Blargh

I haven't been around much due to situational depression, caused by realizing that school starts this week and I haven't even registered. Nor do I want to. As longtime readers know, I hate school. Loathe it. Wouldn't go at all if American business owners hadn't decided at some point that everyone without at least an undergraduate degree (and quite a few people with) deserves to work at Wal-mart or a call center or, since these jobs pay for shit, BOTH.

Anyway, I can't register online because I have to go through advisement. The first college to axe its academic advising department will be the one I bequeath all my money to, if I ever have any, because academic advising is bullshit. Oh, I know the purpose: It's to prevent a lot of arguments from seniors who think they're supposed to graduate that semester but aren't going to, because they didn't read the catalog correctly and they're missing n credits of their core requirements, or their major electives, or what have you. Supposedly, seeing an academic advisor (otherwise known as "the lady who signs my registration form so I can go home and register online like a fucking normal person") prevents this, because your academic advisor is supposed to helpfully point out that underwater basketweaving does not, by itself, fullfill your arts and humanities requirement.

But as someone who has stood in long lines outside an advisor's office listening to these fuckheads who think they're due to graduate when they are not, I can tell you that these arguments STILL HAPPEN. This is because academic advisors don't actually advise you about anything. They just thank heaven you're not there to argue about graduation and sign the fucking form. It's a formality or, as I like to think of it, a complete waste of my time.

I'm 37 years old, is what I'm saying. Let me take second-semester Spanish without this fake-advisement rigamarole.

So I have to go down to the school today. That's the first thing I'm disgusted about.

The second thing I'm disgusted about is the internet phenomenon known as Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey--JMPP for short because I am NOT typing that out again. Two names are enough for the rest of us, Jacquie. Get with the program.

I thought discussion of JMPP's dating criteria would last, you know, a day or two. But I forgot something! I forgot that JMPP is a chick. Any response to her must be disproportionate. Or: Somebody please tell me the last time a man posted an equally absurd list (and don't tell me that doesn't happen; that page by The Nice Guy is basically one long list of "dont's" for potential partners, i.e., "don't ask me for help setting up your computer and then refuse to fuck me") and got THIS MUCH SHIT for it. It's never happened, because people just laugh those guys off without questioning their rights to have criteria. The people knocking JMPP are only partly angry that her criteria are ridiculous; they're mostly angry that she has criteria and had the nerve to say so.

Don't argue with me about this. People don't get this vitriolic over shit this stupid unless it fundamentally upsets the order of society in some way, and a woman saying "Sorry, but you're just not good enough for me" will always do exactly that, especially when she makes it clear that, actually, she's not sorry at all. In fact fuck you, ugly losers. Try mail-order brides.

Anyway, thanks to JMPP fever I was treated to--well:

Look, I want to make it clear I'm not saying this girl is ugly, per se. What she is is "plain." She is what I call "Bad Irish." The Irish look, but not the Good Irish look. The pasty skin, the elfin features... but not cute elfin, or better yet, hot elfin.

What you're looking at here is a 5. A girl you wouldn't notice in the average college or singles bar, except maybe if you had recently quit smoking, and noticed she had a fresh pack of Marlboro Reds held in her (indifferent) cleavage.

Jacquie needs to grow her some bangs to cover that high forehead. I'll grant you that. But a 5? Oh, wait. It seems we have further explanation as to how this value was derived:

I'd hit it, I admit, but there are different levels of "I'd hit it."

She comes somewhere on the "I'd hit it" scale between "I'd hit it, but only if it were 3am and I was drunk and really needed somewhere to crash for the night" and "I'd hit it, but only if she walked right up to me, grabbed my hog with both hands, and screamed to the bar, 'I claim this Man-Thing as mine own!!' and then vowed to fight any challengers to the death with Vulcan axe-spears."

Let that sink in. Then, consider the source:




Who CARES who this guy would hit? Why am I reading an Ewok's explanation of the difference between "bad Irish" and "good Irish?" Seriously, answer those questions in a way that does not boil down to m-a-l-e e-n-t-i-t-l-e-m-e-n-t, I dare you.

The third thing I'm disgusted about was already aptly summarized here, by Tekjani. I can't add much except to say, remember when I complained a little about Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? Here's my lengthy list of things you'd have to change to make that a more, uh, "girl-friendly" game to me:

Don't reward the player for killing hookers and stealing their dough.

Seriously, that's about it. You could even leave the stripper scene in, or the part where Tommy yells at the pr0n flick director to "keep the camera pointed at the poontang." I mean, I didn't really dig that part, no, but I could overlook it.

I don't need pink games; I just need games that don't towel-snap me in the face with the message that I am not part of that game's target market and maybe shouldn't be playing it at all--maybe I should be in the kitchen fixing a tray of nachos while my man plays it, in fact. Or hey, there's always laundry! A man can always use more clean boxers for his jimmy.

UPDATE: Registration is never as bad at this school as I think it is going to be. So why do I keep working myself into such a state over the whole thing? Because I was scarred for life by the hate-filled bureaucracy known as the University of Texas at Arlington. Their slogan? "Students Come First." I saw a lot of stickers around campus that said so. Several of them even bore an appended clarification in felt-tip: "FOR ASS-FUCKING."

Basically the job of every employee at UT-Arlington is to reduce each student to a sobbing, incoherent puddle of misery who knows all the words to this song. Every employee of UT-Arlington is fantastically good at his or her job.

The result is that I cannot register for classes without my boyfriend. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. In this respect he functions like a seeing-eye dog. He tells me where to park the car and where we need to go and when we walk up to the desks of various secretaries he's the one who says, "Uh, she's trying to register, but we think she has an advisement hold? Do you know who she needs to talk to in order to clear that?" (My job during all this is to stand there, shaking in fear, without crying.)

Then he gives 'em my ID number, and they look it up, and then they tell us the wrong office in the wrong building, and we go through this a couple more times, and then eventually, finally, we find the advisor's office, and by then I can kind of, sort of articulate my problem without bursting into tears, so I do, and then the advisor turns out to be very, very nice and maybe even the type who would actually give advice? But I don't press it, because I just want to get out of there and go home.

And then, because I've put this off for so long, I find there are no Spanish II classes open, so I sign up for a class in compilers. Compilers. I couldn't write "Hello, world" in Pascal, or even Visual Basic, if you put a gun to my head right now--that's how long it's been since I've done anything remotely computer-science-related. But I'm going to take a class in motherfucking compilers. Because I am insane.

In the event I have forgotten to mention it lately, I hate school.