Category Archives: Modern Life

Feb 28 2012
11 Comments
Lists, Modern Life, Two minute read

Five Bad Ideas and One Good One

Oh sweet and savory. It does not get better. .

Uh oh. The weather is nicer than you expected and your coat and scarf are now grossly inappropriate. You’ve become too warm and are forced to take the scarf off and put it in your bag which bulges awkwardly, making you feel like a clumsy forest creature. This sucks.

Also, you’re locked out of your house.

The key is sitting on your desk, safe within the apartment’s walls. Your phone is dead, you have precious little cash on you, and your roommate is out somewhere in this godforsaken city.  She won’t be coming back until much later, if she’s even still alive. A salty panic rushes over you: “Oh God what do I do? I’m completely alone, getting hungrier and more fatigued by the second. Is there any hope??”

In order to save time, you should consider your extremely limited options as you panic. Remember that the situation is just as hopeless as it seems. You have only six possible courses of action.

  1. Break the door down. Borrow your neighbor’s Gerber Camp Axe and bash that bad boy in while thinking of people or societal situations you don’t like. When your roommate gets back and starts to ask questions, wondering why she stepped onto a heap of door splinters after entering the apartment through a gaping hole, say you don’t know what happened and that you’ll go fifty fifty with her on a replacement. Encourage silence by wearing a pair of her patterned socks as an unspoken threat.
  2. Use your spider-human powers to shoot thick, moist web from the disgusting holes in your wrists and swing up to the balcony. If the door is unlocked, you can stride right in and pretend nothing happened. If not, you can smash that bad boy in and follow the instructions from the previous piece of advice.
  3. Depending on your manna levels, you might be able to reduce your body density and float through the door. This is an advanced maneuver, however, so be careful when trying it. Internal organ damage is likely if the density reduction is done improperly.
  4. Go to the grocery store and spend all of your money on chocolate pudding. While you wait for your roommate’s return, devour it in front of your door with the spoon you keep in your pocket. The pudding won’t help you get into your house, but you’ll feel better about the situation with a belly full of pudding.
  5. Go across the street to your landlord’s mom’s apartment and eat meatballs while watching foreign soap operas until your roommate comes back (Note: this option is Egypt-specific).
  6. Go to IHOP’s National Pancake Day Celebration and eat free pancakes. Stay awhile and make friends with the staff; they are your new family. Leave your old life behind and never look back.
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Jan 30 2012
8 Comments
Lists, Modern Life, Two minute read

7 Indicators of a Great Start to the Semester

No pen=no doodle. 😦

1. You forget the pen you were sure you recalled and proceed to not record anything for the entire day except for when you borrow that one guy’s pencil. You even regret doing that because the lead is really light and a pain to write with but you remember that beggars can’t be choosers.

2. You spend a large amount of class time debating whether the classrooms feel most like a coffin, grave, cistern, or well. You decide that the grave motif resonates the most because of how you feel about the course itself and the room’s stark lack of natural light, but ultimately you throw out all your choices and settle on describing it as a morgue: stale and lifeless.

3. After staring at the wall for most of your first class, you rush downstairs when it ends to go to the bathroom/escape. Later on you see the teacher from that class who asks you whether anything is wrong. The prospect of taking classes for the next 4 months in the morgue makes you want to curl up and die but there’s nothing she can do so you keep your mouth shut.

4. On your way into the university, you look at the bottle of water you just purchased and wish it were whiskey. You close your eyes and wish for it to turn into whiskey. When you open them, it is still water, which you drink because you hope will cure your massive headache.

5. Having shivered most of the day, you exit your unheated classroom building and find that the air of the city in which you reside has been rendered brown and unbreathable from dust kicked up by the massive gusts of wind. This would make great stuff for a song about witches coming down chimneys, you think to  yourself.

6. The best part of the day was when you learned that your first class might be 15 minutes shorter than originally scheduled. The worst part of the day was when you had to sit through the entire hour and thirty minutes because they hadn’t decided on a time length yet.

7. You’re looking forward to the fact that the only girl’s bathroom is about a 1.5 minute walk away, which will be good for breaks from class over the next four months. If you time it right, you might be able to miss hours of class.

It’s going to be a wonderful semester!

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Jan 05 2012
6 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Open Letters, Three minute read

I’m Unhappy About This Free Service

this is just how it turns up on my news feed. Is that weird?

Dear Facebook,

Recently I’ve been unsubscribing with remarkable pace from many so-called friends I am connected with on your social networking website. After debating for months over whether or not I wanted to hear about these acquaintances’ marriages, babies, or fun nights staying in with a blanket and cup of cocoa, I have decided against the mundane and released myself from hundreds of people and their accompanying facebook drivel.

I expected my newsfeed to become a haven, a place where I could go and see what was happening in the lives of people who are close to me and the interesting or laughable lives of others I am not close to. Alas, this has not happened. One reason is that as I unsubscribe from my facefriends, friends that lurk deep within my friend well have come to the surface, gracing me with one status update or a tagged photo before I try to recall who they are and then unsubscribe from them. This is obviously my fault. You didn’t force me to accept their friend requests or friend people after knowing them for one evening, after which we never saw each other again except for on the sidewalk where we both maintained awkward silence and averted our eyes.

However, another chief reason for my dissatisfaction with the “cleaned up” newsfeed is the garbage facebook continually highlights. I speak, of course, of the continual promotion of prof pic changes, the ubiquitous “so and so and 10 other friends changed their profile picture.” To be frank, I don’t care who changed their profile picture after spending hours and possibly weeks mulling over which snapshot succinctly captured their humor, beauty, or relationship status.

Actually, I can’t think of anything more uninteresting. It might as well read “so and so and all of your other friends used their computers today.” Honestly, what’s the purpose in knowing who changed their profile picture? Not only does it not reflect in the least bit any change for better or worse in their own lives—it’s quite possible to dig out a prof picture from happier months—it is anti-news. It provides no new information while making one feel vaguely anxious and insufficient: “Should I be changing my profile picture so I can appear to be moving forward in my life?” It is iceberg lettuce, the filler in Taco Bell meat, and worse than Yahoo! news.

Facebook, I know that you provide a free service. I know that I have trapped myself into a cycle where living without this service would be undesireable, if not impossible.  Furthermore, I realize that I am powerless against you and that you  will have your way with the facebook-using pawns and wreak whatever kind of layout changes and privacy destruction you wish. That’s why I’m not asking you to stop highlighting profile picture changes on my newsfeed. This letter is actually an urgent request that you do not harm me or my family once you take over the world. This profile picture thing is my only complaint and despite it I will always be loyal to you.

Your eternal and groveling servant,

Emily

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Jan 03 2012
6 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Modern Life, One minute read

Rejected from the Job Search

these boxes do not hold the key to your future. please look elsewhere.

Thank you for completing CareerBeam’s skill verification exercise. At this juncture, our special algorithm would have usually crunched your responses and placed you in one of six categories we use to classify all of mankind. With the knowledge of your category, the world would have been yours for the taking, success and fortune shortly following the completion of our quizlet.

Unfortunately, due to an irregularity in your responses, we are unable to process your information and provide you with the only thing that would rescue your future self from a failed life. The irregularity could have resulted from one of three circumstances:

a. You are wholly unfit for employment. Return to the cave from which you crawled and burden society no more.

b. You are the antichrist. We are legally obligated to tell you about this possibility while not revealing whether or not you are “it.” If your responses lined up with the predicted skill set of the Man of Sin, a team of US Marine exorcists will have been called to exterminate you. Please remain where you are.

c. You are not human. Most likely you are a forest or river spirit trapped in a human body. In either case, you have no place in the workforce. Please take our quiz “Finding your spirit identity” for advice on how to escape your fleshy prison.

Thank you for using Career Beam and we hope you consider us for all your future self-awareness needs.

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Jan 02 2012
6 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Three minute read

Country Music: Proud of Itself

wranglers at Deer Valley Ranch, the former vacation destination of our family

In many parts of the country, a fondness for country music brings a plague upon one’s career and friendships. Country music, outside its native habitat, is as popular as pungent body odor in small vehicles. It is to be masked and not spoken of, its producer’s cheeks reddening in shame and the rest embarrassed to be in the presence of such a foul substance.

Despite the widespread prejudice, country music actually isn’t all that bad. While growing up in OK, I listened to and resented country music all the time, since most of my family members enjoyed it and would play it relentlessly on the radio and at home. Years later at Boston University, this caused the bizarre sensation of both revulsion and pride whenever I heard a country song.

The revulsion resulted from years of carefully practiced loathing, and the pride came from me belonging to something different than the rest of my mostly coastal colleagues. Eventually I came to appreciate the twang-infested music as something unique to the specific subculture in which my adolescence was submerged and an art form that can be quite beautiful in those rare instances where it is done properly. And when it is not beautiful, it is generally hilarious.

Mostly for the ha-has, I’ve been drinking in the country music as much as possible during these short weeks in Oklahoma, but I have realized that a lifetime would not be enough to fully understand the breadth and depth of the genre. Where else do you find such tender descriptions of trucks, tractors, and other vehicles of labor? In this modern music wasteland, what other than country music will dare to describe innocent love in barns, hayfields, and blue jeans? What about all the myriad ways whisky, Jesus, and America are intimately connected with the problems one has while courting the farmer’s daughter?

What I most admire about country music, however, is its ability to admire itself. Since the dawn of the genre, it has been lauding the country lifestyle and the country way, in small towns full of simple, country men and women that like to do country things.

Songs like “I Got My Country On,” by Chris Cagle, “These Are My People,” by Rodney Atkins, “Where I Come From” by Montgomery Gentry, and “Where I Come From” by Alan Jackson, among many others, celebrate a rustic problem free, healthcare free lifestyle. In this highly fictionalized country world, there’s a lot of front porch sitting (AJ) with preacher men in cowboy shirts (MG). It’s where people do things with their own two hands (CG) and give this life everything they have and then some (RA). It’s a wonderful, wonderful, place, and anyone listening to this music would probably imagine a haven of small town goodness, unspoiled by the modern world.

While modernity may not have touched it, the world in which country music lives and from which it sprouts has unfortunately been spoiled by high divorce, obesity, diabetes two, and poverty rates.

However, I am confident that a genre with such hits as “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” “Jesus Take the Wheel,” and “Somethin’ Bout a Truck” will have the creative energy necessary to face this rampant decay with some great ho-down tunes that will get knees a poppin’, heads a bobbin,’ and boots a stompin’.

If you have any other winning country music titles, please feel free to pass them along and I’ll see you down at the barn for the next line dance.

Picture Credit: Trip Advisor

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