The Sociology of Breakfast

I am a stranded hiker on a mountain of term-end work, so obviously I spent twenty minutes composing a graph that documents my eating habits.

The website of _____ College/University has a handy feature that tells you the precise minute you swiped your ID to get into the dining hall (it also tells you when you did laundry, so keep on the lookout for a laundry-graph-sequel-blog post!). I thus decided to investigate potential patterns in the swipe-in times of all 48 weekday breakfasts I have enjoyed and/or eaten so far this term.

There are grid lines in the background, which makes it official.

Check out that linear trend all up in my breakfast business. Sadly, though, my results are actually not as scintillating as they might first appear. When the two outliers of post-morning-class breakfast are excluded, my average swipe-in times for the first and second halves of the term differ only by a minute, 7:59 AM vs. 8:00 AM.

The power of science teaches us that I arrive at the dining hall at pretty much the same time each morning.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Dear Friend,

If you know me personally, which you very likely do if you read this blog--in fact, I'd say that you are quite potentially a creeper if you started reading this blog after finding it somewhere in the digital netherworlds of the Googular realm--you know that I consider The West Wing to be the grand embodiment of everything television can and should be. It's got smart white women talking, smart black women talking, smart white and black women talking to each other about things other than gender, sex and race, smart Republicans, stupid Republicans, and speeches that simultaneously elicit tears, laughter, and longing for a world in which Josiah Bartlet is really President and C.J. Cregg silences enemies of all that is righteous with a a little snappy Sorkinese.

Then there is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the second-best thing that television producers ever had the good sense to broadcast. High school girls (who care about grades!) and high school boys (who don't care about sports!) take down arrogant vampires and Jabba the Hut lookalikes with a certain irresistible ratio of wit, brawn and cunning that is far too rare in mass media. Plus, Buffy features some very feminist ass-whooping: it's the women who slay and the men who just sort of watch.

Actually, this one Watches.

So, yes, The West Wing and Buffy: two extraordinary pieces of extraordina. But you know how chocolate and lasagna really don't work well together at all? Or how, if you eat too many cookies, all you want to do is sit in a chair, jiggle your legs and groan? I could go on, but all I have are food-related analogies, so instead I'll just get to the point: this is totally unacceptable. Get rid of it, Internet, and while you're at it, take hashtags with you.

Thank you for your consideration.

A Concerned Friend

The Scourge of Humanity

Humanity is afflicted by more than a few scourges, but I have one in particular in mind on this balmy fall afternoon: leaf blowers.

There is something deeply unsettling about leaf blowers. Maybe it's that their very existence is predicated on the WALL-Eesque goal of removing all remnants of nature from human settlement. Yet rakes and hoes, in my opinion, are just fine. No, what's so outrageous about these noisy-ass lawn tools is how unnecessarily and how excessively they pollute our otherwise pleasurable autumn air.

What exactly does the man above hope to accomplish by using a leaf blower? There are no leaves in that photo. All he seems to be doing is displacing some poor earthworms from their homes--oh, yeah, and elevating sea levels, driving polar bears, penguins and other perennial Pixar stars into extinction, flooding New York City, and generally bringing about a secular, human-induced Armageddon.

In conclusion, leaf blowers are the scourge of humanity.

An Original Joke

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Harry Potter.
Harry Potter wh--
EXPELLIARMUS.

There are at least three dimensions to this one; think about it!

A Pottermore-Inflicted Existential Crisis

I finally received my Pottermore early access last night. Digital events ensued, and now I have some proverbial things to get off my chest. So let it be written, so let it be done.

I'll stop mincing words. Let them stay roughly chopped instead. There were not a number of digital events that I found disturbing, bewildering, strange and demeaning--there was really only one. I got Sorted into Hufflepuff.

Badgers are easily run over by cars.

I am a pretty tolerant and accepting person. I have friends who claim to dislike J.K. Rowling's masterworks. I even have friends, if it can be believed, who have never cracked open one of her sacred texts yet who have seen every single one of Warner Bros.' cinematic heresies.

But when I found out that I am, in fact, a Hufflepuff, and that I have been deluding myself for twelve years about having qualities of wisdom, daring or even cunning, I let out one giant obscenity. Hufflepuff, after all, is the house of "the rest," taking every magical (and, yes, fictional) 11-year-old from the British Isles who does not exhibit any remarkable demonstration of a personality. It has the common room in closest proximity to the kitchens, presumably so that its gluttonous students can snack between meals. I'm also pretty sure that each of the other house mascots eats badgers.

There is no conclusion to this sad story. My intellectual capacity is probably not strong enough to develop one.

A Jimmy Lolcat II

Two out of two professors agree: my humor is "for the most part well-placed." I will confirm this sound endorsement with a second Jimmy lolcat.

Jimmy Carter show'z meshured thinkin!!!!11

Cupcakes

This morning, in the baked goods section of my college dining hall--not the dungeon-like one with the more complete salad bar, but the one with a slightly more pleasant ambiance and rather less good food--I saw a perplexing sight. It was an array of cupcakes. Now, seeing such an unapologetically non-breakfasty dessert on my first morning of classes--in my choice of chocolate or vanilla, no less!--was enough to catch my attention; but what was on these cupcakes, far too appetizing for 8 am, was even more bewildering. Formed in icing atop a chocolate or vanilla base were the words "I [heart] NYC."

My initial, early-morning reaction was to pick one up. After all, I do love New York. I am from New York! Plus, it was a cupcake. I could save it for after my first classes.

Then I showed the cupcake to my friend. "Wait," I said, my neurons quickening as the drowse of the morning began to slowly wear off. "Do you think this is a 9/11 cupcake?"

My friend the dormant blogger agreed. There were no other possibilities. Football is a favorite theme of our dining hall cupcake decorators, but New York City (thankfully) lacks its own team, and ____ College/University is sufficiently far from the city to justify a show of New York pride.

I ate the cupcake, but I am still not sure what to think of the sentiment of 9/12 cupcakes. Sure, the design was certainly less offensive than what they could have possibly conceived of, but maybe it would have been for the best to keep recognition of the 9/11 anniversary off cupcakes entirely. Or, I guess, we could just as easily have gone without cupcakes for breakfast.

What do you think?

Standards of Excellence

Hi friend,

My semi-regular blog posts are back in full force. They are, in fact, so forceful that I've heard they were caused by some tropical cyclogenetic activity in the Caribbean. Lock up your windows and your local evening news reporters!

Beginning yesterday, the blog known as From a Concerned Friend shall be even more concerned and even more tangential. I will no longer hesitate to write something just because I have no ideas. Whatever I find in the corners of my mind is what I will relate to you in beautiful Times New Roman. Unadulterated concern, like the murky detritus at the bottom of a sieve, is what you will get.

Still, I promise you that no matter how lowly my blog may fall, and no matter how minimally I may censor my every thought from flowing into interweb space for all eternity, I will never, ever resort to bullet points.

Yours forever, at least in digital form,
A Concerned Friend

Jimmy: a Lolcat

Why, hello. Why hello? Hello because it's been four months since I last mustered the willpower and finger dexterity to tap out a message to my "many" eager reader"s".

And here we are again! The West Indian Day Parade has signaled the beginning of a new school year with its pounding beats that drown out the rhythm of my own heartbeat, its helicopters buzzing overhead, its sporadic gunshots, and its cries of deeply entrenched racism--so I guess I'd better get back into the swing of reading and writing before reading and writing take a swing at me.

Here is a summer news-inspired lolcat to tide you over while I continue to regain sensation in my brain matter.

 

We can has peace in teh holy land!!!!111

Breaking News

Osama Bin Laden was killed last night in a top-secret, CIA-run operation. His body was buried at sea.







So that would have been impressive to report had I announced it, oh, 17 hours ago. It is amazing how a partial rotation of the earth can render an entire amateur blog post immaterial.

 Africa is threateningly large! Can we get a Mercator projection going on up in here?

Eastertime Excitement

I guess I should start off by addressing my four-week hiatus.

Dear Four-Week Hiatus,
The other day, inundated with medieval Christian imagery, I realized something. I realized something worth blogging about!

It's likely you know this story better than me, but I'll do my best to recount the basics. One day, a little baby named Jesus was born. This was a pretty unusual birth because his mother was a virgin (Give me a break! I'm sure she got around.*). Jesus also turned out to be a pretty unusual guy. He did a lot of good things, like clean people's feet and revive the dead and give good speeches. For some reason, however, the Romans and/or other Jews were not too pleased with Jesus, so they sentenced him to death by crucifixion.

Pretty harsh! The main point of this story, though--apart from all those bits about doing good on earth and whatnot--is that crucifixes are pretty deadly. Go into any church, except those silly Lutheran ones,** and you'll see a bleeding or otherwise visibly distressed Christ bound to the cross, on the verge of death or whatever else befell him before his body disappeared from his tomb.

Flash forward to the twenty-first century, the era of iPads, eyeglasses and independent Ireland. Today, the main usage of the cross is not in the capacity of a murder-or-incapacitation-of-the-Messiah device, but rather in the following way:

The Red Cross: if this ain't reappropriation of religious imagery, I don't know what be.

By the 1860's, when Wikipedia says that the International Red Cross was begotten by (most likely) a number of non-virgins, the cross, unlike the Jews, must have lost its connotation of "Jesus Killer."*** Otherwise, it would have taken a great deal of insensitivity--much like that which I display in this blog entry--to venture out onto the battlefield under the banner of the crucifix and heal the wounds of good Christian soldiers.

Happy Easter!

A Concerned Friend

*God, please don't kill me. I was just joking.
**Just kidding, I swear! I even have Garrison Keillor's autograph.
***Killer Jesus, on the other hand, might make a good side-scroller game.

More Loss Than Maintenance

It is hard to be deprived of my native language--so hard, in fact, that I now believe the maintenance-loss theory of language acquisition to carry more weight than I did previously. Look how crappy that sentence was! Don't you believe it, too? Another result of my Englishlessness has been my utter neglect of my blogging duties. Sorry. Forgive me. Thanks!

What struggling through sentences in this mysterious foreign tongue reveals even more convincingly than a confirmation of the maintenance-loss hypothesis is my own speech patterns. I have gained a great deal of awareness on how I conceptualize and produce my utterances since, speaking in a language I know cripplingly worse than my own, I have had to consciously mull over my lexical and syntactic choices every time I open that beautiful mouth situated on my face.*

So what are my revelations on my language use? I have come to realize that I am an awfully vague speaker. I use useless filler phrases such as "or something" just about every other sentence, I rely heavily on spatial terms that denote "here" and "there," and I like to qualify everything I say by beginning my utterances with "I think" or "I wonder." But maybe that's just the narcissism talking.  

 Narcissus and Echo, ECHO, ECHO!

*I forgot whether everyone in the U.S. has mouths on their faces--here they definitely do, though.

Fishwords

Holy mackerel!

This blog hasn't been updated since the Mets won the pennant. Zing! Speaking of "zing," or, I guess, speaking "zing," I would like to issue a warning to you on behalf of all who enjoy the occasional word game. My warning is what follows in bold, if mere placement of the warning directly following the statement describing its delivery was not clear enough: the Scrabble dictionary is an anti-intellectual, consumerist, pro-life conspiracy of corporate America. OK, so I have only anecdotal evidence to support its position on abortion. You may solicit that evidence directly from me, since my keen journalistic integrity forbids me from posting hearsay. But play a game of Scrabble with one of those middle-aged Jews (yes, you) who has memorized those ridiculous Scrabble-ordained 2-letter combinations and the slang words that have been deemed acceptable by that corrupt multinational "toy"-maker known as Hasbro, and you will not only discover the insidious way by which the Scrabble dictionary manages to sustain itself, but you will also, frustratingly, lose.

I propose a boycott of the Scrabble dictionary. Maybe we should just play more Bananagrams, though.

Vagueness City, Ambiguity Nation

Friends, frenemies and randos who find my blog by Googling "obama earwax,"

Soon I will be spending an unspecified amount of time in an unspecified foreign land. An unspecified result or results shall arise as a result of the temporary relocation of my person and accompanying soul. I may blog more frequently or less frequently, accidentally record my blogular thoughts in the language native to the land to which I shall be traveling (French? English? Swedish? Korean!?), or even turn "From a Concerned Friend" into a series of photos of ceiling lights.* As I said two sentences ago, what will come to pass in terms of blogs, and, indeed, Libyan uprisings and Japanese nuclear crises is really a mystery to everyone except the divinity of unknown gender and person who lives
"upstairs." Actually, there are plenty of religions that don't ascribe to the concept of an omniscient, heavenly-dwelling god, so, I guess, nobody knows.

Heaven is most certainly full of manatees.

Would you like to know something cool? How about two things? Yeah, I'll bet you do! But wait! Don't get too excited or you'll accidentally close your browser window.

OK. One cool thing is that manatees are flexitarians--that is, their main girth comes from a solidly herbivorous diet, but they occasionally eat small marine animals by accident while browsing on sea vegetables and the like.

What a manatee would not eat by accident is a Golden Opulence Sundae from Serendipity 3, a restaurant on the Upper East Side (of Manhattan, you dolt). This occurrence is unlikely to transpire because the Golden Opulence Sundae falls within the set defined by things that are desserts, a characteristic of which is a tendency to be found on land rather than in the ocean. Furthermore, the humans who fabricate this particular sundae have a rather strong impetus to keep it out of the water, since it holds the Guinness World Record for most expensive sundae. It costs $1,000. I will eat one when I am rich.

Until we meet again, but before I hit the jackpot and move to this building,
A Concerned Friend


*Wait, that would be an amazing blog...and, according to Google, it already exists in at least one permutation. All right!

Spring Begins Tomorrow

I haven't been a responsible blogger recently. I bet you've been concerned for me, as I am so frequently concerned for you; but, unlike that which I bestow upon you, yours is quite unnecessary concern. You see, my cerebral cortex is undergoing a much-needed period of rehabilitation in which the edges of my gyri and sulci loosen up, play a little bridge, and go kayaking.

Yes, I did spend time making this.

Being on this "spring break" has also afforded me the opportunity to read. Although I have not yet taken that opportunity, I would like to start now. Have you ever read a book? What book was it? Did you like it? Leave me a comment and tell me about reading.

A Concerned Friend

For Cornelius

Yesterday I got a fancy new computer. It will be replacing Cornelius, who has served me for five years and two days with grace, poise and, towards the end of its stint as my laptop, a rather grating noise emanating from his fan that was once mistaken for an electric shaver being operated in an adjoining room.
 
Cornelius was a miracle laptop. A few weeks before I first headed off to ____ College/University, Cornelius stopped turning on. The folks at the--let's call it the "fruit stand"--informed me that a repair would be more costly than a new laptop. I took my large aluminum paperweight home, happy, at least, that it had lived to see the election of our first biracial president. "Yes we can!" my computer said, and allowed a hard drive hanging around the house to make it functional once more.

This is Cornelius. It has rested on a lap stand for four years because my thighs would otherwise have melted long ago.

It is hard enough saying goodbye to a computer I have sort of anthropomorphized, but at least I don't know how to drive. It would probably rack me with guilt to give up a car with those neotenous headlights. At least personal computers don't have human features, am I raight?