an open letter, concerning your pants.

dear girls of western (and some guys),

i hate to keep bitching about your clothes. because it makes me seem petty, and entirely un-intellectual. not that i ever really seemed otherwise, but at least i don't need to rub it in every time i post. but you just keep asking for it!

let me tell you a story.

in 1872, Levi Strauss invented the 'blue jean,' and started a trend that everyone can live with. his sturdy riveted denim pants set the stage for a revolution in non-overall-type pants that can be worn by coal miners and trendy idiots alike. these pants tended to wear unevenly, lending the wearer a look of insouciant disheveledness, perfect for the beat generation. different sorts of washes, treatments, and colorations gave us an unprecedented variety in our pants-wearing options over the decades, from green-jeans to acid-wash, all of which had their own unique charm.

yet one thing bound together this otherwise diverse bunch of indigo pantaloons. they all had two front pockets at one's hips, and two back pockets, situated firmly upon one's butt cheeks. and they had seams which ran, quite logically, down the sides of the pants.

why, why must you tamper with this divinely-ordained blue-jean archetype? there's absolutely no call for it. if it's good enough for a coal miner trapped under thousands of tons of rock, it's good enough for you, ugg-wearing airhead girls.

when you wear jeans with no ass pockets, seams running down the front, or, god forbid, embroidered patterns, you fool with the will of god, as communicated by His bavarian-dry-goods-merchant servant. and why? do you enjoy looking as though you grew up in a trailer park? have you got some aversion to shopping at stores which don't suck? does your mom own a Stitches? or maybe you're engaged in some kind of bizarre make-work project in which your clothes are purchased for you by the handicapped.

and those aren't even all of the possible unholy abominations which have been executed by the fashion-challenged. you guys who wear carpenter jeans, you ought to just go and choke on a scrotum. do you really need that extra little denim doohickey, and the ugly pocket halfway down your leg? how often do you paint things? i'm going to guess never. eat shit. and then get new pants.

and finally, while cargo shorts are laudable for their shoplifting-friendly bagginess, anyone who has participated in the sick fetish which is the 'cargo jean' should, in the classic words of funkyzeit mit bruno be placed on a train and sent bye-bye to a camp somewhere. the same goes for anyone with a pair of jeans that features reflective material of any sort. randy river is basically a terrorist bombing, in clothing store form.

so, in closing; the canonical form of the jean offers you so many choices. colour, finish, wear patterns - the call is yours. even change the size of the pockets, or paint all over them.

but for god's sake, don't fuck with a good format.

sincerely yours,

the rationally-minded public at large

blogging your inadequacies.

it seems as though pithy criticisms of people's attire are a tradionally female and/or homosexual pastime, here in the blogorama and in the remainder of the 'world.' does anyone else think that the term blogosphere is awful? i mean, it's certainly useful. but it's just about the lamest term ever to say. it sounds like something that captain kirk would have to fight and/or sleep with on the barren moon of Tremulon Mector, or some such shit. i just realized, also, that i would love to be able to put footnotes in my blog entries.

but i digress. i too, demand to be able to mock and critique! what with school being back in session, people need to have their failings pointed out more than ever.

i've always been of the opinion that you can tell a great deal about a person by their shoes. so, let's see what broadly-drawn generalizations i can make about people based on some random pictures i dug up on google image search. see where you fit!


if you have a pair of shoes like this, you probably play basketball. and/or talk about basketball. clearly. you have a 'favourite' team, and when they're playing a game, you refer to them in the first person plural. i.e. "we gotta start hustling better out there," or whatever you sporty types play. you think that 2pac is still alive. you're probably wearing sweat pants. you drive a honda civic, and you think it would be "sweet," or even "bitchin,'" if you put some neon lights underneath it. you have never spoken to a girl without imagining how she looks naked. your courses are chosen based on the number of words there are which you can't pronounce in the calendar description.

if you have these shoes, you are not only unfazed by the fact that everyone else has them, you have them because everyone else has them. you don't leave the house without putting on makeup, unless you woke up next to a guy (perhaps wearing a pair of those air jordans), and it's not your house that you're leaving. your tank tops, for reasons unknown, extend well below your ass, covering a good chunk of your tennis skirt. you have never played tennis, of course. when you go to the bar, you get bitchy if you have to pay for a drink yourself. you also get bitchy if you feel the guys buying you drinks are not adequately greased/beetle-browed/grovelling. your low-cut outfits conveniently exempt you from such traditional requirements as speaking, having opinions, and more or less having to do anything yourself.


if you wear shoes like these, you go to business school, or wish you did. you also think that being a CEO is the highest calling to which a human being could ever aspire. somewhere between mother teresa and gandhi. but white, obviously. you drive a BMW on which you have never made a payment. you speak a foreign tongue of "appointments," "scheduling," and "networking." you pay three-digit-plus sums for bottles of liquor at the bar, in the hopes that you can find someone drunk enough to think you're interesting. you're in a fraternity because you hope to one day build your coke-addled roommates into strong corporate partners.


you better be on your way to or from the gym if you're wearing a pair of shoes like these. please tell me you're going to or have been engaging in some type of athletics if you've got a pair of these on. if you're wearing these regularly, then you just don't care about yourself, even a little bit. why do you cut your hair? or wash? or go out in public? you suck. you think that the term 'taste' can only be applied relative to a meal of some form. your pants fasten only slightly south of your bellybutton, and you have at least one sweater with a picture of a wild animal on it. most of your clothes were probably purchased by one of your parents - if they were, you can at least be grateful for that excuse.


if you thought i was going to conveniently omit my own demographic, you thought wrong. if you wear shoes like these, you think that Boathouse is a "skate shop." you skateboarded and/or dated a skateboarder for a few months in grade nine, and thus think that you now have official licence to wear this stuff for all eternity. your ability to criticize the 'corporateness' of others is unhampered by any consciousness of your addiction to branded clothing. you know of at least twenty different ways to refer to marijuana.



if you wear shoes like these, then, personality-wise you're basically the slippers girl, except you like to feel as though you've stuck your foot up a sheep's ass. the world may well have been a better place if you had died to keep the sheep's feet warm. you suck more than the new balance guy, because at least he doesn't think that his shoes look good.


if you're wearing these shoes, you are only marginally a human being. your feet have been eaten whole by rabid foxes. that little dog that you have didn't descend from a wolf, it ascended from a rat. and the fake-tan isn't fooling anybody. if anyone ever doubted that we're all being controlled by mind-rays from mars, here's your proof. i'm going to build myself a tin-foil hat before i start getting the urges to leash rodents and play with wildlife.

now, i'm sure that many of you who read this have found yourselves scathingly critiqued right here. but, as we all know, if you can't take a joke, then the martians have already won. does anyone know if there's foxes in london?

on anger.

here's a page from my philosophy.

there's no point in getting pissed off.

ever.

why?

because it's a huge, ridiculous waste of time. and it's the cause of everything shitty in this world. let's put forth a very simple set of premises and we'll build a bit of a proof, because, well, i'm at work, bored as hell. and it's time to get back into thinking mode! sort of.

premise 1. a state of mind is useful if either:
p1a. it accomplishes or facilitates the accomplishment of some positive outcome.
p1b. or it facilitates the prevention of some negative outcome.

p2. a positive outcome is simply one which the hypothetical agent desires, whilst a negative one is an outcome which the agent does not desire.

p3. if a state of mind fulfils neither the conditions set forth in p1a or p1b, it does not operate for the attainment of an outcome agreeable to the agent in question, nor for the prevention of an outcome disagreeable to that agent.

p4. if an agent is not fulfilling a desirable outcome or preventing an undesirable one, that agent is either acting neutrally (ie not acting toward any outcome at all) or acting counter to their own interests.

conclusion. if a state of mind does not fulfil the conditions set forth in p1, the holder of that state of mind is at the very least not acting in their own interest, and at worst acting counter to their own interest.

now see, that was going to be a lot longer, and was actually going to prove something, but i just smoked a bomber before work and i'm kind of out of it. plus i haven't taken logic for like, five months. or some shit.

but let's work through this a little more intuitively, shall we? some cases in point?

when one has been affronted or perceives that they have been affronted, the instinctive reaction is anger. yet what does this accomplish? gratification, to be sure, but that gratification is fleeting. the respose of anger is, after all, an affront in itself. thus the recipient of that anger will in turn be affronted, and on and on ad infinitum. so, rather than simply getting angry, one must ask oneself what they truly want as a response to their affront.

if the affront in question is petty, one would rather likely be better off to ignore it, as in my personal experience, that which goes undiscussed is quickly forgotten.

if the affront in question is a serious one, then the question of goals becomes important. if the affront is serious enough or the affronty party random enough, that the intended goal is to cut off further contact with the affronting party, then anger is simply a waste of time and mental energy. apart from the visceral joy of getting royally pissed off, you're really only ruining your own moment. if the person was enough of a jackass to piss you off in the first place, they're not really going to be fazed that you're pissed off. indeed, that was likely the point. this goes for the "guy-spilled-a-drink-on-you" type of scenario, i suppose.

but when the affronting party is a friend, or some such, and one's desired outcome is penitence and apology, anger is unlikely to achieve it. instead, anger is counter to one's goals, since it is more likely to provoke indignation and bitterness.

but, in the end, this was a pretentious little exercise in futility, because you can't rationalize being a lazy-ass/pussy/milquetoast/laid-back type of fella who just doesn't get pissed off. anger doesn't have anything to do with rationality. indeed, the more of life i experience, the more that i feel people's actions as a whole have very little to do with reason or logic. instead, people just do what they want, and latch onto whatever reasons for doing so are close at hand. thus we have profiteering disguised as liberation, homophobia disguised as religion, and sourceless bitterness disguised as righteous indignation.

hurrah!

maybe i'll write something a bit less boring next time.

p.s. hello! internet. i'm back in action. alternately boring you/pissing you off/taking up space/being completely ignored by you, with each passing day. oh thank you, gods of information, for this fantastic gift, by which every hapless dullard can give themselves the delusions of grandeur that only exhibitionism can give!

p.p.s. i am the furthest possible thing from interested in hurricane katrina. it's only to be expected that the founders of america's capital of apartheid, boobie-flashing, and dirty-insect-eating would have been dumb enough to build it below sea level. oh good! let's build this coast town below sea level! we're a bunch of slaveowning idiots! thanks, end of story, we can all go back to talking about missing sluts in the caribbean or whatever the hell other diversions CNN has cooked up for next week.

sorry, that was callous. but when every damn website has to mention it... it gets old. flipping through the channels today, amidst concerned-looking news anchors and pre-rendered graphics, i was at least comforted to know that NASCAR coverage is still alive and well, despite the drowning of a good chunk of its fanbase.