thanksgiving

thanksgiving is a brilliant holiday, but i am beginning to get sick of it. what ever happened to sitting around the table and telling each other what you are most thankful for? why is it important to make plans to see each and every family member on that day and to eat with them?

troy and I ate three dinners for thanksgiving. seriously. and that was after I watched the Today Show's special on the caloric intake of the average American on thanksgiving. depressing. here I am, about to get married and have to squeeze into a dress, and i cant even begin a diet because everyone expects everyone else to eat dinner with them.

the dinner is no longer special. now, its about hassle and scheduling, and is just another holiday where family takes a back seat to retail. (and i wont even go into the whole beginning of thanksgiving and how it really is founded on genicide and hate, and the displacement of native americans, and slavery and the very people who spawned the people who spawned wallstreet.)

black friday has slipped out of its post-thanksgiving food-coma stupor and taken over the entire weekend. retail stores have raped familys of the holiday.

instead of sitting around the table and talking, families are rushing through that expensive and hard-earned meal to make it to some retail store before every other person in that particular area.

people lined up at Best Buy in Owings Mills, MD at 6pm. did they even eat dinner? did they say hello to the families that flew into MD to see them for the holiday as they were cramming cranberry sauce into their face and grabbing the car keys on the way out the door? the cops were called to that particular store twice for fighting and threats.

and the worst part is, the retaliers are pulling one big heist over on the trusting shoppers after another.

example: Kohls. Troy and I went to Kohls around 4pm on black friday. the sale was still going on, but I didnt see a single sale. A shirt that was on sale for $15 a month ago was still on the rack, in the same place, only it was marked up to $50 and on sale for $25. so...the person who was not paying attention would say "look, honey, this is a $50 shirt, thats not bad for $25" until said idiot goes into work with the shirt on, sees someone else with it, they talk about where they got it, and said idiot finds out that the $50 shirt was actually a $15 shirt back in October.

and what is this about "only the first 15 people in line get a flat screen tv"? so youre telling me that, with all of the money that retailers make, and of all of the tv's they ship in and sell all year, they can only order 15 of them on the biggest shopping day of the year?


not to mention the two men shot, the pregnant woman knocked down, the 45 year old man who was trampled to death at walmart......

not over diamonds or gold, or a car, or a house, or a life-or-death situation...that poor man, a walmart employee who probably didnt want to work that day because he wanted to spend it with his kids....was trampled to death, stepped on, walked over, tripped over, crushed. CRUSHED TO DEATH BY FAT AMERICAN CONSUMERS over a television. over something that almost every single home in this country has. every single home.

i read somewhere recently that even homes that have no food, clothing, or heat for the winter have a television. a kid can go without food for a week in this country, but they still watch cartoons.

and yet so many people were worried about getting a television that they killed someone over it.


and that brings me to the "that cant happen to me" mentality in this country: I almost gurantee that all of those people who trampled the poor man watched it on the news that night and thought "what animals. killed the poor man. what a shame" not even stopping to consider that they did it, that his blood is on their hands.

at walmart. isnt that a joke? not Saks 5th avenue. not Tiffanys. not a gucci outlet, not nordstroms, not a place with any sort of worth. walmart. the place that owns half of the known world. the place that scouts out small mainstreet towns with the intent to destroy.

walmart...that place that you hate because it is always crowded, the parking lot is a pain in your ass, the employees are the lowest of the lowest class, and so are most of the shoppers. the place you wish you never had to go, and yet you have to because who else has a lightbulb or windsheild wipers, or a pack of napkins, or glad plugins at all hours of the day for inflation-proof prices? that place that has helped destroy the economy, and multiple cultures around the world. the place that preys on good quality product makers by exploiting the lower class.

it was for this place, this hell-hole on earth that a man died.


now isnt that a shame?



it is a shame. this whole thing is a shame, and yet it will never stop. black friday is as much a part of our culture as buying tons of christmas gifts, eating our weight in turkey or mcdonalds hamburgers, shooting each other over a little argument, beating each other with baseball bats at stoplights, jerryspringer, theft, child abuse and neglect, crooked politicians, racism and reverse racism, and inflation. it is an accepted norm, and as long as there is a lower class, it will continue to grow every year, preying on those who cant afford inflated retail prices.

Pasta, of all things

I have been developing a deep disgust for my fellow humans. Perhaps "countrymen" would fit better than "humans" as I am sure that the people for whom I feel the most disdain are primarily Americans.

Americans love to eat. But we dont just eat the way other people from other countries do: we eat in excess! we cant just order one meal and be happy, we have to get as much as we possibly can for our dollar. How dare we stereotype other nationalities and call them cheap or swindlers when we try to cram as much in our wallets and mouths as we possibly can.

a direct representation of this is the "Never Ending Pasta Bowl" at the Olive Garden. disgusting. for $8.95, a single person can get endless pasta, bread, and choice of endless soup or salad. thats fine, especially since the price is so low, but it just is not enough for the Americans.

Endless pasta: people literally sit and eat bowl after bowl after bowl of pasta. I am surprised that people dont regularly die of carb-shock! and as if bowl after bowl of penne, or linguine, or angelhair is not enough, add the sauce: alfredo, meat sauce, five cheese marinara! did you know that eating one portion of Olive Garden alfredo sauce is like drinking a pint of heavy cream? its true. but dont tell the corporate office I told you.

so we have the endless pasta. that should be plenty to fill up any person. It is endless.

but, that obviously isnt enough, so first they have to cram themselves with endless soup or salad. So many people ask me: "the never ending pasta comes with endless salad, right?" as if, if the salad was not included, they would not order the pasta. is it that important to have endless salad with endless pasta? and god forbid the garlic bread does not come out constantly.

how do these people eat so much?

and then complain about McDonalds having such calorie loaded food!!!

You can probably eat five Big Macs for the caloric intake of the five cheese ziti at Olive Garden. I'm serious.

so my new complex is this: I cannot watch people eat without feeling queasy. It is fine if i am sitting down in the resturant and eating and am able to ignore the people around me, but as a server, watching the guests mindlessly stuff themeselves into a food-induced coma disgusts me.

Have you ever seen Casper, the one with Christina Ricci? the scene where the three ghosts are eating breakfast and all of the food is just falling on the floor...thats what i imagine when i am at work and serve people their food. it literally makes me sick.

and the bicker over the smallest price change. the Never Ending Pasta Bowl, like i said, costs 8.95. that is almost $1 more than a lunch portion of pasta. yet people complain that it is expensive! how, i ask you, is endless amounts of pasta, 75 bowls of pasta, if you wish, expensive at $9? how can people take themselves that seriously?

and then there is the lack of manners. We consider ourselves advanced, ahead of other countries, yet we have no table manners. NONE. we shout at the table, answer cell phones in the middle of dinner, allow our children to literally throw food in resturants, much less run around the resturant and then get upset when the server trips on the little brat and spills hot food on them.

and we chew with our mouth open, stuff our mouths till food is over flowing down our chin. then we speak to the server (who we treat like a dog and snap our fingers at) with full mouths. heres a news flash, america: most servers are college students, or college graduates trying to get a new job. I.E. they probably have a higher degree than you do and are usually smarter than you. dont treat them like infants.

i need to get out of the resturant industry. hopefully I'll get a call back from one of my applications soon. the food service industry depresses me.

the answer, my friend...

I FINALLY have my degree. UB took entirely too long to get things sorted out, but i picked up the actual certificate yesterday, and it is much smaller than i expected. i'm pretty excited to have it, though, regardless of size.

some observations:

there really is no reason for the MVA to make so much money on tags and licenses and what not! 120$ is a little outrageous! i am sick of "the man" taking advantage of people where they have no choices. for example: movie prices can go up because people have the ability to choose whether or not to see a movie, same thing with things like furniture and high-end cars. but to raise the price on things like clothes and food is ridiculous. the basic things needed to sustain human life should be avaliable to all human beings. like health care. how can a doctor charge over $400 for a hospital visit in which they spent a total of 10 minutes in the patient's room? (can you tell that this is personal now?) health care should be free, but the problem is that the majority of people who have the ability to make a difference in the fight for universal health care do not care.

think about it. the people who have health care and have always had it are worried that by giving everyone else healthcare, they will have to wait for treatment, and will have to share their doctors and hospitals and oncology labs and mri machines with the population as a whole. why would they want that? why add lines and waiting lists when they already have it fine.

take away their health insurance, let them suffer for a while, and see what they think.

i used to not care. i was as ignorant of the whole problem and exactly how big it is until, as a full time student living with my parents, my insurance provider sent me a letter 5 months after my birthday telling me that my insurance had already been cancelled without my knowing it.

i wonder when i drive now, what if i get into a major accident? is it possible to be in a coma and refuse an air-lift? what if i have a terminal illness right now, but because i have no health care, i have no way of finding out.

i am not a paranoid person by nature, but while i search for a job, i have to worry. every little ache and pain and symptom suddenly blows out of proportion and into cancer, typhoid, tb, pancreitis, appendicitis, and staph. i felt nauseous a few days ago. sure, there is a virus going around that i cannot be diagnosed or treated for, but in my mind, it could be eboli.

we, the middle and upper class, look at the uninsured, lower class as lazy members of an infamously ignorant and uneducated whole: as a group of miscrients who could dig themselves out of their caste if they wanted to bad enough. but now i know that it is not true.

people are trapped by our systems. our education system, our healthcare system, our thought system. we have dug a hole that is just as big as the mass graves the nazis dug, and yet we blame the people that we have shoved into the hole.


how many times must a cannon ball fire?

self-fulfilling prophecy

i am so sick of waiting on other people. my impatience on this particular occasion is brought to you by the Welter staff who are not doing what needs to be done so that my life is not miserable next week.

i have to fit a month's worth of work into one week, and i had no idea that that was the case until this weekend. press day is april23 and i have no cover art, no written work, much less author bios, order of appearance, or logo. now, if this was my magazine, and i could take care of all of that myself, it would be done by now. but no...i have to wait for a democratic decision on cover art that is apparently not even created yet. i also have to wait for 5 people to proof 43 stories, essays, and poems. they are supposed to have them to me by the 17, and as of yet, they havnt looked at them. i have to wait for someone to tell me that i can go ahead and create a logo, but that logo has to depend on the cover art that i dont have. how can i figure out how to incorporate the cover in the layout without first seeing the cover?

this impatience has extended to disliking people who do not immediately respond to text messages, phone calls that are not picked up on the first ring, being left waiting for a response on ichat, especially when the other person is the one who started the conversation, traffic, sitting in class and listening to a lecture when there are so many other things i would rather be doing with my time, havint to write papers instead of reading a book that i would love to read, slow windows computers in the computer lab at school, being in front of, behind, next to, or within a 50 mile radius of a cop while driving, email, having to be nice to people because they are in my class, when i would rather be in charge so that i can enforce the rules and deadlines in a way that ensures they will be done, not being in a position to step on toes when necessary, and having to move from my bed to my desk to connect my macbook to my external harddrive. thats it, for my birthday, i want some sort of wireless or bluetooth external!!!

adventures in serving italian food

As a server, I find that the strangest things make my day. For example, I was ecstatic that two tables left an extra pen on my table. Two completely different tables, back to back! That might sound trivial, but when you find a good pen and get used to using it, and then have to let a guest use it to sign a credit card receipt and they take it…well, its just devastating. We usually carry three pens at a time, so if two tables steal a pen each, youre down to one. And it is only a matter of time before someone steals the last one. How do you write a complicated food order for a party of 12 without a pen? You don’t.

But today the restaurant gods smiled upon me, and was given two beautiful pens. Clicky Pens!!

But pens are nothing compared to genuine manners and pleasant attitude from your table. A smile, a wave, or even something as simple as answers to your questions:

“how are you today?”
“Yeah, I’ll take the minestrone.”

Is not acceptable

“ma’am, would you prefer soup or salad?”
“I thought it already came with that big bowl of salad!”
“yes, ma’am, but you have a choice between the salad or a bowl of soup.”
“so you’re not going to bring my salad? I thought you brought salad!”

and so on.

But sometimes you find people who actually listen, who actually care about what you have to say, and do not cut you off in mid sentence.

Personally, I am perfectly happy with any table that does not look down its nose at me or snap at me or clap its hands at me or try to tell me how to do my job.

I especially LOOOOOVE middle aged women. I will deal with any grouchy, smelly, pain in the butt table of 30 toddlers before I will volunteer for a table of over-dressed, control freak middle aged women.

I honestly do not understand what is happening in this world. All white women between the age of 29 and 60 seem inclined to bad temper, bad manners, bossiness, controlling attitude, too much bad perfume, god complex, stupid over-the-top laughter, and prissy snotty flat out rudeness. They shop at kohl’s and all wear the same thing, have the same interest in basket bingo, coach bags, competing against each other’s kids, too much makeup and jewelry, laziness, and just a general bad attitude. Theyre the type that will sit and take up a table for 4 hours without a tip, or have to order for their husband, friend, kid, elderly parent, or the person at the table next to them. No, he doesn’t want peach tea, regular will do just fine. Or honey, you don’t like alfredo sauce. Or I want the capellini pomodor (literally tomatoes and angel hair pasta) but with no tomatoes. Or with Alfred sauce instead of the tomatos.

I swear, that dish is the most complicated I have ever seen. It is literally diced roma tomatoes and angel hair pasta, but at least once a week I have a conversation like this one:

“Can I get fettuccini Alfredo instead of the tomato sauce on the pomodoro?”
“do you mean fettuccini or alfredo?”
“fettuccine alfredo”
“so you don’t want capillini pomodoro at all?”
“yes, I just don’t like the sauce”
“ma’am, the dish is literally angel hair pasta with tomatoes. Do you want alfredo sauce in place of the tomatoes?”
“yes, that’s what I said”
“oh, I’m sorry, I thought you wanted fettuccini alfredo. Fettuccine is a pasta, and alfredo is a white sauce.”
“yes, the white sauce”
“but you still want the angel hair, right?”
“it comes with angel hair?”
“yes ma’am.”
“no, just give me the thick flat noodles, what are they called?”
“Fettuccini”
“yeah, them”
“so you want fettuccini with alfredo sauce?”
“yes, but made like this capilini pomodoro.”
“ma’am. That dish is completely different. Capalini is a type of pasta that we call angel hair. Pomodoro is the sauce. Its literally diced tomatoes. it is angel hair with tomatoes. fettuccine alfredo is the flat noodles with a white sauce.”
“well cant they substitute it?”
“theyre two different dishes. Look, lets do it this way: do you want angel hair or fettuccine?”
“fettuccine”
“and red or white sauce?”
“white”
“okay, I’ll bring you fettuccine alfredo.”
“well doesn’t that cost more?”
“yes. The alfredo sauce is more expensive than the pomodoro sauce.”
“well, just bring me the cheaper one.”
“If I bring the cheaper one, it will be the tomato sauce with angel hair pasta.”
“It doesn’t matter. Oh, and no olives, croutons, tomatoes, onions, or peppers on my salad. But can you throw a few extra cucumbers on there?”
“we don’t have cucumbers”
“are you sure? They did it for me last week.”
“ma’am, ive worked here for three years. We have never, in the history of the restaurant had cucumbers.”
“I swear they had them last week. Are you sure?”
“positive.”
“alright, just put some French dressing on it then.”
“ we do not have French dressing either.”
“can I speak to yoru manager? You’re getting a little bit of an attitude and I’m not sure I like it.”
“gladly.”


I swear, this is the type of conversation I have with people allllllllll the time. And when they don’t understand because they aren’t listening, they think I’m either rude or stupid.


I love my job.

this is it.

the day has arrived. i am sitting on troy's couch waiting for him to shower. we're leaving for dulles in a little bit. im going to drop him off and return home alone.

as was expected, the day for this scary trip (my first ever driving by myself in, over, around, near, through dc) has turned out to be quite the fun, warm, pleasant, sunny, peachy day.

and by that, i mean i just spent a good hour scraping a layer of ice from all sides and surfaces of my car. and i was soaked. it wouldnt be bad if the temperature would rise. but the ice will turn to rain and the rain will turn to snow while i am on my way home.


thrills.

troy doesnt seem worried that the weather will be too bad for me to drive in, so i guess i shouldnt worry.


but then again, my car stalls out and starts smoking in deep puddles.


i need a new car. first item of business after graduation and new job.


in the mean time, i had a fight with my mother over sheets this morning. i had a fit because the sheets I bought (for over 50$) were given to my brother to use. my mother said i shouldnt take my problems with troy leaving out on her. i think she missed the point.

she doiesnt understand that i basically confine everything i own to one room. i buy all of my own things. the only public domain items in my house that i use are water, electricity, and food. i buy and wash my own sheets, towels, clothes. i use very few dishes, and wash them when i finish.

i swear, i was not made to share a house with five other people.

but graduation is around the corner. i cant wait.

so i got a little sidetracked.

the point is that i will be stuck with her for three weeks telling me any time i am angry that i should go yell at troy or that i shouldnt take my anger or frustration at his leaving out on her. she loves to rub this sort of stuff in.

i finally gave troy the big project. i hope he doesnt think it is dumb. i hope he appreciates it and likes it for what it is. i hope the whole thing wasnt a waste of my month and a half.

i skipped school yesterday. my department head/faculty adviser said i made the correct decision. i feel a little less guilty now.


im hungry. i took troy's word that he was going to make us breakfast. somehow i think our plans have changed.

lets ramble.

i havnt written since the first day of school. it has been one of those weeks where alot happens but i dont feel like talking about anything, or nothing feels worthy of typing, so i have decided to just start typing and be done with it. i have to blog, right? any excuse? i told myself i was going to be all over this blog business to keep myself writing, so here i am, writing in my blog. but what about? i'll tell you one thing, i will not be grammar or spell checking this post. i simply do not feel like it.

how about the guy that was murdered at the video store on 140? pretty pathethic. so Tiffany is a girl i work with, and i found out that the guy was someone close to her. i dont know the relation, but what the paper isnt telling people is that the guy was beat to death with a fire extinguisher for a measly $1000. seriously. is it worth it? is that money so important that people must die over it? the guy's wife and son were waiting for him that night. he didnt come home at the normal time so they went to his video store to see what was up. they found him dead. can you imagine? i cant. i dont want to, and i never want to know what that is like.


i know i go on about this often, but i really do not understand people. as a whole. how can one human being feel that they are so much more important than others? do people think it is okay to do things like that? murder, scream at cops, hurt other people, destroy property, steal...do the people who do these things really think it is okay? or are they delusional? is there somethign wrong with them? i cant understand it.

i am sick of greed.

all i want is enough money to be comfortable: pay of my loan for school and not struggle to survive. thats not too much to ask. but i will not go out and destroy a family, take a life, and possibly land myself in jail for some extra cash.

i cant understand the things people do for a little bit of money. i am ashamed enough that i have to wait on people and serve them food for money. that is degrading enough. when someone murders for money, do they feel as though tthey are stooping really low? or is it something they enjoy?

do you have to enjoy killing to be a murderer?

i do the best i can to keep my temper under control because letting myself get angry is slightly embarrassing. are people embarrassed when they lose control to the point that they murder someone? do they feel good? do they feel anything? do murders feel bad for what they have done? do they regret it?


people make no sense.


but thats enough depressing news.


im pretty happy about my classes. i find myself having trouble getting into the swing of the semester, but then again i have only had two days of class so far. i guess it will be easier. i dont feel like doing work though, thats for sure. i like the classes, but im getting lazy. senioritis? seriously. i still have to buy two textbooks. and pay my application fee for graduation. and buy a cap and gown. though i wish i could find a way to see the cap and gown and compare it to the cap and gown i already have. oh, and i still havnt paid the sigma tau delta fee. gotta get on that. everyone wants money. i hate money.

im worried about filing taxes. i want to do it and get it over with. i just dont want to owe. thats all i really care about. i wish there were people who could direct you at tax time but not charge you hundreds of dollars. I have quite a few questions that i would love to ask. complicated, personalized questions. everyone gives me different answers. i think the whole thing is designed to be misleading. im convinced there are no answers. that even the irs has no idea what people should do. its just funny how each person does what they can and cheats the best they can to get as much money back as possible. meanwhile, the irs tries to cheat us out of as much money as they can. the only difference is that if a person gets too much money, the irs can chase them down and punish them. if the irs cheats me out of money, all i can do is hold a grudge against them and be angry that tehy are such a ripoff. how unfair.

i have alot of reading to do. too bad i have to wait till tomorrow to buy one of the books i need to read. i will buy it tomorrow, and then i need to read through chapter 33 of said book by tuesday. this is what i dont like about college: everything is excessive. they dont just make you pay money, they make you pay excessive amounts of money. they dont make you read, they make you read tooooo much. and writing wouldnt be bad if i just wrote alot. but i write more than alot. i write non-stop. excessively, if you will.

but the world is still spinning, and there is supposed to be an ice storm tomorrow. im not sure how thats related, but im hungry.

the answer to the war against terror.

A friend of mine figured out a way to fix all of the world's problems with the click of a button.

Lately I am upset with the Baltimore City School Board. They have decided to pay students for increasing their individual test scores by 5%. The board is prepared to spend thousands of dollars bribing high school students to work harder to pass state tests.

I attended highschool in Baltimore City for two years. Terrible place to learn. I am living proof that Standardized tests do not prove a student's ability to learn or to think. I failed my Math SAT two times. Not for lack of trying, but because I am not good at taking test. After feeling stupid and inadequate compared to my peers, I gave up on school and my GPA dropped. When I moved to Carroll County, I learned that standardized tests really mean nothing, that they are a way for school systems to compete and earn money.

I began taking classes that focused on thinking and writing, and my GPA jumped to a 4.0, and has not dropped more than .1 since.

Now, while I am one of the top 10% of my University, many of those students who scored well on standardized tests are either college drop outs, did not attend college at all, or gave up their academic life for retail and other minimum-wage jobs. I have nothing against those people, I do not look down on them. I understand that, while they scored well on tests, they were never taught to think or solve problems.

Success in the real world does not depend on answering all of the questions correctly. Success is measured by the ability to solve problems. Not problems given in paragraph form with one variable missing, but real problems scattered haphazardly throughout larger problems.

Even a student who scores well on a math test might not have the skills needed to create and maintain a budget. Students who can find the "main idea" in a paragraph, or the "subject" of a sentence may be incapable of constructing a well-written essay.

There are seniors at my University who cannot construct a paragraph. Many are my age and have completed the same amount of school, yet cannot write a proper sentence. They may understand the definition of a "compound-complex sentence" but cannot create one.

I wish standardized test could be eliminated from the curriculum.

Why does education have to depend so heavily on people who have no idea what makes a child learn. Why will school boards never listen to the teachers who actually interact and care about each child?

Do other countries have this problem? Or is it just this mass of land we mistake for the most powerful and wealthy country in the world?

Cheating is Patriotic, according to the NFL

Why has there been no parallel drawn in the NFL between the Patriot’s perfect record and their “brief” stint as cheaters? Am I the only person who understands that people who cheat are given an unfair advantage over those who do not? Why else would they do it?

Warning: This may be the result of post-losing-streak bitterness, but I honestly feel that the Patriots should forfeit their winning streak.

After being caught spying on other teams, the Patriots were barely slapped on the wrist with a few fines: Belichick $500,000 and the team $250,000, according to AP. For a team that pays their QB $60 million, I think $250,000 sounds like petty change. Even if $250,000 is a substantial amount of money, it does not destroy the unfair advantage that the team gained from cheating.

As a side note: Who actually believes that this is the first instance of cheating. Aren’t most big-time thieves caught after stealing their first candy bar? No, not usually. The NFL Commissioner believes that the team will abide by the rules from this point on. I’m sure.

While I do not feel that taking the Patriots out of the equation this season would not have helped the Ravens, I must admit that I wonder if we, too, might have been undefeated had we cheated. I think that’s a fair stab.

To be fair, I would normally commend and hope the best for a team with such an excellent record. Even if the Steelers were undefeated (never going to happen as long as they have to play the Ravens at home. If we can beat no other team in the NFL, at least we can beat them). Anyway, I don’t care if the hated Steelers had a perfect season, I would admit that they deserve it. If a team—regardless of who they are—worked so hard and put so much into the game that they maintained a perfect record, I would personally shake their hand and congratulate them on a job well-done and a W much-deserved. “Deserved.” Do the Patriots DESERVE to win the Super Bowl?

Do the Patriots DESERVE to be undefeated? How much of that record depends on good players, amazing training, concentration, power, muscle, determination, and flawless execution of plays? How much of the record is the result of information gained by cheating? Knowing another team’s plays and patterns can make or break a game. Especially a really important game.

In short: I hope they go all the way and then lose. I hope they make it to the Super Bowl and get shut out. That’s what they deserve: to be cheated out of the Super Bowl like they have cheated other teams out of Wins.

By the by, I really hope the Packers are the team to do the honors of blowing the Patriots away. It is my opinion that Favre (if not the rest of the team) deserves the Super Bowl after the shit he went through last season. He is amazing, and just generally deserves the honor.




I am Ravens Girl, through and through, but I have always loved the packers too. Who doesnt?

Lets see a repeat of XXXI!

My Chemical Obsession with something i know nothing about.

I used to think my father and mother were stupid because they were out of the popular music loop. My mother didn’t know about Metallica, and my father had never heard of Staind. Later, neither of them could stand the sound of Avenged Sevenfold or Converge. These bands were important to me. Everyone else knew who they were and how awesome they were and how important they were to the grand scheme of…I don’t know…life?

I had never stopped to think that maybe they were uninterested in my music because the music fromt their generation was 50 times better. I wouldn’t realize that until my 20’s when I developed a healthy love for Jefferson Airplane.

In the mean time I felt superior. I would argue in favor of my favorite bands, and I knew how amazing Nirvana was and how bad off the world was now that Cobain was dead. I knew all the names of all the important bands, and if I didn’t know about them, they must not be worth my time.

I watch so many kids go through this. My brother has finally gotten out of it, and is harkening back to the days before he was thought of, by obsessing over bands full of dead or really old people. He knows whats what because he knows that Freddie Mercury was the front man of Queen. He collects vinyl records and hangs them on his wall, and wont let my sister listen to them on her record player (a luxury that he neither has nor wants) because she “doesn’t even know anything about them.” Coincidentally, he tells my dad the same thing. My dad who probably, as a young adult, went through the same routine of knowing everything about every band on my brother’s wall.

Why is it so important for people to feel an affinity with the bands that they know about? Why do kids go through the cult phase of feeling superior to other people because of their style of music. A kid that listens to heavy metal feels superior to the kid that listens to rap because the rap kid has never heard of this Metal band or that singer.

Everyone knows that ____insert name____ is the best drummer to ever live. Who cares what rolling stone says: they don’t know what they’re talking about. (like saying that the Ford Focus is the greatest car ever made…regardless of what Car and Driver or even the Kelly Blue Book says)

Those of us who are lucky fall out of this phase like a kid falling off of a swing…with just a scraped knee and no psychological damage.

Some of us realize that music is as diverse as the colors in one of those really big Crayola boxes. Red isn’t just red, but a whole host of hues and shades that look like red.

After years of teenager hood, my need to impress friends with my CD collection ended a few years ago. Now, I take pride in knowing as few bands and songs on the radio as possible. The music I like is rather obscure and strange. I like it that way. I run a very small risk of finding someone who has heard of the bands I like, or of someone gushing over them and making me list my favorite songs or exchanging “I heard they…” stories.

I try to convert people to my music if and only if I think they would fully appreciate the music. I tell people about bands because I love them, not because everyone should know about them. I recognize that the majority of the country would not enjoy my music.


If they did, I wouldn’t like it anymore.



Bands I LOVE that many people have never heard of:

1. Animal Collective
2. (and consequently) Panda Bear
3. Sigur Ros
4. Devandra Banhart
5. Do Make Say Think
6. Islands
7. Mum
8. Storsveit Nix Noltes
9. Squirrel Nut Zippers
10. Air
11. The Album Leaf

These are all bands that I listen to regularly. Yes, I have Troy to thank for introducing me to them, but they have become my bands: what makes a bad day better, my inspiration, my companion through the grueling semesters, my relaxation time. I love them, and I don’t care if anyone else does. As a matter of fact, If you are one of those hateful “I like bands because other people like bands and I’ll probably ruin good music for you” kind of people, I’d rather you just go back to your Nsync and My Chemical Romance.