At the turn of the academic school year, I find it imperative to look toward the future and plan my next couple semesters of studying in Austin. It will be important for my duplex to provide for me an atmosphere conducive to excelling in academia. In it's current state, it is quite apparently the home of a 19 year old. Unfortunately, I'm not 19 anymore--I'm no longer a boy. I am 20 now. I know, I know--it's a hard concept to comprehend. I don't understand myself; it feels as if I grew a whole decade on the night of May 25th. Nevertheless, I'm 20 now, and I need to implement some changes to reflect my new-found maturity.
I will start with the purchase of a few items.
1. Fancy pots and pans--probably of the stainless steel variety. Having a nice set of pots of pans says a lot about a man. It shows that I like food, that I care, and that I'd make a great husband one day. The fact that I'll never use them will also be of benefit. I'll be able to proudly display my spotless pans, and people will even think that I clean them thoroughly. I chose the stainless steel ones over the non-stick teflon ones for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'll never be using them, so I don't care whether the surface is prone to sticking. Next, stainless steel is a lot more shiny, and finally, I can use them as a mirror sometimes. Every man should invest in some stainless steel pots and pans. If a burglar ever tries breaking in of if John Goodman comes to assault us some more, they can serve as weapons too.
2. Criterion Collection DVDs. I have a tv rack that I built from some cinder blocks and mdf that needs some DVDs to fill the shelves. For those of you that don't know what these are, the Criterion Collection is a highfalutin company that packages DVD versions of movies they consider "important classics." Most of them are old or foreign, so just having them on your shelf makes you look like a film aficionado. They'll make for a wonderful addition to my room, no matter who I have over. If Andrew Foy is over, he'll most certainly tell me about how each of them sucks/rocks, which shots were his favorites, and he'll surely comment on the directing. If Brett Blieden comes over, he'll look to see if I have Zohan yet. If anybody else is over, they'll exclaim "Ooh, I've heard about these! Do you have any Kurosawa? I've never seen his movies, but he's the only important film guy I can think of." With me being me, I will most likely not have the attention span to watch any Criterion Collection DVD and will probably just throw out those DVDs and replace them with my 20 DVD compilation of The Fresh Prince of Bellaire. For a 19 year old, it is perfectly permissible to have Fresh Prince of Bellaire DVD cases on the shelf, but now that I'm 20, I need something more sophisticated. Just pray nobody opens the cases.
3. Fondue set. Grilled Cheese? How old am I? 13? I'm not a teenager anymore--which means the only cheese I eat is melted in a bowl and then scooped out with bread on a stick. I don't want people getting the wrong impression about me, so I'll conspicuously leave the fondue set out on my coffee table for everyone to base judgments upon. Out of fear of spilling molten cheese on my arm, suffering from cheese burn and then being on the disabled list for a while, I probably won't use the fondue set either.
4. Finally, I'll need a globe. I'm going to put the globe on my nightstand to give people the impression that I reference the globe all the time. This strategic placement of such a strategic object will cause people to immediately conclude that I'm worldly, well traveled, and care about things that happen in places farther than Clowndog. (I hope their phone lines are back up so I can use my credit card again!) During house parties, I'll spin it and then while pointing aimlessly, my guest will inevitably say, "Huh, that's where Zambia is," as if they'd been wondering for a long time, but never had a globe to resolve such a conundrum. A globe seems to be the most practical investment on my list today because it can quite easily incorporate itself into my everyday life. For example, I won't need to carry different maps for different places anymore. I can just take the globe with me and navigate to wherever I need to go. I can ditch google maps and my garmin navigation system! This way, when Andrew Foy calls me at 7:45 in the morning for directions, he won't have to wait till I'm around a computer. I can just tell him, "Drive toward Canada, then take a left toward the Pacific ocean, and you should get there shortly." Likewise, if I ever get lost in meyerland, I can easily find my way back to a Muslim country like Syria, Jordan, or Egypt.
With these new changes, I will unmistakably be a real man. I will display my departure from the ever so prime age of 19, and embark on a journey toward the quite factorable age of 21. For now, however, I remain at the delicate age of 20--the most factorable age I've ever been.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
thoughts
Whenever I am asked the question, "How can I become like you, Ibaad?" I am compelled to confess that this is not a question I get asked very often. If you had asked me instead "How did you get like this?" I would have been better prepared to answer your question. But regardless of my obvious discomfort with extemporaneous rhetoric, I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
My identity is centered around my [pastel colored] Shirt-Based Wardrobe. Most people immediately say, "What about the Jeans + Sneakers combination?" But I have to be honest. I don't think Jeans + Sneakers has anything to do with it.
A lot of kids these days are looking for answers. And whether or not they see me as someone who has these answers, they are looking for a role model. And maybe that's what you're thinking. And I am someone who successfully manages to have a [pastel colored] Shirt-Based Wardrobe, so I am qualified to speak on this. And this wardrobe is a good and important thing to know about. So I am happy to tell them about it, although it's not easy for me to say this. I sit them down, I give them a cold drink of water, and I say, "Who am I? Who is God? How are we to live?"
These are difficult questions for people to ask themselves, and to most kids these questions probably seem like a lot of boring nonsense. But on the answers to these questions rests, young brother or sister, your entire fate. I first encountered them in a Houghton Mifflin religion textbook we used in grade school. If you are thinking of these questions in the context of the Shirt-Based Wardrobe, you are on the right track. Just write the questions down in your best penmanship, put the loose-leaf pages in a letter-sized file folder, and put the file folder in a box in the basement of your mother's house.
And then forget, at once, about ever answering these questions.
Go back to playing video games, listening to adult-contemporary stations on your Walkman, crying, and hiding from people. And start realizing that you will never be able—I mean never really be able—to talk to girls, or anybody, for that matter. If you don't know what I'm talking about now, just wait for the day to come when you do know what I'm talking about. For on that day you will be on your way to the Shirt-Based Wardrobe lifestyle of your dreams.
Life ... wonderful, mysterious, and sad. We have a plan for ourselves, and for a few months at a time things seem to work out fine. We're going to learn and improve, study, grow, and one day instruct ourselves and others. But there's no fooling Time. Time is the lecturer of truth. And pretty soon you're back to that Walkman and to those songs that fat women sing to themselves as they're falling asleep. And pretty soon you, too, are back to crying.
What you're going to find, kid, is that there's no heaven anywhere. And all of a sudden you're in the Shirt aisle at Macy’s looking for something to go with the semi-baggy jeans you wear to school or work all the time. You're going to wear a different shirt every day in Spring because every pastel color you have will match a different pastel colored Easter egg. You’ll have no need for a belt, for you’ll never tuck this shirt in.
I don’t expect you to comprehend such a complex concept immediately. There will be takeout, Blockbuster nights, and the lifelong ambition for things just to get quiet in your mind, but once you understand, you too will be unstoppable.
My identity is centered around my [pastel colored] Shirt-Based Wardrobe. Most people immediately say, "What about the Jeans + Sneakers combination?" But I have to be honest. I don't think Jeans + Sneakers has anything to do with it.
A lot of kids these days are looking for answers. And whether or not they see me as someone who has these answers, they are looking for a role model. And maybe that's what you're thinking. And I am someone who successfully manages to have a [pastel colored] Shirt-Based Wardrobe, so I am qualified to speak on this. And this wardrobe is a good and important thing to know about. So I am happy to tell them about it, although it's not easy for me to say this. I sit them down, I give them a cold drink of water, and I say, "Who am I? Who is God? How are we to live?"
These are difficult questions for people to ask themselves, and to most kids these questions probably seem like a lot of boring nonsense. But on the answers to these questions rests, young brother or sister, your entire fate. I first encountered them in a Houghton Mifflin religion textbook we used in grade school. If you are thinking of these questions in the context of the Shirt-Based Wardrobe, you are on the right track. Just write the questions down in your best penmanship, put the loose-leaf pages in a letter-sized file folder, and put the file folder in a box in the basement of your mother's house.
And then forget, at once, about ever answering these questions.
Go back to playing video games, listening to adult-contemporary stations on your Walkman, crying, and hiding from people. And start realizing that you will never be able—I mean never really be able—to talk to girls, or anybody, for that matter. If you don't know what I'm talking about now, just wait for the day to come when you do know what I'm talking about. For on that day you will be on your way to the Shirt-Based Wardrobe lifestyle of your dreams.
Life ... wonderful, mysterious, and sad. We have a plan for ourselves, and for a few months at a time things seem to work out fine. We're going to learn and improve, study, grow, and one day instruct ourselves and others. But there's no fooling Time. Time is the lecturer of truth. And pretty soon you're back to that Walkman and to those songs that fat women sing to themselves as they're falling asleep. And pretty soon you, too, are back to crying.
What you're going to find, kid, is that there's no heaven anywhere. And all of a sudden you're in the Shirt aisle at Macy’s looking for something to go with the semi-baggy jeans you wear to school or work all the time. You're going to wear a different shirt every day in Spring because every pastel color you have will match a different pastel colored Easter egg. You’ll have no need for a belt, for you’ll never tuck this shirt in.
I don’t expect you to comprehend such a complex concept immediately. There will be takeout, Blockbuster nights, and the lifelong ambition for things just to get quiet in your mind, but once you understand, you too will be unstoppable.
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