"You're Still Young": The Trump Card That Isn't Always True

        Though it we may share a hemisphere, South America and North America may as well be different worlds. If Canada is the ill fitting hat that the United States often forget it has on, then South America is our penis. One thing that always bothered me about our penis, which encompasses countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Columbia, is the stories of these crazy rats I always hear about. Apparently these things are almost the size of dogs, or if there was a dog that was the size of two normal dogs, it would be that... and like Beethoven dogs too, not like Paris Hilton-this-one-goes-with-my-purse dogs. Okay, I may be exaggerating. New York is probably the only area on U.S. soil with rats that even come close to rivaling these genetically modified dog-rat hybrid beats that could not have been made for any purpose short of Pokemon-style arena battles. South America is cray... Well, mostly cray.

     If you were to take a seven-year-old from Mexico and a seven-year-old from The States, and, hell, let's take a seven-year-old from China and two from South Africa... If you took these kids, with their boogers and their childish energy and their disparate cultures, you could almost guarantee that each had at least one thing in common: They think old people are smart.

    Now, chances are I have some sort of bias that I'm not fully aware of, being a young person myself, but it drives me crazy when a person uses age as rank. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha spoke about the correlation between age and wisdom. He said that age does not always make men wise because someone may have grown through ignorant means. While this is usually true in extreme circumstances, and experience usually comes just by living, no man can learn everything the world has to offer, the most challenging of these, for some reason, being tolerance.

   Now before I go any farther, I'd like to admit that I'm intolerant about a lot of things: James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, Starbucks drink sizes, James Franco just as an actor who actually somehow works. The list is nearly endless. I do know one older gentleman, however, who is intolerant to the point that, if he really wished, he could easily play the role of Carl Fredricksen in the live-action rendition of the film Up! He's not a bad guy, however. He's mostly socially progressive, so it's usually more ridiculous things than anything likely to offend or upset anyone. 

    Still, I wonder where the animosity comes from. Is it some kind of node that grows in one's brain after years of exposure to pessimistic viewpoints? I doubt that's it, as I already see friends my age taking on some "grumpy old guy" traits while I sit in the corner with my rainbow bandana on bobbing my head back and forth to "Take on Me" by 80's pop band A-Ha. 

People really should do studies on this crap. It may even lead to a cure for douchebaggery.

Peace out my little gustas!

- Fuju

The Internet: An Alien's Guide to the Human Race (YIKES!)

          A couple years ago, comedy sweetheart and amateur Circus strongman Jon Stewart wrote something that, should it be discovered by aliens centuries down the line, will be a perfect explanation of human history. It was called Earth: Everything An Alien Tourist Needs To Know About the Planet After Human Beings Are Gone, a title so long, it rivals the band names of most underground rock groups in pure syllabic content (See Sleepy Time Gorilla Museum.) The book did a fantastic job, and would be the perfect guide for any alien seeking to know what Earth was about, IF it was in fact the first and only book any alien may find. Imagine if they didn't find a book at all.
     
       Assuming, naturally, that the aliens in question are mentally evolved floating prisms with limited telekinesis, we would assume that they also possess some sort of reverse EMP ability capable of turning the lights back on long after they expired. These beings would then have access to the Internet....

OH! MY! GOD!

     After cycling through an archive of porn akin to a nekkid Tower of Babel, they would eventually find their way to the lost worlds of Tumblr and Twitter. To otherworldly visitors, the first of these would probably seem like the forum of a massive organized religion. Assuming they had no need for Gods, as floating thought-prisms tend not to, I can't help but think they would find it strange that sentient beings once worshipped both the Love Gods Ren and Stimpy AND the Trickster/War God masquerading as a healer. If they had a working knowledge of pantheons, they would have already seen this idea many times over (As we have in Greece, Egypt, etc.) , but as a new concept, it seems disorienting.

    Twitter would probably seem like an open journal written by... well... pretty much everyone. They would discern the people of influence from the lowly peons by number of followers, which would actually be pretty spot on. They may, however, wonder why those with the greatest followings seem to have the least to say about anything of worth. And that's just our celebrities!

   Facebook wouldn't be an issue, as 50-some-odd years prior to the fall of man, it will become sentient and fly off into the cosmos in search of a more advanced computer system to integrate with. By the time the aliens come, the Facebook program will be how they flush their toilets.

- Fuju

This Guy's Glory Days

        Today I've been piecing together a new song for the Youtubes, as well as studying for tests and how to be a grown up. I'm writing this post as a break from the madness. The song's theme, which is mostly all I've worked out beyond a few lyrics, is a tribute to the 90's and how it affected those who were just little sprouts at the time. I love Kurt Cobain, but I can't even remember if I knew who he was when I was 6 or 7 (My sister may have listened to him. I didn't quite know her very well beyond that she was taller than me.) But this song is about the things that were on my radar at the time, not what I found out I missed 10 years after (Sorry, Operation: Desert Storm.) I think it's important, at least to me, for that perspective to be represented.
   
        I got most of my news through cartoons, and by teenagedom had a surprisingly extensive knowledge of pop culture. I knew Einstein was like the top dog scientist (He was Dexter's Idol), the President played an instrument (thanks to Animaniacs and an inquiry to my parents as to who Bill

Zach Morris taught us drugs
are bad every weekday morning at 7 and 7:30

Clinton was), and it just got bigger from there. I watch kids' television now, and most of the stuff is just brain filler. Every TV show doesn't need to have a Socratic epiphany, but at least be creative (Google "Annoying Orange"... I dare you.)

      What was more important than learning lessons from television was, shockingly, learning lessons from learning. I grew up at the tail end of the days where parents didn't care just enough. For me, there were emotional blockades that didn't give me a lot of social time, or even many people to make any such time with (x didn't have many y's to = fun.) Regardless, I managed to skin my knee enough to learn a small fraction of the lessons most people learn by adolescence. Most importantly, I learned to spot a Doucheface McAssFlapper when I saw one. Still, I didn't get as many chances as others to learn how to identify every variety of asshole, and that's gonna come out in this song.

     In a way the 90's were better. I didn't know a lot about responsibility, so I didn't know enough to care. On the flip side, I had struggles on an astronomical scale, and just lacked the sense to comprehend them. It's sort of inverted now. I've tackled my major demons, so now I have time to sweat the small stuff. Still, with everything horrible, and I mean truly horrible, that happened with me then, I can't help but miss it whenever I see something I recognize from the decade. So if it's not the actual events, maybe I miss how I thought: The simple, cheery, yet utterly profound way that children, particularly children in my shoes, see things.

- Fuju

Lena Dunham: America's Quirky Ishtar with Better Hair

            The biggest trait my girlfriend I share, and what probably makes us such good friends, is that we love when weird things make us feel good. Big-eyed animals take up probably 80% of our Facebook messages. We also enjoy the handful of hipster cartoons that have popped up in recent years (Most of our shared TV time is spent between Adventure Time and Gravity Falls. Otherwise our tastes are on entirely different polarities.) In the past month, however, we’ve found ourselves trading our cartoon lederhosen for HBO’s Girls, a show that, while certainly weird, is built so much around realism that I had to convince myself it wasn’t some very well lit, high quality, Real House-Girls of New York Something-Ruther. There are also boobs. It’s really the perfect thing.

            If my unfinished garage apartment was the world, and my Playstation 3 every governing body therein, I would tell you that Lena Dunham, Girls’ writer, producer, lead and Disney chipmunk is the most important person in the world. My girlfriend and I treat our viewing sessions as rituals (We’re still working through the Season 1 DVD) and like to ingest copious amounts of alcohol to make the whole experience a little… sweeter. With the show’s legion of fans practically from the start, it’s not unlikely that other couples, groups, or creepy stalker dudes have similar rituals. There are times when I think Lena Dunham’s star is so big that she could be more akin to a being of worship, and I mean that in the Tiki / Small Black Statue with a Giant Dick sense, than a talented individual.

            Aside from being just adorable, Lena Dunham is probably the oldest young person I’ve ever heard speak. She has deeply thought out opinions on things like death and sex that other young people are too drunk to think about, and that older people are too old to care about. I can see all her interviews over the next ten years being collected into a 2035 Anthology of Philosophers. She’s got that kind of crazy, and she’s throwing it up all over us.

            While speaking about her grandmother to Rolling Stone, she gave some insight into the importance of work ethic: “How do we ever just sit around loafing if we’re just going to die? How can people take a life and just waste it?” Guys, Benjamin Franklin is back… and he got hot.

            One of Dunham’s definitive traits is her tendency to go buff when playing Hannah Horvath, the rather promiscuous lead in Girls. Critics of the show have called the nudity excessive. I say the same about their presence in any community of living humans. While Dunham herself has said the nudity is present for the purpose of making sex awkward, I believe it can be more enticing than she intends. I wouldn’t be surprised if Girls replaced Barry White as the baby-making ambience for some very small niche group of hipster lovebirds.

            Between the sexual, philosophical, and emotional influence Lena Dunham has on her fans (or maybe just me in particular) Girls is starting to seem more like a religion than a show. Or maybe it’s just good, and Dunham is just one of those Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac artists with a mind for more than just making money off her product. Yes, I just compared a 26-year-old girl to Bob Dylan. Fuck you.

- Fuju