Final Satire: "Fifty Shades of Success"

                A deluge of somewhat-acidic rain pounds against the glass windows of his apartment, on the forty-second floor on the cheap side of town. Max, distracted as usual, glanced between this natural normality, the glass of whisky in one hand, and his copy of Thoreau's Life Without Principle in the other. The only thing thumping harder than the rain against his window is his tell tale heart. His mind is bombarded to the point of the most unbearable of headaches with questions that hurt too much to answer.
                The year is 2025. Max is a middle-aged man with no family whatsoever. The closest thing he has to friends are the haunting reminisces of figures in his past life, phantoms that could have meant something to him, but didn't. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, his dead father stands beside him, scolding his inability to finish a single sentence of the book.

"How dare you consume such a poison to your precious mind!"

"Would you rather a seven percent solution?"

"How do you expect to get anywhere in life defying those that have authority over you?"

"Get where? To a higher degree of education? To a more lucrative career? To some greater extent of success?"

                Max is still in denial about losing his job after his first case as a lawyer.

"You have failed young man!"

"With what? What went wrong with anything I did, papa? I am perfect in every objective way with every decision I've ever made!"

                In a fit of despair, he falls over in his chair, hitting his head on the tile floor, and falls into a hazy reminiscence of his youth.

                Falling through the rabbit hole, he wakes up to go to his first day of kindergarten. He recreates this day and more throughout his jovial youth, in which the world seems so quaint and peaceful. He befriends his neighbor, Min, with whom he walks to school. On the way home one day, they stop at Min's house to play hide and seek in the backyard. When Max's parents see this from the windowsill, they ask each other about the educational value this has. They want their child to spend his time learning and getting ahead of his classmates in every way possible. So, his father goes out to get him back inside to practice his multiplication tables.

                Min later on brings the topic up at dinner, asking his parents why Max needs to study all the time. Min's parents laugh at the notion that kindergarteners should spend their free time studying. They then tell the boy to go outside and interact with the world in his free time, only studying when it truly seems necessary.

                When the test on multiplication comes around, Max gets a perfect score, while Min only gets a "C." This pattern repeats itself again and again. Throughout grammar and middle school, Max would learn what he needs to in school, study when he got home, and then do well in school as a result. He spent hours working, and when he was done, literally didn't know what to do. He developed no interests; had no games, toys, or other entertaining possessions, and thought hobbies were silly and useless. However, his father was proud.

                He ends up staring at his ceiling, thinking, doing nothing at all, for hours on end. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. He just looks at the patterns in the ceiling tiles. They had a swirling curviness to them, colored black juxtaposed on the white background of the tiles. They would fold around and make shapes and patterns in his mind. He envisions whatever he learned about in school that day on the ceiling at night, as he knew nothing else to envision. One day it would be a patricianary king, overthrown by the meager and ignorant masses, after learning about the French Revolution. Another, after reading Animal Farm in English, simplistic animals put in their place by the justly greater pigs, pigs who were objectively more valuable to the community because of how smart, productive, and hard working they appear to be to Max.

                In high school, he gets a perfect GPA every quarter. He develops a certain degree of arrogance and intolerance for others who don't attain A's in every class. However, whenever approached in conversation, he responds incoherently and incompetently as he's completely devolved from his former self into introversion. Whenever Min sees him, he attempts to strike up a conversation, only to be eluded by Max's aversion to talking to anyone. Min has a much rougher time than Max in high school. He has perfect standardized test scores, but can't bring himself to enjoy school or hold any ambition whatsoever. Max, just as he can't talk to others, can't talk in speeches either, nor anything requiring interaction, resulting in him taking on group projects by himself, allowing group members no roles in the group at all.

                These antisocial tendencies further his problem with free time, as he's compelled to enjoy nothing, but still has time to do things after all his homework's done. He feels depressed, as others that seemed obviously well-liked don't try as hard as him in school, as others love one another, but he doesn't do anything about it his own inabilities. He instead holds onto the belief that postponing anything errant from the path to success would make everything better and worth it in the end. His parents constantly reaffirm this and force it down greater whenever the topic came up. His life was about his parent's expectations.

                Voices creep into his head, voices of philosophers and scholars, voices of heroes and madmen, or anyone that might have some personality from history class. They affirm this sense of intellectual entitlement he fills himself with on a day to day basis, one that asserts a correlation between success in school and utility to the world. He believes that he's like a god among mortals, impeccable and flawless. But yet, unceasing misery fills him at all waking moments.
                This overflowing jar of despair is only purged to be replaced with anger following the beginning of college. He's now a major in pre-law at Cornell. Being as introverted as he was, he has difficulty attaching himself to his roommate, Mark. This detachment turned to unfriendly hate as the weeks went on. Mark is a sociable pot-smoking free-thinker, who loved to talk and discus and debate and relate. Because of this degree of openness and relatability, he quickly becomes the most popular person on the floor. Max couldn't be more opposite in every way.

                Max gets A's in every class. Mark gets B's in every class. Max detests waking up in the morning, spending his day with self-proclaimed idiots, and falling asleep without saying a word to anyone around him. Mark loves every second of his life, doing as much as possible as often as possible. He spends his days hiking, walking, reading, writing, learning, discovering, talking, and feeling, all while high and with those around the floor to whom he had grown attached. Max starts spending time talking to himself, replacing the voices of others in his head with his own, driving himself through the misery with words of reaffirmation, paving the path to hell in virtuous intentions.

"Almost there Max; it'll all be worth it in the end."

"You've still got some studying that can be done; don't stop now."

                Max was at perpetual war with himself.

                Mark, at the end of the year, decides to switch to being an English and Political Science duel major, rather pre law. Max scoffs at this, with the generic liberal arts critiques of applicability and career-orientation. Mark's last words to Max that school year are:

"Max, if you knew how the world works, you'd be a bored billionaire by now. You see education as a means to a fiscal end. I truly feel bad for you, for feeling like all these 4 years are just to get a better job."

                Max is driven insane. Sophistry peaks in his own mental defense and defamation of this logic. Throughout all of summer, he sits in his room staring at the swirling lines and squiggly patterns in the ceiling, utterly depressed in his apparent omniscience. His father was proud.

                Years later, after graduating Columbia's law school, he went to rent an apartment downtown. The landlord was, of all people, Min. A brief conversation, one wherein Max sat dumbfounded and noncontributing, revealed that after dropping out, Min pursued a business degree on his own at a New York community college, and through networking, connections, and an unmatched degree of social skills, worked his way to a 6 figure paycheck by the age of 25. Max made less as a Columbia lawyer.

                This broken man awakes from his drunken slumber on the floor, crawling his way to the bedroom to snooze once more. The revisiting of his youth continues with his first court case.

                He is hired after searching for a job for months, failing nearly every interview, for a firm in New York. Being the polluted scumbucket of a futuristic city it is, he now represents, in his first case, a company who polluted a near river to the point of nearly killing individuals in a nearby town who used the river. Upon walking into the courtroom, dementia takes his mind to a new extent of disillusionment. The judge, in said case, is the former roommate, Mark. After the first day of trial, in which Max stumbled on his own words innumerably, Mark, like the former neighbor, has a brief conversation about life after college. Mark has a wife, kids, friends from and after college, and an unrelenting love for everything and everyone around him. Max is broken inside.

                The first night after this, Max doesn't sleep a moment. He stares and stares, leering with no movement whatsoever. Teachers and various influences in his life appear around him, barely visible due to his unmoving eyes. All throughout the night, he hears words of admirance, with the sole purpose of making him feel haughty and proud, but actually making him devoid of all feeling. Consumed by apathy, he waits for the night to end. Then, finally, his father arrives, telling him to not socialize with this evil pot-smoking failure of a judge.

                The next night, his mind cries for peace and sanctuary. He continues with his inability to sleep and his frequency of hallucinating. His school-yard chums come up to his bedside admiring his grades on tests and such, asking how and or why he has worked so hard. The only response he could think of was "to do better", but in his mind, he felt it should have been "to be better." The neighbor of his youth comes up to him, asking why he is so antisocial:

"Because people get in the way of my studies."

"Because I want to finish my homework rather mindlessly mingle with peasants such as yourself."

"Because I don't need friends to be happy."

                His college-aged former roommate appears, repeating those same old words of yesteryear:

"Max, if you knew how the world works, you'd be a bored billionaire by now. You see education as a means to a fiscal end. I truly feel bad for you, for feeling like all these 4 years are just to get a better job. I truly feel bad for you, for feeling like all these 4 years are just to get a better job. Get a better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job."

                On the last night, 66 hours into this sleeplessness, he sits up, staring out the window. He feels awakened from this harsh dream because he sees the same picture as that horrible night, sitting up on the same bed in the same room out at the same hopeless night. But there's someone there: himself. This doppelganger initiates a dialogue:

"Staring off into the starless desolately bleak city once more; oh how enlightened you are now."

"Like you're any better, you pathetic excuse for a ghost."

"Tell me, are you a success?"

"Did you always choose good over bad?"

"Don't mock me, me; I'm a Columbia lawyer at the top of the food chain. I've done more for society and produced more in my life than any of those wastes of oxygen from high school, college, or the trial. Everyone wishes they could be more like me!"

"Oh, so I'm assuming you've drawn this conclusion because Mark said how much he aspires to be like you, or your old neighbor, right?"

"They waste their lives not taking the greatest possible advantage of their abilities. Everyone should always try their hardest on everything they do if they truly love the world and want to give back to it, as Cicero once said."
"But what did Cicero say about love, friendship, and happiness?  He said how friendship is essential to any civilized human, and that one can only be as happy as he makes others. Have you succeeded in doing that, making people happy, making yourself happy?"

                With that, the window shatters outwards of this forty-second floor apartment. His final thought is a query to a boy below on whether or not it's Christmas.

I have this feeling that writing about "DA ALPACALYPSE" would render the same responses as the last 3 blogs I wrote today

But Ill do it anyway! To fully comprehend the alpacalypse, to acknowledge the total collapse of centralized orders, one must embody my favorite alpacalypse day album, the cancelled earth.

Described on the band's last.fm page:
"The Cancelled Earth album is the result of almost a decade of sporadic field recordings mainly recorded in airports, train stations, various tunnels and under numerous bridges all greatly polished and turned into a refined mass of desolate ambience and subtle hypnosis all engulfed in Pär’s (the sole member of the project) legendary signature sound. "


This is exactly how I view the alpacalypse. You have all these occurrences defying and defiling nature, occurrences of combustion and fashioning the earth for transportation, that would become useless to humanity, as their sole purpose was to serve the artificial bonds now shuffled off. People now look out into the world around them one morning and don't observe the stress of efficiency, the inane means of labor justified by the end of surviving capitalism, and most of all, the intolerable cacophony produced by the overpopulated and inconsiderate first world. All they see is the beauty of nature we try to hide with production. Look at this picture from that old crappy Hitler channel series Life After People:

As you can see, the fauna and flora have overcome the oppression of civilization to a point of purely ecstatic harmony. This is a great fruition of the logical conclusion the album draws, worded above as "various tunnels and under numerous bridges all greatly polished and turned into a refined mass of desolate ambience." Although these views may seem generic for a typical Hinsdalian lower-middle class pseudo-hippy liberal arts asshole such as myself, I wish more than anything else to be submerged in such a world as that described by the album.

I bet the world looks a lot prettier with nothing but blankness in it

This book perfects a concept I described in the Children of Men blog about detail. To specify, the concept was that as a story takes individual circumstances down to a deeper and more realistic level, that story becomes more easily interpretable by all sides, as thought that story was really arguing for whatever the listener/reader wanted. As this is the case, I would argue that the book is about revolution, about a people so bent on control over themselves that they need to control others in order to "protect" themselves. This then ultimately leads to those being controlled, so desperate for control over themselves, that they switch places with the once ruling class through bloodshed and revolution, referred to in the book as scissors and sneakiness. The best way to sum up the authors whole argument is with a post title I saw on reddit while procrastinating these blogs: "In Germany it is not illegal to try to escape from prison because it's basic human instinct to be free."

The primary theme in the book is that controlling others is a flawed and inevitably failing concept. A government can try its hardest to get a grip on every possibility that could happen; as the founding fathers said, the government will give you as much freedom as it can before it impediments another's. My fist can go far, but only as far as in front of and not touching your face. The author, as I, laugh at this notion that the abilities of one can be controlled by another, almost as though ability isn't inalienable. The government recognizes this, so they take a different route: control the mind, and the body will follow. Make people live in fear, so that they are too scared to want to be free. Make public examples of consequences for seemingly insignificant acts, consequences as inhumane as decades in a cell. So what happens when all this control and fear get rendered useless by something man cannot conquer, nature?

When man becomes forced free from its bonds, all organization doesn't break down, but reassemble to more natural orders. There's no chaos or "anarchy" as you pessimists would say, but peace and love for thy neighbor and other concepts for which governments see no need. Individuals realize that they are better off themselves by helping others, who would in turn help them. As Marx once said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" (no I didn't realize Marx said this when I typed it into google to get the full quote.)

That loathful moment when you realize this blog says it was posted at 5 am, and its not lying.

On the unimportance of gender in A Handmaid's Tale

I look at genders in Handmaid's Tale as more of a means of expressing arbitrary allocations of artificial power rather than some statement about how we view feminism, to what extent expression should be socially acceptable, etc.  arguments and views from the class discussions wherein I was against everyone again.


For each gender, a hierarchy exists which the members of the gender are expected to aspire to climb. Nick is powerless compared to the Commander, just as June is powerless to Serena Joy. However, by doing what one is "supposed to do," as in following a narrow-minded path paved by the delusion of virtue, Nick and June may climb to the points at which the Commander and Joy are. I see the abuse, the blatant disregard for personal autonomy, and the most prevalent judgmental dichotomy adhered to by the whole nation, all as being a statement about a theme grander than the gender roles by which the issues are presented. This theme is exactly the theme preached slightly more obviously in 1984, the theme of total self-control, autonomy, and acceptance of the fact that one cannot force another do, make, say, or think, anything. As I read this, I sincerely looked for gender stuff, but all I saw was the whole issue we have with gender roles: control over one's body. When the question is whether or not she is allowed to wear something so revealing, the question isn't being asked because she is of a specific gender, it's being asked because one thinks that they can control the basic inalienable abilities of another. That's how I looked at this book in context with contemporary issues.

Children of Men pseudo-reflection

I really wasn't a big fan of this film. I like the interpretation that the first world's over-reliance on pharmaceutical medication has rendered unnatural peril only absent in an individual living more naturally, within a "third world country." I just cant find much to really comment on beyond that. I think there's two goals as a Hollywood film maker: make a popular movie and make a deep movie. Although I would personally argue that the latter is impossible to some extent in Hollywood beyond "first world problems," I'd say this movie did poorly in both respects. Ill do the optional blog to make up for my unthoughtfulness maybe? Crap that one's even less provocative.

Since it looks like there's no blog about Idiocracy, Ill compare the successes of that to the faults of Children of Men. Idiocracy took the archetypal American, and made his faults more obvious, a process they subtly referred to as evolution. To elaborate on what specific flaws, we must look at the whole progression of the plot and the consistencies constant throughout. At multiple points, the writers are trying to show that baseness and simplicity have overcome enlightenment as the primary concern of the individual. This starts from the moment of the main character's awakening in the future, as the most popular television show is then "OWWWWWW, MY BAWLZZ," the most popular (and only) movie is a similar mindless potty joke, and the average lifestyle consists of consuming and satisfying base necessities with the simplest alternatives (food, sex, and surprisingly no drugs.) Yet, when it comes to the other film, we see a perfectly natural sort of people, with nothing highlighted as wrong or right, progressing through events which didn't necessarily show any tragic flaw. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, in fact, many of my favorite works allow for the reader or viewer to intemperate to support a variety of views just like reality allows. However, in this film, there wasn't enough detail, any highlights, or any characterization deep enough to allow for this whatsoever. Things like Idiocracy, 1984, and Blindness allowed for the depth of circumstances to be explained in full, while not necessarily being too vague as to make counter-arguments always greater than arguments derived from the books (and movie.) Children of Men, however, is the perfect example of a story just the opposite, by being too vague as for its message and not specific enough with the things it did focus on. This is my problem and the root of my inability to analyze it more thoroughly.

Heres a cat being surprised if you dont like my lack of on-topicness.

On the Duty of Civil Disobediance

     Moira is easily the most realistic character in this book. Breaking out of the indoctrination center/academy for handmaids proves that human nature in this book doesn't breed submissiveness but autonomy. Whereas everyone else felt trapped in their roles, or subverted them only secretly, Moira broke the chains of oppression to free herself from her authoritarian masters.

     Moira is introduced as a controversial character in the new society; she is the archetype of what this new order is meant to inhibit, a lesbian, formerly-feminist free-thinker. By bringing up that she is a lesbian at various points, Atwood creates a strong sense of friction with the child-bearing-centric world. She builds the new world as a place of terror, wherein no personal authority is held by anyone but the state and the commanders for a couple of reasons, the main of which being alleviating care for children. By introducing someone, praised and looked to at various points by the protagonist, who is incapable of producing children by her orientation, Atwood instills advocacy for personal freedom through expression.

     Censorship of expression is a guarantee in America, and I read a story a couple weeks ago on the boy scouts furthering it: http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2012/11/intel_will_end_support_for_ore.html

Jonny Sims explains the meaning of life

Why is life worth living? Material possessions? Petty desires and hopes and dreams? Achievement? Love? By these ideologies, we wouldn't have advanced from cavemen to civilized humans because cavemen wouldn't have wanted to live. Miranda, saying things like “I wonder if I'll ever have to decide what's worse, life we we’re living, or no life at all.”, proves to be an avid believer that she was born to buy things. 

These ideas that life is derived from the manifestations of mankind are reversed and over-simplified. As life develops, it gains a certain consciousness about origin. This consciousness, manifested more commonly as “Why am I here?”, is a rationalization of the fact that one is alive and one would like to stay alive for as long as possible. The real question stems from that initial yearning for living. Why did cavemen want to keep living? Because it is selfish.

Egotism is the essence of life. You are only alive as you are self-centered. To answer the question “Why should I be here”, one must break themselves down to their innermost desires. Life is the most precious present possible, proven over and over again by high-pressure situations everyday. And the very asking of this question acknowledges a certain desire to protect one's interests, as it is in regards to their most precious possession. Thus, if one asks for meaning of something because of egotistic selfishness, and the very asking is the something, couldn't it be said that the meaning is selfishness:

1. Life has meaning

2. One asks for the meaning of life
3. Asking for the meaning of life is microcosmically life

4. One asks is one being egotistic

5. Being egotistic is microcosmically life
6. Egotism is self-evident
7. Meaning of life is Egotism

If you believe #3 is controversial, then you haven't ever lived, or you're lying to yourself. What gets you up in the morning, or lingers on your mind before you sleep? This degree of questioning is prevalent to such an extent that I can safely say that a snapshot, a single day of my life, summing up what I do on a day-to-day basis would include at least a thought on why I am anything at all.

Heres an artical on some hollywood capitalist pig profiting on the inability or indecisiveness of the masses to answer their own questions on origin: http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/movies/general/view/20221123lee_ponders_meaning_of_life/srvc=home&position=also