Commentary: The lines quoted below introduce "All My Best Friends Are Metalheads," but they are not by Less Than Jake. They are sampled from a spoken word piece by Victor Lundberg titled "An Open Letter to My Teenage Son" (Lundberg-link):
This is a fair request & I promise I will not judge any person only as a teenager if you will constantly remind yourself that some of my generation judge people by their race, their belief, or the color of their skin, & that this is no more right than saying all teenagers are drunken dope addicts or glue-sniffers.My customary grouse remains in effect: Magnificent an album thought it is, the title Hello Rockview is nonsensical. It should be Hello, Rockview. The comma is necessary, not optional.
The following words are L.T.J.'s.
"Do you know about his strength and conviction,
Or how she puts all her faith in religion?
Did you take the time to really discover
How little we know about each other?…"
Project MERCATOR
The purpose of Project MERCATOR is to expand my horizons by being more social. Such expansion necessitates reaching beyond one's "comfort zone." One such expansion that has dramatically backfired was an exploration of video games. A gal pal, who shall go unnamed (including code names) so as not to subject her to public shaming, invited me to play a video game, through the FaceSpace, called Trivia Crack. Despite my entirely negative lifelong history with video games, I decided to accept, due to my fondness for her & well-documented love of trivia. Though I have no experience with crack cocaine, I soon found the experience of Trivia Crack to match the popular idiom that anything that one finds compelling is "like crack."
I won some games, I lost others, I competed well in group competitions, & all was going well until she began to invite me to play games in other languages, languages I neither speak nor read. At first, I did not understand what was meant by icons including the flags of the Russian Federation, the French Republic, the Kingdom of Spain, & the Italian Republic, but a single-question foray into the Russian game indicated questions & answers written in Cyrillic script (presumably in the Russian language). I clicked on a randomly selected answer, since all of the options as well as the question were mutually unintelligible, & was informed, in English letters, that this was the "Incorrect" choice. What the devil? I exited out of the Russian-language game & promptly declined her request to play games in French, Italian, & Spanish. I send her a brief but polite missive through the FaceSpace asking her not to invite me to any further games in languages I neither speak nor read. I thought this a fair request.
I was taken aback when she refused. She flatly refused, stating that competing in languages one neither speaks nor reads "makes it more challenging!!!" I do not believe in ultimata, in coercing consent. I thus did not offer her an ultimatum such as "Stop inviting me to play game in languages I neither speak nor read or I'll stop playing games against you in English." I simply informed her that in light of her refusal to stop inviting me to games in foreign tongues it would be impossible for me to continue playing Trivia Crack at all. She said that this was "Fine" & that she would continue to play "none English" games against other opponents. (I have to assume she meant "non-English," since "none English" is a grammatical nightmare too terrifying to contemplate as anything other than a typographical error.)
I continue to be at a loss to explain how my request could be viewed as anything other than fair &, if i might add, reasonable. I cannot read French. I cannot read Italian. I cannot read Spanish. Even if I could make guesses at questions & answers in those languages due to their alphabetical & etymological links to the English language, how on earth could I be reasonably expected to answer questions in Russian, a language with an altogether different alphabet? I cannot read Russian. Knowing this, it is unfair to then expect that I'll magically be able to answer questions posed in Russian, written in Cyrillic. That's not "more challenging," that's asinine.
I am at a loss to explain her refusal, except for the old standby, gleaned from a lifetime of watching kith & kin sit in front of their televisions & H.A.L.s for hours on end, whiling away the days engaged in endlessly repetitive gameplay: Playing video games transforms otherwise kind, sociable individuals into arseholes.
Pardon my French.
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