Questions For 1/31/09

Do not be deceived by the picture of the pencil. You should use a pen. The guy in this picture has no idea what he's doing.

You have 50 minutes. Please answer in complete sentences. Use blue or black ink. Do not use red ink. If you use red ink, an angel will get leukemia.

Red Robin
I’ve been to literally hundreds of Red Robins in my life, all around the world – from Eugene, Oregon, to Salem, Oregon, to Albany, Oregon, and I think I ate at one in Beaverton once, too. It’s one of the only things that haven’t let me down in some way.
Well, no, scratch that, I’d say just about everything has let me down in some way (the sequels to The Matrix, last year’s economic stimulus package, Colorado) and Red Robin is really no exception. The food certainly has never let me down, but the ambiance, man, they are just grasping at straws. Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, Red Robin – they’re all trying to be so lively and folksy and American, like a throwback to some classic restaurant that had been genuinely lively and folksy and American in the 40s until it went out of business and some meth heads burned the building down a few decades later. And I guess that’s cool, that they want to be like something that was great and unique back in the day, but there’s so many people trying now that what was once a really novel place to eat has now become sort of boring and played.
I mean, yeah, it’s amusing that you’ve got a plastic fireman’s axe hanging up over the door, and oh, wait, is that a group of waiters singing a birthday song and publicly embarrassing someone with a free sundae? It’s all well and good, but there comes a time when a man is ready to be done with the stuff on the walls and the toddlers and balloons and the forced jubilation and just wants to eat a fucking hamburger, you know?
My ideal Red Robin experience is this:
I walk into Red Robin and place my order with the first waitress I can find, paying in advance, in cash. I then walk two blocks south across wet pavement on a somewhat cold night to another restaurant with a name that is a proper noun of some sort (Rick’s, Ed’s, Bill’s, Dockside, The Place). The floors are heavily carpeted, the lighting on the dim side, and there are absolutely no children allowed. The food isn’t so hot, but I’ve got that covered. It’s my birthday, and the staff knows it, but they’re not going to sing or make a fuss or anything because they play it cool there. Ten minutes later, someone from Red Robin comes in, gives me my food, and leaves. And, excellent food in hand, I continue to pitch my idea for the MacGyver movie to Richard Dean Anderson.

1) Every Red Robin has the same décor – does Red Robin have a giant warehouse somewhere like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, only all of the boxes are full of pictures of Marilyn Monroe, sickeningly goofy art, and movie posters?

2) If so, how does that make you feel about America?

3) Remember how they used to have “The Kramer” picture from Seinfeld in Red Robin?

4) You remember how quickly those pictures disappeared after it turned out that Michael Richards was a crazy racist bastard?

5) Did you laugh? Because I laughed.

Extra Credit: Why did I see a poster for K-Pax in Red Robin tonight? I get hanging posters for film noir movies and real classics, but K-Pax was a forgettable movie about Kevin Spacey being a schizophrenic guy who just might actually be a schizophrenic alien. Is that the kind of pop culture we want to preserve?

Babies (As They Pertain To Movies)
It’s really inspiring that, no matter how stupid people are – how bone-ass, XFL loving, Git ‘R Done yellingly stupid they are – that they still just seem to inherently know how to have sex. I can’t really imagine how they’d figure the specifics out, seeing as most movie sex scenes are people wrestling under blankets throughout soft focus close-ups on the actors making funny faces. Porn, maybe? Or they could’ve gotten directions from their friends. They sure as hell don’t teach it in health class (I’m willing to bet that my health teacher Junior year probably watched XFL whilst yelling Git ‘R’ Done). It’s just really inspiring that even if you and your wife are the dumbest motherfuckers to ever live, you can still figure out how to reproduce.
You know how I know this? It’s because people keep taking their infants into R-rated movies – clearly, since these people have babies, they know how to reproduce, but since they seem to think it’s a good idea to take a tiny bundle of shrill crying and pooping and occasional vomiting into an area that demands silence and rapt attention, they are profoundly stupid.

1)Why would you take your baby with you when you go to see Benjamin Button?

2) Did you think, because he’s a baby at one point in the movie, that it would be a family friendly movie? Because, uh, newsflash – there’s violence and sex in there.

3) Or did you just think we’d all be cool with listening to your baby scream for half the movie?

4) Did you know how close I was to starting some shit with your deadbeat-parenting ass? No, I’m totally serious, I was this close to going down to where you were sitting and saying, “Hey, I think they’re still showing Beverly Hills Chihuahua down the hall – maybe you assholes should go see that.” It would’ve been awesome. I would’ve gotten a medal, probably.

Extra Credit: Rid Rock, seemingly unsatisfied with the fact that I’ve already taken him to task in my last two entries, is now starring in a National Guard commercial they show before movies in which footage of “him” “singing” is spliced together with shots of patriotic soldiers and, yes, NASCAR. Do you think that they’re testing us to see just how much we’re willing to tolerate in support of our troops? I think so.

My Job
This Oregon Daily Emerald stuff has been good so far. I’ve got a wider audience, I have interesting hate mail to put on my door, and they just refuse to stop paying me. Recently, the University of Oregon’s alternative libertarian newspaper, The Oregon Commentator, gave me props in a roundabout way for my article about community service. This is particularly impressive because the Oregon Commentator exists primarily to advocate alcohol, mock the Oregon Daily Emerald, and also write about the virtues of a free market economy if time allows. So in your face, people who say my stuff for the Emerald isn’t as good – sure, maybe you, my fans, don’t like it, but the people who built an entire page of their paper around making fun of me and mine sort of liked it!
But it’s been getting tougher recently, and traditionally When The Going Gets Tough, Truman Goes Somewhere Else And Watches TV. As an opinion columnist writing about campus life, I’m sort of restricted in that everything I write has to 1) Have an opinion and 2) Pertain to campus life. Seldom can I come up with something that fulfills both of those requirements, and usually when I do I’m so scared that my opinion will piss 20,000 people off that I’m unwilling to go with it.

1) Why can’t I think of anything to write about when there’s this whole big campus full of stuff happening? Is it my problem, or the campus’s?

2) What kind of opinion columnist is afraid of his own opinions?

3) Should I go to a party and have a Roofie Colada so I can write a hard hitting column about date rape?
(Extra credit for a “No” answer)

4) I imagine some Emerald and Commentator folks are reading this, seeing as I’ve mentioned the names of the papers a few times. What do you guys think?

5) Should I just pretend to have been date raped and write a column about it? That one sounds a lot easier.

Truman Capps kind of suckerpunched you with the serious bit at the end, didn’t he?

Community Service - A Treatise

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

It was a warm evening in May, and I along with some 8000 other people were standing in the quad listening to Barack Obama talk about his vision of the future of America.

He told us that, if elected, he would make it easier than ever for young Americans to go to college, and we all cheered.

He told us that, if elected, he would implement a federal tuition credit program in order to bring down the cost of a college education, and we all cheered.

He told us that in return, we, the youth of America, would repay our country with community service, and the crowd cheered, and I said, “Um, wait – what?”

I’ve always had something of an aversion to community service. Community service was not a graduation requirement at my high school, and the only reason I didn’t join the National Honor Society was because I didn’t want to do the 40 community service hours that were a membership requirement. My logic was that if I wanted to do community service I’d at least commit a misdemeanor first so I could get some fun out of it. Growing up in Salem, I felt that as soon as my community was willing to serve me with effective public transportation, better urban planning, and a branch library that was even reasonably close to my house, I’d be willing to serve it right back. That day never came, however, and thus I logged exactly no hours of community service.

I had never felt bad about ducking my civic duties before Obama came to town. President Bush clearly did not want or need the help of the American public (as indicated by his unwillingness to consult us on matters of domestic wiretapping or FEMA appointees) and I didn’t want to give it to him. My friends who did community service didn’t seem to be gaining any enlightenment from their work, so I didn’t give the matter much thought and instead spent my spare time surfing the Internet and complaining about the sorry state of my surroundings. If angst was a form of community service, I’m sure I would have qualified for a Nobel Prize.

What I realized after the rally, however, was that by griping about what was wrong with the country without doing anything to change it I was just about as bad as the people who complain about the president but never vote. America has its flaws, yes, but I think we can all agree once you forget about the Electoral College and Kid Rock that we live in a really great place. Yes, my community failed to provide me with adequate public transportation or easy access to a library, but it did give me safety, electricity, and 12 years of public education (whether I wanted it at the time or not), and since I wasn’t paying taxes for most of those years, the least I could’ve done was contributed a little elbow grease to keep the place tidy while I was living there.

Do you know how easy it is to live in America? In Austria, South Korea, and Israel, military service is mandatory for the majority of the population. For the very right to live in the country, tens of thousands of people enter military training and leave their families for anywhere from months to years. At the age of 18, Austrian men must serve six months in a branch of the military; conscientious objectors must spend nine months as part of a civilian service work crew. South Korean men are required to spend up to two years as a soldier. And in Israel, men and women alike must serve for three or two years, respectively. Even after their time in the service, Israeli men are required to remain in the reserve program, serving for a few weeks every year until they’re in their mid forties. And in America, people bitch about jury duty. Our country asks so little of us that spending a few hours volunteering to improve your surroundings really doesn’t seem like much trouble at all when compared to boot camp.

It’s important now that we start pulling our own weight – and not because President Obama wants us to, but because it’s what we should have been doing all along. We’ve got to start taking better care of our parks and roads and playgrounds; these are things that our community has given us, and we since can’t expect them to give us new ones right away our best bet is to keep what we’ve got in good working order. Sure, the current mood in the White House seems to be one of change, but if the piles of trash the inauguration crowd left behind are any indicator, the rest of the country seems to think that, having elected The Reformer, their job is done and they can return to their Doritos and American Idol.

Hopefully Obama will do what we put him in office to do, but for it to work – and for it to keep working with the next president, regardless of his or her party – we’ve got to start taking pride in our country, and not just with patriotic bumper stickers. We’ve got to clean this place up like we’ve got company coming over. Oh, there’ll be a time for Doritos and American Idol, but we’ll have to earn it first.

To #44, from #43

As is customary for departing presidents, George W. “Sillypants” Bush left a letter on the desk in the Oval Office for President Obama with sage advice for our newest, blackest president. The contents of that letter were not publicly known.

Until now.

Dear Barak O. Bama,

Hooooo, boy! Has it ever been a long 8 years, am I right? I mean, yeah, the digs are alright and I like the limo, but hows about the pay? That was the thing I always wanted to do – give myself a raise. I mean, yeah, they’ll always tell you that it looks bad to do that, but who cares, am I right? Let me tell you, Bama, you should really succeed where I failed: Raise your salary. With the econo-thingy the way it is, $400,000 a year really isn’t enough to raise a family on.

And I tell you what, I hope you took a good long vacation before you got here, because all those news-watching Huffington Post types just flip a bitch every time I try to take a month or so off. Don’t let that stop you, though – the media’s got this liberal bias thing happening that I keep hearing about, so they’ll probably spin all your vacations as some sort of Ramadadan Muslim spring break deal. Oh, but here’s a tip: Never be on vacation when there’s a flood, because then everybody just freaks out like it’s your fault or something. And heads up, if there is a flood when you’re on vacation, they’re going to expect you to cut your trip short. Yeah, I know, B.S., right? That means no going to birthday parties on the way back. Trust me, I figured that one out the hard way. Honestly, your best bet is to just try and kick back in the White House. If you wear shades to cabinet meetings you can sleep right through them with nobody noticing, and then you can always catch some football on the bigscreen upstairs. Just chew those pretzels carefully.

Yes, Air Force 1 is awesome and yes, the pilot will do a barrel roll for you, but only if you threaten to deport his family.

Oh man, but those Press Core people? Well, after two or three press secretaries we managed to calm ‘em down (shit, how many press secretaries did I have? Even when I’m sober I can’t remember that sort of stuff) but they’re a wily bunch, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get right back to their old tricks once it’s you up there on stage. Those cocky bastards have no respect. They’ll start asking you questions about what kind of stuff you and the boys are doing – as if they have a right to know! I mean, my Dad was president, for God’s sake! Don’t they get it? I’m, like, the prince. I’m the Prince of America.

They tell me you’ve got a family. That’s real great. I’ve got one too. I’ve got a couple of kids – daughters, I think three of them, but who can be sure? Let me tell you, though, I know for damn sure I’ve got a wife. Man, she is always around! And if she isn’t, then there’s some Secret Service guy watching me who’ll tell her where I am. Oh, man, I can’t even tell you how hard it is to get a little side action around here, what with all these people watching. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. After a rough day of not finding weapons of mass destruction, there’s nothing like a cold beer and a non-wrinkled biddy with a couple of interesting piercings. I snuck ‘em in through the underground escape tunnels, but if you need more – and I heard that you people do – there’s other options. When Clinton gave me the grand tour, he showed me this pneumatic doohickey he had rigged up in his bathroom that would literally suck sorority girls out of the George Washington University campus and drop ‘em off on his lap. Now that’s what I call a series of tubes!

You want some real advice, though? This country sucks. Nobody here will ever cut you any slack, ever. So if you were hoping to just sort of lay low for 8 years, good luck. Everybody in this damn country is going to be watching everything you do, and if they decide that they don’t like it or it doesn’t agree with their precious fucking Constitution they’re all, “Hey! Worst president ever!” Keith Olbermann is like some sort of robot who was designed to only say mean things, people with blogs are pretty much terrorists, and never hire Stephen Colbert to speak at a dinner party, because that guy is basically one big liar. Saddam really had it figured out – he did his own thing and nobody said boo about it. Everybody respected the crap out of that guy because he’d kill you if you talked bad about him. And was his Dad president? No! It’s not even fair at all. Read my lips: America blows goats. People can say whatever they want to about the president. You hear me, Bama? Goats.

They never give you the benefit of the doubt or anything. You know what I heard today? My approval rating is 33%! That means only 67% of the country approves of what I’m doing! That’s like a D+, and sure that sort of thing flies at Yale, but this is the real world! Bunch of whiners is what they are. Don’t they get that being president is a hard job? Sure, I’ve made a couple of slipups that might have gotten a few people killed or plunged a country into sectarian violence, but it’s a hard job! They just don’t get that. Sure, maybe I wasn’t totally qualified to do the job, and sure, maybe I wasn’t 100% elected that first time, but it’s a hard freaking job! Doesn’t that count for anything? Not in the US of fucking A, I guess.

So you really want to know what my advice is? Just do stuff and don’t look back. One good thing about this place is that everybody is way too lazy to impeach you, no matter what kind of crazy shit you do, so go to town. You’re the third most powerful man in America after the Vice President and whatever Karl Rove is. You can do whatever you want.

Sincerely yours,

George W. Bush
Prince of America

Truman Capps wishes a plethora of shoes and pretzels on our ex-president.

Romance Language Funding

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

Every student at the University of Oregon must eventually ask him or herself one very important question: What do I hate more, math or foreign languages?

In many cases, it is this question that determines for the student whether he or she becomes a bachelor of arts (B.A.) or a bachelor of sciences (the infinitely funnier B.S.). I know a girl who is getting her bachelor of sciences in theater arts because she would rather take math classes than foreign language classes. It’s in college experiences like these where we choose our path based not on what we want to do, but on what we don’t want to do.

I am painfully bad at math. This is no exaggeration – when I try to multiply fractions, my head fills with the sound of grinding gears and young children crying. It is for that reason that I am a bachelor of arts, now in my second year of Spanish study. I came to college with the high-minded ideal of actually learning a second language, not just faking my way through on charm and bribery like I did in my high school Spanish classes. However, once I got to college, things were considerably more difficult.

At the beginning of last year, I attempted to register for my Advanced Beginning Spanish (111) class, only to find that every available timeslot had filled up. The following term I was lucky enough to get on the waiting list for a Spanish 111 class, and through some time honored charm and bribery was able to get a seat in the class, which met at 8:00 AM five days a week in a building as far from my dorm as humanly possible. There were quite a few other students in line behind me for that seat in the class, none of whom were able to get in. As Spanish 111 is a two-term sequence, these students had to either take it over the summer or put off their foreign language requirements for next year. So far this year in Spanish 202 I’ve seen at least two people each term jockeying for one seat in a Spanish class, each knowing that if they don’t get in they’ll have to wait another year to take the three-term 202 sequence.

The problem is that two years ago the Romance Languages department had only just clawed its way out of a multiple-year spiral of debt, brought on by multiple budget cuts. Since then, the department has been struggling to stay within its smaller budget, which means either drilling for oil outside Friendly Hall or laying off professors. Sadly yet more practically, the department has been forced to eliminate several teaching positions in the past few years, resulting in fewer available classes, which in turn leads to several students playing musical chairs for a spot in a class when there’s only one chair, or maybe no chair at all.

The obvious solution to this problem – the obvious solution to most problems, come to think of it – is more money. Departments throughout the University have had to face shrinking budgets as times get tougher, but to slash budgets for the Romance Languages department, where nearly all bachelor of arts students go to fulfill their language requirements, seriously impacts nearly half the student body. But what can we do? There’s only so much money, and plenty of programs that need it. I know I’d be first in line to complain if funds from my beloved marching band were diverted to another, perhaps more widely benefical, program. The simple fact is that the University just doesn’t have the money to completely fund every one of its academic programs.

If only we had some world-famous, billionaire alumnus with a history of philanthropy…

Hey, so long as you're here, hows about you watch Writers if you haven't already? Find (almost) the complete series on YouTube, and vote our pilot "Funny" on funnyordie.com! If you don't, a nun will die.

Ready for some Oscars

He's got critical acclaim, how 'bout you?

You may have noticed that I’m not a massive sports fan, by which I mean, you may remember several of my previous updates in which I explain that I’m not a massive sports fan. This would be no big problem if I lived in some incredibly nerd friendly country wherein acts of physical ability take a backseat to spelling bees and competitive video gaming. But no, I don’t live in South Korea – I live in America, where professional athletes make more than the president and you can scarcely turn on the TV without seeing burly men throwing balls or hitting balls or hitting each other or hitting each other with balls.

Every few months, a major sporting event comes up and everyone around me with the good sense to take an active interest in sports starts to talk about it, leaving me at something of a loss around watercoolers and other such dispensers of beverages. The World Series, the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup, NBA playoffs, whatever the hell they call the tennis thing – try as I might, these events just really don’t interest me. Don’t take offense, now; the things I like don’t interest you either – why else would just about every TV show I like get cancelled?

Sports dominate our culture, and often the only time that all Americans are united, save for hatred of France or hatred of our own elected officials, is when one such big televised sporting event is on the horizon. However, there is one night - one night – when the thing that interests me is the thing that interests everyone else. That, dear readers, is the night of the Academy Awards, when the beautiful and (sometimes) talented all get together and rub smooth, lovingly moisturized elbows before passing around gold statuettes of a naked guy holding a sword dangerously close to his privates.

Why do I like the Academy Awards so much? I honestly can’t tell. It is, after all, basically prom, only this time around the people are twice as successful, three times as beautiful, and I’m not invited. When all is said and done, the whole affair is just one big handjob for Hollywood – the sons of bitches who greenlit Beverly Hills Chihuahua and have yet to give me Serenity 2 - and yet for some reason I eat it up with a spoon.

Some people watch high school football videos from around the country to identify the potential college players, who, in turn, will become potential professional players, who, in turn, will become potential beer and razor commercial stars. I, on the other hand, go spelunking in the bowels of IMDb in search of upcoming independent films with serious award potential. It’s not really hard; just look up Phillip Seymour Hoffman and pick any three of the movies he’s starring in for the coming year and you’ll probably have at least one nominee on your hands. Paul Giamatti and William H. Macy are also pretty good indicators, but not quite as reliable as the pudgy, bespectacled thespian who danced his way through Capote and Punch-Drunk Love. Basketball fans have Michael Jordan, I have Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I’m going to edit together a highlight reel of his greatest moments and put it on YouTube with the “Hey!” song in the background. I think he’s going to go all the way with Doubt this year.

Maybe it’s because I appreciate the celebration of creativity,* and even though it’s being celebrated by the sort of people who I traditionally distrust and ridicule, it’s the only game in town and I’ve got no choice. Oh, sure, there are other awards shows, but I’m really eager to know who gives a shit about the People’s fucking Choice Awards. The People’s Choice Awards is where everyone in America votes on what elements of pop culture they like best, hence why Kid Rock won an award this year for his "song" where he mashes up “Sweet Home Alabama” with “Werewolves of London” and calls it original. You know what, America? That kind of shit is why we have an electoral college. It’s because our founding fathers feared – and rightfully so, it seems – that the American public would be too stupid to handle the loaded gun that is democracy. That’s why these award shows need to be done by a committee of sorts, not just asking everyday Americans what kind of stuff they like, because when you ask Americans what they like every year, you’re going to keep getting the same answers: Family Guy, Will Smith, and Kid Rock.

*…Truman said, sounding gayer than he had ever sounded before.

Kid Rock has an award and I don’t have an award. Kid Rock sucks, every minute of every day, and they gave him a freakin’ trophy for it. He just took two other songs and mashed them together along with his essay about what he did on his summer vacation! You don’t see me mashing a couple of other people’s blogs together and calling it my own work, do you?

See, they don’t let that sort of shit happen at the Academy Awards. All the nominating and awarding is done by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The very name implies prestige. Reading a name like that – a name that is commonly shortened to just The Academy, and how badass does that sound? – conjures in my mind images of men in suits and ties and women in evening gowns walking briskly through elegant corridors, drinking fine burbon and laying out in fine detail which movies will be known as “good” and which will be known as “great.” Also, there’s a rather warty intern who nobody likes in charge of picking the musical performances during which most of America heads to the kitchen in search of more hummus.

Soon, The Academy will release the names of the nominees, at which point I will go to work watching all of the Best Picture candidates, and as many of the Best Screenplay candidates as time allows. This could put something of a dent into my social life, but bear with me – Christmas in February comes but once a year. It’s during this orgy of filmdom that I feel that I understand sports better than ever. Sometimes, it’s just great to be fanatical about something.

Truman Capps also noticed that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was nominated for ‘Best Movie’ at this year’s People’s Choice Awards. Proof at last that a staggering number of Americans are dumb motherfuckers.

Late Update - Hella Info

Yes, I know - this article should have been up yesterday. However, I hope you can tell from the content that I've got a thing or two occupying me at the moment.

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

When people ask me what my major is and I reply, with a hint of dismay, “Journalism”, the response is always the same. No one ever asks me what I want to do with my degree or why I got into journalism (and maybe that’s for the best, because in both cases I sure as hell don’t know), but instead I am constantly bombarded by the same question: “Have you taken Info Hell yet?”

Journalism 202, a Pre-Journalism class in which students have 10 weeks to write an exhaustively researched 20 page research paper and nearly 70 pages of annotations, has achieved something of a legendary status among the student body. Ghost stories are told around the campfire (or hookah) about Info Hell students who went insane after annotating one too many sources or got lost and starved to death in the library stacks. And every term, a few hundred terrified Pre-Journalism majors must face the terror of Info Hell firsthand, marching off into oblivion with the same fatalistic mentality as a red shirt security officer on the starship Enterprise: the coming days will be bleak, and not everyone will make it out alive.

I am currently enrolled in Info Hell myself, and although it’s only the second week I can proudly say that I’ve already considered switching majors five times. Much of my weekend was spent immersed in an ocean of research about the current state of the American prison system, and as you read this I am fighting my way through a flurry of two-page annotations that are due by the end of the week. The work is, to say the least, unpleasant.

So imagine my disappointment when I heard that next year Info Hell, along with two other prerequisites, will be discontinued in favor of a pair of more streamlined courses designed to keep up with the changing face of journalism. There will be no more 100 page research paper, no more throngs of anxious students outside Kinko’s the night before the due date, no more horrific descents into madness at the inability to find one more scholarly source. It seems that the University wants to keep its curriculum up to date – and more power to them. It appears that the intent is to remove the mammoth research paper aspect of the journalism major and replace it with something less intimidating and, in their eyes, more useful to the modern journalist.

However, I think Info Hell is a very useful course as it is. Yes, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever have to face down that much raw research and planning in their professional life, but I don’t think that’s the point. I think that the point of Info Hell is to be horrific, frightening, and larger than life – the Keyser Soze of prerequisite classes, if you will. While the course may have been designed as a means to teach students about how to distill facts into a cohesive paper, it does a much more important job now: it separates the men and the women from the boys and the girls.

I’m not really sure why I decided to pursue a major in journalism – it’s certainly not because I want to be journalist. Part of the reason was because I didn’t like the English curriculum, and part of the reason was that, under the right circumstances, I look like a TV news anchor. But my motives for being in the journalism department certainly aren’t ironclad.

It’s going to take a course like Info Hell for me to find out whether journalism is what I want to do or not. If I find that I can’t keep up with the class’s considerable workload, that’ll be a surefire sign that I should look for something else to study. However, if I pass, I’ll know that I’m on the right track. Rather than get rid of a class like Info Hell, I feel like there should be a similar class in every major. Sure, it might sound objectionable at the outset, but give it some thought – when, chemistry majors, would you like to realize that you hate chemistry? As a freshman or a sophomore, or as you’re walking off the stage with your chemistry degree in hand?

That which does not kill you only makes you stronger; worst case scenario, I’ll be dead by the end of the term. Best case? I’ll be an exceptionally strong aspiring journalist.

Education's Bitch

So I says "Hey, Google Image Search, give me an education related image for my blog!" And Google Image Search was all, "LOLOL YAAAAAY!" And here we are.

In the spring of my senior year at Sprague High School, our band director enthusiastically introduced the upperclassmen to a pet project he called “Sprague Conservatory”, wherein middle schoolers from our part of the district would come to the band room two evenings a month and we, members of the Sprague Wind Ensemble, would teach them. A lot of people in the band reacted enthusiastically to this – mostly girls who would go on to major in music education. To them, teaching oboe lessons to five bored 7th graders whose parents had shoehorned them into missing Spongebob two times a month was nothing short of paradise. I, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to graduate from high school and never see an adolescent again, much less a pubescent one. Oh, but there was nobody to teach the trumpet students – Truman, they said, you must come to your high school band’s aid!

I’d always known that I would hate teaching and would never want to do it. When I’d bring this up in conversation, people would chastise me, telling me that I would probably be a great teacher if I just gave it a shot. And, let me tell you, fuck that noise. Even if you’ve never had cancer, you know that you don’t want to have cancer. If you’ve never had your nose sliced open by a street thug, I doubt you’re really eager to go out and give it a shot. And if you’ve never been to El Paso, well, need I say more? Common sense is the voice in your head that tells you when you shouldn’t try new things, and it was telling me that if I wanted to try something new that month, well, maybe it should be a new restaurant downtown or a different kind of toothpaste. But no, my band director kept after me, and eventually I caved and agreed to become a temporary middle school music teacher.

I think it’s important to know your limits, which is easy for me because I’m good at maybe five things* tops and my limits include, among others, all sports, romance in all its forms, and drinking milk. What I figured, though, as I drove up to school on that first faithful evening, was that maybe I could conquer my limits. Maybe everything that I’d thought would happen could be avoided through sheer force of will – maybe, if I brought my absolute Truman Capps A-Game for an hour, I could become Mr. Holland meets the guy from Dead Poets Society, with a little Optimus Prime thrown in for good measure.

*I don’t want to give them all away, but one of them rhymes with “glassturbating.”

Oh, but the world’s greatest intentions can be cut down in an instant by a row of listless 13 year olds. Once I was alone in the room with the four of them staring at me, waiting for me to dispense some musical wisdom, I understood that I completely lacked any ability to educate or inspire, and would never be able to turn into a semi truck either. I had absolutely nothing to say to these kids. I really don’t know how to talk to people who are a lot younger than me in the first place, let alone how to teach them something, let alone music, which isn’t exactly my strongest suit.

So for an hour I stumbled around like the educational equivalent of a stripper on horse tranquilizers, trying to figure out a way to make them better trumpet players without saying anything offensive or having to give anyone a hug. By the end of the hour I was completely soaked in nervous sweat – and don’t get me wrong, that was a regular occurrence back then, but usually it only happened when I was talking to girls my own age. Trying to teach had successfully turned me into the quivering, unsettlingly moist shell of a human that until then only women had been able to create – and the middle schoolers had done it without even the possibility of nookie. Walking to my car*, I knew once and for all that if indeed it was possible to conquer my limits, education was not going to be one of them. I would forever be education’s bitch.

*The only thing, the only thing I miss about Sprague High School was walking to my car on late spring evenings after rehearsals. The air was fresh and warm, the sun was just starting to set over the stadium, cars were puttering back and forth as everyone else left, and if the wind blew, all the leaves on the trees rattled in a pleasant way. On those evenings, I could almost forget that I went to a school built on a solid foundation of crushed dreams and snakeskin boots.

Two days ago I sat down along with 29 other people in my discussion/lab section for one of my huge journalism classes. We all sat and waited in a dungeonesque room in the basement of the university library until exactly 1:00, when the graduate student (commonly known as a GTF, for graduate teaching fellow) in charge of our discussion moved from the edge of the classroom to the front of the classroom. Petit and no more than five years older than me, Kelly did not appear entirely comfortable with herself in front of the class. Taking a deep breath, she spoke to us in a high, slightly squeaky voice not unlike that of Kristin Chenoweth.

“Uh, hello.” She said. “I’m Kelly Saunders, and I’ll be the GTF for this discussion. Uh… I’m not very good at it, so… Go easy on me.” She paused, looked at the clock, and raised her eyebrows in quiet dismay that only 30 seconds had passed and she still had 49 and a half minutes to teach. “Uh… I also have Type 1 Diabetes, so if I pass out, you should call 911. But I don’t think I’ll pass out.” She looked at the clock again and appeared so sincerely disappointed that only 15 more seconds had passed that I honestly wanted to cry. “So… Do any of you have Diabetes?” She asked. The class, not fully sure what to make of the past 45 seconds of their lives, stared at her silently. She nervously clasped her hands and bobbed on the balls of her feet. “Well, it’s… Not fun.”

Class wore on and she uncomfortably worked her way through the lesson plan – I don’t want to employ the “stripper on horse tranquilizers” line here because I think it’s sort of a dick move to imply that a complete stranger is acting like a drug addled harpy, but she certainly was stumbling. Every thirty seconds or so, she’d look at the clock, and every two minutes she’d either apologize for being such a “horrible” GTF or tell us something about herself in an effort to eat up more class time. It was through one of these impromptu candid admissions that she explained how she wanted to go to grad school but couldn’t afford it, and so she applied to be a GTF so she could get a scholarship, despite the fact that, quote, “I always forget everything I’m doing in front of people.”

My heart went out to her, this poor young woman shoehorned into attempting to face one of her limits; a truly impossible battle. Every time she’d grimace at the clock or apologize for herself or crack a weak joke and then mutter, “So painful…” when nobody laughed, I couldn’t help but smile because she reminded me so much of myself. As we got further into the class and her apologies and self-deprecating statements became more common, I found myself wanting to get one of those big foam fingers and write “KELLY IS #1!!!” on it and then sit in the front row waving it around, or maybe make a giant sign that said “YOU’RE DOING OKAY, BUT TRY TO PROJECT A LITTLE MORE FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK MAYBE? JUST A THOUGHT!!”

So good luck to you, Kelly. At least one person in the class gets what you’re going through.

Truman Capps changed the name of his GTF, but if any of “Kelly’s” superiors are reading this and can figure out who she is, please don’t fire her – her heart is in the right place. And, once again for comedy’s sake, pantalones.

Textbook Prices

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

After three weeks of Winter Vacation, when the most stressful thing I had to do every day was make it to the TV in time for King of the Hill, it came as something of a shock to me a few days ago when I arrived in Eugene and remembered that, one, classes would begin on Monday, two, I had to buy books for those classes, and three, that I apparently wrote a column for the school newspaper and had to submit something ASAP. Opting as usual to forego my responsibilities as a journalist until the last possible second, I printed a list of the textbooks I needed and went to the University Bookstore to see what I could find.

The pre-term ritual of buying new textbooks is a great way to ease back into the bureaucracy of college after the indolence of vacation. In my case, I slowly relearned innate hunter-gatherer skills as I stumbled through the shelves in search of the necessary texts for my classes. At the checkout line I quickly relearned outrage when I found that I’d still be paying close to $100 for my textbooks even though the majority of them are just stacks of printed paper bound by OfficeMax dowels.

Why does a 200-page book about journalism cost $90 when a 550-page book about teenaged vampires costs $30? According to Minding The Campus, a subsidiary of the Manhattan Institute think-tank, the reason is that demand for textbooks is inelastic. If you’re enrolled in a history class, you have to buy a history textbook – you do not, however, have to buy a copy of Twilight (unless you’re 15, in which case you apparently do). With their customers essentially required to buy, textbook publishing companies have free reign to charge as they please. Contributing to the problem is the fact that many universities own their bookstores, which serve as a large source of income.

As much as I’d love to follow my liberal tendency to demonize large corporations, textbook publishers are justified to some extent in their pricing. Texbooks are more durable than run of the mill books. They’re printed on higher quality paper and in many cases incorporate big colorful graphs and illustrations that use up more ink and cost more to print. Until the Big Four publishing companies decide to forego any sense of business and start selling textbooks at a loss, prices are likely to remain well above that of ordinary books.

So we can thank a combination of ordinary human greed and also the cost of doing business for the ridiculous price of our textbooks. And when a problem is created by the combination of two near-unstoppable forces, there really isn’t much that can be done about it – take the shark-velociraptor hybrid, for example. However, if you want the textbook pricing game to change, you can always opt to shop for books in other stores or online, where prices are often much lower. Barring that, seek out used books for lower prices. These tips aren’t just about saving money; if enough people start circumventing the ordinarily high price of textbooks, it’s reasonable to assume that the Big Four publishing companies might exercise a little restraint on their exploitation of inelastic demand and drop their prices to reclaim the lost business. Even then, textbooks are always going to seem too expensive; nobody ever feels good about taking enough money to buy an Xbox and using it to buy Principles of Economics. At least, not until Principles of Economics comes with a Blu-Ray player.

Observations About A Place Called San Diego

The Oregon Marching Band, of which I am a member, recently went to San Diego for the Holiday Bowl, hence the downright spotty update situation over the past week.

"Na na na naaaa SAN DIEGO!" - Austin Fiske, a trumpet player.

Why, yes, before you ask, it was awesome to leave snowed-in Portland for a free trip to San Diego and $200 cash per diem. It sort of makes the months of frigid, rainy rehearsals worth it, along with the embarrassment of listing “marching band” as one of my hobbies. However, every silver lining has a dark, nasty cloud in there somewhere – in this case, it was the fact that we had to drive from Eugene to San Diego on buses. And then, afterwards, drive back.

Two days on a motor coach does things to a man. I have now learned not to measure the time between stops in hours, but rather in the number of movies we’ve watched. For example, Eugene to Red Bluff, California was Shoot ‘Em Up, Death Race, Step Brothers, and half of Dogma. After days of roadside Jack In The Box, I have developed a bizarre immunity to heartburn. Also, I have mastered the art of peeing in a coffin-sized bus bathroom while traveling over a steep and bumpy road through the Siskiyous – sadly, this practice has earned me a bizarre and inaccurate nickname that I’d just as soon never repeat.

California’s problem is that it’s very long – inconveniently so, in my case. What’s worse, all the really relevant California stuff happens in only about two-thirds of the state, and there’s a full third up at the top there north of Sacramento that’s just the geographical equivalent of packing peanuts and lint. That might sound like a low blow toward the people of Extremely Northern California, but if you’d just spent four movies driving through it, you’d get where I was coming from.

I feel like I’ve always made it known that I have a general mistrust of the state of California. Before anybody gets angry, I should clarify that I mistrust the state of California for the same reason I mistrust incredibly handsome guys who got laid all the time in high school, because generally speaking, California is that guy. The outskirts of San Diego, parts of town that, in Oregon, would be comprised of strip malls and oily puddles, are here filled with rolling bluffs, ocean views, and at least six things from a Beach Boys song. It’s locations like these that make California an Aryan, single syllabic-named god of football who goes through hot girlfriends as fast as I go through Kleenex. Oregon, on the other hand, home that I love, is a lot more like me in high school – unpopular and sweaty at awkward times.

Things are different down there. The walls on either side of the highway are made out of pleasantly tanned brick rather than flat, drab concrete, giving the impression that perhaps someone knocked down an old Spanish mission (they seem more common than trees in Southern California) and used that rubble to build the sound dampening wall. Everything costs 8% more than the listed price because of some “Sales tax.” Most importantly, though, these strange, alien, beautiful people practice the bizarre tradition of celebrating Christmas for about a week and a half, instead of one day like all of us posers in other parts of the country.

When we made a trip to Sea World, Christmas was still very much in full swing, even though it was December 28th. Christmas music was playing in all the park restaurants. Furthermore, rather than playing actual Christmas music, the Sea World staff had cobbled together an awesome mix CD of the best Jamaican steel drum covers of Christmas standards, in keeping with the tropical theme of the park. My tolerance for steel drum music is limited at best. My tolerance for Christmas music is practically nonexistent. I call it The Perfect Storm.

To augment this, a crack squad of four carolers was strolling through the park, crooning Christmas carols of yore and dressed in replica Victorian attire. Now, I suppose all of that is fine and dandy if you’re in Victorian England Land,* but this was Sea World. The women were wearing hoop skirts and bonnets, the men black suits and top hats, and they were standing in front of a tiki torch and matching pitches with a bunch of horny sea lions a few feet away. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe if they’d dressed a bunch of dolphins up like Victorian carolers? I mean, the Victorian bit still makes basically no sense, but at least at that point you’ve got dolphins.

*”Come on down to Victorian England Land! Take the kids for a spin on Jack the Rippercoaster, and afterwards help yourself to a biscuit full of weevils and a glass full of typhoid infected water! It’s all… Uh… Wow, this was a terrible idea for a theme park.”

Last of all came the Shamu Holiday Spectacular. Now, I’m not necessarily a fan of watching a giant whale splash its own filth on people (I find it to be an all-too-accurate metaphor for life) but I figured that since I saw a Broadway show in New York, I ought to go see Shamu at Sea World. After all, he’s basically the Barry Manilow of giant water-dwelling mammals; I would be a fool to pass such an opportunity up. Let me say this much: The show started with a master of ceremonies, clad in a long wool coat and scarf, walking through the stadium and inviting us via microphone to join Shamu in celebrating peace on Earth and goodwill towards men. Shamu’s plan to celebrate this was evidently to swim around in his tank and splash his own filth on the audience, but that’s cool – art is never recognized in its time. As the show wore on, many more of Shamu’s “friends” joined in the fun, including eight robed children singing hymns, two dozen carolers in bow ties and red blazers, and a nonunion musician who was clearly a scholar of Kenny G. playing a winsome and slightly off-key rendition of Silent Night on a soprano saxophone.

Billboards on the roadside informed me that Knott’s Berry Farm was reenacting the Charlie Brown Christmas until January 4th, and every restaurant we went into, no matter where in the city, was playing Christmas music on the PA system. It’s like California is trying to apologize to God for the porn industry by celebrating the birth of the big man’s son for much longer than is appropriate. Listening to White Christmas while sitting under a palm tree in an outdoor café in 75-degree weather is oddly ironic, even moreso when you’re doing it on New Year’s Eve. San Diego needs to get the message – it’s not white, and Christmas is over.

Aside from questionable taste in music, though, San Diego is a fine place to be – I’d put it up there with San Francisco as one of the two cities that begin to atone for the flagrant vileness of Los Angeles. I could be saying this because my friends and I spent most of the trip saying, “God, this is so much better than El Paso!” Really, the bulk of my complaints about San Diego come from the fact that I went down during the time of year when they’re playing music I hate, and that it just happens to be the southernmost city in California, necessitating a very long drive. So if any members of the city council could do something to rectify those two issues, I’d be more than willing to give San Diego the gold star of my unflinching approval.

Oh, and we also won a football game.

Truman Capps was worried at first that he would lose a lot of readership because he missed an update day, but then he remembered that 95% of his readership went on the bowl trip with him.

New Year's

Gettin' creepier, every day.

Here's the deal: It's New Year's Eve, I'm in Sacramento, surrounded by friends, and drinking in a free hotel room. You should be out enjoying the people around you like I am, not reading this. My San Diego recap blog will be up in the next couple of days. Happy New Year - my resolution is to be more prompt with my updates.

Pantalones!

The Current Deal

I have two hours to cram all my dirty laundry back into my suitcase and jam it on a bus, and then eight hours on that bus to do nothing. Knowing that, please understand that my blog probably won't be online until this evening.

Also, since this post hasn't been terribly funny yet, Pantalones.

Guest Blog - Courtesy of Mike Whitman

At last, I've figured out the Internet here at my hotel in San Diego. This week, since my various musical obligations prevented me from getting a blog in, please enjoy the following work of wonder from my fellow Writer and Doogie Howser copilot, Mike Whitman. For more of his rustic, honky-tonk bullshit, check out his Blazers Oriented Blog.

“The police have themselves an RV.”

This was the text I received the night of December 25th from my buddy and fellow ’80s cinemaphile. I stared at my phone for several minutes before slowly working my eyes upward to the inevitable, inescapable truth that beamed from my mother’s TV:

Jack Lalanne and his Power Juicer*.

*Mike has nothing against either Jack Lalanne or his Power Juicer. In fact, Mike owns that Power Juicer, and it is a fine piece of machinery. But watching that commercial for the 34th time, on Christmas of all days, was a little depressing.

I looked back at my phone and sent a half-hearted reply:

“It’s Christmas, Theo. It’s the time of miracles.”

Glancing at the Christmas tree that my former stepfather and tormentor had cut down presumably with his bare hands, I began to think about all the Christmases past and how much joy I used to take in the most magical of all the days I got to sit around and do nothing.*

*Mike typically sits around and does nothing. In fact, it is his favorite activity. But he prefers his laziness during the Christmas season because of the heavy ham consumption.

The bottom line, dear reader, is this: I didn’t watch Die Hard this year. Hell, I didn’t even watch Lethal Weapon.

In the past, no matter how horribly my Christmas turned out, I could always take consolation in the fact that Mr. Officer John McClane of the New York Police Department was there to save me from Hans Gruber and his band of exceptional thieves. This year was no exception, in that my Christmas has been relatively shitty. My car blew up on the drive down to Mom’s house, and while I’ve consumed large amounts of ham…this year, more than any other in my memory, just doesn’t feel like Christmas.

So when your lord and savior, Truman Capps, called me up and asked me to fill in, I said yes without thinking, assuming that I could be at least passably funny, regardless of my lack of holiday spirt.* But as I sat down to write this, I realized that a Christmas blog update without Christmas spirit is like a nativity scene without the baby Jesus.

*Mike was not Truman’s first choice for this job, and for good reason.

For those of you who gathered around a roaring fire with members of your loving families and sang carols deep into the night, good for you. But for those of you like me, who perhaps don’t have that option, don’t fret. Go to your local videomart, ask that pencil-necked geek behind the counter to point you toward the action section, and go grab yourself a copy of Die Hard.*

Mike will be following his own advice, since he forgot his copy in his apartment in Eugene.

You may not have a merry Christmas, but at least you can forget you’re having a crappy one for 131 minutes.

Plus, if you see people caroling, you can run at them in a dirty tank top and strangle them to death with a length of chain.

Status update for Sunday the 28th of December

Hair Guy is currently without Internets at a certain sporting event with a certain band of marchers.

His update will be online shortly. Thank you for your patience.

Hair Guy Staff Christmas Memo

Mecha-Chaucer moments before the infamous "camera smash" incident.

From: Truman Capps (The Hair Guy)

To: Hair Guy writing staff (Bizarro Hemingway, Robo Faulkner, Zombie Fitzgerald, Mecha-Chaucer, Truman Clone 1, trumanclone43@gmail.com)

Subject: Excelsior!

Merry Christmas, everyone but Truman Clone 43!

Happy Kwanzaa, Truman Clone 43!

I’m just going to come right out and say that I think this is the best Christmas Hair Guy™ has ever had. Now, that statement might sound a bit loaded, given that it isn’t actually Christmas yet and this is basically the first Hair Guy™ Christmas, but go with me. We’ve overcome an awful lot of adversity in the past year, but the work has clearly paid off.

I was taking a look at SiteMeter the other day, and you’re not going to believe how many total hits we’ve gotten since this blog went online just over a year ago. Anybody want to guess? Go ahead and guess. Just, like… Just write it down on a bit of paper, or something, and then scroll down and look, and then compare what you thought to how many hits we’ve had in 12 months. Do it, seriously. The number is unbelievably high. I really wish I’d had the chance to do this.

Ready?

14,965! That’s fourteen thousand, nine hundred and sixty five! You round that up, you’ve got 15,000 hits in 12 months. And then, well, not to get ahead of myself, but what does 15 round up to? Yeah. It rounds up to 20, because it’s a five, and a five always rounds up.

So 20,000 hits* in one year. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. In fact, hows about we all pat ourselves on the back? Yeah! Go right ahead and do it. See? I don’t have to make any special concessions now that Truman Clone 2 (or Mr. Flippers, as I used to call him) quit and took his treacherous, backstabbing ass over to Columbia Pictures to work on House Bunny 2: Mo’ Bunny, Mo’ Problems. Look at that! We overcame that kind of thing! We don’t need Truman Clone 2 to get 20,000 hits** in one year. 20,000!*** That’s like… That’s like more than a thousand hits a month! Hell, if you round that up to 24,000 then we’re talking about two thousand hits a month!

*Basically.
**Basically.
***Basically.

So 24,000 hits in one year. I’m thinking we should make some T-shirts about that sort of thing. They could say something like “Hit me baby, 24,000 times!”, or “If we make the assumption that half of all Internet users are female, then 12,000 chicks have hit on me!” I’m not quite as hot on the second one, what with the whole… Wordiness thing it has going there. Look, hey, I’m the business end of Hair Guy™ – how about you guys think of something? Just figure it out and send it up my way. Be sure to make a joke about the word “Hit.” Maybe you can get a picture of Stallone at the end of Rocky, and then say something about how he got hit 24,000 times, just like Hair Guy? And maybe just bump that up to 25,000 times, for the sake of having a round number.

I couldn’t have made the big 25,000 without you guys. So much happened in this crazy, crazy year, but it didn’t keep us from getting 2000 hits a month now, did it? Actually, I guess that’s more than 2000 hits a month, it’s more like… Well, 1000 divided by 12, that’s… 83.33333? Well, okay, let’s just round that back down to 24,000 to make the math a little less- Wait, no, nevermind – back to 25,000. I’ll have Accounting figure that one out for us.

Look, anyway, it’s been a rough year, and I’m really proud of the way you guys pulled together and kept getting your work in on time. Mecha-Chaucer and Truman Clone 43: You guys are the new kids on the block (figuratively, of course – I in no way mean to suggest that you are or ever have been in a boy band) but you’ve both jumped right in and pulled your weight admirably in spite of the fact that Truman Clone 43 only writes in Ebonics and Mecha-Chaucer is 50 feet tall and likes to smash things. Truman Clone 1: I’m sure the spontaneous combustion of Truman Clones 3 and 4 must have sparked some pretty deep thoughts about your mortality, given that all of you were created by the same bargain basement South American cloning lab, but you never let that affect your work. And Bizarro Hemingway – it was tough for all of us when, in defiance toward Regular Hemingway, you tried to commit anti-suicide. Now, to be honest, I still don’t really get what anti-suicide is, but the other writers lead me to believe that it’s no walk in the park, so… Well, I’m just glad to have you back from Bizarro Rehab.

I’m sorry to bring up all those tough times, but if you take a look back, you’ve got to appreciate how incredible it is that we’ve kept this thing going for a year without any major hitches. There’s literally hundreds of blogs on the Internet, and I’d be surprised if even half of them could keep to a schedule this rigidly – and I’ll bet you none of them have a writing staff comprised of clones, robots, and zombies! Sure, we may not update as often as the other blogs, and we may not be as popular, but we do something special here at Hair Guy™. We don’t just offer words; we offer an experience. And sure, the experience may not always be a pleasant one, (mad ups to whoever thought of that thing about the rash!) but it’s always interesting, sometimes even borderline amusing, and I think that’s something to be proud of.

Sleep the sleep of kings tonight, writing staff. You work for a blog that scored basically 30,000 hits.

Sincerely yours,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps was not the one who photocopied his ass at the Christmas party, no matter what Robo Faulkner says.

Things I Thought About Before and During Wayne's World 2

You know what this picture means? It means you're about to see some Tia Carrere. It means you're happy.

12:39 PM - Oh, great, even more snow and below-freezing temperatures. I think I’m not going to leave the house today. Yeah, that sounds about right. The outside world has been doing fine without me all this time I’ve been sleeping, I feel certain it can last another 24 hours without me poking my head outside. Maybe I’ll see what’s on TV.

12:51 PM - Man, FX, you guys are really excited about this new Damages show you’ve got, aren’t you? I mean, you keep showing all these ambiguous promos with some lady getting out of a car and Glenn Close looking hawkish and angry. I mean, I might have been excited about this show once, like, before I spent a couple of weeks getting teabagged by commercials lauding Damages for having “the best cast on TV”, but now, if given the opportunity, I think I’d not watch your show out of spite. Man, I make a point of not doing stuff out of spite a lot, don’t I? That’s probably not healthy.

12:52 PM - Oh, yeah, and it’s clearly not the best cast on TV, because Neil Patrick Harris isn’t in it. I also don’t see Richard Dean Anderson. You see the connection, FX? It’s having a middle name. Talk to Glenn Close about getting a middle name, then I might be interested.

1:00 PM - Oh snap! Wayne’s World 2! Score! God, I hope I don’t have to be anywhere for the next two hours.

1:34 PM - Y’know, they just don’t make sequels like this anymore. I mean, it’s not the original Wayne’s World - that movie deserved an Oscar of some sort, or at least preservation by some snooty film society in a giant vault labeled “CULTURALLY SIGNIFICANT” – but it’s still a funny movie. You look at sequels today, I mean… Well, I doubt Cheaper By The Dozen 2 was anywhere near as funny as Cheaper By The Dozen. Actually… No, that’s probably a bad example, because I’m pretty sure Cheaper By The Dozen sucked monkeys anyway. Also, no Tia Carrere. A lot of movies suffer for not having Tia Carrere in them, come to think of it...

1:40 PM - There Will Be Blood probably would have got Best Picture if they’d put Tia Carrere in it. And I feel like if Scorsese had put a big Tia Carrere scene in Goodfellas or some other movie, he could have gotten Best Director way sooner. Oh, man, he should have put her in Last Temptation of Christ! She could have been the, y’know, the Last Temptation! Man, if I was being crucified, Tia Carrere would really just take the edge off.

1:54 PM - She’s like… She’s like the Asian Drew Barrymore. Lucy Liu is the Asian Cameron Diaz, but Tia Carrere is the Asian… No, no, scratch that – she’s the Asian Yasmine Bleeth. Yeah, I like that better.

2:13 PM - Oh, for crying out loud, Best Buy, enough with these human interest story commercials! This one, with the Geek Squad guy talking about how some customer made him dress up like an elf before doing tech support work on his daughters’ computer? It’s a disgrace. See, what you’re selling here isn’t a Geek Squad membership, nor is it a promise of exceptional customer service. What you’re selling is the opportunity to completely humiliate a fellow human being. This commercial says, “At Best Buy, we’ve got our employees so whipped into a miserable stupor that they’ll do literally anything – so have fun!” For God’s sake, the man is already a willing member of the Geek Squad, he has to march around in a neutered, less-cool Reservoir Dogs outfit, and his primary mode of transportation is a New Beetle painted black and white with the word “GEEK” emblazoned across the side. Why would you try to bring him lower? It’s not the Geek Squad anymore, it’s just Dial-A-Doormat.

2:14 PM - “Hey, thanks for coming to fix my computer, but I’ve got a proposition for you: Would you put on this leather gimp outfit and let me chain you up in the basement? The missus and I are in the middle of, uh… Something, and I think it’ll really make her Christmas.”

2:17 PM - But like I was saying, she just carried that show Relic Hunter. Without her, you got no show. It’s just relics, at that point.

2:32 PM - Awful lot of cologne commercials this time of year. Interesting thing is, the only people I really notice wearing cologne tend to be posers who probably won’t get a lot of nookie regardless of what they smell like. I mean, I look at Antonio Banderas and I think “Here’s a man who needs absolutely no help getting beautiful women to caress him in various erotic, sensual ways.” And yet, now he’s marketing cologne. For Christ’s sake, the man could rub dead trout all over himself and women would still run right past me to try new and exciting sexual positions with him. None of these guys need cologne to get women. But because some losers think it works, I have to sit here, alone, in a dimly lit room, and watch buff shirtless guys do stuff in slow motion.

2:45 PM - Thumbs down, Wayne’s World 2 - since when is a 10 minute ripoff of The Graduate a suitable ending for a film? I don’t know how I missed this before. God, I mean, if I wanted to watch a bunch of lame ripoffs, I’d watch Family Guy!

2:47 PM - Ooh, I wonder if Family Guy is on, so I can watch an episode and then write on my blog tonight about how much I hate Family Guy. Oh man, I would be awesome then. A lot of people like Family Guy, but I’d be taking the piss out of it on the Internet. I’d look bocu cool.

2:50 PM - Man, what happened to you, Mike Myers? Everybody was so excited about how cool you were, but now that I look back on your old movies, having seen all your other movies, I realize that you ran out of material pretty quick. Like, you’d done about everything you could do after a season on SNL, but they just kept giving you movie deals, didn’t they? Your entire career has consisted of making stupid jokes and then making out with hot women. Tia Carerre, Tia Carerre again, Elizabeth Hurley, Heather Graham, Beyonce… It’s not fair, really. I’m funnier than you are and I’ve made out with basically none of those women.

2:53 PM - Okay, that was harsh. Maybe I’m not funnier than you, Mike Myers, but I feel like I’m a lot broader. Y’know? I do more stuff. You do five or six characters, but, I mean, I’ve got the blog, and I did a public access TV show, and… Well… Okay, but I update the blog a lot.

2:55 PM - So I’m not broader than you, Mike Myers, but I try really hard. I feel like I work harder at it than you do. Sure, you put on silly costumes and do voices and things, but you do basically the same costumes and silly things, over and over. At least I don’t get stuck in a rut and keep redressing the same crap for my audience.

2:59 PM - Hey, I should do one of those “Things I Thought About” updates like the one I did a few months ago!

Truman Capps was not masturbating during any of the parts where he talked about Tia Carrere. Just, uh, in case you thought he was. He didn’t even consider it.

Snowblind

"No TV and beer make Homer something-something."
"Go crazy?"
"Don't mind if I do! YEARBLEBLEBLEBLBE!"

I’m sorry, Matt Zaffino. I’m sorry, Portland metropolitan storm teams. And, most of all, I’m sorry, all TV weathermen. I see now, I truly do, that your jobs do have meaning! Every day! I… I take everything back! You are real journalists! Sure, you majored in Communications – which, in my less-enlightened times, I held in almost as much contempt as Business – but my eyes are open! Even though all you do is read a teleprompter, without you it would be impossible to know what the weather would be! We need pretty faces to read us weather information, and that’s where you come in! You Communicate! You Communicate so well! Your college money was well spent, your jobs have meaning and impact, now will you please make it stop fucking snowing!?

A riddle:

How many inches of snow does it take to completely bring the city of Portland to its knees?

One. Maybe less.

We were not expecting this. On Sunday – the day that my callous, my so very callous blog about weathermen went online – it snowed for the better part of the day. We’re used to that. It snows, it accumulates, and then the sun comes out and the temperature jumps to 65 degrees and the next day everybody goes to school. But this snow… It came at us sideways. Not… Not literally, of course. It came at us from the usual place – the sky. But speaking metaphorically, in terms of our preparation? Shit may as well have come out of a microwaveable burrito.

See, it snowed, and the next day the highest temperature was 26 degrees. The snow didn’t melt. Or, rather, the sun came out and melted the top layer of snow, and then Science came along and made the melting snow freeze on top of the other snow as a layer of ice.* I mean, what the hell? Since when is that legal? It’s like the snow is covered in really slippery bulletproof glass. Fall down on it and you’ll see what I mean. And frankly, at this point, I’m about ready to go out and shoot some of it.

*And just why did you do that, anyway? I thought we were bros, Science. I thought we ran deep. I’ve been using you as a suitable alternate for God since I was a little kid, and this is how you repay me? I quit believing in Math and Economics; don’t think you’re safe. I won’t hesitate to become a nihilist out of spite.

Here’s the thing: I was all geared up for a very relaxing Christmas Break. You see, I made a TV show this past term, and that in conjunction with classes is a somewhat stressful endeavor. Not only did my mellow get harshed, but my Xbox 360 went seriously neglected, and a lot of my plan for Christmas Break involved catching up on the new video game releases I’d missed, and also not making a TV show. I was planning to drive down to Salem to visit friends who I haven’t seen in months (in one case, a year), and also to make the rounds of the Portland suburbs to visit some college friends. It was going to be a relaxing vacation full of good fun, good friends, and using a chainsaw bayonet to eviscerate aliens in Gears of War 2.

But our Subaru has front wheel drive and no snow tires, and currently every road in my part of town is still coated in ice. I’m a bad enough driver when conditions are perfect; an inch of snow and ice on every driving surface? I’d have better odds of survival if there were a carbomb under my seat. Those of you who hail from the Northeast and the Midwest may be laughing at me, but as a lifetime Pacific Northwesterner I can assure you that in these conditions the only vehicle worth driving is an AT-AT.

That’s from Star Wars, by the way. The Empire Strikes Back, more specifically. But if you didn’t know that, you’re probably reading the wrong blog. Run and look if The O.C. is on, you might like that better.

With driving out, bus schedules squiffy at best, and none of my Christmas Break plans within 20 miles of me, the snow has really cocked up my holidays. Temperatures are expected to stay below freezing all week, they’re predicting snow tomorrow, and a possible ice storm on Sunday. Visiting friends around town is unlikely, and going to Salem is downright impossible, as the projected ice storm would take place on my second day visiting – the only fate worse than being in Salem, in my eyes, is being stuck in Salem and unable to leave.* Also, I tried to take a sad song and make it better by going to the nearby Hollywood Video and merely renting Gears of War 2, but it seems some joker (not the cool kind) has had it checked out since November 26th. Depriving me of excruciating violence? I mean, they may as well just rip out my soul in a shower of my own blood. Worst of all, though, we ran out of Diet Coke two days ago and we can’t go to Costco to get more at bargain-basement prices until the snow melts! I mean, what am I supposed to do? Drink water? Can you… Can you even drink that, anymore?

*Actually, I guess being in El Paso is probably worse than being stuck in Salem. Cancer, also, is apparently no walk in the park.

So, trapped in my family’s condo by one inch of snow, I sit and I wait. I watch King of the Hill reruns at 1:00 and 3:30 and slowly learn to hate Wendy’s new Portobello Mushroom Burger because they absolutely refuse to stop advertising it. And I stave off insanity by counting my blessings.

1) I’m not in El Paso
2) I’m not in California
3) 30 Rock is finally getting an audience
4) They’re making chipotle hummus at LONG last
5) I’m not one of the hundreds of homeless people literally freezing to death in cardboard boxes downtown right now because all of the rescue missions are full to capacity
6) Arrested Development movie? It’s possible.

So please, storm teams - have mercy. It’s Christmas.

Truman Capps stated at the end of his last blog that whether it snowed or not had little effect on him – this was a shortsighted statement, made by a man who thought it wasn’t going to snow. Since when does Mother Nature read this thing, and since when does she have a blistering sense of irony?

Update: 9:35 AM

Forget it.

Just... Just forget every damn thing I said, hows about?

Piss!

Storm Teamwork

Timberline Lodge, home of elevators filled with blood and the only snow in Oregon.

Arguably the two rarest things in Oregon are snow and black people thanks to our proximity to the Pacific Ocean and our sterling history of institutional racism. Yet once a year, our local news stations get whipped up into a right proper frenzy about one of these two issues – I’m referring, of course, to snow. (To be fair, I’m sure Fox would have a “Black People Watch ‘08”, but the sad fact is that you can’t track black people with satellites the way you can track storm systems.)

Snow is a fairly common thing in a lot of the country – it’s basically rain, only rain that you can slide around on and throw at people that sometimes cancels school. Rain, on the other hand, is wet and dreary, uninteresting, and disliked by most save for a gaggle of poets and the first three people to reply to this update. Think of rain as the really boring kid in elementary school who hung around you all the time and only wanted to talk about lame, boring stuff – for some of you, that was probably me, but let’s forget that for a while. However, imagine if this kid had an awesome cousin who would come to visit every once in a great long while, and that this cousin had the power to cancel school, and gave everybody free skateboards, and shot candy out of his eyes. The day that that guy showed up is like the way it is when it snows in Oregon. While many of you Midwesterners may be tired of skateboards and free candy, we can’t get enough of them out here. It’s an exciting occurrence for everybody – for kids because they love skateboards and candy and for adults because they love to fret about the inherent danger of Snow and his toys.

The thing is, snow never really sneaks up on you in Oregon, because at the slightest hint of snow or snow related activity our weathermen awaken from their Xanax and Bacardi-induced slumber and say, “Wait! My job matters now!” Extra green screens are activated, interns bulldoze mountains of instant coffee into great vats of hot water, and researchers compile a full 20% more trivial information that is of no use to the viewer about the incoming storm. It is in these times that the antics of the wacky weathermen become significantly less wacky. Such is the nature of the world when the Storm Team is mobilized.

Every major station in Portland has a storm team, (sometimes they have epic battles downtown, flinging lightning bolts and cold fronts back and forth across the Pearl District, and… Well, no, they don’t, but we can all agree that this would do wonders for tourism) each one hand picked from the region’s bad boys of weather. Oft-run promos at this time of year feature each member of the given station’s storm team standing confidently in a crisp suit, superimposed over footage of snowbound streets as the authoritative announcer reads his or (rarely) her credentials. Amid all this action movie posturing, the weather person in question is nodding smugly, as if to say, “I’ve got your number, weather. Don’t you try anything on my watch.” After watching one of these commercials, I get sort of jazzed up about man versus nature. I think to myself, “Sure, everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it – except for Matt Zaffino, chief meteorologist. Matt Zaffino makes weather his bitch.”

*You’ve got to respect how hard it is for the news station editors when it comes to finding footage of snowbound Oregon streets. Pretty much all they have is the candid footage of the car sliding down the hill and hitting all the parked cars, and the two people in mittens chaining up a car. After that, they have to default to shots of people skiing on Mt. Hood, or pictures of a computer running Oregon Trail when you get caught in a blizzard.

Right now, every storm team has agreed that everyone between Alaska and Mexico is straight up fucked this weekend. It seems like every time I turn on the TV there’s another frantic weatherman pointing at swirly computer rendered graphics, attempting to explain in no uncertain terms that God is going to personally rape all of us with snow, and that only by sticking close to the TV can we hope to be safe. This, in turn, has whipped everyone else into a frenzy, and now all anyone can talk about is the impending snowgasm. Rumors of up to three inches (which may not sound like much to some of you from more snow-prone parts of the country, but just apply the dog-years rule to every inch of Oregon snow and you’ll understand how much havoc it wreaks out here) have been fluttering around all week, and I’ve watched many people hastily redraw their plans for fear of getting caught in a Donner Party-esque situation.

The problem is, the snow isn’t coming. The first forecasts predicted snow on Thursday night, and here it is Saturday night with nary a flake to show for it. My friends in Salem have mentioned a dusting of sorts, but so far I feel slightly cheated by our storm teams. When snow didn’t come Thursday, they told us that we’d be screwed on Friday, when we weren’t screwed on Friday, they told us to wait for Saturday, and although I was waiting patiently to be screwed all day today, it didn’t happen. Of course, tomorrow is now the big day, but at this rate I imagine we’ll be hunkering down for a snowstorm in July.

But, as with any other kind of news, it behooves the storm teams to assume the worst and keep us scared. If we think there’s going to be a snowpocalypse, we’re far more likely to stay indoors, and so long as we’re indoors we may as well be watching TV, and if we’re watching TV we may as well be looking to see what the storm team has to say about it. And if, in fact, there is no coming snowpocalypse? Well, hey – the ratings come through the same whether it’s snowing or not.

So if you’re putting off driving to the supermarket because you don’t have a snowmobile, take heed: Rain’s awesome (yet dangerous) cousin may not be coming to visit us this year, and if you disobey Matt Zaffino and go outside, I’m predicting a 25% chance that he won’t try to kill you in his sleep.

Truman Capps doesn’t have anywhere to go anyway, so snow or lack thereof will have little effect on him save for amusement at the suffering of others. Merry Christmas!

Down With The Sickness 2: Kingdom of the Crystal Rash

Is there a Photoshop doctor in the house?

I don’t get sick very often. It’s just not really a thing that I do. It could be because I wash my hands a lot, or maybe I just say “No!” to the very notion of illness, but I’ve almost always been a remarkably healthy individual. This was not always the case, however – when my family lived in Longview, Washington, I used to get sick all the time. However, we moved to Salem when I was seven, and it was in that same year that my parents made me an appointment to have my tonsils taken out – perhaps as a grand, misguided “I’m sorry for making you live in Salem” present. I was doubtful at the time, but looking back I can’t tell you how great having a big chunk of your throat cut out is for your health. Although at the time I was rather attached – emotionally and physically – to the little guys, it turns out that my tonsils were really just holding me back in life. Once they were removed, I was on the fast track to success – by which I mean, vice presidency of the high school speech team and little to no feminine contact for a prolonged period of time. But I was healthy, damn it.

I’ve found that throughout my education, there have always been students who are just plain prone to sickness, and who would absolutely drop off the scholastic radar for weeks at a time with one crippling illness after another. Whenever one of these illness-prone classmates would return, I’d always be disappointed that they looked about the same as they had when they’d left; no robot body, no genetic mutations, no missing limbs. As a generally anti-germ, pro-health kind of guy, I had little understanding of what these people were going through, and as politically incorrect as it was, a tiny part of me secretly regarded them as pussies. They, in the opinion of this tiny, callous, unlikeable portion of my psyche, would do well to follow my example and just not get sick. At some level, I felt like they had it easy – I would gladly have submitted to any number of flesh-eating-viruses if it meant I wouldn’t have to spend another day at Sprague High School.

Being sick in college, as I’ve mentioned before, is a different kettle of fish entirely. It’s one thing to be in Mom’s care when you start having bizarre symptoms, because ultimately she is the one who makes the call as to whether you go to the emergency room or not when you grow a third arm out of your chest. When you’re on your own, you have to make that decision and live with the consequences. Incidentally, I’d vote that you stick with the third arm, because it’d make for an awesome cup holder.

I had the privilege of being sick this past week, and coming out on the other end of it, now mostly cured, I can look back and sympathize with my sickly classmates. The whole affair started last Saturday, when I woke up at 6:00 AM with a pounding headache and a pronounced desire to throw up. My first instinct was to call the University health center, but it seems that they don’t open until 10:00 AM on Saturdays – y’know, because they figure that all 20,000 college students at UO were being really responsible the night before and were in no need of medical treatment or consultation. In lieu of an actual doctor, I did the next best thing and called the 24-hour nurse hotline that the school provides.


These nurses, I regret to inform you, are not naughty. Or, at least, the one I talked to wasn’t. For all I know, though, she could have been a naughty nurse who was going to medical school and had been studying for an important exam when she got my call, and, well, hey – excuse me while I write down my new idea for an awesome TV show.

The nurse I spoke to told me that what I had didn’t sound too serious, and so I refrained from visiting the health center. Lo and behold, not too long later my urge to puke dissipated, and I spent the rest of the day nursing an unpleasant headache. Still, though, I consider the day to be a success overall, because any day that I don’t throw up is a success in my eyes. It’s a real “Glass half full of Pepto Bismol” way of looking at things, because by this logic even my senior prom was a raging success.

On Sunday I woke up sans-headache but feeling dizzy. This was perplexing, as I’ve been pretty good at walking for the past 18 years or so. Admittedly, I’ve tripped and fell a few times when I shouldn’t have, but overall I’d still give myself a solid B+ in walking, and the sudden onset of dizziness is not something I’m used to. I would have gone to the health center to have this checked out, but as it happens the health center is closed on Sundays – but that’s cool, because it’s scientifically proven that people don’t get sick on Sunday. They’ve got God looking out for them, what do they need with modern medicine? By the end of the day, my headache had returned, and after consulting WebMD I became convinced that I was dying of meningitis, the symptoms of which include fever and dizziness.

(In addition to vomiting, severe muscle cramps, and the inability to touch your chin to your chest – I wasn’t experiencing these, but I assumed that I would be soon enough. Also, I’ve had a meningitis vaccine, but I figured that the industrious bacteria had found a way around it. I mean, germs do some crazy shit these days, after all.)

One of my childhood friends got meningitis when she was three or four. The infection spread quickly and she had to be airlifted to OHSU, where her legs were amputated to save her life. This story has always scared the living crap out of me and the hyperliving crap out of my mother, and we’ve both always been a little jumpy around the subject. Therefore, to possibly have meningitis while all alone was a really terrifying experience for me – not only was I scared of losing my legs, but I was also scared of Mom getting pissed at me for not going to a hospital sooner when I found out that I had meningitis symptoms.

The next morning I showed up at the health center ten minutes before they opened. A nurse opened the door for me.

“Have you got an appointment?” She smiled.

“No, but I think I’ve got meningitis.”

She laughed in my face – setting the tone for my experiences with the health center over the next few days – and let me in, pointing out that if I had meningitis I’d probably be dead already. I recounted my symptoms to a receptionist, who sent me in to see a nurse, who promptly diagnosed my ailment as a virus that had been going around a lot and urged me to return if things got worse.

Five hours later, walking through the 38 degree winter day to get to class, I started to sweat profusely. No good reason for it, just nonstop, inexplicable sweating. I took this as a sign that things were getting worse and went to the health center, where I sat in an examining room and sweated for 10 minutes until a nurse came in.

“So,” She said flatly, her eyes darting down to my chart. “You’re… Sweating.”

I instantly felt like an idiot for going to the health center with such an obnoxiously stupid symptom, and began to apologetically sweat through my shirt. The nurse left and a doctor returned, who seemed none too pleased to be visiting “the sweat guy.”

“So,” She said flatly, her eyes darting down to my chart. “You’re… Sweating.”

I tried as best I could to explain why I felt like this was a dire situation, and for her part she listened patiently before telling me that this was most likely an anxiety attack brought on by the fear that I had meningitis. It seems that the story of my misguided fears of meningitis had spread through the health center with all the ruthless tenacity of, well… Meningitis.

After examining me with a stethoscope, she crossed her arms and sighed, defeated. “Well,” She said. “You are pretty sweaty.”

That’s what she said.

She told me to get some more rest and sent me home to sleep.

And sleep I did, for a good three to four hours. When I woke up, I was no longer sweating and my headache was gone. However, my arms and legs itched like crazy, and when I turned on the lights I found that a giant red rash had begun to spread across my body.

(“No, Mom, I can’t come to dinner!” My reader shouts down the stairs. “I’ve got to finish reading this update! He just started talking about his rash! This is off the hook!”)

I spent the evening futilely rubbing various creams and ointments all over the afflicted areas with little to no success. For one thing, rashes were springing up faster than I could apply soothing cream, and also, the soothing cream was about as effective as rubbing a raw steak all over my rash, although not nearly as fragrant. As I made myself slipperier and slipperier with cream, I wondered if I had inadvertently joined the “Symptom of the Day Club,” After headache, nausea, sweating, and itching, I had no idea what I’d get next, although I considered pustules to be very likely.

After a poor night’s sleep – it is very hard to concentrate on sleep, or anything for that matter, when you want to rip your own skin off – I returned to the health center, sat down in front of the receptionist, rolled up my sleeve, and was finally taken seriously. I was ushered to an examining room, where a nurse oohed and aahed over the size and breadth of the rash, and shortly thereafter provided me with a shot glass full of bright pink antihistamine liquid, which made me sleepier than even my 12:00 Humanities lecture. I moved through everything else in a daze – the trip to get my blood drawn, the half hour I spent in the waiting room while they tested my very complicated, multifaceted blood, and other half hour I spent in an examining room while doctors poured over the results of my blood, which were clearly better than anyone else’s, given my blood’s inherent superiority. In the end, the doctor wrote me a prescription for over-the-counter antihistamine Zyrtec (she may as well have written me a prescription for a glass of water, too) and sent me home to sleep it all off.

I slept the sleep of antihistamine-infused kings, only waking up to a brisk “Shave and a haircut” knock on the door of my apartment. Thanks to my drug induced state, I figured that the only people who would knock so obnoxiously would be my friends, and that my friends would be willing to see me in my standard sleeping attire of boxer shorts and T-shirt. I stumbled to the door and flung it open, blinking in the early afternoon light.

Standing before me were two of the most beautiful, pristine Mormon girls you could ever want to see, clad in matching black pea-coats. Their smiles wavered slightly when they caught sight of my near-nudity, and wavered even more when, upon realizing my error, I shouted “Shit! Fuck! Jesus!” and halfway closed the door in search of my pants. I returned to the door wearing a pair of jeans, and one of them began to launch into a sales pitch for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I stopped her halfway, saying, “I’m sorry, but I think you can tell by now that I’m not really the sort of person who’ll buy what you’re selling.” They didn’t argue, and left without incident; like most women who have seen me without pants on, they were in a hurry to get away.

I look back on these experiences – itching, headaches, near vomiting, ridicule from the health center, and the very real possibility that the Mormon church has put me on a watch list of some sort – and am floored with sympathy for my ailment-prone high school classmates. After what I experienced in two days, I’d much rather go to school.

Truman Capps doesn’t have the rash anymore, ladies.

Energy Drinks

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

For someone with so few vices, I tend to worry an awful lot about addiction. I don't smoke (this includes the wacky tobacky as well as the regular kind), I am a social drinker at best, and the one picture of me the Emerald keeps printing makes it tough for me to indulge in loose women, no matter how hard I may try. Seriously, take a look at that thing - it's like I'm out on work release.

But I digress.

One of my great fears is getting hooked on a substance that is bad for my health. To be honest, this is the reason I avoid so many college vices, for better or for worse. That includes the aforementioned smoking and drinking, as well as another increasingly conspicuous college habit: the energy drink. Here's my challenge to you, reader: Take a look around and count how many people you see with energy drinks the next time you're in public, especially on campus. The number may surprise you. Back in the '80s, people did cocaine when they wanted a pick-me-up; now we've got the same idea in a can without the runny nose afterward.

I've been wary of energy drinks because of the power they claim to have. As a lazy person, I'm easily distracted and prone to abandoning my work in favor of my XBox or a re-run of MacGyver. This very column was written the day before my deadline. Sure, I'd like to have the work ethic to get everything done ahead of time, but with Gears of War 2 now in wide release, I doubt that will ever happen. Thus, the prospect of a magical elixir that gives the drinker energy and motivation is appealing, but my fear was that after one energy drink, I'd get so hooked on the miracles they worked for my study habits that I wouldn't be able to study without them. To be perfectly honest, my diet isn't terribly healthy as is, and the last thing I need is 12-ounces or more of raw caffeine and sugar every day.

It was a few days ago that I finally broke down and had my first energy drink experience. I was studying with a friend in the library and found myself unable to stay awake - probably the result of the

MacGyver episode I'd watched the night before in lieu of sleeping an extra hour. The test for which we were studying was important and I didn't want to miss out on any of the review, so I ran downstairs and bought a 12-ounce Red Bull from the café.

I stayed awake for the rest of the study session and did pretty well on the test the next day. For that, I'd say that can of Red Bull was pretty useful; it gave me the energy to keep my eyes open, and I did my part by continuing to study for another hour and not throwing up.

However, drinking the Red Bull did not turn me into a genius, nor did it make all my homework worries go away. As it turns out, energy drinks are not a miracle cure for school-related stress, nor are they particularly healthy. Red Bull is banned in Denmark and Norway because of health concerns, and in 2000 an 18-year-old Irish basketball player died on the court after drinking four Red Bulls before the game. French scientists discovered that when lab rats were fed concentrated doses of taurine, an amino acid present in every can of Red Bull, the rats displayed a higher incidence of irritability, anxiety and self-mutilation. These facts aside, I can't argue with the fact that if not for Red Bull I would have slept through a very valuable study session.

In my opinion, the key difference between death and not falling asleep is moderation. The boost in alertness that an energy drink gives can be useful when you need to go the extra mile at the end of an all-nighter, but drinking one or four of them will not give you wings (it could, however, give you high blood pressure).

I don't plan on having another Red Bull anytime soon, but if I find myself falling asleep at an inopportune time during finals week, I'll probably buy one to help get me through the day. I won't pound down two or three more, though, much for the same reason that I don't drink a gallon of water whenever I'm thirsty, or eat 15 Chalupas every time I go to Taco Bell.

Consuming a high enough level of anything will almost always have negative results, but energy drinks - much like drugs and alcohol - just might give you those results faster. Think about this before your next pre-exam Red Bull binge, and remember, always energize responsibly.