I have about 30 Google Wave invites, so the first 30 or so commenters get an invite! I have to approve comments before they’re posted, so I’ll invite you and decline your comment so your email address isn’t broadcast to the world.
This isn’t possibly an excuse to try to drum up traffic! I promise!
ヽ(;´д｀)ノ
I understand that it’s completely normal to be nervous about what’ll happen after I graduate. Everyone else, though, seems like they know what they want to do when undergrad is finished: graduate school, the work force, an internship.
Whereas I don’t even know where to start in making my “post-college life plan”. It seems so final. After all, the decision I make will alter the course of the rest of my life.
My options are kind of limited. Though Japan is still by far my number one choice, if I don’t go to graduate school, will that destroy my chances of ever going? I think I’m burnt out on math, which is really upsetting because it makes me wonder if the last four years of classes were pointless.
Teaching English in Japan, which I thought was awesome, is apparently extremely popular, and it makes me feel a little less confident in my choice. Plus, would I even make a good teacher? I’m introverted mostly, but I do love watching kids learn.
Can anyone provide some direction?
Soon, I’ll be sending off my application to the Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program… I’m really looking forward to living in Japan and learning Japanese, plus I really think a year away from school and math will do me well. If I don’t get in, I plan on applying to some of the private 英会話学校 (English-teaching schools), so I’m not putting all of my eggs in one basket. Or trying not to.
People keep asking me why Japan, and why the JET Program, and why not graduate school, so I think I’ll tackle each of those one at a time.
Why Japan? As nerdy as it sounds, I first became interested in Japan when I bought an import Dreamcast wayyy back in the day. The language was fascinating, mostly because they didn’t use Roman letters. Later, I played Final Fantasy XI, which is an online RPG, and there I actually got to talk to Japanese people, albeit through a rudimentary auto-translate system. The culture of cooperation and community really impressed me, especially in contrast with the North Americans, who were ruthless and often rude.
Why JET? The reason I’m so excited about (hopefully) being in JET is the cultural exchange emphasis. I’m not simply going to Japan to teach English: I am also teaching American and Western culture. If I would have had the opportunity to be taught by someone from the East about their culture and language, I can’t even imagine how much broader my worldview would be. I’m having to force it open at the moment.
Why not graduate school? I am burnt out. Every time I think about math, doing math, or graduate school in math, I get a frustrated headache. The best option if I were to go to graduate school would probably be linguistics, which actually does excite me, but even then I think a year in Japan would provide me with some context instead of academia divorced from reality.
In no particular order…
BabyPeasants.com
4. Adnoxious
→ McDonald’s continues to carpet-bomb your tolerance
5. Look How Fucking Bad I Parked
The point is, if you’ve got issues these days and you want to deal with them in a not-old way, get a script for Lexapro or consult a life coach. Or book a night with a prostitute who’s got a psych degree.
#129: Banksy
Keeping up with art is hard; trips to galleries, enormous books, and costly bi-annual magazines are just a few of the many expenses you will incur during the process of attempting to stay current with art. While the challenge and difficult of this proposition would seem to actually attract more white people than dissuade them, the amount of work required to become and remain an expert on art is simply too much for the majority of white people.
8. Look At This Fucking Hipster
Do you know of a blog I missed? Let me know in the comments.
Most (reasonably intelligent) people have a short list of things that, if violated, would cause them to have no interest in a potential boyfriend or girlfriend. Some may argue that this isn’t doing justice to a person, and if they are otherwise the man or woman of your dreams, why should it matter?
I would argue that the “man of my dreams” wouldn’t have one of my dealbreaker characteristics because I believe they are severe personality flaws that necessarily affect (infect?) the rest of a person’s persona.
1. Doing drugs regularly, including smoking and drinking.
Let me qualify this. In no way am I saying I would break up with someone for doing drugs, getting wasted, or smoking a cigarette. I would, however, have no interest in dating a guy who does drugs, smokes, and drinks (to buzzed status) often. All of these make it obvious that the guy has a problem with wanting to escape from reality and/or his problems, and I have no interest in dealing with someone disconnected from reality all the time. If a guy wanted to smoke pot or get drunk from time to time, that’s really fine by me, as everyone needs to relax and escape from time to time. Every day, though, it becomes a chore. (Also, kissing someone who just smoked and having to smell smoke all the time is disgusting.)
2. Not being intelligent.
If a guy is dumb, having a conversation with him is painful. Literally. I can’t talk about the weather, video games, and movies forever. If I can’t have a serious conversation with someone, why are they worth my time? I’m not saying he has to be very political or have strong religious (or irreligious) views, but if he doesn’t want to think about them at all, he’s most likely running away from actually having to think for himself. Nothing is less sexy than that.
3. Being a slut.
I realize that asking a gay guy to not be a slut is pretty much asking the impossible. But it shouldn’t. If a guy I like is slutty, I am automatically and irrevocably turned off, for a very simple reason: if he’s had sex with anyone and everyone, what makes me special? I’m not saying that I should feel special all of the time, but being another notch in someone’s belt I find extremely nauseating. It also says that the guy has no standards, and who knows what kind of gross diseases he’s carrying around.
4. Being cruel or violent.
These are obvious personality flaws that will make every other part of his character sullied. This includes being cruel or violent to homeless people, animals, waiters/waitresses, and strangers. Every person deserves respect initially — when they actually do something disturbing, as many people will do, you can retract your respect.
5. Flaming queens, leather daddies, and any other gay stereotype.
Look, I’m glad you have found a niche, but you make every other gay person look bad. Queens are putting on a show most of the time, and why do you think I’d like a ditzy flamer when I hate ditzy girls? “Bears” in leather are frightening, and not just to me! I know these are just the most visible gay people, but that’s the problem. There are many of us who are “normal” in the sense of not feeling like we need to fit into a prepackaged gay stereotype.
What are yours?
I have been single my entire life. I’ve had a few flings here and there, but nothing even approaching a long-term relationship. For a long time, I felt terrible about myself. Why do uglier, dumber, meaner people have boyfriends while I can’t even get a date? in some variation was often in my thoughts. With help from a therapist, I’ve made several realizations I thought would be helpful to share with others in a similar situation.
1. You are not worth less because you aren’t dating someone. It doesn’t make you less of a person in any way. Do you want to know why uglier, dumber, and meaner people than you have a significant other? Because they have no standards. Being at the bottom of the ladder means you’ll latch on to anyone that shows you interest.
2. Most relationships are more dysfunctional than they appear. There’s always the rare couple that makes perfect sense together, get along well, etc. But for the most part, people are acting like they’re happy. All those happy couples you see walking to class holding hands? Holding hands is rarely about shared affection. It screams “Look at me! Someone likes me!” … My advice: don’t look to others to complete you.
3. Other people are desperate. If you’re like me, you probably have fairly high standards (not being a douchebag, caring about you, being smarter than a high-school dropout, to name a few). People are so invested in having someone like them that they’ll get it wherever they can, which usually means anyone.
4. If someone is talking about how much sex they’re having, they’re probably having none. Don’t be jealous. I’m sure sex is just fine since everyone seems to be obsessed with it, but instead of wasting your time on all the drama that 20-somethings love to incorporate into their lives, work on developing yourself. In 10 years, you’ll have a great personality, and they’ll have an incurable STD and horror stories.
5. I’m 21. For a long time I thought that I was the saddest person in the world because I hadn’t had sex yet. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time it was very painful to think about. Prudence from Slate.com’s Dear Prudence column discussed the dozens of 20- and 30-somethings she knew who were virgins but were perfectly attractive and intelligent. Having sex isn’t an accomplishment. It’s a combination of luck and lack of standards. If you had absolutely no standards, don’t you think you could go to a bar and find someone to screw you? I think so. As unappealing as that sounds to me, people do it every weekend. Think about the people you consider to have a lot of sex… On a college campus, for instance, frat guys are generally believed to have tons of sex all the time. But every sorority girl looks the same, and does it really count if they’re both drunk?
5. My Maudlin Career by Camera Obscura
☆ standout track → “French Navy”
pitchfork — 8.3/10
Camera Obscura fans will be pleased to know that she’s still turning out maudlin torch songs with apparent ease. It is a record of the most immoderate sentiment: Thirty seconds in, on “French Navy”, you’ve already got a dusty library, a French sailor, and the moon on the silvery lake. By the second track, “The Sweetest Thing”, Campbell’s ready to trade her mother for a compliment from a certain someone. She might not want to be sad again, but judging from the kind of tangled romantic assignations she confesses to here? Album number five already lurks in the inevitable fallout.
paste magazine — 89/100
My Maudlin Career is 45 minutes-plus of blissed-out orchestral indie pop, enlivened with classic Motownisms and overflowing with silvery tones as singer/guitarist Tracyanne Campbell unspools her lazy, entrancing croon and clever-cute rhymes across a night of innocence regained. Liquid-soul surf guitar and dreamy organ work are punctuated by tiny, chiming glockenspiel hits, wrapped snugly in a blanket of twee, placed gently in a Belle & Sebastianet and set afloat on the River Reverb, waiting for some pharaoh’s daughter to fish the precious little bundle out of the cattails. My Maudlin Career is anything but—sure, it’s sentimental, but never effusively. It’s an infectious album that blooms repeatedly throughout, unfolding in muted, endearing aural hues; simultaneously sad and celebratory, and always charming.
4. Bitte Orca by The Dirty Projectors
☆ standout track → “Cannibal Resource”
paste magazine — 89/100
Utilizing his bandmates as instruments, he dispatches guitarist Amber Coffman on a Mariah Carey-styled slow jam entitled “Stillness is the Move” and bassist Angel Deradoorian for the fragile balladry of “Two Doves,” their voices allowing Longstreth to experiment with a different type of pop arrangement. The Led Zep-ish swagger of “Cannibal Resource” and the dizzying harmonies and stuttering backbeats of “Temecula Sunrise” are more typical of his contrapuntal sense of composition, though he seems to be gaining confidence in his ability to cut directly to the listener instead of obscuring his melodies with constant thematic and structural shifts. The result is the most thoroughly engaging entry in the Dirty Projectors catalog and one of the most singularly engrossing albums likely to be released this year, a triumph in sustained creative restlessness.
pitchfork — 9.2/10
The key is that, rather surprisingly, Bitte Orca is one of the more purely enjoyable indie-rock records in an awfully long time; remarkable by any means, but even moreso considering the source. It’s breezy without a hint of slightness, tuneful but with its fair share of tumult, concise and inventive and replayable and plain old fun. It is the sound of Longstreth the composer and Longstreth the pop songwriter finally settling on a few things together after years of tug-of-war between the two.
3. Riceboy Sleeps by Jónsi & Alex
☆ standout track → “Boy 1904”
pitchfork — 5.3/10
Put together, Riceboy Sleeps is an admirable, intensely personal labor of love from a guy who’s risking risibility by the mere matter of including the word “sleep” in its title, and although “Daníell in the Sea” and “All the Big Trees” do little remarkable on their own merits, when combined with the arresting videos found on the Riceboy Sleeps website, you start to understand its motivation more thoroughly. And really, as long as you don’t give it your undivided attention, Riceboy Sleeps can keep you company in your cubicle or gridlock traffic, though I realize that’s not exactly as riveting as “if there’s one ambient album you own this year…!” But in a necessarily faceless artistic milieu, a Sigur Rós Stamp of Approval might make that the case anyway.
paste magazine — 83/100
Where Sigur Rós drew minimalist lines, Riceboy Sleeps paints sweeping landscapes with fully fleshed out layers of sound, sans lyrics. Film-score comparisons are inevitable; “All The Big Trees,” especially, has an awful lot in common with the melody threaded throughout The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. [...] The album flows seamlessly from one track to the next, from the lighter “Indian Summer,” which floats by without any arresting change, to the dark “Boy 1904,” which opens with a stunning barely-there choir and closes with chilling footsteps and a door slam. “Atlas Song” is more haunting, with a ghostly chorus of warbly young voices and a trapped-underwater feel.
2. The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists
☆ standout track → “The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid”
antiquiet — ★★★★★
I got my copy a week ago, and according to iTunes, I’ve listened to it twenty times. I didn’t start to understand the story until at least the tenth or eleventh run through, so part of me just wanted to sort it out on paper. But what you need to know is that this is the best album of 2009 so far. It’s a masterpiece, and The Decemberists have outdone their amazing Crane Wife against all odds. It’s a grand, inspired vision. It’s a concept album, but not the usual sort, where the story or cliché being milked for an album’s worth of lyrics is more of an excuse than a constitutive instrument. Go. Get it now.
pitchfork — 5.7/10
Nobody got into the Decemberists for the riffs. In other ways, though, the theatrical Portland folk-rockers’ noble sojourn into heavy narrative prog-folk was probably always in the stars. Ornately antiquarian diction was their Ziggy Stardust. Ginormous song suites based on world folklore were their deaf, dumb, and blind kid. Yes, they were meant for The Wall.
1. Manners by Passion Pit
☆ standout track → “The Reeling”
pitchfork — 8.1/10
Even if the rock kids aren’t doing the standing still as much these days, indie-friendly electro-pop bands are still liable to have their own backs against the wall– Hot Chip with their Urkel affectations, Junior Boys’ overriding permafrost, Cut Copy and their unflappable cool. Despite residing on the always trustworthy Frenchkiss, Passion Pit aren’t cool. Their approach to danceable rock music is more Friday night than year-end-list. It’s also distinctly, for a lack of a better term, American.
paste magazine — 92/100
In the last several years, the indie universe has expanded—shambling white-guy rock will always have its place, but dance music now occupies the same hipster-certified space. No new band connects the dots better than Passion Pit, a Boston-area quintet with a giddy melodic sense and an unabashed love for synth pop.