Gone Goose

Posted on March 27, 2014 by qrparker

You can’t walk in the grass by my apartment complex, because if you do, you will step in goose poop. Goose poop, like most bird poop, is not as unpleasant to step in as say, mammal poop, because birds eat mostly grass. You don’t really notice it, and it doesn’t stick to your shoes, but if you look down, you feel like a disgusting human being.

Due to no choice of my own, I am now relatively familiar with the behavior of geese. Here are three behaviors I have observed:
#1 Geese are braver alone than in a group.

#2 Geese and squirrels are surprisingly cool with each other.

#3 Geese possess the ability to hiss AND THEY HAVE TEETH.

The particular goose I happened to step on spends a lot of time on the sidewalk. Maybe he just wants attention, because he should know by now that sitting on sidewalks highly increases the probability of getting smooshed by humans.

How do I know it’s the same goose?
Because all the other geese have flown back to Canada.
At first I thought it was because he couldn’t fly, and his friends had to leave him behind.

Apparently, this goose just likes to hang around my sidewalk, making my life that much more difficult.

And thus mankind and goose grew a little bit closer.

~Fin.

Two Geniuses Who Killed People

Posted on March 20, 2014 by qrparker

Why has genius, as of late, chosen to take the form of mustachioed men with happy faces and big noses? For reference, I present two geniuses:

(Albert Einstein – Developed Theory of Relativity and relatively bombed Japan)

(Kurt Vonnegut – Brilliant anti-war writer and World War Two participant)

It’s spring break around my part of the world, so I’ve been trying to keep as unproductive as possible. That means I’ve been doing a lot of reading and bed-sulking.

One of the books I’ve been sulk-reading is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I avoided this book for years because the title made it sound like a miserable, depression-inducing war novel. Imagine my delight when I finally cracked open my copy and found it was actually a hilarious, depression-inducing war novel.

The first chapter is very different than the rest of the novel, and is really just Kurt Vonnegut reflecting on the story he’s about to tell. One reflection is about a man who told Vonnegut he’d be just as well writing an anti-glacier novel as an anti-war novel.

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

The one thing Vonnegut didn’t count on when he wrote this in the 1960s was a little thing called global warming.

In the same way Einstein turned his bomb idea into cool science and Vonnegut turned his war participation into anti-war novels, I wonder if we can turn our melting glaciers into peaceful coexistence.

~Fin

Why I Didn’t Post Last Week

Posted on March 13, 2014 by qrparker

I keep getting in trouble with my English teachers for being too mean. This has been going on for a while.

There’s something very uncollegy about the check-plus, check, check-minus system. Like they’re afraid to tell us if something is good or bad.

Like we’re children.

In my early-level courses, I was grateful for the sugarcoating. Writing is a vulnerable act, and early on encouragement is probably more important than honesty.

After a while, I began to distrust this plastic layer of niceness.

Now it’s reached the point where I completely distrust anything positive about my work.

The problem with English majors is that they’re goddman sensitive. Everyone’s got some common problem with a simple solution, but instead of trying to solve the problem they expect the universe to change around them.

I wrote all this last week. If it reads as a condemnation of people feeling bad for themselves then good – I fooled you. I also fooled myself. That’s what I was really trying to do.

But you can’t run away forever, and it looks like things have finally caught up to me.

Oftentimes when I make fun of things, it’s because I’m trying to expel something I see in myself. That’s what I was trying to do with the first half of this post, but I just couldn’t finish it.

I’ve been posting every Thursday for a while now, but I missed last week because I was staring at my computer, wondering what was standing in my way.

I like to think of myself as the type of person who is in control of their emotions, but that’s only because I know I’m not. My outside behavior is a product of carefully maintained self-manipulation.

I don’t think this is unusual, and everyone does it to some degree, but for me it’s a constant process. When I see people acting in complete disregard of their own insignificance it enrages me.