As the weather begins to take a dismal turn towards arctic and you begin to wonder why “midterms” have already begun, there is just the right amount of anxiety, un-assuredness, and susceptibility to make it worthwhile for me to find other things for you to worry about. I know. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it. Without such societal rules, constraints and unattainable standards, every girl would be fat, Kate Moss would be majoring in biomedical engineering, and every guy would masturbate all day … to cow porn. So give yourself a pat on the back and remember that my being judgmental isn’t a defense mechanism, it’s just an outlet for me to deal with your actual problems. And thus, I commence.
Dear New MacBook Owners:
Facebook.com newsfeed is intense enough as is; throw in my adderall addiction, and you have one perturbed facebooker: If I see one more Brady Bunch-esque, four framed, digitally rendered photograph taken by a MacBook built-in camera at 7 in the morning after a night of reading Kant and Gawker, I might have another epileptic seizure.
The novelty of digital photo editing is just not that cool. No one really cares to see your face warped (it’s f—ed up enough already); no one really cares to see your face posterized in various solid colors (ugly is ugly, no matter how you color it); no one really cares to see you in black and white (because the white offsets any slimming characteristics of the black); and, lastly, no one really cares to see your visage in one Facebook frame four times: You can have too much of a bad thing. Besides, it really lowers the quality of your original photo, which can leave a person who doesn’t know the inside you with a bad impression of the outside you. It also forces me to rampantly peruse your albums for glimpses of your New England country house and tangible evidence of your step-mother’s boob job. Additionally, the rising trend of such pictures on Facebook.com is only indicative of your participation in the back-to-school shopping promotions from Apple. Does free iPod nano with purchase of the MacBook sound familiar? What are you? So poor you need a promotion to get an iPod? Geese, Louise. I am disgusted by you plebeians.
Dear People:
If there’s one thing I hate about coming back to college besides college, it’s sorting between the fact and fiction, i.e. differentiating between the fabricated memories and the real memories I made up in my head. After coming back from summer vacation, I end up forgetting the people I knew, publicly acknowledging the people that I don’t know but practically know via avid Facebook.com stalking (by the way, how was your summer in Croatia?), and losing track of the people I do know but have pretended not to know, such that when I see someone in each case respectively, I end up blatantly ignoring people I once said hi to, I end up saying hi to people who don’t actually know me, and, lastly, I end up forgetting whether I am supposed to ignore or say hi to someone I used to pretend not to know, but forgot whether or not I decided to stop pretending not to know them. I find the latter instance to be the most awkward of all, especially since there are a lot of people I know that I pretend to not know (biblically), and it’s really hard for me to keep track of the ones I’ve decided to start acknowledging and the ones I’ve marked as still being unsafe to address (sorry Flower Lady!).
Joe Aphinyanaphongs may hate MacBook photos on Facebook, but he loves receiving your “personal photos” via email — just don’t be surprised when he sells them to “dirtyivyslutsgonewild.com.” A boy’s gotta fuel his fatty porn habit somehow, right?