End The Oppression Of Free Speech

Posted on December 2, 2015 by qrparker

In case you couldn’t tell by my unkempt hair or proclivity for drawing Jesus as a non-white dude, I’m a pretty liberal guy. So when progressive ideas like feminism and gay-rights and whatever- the-opposite-of-racism-is began to take hold among popular culture I was pretty happy because, fundamentally, I think these ideas serve as a reminder to judge each person by their character, not the genetics they were born with.

Still want to call me racist, even after reading those funny pictures? Well, guess what, sucka? I’ve never mentioned my race or my gender on this blog. If you assume I’m a white man just because I draw myself with no skin color and a square body then YOU’RE THE HETERO-NORMATIVE RACIST BIGGOT. Mwahahaha.

If you’re not picking up on the irony then that probably means you haven’t been spending time on big, wealthy, liberal arts colleges in America. Congratulations on graduating/not being an American.

Listen: as of late, hordes of young, wealthy, supposedly progressive college students have been gathering together to complain that their large, prestigious, ivy-league institutes (whose admittance was definitely merit-based and had nothing to do with parental connection and wealth) are not doing enough to protect them from words and ideas they don’t like. I would find this phenomenon disconcerting if it were happening in my local middle school. The fact that it’s happening in million-dollar educational institutions is terrifying.

If all this seems outlandish to you, here’s a couple of articles from much more credible sources than my dumb, internet thingamablog:

The Atlantic – Coddling of the American Mind

US NEWS – Megaphones to Muzzles

New York Times – Hiding from Scary Ideas

The most personally frustrating part of this phenomenon is that I actually agree with a lot of the underlying messages of these protests. There are many socially marginalized groups in America that absolutely deserve to have their voice heard. But demanding the censorship of anyone who doesn’t welcome you with open arms is the kind of crazy radical idea that can only existing in a country that DOESN’T have such censorship.

The world can be a tough place, but living in a city as diverse as Vancouver, I’ve met and worked alongside people who literally had to flee their own countries to avoid persecution or death for their religion, race, or orientation. One of my coworkers is a refugee from the Nepalese earthquake. One is an orphaned Iranian refugee. One is a gay man from Sri Lanka, a country where homosexuality is illegal — not frowned upon by the religious right wing — an actual crime you can be sentenced to prison for. Just about everyone I work with has experienced more institutionalized tragedy and discrimination than anyone I ever met living in America, and I’m willing to bet, more than anyone engaged in these college protests.

Why am I so sure?

Because, overwhelmingly, the people I’ve met who’ve suffered horrifically don’t try to censor others. Overwhelmingly, they’re grateful. That doesn’t mean they’re always happy, or that they never complain, or that they aren’t willing to fight for their ideas. It means they understand how much freedom they have, and that there is a sharp, cutting difference between having someone disagree with you (or, as often the case in these protests, having someone only agree with you 95 percent) and real, legislated, institutional repression. When college students in some of the most prestigious, powerful, advantaged establishments on earth use their privilege to censor the free-exchange of ideas, they look spoiled. Worst of all, they make legitimate ideas and ideologies appear weak to those on the other side.

A person who promotes acceptance through unacceptance has nothing but hollow words. Hating homophobes won’t make homosexuals safer. Hating whites won’t make blacks any more accepted. Hating the rich won’t feed the poor and hating yourself doesn’t give you a right to hurt people.

Hating those who hate only increases the net amount of hate in the world.

Censorship is a temporary solution that does nothing to solve the underlying problem. Let’s improve the world through solutions, not suppression.

~Fin

Fun With Racism

Posted on November 19, 2015 by qrparker

Note: This blog post deals with very serious social issues and any attempts to find humor or inject levity into the pain of human existence will be met with stern glares from all my liberal, college-educated, white friends.

This is a post I’ve rewritten maybe three times over the last year, trying to refine exactly what I want to say. It’s tricky. Things have really changed since the brisk, carefree liberalism of my youth.

When I was first developing my political views, America was a far more conservative space than it is today. All a bright-faced, rebellious, optimistic teen had to do to be liberal was NOT support the war-mongering, anti-intellectual, technically unelected president.

Times have changed though. America’s current president is both democratically elected AND half-black. No matter how cynical you are about racial politics, the fact that black people can go from literal property to Leader of The Free World proves that a fuckton of progress has been made.

Disregarding any political feelings one might have about Barack “Probably-a-Secret-Terrorist-and-Antichrist-Hussein” Obama, his election was a massive, historical event in American history. Following this election, a tidal wave of mainstream liberalism drowned popular culture, splashed unpopular culture, and dried completely before it hit anyone rich or powerful.

The liberal flood, combined with the almighty connecting power of the internet, has created such an ocean of social issues that even a friendly, open-minded fella’ like myself has some trouble keeping up.

The thing that constantly divides me from my generation and all their new ideas is not the ideas themselves, but the fact that no one is willing to admit this stuff is fucking nuanced. These ideas are cutting-edge, digital-age, precision technology, and yet I’m constantly at odds with people I agree with due to their insistence on wielding progressivism like a blunt-force object.

In my mind, the point of all this rigmarole, the apex of creating a progressive society, is to build a place where people are kind to each other. You know, that thing all your heroes wanted.

Call me sequential, but I cannot envision a society that achieves greater kindness and understanding by refusing to acknowledge perceptions and beliefs beyond their own, no matter how irrational the opposing side’s viewpoint may feel.

Let’s try to be kind.

~Fin

My Roommate, The Ghost

Posted on June 5, 2014 by qrparker

My roommate and I don’t have a good relationship.

That’s not to say we have a bad relationship.

We’ve lived together for almost a year, yet somehow we don’t have a relationship at all.

Every time my roommate sees me, he runs away.

It’s my ideal living situation.

After several months of vigorous non-discussion, I began to suspect my roommate might not be very fond of me. Then, to protect my ego, I began to suspect he was a ghost.

At first it was a joke, but like most jokes, the longer it percolated in my mind, the less funny it became. If my roommate was genuinely a ghost, then his refusal to speak to me or look me in the eyes or acknowledge the fact that I lived ten feet away from him had less to do with my social skills and more to do with his ephemeral statues.

Last week, my roommate left. He didn’t say goodbye, but he did leave a bunch of paperwork he was supposed to do.

While filling out his notice of vacancy form and sliding his keys into an envelope, I realized there was actually no substantial evidence that he existed at all. I never even got his phone number. Was it possible that my roommate was just a figment I invented to make my apartment less lonely?

I thought about existence for a long time. For most of us, a couple hundred years after we die, it’ll be like we never existed at all.

For a few days, I was melancholy. Then I realized I was still only paying half the rent. So, if my roommate didn’t exist, that means I’m kind of a genius.

Have a nice summer everyone.

~Fin

I’ll Draw Anything

Posted on April 10, 2014 by qrparker

UPDATE: Keep commenting. Rather than responding one at a time, I’ll compile the drawings into a post next Thursday. Also, thank you for all the very kind, very thoughtful comments.

Hello everyone. First off, let me tell you that you’re beauty is outweighed only by your sparkling intellect and management skills.

Let me tell you, life is really wearing me down. I’m dealing with some medical shit, which leads to emotional shit and also monetary shit (money is the emotion of America).

I’m going to take a break from blogging until May, just so I can finish up school and try to get my life back on track. I’ve been humbled by all the amazing feedback and encouragement I’ve received here. After years of believing comment sections to be evil places of dangerous vitriol, I’ve been amazed by the intelligence, insight, and general good will of those who comment here. This blog has received almost 500 comments, and I haven’t had to block a single one. That’s kind of amazing.

To prove I’m not vanishing (and to prove I love you), anyone who comments here will get an original, ms paint, digital art picture. Ask me to draw anything, and I swear to Vishnu-Jesus I’ll do it.

(comment below)

~Fin

Why I’m Afraid of Haircuts

Posted on January 23, 2014 by qrparker

My hair grows very fast. I know this because, in my family’s lean and early years, my constant haircuts were a source of contention.

As the member of our little family that contributed least to our financial security, I felt it my responsibility to keep the monetary burden of haircuts as minimal as possible.

I kept my haircuts down to one or two a year. As a result, this cycle of growth and removal became unintentionally ritualized – a trend that continued long past the age when it is appropriate for parents to pay for personal grooming.

I did not realize to what extent this cycle had on me until several days ago when I decided to cut my hair before the new semester and found I was deathly afraid.

There’s a barbershop I pass every time I walk to the grocery store. It’s just some guy’s house with a sign and phone number outside.

This house used to just tell me I was one block away from packaged food. Now every time I passed it, the house was like a guilt-machine reminding me of my crippling personality flaws.

I bought more and more groceries to force myself to keep passing the house, until finally I had mustered up enough courage to schedule an appointment.

Three sunsets later, I returned to the house/barbershop.

The Barber washed my hair and then cut it.

I had 25 dollars in my wallet. He charged 20 dollars, so I gave him a 5 dollar tip. He said if I ever needed a quick trim it was free.

When I looked in the mirror, I was amazed by how symmetrical the haircut was. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that haircut was actually asymmetrical, but in a manner inverse to the way my face is asymmetrical, making the face as a whole therefore symmetrical.

Most haircuts I’ve had try to be perfectly even, but the human face isn’t perfectly even.

I guess if you decide to cut hair in your basement, you probably know what you’re doing.

Here’s to new beginnings.

~Fin

More Canada

Posted on January 16, 2014 by qrparker

I’m back in North North America until school starts up. Canada is nice place to vacation, because everyone does their best to ignore you, especially if you’re the kind of person who looks a little troublesome.

I went to see a movie with Sister One. It was more difficult than you’d think, because in Canada, days that are close to holidays count as holidays.

In order to travel to the movie, we took this magical train not available in Real America called the Skytrain. Cars are the transportation of land, airplanes are the transportation of the air, and the Skytrain is transportation of the middle.

In case you couldn’t figure out what a Skytrain is by the name or that helpful diagram, a Skytrain is a train whose tracks are suspended in the sky rather than bolted into the ground.

A lot of Canada’s culture is based around doing the opposite of whatever Real America is doing. It’s like those teenage boys who hate Justin Bieber so much that they pay $500 dollars to go to his concert to throw an empty water bottle at him. Justin Bieber doesn’t care where the money comes from. All he cares about is that people keep saying his name. (YOU’RE WELCOME FOR THE FREE PUBLICITY, JUSTIN BIEBER’S MARKETING TEAM.)

I always enjoy my time here, but I think I’m about ready to return to Real America, where the only Canadians you see pretend like they don’t hate you.

~Fin

MALAKIM

Posted on December 19, 2013 by qrparker

This is something I made using Windows Movie Maker and MS Paint when I was supposed to be doing homework.

Why I Made This Blog

Posted on December 17, 2013 by qrparker

I have a confession: a confession about this blog, about the nature of this blog, which I will tell you via this blog.

Believe it or not, when I started this blog, it was not a vanity project. It certainly seems that way – I mean, I have drawn a lot of pictures of myself.

The internet has created an amazing canvas for vanity, which I think is a good thing. The fact that anyone can have a voice is incredible. It took less than five minutes to create this website. The barrier of entry is so low it’s practically invisible.

The human spirit wants above all else, I think, to be free. There’s something in the air we all feed. We bleed our minds and our hopes and our dreams into the nothingness and hopes it spits back something interesting.

If I had a thousand lives to live I’m sure I could sort out this whole damn mess, but it seems my great misfortune to only have the one.

This blog was started for a college class: Writing in Online Environments.

I took this class as an alternative to a plethora of other dull-sounding classes, most of which involved the word ‘rhetoric’ or ‘discourse.’

That’s not to say this blog was the product of some well-structured syllabus. I broke just about every rule set in front of me. This page was supposed to be an academic analysis for the thesis of my blog (I actually think it is, by the way.)

The class is over, but I think I’m going to continue the blog.

So now it’s all on front street. This blog isn’t a vanity-project designed to maintain an ego. It’s a education-project that almost immediately descended into a vanity-project designed to maintain an ego.

But then again, isn’t all of academia?

~Fin

Personal Failure, Part II

Posted on December 12, 2013 by qrparker

(Click the picture below to read the first part. It’s not a requirement. You are free to make your own choices.)

Now that everyone has completed the first part of my tragedy, I feel confident in giving you the conclusion. Here it goes:

I took financial mathematics because I needed a math credit and I thought the practical application of finances would lend to a practical learning environment.

I was incorrect.

I turned in assignment after assignment with answers correct down to the decimal point, but would constantly receive zeroes on assignments for doing it the incorrect way (the way the book does it). Eight out of ten answers on the first test were correct. By my math this is an 80 percent. By his math it was a 10 percent.

After the first test was graded, about half the students dropped the class. This moment would have been perfect for me to leave this professor and his ego in the math department where it belonged. No one would blame me if I left.

Instead I took it as a challenge.

Academia had usually provided little challenge for me, and in the rare instances where I was challenged, a few dedicated study sessions pulled me out of even the most dire of situations. Hell, senior year of high school I had less than half attendance and still managed to pass all my classes. I think technically I shouldn’t have been allowed to receive credit due to my absences, but they let it slide on account of my consistently high grades (and I think it would have required paperwork they didn’t want to do.) I would have even received honors if I attended the mandatory meetings (I didn’t, and they kicked me out.) Before I took financial mathematics, I had never failed a test.

Now I’ve failed four.

By last month, I was mathematically failing this class. By this I mean that even if I were to magically receive perfect scores on every subsequent assignment and test, I would still not have enough points to pass the class. The amount of people attending the class on any given day had dropped from the initial fifty or so to about eight.

So why did I continue to stick around even when, mathematically, I had no way of succeeding?

I’ll tell you:

It’s called a grading curve.

Yes, in order not to feel like terrible teachers, sometimes educators will employ this magical device to curve the grades. F’s become C’s, B’s become A’s, and A’s stay the same because fuck you if you’re getting an A when everyone else is failing.

You see kids, if everyone is failing, than failing is the average, and an average is a C, not an F, you silly, silly children.

I chatted up the few remaining students, and most of them seemed to be failing or at least close to failing. A beautiful grading curve was inevitable.

Now, I’d like to tell you that even though I wasn’t the strongest or smartest, even though all the odds were stacked against me, I stuck it out. And because I stuck it out, working hard, studying into the wee hours of the night, turning in failed assignment after failed assignment, my god-damned determination paid off in the end.

I’d like to tell you that.

But I can’t.

Because it didn’t.

I fucking failed and I just have to live with that.

And so do you.