Entries Tagged 'being a smart***' ↓

Do they still assign reading groups in school? Personally, I think they were an invaluable part of the learning process. It allowed us to quickly and easily identify all of the “slow people” so that we wouldn’t cheat off them during geography tests. Because inevitably, every group had a mascot, a giveaway. It was either the kid who could already count to a thousand by kindergarten, or the kid who was still drooling because he hadn’t figured out how to keep his bottom lip tucked. By association, you were able to pigeonhole every other kid in that group.

Reading groups were always given cutesy animal names based on the textbook you were reading. Since my first grade book was called “Travelling the Trade Winds,” my group was The Trade Wind Tigers. Everyone knew that we were the smart group as much as they knew that The Getting Ready Rabbits (their book was “Getting Ready to Read”) was the “‘tard group.” Hey, we were mean little six-year-olds and they didn’t start teaching sensitivity until third grade. Fifth grade for the Rabbits.

While we Tigers were reading thoroughly stimulating stories about Pedro who had lost his pet snake at the market, the Rabbits were still busy learning their letters and phonetics. At first, we were content to just mind our own business and call them i’jits behind their backs. But then our teacher, Mrs. Alcott did something to incite revolution. It seemed that the Rabbits were having a hard time understanding what sound the letter G made. Mrs. Alcott just couldn’t make them grasp that it was pronounced “guh” not “juh.” After about a week of no progress, she got inspired and gave all the Rabbits a piece of GUH-um. Strawberry-flavored, Bubblicious, GUH-um. She let them chew it in class and everything. Big mistake, Mrs. Alcott. Big mistake.

A powder keg had been ignited under the Tigers. We knew what sound frickin’ G made. She never gave us any gum. We nodded to each other with a silent accord and made it our immediate mission to destroy the Getting Ready Rabbits. Recess was an exercise in genocide that day as we chased the Rabbits, tackled them to the ground and stole their gum. We reveled in our own scholastic aptitude as we threw their GUH-um on the GUH-round and stomped it in the GUH-rass.

It was probably because of kids like the Tigers that the Human Potential Movement started “homogenizing” classrooms and grouping kids of all intelligence levels together. Their reasoning was that it would somehow make the kids with “learning disorders” not feel inferior to those of us who weren’t going to have jobs with paper hats. Oh, but we still knew who they were. Hiding them among the Tigers only provided temporary camouflage. We hadn’t forgotten the gum incident, and we were as persistent as Elmer Fudd hunting our Rabbits. We just had to be more methodical, dangling carrots in the form of questions, like “What is the plural of Moose?” to see if we could entrap them in answers like “Mooses.” (The correct answer is “Meese” of course.)

Unfortunately, by high school, the evolutionary playing field had been leveled and most of these Rabbits evolved into big, scary, Monty Python, psycho man-eating Rabbits. They could tear us a new sphincter had we tried taking their gum again. Stupid Darwin.

What if they split us into reading groups in our adult lives? That’d be great wouldn’t it? Maybe, instead of questions about race and religion, the census could ask us what the square root of negative one is. They could give us cute little names and everything. The Associated Press would release a report stating that, “According to the latest census, Los Angeles is comprised of 6% Mensa Monkeys, 22% Adequate Alligators, and 70% Bricks.”

(In case you’re wondering, the correct answer was “i“, a mathematical concept called an “Imaginary Number” which is only used by über-intelligent former Trade Wind Tigers who now belong to the remaining 2% group called The Too Smart For Their Own Good Gophers.)

Reading groups would make things so much simpler. If we knew that a particular street was populated by Bricks, we’d know to never stop and ask for directions. We’d go one street over to where all the Alligators lived. A poetic thought, though probably too idealistic. Eventually, people would just start abusing the system. They’d rightly assume that many Bricks forget to lock their doors, then break into their houses to steal their gum.

It’s been awhile since our country’s last school shooting and I fear that the clock is ticking down to yet another Ritalin-saturated kid going berserk and blowing away his teacher or principal. Before that happens, I make this plea to every student in America. “Please stop blowing away your teachers or principals!” Honestly, what has society come to when a kid brings a gun to school and…

Okay, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I’m afraid I must step down from this particular soapbox. That little bout of self-righteousness was actually nothing more than thinly veiled jealousy. The fact is there were plenty of teachers at my high school who I wished somebody would shoot, but nobody ever did! It didn’t seem like such an impossible dream considering the fact that everybody in my town owned a gun. Of course, this was rural Maine and most of those guns were hunting rifles—which I suppose were harder to conceal under a varsity jacket.

Hindsight being 20/20 and all, I am glad that nobody ever busted the proverbial cap on some of our more detestable teachers. First of all, I was in a lot of those mean old codgers’ classes, and I mean, hello… ricochet. Second, it took our janitor months to clean up vomit. And third, in the midst of a generation fixated on instant gratification, I was taught a valuable lesson. In situations like these, prolonged torture was often far better revenge than instant death. Pushing a teacher to the edge of sanity by undermining their authority was more priceless than a canister full of bullets.

Subtlety was the key. Subtlety and teamwork (another good lesson). Spitballs and outbursts were fun and all, but all they gained you was detention—which only served to strengthen the teacher’s perceived dominance. No, if any subversiveness was to be accomplished, it had to be done a little at a time over the course of an entire year. And every kid in the class had to be in on it. Divided we fell. United, we said, “They can’t send us all to the principal’s office.”

In Mr. Guinness’s Life Science class, we started simply. Many of us wore those digital watches that beeped on the hour. Before class one day, we spent ten minutes synchronizing them exactly two seconds apart. At precisely ten o’clock, Mr. Guinness’s lesson was interrupted by a chain symphony of hourly reminders: beep-beep…boop-boop…tweet-tweet…chirp-chirp…honk-honk…yuk-yuk… When he turned sternly from the blackboard, we were all diligently taking notes, innocently unaware that anything unusual had occurred.

While discussing the reproductive system, we took sadistic pleasure in getting Mr. Guinness to say words like Sperm and Testes over and over again. “Uh, Mr. Bailey, what bone did you say this was…? Oh, the pubic bone!”

By the end of the year, Mr. Guinness’s hair had started to thin and turn gray. The confident air he’d projected on that first day of class was a faint shadow of the rattled fear that now emanated from deep within his tortured soul. His breaking point finally came during our study of the digestive system and a lesson on Peristalsis, which Mr. Guinness described as the process by which the intestines move food through the body using “wave motions.”

To illustrate the point, the whole class spontaneously broke into “the wave”, moving from left to right and back again. Our favorite game became to see how many times we could “peristalsize” while Mr. Guinness’s back was turned. I think the record was something like fifteen. When Mr. Guinness eventually caught us in the act, we erupted in laughter, telling him that we were just trying really really hard to study Peristalsis.

Something finally popped. He slammed his pointer on the desk so hard that everybody jumped. His head turning purple and his voice reaching an inhuman pitch, Mr. Guinness bellowed at us to “SHUUUUT UUUUUUP!!!” With pure satisfaction at his complete and total loss of control, the smug look on everyone’s face said the same thing; “You can’t send us all to the principal’s office.”

So kids, take it from me. Shooting your teachers, although tempting, is never the right decision. There is far more fun to be had, messing with their heads. So be creative. Work together. And when you get suspended, don’t you dare tell you parents this was my idea!

The cooks in our elementary school didn’t take kindly to criticism. They yelled and made us spend recess inside with our heads down whenever we complained about the burnt pizza, hairs in our yogurt or rubbery meat in the spaghetti sauce. It had gotten so bad that by Christmas of fifth grade, our teacher forced me and my trouble-maker friends to write the cooks a formal apology. We drew happy pictures of ourselves eating cafeteria food under inscriptions like, “I’m sorry I said your meatloaf tasted like Play-doh… From now on I’ll just pick around the brown lettuce… My mom told me it was just a stomach flu.”

We choked down our spongy carrots and freezer-burned fishsticks without a word for a while after that, but a constant sense of impending vomit can only be kept silent for so long. By May that year, the cooks and lunch monitors had resorted to all out ignoring us, saying, “Just go!” whenever we so much as asked for a shaker of salt. We took it begrudgingly. It was spring and none of us wanted to risk any more recesses inside.

Everything came to a head the day our gang got to the cafeteria late. Our teacher had undoubtedly held us back to yell about something trivial, and by the time we got to the cafeteria, everything was gone. Not the food of course. There were always sufficient economy-sized, re-thawed, re-heated food-like products on hand to survive the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. No, on this particular day they had run out of silverware. Not a clean knife or spork to be found.

This time we felt perfectly justified in raising our concerns, but the lunch monitor cut us off, “Just go!” The cooks turned a reflexive deaf ear to us saying, “I don’t want to hear it boys!” And when that spatula slammed down on our tray, plopping the day’s nutrition into one of five pre-portioned slots, we knew they meant business.

On any other day, I think we would have continued pushing our point, even if it meant risking yet another recess inside. But the group of us, in a rare moment of psychic harmony, all decided to let it go when we saw what was on the menu: Sloppy Joes and blueberry cobbler. The latter was a relative term of course—pie filling and Cool Whip really—but it was certainly a meal that one would not want to eat with one’s hands… unless, of course one, was a smartass eleven-year-old with an axe to grind.

Oh the fun we had that day, devouring our government sanctioned Hot Lunch (again, a relative term) with bare hands and the ravenousness of starving children. We shoved Sloppy Joes into the general vicinity of our mouths. Some hit its mark. The rest slid down our faces. We closed our fists around handfuls of blueberries, squishing half of it into our mouths and letting the rest ooze down our forearms.

Did I mention that they had run out of napkins that day as well?

The lunch monitors yelled of course. But what else could we say through smiling mouthfuls of ground beef and fruit product as we wiped our hands on the fold-out tables? “They didn’t have silverware.” And then the most amazing thing happened. Not only didn’t they make us spend recess inside with our heads down, but the lunch monitor actually ran to get us the silverware we had been asking for.

We were baffled. Somehow, we had won. We had subverted the entire cafeteria system, and the teachers and cooks had been powerless to stop us. We’d acted like bratty inconsiderate snots and gotten away with it! We should have been relishing our victory and making plans for new and exciting ways to make mischief. If only we had realized the truth.

Fortunately for all our future teachers—and okay, for us too—our parents had instilled a healthy fear of adults as unshakeable bastions of authority. Had we pushed forward, the sixth grade academic and nutritional world could have been ours to manipulate and control. Instead, afraid that retribution was just over the horizon, we eased off on the cooks, giving them time to regroup. By the time we came back to school that next year, they were ready for us. Any further attempts at rebellion were dealt with swift and harshly. We had no choice but to deal with another year’s worth of bad food… and recesses spent inside with our heads down.

There are many reasons why I never ever ever eat at McDonald’s, not the least of which being I start farting about halfway through my burger and then don’t stop for about three and a half days. But also, I just find it utterly depressing that I have to deal with an entire team of people who are quite literally as stupid as a person can get without qualifying for a legal “disorder.”

I ordered a Chicken McNugget Happy Meal for my daughter tonight. Now there are two choices when one orders a McNugget Happy Meal: a Four-McNugget meal or a Six-McNugget meal. So when I stepped up to the register and placed my order with Mister Headgear, I said, “Yes I’d like a Four-McNugget Happy Meal, please.” You can imagine my surprise when I looked at my receipt ten seconds later and realized my credit card had just been charged fourteen dollars for a Happy Meal that should have cost about $4.50.

“Well you said you wanted four Happy Meals,” responds Mister Headgear.

Okay, I’m sorry, Mister Headgear. I know you’re stupid. But I also know that the corporation employing you understands that you’re stupid and has broken down everything you must know into about thirty simple phrases: Big Mac, Fries, Number Six, Super Size… I simply can’t imagine that I am the first person ever to come in here and verbalize this particular order. I know that you know you have a four-McNugget meal, so… why, Mister Headgear-wearing McDonald’s employee, wouldn’t you have at least clarified what you thought you heard me say before charging me for four freakin’ Happy Meals? Especially when you can clearly see I am standing her with ONE STINKIN’ KID!

Now please go ask your slightly smarter manager to give me a refund while I continue farting in your general direction.

I saw a Humvee in the parking lot of Whole Foods today. Weird.

I realized today that I don’t really like most Christmas music and haven’t since I was a kid. Actually I realized that a few years ago, but I figured out WHY today. As a kid, Christmas music is fun mostly because you’re always the one singing it. But as you get older, you’re forced to listen to Bing Crosby sing it. And if you don’t particularly like Bing Crosby, well… it doesn’t do much for your like of the music in general.

My daughter came out with a very profound statement the other day: “I was two on the day I turned three.”

I used to buy milk two or more gallons at a time. Then I read some stuff that said milk wasn’t as good for you as everyone thought. These days I buy vinegar two or more gallons at a time. I’m not saying the one is a natural byproduct of the other, but there you are.

I never realized just how insanely fun it can be to throw one tiny cat onto the back of another.

I don’t think I will ever reach a point in my life where I am too mature to laugh at a really fat kid falling down.

For years I’ve told people the story of a childhood friend who peed on an electric fence as if it were something that happened to me personally. Somehow a story like that is just funnier in the first person.

I don’t care if she’s only fifteen; hot is hot and show me the law that says it’s illegal to leer.

I like to think I’m fairly open-minded when it comes to strange foods, but I still cannot wrap my mind around tofu.

Little kids’ bodies are so ridiculously disproportionate it’s almost a marvel they aren’t defective. Look at one of them when they raise their arms up high.  The fingers barely clear their scalp for crying out loud!

The thing I really miss about my Geo is playing “Merge Chicken” against people in Mercedes SUV’s.

I have no idea how I used to eat Ramen noodles in such large quantities.

I somehow can’t bring myself to feel sympathy for anyone who loses an hour and a half’s worth of work because they forgot to save.

I never realized that I hadn’t seen a single red hot dog since leaving Maine until about a year ago when I read on Wikipedia that red hot dogs are actually a Maine “thing.”

I likewise never realized that I hadn’t seen a single whoopie pie since leaving Maine until somebody told me that Maine is apparently the whoopie pie capital of the world.

Britney Spears is hot. Her music is catchy. And everyone just needs to lay off.

At any given hour on any given day I would bet a minor sum of money that I could find at least one Law & Order or CSI incarnation on TV.

I still don’t know, nor care, what the top news story of the day is.

I saw a Humvee in the parking lot of Whole Foods today. Still weird.

I received this email forward from an older relative. Even though I can appreciate where the writer is coming from, and even tend to agree with a lot of its sentiment, for some reason it just hacked me off. It’s a typical “Our generation is better than the new generation” tirade, which acknowledges all the things that made the previous generation great, but fails to recognize all the things they did to screw it up for those of us who followed. So just to set the record straight, here is the original email in its entirety with my comments in bold italics.

======================================

Those Born 1930-1979!

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930′s 40′s, 50′s, 60′s and 70′s !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

Yes and I’m sure many of you are still dealing with health problems and your own addictions to the same substances to this day as a result.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Of course, the oceans weren’t nearly as polluted back then as they were now thanks to you, so mercury contamination in tuna wasn’t as much of a concern back then.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

Look around at the gluttony of TV ads for designer pills intended to take care of everything from chronic asthma to irritable bowl syndrome to erectile dysfunction. Look at all the fun new forms of cancer you’re getting that your parents never had to deal with. Looks like all that lead-based paint and other chemicals you’ve been introducing into every product on the market had some unexpected long-term effects.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

Mind you, this was during a time when all your parents had to navigate were 45m.p.h. rural two lane roads where you encountered maybe ten other cars on your way to work. There were two intersections and one blinking light in town. Unless your parents were particularly idiotic drivers, the only chance they had of getting into an accident was if a deer jumped in front of them.

Today we’re driving on multi-laned highways with heavy merges, multiple exits to left and right, hundreds of signs pointing this way and that so that you’re never quite sure if you’re heading in the right direction or not. Not to mention the fact that we’re trying to run this gauntlet with about a thousand other cars, all going the same 65m.p.h. So forgive us if we’re a little more worried about what might happen to our children if we ended up in the middle of a ten-car pileup.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

Again, back then you actually had roads that weren’t jammed with other cars, and nice soft grass to ride on. But you’ve paved over everything since then, meaning we’re riding our bikes on asphalt. So yeah, we want a little more protection for our head in case we wipe out on yet another of your oil stained parking lots.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

Great, and maybe if you hadn’t gone and polluted the water supply we’d be drinking from the hose too.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

This seems a bit disingenuous. Somehow I doubt that the “cootie” argument began with our generation.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because :

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !

We’d be outside playing too, except for the fact that you bulldozed the baseball diamond to put up luxury condominiums, you tore down the YMCA to build a WalMart and you drained the swimming hole to put in yet another massive parking lot for yet another massive strip mall (which you won’t allow us to skateboard on). You’ve kind of taken away all our outdoor places to go. We’d ride our bikes there, but again, refer to the previous bit about those roads that you made entirely unsafe for us to be riding on.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

Chances are you were playing at or near one of your friend’s houses with at least one parent or trusted neighbor keeping a loose watch on everything. Today, our neighbors are strangers and both parents need to work just to keep up in this two-income trap that you managed to set for us.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

Do you really expect us to believe that you’re going to allow us to race a handmade go-kart down your hill? You won’t even let us SKATEBOARD on all those nice big parking lots you built.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computer’s, no Internet or chat rooms…….

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

Your friends lived across the street. Our friends live ten miles across town via one of those multi-laned highways we mentioned earlier. You know what we find when we go outside? Traffic.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

Those trees were in the backyards of your own houses. But since you’ve created a housing race encouraged by zero-interest loans you’ve priced us out of our own neighborhoods. We live in crammed-together suburbs and apartment complexes where the only trees are owned by somebody else who puts a fence around the thing so that we risk impaling our testicles more than breaking our teeth should we fall out.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

Okay, but then YOU yelled at US for swallowing gum. Which way do you want it?

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

AGAIN, you had your own backyards to do that stuff in. Our downstairs neighbors tend to call the police when they see us holding a gun in our common back yard.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Yet again, your friends were a two-minute walk across the street. You’ve destroyed the idea of a town center so all our friends are scattered across a thirty-mile radius. We need phones and email if we’re ever going to talk to them outside of school.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

Because you still had parks and public pools and something called “recess”, it probably wasn’t such a big deal if you didn’t make the team. You had other things to keep you active. But since you’ve graciously ELIMINATED all these things for us, maybe we don’t mind creating a few extra Little League teams so that more of our kids have the opportunity to do something other than play those X-Boxes and Playstations you mocked just a couple paragraphs ago.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

Okay fine, I’m with you on this one.

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

It has also produced some of the most soulless, narcissistic, toy-hoarding, money grubbing greedy generations ever to grace this earth. People who gave up on the idea of making the world a better place once they realized that they could drive a BMW , own a condo and go on a cruise every year… Just sayin’.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

It’s also been an explosion of land, water and air pollution as you search for easier and cheaper ways to mass-produce all those innovations of yours.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And you dealt with it by selling out the idealism of your youth in favor of stock options, middle-management positions and items that sell for thirty-nine cents less at WalMart even though it put some of your friends out of business. Quite frankly, I’m not impressed with what you did with all that freedom, success and responsibility.

If YOU are one of them . . CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good

Okay, excuse me but YOU PEOPLE are the ones IN CHARGE of the government right now!!! YOU are the ones who made these rules and regulations. If you don’t like the way the world has gone, you have nobody to blame but your own self-righteous SELF.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.

Brave? BRAVE??? Are these the same “brave” people who spit, cursed and threw blood at the soldiers who returned from Vietnam in the late 60’s? Yes, your generation turned out a few gems, but so does every generation… ours included.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?

No, it makes me want to strangle all you sell outs from the older generation for ruining it for us. God willing we’ll do a better job with it for OUR children.

I am whooped. The fam and I just got back from a place in Pennsylvania called Peddler’s Village. It’s a very toursity place where people go to buy lots of crap that they don’t really need. Fortunately we didn’t go for that reason. You see they also have a mini-amusement park for kids called Giggleberry Fair which consists of a merry-go-round, a playroom full of dress up clothes, musical instruments, puppets, etc… But the coup de gras at this place is “Giggleberry Mountain” which is a gigantic contraption made of nets, ropes, tubes, slides, and anything else a kid might want to climb. It goes up six stories!

BUT, the best thing about this whole place, the thing that makes me want to go back again and again: on the bottom two levels of Giggleberry Mountain are a series of air canons for firing little NERF-like balls, of which there are literally thousands scattered here, there and everywhere. On the lower level there are canons that fire large volumes of balls up into the air, and on the second level there are swivel cannons that you use to fire at opponents on the other side of the well. Or you can do what I did and fire down into the well… into the crowd.

The best part is shooting at those kids who have just walked in and don’t quite realize what the room is all about just yet. Then out of nowhere a little ball suddenly plunks them in the head. They look up like, “What the heck was that?” When they shrug their shoulders and look away, you blast them again. Seriously, how awesome is that? Where else in America can you go where it’s actually okay, and even encouraged, for you to shoot little kids in the head? Nowhere, that’s where!

And I just want to say that I think I earned the title of “Funnest Grownup on the Freakin’ Planet” tonight. Most parents were only shooting at their own kids. Well, my kid was off with her mother climbing nets. So I just started unloading on anyone who was at least six-years-old and within range. At first they’d be like, “Holy crap, was that an adult who just shot me?” But after the second or third direct hit, they smartened up and started returning fire. By the time we finally moseyed on out of this place, I had a good twenty kids all ganging up to blast me with cannons or, when that failed, flinging them like baseballs and cheering like Mardi Gras whenever they pegged me in the face. No kidding, almost every single kid in that well was ignoring every other person at every other cannon and focusing every bit of firepower on me. It was like being on American Gladiators except I was the Gladiator.

It… was… AWESOME!

I received a rather long internet forward on my MySpace bulletin board this week which basically said, “Hey couch potato, make sure you vote next Tuesday!” Like most forwards that don’t involve filling out surveys or watching videos of indie rock bands on treadmills, I gave it only a quick skim before devoting my attention to more pressing matters, like creating my own South Park character and scanning for hotties amongst my friends’ friends list. I fully expected the bulletin and all its content to fade from memory by the time I logged off the site. But before clicking away to post a YouTube video of a cat falling down the stairs, my eyes happened upon one particular line: “They’re calling our generation the Apathetic Generation.”

The composition of this particular bulletin indicated an author with better writing skills than your typical 14 to 23-year-old MySpace user, so it made sense that the original poster was probably someone closer to my age and the apathetic generation to which he referred was my own. Born in 1978, I’ve always been rather confused as to which generation I technically belonged. A quick check of Wikipedia simultaneously places me in Generation X, Generation Y, The MTV Generation and something called “The Boomerang Generation.” But no matter which “our generation” the author was actually indicating, I could only assume that the finger-wagging “they” to which he alluded meant the people of our parents’ generation, which for the average MySpacer means the Baby Boomers.

Normally an attack like this doesn’t bother me enough to give it a second thought (isn’t that what apathy is all about?), but for some reason this particular criticism, made in this particular context, stuck with me well after I’d finished approving new friend requests and changing my profile song to “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. What this nameless “they” was saying, according to the author, was that despite being faced with a war, a nuclear threat, human rights violations and a laundry list of other issues, “our generation” is still too lazy and uncaring to go out and vote. I went back over the post several times and the more I read that one key line, the more self-righteous my apathy became.

When “they” say “our generation” is apathetic, what “they” are really saying is that “we” aren’t like “them.” “We” don’t do all the things “they” did at our age. “Our generation” doesn’t mobilize for reform on college campuses. “Our generation” doesn’t march on the Capitol building waving placards and hurling slogans. “Our generation” doesn’t engage in civil disobedience while singing defiant folk songs. And “our generation” certainly doesn’t rally around political candidates who might end the tyranny, bring peace to our country and harmony to the world. If this is what “they” mean by an “apathetic generation” then I guess I’d say “they” are right.

But can “they” really blame us? After all, “they” are “our generation’s” role models. “They” thought trying to change the world was all noble and groovy for about a decade or so until they realized there was more money to be made selling real estate. “They” were all about fighting The Establishment and standing up for the little man until “they” realized they could use their law degree to defend The Establishment against little man’s lawsuits and earn a fatter paycheck. Woodstock, Marin County, the Sunset Strip, places where “they” used to hang out, smoke dope and say, “Love is all you need,” are now nothing more than giant spaces for them to build luxury condos and hang billboards advertising Big Macs, timeshares, and the next season of Big Brother. “They” were passionate. “They” were going to make a difference. And yet look at what “they” produced. Frankly, I think things might have turned out better if “they” had taken a cue from “our generation” and just said, “Eh, whatever.”

If there’s anything “our generation” has learned from “them”, it’s that politics is not the way to change the world. We tried it out for a while… more to see what all the fuss was about. During the 2004 Democratic and Republican Conventions, “our generation” descended on Boston and New York and tried to capture that allure of the late sixties. We marched. We protested. We spoke out on matters we only kind of understood. But the trend died quickly… probably when all the young men realized this political revolution wasn’t manifesting with a sixties-style sexual revolution. And as soon as it became apparent that those hot Blue State chicks weren’t giving it up after the rally, we went back to work at Best Buy to save enough cash for a Razr phone with internet capabilities—so we could check our MySpace on the go.

Maybe “our generation” doesn’t vote. Maybe we don’t give two hoots about who ends up controlling Congress next Tuesday. But does anyone among us—from “our generation” or “theirs”—really and truly believe that a different set of politicians will be the thing that brings about a new and better America? “They” have already proven their own lack of faith in the power of the vote by moving on from the passionate activism of the late sixties to the apathetic consumerism of pretty much every decade since. All “our generation” is doing is skipping over “power of the vote” and going straight to apathy.

That being said, “our generation” is far from apathetic. We do care about things. We really do. It’s just that right now, honestly, we have no idea whatsoever how to fix the mess that “they” created. Perhaps it will come to us in time. Perhaps what looks like apathy is just “our generation” unconsciously biding its time, watching and waiting until “they” vacate the premises. We know there’s nothing we can really do as long as “they” are still in control, so why waste “our” time and “our” energy on useless rallies and campaigns that will only serve to get another one of “them” elected? Better to sit here quietly listening to our iPods, playing World of Warcraft, and deciding which MySpace friends to put in our Top 8 List. Who knows, maybe MySpace will become the platform where the new revolution begins. Maybe with every silly blog we post, with every YouTube video we embed, with every slutty self-portrait we upload, we will slowly but surely come together as one unit who will finally bring down The Establishment “they” were ultimately powerless to stop. And unlike the misguided stunts “they” pulled in the preceding generation, our tactics are less likely to get us shot by the National Guard.

So to all the “they’s” who want to call us “The Apathetic Generation,” we say enjoy your election next Tuesday. We won’t be there, but we’ll be thinking of you. And when your solution to everything once again fails to solve anything, we’ll be here, predictably not caring. We’ll just keep on doing what we do everyday; hanging out on MySpace and waiting for you to die.

I read a story in USA Today yesterday (actually “story” is too big a word, this was more of a blurb buried in the margins) about a series of explosions that occurred inside a bomb recycling plant in Louisiana this week. Okay, first of all, in this spectacle-fueled society, why was that one not all over the front page? People live for stories with explosions. Especially ones that occur right in our own back yard.

Second of all, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as bomb recycling plants in this county. I didn’t know there was such a thing as bomb recycling. Exactly what kinds of bombs do these people recycle and what, pray tell, do they make with the leftover components? Firecrackers? Presto logs? Cap guns? Apparently this plant recycles old military bombs. I assume we’re not talking about nukes here, but are they the kind that look like old cannon balls with fuses on them? Are these like plastic explosives? …and if so, which number is printed inside the little triangle on the bottom?

But more to the point, who signs up for this particular job? What are the qualifications one needs to recycle bombs? What sorts of interests and aptitudes would a high school student need to demonstrate for a guidance counselor to point him down the road of bomb recycling? And what kind of salary would you need to pull down before you agreed to something like this? Oh I’m sure they have safety guidelines in place at this recycling plant, but dang, a place like that is (forgive the unfortunate turn of phrase) a ticking timebomb… which they probably refurbish into a watch or something before the timer goes to zero.

But the thing that is really… REALLY funny about this story—the explosions forced police to evacuate two schools in the area.

Seriously… no I mean seriously… WHO BUILDS A BOMB RECYLING PLANT NEAR A FREAKIN’ SCHOOL?

You know what TV show I used to love as a kid? American Gladiators. What an awesome show that was. To a ten-year-old boy, that show was like gym class for superheroes. I mean you had dodgeball, except the balls in this case were fired at you from a high speed canon while you shot back with crossbows and rocket launchers. There was a rock wall with the added element of a really big guy chasing you, trying to yank you off. You had an obstacle course, though it was more like a mythological gauntlet full of smoke, flashing lights and giants trying to knock you down.

I wonder if that show would impress kids these days, what with the gluttony of fast-paced action-filled cartoons and kid shows they already have at their disposal. But when the most exciting shows were Growing Pains and Muppet Babies, American Gladiators was like a forbidden look into the hidden lives of action stars or something. The fact that it came on late on a Saturday night, right after Saturday Night Live where I lived, only added to the allure that you were somehow breaking the rules and seeing things that only grownups were meant to see.

As kids who played sports, my friends and I would often talk about wanting to go on American Gladiators. To be honest, I don’t even know what kind of prizes the winner of each show received. For us, it wasn’t about winning, it was about competing. But really it was about playing. Hardcore, meat and muscle, violence-for-fun playing. Running inside a giant metal sphere and bashing into your opponents in an effort to score points. Walloping a guy twice your size with a big foam jousting stick, trying to knock him off his ten-foot pedestal. How freakin’ awesome would it have been just to be allowed inside that auditorium and be given the chance to compete in any of those games.

I read in TV Guide one time the qualifications needed to be considered as a contestant for American Gladiators. I don’t remember them all, but I do know you had to be able to do something like thirty chin-ups in a minute. That was crazy. Even at my strongest I’ve only been able to do ten of those things. I’m sure other qualifications were you had to be able to run a mile in less than five minutes, you had to lift a certain amount of weight with your legs and arms. Stuff like that. Stuff that only somebody at the very peak of physical strength and fitness had any hope of accomplishing.

I wish they’d bring back competition shows like that. Shows where you actually had to have, not just talent, but extreme talent to compete. What an awesome bar that gave us to shoot for. To get onto American Gladiators you had to aim high and work hard. These days, most of the competitions shows you see on TV require no other qualifications than not being a convicted felon. Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race. Anybody can, in theory, appear on those shows. The only thing that increases your odds of being chosen isn’t superior strength or talent, but above average looks and a quirky personality. I guess that appeals more to people these days. The average viewer can watch these shows and actually picture themselves on that screen competing as they are, without any new skills or improvement. Hell, William Hung taught us that you didn’t even have to be a good singer to succeed on American Idol.

Is this all a sign of where we’re headed as a country? As a civilization? As a species? The bar used to be high. Impossibly high no doubt. None of us were ever going to attain the superiority required to appear on American Gladiators. But in the end, was that really such a bad thing? It gave us something shoot for and even when we didn’t hit that mark, we landed higher than we would have had we shot for something lower. These days, there’s no mark to shoot for. The message competition shows send out today is, “Just be yourself… your regular, stupid, talentless self, and you too could be a star.” If this trend continues, the human race is doomed. Evolution cannot progress if we aren’t constantly challenged in our daily lives.

I hate Reality TV. I refuse to watch any of it. But I promise all you TV executives out there, if you were to bring back American Gladiators, I would watch. But it’s got to be the real thing. The standards have to remain high. Contestants actually need to be able to pass a physical test to compete. And for the love of God, if I don’t see ugly people in the mix along with the hotties, I’ll tune you out forever. Because strong people with talent come at all levels of beauty.

Bring back American Gladiators. The future of the world depends on it.

1/5/09: Ironically, since I wrote this, NBC did come out with a new version of American Gladiators. And to this day I still haven’t seen it thus proving that I have no conviction in anything I say but prefer to just be a whiny little man.