The first

My Friday nights used to kick off with a heist. I remember me and a few of my friends, jacked-up on the hardest stimulants we could pilfer, racing down Back Beach Road toward our destination: A calculated, well-planned assault on a fine art warehouse. Or, you know, the middle school equivalent of fine art.

Video games.

Checking video stores on Friday nights for the latest and greatest PlayStation games sure felt like a heist. We would rush the door and file through the magnetic anti-theft pillars, scoffing like they were some advanced motion-detection system we'd hacked moments earlier. From there, we would all split up and take separate routes to our respective console's section of the store. And after a few moments, a victorious shout.

"They've got the new Metal Gear!" Or "Dude, the new Bond game!"

That was the thrill, perhaps more so than the games themselves. We would give proud, condescending glances to anyone who passed us as we were leaving. Don't bother, we thought. You snooze, you loose. And one confused parent would drive in silence as the car of over-caffeinated kids poured over the game's instruction manual and speculated about how good the "graphics" were.

I was always a fan of the party games, like Super Smash Bros. or GoldenEye, because by their very nature they avoided the situation I came here to talk about: Being the first. Everyone is equally inexperienced starting off a new party game. And no one person's skills come into focus. It's great.

But with single-player games, someone has to be the first to try it out in front of everyone else. Certainly not me. I would always find an excuse not to be the first to play the game when we all got home: It's your console, man. Your mom drove us. You didn't get to play first last time. Nah, I hate 3rd person stealth shooters.

I would literally say whatever it took to avoid being humiliated by the first five minutes of a new game. The last thing a middle-schooler with zero confidence and zero athletic skills wants to hear is that he really sucks at gaming, too. So I would let the bravest among my friends have the first pass at guiding Solid Snake through Shadow Moses.

Eventually the first player would die in some stupid way and one of us would make some snarky, immature comment about them sucking. You know, the way middle school friends treat each other. And then the question would be posed: Who's next? Oh, not me. That shit looks hard. Better let the other expert take the reigns instead.

I was 12 and already defeating myself at every minor opportunity to succeed. Even something as stupid and trivial as a video game.

There would always come a point, either later that night or the next day or maybe a few months down the road, when I would angrily think to myself "why am I not as good at Metal Gear as my friends?" Well, because I didn't have the practice. That didn't dawn on me back then, and I would shift into another unproductive mindset thinking that I'm just not as naturally skilled as my friends.

Those negative mindsets have stuck with me to this day, albeit surfacing in more adult situations. What's the point in apologizing? I can't ever make it up to them. I can't humiliate myself by talking to her. I'm not interesting. I can't do this, I can't do that.

And those thoughts and situations inevitably lead to sitting back, watching my friends excel and wondering if I'm just not as good at life as them. Wondering why people can program faster and more elegantly than me. Wondering why my brain feels so un-pliable and unreceptive to the prospect of new experiences.

Well, you may not ever be the best at the game, but dammit, you gotta play to get better. If you take this fact for granted, and you're thinking "well duh, Kyle," then at least consider for a second that it's not easy for everyone to place confidence in themselves, especially when defeating yourself has been a ten-year habit.

I wish I'd have learned this lesson when video games and a few derisive middle school insults were at stake, rather than my human soul. But I'm tryin', dammit. I figure that humiliating myself by trying is a lot better than humiliating myself by not trying.

Efficiency

Efficiency. Doing things in the shortest amount of time with the fewest resources has always been an obsession of mine. It's why I went into engineering. It's why I get such a kick out of helping businesses work efficiently with well-designed software solutions. It's why I've Google Maps'd, tested and re-tested the hell out of every route and shortcuts to and from work.

I may not be 100% efficient 100% of the time, but dammit, there's an untold elegance in getting a jobs done simply and quickly. And I'm quirky about it.

I caught this article in the latest issue of Wired about the IOI: The International Olympiad in Informatics. The kids are savants on a level that is both foreign and frightening to me. But my god-- is there anything more beautiful than 22 lines of Pascal tearing through a multi-dimensional dataset? I posit not.

Reading through the article, you'll notice that the USA doesn't excel at the IOI in a way you might expect the birthplace of the Internet, personal computer and Furby to excel. Perhaps our performance is a criticism of this country's math and science education standards. Maybe we need to start teaching programming at a younger age. But I doubt it. After all, do you think China and Belarus really have better math and science programs than the United States?

Eh. Actually, maybe they do :-/ But no. The quality of education isn't necessarily the issue.

I just don't think American culture, as a whole, appreciates efficiency the way other nations of the world have learned, out of necessity, to appreciate it. The America I see every day cares about jobs done right and gives bonus points for efficiency. The rest of the world demands efficiency out of necessity. Lack of food. Lack of space. Lack of labor. Lack of technology.

I'm not saying the best coders in the world grew up poor and hungry. Hardly. What I'm saying is this: When you have a deep, personal connection to the realities of scarcity-- maybe in your neighborhood, maybe in your own home-- you begin to make efficiency a part of everything you do. And that sort of edge can really make all the difference, whether you're in a high school coding competition or vying for a promotion in your company.

Something to think about.

I need a more efficient way to find good new music. Any of you Belarusian kids out there wanna design me the next Pandora, so I can get my electro on?

Think Small

It's weird how inspiration can come from the most random places. An inspirational link and a quick conversation with my brother and, quite suddenly, I'm ready to start writing on this thing once again.

It all started quite innocuously this morning: Get to the office, throw on a cup of coffee and check reddit for all the easy-to-digest liberal nerd rage I can bite off with my dulled political chops. Years of caring too much have turned me from a youthfully deaf, rabid Michael Moore wannabe into one of those more sage, jaded liberals who believes in the goodness of sharing and equality but is disheartened by the empty promise of politics in America.

I noticed one particular headline that suddenly cranked my fatigued morning brain into overdrive:

This is interesting: Julian Assange's old blog. (web.archive.org)

A blog written by an academic from 2006-2007 touching on some high-minded topics such as freedom of information, love, life and humor? Interspersed with random snippets of useful Ruby code? All on a very non-flashy, flat-style page? Totally fucking early 2000's nostalgia! Where do I sign up?

To me, Assange has never been the enigmatic, borderline Aspy with a serious case of US butthurt that many media outlets have attempted to mis-characterize. To me, he's a man who values the academic principle of openness more than the academic definition of journalism. And that pragmatic attitude garners a lot of respect from me.

Professors and pundits alike may argue all day about the proportions of journalism, recklessness, integrity, fairness and freedom that constitute the WikiLeaks initiative. At the end of the day, though, WikiLeaks itself (especially with this latest iteration of leaked cables) is not dismantling the institutions it highlights. At least, not on its own. They're dismantling the facade. They're exposing the way the world works in a very candid way, leaving the accountability in the hands of those who dare to lie, mislead or at the very least not educate the public at large.

I think that's cool, because history tends to favor openness and expression.

Anyways, back to that blog.

Breezing through the international pariah's random, somewhat intimate wisdom, I found myself awash in one big, awesome thought: He blogs for the same reason I have to blog. To put my ideas out there. To reflect and check myself in a public space. To share and clarify and sharpen my position instead of keeping it in my head. I feel like those higher goals are evident in Assange's blog as they are in this one.

Blogging for me has always been more than just an indulgent exercise in narcissism, though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't some significant part of it :-) It's a giant "you are here, and this is where you've been" map for life. I do re-read my shit on occasion. I bet you're not surprised.

Honestly, I know myself well enough to know that I have never been able to keep track of myself well in my head. I lose myself. I make myself crazy with the sort of deprecating, self-defeating nonsense that left me depressed and insular for the better part of this year. But when I unleash the stream of consciousness into a finite bitstream for public consumption, well, those self-defeating thoughts get pulverized like errant letters by a springy, loud, 80's style backspace button.

So thanks to Mr. Assange for helping me realize and see the importance of writing on my blog once again.

I also chatted a bit with my brother today and, together, we came to another conclusion: That each blog post doesn't have to be some big odyssey of a tome. It feels like everything I've written in the past year or so is some historical essay on the recent life I've been living up to that point. But that sort of defeats the purpose I was just talking about. What I ended up with this year was three or four giant characterizations of my life based on those pivotal moments when I was so emotional or worked-up that I just exploded with prose. But those aren't honest. They're moving, but they're not necessarily me on-the-whole.

The odyssey isn't each constituent post. The odyssey is the blog.

(oops, I ended up saying way more than I thought I would. oh well. I promise the next post will come soon, and be small. twss?)

The Great Literati Divide (or How to Kill a Student Newspaper)

Every Sunday evening, without fail, I would space out for an hour while the section editors and shakers of Rice's undergraduate newspaper argued about factual accuracy and page layout. My job as the Thresher's satirist was to give readers something to laugh at while they're taking a crap in Duncan Hall between classes, not to win a kiddie Pulitzer for the most hard-hitting investigation of campus inefficiencies. So, naturally, I often resented the fact that I was required to attend these meetings.

To the extent that I did listen, though, there was one resounding lament that I heard over the course of my tenure as Backpage editor: The Thresher's general decline in article quality. The news and copy sections have been embarrassed a number of times this past year thanks to awesome ineptitude demonstrated by the news writing staff. Check out the erratum in nearly every issue published in this year's volume. Last fall, the front page ran an article that reported one in five students was infected with H1N1 (when the number was closer to 2%). The downward trend hit rock bottom in February when Rice's administration was forced to write-in and correct glaring factual errors two weeks in a row.

Personally, I'm more upset about the decline in quality of another section: Op-Eds. The weekly editorial columns that the Thresher receives from the student body have all but flatlined in terms of caliber and general interest. Case in point: The Thresher's most prolific student author also happens to be the most out-of-touch when it comes to campus culture, writing in about how Houston is inferior to New York City and why final exams should be optional. This is the kind of thing I should have been writing about in my satire section and yet, somehow, columns like hers are still showing up on Page 3.

Pinpointing that "somehow" interests me severely. What happened to the Rice Thresher? Is Coffeehouse poisoning the staff with ayahuasca? No, because the Thresher doesn't receive free Coffeehouse coffee anymore. Thanks, Evan.

We are then left with a few reasonable explanations:

• There are no more good, dedicated writers at Rice University. They all graduated in '09.
• There are good writers at Rice University, but their work is purposefully sabotaged by the Thresher's editorial staff for some incomprehensible reason. Goddamn it Casey.
  
• There are good writers at Rice University, and they're just not writing for the Thresher.
  

Let's ignore that second point for a moment while we critically consider what has changed the landscape of Rice's undergraduate writing community over the past few years. Obviously, the first thing that comes to my mind is the Rice Standard (because Alice Townes is always on my mind, zing!). It's a student-run, university-independent magazine/blog that has really taken off in the past few year. Oh, and don't forget about Open, Rice's literary sex magazine. Open is like an episode of The Big Bang Theory with less blonds, more nudity and more frankness about nerds not getting laid. And then there's Catalyst (the research journal for kids).

Did I miss anyone? Probably. It seems like every niche at Rice has its own publication these days.

But if you take the time to read any of the publications mentioned above you'll realize that my first guess—that the good writers have gone the way of the dinosaurs—simply can't be true. The Standard (mostly) holds itself to an intellectual... standard that borders on cosmopolitan. There are a few exceptions to this rule but, on average, the essays posted on the Standard possess a quality and readability that easily exceeds that of the contemporary Thresher. While Open and Catalyst don't generate nearly as much content per year as the Standard, their existence still necessitate a certain amount of hard work and dedication from their respective editorial staffs, writers, and girls willing to show their butt-cracks to the campus. God bless you, youthful rebellion.

And so here we are, finally, at my thesis. Despite their respective intentions, publications like the Rice Standard are sucking the life out of Rice's student-run newspaper. Their crime is not a malicious crime but, instead, a crime perpetrated by sheer existence. They are draining the literary-oriented campus talent from its former, centralized location at the Thresher and directing it toward niche audiences with limited perspectives and smaller readerships.

The issue is simply a matter of limited resources. Rice's small campus has a fixed number of individuals willing to write for fun on a regular basis, and even fewer willing to read, edit and layout pages. These are busy kids. Future leaders, I'm told. And they're smart. They're going to write to maximize their exposure to interested readers, minimize the work involved in getting published and, perhaps most importantly, they're only going to write when they have the time to do so leisurely.

The Standard's WordPress format makes it easy for any member of Rice's literati to contribute a couple hundred words on a topic of their respective interest. They don't get paid, sure, but no one (except for it's own editorial staff) is writing for a living at the Thresher anyways. Standard writers also receive instant gratification and can easily and quickly engage their readers through a familiar commenting system. The Thresher's College Publisher-based website is laughably clunkier than the Standard; the rules governing when and how writers can comment on their articles on the Thresher's site are contrived and confusing.

On the other hand, the Standard's online-only format severely limits its ability to reach the entire campus. College newspapers-- at least, our college newspaper and most other small college newspapers-- don't necessarily follow the national trend of declining print newspaper readership caused by increased online readership. Picking up a free Thresher on Friday mornings is still a tradition well-ingrained in campus culture. There's even one particular professor who likes to talk to me during Friday ELEC lab about what he has read in the Thresher. The Standard, on the other hand, may reach students but not necessarily alumni and professors: It's just the nature of the beast.

And so, owing to convenience and prestige, the Standard has effectively stolen the campus' best writers away from the student body and directed their efforts toward reaching a smaller and more niche audience.

For that niche audience, though, convenience and prestige are a great thing. The Standard has a certain feel to it. Articles feel smarter. The site looks good. The pool of individuals who regularly comment on articles is small and personable. They laud intellectual discourse and shun stupidity. And while I have no doubt that the Standard is daily reading for some members of the campus administration, it is not scrutinized by the same pool of prospective students and their parents, alumni or faculty members who love to make a fuss when the Thresher does anything slightly subversive. Autonomy has made the Standard interesting.

The Standard, however, is not the face of Rice. The Thresher is the face of Rice. And when those same prospective students, alumni and faculty read yet another half-brained, last-minute opinion piece presented under the Thresher's masthead, they have to wonder what sort of students are running the student-run newspaper. Or what kind of students go to Rice.

It's in everyone's best interest for publications to present their best, most high-quality copy to the campus. But things have to change in order for that to happen. The literati have to branch out. The publications have to innovate and recognize that if any one of them is going to flourish, they have to sustainably manage their most valuable resource.

And lastly, I have my prescriptions. No giant rant pointing out the obvious would be complete without some ideas about where to go next.

For the Standard:

• Recognize that the Thresher is hurting as a result of your existence. This was, after all, one reason that the Standard was formed in the first place: As retaliation against what the founders perceived to be bias and lack of Rand-esque autonomy and free enterprise at the Thresher. Or because the founders were mad they couldn't inject their wacky, neoconservative opinions into the student newspaper. In any case, it's time to make nice.
  
• Encourage writers to increase their exposure by re-working their opinion articles toward the campus as a whole and submitting them to the Thresher. That's how activism works: Pounding every available outlet with your brand of the truth.
• Stay open to new ideas and collaboration with the Thresher. They have something you don't: Money. And they're probably willing to share it in the pursuit of readership.

For the Thresher:

• Realize where the good writers have gone, why they left and admit that you have suffered as a result.
• Work on writer incentives. Standardize (lolz) a workflow that makes it easier for writers to participate in the editorial process, provide commentary online and minimizes the amount of time they have to spend writing articles.
• In today's world, no one expects a print institution to provide the same sort of time-sensitive information that the Internet and social media provide. If an Op-Ed isn't time-sensitive but has potential, send it back for another week of revision. Work on articles for months at a time if you have to. The point is to recover some of that quality that has been lacking for the past year or two.
• Pay writers more money. If it's supposed to be an incentive, make it an incentive. Ten dollars per article is a joke to writers exhausted by their respective workloads.
• Stay open to new ideas and collaboration with the Standard. They have something you don't: Quality. And they're probably willing to share it in the pursuit of readership.

For the other campus publications:

• Just... I dunno. Write something for the Thresher and the Standard every now and then, even if it turns out to be a shallow promotion of your publication. Their editorial staff can always turn you down.

Now, what to do about armchair experts too selfish to write for any campus publication is another story entirely...

It's Christmastime

It's Christmas Eve in Truckee, California. My family decided to exchange gifts tonight; it's an unfamiliar but welcome departure from our usual crack-o'-dawn tradition. Instead, we're all planning to ride snowmobiles around Lake Tahoe tomorrow at 9 a.m. I can't think of a more unique and enjoyable way to spend Christmas Day.

I passed all of my fall semester classes. Actually, I excelled in my fall semester classes and completely surpassed my own expectations. All the time I spent flustered for the past weeks and months—worrying whether I would be allowed to graduate in May—seems to have been a complete waste of time. Perhaps not a waste but, you know, I could have been proactively positive rather than a negative Nancy the entire time. Straddling the edge, tripping over my responsibilities and worrying whether my next clumsy step will see me into another one of life's ditches... well, it's a recurring theme in my life.

My dad warned me a long time ago that he, too, spent too much of his youth worrying about things and not enough time actually doing the things that needed to be done. It must run in the family.

One of my winter projects is finished: All of the music, movies and pictures on my hard drive are now organized into nice, neat little folders. Shuffling old images reminded me how long I've been going at this whole college thing. Half a decade now. The amount of weirdness, badness and disappointment I'd blocked from my collective memory of freshman and sophomore year is startling and staggering. What else don't I remember? Would I be a better person now if I had remembered?

Would I be worrying so much about things I can control?
Would I worry more about the things I can't control?

What a decade.

I was 12 when Y2K happened. I stayed up late and watched one of Dick Clark's last New Years Eve broadcasts with my dad. I remember trading a weird, disappointed glance with him when the power didn't go out and planes didn't fall out of the sky at midnight. Barely two years later he died of esophageal cancer and his eighteen month battle with the disease is still very vivid and real in my mind. And nearly three years after that I received my acceptance letter from Rice. My good friend Phillip was there next to me when my mom came running at us from the mailbox, holding the letter and wearing the most proud smile a parent can ever hope to wear. Phillip's getting married this summer.

And what of the second half of the decade? I made do, I suppose. I had a lot of fun—both superficial fun and real, earnest, ear-to-ear smile fun—and had some great, priceless life experiences with great, priceless friends. I also did some stupid, selfish stuff that I'll never be able to undo or atone for completely. I did some bad things to people who either were my close friends or, miraculously, remain friends with me to this day. Five years of pushing the extremes for purposes that, in retrospect, boil down to selfishness, stupidity or entitlement.

But it wasn't all bad. I remember O-Week at Rice, meeting Andrew and Augusta and Louie. And even before O-Week, getting to know Sam and Allee and Leslie and all the clever nerds who were so earnestly excited to experience college. Sharing Southern sensibilities with people like Julie and Sarah who seemed like old, familiar friends the instant I met them. Austin City Limits Music Fest, both in 2006 and 2008. Road tripping across Texas to Port Aransas and Matamoros, Mexico, for spring break during my sophomore year. And to Shiner and Fredricksburg for spring break last year. Meeting a girl named Cristina who shared all my weird interests and made me feel comfortable and confident and happy while pushing me to be the better man. And those parties that saw me outside Baker College 'till 5 a.m. talking with Stef or Britt or Johan about life, love, movies, music &stuff.

Not bad for five years. Not at all. And, deep down, I know that the person ending this decade is the same person that started it: The one who is surprised when planes don't fall out of the sky.

I'm the last person awake here in the little vacation cottage my mom won for a week in a contest several months ago. Goodnight, blog.

Living on-campus at Rice will ruin your future

With no certain regard for next year's living situation, I let Rice's on-campus housing deadline pass this past week without throwing my name in the hat. Some people will call me crazy; I could have easily scored a lovely little single at the newly-built McMurtry College. They're sticking all of the members of my own residential college and former home-- Will Rice-- at McMurtry while they pull the asbestos out from the air ducts and scrape the green resin off the walls of the 90's. They got pods for bathrooms, grass for roofs, and personal space for all.

See, I love to espouse the benefits of living off-campus. I lived on-campus for two years and off-campus for nearly two years and compiled a laundry list of pros and cons along the way. Generally, living off-campus fosters a sense of independence and adulthood that I found to be markedly lacking while living on-campus. Stumbling out of bed and throwing on a free T-shirt and pajama pants and grumbling about waking up at 10am while you trudge fifty feet to your first class is not a lifestyle I wish to revisit.

There are logistic benefits and detractors, of course, but I think it all boils down to "don't shit where you eat." Your school should be school, your personal life should be your personal life, your job should be some job, and there should never be overlap between them. Your life should be a Swiss-Army knife with separate tools for every facet, not one tool that does everything shittily (read: a spork).

One of my favorite things about living off-campus is seeing the city everyday, particularly the marvelous homes and businesses in the Rice University area. I make a point to drive through the neighborhood west of campus on my way to work every day. The area is interspersed with little parks, two-story brick-and-mortar abodes for the UMC, and the tall, whitewashed walls of the occasional art deco mansion. Basically, I masturbate to the homes along Sunset and the Bissonnet corridor. Stuff white people like, indeed.

But there's no reason to feel guilty about admiring architecture. I think that big houses are a seminal building block of the American Dream-- they're something to want. A goal. A benchmark that might, one day, indicate that you've made it as far as you ever wanted.

That benchmark is sadly lacking from day-to-day on-campus life. Campus architecture isn't lacking, per se, but those buildings do not serve as any sort of motivator. They're not the potential containers of your four-member future family-- they're the dungeons where you toil away, trying to cram yourself with enough knowledge and good work habits to piss further than anyone else in Real World. Living off-campus affords one with daily reminders of what could be, without the jealousy that comes from being 35 and wishing you lived in a bigger place.

You can imagine it on the way to morning classes. You can bring your car to a complete stop at your favorite neighborhood intersection and look and suddenly feel your hand pushing open the ten-foot dark mahogany door to your dream home. You can feel the resilience of the brushed aluminum spiral staircase that leads to an upstairs foyer where you can look back and just barely see down into kitchen with the black marble countertops and matching appliances with the fridge that has a pull-out freezer and... oh Jesus, wait, I just peaked into the master bedroom. There's a small black telescope next to the floor-to-ceiling windows obscured by sliding-panel blinds. The bathroom is a brightly-lit orgy of authentic Mediterranean tile art, five massaging showerheads, this particular jacuzzi, and there are no faucets centered by the dual sinks-- just one knob at each basin that shoots a straight stream of water down from the ceiling. There's a dog in the backyard, barking, but it's hypoallergenic and can speak French. The baby crying down the hall quickly stops when you pull out your BlackBerry and reset his Baby Einstein tapes using the WebUI you developed to control everything on your property, including the turrets which automatically pelt intruders with pepper spray paintballs if they even look at your house crooked. The pepper spray washes out of the carpet easily because the carpet is coated in nano-particles that repel stains and prevent cancer and are worth more than a cinderblock of iridium. There is a sex swing in the master's second walk-in closet which is lined with rose petals and self-cleans in a fashion somewhat similar to today's ovens. Everything in the home is pained either black or white, and you own another one outside San Fransisco.

I think I want to start a business. And I didn't even have to talk about the entertainment system.

See? You're the one holding the steering wheel on this blind drive down the I-10 of life-- so where's the daily nudge to keep you from veering off into the food service industry? Mine is homes. Big, sexy homes that I see every day, because I live off-campus.

People You Hate on Facebook

Just like the Matrix, the Internet has gone through several incarnations in its sentient quest toward perfection. Remember 1996? Remember watching a lot of JenniCam? Remember downloading funny Wayne's World gifs to put on your homepage? Remember reading "underground" wrestling news sites between bouts of watching more JenniCam?

Okay, maybe you weren't me 13 years ago. Whatever. A lot has changed since then: Right now I'm Torrenting all the dirty video highlights from JenniCam while video blogging about John Cena and sending my old roommate pictures of SNL skits-turned-movies on Facebook just because.

I love social networking more than anything. Facebook, though. Not MySpace. MySpace is for bands and hooking up with scene chicks when you're back home for Christmas. Facebook, on the other hand, is a respectable tool used to communicate with people you know. People like your mom (Limited Profile), your boss (Limited Profile), your best friend from high school (Limited Profile) and your girlfriend (Limited Profile). And by "communicate with," I mean "hide your profane, secret lifestyle from."

All of this personal exposure-- all of this culture surrounding You-- has given rise to the pariahs of Facebook. Jerks who feed on the nature of the beast. Idiots that throw a monkey wrench into your relaxing semisocial experience. You know the ones.

Or maybe you aren't familiar with the beasts I bemoan. Allow me to introduce you a few types of people you absolutely hate on Facebook. I've attached pictures.

People You Hate on Facebook

The Guy Who's Not on Facebook
The first person who annoys me on Facebook is, ironically, not on Facebook at all. He's the person who is scared of Facebook for privacy reasons. Or maybe he's doing it just to be cool-- totally counterculture. Whatever the reason, he refuses to get with the program and provide three easy-to-access pieces of information in order to join the digital revolución.

To the Guy Who's Not on Facebook: Get real. There is no world outside of the Internet anymore. The real world is the Internet. Google e-mails me breakfast every morning for Christsakes, and it's fucking delicious. Sure, I had to give them my social security number in return for a delicious picture of orange juice and a bagel covered in lox and capers, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for the convenience.

So what if advertisers know that you love the Jonas Brothers and The Boondock Saints? So does the CIA, and you put a waterboard's worth of trust in them. Trust the corporations: They're hiring.

The Critic
I suppose it's sort of ironic that I hate this sort of person, considering I have my own well-formed opinions and you're reading them right now. But I also leave a lot of my opinions to myself and try not to do it all the time. I know what it's like to be hassled all the time about your opinions, thanks to these jokers.

The Critic is the person who looks at everything you post on Facebook and tells you that you're wrong. Is your status related to a song you like? That song is worse than Three Doors Down's National Guard advertisement. Did you post a link to your favorite new restaurant? Papercuts have more flavor than their cheeseburgers. This person thinks every band you enjoy is an audio abortion and every movie you list as a favorite is a visual vulgarity.

Most of these people have sharpened their ability to argue against you, but are pretty bad at defending their own opinions. There's an encyclopedic volume of psychology literature dedicated to the fact that these people are actually soft-spoken cowards in real life. Not the Internet real life I was talking about earlier, but the one where you go to class and learn stuff before getting drunk at 2pm. Find these Critics and stare them down next time you see them. They will cry. It's a doctor-recommended remedy to your distress.

The Appmonger
I wake up every day and after eating my digital Jewish breakfast, I wade through all of my Facebook application invites. My friends really know me. They know my affinity for things like "Compare Friends," "Which Desperate Housewives Mailman Are You," "Enhanced Texas Hold-Em.biz,"and "Contribute to my Birthday Cause." But I've already got all the applications I want, so I have to spend time deleting all these invites. And after I'm done I leave my apartment and swing by the unemployment office to pick up my check before continuing to the hospital to have fluids fed to me intravenously because I've spent twenty days deleting application invites and not eating or working.

I am a victim of the Appmonger. There are only two explanations as to why this sort of person exists. Either there are people-- groups of people!-- out there who enjoy having twenty different Facebook apps installed on their profile and they wish to share this elation with others, or people are knowingly trying to kill me using the Internet. Damn, you know my weakness.

The Kid You Know Well Enough to Friend
One of the most awkward thing about the online world is drawing the definition of a "Friend." Don't worry: The hot girl next to you in class is most definitely your friend, regardless of whether you've ever spoken to her or not. But what about that creepy kid in the back of class that, one day, decided to send you a friend invite out of nowhere? You had a group project with him, once, and he's in like five of your other classes. I mean, why not?

Don't do it! The subtle, real-real life awkwardness is simply a portent of awkward situations to come. When you accept Facebook friend invites from the kid you don't know, you're limiting yourself to a few possible online outcomes. In one familiar situation, you will be inundated with their personal life on your News Feed, forever, and not have the guts to remove them. Maybe you'll enjoy reading about them for a while, sure, but things are going to get ugly when they start dating your ex.

A more likely situation is that they will turn out to be one of the archetypes above, and you will just have more Facebook friends you hate. There's always a slim chance that they're a serial murderer and friending them will spare your life later on. I think not. Obviously, the most probable outcome is that they barge into your hotel room one night and hold you at knifepoint while they take pictures of you screwing your wife.

The music discovery process

Way earlier this year-- like, trendy earlier-- my friends tried to introduce me to Does It Offend You, Yeah? and their awesome debut LP. They're everything I ask for from a band: Electro, from Europe, and etc. Yet, it's taken me several months to finally give them a chance, fall in love, and throw "Dawn of the Dead" on repeat for hours on end. I find myself in these sorts of situations all the time. In fact, most of the bands that have made a huge impact on my life (Interpol, Bloc Party, and Justice, to name a few) sat around on my computer for months before I got around to listening and eventually obsessing.

I've been wondering if maybe my methodology for sampling new music is all wrong.

For as long as I can remember I've been slyly shifting between Pitchfork, last.fm, Pandora, and the other music blogs to pick up on new bands as soon as they blip on the radar. After listening to a new album once-around, I plug my initial reaction into a very complicated second-order differential equation. Then I decide whether it warrants another listen or should be shelved for further fermentation. Eventually, shelved albums get re-listened or cleared out during my periodic NEED MOAR SPACE TO STORE PORN purges.

And how do you listen to the new bands once they're in your music library? I tend to just throw the album into Winamp and listen to it straight-through and make my judgment. Some of my friends do this three albums at a time, on shuffle, in order to discover their favorite songs out of the new collection of albums. And some people just try each track one-at-a-time.

My process has worked wonders for bands like Animal Collective. Strawberry Jam was all the buzz when it landed on the 'sphere, and yet my intuition was to let the album slide because it was nothing but repetitive noise and nonsense. And so, it sat on my computer for months until someone (probably Cristina or another self-loathing Pitchfork reader like me) made a comment about the "Peacebone" video being incredibly trippy. I gave the album a second chance, decided that "Peacebone" was the only thing worth saving, and tossed the rest of the album to make room for scissoring redheads. And it worked for Fleet Foxes, too-- you don't see me talking about them too much.

Friends are definitely the most dependable way to find music you like. But I also get a pretty big kick out of finding bands myself and disseminating them upon the masses. So, masses, how do you get into new music? Is it all friend-driven, or are you at the aristocratic whims of the music blogs?

Late-night sushi? No thanks.

Katharine Shilcutt (the bimbo who stole the Houston Press food blog job that I wanted but didn't apply for and I actually love her but I love calling people bimbos even more) reports today on Eating Our Words that Crave Sushi is one step closer to opening a late-night raw roll retailer in Midtown Houston. And she's predicting windfalls for this trendy tuna tavern, based on nothing but its location and originality.

Uh, what?

I feel like I understand the late-night food industry pretty well, having been a connoisseur since before I started drinking heavily. Going to Waffle House at 3am used to be one of the only entertaining things for a kid to do back in Panama City Beach. Me and my friends would sit back and swap stupid stories while ignorant drunk rednecks would bring in their scantly-clad escorts and get into fights about things like F-150s and mud.

Since moving to Houston, I've navigated the late-night high seas like a stoned stalwart pirate of munchies. Like all Rice students, I started my love affair with the freshman year staples: House of Pies and Taco Cabana. Since then I've conquered all the places that matter. You know, BB's, Bibas, Katz's, Tacos a Go-Go, and etc. There are plenty.

The one trait all these places have in common is that they serve piles of hot, delicious food that caters oh-so-well to the inebriated taste palate. The drunken taste palate, of course, is driven by the basal need to kill something, fry it, and dip it in jalapeno ranch dressing. Cajuns, Greeks, Mexicans, and Jews New York-style delis all know how to do this really, really well. The Japanese, on the other hand, wrap cold fish in cold rice and cold seaweed and douse it in black salt water.

Sorry, Crave. I really am. But considering the decor and the price tag, I just don't see sushi being more than a passing fad in the world of Houston late-night food. Drunks crave fat and stoners crave quantity (of anything edible). Sushi provides neither. Even if this Crave place is initially successful, I have a feeling that Houstonians will be back to their late-night staples of gyros and chimichangas before you can say "I'm not driving."

[Houston - Eating Our Words - Craving a Sneak Preview?]

Clenchè

So what's a boy to do, waiting to be cleared through security at 6AM two days before Christmas?

Fidgeting is not an option in the Expert Traveler line. Pausing for the slightest moment holds up this so-called fast lane and makes you the target of businessman ire: You can practically feel the hate seething off their thumbs and into their Blackberries if you don't continue the slow shuffle forward. But the queue moves too fast to start unpacking your laptop or removing your boots. Reading is stupid and moot and puts off a pretentious air that's completely unappreciated so early in the morning. And I'm totally self-conscious when traveling by myself.

So, what's a boy to do?

My bored eyes busied themselves by searching the crowds as they often do, looking for odd behavior or cleavage or well-done pedicures or ironic T-shirts or hair styles I should consider trying down the road. Anything to keep me from breaking down into nervous, tired twitches-- I hear that's how you get chosen for a cavity search.

During this idle waiting time I started to notice a certain, particular behavior shared by every potential passenger: Clenching. No one passes through the metal detector without tightening their rear cheeks, and no one relaxes until they're waved on to collect their belongings.

At first, I thought it was some sign of guilt. Those people must have condoms full of heroin stashed up there. Maybe they're hiding some CP on their laptops. Maybe they know they're going to set off the metal detector with their C4-lined Mujahideen briefs. But then I noticed that even kids as young as seven or eight tighten up with fear as they pass through America's second-most-ominous arch. Husbands, wives, geriatrics, and 20something hipsters alike all pinch up painfully as they prepare for TSA judgment.

So why does this universal behavior exist, anyways? Houston Hobby has to be one of the more likely places you might find a completely guiltless Christian person who could pass through security with their conscience clean and their ass relaxed. It also happens to be the sort of place where you might find asses so big that clenching is just too much effort. Is it some sort of mass post-9/11 phenomena that speaks to our culture of fear? Or is it a certain distrust of technology, knowing that these metal detectors go off even when you're ferrous-free? Maybe the entire country really is on drugs and everyone worries whether they forgot to take the pocket pipe out of their apple-bottom jeans before heading home for the holidays.

I was lost in these thoughts as I went through the traditional motions: Step up, grab the gray bin, throw your Docs in with your laptop, throw the backpack on, top it with the plastic baggie full of allergy meds and Tide stain sticks, watch your stuff disappear into the magic false-color X-ray machine, and then...

I stared ahead at the kind-looking TSA attendant on the other side of the beige arch. She smiled but held her hand up, signaling that it was not yet my time to pass. I glanced at the bar of LED lights on top of the detector as it fluctuated with randomly-changing electromagnetic fields. I was about to be the guinna pig in my own little experiment: Can you really pass through this thing without tightening up?

She waved me forward, like Neo ready to take on Agent Smith. Her gesture was some sort of dare. But I knew I could do it. I tried to reassure myself. I turned my pockets inside out before I put on my pants this morning. The last guy made it through no problem, and his teeth looked loaded with fillings. No turning back now. This isn't just an experiment. This is a challenge to discard the past eight years of fear-mongering American life and...

...and...

...and by the time I opened my eyes from the feighned blink, I was on the other side of the detector, handing the TSA agent my boarding pass like I always do. I sighed and relaxed.

Science fiction and you!

I've been a busy little bee lately. Between bouts of scouring Downtown Houston for bits of my identity and diligently coding away at work I stumbled upon this interesting article on io9.com. For those of you who don't read io9, it's basically a science/technology wankfest of a Gawker blog that appeals to my constant desire to be force-fed nerdy, delicious news-- like a Slashdot that appeals to people under the age of 40 or 400 pounds, whichever comes first.

The aforementioned article poses some relatively deep questions about the relation of science fiction to science fact, like how our blooming imaginations have the effect of shaping research, engineering, and society's perceptions of the former two. It certainly points out some classic examples of negative (if not cautious) influence-- rampant AI in the Terminator series, genetic engineering in Gattaca, unchecked scientific endeavors in Frankenstein, et cetera. Those works of sci-fi have not only served as pervasive warnings to scientists of the dangers of unguided technology, but also hampered research in those respective fields due to the unjust fears they peddle. The list of fictional works that have made positive impact, on the other hand, is a bit harder to compile. I mean, this article cites WALL-E as shaping sentient robotics and environmental awareness, for chrissake. Talk about a stretch.

My thoughts on the subject are a little biased, being an engineer myself. I can ashamedly, albeit with a smirk, admit that playing Half-Life all throughout my adolescence got me interested in quantum technologies. I mean, portals? Entanglement? Strange matter? Popular media certainly has a way to inspire us to delve further into a subject and educate ourselves properly.

My biggest irk with popular media that tries to make a point about technology is that, well, most people are stupid. I'm no objectivist, though-- I think Ayn Rand was a pretentious [word that McCain called his wife] who tried to tie her selfish worldview into a philosophy, and that the thinkers of the world should indeed answer to the authority of the masses.

But people are generally stupid. Stupid people are more than willing to affirm themselves as experts on a subject after seeing one Hollywood blockbuster that touches upon it. How many people are probably scared shitless (or at least overly wary) of the concept of artificial intelligence after seeing all the Matrix films? How many senators, world leaders, policy shapers, and gatekeeprs probably learned everything they know about engineered foodstuffs from Soylent Green? How many people know nothing about genetic research outside what they read in Marvel comics?

Those movies were written with the expressed purpose of being entertaining, NOT as educational films to be broadcast to seventh graders during science class. And yet that happens all the time. The scientific community is then at the whims of voters who know nothing about the scientific world but the fear instilled upon them by popcorn-laden Saturday matinées.

And that's no good for a kid who wants to build space lasers and teleportation devices.

Is there any easy solution to rectifying society's perceived fears of potentially life-changing, beneficial science? I suppose that harping on the "educate the masses" argument sure would be a start. More importantly, though, I think that artists on all fronts need to realize the impact that their works have on fields of seemingly unrelated research.

After all, it's the dumb people that are handing out the grants.

Houston, I love you but you're bringing me down

Taking the good with the bad-- it's the story of the 20something college student. Taking the city with the traffic. Taking the school with the grades. Taking the money with the work. Taking the friends with the dramatics. Taking the girls with the heartbreak. Taking the hookups with the awkwardness. Taking the drinks with the hangover. Ad infinitum.

Eventually you grow up and start ignoring the bad things, one way or another. Maybe you excuse them away with religion. Maybe you become self-absorbed and narcissistic and surround yourself with people who can ignore their problems in the same way. Maybe you just shell up and become so engrossed in work that you stop taking in either the good or the bad. I've worked with people like that.

There's the hard part about moving from adolescence into adulthood-- you experience all the good things yet haven't stopped noticing the drawbacks. You've still convinced yourself that you're hardCORE enough to take both at once, not realizing that the human brain was never meant to be bombarded with as much information as we're exposed to today. So much bad news.

Adolescence was just all the good with none of the bad. Here's a car and some beer, try not to get any girls pregnant between now and college! I probably should have exploited that more than I did.

Adolescence, of course. Not the girls.

Goddammit, there I go again with one of those lofty diatribes. Third in a week. NEED MOAR LIFE UPDATES.

So let's see. Oh, I shaved my face last night. That's kinda epic. I haven't been clean-shaven since the middle of last summer, and I haven't actually seen my cheeks since the winter. I could probably extrapolate some sort of meaning from the shave but, eh, sometimes you just need a change of scenery. Sometimes a shave is just a shave. Last time I shaved my face I was immediately washed in a caustic sense of regret; this time I backed up from the mirror, smiled a big smile and thought to myself "Wow, I look happier."

I guess we'll see.

General self-improvement rolls onward. I spent all of Sunday outside, even going so far as to walk from my apartment to Rice Village, which was probably... what? Two mile walk? I'm bad with distances, but it feels like fifteen miles when you're in sandals. I kept thinking the entire way to the Village that if I were back in Panama City, it would actually be a shorter walk from my old house to the Pier Park shopping center. Both have a Buffalo Wild Wings!

Where was I? Self improvement, right. Being outside isn't something I get to do regularly during the week. I mean, jogging around Hermann Park at 6PM is one thing, but finding yourself midway through the Rice Stadium parking lot at 2PM on a blazing hot Saturday is an outdoors experience I hadn't felt in quite some time. The thing is-- and I hate to say this-- but I actually like being outside. It's the ongoing body image issues coupled with allergies that fight to keep me indoors and inactive. But if I can overcome them one day, I can overcome them any day.

Ah, there it is. The positive summer mindset. The do-anything attitude that I seem to lose over the course of the school year. Rather than suppress and twist it into a tool for my own disillusion like I did last summer, I'd like to take that positivity and run with it. Be the better person.

But inside...

Curtains!

I dare you to go back and look at how many half-written and quarter-written blog posts I've got piled up behind the curtains of this blog. They're great if not completely worthless. But I look at the volume of posts and I wonder what in the world has been going on in my brain for the past couple of weeks.

One thing I'm starting to realize about the way my brain works-- not just in writing, but other facets of my self-expression-- is that I love a good lead-in. The first paragraph of an article, a book, or an essay is always an author's most creative and candid attempt to get your attention while setting up characters and plot lines. My problem is that the setup comes easy. The rest of the story doesn't.

And such is life. Books have first paragraphs, life has first impressions.

Think about the first person you ever tried to impress on any sort of serious level. Seriously. The first girl I ever had a huge crush on was named Hallie Johnston back in 4th grade. My class would venture next door to her classroom once a week in order to watch videos and presentations from the local DARE officer. Which is kind of funny, I think-- I first felt the relentless pangs of love through DARE and nowadays I do the opposite.

But I digress.

I haven't really changed since I was five years old, so I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I spent a lot of DARE class with my head propped up against my hand, wearing a goofy smile and staring listlessly off into the distance thinking about Hallie. One day I surmised that I would introduce myself just like they did in the movies by telling her she looked nice. After all, it's not like our parents are training us to be ladies men at age nine. This is Hey, Arnold sort of shit.

Predictably, I fucked it up. The whole thing is just a giant, shit-colored mess on the palate of my memory. I think I said she looked "good" instead of "nice," which is a semantic fuck-up unlike any other. I do remember her excusing the comment just as quick as she excused me. I guess another funny point about this story is that she wouldn't even remember any of this, nor would anyone else, but that it was such a pivotal moment in my own life. It was the first outright rejection based on maybe five seconds of talking.

This was just one story in a series of stories which explain why I was single and lonely until the middle of high school, though I haven't decided whether Dragonball Z was a cause or a symptom.

It's not like Hallie completely ruined me from day one, but soon enough I heard that she had started dating some other guy. It was at that point, coupled with all the businesslike advice my mom and dad ever gave me about the importance of making a good first impression, that I realized my people skills would need a serious improvement in order to ever wow anyone over. Because you'll never get where you want to be if you can't make the first step in building a relationship the biggest step.

Eventually (Arguably?) I did learn how to talk to people. I became the master of the firm handshake, the coy grin, and knowing which stories impress what kind of people. I feel like anyone else who goes to Rice learned their people skills in a similar fashion. People are a game; you realize this over years of recitals, job interviews, sucking up to teachers, college interviews, etc .

Just don't forget about substance. Because getting your foot in the door is one thing, but following through the door to the other side is just as important. Shy people are great once you get to know them. I'm like the opposite- I'm great once you get to meet me, so hold onto that first impression as hard as you can.

Logic dictates

It's roughly 5:30 here in Houston, where I just finished my next-to-last problem set until Spring Break. Logic dictates that I should probably jump headlong into a few restful hours of sleep. But I'm American and you know how we Americans feel about dictators, so instead I'm going to catch up on a little blogging. I also know that if I hit the sack now there's no chance in hell that I'll wake up by 9:30 to turn in this shitty assignment.

Yesterday's (er, two days ago?) post about punishment wasn't really aimed at anyone in particular. But I re-read it today and realized that I've once again danced on the boundary between making my friends happy and kicking sand in their faces. Hell, it's passive aggressive, but in an ironic way that is both unfunny and not really entertaining.

Maybe my blog should have a disclaimer. It's not like I'm an expert in human psychology. I'm just an enthusiast. A wonk. And I know how people in college like to seek revenge upon one another-- they're observations anyone could make. It wasn't even really that accurate in its wording: Those examples are all forms of everyday psychological torture, not punishment in general. You can also punish people by breaking their arms or using a cattle gun.

Anyways, I was serious about what I said at the end: We're all human. Part of being human is giving into that selfish, stubborn gremlin that tells you to complicate your life by being vengeful. I guess I'm just trying to remind everyone that, really, happiness is always a simple answer: An apology, a hug, or a smidgen of trust.

Let's see, okay, what else...

I just wrote about three more paragraphs expanding on trust and being truthful and happiness and all that good stuff. And then I deleted it because I think I'm becoming less of a blogger and more of a fourth-grade cartoon show, complete with morals and zany characters. So no soup for you, at least not today.

I started writing science fiction. Uh-oh.

I have a problem with recidivism

I've got a big boner for criminology. Yesterday, my contemporary ethics class began a weeklong straddling of the death penalty and the criminal justice system. I was actually enticed to look up from my computer and pay attention and recall everything I'd learned in my criminology class a year ago. All the old questions of crime and punishment, retributive justice versus deterrence, and which school of criminal justice I subscribe to came rushing back in a way I hadn't considered since...

...well, since the last time I found myself being punished. Because punishment is fun!

But I think punishment is much more interesting on the microscopic, everyday level. Nevermind these bigger questions of the death penalty and mandatory incarceration times and things like that. Look around you. How do your friends punish their enemies? How do you punish your enemies?

Hell, how do you punish your friends?

Because we do all of those things on a semi-daily basis. Say your roommate kicks you out of your own room for one evening. Maybe he's smoking meth or humping the girl of your dreams or something. How do you retaliate?

• You could do it the way we did it in the 90's, by being super passive-aggressive and complaining to one another about how much we hate so-and-so. We throw around that PA word a lot in contemporary society. It's one of those pseudo-psychological phrases you learn in middle school and use to sound smart, but it's much more nefarious than that. What you're doing is weakening a person's ability to make trusting bonds in their life. Weakening their friendships. De-constructing their social framework behind their back. Just, you know, realize that the end result of everyone being passive-aggressive is that no one trusts anyone.
• Direct confrontation. I'm pretty used to the passive-aggressive retaliation at this point in my life, but when someone actually comes up to me and asks me dead-on to explain myself, I often fall short of words. And that's part of the punishment: Looking like an idiot. I'd say that direct confrontation only happens on drunk Thursday nights at pub when you're still tired from the week and liable to start a fight.
• There's another, more evil form of direct confrontation that happens by proxy. Instead of telling you to your face that you're a douche, people have been known to get all of their friends to do it for them.
• Being emo. Today's self-pity society has learned to take advantage of other people's feeling by inflicting kamakaze punishment on others. Think passive-aggressive without actually talking to people about your problems. Just hole up, don't talk to anyone, be really sad when you do talk to people, and eventually the person you're trying to punish will feel so incredibly bad that they'll bear the bulk of the psychological burden.
• Being fucking insane. Just get all hopped up on drugs and stumble around campus, mumbling to yourself and requiring a three-man team to put you back to bed. Just like being emo, you will eventually get the attention you're seeking.
  
• Not being at all. The tricky people among us are actually unfazed by petty things like this example. They play the didgeridoo and probably enjoy the outdoors. In the end, they let their inaction and utter lack of hate propel them into a happiness that neither meth nor sex could ever help to achieve.
  
• Then there's the elaborate, movie-style retribution path that really only happens in movies.

The ultimate form of knowing one's self is knowing your retributive side. It's the side that we have to deny because, really, no one likes to admit that they are the same vengeful beast as the rest of us. But we are.

We're all human.

Some things just aren't meant for print

Note: I pumped this out over the course of two hours a few days ago with the intention of submitting it to the student newspaper I've come to love so much. However, after facing the grim reality that it's too pompous and the very subject matter makes it unpublishable, I decided to slap it up on my blog instead. Enjoi!

As 2008 sheds the diaper of January and heads into the hormone-driven, lovey-dovey adolescence of February, you're probably noticing a shift in the student dynamic all around campus. Things seem more tense. Undergrads are pounding their fists and sharing some ill-toned sentiments at dinnertime. Graduate students trudge on per the usual, but that trudge has seems slightly affected by worldly happenings. Your Facebook account has probably become awash with invitations to support political candidates. That's right, kids: The election season is ramping up, and the very Thresher you're holding right now is bound to become a battleground of political nitpicking in the months to come. You may even become part of the madness.

But let me save you the trouble.

There's a certain clockwork mechanism to writing about politics and politicians during an election year. First you pick a topic, you write about it with varied degrees of fervor and one-sidedness, consider the opposing viewpoint for about two or three lines, and then dash it into freedom fries before your eloquent and thought-provoking send-off. Then you wait a week for some angry alumni or tenured professor to dash you to shreds using words so incredibly long, you'll wonder if they only teach them at the Ivies. Such is the process at every print institution in this nation, from the Podunk Press to the New York Times. And after you notice the doldrum process repeated article after article, election after election, you start to wonder as I have-- what's the point?

There is no point, besides maybe trolling the campus for attention. Take a look around you. We live in a world of instant information access, not a world of cheesy "I Like Ike" parade floats creeping through downtown with loudspeakers blaring campaign slogans. The age of the "elect this guy" political column came to an end after Al Gore plugged in the Internets so many ages ago. And likewise, the archaic concept of thoughtful political discussion has given way to armchair experts flinging quotes from their favorite blogs in order to sound smart. Today, people turn to blogs, web sites, iPhones, and even their make-believe online friends to decide which lever to pull on November Fourth. The decision is not made by the best-versed columnist or politico anymore, and perhaps that's a good thing.

This attitude towards political opinion applies most definitely at Rice. Consider the audience, for example. Professors and academic staff have been voting for the same party for the past fifty years. Likewise, students are pretty set when it comes to the issues that matter (i.e. drinking age, the right to carry firearms at school, whatever Ron Paul says) and had their minds made up months ago concerning which candidate to support. You can thank the Internet and national media outlets for starting campaign coverage back in 2005 and forcing opinions on us before we knew, say, anyone's actual stance on the issues. And don't forget that smart people, whether they're actually smart or just told they're smart by their friends, are usually some of the most thick-headed people you'll ever try to persuade. Good luck doing that in six hundred words.

So what's an op/ed page-- nay, the entire campus-- supposed to do with itself if one-sided, Crossfire-like bickering has become moot? There is such a thing as healthy political discussion, of course. It requires a mindset akin to a typical Rice student after a couple of drinks-- just enough to get them talking but not quite enough to get them shouting obscenities at their loved ones.

I believe this campus should spend less time worrying about which tuckus is going to fill the Oval Office throne come 2009 and more time reflecting upon what this country actually needs: Open minds, friendly spirits, and the return of the rational-thinking voter. Or we could all reflect on this campus' many needs: Communication between the administration and the student body before major construction projects are undertaken, a sense of identity that can hold tight in the wake of the Second Century speedboat, and, of course, a Waffle House.

Saturday Free for All Op-Ed - Panama City News Herald - 1/5/2008

I got a call this morning from my mommy that my Letter of the Editor made it into the Saturday Free-For-All section of the Panama City News Herald. I haven't seen it yet, but below is the text I penned in one angry night.

The article pretty much explains itself. If you want to read (or even participate!) in the Squall Line and call me a pompous ass (clever!), you can find it at:

http://newsherald.com/squall/

Sitting down to a the News Herald-- the local paper that taught me about the media's role in local and state politics-- has been a breakfast time tradition for me since middle school. With my pancakes stacked high, I work my way through the front page, the national news, and eventually hit the lovable and progressive letters to the editor that Bay County has to offer. And whether I agree with the opinions or not, it has always been a pleasure to know that this town has some highly educated, politically active free thinkers. Yet since I left the Redneck Riviera to study in that oil refinery-lovin', gun-totin', culturally devoid but otherwise lovable city they call Houston, I've come back home at the holidays to find a scenic obstruction in my otherwise clockwork perusing of the paper.

The Squall Line.

I think that most rational people, including those who operate the News Herald, would recognize that the Squall Line is about the most morally and intellectually unproductive way that a print media institution could possibly utilize its page real estate. And that's directed towards a paper that sometimes features local politicians.

See, I spend a lot of time on the Internet. It's a place of uninformed, ridiculous opinions slung like mud back and forth between people hiding behind the anonymity that the Web has to offer. Hey, and half of the time that's why it's entertaining. The Squall Line is an extension of this unproductive mudslinging. It allows the community a public forum to say ridiculous things like "global warming is dumb," and "I sure hate this politician," and "go GATORS!" When granted anonymity, relatively intelligent people will act pretty silly.

If the Squall Line was indeed a joke it might be a funny one. But the News Herald advertises for the Squall Line as if it's an alternative to writing an informed letter to the editor, asking its readers to "sound off!" So rather than research their opinions, back them up with facts abounding and sign their names proudly at the bottom, today's News Herald readership can conduct some seriously brainless arguing using a local number or, even worse, that Internet thing I was talking about earlier.

I come from a school of thought-- an archaic one, perhaps-- that demands a certain amount of accountability from its press institutions. When was the last time any Pulitzer-worthy newspaper was caught printing uninformed one-liners from people too lazy to make a sustained argument to back up their opinions? Don't mistake the Squall Line for "local flair," either. Local flair is something that I've been proud of since I was old enough to recognize it. Local flair is on the Saturday Free-For-All page. Local flair is printed daily, with substance, in the Forty-One Cent Forum and has been (albeit under different names according to the postage rate) since before I could read at all.

In all its grand irony, the Squall Line on page two replaced a feature that was very near and dear to me. Remember reading about what happened on this day in history? I do. I used to soak up the daily history lesson featured on page two of the News Herald. Now that history lesson has been cut down to a few lines sandwiched between the funny pages and the daily Sudoku puzzle. Perhaps that, my local friends, is the best metaphor for the day and age we live in-- the ridiculous one-liners are on page two while the truly educating material is buried next to "Pearls Before Swine" and "Garfield."

Then again, I think Garfield has taught me more than the Squall Line.

Kyle Barnhart
Rice University
Houston, Texas

Ron Paul, you are making me die

Story highlights, for those who need them:

• I hate the Republicans. Except for Romney, who has a chin I would marry.
• Rice University students are stupider than you might guess.
• Ron Paul isn't stupid but he's responsible for my sleep apnea.
• I have a hundred-year plan to turn pollution into gold and candy. Elect me.
  

So I'm watching the Des Moines Register's big little Republican debate right now. If you can imagine staring right into the sun while simultaneously having your ears are assaulted by a thousand fire ants, you might have an idea how painful this experience is for a liberal douche like myself. But I haven't talked national politics in a while and I feel like I owe it to the people who don't give a flying shit about flailing magazines at Rice University to change the course of this blog.

If you want an idea what the political climate at Rice University stands, you don't have to look much further than this little slice of cyberspace: http://www.rontorice.org/.

Seriously, take a look at that site for a minute. Bask in its sub-Web 2.0 look. Be transported to a time when the Internet's worst web sites didn't even look that great. Check out those YouTube videos! Then realize that this is a real candidate who has won the hearts of every college student looking for an anti-establishment hero.

Holy fucking dogshit. Not at my college.

Ron Paul is systematically taking pieces of my soul with a melon scooper, day by day, scoop by scoop. It's not his policies that drive me insane. His ideas are good ideas. Diversifying America's economic basis? Not too shabby. Libertarian values? I'm down with some of those. Ron Paul is one of those starry-eyed politicians who has a lot of great ideas.

Great ideas that could only be implemented AFTER we dismantle the entire government, arrest every corporate board member in the country, make drugs safe for everyone that uses them, reverse America's established foreign doctrine, and forget the lessons that established the institutions and rules I just brought up.

My problem is that Ron Paul's supporters just don't get it. The things he wants to do-- dismantle the Federal Reserve, for example-- would take more than the two terms a US President is afforded. And yet there are students at Rice University who don't see this. They're wrapped up in the armchair expertise of the same people who start flamewars on FARK and Digg.

I'm going to interrupt this politically-charged post to let everyone know that at 2:30 every weekday on PBS, there's a wickedly strange show called "Between the Lions" broadcast to children all over the world. Try to imagine what would happen if Wonder Showzen's producers actually made a for-serious children's show with the same effects and transitions as WS, and tried to get you to read, you'd have this shit. And it's restoring those little pieces of my soul.

Anyways, what was I saying? Something about Ron Paul.

It's like Rice students never took a serious history class back in high school. Even if Ron Paul were to try to implement one of his policies, he'd meet impossible opposition from, oh, THE DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS WHO HAPPEN TO HATE REPUBLICANS. Remember how much policy Clinton got pushed through the GOP Congress during the 90's? Like, two things. Maybe you weren't reading Time when you were 8, but I was.

And I'm criticizing his ideas under the the unrealistic assumption that he wouldn't just be a tool of his party after his election, which is after all the way American politics have worked since Jefferson.

You realize that, right? No candidate as maverick as Ron Paul has ever been endorsed by a major party. Ever. And if Ron Paul runs as an independent, you might as well write in your vote for that other rich Texas politico...


...remember him? Seemingly old, starry-eyed man who wanted to reinvent America for the better and had a rabid base of grassroots support? H Ron Paul... err, H Ross Perot.

Ron Paul. Ross Perot. RP + RP 4 Ever.

All Ron Paul is going to do is eat the votes of college students and educated Internet-dwellers, which is ultimately going to put Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney's Chin in office. And then you'll get another four years of Republican shadow government and basically the opposite of Ron Paul's happy-go-lucky worldview.

You can fight for the improvement of the world, but your revolution is going to ultimately bring this country down. In America, you draw in the lines to get things done, not write the world LOVE backwards and teabag the IRS with a blimp.

But if you still can't see all this, go ahead and register Republican. Inflate their supporter numbers and allow them more sway. Whatever. Just don't vote for Allen Keys. He's fucking CRAZY.

And that's all I'm gonna say about that.

Like a lungfull of needles, and I love it

I woke up with the crisp fangs of winter chewing on my nose for the first time since I moved into the Esplanade. And I loved it. I love the things that remind me of the season.

I fucking love winter.

See, I think it all goes back to growing up in Panama City Beach with some of the most gorgeous people you'll ever meet, both guys and gals. It was a very superficial world centered around tanning beds, going to the beach to tan, and hitting the gym before going to work on that tan. Winter was the great equalizer, drastically so back home; no longer did the pudgy and the pale feel the sting of inadequacy because God thought it would be funny to make them ugly and fat.

Winter undoes God's cruel joke and shoots the sun out of the sky. It forces us to bundle up. With enough layers of wool everyone looks like a giant, walking Hershey Kiss.

Winter is the American burqa.

Then our personalities come out to play. Our true selves are revealed, not pressured by the world of self-involved, masturbatory obsession on looks. Winter means having to hold a conversation. Winter means knowing what to do with yourself when the sun's not shining.

I am happier during winter.



Thanksgiving break was amazing, albeit short as always. I feel like I connected with my friends a lot better this time around since most of them are finally at real people college. It was a good prelude to the upcoming winter break. Winter break is going to be amazing.

Most of the Christmas gifts from my mom were bought on Black Friday. Check my two favorite.



Sexy.

I have another Thresher article hitting the stands Thursday night. But what I'm really waiting for is public reaction, because I'm ready to grab some friends and shakedown anyone who dares to argue with me.

Heroic in an age of modernity

You know what's great? When prolific writers write about their writers' block and call it writing. Like me, for example, pulling at hairs and strings and looking under rocks and nooks and crannies for anything that might actually get me worked up enough to be entertaining. I've been eager to author another one of those trademark columns for the Thresher since I finished penning the last one.

Then suddenly, I stopped being pissed off about anything remotely interesting. I doubt the entire campus and all those parents with $50/year subscriptions to the rag want to read my insight on why ELEC classes are giving me IBS or how sleeping fifteen hours on Saturday is a good substitute for exercise. And besides the lack of creative ideas, the old standby topics seem more cliche than ever. I feel like I overdid politics in high school to the point that I never want to cover a presidential election again.

Any asshole can write about how Barack Obama will ride down on a chariot and save America from itself, or how evil Bush is, or whatever the Typical College Opinion is this hour. And likewise, Ron Paul is too popular and too easy of a target to warrant my attention in the print forums. If I dashed the Internet phenomena that is Ron Paul (and by the way, that's all he is besides old and crazy) in the Thresher, I'd get to read about fifty letters to the editor in the next issue from unrealistic, skinny armchair libertarians ready to eat foie gras out of my skull.

That's right. Ron Paul is below me. Now go cry.

Campus popularity, recognition, and all that stuff that strokes my ego (and compensates for my penis size) doesn't come from attacking national issues. Or state issues. You win the hearts and minds of a campus by sticking to local issues, uniting your audience against a common foe that's trying to quash "us" little guys. Like hunger, as was my column last time. The problem is that, on the whole, there's not a lot to bitch about at Rice. At least nothing that has personally affected me lately.

I guess the root of said problem is that Rice doesn't do a lot of stuff "wrong." But it could be doing more "right," which is a columnist's nightmare, since you end up sounding like a blond toothpick with a laundry list of demands rather than a scruffy-headed, objective cynic when you write about problems.

Okay, I thought of some random shit to droll on about, so I can stop acting like an authority on the subject of writing. Here's a funny picture to aid in the transition.

Har har.

So college is all about obsessions. Don't argue, let's just agree that the basis-- the underlying truth-- is that college is about obsessions and sorting through them to define your personality. Some people obsess over movies, bongs, going to the gym, speed cubing, hacky sack, or whatever. People have obsessions, and college lets us explore them.

My latest obsession is the Sopranos. It's about as healthy as any obsession, really. It's changing my mode of thinking and the way I talk and the jokes I make on any given occasion. It's a fun show; it helps me get in touch with my inner sociopath without having to weight down all those dead bodies and throw them in storm drains. What really surprises me more than anything, though, is that no one prior to this year thought to say "Hey Kyle, you might really like this show." It seems like I actually am the last person to find out about it, but hey, that just means I can appreciate it without the added pressure of being up-to-date and such.

Sometimes I wish my obsessions would lead me down a clearer career path. I can't make an EE job out of grilling cheese steaks and watching Heroes. Those are things to do in my spare time, not a viable gold mine to support two kids and my suburban fantasy world where I derive sexual gratification from owning multiple iPhones.

I did catch myself dreaming up different types of UAV projects I could do for a senior design project while sitting in class today. That's the kind of thing that my future military employer would salivate over.

Now comes the hard part: Action.

Salut.