TBT #85: This Things I Believe

I have less than a week left before I am done with school forever. Most of the people I know are in a similar boat. Similar, but not the same, because while they are getting done with this school — most of them — they are not so much done with school altogether. Many people have plans to go on to graduate school which, as I understand it, is very similar to undergraduate school except more expensive and thicker books. It is as if these people have glimpsed the battlefield of the outside world which is quite clearly filled with cyborgs and techno-punks and giant monsters made of plutonium and argon maybe and, having glimpsed that horror, decided they need more weapons and armor before they can go out and face such devastation. I am different, however. While I may not have a lot of awesome guns or any mutant powers (I often try to move things with my mind to little discernible effect) I am pretty sure that I can be stealthy and covert and thus forge a life out there on that cyborg-corpse-ridden battlefield — which, I remind you, is metaphorical — and thus bypass that old ‘more school’ thing that, honestly, does not sound like very much fun. It’s like you go through another two or three years of intense schooling to become an expert on, say, Thomas Hobbes, and then in the end you still end up staring at a job interviewer who, sure, will be interested when you tell him “I am an authority on the work of Thomas Hobbes” but will still probably respond by telling you that they really just need someone who knows how to use a broom.

So me, I am done with school. I have no further scholarly aspirations except maybe being awarded an honourary doctorate given to me entirely because they like my style. Like most people who are graduating and have decided to no longer go to school, I do not really have a concrete idea on what I want to do with my life. Sure, I have some plans for next year, and some hopes for the future, but many of them are unrealistic (involving flying cars and a dystopian future in which I am the last man on earth) or idealistically optimistic (involving a Pultizer prize and a utopian future in which I am the last man on earth) so I’m not exactly filled with confidence. I am, however, filled with possibility which is like confidence except vaguer and fraught with potential for failure. In short, I know what I might want to do, and have decided to list them for you this week.

It just might be the Best Thing Ever for March 31, 2006.

Matt’s Possible Futures

I have a lot of potential. I know this because when I was in the fourth or fifth grade they came to my class and told me that, every Thursday afternoon, I’d get to go down to the music room in the bottom of the old part of school and hang out with six other students doing logic puzzles. This was really weird for me at the time as I did not consider myself logical so much as I considered myself very good at Four Square. But, still, they insisted that I go down there with the other kids and discuss ways we could get the fox, the chicken and the chicken feed across the river without food chain-related mishaps.

When I was finally done with this weird little class, the exact character of which I will never really understand, they told me I had potential. Potential to be what I am not exactly sure. Probably not a Ninja Turtle or a Power Ranger, which is what I wanted more than anything at the time. But, still, it was nice to know I had potential, even if it was vague potential. I was, and am, pretty sure it means I will never be an untalented homeless man.

So potential. I’m clinging to that. I would like to realize my potential in my following ways:

• You know the way office chairs go up and down when you use that handle at the bottom? It makes that cool pffffft sound and then lowers all smooth-like. Or it will raise really quick with a veeeeeept sound. Here is my idea, based on that: make elevators work on that technology. It would be awesome and so much fun. People love pressing that lever on office chairs and they would love even more if there was a similar lever on an elevator that would let them go up and down on a much greater scale. If I devoted my life to marketing this I would probably be very rich and also hailed as a hero in the field of Elevator sciences.
• I’d like to become really pedantic and uncompromising, if at all possible. And I don’t mean just in the way that I would correct all signs that have unnecessary apostrophes (Yeah, you don’t sell CD’s, you ignorant asshole) but also in that I’d try to regulate the spelling of the word ‘draft’. It really bothers me when I see it spelled ‘draught’. I understand this was the ye olde English spelling and it brings us back to the days of Chaucer and 1998 Heath Ledger and all of that fun stuff but it doesn’t make any sense in today’s world. When I see it on a bar sign I immediately think of the word ‘drought’ when makes me think everyone is very thirsty and perhaps dying in some sort of dustbowl. I understand that raging against the ‘draught’ spelling is kind of like an American getting pissed off over an extra u in ‘colour’ or just going fucking nuts about the metric system but I honestly believe the world would be a better place if we just spelled it ‘draft.’ And if I could get this passed into law and then be some sort of sign-inspector, that would not be such a bad life. I think “Sign Inspector” would look quite good on a business card.
• Do you ever wish some person you knew would get a rare but deadly disease so that you could start a non-profit organization dedicated to the eradication of that disease and thus make your living off of that? Haha, no, me neither. That would just be wrong. Sick and wrong.
• I guess I could be a writer. I was told this week that I was “clearly a very competent writer” and also that “we have very little else to say regarding your work.” They said “you could make money off of this” and I said “thank you.” Which, you know, is positive, except I apparently lost the CBC Literary Awards contest, which is negative. If I’m not the best writer in the country than I don’t really want to be a writer. If I don’t get to win the Governor General’s Award and pal around with the very attractive Governor General as she tours about Scandinavia than I want nothing to do with the written word.
• Vigilante. This would have to be secret, though. I would not tell you if I was a vigilante. It would put my friends and family in danger.
• Just selling stuff. I am pretty sure I have enough stuff now that I could at least survive for a few years if I sold all of it. Of course, then I would have no stuff and would thus have to pretend to be a buddhist or a member of one of those other religions where they do not like stuff. Which I would be bad at because I think the other members of the religion would somehow sense that, when we were sitting atop mountains staring at the clouds, all I would really want to do is play video games.
• I guess I could just move somewhere and get a job and live and see where that takes me. But that’s pretty crazy, isn’t it? What if there are cyborgs. Or argon, I guess. Is argon really inherently funny? I’m kind of reconsidering that line of thinking. It’s just a gas, right? But I think it’s the funniest of the inert gasses. Way funnier than Helium.

Pre-Sweeps Capsule Reviews

Hey, I realized that I don’t really watch a lot of TV any more so I haven’t really been reviewing it like I used to. I mean, I still watch many of the shows I used to watch but I kind of despise most of them or think they are boring and terrible. But, still, here are some quick thoughts so that I might pad out this already forced and ill-conceived update.

• The Amazing Race: This is much better than it was last season! But that is sort of like making the claim that the time we live in now is much better than the whole time during the Cold War period. It’s true but, well, of course it’s true — it was the cold war. We all could have died from radiation during the cold war. Now? Less likely a possibility. In any case, The Amazing Race — 9, is it? — is much better than the stupid family edition, the watching of which was the closest experience I have ever had to dying of radiation. I still don’t really like any of these teams particularly — though many are growing on me — and the stupid “needle-in-a-haystack” tasks are grating, but at least the suspense and the sights are back.
• 24: Actually surprisingly awesome, but I think it might be like Season Two in that the story peaked in the middle. That episode where there was gas all over the place and Samwise Gangee was stuck in the supply closet and ROBOCOP was in the infirmary and everything was going to hell? One of the best ever. I’ve been liking it a lot but I just don’t know how it can get any more exciting from here!
• Scrubs: It’s like an old friend who used to be funny but now is just kind of amusing and often over-the-top.
• Gilmore Girls: Oh man, it’s 45 minutes in and the tension has been building. Surely something will HAPPEN this episode! Oh, wait, it is over. Nothing has happened. It has ended with Lorelai staring off into space, knowing that she wants to say something, but not saying anything. That is fantastic. This show is 44-minutes long and I think the minute I have enjoyed most in the last six or seven episodes has been the one where they play the theme song. If you leave, I will follow…
• House: The best hour-long show on TV now, I think. The last new episode was a little weak but overall they’ve done an impressively good job of keeping the plots innovative and the House character fresh. The Stacy arc was really really good, even if they did have those scenes where they were supposed to be on the roof of the hospital but actually looked like they were in a seventh-grade stage production where they had let the fifth-grade class paint the backdrops.
• Veronica Mars: This might be the best hour-long show on TV right now except I am just dying for some sort of resolution. I have faith that they have all these mysteries worked out but, still, I want some goddamn closure. I really do not know who could be behind the bus crash that would leave me satisfied but my official guess is… Brad from Home Improvement.
• Lost: This show lost me with the last Jin/Sun episode. Never has the show been so transparently padding itself out. There is nothing interesting about a character having a baby on the island, considering a character has already had a baby on the island. I think it hit me then that there is no way this show could ever be wrapped up in a satisfying way and that ultimately we are just going to be dicked around with mystery-on-top-of-mystery until eventually it is revealed that there were some sort of hybrid aliens developed to repel a future alien invasion and actually Christianity is the answer to defeating all evil.
• The Office: The best show on television, I think. Truly fantastic in every way. People will still compare it to the British version but such comparisons are invalid at this point. It is its own show now, with vastly different characters and vastly different plots. This show is so good that showing it to invading alien hordes would convince them to spare our lives. It gives us all faith in humanity. The last one was kind of weak, though.

And I think that’s enough! I’ll be back next week with something, I hope, more substantial. Actually next week I think I will be buried under a huge amount of assignments and tests but, still, maybe I’ll write a story about a guy who is in love but can’t just tell her or something. You know, something original.

Love always,
Matt