Secular Commentary

As we all know, any form of physical pain is unacceptable as a disciplinary tool. I know this from personal experience. Although my parents "spanked" me (when will we realize that this is only a euphemism for "brutally beat me and disfigured my emotional life forever") on only a few occasions, I have been irreparably damaged as a direct result.

On one occasion, I threw a frisbee with remarkable accuracy at one of my playmate's heads, catching him completely off guard and causing him to react with a satisfying combination of squirming and weeping. Following this action, I tried to walk away as though nothing had happened, but was apprehended by the lunch lady. In the process of trying to escape, I let slip my opinion that the lunch lady was a "butthead." Surely this was unacceptable by most standards, and any good parents would have given me a long rational disquisition on why this was not within the parameters of normal ethical behavior, listened as I let them know that I understood their argument and would respond more appropriately in the future, and then taken me out to ice cream in order to show that they still loved me and did not think that I was a "bad person." What did they do instead? First, my mother put me through the unbearable guilt of seeing her cry upon hearing of this totally unprecedented behavior, and then my father spanked me when he arrived at home, applying a total of three blows to my fully clothed buttocks with a yard stick.

My parents clearly passed up a valuable opportunity to teach me true ethical behavior in this instance. Instead of learning that physical violence was wrong, I learned that it is in fact the only way to set things right. I realized that my parents not only regarded me as a dangerous force that could only be reigned in by brute force, but beyond that, that my parents actually hated me and were only taking care of me as a result of some outside physical force of which I was unaware. The only positive result of this experience was to make me anxious for the day when I would be bigger and stronger than my dad, at which point I would apply a yardstick to his buttocks with alacrity and zeal.

On another occasion, I was playing near my grandmother's wood stove, which served as a fireplace in her living room. There was a pot on top of the stove, placed there for decorative purposes, and I thought it would enhance my childish revelry. To prevent me from touching the hot object, my grandma grabbed me and gently slapped my hands. She cried upon doing that, and her cover-up story was that she was tormented by the idea of causing me physical pain. I saw through that immediately, though: she was crying because the farce was over. From that point on, I knew that my grandma hated me and was anxious to find any trivial occasion to cause me physical harm. Only my father's superior strength and his outside compulsion to insure my safety prevented her from indulging in her violent desires more frequently.

Then there were the other violations, such as the one time that my mother washed my mouth out with soap after I told my sister to "shut up." I learned then that my mother feared my powerful voice and that she needed to subject me to intense discomfort in order to reassert her authority in my father's absence. Violence, clearly, was the only answer. Genuine love was impossible, even in the most intimate of relationships. Ever since growing taller than my parents, I have greeted them with a healthy punch in my face; my grandma receives a brutal choking. And they're proud of me!

If the relatively mild physical pain that I endured as a child warped me to such a degree, I can only imagine what happens to those more mischievous children who seem to have experienced spankings with much greater frequency. Only the constant presence of police armed with shotguns and rocket launchers, ready to destroy anyone who disturbs the social order, keep us from becoming a nation of serial killers. The true irony is that I have been so shaped by violence that I will inevitably subject my children to the same horrifying treatment that I endured; indeed, I will enjoy doing so due to my sadistic upbringing. And I can't really blame my parents for what they did, either. It's not like they got to choose how they were raised. They can't help the fact that our every action is determined by our childhood experiences. There's really no one to blame but God.

• After I got out of conditioning fitness class, I noticed something bizarre about our civilization: before a certain age, people are required to read, study, and learn, and they can additionally take on the task of lifting heavy things as a hobby. This is completely the inverse of many previous civilizations, where learning was considered something nice for maybe a few people to have, but lifting heavy things was a staple. One could make the same kinds of observations about the hobbies of gardening and hunting.
• I think that book reviewers are probably very insecure -- they are expected to produce insightful comments on entire works of literature that will likely influence people's decisions on whether to buy them. I don't know exactly how long a book reviewer usually has, but it doesn't seem like they'd get a chance to read the book more than a couple times. To make up for having only just read the book, a lot of them will attempt to portray themselves as some kind of expert on the topic at hand -- giving an occasional sidelong glance (usually critical) at the book itself while giving a nice overview of the book's subject. It's a really strange genre, but I always feel like I learn something when I read one except maybe in Newsweek or something.
• How to be a critical theorist: live a life of privelege that allows you to study at great length; become convinced (through your first-hand reading of other theorists) that the System is utterly corrupt; write wonderful things about the utopia to come if everyone will just embrace your specific cocktail of Marx, Nietzshe, Heidegger, Kristeva, Levinas, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Kurt Vonnegut, Freud, and Bill Clinton; enthusiastically support extreme right-wing political causes, forcing future theorists to come up with elaborate explanations of why we should still believe your theories despite your unappealling political stances and horrific prose style; spend your stay in purgatory having your works graded by your freshman composition teacher.
• Most of the time when I get home and find that I have no voice mail and no substantive e-mail messages, I'm relieved rather than annoyed. This is the maturity that develops from the freshman to the senior year of college: rather than being excessively reliant on the approval of other people for my own self-worth, I hate other people.
• If I'm going to clean, I want to do literally everything: dishes, laundry, vacuuming, barhroom fixtures, dusting, mowing the lawn, etc. I think I might have the illusion that if I do a good enough job, I won't have to do it again.
• A quote from one of my professors: "I think it's important to talk about sex all the time."
• I read an article on Salon.com (note how I'm not taking advantage of the Web's special capabilities here) about a book that addresses the fact that a lot of people seem to think that children need to be protected from everything unseemly and that adult discourse needs to be toned down appropriately. It really helped me to crystallize my annoyance with all those "good Christians" who worry about such stupid things as Harry Potter. Characterizing natural curiosity about simple facts of life as somehow perverse or dangerous might -- might -- be worse than allowing a kid to read a scary book or see a dramatized death or witness sexual intercourse.
• My method of writing a paper is to do absolutely everything other than write the paper: update my web page, do the dishes, catch up on my online discussion forums, play Super Mario Kart, do push-ups, sit and stare at the screen. It's surprisingly effective.
• I think if most people were to read Freud, they would be surprised by how really conservative he is. For instance, he actually believes in the ability of science to preserve and improve human life, which is definitely not cool.
• I used to make fun of my sister for listening to CDs repeatedly, but now I've really gotten into it. One weekend, I listened to Radiohead's Amnesiac on repeat literally the entire weekend, every moment that I was in my room. It's not even that good a CD, but there's something very comforting about knowing what's coming up and being sure that if you somehow miss something this time, it'll be right back. Maybe marriage is like that.
• I think that when I go to graduate school, I'm going to focus on authors who are quotable and who are widely recognized by the reading public. So far, my list includes Shakespeare, Dickens, Thoreau, and Twain. I figure that will allow me to look smart and to bring the immediate authority of a "famous author" to my side of any argument, while simultaneously allowing me to avoid looking like a know-it-all: "Oh [snicker], you haven't heard of Wittgenstein [pronounced exaggeratedly "German"-like]? Sorry."
• Sometimes in boring classes, I start trying to see how much of the random high school knowledge I learned by rote (foreign-language grammar, mathematics) I remember. Once I drew a triangle, labeled the sides and angles appropriately, and wrote out all the trig functions. I'm still not sure if sine is a/c or b/c or which one is b or c. In that same class, I also wrote out a multiplication table, which was surprisingly satisfying. Once I undertook to prove the quadratic formula, which by some miracle I actually remembered, but it was far beyond my abilities. I had pretty much mastered the stuff from third grade, though, so that's cool.
• I think I actually hate my computer more often than not.

The phases of heterosexual relationships are as follows:

1. Acquaintances
2. Perpetual Just Friends
3. Couples

These are not quantitative distinctions. People cannot "move up the scale" from acquaintance to perpetual just friends, or can they become "better and better friends" until they suddenly find themselves a couple. Just as in Kierkegaard's theory of three stages, there is between each of the three phases a qualitative difference that can only be crossed by a leap of faith. There is no being "ready" for this leap, no "preparing." An acquaintance cannot learn by making the kinds of observations an acquaintance can make what it would be like to be the friend of a particular person. I cannot watch the clerk at the coffee shop so long that by the time I actually introduced myself to her it would be as though we had always been friends. The relationships are completely different, and we would be completely different people for being in that different kind of relationship with each other. The best one can do is to make "objective," "scientific" observations in order to calculate whether the leap will be worth the pain that it will inevitably bring. I can observe that the clerk at the coffee shop does nothing but watch TV, and from that I can deduce that we perhaps do not share the same interests and therefore that becoming her friend would somehow not be "worth it." The only way I can know, though, is to make the leap.

I had the great pleasure this year of spending the New Year with a small group of friends. No kissing was involved, which is always a disappointment, but at least this group did not contain the obligatory person who is overly excited about the ball dropping and attempts to get everyone else to count out loud. "Auld Lang Syne" was also not sung. Friendly conversation and amiable games defined the evening: more exciting ways to begin the New Year abound, certainly, but this way was full of the general good will with which all of us want to start off a new year.

The change was disturbing an hour and a half later when I decided to go home. I walked outside into the bracing cold, started my car, and realized that I was potentially heading into a squadron of suicide bombers, any of whom could kill me without a second's thought. Although I did not get it directly, I was present when my mom gave my sister the obligatory "watch out for drunk drivers" speech: "Don't assume anything. Wait extra long at four-way stops, because people might just fly through. Don't be afraid to pull off the road at a moment's notice, etc., etc." In short: people are going to be operating heavy machinery while thoroughly intoxicated. While they might normally be decent people who would observe the conventions of right-of-way, tonight they are little more than murderous apes with car keys. I could trust no one but myself.

The time I spent in absolute danger was brief, perhaps fifteen minutes at the most. I didn't even notice anyone driving erratically. In reality, I was probably in less danger than I am at high noon on any given day. If we were all perfectly honest, every time anyone we cared about got on the road, we would say, "There are crazies out there who could kill you in a heartbeat; trust no one." But we save that for New Year's Eve, storing it in a box until next year, tacitly resolving to step into our cars for the next 364 days without a second thought.

A reading from Catch-22:

A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks.

This scene takes place in Italy in the last years of World War II. Throughout the novel, Yossarian has been trying desperately to escape from the seemingly unavoidable fact of death, with humorous results. He has seen death all around him, witnessed grisly deaths first hand -- and he wants out. He has gone AWOL in order to consider how to handle his situation now that it has come to a crisis point, and he continually comes upon hopeless, pointless scenes of suffering, of which this is only one. He can only walk on.

A similar scene occurs in American Psycho. The protagonist goes up to a homeless man on the street who begs him for help. He tells him to get a job and shoots him in cold blood, and the audience stifles a laugh. It's the most horrible thing in the world, but the audience seriously isn't sure whether it's supposed to laugh at this murder of a homeless man. It's just so utterly ridiculous, right? Who would ever want to kill a homeless man? We have nothing but pity for those poor men living out on the street. We sometimes find them amusing, sitting on their little corner, especially the cheerful little black man making the stereotypical kinds of comments. We don't like them so much when they're playing musical instruments or when they're selling the stupid magazines: we don't like them when they're obviously drug addicts or seem like they could probably get a job easily (i.e., are young white men). We especially don't like them when they're mentally disturbed, when something's just not right in their eyes, when they creep us out in their disconnectedness from the world around them.

And why do we dislike them so much? Obviously, it's because they show that our System doesn't work, right? They are a guide to the failures of Late Capitalism, the extreme manifestation of a medicated society or of any other currently trendy idea. We're all bourgeois, so we feel very uncomfortable with these people, and well we should. They will lead to the downfall of our System soon enough, and we feel insecure. That's why we wonder whether to laugh about the scene in American Psycho (perhaps why we're glad to read the word "Psycho" in that movie's title). Of course none of us wants to murder anyone, because it's against the law, right? No one wants to go to jail. But don't we all feel threatened by these people on the margins who manage to live day after day without "buying in?" Isn't our complacency as a class put into question by these poor souls? Don't they call out for widespread social reform, for a radical change in the society from which we benefit?

But what of Yossarian's little boy? Does he cry out for social reform? Does Yossarian say that he doesn't want to look at this child because Yossarian has bought into the System? At this point in the novel, Yossarian has been beaten up by the system, forced to fly a ridiculous number of dangerous bombing runs, lost several of his friends, seen one of his fellow soldiers disemboweled, seen another chopped to shreds in a plane's propellers: he is not afraid of reform. He has nothing to lose but the obligation to expose himself daily to death. He wants to destroy this child because the child needs shoes and needs a haircut and needs medical attention and needs food and because Yossarian owes that to him, without condition. And he owes all these things to all the children who come to mind, all the poor Italian children, all the poor African children, all the poor Afghani children: he owes each and every one of them everything they need, everything he is, and he knows this. The book is the story of his trying to escape from this web of obligation, this absolutely disturbing and absolutely unsolvable problem that he has to give everything up.

He could rationalize and say that it would be no fair to supply this child with his needs without supplying the others with their needs. This would only be to wait for a distant revolution in society in which everything, suddenly, would be absolutely fair and perfect and just. He could rationalize and say that he can't go starving himself in order to feed every poor child. This would be to value himself above others, the most instinctive and at the same time the most irrational position one could (and does) take. What right does he have to the things that he has? What right does he have to experience pleasure while others experience pain, to live while others die?

Yossarian does escape. He runs from death, runs from his ridiculous duties, runs to the paradise of Sweden, a neutral territory in history's greatest war. He claims he will help others along the way, that he's done what he could, but he hasn't. He lies to himself, as we all must. And that is what makes the scene from American Psycho so disturbingly funny: not that anyone would do such a terrible thing, but that anyone could be so absolutely honest.

Many students at Olivet Nazarene University, a liberal arts institution in the Wesleyan tradition, find themselves at one point or another frustrated with chapel. This frustration is understandable in a group mainly made up of people who have only recently crossed the threshold into adulthood and find in every regulation a step backward into the slavish dependency of their former childish lives. Beyond the simple fact of required attendance, many object to the tacit enforcement of certain worship styles. In a nation founded on the idea that people should be able to worship as they see fit so that religion would be reduced to a mere matter of personal preference and not impinge upon the political order, students naturally chafe at the idea of worshipping in one style all the time, even though that style was of course designed to appeal to their own contemporary tastes.

Thankfully, I have come up with a plan that will answer everyone's objections to chapel in a convenient and practical way. The conventional chapel services should still be offered, but without mandatory attendance policies. Those who attended would be counted present and would meet their chapel requirement; those who did not would have to account for two hours of solid God-worship throughout the week. This could be found in a church setting, in which case a signature from the appropriate church authority would suffice to prove one's attendance. Private devotions could also serve as a substitute for chapel: students could spend two hours a week reading the Bible, praying, or singing repetetive worship choruses to themselves. If students chose this option, a review of film footage from the cameras installed in every room would become necessary.

I realize that installing cameras in everyone's room and leaving them running twenty-four hours a day may seem unnecessarily expensive, but it would be much simpler even than a system that required one to turn on the camera for oneself and turn in the footage each week. In this arrangement, one would only need to alert the chapel office of the room number and the time frame, and the film would be checked to verify that worship had occurred at that time. Having the cameras running at all times would save students from the trouble of learning how to use them, and it would help students to be more spontaneous in their worship. One can easily imagine a student being caught by a movement of the Spirit and worshipping for two hours straight, then thinking, "I'm glad that that was caught on tape." He would then simply have to take note of the time range and write an e-mail to the chapel office after the Spirit's movement had passed, which is obviously preferable to having to fiddle with a camera while the Spirit is beginning his movement. The chapel office's highly trained student workers could then watch the footage in question. Any worker caught watching any non-authorized footage would of course be put on probation.

In conclusion, modern technology affords us a unique opportunity to meet the changing spiritual needs of today's young people in a manner that respects their dignity as Christian adults. Olivet Nazarene University's administration should avail themselves of this opportunity as soon as possible.

My first set of aphorisms met with such resounding agreement and approval from all those who commented that I feared something had gone dreadfully wrong. Hopefully these aphorisms will alienate a few more of my readers.

• Computers represent the last phase of technology, the phase when it slips into decadence. The future is the story of people becoming increasingly tired of computers and finally calling into question the entire idea of open-ended technological progress.
• The world has been done a terrible disservice by those mothers who failed to force their children to do chores.
• God's existence is as self-evident as the existence of a real world outside the mind; only a very artificial mindset could allow us to think otherwise.
• All freshmen in college are entitled to a one-year period of complete idiocy, after which they have no excuse.
• Few situations illustrate the human condition better or more completely than reading on the toilet.
• It is inappropriate to say that God wills you to do anything he does not also will everyone else to do.
• Writing a sentence in the passive voice is not a sin.
• A good man should not take the risk of entering politics.
• Those who reduce everything to the will of God are every bit as bad as those who reduce everything to the interaction of particles and forces.
• Beowulf isn't really that impressive.
• Israel is the last example of outright colonialism.
• White people don't commit acts of "terrorism."
• Patriotism is a sign of intellectual weakness.
• Draft-dodging is morally imperative.
• Evangelicalism will eventually collapse back into the Fundamentalism from which it arose.
• No one understands what's really going on here.

My grandparents lived in a huge, beautiful house while I was growing up. The back yard was a wide expanse of mown grass, followed by a large field they left to grow wild, followed by seemingly endless woods. I spent nearly every weekend there for much of my early youth, enjoying the excitement of my grandpa picking me up from school, of watching my Saturday morning cartoons without my younger sister's interference, of having a nice cup of soup on Saturday afternoon, of exploring the house and sometimes, if I was feeling brave, the woods. The best part was simply being alone. My grandpa usually worked on Saturdays, and even if he didn't, he was occupied with the vast project of lawn maintenance almost the entire time I was there. My grandma was similarly occupied with the Herculean effort of thoroughly cleaning the entire house every weekend. I loved my grandparents, of course, but the true appeal of their house was the almost total freedom to sit and watch TV, or to develop elaborate plots for my action figures, or even to help with the yard work or housecleaning. It took me a long time to learn to control my instinct to throw a fit when my parents came to pick me up.

When I was in seven or eight, my grandparents got a swimming pool in the back yard. Nearly every weekend during the summer - maybe even every day sometimes - the entire family went over to their house for a lazy day of laying around. My sister and I would generally go over with my aunt at about noon to find my grandma inside, almost invariably cleaning house, and we would have gone through several cycles of getting wet and drying off by the time my grandpa and my mom got home from work. Since before my birth as the first grandchild, I knew that my real family consisted not just of my mom, dad, and sister, but of my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and eventually my little cousins, Tyler and Tanner. The pool proved to be the place where that knowledge was confirmed and deepened as we played water volleyball, tipped each other off the floats, had contests to see who could stay under water the longest, and even moved into the back yard for a game of badminton. We shared many meals and a great deal of laughter around that pool; my sister, Hannah practically grew up in the waters of that pool; even our family's various dogs felt a special bond with those waters (and even more with the huge yard).

Of course, as great as all this was, it compromised the atmosphere of my grandparents' house somewhat. The house that was my sanctuary was now invaded by the whole family on a disturbingly regular basis. I could gain some modicum of solitude by riding my grandpa's mower in seemingly endless circles in the back yard, and I could even try to stay under water as long as possible, using an inverted raft as a place to get my air. I could attempt to climb the single climbable tree in the back yard and could explore behind the barn. All of those attempts at solitude and freedom never seemed to measure up to the times when I would step into the back yard and just start flying.

It was surprisingly like swimming underwater, really. I would just open my mouth, let the air flow in, keep it in my body, and float around in the sky. I don't want you to think that I was anything like a balloon, because that would be a tragic misunderstanding of this special talent I discovered. I now suspect that letting the air into my body was more symbolic (even sacramental?) than strictly functional, indicating my openness to the air around me. The way I flew was also nothing like a balloon. I could dive, I could make sharp turns - I was almost like a bird. I made sure to stay relatively close to the ground, because I've always been a little afraid of heights, and I didn't fly terribly fast. I kept my arms out for balance, but not really for flapping purposes.

I'm still not entirely sure how exactly these flying sessions began or ended, because it certainly wasn't an act of will on my part. Quite unexpectedly, after I had gotten out of the pool, dried off, and decided to run around in the big field, I would occasionally feel myself lifting off the ground, and I would take in (or allow in?) the air, and then just as unexpectedly, I would start to feel heavy and let out the air as I slowly descended to the ground. Although this fact never really struck me at the time, I think my family failed to notice these flying sessions, or at least they had an almost appallingly casual attitude toward them, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Strange as it may seem, the second seems more likely to me - how likely is it that my entire family, nine people other than me when it was in full force, didn't notice that the firstborn grandchild was flying? The table on the deck was usually arranged so that the chairs didn't face the field, and the women of the family tended to fall asleep on the rafts while sunbathing, so I suppose it's not totally inconceivable that they weren't paying any attention. The whole thing is very strange.

At times I suspect that it only really happened one time, because every time I did it seemed so similar to the previous time. An experience like that is something that you really remember, and I know that sometimes I have had vivid, triggered memories, almost on the order of something out of Proust. Sometimes if the wind hits me just right on a September afternoon, I can remember how it felt to be in marching band rehearsal, or how it felt to be walking home from elementary school, or how it felt to have my first day off classes at Olivet when I didn't have to go home. As I write this, too, I can remember exactly what it was like to come home to a completely different house on my first long break from college, or what it was like to sleep in the large upstairs bedroom in my aunt's house on Christmas Eve. Sometimes these memories get mixed up with their triggering events to such an extent that I completely lose track of chronological order and get caught in a network of associations.

Some particularly vivid dreams have even gotten caught in this vast network. One example is the one I had about holding hands in the main corridor of my high school. I had a very close female friend named Melinda, and one day as I was walking down the hall with her, I brushed up against her hand accidentally. I made a joke about holding hands with her, and she teased me, saying that I didn't even know how to hold hands properly. I took it as a challenge and promptly placed her hand in mine, but it didn't seem as platonic as the joke should have implied. I woke up on what seemed to be the next morning almost in a panic, wondering how I would tell my girlfriend what I had done, what I had felt? Should I even tell her? I can picture that event as clearly as any that ever happened in the real world - in fact even more clearly. The real world has always had difficulty competing with the creations of my mind.

I've been living in Genesee County for about a month now, listening to the abyssmal garbage that is Flint rock radio virtually every day. I hate it because the fascination of twenty-year-old songs is so great that there are three "classic rock" stations in the area; I hate it most of all because the only station that consistently plays new rock completely ignores any songs that are not revoltingly aggressive and ultra-masculine. I hate the fact that people are impressed by singers who have nothing to say except that they hate their parents and want to have sex. I hate the fact that a song whose guitar "riff" consists of a single note repeated endlessly is a huge success. I hate the fact that they are all so ridiculously strong and confident and ignorant. When I get home from work and have a chance to listen to music of my choice, I listen to singers who sound weak and whose themes focus on their weakness. I listen to people who are every bit as talented as the radio stars, perhaps even moreso, but are excluded from the airwaves because they are not immediately familiar.

Although I have made it a point to avoid "minority literature" for the most part and even made a point of complaining about the fact that we had to study cultural theory in my lit crit class, it would appear that at the level of my music preferences, the level that is least tied to academics and thus stands some chance of being less artificial, I like hearing from minorities, and even women. And even in my Dead White Male books, I like the ones who seem to be the most oppressed. I like the fact that Milton created his amazing poetry after being effectively a minority of one for his entire life: too smart for everyone around him, too unorthodox in his religious opinions even for the revolutionaries who executed the king. I like that James Joyce came from a cultural backwater. I even like to read some of the Dead White Males simply because they seem to have fallen out of favor or are difficult to understand for reasons beyond their control, Spenser, for example, or Langland. And I am jealous of people who have their minority status built in: why was I cursed with this white skin? Would I not be twice as impressive, nay, three times as impressive, had I graduated in the top ten of my class, gotten a full-tuition college scholarship, and spent a semester at Oxford, and been Chicano, or Hmong, or a Kosovar refugee?

And seriously, though I did a good job of alienating my parents by majoring in a completely impractical field and most of all by converting to Catholicism, why couldn't I have topped it off by being attracted to men? I like girls too much to risk driving them away while developing a taste for men: it must be so easy for those people who are born with that particular taste. Then look at my biography: all the same accomplishments, all the while hiding my homosexuality and eventually becoming a pariah in my own family when the love that dares not speak its name speaks its name. Not only would I look like a real trooper, but then I'd have a bit more of an excuse for what I laughingly call my "love life" for the past couple years. It would be rough going for a while, but I would be more than willing to go through that suffering to round out my introduction in the Norton Anthology.

In all seriousness, though, if I had to take that lit crit class again, I wouldn't get upset about the cultural studies, even though I, as a Living White Male, have no culture to call my own. I joke about the "benefits" of being in a minority, but those artists who have had to live with that burden for all their lives do usually seem to have a special insight into the human condition, almost as though they've had enough suffering for several lives. The closest I will ever come to that is my Catholicism, and after I leave Olivet, that "minority status" will probably lose much of its relevance. On a more fundamental level, though, I think that the voice speaking right now, the one that has been sincerely expressing my views for the past paragraph, is definitely a minority in my life, or at least this voice doesn't get a lot of the attention. Look at the end of my second paragraph and my entire third paragraph: I slip into Mr. Sarcastic and all of a sudden I'm on the verge of being a bigot. This is the kind of thing that gets me in trouble, isn't it? It's the mixture of tones that confuses people. I like to think that I could pick up the switch in tone on a "close reading" of one of my articles, but that requires more time than I can reasonably expect of my customers here. Thus, from this point forward, I will try to abide by the following rule: an article is either entirely sincere or entirely sarcastic, and any deviations from the former to the latter will be clearly and distinctly marked.

• Janet Jackson is a talented vocalist and dancer, the survivor of a terrible childhood, and an attractive woman, but when I hear that stupid song that says, "Maybe we'll meet in a bar / He'll drive a funky car," I want to choke her to death.
• Obviously it is a problem when one man is writing for practically all the bands on the radio, such as the one man who wrote for Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, and Britney Spears. The real problem, however, is when those people start writing for themselves. The best example of this is Destiny's Child. When they first came out, I had to admit that if there was such a thing as good R&B, they were it. "Say My Name" was a great song, and "Jumpin' Jumpin'," though certainly repetitive, was also incredibly cool. Then they ruined it by starting to write for themselves: "Survivor" is repetitive without the coolness, and "Booty-liscious" is clearly ridiculous. What makes me really hate them (and myself) is that "Booty-liscious" has actually grown on me.
• And now to make fun of some white people: Even though people claim that that radio song about the boyfriend who's "too stoned" and "don't know anything about" his girlfriend is not actually by Blink 182, I refuse to believe it.
• If I hear Staind's song "It's been awhile," complete with the obnoxious censorship, one more time, I will hang myself.
• This song highlights the problem of radio censorship. I'm not going to rehearse the tired arguments that "everyone knows what they're saying," though the editing sometimes seems to be purposefully bad. The fact is that past elementary school, it is increasingly impossible for anyone to avoid hearing swear words. If parents don't want their kids to listen to music with swear words in it, then they should take some kind of responsibility for what the kids listen to. As it stands, the legal prohibition against swear words leads to a greater fascination with them: kids delight in figuring out "what they're saying," and when they go out and buy the uncensored version, the tracks with swear words will become a special treasure. Perhaps the best thing that can happen is for kids to consider swear words some kind of ridiculous joke, so that they will never think of them as a way of seriously expressing themselves.
• There are no good radio stations that consistently come in in Genesee County. This is yet another reason why no one would ever want to live there.
• There should be two kinds of radio stations: those for short-term listeners and those for all-day listeners. Currently, all of them seem to be designed with the short-term listener in mind, repeating the same small set of popular songs every hour or so. Not only is this torturous for the all-day listener, but it is a terrible abuse of the music. No song, no matter how good, can stand up to the pressure of being repeated every day, let alone eight times in a single work day. The fact that music is so abused by the radio shows us to what degree the music industry is in fact an industry, whose only goal is to bully us into buying their products.
• The problem with TRL is that its time slot guarantees not only that prepubescent girls will dominate the voting (which might not be all that bad), but that they will inevitably be exposed to only a small set of songs. MTV would be smarter to place a music program that plays a good variety of new and old videos at the crucial right-after-school slot, and then put TRL later in the evening, when everyone has had more time to reflect on what has been played. Of course, since MTV has decided that actual music videos are best left to a "2" channel, this will never happen. The lack of videos on MTV shows to what degree the music industry is indifferent to music.
• Someone needs to revive the festering corpse of modern rock music. No, Incubus does not cut it.
• The following groups need to be brutally murdered before they can record a new album:
  1. Kid Rock
  2. Limp Bizkit
  3. Blessid Union of Souls
  4. Fuel
  5. Creed
  6. Creed
  7. Creed
  8. Kid Rock
  9. Kid Rock
  10. Creed
  11. Creed
  12. Kid Rock
• I would be happy if every "classic rock" station in the world suddenly burned down. It's like the "short-term listener" format without as many opportunities for variety.
• In this world of bad music, only Beck can save us.

As detailed below, I was involved in a car accident that was serious for my car and in the long term, largely inconsequential for me. At the time, however, that accident made it seem as though the world had ended, and that kind of event calls for earnest reflection. I chose for a time to focus on the "if only": if only Richard hadn't talked to me in the parking lot; if only I'd been scheduled for a different night; if only the person had ordered his pizza at a different time; if only it had been someone else's turn; if only I wouldn't have inadvertantly run the stupid red light; if only the other person had paid more attention and noticed the navy blue missile hurtling toward him. Obviously my immediate situation would have been better had any of those "if only" statements corresponded to reality. As a practical matter, however, they were all utterly useless, and probably even annoying to those who were forced to listen to them. The past is completely inaccessible to us. Even time-travel movies usually only partly flout this most obvious fact of our existence: very seldom does one see a time machine that allows a person actually to be himself in the past and act differently at a crucial point. Even if a person gets to go back to a time in his own life, he must act as a kind of Voice of God for his past self, still leaving the decision up to his former self, who is at this point practically an entirely different person precisely because he can be only indirectly influenced.

Clearly the "if only" is a futile gesture, incapable of correcting the problems it addresses and only occasionally capable of indirectly influencing the future course of events. This stems from the fact that no two situations are exactly alike. One could say that the Roman Empire would not have fallen had some crucial decisions been made, and one might even be correct, but even in the most demonstrably parallel situations there is a kind of absurdity in applying those lessons from the past to some current situation such as the perceived decline of American hegemony. The past is the past; it is completely gone; only traces of it can be found in the present, and those traces are arguably nothing but a human creation.

If we are to be completely logical, we must say that projecting hypothetical situations into the past should largely be avoided, but the common practice is clearly very different. More popular than resignation, more popular even than the "if only," is the "at least." To use my accident again, I could just as easily say, "At least it was insured; at least I could keep my job; at least I didn't die." These situations have as much value as the "if only" statements: that is, they have no practical value at all. The inaccessibility of the past divides events into two categories, those that happen and those that don't. The "if only" and the "at least" both fall into the category of those that don't, and they only influence the course of actual events indirectly, when consideration of them becomes something that happens. The usefulness and legitimacy of the "at least" can be called into question, not simply on the basis of its non-happening status, but also on its indirect influence. Simply put, the "at least" makes my decisions, which from an "if only" perspective" could be very poor, look good, even brilliant. Truman dropped the atom bomb on Japan: at least he didn't start a nuclear war by dropping it on someone who also had it. Bush passed a huge tax cut that will largely benefit wealthy people: at least he didn't pass a bill that offered tax credits to child molesters. I wasted my money on a big-screen TV: at least I didn't contribute to the slow economy by hoarding my money. Where the "if only" can help us to interpret a situation in such a way that we will avoid duplicating past mistakes, the "at least" at its worst encourages us to interpret a situation in such a way that we will repeat our mistakes, and repeat the mistake of thinking that our decisions were good.

But haven't I said all this before? In my earlier commentary "Life is Over," I write, "To be human is to fail and to lose, and convincing oneself that that failure and loss is anything other than failure and loss accomplishes absolutely nothing." This is exactly what I just said, and it is said much more forcefully and much more concisely. And in my earlier writing about my accident, I write, "I am loathe to participate in all the talk of the 'at least,' which seems to me nothing but a way of deflecting myself from a true assessment of my actions and myself." This is certainly a little more honest than my abstract analysis above: the "at least" is just a way of making myself feel better; it is a comfortable lie. Look, though, what follows this assessment: "but the 'at least' is the only thing I have." This is the truth: while the "if only" is certainly useful in a limited set of circumstances, the "at least" is the only thing that can console me when I have made a wrong choice.

The "at least" is thus a necessary consequence of being human. Although philosophers have derided it as a useful or comforting illusion for generations, all of us know that we have a free will, even those of us who have expended a great deal of energy convincing ourselves that we don't. Far from being comforting, the idea of free will is one of the most terrifying things a limited being could imagine: the inaccessibility of the past means that in every decision, we are doing something absolutely for real, something that will never go away. We cannot handle that responsibility. It is far too much for us to accept directly, and so we need to "deflect [ourselves] from a true assessmment of [our] actions and [ourselves]." We do this through the "at least," which is manifestly a lie, and a lie that we must not allow the lie to stray too far from reality. The "at least," if completely uninhibited by the "if only," tends always and inevitably to the greatest lie: the "at least it wasn't my fault." Mitigating circumstances, unavoidable influences, and impossible situations certainly enter into every life and into every situation, and to deflect all of that onto myself would be the sign of immeasurable pride, of a childishness that wishes to control the entire world. To deflect myself completely from the bare fact of my personal responsibility, though, is not simply to indulge in childish wishful thinking. It is essentially to deny that I am human at all.

I have a boring technical story to introduce this essay. You may skip it if you wish. Last night, I was using my computer to do something highly advanced and experimental, browsing the web. Since they haven't quite worked out all the bugs in Internet Explorer over the course of six versions, my computer absolutely locked up in the middle of downloading a web page: neither my mouse nor control-alt-delete worked. I decided to reboot the system by hand, and of course Scan Disk started up, just to make sure everything was alright. I pushed cancel, since it was late at night and all I wanted was to finish reading the page I was on. Then this morning, I was going to leave the house and thought it would be a good idea to run some maintenance software on my computer. I fired up Scan Disk, and it actually found an error, for the first time since I got this computer. I pressed OK to fix it, but by that time, the contents of the hard drive had changed, so it needed to start all over again. I closed out all my other programs, even pressing control-alt-delete to close all the things that weren't visible on the task bar, and I started it over. Again, even though Scan Disk was apparently the only thing the computer had to worry about, some other program couldn't wait thirty seconds to look at the hard drive. It eventually became apparent that I was caught in an infinite loop: it would find the error, and by the time I could respond to it, it would have to start all over. Interestingly, the same thing happened when I told it to just go ahead and fix the errors without my explicit approval. I needed somehow to get the computer to the point where Scan Disk was absolutely the only thing it needed to do, so that it could get through it uninterrupted, and the only way I could think of to do that was to shut down the computer improperly and let Scan Disk show up. If I weren't a person who has had a million computer problems and has had the patience to figure every last one of them out, I would have just had to let that error stay there, and then other errors would pile up, until I finally had to format my hard drive and start over.

The point of that story is that Microsoft's products are ridiculously stupid. Anyone with half a brain would include a function where maintenance software can override everything else so as to get its job done uninterrupted. Not Microsoft, though. No, they have to focus on making tiny little changes to the user interface so that they can justify charging for a new version, all the while letting stupid bugs and stupid annoyances pile up. If they had put half as much time into making their software not constantly lock up as they did into trying to put Winamp out of business with their Media Player, they probably could have fixed the most egregious bugs right away. Granted, an overriding focus on technical minutae might not be the best approach, since Linux absolutely never locks up but is also sometimes openly hostile toward users who don't have a master's degree in computer science. Microsoft needs to learn, though, that software is not easy to use if it can suddenly lock up at literally any time for no apparent reason, and it's not easy to use if their idiotic design makes it nearly impossible to fix problems in a reasonable manner.

My stupid way of fixing my computer today made me late to where I was going, but what if it was something more serious? What if instead of locking up while I was reading some news article, my computer had locked up while I was writing a paper, and the disk error didn't just make me late, but made me lose my work? Think of the time that I've lost, whether it makes me have to turn it in late or not. Professors know that such things can happen and are usually very understanding about it, but think of all the time that they lose grading my paper individually when they could have graded it with all the others. And what about the business world, where people's work actually has a direct economic value and it can be so easily lost? And even if the work itself turns out to be intact, what of the time that is wasted staring at the screen as the computer reboots? An older computer running the latest version of Windows could probably take up to five or ten minutes to reboot. If every employee's computer locked up once a week (a conservative estimate), imagine how many man-hours a large corporation could be losing. If the workers whose time is wasted are salaried, then the company can simply force them to work unpaid overtime to compensate for the errors, but that takes the workers away from their families.

Clearly, Microsoft's software carries with it not only an economic cost, but also a social one. As Microsoft's software costs working parents more and more of their personal time, it contributes to nothing less than the deterioration of the family, indeed of American society itself.

That is why I am filing a class-action lawsuit on the part of all computer users whose time has been wasted, whose money has been squandered, whose families have been torn apart by the scourge of Microsoft's bug-ridden, grossly negligent software. I encourage you to support my effort by your complaints to your congressman, by your financial contributions to my legal fund, but most importantly by your fervent prayer that this company that has visited wanton destruction on the economic and social structure of our great nation may finally be brought to justice.

I was introduced to Mario at an early age, occasionally playing Donkey Kong on the Commodore 64, but the love affair only began after I received the original Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas. I was slow to catch on to the idea of video games, but once I clearly and distinctly grasped the correspondance between the buttons I pushed and the actions of that lovable brown and red dwarf on the screen, there was no turning back. A shameful portion of my life was spent in the basement playing Nintendo; entire summers passed by without my knowledge; I reached a symbolic turning point when I stayed home from the final meet of my "pay to play" track team and instead beat Mario 2, still the most compelling in the series, in my opinion. I admit that I was distracted by the false idols of Zelda II (notice the simple, straightforward style of the Mario series, always using the easily recognizable Arabic numerals instead of the pretensious and inefficient Roman equivalents) and Final Fantasy -- but Mario remained my true passion. I remember my excitement at receiving the issue of Nintendo Power that reviewed (or advertised) Mario 3, which was to be the crowning achievement of the 8-bit consoles. I remember devouring the official strategy guide, with its detailed maps of every stage, before even so much as playing the game. Then I remember the joy -- no, the ecstacy -- I experienced as early as stage 1-1 as Mario gained a racoon's tail and with it the power of flight. I hadn't been in a biology class yet, but I knew that racoons couldn't fly -- but it didn't matter, did it? The non sequitur added to the allure. By the time I had earned the teddy-bear-with-racoon-tail and the Hammer Brothers suits, I knew that I was not playing a simple game. I was playing a part of history, a flawless marriage of Japanese pop-culture nonsense and Italian stereotypes that was as certain as Milton's immortal Paradise Lost to be a permanent fixture in the great Western cultural tradition.

I had beaten Mario 3 all too soon and was longing for more when the Super Nintendo entered my life. Super Mario World, the Mario 1 of the next generation of Nintendo consoles, was considerably tamer than the two 8-bit sequels, refraining from the complete paradigm shift represented by Mario 2 and reigning in the creative excesses that sometimes threatened to throw Mario 3 into an abyss of complete incoherence. The introduction of Yoshi was ingenious, yes, but still Super Mario World could hardly stand up to the vigor, the urgency, of the 8-bit Mario sequels. I made the obligatory trips through the annoyingly cute Donut Plains and Choco Island; I completed the circuit of the mysterious and frustrating Star World; I passed through the back door of Bowser's castle to give him a thrashing he is not likely to soon forget -- but it had long since begun to seem automatic, almost obligatory. I was playing a Mario game not because of its innovative gameplay or gripping storyline, but simply out of my sense of duty to the Mario franchise.

Things quickly changed when I became hooked on Super Mario Kart -- I forgave Nintendo for misspelling "cart" when I realized the magnitude of their achievement in this game. In it, twenty courses are presented to the player, who must choose between eight subtly different characters in his quest for victory. The incomparable Mario brothers were options, but I was more compelled by the chance to root for the dark side, experimenting with Donkey Kong and even Bowser himself, but finally settling on Koopa Troopa. Oh, to find a woman who is as perfect a match as Koopa Troopa -- his acceleration, his top speed, and above all his handling all convinced me that I had in this loveable bird in a turtle shell as close to a soulmate as I would ever find. Koopa Troopa and I stuck together through good times and bad, through the joy of surfing along in Koopa Beach 1 and the agony of repeatedly banging into walls in Bowser's Castle 3, through the exhaltation of finally finishing first in Donut Plains 3 and the frustration of hurtling into the abyss on Rainbow Road. We mourned together when we ran out of continues; we celebrated together when we finally got to witness the ending, having thoroughly beaten every course and circuit.

After Super Mario Kart, I was distracted from the Mario franchise by women and literature, but my interest was rekindled in college when I received Super Mario All-Stars, a Super Nintendo compilation of all the original Mario games, together with a collection of new levels previously available only in Japan. Before approaching the new levels, however, I had to settle accounts. To my shame, I had never defeated Mario 1 in the original, and I will almost certainly never have an opportunity to do so due to the rapid deterioration of the original Nintendo consoles. The Super Mario All-Stars version was substantially the same, with some notable exceptions: the brown Mario was replaced by the now-familiar red and blue version, a save game feature was added, and most decisively, a bell rang in the "maze" stages to alert the player he had gone the wrong way. I had gotten to the nearly impossible 8-4 on the original version, but I had always gotten hopelessly lost in the maze. With the crutch of the warning bells, I was able to defeat it with relative ease, but I knew that it would have taken me years to accomplish the same feat without that added enhancement. I was able to complete the Lost Levels with some difficulty, but I felt that my achievement had been permanently tarnished. Even if by some miracle I found a working NES with Mario 1, I could never return to my pre-warning-bell innocence: my repeated trial and error had allowed me to memorize the correct path, keeping me from ever overcoming the obscenely difficult challenge the original geniuses behind Mario 1 had intended.

Though I never fully delved into the Mario games for the Nintendo 64, Mario has remained a fixture in my life. He has been a staple in my computer wallpaper gallery, he has inspired my most popular and consistently amusing away message for AOL Instant Messenger, and I still regularly play Super Mario Kart as a way of grounding myself, of reminding myself of the really important influences that have shaped me. Throughout the tumult of my adolescence, my two serious dating relationships, my conversion to Catholicism, my semester at Oxford, and my car accident, I have been able to endure and thrive because of the soil in which my life has been planted. Certainly other factors, the love and support of my immediate and extended family, the encouragement of gifted educators, the fellowship of good friends, have helped me to become the person I am today -- but where would I be had I never gotten the first mushroom that made me double in size? And so I offer this tribute to Mario and to the geniuses at Nintendo who created him, to thank him and them for helping me to grow my own racoon tail and fly into the adult world with confidence.

As some of you know, I was suffering from a sore throat for a while recently. I thought that it was a relatively minor problem, amounting to little more than losing my voice, and I assumed that taking a day off from waiting tables would allow me enough time to recover completely. I called in sick to work, then promptly got in bed and disconnected my phone, so as not to be disturbed. My boss apparently attempted to call me several times, suspicious about my excuse for missing work, and by the time I had nearly recovered and reconnected my phone, my boss, Glen, was livid. He called on Friday night and left a message alerting me that I wasn't sick and that I was fired. The decision had been made long before he even called me, so reasoning with him was completely out of the question. I accepted the humiliation graciously, and the next day I washed all my uniform items and took them over to work so as to avoid a hefty fine on my last paycheck, as well as to avoid having a bunch of stupid aprons.

I arrived at about 2:00 PM, the slowest time in a restaurant, but I found that the parking lot was crammed full of police cars. I parked in the employee lot and rang the back doorbell, although I think some of the police officers were trying to discourage me for some reason. The dishwasher, Bob, opened the door, holding a gun. Bob had been working at the restaurant for many years and was used as a jack-of-all-trades, so I assumed that he was just cleaning out Glen's gun. As I walked in the door, he said, "Man, you'll love this." I assumed he meant that he had cleaned the floor especially well or something, but then I walked in and found that he had tied all the employees together and hung Glen upside down from a ceiling fan.

It only took me a moment to realize that Bob had done this and had evil designs on Glen's life. I acted as though I sympathized with him and told him about my unjust firing, and he said that he would give me the honor of the first shot. Hoping to look realistically humble, I said, "Oh, I couldn't." Sadly, he thought that I was being ungrateful and promptly shot me in the thigh. As I writed on the floor, he began enumerating his grievances against Glen, often repeating his charge that Glen had been paying him minimum wage for the last eight years. As he listed off his charges, I gathered my strength and jumped at him in an attempt to keep him from following through on his nefarious designs. Sadly, before I managed to tackle him, he shot me in the head. My dying thoughts were, "Man, first I total my car for this job, and now this."

Glen had been baptized Catholic, and I soon ran into him in purgatory. "Now that we're dead," I asked, "I have to ask, why did you really fire me? I know that calling in sick isn't grounds for termination."

"Well," said Glen, "you're right about it not being about calling in sick. I was just waiting for you to do something wrong so that I could fire you, because I always thought you were a total moron."

I thanked him for his honesty and started to walk away, but he called me back.

"Oh, and that thing with trying to tackle Bob and save my life," he said. "You really screwed that up. If he wouldn't have killed you, I definitely would have fired you for that."

I had nothing to say. He turned and left me to rolling out the 5,035,227 extra large pizzas I had remaining.

I made a choice, perhaps a bad choice, to live in Hills Hall on Olivet's campus this summer. This provides me with an ultra-fast, if not ultra-reliable, Internet connection, free utilities, and free cable. It also provides me with the opportunity to use community showers and public restrooms for the entire summer. A problem has recently developed in the bathroom: people think that it is reasonable and prudent to put large food items in the sinks. On one occasion there was apparently an entire bowl of beef stew in the sink. On another, there was salad. Ramen noodles are also frequently found in larger quantities than could possibly be rinsed down the sink.

I do not understand the reasoning behind this at all. With a garbage can and four toilets so nearby, how can one possibly think to himself, "Hell, I'll just put this in the sink"? If he put it in the toilet and flushed it (often people will do the first without doing the second), the food would go away. No one would have to clean it up because it would be gone. If he put it in the garbage, it would stay there for at most twenty-four hours, at which point it would be gone, and in the meantime he would not have to look at it, since it would be in the garbage can. When he makes up his mind to put his medium two-topping pizza in the sink, however, he will have to look at the mess he has made every time he walks into the bathroom at least for the rest of the day. Sometimes the food remains in the sink for more than a day, and I can't really blame the janitor for not wanting to clean up such a ridiculous and easily avoidable mess.

This is not the only reason I hate people.

I also hate parents, especially those parents who commit the following two mortal sins: allowing, or even encouraging, their children to become morbidly obese; and allowing their children to wreak havoc in a sit-down restaurant. (There is significant overlap between the two groups.) I know that some people apparently have a genetic predisposition toward obesity, and I also understand how difficult it can be for people to lose weight once they've gained it, but in all honesty, we know what makes people become fat. We know that if a young child, when going to a pizza place, gets his own personal appetizer and then eats half of an extra-large, meat-laden pizza, there will be health consequences. We know that if children are allowed to sit for hours on end, mindlessly watching television, there will be health consequences. And while allowing children to create disgusting messes in a restaurant is a valuable step toward a less sedentary lifestyle, I think we can all agree that there are more systematic and less destructive ways to promote health. Both of these problems point, to me, in one direction: the parents do not really care about their children. As long as they don't have to clean up the mess and don't have to listen to their children whine about how they don't like their food, the parents are happy.

Throughout the almost annoyingly frequent theological debates that took place among my fellow students at Oxford, I made a conscious decision not to express my opinions in a direct way. My Evangelical Christian friends were not accustomed to being told that they were wrong, as sometimes evidenced by their style of "discussion," and at one point, one of my fellow students asked, with some annoyance, "What do you believe, Adam?" I'm not sure if I answered his question adequately at the time, but I hope to make it up to him now in the form of an exhaustive list of aphorisms.

• When people say that they don't enjoy classical music, that makes me sad for them.
• Although shaving downward does not produce as clean a shave as going upward, I'm willing to pay the price of a sloppier look in order to avoid a rash at the bottom of my neck.
• Unless it's dangerously hot, air conditioning, especially central air, is wasteful.
• Walking a considerable distance for purely utilitarian purposes is completely un-American.
• The immorality of democracy comes in its effort to convince us that the actions of the inevitably arbitrary powers that govern us are our own dumb fault, when in reality something that is "everyone's fault" can just as easily be called "no one's fault."
• Microsoft may have made computers more aesthetically pleasing to use, but no tool is easy to use if it arbitrarily stops working at crucial times.
• Raise your children without television until they're old enough to assess it objectively and realize that it's largely a waste of time.
• Total Request Live is in the process of consolidating the complete destruction of the music industry's credibility.
• The only art worth studying and enjoying is the kind that the creator secretly hopes no one will ever study and enjoy.
• Life must be difficult for those pastors who must preach to congregations full of people who possess intimate and detailed knowledge about literally everything, from the creation of the world to its ultimate destruction, from the innermost secrets of the human heart to the mysteries of God.
• On language usage:
  • The verb form of "procession" or "processional" is proceed, NOT pro-CESS.
  • Those who whine about the "limitations" of the system of grammatical gender in English should learn a language with a neuter pronoun, move to a country where it is spoken, and leave the rest of us alone.
  • Any political movement that encourages people to write and speak in an unnecessarily wordy manner in order to avoid offending people should be ignored.
  • The fact that the spelling English words is often related more to the history of that word than to actual pronunciation does not excuse people from the responsibility spell words according to accepted usage.
• On high school education:
  • Graduates from high school should be able to read comfortably and comprehendingly anything written in English since the publication of the King James Bible.
  • Graduates from high school should be able to recognize glaring errors in their writing on a quick glance through a first draft.
  • Graduates from high school should think of books as one of their primary means of enjoyment and of personal growth and should read them with alacrity and zeal at every opportunity.
  • Graduates from high school know that only in very exceptional circumstances is a "group project" anything more than a collection of people who are fortunate enough to get the same grade, after no work, as one hard-working person does, after too much work.
  • Graduates from high school know that one of the primary goals of our great institutions is to keep everyone as busy as possible, whether or not the activity leads to anything worthwhile in itself.
• Christian pop culture is a waste of time.
• Contrary to the arguments of patriots, most people who live in countries other than the United States love their homes and have no desire to emigrate.
• Every child, by the age of ten, should be able to set up and administer a large-scale corporate intranet, so that the United States can remain competetive in the world market.

I hope I have made myself clear. Any confusion resulting from this list can certainly be cleared up by a brief postscript.

In a rare triumph of investigative journalism, the editors of the Homepage have uncovered some top-secret information about the new albums coming from your favorite bands.

I'm White Trash And It Sucks by Everclear

Everclear has long been noted for its meditations on the struggles of white trash, but never before have they focussed so intensely on the essence of what it means to be a worthless piece of white trash. "In many ways, this is part of the natural progression of our message," said the lead singer. "In songs like 'I Will Buy You a New Life' and 'Father of Mine', we definitely alluded to the fact that we were all white trash, and a lot of our fans picked up on that. We got a lot of support for representing white trash in the mainstream, watered-down 'alternative' market, and we decided it would be appropriate to be more explicit about that." One of the most noteworthy aspects of this albums is the lyrical technique. Long known for taking previously released singles and adding new words and very slight musical variations, Everclear has taken the artistic risk of dispensing with musical variations entirely, and only marginally altering the lyrics. "A lot of people would accuse us of a lack of creativity, but the last thing we want to do is add any discomfort to our fans' lives by giving them something unexpected," said the bass player. "So you know how our one song about how everything is wonderful is actually just a slightly edited version of 'Everything to Everyone?' Since we had such a great reception for that song, we've just decided to keep using the tune from 'Everything to Everyone' on all our singles from now on." Expect the new single, "All things to All People," in late June.

DO NOT BUY THIS ALBUM by Radiohead

Radiohead's last album, Kid A, seemed to be poised to be the greatest commercial failure in pop music history. Critics, long known for their tendency to prefer to listen to music that no other human being could bear to hear, praised the album effusively, and the band took the radical steps of not touring and not releasing videos or singles. It was Pearl Jam all over again, with a twist: people actually bought the album. Lead singer Thom Yorke explains the band's reaction: "Like most rock bands, we had come to resent our own success and secretly wanted out of our contract so that we could finally finish law school. We decided that we would record an album that showed that we had not sold out to the Man and that would almost certainly fail so miserably that we could never find another record company if we tried. Imagine our disappointment, then, when it became a huge success." With DO NOT BUY THIS ALBUM, Radiohead is giving failure another try. Says Yorke, "We decided to emulate Pearl Jam by using unorthodox packaging for the new album, but we took it to the next logical level by using poison ivy instead of paper. In a nice coincidence, this really drove up the price of the album, which should help cut into sales." Those fans who work their way through the packaging should find the music similarly abrasive. Modelled after their novelty song from OK Computer, "Fitter Happier," all these songs are performed entirely with a piano and computer voice-generation software. Most of the lyrics are in twelfth-century Danish. Critics have been kind so far: Rolling Stone calls it "quite simply the most brilliant album ever," and Spin has extended its scoring system to twenty stars, up from the usual ten.

Fifty-One Crappy Songs by Smashing Pumpkins

Those Smashing Pumpkins fans who were not satiated by the recent Internet-only release of MACHINA II: Friends and Enemies of Modern Music need look no further than the latest Smashing Pumpkins b-side collection, Fifty-One Crappy Songs, which, despite its name, actually contains sixty-eight songs. Billy Corgan explains: "All of our fans realize by now that we have always purposefully included some remarkably crappy music to fill space on our the ridiculously albums long albums we've been putting out since Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Well, we did the math, and we noticed that roughly a fourth of the tracks on these later albums were utterly worthless, and we decided that for this last album we would see if we could triple that and still have anyone buy it." Fans of crappy Smashing Pumpkins songs should not be disappointed, as the collection includes three songs with Corgan singing a capella as well as an unprecedented twelve songs by guitarist James Iha. Critics call one fourth of the music on this album the best the Pumpkins have put out since Siamese Dream, but the tracks are arranged in such a way as to require constant skipping to wade through the sea of mediocrity that is the remainder of the album. Especially crappy songs include a bossa nova influenced cover of "Sweet Home Alabama" and a dance remix of "Disarm."

I Can't Believe You're Still Buying This by Limp Bizkit

A collection of covers of Rage Against the Machine songs, I Can't Believe You're Still Buying This finally pays homage to the originators of the rap-rock genre that Limp Bizkit has popularized. Interestingly, nowhere in the liner notes does it mention the fact that these are covers. "We're counting on the fact that everyone has already forgotten about Rage," says singer Fred Durst. The first single, "Bulls on Parade," will be released in early August.

I can't sleep right now. At about 8:30 last night, I was driving down U. S. Route 45, on my way to deliver a pizza and collect my $2 tip. As I came to University Avenue, which forms a T intersection with U. S. 45, I noticed that the light for my direction was red, but the light for University Avenue was yellow. I was quite some distance away from the light and reasoned that it would be green in my direction soon enough that I wouldn't have to stop. As I came closer and closer to the intersection, the yellow light lingered, and my current view is that the light for University Avenue turned red just as I was getting to the point where I couldn't really stop anymore. My light persisted in its redness, and I ended up running it, looking up at the light the whole time, hoping by my force of will to change it to the appropriate color. By the time I had committed to my breach of the law, I saw that my reasoning had been flawed: someone coming from the opposite direction on U. S. 45 was turning left in front of me, and I later realized that he had a green arrow, which I should have been able to predict after passing that intersection so many times.

I hit the front of his car head-on from what I can tell, and he hit me in the front driver's side corner. My car ended up turned perpendicular to the road (this is when it became a Good Thing that there was a red light in the direction I was coming from) relatively close to the point of impact, but the other guy's ended up pretty close to the other side of the intersection. My front end was in sad shape, my door wouldn't open, and I hit my head ever so slightly; I turned off my car, was instructed by standers-by to get out on the passenger side, and saw that the other guy's car was in considerably worse shape, dripping and smoking profusely. The police arrived fairly quickly, and I described the course of events accurately as far as I could tell. At no point had I lost consciousness: I can even remember that my CD player skipped so severely that it had to start the current track over. I was taken to the hospital and declared to be in perfect health.

It's 4AM the morning following, and I don't yet know the full extent of the damage to my car or of the consequences of my actions. As a result of what really amounts to only a moderate lack of judgement, I was the cause of severe property damage, and had events happened slightly differently, I could very well have been the cause of my own death. My driver-side door was after all damaged: perhaps I was saved by the precise amount of braking that took place. I've gone over the scene many times in my mind, and I've even begun to do some rationalization: clearly the other guy wasn't watching very closely since I clearly was not anywhere near stopping, but I also clearly shouldn't have run a red light. At best I can assign us both partial blame and I can be thankful that he saw fit not to talk to me, rather than to become irate. I was apologetic at the scene, which I was later told was a mistake -- blame is, I realize, a legal fiction.

As I contemplate this event more and more, I am appalled by the waste. I made a simple human mistake that probably most drivers have made, and by sheer bad luck, I now have to deal with some serious consequences. My insurance costs might go up; I might end up having to pay for repairs to my truck myself; the unnecessary hospital visit may be ridiculously expensive. Beyond the waste of money, there is the waste of time, the time of the person waiting for his pizza, the time of my boss trying his hardest to supress the fact that I was on the clock when this happened, the time of the supervisor from work who happened to see me on her way home and went to the emergency room with me. None of this is very serious; none of this is anything to be agonizing about -- but it's waste, and it's unnecessary.

I have long contemplated writing a commentary on regret. My philosophy is that the proper response to the waste that comes from human imperfection is a radical regret, an absolutely unswerving look into the fact that the world is slightly worse off after one's mistake. I am loathe to participate in all the talk of the "at least," which seems to me nothing but a way of deflecting myself from a true assessment of my actions and myself, but the "at least" is the only thing I have. At least it wasn't more serious. At least the other guy turned off his car before it burst into flames. At least I've learned the valuable lesson that I should drive more carefully and not be in such a huge hurry all the time: my urgency not to waste time has led to a greater waste. To me, the "at least I've learned a lesson" is the worst part of the "at least," because look at the lesson: Drive Safely. Did I really need to see the front end of my pristine new truck demolished to learn that lesson? If I did, then isn't my real lesson that I am imperfect and arrogant, not that I should drive more safely?

I could say that I've learned how fragile life is and that now I'm going to live life to the fullest, etc., etc., but I haven't learned that. I'm twenty years old, and if anything, I have learned that a little caution on my part is all that is necessary to augment my natural invincibility. I've learned that people want more than anything to be able to say that it's okay, to salvage whatever they can from a situation, to take refuge in the "at least." I've learned that an activity that seems at most entirely secondary to my "real" life can seriously disrupt that "real" life in an entirely unexpected and seemingly disproportionate way. I've learned above all that I have been overestimating the value of money and that the risks of pizza delivery far outweigh the benefits. At least I can take that away with me.

Albert Camus tells us that suicide is always an option and that the ultimate question is why we should not take that option. If suicide were a simple choice, then I could agree with him without reservation, but the fact is that it takes a lot of effort. In order to kill myself, I have to go against my most deeply-ingrained instincts of self-preseravation: no matter how badly things go, the fact will remain that at some deep level I want to avoid pain. This is especially true, as Foucault tells us, in a society where the health of the body has become the paramount concern. Perhaps if I were a knight in the court of some medieval king, where an honorable death was an object of the most intense obsession, I could reasonably consider this question, but today the fact remains that even the most lax of us has put a great deal of effort into keeping the body healthy, simply for its own sake. I personally have put many more hours into lifting weights than I have into anything that could even remotely require the strength I gained from that. All of us are acquainted with the problem of calorie-counting, even if we do not personally take part in it, and all of us have probably, at some point, taken some kind of bizarre pill that is supposed to help us to become healthier. In addition, we constantly watch television shows that alert us to the manifold health risks that we encounter every day: "You could choke on your spoon; your toaster could burn your house down; your dog could give you an infectious disease." We wash our hands obsessively; we take at least a shower a day; we wash our clothes after wearing them for a half hour; we disinfect every surface. The world is in a constant state of becoming a healthier place for us all, so why would any of us want to go against this general trend and ruin the beautiful edifice we spend our lives agonizing over?

When I asked two of my friends why they continue living, they did not mention the facts I enumerated above. One said that she lived essentially because of Jesus, with all that entails. The other said that he lived out of simple curiosity: he can stay alive with relatively little effort, so why not see how things turn out? Both of those are perfectly acceptible answers; I can think of none better. My personal philosophy has long been to choose life in almost any conceivable situation, and I have always thought those who say that they would rather die than do or experience a certain thing are being slightly dishonest with themselves. It's easy to say that you'd rather die than be raped or rather die than deny Jesus, but is it easy to put that into action? When we have been taught our entire lives that we should be healthy and happy and should try our very best to live as long as we possibly can, when the overriding project of our government is to preserve the physical health of its citizens, when only the most exceptional of us can even pretend to say that we love anything better than our precious and beautiful selves, how can we say that anything would make us want to die? If one lives for Jesus, perhaps the point becomes moot, because the martyr gets to be him Self with Christ, world without end, according to the common conception, or at least he'd better, because it sure would be boring to go to heaven if all I had to do was sing God's praises all the time. I want to play golf, or read my books, or watch TV, or have sex, all eternity long. I am special; I have a high self-esteem; I am all I could ever need.

I continue living because I love myself, and I'm not sure if anyone can unreservedly deny this. In this world, I have myself for sure, and even though I might accept Pascal's wager in an attempt to keep myself a little bit longer, this world is the place, above all, where I get to enjoy the glory of Self. I have only the faintest idea of what it is to want to commit suicide, because it seems implausible to me that life could ever happen in such a way as to render me perpetually unhappy. The universe seems to have been on my side so far, and as long as I can be happy and be myself, nothing could be better than to live. Glory be to me, as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be, world without end.

From a very early age, we are all taught to organize our meals around the five basic food groups. For those who follow those guidelines, there are obvious benefits, such as increased health and the simple joy of variety in a meal. The system works on a practical level, but everyone is aware of the conflicts that sometimes occur, the most famous of which is the Tomato Question. As far as I can tell, those calling it a fruit have supposed "scientific" backing, but the very fact that a dispute exists shows that the system is not entirely natural or inevitable. Much of it has to do with simple human custom, and the likeliest explanation for the existence of the Tomato Question is the strong association between tomatoes and salads, which are dominated by vegetables. The obvious utility of the food grouping system renders any attempt reform unnecessary, though: the arbitrary associations are fairly inconsequential in their effects.

The food groups are far from the only arbitrary sets of associations in our lives, though, and one particular set of associations has come to dominate our thinking in a way that is truly destructive to individuals and to society. This system is the supposedly universal influence of stress over every aspect of human existence. Biologists notice that in certain situations, human beings tend to tense up; they call these situations "stressful," and they note that they are not necessarily always negative situations. This is simple scientific fact, but pop culture has built a complex edifice of associations around it. Every negative emotion, anger, frustration, melancholy, irritability, and on and on, can be attributed to the effects of stress, which comes to be seen as a pervasive force similar in power and inevitability to gravity. We overcommit ourselves, and we feel stress, which leads to other negative emotions, but since stress is inevitable, there is really no reason to keep from overcommitting ourselves. The world is quite simply stress-filled in our times, in much the same way as it was once demon-filled. The power of the individual will becomes overwhelmed in the flood of stress, which becomes an excuse for neglected relationships, poorly done jobs, sleepless nights, abused children.

Stress is a lie. Stress is handing over our real moral choices and our real control over our emotions to a biological phenomenon that can only be naturally connected to nervousness. Stress is a destructive force, a word that swallows other words and loses meaning in the process, an invisible hand much like Freud's subconscious or Hegel's "history", a force that we can only name and whose naming can only lead to loss of human freedom and human dignity. My proposal then is that none of us ever experience stress again, since stress is really nothing but a surrogate for other direct experiences. If we have to give a speech, we can be nervous. If we've overcommited ourselves, we can be frustrated. If we are having problems in a relationship, we can be sad or angry or anything but "stressed out," because words matter and words can and do destroy us.

As an English major, I am often called upon to read pieces of literature, works of poetry, drama, and prose that have been highly esteemed throughout the centuries for their educational and artistic value. One particular work of literature I have recently read is Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, a long work of poetry that combines the techniques of the classical epics such as the Odyssey and the medieval romances such as the legends of King Arthur. Various knights, the most important of whom is a cross-dressing woman called Britomart, enter and depart from the narrative at seemingly random intervals, sometimes doing something while they're gone, other times simply remaining in a stasis field until the other characters happen to stumble across them again. A lot of times they get into fights, sometimes with each other and sometimes with dragons or other such monsters. The plot is difficult to follow, but that is not because it is especially intricate like a plot in Shakespeare, where various events are woven into a whole by chains of cause and effect. The difficulty in Spenser's technique comes from his casual and almost cheerful disregard for cause and effect, or logic of any kind. He is concerned more with moral instruction than with plot, and thus he uses all kinds of characters like Despair or Mammon and locations like the Bower of Bliss or the House of Pride.

Obviously, this is complete bullcrap. And this is not to say that Shakespeare is any better, just because he focusses on plot. I defy anyone to tell me why it is especially necessary for every single stinking play to have five thousand distinct plotlines and to have all the characters be related to all the others in every possible way. All these complaints are of course completely seperate from the question of language, which as we all know is completely incomprehensible to all those who have not been reading poetry on a daily basis since the age of six. And as for his brilliant pictures of the human condition, I find something lacking. King Lear hands over his kingdom to his daughters, and we're supposed to feel sorry for the moron when it turns out that he didn't raise them right? Hamlet's mother marries her brother-in-law after he kills her husband, and this somehow obliges Hamlet to murder the guy and to treat his girlfriend like crap? And let's not even talk about the complete ridiculosity of A Midsummer Night's Dream: fairies? a guy with a donkey's head? Seriously, guys. While I'm talking about the greatest English poets, I might as well mention Milton, too. The main point I would make here is that Paradise Lost seems pretty pointless: oh, man, are they going to eat the stupid apple? We've all heard that one before, and it didn't take thousands of lines of blank verse to tell it. And also, Mr. Milton: Satan's supposed to be the bad guy. Get it right, moron.

And aside from the Big Three English Poets, I have to point out that the novelists haven't been all that great either. Just to change things up a little bit, I'll start with one of the few female Dead White Males, Jane Austen. I'll just outline one of her books for you: 1. A young girl enters the market for a husband. 2. She meets a man. 3. The relationship enters into some complications, and she might meet another man. 4. She ends up married to someone. Yeah, big deal. That sounds kind of like everyone's life. As for James Joyce, Ulysses is a huge letdown. First of all, Odysseus doesn't even make a cameo appearance; second, the most interesting characters are an over-educated, whining little jerk who won't even kneel at his mother's bedside when she was dying and a fat Jew who keeps eating non-kosher food. The critics just love it, though, which shouldn't be surprising since they seem to be on a constant quest to make sure that nothing even marginally entertaining or informative is considered literature. They set up the system so that you have to suffer through endless hours of tedious reading to be considered educated, and then they act upset if no one goes through the trouble to join their little club. All the time, though, they're glad that they can call themselves smart and can intimidate everyone into thinking that all the things that a smart person can read are of course much too difficult for the common simpleton.

But I've seen through their game. I'm on the verge in getting an undergraduate degree that will qualify me to be a junior member of their little club. I've read their stupid books and poems and plays, and I know their dirty little secret. So listen to me all of you: Literature sucks. Do not read it. Do not waste your time. Just go back over to your TV sets and watch "The Weakest Link" and leave our little club alone.

Among the many lessons I have learned from my experience studying abroad, it is that many families and schools have failed to equip the youth of America to keep cooking facilities reasonably clean. Some kind of reform in early education is obviously necessary, but in order to break the cycle of ignorance, I have decided, from the generosity that wells up within me every time I clean up after my peers, to draw up this brief guide to cleaning the kitchen.

1. Pre-washing preparation of dishes. The importance of scraping and washing dishes as soon as possible after use cannot be underestimated. Removing solid chunks of food from the dishes by scraping them into a garbage can or disposal is absolutely essential to maintaining the usability of the sink. In addition, the rinsing of any sort of semi-liquid waste, together with perhaps some very small solid waste, not only makes eventual washing easier by preventing said waste from drying into an impenetrable film, but it also allows the dishwater to be kept as clean as possible during the actual washing processes, leading to cleaner dishes overall.
2. Pre-washing storage of dishes. Ideally, one would always wash dishes relatively soon after use in order to keep the kitchen in a tidy condition. Sometimes, however, scheduling conflicts or the small volume of dishes used can make such a process inconvenient or superfluous. In any case, after going through the pre-washing procedure outlined above, one should make every effort to find a suitable storage location for the dirty dish outside the sink. This serves the same purpose as scraping the dishes, that is, to allow the sink to fulfill its normal function as much as possible. Washing dishes is easiest when one begins with an empty sink, and any attempts to store dishes in the sink on a long-term basis add an unnecessary step when the time to wash comes. If counter space is limited, the stacking of similar types of dishes can be very helpful.
3. Actual washing of dishes. This is the most straightforward of all the steps, but some guidance is still necessary. The key element is that a dish should not be considered washed before it is actually clean. This means that there is no foodstuff of any kind remaining on any surface of the dish. Those who are blind may wish to run their fingers across a dish to ensure that this is the case, since dishes are often designed to be more or less smooth in their clean state.
4. Pre-drying storage. Especially if one person is doing all the dishes by himself, it is impractical to dry a dish immediately after it has been washed. As such, a rack of some sort is desireable, and for the sake of convenience, they should be placed on that rack in an organized fashion. This makes hand-drying more efficient, because it allows for the dishes that go in the same place to be dried all at once. Beyond that, though, it makes air-drying more efficient, because it allows those dishes that are ready for use to be found much more easily. Especially in the case of air-drying, all dishes should be placed so that there are no places where standing water can gather, in order to avoid the water spots that can make food and drink unappetizing. Spoons and cups in particular should be stored upside down.
5. Drying. Any idiot can dry dishes.
6. Miscellaneous cleaning. When one is done cooking, one will often find that the dishes are not the only part of the kitchen that calls for cleaning: something may have spilled on the counter or the table, or crumbs may cover the floor. In the case of spills, the same general practice should be followed as for dishes. Any outstanding solid or semi-liquid waste should be removed as soon as possible to prevent the drying process from making clean-up needlessly difficult. In addition, though complaining about the untidy state of the floor is a valuable step in coming to grips with the problem, it is no substitute for some quick work with the broom. Even a mediocre sweeping job can often result in notable improvements that can reduce the risk of anyone needing a tetanus shot after walking across the floor.
7. Garbage. The garbage can is an essential tool in cleaning, as illustrated above, but it, too, needs to be cleaned on occasion. This is known as "emptying" the garbage. Many people appear to be well-acquainted with the process of tying up the garbage bag, but few seem adequately equipped to go on from there. Most think that the most appropriate course of action is to leave the garbage bag beside the can, which is admittedly an improvement over the occasional tendency to leave the tied garbage bag in the actual can, but it still does not go far enough. If garbage cannot immediately be taken out, it can still be placed in the hallway or some other area where people heading toward the long-term garbage storage area will see it. The next step in this process is for someone, perhaps not even the person who filled up the garbage can, to take responsibility for the garbage to which he or she has contributed in some degree and to carry that bag to the long-term storage area. Most such areas are situated relatively near the building, and those confused about the location are welcome to ask their better-informed peers.
8. Community issues. As stated before, it is not always necessary or practical to wash every dish as it is used: one would rightly think it is ridiculous to go to the trouble of washing a single cup or butter knife at a time. This process cannot carry on forever, though, and after a short time of non-washing, small items often pile up to a formidable degree. The solution is similar to that stated above for the garbage. If one is washing dishes and notices a few extra items, even if they are not his, it would be helpful if he would wash them regardless. If everyone did this every few days, most pile-up situations could be easily avoided.

Thank you for your time.

Although I make fun of them later, the second I walk out of a Robin Williams movie I love it, even the retrospectively horrible What Dreams May Come. I enjoy the song "I Will Survive," especially Cake's somewhat lame cover of it. I enjoy novels by Douglas Coupland that end in statements such as "I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love" (Life After God), and then move on to a hopeful immersion in the stream. I even enjoyed the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Captain Picard finally decides that life is too short and plays poker with all the young and hip members of the crew. All of these are pop-culture manifestations of one essential thing: the idea of moving on, of consolidating one's life, learning what is truly valuable, and getting on with the business of living. All of these experiences are cathartic: listening to The Wall and hearing him admit that he's been wrong and collapse into the arms of the bleeding hearts and artists is every bit as much an emotional purge as witnessing the noble Oedipus reduced to a blinded shell of a man or seeing a humbled and insane Lear shattered by the death of the daughter he has wronged. We are speaking in a different language today, but we are speaking about the same things as did the Oxford Standard Authors, simply because there is nothing else to talk about.

The question, then, is whether these artistic manifestations of the desire to move on with life represent anything, whether they actually correspond in any way to reality. My response tells me that they speak to something inside me, and presumably inside the other people who have enjoyed them throughout the years: this desire for conversion is something real. Whether it shows itself in the resolve never to let another member of the opposite sex take me for granted again or never to allow myself to lose my focus on what is really important again, the message is the same. We have made mistakes. We don't want to make mistakes in the future. After we see and know our mistakes, we cannot possibly do anything other than avoid them: Pink will never build a wall around himself again, the guy from Cake will truly save his loving for someone who's loving him, Captain Picard will be a social butterfly. Once we know what is truly good, no other course is possible except a pursuit of that genuine good: this is the kind of idea that has made Plato a pillar of Western thought. What none of these things truly do, however, is address the idea of actually living after this conversion. The series is over, the album is over, the song is over, the play is over: life is over when this conversion occurs, at least in the cases I have mentioned. That is why these pieces of art, though they speak to a very real desire in the human heart, are untrue.

What is the truth? That true conversion is absolutely impossible. We all have anecdotal evidence to back this up, but I'll stay with my artistic examples. Pink Floyd's trick of turning their albums into continuous loops is used to brilliant effect in The Wall: fully one minute of the final song is transferred to the beginning of the first song. The same Pink who moments ago would never make that mistake again is suddenly back on the path to making it, in exactly the same way. At the end of the Hebrew Bible, Chronicles follows Ezra and Nehemiah, the story of the collapse follows the story of the restoration, and a short segment of the restoration is tacked onto the end of the collapse: a different emphasis from Pink Floyd's work, but once the cycle is carried out a few times, there's no essential difference. In the same way, at the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve walk out of the garden bravely, even optimistically, but Adam has already been treated to a complete history of the world, already knows that his own son becomes a murderer and that it only gets worse from there. People can have all the momentary epiphanies they want; Robin Williams can descend into hell to find his wife; Matt Damon can learn for the first time that it really isn't his fault. But at some point they will have to live, and once they begin to live, the only thing they can do is lose, and often lose in the exact same way. We are capable of nothing more, and no emotional high disguised as a purging of the intellect from all untrue and unhealthy ideas can change that.

This is the genius of American Beauty. In the last moments of his life, Kevin Spacey has learned that it is wrong to do nothing but take: he turns down the chance to fulfill his Humbert fantasy and he even turns toward thoughts of his daughter, acknowledging that he has failed her. And he is shot in the back of the head. Life is over. He has succeeded: he has lived to the full, in complete accordance with his conversion, until the end of his life. It is over, and he is perfect, and he carries his enlightenment into the next life with no chance of tarnishing it with the inevitable failure. He has lived a worthless, stupid life, a life in which he wants the least possible responsibility, in which all he does is smoke pot and lift weights, but he dies a saint, perhaps even a martyr. It is the same genius of American History X, where the aspiring young Nazi sees the error of his ways and is shot in the head, the same genius of the gospels, where the thief sees who is hanging next to him and soon has his legs broken and suffocates. Perfection is available only in death, because then it's over: everything has been determined, and change is impossible. Life is over, and that is beauty.

True perfection comes only in death. True conversion is utterly impossible for us. To be human is to fail and to lose, and convincing oneself that that failure and loss is anything other than failure and loss accomplishes absolutely nothing.

In England now it feels like a Michigan spring to me, because I have always thought of the beginning of spring as embodying all of spring. Spring is Lent; by the time it's Easter, it's summer already. Spring is the time when I can't quite go without a coat, but I'm always a little too hot with one. Spring is the time when I wish that I played a sport so I could be outside. One spring night while I was taking an astronomy course, I noticed that Olivet's annoyingly bright lights weren't on, and so I lay on my back in the grass, looking at the stars.

Spring time always makes me think of the rosary ever since I became Catholic. The first Lent that came around when I knew I wanted to make the change, I gave up getting a ride home from school, and while I walked home, I prayed the rosary to myself. I can remember the excitement when I had finally gotten all the prayers memorized and said my first "real" one. I remember that I usually made it all the way down the very long Clark St. and crossed M-15, and then I was done by the time I had passed Central Elementary school. The field across from Central is in my mind one of Davison's unappreciated blessings, much like the woods that surround the high school. Even though so much building is going on in Davison, we still have plenty of trees and fields; it's a wonderful town.

Spring time makes me think of non-natural things as well. I remember my Pink Floyd obsession of last year, when I listened to practically nothing else, and then when my mom bought me a legal copy of "The Wall" while I was sitting home bored for spring break. I remember the time that I spent reading during all those spring-time months of middle school and early high school, when I went to the library and checked out the next book in the science fiction series I was reading and "Crime and Punishment", too, and I only ended up reading one of them. I remember when I was in sixth grade and I came home from school and realized I didn't have to wear a coat, and I stayed outside just for the sake of it, and I sat up in the swingset reading "Robin Hood" for the tenth time, imagining I was one of the merry men. I remember taking a bike ride with a friend last year, borrowing a bike from an RA, seeing places I'd never seen. I remember last year when I took my dog out for walks because the weather was so beautiful that I couldn't stand it anymore.

But my memories are muddled sometimes, too, with those moments in mid-winter when it feels like Spring, but I know it's too early. I remember taking my sister to a basketball practice in some distant land during one of those times, and I sat in the car with the window down (or am I confused?) and read Plato's "Protagoras" straight through and thought it was the greatest thing I had ever read. I remember during that time reading the first book of Spencer's "Fairie Queene," and I remember my family being confused about what could possibly attract me to it: but it's just Robin Hood all over again, even down to the way he spells things. And now I know why I'm taking a Middle English class and why I love it so much more than the Romanticism class that should appeal more to a time of natural wonder: because Spring time for me is a time of Robin Hood and sitting in trees and wishing vaguely for adventures and greatness, and the ancient language reminds me of a book I read so many times so many years ago and loved so much, and I might have forgotten that if I hadn't been walking down the street in Oxford today, praying the rosary and paying more attention to the cold, crisp air and to the beautiful green grass and to the rocks and trees and castle-like buildings than to the sufferings of Christ.

I might have forgotten if I hadn't been sitting in my room today enjoying reading "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and even enjoying writing on it, while I listened to "The Wall" and while the sun was so bright. Spring time reminds me of other things, too, like the excitement and strangeness of taking a walk through town with my first girlfriend and the joy of taking my cousins on a bike ride and of the strange and ugly chunks of snow that still refused to melt. I remember how much fun I had doing a ridiculous group project with a great group of people for Mrs. Herfert's class, and how much fun we had walking around downtown with a camera and filming a train going by. I remember the profoundly strange act of getting a take-out pizza and going to a park with a beautiful girl. I remember climbing onto the roof of the Catholic school using the bike rack as a ladder, while I was in college. I remember two Easter vigils and how they didn't seem long at all, and I remember going to Richfield park with a girl I didn't deserve, and I remember riding around on a scooter before they were the trend they are now and pretending that it was something akin to the car from "Knight Rider." I remember all the band trips, too, going to San Francisco and New York and Chicago. I remember asking for "The New York Times" at a newsstand in that city. I remember the Muir woods and trying to stay off the trail as much as we could while still following it, "taking the high road." I remember taking a short band trip in middle school and drawing comic books one way and sitting with a girl the other.

I remember doing so many stupid things, but I remember being happy, and one day I'll say that I remember walking through Oxford on a spring day, half-praying the rosary, disappointed to have to go into the library, and I'll remember writing about it and telling the whole world, because I had to.

The masses spoke: a century ended December 31, 1999. As such, we have had over a year to reflect on the shining accomplishments and dismal failures of that century, and I think that I at least have gained a certain objective distance. Thus I present to you a list of the best bands of the last century divided into appropriate categories. Although there may be some surprises, I think everyone should be satisfied with my choices.

Best Punk Band

Although some would dismiss them as pop-punk, I award this title to Weezer. The discourse of punk music is based on wimpiness and girl troubles, with a special focus on being picked on in high school: Rivers Cuomo takes that discourse and transforms it into something all his own. He can be creepy, as when he declares, "I want a girl who will laugh for no one else. When I'm away she puts her makeup on the shelf," or when he obsesses over a young Japanese fan. His true genius, however, lies in turning that creepiness into charm: for sure likability, few songs can match the dorkiness of "El Scorcho," which chronicles romantic obsession from an ironic distance.

The Runner-up for Best Punk Band is Ben Folds Five, who take that same punk discourse and remove the guitars. But I swear, they're still punk.

Best Angry and Depressed Band

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is so angry and depressed that it becomes a mockery of itself within the first few minutes of every one of his albums. As generic as his lyrics become, especially in The Fragile, the music is difficult to laugh at: "Eraser" is seriously angry, and in a way, the instrumental tracks are more depressed than anything else in revealing a person who has turned completely in on himself. Trent Reznor is the most angry and depressed because no matter how many times he rages against Marilyn Manson or drops the obligatory "you" into his lyrics, his music leaves me incapable of believing that there is really anyone in his life other than Trent Reznor.

Best Horribly Self-Important Band

Though Pink Floyd did give them a serious challenge, the Smashing Pumpkins win this coveted award. The Wall is pretentious and self-important, but though it is a very uneven two-CD set, it is after all called The Wall and not Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and it was not followed up by a strangely packaged boxed set of five maxi-singles. Few bands' releases have been met with as much listener apathy as Adore, a 75-minute pop album from the practically self-proclaimed Biggest Rock Band on Earth, and few bands would have the courage to attempt to preserve their careers by releasing a 75-minute pop-rock album called MACHINA: The Machines of God. Fewer still would release a vinyl two-EP/one-LP collection of b-sides to twenty-five fans, encourage them to put it on Napster, and go so far as to call it Machina II: The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. And I haven't even begun to get into the lyrics: "The street heats the urgency of now," for example. If I didn't like their music so much, I would hate them, and often I am genuinely embarrassed to be a fan.

Best Post-Apocalyptic Band

This is a category I made up specifically to be able to give Radiohead an award that no other band could possibly challenge. OK Computer and Airbag: How Am I Driving? convinced me that the world was going to end. Kid A sounds like it already has. A lot of bands, such as Tool or dc Talk, have a "message," and Radiohead seems to have one, but it's not a message they talk about so much as live through their music. Radiohead is leading the way into turning the "postmodern-Generation X" bullcrap into something comprehensive and believable, and they're leaders not so much because they are really original thinkers as because they're using pop music to do it. This particular award is leading me far afield of my main topic: here's the next one.

Best Definitive Band

Led Zepellin is rock music. To listen to their greatest hits is to listen to what mainstream rock music (as distinct from pop) has always been and probably always will be. Pink Floyd expands on the tradition through their extensive use of concept albums, punk simplifies it and intensifies the emotion, and many modern bands throw in all manner of electronic effects, but I'm not sure that you can truly say that there is a better definition of what rock is as opposed to pop than to say that rock sounds like Led Zepellin, and pop doesn't. Note that I have not said that this is a good thing.

Band of the Century

I am naturally predisposed to award this to Radiohead, but in this award I have to go both with size and diversity of the band's body of work and with the deepest impact on the most lives. Many bands have cults, but most cults are full of fair-weather fans who fade away once the hit single drops off the Top 40. Truly influential bands in my mind have fans for a lifetime, fans who will buy literally everything that particular band releases, fans who will even evangelize. The music of this kind of band may be disdained by the mainstream, banished from the radio, and granted virtually no critical attention, but this band lives where their listeners live and truly provokes thought, not about what is fashionable for the moment, but on universal truths.

With these standards in mind, is it any surprise that I name They Might Be Giants as the Band of the Century? Even the Smashing Pumpkins, with their vast arsenal of b-sides, cannot stand up to the Giants in terms of sheer bulk, and certainly no band can compete with Them in lyrical genius. Their grasp of irony is incredible: "Someday mother will die and I'll get the money. Mom looks up and says, 'My sentiments exactly, you son of a bitch.'" At the same time, they offer practical advice: "When you're following an angel, it doesn't mean you have to throw your body off a building." I could keep quoting their lyrics all day, constantly uncovering examples of genius, such as this one that is probably familiar to many of you: "Go ahead: wreck your life. That might be good." I guess their music is pretty cool, too, though it doesn't really break any new ground. They consolidate and critique the rock music tradition, then. There: They Might Be Giants is indisputably the Band of the Century. Have a wonderful day.

I know that my gentle readers would normally expect to find comments about God in the religious commentary section, but I feel that my new secular lifestyle could be better explicated in a secular forum. As you may have read in my title, I don't believe in God anymore. A lot of things have brought me to this, but the main thing was that I did not see the Christian tradition as offering a coherent set of beliefs upon which I can base my life. The constant intramural conflicts over predestination vs. free will, transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation vs. memorialism, feminism vs. chauvenism, alcoholism vs. abstinence, etc., etc., have completely turned me off. I might continue to go to mass, but that's just so I'll have an excuse not to go to stinking College Church of the Nazarene.

Thankfully, though, I have found a new foundation for my life, and it's one that is probably very familiar to most of you. There is a tradition that goes back to earliest antiquity and that has brought meaning to everyone who has seriously grappled with it: I mean, of course, the Pop Music tradition. From the lowliest one-hit wonder to the critically ordained genius, the legacy of the Pop Music tradition is one of coherence and comprehensiveness: that is, Pop Music answers every question one could ask in a way that is consistent with the other answers.

As an example, let's take the question that led me to this conclusion: "Does God exist?" Trent Reznor has spoken passionately on this subject on many occassions, most notably when he says, "Your God is dead and no one cares. If there is a hell, I'll see you there." Clearly if God exists, he exists only as a corpse. Trent does leave his options open, leaving room for the judgement machinery to continue in operation even without God's continuing life. And notice what a scathing indictment this is of the Christian God: if he's not there to intervene in the judgement, everyone goes to hell. Do you really want to believe in a lumbering corpse of a God whose default behavior is to send people to hell? I know I don't.

And neither does the legendary Maynard Kenan, lead singer for both Tool and A Perfect Circle. Maynard is not afraid to call Jesus a liar, going so far as to say, "He had a lot to say. He had a lot of nothing to say." Later he issues a challenge to the Christian idea of atonement: "It's not like you killed someone," he says, asking in essense, "What did you ever do that was so evil that you need someone to die a brutal death in your place?" Maynard's practice is completely in line with his expressed beliefs, in that it makes a mockery of Christian moral beliefs, as anyone who has seen the packaging for Tool's second LP can attest.

This practice of lashing out against Christianity is, ironically enough, completely in line with the practice of the Early Church. The earliest theologians had to articulate the reasons to believe in the Christian faith above the various pagan and Jewish options available to the religious shopper, and they often had to resort to negative characatures of opposing factions in order to affirm own their system.

This quest to root out falsehood does not stop at outsiders: Pop Music has its heretics as well. Those who attempt the unholy marriage of Pop Music with Christianity pay the penalty of being almost completely hidden from public view, but those who bastardize the faith from within are often singled out for attacks. Marshall Mathers has proven to be one of the most effective rooters out of these heretics: "I'm sick of all these girl and boy groups. All you do is annoy me, so I will search out and destroy you." That is not mere rhetoric, as any listener to his latest LP can tell you: "You don't want to [mess] with Shady [Mathers' alter-ego], because Shady will [freaking] kill you." All those who dare to follow in the steps of the great heretics Savage Garden have been warned.

It goes without saying, of course, that Pop Music offers a healthier system of sexual morals than Christianity. Take, for example, the famous statement of the above-quoted Trent Reznor, who compassionately says to his lover, "Help me. I've got no soul to save. Help me. The only thing that works for me: help me think I'm somebody else. I want to [make love to] you like an animal." Maynard Kenan is a similarly considerate lover, telling his partner, "This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to." Perhaps the most innovative thinker on this front, as in so many others, is Marshall Mathers. His liner notes are practical and insightful guides to healthy, giving sexual relationships.

As an English major, though, I must say that the thing that appeals to me most about the Pop Music tradition is the firm mastery of the English language. Billy Corgan, lead singer of the now-defunct Smashing Pumpkins, offers some of the best examples of this: "We're not the same: we're different"; "Ain't it funny how we pretend we're still a child?" REM's Michael Stype offers another example of subtle expressiveness: "I know you called. I know you hung up: Star 69"; "What's the frequency, Kenneth? Uh suh, things a dream, uh huh. I'm brilig with sum tin matter and chew suh suh moo, uh huh."

In conclusion, Pop Music has convinced me through rational argument that belief in God is unwarranted, and it has offered me a meaningful replacement for the Christian tradition I have rejected. Now I join Trent Reznor in his powerful refrain: I, too, am "Too [messed] up to care anymore."

Mr. Adam Kotsko is currently seeking a qualified female to fill the position of Girlfriend. If anyone wishes to be considered for this position, she must meet the following requirements:

1. She must demonstrate a reasonably apparent willingness to become romantically involved with Mr Kotsko. Mr. Kotsko sometimes allows the candidacy of certain special girls to continue indefinitely, based on a rather liberal definition of "reasonably apparent willingness." This is not because of any pitifulness on his part.
2. Mr. Kotsko must miss her when she is gone. Missing her constitutes more than merely giving her the occasional stray thought. On this point, Mr. Kotsko would need to have a distinct desire to make contact with her through any of the various communication media available to him. He would not necessarily have to follow through on this desire, especially if he is at the point of feeling as though he is being overly liberal on requirement one (see above) with this particular girl.
3. She must share common interests with Mr. Kotsko. This means more than a common interest in sitting for hours on end in the lobby of Hills. If she can have an intelligent conversation with Mr. Kotsko on a topic of mutual interest, then she most likely meets this requirement. If she can compete with him in pingpong and Street Fighter II, then he "will surely have found his soul mate."
4. She must not love things that Mr. Kotsko hates. She can be indifferent to things that he hates, but loving them is another issue entirely. Of course, this only applies to things that affect Mr. Kotsko directly. Differing food preferences, for example, would not be an issue unless she was constantly trying to make him eat "such loathsome foods as tomatoes and green peppers." Some interests that might seriously hurt a girl's chances are as follows:
   • Country music
   • Giving people shots
5. She and Mr. Kotsko must have a reasonable chance of seeing each other in person regularly. "Regularly" does not mean "every month or so". There must be a good chance of Mr. Kotsko seeing her at least half the days of a given year. Long-distance relationships are unacceptable for a variety of reasons, among them the high phone bills required to maintain them.
6. Looking at her must be a generally positive experience. Mr. Kotsko does not ask for perfection, because he does not have perfection to offer to a girl. He does, however, ask that children would not stop and stare.
7. She cannot have met Mr. Kotsko over the Internet.
8. She must not be impossible to buy gifts for.
9. She must not have an annoying machine-gun laugh.
10. She must not consistently embarrass Mr. Kotsko in public.
11. She must get Mr. Kotsko's jokes.

If any females believe they are qualified and would like an application for the position of Girlfriend, they should send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Mr. Kotsko's mailbox, the number of which is posted in the Red Room right next to the post office. If your application is accepted, Mr. Kotsko will call you to make an appointment for a personal interview.