I guess I'm being mean

I think girls, in general, are blurring the line between dressing like a slut and being a slut.

I'm sorry that's not that gentlemanly.

But I think sluts need to be more accountable for themselves. And I know the word "slut" is an ugly and demeaning word. It is a shame that we have such words in our language. But I think it's an even bigger shame that there are girls out there who embody such words. It seems very difficult to be a woman these days. Maybe it's always been hard because of the whole childbirth thing. But women don't get any leeway for anything. Guys can dress up like Mr. Rogers and be labeled as classy. Guys can dress up like Kevin Federline and be frequently mislabeled "bad boy." In either case, there is a niche for women to choose from. If women dress up like Rihanna, Beyonce, or Britney Spears, guys do not make any distinction. To them you are that H-O. And it doesn't matter if you are one or not, you get treated the same way. And there is no niche. H-O is the market. The only niche in the market are the good girls, ladies. And ladies are rare, hard to find, and really not as appreciated in society as they should be. H-Os have a hyperinflated stock price.

The problem is that we've centered our culture's perception of women around Beyonce's, Rihanna's and Britney Spears', and not enough around girls like Janelle Monae.



I do advocate that women be treated with as much respect you can give them, regardless of whether they deserve it or not. But when you see an H-O, the mind will call it what it will.

The Power is in the People

I don't have any regrets going here. I realize that life is about constant change that we all learn from eventually. Cliche: I wouldn't change a thing. But sometimes, there are things that I wish didn't change. Before I left home, I had people. I knew people. I was two degrees away from the people I wanted to know or had to know. I had a real-life facebook going on at home. I remember desperately not wanting to leave, but also wanting a change of scenery. At the time, it seemed I could afford this type of break because I had a reputation. I'm not saying that for ego but I've always been aware of my reputation because I'm the one who created it. I felt like my name would still be tossed around if I was gone (and it was) but I knew it wouldn't be the same as it used to be (and it wasn't). After spending four years away, it becomes increasingly apparent to me that I've lost a lot of people.

It is the connections, that real human connection, that I miss the most. And I've become cognizant of this fact as my senior year dwindles down to its final days. These past four years have not been wasted. I've managed to know enough people to say that I had a fulfilling college life. I don't know if I have a reputation. You can't place a kid in a school where all the students were at the top of their class and worry about a reputation. No one's really got a reputation when everyone has their minds on themselves. But after graduation, I have to come back home and deal with the fact that I have no people. I have friends I call every now and then but it won't be of the magnitude it was when I was in high school. I also have to deal with the fact that the industry I will be working in is dependent on the people you got. I've been running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying to find people. I'm iming people, posting on facebook walls, approaching strangers, all in an effort to reach as many people here in an environment where it is supposed easy considering there's 30,000 people that go here.

But I'm really just trying to reconcile the fact that once I go back home, I'm powerless.

Santa Barbara

I was over at UC Santa Barbara over the weekend, a school known for it's crazy party ethic. While we were walking, a friend told me about this conversation he overheard from some UCSB students.

"You know what I like about being an engineering major? You're guaranteed a job after college."

The other guy goes, "Yeeeeeaaaaah that's the best part."

This seems to be the fundamental difference between Santa Barbara and Berkeley. They have this large contentedness for life. They are happy with it and they celebrate it. This is really me on the outside looking in. I'm sure the schoolwork gets people down from time to time, but it's nowhere near the cultural depression that Berkeley clouds over its students. Everyone is constantly competing with each other. Everyone is looking over to the next person and trying to set the curve. They try to go as far as they can but there is no purpose, no direction. What's the point of going far if you don't know where you are? You got A's but what else do you have? You got interviews and resumes, but why do you get up in the morning? For SB students, the concern is to be happy. Everything else is secondary. For Berkeley students, the concern is security. Dignity is secondary.

It's the ones at Berkeley looking for happiness that get screwed over at the end.

You Should Watch American Gangster

That is all for today. It just seems all too bad that there does not seem to be any true American Gangsters around anymore.



One very good reason to watch... is Cuba Gooding Jr....as a pimp.

Yes I said it.

So listen...

Wattup world,

I just finished a weekend in Sunny SoCal for Friendship Games weekend. It's the first time I've been home since the day before the first day of school. Long story short, it was good times and a lot of laughs.

But we did run into this while we were down there...

MAD TV Can I have your number?

After laughing hysterically about it for a couple hours after watching it, I decided the story of Darrel is, in essence, the story of every male in terms of how to close on those seven digits. If you think about it, Darrel's method is straight to the point, and if it weren't for the formality of women complicating the situation, all men would probably do what Darrel does.

But here is the mindset of man broken down: If a dude sees an attractive girl and he's single or not, he automatically thinks, "I have to know that girl." The intentions could be varied. He could be looking for a relationship or he could looking to just be friends or he could want sex, but the bottom line is that he is compelled to force fate and meet this girl. After mustering up courage, he tries to think of the best possible way to approach a stranger that he will probably never see again and create some sort of connection. A successful attempt results in a phone number. In his mind, he's probably thinking, "This girl could change my life. If all things go good and well, she could possibly be my (insert label here). If I don't do this now, I will never see again." For those who do nothing, they spend their whole lives contemplating the what-ifs until they see another once-in-a-lifetime girl where they can repeat the process.

The mindset of woman: She is probably not impressed at all by any amount of courage mustered, as if courage was so abundant from where she came from. It doesn't matter what intentions he has. He probably just wants sex. She's been hit on how many times today for the past how many years. How impressive could this man really be if he just approaches strangers and asks for their number. She is not flattered at all or maybe she has low-self esteem too and doesn't know how to take a compliment. She doesn't need a connection. This sort of thing happens to her everyday.

Ladies, guys wish they had your problem!

But to the defense of women, the majority of the male population is nasty and not worth your time, but don't overlook those one or two decent dudes out there.

Profile on David Simon or Why "The Wire" Rocks

The New Yorker just released an article on David Simon, the creator of the Wire. I've been tooting the horn of the Wire for a while now, almost to the extent of a senile old man, but still, no one's really hearing me. The Wire is THE BEST TELEVISION SHOW EVER WRITTEN!!! I put my whole reputation on that. And I'm not talking about Desperate Housewives good or Gossip Girls good (am I really validating this show?). I'm talking about the smartest script ever written for a television screen. I'm talking smarter than any show I've ever watched or talked about including: The Sopranos, Smallville, Heroes, Weeds, 24, Studio 60 or any other show I can think of worth mentioning. It is actually so smart, it often gets overlooked by middle class America. Middle class America doesn't deal in smart. It deals in monotony, sticking to what works, and making sure their shows make a profit, without analyzing the adverse effects of bad television on the minds of its audience. The article is pretty long, and I can't really expect you to read the whole thing, especially without having the context of watching the show. We can't really expect anyone to read anything longer than 5 minutes because that's how big our attention span is these days. But I'll pull out things I like from the article.

“The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”


You ever hear of a show that consciously is blaming the media for the sh*t that's wrong in the world? The most you ever hear is Justin Timberlake decrying for MTV to play more music videos. Even as noble as that effort was, it still got reported on the internet in tabloid fashion, which is contradictory to the actual point he was trying to make.

Viewers of “The Wire” must master a whole argot, though it can take a while, because the words are never defined, just as they wouldn’t be by real people tossing them around. To have “suction” is to have pull with your higher-ups on the police force or in City Hall; a “redball” is a high-profile case with political consequences; to “re-up” is to get more drugs to sell. Drugs are branded with names taken from the latest news cycle: Pandemic, W.M.D., Greenhouse Gas. “The game” is the drug trade, although it emerges during the course of the show as a metaphor for the web of constraints that political and economic institutions impose on the people trapped within them.

That's one of the dopest parts of the show. It forces you to understand the show's vocabulary. It also reinforces the point that speech is something organic. The inner-city urban environment uses a different vocabulary than the rest of middle class America. If we're going to understand their story, we gotta learn their talk, at least. I'm also a fan of slang, it's almost but not quite, like being bilingual.

Because Simon and his primary writing partner, Ed Burns—a former Baltimore homicide detective who was once one of Simon’s sources—are both middle-aged white men, people tend to assume that the dialogue spoken by the drug dealers and ghetto kids is ad-libbed by the black actors on the show.

They're white, and they get it more than some Black people do.

Simon is an authenticity freak. He said, “I’m the kind of person who, when I’m writing, cares above all about whether the people I’m writing about will recognize themselves. I’m not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world I’m writing about will read it and say, ‘Nah, there’s nothing there.’ ”

Fuck yeah for authenticity. How much authenticity is in Heroes? Can you really understand the emotional burden of having a superpower? The Wire is about real people.

“ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.”

Exactly!

Rafael Alvarez, a former Sun reporter whom Simon hired to write for the show, said, “You know how, in a Russian novel, the reader does the work for the first hundred pages, and then it turns and you’re lost in it? With ‘The Wire,’ it might be Episode 6 before it turns and you’re in.” The creators of “The Wire” would never say that their work is as good as that of Tolstoy or Dickens, but they can’t quite resist the comparison, either.

That's exactly how I felt when I watched it. The first episode was, "WTF is going on? I can't even understand what they're saying." By the 5th episode, I said, "This is getting a whole lot better." By the season finale, I exclaimed, "This is THE BEST TELEVISION SHOW EVER WRITTEN!!!" I mean, some of you must've read Harry Potter and thought the first couple of chapters when he's dillydallying in the real world was pretty boring until he got it on and poppin' in Wizardland.

This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about “perception versus reality”—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”

We actually do need a television show to depict this for us. A lot of us just take in anything on print as truth these days. But maybe Britney isn't really that bad. Who knows?

The Wire is in it's 5th and last season this year. Please watch it. Bittorrent it, netflix it, or call me up, but do what you gotta do and make yourself smarter through watching television.

Oh yeah and he's also trying to write a pilot on a new show in New Orleans. Can't wait.

You Thievin' Mofos

"Gangsters, these are men who embraced who they are and decided to make something out of it. They did not wait for a handout or wait for Teri Hatcher to say the wrong thing, so they can force ABC to pay for 'diversity scholarships.'"

I honestly thought that the "Filipino community" (read: upper middle class interests) would keep the protest at diversity scholarships. And then they pull this sh*t.

Filipinos Sue ABC for $500 Million

I have to ask, "Why would I support this lawsuit?"

Will I see any penny from this $500 million? Will my Filipino mailmen experience any riches beyond belief? How does my secretary mom and construction inspection dad who work for the State get a piece of the action? How about my Tagalog teacher? Will she get $500 million too?

NO!

The money goes to a very small upper middle class demographic of the entire Filipino-American community. You're the mofos who moved out of the city and moved to the suburbs to let your people rot. And what other implications can we expect? Without $500 million dollars, ABC will be forced to make shows of a significantly lesser quality that you will probably end up watching just so you can wait on another white person to say something racist and you can sue them again. Meanwhile, I have to deal with you ig'nants for watching such reality shows and making me look bad. Also, with the upper middle class already cakin', the last thing I need is for you to have $500 million in your pocket so you can give your kids a fixed-up rice rocket and have them act like they're better than Filipinos who actually work for their sh*t and have higher priorities than what you drive. And what about Mychal Bell of the Jena 6 whose family didn't have enough money to post $90,000 bail for being a blatant victim of racism as opposed to what you are going through? Why do you deserve 5555 times more money than him? What else? Oh yeah, did I mention that you haven't earned this $500 million at all?

“What’s important here is that this is sending a message to the other producers, the other stations that if you do this, this is what’s going to happen," said lawyer Rodel Rodis.

Yeah we're sending a message alright, that we're some thievin' motherfuckers.