During a week-long sojourn to Florida over winter break, I encountered a man named Top. Top was a shuttle bus driver, but, more importantly, Top was a chatty shuttle bus driver.

While most drivers are content to announce stops and — if you’re in Orlando, as I was — provide Disney trivia, Top decided that his job was to invigorate a crowd of unresponsive, heat-stroked passengers by occupying every single second of the trip with his voice.

Top was my bus driver twice, and I soon learned that his repertoire was carefully calibrated to last through the duration of a one-way trip; relying on the quick turnover of a tourist crowd, he would repeat the same shtick each day. First he would introduce himself to the passengers, mentioning both his previous service in Vietnam and his current occupation as a substitute gym teacher. Then he would ask if anyone on the bus was from another country, and nobody would respond. “Another country” would be modified to “another state” and, still, no response. That’s when Top would break out the jokes.

“What do you call two Mexican guys playing basketball? Juan on Juan.” (Several people chuckle.)

“Here’s one for the kids. Why was Tigger looking in the toilet? He was looking for Pooh.” (Little kids giggle.)

“Why are there no Wal-Marts in Iraq? Because there’s a Target on every corner!” (There is dead silence as everyone shifts uncomfortably in their seats, exchanging wary glances.) “Get it? Target? Tar-jay?” (Several teenaged girls laugh because they, too, call it Tar-jay.)

Continue reading Laugh, and the World Laughs With You… Sometimes…

Much ado has been made lately about The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, a soon-to-be-released book written by psychologist and sex researcher C.A. Tripp shortly before his death. Taking into account Lincoln’s dearth of close friends and his icy marriage to Mary Todd, Intimate World arrives at the conclusion that one of Lincoln’s favorite pastimes was smoking a little stovepipe (if you know what I mean). It’ s certainly not a new rumor; in 1978, Lincoln was tenuously referenced in the name of the Log Cabin Republicans, who sought to provide a voice for gay Republicans by distancing themselves from the label as much as possible.

I first heard about Tripp’s book — and the resulting controversy — while watching two talking heads duke it out on CNBC. Many weighty issues were raised, such as:

* Abraham Lincoln had sex with men.
* Abraham Lincoln did not have sex with men.
* No, seriously, he totally took it up the butt.

After enduring ten minutes of this verbal ping-pong match, I had only one question: who cares? Isn’t there a war going on somewhere, or at least people engaging in fights to the death over DVD players at Wal-Mart?

Sadly, plenty care, and Uncle Abe isn’t the only one whose bed habits are being debated seven score and four years after the fact. Americans have a long and storied tradition of posthumously outing historical figures, foisting the honor upon such influential people as Plato, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, Virgil and three of the four Ninja Turtles’ namesakes (apparently Raphael was the only one tempted by April’s pneumatic figure).

Continue reading Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That…

The holiday season is upon us, which means two things: first, it is now impossible to turn on the radio without hearing horrible pop covers of already horrible Christmas songs performed by artists whom God never intended to collaborate. After listening to Mariah Carey shriek out far too many key changes on “All I Want for Christmas (Is You)” while sitting in holiday traffic for five hours, I have decided that I am writing my own holiday song. It will be called “I Hope Your Kidneys Don’t Get Stolen This Christmas,” and it will be an instant classic among black-market organ traders and urban myth aficionados alike. Here is a sneak preview:

I hope your kidneys don’t get stolen this Christmas,
‘Cause come Kwanzaa, they’re gonna be mine,
I’ll slip you drugs and when you are unconscious,
I’ll excise your kidneys and leave you in a bathtub full of ice.
Singin’ kidneys, kidneys …

Second (lest you forget I’m listing things), the holiday season is all about maintaining relationships, which means that it is the perfect time for apologizing for past transgressions and making amends. Traditionally, Christmas is a time to let bygones be bygones, to forgive and forget, and to use endless trite phrases in lieu of original content.

As a columnist with a devoted readership of, oh, at least two or three people, I’ve angered plenty; as someone with little sense of propriety I’ve angered many more. In the spirit of Ruben Studdard, whose song “Sorry 2004″ comprised a blanket apology for every mistake he was going to make in the subsequent year, I would like to use my last column of the year as a forum for extending the olive branch to some of the people I have offended in 2004.

Continue reading I’m Sorry, So Sorry…

Every time I go home over a break, something is different. Nothing drastic has occurred — it’s always some small, barely noticeable shift that leaves me vaguely unsettled until I figure out what it is. The coffee table is turned 45 degrees, or there are new handtowels in the bathroom. The last time I went home, for fall break, there was a rather lifelike artificial rooster surveying the dining room from atop a tall stack of shelves in the corner. As I recoiled in horror, my father proudly announced that it had been his purchase. The fake fowl regarded me with disinterest from its lofty perch; I nodded in feigned appreciation.

Today marks the onset of Thanksgiving break and with it comes the annual campus exodus, in which thousands of students make the journey back home to argue with relatives and gorge themselves on turkey and stuffing until they drift into tryptophan-induced delirium. For more than 3,000 freshmen, this will be their first home-from-college Thanksgiving, which means that it will be an opportune time for them to notify all of their closest family and friends that they are gay or — even worse — Republican.

Tomorrow night, Cornell students across the country will be squeezing into their now-too-small childhood beds and lying awake in the dark, examining the artifacts of their youth by the glow of a teddy-bear nightlight. I know the scene all too well: stuffed animals cast monstrous shadows across the walls, and plastic spelling bee trophies reflect the barest glimmer of light from the darkened recesses of the room. Everything smells musty, static. It’s difficult to ignore the feeling of suffocation.

But even asphyxiation is better than the alternative, which is coming home to find that, in your absence, your parents have cleared out all of your stuff and converted your room into something completely different, like a guest room or a meat freezer. The sense of abandonment is unparalleled; your room is sacred ground, and nothing should be moved from its place. In fact, the day you left, your parents should have constructed a papier-m�ch� stand-in who could sit on your bed and be equally unresponsive to their prying questions.

Continue reading Ch-Ch-Changes…

(My half of the Sun’s “Vs.” feature, in which two columnists face off on a topic every other Monday. Erica’s rebuttal can be found at the Daily Sun website)

Ah, television. It used to be that if you wanted to see a midget mother of three in a bikini drinking pureed slugs while standing in a tub of horse vomit, you’d have to get a blender and a kiddie pool and some very drunk friends. But now, through the miracle of technology, you need only turn to FOX during the 8:00 to 10:00 timeslot.

Of course, this is assuming that one actually wants to see such a spectacle. I, for one, do not, and I fear that this means I am quickly losing touch with mainstream American culture. You see, I don’t care what happens when you put seven attention whores together in a swanky apartment for three months. I don’t care who’s in it for love and who’s in it for money. I especially don’t care who the last person left on the island is.

Here’s what I would like to see: a well-written, well-acted, well-shot show with that perfect blend of wit and drama. But that’s a pipe dream, because reality shows are so much cheaper and easier to produce that they have all but replaced quality scripted shows. There are no preening actors to pay, no rooms full of insomniac writers; all you need is a pack of Type A personalities who thrive on exhibitionism, a couple of editors who lack scruples, and a hairdresser with a strong stomach who can keep Donald Trump’s comb-over freshly shellacked. If you play your cards right, all you have to do is lock the doors from the outside and let the fur fly: 99 percent of the footage will end up on the cutting room floor, and the remaining 1 percent can be twisted into some kind of shocking narrative with the help of sound effects (if only double-takes were accompanied by a resounding Boing! in real life).

Continue reading Reality TV: Fall of Western Civilization?…

A Note to Readers: the deadline for columnists is noon on the day before the column runs. Because of this, although you are reading this column the day after Election Day, it was written long before the polls closed. Due to the extremely uncertain nature of this presidential race, I have taken special measures in order to be able to comment on the outcome. I have provided several options for each relevant detail; simply select the most appropriate one.

Yesterday, Election Day, American voters were finally given a chance to have their voices heard, and (heard / confused) they were, handing a decisive victory to (George W. Bush / John F. Kerry / who the hell knows). After staying up until the wee hours of the morning watching (PBS / NBC / CBS) to follow the results, all I can say is (”Wow, what an election!” / “That sure was exciting!” / “Somebody please punch Dan Rather in the face.”)

The outcome of the election has disappointed many. In the months leading up to the face-off, it was impossible to turn on the television without hearing people rail against, in their own words, (a simplistic idiot / an elitist flip-flopper / Ralph Nader). Though much was made of (Bush’s questionable National Guard service / Kerry’s questionable Vietnam record / John Edwards’ boyish good looks), when it came time to actually (pull the lever / poke the chad / get turned away at the polls) the deciding factor in the election was (who would protect our country from terrorists / who would make other countries not hate us anymore / Ralph Nader).

Continue reading Choose Your Own Election…

Let me tell you about the great party my housemates and I threw on Saturday night. The party was themed, the theme being “roll up your jeans, put on some waterproof shoes, wade into the bathroom and furiously plunge the toilet!” (We’re still waiting for the souvenir T-shirts to arrive from the printers.) It was a small affair, comprising two of my housemates and myself, as well as one visiting boyfriend, who kept insisting, “I didn’t put anything in it, I swear!”

As you may have surmised, this was less a party and more a mild plumbing disaster involving an overflowing toilet and a group of inept tenants. After going through two plungers and three of my reluctantly-surrendered bath towels, we finally got everything back in working order. We mopped the floor three times, and I laundered my towels with copious amounts of detergent — I even splurged for the washing machine’s “SuperCycle” because I figured the peace of mind was worth the additional 25 cents.

Though it was a nuisance to deal with, I felt far worse for our downstairs neighbors; I had the regrettable fate of answering the front door at midnight to find them standing there, wondering why their ceiling was leaking. Downstairs neighbors, if you are reading this: I am deeply sorry that our toilet water was dripping from your bathroom light fixture. If it’s any consolation, the water was surprisingly clean (for something that has come out of a toilet).

Continue reading The Glory and the Freshness of a Dream…

I was watching Felicity the other day. Why are you giving me that look? It’s not like I was watching The Babysitter’s Seduction, a made-for-TV movie starring a 19-year-old Keri Russell as the innocent babysitter bedded by the creepy widower, portrayed effortlessly by that guy who now plays the father on 7th Heaven. Especially since said movie was playing on Lifetime, which doesn’t even come in clearly on my television, and do I really seem like the kind of person who would waste an hour of her life squirming uncomfortably as a blurry Reverend Camden lures an equally-blurry teenage girl into the bed still warm from the body of his suspiciously dead wife?

What’s that? I seem like exactly that kind of person? Let’s move on.

As I was watching Felicity, I inevitably began to reminisce about the first time I had seen it: it was ninth grade, when graduation still loomed comfortably on the horizon. I didn’t know any college students, nor had I ever been on a college campus — in fact, everything I knew about college I had learned from watching melodramatic TV shows aimed at ninth graders.

Gleaning information about college life from teen dramas is, of course, only slightly more accurate than learning about astronomy from Star Trek. In ninth grade nothing struck me as unusual about Felicity being able to foot her entire tuition bill with a barista job, but now, years older and wiser, I’ve come to realize the extreme inaccuracies upheld by three popular portrayals of campus life: Felicity’s “University of New York,” Saved by the Bell: The College Years‘ “California University,” and Gilmore Girls‘ “Yale.” What follows are the trademark — yet blatantly mistaken — characteristics of TV college.

Continue reading Everything I Know About College……

Like the responsible columnist that I am, last Thursday found me planted on my couch, watching the presidential debate. As one of the less… shall we say, germane columnists, I spent a good deal of the time drowning out the debate with yells of frustration because ever since quotation marks were invented, politicians have been unable to speak in anything but sound-bites — and not exactly William Jennings Bryan-caliber sound-bites, at that. Goodbye, “cross of gold”; hello, “help is on the way” and “of course we’re after Saddam Hussein — I mean bin Laden.”

When I wasn’t curled up in the fetal position and moaning in agony, I noticed something interesting: Bush’s podium was higher. The NBC broadcast, which I was attempting to watch, would often show a split-screen view of both candidates at once so that you could see Bush’s nervous lip-pursing as Kerry attacked his presidential record and Kerry’s scary grin as Bush accused him of sending “mixed messages.” And though the two candidates were standing behind seemingly identical podiums, the one Bush was standing at seemed to be about five inches higher on the screen.

Of course, it wasn’t that Bush’s podium was five inches taller than Kerry’s; it was that Bush is five inches shorter than Kerry. The cameras’ positions were such that the tops of the two candidates’ heads were even, which meant that five more inches of Bush’s podium were peeking into the bottom of the shot.

It was a curious phenomenon, and one that was likely to be at least partly deliberate. Granted, the pictures were coming from two different cameras, and the camerapersons no doubt wanted to fill as much of the frame as possible without zooming in on Bush so closely that you could see his pores. It makes sense to keep the cameras at the same distance so one candidate doesn’t look like he could pop the other’s head off as though he were a Barbie doll.

Continue reading Prepackaged Views…

A couple of weeks ago, in this very space, I examined the commonly-held notion that technology is a panacea for all our communication woes, narrowing the gap between face-to-face conversation and long-distance exchange and thereby increasing the intimacy of everyday communication. I determined, in typical social science fashion, that technology can both improve communication and worsen it.

One the one hand, communication over a distance is made ever more like talking face-to-face; on the other hand, technology is now used more often to increase the efficiency rather than the intimacy. Essentially, you’re giving Mercury some turbo-powered wings for his feet, but then you’re bashing his kneecaps with a tire iron.

Then I threw in some stuff about The Facebook so that someone would actually read the column. Today, instead of pop culture references, I have — to use a nominalization that would make any prescriptive linguist cringe — a graphic.

Below, you will find the Hierarchy of Communication, a list of various forms of communication listed in a convenient low-to-high-involvement format. “Involvement” is the amount of personal involvement intrinsic to the medium — to put it another way, the likelihood that any given mode of communication will make a person feel smothered and/or uncomfortable.

Continue reading The Hierarchy of Communication…