Oh, You Don't Tweet?

I’m told I need to adapt. Christ, I’m twenty-one. How fast is this whole technology thing really moving? Adapt? I’ve barely cleared puberty and I’m already being told I need to adapt?

I’ve got internet-savvy friends who leech Tweets and posts and hyperlinks onto every possible multi-colored word they can. Solid text is now a shameful misuse of the English language. People expect to be able to read about the mating habits of gorillas or terrorist cats without actually having to do any reading at all—just look for the hyperlink or Tweet or whatever and then the information can be quickly dumbed down and mildly explained without really having to read much of the author’s work at all.

Hemingway never Tweeted a single fucking Tweet and he turned out alright.

I assume that if you’re reading this, it’s because you have nothing better to do. There is nothing useful here. If you’re looking for useful go to Matt Taibbi’s blog. I don’t have much to click on. I tried to create some sort of gimmick, but it failed miserably next to some 7^th grade web design projects created by kids who will probably end up calling me into their office for a job interview. These days, nobody wants to read a page. They only want to click on it.

The Riot.

Last Tuesday I saw a riot. You know, there was no blood (well, a little) or burn victims or anything, it was just a situation that got out of control. But I think that’s good sometimes.

The riot, which was between my Augustana College and our rival the University of Sioux Falls (USF), lasted only for a short time before the authorities arrived who were then followed by a fire truck to put out a dumpster fire. I don’t know why such a rivalry exists between the two schools, but for whatever reason, it just got violent.

In my opinion, it was your basic feel-good kind of thing. Nobody got seriously hurt. It was a way to leak a little testosterone in lieu of bad sex I suppose. No guns, no knives. Just a couple of fistfights, some artillery shells, a box full of Black Cat fireworks, some curdled milk, and the entire egg inventory of the local Hy-Vee. But I think, like most things, this whole mess could be seen coming from a ways out.

More than anything, it is that time of year for college students where there are knives at their throats in every direction. Professors, realizing finals are coming up no sooner than the students, make that push to get one more grade in before finals and Thanksgiving break. Many students, myself included, respond to this sudden shock of assignment load similarly: We tune out.

It’s that psycho numbness that creeps into your head and pinches your brain stem until winter break. Get up too early, go to class, go to work, go back to class, go back to work, get the most important homework done first and wing the rest and then sleep. Repeat this process. To endure, sometimes it’s easy to just let it go. Turn off the noise. Your body teeters constantly on the verge of physical and mental collapse, typing line after line of mediocre work onto a page until you crash completely, facedown on your keyboard until you wake up the next morning with 340,000 letter j’s gracing the last 122 pages of your English paper.

As wild and glamorized as college life is made out to be, it is almost as drab as the moments just before a midlife crisis. The rut digs deeper with every buzz of the alarm clock early in the morning and college students across the nation wear the stain of midnight oil on the dark circles under their eyes from many sleepless nights cramming for tests and finishing papers. Soon enough though, a man is liable to snap.

For these reasons, I can’t blame the rioters on either side. I think all parties involved woke suddenly from this zombie-state and realized their own youth was slipping away from them. What had they done with their lives besides keeping their noses in a textbook they would be paying heavy debt on later in life? What had learned besides flawless beer pong technique or screaming chants at football games? Besides learning how to pull a decent prank? How to seduce a freshman? They look, actively search for any chance they can get to break the routine.

So when your rival comes over to your college trying to graffiti your mascot, what are you going to do? For the first time in many of these students lives they did something to break their self-sculptured mold, and threw a punch and some punk from the other side of 26^th Street who dared to desecrate the Augustana Viking.

Education—real education—isn’t just about how many times you’ve cracked a book, but also how many times you’ve had your back to the wall. Those boys who sauntered out and rumbled with those USF thugs who dared tread on our turf did us all a favor. They broke their gaze from their books and fought the good fight. They acted immaturely only for the sake of a good story. But more importantly, they reminded us there’s something beautiful about burning the candle on both ends.

Welcome

I’d like to think blogging is useless. But it’s here and, as much as I’d like, I can’t convince myself it will go away anytime soon.

Even my computer can’t believe it. If you could see the word document this blog was originally conceived on, you’d see the red squiggly error lines under every form and tense of the word “blog.”

Blogging.

Blogged.

Bloggers.

As much as I want to tell my computer it’s right, that this whole issue of blogging is just one big typo on the manuscript of human achievement, blogs have made their way over the legitimate domain of human reason.

It’s not that most people are particularly stupid, it’s just that when they’re given the mask of anonymity they are free to say stupid things. Give a guy a domain name and a pseudonym and he’ll try and convince you that Obama actually is a terrorist who has been using the internet porn industry to create revenue to perpetuate the war against the infidels, and in effect, all this will make you angry enough to spout off your own little blog that shuns the President/Terrorist/Porn connection. Before you know it, POW!, you’re just as annoyingly opinionated as the guy you only wanted to disprove in the first place.

It just feels like everyone’s bickering too much about everything. Let us all stop and think—deeply for once—instead of whimsically. As it stands, I feel like I’m standing on a crowded soapbox, amidst millions of half-informed bloggers, typing at the top of their lungs even though they really have nothing worth saying at all. And somehow, in submitting to all of this, I’d like to think I’m no different.

I’d like be writing something important about major world issues or profiling some catastrophic soul. Instead, I’m staring at squiggly red lines on one piece of technology telling me something about another piece of technology is very, very wrong.