The Stormy Present – Society

I held out against Facebook for as long as possible. I’m a private person and didn’t really like the idea of people I had a casual acquaintance with being able to see what I was up too. But I eventually gave in, mainly because due to my special lady friend’s persistent requests, and now I kind of like. But there are some key things about Facebook that you need to know and do in order to make Facebook worthwhile.

If you have 1,000 Facebook friends you are a douche. No one has 1,000 friends. Realistically, normal people probably only have about 10 really close friends. And those 10 friends have significant others and best friends that are outside of your 10 closest friends. So if you have 10 friends and they all have 10 friends, then a liberal estimate would say that you should only have about 100 friends on Facebook.

If you go beyond the 100 friend mark not only are you telling the world that you crave attention to the point that you will be friends with anyone, but you also really defeat the redeeming factor of Facebook.

Ultimately I joined Facebook because I realized that it made keeping in touch with your friends from all over the world insanely simple. Prior to Facebook the only way to keep in touch with friends was through group emails, which are annoying and take a lot of work because you’ve got to have something to say to each of the people included in the group email or else you are basically just spamming their mailbox. But with Facebook you can send personal messages to Friends individually that the rest of your friends can see what you said to them if they are interested because your actions are listed on their home page.

And that gets back to the total number of friends issue. If your goal is to keep in touch with your closest friends, then the home page with status updates concerning all the people you are friends is of the utmost importance. With 100 friends, pretty much everything that gets listed on your home page is something that interests you. Once you pass the 100 friend mark, you start to get things on your home page that concern people you don’t care about. If you are up around 1,000 friends then your home page would be useless as far as its purpose of keeping you in touch with your core group of friends.

So my point is as follows: turn down friend requests if the person making the request is someone that you wouldn’t hang out with one on one. If you do this, you’ll hover around the 100 friend mark and Facebook will prove itself to be a valuable asset in making your social life easier.

So some broad named Kat DeLuna, who is apparently a “pop sensation”, sang the National Anthem last night prior to the Cowboys Eagles game. She got booed at the end by the crowd because instead of just singing the song like a normal person she felt the need to change tone and pitch on every second word.

Look people, it’s an anthem. It is meant to be sung all together. I can’t sing for shit and neither can most people at a football game. If the person with the microphone doesn’t lead the audience in song in such a way that we can all sing along together it loses its meaning.

The anthem is about the solidarity of Americans. It’s not a tryout for American Idol. Stop trying to impress us with your individual talent and start trying to show the audience and everyone else that you are the sort of selfless patriot that can put aside your individualism in order to show your devotion to your country and camaraderie with your fellow citizens.

Here’s the video:

So I’m reading the website What Would Tyler Durden Do because I need a mental health break and I see that he mentions that at the MTV music awards, which I didn’t watch because I’d have no idea who any of the people are and would feel 100 years old, someone named Russell Brand (no idea who that is) made fun of the Jonas brothers (no idea who they are) because they wear and support the wearing of promise rings. Then Jordan Sparks (I believe she has something to do with American Idol, a show I’ve never watched) got up and defended the honor of those who wear promise rings.

This really gets to core of what sucks about the younger generation. They go and take the magic that is trying to get laid in high school and drive it to extreme ends. On the one hand you’ve got kids getting more ass than Charlie Sheen and on the other hand you’ve got kids promoting the idea that sex is icky.

American Pie was a good movie right? Well for normal kids, like the ones of my generation who were in high school when that came out, a bunch of seniors worried about graduating without losing their virginity made sense. If you remade that movie for today’s generation you’d have to set it in Jr High because no one would buy the idea that a couple of 18 years olds hadn’t had sex yet unless they were purposely trying not too. For the love of God, the girl from Disney’s High School Musical (which I’m told is a popular movie) was sending her boyfriend naked pictures of herself via her cell phone. Up to 10th grade my cell phone was one of those bag phones that was mounted in my car. So on the one had I’m a little jealous that I missed this whorish and technological uprising by a mere 5 years or so and will now probably never receive naked pictures of my girlfriend on my cell phone, but on the other hand I think the fact that we had to work a little harder to satisfy our libidos made us better people.

The modern equivalent of ‘In my day I had to walk 15 miles to school uphill both ways’ is ‘Back in my day you had to actually round the bases instead of just going straight to home.’

And as if it wasn’t bad enough that younger generations are growing up without a healthy appreciation for dry humping and foreplay there is this weird popularization of sexual ignorance as well. As if to counter act the over sexed half of the youth population, the other half has sensationalized sexual repression.

Let me get this straight; you are in a committed relationship with someone and responsible enough to recognize the emotional gravity of sexual congress as well as its biological pitfalls so you therefore promise to spend your life with this person but not do something that two committed and responsible people would find highly enjoyable. Have I got that right?

What’s worse is that these celebrity proponents of sexual repression got famous in large part due to their sex appeal. Whose side are you on Jonas brothers?!?!

The bottom line is that today’s youth get life advice from the entertainment world, which is a business. And businesses are rewarded for pushing things to their most extreme forms without regard for logical consistency. So you get Taylor Swift basically taking a shower on stage at the CMT award show one day and then the next day she and a Jonas brother are singing the praises of abstinence. It makes money, but it doesn’t make sense and as a result kids today are completely insane.

So kids, stop living your life according to the Gospel of Lindsey or the Gospel of new aged Gospel. If you are responsible and committed to someone enough to give them a freaking ring its probably ok if you get busy. Meanwhile, if you don’t have to work very hard to get laid because everyone is whoring themselves out, you’re probably not going to be very good at sex when you get older. And that troubles me because when I’m 60 and marry a 35 year old trophy wife I want her to have had a healthy sexual development.

Reading the news has become something of an addiction for me. However, it does mean that I run across some interesting articles from time to time, so I thought I’d share some. Enjoy.

- Bob Herbert of the New York Times makes a good point that all the attention being placed on the pregnant teenager whose mom might be VP serves as little more than a distraction from more important issues.

-That said, the Huffington Post reveals some interesting tibits about Palin’s former church home. Makes you wonder if this will be brought up and discussed as much as Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright was.

- An interesting article from Newsweek that examines the recent phenomena of “Peter Pan” like behavior exhibited by men in their 20’s.

- Always worth an hour of procrastinating, the annual Tuesday Morning Quarterback All-Haiku NFL Preveiw.

- Hang out with Trey and I long enough when we’re drinking, and the topic of conversation will inevitably turn to the evil that was the expansion of the ACC, and how it is ruining of favorite conference. Nice to know someone else agrees.

- Delightful t-shirt.

- The Onion. It’s just fabulous. Was afraid I wouldn’t like their videos when they first started coming out, but they are amazing.

Share any links you think everyone might enjoy in the comments section, please.

As most of you are aware this whole Top 5 thing we do is a complete rip off of High Fidelity. Rather than deny that I say we embrace it. Since we’ve been doing a bunch of Top 5 stuff and since many posts on this part of the site have focused on being in our 20s and having jobs that don’t make us happy I figure we should blatantly copy High Fidelity by having a Top 5 Ideal Jobs.

In the movie, Rob, portrayed by John Cusack, is depressed about his life’s direction, or lack thereof, so makes a list of his top 5 jobs. In doing so, he allows for the possibility of time travel, but I think we should stick to the present. So no ‘I would be a music producer for Motown in the 1960s.’ I’d also say that you can’t make professional athlete one of your top 5 because I think every man everywhere would put that in their top 5 and it is therefore unoriginal. With those two rules in effect, I now present my best effort at making a list of my Top 5 Ideal Jobs with comments about why they would be awesome and some potential negatives.

5. Smoke Jumper/Fire Crew Firefighter – talk about Billy Bad Ass; the only thing cooler than fighting raging wild fires is parachuting into raging wildfires. (Negative: work is seasonal and burned alive is not a good way to go)

4. Secretary of State – who wants to go through all the bullshit you have to go through to be President. This position lets you do all the cool political stuff without having to pander to jackasses. And isn’t foreign policy the best part of politics after all? (Negative: if you go to war you are responsible for all the people that die in it)

3. Speech Writer for a Good Politician – basically I’d want to be the Sam Seaborne to Jed Bartlett. Again, who wants to go through all the crap that the President goes through? As a speech writer you are an advisor and get to shape the person you are writing for, but you get to keep your anonymity unlike the public figure whose policy you are shaping. So newsmen don’t go through your trash to find a scoop, but really you are as important the public figures that draw that sort of intense media scrutiny and have to create a fake public persona and have to constantly ask people for money. (Negative: someone else gets the credit for all your work)

2. Professional Adventurer – ok, so this probably isn’t a job but just imagine scratching out a living doing Indiana Jones stuff. Or if someone needs a guide through the Democratic Republic of the Congo they call you because you are a world renowned professional adventurer. How great would that be? (No foreseeable negative)

1. Writer – this is pretty wide open for interpretation. You could be an adventure writer to satisfy the otherwise imaginary nature of Professional Adventurer. Or you could write political philosophy books and get interviewed on PBS and whatnot. Or you could be a sports writer and possibly end up with a show like PTI or a website like The Sports Guy has. Any way you look at it you get to set your own work schedule because you are your own boss, which is pretty boss. And, theoretically at least, you get to write whatever you want so you get to decide the nature of your work. I really can’t think of any other job where you get to do that, so I’ve ranked writer as number one due to the creative and lifestyle freedom it offers. (Negative: no one reads anymore and the bulk of writers of all ilk seem like self important snoody assholes [especially in academia])

You know that was actually somewhat cathartic. Perhaps now I can develop a life plan that will allow me to succeed in life. But probably not.

Anyway, I encourage all my fellow malcontents fighting an internal spiritual war for personal purpose in a world devoid of substance or meaning to create your own list in the comment section. Then we’ll either become music producers for the punk kids that hang out outside our music store to win our girlfriend’s love back or just start a fight club or something.