Chapter IV: Sk8er What?

Avril Lavigne is fucking hot. Note image on the left. Her eyes gaze out at you with such vulnerability that you wish you could just hold her and whisper everything will be okay, but at the same time her strong chin and highlights bespeak of inner strength and passion (I am small and the world is big/But I'm not afraid of anything - "How Does It Feel"); this interplay is what makes her so compelling to angsty teenagers. Of course, Avril Lavigne's image is every bit as artificial as that of, say, Britney Spears, and both are contrived for the sole purpose of selling records. That discussion, however, is beyond the scope of this article.

I am taking issue with just one song, the eponymous "Sk8er Boi." Catchy though it is, the lyrics of the song defeat the intended message of "be true to yourself". As you know, the song recounts how a skater boy is rejected by a "preppy" girl, and he later goes on to fame and fortune and isn't she oh-so-sorry.

My contention is, the girl shouldn't be sorry, because her situation, as described in the lyrics, isn't all that bad.
1. Five years from now, she sits at home/She's feeding the baby... So she has a home, which is promising, and she has a family, which is a very respectable.
2. She turns on TV, guess who she sees?/Skater boy's rocking up MTV... Not only does she have a home, she has a TV, and what's more, SHE GETS CABLE! I know people who live in single-family, detached housing (suburbia) in Orange County who don't have cable. And the very next lyric...
3. She calls up her friends... Aha! She also has friends and, incidentally, a telephone. What more could someone want from life than a family, a house, consumer electronics to put in the house, and friends?

At the very least, it's not fair to belittle someone who has this kind of stability in her life; and certainly not for a decision she made five years back to forgo a deadend relationship. This decision is supposedly an example of caving in to peer pressure and not pursuing your dreams.

Clearly, Avril (by which I mean her cadre of songwriters) was not thinking clearly. The lines of the song I referenced above would be much more powerful in painting a negative picture of what happens when you don't stand by your convictions if they were slightly adjusted, to say, the following:

One month from now, she sits on the street/She's feeding the rats, they think she's already dead/She closes her eyes, guess who she sees?/No one, because her eyes are fucking closed/She calls up her pimp, he tells her to shut the fuck up and get back to work.

You disagree? That's your prerogative. Certainly, a song is not required to be logical, or make any sense at all (i.e. anything by The Butthole Surfers), but this is something I've been thinking about today. Cheers.

Chapter III: Fuck CoinStar

Yes, fuck CoinStar. Why, you ask? Because CoinStar is fucking YOU. I refer, of course, to the 8.9% service charge. Eight point nine per-fucking-cent. It does NOT take a dime's worth of effort to count up 100 pennies. I timed myself, I takes 53.44 seconds to count out 100 pennies. If I made 8.9 cents every 53.44 seconds, that would be $5.90 per hour.

Okay, maybe that's not that much. But then again, CoinStar counts much faster than I do, and the evil manager at Ralph's told me to CoinStar my half-dollars too! It DEFINITELY does not cost a dime to count out two half-dollar coins.

Sure, you might say, you don't HAVE to use CoinStar. You could buy groceries with coins if you want to. But the fact is, paying with coins has always been surrounded by a miasma of opprobrium. It's like, you don't HAVE to say the Pledge of Allegiance, but everybody looks at you funny if you don't.

People have always preferred bills to coins, and CoinStar is an institutionalization of that. Not only are coins worth less than bills, but according the CoinStar, they are worth 8.9% less.

And...um...that's bad. I forgot where I was going with this. Something about Gresham's Law and CoinStar being responsible for the downfall of America. It's too late anyway (in more ways than one). Nighty-o.

Chapter II: Consumerism, a Personal Perspective

We are what we buy. The following is a list of things I have purchased this summer, their manufacturers, and their prices, as nearly as I can remember.

one year subscription to Adbusters.............$35.00
two Now And Zen t-shirts.......................$15.98
one Victorinox Swiss army knife................$20.23
one American Apparel track jacket*.............$39.06
six Green Squirrel Shirts t-shirts.............$30.55
one Mossimo track jacket.......................$23.99
two Abercrombie & Fitch fleece jackets*........$49.50
one Aeropostale cargo shorts...................$19.99
one American Eagle cargo shorts................$9.99
one AXE bodyspray..............................$0.99
one Simple tennis shoes........................$13.99
one Simple sneakers............................$50.99
two Staedtler Mars kneadable erasers...........$3.98
three Canson drawing paper.....................$6.00
one Strathmore 18x24'' sketchpad...............$4.00
one Interplay computer game....................$3.99
five Clearasil face soap.......................$19.99
one Victorinox Startech 2000 watch.............$80.75
two Aeropostale t-shirts.......................$25.00
four Hanes boxer-briefs........................$8.49
one Tempurpedic pillow.........................$17.99
three Staedtler Mars drawing pencils...........$1.50
five used books................................$3.00
one birthday cake*.............................$7.00
one shitty boardgame*..........................$13.00
one Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.....$17.99
two Pilot pens.................................$2.50
one pack of Jenga blocks.......................$12.50
one Sony clip-on headphones....................$32.00
one year subscription to All In................$22.00
one year subscription to Wired.................$4.99

*not for me

Conclusion: Ironic, is it not, that Adbusters, a magazine devoted to anti-consumerism that urges people not to buy things they don't need, offers subscriptions. Do I really need the magazine?

Chapter I: The Beginning of the End

I know what you're thinking...you are weary of seeing yet another blog link in yet another another AIM profile. "How will this one die?" you cynically wonder to yourself. There are so many ways.

Scenario A: I could be one of those people that writes long detailed recapitulations of my daily activities for about a week, and then suddenly lose interest. The blog will lose its AIM profile link and never be heard from again.

Scenario B: The fade-out will be more gradual. Entries become infrequent and less detailed, although not necessarily shorter as I begin replacing actual content with cut-and-pasted song lyrics. Perhaps after six months, I will simply forget the blog exists.

Scenario C: Miscellaneous (what insurance companies refer to as "an act of God")
Subsection i: The server mysteriously crashes and all data is rendered irretrievable.
Subsection ii: I am abducted by Martians that don't have Internet access.

Scenario D: I never actually stop writing entries, but after a while, they're all pretty much the same and completely devoid of interest. I know nobody reads them, but update out of habit. It's like the blog version of the Flying Dutchman, drifting through time; a ghost of itself.


Which will it be? This thing was created on a whim, so I'm guessing it'll die the same way, but who knows...

A final question: Do all blogs go the heaven?

P.S. Scratch the final question, that was stupid.