'Work' (as if) Day

Well 'work day's basically over now, talk about work! Haha, 4 hours minimum work... That happened... not. There was a Teacher's Only Day at school today but it was changed into a 'Work Day' where we must work and then donate the proceeds to school to purchase something for the students. Umm, that's happened once in the three years I've been at school. So quite frankly, they can get fucked. I worked all day Saturday, and that was quite enough for my weekend so I'll take that 'work day' as a day off, TYVM. Today I went grocery shopping with Mum, cause I can always stock up on things I want. I hate dieting though, it's like 'YUM!' and then I remember I'm on a diet and can't have it. Oh well, I bought a new toothbrush and some moisturiser (which my dry flakey skin NEEDS!) which cheered me up a tad.

Anyway what else did I do? Well I didn't really get onto the massively annoying amount of study I seriously need to do. And I didn't study for my lisence either... hmm, I'm gonna be like a 40 year old driving virgin soon. Gawd, fuck me; need to get my lisence! Don't really need to drive anywhere though, guess I'd find somewhere to go if I could. Join the rest of the sad teen gas guzzlers, although I'm not life's biggest fan I'm quite eco-friendly - so pollution and shiz is really not cool. So... I'll give that a miss.

I went for a run today which I was quite proud of, but it was cold and tiring and I was aching, dying and spitting flem the whole way (as attractive as it sounds, ie. not very) so I was a bit over that. I was over it before I left actually, but whatever. Bodies don't become skinny themself, let alone toned. So when I got back I had never been more pleased to have soup for dinner! And my God it was good soup, I will be bringing some to school tomorrow in a flask.

God this blog is boring, lol! Talking about my soup tomorrow, I'm like an old woman. I quite like old woman, they often have good values and are also eco-friendly. They have good cooking skills and can make great feasts on little, and they're big on not-wasting too having survived through the depression and all that. Poor woman, and now we're heading into a new depression. Could the economy die at a worser time? If I go to uni or polytech or something (which i have to decide in a year if I will. Fuck!) I will need a student loan and be in debt and stuff, and if the world's money's dying I'll be screwed and so will everyone else. Gawd, guess I'll just have to work in retail forever... Joking. Never that desperate, well hopefully not. It's a pretty tiring job. Being the 'young guy' I think I'm supposed to be fit and energetic, I had to carry the most heavy mirror up and down the store the other day. Lord it was death!! The funny thing was there was this big burly guy I was carrying it for, and it's like "Hello?! I have fat not muscle!" God it was hell.

Anyway, that's me whinging. I'm quite frankly, over it. I revisted the online game Flyff today! God I miss it, everyone's so nice and sweet and all my stuff's worth fuckloads! So starting to play again! Loving it!

$90 on my way

Yay, another day of work complete. $90 on my way, normally like $80 but I worked an extra hour so get $90. Thank God! Need to save it for the Wellington trip I'm going on in two weeks for the Shakespeare competition me and the group are off to. There's like 8 of us I think, thank God my parents are paying the main fees thank God. I'll just pay for my own needs aka. shopping. Should have close to $500 so I'll be all good.

Feeling quite sick right now, which sucks cause like, tomorrow's my only day off in the week. I guess it's better then having to do stuff, but seriously. Is it too much to ask for to feel ok for one day? Guess I'm just complaining, the heater in this room is way too hot right now. Need to turn it down, it's a gas heater. There's probably no oxygen in the room anymore and I'm about to die. Won't get my hopes up though.

Anyway, enjoy.

...and pull your pants up.

Childhood in America has changed a lot since I was a kid. When I was growing up, childhood was viewed as training for adulthood; children were adults-in-waiting. Today’s kids are helpless retards who need to be completely shielded from the reality of dirty words, mind-altering substances (unless it’s Ritalin) and human sexuality, while being simultaneously showered with material excess and the ridiculous notion that they are somehow special. When I was a kid, I was thrilled to receive a $12 pair of Converse All-Stars; today, kids are shooting each other over $170 Air Jordans. I often joke that I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I think this is a result of my upbringing, which instilled in me a sense of curiosity, anticipation and delayed gratification that seems to be absent from today’s youth, many of whom seem much older and jaded than I am even as they struggle to perpetuate their childhood. I’m not trying to use myself as the archetype of the Successful American Adult—far from it—it’s just that I marvel at how we can view school shootings and melting glaciers and corporate corruption as anything but the inevitable result of our approach to child rearing.

Maybe it’s because my siblings were all older than I was, but as a kid, I always wanted to be older. The older kids always got to do stuff that I couldn’t do, and the achievement of each level of freedom brought eager anticipation for the next. But that anticipation was accompanied by the knowledge that additional responsibilities would be the cost of enjoying the new freedom. The hypothesis (which worked most of the time) was that this system of gradually increasing freedoms and responsibilities would prepare the child for adulthood. There were lawns to be mowed, paper routes to take over from older kids, part-time jobs, and a whole menu of chores and duties the completion of which signaled your readiness for the next level of freedom.

We seem to have replaced that adult-in-training process with one that shields children from nearly every daily reality until they are in their mid-twenties, at which point they are supposed to magically become adults. Many of these overgrown children then decide to have kids of their own as if to clarify for the public that they are now adults—children having children. So they suddenly find themselves at thirty longing for childhood because adulthood came in one huge chunk instead of bit by bit. The divorce and alcoholism and workaholism and materialism and workplace violence and greedy, self-absorbed nihilism that is the unavoidable result of this process inadvertently scars the kids, even as the parents endeavor in futility to shelter them from reality. So, instead of gradually increasing levels of freedom and responsibility, parents offer their kids wild fluctuations between fantasy and reality. And their children—exposed only to reality’s bad parts—eagerly await the freedom of adulthood, which they view as perpetual childhood. And the cycle continues.

The news is full of divorce. The only reason the divorce rate is down slightly from its 1980 peak is that many young couples are choosing cohabitation over marriage, and breakups of these relationships are not factored into the divorce rate. But the fact remains that our culture views romantic entanglements as temporary conveniences rather than lifelong commitments, and spouses blame each other for the fact that adulthood always turns out to be too full of reality. My hometown paper, the Star Tribune, recently ran a three-part series on divorce. Part two chronicles this woman’s reason for leaving her husband of 23 years. “I loved my husband, but I was not in love with him,” she explains. This is something a teenage girl says to her boyfriend when she wants to date someone else, not something we should expect from a grown woman with two grown children.

Marriage is full of shitty diapers and shitty jobs and shitty school boards and crooked mortgage companies and buying the minivan when you really want a Porsche and endless sacrifices and compromises and emergencies. And at the end, all you get is a sore back, arthritic fingers and death. But it can also be a beautiful enterprise in which both partners share triumph and defeat together, because no matter what happens, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, they have each other. This used to be the American Dream, and the American Dream used to be good enough for most Americans. But that American Dream has been replaced with a phony and unattainable cornucopia of fake tits and relentless luxury where women are madly, deeply in love with handsome, opinionless men who never raise their voices or smell bad. Here’s a secret: Fake tits only look good on TeeVee; up close they’re kind of gross, and that man you’re with is going to have hair growing out of his ears in about twenty years.

America’s collective refusal to accept reality at almost every level has resulted in a corrupt, ruined planet; and as reality gets worse and worse, we concoct more and more elaborate methods for denying it, the most tragic of which is an endless cycle of abuse whereby each generation is less prepared for adulthood than the last. Children are not stupid; they’re simply inexperienced. They can handle all of the realities of life and death as long as those realities are presented to them in a logical and gradual manner.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Yay! Christmastime is here!

I didn’t hear my first Christmas carol until the day after Thanksgiving. It was Dr. John’s version of “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.” It was followed by all the classics by Bing, Frank, Dino, Ray Charles, John Denver and of course those lovable Chipmunks. Needless to say, I was SHOPPING.

Yes, shopping. That is how we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior in America. We shop. And shop and shop and shop. And fight and shop and fight. And shop.

And fight.

Four days ago, on my way home from work, I saw a man beating his son (presumably it was his son) while attempting to hang a string of Christmas lights on the front awning of his house. The string of Christmas lights was hopelessly tangled as they always are this time of year, and the boy, who looked to be about seven or eight years old, had carelessly walked directly into the massive snarl. The dad instantly dropped the focus of his labors and grabbed the kid’s sweatshirt with his left hand and walloped him repeatedly with his right. Jesus would have been proud.

Or he IS proud. That’s what I meant to say. I keep forgetting that he’s not some guy who got killed by the Romans 2,000 years ago, but a living, infinite being with whom I can forge a meaningful bond.

Anyway, to honor this Son of God who Died for Our Sins, we must shop. And decorate our dwellings with garish symbols of pre-Christian paganism. And shop.

And fight.

I have not yet heard of any occurrences of the annual separation-of-church-and-state fracases that seem to accompany this glorious season, but no doubt they are right around the corner. Some hyper-Christian civil servant will erect a manger scene in a government center somewhere and the Secularists will raise their angry voices in protest. The ACLU will be called upon, once again, to set the situation to rights and the Christian symbols will be replaced by pagan ones. But as Molly Ivins once famously observed, erecting a Nativity scene is probably the only way to get three wise men in a government building.

From all this, you might be inclined to believe that Big Daddy Malcontent hates Christmas, but nothing can be further from the truth. As mentioned above, Christmastime has pagan origins. The ancient Germans would mark the shortest day of the year by gathering with family and friends to eat, drink and be merry in an effort to fortify themselves against the coming winter doldrums. And, if times were good, they would exchange a gift or two in honor of the friendships without which life would be dreary. Decades of conflict with the Romans hipped Caesar to the tradition, proving that good can come from bad. As the Roman Empire morphed into the Holy Roman Empire, these German traditions became the accepted method for celebrating the birth of Jesus.

So, whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa or some nebulous incarnation of the seasonal merriment, the central theme remains the same: Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward Men. Lack of it is at the heart of Big Daddy’s malcontentedness, so naturally he is Down with Christmas. Peace.