Whenever I see a trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby adaptation, I just envision:
Colors colors colors PIZAZZ!
Starring:
Jack from Titanic!
Spider-man! No, the old one. You didn’t even see the new one.
That girl you think is Michelle Williams!
Not Tom Hardy!
and more…
Featuring music by:
Whatever’s on your iPod right now!
Based on that novel you Spark Notes’d in high school!
Coming Soon to a screen you’ll be ignoring while you tweet.
(Seriously, what the fuck?)
I want to make an atheistic holiday that’s equivalent to Easter. I haven’t quite gotten the name down yet, but there will be a version of the traditional egg hunt that’ll be called the Soul Search. Every little kid will get a basket filled with fresh cut grass and a shovel, then be set loose in the local cemetery. They’ll be tasked with digging into graves and examining the remains of the bodies, looking for evidence of where the deceased’s “soul” has gone. Just imagine little Julie with a big grin on her face, rattling around the skull of Mr. Francis Jones, father of three and beloved husband.
No soul there, Julie!
The hunt will eventually lead the kids to churches and similar places of worship, where they’ll be tasked with finding where that pesky Lord is hiding. Where could Jesus be?
I haven’t a clue, Julie!
The children will be rewarded for all their hard work when they arrive home to find a present waiting for them. With vigor, they’ll tear into the beautifully wrapped box to find absolutely nothing. The gift is the lesson that after wasting their entire day in search of God and the human soul, they’ll only end up empty handed. This will be every child’s first atheist Easter, and every year thereafter, they’ll spend the day celebrating their lives and the tangible world around them, because it’s as lush and beautiful as anything they’ll ever know in their finite existence.
I don’t smoke anymore, but if I did, it would have to be right after sex. It doesn’t feel particularly good, mainly because sex (I’d assume) is a physical activity. Would you light up right after jogging? Obviously not, everyone knows smokers don’t jog; You can’t look cool doing it.
So why smoke post-coitus? I think it’s because that’s the image best representing cool in my head. You just got a lady, had some great sex, and now you’re laying there, splayed in your perfectly tussled sheets, staring at the ceiling. You’re not naked, because tv has embedded in me the idea that people laying around in underwear is sexier than being naked. And you need a zippo, because there’s nothing sexy about being a regular person with an ornate BIC you “accidentally” lifted off Chad at the bar. The synonymous click of that hinge is half the appeal, anyway. You can start a movie with that sound and everyone would think it’s edgy. Then there’s some heavy breathing because your memory of sex always begins right after an orgasm and someone rolls off the other to the base position on their backs.
Somehow, thumb rings are a part of this equation. I don’t know why, but in my head they’re cool, even though I know they really aren’t. Also a beard. Every guy who has sex and smokes in bed has a beard. It’s a fact. I saw it in a Chris Evans movie.
So you smoke, and it doesn’t make you cough or feel winded or worry about whether you’re getting ash in your bed or chest hair. It’s cool and she likes it and, ultimately, you’ve achieved greatness. I got to do that once and, since then, I haven’t tried to sleep with that many people. I achieved exactly what I wanted sex to be since age thirteen and now I don’t know what’s left.
I better check out some more Chris Evans movies, because I’d like to try out some more sex, but I need a purpose. What? Sex for the sake of it? No, stupid, everyone knows it has to be about something. Someone who saw a Kevin Spacey show told me that.
Imagine if you could know exactly who has viewed your Facebook photos, when, how many times, and for how long? It would change the way you view everything. Your own behavior, society’s, that of the people closest to you. Slutty girls would have the affirmation they so long for, but now with exact data on what works best for them to achieve maximum fame as an internet trollop.
Oh, Chris, that’s what the “Like” button is for.
No, it isn’t. That’s for people who are comfortable enough to let you know that they approve and are looking for some mutual back-patting. If you really wanted the truth, you’d be horrified at the influx of visitors and lingerers that are on your page. Or, you’d be tragically crushed by the lack, thereof. Although, I’m less sure that’s a possibility, because even horrifically ugly or stupid people gets tons of web traffic, if only out of some morose sense of spectacle. Here’s how I envision it happening:
________
Shannon Z decides to upgrade to Facebook Pro, which allows her to see who viewed her page, pictures, and posts, how many times, and for how long. She feels the warmth of public validation envelope her as she sees that, on top of the 37 “Likes” she received on her gussied up party pic, there were also an additional 54 views of the photo itself, most of whom are men. They like what they see, she thinks, bemused as to why so few of the girls made their viewership known. They’re just jealous.
As she continues her foray into the informational abyss, Shannon Z takes note of a recent status about her new job as Marketing Rep. for LoLserious Studios, where she finally got the job of her dreams (that week) and ecstatically posted about how she wanted to thank all of her friends, family, and the big Gee Oh Dee. 14 “Likes.” 14?, she thinks, but 92 people viewed this post and…and…there’s only one comment from Mr. Donovan, my high school English teacher, reading, “nice.”
The discovery is so distressing to Shannon Z that she begins to furiously click through all of her recent posts, from birthdays to lazy, rainy Sundays with the besties. She begins to notice a trend. As high as the viewer traffic may be, those people who would verbally massage her ego were only willing to do so when it involved something trivial, like her love of Pretty Little Liars or the Cinco de Mayo tradition of ”Margz with Momz.” Worse still, the greatest flow of “Likes,” comments, and passive voyeurism revolves around the cute, innocent, and hi-larious pictures she takes with her friends. In a slinky dress. Or a bathing suit. Or a particularly tight sweater. But just how big is the void between these two groups of followers? She begins to take note.
Photo of Grams and I? 12 views, 1 “Like.” Photo of me wearing those funny black-rimmed glasses? 23 views, 2 “Likes.” Photo of me cuddling with Fwuffy Mitts-McGee? 1 view, 0 “Likes.” Photo of Jessica Q and I trying to paint the Rec center in yoga pants? 87 views, 19 “Likes.”
Huh?!
Baffled, Shannon Z begins to wonder, It has to be because we’re doing something nice, painting the Rec center. And with that, she continues her study. More and more, she begins to realize that the people she “knows” are less interested in her academic, philanthropic, familial, or personal achievements, and more interested in how many eggs she stuffed in her mouth that one drunken Easter or whether her Delta Gamma Frappa torn graffiti tee was see-through that last time. With that staggering realization clouding her judgement, she begins to graph together the stats, with horrifying results.
Of all those viewers of her physically promiscuous, socially uninhibited, and often flagrantly inebriated photos, the lion’s share are men. And not just men that she normally interacts with. Of course, there’s Ryan K from work, nice guy he is. And George T, from college, always so helpful in class. But then there was Frank M, the somewhat shifty-eyed guy that lived down the hall in her dorm. They had become Facebook Friends (FaFrenz) during orientation, but they had never really spoken. So why has he viewed her page so frequently? And for so long… Out of the 948 pictures she’s currently tagged in, Frank M had viewed them all, often spending upwards of 25 minutes on some, collectively totaling to over 19 full hours lingering on images of her. What a creeper!
But then, she sees. Trent P, Harry O, Tyler F, John S, Chris(s) H, R, AND C! All of these guys, some of them she knows rather well, have spent dozens of hours viewing only her most scandalous of shots. Disgusting!, she thought. What could they possibly be doing with all those photos for so long?
And this is where you might want to interject and say, Well, obviously, they were masturbating. But that seems like too long a time for a guy to be doing that to one girl’s picture(s).
And that’s where you’d be wrong. For Shannon Z knows, in the recesses of her mind, exactly what’s possible in the twisted, vulgar world of the modern male. She had seen it first hand upon rashly walking into her younger brother’s room. One, two, three porn videos up at once! It was vomit-inducing. Some of those things, I’ve only tried to forget. But… is this what people do to my pictures? Can’t be. My brother’s just a total perv.
And though he is, he isn’t alone, as Shannon Z finds the worst information she’ll see all day. Her top viewer, most fervent and loyal, a worshipper at the altar of her body, is none other than Mr. Donovan, her high school English teacher. Her face sinks. Her mind begins to race at the thought of soft-spoken, gray haired, charmingly aloof Mr. Donovan. And the sheer number of views! To garner the amount of time spent on her pictures, why, he’d have to have multiple open at once. Which he does. One, two, three, four, clockwise around a video of his favorite porn star doppelgänger for poor little Shannon Z. The vision burns through her mind, binding her in the anguish of shattered naiveté. This is what they think of me!? This is what they do?!? Oh God, why… I didn’t know! I didn’t ever want to know.
Her mascara running, vision foggy from the tears, Shannon Z begins to systematically take back her life. Album by album, page by page, she tears down the world of objectification she’s allowed her Facebook profile to become. And once her slate has been cleaned and her mind put at ease, she silently deactivates her account, putting an end to the darkest era of her life, the twenty-some-odd minutes that metaphorically encapsulated years of unknown strife. And with that, she takes her newfound victory to the bathroom, where she wipes away the tears, freshens up her mascara, and takes a photograph of herself in the mirror. She posts it to Instagram, with a caption reading: Ain’t nothing gonna bring me down. Imma a new girl <333
And there she remains safe from the scrutiny of stalkers, creepers, employers, disapproving parents, and girls that are totally just jelly. The vestiges of her misspent youth on Facebook rest foggily in her mind as a distant memory. And as eternally stored data on Facebook’s internal servers. Also, on the hard drives of roughly twenty men who were smart enough to save their favorite spank bank material before she eventually removed everything in shame.
Oh, you think guys don’t do that? Yeah, because they do.
I told her that I thought she secretly missed me.
She told me that not all secrets are great mysteries, some are just unfortunate truths.
“If it’s good enough for Iron Man, it’s good enough for you.” Best advice I’ve ever gotten.
In response to The Onion’s tweet from last night which, if you haven’t heard, referred to Beasts of the Southern Wild star, nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, as a “cunt.”
Sorry, but I’m a firm believer that anything goes in comedy. Anything. We revel in “tasteless” or “vile” humor daily, whether we want to admit it or not, then when the right cause comes around, an easy pick to appear righteous, we dog pile on someone with our flimsy, circumstantial moral codes. I’m not saying that the little girl is, in fact, a cunt. To the astute reader, neither is The Onion. Their joke was based on the relatively new idea that post-Oscar Twitter has become a platform for everyone to eviscerate celebrities from the quiet recesses of their filthy, humanoid-indented section of the futon. They took it, as The Onion tends to do, to the logical extreme and that’s where the joke landed.
Look, nobody is actually calling this little girl that horrible, nasty little word. I’m sure that most people only have the fuzziest of fuzzies toward her and wish her the best. I know I do. I generally loathe children and the movies starring them, but Beasts of the Southern Wild was downright beautiful, and managed to make me emote via my tear ducts numerous times over its relatively short running time. Like, really emote, not hand in hot water/why don’t you love me emote. Needless to say, it rested thoroughly on the shoulders of a brilliant little girl pulling off what is sure to be the first of multiple fantastic performances throughout her career.
That being said, it’s okay to call her a cunt. Not necessarily directly to her face, because that just seems unnecessarily cruel. But on the internet, the place people go to explicitly for the free reigned nigh-anarchy of self expression, this kind of thing is bound to happen. Sorry, but it’s fair game. Despite what people may wish to believe (and try they will) that Seth MacFarlane called this little girl a cunt during a live broadcast on ABC, he didn’t. It wasn’t a public denouncement of her awful behavior or being too goddamn lovable NOT to call her something awful as a knee-jerk reaction. It was a tweet from an organization that’s paid to tweet jokes. Sometimes, jokes hurt people, it’s just in their nature. And people will likely argue that Twitter posts from reputable organizations should be censored or filtered for content to avoid offending people, but they’d be wrong. That’s the very first step toward limiting their ability to properly do their job. It may not have in the past, but their job has evolved to require a Twitter-atuned sense of humor and, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but sometimes sarcasm can get lost in the mix when you’re limited to 140 characters. Just think about how often your jokes fall flat when texting because some of that clever inflection is lost. Never? I think you should hear what people say about you behind your back.
The entire “responsible media vs. distasteful asshole” argument went out the window the moment this became a Twitter-based discussion. Despite everyone’s best intentions, the internet is still essentially the wild west of media platforms. I can go online right now, log into Facebook, find a picture of your grandmother and leave a comment reading, “Nice tits lulz.” You can report me for being a dick and I could (won’t) get a stern talking to, but it’s irrelevant in the grand scheme. The internet is a game of trust, and it’s built entirely on uneven ground. That’s not to say it’s an evil invention, it’s merely chaotic neutral. As an adult in your mid-20s, you should currently be able to effectively brush off 80% of what people will say about you on the internet (that you know about). You were there during its infancy, sneakily entering the “teen” chatrooms even though you just hit twelve. And don’t even tell me you’ve never lied when answering “a/s/l.” You’ve seen the videos of beheadings and rapes and all the things that have been linked to you, inadvertently or not, and even if you don’t like them, you should now have a slightly thicker skin. Despite our modern culture’s insistence on forging a more politically correct future, we live in a world that has created infinitely more ways to bully than ever before, and we should be getting progressively more resilient to the mean things people will always say.
Back to the little girl for a minute, because there’s something that popped up almost immediately in response to The Onion’s controversy. I’m not going to take a position on whether or not they have the “right” to take this path, because it would meet immediate rebuttal via recycling their original argument, but people have been calling this whole scenario racist, and that’s just plain wrong. People have claimed that “Nobody would ever say this a little white girl,” or that “They’re just trying to knock a talented black girl down in her prime.” I’m not going to get into the treacherous territory of questioning angry black people about their motives, but let me just put it this way: If this were a few years ago and the child in question was Dakota Fanning, creepy white Golem of the screen, I’d have laughed just as hard. Maybe twice as hard, because she actually seems like she could be a little cunt, bossily stomping her feet demanding someone pick the baby carrots from of her salad. Her race was and will never be the point of the joke, or even a remote part of it. It is succinct, and clearly hinging on the irony of people willing to insult celebrities to an extreme, even a child.
And with that, I arrive at my longwinded point. It’s abundantly clear that we live in an odd time. Society, as a general rule, has grown progressively more callous and extreme in its love affair with the sordid and macabre. Within the last hundred years or so, as mass media has exponentially increased the rate at which cultural memes and unified understanding of humor can spread, (most) people have allowed their guards to drop somewhat. It’s a given that people from any previous generation would find today’s humor vulgar (Though, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a minstrel show, so stop pointing fingers you decrepit husks). Whether our increased desensitization is socially healthy is up for debate, but the fact is it’s relevant. The problem is that people aren’t willing to accept that they, too, are a part of this culture. They splash in the kiddie pool of insensitivity all summer long, with the floaties of subjective victimization as their crutch. Every feminist who thinks the word “cunt” disenfranchises their gender has probably thought, “That stupid bitch!” when a drunk chick spilled a beer on her. Every person of the religious right raises a red flag when someone offends their precious belief system, but will gladly throw a Muslim under the bus for a laugh. And only sometimes figuratively. For every time a dad has defended the right for his daughter to play softball on the same field as the boys, he’s probably called someone at the grocery store a nigger under his breath. (Oh, I was supposed to hyphen-hide that, wasn’t I?).
People like to laugh at the things that awaken their inner prick until someone’s pointing the finger in their very general direction. I’m talking like, within 45 degrees. The joke could have easily been one of fifty horrendous jokes that Daniel Tosh would make on his show within 22 minutes. He averages between 2-2.3 million viewers every week, not including the people that pay to see him live or on DVD. Comedy Central is also building an entire line-up of shows directly intended to offend as many people as humanly possible through famous assholes Jeff Ross, Anthony Jeselnik, and Amy Schumer. These are people who will jump at the chance to mock someone the day after they die, let alone calling a little girl a name anonymously on the internet. And let’s not forget the currently renowned king of all things comedy, Louis C.K., who on numerous occasions has called his own children cunts. Like, way more than once. Frequently, in fact, to hilarious results. What separates his usage from The Onion’s? He wasn’t even being ironic about it, he just threw it out there with earnest gusto. Oh, but his detractors find it offensive?
Well, there’s no helping those without a sense of humor. They’re just a bunch of cunts.
In the unfathomable instance that you actually missed the most important thing ever, a night where people you don’t know won things you didn’t vote for, here’s my very important recap via my live tweets:
That was to help you and totally not about indulgent self-promotion or ego stroking. Totally. Not. You’re welcome.
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