nin137

You are not your fucking khakis.

This was written by my good friend Joe Yavelak, it rocks!

Isn’t it strange how everything in life suddenly
becomes clear when you’re half asleep at your 9 A.M. class
and you just wish you were in bed either waking up from a
wonderful night of rest or face-down, passed out, dead to
the world from a night of hard drinking? These early-
morning breakthroughs are few in number, so I can consider
myself especially lucky to have had one on the first day
of class. My professor, who at this point still hasn’t
lost my respect and seems rather entertaining, tells us
that he is going to teach us how to solve problems step by
step, even as far as showing us how to punch shit into the
calculator. And right then, I knew that I was just
a “space monkey.” A microchip just waiting to be
programmed with other people’s solution finding software.
Just a living, breathing piece of artificial
intelligence. I realized that if I continue on my
engineering path, one of these days I’m just gonna be a
cog in a machine that builds “the world’s most advanced
ships.” It’s a fucking boat for god’s sake. How fucking
advanced can it be. It floats. Big fucking deal. And
perhaps one day my work will progress to where I make a
breakthrough that allows the U.S. Navy to bomb “the enemy”
without getting detected. Will I personally feel the
weight of those lives that ended all too abruptly?
Anyways, I’m way off topic.
“Society has us running around, working pointless
jobs, in order to make money so that we can buy shit we
don’t need.” That’s a quote from Fight Club, not word for
word, but it’ll do. It seems so circular though. I mean,
why do I need one of these shitty jobs? I’m not even
interested in the stability of a submarine at varying
depths and pressures. Why do I put up with it?
Here’s why. Walk around campus and take a look at
all the people who just hate what they’re doing. We’re
kind of an unspoken community. Those who hate the shit
they’re getting into, but figure they have to do
something. My question is this—With so many people
wanting to change the world, why is it that the world will
never change? Nobody is absolutely happy with life.
Everybody wants to change at least something, some more
radical than others. People become writers, artists, and
musicians just to vent their frustrations, and even some
of these people, whose opinions are well known, can’t make
any progress in changing the world. It’s common opinion,
at least by those who know a thing or two about the world,
that this clockwork lifestyle isn’t fulfilling and
satisfying.
So why isn’t anything done? We, the naïve and
rebellious, know that the way things are currently working
isn’t effective, but there’s no clear alternative. In
turn, everybody has their own alternative and ends up
fighting alone against all of society. The odds end up
stacked against us, and we have to struggle to even win
our own personal battles, much less change the world. So
why were such obvious displays of rebellions as the hippie
movement and Fight Club (hey, I know it’s a movie, but
stick with me here) successful? Because they collectively
picked SOMETHING and stuck to it. Their methods were
insignificant; their unity—powerful. If we all just
joined together and poked people with pencil erasers,
think of what great power we could have? Everyone would
be watching over their shoulder, hoping not to become
another victim of “pencil-poking.” Their fear would
overcome them. And the power would slowly shift, from
those who “had a lot of money” to those with the
biggest “eraser.”
I don’t know, maybe I’m way off, maybe life IS all
about getting money so I can buy cars and houses on the
beach, and indoor swimming pools, and Calvin Klein, and
Sony, and Versace, and “Dijon ketchup.” Fuck it, I don’t
know. Maybe we need to continue destroying the world and
blaming it on other people. Maybe eventually we can all
become incompetent and be replaced by robots who typically
exhibit more originality than your average stranger. And
I don’t know what I’m gonna do right now about “the rest
of my life.” But one thing I know for a fact. When the
clock reads 9 A.M. on Wednesday morning, I’ll be
daydreaming in class, most likely about poking my
professor with a pencil eraser.