I Wouldn't be so Cynical if the World Didn't Make it so Easy

I was gonna write something uplifting, I swear. I was tossing around ideas about exploring nerd culture and all its facets, what appeals to me and what doesn't, and why I cringe when I see people dressed up as anime characters and when they correct my enunciation of manga.

I was gonna explore all of this and more, and offer my insight as a pseudo-expert/reformed nerd, but it'll have to wait until next week because I saw this on the bumper of a car on my way to work.

Naw bro man, it's cool. She's into me. Bro.

 

And I thought, There is no better way to broadcast to the entire world so clearly that you're a giant dickstorm of a human being.

 

For the uninitiated, that isn't some kind of confusing foreign way of signaling the number 3. It's called the Shocker, and it was invented by bro-happy frat boys an unknown number of years ago after a night of drunken homoeroticism that they swore they would never tell anyone about. So to overcompensate, they came up with the phrase "two in the pink, one in the stink," because things that rhyme are clever. School taught them that. I'll let you figure out what that phrase means if you don't already know, because I'm getting nausious just thinking about it.

 

Anyway, that's what I saw while I was on my way to teach children how to correctly speak and write the English language. High school is a place where kids go to learn about the big four subjects: Math, English, History, and um, art or something. A secondary effect just happens to be life lessons that the students gain while they are there, but when I see something like the above on a car, or I hear a bunch of stupid bros talking about it, it makes me realize that the lesson is often lost on people. That's disappointing, and it's not like I can show students the above picture and say, "If you ever willingly make this figure with one or both of your hands, you are a stupid asshole." And if I see a student throw this sign, I may not be able to say, "No, that's a BAD student," and hit them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, but maybe I would write them up for throwing gang signs.

But I digress.

There is a reason I'm so cynical, and not just about things like the Shocker. That only happened to be what set off this tirade. Things like this perpetuates the problem, because this type of thing is plastered all over the internet. You don't have to go far to find a picture of someone doing something so stupid that it makes you wonder who gave their parents permission to breed. There are so many dumb things in the world catering to dumb people and we're just saturated with it. And I'm tired of it. I really am.

It must be the government trying to control the weather to contact aliens and confiscate our guns!

No, it's aurora borealis.

Naw that ain't natural man, I shoot my gun at it and it don't die. Shucks!

 

 

I do my best to surround myself with smart people and I do truly believe that there are more smart people than dumb people (it's just more fun to write about the dumb ones, and one of my good friends is already writing about the smart ones), but they must be off doing smart things like not watching television instead of watching television. That's why we're stuck with shit TV shows where they put the laugh track on autopilot and pay the "writers" hundreds of thousands of dollar monies to write the most inane tripe they can manage while still being considered legally sane.

Oh my god. LAUGHS. You slept with her? LAUGHS. She sleeps with everyone! LAUGHS. Also, video games! LAUGHTER LAUGHTER LAUGHTER, DIE.

 



The world really is not a horrible, dumb cesspool of a place. It's the internet thing. The same thing acting as an outlet for me to vent my banal frustrations is also acting as a vessel to deliver us the mundane. It's a two way street, and some of us happen to be caught in the shitstorm while others revel in it. I'm not better than anyone, although this piece makes it seem like I think I am. Maybe I do think I am, but most of us think we're better than at least one person out there. It just so happens that the internet gives me proof of my grand delusions and reinforces it on a daily basis. And that's the world we all live in.

So here is what I will leave you with: If you're reading this and you got this far, you're probably not dumb, so congratulations on that. Continue to go out and do not dumb things so we can take back a little bit of the world at a time. And if you ARE dumb, Yay, you read something! See you again in fifteen years!