>>> Text-Heavy
By staff writer E.E. Southerby
Volume 44 – August 10, 2003
Now Playing: “Meet Me at the Bottom” by Longwave
The summer is starting to wind down. It's the middle of August, and nothing much is going on. Every college student in the world is busily slaving away at their summer jobs, except for those that somehow didn't manage to find a job for the summer and are therefore busy sleeping in until two in the afternoon and getting yelled at by their moms. If you're like me, and you'd better not be because that would mean that I'm like you, and I really don't like that idea very much at all, a lot of unrelated thoughts enter your head throughout the day. Almost all of them are a complete waste of time, and no sane person would ever want to read or hear about them without first indulging in ‘recreational' pharmaceuticals. I have included a sampling here, for your convenience. Here's what happened:
-How totally awesome would it be to work in the bottom rungs of a University Administrator's office and also, by sheer measure of coincidence, happen to be named ‘Dean'?
-Why is it that, if you go to the washroom just to wash your hands, as soon as you're done you decide that as long as you're already there you may as well go to the bathroom, and then you have to wash your hands again? Does this happen in any other facet of life? Have you ever gone to your car just to get something out of the backseat, and then decided, as long as you're there, you may as well drive to the mall?
-How come there are still stores with names like ‘Crazy Joe's' or ‘Crazy Ivan's'? What kind of a bullshit holdover from the 80s is this? You always see the commercials like “Come to Crazy Joe's! Where the prices are so low, they're CRAZY!” I want these stores to disappear, or at least go whole-hog. I want to see a store called ‘Suicidal Steve's'. I even came up with a commercial: “Hi. I'm Suicidal Steve. I'm having a closing-out sale. Everything must go. (At this point, Steve bursts into a fit of tears and the camera cuts to static.)” I think that would go over really well amongst the people who like to shop at a store named after a combination of the owner and his least appealing feature.
-Suppose you got all of your information about the outside world solely from the internet and the Jenny Jones show. Now, what percentage of the world's females would you think were in porn?
-Obviously, SOMEONE must still be buying CDs, even in the post-Napster world of online piracy. I mean, every week the Billboard chart is filled with albums that have sold millions of copies. The real question is: Why? Who are these people who can't seem to figure out how KaZaa works, but still somehow manage to make it to a music store without falling down and breaking their helmets or lighting themselves on fire?
-Are there any summer interns in the whole entire world who work in a cubicle and yet somehow haven't gotten really, really good at Minesweeper?
-What ever happened to ‘pump'-style sneakers? You know, the shoes that had that stupid bubble on the tongue that you would have to squeeze a couple of times before you could walk anywhere in them? Boy, those were cool AND useful. Provided that by ‘cool' I meant ‘looked like you were wearing pool floaties on your feet' and by ‘useful' I meant ‘provided the ability to check one's blood pressure at any time, including important business functions'.
-As a modern suburbanite, it's quite common to make fun of people who live in rural areas and small towns. We call them by these derogatory names like “hicks” and “donkey-fuckers”, and accuse them of smelling funny and having bad teeth. My problem isn't with the stereotype. My problem is that I have a hard time imagining the rural folk making fun of us the same way (“Hey, Lester! Check out Mr. Big City Boy with his flush toilets and ability to read. What a loser!”)
-Quote of the Moment: My friend Sean, after I suggested we spend the day Go-Karting: “Why would we do that? We both have cars. And they go faster than Go-Karts.” I concede he may have a point. But in my defence, I kind of thought the Go-Karts would be able to do loop-the-loops and corkscrews and jumps, kind of like a life-sized version of Hot Wheels. There's a possibility I may have been drunk, or thinking of roller coasters.
-And, finally, do you remember in high school how you would count down the number of days until summer vacation? Well, now that I'm in college, and it's summer vacation, I find myself counting down the number of days until school starts. What the hell happened here? And does this trend have an end? What's going to happen when I graduate from college and start working full time? (“Ok, it's Tuesday, so that means only 11,951 more days until I die. Yay!”)