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Conversation With My Student Loan People

Sooo I lost my temper at my Student Loan people the other day. The bad news is they probably recorded it. The good news is my service couldn't get any fucking worse, so whatever. The other bad news is that the problem still isn't worked out. The other good news is that when I get really angry, I tend to work a good blog post out of it. So here it is, my unedited* conversation with my student loan people:

*Okay, it might be a bit edited because I don't remember exactly what I said, but below is the gist.

Twenty Minutes of Electronic Touchpad Bullshit

Her: Hi this is (LOAN PEOPLE) how may I help you?

Me: Hi, I've been calling about four or five times a week since, uh, July, trying to sort out my loan forbearance, which you owe me for (reasons I legally can't publish online), so I'd love you to take care of that.

Her: Okay sir let me bring up your file… yes, it appears we emailed you that form last week. Also you're a billion days delinquent and owe us all the money in the world!

Me: Really? You E-Mailed it? Because last time you specifically told me you couldn't email it, you had to mail it via normal mail.

Her: No sir, that's not true.

Me: We had a long, irritating conversation about it. I wrote a sticky note to myself saying "they have to mail it for some reason so I can fax it back to them." I was angry when I wrote the sticky note so my handwriting is all fucked up. I remember this very clearly.

Her: Well, sir, I can email it to you now.

Me: Well what does that mean? Will you actually email it, or are you going to, like, text it to me or something now?

Her: Sir, I will email it to you.

Me: I don't believe you. Like, I'm sorry, but I really just don't believe you at all. I feel like you're just screwing with me. Are you just screwing with me?

Her: Sir, I need you to calm down.

Me: But I'm being straight-up lied to. By you. A huge, multi-national corporation. What do you possibly have to gain? I don't owe you that much, and what I'm trying to do is going to benefit both of us.

Her: Sir…

Me: No! I don't think you even want me to calm down. Nothing you're doing is making any sense! I don't even think you need my money, I think that's all a sham, and your corporation actually runs off the frustration of people in their mid twenties.

Her: Sir?

Me: Does it? Do you have a doomsday machine powered by rage-drinking and indigestion? Are you sucking the anger out of me through a microchip installed in my phone?

Her: No.

Me: I still don't believe you. This is the kind of thing that is starting to make sense to me, okay? I hear the things coming out of my mouth and they're insane, but I still believe them because they make more sense than the alternative. As Sherlock Holmes once said, when you remove the impossible whatever remains, how improbable, must be true. Do you disagree?

Her: Do I disagree I work for a company with a doomsday machine powered by frustration? Uh. Yes.

Me: So you're saying you're smarter than Sherlock Holmes.

Her: What?

Me: I'm asking if you're smarter than Sherlock Holmes. I'm asking if you're smarter than a fictional character whose defining characteristic is being smarter than everyone. It's the easiest question I could possibly ask you.

Her: Can we talk about your loans?

Me: No, because whenever I try to be productive with you people, nothing happens, so I'm trying the "ranting like a crazy person" route. At least this way I'm starting to feel a little bit better.

Cereal Habits Are Hard to Break

Today was an auspicious day for my grocery habits. For the first time in my life, I was unembarrassed by the content of my foodcart. Normally I buy stuff like ten frozen pizzas, a sixer of Dr. Pepper and a can of beans that everyone quickly infers I will eat cold. I've been doing this for so long that as I approached the check-out I started to feel guilty out of sheer habit.

But then I realized that, without even trying, my groceries weren't that bad. I was buying stuff like cheese. And Capicola ham. And mustard -- And not French's Yellow Mustard with the little American flag either, it was the fancy spicy brown mustard that looks a little bit like poop when you squirt it out on your food. The closest thing I had to my usual groceries was a box of Lucky Charms, and even that was kind of a step in the right direction because I had actually worked up the courage to buy Lucky Charms.

That may require some explaining.

As a child, my household had some pretty strict rules about sugar intake. While I don't remember the exact numbers, I do know that there was a specific number of grams of sugar a box of cereal was allowed to have to enter our home, and I know that, as a child, I was well acquainted with exactly where on the side of the box the Sugar Grams measurement was. Every time I visit a new grocery store and we got to the cereal aisle, I would run ahead to give myself plenty of time to research which box would give me the highest amount of sugar while still containing nothing gross like fruit or nuts or anything that was made in a "mill".

I would only have to do this once per grocery store of course because once I got the research down, I was an efficient little motherfucker. I knew right where the best cereal was and I was not afraid to make it my bitch.

The point here is that after 18 straight years of this process, my decisions regarding cereal were far too firmly ingrained to change. When I went to college and walked through a cereal aisle for the first time, I remember thinking "Wow! I can get absolutely anything I want! It doesn't matter one hairy Republican armpit what the sugar content is!" I gazed, as if for the first time, at the bounty before me, and spread my arms to bask in the corporate glow of symbolism and mis-spelled puns.

I then promptly bought a box of Honey Bunches of Oats -- a cereal I've always been allowed to eat. I did this every week for five years.

But no more. Now, for the first time ever, a box of some ridiculous, sugary, tooth-rottening, life-span shrinking cereal sits in the cupboard of my new home, taunting me with its diabetic goodness. I'm even going to get around to eating it. Totally. Any day now.

The Scary Door: An Official Petition to Whoever Writes Futurama

Dear Futurama Guys,

Wow, I totally should've looked up your names. That's embarrassing. Too late now, I guess.

I'm writing to officially request that you give me the rights to write a spin-off show titled "The Scary Door." I'm also officially requesting the money to get started, as well as some actors and maybe a producer because I'm betting there's a lot that goes into making a TV show that I don't really know about.

To prove that I'm capable of this, I submit three alternative introductions that I wrote during my lunch break last week. (By the way, I'm talking about this, in case you've forgotten how brilliant that thing you created is).

It's, uh, best if you read it aloud to yourself in your best Rod Serling voice. My Rod Serling voice is fantastic, but I guess that's not really going to be communicated here. Trust me though it's totally the bomb.

You're walking down the hallway of your mind, looking for a place to pee. Every door you open isn't a bathroom -- it's the remedial geometry class of your past, the PE of your very soul. You pass your grandmother, but she's not your grandmother, she's a fish or something. I'm not making this up. Finally, frustrated, you decide to pee on whatever you find behind...

...The Scary Door

You're traveling to another dimension, or at least another time zone. Maybe across the state, maybe just downtown. Across the street at least, most likely. Hell, some days, just getting you to stand up is an accomplishment. Let's do babysteps -- your first one going right through...

...The Scary Door

You're traveling down the road when your car makes a funny noise. You pop the hood and find Narnia, only instead of Christianity it's a dark, edgy Narnia with Christian Bale as Aslan and directed by some European guy. The whole thing is European as fuck. Also,

...The Scary Door

Two New Cracked Articles: Ridiculous Superhero Weaknesses and Parodies That Succeeded Because Nobody Got the Joke

Look, I've just started working as a teacher at an honest-to-god-real-High-School-that-isn't-a-prison-this-time, and it's been pretty busy. Both of these articles are "new" in the relative sense of the word only -- both are outside the first week, so promoting them doesn't even get me any closer to the monthly traffic bonus, but whatever. They're both fucking awesome. Especially the second one, because it's the most of my writing that's ever made it into the final draft (damn near all of it).

Shameless Self Promotion of Shameless Self Promotion

Look I'm a Celebrity. My college is pretty glad that I'm doing something worthwhile with my life.

New Cracked Article: Video Games Tie-Ins That Ruined The Point of the Movie

My new Cracked article is up, and it's really great and everyone should read it. Again, a couple things got cut -- for very good reason -- but I thought I'd throw them up here because whatever.

Animorphs: Shattered Reality is Actually Completely Normal Teenagers: Shattered Reality

In case your unfamiliar with the books, The premise of Animorphs was that there's a group of teenagers with attitude that transform into animals and fight aliens. The "point" of the books is that this is awesome. Occasionally there was some "war is hell" stuff, but the books (wisely) never strayed too far from "hey, how cool would it be if Tiger v. gigantic-killer-centipede happened? What about huge-snake-headed-orc-with-blades-all-over-its-body v. grizzly bear? How about Eagle v. mind-controlled-telephathic-alien-horseman-with-scorpion-tail?"

The specific story in the game is that Visser Three (the leader of the alien invasion of Earth) gets a hold of a device that can "shatter reality," and the Animorphs have to stop him. Okay what's the Visser gonna gain by "shattering reality" again? Do you feel like maybe explaining this in the opening cinematic? No? Okay.

Barring the total insanity, this actually sounds pretty passable as an Animorphs plot. Those wacky kids were always stopping the villains’ plans by transforming into animals and fighting them. Hey, Video game developers, looks like you actually managed to pull this one off!

How the Game Ruined the Point

As you've probably already guessed by the title of this section and our sarcastic optimism, the video game developers didn't actually manage to pull this one off. The load times are pretty slow, and the character models get a few pretty important things wrong: for example, Jake's hair was supposed to be short in the books, but it's pretty clearly medium length here. Oh, and you can't fucking turn into animals.

Gosh, how will I solve this problem? Not by flying, which I can totally do.

Alright, in all fairness, it is possible during pre-scripted combat sequences and certain other moments to turn into a tiger and fight things (with a sixty second time limit), but the vast majority of the game is spent in human form. And since the game is a platformer, you spend most of your time jumping.

It's almost like the game is taunting you: you have the power to turn into a bird and fly, but only when the game says it's okay. It's physically painful to watch your player character hop across floating platforms for half a fucking hour, only to come to a cliff and have the game gently inform you that you've been able to fly this whole time.

Do you want us to keep giving you screen shots of Jake poking around as a person? Because we can.

Where the Wild Things Are: A Tragedy About Insanity And Death

NPR called this movie "the hipster version of Star Wars" and… yeah, we can't top that. Touche, NPR.

In the most common interpretation of the movie, most of the story takes place in Max's head: the "Wild Things" represent his conflicting emotions, needs, and desires, and his story with them is a metaphor for his coming of age in a difficult time. Disappearing into a world of hallucinations and insanity might seem a bit extreme for a nine year old, but we'd probably do something similar if we ever found out our mother was dating Mark Ruffalo.

http://musicforants.com/blog/?p=1985

To be fair, we can't blame the video game developers for balking at a theme like that. A video game about growing up? A metaphor for achieving maturity? We're all for acknowledging video games as art -- but that's pretty ambitious. Given the limitations that come with a big license like this, it's totally understandable that they'd just make a kid-friendly platformer built around running, jumping, and smacking black gunk monsters that try to eat Wild Things and drag them into the "Nothing."

They look like big, strong hands, don't they?

How the Game Ruins the Point

"Ruined" is a relative term here. If you’re the kind of person who prefers childrens stories that end up being about death and dementia, then you’ll probably love this game – but we’re going to go ahead and assume the developes didn’t really think the implications through on this game. First of all, if the Wild Things' island is in Max's brain, what is the invasive blank gunk supposed to be? Alzheimers? Because that's kinda fucked up.

Because your consciousness is being consumed by a degenerative mental illness!

You know what else is fucked up? Bull, the Wild Thing that represents fear, nature, and Max's Father, decides to stay in "the nothing." And unlike the movie, at the end of the game Max doesn't go home. He stays on the island as king, and there's no suggestion that he plans on leaving.

Wait… which one is laughing?

Now we're not saying that Max is crazy for imagining an island full of monsters that represent different facets of his personality. He's a kid established to have an active imagination, and the movie makes it clear that fantasy is voluntary. The last scene is him reuniting with his mother, and its pretty straight forward that Max has simply used story-telling to work through some shit.

Though even at 8 years old, at least one of the Wild Things should’ve had tits.

But the ability and desire to leave that fantasy isn't just a throw away detail, it's the difference between using imagination as a way to grow and using imagination to keep from ever growing at all. It's the line between a child who's coming of age and a child who's mentally ill and really needs help. So while the movie tells the story of Max struggling with and ultimately accepting the hardships that come with his burgeoning maturity, the video game tells the story of an 8 year-old boy who loses his grip on reality and spends the rest of his life suffering from severe alzheimer induced schizophrenia. Since he was lost and far from home when these delusions hit, the rest of his life is very likely to be, at most, three days.

Max, the little boy who was brave enough to be king, is going to starve to death. In the woods.

Alone.

Terminator: Future Shock

Since it's based on the entire franchise rather than a specific film, all Bethesda's "Future Shock" had to do to stay off this list was follow the very, very loose rules of the first two Terminator movies. Seriously, guys, it's not hard. Please, just…

How the Game Ruined the Point

God dammit! Well first of all, when you beat this game Kyle never goes back in time because the war never happens. So, yes, it literally writes the movies out of existence.

But it gets worse: according to the game, not only did the first two movies never happen, they couldn't have happened.

None of the Terminator movies have really "made sense" if you expect your time-travel logic to be bullet proof, which is why no one in the movies ever go into too much detail about how it works. In T1 and T2, it's taken as a given that the time-travel thing is a bit wonky. There seem to be specific moments when you're allowed to go back: Kyle and the original T-800 arrive at pretty much the same time, as do the next T-800 and the T-1000. When pressed on details as to why, Kyle says "I don't know tech stuff."

I do, however, know how to present myself as a sane and rational human being.

That's fine, whatever, just keep the movie going. It's a bad idea to bog a movie down with tech stuff, because if you try to explain how time travel works, you get stuff like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv_jPWWcAtg&feature=player_detailpage#t=47s

You... you did? You thought that? Wow.

Anyway, according to this game, not only is Skynet going back in time to create itself, it's also informing itself how to win battles against the resistance. Furthermore, it's warping in extra soldiers to fight those battles it already lost. Which means it can send as many T-800 as it wants to any point in history it wants.

(This creates problems, but not new problems, so let's keep moving...)

The human resistance notices this happening because history is changing in real time: the program Skynet is uploading to its past-self is almost done uploading, and as such everything is still in flux.

History changing in real-time in 1995

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsbcdiCmy_c&feature=player_detailpage#t=343s

When it finishes uploading, Skynet will have retroactively won all the previous battles it lost and the resistance will stop existing.

Okay, fine.

But if that's how time travel works, the window to stop the original T-800 from killing John Connor would have been while that T-800 was being sent back -- as soon as the process finished, Connor would have ceased to exist. However, in the movie, Kyle explicitly says that he got to the time machine after the first T-800 was sent back.

Unless it happened in much closer proximity to each other -- in which case, will the sequel to Terminator: Salvation have a long sequence where John Connor almost fades away while struggling to play Johnnie B. Goode?

If you can hear me… you are the resistance.

Because that's pretty much the only sure-fire way you're getting us back in that theater.