Don't Stop Believin'

Thanksgiving break is the biggest tease on the academic calendar. For non-religious people such as myself, it's the third-most important holiday of the year (after my birthday and X-Mas), and it has every key aspect of a hugely important holiday. Gluttony? Check. Football on TV? Check. Necessary bonding time with annoying family? Check. Everyone's back home, regardless of where they live the rest of the year? Check.

The thing is, break only last four days, at which point everyone has drive back home and deal with another month of bullshit cold weather, annoying people, and tons of shopping. Oh, and don't forget the driving. It's like people who don't drive 11 months out of the year come out in hoards between Nov. 25 and Dec. 25. It's like fucking amateur hour out there on the roads.

Driving home on the Merritt Parkway on Wednesday morning, I saw (literally *saw*, with my own two eyes) a car get clobbered by a full-size deer. Bambi was just loping across the road, minding her own doe-eyed business, when a Honda Civic (not mine) barreled into it at 70 mph*. (*NOTE: This only tangentially relates to things I've seen other creatures named Bambi do at certain types of establishments, in ::ahem:: different phases of my life.) Anyway, traffic slowed to a crawl and I eventually passed the accident; Bambi was on her back, twitching like Michael J. Fox on the side of the highway. It was disgusting, and I did everything I could not to vomit. Luckily, the Honda Civic was okay, however.

I almost never see accidents on my trip from Boston to New Jersey (and back); rush-hour drivers are the best drivers, but Northeast Corridor long-distance commuters (the "long-distance relationship group" that I'm teeth-grindingly a member of) are the second-best. During Thanksgiving break alone, I saw four accidents. You know that statistic that says "92% of all accidents happen within 26 miles from home"? This is the most crap-tacular statistic in the world. OF COURSE 92% of accidents happen there; that's where 92% of all driving occurs! Think about the people whose cars you've sat in during the past year. How many of them would you trust to drive you from New Jersey to Boston? I wouldn't trust one-half of the writers on this blog to drive me from New Jersey to Boston. PatentlyJersey would unquestionably hit an elk, or something.

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Over break, I went to a bar in lovely Sea Bright, NJ. This is (I'm pretty sure) the town where Tony Soprano fictionally once had a beach house; he also docked his yacht, the "Stugatz" upon which he famously whacked Big Pussy, out of Sea Bright. I always thought that Sea Bright was a pretty lame beach town. There is only one bar and one restaurant in the town worth going to, there's only one street that runs north-south, you can't speed because there are too many bored cops, and it's way too close to droves of annoying Sandy Hook tourists in the summer. But maybe this is bubbling teenaged angst speaking here; maybe I'm conditioned to dislike everything related to my youth. Maybe one day I'll buy a house on the west side of that pitifully short sea wall, and maybe some other day it'll be destroyed by a rogue hurricane.

Regardless, this particular bar had a cover singer perform that night. Unlike most solo singers, he played electric and not acoustic guitar. Unlike most solo singers that play Jersey Shore bars, he distributed his set list before going on stage (presumably to facilitate audience requests), and it was immense, both in quantity and in scope. It consisted of seven and half pages, with 100 songs per page, and included everything from Kenny Rogers to Kenny Loggins, from Danzig to Dave Matthews, from Metallica to Men at Work. It's amazing, given this man's knowledge of guitar, that he could not find better work. I mean, I've seen some successful Jersey Shore cover bands that know literally 12 songs (and that includes two separate renditions of "Mr. Brightside").

On the left side of the first page of this tome is a listing of 50 songs that the songwriter deems "Most Requested." I semi-drunkenly brought the song list home with me because I was convinced that these 50 songs are definitive proof of how unironic, uncool, and ridiculous the average doofus who requests songs at a bar is. For example, "Joker" by Steve Miller Band is on this list. In the pantheon of mainstream classic rock, the Steve Miller Band is the single most unimpressive band (it's bland enough to appear in commercials for clothing brands sold at K-Mart), and "Joker" the most unimpressive song of all. The only song by Steve Miller Band that I like is "Stuck in the Middle With You," which is actually performed by Stealer's Wheel, a completely different band.

The list also includes "Laid" by James (a decidedly-agnostic piece which I always confuse with that song "Flood" by Christ-rock band Jars of Clay), "Baby Got Back" (which is played out, even at weddings), "Shimmer" by Fuel (not even one of the top 25 alternative rock songs of the 1990's), "Five Hundred Miles" by the Proclaimers (a song that Brainpan hates, so it must be unironic and uncool), and "Sweet Caroline" (which is played during the 7th inning stretch at Red Sox games).

Jersey Shore bars are sort of ironic (emphasis on "sort of", since the exact same claim I'm making here can be made about bars in California, or northern Virginia, or the suburbs of Boston, Mass.) in that there is no inherent advantage to being a smart kid at the bar. Like many of the people who read this blog, I grew up in a hyper-competitive intellectual environment without ever really realizing what was going on around me. My friends growing up were/are almost unilaterally smart-to-brilliant by nature, which is not the way that 99.9% of the people in this world grow up. Were I born into a steel-mining family in central Pennsylvania, I would feel infinitely more comfortable at bars than I currently do, even though my life would as a whole be much more miserable and unfulfilling than it currently is.

Some of the people everywhere, even in the "brightest" parts of the country, are completely fucking retarded. I realize this fully. (I mean, look at how we drive -- isn't it weird that the parts of the country with the dumbest people also have the most competent drivers?) And, I realize that completely fucking retarded people are just as entitled to go to the bars as I am (even though I wish it weren't like this). What bothers me most, I suppose, is poor taste - something which can be only understood by people who have good taste, because taste is completely subjective. There are millions of people out there who love shitty reality TV and canned Jerry Bruckheimer films, because they're mediocre people by nature and don't care that everyone around them is quietly snickering under their breath. It's not up to me to fix them -- I'm not even sure they should be fixed, since there needs to be a fish at every table -- but it doesn't mean I shouldn't be pissed off that they exist.

And, come on, "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany makes the top 50??! Are we even human?

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I'm taking a course on emotion theory this semester. It's kind of a frustrating course for me, because we have to write reaction papers every week that are graded (on a scale of 1 to 5) by the professor who teaches the course. I'm a chronic overachiever, and it's bothered me all semester that I cannot get a 5/5 on these reaction papers*. (*NOTE: I do routinely get 4/5, and the professor swears to use the entire scale, so I'm not really that pissed. But still...)

Early in November, I went to visit the professor during office hours because I was curious about how to get a perfect 5/5*. (*NOTE: I am a giant fucking tool.) We went over my reaction papers, and he determined that my thoughts are very interesting, but I jump from place to place too much. In other words, I'm a fragmented thinker who doesn't make his transitions explicit. This is probably the exact same problem that I have in writing this blog. :-)

Stay classy out there.