Late one pre-summer afternoon amidst the thick bustle of nervous tension that can only mean final exams, I removed a “borrowed” white board pen from my pocket and for the second time ever, wrote something on the white board of the door. It was a crafty advertisement for a service: Freddie’s Awesome Airport Shuttle. For $10 + optional tips, I ferry you and your precious cargo to LAX in style and comfort only a VW can provide. For small compensation, I would also give the curbside baggage checker the patented Evil Eye when he tells you disapprovingly that you simply cannot check five four-hundred pound duffel bags. Although I was not adequately compensated for this service, legend has it that one look from said evil eye can kill a man from the inside, utterly destroying and deferring any and all dreams in a manner similar to small dried grapes basking in solar energy.
I should note that this post might be seen by most people as somewhat crude. “Awesome,” I hear you thinking.
The college white board, it seems to me, is in many ways a relief measure for the inevitable build up of male hormonal tension that being cooped up in a dorm engenders, for here finally is a benign, non-destructive, completely erasable canvas where the inner artwork of the male psyche can be expressed. This inner artwork is comprised entirely of renderings of the phallus and the endless variation of shapes, sizes, and textures that the two simple elements of cock and balls combined can create.
Apart from the future Georgia O’Keeffes, you never see the college female engaging in crude renderings of their genitalia on their white boards. From my experience, the messages on the girl’s side of the hall consisted of cute messages to the person across the way. Lauren and Ana got into a maddening war of Kimura-Wong Reflex conditions, wishing each other good mornings and nice days to the tune of curly orange letters and happy sun faces.
Perhaps the reluctance to render the female genitalia owes in part because of the comparative difficulty in creating a satisfactory caricature to what is a much more complex system. Evidence: in the seventh grade Life Skills class, the “What’s Happening to my Body” book for girls was, in addition to being a much more entertaining read, sixteen pages longer than the boy version (No, I didn’t dig up my copies – I checked Amazon. I’m strange, but not a perv like that). Representation in artwork of the vagina consists of O’Keeffes’ aforementioned flowers, requiring many years of technical training to master oil painting, whereas representation in artwork of the penis consists usually of large rocks or trees stuck upright and generally pointed at and laughed at.
On a related note, I used to doodle a lot in class, rather than take notes. In taking a psychoanalytic lens to this habit, I realized with some chagrin that should my notes fall into the wrong hands, one would assume that I was a pervert, as my doodles were all either phalluses or vaginas. Further contemplation of this revealed that nearly all doodles can be classified into those two categories – closed shapes are vaginas, and pretty much anything else is a penis. Dismayed, I stopped doodling and my grade point average shot up several points.
Thankfully, my white board did not degenerate into a wasteland of crude phalli and ejaculate renderings, mostly thanks to the fact that there was not a whiteboard pen freely available. Max and I, constantly testing our inane social hypothesis, theorized that a figure on a whiteboard will be endowed with a phallus within two hours of unsupervised display. This number is drastically lowered during Thursday and Friday nights, where guys full of booze and the need to impress the boozed up broads they have with them are more likely to engage in such wanton acts of vandalism. To test this, I drew a crude figure staring in horror downwards towards his crotch on Max’s board, which he bravely volunteered for the sake of scientific inquiry. Checking back on the experiment later in the day, our hapless figure was indeed gifted with a brand new coiling member that, when outstretched, would approximately triple his height. “No wonder he’s so horrified,” I think.
But thanks to finals and stress, our halls laid empty, and would be vandals sequestered away in a last ditch effort to justify their parent’s money. Soon I had a small base of clientele which I would deliver to the airport on the day of their flights in a timely manner, thereby funding my portion of the gas money for the long drive back up to Seattle with Reed and Angee.
This task taken care of, I set upon the greater one of cleaning up my room. Although I take pride in my supposed monk-like thrift and rejection of worldy objects, I am forced to acknowledge that I really did acquire a great deal of shit during the year. A sampling of these objects, both necessary and completely unnecessary are as follows:
I half-heartedly engaged in the vigorous task of weeding through what will be stored, thrown away, and brought back. There was a mountain of stuff, and our trash rooms were overflowing. I would wager this is the case in all the colleges – kids can’t bring all their shit home, so they throw away thousands of dollars worth of goods. Thank God Deputy R.A. Jen put some large bags out for Goodwill donations. They were filled to the brim almost as fast as she laid them out. The dorm halls were a mess of crap, and moving about required deft maneuvering around the unfortunate byproduct of the volatile teenage spending demographic. It’s amazing how much crap we accumulate.
Brandon, a true forward thinker, had gotten rid of nearly all unnecessary items when he flew back home for winter break. His room was a true monk’s den: bed, desk, laptop, clothes, and a few DVDs. We passed his open door with sneers of burning jealously, like demons passing by the gate of heaven itself.
I volunteered to help Polish Jen (like the hot dog, not the cleaning motion employed on fine silverware and candlesticks) and Ana and Jason move their extra stuff into a nearby public storage facility. The car absolutely laden with bags full of goods, we took several trips back and forth to get it all in. At one point, Jason had filled my car’s rear (seats down and all) plus my rocket box (or canoe, as most people seemed to think it was) full with clothing. “Holy crap,” I told him, “why do you have this many clothes?” He riposted: “But didn’t you notice how varied my wardrobe was,” to which I told him that I wasn’t the type that really notices that sort of thing, and he could have worn a bright orange prison jumpsuit all year with nary a peep from me. He was crestfallen, I could tell.
The stuff I had amounted to a few small boxes plus my lusty stallion (skateboard) and my weapons of mass destruction (guitars). I finished around fo
ur in the morning, the morning of move-out day, and got four hours of sleep.
Move-out day was just a tad less chaotic than Move-In day, partly because people had been leaving throughout the week, but mostly because any frustration one might perceive is dampened by “Hey somebody threw this away, I guess it’s mine now” moments. Watching parents move boxes out of their kids rooms, I was reminded by clowns piling out of old VW Bugs, and thinking “How the hell did they fit all that in there?” The cleaning staff combed the hallways for goods as I loaded up my car with eager kids heading to LAX. One carload after another, I sent friends on their way, to be met again in a few short months.
I was supposed to send Ed and Jason on my last trip around five in the afternoon, but I had to get going to Pomona and meet up with Reed, so I begged them to take a cab. Plus, Jason, going along with the theme of “Holy crap, you have a lot of stuff” just about filled my car up with massive bags. After much hemming and hawing, Jason finally agreed to get a cab. “What’s wrong with a cab?” I asked, “it’s about the same price I’m charging you if you share the fare with Ed.” He looked around furtively, before confessing that, frankly, he just doesn’t like cabs – “something about them.” I sensed deep-seated childhood psychological trauma involving perhaps the color yellow, so I thanked him for his flexibility, loaded my car up, and rode off into the sunset like the complete badass I fancied myself to be. Burning rubber, hands on the wheel, leaned back in my seat, and sailed smoothly eastward towards Pomona.
Well, except for that one point where I was in the middle of the intersection and the light turned red, and this Mexican guy yelled stuff at me and honked his horn and shook his fist and called me a puta, and I was really embarassed, but other than that I think it was pretty much 100% badass. Yeah.
Next time, I’m talking about road trips, lustful European exchange students, and why Reed, despite his political and moral beliefs, says that McDonalds isn’t a bad company at all.
-f.w.
The epic hurdle known to most as “the first freakin’ year at college” has been hurdled, and I have cleared the bar without nailing my groin and making a fool of myself in front of hundreds of spectators. Like the unintentionally hilariously named holder of Lakeside’s High Hurdle speed record, Dick Shafer (no, I’m not kidding), I cross the finish line defiant of those who expect my failure, or at least hoping for some laughs on my behalf as a result of tragic comedy or accidents.
For those of you who can’t wade through my “shitty sentences coagulated into a glob of a paragraph’ paragraphs such as the one above: I’ve seen this college higher education shit now, and I’m back and badder than ever.
Well, let me qualify that by saying that “badder” doesn’t mean that I’ve compromised my moral character. Nor do I wish it to imply that the first quarter of the higher education process has somehow made me an inferior person in any way. I mean “badder” in a strictly hypothetical, vernacular sense, without any negative implications, the same way that being a “bad ass,” two usually negative attributes when taken out of context, can actually mean a good thing when put together.
I’ve hella slacked off on this updating crap, and I’ve received earfuls from my legions of adoring fans who have nothing better to do than check if I’ve updated providing them yet another temporary distraction in the labor that is life. And, lo! Like a doctor performing a cesarean section on a desperate mother, dear readers, I update and proclaim that you shall labor no more!
Let me explain some of my laziness. I am famously prone to declare USC to be a joke of an academic institution and that I have achieved a sort of academic nirvana where I experience a complete utter lack of need to study for tests and do the reading and still manages to perform like a finely tuned racehorse (a finely tuned racehorse, incidentally, whinnies a perfect 440 hertz “A”). But like a 747 landed by an amateur pilot (who, incidentally, the crew and the pasengers’ last hope) screeching across the rainy LAX tarmac without the aid of brakes, flaps, nor landing gear, the momentum of eight years at one of the most challenging private schools in the nation has yet to cease up, and I still have this irrational drive to achieve.
This irrational drive for academic excellence is made even more absurd when one is surrounded by vomit filled hallways, the end result of constant alcoholic excess, and highly intellectual banter wherein a group of legally adult males sit and talk about their sexual conquests, measured in sheer numbers of “babes” they’ve “boned,” and occasionally “boned in the pooper.” To attempt to achieve at USC, where in the last week of school, the same legally adult males started a food fight in a cafeteria, is needless to say patently ridiculous.
So it follows that, I, connoisseur of all things ridiculous and irrational, feel this drive. Much time was spent pawing away furiously at a DVD final project, where I slyly typecast future roommate Max into a suavely evil CEO position. He has expressed a mild disappointment at being given these “evil douchebag” roles, kind of like the disappointment Morgan Freeman feels after all those “wise old black guy” roles. The project was a success, at least. It’s one thing to be an evil CEO. It’s quite another to be an evil CEO who is a failure. Most of the fruits of this project, I might add, will be seen by perhaps two instructors before being filed away into some dark dank archive of multimedia somewhere in the bowels of USC.
Max, besides being an evil CEO, happens also to be the sexiest indie gamer alive and of all time. What this necessarily entails, I cannot say, but I’m sharing a room with him, and dammit man, I don’t want to wear the earplugs again.
Let me explain: for a period of about two years of my life, I could not sleep without earplugs. Absolutely could not. I could not psychologically relax unless I was in complete silence. The reason was that right outside my window we had placed our security system alarm siren, which basically is set off when the door to the garage is blown open by the wind downstairs and loudly and annoyingly lets all of Nomandy Park know that the freakin’ Wong family forgot to shut their door tight again. For a period of time, the alarm would go off once a week at around four A.M. or so because of some wiring problem. I would be rudely jolted awake over and over until I became a nervous wreck, and required earplugs to sleep through a night. Needless to say, (although I probably shouldn’t say this online where all the sickos are) we’ve since given up setting the alarm.
I’ll protect my family by noting that, in place of the alarm system, we protect the home with three highly trained assassin dogs armed to the teeth and trained in close quarters combat, biting crotches, and fetching tennis balls.
It always baffled me as to why we so desperately needed this alarm system. In 2003, the FBI reported a whopping 3 violent crimes here, or half a violent crime per thousand retirees and small children that dot the Normandy Park landscape. To put this in perspective, the chance of getting a violent crime committed against your person while within Normandy Park city limits are very small. It’s like taking a quarter and flipping “heads” ten times in a row, and then having somebody come by and heartily but slightly maliciously pat you on the back.
Other than that DVD project, I had two finals to really study for and another project. This project required me to produce a portfolio of my writing steez consisting of two topics for USC’s ridiculous freshman writing program, a.k.a. the dreaded required semester of Writing 140.
To properly imagine Writing 140, pretend that you are an accomplished Formula-1 Race Car driver. Imagine that you live and breathe high speed cornering, chicanes, late and early apexes, outbraking your competition, and shaving off milliseconds from your lap time. Imagine that you are able to make your vehicle do anything but standing backflips, and even those you’re pretty close to nailing. The open road, the limitless boundaries of freedom that lie before you, are your lifeblood and very essence.
Now pretend that you are forced to go through driver’s education once again – the videos, the Max Headroom era 3D animations, the mind numbing boredom, the shackles of education you don’t need, and you’ll have an idea of how Writing 140 can crush a man’s immortal soul.
Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that I am some lion tamer of the tenacious English language, nor do I wish to imply that my handling of the syntax and structures of the written word being to even approach what might be considered mastery among the circles of the elite. I am not the Michael Schumaker of the English language by any means. In fact, in all honestly, I’d wager that Writing 140 made me a slightly better writer. But the soul crushing lunacy of that class did not justify the improvement.
The worst part is this: Writing 140 is absolutely necessary. When we peer edited our papers, it was downright embarrassing how bad some of these elite USC kids wrote. A girl peppered an essay with vernacular “like totally”’s, making me want to reach across the room and choke her with her inane ponytail. If there’s anything Lakeside teaches you to do, it’s to be a somewhat decent writer. But there’s no way to place out of this insipid writing requirement at USC, so hack and Hemingway alike must toil through it.
And to add final insult to injury, my teacher happened to be the one person in the entire writing department who took the
whole “this class is teaching kids to write because high school frankly blows” thing seriously. Although that’s probably a good thing, there are no words to describe what it’s like toiling over a paragraph long writing prompt asking you to talk about the cross class fantasy film genre during the Great Depression and how these films were a means to sate an otherwise dissatisfied working class while your friend down the hall who’s also taking Writing 140 is writing a paper on “The cultural significance of the freakin’ OSCARS.” That class must be full of drooling dolts who clap and moan in glee for themselves as they drool upon their keyboards for every syntactically correct sentence that providence helps them manage to piece together from the regions of their broken minds.
But the idiocy of the Writing Department cannot hold a candle to the lunacy of USC’s biology program. Now, I am guessing to any other person, the biology classes at USC aren’t a big screamin’ deal, but you have to understand that one of the reasons I am a film production major is precisely because there is no biology involved. Film production is probably the farthest away you can conceivably get from any sort of biology. “Thank goodness,” I remember thinking to myself as I got the USC acceptance letter, “I won’t have to deal with freakin’ cells any more!”
And as time shows again and again, my predictions are utterly incorrect.
The lecturing professors, save for the very last one, were utterly incompetent – our first spent an entire lecture on nutrition and the body’s dietary needs on how he is one of the blessed souls who is able to eschew the meal known as “lunch” completely. The other talked briefly about how USC isn’t like the “school of hard knocks” and how you get lessons pounded into you at the school of hard knocks, a.k.a. prison. Pounded into you. As the class sat aghast, he told us “Bottom line: Don’t drink and drive.”
“Now Freddie, surely if this class is that bad, then there must’ve been some uproar, and USC, the paragon of academic excellence, the jewel in the crown of higher education, must’ve done something about the class!” I hear the wiseasses quip at their screens. The problem is this: the class was basically AP Biology. Unfortunately, I never took AP Biology. Doubly unfortunately, a good portion of the class had, explaining the inexplicably above average bell curve. Every week I would download the latest grade reports and stare at that bell curve as it tolled the demise of my grade point average week after week, hour after hour, like a cacophonous symphony issued forth from a cathedral tower calling all within earshot to lay down and repent for their staggering mediocrity.
To further back me up, master of all things scientific A. Rob took a quick jaunt around USC during Stanford’s spring break. I showed him this question (or one like it – my memory has faded and the original test is but ashes now), which was on the latest midterm:
“Pretend you isolate two colonies of bacteria – one from a hot springs and one from a room temperature environment. Upon analysis, one colony shows a 30% composition of guanine and the other shows a 20% composition of guanine in the DNA.
WHICH FREAKIN’ COLONY CAME FROM THE HOT SPRINGS?”
During the test, I threw my hands into the air shouting (in my mind) “The one with the freakin’ bath towel!” Alex could only look at it momentarily perplexed, stroking his chin, before declaring a decisive “What the fuck.” The answer is equally ridiculous, having to do with the number of bonds between G and C in DNA. Frankly, I don’t think I’ll ever need to know this, and frankly, I don’t think I’ll ever go to a hot springs again.
Fortunately, I was not alone in the cellular biological hell known as “The Nature of Human Health and Disease.” I had a comrade in arms on my floor, Brian, who good-naturedly teamed up and split the lectures with me. Trust me – I know that if I went to every lecture my grade would’ve been higher, but trust me also that if I did, I would not be alive to type this today.
Brian, in his radiant wisdom, took the class “Pass-fail,” reasoning that any class with four midterms and a final likely warranted that grade designation. In college, “midterm” refers to every test rather than the middle of the term, which explains why they can get away with four midpoints in a semester.
Based on a hasty calculation of mine, Brian decided to go bezonkers on one test and totally blow it off. Unluckily for him, it happened to be the easiest test, but the fake test he made was seriously hilarious. He wrote poetry, drew Waldo on pages, challenging the T.A.’s grading to find him, and openly mocked the class and the questions. The best part was that one T.A. obviously wrote him off right away, grading the entire page a zero, until coming back and realizing that, buried within his iambic pentameter, he had actually answered a good chunk of the question, if in an unorthodox manner. One T.A. actually got into the swing of things, gleefully circling Waldo and writing “I found him!” along the side.
This momentary joy was crushed when we realized that this tactical blunder required him to almost ace the final in order to pass the class. We spent the day before in study shifts chipping at the impenetrable block of science (in my mind, at least, it’s impenetrable). We were, for all intents and purposes, boned in our poopers when by some glorious miracle the test happened to cover everything we worked on for the last two-hour study blitzkrieg. The happy ending is he managed to pass the class. The moral is never take a class that is reviewed online as your peers unanimously as “The worst class at USC.”
I’m going to get some lunch or something. Next time I’ll talk about mad road trippin’ + I’ll have pictures finally because at that point I bought a charger for my digital camera.
-f.w.
