So when my mom suggested we go to see a play, I threw my hands in the air and shouted for joy at the prospect of phenomenal repertory theater in Boston! Or, to put it differently, I was over-joyed at the food that would bookend whatever show my dramaturgical mother set her heart on. She picked me up from the library, and as I got in a car I paused for a moment:

“Woah. People drive cars.”

“So what show are we going to see?”

“Let’s eat in the food court, we don’t have much time before the show starts.”

(Shit.)

“Ok, yeah, I’m hungry so whatever works.”

We approach a street corner, where a group of children is standing (kids don’t ever really “stand,” they sort of just constantly freak-the-fuck-out). The pack senses me, and I can sense in return their little eyes sizing me up. Whenever there are enough kids around, cannibalism becomes much more likely, if only because you know they don’t yet have the entrenched ethical systems that would tell them it’s wrong (and kids are universally always famished, like vultures — neon-clad vultures with backpacks that aren’t large enough to actually carry anything).

“WIZARD OF OZ!!” They all shout in infinitely excited unison.

Jesus Christ. (Louis CK is right, how did people express confused fascination before Jesus died?)

“It’s the Wizard of Oz,” says my mom, just to hammer in that the kids were, in fact, answering my query without realizing it. So after having my drama heart broken, I reconcile myself to at least enjoy dinner.

I had a Chutney’s vegetable and rice bowl. I only know that because of my performance of ordering (“You want the vegetables?” “No, I said that just to fuck with you, of course I do.”), since to attempt to understand what the indiscriminate chunks of matter in your Chutney’s rice bowl actually are through some deductive process would be beyond any intellects. The guava juice was good. I have never in my entire life had the possibility of eating a real guava — Does anyone ever sit down at a corporate picnic or farmer’s market and just open up a guava? — so I can only assume this is what guava juice tastes like. Honestly guava’s may taste absolutely nothing like the sugary-sweet nectar that Chutney’s tried to pawn off on me but I’m almost happier being none the wiser.

Indigestion in tow, we walked to the theater.

From more than forty feet away, the Wheelock theater looks pretty pleasant, even modern, which is an adjective you can give to just about anything as long as it isn’t literature or philosophy because someone wearing an ascot will correct you. I’m one of those people who knows literally nothing about architecture other than liking Frank Gehry buildings when I was ten, so I also have to habitually “notice” that things are “well built” to keep up this strange adolescence-inspired charade.

Then I opened the doors and saw the army — a teeter-tottering mass — of children shaking and jumping and screaming all over the lobby — literally, agitating so tightly together that walking through to the Will Call table was impossible and I was basically shoving little people aside, standing on heads because they’re not just in front of you but under and above you all at once and it starts to feel like you’re a Chilean miner because you feel crushed and start having to punt toddlers out of your way just to pick up your tickets. It was here that I realized that this was a family theater production of the Wizard of Oz and that I was the only 20 year old guy wearing a blazer in the entire building.

At most other places I go, my grandfatherly cardigan and tweed jacket combination work out a “comfortable fit,” and I’ll get one compliment from a Hispanic girl — not kidding, it’s always the Hispanic girl — about it. But here, they mean only one thing to the eyes of leery parents guarding their precious commodities: my sweater, age, and gender mean that I am subject #1 for all of their deepest and darkest molest-y fears. Here’s the thing: I love kids. That’s a really hard thing to say as a man in general, but particularly as a man at my stage in life, but I really do, and here I’m forced to act like I don’t even know what they are. And it’s made all the funnier because a lot of men at the Wheelock Theater would really give the “Ugly Fathers or Pedophiles” contest a run for its money.

None of this was helped by my immediate need upon arrival to use the restroom — to pee out that toxic, neon guava juice — which was less a bathroom and more just a broom closet with two toilet stalls, two urinals, and three sinks crammed together with about the same quality of urban planning as Boston. If there were ever a bathroom that did not do anything to deserve having three sinks, it is one that has only two urinals that are separated by barely two inches of penis-to-penis space. So I had to pee and I managed to wrangle my way into the corner urinal, as far from danger and the aroma of dank poo as possible.

The whole time I’m in the Harry Potter bathroom, I’m consciously trying to avoid looking at anyone but I can’t help noticing that the kid next to me who is dangerously close to me — and I’m crouched like a fucking gremlin in this corner — has his trousers around his ankles as his dad levitates him into the air, and he’s just shooting piss all over the already piss-wallpapered walls right next to me. But his dad is not looking at the kid — no, he is not even noticing the horrendous mess that is happening to these poor, poor misused walls — because he is looking at me and my potentially-rapey sweater. So I don’t want to make eye contact with anyone and I’m studying the hell out of the tiles of the bathroom wall like I work at a Tile Import shop and hoping my bladder squeezes it out of me faster than usual so I can escape lazer-eyes and his floating piss-machine. Eventually I wash my hands and have to awkwardly suggest that another urine-guardian allow me to reach the paper towel machine so that I don’t walk out of this den of horrible smells and tragic aim with dripping hands.

Because everyone knows that when someone walks out of the bathroom with dripping hands, you kind of wonder if they were reaching into the toilet bowl. Nobody wants that.

Imagine your worst nightmare. If you aren’t dreaming of a surprise production of the Wizard of Oz in a theater where the backs of the seats feel like rough planks of thousand year old wood and you’re seated directly in front of the orchestra who is blasting smooth jazz at you, then you don’t have any idea what horror is.

It’s here where I should admit that the leads (THE LEEDS AREN’T WEAK, YOU’RE WEAK), especially Dorothy and the Tin Man who was, (not) coincidentally, played by my brother, were quite good.

The Director or Stage Manager or, honestly, some random dude, came up before the show to say a few words and said (to the kids in the audience, but I assumed he said it to me) “We hope to see you on stage next year.” So I spent the rest of the show imagining myself simultaneously playing all the roles in the Wizard of Oz which is both enthralling and terrifying to imagine. Shows that would not make good one-man shows: The Wizard of Oz.

Quick game: think about your ideal version of the Wizard of Oz. Now decide how many music numbers there would be. Is it twelve? No? Well, it was here. There were twelve musical numbers in this version of the Wizard of Oz. It’s like ten too many. This is not your ideal version of the Wizard of Oz. In fact, in my ideal version, the munchkins just dance for a while, Dorothy realizes that the crazy woman who lives near her is a total bitch, and everyone gets to eat free cookies.

At the intermission, for which I thanked Jesus more times than I have for almost anything else in my life, I realized that I had to go to the bathroom again and would have to do the whole ritual again. But I was saved from total despair when I looked at a line of women that looked like a Nicholas Sparks book-signing, but was in reality the bathroom line. If you ever wanted to feel great about not having a vagina, you should stand outside of a women’s restroom during the intermission of any reasonably public event. It’s like ladies discover bathrooms anew each time there’s a large public gathering split into two parts and, due to some inexplicable primal instincts, all act like predatory lions gathering at a gazelle corpse. Except the gazelle corpse is an improperly cleaned public restroom without enough paper towels.

So I retreat back to my concrete seat, weaving through groups of kids, some of whom are inexplicably wearing pajamas — some adults even had pajamas, but in groups that were not linked to the pajama-ed children, so it just felt more and more like I was in the Twilight Zone — in preparation, I can only suppose, for the moment where the kids catastrophically collapse and can’t be shepherded through the process of “getting ready for bed.” I, like I’m Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell, make it past the concessions table, which happens to be doing Super Bowl-quality business because the little bands of mongrels are all famished again after sitting still for about an hour, though honestly I entirely understand because when my mom takes me to see the Wizard of Oz, I kind of want to just leave and eat instead too. Except they get cookies and I don’t, split up into micro-chunks, because one thing that modern parents seem to really take a delight in doing is breaking up foods that don’t really pose choking hazards into small chunks for the fuck of it and then slowly parceling them out to their dying-of-hunger youngsters like they’re re-enacting Oliver Twist or something.

At the end of the play, a lot of people stand up, as if the play and it’s ensemble supporting cast of children, who, we have to admit, are adorable but not good at acting — because it’s not like a five year old is out on the street smoking cigarettes and reading secondary texts on the Wizard of Oz as part of their Daniel Day-Lewis method-acting routine — deserve a standing ovation. It was very cute, some people were good, but one thing that really bothers me is how often plays get standing ovations. It totally defeats the purpose if you’ll give everything a standing O. Playgasm.

The director’s note says something along these lines: “Finding the gold inside ourselves remains one of life’s greatest challenges.” I entirely agree. In many ways, I think the Wheelock Theater helped me do that tonight.

My name’s Brad, and I skipped the Freshman Formal to see the Wizard of Oz with the children of the city of Boston.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/12/things_vladimir_putin_is_not_too_busy_for

Dear Jacques,

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon,
115 West 95th Street,
New York City

Virginia, your little friends are right. So is your father (but is that not always the case…?). You have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. You strive for socio-symbolic completeness. You think that nothing can be which is not confirmed by some larger sociolinguistic entity — in Seminar XX, I call this the big Other. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s are incomplete. In this traumatic universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him and his inability to come to grips with the constitutive lack.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Or, perhaps Santa Claus exists as exception to the universal — the not-all. Which is to say, only in the sense that he does not. Your father wants to control your jouissance. He does this precisely through the Superego imperative to enjoy!

No Santa Claus! Thank not-God he does not live, and he does not live forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now we will still reside in these elaborate fantasies constructed out of a need to explain the unexplainable. I suppose in that sense, Santa might as well exist.

Sincerely,

Jacques Lacan

Two sets of skanky middle school eyes are sneering at me, momentarily distracted from pawing at iPods they will never own to take in my difficulties.

“Can I help you with something?”

Can you? There are so many people working in the Apple Store today, I start to wonder if unemployment even exists.

“No, thanks. I’m here for a Genius Bar appointment.”

“Oh, let me get Craig.”

If you insist. She does.

“Craig, paging Craig, can you put up your hand?”

He does not, and I awkwardly stand right in the doorway of the store. I fiddle back and forth doing the little dance with my feet that signifies aimlessness. At least the angsty acne-ridden monsters have become distracted again. We have technology to thank for many small miracles.

“Craig, Craig, are you back there? Throw up your hand, Craig!” She chuckles.

Throw up your fucking hand, Craig.

“Craiiiiiig, can you wave real fast? I’ve got a Genius Bar guy.”

His hand shoots up from the mass of obesity, opulence, and red-shirted Appeople at the back of the store.

“Do you see him over there?”

No, I have suddenly become blind. Lead me to him!

“Yes, thank you.”

I walk through this thrawl of people. I’m not claustrophobic, but if I were, this Apple shopping experience would be infinitely less comfortable. I wonder briefly about people who fear Aluminum, and how hard walking to the counter would be without crying. I then imagine the oddly short individual next to me crying. It fits him.

“Hi, I had an appointment, but I’m a little late.”

“What was the name?”

“Brad.”

“Oh– I see, well you’re going to have to sign up again.”

I already signed up. I’m not that late. Can’t I be squeezed in?

“Oh, really?”

“Yep.”

“Um… so can you do that for me? Or do I have to go home and come back?”

“No, no, can’t, sorry. You can however grab one of these desktops and sign up — HA HA — not these kids computers here.”

I was planning on using the kids computer so I could feel like a giant. The Appeople will deprive me of even this small pleasure.

“Ok, cool.”

I walk over to the computer, next to an avid white man transfixed by the magnificence of an Apple Cinema Display. It reminds me of what I picture to be the general pants-pooping that followed early public demonstrations of electric lighting.

I sign up for an appointment an hour later. After spending too much (which would really be any) time in Eddie Bauer, I head back.

This time, things will be different.

I am a few minutes early. Craig, you will not again deprive me of the opportunity to fix this computer. I am on a mission.

I burst through the doors like the Sultan charging into his highly profitable, all-white harem. Apple’s annoyingly pretty industrial architecture will not catch me off guard like before. The doors do not really burst because of their hydraulic systems, but it is nonetheless dramatic.

I shoot devil stares at all non-adults in the room. Those roving pre-pubescent eyeballs will not fuck with me. They recoil in terror. Unfortunately I also pass my evil glower over a baby. Sorry, baby. You were a casualty of something far grander than yourself.

Out of nowhere, multiple red-shirted employees appear, readying their memorized introductory sequence:

“Can we–”

THERE WILL BE NO HELPING ME TODAY, APPEOPLE!

I spot Craig chatting with a colleague in the exact same place as before.

“Brad. I’m here for my appointment.” I say it with the maximum possible amount of gravitas — which means, very little.

“Ok, wait a few moments.”

Oh, Craig, I will wait decades for this fix.

And then after running all the tests in the book, I was told there was no problem with my computer. So I left with exactly the same computer as before. But with a much higher level of JUSTICE.

I extend my offering again, hopeful something improves in the second go-round.

Embarrassed, at a loss for a clever retort, I wonder, “Would saying yes even make it any better?”

“No, um… it’s not. But it’s my first time here.”

She has a shy grin, but boredom is her defining feature. It always happens this way with these girls.

“First-timers tend to go a little overboard.”

This is the moment I’m supposed to realize I’ve done something tremendously wrong, awkward; something in serious need of correction. But the defects that she sees in me so quickly are ones that I’ve long ago noticed in myself. Ones that will not disappear. They are me.

“Right… right.”

She can’t have graduated high school yet. It’s written in the way she holds herself; in the way straightened hair falls across her face. Her youth so vivid in the ill-fitting neon shirt.

I look down again at the mess I’ve made. Though I should only feel sadness and disgust, there’s something redemptive in the inspection of what I’ve done.

“That’ll be $5.35,” she adds, as I fumble for my credit card.

“I don’t need a receipt.”

I pick up my Peachwave frozen yogurt, filled to the brim with frozen fruits and boba balls, and walk out the front door, past the midget-sized, amorphous plastic chairs.

As the spoon grabs granola and yogurt, I think,

“I’m going to enjoy this one.”

Starting in Nashville, TN, the case proceeded to Knoxville, TN. That’s reasonable, after all, you can’t expect these people to drive forever, or fly, or however it is that packages even get moved these days. Trains? Do we do that?

After Knoxville, my case made its way to Virginia, stopping over in Roanoke, a city I’ve never heard of but appears to be reasonably sized. I don’t know anything about Virginia. I’ve never cared. After researching, I learned that Roanoke does happen to be the site of Virginia Tech and maybe UPS made its drivers take the day off to comemorate the police officer who was killed in another awful shooting at Virginia Tech. Rest in peace, sir.

I used to not like police officers that much because I think it was a “cool kid’s club” thing to do, but most of the ones I’ve met in Boston are quite pleasant fellows with appealing accents, so I have to say I’ve been relatively mollified.

The next day, the iPhone continued its Odyssey to Laurel, MD — yet another city that could probably not exist without changing much about my daily activities besides my reception of iPhone cases. My case decided to stop over a day in Laurel, maybe the sights are nice, who is to say? Laurel is near the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, so maybe my iPhone case needed to do a little bit of ballistics research with some of the nation’s top minds.

Next, it traveled into my mother’s ancestral state: New Jersey, deposited in some UPS building in Saddle Brook. Saddle Brook was really only a quick stopover though because then the case proceeded on its way to Shrewsbury, MA.

From Shrewsbury, you might imagine that we could make the straight shot to Cambridge, the final haul, allowing this poor UPS driver to take a little bit of time off, but I think as you can tell that would be a little too easy for UPS.

Instead, UPS decided it would move on to Watertown, MA in order to, who knows, maybe check out some of the great tourist spots like the old home of Boston frontman Tom Scholz or visit UPS’s friend, TV and movie heart-thief Eliza Dushku. Watertown is a relatively pleasant place I’m sure, but my iPhone is feeling awfully naked, and has felt that way for roughly a week. If I drop it again, onus is on you, UPS.

At this point, they were all tired out of driving and ready to take a weekend break. I suppose on Monday I’ll see if we finally unite at the Mail Center in Harvard Yard or if instead my iPhone case and its UPS courier decide to take a little more time and visit Martha’s Vineyard before returning to the city for a long work week. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised.

While I was searching, I found a cd from Ariel Rubin. “Who’s Ariel Rubin?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you because you really needn’t stay in the dark: she’s a singer-songwriter-type based in Boston. She plays electronic ukelele which I think is a little gimmicky, but she pulls it off in a barely-gimmicky sort of way that makes it hard to hate much. After watching her do a live concert at the MegaStarshipBucks near Harvard — sufficiently convinced of the semi-gimmicky-ness of her uke-strumming — I decided I would support the band by buying a cd. There’s something about supporting the underdogs, it gets me every time. I walk over to her stand. “Which of your EPs is the best, do you think?” I ask her. Ariel indicates that the newer cd is produced much better, but we laugh at the difficulty in picking a “best” together. Such mutual rapport. I haven’t made friends this quickly since the time I was ordering coffee downstairs and, when the register stopped working, suggested with a coy smile that it was these “small victories against the machines” that kept us alive. I hand Ariel $15 dollars. My hand wavers momentarily, waiting to receive change. I do not.

I am not receiving any change.

“Well I guess I’ve made quite a contribution,” I reason to myself striding back to my corner table. My computer is still there. I have a computer-table-lock-thing but use it with little frequency and thus constantly to worry that I will return to my table to find a vanished computer. I lose everything else, why not? I like in movies and TV that when things disappear, they always leave a dust-imprint where they once were. It would be nice if that always happened, so every time you left somewhere there was a buttocks imprint proving you were once sitting there.

Then again the world would be a dusty asthmatic hell. So maybe not.

I look at the back of my new Ariel Rubin cd. There are three songs listed on the back. “You’ve got to be nutting me.” For those less mathly inclined, like myself, I did some quick calculations: that’s $5 per song. I don’t think I’d even pay Elton John $5 for Rocketman and that’s probably the best song of all time. I look back at Ariel Rubin from across the crowded MegaStarshipBucks: you may have won this time, Ariel, but I will vanquish you some day.

Her music is good, you should listen to it. But you should maybe avoid buying the $15 dollar EP.

I know that winter is coming, but I just keep listening to Beach Fossils, Real Estate, and The Drums and pretend that it’s perpetual summer. I usually do that while wearing a winter hat. This contradiction doesn’t bother me as much as you might think it should.

The number of Facebook friends who I add has dropped considerably these days, even given the relatively new shift in social location. In fact, my history of Facebook would probably show something of an exponential decrease curve, or a bell curve. Look, I don’t take economics classes here, I don’t do those CHART things. I’ve narrowed down possible reasons to two options. Either A) because I don’t have any friends or B) because I don’t use social networks with the same incidence that I did before. Unfortunately, given the frequency of snarky or music-themed statuses on my wall, it’s much more likely to be the first than the second.

On Friday, I was walking through “The Yard” in the bitter cold with a friend. We had both made mention of the bitterness of this cold and our desire that this cold be less bitter. Then I get a call on my cellphone.

I never get calls. Even when I know that the number is a mystery and probably a depressed-sounding Hispanic woman calling for Charlie or a telemarketer trying to sell me purple capsules to increase the size of my penis, I pick up the fucking phone because of how few calls I get. “Are you in the Yard?”

I am.

“I’ll come find you by the steps.”

And so I wait. The cold continues to bitter.

“Ok, you need to take off your shirt for a picture.”

I don’t really like doing that. You can’t let this Gulag frame out into the wild too much, especially not when there’s light around. Given the propensity for secret photos to make their way onto the internet, I’m slightly concerned. But then the idea of accidentally stumbling upon myself on a Ukrainian porn website makes me chuckle.

“And you have to hold this baby-doll.”

I’m starting to feel increasingly violated, but mostly just confused.

“And you have to suck your thumb.”

Violated.

“Ok, thanks so much, bye!”

And with that they disappeared. I started to put my shirt and coat back on, wondering the whole time what had really just happened here. I couldn’t help imagining this is what it feels like after a low-budget adult film shoot when you put your clothes on again and go back to your job serving burgers at a California Arbys. Then I remembered the little sticker they place on the back of books rented for class:

“I’m a rental, be gentle”

I have more in common with used copies of Dostoyevsky than I realized. Admittedly, it’s been a small goal of this blog to insert that line into something for quite a while.

Today Annenberg, which I will henceforth refer to pejoratively as “the cafeteria,” was serving “smashed potatoes”. Nobody likes smashed potatoes. We like mashed potatoes and we like regular potatoes. If anyone wanted hard, under-cooked potato chunks in their silky mash, they would ask for it. And if anyone is asking for it, you’re wrong. We don’t ask for eggs half-way cooked or under-done chicken. Even though, as I’ve heard from my meat-consuming comrades, the cafeteria does that one anyways.

Whoever decided to replace the Cranberry Pomegranate juice with Fruit Punch has created a vendetta with me that they are probably unaware of. Prepare yourself for battle.

Today was the Harvard Book Store 20% of customer day. That means that today I went like the Benjaminian-influenced bibliophile that I am and dutifully bought more books to enrich my knowledge base and my bookshelves, which are already so over-saturated that the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time sit forlornly at the edge waiting to be read next semester. While I was inside, perusing the fiction shelves, I overheard a sentence that seemed out of place surrounded by so many great works of literature:

“The Odyssey is about… going around the Roman Empire right?”

Fortunately her friend corrected her. I didn’t want to have to do that.

“I didn’t realize the Baltimore Ravens were named after Edgar Allen Poe.”
“Neither did I.”
“Yeah.”

I had to leave.

People who wear sweatpants around everywhere bug me, even though I can’t really put my finger on why. I think everyone should be comfortable, but the rest of us are wearing real pants and you’re just a fabric cloud. It’s like clothing cheating. Maybe part of the resentment is that it feels a lot like they’re wearing pajamas outside. I admit to not really knowing. In contrast to this, I believe strongly that babies in pajamas, particularly onesies, are more adorable than usual babies. Go figure. Then again vomiting in public is much less acceptable coming from older people in sweatpants than it is from babies in sweatpants.

I heard Pumped Up Kicks again today. I thought that song was gone. Then I realized: it will never be gone. Pumped Up Kicks is an ontological certainty like birth and death. There is waking up, there is the sun, and then there is Pumped Up Kicks. When I die, they will be playing Pumped Up Kicks at the hospital. In the moment of my final breath, I will smile knowing that I have finally escaped Foster the People and their strange song about a school shooting. But then, as I approach Heaven, which I will realize much too late is real and will curse all of that sinning, blasting from the low-quality speakers at the gates will be Pumped Up Kicks and I will turn to St. Peter and say, “Fuck it. Send me to Hell.” And in Hell, I’ll scream “Noooooooo!” because I’ll probably just have to listen to bad remixes of Pumped Up Kicks and I’ll just suffer for the rest of eternity.

Sundae Sundays would be better if the ice cream weren’t a color that I’m relatively sure doesn’t exist in nature.

My name is Brad, I used to like Pumped Up Kicks and I still like babies in pajamas.

I’m pretty sure part of the dream even involved me blogging about the dream. There’s no way it was that self-referential, but I have that creepy deja vu-esque sensation that it is.

Strange conversation I walked by:

“Right… and you have these nanobot red blood cells.”

I noticed a lot of people dressed up here on Halloween as police officers. But if you’re a girl, you don’t dress up as a real policer officer. Instead, you dress up like the “police officers” that pull you over in adult films and then “punish you.” I have to say, men and lesbian-ladies-who-love-porn, is this really anyone’s fantasy? Don’t people want to avoid an arrest and maybe just meet someone nice and intellectually stimulating? No? That’s fair. It certainly would be strange though if we inverted the porn-cop costume with the atire of your average police officer. Then, on Halloween, people would wear their “Fat-cop” costume or their “Well-Dressed and Official Publicity Session Lieutenant” outfit. The result would include what are essentially Arrested Development-style Hot-cops or tons of Lt. Dangle patrolling the mean streets of America, and on Halloween a bunch of people looking either

1. Menacing and ready to give you a speeding ticket or
2. Strangely well put together.

But girls don’t seem to dress up in business attire for Halloween. If I had a nickel for every time I heard, “I’m hot Hillary Clinton tonight,” I’d probably have to give a few nickels back for all the times I’ve heard, “I’m just sort of slutty-looking.” At the very least, police departments would save a lot of money on cotton and polyester. Hot pants are infinitely more economical to produce.

Music you should listen to: Morning Teleportation. Trust me, you haven’t heard of it, but it’s great.

Whenever I visit CVS, I go upstairs to look at office supplies. There’s something about staplers. They get me. This means every time I go, I’m tempted to buy one of those really top-notch Swingline staplers that you can swing around and staple shit with absolute efficiency and something akin to power. One strange thing about the Harvard Square CVS is that the pharmacy is located right at the top of the stairs. This invariably means that when I’m searching out a foxy new stapler, I see a bunch of people searching out some foxy new prescriptions. And there’s something that my level of society hasn’t quite worked out yet about seeing someone you know waiting in line for a prescription so that the experience can’t help but feel “awkward.” Medication is a lot like fornication or crapping in that we all know it’s happening but most people refuse to admit that the standing figure in front of them is capable or willing to do either of those things. Imagine a life without pooping. Now come back to reality. So when I see girls that I know at CVS waiting for what could honestly just be 24-hour photo development (it’s right where the Pharmacy is in some bizarre photography/medicative deal) but is probably birth control or ADD medication, there’s a strange moment where the person in front of me transforms beyond the idealized prototype of an individual that I think everyone to be into something quite other. When I see you standing there, I think, “Oh, this person is getting some action.” And I also append, “And probably more than me,” because my inexplicable and egotistic insistence that “I only date models” has really complicated romance at Harvard much further than it should be and to a nearly impossible level. This is not only due to a cross-application of the above discussion of the beautiful Harvard girl, but also because artificially limiting yourself like this ends up meaning you like women who quite like to pretend you don’t even exist. And here I thought I was the only one thinking nobody else exists. The Matrix.

Why did Kanye choose the West?

I get a lot of email spam. It makes things doubly hard because often I want to know about certain events that are happening. The problem is that when every third email entering my inbox is about “Patrick’s Pumpkin Hunt!!1!,” I have a hard time convincing myself of the importance of any other messages and that they don’t represent another “Farmer’s Lewis’s Amish bakery sale in the farthest away building on campus”. Because as many “Hear former President Clinton speak to an audience of six people in which you are the sole focus of everyone’s attention!” messages come, so many more are just shouting about midgetnards and the 86th health survey about whether or not my feet are comfortable on Harvard’s pathways. Someone’s job should really be to ensure that spam is filtered more effectively based on my interests. Google?

Things that make me laugh: Fat people on bicycles.

Also, fuck you, Palm Pre.

Goodnight, I’m Brad, even though I’m really just a world trying to open up to yours.