD LIKE I TOLD YOU 3 SECONDS AGO.

What’s worse, after I tell her this, she just blankly stares at me for about 10 seconds before saying, “That’s right! Which path should I use to get there?”

I DON’T KNOW, BITCH. USE YOUR EYES. I CAN SEE IT FROM HERE.

Again, she stares at me for 10 seconds before saying, “That’s right! Let’s go!”

 "Which way do I go to get to that tree that I can see from here and is on this path?"

As we walk down the right path (finally) Owl, the villain, inevitably does something to stop us. Owl’s a huge asshole.

Eventually, we get to a bridge over mud that is approximately 3 inches deep. Owl has his minions remove two screws from the top of the bridge and it tumbles into the mud.

Two screws and the whole thing tumbles in? That does not seem structurally sound.

 This isn't the bridge from the Dora I watched but apparently shoddy construction is typical in Dora's travels

So what does Dora do? Does she get down and walk in the mud for 15 ft and get her shoes muddy? No way!

She spots some elves doing work on the other side of the mud and imperiously order ME to yell to them to come help us. Why can’t she do it herself? She clearly has no problem bossing me around.

This is the face of a modern day slave 

Anyway, the elves come, she explains her dilemma and the elves get down in the mud (which, as I previously stated, is about 3 inches deep) and REBUILD THE MOTHER F@CKING BRIDGE FOR HER!

Also, I would like to pause here and note that the elves

1) build the bridge from the top down which is completely impossible and against the laws of physics so I have to question this show’s status as “educational”
2) one of the elves happens to be carrying around two small screws which he uses to screw the bridge back together. Two tiny screws? NOT OK

3) the elves have screws but no screwdriver (wtf kind of logic is that) but Dora, luckily, remembers she has one in her back pack.

So what does she do? MAKES ME GET HER F@CKING BACKPACK OUT AND LOOK FOR IT!

 Most frightening backpack I've ever seen

So I open up this little shanty’s (new word meaning “stupid bitch”) backpack and what do I find?

The contents of her father’s tool box apparently. We’ve got a wrench, pliers, a screw driver, a hammer, and a saw.

A SAW

Let’s review. A three year old child has run away from home to go to the Enchanted Forest to help King Unicornio reclaim his throne and what does she pack in her backpack? A SAW. No water, no food, no money or way to contact home. Just A SAW.

There is so much more to go into here but for now, this is going to have to suffice. I have to go now because my shanty friend Dora is making me do her laundry and give Boots (her rabid and possibly mangy monkey) a bath.

 Children, if a monkey approaches you with a yellow tail and underbelly, run away. It's got mange.

Adios Amigos