My Review of Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows Part 1

It was OK, but I still don't understand why, after learning that one of the Deathly Hallows is an invisibility cloak, Harry didn't go
"HOLY FUCKING SHIT I HAVE ONE OF THE GOD DAMN DEATHLY HALLOWS. LIKE I HAVE IT AND HAVE HAD IT SINCE I WAS A LITTLE KID WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THIS RON RON SERIOUSLY YOU HEARD THIS STORY WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE AND DIDN'T BAT A FUCKING EYELASH WHEN WE USED THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK LIKE EVERY DAMN DAY BACK THEN WHAT THE HELL BRO"

Let's be reasonable, people

Stuff that's happening

So apparently there's a lot of hooting and shrieking going on about violent video games and whatnot. Now, I'm nothing if not an ignorant and uninformed person. This is what happens when one does not have access to TV news, newspapers, or the will to find reliable sources of news on the Internet. So, I don't really know what the people on either side of this issue are arguing. But I know enough about stupid reactionary idiots and the nature of fabricated moral panic to have a basic idea.

The thing that most annoys me about this is that the violent video game most often cited by the anti-game people is Postal 2, a game specifically designed to be as obnoxiously inappropriate as possible. This game is A. Over 10 years old and completely irrelevant when talking about modern gaming, B. taken seriously by approximately zero percent of the gaming community and is considered kind of a crappy game, and C. Seriously, what the hell?

Worse still is the Grand Theft Auto hate. Every mention of the series is sure to come with a mention of prostitute-killing, painting a wholly inaccurate picture of the games and gaming as a whole. Here's the deal: Most of the people who have an opinion about this issue have never played video games or are so ignorant of them that they may as well not have--this in and of itself is absolutely ridiculous and makes me miserable--and therefore most of what they know is based on what has been told to them. When they hear whore-killing linked with GTA so often, it follows that they would connect the two in their minds. Since they hear little else about them, GTA becomes "that game where they give you points for killing hookers" (nevermind the fact that "points" as a game design concept have long become irrelevant and are rarely if ever used). Couple that with GTA being one of the most prestigious series in modern gaming, and you have a lot of ignorant people who associate an entire branch of media with killing prostitutes. AND THAT'S TERRIBLE

I mean, here's the deal: GTA is about giving the player freedom. They can do whatever they want. They're in a city, and, as cities are wont to do, they are full of people. The player, being equipped with weapons, is able to use them against any of said people. Some of said people are appareled in clothing befitting of ladies of the night. It is therefore possible to discharge the player's weapons upon such women. Is there any benefit to doing so? No. Is it ever required or even recommended to the player to do so? No. Let this sink in. GTA mostly stars anti-hero gangsters who adhere to a basic honor-among-thieves moral code. They aren't much worse than the mobsters one finds in mafia movies. Of course, the player can be a total dick and kill every pedestrian during gameplay. But they can also get in an ambulance and save people's lives. But that doesn't matter: GTA is the game that gives you points for killing hookers. The news said so.



But that said, the fact is that most video games are, in fact, violent. Most games have the player shooting a gun of some kind. Oh no! What horrors! Humanity will always have games and contests--it's the way we are. Video games are a way to live out that need in ways that wouldn't be possible in real life. Take, for example, Team Fortress 2, a popular competitive shooting game where your team must shoot, explode, stab, bludgeon, and burn the other team to death. When I play this game, am I doing so because I am an aggressive person? Do I like to hurt others? No. I'm playing the game because, like all human beings who enjoy games (that is to say, all of them), I wish to test my skills against others, hoping to emerge the more talented competitor. Team Fortress is about strategy, skill, and quick decision making much more than it is about murder. I suspect other popular games like Call of Duty (which I haven't played) are similar. The satisfaction a player gets from a challenging kill isn't due to their primal, immoral bloodlust and violent nature, but the same satisfaction a chess player gets from saying "checkmate" after agonizing over dozens of moves. Really, why isn't there more controversy over violent chess games? I mean, you can kill whores in GTA, but in chess, you can kill clergy and female heads of state!

Anyway, I don't want to continue this anymore because I'm getting mad and have work to do.

Woes re: Dracula

Reading Dracula makes me really self-conscious that I don't write journals (let alone well structured and narratively compelling ones).

I mean even if I were to write journals I don't think I'd remember all that dialogue.

Oh man

Do I ever write gigantic walls of text. Oh well, I never claimed to edit any of this stuff, and it's better to have too much to say than too little. Sorry my two readers (that is, myself and my imaginary friend Klondike Robert [disregard part about having an imaginary friend {I don't, honest}]).

P.S. Check that correct usage of squiggly brackets, brackets, parentheses, and period, in that order! Yeah, I'm an English major, and am cool.

The House That Drips Blood on Alex

Well, it had to happen, didn't it? Tommy Wiseau, director, writer, producer and star of The Room, a man who most resembles Vincent D'Onofrio's alien-wearing-a-dead-human's-skin character from Men in Black, has produced another film, this time the bafflingly titled The House That Drips Blood on Alex.

I mean, The Room, as terrible as it is (and it is terrible), had enough of its own undeniable charisma to make it ultimately more profitable than Wiseau might have hoped. Every frame and line drips sincerity. Wiseau's intentions are as apparent in The Room as the complete lack of recognizable human behavior. His dreamed-of drama of a wronged man and his devilish fiancee and disloyal best friend (who curiously is freed of blame at the film's end, leaving the horrible, horrible woman wholly responsible) is undone by the sheer incompetence of Wiseau's writing and acting. Its particulars are well documented, and are obvious after watching even a fraction of the film. What made this terrible film so magnetic was the singular way it was terrible. Wiseau's brand of mangled English, his unwavering dedication not to resolve subplots, and nigh-surreal plotting is unlike anything else in film--it is entirely Wiseau, and it is this glimpse into the mind of a man unlike any other that makes The Room worth seeing.

But poor Tommy Wiseau, despite all claims to the contrary, knew that people were laughing at him, not with him. This would be kind of tragic if these same people weren't also giving him their money. But they are. And Wiseau wanted more. And so comes The House That Drips Blood on Alex. I was excited at the prospect of further Wiseau, but upon its release a few days ago, I learned this film's fatal flaw--it's intentionally funny. Which is to say, in Wiseau's case, not funny. What's even worse, it's not even written by Wiseau, but some crappy sketch comedy group looking to cash in on the Wiseau glory.

Wiseau kills any possible spark when he winks at the audience. When he implicitly says "Oh hi guys, isn't this movie so silly? Listen to the weird stuff I'm saying," he's undermining the inscrutably weird sincerity that made The Room work. And it's sad--because The House That Drips Blood on Alex could really have been hilarious. I realize it's kind of cruel that I'm saying Wiseau's films can only be enjoyed when they unintentionally expose the vaguely non-human elements of his mind--but who cares, everyone knew that already.

Even the title shows Wiseau's newfound self-awareness. The Room is famous for its non sequitir title, as it is unclear exactly which room is the room in question. So what better way to have another funny title than to have a comically long one which excessively describes the film's ridiculous plot? I don't have an answer, but the title's not that funny. Wiseau's character, Alex, is, like The Room's Johnny, a doofus who acts in supremely strange ways that are completely accepted by the rest of the world. Unlike Johnny, the situations in which Alex does so are located firmly in punchline land. It wouldn't be past Wiseau to be amazed by a quill pen, but The House... has him saying "it's like writing with a duck" and quacking after being presented with the pen in a scene ripe with calculated foreboding. Cheaters host Joey Greco (who is actually great in this--he's ever so smarmy and clearly having a great time) plays the realtor who sells Alex the titular house. He mugs and smirks, his character taking no effort to hide his evil intentions. He presents Alex with a deed for a house on 3 Blood Street (pronounced "blewed," he insists--Wiseau's attempts to pronounce "blewed" are a highlight), written in Gothic calligraphy and the aforementioned quill pen with an ink well filled with blood. Greco's character seems to genuinely enjoy passing off cursed houses on people, so gleeful is his performance. Of course every thing he says is met with a misunderstanding from Alex, a conceit clearly supposed to make the audience say "Ha ha! That doofus Alex!" but that mostly falls flat. Alex says the ink reminds him of something. Greco replies with an exaggerated "blood?" "I was going to say ketchup. I love ketchup," is Alex's response. It's all so set up, so much like a sitcom. It may have worked in someone else's hands, but the scene falls flat here.

There are flashes of Wiseau's trademark ability to present lines, situations, and actions no normal human could conceive of. See Alex's refusal to acknowledge his house drips blood on him. Taken by itself it's a pretty standard joke, but when you consider Alex's method of showing it--he claims he doesn't even like the bloodstained shirt and proves it by ripping a hole in it. There! That proves the house doesn't drip blood. I guess. His friend Thomas welcomes Wiseau to his new house brandishing a happy-meal style cardboard box emblazoned with the words "Pizza Party" on the side, cheerfully exclaiming "I brought a pizza party!" Wiseau's moving boxes consist of "house stuff," (specifically a lamp, oven mitt, and flashlight) "pillows," and "gifts for mother." In The Room these would be seen as some of Wiseau's crazier conceptions of life. But in this, their artificiality is clear, a side-effect of words being put into Wiseau's mouth. He isn't an actor capable of performing someone else's work, or really performing at all. The only possible value in his work is its exposure of his fascinating self. For example, in The Room, Wiseau tells his friends a so-called "interesting" story about how he met his fiancee. In a disinterested deadpan, he tells the tale of seeing his fiancee in a coffee shop, thinking she was attractive, and talking to her. On their first date, she paid for dinner. His companions roar with approval. The entire exchange is so bizarre and so sincere--it's played as legitimate character development. Wiseau seems to have wisened up about the public's perception of his material. In this film, he begins a similarly described interesting story. He begins in the same cadence, only managing to recall his memories "as a little girl" before being interrupted. Apparently the film's trying to be slyly self-aware of his own weirdness, but Wiseau lacks the range to convey sarcasm or humor in general.

The dripping blood is eventually explained via a trip to a Turbo-Cooker-housing attic and the discovery of a poorly explained and not scary source. The film then switches back to a pointless frame story, in which Wiseau is telling his tale to two unwilling girls in a movie theatre. It turns out that Wiseau's story is mirrored in a trailer for "3 Blood Street," a fake movie with some Jared Leto-lookin' fool in the Alex role. The girls look back at Wiseau and he looks exactly the same! They scream in horror! Or maybe it's a prop made to look like Wiseau's desiccated corpse. It's hard to tell, really.

At least The House... is only 12 minutes and saves the viewer from too much punishment. This film's obvious jokiness kills many of its scenes--even Wiseau's vaunted accent seems exaggerated in places. As a straight comedy, it's terrible. Not Wiseau terrible either, not the kind of terrible that made The Room a sensation--it's just plain vanilla terrible from some plain vanilla bad writers. The sets are laughably cheap (count the amount of bare white walls characters stand in front of) and the sketch group's cinematography is infuriating (it seems every conversation must show the speaker and the back of the listeners head, and slide the camera so that the listener's head blocks the speaker's). But it isn't a total wash. Joey Greco, still the king of leading bouncers, cameramen, and a jilted lover into the love nest of a stranger, shines in his brief, shameless, gloriously hammy appearance. And despite it all, Wiseau manages to wedge some honest-to-goodness what the fuck moments in there. From the way he must constantly say his friend Thomas's name every time he speaks to him, his insistence on the nonexistent nature of both shit houses and shit offices, and his startling nonchalance toward blood dripping on his face.

I'm not usually a huge proponent of the auteur. Most great art is forged with compromise and limitation--imagine how Jaws would have suffered if it had a fully functional shark able to be shown in every scene--and avoiding collaboration almost always corrodes creativity. However, Tommy Wiseau is an actor who undeniably must only work when reading his own scripts. He is a miserably talentless actor, and any work he finds is clearly just an attempt to tap into the kind of unfathomable energy The Room is so famous for. But that energy isn't just the voice, the craggly, jowly face--it's the glimpse into what makes this man tick, this man who hates women, loves football without seeming to understand that there is an actual game beyond playing catch with it, and claims to be from New Orleans despite having a speaking voice closer to Borat than...some sort of character known for being from New Orleans. There is no one in the world like Tommy Wiseau, and human curiosity is naturally drawn to the perfect storm of incompetence, confidence, and uniqueness he embodies. No one wants to see him act, inhabiting the role of another--they want to see him. In his own work, every word spoken by every character shows more about the weirdness of Wiseau. The House That Drips Blood on Alex wants to exploit this weirdness but misunderstands what made it so alluring.

Janelle Monae is everything that is right with music

Whoa ghost town all up in here. Here is a new thing I wrote. Sorry if it's a bit slapdash--I just wanted to write something because I hadn't in a while.




Janelle Monae is everything right with music today and if you care at all about originality, creativity, and enthusiasm in music then you must support her as soon as possible. Her latest album, The Archandroid, is one of the most ambitious, unpredictable albums in recent memory. If you’ve heard it, you likely understand me and love it; if you haven’t, you really should.

Monae’s music is thankfully worlds away from the standard, commercialized, easily categorized R&B the music industry expects from black female artists. The Archandroid accomplishes a startling feat for an album of 18 tracks lasting nearly seventy minutes: it is never once boring, repetitious, ordinary, or redundant. To say that every track works would not be true—but the mere fact that every song is different is mind-boggling in modern music.

The industry would much prefer all artists to produce exactly the type of music they would most easily be identified with based on their appearance. White dudes with glasses? Indie rock, please. Black guy? You better be a rapper. Black guy with glasses? Your raps better reference comic book characters. This way makes it much easier for the industry to classify music, and cater to specific audiences, giving them exactly what they want and what they expect. Some people might love getting a steady stream of the familiar, and it certainly makes money, but it also stifles artistic growth and creativity. Janelle Monae is amazing and defies expectations like it’s her job.

For example: she releases a 70 minute, 18 track concept album about how she was sent from the future and had her genes stolen to make an android named Cindy who has superpowers and is the only one who can help some oppressed masses and some other stuff. It’s all very hard to follow and poorly explained. She’s heavily influenced by Fritz Lang’s Impressionist film classic Metropolis, both in the style of the cover art and in the lyrics themselves. These themes don’t exactly cohere or anything—but good lord, man, when was the last time you could say that there was so much excess meaning in an album of frigging pop music? How often does a pop musician even take the effort to put something strange or out of the ordinary in their work? One of the most complimentary things one could say about The Archandroid is its all-too-rare quality of never being the same. The listener isn’t numbed by 70 minutes of the same style repeating over and over. Monae’s schizophrenic mishmash of influences, themes, and styles is welcome even with its flaws, because what else is there in music today? When we have musicians like Ke$ha who seem almost willfully ignorant of good taste, every little bit of originality is a blessing.

And dang if Monae is ever original. She opens the album with an orchestral overture, moving into a slow, understated, bass-heavy groove, then an upbeat, peppy piece of guitar funk, into a classic piece of soul wondrousness that would make Stevie Wonder proud, then a languid, ambient ballad, then a drum-destroyingly propulsive rock-soul banger, and caps it with “Tightrope,” an impossibly funky horn-assisted masterpiece whose repetitive yet ripe-with-emotion vocal performance recalls the best of James Brown. The eleven songs following are no slouches—highlights include a folk-styled hymn with a standard R&B chorus showcasing Monae’s traditional vocal strengths, and a diabolically sleazy slab of punk guitars and funk bass over which she shows she can screech and scream with the best of them—but man, those first seven songs are all five-star instant classic winners. The Archandroid demands repeat listening, if for no other reason, than to re-experience that opening stretch, one of the most exhilarating you’ll encounter from any album, in any genre, in any era. Yes, I’m serious.

Some later songs misfire, but at least they do so in interesting ways. Monae isn’t perfect—her voice is perfectly acceptable and versatile, but she’s not on her way to being the next Aretha Franklin. What she is, however, is brilliant, ambitious, and unhindered by what she thinks she has to do as a musician in her genre. If I had to compare her to any musician, the only choice that presents itself, honestly, is Michael Jackson in his prime. Like Jackson, she breaks barriers of genre, has an ineffable charisma, and is quite simply producing dance music completely different from everyone else. I know MJ is an untouchable icon to many—even more so after his death, when people stopped making pedophile/plastic surgery jokes and realized, man, this guy made some unimpeachably brilliant music—and I don’t mean to say that Monae, a relatively new artist, is on the same level as he, but she is doing something monumentally rare in modern popular music. It’s something Jackson did and something hardly anyone else does (Andre 3000 seemed like he was going to, but then I guess he decided to stop for some reason): she is making music completely fearlessly, with no regard to real or imagined constraints, discontent to stay in one place for too long. Technically, experimental groups like The Residents or whatever do this, but I’m speaking about pop music specifically here, the kind of stuff meant for “the people,” the stuff that gets stuck in your head and gets you on the dance floor.

So you can keep your bland, samey singers wailing cookie-cutter lyrics over a manfactured electronic dance beat polished to a mirror sheen by Pro-Tools wielding producers. I’m sure Monae isn’t going to dispel all the Britneys, Ke$has, and Gagas in the world overnight. But if you want something more out of your music—effort, ingenuity, insight, creativity—there’s Janelle Monae waiting for you. She offers something you’d be hard pressed to find in her peers. Specifically, her music isn’t something you’ve heard before. It’s influenced by the great musicians of yesteryear, but it’s changed, interpreted, flipped, made new. In an industry content to tread water, Monae moves forward into the unknown. She is everything right with music and art in general and if you care at all about creative expression spread the word and give her your money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc

Some Stuff

So today I saw a movie poster that presented to the world an angry looking owl with a bucket on his head named "Metalbeak the Destroyer," who is apparently a major player in the owl politics of Gahoole.

Yeah...I don't think this deserves to be taken seriously.

Re: flight attendants

Specifically, "I'm happy to be the first to welcome you to (destination)."

I'd like to get into the habit of preemptively welcoming everyone around me just to take these smug jerks down a peg. I mean why do they have to gloat? They kinda have an unfair advantage.

The Great Flood of 2010

I was sitting at my computer at 2:30 AM, alone, in my bedroom, as I had been for the past few hours. Just surfing the internet mindlessly—watching stupid videos, getting caught in Wikipedia’s never ending web of links. My attention was primarily focused on Janelle Monae’s Archandroid, the album then playing on my speaker system. I had heard good things about it and skimmed the album to my liking, but wanted to give it a more in-depth listen. So here I was, dicking about doing nothing in the wee hours of the morning. Living the dream, as they say.

I was then rudely interrupted from my reverie by my pet peeve, namely, being reminded that I have a physical form that so inconveniently demands attention and service. Bah! If we were supposed to have bodies, God wouldn’t have invented a limitless network of nigh infinite information accessible from my chair. But I digress, don’t I? Well I do it for a reason. My digressions are like solid gold rollerskates. You wish you had digressions like me. Well, granted, that last one was a bit meh but who cares. I’m talking here.

My foot, tapping to the music, suddenly felt a strange, sharply cold sensation. I figured it was one of those sudden foot pains that grabs hold of the arch of the foot and for about five seconds fills it with countless metaphorical needles. So I wait for it to pass. It doesn’t. Odd. It doesn’t really feel like those pains either. What’s going on here? I start stomping my feet on the floor (just to see what’d happen, I assume) only to hear splashes coming from underneath my desk. Ah, so there it is. It was wetness; my feet were wet. Wait, my feet were wet? I’m in my goddamn room. There’s no water here. How can there be? It’s inside. This is where I live. I had a vague understanding that it was raining, and knew that my room was in a basement, but I hadn’t been outside since the rain had begun so I wasn’t expecting this. I looked under my desk to see a puddle of freaking water all up on my floor. This is behind my desk, so all the wires powering my computer, monitor, and speakers are hanging around back there. In the water. My bigass bass speaker (that’s called a woofer, right? It’s right to call it a woofer? That sounds silly) was dangerously close to being submerged, and as I realized this, in my disoriented state, I panicked and scooped it up. My speakers would break! I couldn’t listen to music! And most importantly, Ms. Monae was in peril! Er, wait. No, she wasn’t. That’s not how speakers work. But cut me some slack, I was bugging out at the time.

I turn around to see puddles all over my room. A room which, incidentally, had a massive number of items on the floor. I had been loathsomely slack in my laundry routine, and as such, the massive pile of dirty clothes on my floor were subject, now quite literally dripping wet.

A stack of books I had listed on half.com were ruined beyond repair. Fuck. So long, theoretical money.

So I look around for a stack of important paperwork for a job that I left on my floor, finding it—thank Ahuramazda!—on a veritable island of dry carpet, scarcely larger than the papers themselves. So I rush the paperwork out of my room like it’s on fire. Except, wait, if it was on fire, I could’ve put it out in all the water—never mind, bad simile. I then put my woofer (that still sounds like it’s wrong. I mean, it’s not, but still…) on a chair in the basement’s common area connecting the two underground bedrooms. Luckily the common area was dry enough for me to port the wetter items in my room all up on it, only the outer edges being wet.

I yelled for Kevin, the fellow basement-dweller, to look at what’s going on. He came down and checked out his room. Now Kevin had very recently moved into this room, having only taken his desk and mattress down into it by this time, so he didn’t have as much at stake, which was convenient, because his room was in a much more dire state than mine. The entrance to his room, and, by extension, the opening of his closet, were over a dip in the concrete foundation of the building, leading to a small valley in the carpeted floor that was now filled with standing stank-water. And did it ever stank! A weird mix of sewage, fetid stagnant water, and years-old, uncleaned carpet must.

Kevin moaned, exasperated. He was resigned about the situation, joking about it and exploring the full depths of his flooded room with morbid curiosity. He was especially taken with an area so saturated that the carpet had risen off of the concrete below. Taking a ruler, he determined the worst area had one and a half inches of water.

I was, in the simplest terms, pissed the fuck off. I paid money to live in this place, this was my apartment, my goddamn bedroom. I didn’t remember inviting no bitchass water in. Get out of my room, you bitchass stankwater! I was flustered. There was an intruder in my room, and it didn’t even give me the common decency to be sentient so I could yell at it? Hell, even a bug can get smushed. But water? Water just chills out and touches all my stuff without asking and isn't even careful with it and stinks up the place.

Who wouldn’t be pissed if this bitchass were in his/her room? Every trip in and out to relocate further dripping and/or ruined possessions of mine incensed me more as I had to again look at, acknowledge, and remain powerless against the squatter in my room. I called my girlfriend Georgia to let someone else know about this. She had been asleep and groggily tried her best to comfort me, but there was little she could do from her house in the suburbs. Still, it was a mite comforting, and comfort is hard to come by in situations like this.

By this time, Kevin and I decided to wake up another roommate, Eddie, who sleeps in a bedroom on the first floor. Our other roommate, Damien, had work in the morning so we decided to leave him be. Eddie was expectedly shocked by the state of our rooms. In showing him the worst sections, I noticed that the water seemed to be spreading, rising. I referenced photos of the water I had taken on my phone as soon as I registered its presence—and the level was most certainly rising.

I ran upstairs and opened the front door to see some Ghostbusters-style end-of-the-world storm bursting from the sky. Fuck. Fuck. This is not good.

I was forced to return to the pool of festering sewage water that was overtaking my room and move items I had previously thought safe. Still, there was a lot that was left where it was. I assumed that anything elevated off the ground more than 3-4 inches couldn’t be in any danger. Every trip in and out of my room irked me even more. How dare our landlord rent us such a leaky piece of shit? I’m paying for this room? For the privilege of having water steal it from me? Inexcusable. I wanted to scream in his face, verbally beat him to submission for letting this happen. True, it “technically” wasn’t his fault, and the storm was “of startling magnitude and responsible for widespread flooding across the entire city,” but seriously, as if that was going to change my mind.

It was somewhere around this time that I noticed that water was seeping past the edges of the common area, encroaching dangerously close to where we had moved all of our things. Apoplectic with frustration, we set out moving all of my earthly possessions yet again, this time from the common area of the basement. By the end of this, it was clear that the common area was well on its way to being completely submerged. The water was quickly rising well above ankles and became more and more black. One might even say it could become none more black. One might. It’s certainly possible. I’ve heard it said before.

By this point, anger wasn’t even an issue. The puddles I discovered an hour earlier would be welcomed with joyous tears compared to what had forced itself into our basement. This was something differently entirely, a disgusting, ever-expanding, ever-consuming beast taking all that I considered mine. I had been out of my parents’ house long enough to no longer consider my room there as my home, as it were. It wasn’t “home base” anymore. I had very few things there, very little emotional connection. This room, in this apartment, was mine. Everything that meant something to me, everything I cherished, everything that was mine was inside of it. And it was being taken. It wasn’t mine anymore, wasn’t safe, wasn’t anything but a container of sewage. It couldn’t happen, this water couldn’t take what was mine away from me. I felt things I had never felt before. There was some sort of tangible, determined force literally and deliberately taking what was mine away from me. I wanted to fight, lash out, but I knew I couldn’t, and every second the enemy grew. I was convinced it would never end, the storm would surely last another day, nothing would be saved. Having a lot of water in one’s basement sucks, but having a potentially infinite amount of water in one’s basement is unbearable. Hyperventilation took hold, each breath more like a desperate grasp at wisps of air to pound into my lungs, to little effect. I felt like I was slowly suffocating. I was near shaking, didn’t know what to do, where to go—everything seemed lost. It was all under now. Under that god damn water. Under any other circumstances I might have broken down in tears, but even that was beyond my comprehension at this point. I’ve never witnessed so-called “panic attacks” first-hand, but I imagine they go something like this. Every trip now involved more sloshing through the nauseating water, now at shin-level, taking more and more out of my room. I had incapacitated myself with my emotional suffocation, so the burden fell on Eddie and Kevin (and Damien, who we had accidentally woken up). Nothing I thought was safe turned out to be. In the end, all that remained in my room was my poor empty desk and bed frame.

Eventually the water did stop rising. We determined that, at peak, there were eight and a half inches and that it smelled like misery.

I had called my parents and weakly explained my situation, somehow thinking that they could make it better. My dad graciously agreed to pick me up (at 4:30 AM no less!) and take me to a dry room, and a tub that hadn’t oozed forth both pink and black liquids, in that order.

It wasn’t “my room,” the room that had meant so much to me, but it was good to be somewhere stable. After the water had leveled off I calmed down, apologized for not helping towards the end, even got calm enough to joke about it. I was shaken but survived. Nothing important was destroyed. I had made it out.

Ten days later, I moved back into my newly carpeted, newly repainted, mold-free room. And in all honesty, it feels absolutely amazing to have it back. Someone could easily spout some Fight-Clubby, anti-establishment screed about how our possessions are worthless, they don’t make us who we are, a human should be more than that, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t care. Some things mean a lot, some things are cared for passionately, some things have all my music saved on them. But it’s not so much about my things as a space of my own. A place that is mine, where I can be alone, be myself. It’s not that much to ask for. Mine was taken away and it touched me much deeper than I would have expected. There’s so much taken for granted, so much that can just go away at any second. So much that, even when it seems like life is working against you, is unfathomably awesome. Here I sit in my room, again, writing this rambly piece of crap, and does it ever feel good to be back again.

A Guide to Pretentiousness

For those who are not lucky enough to have it come naturally. (Blogspot is being uncooperative so you gotta click on the chart for it to be big enough to read. Sorry.)

I am now indistinguishable

from the throng of be-scarfed would-be writers who use their blog instead of writing something of publishable quality. Be on the lookout for half-formed works to be heaped upon the already oversaturated wasteland of bloggery. For my thoughts must be seen and shared! Praise be to narcissism. Why did I break down?

Yesterday my friend Kevin and I were walking down Damen Ave and came across a statue of a cow peering into a telescope, presumably on some type of scientific venture, which, as one can likely surmise, is in itself a noteworthy achievement for a cow, a species who rarely have the time for intellectual curiosity. I do not know exactly what he was attempting to observe, or what analysis he made of his findings; I am not a mind reader, although I did use a semicolon which makes me smart.

A plaque on this statue read "Cowlileo," presumably a pun on famous astronomer "Li'l" Leo Da Vinci. Kevin's keen mind caught the intended meaning however, a play on "Galileo." We agreed that this was tremendously stupid. No possible stretch of the imagination can justify why it would be considered clever or insightful to replace the "Ga" in Galileo with "Cow."

I bemoaned the wasted potential of this stupid name, saying, and I quote, "especially since they could have gone with the much better 'Cowpernicus.'" I came up with this in like two seconds.

That's why.