What it do.

Yeah, I persistently neglect updating this blog. Whatever, I've been busy:

...Apart from competitive eating , I've been doing quite a bit. I've never blogged about my personal life, but it's been an exciting year. I escaped a poisonous and mutually damaging relationship, went on an epic and immeasurably worthwhile journey all over Southeastern Europe to cap off my time living in the Czech Republic, moved  back to Canada, and finally found a job I love working in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

I've recently promised myself I'll never again work a job that I can't feel great about. How strictly I'll adhere to that is anyone's guess and only time will tell, but to sum up, I'm poor as fucking shit right now yet I feel happier and more ambitious than I ever have in my life. It's really refreshing; for the past four or five months, I feel like I've been radiating joie de vivre in the same way that Lil Wayne emanates pure ineptitude at the guitar or that Babar exudes the spirit of neocolonialism. 

Unrelated to (though definitely not hurting) my newfound exuberance for humanity is my decision to have a 'So-vem-ber': one month without putting anything "bad" or "fun" into my body. The goal is to work on self-control, something I could always work on, and to generally be more aware about my consumption. In other words, no more of this:

Fuck, that was a rough night. I also started a tumblr page in a sort of lazy, stream-of-consciousness effort to (micro)blog more. As for this page, I'm hoping to continue writing about ridiculous things I see all over the place as well as reviews of anything and everything I find interesting. I'm planning on reviewing my kitten Chuck once I get to know him better, but we've only been hanging out for a week or so. So that's what's up with me. 

When Advertising Goes Oh So Right

You may have seen this, and I usually refrain from posting videos, because there are so many of them and they are not really the focus of this blog, but this is the best thing I have seen in a long time. It is taken from a recent broadcast of Battlestar Galactica on the Space network, where apparently Jesus Christ Himself is working overtime as the Hilarious Advertising Placement Manager. Make sure you watch it to the end. Alls I will say is, ka-blammo.



Alleluia!

Things I've Missed Out On: Zimbabwean Cash Baths

The other day, as I was posting that amazing joke about the Icelandic economy, I was reminded of a photograph I saw earlier this summer of a Zimbabwean kid strutting down the street with as many stacks of cash his little arms could carry. I remember thinking, this kid is a fucking pimp. Then I read up on it and discovered these $200,000 bills he's carrying were worth about 3 cents apiece. Okay, I think to myself, so maybe he's not a pimp, he's probably been charged with the task of walking to the corner store to buy a bottle of milk.

Hyperinflation is fascinating to me. This spring, one Canadian dollar would have bought you over ZWD$45 million. I ask YOU, who could resist the temptation to bathe in this much money? By July, the Canadian dollar was worth almost ZWD$1 trillion. They were printing money so fast that they fucking ran out of paper. Give me a fucking break; at this rate it would actually be cheaper to bathe in the money than to try and spend it on anything. It would be possible to save on food costs by blending the shit in water and drinking the worthless, filthy slurry. Economically speaking, it would literally be a waste of time to hold, look at, or burn stacks of this currency to warm your home. I think you get the idea.

Okay, so everything other than the money bath is rather unappealing. In fact, it's understandably ruining the lives of almost all Zimbabweans. Still though, filling a bathtub with liquid capital and writhing ecstatically within it has always been a dream of mine, especially bills with so many zeroes (on July 19th, they released a ZWD$100 billion bill, the highest denomination of currency ever produced anywhere, which could buy about three eggs).

For a second there, I thought this bathing idea may have been possible, at least until July 30 when widely detested tyrant dictator Robert "Fuckhead" Mugabe and his corrupt, impotent government ruined my dream by knocking ten zeroes off the currency, turning ZWD$10 billion into ZWD$1. I guess he assumed he could save on money printing costs or something.

Robert Mugabe is a fucking clown, but not the funny kind. The kind who has his opposition leader arrested and beaten to a pulp. The kind who has dissident citizens raped and beaten. The kind who consistently rigs elections, works around the clock to destroy freedom of press, and earlier this year had his thugs sever the hands and feet of a political opponent's pregnant wife before burning her and her six-year-old son alive.

He's a huge prick, is what I'm trying to say. In the early 1920s the Weimar Germans decided "Hey, we'll just print more money," and it failed. Mugabe said "Oh, our currency is worth less than nothing? Um, er, DUHHH... No it's not...?" and expected everyone to believe him. Well guess what, Mugabe? It ain't fucking working, man. The ZWD coins you reintroduced were worthless again within days. On September 19th you had to introduce a ZWD$1000 bill and then ZWD$10,000 and ZWD$20,000 ten days later (maybe it's just a matter of time before I can fulfill my bathing fantasy). The minimum price for a loaf of bread is ZWD$7000, or $70 trillion in the old system. Half a kilogram of baby cereal costs ZWD$1060. The average teacher's monthly salary is ZWD$800. Your country's inflation is now estimated to be 5,700,000,000,000% (not a typo - trillions), and you couldn't give a shit. Asshole.

So how are you?

a spectre is haunting my apartment: the spectre of irrational consumerism.

Sept 21/07 - The Diderot Effect and Diderot Unities are fascinating concepts to me. As described by McCracken, they refer to habits of consumption that complement more abstract personal desires and systems of objects working as systems of self-identification, respectively. Diderot uses the example of receiving a new dressing gown as a gift, which is pleasant at first but quickly becomes troublesome as the luxurious article of clothing seems to stick out, implicitly demanding that the subject replace all of his other old possessions to match the new gown's au courant allure.

I recently experienced such a mind glitch, when my roommate and I were asked by his parents if we wanted their massive 5.1 surround sound entertainment system, as they were replacing theirs to go with their new home (!). Their new place called for new, higher-definition imagery and new, more-enhanced Dolby sound, and we were fortunate enough to intercept their (relatively) 'old' hardware on its way to the dump. After a few hours of laboured moving (our apartment building doesn't have an elevator, and we inhabit the top floor), we sat down to enjoy the fruits of my roommate's parents' electronic modernization. Our Playstation 2 had never looked or sounded so good.

Before long, though, the handsome sheen of the solid black speaker towers and entertainment centre began to look out of place next to the cinder-block-and-2x8 bookshelves of our humble 1.5-bedroom apartment. Sure, it didn't 'match' in a conventional interior design sense, but that wasn't what bothered me.

Perhaps I should rephrase: the cinder-block-and-2x8 bookshelves of our humble 1.5-bedroom apartment began to look out of place next to the handsome sheen of the solid black speaker towers and entertainment centre; I somehow got the feeling that we needed to update our living room furniture out of respect for our new possessions. Suddenly, the trusty solid oak coffee table that I bought for $5 at Value Village wasn't smooth or shiny enough; its space would look much better with a structurally unsound but polished MDF table from Ikea. Same deal with our humdrum bookshelves. Before I fortunately snapped out of this completely irrational train of thought, for a minute it made sense to me.

Regardless of our awareness of it, we are all guilty of conducting Diderot-ical (?) experiments on ourselves. A girl buys new glasses because she thinks they make her look (and feel!) smart for the back-to-school season. My friend buys a smoking jacket in order to present a more sophisticated front to people who don't already know he's a total goofball. I myself try to limit my wardrobe to items used and inexpensive in an effort to reduce my materialistic tendencies. It happens to everyone. If I hadn't stopped myself, though, I may have inadvertently let myself go and buy a new black table to go with our newly imposed black motif.

As students in an ever-precarious housing situation, there are countless reasons why it is completely impractical for us to spend hours moving this ridiculously heavy and expensive equipment into a tiny East Vancouver apartment with walls the width of Bible paper. We'll never crank the sound up past level 2. We're just going to have to move it all again in a couple of months. The no-name Superstore TV we had before worked just fine. But damn, the picture on this thing is so clear. And the entertainment centre's wood is so smooth and lustrous. The Diderot Effect is the perfect articulation of the irrational consumerism that fashion and, on a larger scale, image culture, bring about. So yeah, I admit it, there are huge contradictions between my philosophically ideal ambitions and my anemically justified willingness to consume free things. In writing this, as I drool over the soundsystem waiting for me at home, I can feel myself taking two steps back in my personal struggle towards anti-materialism. This may be anticlimactic but I'm going to stop writing now while I still feel I can salvage my good mood for today.