China cares about your well-being. The country’s universities aren’t ignoring the crippling anxiety of their student bodies, but rather building whole rooms with foam walls so that kids can work out their issues. There are sandbags for punching, rubber mannequins for wrestling and soundproofed chambers if you need a good scream. Or if you saw someone do something really fucked up to a mannequin.
At Yale we have different cathartic resources, like the gym and alcohol and apple picking.
I have tried only one of the above and found it quite adequate.
Until recently, that is. I just went to the bathroom in Bass Café and stared at the warning label on the baby-changing station for several minutes, which depicts an adult doing various acrobatic moves involving the changing table. “I. Want. To. Do. Those. Things,” thought my brain.
Then someone tried to open the door, and I yelled “one sec” in the panicked way I always do when I’m in the bathroom and someone tries to open the door. I quickly flushed and washed my hands, but then got distracted by my pores for a while in the mirror, until the person tried to enter again.
I opened the door, while her grubby hand was still clutching the handle. AHA! Caught in the act of your slimy impatience! Your bourgeois entitlement! Embarrassed now? Embarrassed???
I need a new release, I think.
Suddenly all my friends, who throughout Yale have “championed causes” and “turned underwear inside-out to maximize use” are now printing out 50 resumes at Tyco on eggshell card stock and plotting their entry into the corporate firmament, which rains shit daily on my life.
Like when I scratched and then shattered and then lost my iPhone last week and had to hunt online for a new one, I discovered my $200 phone had been subsidized and a new one would be twice the price.
“That sucks,” said an angel-faced friend, recently returned from the Out for Undergraduate Business Conference in New York City, where gay people can network and become immensely wealthy but still cool and alternative because they’re gay.
Women were in poor attendance, I heard, because lesbians are still largely too discriminated against to become immensely wealthy, but can enjoy cool and alternative compensation for their mainstream estrangement: veganism, freeganism, environmentalism, hair dye, compassion etc.
To be cool and alternative, I spent four days in political abstention from AT&T, a difficult task given a recent survey of Bostonians showed that a third would rather give up sex for a year than their cell phones. OK yes, I sleep with my cell phone. But that’s because I need it for an alarm. And yes, I sleep with my laptop, but that’s because I often fall asleep mid-tweet. And yes, I sleep with a rabbit, but that was only one time and Lewis fell asleep first, I swear.
“I don’t think your rabbit’s happy,” commented a friend.
WHY? Because it shakes sometimes and lives in its own shit and has nails so long they’re beginning to curl and yellow like that woman from Utah with the long white hair and leathery complexion and curling, yellowing, 25-foot nails?
Yes … maybe Lewis was exposed to a lot of marijuana from his previous owner, but rabbits have a memory of four minutes so …
Yo Lewis, let’s start over, yeah?
I wish everyone had a memory of four minutes. Especially my iTunes.
My Top 25 Most Played is totally lying. I definitely haven’t played Bon Iver songs 206, 105 and 93 times respectively, as my top three spots would like you to think. I do not like Bon Iver. I was very disappointed when I saw Bon Iver in concert last summer. Having Bon, the quaint and elegant singer-songwriter, turn out to be “Boniverre” the indie quartet, was a pretty crushing experience.
(The fun we could have had, Bon, wasting hours away by the lake! How pretty the lake looks today, I say. Whistle me a tune, Bon. Oh, Bon! What a fine whistler you are! And such sweet-smelling hair!)
So what if my friends are joining the corporate world? So what if they’re going to become complicit in iTunes’ algorithmic malice and AT&T’s exploitation and are going to make all this money and build their own gyms and bars and apple orchards and whole auditoriums to fill with foam and sandbags and mannequins and baby-changing tables?
My goals are far more short term. They involve giving Lewis a manicure to the soothing sounds of Bon Iver. I’ve heard ‘they’ are really good.