Trendspotting: The Recession

Trends are sometimes hard to spot: the color purple (not a trend… yet!), docksiders (that some people are just now buying these proves they’re a trend for sure), lo-fi music (it shouldn’t be a trend). Trends are especially hard to spot if you aren’t trendy, but starting today, I’m going to do my best for all you lame-bos (trademark!) out there.

One trend that’s pretty obvious these days? The recession. It’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Here are three questions:
1. Why do things cost more these days?
2. Why wouldn’t that girl date me?
3. What is a receding part of a wall, building, etc?

Answer: Recession.

As a side note, Mihir Vedantem failed this quiz, so if you received a score of 2/3 or better, pat yourself on the back and tip back a cream soda in honor of your stunning intelligence.

MSNBC spends most of the day blaming the recession on a failure of bipartisan efforts and Republican steamrolling of the Obama agenda to bring about sustained economic recovery. FOX and Friends spend the rest of the day blaming Obama’s economic stimulus package and other things that they can now safely hate out loud. Sometimes you can even smell it in the air, although I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s just the smell of fall.

But the capital “R” Recession has been having effects beyond simple price structures at your local restaurants (Particularly obvious at lower quality establishments that change prices with a strip of paper and a piece of tape over the menu’s “Price” column). Yes, brave students at Pembroke Hill, the recession has struck our school.

*GASP*

You can see it all around. How the paint on the building just doesn’t seem as “new” anymore. How crazed religious fanatics show up drawn by a hatred of equality and money. How the middle school play had to be about a non-existent tollbooth instead of a real one. How the Crookers Remix of Day ‘n’ Night is still incredibly popular. How “payrolls fell by 190,000 last month, more than forecast by economists, … the jobless rate rose from 9.8 percent, … factory payrolls dropped by the most in four months, and the average workweek held at a record low.” But there’s one area where you’ll see it most: soap.

Look, I know I’m a little fonder of foam soap than other people. But the moment of transition between button press and the reception of foamy soap onto my hands always feels like an answer to my quiet prayer for cleanliness. That knowledge that I will rapidly transform this foamy delight into a serum of utter dirt-obliteration instills inside of me a serenity that combats the foulest odors on God’s green earth left by those freshman who always seem to beat me into the bathroom. But this delightful elixir is gone now in a majority of restrooms, replaced by a soap that I can describe as nothing other than “industrial.” I might as well be cleaning my hands in a pit of mud and barbed wire for all of the psychological damage this has caused to both myself and many other trusty ladies and gentleman of our school. It’s a soap that feels like any old soap and one that leaves your hands smelling vaguely like pants, machinery, and books. Now perhaps this was a purposeful change, made to ensure that nobody got the idea that Pembroke would clean its collective hands with anything other than the most academic soap available. If only I could fall asleep at night knowing that this were the case. No, I’m afraid, as far as I can guess from purely uncorroborated, self-manufactured rumors, this is just another cost-cutting measure.

Fortunately, brave citizens are speaking out about this tragedy:

“Yeah.” – Peter Vale, Senior and “Best Faux-Beard” Award Recipient

“An atrocity on par with the holocaust.” – Gandhi

“I hardly ever go to the bathroom at school.” – Thomas Hodgman, Junior

Coalitions are emerging and growing strong quickly. My club proposal for the “Return the Foam Soap Alliance” is likely to be approved as fast as the Native American Sovereignty Association was last year. The people are making up their minds and they’re saying that they’ve had enough of this industrial soap of doom (Itzpzpalotl, bringer of death and famine in Aztec terms). The people are demanding change so much, I’d be shocked if you were demanding change before you even finished this article, let alone began reading it. You’ve probably been demanding so much change that your demand hands are exhausted.

Yeah, we need to be economically smart, and fickleness is always a positive. But at some point, we’ve got to stand up to Mr. Recession and say into his face, that he can take our money, gross domestic product, creativity, compassion, and land, but he will never take our foam soap.

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