How to Become LEVIMILLS

*I’m about to turn this in.  The prompt was simple - “How to Become…”, and the style choice was our own.  Never missing an opportunity to write casually or sound like an asshole, I chose to write about myself.

How to Become Levi Mills

(A comprehensive guide for the aspiring infant)

First and foremost, you should probably just completely erase that birth thing from your memory.  Seriously.  The chubby, track suit wearing lady you’ll call your “Health teacher” will explain my reasoning with a haunting video when you get to the 8^th grade.  Question her concern with your health.

Welcome to the world.  The next two years will be the best years of your life.  Start crying, eating, and pooping immediately.  All at once.  Your servant lady will comfort you, feed you, and clean you.  It’s wonderful.  Don’t use this time for anything productive, you’ll spend plenty of time pretending to do that later.  I can’t stress the eating enough.  Everybody loves a chubby baby.

Don’t fight the servant when she forces you into a little navy tuxedo to have a strange man flash light in your face.  The photos will stay four car-ride-naps away, at the house that perpetually smells like pumpkin pie, until you’re in college – when you’ll have the chance to post it as your ‘profile picture’ on a website called Facebook.  On the Internet.  From a computer.  All things you don’t know exist.

Toddler.  Stop crying and start using the room with the bath for processed cookie deposits.  You’re a man now.  Don’t complain about the hundreds of viewings of We Sing in Sillyville you’ll be subjected to.  What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – A reward for the future flashbacks of creepy, singing children with a not-so-subtle message against racism towards rainbow colored people.

Skip most of your Pre-School days under the guise of missing the servant.  Don’t miss ‘ants on a log’ days.

Enter the public elementary school ready to use every bit the wisdom of your first five years.  You’ve entered social hierarchy in its most refined form.  You’re shorter than most of the other heathens, but you’re fast, deathly afraid of authority, and know your numbers.  You have the opportunity to establish yourself as the quiet, well behaved, athletic kid. Take it.

Most importantly – and I can’t stress this enough – get a bowl cut.  Rock that bowl cut.

Gain the respect of your peers through such heroic acts as doing an above average amount of pull-ups and being the first to complete your multiplication tables. Wonder why you’ll ever actually need multiplication tables.  Discover Math 24.

At this point, you may think you’re ready to take on the next challenge.  You’ll hear terrible things about this “Middle School” – the worst of all being the absence of a milk break – but you’ll think you’re ready.  After all, you’ve been doing long division for two years now.  You’re wrong.  It’s not your fault, though.  There’s no way anybody could ever prepare themselves for that vulgar, awkward, torturous, hell cocoon of a three years.  I can’t give you advice here.  I’m sorry, but struggling through this time on your own is a necessary evil.

OK, one thing.  For the love of god, lose the bowl cut.

High School.  Be completely shocked that you didn’t instantly transform into Zack Morris.  Be even more shocked that there’s no Kelly Kapowski.  In fact, nobody here looks older than 16 in TV years.  You are a slightly pudgy Sam Weir.

Sign up for football and wrestling.  The former will be coached by your sophomore year English teacher.  He’ll have the nerve to regularly give you congratulatory slaps on the rear and expect you to look him in the eye the next day in class. The latter will make you tear up every time you see a starving dog in a Sarah McLachlan animal cruelty commercial.  Physical activity will help relieve any kind of stress that comes your way.  Remember that when your Chemistry Honors teacher makes you angry enough to club a baby seal.  In regards to the working out: listen to the chiropractor your senior year.  Believe it or not, beating a neighboring city of 7,000’s football team won’t seem so important when you’re older.  Like, three months older.

Your grades will be fine.  Teachers will continue to mistake your unnecessarily wordy research paper writing for genuine effort, and your rushed, procrastinated essay techniques for creative humor.  Take full advantage of this and use words you’d never use in conversation, like “perpetually”.  They like that.

Apply for college because nobody else in your family did.  Choose Milwaukee because it’s bigger and farther away from home than most of the alternatives.  Both factors giving you the oh-so-essential ability to play Whitesnake’s, “Here I Go Again on My Own” in your head as you walk onto campus for the first time.  Enjoy yourself.  The academics aren’t too difficult and the extracurriculars are aplenty.

Transfer to The University of Wisconsin.  You’ll want a better education and a chance to live in the same building as your best friends. Yellow didn’t really vibe with your skin tone, anyway.  Apparently, you’ll also want more homework, residence at a library, and to rarely see said friends.  But you’re happy being busy and busy being happy.  You’re Levi Mills.

Reconsider the bowl cut.

TL;DR

Interesting news stories: Linked to, and summarized poorly

With all of the commotion about Obama’s recent Presidential Address, his much more telling Q and A session at a Republican retreat might have been pushed aside. While the Address was impressively candid after an initial bout of motivational rhetoric, this open debate with a room full of GOP House members is golden. The President played the roll of professor, answering the inquiring students as if their questions weren’t backhanded attempts to catch him in a lie.  And he didn’t stumble once. It’s beautiful to see a president fact check numbers on a House member who had obviously assumed that, out of the thousands of documents the president must read every day, he hadn’t read his.  And he didn’t leave his criticism to the GOP alone. He chastised both parties’ political leaders for what’s become the political norm in the last 6 months;  basing political activity on partisan, campaign minded goals instead of the interests of the people who elected them.

Here’s a few of the best moments and the full video:

On the Health Care struggle:

Component parts of this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year. Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker and Tom — and certainly you don’t agree with Tom Daschle on much — but that’s not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate, and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot.

An appeal to Republicans:

So all I’m saying is we’ve got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I’m not suggesting that we’re going to agree on everything, whether it’s on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, “This guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.”

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CBS rejected gay dating website, Mancrunch.com’s Super-bowl ad. And they’re going to air a Pro-Life commercial featuring Tim Tebow, his mother, and a solid factual inaccuracy*.  There goes their excuse of not airing advocacy campaigns. Reminder to CBS: The FCC still has you by the balls, CSI in syndication is just as good, and the internet exists.  A couple quotes from the United Church Of Christ (very accepting to gay members) and the GLAAD:

UCC:

“[w]hile CBS is reportedly saying that a bad economy now necessitates changes in its policy on so-called advocacy ads, this decision only underscores the arbitrary way the networks approach these decisions and the result is a woeful lack of religious diversity in our nation’s media,” says the Rev. J. Bennett Guess, the UCC’s director of communications. “Because of its own economic circumstances, CBS is affording time to one religious organization while having suppressed another. This sounds as if the broadcasters think they own the airwaves when, in theory at least, they do not”

GLAAD:

“CBS’s decision to run a Focus on the Family ad during this year’s Super Bowl can’t and shouldn’t be considered in a vacuum. CBS spent years denying a platform to an LGBT-inclusive church that wanted to share a message of inclusion with a national audience. Now, when it happens to be financially inconvenient for CBS to hold to the standard it had previously imposed, the network’s expediency benefits a virulently anti-gay organization whose advocacy on these issues is the antithesis of that of the United Church of Christ.”

Link:http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/29/news/companies/mancrunch_ad_super_bowl/index.htm?cnn=yes&hpt=T2

*In the commercial, Pam Tebow’s going to say that, during her pregnancy in the Philippines, doctors urged her to have an abortion. That cry-baby/man-child producing cow is probably lying. Abortion was illegal in the Philippines.

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A very interesting article from the BBC featuring a foreign prospective on the current political state of America. Look out for the great quotes from GW from the 2000 presidential debate.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8474611.stm?

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743 pounds of marijuana was found in a septic tank on a truck presumably traveling from Mexico. Over $400,000 in street value, the bags were found buried beneath human waste. Honestly, is digging through thousands of pounds of poop really worth it? Did that guy go home that night and tell his wife, “yeah, I’ll smell like other people’s feces for weeks, but nobody in these Southern Arizona suburbs ‘ll be gettin’ high for a month”

Link: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/01/29/arizona.marijuana.bust/index.html?hpt=T2

'Shirtless and Unshowered' - The Motion Picture Soundtrack

I can only hope my future documentary on PBS (or Lifetime. I’m not picky) has a musical score as wonderful as the collection of songs that got stuck in my head this week. Not so much because they’re good - In fact, some of them are terrible - but because it would be so damn confusing it just might be deemed artistic. Trust me, When these songs transition to and from each other, you’re on a roller coaster of emotion. And not the bad ass, ‘Son of Beast’ at sunset kind, either. But the, ‘here, get on this giant vibrator of a cart and let us whip you around for a few minutes’, ‘Iron Wolf’ kind.

1. Portugal. The Man - Created

No complaints.

open up your arms and hold on too.
every thing you own that owns you too.
and just let it all go.
cause we do as we please.
and that’s all we can do.

Backstreet Boys - Drowning

This would play during the ‘lock eyes momentarily with the pretty girl across the room, get scared, trip over my own foot, awkwardly jog it out’ scene of the movie.

Fat Joe/Ashanti/Ja Rule - What’s Love

You can’t prepare yourself for the horror of Ja Rule spontaneously appearing in your head as you innocently exit the library. I didn’t deserve that.

Whitesnake - Here I Go Again On My Own

Break the imaginary girl’s heart. Walk away as she falls apart in miserable sadness. In slow motion. With wind in your hair.

The Beatles - Hey Jude (Specifically, the Across the Universe cover)

It’s been in there all week, and it’s still there. No problem with that. I’d just like for somebody in one of my classes to finally notice my finger drumming of “naaaa naa na, na na na naaaa….naa na na naaa, Heeeey Juuuude”

I had a good week.

Wiki Wednesday

Not Wednesday. Not important.

How it works: I’ll start with a topic of interest, note the most interesting things I see on the page, then click on a link on that page. This is not the wikipedia game. I don’t have a destination.

• Dave Chappelle: Both of Dave’s parents were professors. Dave turned down the roll of ‘Bubba’ in Forest Gump because he thought it was racially demeaning.

• Home Improvement (TV Show): The show’s title is a double entendre: it refers to physical improvement of houses, as well as to improving life with family, friends, work, and school. Top rated show in 93-94.

• Jay Leno: Appeared as a defense witness in the 2005 Michael Jackson trial. Jay is dyslexic and has a prognathic jaw, often described as mandibular prognathism. Has no children, just a lot of cars.

• Conan O’Brien: At it’s current state, wiki says Conan attended Satan’s boarding school for young girls. He then went on to graduate with a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University. Conan will provide the voice of Santa Claus in an upcoming episode of The Backyardigans.

• Beard: Beards were almost non-existent in America between 1920 and 1960. During WWI, soldiers were forced to remove facial hair to fit into gas masks and protect against lice. After the war, the film industry perpetuated the trend with a push from one of their top sponsors, Gillette Safety Razor.

• Sigmund Freud: Freud spent 4 weeks in university unsuccessfully searching for the male eel’s sex organ.  He regularly used cocaine and recommended it to his close friends and family.

• Female Hysteria: Widely discussed in Victorian medical literature. Women considered to be suffering from hysteria would sometimes undergo “pelvic massage” — manual stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the patient experienced “hysterical paroxysm”

• Hysterical Paroxysm: orgasm.

Blog More?

I’m typing this on my phone because A. I don’t want to take the computer out of it’s bag, and B. The Rose Bowl’s on and I don’t want to walk 20 feet and get the cable splitter to plug in the modem. In summary, I’m lazy. It’s a New Year and a new decade. Yeah, it’s been a DECADE since badger state soccer, Mr. McDunough’s corny tomato jokes, and my first chicken cordon bleu. Let’s put aside how terrifying that is and focus on the past year and the year ahead. I’m not big on resolutions; if I really wanted to do something, or make a significant change, I wouldn’t wait until the first to do it. Instead, I chose to act like a completely insane person and had a fictional conversation with year-ago levi. It went a little like this: Levi: oh hey there, you handsome devil. 2009levi: Jesus fucking Christ! I’m in the shower! You look like me! Why do you loOh hey the collick looks like it’s on the left for other people, huh? Levi: from the future, blah blah, I want to tell you something in hopes that I’ll gain some perspective on the last year of my - our life 2009levi:…so, not a badass terminator or a long lost twin who’s mind I can read? OH! And light comes out of our hands when we touch!? Levi: you’re naked, don’t touch me. You can’t be serious. 2009levi: no….no, of course not. That’s….that’s, uh, completely ridiculous. What do you want? Levi: here goes. (Blah blah, all events of last year) 2009levi: oh. Nice. The things you’ve just told me are mostly positive. I am now looking forward to the next year of our life Levi: your happiness has given me perspective on my current position and the events of the past year. Thank you As far as 2010 goes, I’d like to have a good year. That’s it. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next year, and I’d hate to limit the possibilities to what I can imagine at this moment. No, wait. I’d like to find out when ‘Weeds’ starts again. Starting big.