Worst . . . generation . . . ever

I remember feeling a tangible pang the day someone told me I was too young to be part of Generation X. I suppose I'm technically part of Generation Y, a little on the old side, but that always seemed like an also-ran term, like all the second-rate sociologists who didn't catch the GenX train decided to go one step down the slacker food chain. They made us seem like GenX's adoring and naive younger sibling, which I guess we [I] are [am]. So, in place of Wynona Rider and Ethan Hawke, so cool and carelessly groomed, prematurely jaded and preternaturally hunky, who are we but Macaulay Culkin and--I dunno--Kirsten Dunst? Downright lameasses, a group I want no part of.

But alas I am part of it, and Time, a magazine I loathe, has forced me to admit it.

In the upcoming issue, GenY is effectively rent asunder, split into those of us who are old enough to buy cigarettes and those of us forced to steal them from our parents. The article states, however, that while the 18-25 year-old segment of this budding generation may be old enough to legally buy cigs and booze, we'll probably continue stealing those things from our parents anyway because most of us haven't moved out yet, preferring instead to shirk responsibility and flounder in dead end jobs.

I thought I was going my own way on this, but we're so big we've been named. They're calling us twixters, a seemingly odd mish-mash of candy bay and licorice brand names that actually derives from betwixt, a word that would get you beaten up where I come from. Twixters, it seems, are no longer the economically depressed victims of recession that our grunge forbears were, but a "distinct and separate life stage, a strange, transitional never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people in their 20s stall for a few extra years."

This phenomenon has analogues in Canada and much of Europe as well, and while the ostensible excuses vary from country to country, the underlying factor cuts across cultural divides. Those who retreat back to the nest are still promiscuous and irresponsible parasites contaminating an already thin gene pool like GenXers, but now our numbers are great enough to be considered representative of a whole crappy generation.

But parents looking for a silver lining in spending their golden years helping offspring dodge creditors don't have to look far. Dr. Jeffrey Arnett says that, in not wearing pants most days, I'm actually doing "important work to get [myself] ready for adulthood." That's true. Today an egg I cooked--by myself--fell on the ground. After careful consideration, I decided not to eat it. I just left it there for my mom's Cairn Terrier to take care of. In that simple non-action, I avoided cross-contamination like the Lysol Anti-Bacterial woman said, and I also did a little something they call delegating duty; that's a trait of good management.

Also since coming home, I've taught the dog to selectively cull my unwieldy hentai collection and spongebathe me as needed. I'll be using him as a reference next time I apply at the multiplex. They're going to fire the kid with cystic fibrosis, I can feel it.

Related: I just filed for deferment of my Stafford Loan.

Read the full thing here.

C in math, F in not eating everything

Things might be getting a lot worse for dumb kids in Texas, as legislators mull over a proposal to grade kids on their weight. Under the plan, "school districts would be required to include the body mass index of students as part of their regular report cards." correlating education with health sends the clear message: Even the smartest fat kid in Texas is still a fat kid, and in Texas, that just ain't smart.

Breaking with an almost unsullied tradition of slandering Texans, I'm going to come out in support of this legislation. To commemorate the occasion, I'll use fiery rhetoric in the style of an Evangelical, minus most of the religious intolerance. It's high time we begin undoing the damage caused by a Jew-controlled entertainment industry that teaches our children, through its unholy four-headed triumvirate of Kirstie Alley, Delta Burke, Kelly Osborne and Fat Albert, that being husky is somehow okay. People in our permissive, politically correct society think fat people can lead happy, productive lives. Well I know someone who thinks otherwise. That someone is named God, and last time I checked, sloth was a deadly sin. Kids in Texas are sinning to the tune of 33%, that's more sin than even France or the Vatican can muster. Where I come from, education takes a back seat to salvation.

Know who was fat? Buddha, and look what Satan has done with him. New-agers try to tell you how similar the teachings of Jesus and Buddha were. I say look to the waistline and therein know the difference. The history of man is rife with plus-sized false prophets.

And now, to hedge myself against the secularist establishment, let me use their graven idol of science to do God's work. Researchers have documented that after meals the human body diverts energy from all over and puts it to work in the digestive tract, often creating a feeling of lethargy and an inability to concentrate. Now, in the body of a serial-eater, someone who will--with satanic relish--pack away untold thousands of calories a day, the digestive system monopolizes energy to fuel the near-constant process of shuttling waste material through the intestines like a midnight train to Georgia, leaving an anemic and undernourished intellect in its wake. Protest if you must, them's facts and figures.

There's another aspect to this, one long forgotten in today's politically correct classroom. The playground is a place of complex socio-political wrangling, a place where lessons unlearned quickly translate into friends unmade. The modern educator can't hope to teach children everything they need to survive in this networked, rolodexed world of power lunches and Christ-mandated hyper-Capitalism, but including the BMI on report cards will reinforce one of the fundamental truths of succeeding in an image-driven society. Nobody likes a fat kid. They smell, they breathe loudly and they steal your lunch when you aren't looking. F_(chubby)=undesirable. That's the arithmetic of popularity, baby, and it's way more important than long division.

***

In all seriousness, do kids who already have low self-esteem need a quantification of their inability to stack up to beauty norms? I understand the health implications and definitely see the value in education to battle obesity but this needs to be implemented in a more compassionate way.

'There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling.'

Read the full thing here.

A young generation's irksome toxicology gap

80% of college students drink, 50% of those binge drink. Meaning 4 out of 10 college students remain unclear about the purpose of alcohol.
I never understood this statistic, or rather, I've always thought it was wrong. Not the fact of drinking, I went to Catholic school. Those numbers should be higher. Kids--in college, to the tune of 40%--drink without the intention of getting drunk. One could say drinking responsibly. Sounds like there's a D.A.R.E. official looking for a promotion.

This is something so intuitively obvious that doesn't require statistics, it can be deduced with a bit of Socratic Metaphysicism, a Cartesian thought experiment.

Are there now, walking among us, humans, sufficiently adapted, who can relish the taste of Gordon's Dry Gin? Is there now a Natural Light gene that makes cheap alcohol serviceable to the human palate from anything but a latex tube shoved past the tastebuds? If no to the above: are kids more wealthy now than they were uh year and uh half ago?

In college, living among Spokane's wealthiest trustifarians and business majors, no one drank good beer and everyone drank to get drunk. Then, on special occasions, like one of the four-thousand observed Catholic holidays, when kids put away the cough syrup and stole dad's secret bottle of Grey Goose, they still got drunk, not knowing what else to do. In Europe, the third year of a four year tour of duty, when we got ass-canned on $50 dollar wines at the school's expense, it was a cultural necessity of living in-country. The nice men just kept putting bottles on the table.

Point being, there is nothing moderate about college. It's a binary place, a place of ones and zeros, ons and offs. Self-regulation is going straight.

In college, there were two groups, not three. Drinkers and abstainers. Those who casually sat down with a cold one in front of a favored sporting event were not one beer drinkers, they were beating off a hangover or fighting off the shakes, such full-blown alcoholics that drinking to get drunk is like breathing to get breath, instinctual. I had friends in both camps, often oscillating between the two.

I'd lay even money that the 40% who reportedly consume less than 4 drinks were caught early enough in the morning that they could still remember what beer they were on. 0,1,2 or 3 being the number left in the case he or she fell asleep next to.

This is why, in addition to non-smoking and drinking dorms, they now have dorms for recovering substance abusers.

That's not to say that my collegiate years were a whirlwind of debauchery, I was healthily in both columns myself for long periods of time, either having a good drunk or not. And, in the intervening years, my tastes have certainly undergone a process of sophistication, the kind of sophistication that can only come from disposable income or a knack for larceny. There are now, I'm happy to say, beers and liquors I can drink with moderation, beers and liquors whose taste I can meditate upon, whose aromatic essences reward a linger on the tongue. Beers and liquors I never had access to in college. These are lagers of breeding whose fermentation process takes place in the bellies of suckling pigs, and liquors of consequence, distilled from the perspiration of God himself. Beers that cost more than the minimum hourly wage of my home state; Liquors whose proceeds could feed an Indonesian orphan, allowing him to fend off rickets until he becomes a ward of Nike.

Looking around, I realize that I've come full circle and can no longer afford these treats. I guess it's back to binge drinking, or, more in line with my current fiscal solubility, cutting myself with razor blades and spending time in a closet with the nerve gas Grandpa brought back from Okinawa.

Read the full thing here.

Spokane gays push for own district

. . . Opponents argue from ignorance, stupidity, poor reading comprehension. Fear "culture based upon sex"; missing basic genetic truism that all cultures are based on sex.

The Inland Northwest Business Alliance is working to grow a dedicated gay district somewhere in Spokane and citizens are worried there will be a proliferation of lewd and wanton sex acts all over the place. I just found out about this yesterday. I might have known about it sooner if the Spokesman-Review let people read their paper online without also subscribing to the print edition.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more outcry. Maybe Spokane is more progressive than I thought, or maybe the people here just don't feel the imminence of the threat. Maybe now that the Times has brought word to that trans-mountain Sodom in the west, people here will start worrying. Seattle is, after all, where all Spokane's crime and minorities come from. Seattle and California.

The push from the usually quiet gay community--which is in the messy thought-diagram on a large sheet of butcher paper stage--has its share of detractors among Spokane's much larger and more vocal bigot and moron communities. Many people (as perhaps litmus for the Midwest in general) still adhere with shock and horror to the idea that homosexuals are promiscuous Petri dishes for communicable disease. They are, I guess, but no more so than heterosexuals. People who think queers bring something vile and seedy to any community they inhabit don't know any queers, or at least don't know that they know any queers. That's why this is going to be perfect.

As long as the gay community remains silent, "closeted," as is says it has in Spokane, witch-hunting heteros are able to foster any kind of image they want. Until queers stand up and dispel the myths woven by an ignorant and excitable conservative majority, the myths will persist. We've seen this kind of thing twice before in minority communities. Both Blacks and Chinese have been victims of the sex-crazed savage image. Both images, of African Americans driven feral by their massive copulatory organs and the smokey, dragon-shaped monkey on the back of every Chinaman in Chinatown, weren't dispelled until the communities themselves spoke up. The same thing has happened in larger gay communities nation wide and now finally, hopefully, it's happening here.

One man is worried that his "pro-family conventions" are going to go away, presumably leaving only the troublesome anti-family conventions. Another is worried about Spokane no longer being thought of as a good place to raise a family. But the funny thing is, it doesn't matter. The new gay district, if it happens, isn't going to be open to caucusing or public discourse, it's going to be created in exactly the way conservatives want the nation run, with market forces and private money. It's not going to be some morally bereft braintrust of liberals deeding public land to an oppressed group. It's going to be a bunch of queers applying for small-business loans and purchasing real estate and growing businesses and turning a small corner of Spokane into a safe place where they can raise families. How creating communities without fear makes for a less family-friendly city, I don't know.

Now, allow me to prognosticate: Once the district is up and chugging along, slowly at first I'm sure, there might be an influx of homosexual men and women. After that, when violent and sexual crime rates do not go up, people will gradually lose some of their ignorant fear, left with only more general ignorance. Then, after a sufficient amount of time has passed and the memory of the fear is gone, they'll start coming to Queer Street because the Trading Post has cheap organic food, Gayspresso has fair-trade coffee and/or because the fag bakery makes a mean ciabatta. And, once there, on the street, they might bump into Bob, from church, or Chandra, from accounts payable. Nice people who, strangely, don't act the way fundamentalist pastors and legislators say gay people act. They're nice, law-abiding, god-fearing human beings, more or less just like you, trying to make a buck and live their lives. You might still be uncomfortable with who and how they love, what they do behind closed doors, but the thing is, they're doing it behind closed doors, where it can't bother you.

Then, when you hear from your racketball buddy that he read in the local conservative newspaper that queers, on average, make more money than straight people, you decide it might be a good idea to market to them.

And pretty soon, Queer Street's not so much a gay enclave as it is a nice, upscale neighborhood with good food and culture and lots of nice new potential clients and customers. Then, before you know it, Spokane is for real a better place to live, for a lot more people.

Bigotry will never go away, but this is a good first step toward dispelling and reversing ignorance.

Read the full thing here.