Objectivity and Objects

Thanks for all those who have ever bugged me about not writing, keep making me feel shitty about it. You guys are baller.


Much to the chagrin of many public figures in the collegiate, Boston community, Boston University (BU) has been thrown into an unflattering spotlight of national attention and gender awareness. And of course, as most national domestic debates about privacy and sexual identity go, it all started with a really chill bro. This certain "bro" hails by the name of Justin Doody (I had all these jokes written about this guy's lastname, but let it just be noted simply, for all of you above the age of seven that it is in fact, a synonym for shit.) and is responsible for the creation of the website ratebu.com. Now, for all of you who saw "The Social Network," do you remember that site  he makes in the beginning of the film after his girlfriend ostensibly dumps him? The one that allowed people to rate different girls on Harvard's campus by comparatively voting on them? Well, after slamming down some Nattys, this chill bro saw the film, saw that very scene within the movie and thought to himself, "Bro, that's chill," and made a site in which viewers could vote between which girl at BU was hotter, thus creating a ranking system. However, Mr. Doody (poop!) saw "The Social Network" and paid close attention to the unchillness of the bros who sued Mark Zuckerberg's ass and all the trouble he got in for being a bit of a prick. In response, Mr. Doody made many very strict, very smart guidelines and stipulations for using the site. To enter and operate the site you must be a BU student with a valid school email. Your identity will never be revealed making the voting completely anonymous. People then upload pictures of themselves or girls they know and the voting begins. The ranking does not work as a comprehensive list, so I cannot, as much as I wish I could, scroll all the way down and see who has been deemed the absolute ugliest girl at BU. Instead, there is an average score statistic and the scores and pictures of the top 25 women. In the coming weeks, the poop-master also has plans to phase in a section in which guys can be voted on as well.

Higher-ups at BU and women's rights groups have already made their bland, copy & pasted statements of opposition for the site. But I think the discourse that ratebu.com has generated begs for more proper analysis. People seem very quick to rush to the idea that everyone is a unique snowflake brimming with God's love and that there is no way to explore what makes them beautiful to other people. Pretending that sexual tastes and preferences exist seems very counter productive. Men, if you didn't know already, have a living, breathing barometer for sexual attraction that is nestled just past our anus and in between our thighs, (hint: penis) meaning I can only hide so well my attraction for any given person. There's no need to go galloping around telling girls that nothing makes you limper than the thought of them naked, that's simply cruel, but for a society that fills stadiums to hear Lil' Wayne talk about all the different girls he has slapped with his cock it can be disheartening to see that this where we have decided to draw the line in the sand. Objectifying women cannot be morally condoned no matter how instinctual it can be for men to do, but I think banning up-front honesty sends the wrong message to people. We are the country that gives everyone a soccer trophy at the end of the year. The team brutally lost every game and each player, including Legless Lenny, gets a golden statue. On top of that, at the other end of the spectrum where the American psyche loves to vacation, there resides an ideology within our education system and media, that girls need to be perfect. The power-point presentations in P.E. are true, society has created a false idol within skinny models. Conflicting messages for young people of all genders ricochet around many different psychological levels of our existence, and in all the confusion and hectic chaos you can become hypnotized by the whirling motion into absorbing every word of it, no matter how contradictory. Famous monologist and theatre performer, Spalding Gray in one of his pieces said, "Everyone knows they're going to die, but no one really believes it." The same can be said for body image: Everyone knows they don't have to look like a model to be beautiful, and yet they still go through expensive, time consuming measures to look like one. No one will ever find satisfaction beyond their hedonistic desire to have sex with a porn star like they will with finding someone that they love. The Taj Mahal wasn't built because emperor Shah Jahan casually had a one night stand with some slutty Indian sorority girl, it was because he wanted  to see his undying love for his deceased wife immortalized through physical manifestation. Does that mean I would have voted on his wife's photo if she went to BU? Not necessarily, in fact, from paintings I have seen, very doubtful, but there lies the genius of the entire ordeal.

ratebu.com clearly does not promote monogamy, but my encounters with it have been enlightening and stimulating in areas whole appendages away from my crotch. When a group of guys look at the top 25 they rarely ever agree on even just one of the placements. When it comes time to vote, full on bickering can arise over the simple act of deciding whether one girl is more attractive than another. The differences in taste and style, just like a taste in any art form like music or film, are obvious. Mr. Doody's site can be viewed as a bit of a happy accident, living proof that people, just like paintings, have certain styles that will always be popular and hung in museums of varied curation, but that even the most bizarre painting, with the most off-beat composition can be hung up and cherished by an avid, loving collector. Denying a certain level of objectivity within beauty is vain and equally as ignorant as only attempting to get with with girls with straight blonde hair with big boobs who strictly wear leggings, Uggs, scarves and North Faces as a uniform. Art has inherent beauty, and the human form represents a biological masterpiece; people will continue to find essential value endlessly within each other (Stephen Hawking has had more than one wife, c'mon people). Attempting to make the artistry of yourself appeal to a broad audience might make you believe that you are receiving more love or appreciation or attention, but what if you find someone who finally wants to hang your painting on the wall, who is enamored with your beauty, only to find out that upon thorough inspection, they don't agree with the political message the piece represents at all? Through its anonymity, ratebu ensures my honesty in many ways. The few times I have voted I never have considered conforming my answer to fit in with what other people think, there's absolutely no pressure to do so. A site like ratebu only exists so long as everyone, as a broken collective brain-trust, thinks they know what it means to be good-looking and strive to achieve that hallow title. If people lived their own lives like they voted on ratebu, perhaps you would see a lot more beauty in the world, perhaps a site like this would just fade out of view. Maybe no one would care.





"So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell" -Sean (Good Will Hunting)

Back Again, Here to Stay

So needless to say I dropped the ball on the whole, "post something every day" crap I was spewing earlier this month. And while I think that became increasingly unrealistic with an ever expanding workload at school and a long fought bout with a head-cold from hell, I do feel bummed out that I wasn't able to adhere to a little bit more structure. If you haven't already noticed though, the posts on this blog tend to be long and often times vast in scope. It doesn't exactly take me interminable, laborious hours to craft these bad boys, but I also have a large host of other responsibilities besides this pet project. I think that due to the nature of, what are actually turning more into essays, I'm going to keep my goals realistic and look to post twice a week. So, fucking, fingers crossed I guess. I know it is so typical of me to start something like this and just drop it, but there has been a surprising amount of feedback and support from lots of people on and offline so I am determined to keep at it. Needless to say, thank you all for reading, and I urge you to keep critiquing me and telling me what you think because it means a lot!

Down With the Sickness

Fucking boy was I sick these last few days. I was sick in the kind of way that moving makes you just pulsate with pain and ooze. The rhythmic percussion of my internal organs were like an abrasive clanging of pots within my skull. Orchestras of phlegm and stuffy mist played inside me, conducted by demons with cerebral palsy. I was the kind of unnamed seasonal, viral sick that reminds you that before like, say, this century, people used to just drop like flies in the winter time because of pedestrian shit like the flu. Goodness grief, it was awful. Let it be noted though that I was sick for approximately 48 hours. As torturous as they were, I'm not exactly gonna rewrite my will, (reminder to self: find out how to make a will and buy acres of land for my ancestors.) in fact I don't think I've even gained any perspective. In an age of instant gratification, some shit just doesn't really matter. It takes all of 3 minutes for me to start to feel the effects of Advil when I get a headache--I don't even think a three year-old would complain about that. Toddlers are extremely demanding, short tempered, prone to erratic unjustified outbursts and highly impatient, but I have a feeling that most infants, would take Advil and go, "Huh, that was surprisingly effective." I can remember, like it was yesterday, because as I said, it literally was yesterday, my flaccid, unkempt visage, crumpled in my bed, waiting for death's sweet release. I would have gotten addicted to cigarettes and then gone through the extended, laborious process of quitting smoking if God would have just erased my symptoms. And yet here I am, at 2am with a 9:30am class tomorrow morning, rolling the dice with my immune system. "Double or nothing, on you not fucking collapsing Benny Boy!" Have I learned nothing?

In the era of the internet, we polarize and miscalculate valuations within this life; it's like if "The Antiques Roadshow" hired Stevie Wonder to appraise fucking porcelain sculptures. Everyone my age seems so reactionary and radical. Type the wrong smiley face in a text message and cataclysmic waves ripple through people's flesh, yet national, well respected, news publications are starving for readership. People even have the audacity to complain about paying for music. When someone cannot instantly download a recorded piece of music they act as if the internet told an off-color joke about their heritage. If I walked into the Beatles' recording studio, grabbed the recorded tape off of the reel after they finished producing it and walked out and distributed it to all my friends, they--the most peaceful band on earth--would probably beat me and strangle me to death with the cord of a hookah. People always tell me (and I do empathize with this) that they don't have the money to buy the song. Well shit, then you don't buy it. If I can't afford a car I don't perform a heist on my local Ford dealership. When the internet goes down or the GPS takes you the long way people get livid, as if something personally attacked and threatened them. Just do whatever the fuck you did before 1990. And if you're young, then take a huge leap of faith and trust that people had friends, got jobs and even got laid without cell phones at some point.

Life, with all its modern amenities, is beautiful. I am not some hipster who thinks that the internet is poisoning the water. The pros clearly outweigh the cons. I don't want to be halfway across the Oregon trail, eating the half-cooked leg of my mother in order to survive. I also, though, dont want to have to recover from cancer or go to jail for 40 years in order to appreciate a summer breeze or classical music. People often times, when they share my point of view, tend to idealize a simpler past. A pastoral image of a woodsy cabin in spring emerges in their mind in which babbling brooks and woodland creatures sing soft lullabies to you in a rocking chair while you smoke your thick, maroon colored pipe hewn out of a redwood tree you and the townsmen cut down as you watch your wife mend her summer dress and enjoy the sweet taste of a succulent apple. Yes, the slow languorous lifestyle of our idealized pasts are beautiful and serene. But they were also highly dangerous and boring. People used to beat their kids for sport and every other child you had died of a disease named after a color. One would hope and think that there has to be some middle ground. A capacity within all of us exists to look at the small, beautiful details in life and derive meaning from them and to also be able to post a status about that same thought on Facebook later on. Do away with instant gratification, for no person is ever wholly gratified or complete, people require instant appreciation: the ability to see value in life, quickly and rapidly, in a world that moves blindingly fast.

Band of the Day: Little Dragon

So this one time, at band camp, God and his buddies smuggled vodka into their dorm rooms and got super wasted. After a late night of rompus dancing and over-sharing-dark-secrets-and-insecurities, God became rapt with hunger. After staring longingly at his empty cupboards and fridge drawers, he started getting creative. Using whatever scraps of material he could scrounge from his now completely trashed quarters, God blended together a late-night drunken treat: Little Dragon.

The band Little Dragon, formed in 2006, is a living, breathing, singing, juxtaposition of things that don't go together. Little Dragon's lead singer is Japanese, the band is based in Sweden, they sing alternative R&B/Soul and their album art looks like Terry Gilliam's work from Monty Python . Besides the Muslim Midget Mandolin Machine, they are no doubt one of the most interestingly diverse bands currently recording. The off-beat nature of their allure definitely adds to their mystique, but on their own merits they are simply an original, progressive, musically sound band in every way.

Here is the track, "Twice" off of their 2007 self-titled album "Little Dragon"
(The video is also stunning)



And here is the track, "Blinking Pigs" off of their second album, "Machine Dreams"


So far all you Japanese Swedish girls looking to land a role in "Dream Girls," thank me for introducing you to your hero later.

BS

Pooh Bear Reunion Tour

Liberals and artists (everyone I have ever met) love to critcize Hollywood. People often consider it to be hierarchal and full of men in suits, who in turn, because of the suits, do bad shit...? Some logic along those lines. And while I try to stay optimistic about the movie industry, I side with the crazy, cynical hippies on one issue: revivals, remakes and sequels. If any movie in history ever even had a possibility to make money at some point in the past, then Hollywood will simply do it again. Your movie was marginally profitable? We would like to make seven more. You like that movie where those young, studly cops caught that crazy drug lord? Well now those actors are in their 50s and we're making them come out of retirement to have them beat king pins to death with their wheelchairs. For every successful retelling of a story there are thousands of brutal rapes of an intellectual property in some other theatre (60% of those cases go unreported and straight to Best Buy shelves). So when a link popped up on my RSS feed about a new Winnie the Pooh film, my instinct was to commit arson on a shelter home for animal burn victims. I could envision it so clearly: 3D-IMAX Winnie The Pooh, now with top of the line computer animation! Experience the heffalumps and woozles in mind-boggling 3D! George Clooney stars and does mo-cap for both Tigger AND Pooh Bear! Angelina Jolie Stars as the evil Honey Queen! This Summer, experience "Winnie the Pooh: Rise of the Bee's Wax." POOH... IS... BACK!

So, as I thrashed around violently in my chair, I clicked on the link. And something unexpected and beautiful happened. As text came up over the screen, the distinct, clear voice of Pooh came racing into my head from the depths of my childhood memories. And when the text lifted, there in front of me, was the grumbling, two-dimensional tummy of my favorite polo-wearing bear. My eyes began to light up and I could feel pure joy begin to well up inside me. Then, all of a sudden, Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know" began to softly fade into the trailer and again I quickly began to recede into madness. Was this some sort of romantic-comedy? Was Jolie, perhaps, not starring as the evil Honey Queen, but instead some fucked-up 100-Acres-Wood harlot that would act as Pooh's love interest? I didn't even know Pooh had any libido or sexual desires to speak of. Good God. And still, throughout my panic, the soft melodies of one of the world's cheesiest songs continued to play, and yet again, like the Grinch when he realizes he fucked up Christmas, I had a second moment of being being proven completely wrong. For as the song dipped into its quiet bridge, a single, red, not IMAX 3D balloon slowly floated through an empty tree-line in a blissful "American Beauty"-type moment of innocence and simplicity. Everything that makes Winnie the Pooh irresistible--the wisdom, the childlike wonder, the magical realism--all of that was coalesced in one single shot--and from there I was sold. In fact, in a state of complete shock, I laughed audibly, out loud, at the trailer's only joke. I mean fuck me, I don't think I have even laughed at the trailers of movies that are supposed to be hilarious. Needless to say, I am now in eager anticipation for this film. And while I will probably get my fair share of restraining orders as the only non-parent over the age of eight in the theatre, from the looks of things, it may just be worth it.

(In this week's spirit of favorites, I once told my mom that my favorite actor was Winnie the Pooh and one time I dressed up as Pooh for Halloween. So, before you start telling all your lacrosse playing buddies that your bro Ben told you this movie was about to be baller. Just know that I am a lifelong, die-hard fan.)

“If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. i'll always be with you.” -Pooh

Parents Pick Favorites

While the makeup of my readership for this "thing" consists of my mother and three of my sympathetic friends, I am still going to ignorantly trudge forward as if millions of adoring, attentive readers are waiting with bated breath.

In that light, I am going to begin a series of posts (alongside other longer essays I have been working on) that show what sort of person I am based off of a cross-section of my personal tastes. I am dubbing it the "Parents Pick Favorites" series, and everyday I will choose a topic/category/genre and explain why one item within that category is my absolute favorite: favorite books, movies, foods etc.

Yes, just presenting my #1 favorite things in life will not, in fact, do my multi-faceted, extremely diverse, highly-entertaining, complex personality justice, but neither will just saying that I love or hate everything. So in the spirit of decisiveness, boldness and streaking at the Super Bowl I present to you perhaps my most difficult "favorite" to decide: my absolute favorite song.

In our minds, music does not represent any form of exercise or effort. Hearing something is the same as existing--it just happens. When we hear the kick of a snare drum or the twanging of a guitar it affects us viscerally and naturally. Like all effective art, intangibles that cannot be intellectualized or described often dictate how we feel or react to it. Yet for every time we, as humans, consider hearing as just a given circumstance, there have been times when we were sitting in front of someone, or in a classroom and were literally not registering or understanding anything they were saying. The tone and the cadence of the voice existed and travelled into our ears, but ended up limply collapsing like Myotonic Goats, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxKUYhu4-Vw) never fully reaching any semblance of comprehension or acknowledgement. Listening, while primal and ubiquitous, actually takes effort and control. For this reason, my absolute favorite song to ever exist is LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends."



The everyday listener could easily let this song wash over them; the main piano riff and pitter-pat drumming sequence stay essentially unchanged throughout the entire track and the structure of the song is entirely unorthodox and unfriendly for radio play. These are the same qualities though, that make "All My Friends" a beautiful work of art.

Drake songs and Taio Cruz songs are sleekly designed to illicit that euphoric feeling of dancing and drinking at the club, of releasing all inhibitions and indulging in yourself. I would never want to go to an Usher concert, but when his songs come on at a party, the energy is heightened. I fill up my shot glass and am excited to do something completely unplanned and hedonistic. For me, "All My Friends" fulfills a much higher, loftier calling. Everyone knows what it means to be drunk and happy. You dont have to be an R&B star to know that you had a great time on Saturday night even though you don't remember anything about Saturday night. The ingredients are always the same too. Dancing, drinking, eating, sexing, sleeping in bushes--the gang is all there every time you and your friends all go out. But where do those experiences fit in to the larger timelines of our lives? Puking, in no other circumstance, is the sign of night well done. Flashing lights and pulsating rhythms don't act as a soundtrack to all of our hook-ups (unless your name starts with a S and ends in a nookie). Yes, "All My Friends" is in many ways a song about going out to bars and stumbling home and kissing women, but the genius lies in its ability to create monumental context for the pedestrian act of having a good time. What does it mean to have true friends? What is life like right after the party ends? Where do our lives travel after that point? What does it mean to grow up? These are all issues that are integral to knowing who you are in a modern society.

"All My Friends," both musically and lyrically, gives the listener a taste of that visceral feeling of going out with all your friends. Drinks or no drinks, the culmination of the thick piano chords and the whining synths represents that feeling of acceptance and belonging--of someone carrying you home after you pass out and making you eat crackers even though you are screaming inaccurate racial obscenities at them. When the song begins and the clinks of the piano keys are simply twinkling in the eye of the song, you can smell the cold night air, you can see the make-up and the done-up hair and that overly fresh smell. The land of fist-pumping and lude sexual acts still remains, but the song also recognizes the come down, the sobbing and the stumbling into your bed, the shattered relationships and the after-party pizza places. Lead singer of LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy, is 41 and I think his slightly older age (relative to the Jonas Brothers) really resonates in "All My Friends;" a real sense of perspective and emotional arc definitely has manifested life within this song for me. Going out drinking with your friends isn't just about being drunk and in the limelight, it is about getting lost on the way to the party and making in-jokes that no one remembers after it's all said and done. It is about the sweat and tears that causes all the make-up to run. And in a lot of ways life is the same way. Why do you think people get divorced? For millions of people, what is dear in their heart is not being in love, but what it meant and felt like to fall in love. The scene where Frodo drops the ring into the fire and ostensibly solve's an entire continent's problems pales in comparison to the complete scope of his journey from his small home in the countryside, to the world's grandest stage.

Whenever I remember laughing at a friends joke, I always remember what they said that made me crack-up, what words they used and how the punch-line operated. "All My Friends" reminds me of how much of what made the joke funny was an integral part of who that person was, not what they said. Life isn't about the nouns, it's about the adjectives. It will always be about the journey, and just like this song, if you don't pay attention closely, it may fleetingly pass you by.

An Origin Story

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Stanton and I have decided to start a blog. The word blog makes me want to fucking vomit. It just sounds like I think I'm important. It also sounds like a competing Play-Doh product that went bankrupt because everyone found out it had lead in it during the late nineties. The demographic for people who write blogs skews heavily towards those with degrees in actually knowing how to write and individuals who have products or unpopular bands to update the public on. I don't have any of those things, but I am still going to go ahead and write on (Or is it "write in?" This is already the worst fucking blog.) this blog on a near daily basis in the hopes of really putting my effort into something productive.

I realized I needed to put my thoughts in a public, online space when I realized I was spending way too much time spouting non-sense in this other, public online space called Facebook. Many people bemoan the fact that they are incapable of being productive or performing any normal activity without obsessively checking their Facebook profiles; Mark Zuckerberg has basically turned everyone into those annoying, pompous kids who always fox-guard the "base" in kick-the-can. I, however, don't exactly subscribe to this social-media-based affliction, I posses a much rarer strain of online retardation: the compulsive urge to always be updating my status. See, statuses are beautiful things, it's like being able to yell at everyone you know in a socially acceptable manner. Instead of riding around to all my friends' houses on a swift steed and hollering about how much I hate the DMV like some pretentiously entitled Paul Revere, I can instead, with minimal effort, and while under the influence, type anything I want with the guarantee that people who know me will read it. Needless to say, this unbridled access has quickly gotten out of hand and I am now prone to, over the course of 24-hours, posting two songs an influential quotation and a few clever thoughts as statuses every day. And whether people find it interesting or not, it's just a depressing reality to live in. When you start sucking dick for crack-cocaine, you stop smoking crack-cocaine. When you write a status on Facebook, only to realize there's something else you would like to publicize to everyone you have sort-of-met-before immediately after, you make a change in your life. This is my sad little change.

For my innaugural post I will give a little background about myself and a bit of a roadmap where I would like to see all of this going. My name is Ben Stanton and I am 18 years old and a freshman at Boston University. Publishing writing, even just blog posts, at the age of 18 is a bit like starting a pornographic website while in grade school. Writers rarely receive meaningful recognition, and when they do it's usually not until their 30s or 40s at the earliest. I'm really hoping, however, that the things I have to say won't come off as the ignorant ramblings of a teenager. So for now, just pretend that maybe I'm like, say, 32. Just imagine that my hairline is receding and that due to the unblemished nature of my tailored suits and the sleek design of my glasses, that I have potentially interesting things to say. However, if by some rare chance, I happened to actually be 18, know that I would be a Theatre Performance major at BU's College of Fine Arts, that I am tall, with short hair that has no distinct color and cannot be described through written devices (I like to call it "apathetic brown") and that I am skinny. 

I am usually very upfront and casual about my shortcomings. I can easily jest about how I use big words just to be a douche bag and how unorganized and unpunctual I am, but for a long time I have been really uncomfortable about how skinny I am. I still am. People will often times suck in air while at the pool or at the gym like a pufferfish in order to give the illusion of additional body mass; I do that with such consistency that it is almost second nature. I am in slender denial. The blog (every time I write that word a philanthropist gets beat to death with a sack of fruit. Jesus.) is titled "The Skinny" not only because in World War II it was a commonly used phrase that meant "What's happening?" but because it represents a paradigm shift in my life--a metaphorical sense of acceptance of myself. I will still eat protein bars and go to the gym and pretend and hope that one day I will have a "situation" six-pack of my own, but I could probably due with an exhalation of breath. 

Besides overanalyzing myself, I have a varied set of interests that can be expected to be written about with consistency. I am a huge fan of music, which isn't very unique or special--it's sort of like being a fan of photosynthesis and is also a very subtle way of cluing everyone in on the fact that I am not deaf--but I like to think that my taste is eclectic and interesting enough that often times people haven't already heard the songs that I find, but mainstream enough to recognize that any song can be improved by letting Akon sing on it. Going hand-in-hand with music, I am a lover of movies and the movie industry and have very strong opinions about the critical reception and artistic value of films. In addition I like sports, I like politics, I like stand-up comedy, I like being competitive, I like acting, I like seeing plays, I like to drink milk, I like to drink rum, I like avoiding drinking rum and milk at the same time, I like graphic design, I like classic literature, I like comic books, I like the urban streetwear fashion industry, I like drawing, I like sweatshirts without hoods, I like body piercings and much, much more.

This was very much the obligatory, introduce myself and the blog (*shudder*) sort of post and I hope it was mildly entertaining. As a benchmark goal I will be posting at least once a day, if not more, so check back whenever you get a chance. I feel like I'm a prostitute on her first day of work who is all nervous about approaching cars and offering sexual favors--I know I am supposed to put myself out there, but I still just feel slutty.

Now that I've built a common line of empathy between me and those who sell their bodies for money, I can now end this post.

BS