School's done. Been busy taking Japanese class. Real busy. Five days a week, four hours a day plus 90 minutes of homework busy. Nothing interesting going on in my life, whatsoever. Thus, prepare yourself for an excruciatingly dull post.
Matt sent me this sketch the other day. He originally drew if for his psychology-student friend who is conducting some kind of psychoanalysis based on artwork from headcase acquiantances.
At first glance, I immediately thought "gay." Perhaps this sketch is Matt's long-awaited and bold "Embrace Me for the Flaming Homosexual Artist I Am" piece for the contemporary visual arts community, which has traditionally been very homophobic. But then, I looked closer at the picture and realized that the art community has never really been homophobic, and Matt's not really gay, and there's no homoerotic content in this picture whatsoever. This was a series of stunningly disappointing revelations.
This raises the question: why do I desperately want to make the assumption Matt is gay?
Maybe I just wish he was gay, so I could legitimately make fun of him for being gay, in that un-PC way that's so popular among rowdy packs of guys these days.
Or ... OR ... ! Maybe I wish Matt was gay for "other" reasons ... ! If you know what I'm saying, wink wink!
And, of course, by "other" reasons, I mean, maybe, if Matt were gay, he could help me coordinate my outfits and give me advice on how to better communicate with women.
Alas, Matt is sadly not gay (which I suppose is good news for his wife), I don't really have any "outfits" in need of coordination (just random pants and shirts whose daily selection is determined largely according to the magnitude of their odor), nor do I have any female situations that might require the counsel of a trusted homosexual.
Sigh. I'm a man with no homosexual friends in no need of homosexual friends.
Anyway, sorry for the lame post. Here's Matt's sketch. I manipulated the colors in the piece so it would better match the color scheme of my overall web page.
PS -- The rumors that we've all heard appear to be true. Errol Jones, aka "Blackass", aka "E-Money", aka "T-bone" (am I missing any nicknames?) has discovered a (surprisingly attractive) woman unoffended by his filthy apartment and vehicle, mismatched socks, and rather creepy sense of humor. At first, I didn't think it was serious, but then Errol related to me that she complimented the texture of shirt of his that he likes to call his "Captain Kirk Shirt."
"I call it my Captain Kirk Shirt," he replied, presumably without an ounce of embarassment, to her tactile sampling of the fabric.
"A Captain Kirk Shirt?" she answered back. "But you're sexier than Captain Kirk."
I know what you're thinking. After hearing James Tiberius Kirk so casually blasphemed, Errol likely fell into a deep rage and spit in her face, or, at the very least, made the "impending backhand slap" hand gesture. Alas, none of these. Instead, he was jubilant.
"Sexier than Captain Kirk!" he cried. "Holy Shit! I didn't think that was even possible!"
And that's how I knew our little man was gone.
9 comments:
This post is reminiscent of the Dave Barry columns I would often read for hours on end while taking craps. That's a compliment. Dave Barry is funny, and any literature consumed while in mid-crap is inherently worthy of high praise. I think I'll print this out and eat a bag of dried apricots, then wait for the magic to happen.
Thanx Thax! I remember the ole Dave Barry book that you kept in our bathroom back in Corbett. Good times! If only my writing also functioned as a laxative. Then my work could be a boon to the masses simultaneously afflicted with depression and constipation.
While I have no freaking clue who Dave Berry is I will comment on you post.. 1)matt is not gay, I know that you know this but I would just like to reinforce this statement based on one simple fact. Who is Matt's favorite actor? Thats right Jean Claude Van Damme. Now ask your self would any selfrespecting gay man admit to watching countless hours of that movie gold we call Van Damme, I dont think so! 2)Maybe errol let this Cap'n Kirk comment slide cause he was waiting for the rufie to kick in? Or maybe she was topless at the time and errol was mesmorized at the thought of a real live naked girl..I dont know its just a theory. Do with it what you will.
Sorry one more thing. Nice picture Matt!!!! It is only out done by two things the first being our old drawings of Garrett Jax and two Jons wonderful pictures of "student". Good times!
BAM! You remember "Student"? That's the first thing I told Matt when I saw his picture. Actually the second thing. The first thing I told him was that his picture was gay. But second was to remind him of "Student".
Remember how much Chris loved "Student"?
And do you remember the time Andy took one of my "Student" prints and hung it up on the art wall, only to get bitched out by Mrs. Melby?
Sigh ... I miss "Student".
Hi everyone.
School's done. Been busy taking Japanese class. Real busy. Five days a week, four hours a day plus 90 minutes of homework busy. Nothing interesting going on in my life, whatsoever. Thus, prepare yourself for an excruciatingly dull post.
Jon sent me this sketch the other day. He originally drew it for his psychology-student friend who is conducting some kind of psychoanalysis based on artwork from headcase acquiantances.
At first glance, I immediately thought "gay." Perhaps this sketch is Jon's long-awaited and bold "Embrace Me for the Flaming Homosexual Artist I Am" piece for the contemporary visual arts community, which has traditionally been very homophobic. But then, I looked closer at the picture and realized that the art community has never really been homophobic, and Jon's not really gay, and there's no homoerotic content in this picture whatsoever. This was a series of stunningly disappointing revelations.
This raises the question: why do I desperately want to make the assumption Jon is gay?
Maybe I just wish he was gay, so I could legitimately make fun of him for being gay, in that un-PC way that's so popular among rowdy packs of guys these days.
Or ... OR ... ! Maybe I wish Jon was gay for "other" reasons ... ! If you know what I'm saying, wink wink!
And, of course, by "other" reasons, I mean, maybe, if Jon were gay, he could help me coordinate my outfits and give me advice on how to better communicate with women.
Alas, Jon is sadly not gay (which I suppose is good news for his wife), I don't really have any "outfits" in need of coordination (just random pants and shirts whose daily selection is determined largely according to the magnitude of their odor), nor do I have any female situations that might require the counsel of a trusted homosexual.
Sigh. I'm a man with no homosexual friends in no need of homosexual friends.
Anyway, sorry for the lame post. Here's Jon's sketch. I manipulated the colors in the piece so it would better match the color scheme of my overall web page.
Hmm I find your last comment to be very well said but have you considered...
This waiting around business isn't for me. I'd like to say these recent days have been busy and productive, but there's really not much for me to do. At the same time, they haven't been relaxing, either. There's just too much stuff I'm really anxious about.
I started shipping out my stuff this week. On Monday, I shipped out two boxes of indispensable books that managed to avoid the dumpster. I used "M-Bags" from the USPS--a good, cheap way to send printed material overseas (thanks to my friend Aaron for the tip, by the way). On Thursday, I sent out the box containing my PS2, George Foreman Grill, DVD Player, some old writing manuscripts, and other miscellaneous stuff. Together, both shipments cost about $200, and, seeing how I likely have about 2-3 more boxes still left (one of which being the ultra-expensive airfrieght for my PC & peripherals), I'm starting to get very concerned about my available moving funds.
That's why I really need my car to sell. I have an ad out in the paper, but that's only drawn a few phone calls. One guy said he wanted to look at it today, but the bastard stood me up! (Usually that only happens with girls, heh heh.) I've invested a lot of money into it recently: the new igntion lock cylinder, an oil change, a carwash + wax, and some long-overdue hubcaps. I've never had hubcaps on it before (they struck me as extravagent and unnecessary), but they're on there now. My car officially looks better than it ever has, but I still can't sell the damn thing. Once it does sell, I'll feel much more financially secure.
On Monday, I drove a van to pick up some international students from DIA. They're Kobe Kaisei students from the school I'll soon be teaching at, and I and another teacher needed to drive them from the airport to their dorms at Colorado State University via passenger vans rented out from CSU's motor pool.
This other teacher/van driver has disturbed me from the day I met him. He frequently discusses how much he loves all things Japanese, especially the women. I've met plenty of people who prefer Asian women, and I've often wondered if this constitutes a so-called "fetish." But now I understand the difference between preference and fetish. Preference means, I think, a natural gravitation toward a certain type, but nothing so single-minded that others of a different type are immediately disregarded. What this other teacher/van driver appears to have, however, is not a preference, but rather a full-blown Asian woman fetish.
Here's what I mean:
Before deciding to go with two passenger vans, the IEP was planning on using one passenger, and one luggage van. This guy was quite insistent that he drive the van with people in it. What's the big deal? The exhausted students usually just fall asleep in the van, relegating them to the same sphere as luggage as far as company is concerned.
When we arrived at the airport, this guy started taking numerous pictures of the students. Japanese girls are, for the most part, far from camera-shy, but they've been sitting on a cramped and hot airplane for the better part of 24 hours. If I were in their position, I certainly wouldn't want some stranger taking pictures of me. (I don't even want to know what he was doing with the pictures afterward. . .)
Later, this guy started questioning the students about their physical dimensions. Not like underwear measurements, but rather height and so on. Strange, huh?
When he arrived at the dorm his students were staying in, he stayed a full 30 minutes longer than I did. What was he doing? Well, according to him, he was helping them arrange their closets and double-checking on them to make sure they were OK before he left. How would you like it if some weird guy helped you unpack?
Overall, I was quite creeped out, but at least it was an educational experience on the distinction between preference and fetish. A fetish seems to entail an obsession or mania, and this guy definately seemed obsessed. The aggravating part of the whole episode was that this guy could get away with doing creepy things like this because the students, who likely haven't met too many Americans, might assume his creepy behavior is just the way American men are. The alarming part is that he might also be a teacher for several of these students at the IEP, and the combination of a lopsided power dynamic and an apparent obsession could create an awful experience for these students. I was planning on informing someone in power, but someone else who was there that night did the job for me (thanks Jordan!), so I can go away to Japan knowing that this guy will be monitored.
But that's about the only thing I really feel settled about right now. I'm having some mixed feelings about leaving Fort Collins. On the one hand, I love this town. I've lived in it for the majority of my life, and I know just about every neighborhood inside and out. I'm comfortable here. On the other hand, I often feel as if I've worn out my welcome. In spite of living here for years, there's only a small handful of people I'd really consider friends.
Oh well. This could just be another manifestation of the cyclical meloncholy I'm often prone to. Or maybe I'm just jittery about the upcoming flight, and my nerves about this are spilling over into other areas of my life. I really hate commercial flying. Really. Here's the truth: I would rather some guy in a safari hat shoot me a dozen times with a tranquilizer rifle and transport me to Japan in a gorilla cage than fly economy class across the Pacific. I'm dead serious, and if anyone reading this can help me out in this regard, I'd really appreciate it.
Anyhoo, enough bitching from me. I'll end this post with a picture by the incomparable Cyril Rolando. I think it accurately reflects my mood.
Hey ... wait a minute ... is someone reposting my posts in the comment section? At first I was annoyed at the possible plagiarism, but then, I was so entranced by the high-quality writing I had no choice but to be delighted!
It's like "greatest hits" in the comment box!
Hey everybody thanks for tuning into the all jon all the time blogspot.. heres another oldie but a goodie off the the request line going out from Jim in salt lake to his sweetie in big rapids michigan..
Things are going fine and dandy here in Japan. It's a rather funny place, but I like it. Job's good. School's good. Apartment's good. Neighborhood's good. Neighbors . . . could be worse. I'm pretty much finished grading, and now the only thing left on the calendar is this silly little 3-day "summer session." After that, two months of probable nothingness, with a nice 10-day Indonesian vacation in the middle. Although I'm bracing for dull tedium, I'm sure some interesting and blogworthy events will occur, and I'll keep you posted on those. Also, if there are any questions about life in Japan or anything else, feel free to use the comment feature to air them. (As I typed that last sentence, I felt a dire premonition settle upon me . . . no telling what kind of retarded questions I might be forced to field from Errol, but I'll do my best to answer even his.)
That said, in anticipation of the tremendous downtime, I feel a need to add something to this blog. In addition to the orgasm-inspiring artwork, I'm going to start republishing my old Collegian "Cageliner" columns here. I do this mostly out of vanity, somewhat out of nostalgia (you win, Zach, you magnificent, sentimental bastard!), but also slightly because I feel the need to archive my rantings electronically--preservation through the nebulous vagaries of the internet as opposed to the shaky confines of my aging and rattling hard drive. I'll put them in a different font--the elegant "Lucida Grande"--to differentiate them from the rest of the post. That way you can tell when current info ends and old news begins.
We'll begin with my first column, dated August 28th, 2000. Wow--Almost six years ago. In this inaugural piece, I savage teachers. This topic choice was a nod to my first "Soapbox" editorial, which was printed by The Coloradoan some six years before (1994!) and also savaged teachers. That little escapade nearly got me kicked out of school and it still represents what will likely be my life's greatest achievement--the pinnacle of my existence. Sigh. . . it's been entirely downhill since the 9th grade. When the Collegian decided to hire me, I chose to target teachers in my first column in the hope that it would get my newspaper career started on the right note.
This piece also features research--how naive I was to think I needed solid facts to write opinion columns! How ignorant I was to assume that the editors of the Collegian might expect that from a columnist! My boss at the CSU bookstore receiving department thought I'd made a possibly racist comment in comparing Washington D.C. schoolchildren to primates at a zoo; he pointed out that most D.C. schoolchildren are of African descent, and in certain racist circles, simian comparisons are a pejorative mainstay. I say millions of schoolchildren of all races and creeds are as stupid as monkeys, most of them grow up without even slightly augmenting their intelligence, and many are often hired for tenured careers in academia (e.g. CU's dearly departed plagiarizer, fabricator, and non-Indian Ward Churchill). Also, notice in paragraph two my contempt for extremists from both right and left sides of the American political landscape. I disliked extremists back in those days (still kinda do) and tried to blast both sides in a lot of my columns.
Anyhoo, I babble. I forget the headline this was printed under, but that's OK because I didn't write the headlines. Enjoy!
Every time a new report is released illustrating the bumbling idiocy of our nation’s public school students in comparison to kids from other countries, the inane debate over why our education system is failing reignites, demonstrating that our nation’s educational pundits seem to place well below the average intellectual caliber of the graduates of our schools.
Inflammatory reports, like “95% of American fifth graders believe Uranus is the capital of Algebra” or “when asked who the father of our country was, 62% of 10th grade students responded ‘true’,” are usually harbingers of an impending inundation of moronic explanations from “experts”. Absurd rationalizations range from “God is transforming us into wretched imbeciles because prayer has been removed from public schools” to “our standards of testing are race biased, gender biased, or biased against homosexual elementary students.”
Despite the fact that virtually no group affiliated with public education ever seems to take any responsibility for the mess, a loud-mouthed contingent of our noble and selfless “educators” often tend to be a major source of some particularly empty-headed solutions. While their conclusions have been deemed valid in the court of public opinion, the sad fact of the matter is statistics indicate their proposals are actually woefully ignorant of the way education in America works.
For example, one “solution” constantly parroted by the education establishment goes something like, “if we educators were paid more, then the quality of our teaching would undoubtedly increase.” Essentially, the higher their salary, the better the education.
However, according to a February report entitled “Report Card on American Education” published by the American Legislative Exchange Council, there is no noticeable correlation between teacher salary and student achievement. Minnesota and Iowa, for instance, ranked respectively first and second in the nation in student performance based upon ACT, SAT, and NAEP standardized test scores. Keeping in mind the education establishment’s “higher salary = better education” equation, Minnesota and Iowa teachers earn substantially more than the national average for these results, right?
Wrong. The average instructional staff salary in Minnesota is $40,320 a year, 21st in the nation, and Iowa’s average teacher salary is a paltry $35,277, ranking them 35th. Teachers in New Jersey have the 3rd highest average salary, but their students rank only 29th in terms of achievement. Over the past twenty years, New Hampshire has raised its average teacher salary 44%, more than any other state, but their average total SAT score has only risen by .2%. On the other hand, Illinois’ average SAT score has shot up 8.3% over the same time period, but they’ve only increased their teachers’ salary by 7.31%.
Another myth propagated by the education establishment is the notion that if schools had more money to spend on students (for essentials like jump ropes and glue sticks) then the kids would perform better. However, New Jersey, ranked 29th in student achievement, spends more money on each pupil ($10,900) than any other state, and Washington DC comes in second at $10,300 in expenditures per student. How are students in our nation’s capital faring scholastically? Well, let’s just say they’re doing slightly better than the state of Mississippi and the primate exhibit at the San Diego Zoo.
When taken into account all of the information indicating little to no connection exists between public school funding increases and student achievement, one is forced to question the motives and thought process of the mainstream education establishment and their extremely vocal tools. I don’t mind the National Education Administration and their eternal quest for more funding, but I would be far likely to support public education funding increases if the educators themselves could manage to swallow their pride and admit a shred of responsibility for the sorry state of education in America.
The efforts of the good teachers in the public school system -- the quality few who do an outstanding job despite the lack of money or recognition -- are often overshadowed by the constant, asinine call for more money to be indiscriminately thrown about.
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