In a few weeks The Social Network will win the Academy Award for Best Picture.  The screen writing was superb, the acting was convincing, and the score was masterful.  Now, I should disclose that I am not a movie expert.  I didn’t study cinema in college; I studied biochemistry.  Also, I don’t even watch a lot of movies.  I watch, on average, only about two movies a year.  In fact, I kind of hate watching movies.  Sometimes I think people who are really into movies are just normal people who like to sit in the dark and pretend to be artistic (kind of like photographers).  I don’t like to pretend; it takes too much effort.  I’d rather just not watch movies and criticize people who do.  I’m all about the easy way out.

In any case, that Facebook movie should win Best Picture simply because there has never been a motion picture that was so socially relevant to the time in which it was released.  There is a good chance that you or someone you know has a Facebook account.  Facebook is so big that if you don’t have a Facebook, account, it is, or will be in the future, generally accepted that there is something wrong with you.  Facebook is neither good or bad; it’s just part of our culture and way of life.  I, along with Facebook’s five hundred million users, share this way of life, and four hundred of these people are on my friends list.  So why the fuck am I so lonely?

I suspect that many people understand how I feel, regardless of whether they are actually lonely or not.  Of the four hundred people on my friends list (who are not family members), I consider about ten of them to be current friends.  The rest of them are former friends, acquaintances, and former co-workers from different periods of my life (elementary school, high school, college, professional school, and various work places).  I interact with them everyday; I write on their walls, comment on their updates, Like their links, and vice versa.  These are people that I am interested in and care about, yet I wouldn’t mind if I never see any of these people again.  This isn’t meant to sound mean-spirited, but the reality is that I will probably never see most of these people ever again.  There is no doubt that Facebook has made it very easy to keep in touch with people, but it hasn’t revolutionized friendship as much as people think it has.  It just revealed how we really feel about the people who have come through our lives.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t depress me.  A long time ago a very mean women explained friendship to me.  She told me that if you could have at least one real friend on the day that you die, then you’ve had a successful life.  Maybe she foresaw the social impact of Facebook.  In a way, having friendships without having actual friends sounds kind of ideal.  It makes it easier to be real.  I don’t like to pretend; it takes too much effort.  I’m all about the easy way out.

I’m not white, and, despite what other people might think, I’m not black, Mexican, Mongolian, or Armenian.  I’m not Indian, either.  Nevertheless, I guess I am somewhat more ethnically-aware than most of middle America.  This is because I grew up in Los Angeles, which is arguably the most culturally diverse city in America.  I’ve done “diverse” things like eaten Korean tacos, gone to Chinese New Year parades, and attended Dodgers games.  I even listen to System of a Down.  My familiarity of other cultures is the direct result of (85%) being raised in southern California and (15%) watching a lot of Russell Peters.  Ironically, I’m not as familiar with my Filipino heritage as some people might expect me to be.  I don’t eat the food very often, I haven’t seen any of Jo Koy’s shows, and I definitely don’t speak the language.  Whenever my mother speaks to me in Tagalog, I could kind of understand what she’s saying only because, if she’s speaking to me in Tagalog, that usually means that she’s pissed off about something.  My Tagalog vocabulary is rudimentary at best, but one thing that I have always remembered is that the word “mahal” means “love”.  And, I will always remember this not because love is beautiful and important, but because “mahal” is a heteronym and a homonym.  While the Filipino “mahal” translates to “love”, it also translates to “expensive”, and this is everything we need to know about American Valentine’s Day.

Anyone who has ever been in love can share this sentiment.  This week, the flower, jewelry, and chocolate industries will experience their annual boom in sales because couples will flock to the stores to buy presents for their significant others.  While Valentine’s Day is a contrived holiday to get people to spend money, I don’t think this is necessarily bad.  Capitalizing on our emotions was what made the American economy great.  Why else would we spend money for Christmas presents if we didn’t care about people?  Theoretically, I suppose you can love someone and not spend any money on them, but that might mean you’re a socialist.

Money can’t buy you love, but love is certainly expensive.

NUMBER ONE:

The Super Bowl has come and gone, which ostensibly means that Americans are now collectively five pounds heavier and will have to spend Sundays with their families.  The week after the Super Bowl is usually the unhappiest time of the year in America.  As always, the post-Super Bowl chatter is less about the game and more about the things that circumvented it.  Aside from the Darth Vader kid, Eminem’s shitty car, and Kim Kardashian’s enormous butt, one of the biggest things people seem to keep talking about is the performance by Christina Aguilera.  She delivered a fantastic vocal performance of the Star-Spangled Banner, but people can’t seem to get over the fact that she screwed up the verses.  To be honest, I didn’t even notice it, and neither did the fifteen other people who were in the same room as me.  “Twilight’s last reaming” was wrong?  It sounded right to me, and I’m sure it sounds just as patriotic as whatever you think the “real” words to the song might be.  I’m not going to hate someone who couldn’t remember the words to an antiquated song that no one knows the meaning to.  Christina Aguilera has nothing to prove to American sports spectators:  She sang the national anthem twice for the NBA Finals and was perfect each time.  If you’re going to diss Christina Aguilera, then make fun of how her weight gain is slowly morphing her into the blond Snooki.

The Super Bowl has come and gone, which ostensibly means that Americans are now collectively five pounds heavier and will have to spend Sundays with their families.  The week after the Super Bowl is usually the unhappiest time of the year in America.  As always, the post-Super Bowl chatter is less about the game and more about the things that circumvented it.  Aside from the Darth Vader kid, Eminem’s shitty car, and Kim Kardashian’s enormous butt, one of the biggest things people seem to keep talking about is the performance by the Black Eyed Peas.  They delivered a brilliant halftime show, complete with moving stages, blinding lasers, auto-tune, and electric suits.  Fergie sang great, will.i.am auto-tuned perfectly, and Taboo stood around spectacularly.  It was the most phenomenal show ever produced that everyone collectively hated.  Now, it’s no secret that the Black Eyed Peas make mindless music.  If you don’t like the Black Eyed Peas, that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean that they’re bad.  A lot of people recalled that the Black Eyed Peas made socially conscious and quasi-intelligent rap music in the 1990s.  That is true, but what is also true is that Behind the Front probably isn’t as good as you remember it to be.  Everything from a long time ago always seems better, and everything always seems to get better as time goes on.  Taste is subjective, and if you forget that then you will always be unhappy.  The halftime show was simply just a performance by a relevant musical act in their prime singing music that people danced to at a football game.  This was something that hasn’t happened in the Super Bowl in a long time.  If you were unhappy about the halftime show, then that was unhappiness that you deserved.  If you feel you deserved something better, then go listen to whatever “good” music is in your iPod as often as you want.

The Super Bowl has come and gone, which ostensibly means that Americans are now collectively five pounds heavier and will have to spend Sundays with their families.  The week after the Super Bowl is usually the unhappiest time of the year in America.  As always, the post-Super Bowl chatter is less about the game and more about the things that circumvented it.  However, I want to know why no one seems to be bothered by the fact that we call it the “Super Bowl.”  Of all the names of the major sports championships, the “Super Bowl” is the cheesiest name of them all.  The NBA has the Finals, the NHL has the Stanley Cup Final, and baseball has the World Series.  But, the NFL has the Super Bowl.  “Super.”  Did an eight-year-old name this game?  Are the players considered “super”?  Are the Green Bay Packers now considered the most “super” team?  Are the Pittsburgh Steelers any less “super” for losing the game?  Could any hyperbolic adjective been used to name the NFL championship game?  In the most violent of all sports played by the most lionized athletes of our time, couldn’t we have come up with a more dignified name for the NFL Championship Game?

For the past week it has been snowing in forty states.  While it has been clearing up, the majority of the United States is still gripped in a winter freeze.  As I am typing this, it is thirty-six degrees in Atlanta, seventeen degrees in Chicago, twenty-three degrees in Dallas, and a balmy twenty-six degrees in Ogden, Utah.  This is certainly noteworthy weather, especially for TV weathermen and global warming skeptics.  Meanwhile, I live in southern California, and as I am typing this it is a comfortable seventy degrees outside.  This is probably not as newsworthy as the rest of the country, so why the hell am I talking about the fucking weather?

You may or may not have noticed this, but people who talk about the weather have been under fire lately.  I’m not talking about meteorologists who talk about weather for a living.  I’m talking about people whom you barely know who talk about “the weather.”  This person could be your co-worker, your neighbor, the person standing behind you in line at the grocery store, or even the last person you went on a date with.  These are the people who fill a silent void with the simple question, “So, what about this weather?”  There is a popular belief today that people who make small talk about “the weather” are uninteresting, boring, and shallow.  The theory is that these hermits are so lacking in social skills that the only thing that they are capable of talking about is “the weather.”  These people drive “interesting” people crazy.  If you are someone who is annoyed by people who talk about “the weather”, then there are a few things that you need to know.

People who talk about “the weather” aren’t boring.  Consciously choosing to talk about a topic that anyone alive can immediately relate to isn’t considered shallow; it’s smart.  You might not find this interesting, but you need to remember that whatever you think doesn’t always coincide with how the world works.  If you care about postmodern photography or underground indie music, and consider this stuff “interesting”, that’s fine.  But, you need to realize that there are more people who don’t care about Jean Baudrillard or Cults.  Just because someone is chitchatting with you about “the weather” doesn’t mean that they are incapable of maintaining a more intelligent conversation.  It’s more likely that they just don’t want to have an intelligent conversation with you.  The next time someone makes small talk about “the weather”, don’t mentally roll your eyes at them.  In all likelihood, they already despised you first.

In this climate of New Media, do we really need to keep talking?

Last night I had a curious exchange with another blogger on Twitter.  She tweeted that she had been writing, but she was unsure as to whether or not she should post on her blog.  (At the time, I was under the assumption that she had two blogs, one on Xanga and the other on Tumblr.)  She asked her followers to help her decide.  The following discourse took place:

I was immediately struck with two feelings.  One, I was surprised that she didn’t have a Xanga account anymore, and two, I was disappointed because she, who at one time was a very popular person on Xanga, had apparently left Xanga exclusively for Tumblr.  I don’t know much about Tumblr, but I really don’t see why that site might be considered a more reputable blogging site than Xanga.  I mean, it’s not even legitimate like Blogger or has the street cred of WordPress.  My eyeball test tells me that Tumblr is simply a place for hipsters to post their witty Twitter updates, only in size 72 font that begs its reader to “READ ME!!  READ ME!!”  But what the hell do I know about eyeballs?  I’m not an ophthalmologist.

Anyway, this conversation resonated the fact that people are leaving Xanga at an alarming rate.  I’ve been on Xanga for almost five years and I’ve never seen a mass exodus such as the one that we’re witnessing right now.  Readership is down, traffic is light, and Top Bloggers rarely get a hundred comments.  The Xanga Team hasn’t even updated for three months.  Xanga may be that flash-in-the-pan website that high school kids signed up for ten years ago and are now just getting on with their lives.  It’s expected for things to change.  That’s just how the world works. 

Five years ago I started this blog on a night that was not unlike most nights back then.  I was lamenting my life, crying uncontrollably and listening to shitty music by Andrew W.K.  (I suspect that this is how most Xanga blogs started.)  A lot has changed since then; I cry significantly less and I now listen to shitty music by Christina Perri.  But one thing that will not change is the URL to my blog.  I really don’t see myself leaving Xanga for as long as I write because I know that my uninteresting blog posts will be just as uninteresting as if I posted them on Tumblr.  The host is never bigger than the blog itself.  It’s never “kind of over.”

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not a Xanga apologist.  The giant letters and the bright colors on the front page make it feel like it’s a website for six-year-olds learning how to read.  There are a lot of dolts and curmudgeons on this site, and I’m actually glad that some people have left.  But I’ll probably never leave.  I might be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but if this ship is going down, I’m going down with it.

#thankyouxanga

Last night the NFL held it’s annual Pro Bowl.  Unlike the all-star games of the other major sports in North America, this game is played at the end of the regular season and not in the middle of it.  Thus, this game has no significance whatsoever.  It doesn’t decide which conference will have home field advantage in the Super Bowl.  It has no bearing on players’ salaries (though they do receive bonuses for playing), and it doesn’t affect any team’s pick in the draft.  The Pro Bowl is so insignificant that the all-star players who play in the Super Bowl don’t have to play in the Pro Bowl.  As such, the players don’t take it seriously.  To prevent injuries, defenses are only allowed to play man-coverage with two defensive backs, and players are told not to tackle too aggressively.  The game is essentially reduced to a bunch of millionaires playing glamorized touch football.  The irony of the Pro Bowl is that it features the game’s best players playing the worst game of the season.  It’s so bad that watching the game makes me think that I could run the ball against these defenses, pass for 310 yards, and return punt returns for touchdowns.  The Pro Bowl sucks and makes me feel like even I could be a great football player, even though I don’t have an ounce of athleticism in my body.

Watching the Pro Bowl fundamentally describes how I feel about listening to music by Creed.

I started using Twitter for the same reason everyone else started using Twitter, and that reason was everyone else was using Twitter.  When I signed up, I immediately followed people I admired:  authors, musical artists, comedians, Google, athletes, and journalists.  But now, many of these people seldom update.  It seems like the only things that are occurring on my Twitter feed right now are (1) Jim Rome talking about how much he loves Twitter and (2) food trucks telling me where they’re parked.

It’s no coincidence that the rising popularity of Twitter and gourmet food trucks occurred simultaneously.  In fact, Mark Manguera should be honored with some sort of Nobel Prize for discovering a practical use for Twitter.  Manguera was the founder of Kogi Korean BBQ (a Korean/Mexican fusion food truck) and he famously used Twitter to tell his followers where his truck was at.  This was largely credited for beginning the food truck revolution.  Food trucks popped up from out of nowhere.  I now follow over ten food trucks on Twitter, with cuisines ranging from Filipino tapa bowls (Tapa Boy) to hand-crafted donut iced cream (Lake Street Creamery).  These food trucks inundate my Twitter timeline at least twice a day and try to convince me that I am hungry.  I chase them all around the San Fernando Valley and wait in long lines to eat food I don’t normally eat in places I don’t normally visit.  This is the cultural byproduct of new social media:  It makes us behave in ways which aren’t normal.

Here is an example: Perhaps the most unoriginal of the Los Angeles food trucks is the one that specializes in grilled cheese sandwiches.  This is a type of food that is so simple, boring, and easy to make at home that restaurants figured out a long time ago to not serve it.  However, this truck is one of the most popular in LA.  Why?  Because the goons that run this truck figured out that Twitter will make people do anything.  Everyday they tweet about how great the weather is for a grilled cheese sandwich (it’s always mild in LA) and post the location of where they are “melting”.  People flock to their location, wait in hour-long lines, and pay over $12 for a grilled cheese sandwich with tater tots.  This might seem overpriced, but you’re also paying for the experience of eating outside standing up with other curious yuppies who want to dine like eight-year-olds.

This may be the most important impact of Twitter.

When I was a freshman in college I lived in the dormitories.  The dorms at the University of California, San Diego were arranged in suites with six dorm rooms sharing a common living area and bathroom.  There were eight students per suite (two double rooms and four single rooms).  The demographic of my suite was mostly representative of the demographics of UCSD and La Jolla, California (the town in which UCSD is in):  four white guys and four Asian guys.  Across the hall from our suite was a girls’ suite, whose demographics closely matched ours.  We all got along well, but mostly we just got together to (in this exact order) watch Friends, study chemistry, get drunk on Boone wine coolers, pretend to like gangsta rap, and theorize about partying at a place called “San Diego State”.  This was, for the most part, the extent of having a good time at the most conservative research university in the the most conservative town in the most conservative big city in California in 1995.

There was one person in this assemblage of Asian and white students who didn’t hang out as much.  His name was Peter and he lived in the dorm room next to mine.  He was the archetype loner who rarely talked to anyone and mostly kept to himself.  When he did speak it was usually about something that no one cared about:  physics, his bicycle, or the fact that his Discman never skipped no matter how hard he dropped it.  He had no friends and wasn’t involved with any clubs or fraternities.  He wasn’t particularly nice, but he wasn’t overtly rude.  He was socially inept; one time he was laughing so hard at his own bad joke (that no one understood) that he farted.  He never mentioned any existence of a family.  Other than that he was just a quiet white kid with shaggy hair.  Oh, and he liked to wear trench coats and listen to Smashing Pumpkins’ Bullet with Butterfly Wings while locked in his dorm room all day long.

You may be thinking that I am heading toward a bad ending with this narrative about a weirdo named Peter.  He probably sounds like the kind of guy who spent all his time in his dorm room devising anarchic plans while listening to angry rock music.  You may think that he’s your prototypical mass murderer who carries semi-automatic weapons in his coat and shoots students in the middle of biology lecture.  Peter never did that.  As far as I know, he graduated with an engineering degree and went on with his life.  More important than the fact that Peter never killed anyone was the feeling that no one ever feared that he would.

That was the climate of college campuses fifteen years ago, but it’s drastically different today.  If my college experienced were transferred from 1995 to 2011, I assume that we would all be batshit scared of Peter.  Back then, weirdos were just weirdos.  Nowadays, weirdos are nutcases that people want to hide from.  On January 8, 2011, college dropout Jared Loughner attempted to assasinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords at a public speaking event in Tuscon, Arizona.  The shooting spree resulted in six deaths and numerous injuries.  Several people who went to school with Loughner said he was pretty much a weirdo and an outcast.  One classmate emailed her friends that she feared that he would someday shoot everyone in class, and another classmate said that she would often sit near the exit of her class for that very same fear.  School officials eventually suspended Loughner from school because they felt that he posed a danger to the students and faculty.  On April 16, 2007, college student Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.  Cho had a long history of depression and anxiety, in addition to a past arrest for stalking.  His abnormal behavior was a cause for fear among his teachers and classmates.  If Loughner and Cho were my dormitory suitemates in 1995, we would all think they were weird, but we would never have been scared that they would blow our heads off.

It seems like being in college now and being in college in 1995 are generations apart, even though it is only a difference of fifteen years.  What has changed?  If this is simply a sign of the times, then it’s safe to assume that we live in a more violent era.  I don’t think that this is just the natural progression of culture.  Like Jon Stewart recently said, I don’t blame political rhetoric for Loughner’s crime just like I don’t blame Marilyn Manson for the Columbine massacre of 1999.  It’s just not true.  What is true is that the students in college right now have spent the entirety of their adolescence under the umbrella of two wars.  One war doesn’t have a clearly defined goal, and the other war was won by us yet we don’t feel like winners.  Neither of these wars seems traditional or makes complete sense to grown-ups, but do they affect our children in any way?  If it’s true that our government is representative of the people, then we must also accept that a senseless and violent government will breed a senseless and violent society.

This is not to say that there has never been gun violence in school.  When I was in high school, there was always the risk of being shot by a gangster, but you were never really scared of these guys.  They would only shoot you if you said hi to their girlfriend or if you looked at them in a funny way.  Other than that, they were cool and would get you beer.  No one was scared of Peter, but today everyone is scared of someone.  Everyone is filled with rage, like rats in cages.

Everyone tells me that I should watch the show Entourage.  Without ever having seen the show, I can already tell that I wouldn’t like it.  Its entire premise seems to focus on whether each character can upstage every other character with witty one-liners.  This is annoying.  If I wanted to see witty one-liners, I would look up stand-up comedians and depressed hipsters on Twitter.  Also, isn’t Entourage just a male version of Sex and the City?  The only obvious difference is that Vincent Chase (played by Adrian Grenier) looks like Mark Sanchez and Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) looks like a horse.  What if SJP got together with John Elway and had a kid?  They could probably enter that thoroughbred in the Kentucky Derby, which is the biggest rip-off in all of sports. Every spring NBC tries to make me watch that “event” by billing it as the “most exciting two minutes in sports.”  NBC executives obviously have never seen Peyton Manning run the two-minute drill, the final minutes of game seven of the Stanley Cup Final, or ANY OTHER SPORT.  I’d rather watch the NBA playoffs.

So, no, I’m not watching Entourage.

Whenever my friends force me to recall my past relationships, what they are really asking is for me to tell them more stories about one particular girl I dated in college.  None of my current friends have ever met this girl, but they’re fascinated by her because for the entire time that we dated, I was seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was a total bitch.  For the entire time that we dated, I never noticed how rude, unhappy, bitter, and petty she was.  As such, they collectively refer to her as “that one bitch.”  They particularly like hearing the story about how she hated the sitcom Friends but never felt the need to stop watching it.  Every Thursday night she and I would watch the show and whenever a comedic moment happened, she would sarcastically yell at the TV, “HAHAHAHA.  THAT’S SO FUNNY.  God this show is so stupid.”  She would continue to pout like that and mock the entire show.  I don’t know why this didn’t bother me at the time.  It wasn’t until years later that I realized, with the help of my friends’ perspective, that she wasn’t very nice.

In any case, there is one thing that this bitch always said that kind of stuck with me.  Like many women, she was hypercritical about her age.  She liked to lament that, “Time moves as fast as your age,” meaning that the higher your age is the faster your life goes by.  This is probably an overly dramatic problem for a college coed, but I can certainly understand her perspective.  When I was eight years old time seemed to not move at all.  Second grade seemed like it lasted forever, and when summer vacation rolled around it seemed like those three months would never end.  Today I am 33-years-old and time does seem like it is moving more quickly; I’m not even certain that 2010 ever happened.  But I’m not sure if this phenomenon is occurring because I am older or because nothing is changing.  Let me explain.

On most weekday evenings I can find myself catching an episode of Friends on syndication.  Friends has been off the air for almost seven years, and since that show ran for ten years, I can find myself watching an episode that is anywhere between seven and seventeen years old.  This is an old show, but when I watch it, it doesn’t seem old.  The show has aged remarkably well.  An episode from 1998 still holds up well today in terms of the characters’ hairstyles, wardrobes, and even in terms of their dilemmas and everyday adventures (i.e. hanging out at an overpriced coffee house).  However, in 1998, watching an episode of, say, Growing Pains from 1985 (thirteen years earlier) seemed like watching old time television.  1985 felt aesthetically from another era.  The thirteen year gap between 1985 and 1998 is dramatically larger than that between 1998 and 2011.  From a scientific standpoint, we know that this is physically impossible because time is constant.  What we’re experiencing is that technology is advancing but cultural change is decelerating, which makes it seem like time is passing by more quickly.  Does that make sense?  How the hell should I know?  I’m not Stephen Hawking.

It’s already midway into the first month of 2011 and I don’t know where all the time has gone.  Everything feels the same.  I’ll be 34 in four months, but will that change anything?  HAHAHAHA THAT’S SO FUNNY.