Happy birthday to me…

Birthdays are a rather morbid curiosity, when you think about it. All that’s celebrated is said person not dying in the preceding 365 days. Seems to me like a holdover from simpler, bucolic (read: infectious) times, when reaching puberty was considered an outlier, statistically.

I’m 19 today, whoopdee doo. In my country, the significant ages are 16 (driving), 17 (R movies), 18 (tobacco, pornography, the draft, credit cards, legal engagement, or just about anything associated with adulthood), and 21 (alcohol and upper adulthood, such as the capacity to be a legal guardian). I’ve never been one for celebrating my birthday, particularly. In grade school, I would begin by telling people my birthday was January 26th, and by Novembre or so, I changed face and said “January 26th? I don’t know what you’re talking about. My birthday was back on October 8th….”

My “liberal arts” writing class really raises my blood pressure. We’re covering simple texts like Golding’s “Thinking as a Hobby” or LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Nothing difficult, but my clasmates and my teacher never fail to astound me with their inability to grasp even the most basic of philosophical concepts. Fucking egalitarians. They don’t seem to understand the idea that humans are naturally hierarchical. The best part (when asked to describe our “perfect world”) was the pious pill who chimed in “I believe the perfect world is Heaven, like, I don’t know what it looks like, but we’ll all be there someday.” Gee, thanks, you dumb broad, for adding absolutely nothing to the discussion.

The “liberal arts” layer to this silly class means the teacher puts on this desperate danse macabre in front of the room, trying to goad us into having personal revelations by What-Ifing tired platitudes. These people are too deeply entrenched in their unwavering humanism to even debate prgamatism, nihilism, antitheism, or any of those naughty, “dark” ideologies.

Read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” with supplementary materials…

In “…Omelas,” the It child is suffering in its broom closet, and upon that single suffering is heaped the ecstatic happiness of an entire metropolis. Everyone 12 or older must be conscious of this suffering. Why? Because these hierarchical humans must understand that they are high above this Its caste. For that reason and for that reason alone is the paradise maintained. Besides this single two-step hierarchy, there is no authority and no regulaton other than observed etiquette. LeGuin says that the happiness hinges upon the child’s suffering, so it can be inferred that the paradise is a direct consequence of (the population’s knowledge of) the child: it is not so fairy-tale as one might believe.

But they will never get it, these nitwits (Lord, why do I seem so bitter today?). And I will never be free of them.

Happy birthday to me…

I bought something from Hot Topic the other day. I know, I’m ashamed. I got a Jack the Pumpkin King (from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas) lanyard to replace my dorky brown and yellow university one. Mind you, I didn’t buy it for its camp value, the way some self-denigrating teenagers wear Spongebob t-shirts or wax nostalgic for cultural events they weren’t alive to experience. No, I bought it because of my uncanny resemblance to said character, both because of my physical appearance and my morbid cynicism.

But I digress. For those of you who have been living in a cave on a remote island with cotton balls in your ears and your hands over your eyes, Hot Topic is a thriving fixture of malls everywhere, a cozy little niche for counterculture brats that sells everything from full punker regalia to manic-depressive nu-metal albums to Care Bear kitsch. It’s the perfect store for anyone who hates the establishment, wants to die, or just wants to get laid!

The novel thing about this particular store is that they allow —or possibly even encourage— their employees to wear the weirdest outfits they own to work. It’s strange having some Halloween misfit asking if they can help you with anything. Sorry, hon; I’m not the one who needs it.

On the fateful day when I forked over $6 for my little piece of the clichè quiche, my girlfriend, myself, and the cashier who rang up my purchase were the only normal looking people in the store. I must say, the poor guy looked miserable. His coworkers were dressed in knee-high patent leather boots with 1.5 inch soles, fishnets, a leather skirt, a mutant tank top, bright bubblegum-pink hair, and earrings with hoops so big I could fit my fist through them. He, on the other hand, looked as though he should be working in American Eagle.

I don’t exactly like American Eagle, but at least they have the right idea about clothes, albeit for the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, right now, the clean-cut AE/A&F look is as much a trendfuck as anything that Hot Topic has ever rolled out, and at twice the price. Still, nothing sickens me more than some poor teenage schmuck trying to buy into a phony dissident culture, asserting their supposed individuality by joining the pack. The irony inherent here is so thick you could spread it with a butter knife.

I find that the same problem has arisen with what I call the Black Urban Youth culture (or BUY, appropriately enough), which is more or less Blacks, As Described By MTV. A complete departure from every important musical or cultural contribution that blacks have made in their American history, the BUY culture propagates bankrupt “musical” forms, poor social commentary, rampant hedonism/consumerism, and consistently derides education and responsibility. Bring back M.C. Hammer: at least he was “2 legit 2 quit [school].”

I hate to suggest that everyone subscribe to the same, tastefully narrow fashion sense, because then we’re no better off. But too many people perceive a more or less “official” counterculture as being fresh and original, so stores like Hot Topic churn out processed little rebels clutching to their angst and fiery, if misguided, determinism, oblivious to the the looming death of their contemporanæity.

They tried this before, guys, and it didn’t work. Give it up.