Liquid

For whatever reason, the Olympic’s website lists it as just “breaking,” which I find a little odd, but nonetheless, it’s a sport that entirely deserves to be there. If you’re not in the loop, the 2024 Paris Olympics have just introduced breakdancing as a discipline, and for many it’s been the target of much complaining, as many don’t believe it to be worthy of being held at the Olympics. Although I’m not an athlete, nor am I an avid sports fan, I find their complaints to be completely ridiculous. So, I’d like to run through some of the common attacks against Olympic breakdancing and refute them.

One of the most frequent grumblings I have read is “Oh, so x can’t be a sport, but breakdancing can?” and insert x with pickleball or something. To me, this just reads as butthurt people boohooing because their preferred sport didn’t make it in. Advocate for your sport all you want, but there is no need to tear down other disciplines to do it.

People have also claimed that it takes little to no athleticism, and thus it cannot be a sport. I’m not sure how you can watch people spin on their head and perform incredible feats of flexibility and then claim that there is hardly any athleticism involved at all. All you have to do is watch a single match of breakdancing to find this assertion incorrect. And despite being such a laughably flawed sentiment, it’s a startling common one. I find this line of reasoning to be objectively wrong, and I struggle to see how anyone could genuinely believe it without being completely blinded by hate for breakdancing. Anyhow, I’d argue there are several Olympic sports that require less athleticism than breakdancing, such as shooting or equestrian.

There’s also a complaint about the subjectivity of scoring; how exactly does one deem one breakdancing performance stronger than another? It’s a fair critique, but remember that this is nothing new to the Olympics. Sports like artistic gymnastics, artistic swimming, and the recently introduced skateboarding are all based on points given by a judge. And when people bring this point up, they often seem to not realize that the judges are rating based off given criteria, and not however they happen to feel that particular afternoon. However, I understand that introducing the objectivity of certain criteria does not remove the subjectivity altogether. Still, I don’t find it compelling enough to strike off trying to judge breakdancing completely (and then by that reasoning remove gymnastics and artistic swimming from the Olympics). Dance competitions exist, and no, it is not “100% subjective.”

Some people also appear to be outright offended by the idea of breakdancing itself. “Breakdancing? In my Olympics? They’ll just add anything nowadays!” This is likely a result of breakdancing birth in the underground hip-hop scene, and so it’s not “respectable” like the other Olympic sports. And I’d just like to ask, what exactly is so classy about throwing a ball really far or shooting a ball into a basket that makes it more worthy of the Olympics than breakdancing? It all just reeks of ignorance, as people who have no exposure to the sport attack it because they don’t know much about it, and because it’s always existed in their mind as that thing that people do on a piece of cardboard in a back alley somewhere.

The last thing I’d like to address surprisingly comes from breakdancing fans themselves. It goes like this: by adding breakdancing to the Olympics, you are stripping it of its underground roots, selling out, and killing all of its soul. This is similar to what some skateboarders complained about when Olympic skateboarding was introduced in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. I find both arguments stupid. Something becoming a sport does not remove it “soul.” Athletes are not lifeless machines that just perform with no energy. They love their sport and compete with passion, probably more than the people complaining about there being no “soul.” And this complaint was voiced even before the first round of breakdancing even took place, so it’s silly to say this before even seeing any performances. It’s not preserving culture, it’s just gatekeeping.

Unfortunately, breakdancing is already confirmed not to be present at the 2028 Olympic games, so the chance for breakdancing to flourish under a new global audience has already been taken away before it could even start. One of the sports that has taken up the void left behind is squash, and I think I speak for most people when I say that I find breakdancing much more interesting than squash. Anyway, I don’t think people need to watch or even like breakdancing. I personally would have rather had baseball take its spot in this year’s Olympics. However, I do think people should recognize that it’s standing as an Olympic sport is perfectly reasonable, and that there’s no need to discredit it just because they don’t personally enjoy it.

Sometime in January I signed up to be a poll worker for the Ohio primary election because I thought it might be interesting. It was program for students to become more involved in the election, which they named something corny like Protecting Democracy (I just checked and it is called Future of Democracy). They ended up kicking me out of class so I could go to this silly training thing where they made me sign fifty different forms and then listen to a guy talk about how to scan people’s IDs, which I didn’t really listen to and there was so much information that I didn’t really bother remembering it. They also handed me a 70-page long handbook and a troubleshooting guide, and then they made me take a test on all the knowledge I’d just learned.

I ended up not opening the book until about two days before the election because I wasn’t going to remember the whole thing anyway, so I’d just skim over the important parts. And I didn’t even look at the troubleshooting guide. I figured if the scanner broke, I’d let someone else handle it. A lot of the book was mainly focused on the set-up and pack-up procedure, in which you have to document the serial numbers on tamper seals and replace those seals and it’s all very boring. I didn’t want to do any of that so I just let my coworkers do it, who were mostly all elderly ladies, save for the manager and another student worker.

On the day before the election I had to show up and set things up. Mostly I just stood around until somebody told me to go lift things or carry things or assemble things or hang up signs. I didn’t really do anything so I went home not having accomplished much, which was fine by me because everyone was getting paid the same anyway so I didn’t feel the need be a boy scout about it and be constantly asking if they needed me for anything.

On election day I had to show up at 5:30 in the morning, which is pretty ludicrous considering the set-up from the day before had me going home at around eight, so I would have had to have gone straight to bed to get a decent amount of sleep. I don’t remember what time I fell asleep but I can’t imagine it would have been far from midnight, and I was pretty irate when I dragged myself out of bed at 4:30 on Tuesday morning while the rest of my school had a day off. Once I was there they made me do some miscellaneous tasks, like making the other student worker and me put out handicapped parking signs in the parking lot. I should mention that it was freezing and snowing out there.

At six the doors opened and I was surprised to see there were already people even though it was freezing and still dark out. They’d assigned me to work the pollbooks unfortunately, so I was tasked with the crappy customer service job. Pretty much what it entailed was me asking for some form of ID, verifying their information, making them sign something, handing them their ballot, and guiding them through the process of using a tablet screen because most of the voters were elderly and were confused. It was all very boring. I liked the people who didn’t try to talk to me, because sometimes some real extraverts would walk in and try to talk joke with me or something and I’d have to pretend to smile and laugh, which sounded probably like “Oh… ha ha.” Not very convincing. There was even one guy who referred to me by my name because it was written on my nametag and that made me feel a level of corniness that shouldn’t be subjected to minors. The most depressing thing was that I was working from six in the morning until around eight at night. The hours should be criminal.

I’d brought a book and a water bottle and a little container of peanuts. They didn’t serve any food and though I had a one hour lunch break, I had no car and so I ended up not taking a break the whole time. I also ended up not even touching the water or peanuts because strangely enough I never felt hungry or thirsty or even tired the whole time. I did finish the book, and after I did I felt extremely bored.

I should reiterate how cold it was. Every single time someone opened the door and walked in a cold gust of wind would fill the room and sting my skin, and the signs taped on the walls would go flying and someone would have to tape them back up again.

There was a rule that didn’t allow campaigners to be within 100 feet of the entrance, so a little bit away by the parking lot there were these guys holding signs. They were out there for hours and one has to admire their tenacity to stand up for their beliefs, although not once did I ever get a good look at their sign or learn what they were trying to support or oppose. At one point one of the campaigners walked in with a sign and my manager told him he can’t bring the sign in here and the campaigner got all offended and was like “FINE. IF YOU DON”T WANT MY SIGN IN HERE I WILL PUT IT AWAY AND COME BACK. I WAS JUST COMING IN HERE TO ASK A QUESTION MAN. YOU COULD HAVE JUST TOLD ME THAT. YOU DIDN”T NEED TO YELL. FINE.” Then he walked outside and didn’t come back in and I watched him freeze out in the parking lot with his sign for a few hours.

Another weird guy came in at one point. The other student worker with me was Muslim and was wearing a hijab, and this guy came in was like, “What’s with the hood?” or something like that. Then she explained that it’s a hijab and he acted all surprised as if he’d never heard of that even though I’m sure he knew it was a hijab, in a sort of passive aggressive way. Then she had to explain Islam to this guy and this guy just had this lifeless smile and asked her if she knew who Jesus was. And he says, “You should do some research on that. Look it up,” as if she was so ignorant she’d never heard of Jesus before. Then after we handed him his ballot he tried to shake her hand and she explained to him that she couldn’t due to her religion. The fact the he only tried to shake her hand makes me think that he already knew that she couldn’t. Or maybe he was genuinely just a crazy Christian who’d never heard of any other religion before.

Anyhow. My older coworkers wanted me to switch jobs every few hours so I had experience doing all of them. The other two positions I had to cover was handing out the ballots and sitting at the ballot scanner, which were somehow even more boring than scanning IDs. The first one, all you had to do is hand out the correct party ballot. The second one just involves sitting at the ballot scanner, collecting ballot stubs, and explaining to voters how to use the thing even though there are instructions on the screen. I disliked sitting at the ballot scanner the most because I hated repeating the same instructions over and over to every person who came up with their ballots.

At 7:30 the polls closed and we had to clean up, which mostly involved me carrying things and lifting things and taking down signs and disassembling stuff just as before. None if it was very interesting.

They keep sending me to Florida. I hate Florida. It’s too hot there and the people there are the nastiest, most degenerate citizens of America. And I’m not just saying that. The people there are actually just filthy and impolite. Why do I keep having to go to Florida. I hate Florida. The worst part is that I have to miss school just so I can go to redneck Florida, where every town looks like a third-world country, and every city is filled with vapid tourists. I know I am 16 years old and I do not have a job. Nonetheless, I still like to think that I have my own things going on. Why is my schedule being disrupted so I can go to hellhole Florida of all places. I am in my junior year. I perpetually have tests and quizzes. There has not been one week this entire year except for the first where I did not have at least two tests. My cruel, cruel pre-calc teacher gives too much homework every single day and the homework will be going over what she discussed in class which I will not be there for. I hate make-up work. I hate spending time outside of school doing work I could have just gotten done in school. I hate not even knowing what the work is because I was not in class. And for what? So I can dick around in Cape Coral for no real reason. It’s all so goddamn stupid. Every time I’m off school they send me to Florida. I missed one day of school this week for a field trip, just one, and when I got back, I learned I had to watch an hour-long video and fill out a corresponding worksheet that everyone did in class. On top of that, I wasn’t able to finish my English essay in class so now I have to spend my break finishing that. All that crap just for not being present one day. I’ve decided I’m just not going to do the video worksheet because it’s stupid and I don’t want to do it. In conclusion, Florida sucks. And now I have to go write an essay.

I thought of sick new band name, Soundhole, but of course some deranged band nobody has ever heard of already took it. I’m thinking of taking it anyways though.

The lead guitarist was being super mopey and depressed the other day, so I finally bit the bullet and asked him if he wanted to cover a song other than Basket Case, and he said yes. Which was annoying because I had been practicing that for a while, and to just pull the plug like that irked me.

Anyhow, we switched over to Eight Days a Week by the Beatles, which I already had experience playing. It’s a pretty simple song that repeats itself throughout most of it, but when it came time to rehearse, we were a mess. I played alright for the most part but would occasionally forget the lyrics. There are parts of the song where John and Paul sing in unison which I wanted to recreate, but somehow both the lead guitarist and the bassist are impossibly bad singers. We sounded awful singing as one.

Our bassist somehow keeps losing track of where he is and can’t figure out how to rejoin so he just gets lost at the bridge and stays silent for the remainder of the song. He’s playing bass on a keyboard too, which should be especially easy. I can’t imagine his performance on an actual bass guitar. Those bass strings are thick, and he was boohooing over just the soft nylon guitar strings.

Our lead guitarist isn’t very clean. There’s not much else to say about his playing except that. It sounds very messy.

Anyways, our lead guitarist suggested we make a Christmas song, which I thought might be a good experience, and perhaps we could even release a festive EP in time for the holiday season. So I got to work on the songwriting, but it turns out songwriting is very hard. I have a very baseline understanding of music theory, which I figured would be enough, but apparently I need to further my studies because I could not figure out anything past the intro. My idea was to start with a traditional, slow, choirlike Christmas carol akin to Silent Night, before introducing a poppy electric guitar riff and transitioning into a faster, more upbeat Christmas song.

I set it in the key of A major. I don’t know how you’re supposed to choose the key, or why you would pick one major key as opposed to all the others, but A major seemed pretty Christmas-y, so I went with that. I decided the intro should be a piano or organ, since those instruments also felt very festive and fitting. I figured I’d start with chords and go onto the melody based off of those chords. I’m not sure which is supposed to come first, but I just figured it would be easier to build the melody off of the chords instead of the other way round. I settled on a simple I IV V I chord progression because I thought that sounded very churchlike. I layered a melody on top of that, and then I got stuck. I couldn’t figure out the transition or anything after that or if what I had written in the first place was even good.

Here is the intro:

Then I got distracted trying to write a midwest emo intro riff, which I actually think ended up sounding pretty good despite not sounding very midwest emo. I even figured out how to use Garageband so I could layer the lead guitar over the rhythm guitar. After that I tried to write the verse and got stuck again.

I don’t know if it’s my phone’s mic or if Garageband is just genuinely awful, but I couldn’t get the sound quality to sound right. And I didn’t know how to share a Garageband file so I just screen recorded this. But here is the intro I wrote:

I spent hours listening to pop-rock that I like and they made writing catchy melodies seem so easy. I tried to produce something that was similar but I only ended up copying them one for one.

I guess what I am trying to say is that music is hard.

 

I suggested Homebound as our band name, but of course my friend who looks like Jeffery Dahmer didn’t like it because he doesn’t really ever like any of my suggestions. And Homebound is already the name of a movie and some super obscure band anyhow. We spitball some other names but didn’t really get anything worthwhile.

I asked my goober Asian friend what he thought, but he wouldn’t take it seriously and kept saying dumb crap like “whale fart Hitler poop” as his suggestion. I asked him to take it seriously, but he wouldn’t, because everyone in high school constantly feels the need to be the funniest person in the room, and sincerity is nonexistent. He’s like talking to a Marvel character.

What we have figured out is that we’re going to cover Basket Case by Green Day first. I’ll be rhythm, Dahmer’ll play lead, and the goober will be a keyboard bassist since we don’t actually have a bass.

There’s a multitude of problems, one obviously being that we don’t have a drummer.

The second is that Dahmer doesn’t have an electric guitar, only a classical. He keeps texting me, sending me pictures of guitars and saying, “I really like the skronk on this guitar, the tremolo is very nice and has a good 9.5 inch radius neck.” And then the next day he’ll say, “Well actually, I saw someone say that that bazoinka reflex on the guitar isn’t wound tight enough, so I’ll get a different one.” And then he just never makes up his mind. He’s so obsessively caught up with the tiny, pointless details.

Dahmer was supposed to be our vocalist, actually. He hyped up his voice for a week, and he even made us miss the release of the FNAF movie just to hear it. And when the time finally came, he started pathetically making excuses about how he doesn’t want us to suffer from his Yoko Ono voice. So then he made me be the lead vocalist, which I thought was dumb because I can’t really sing, and I know he’ll get on my case about my voice all the time because he’s so particular about everything. I listened to a recording of Dahmer singing because he refused to give us a live performance, and while it wasn’t Yoko Ono tier, it wasn’t too great. And the goober is even worse at singing, so that’s a third problem. We don’t really have a good singer.

Fourth, the goober is not good at music whatsoever. He was never in band or in orchestra. And even though he is Asian, he could not play piano. His music taste is pure pop, any other form of music like hip-hop or even rock is just too out there for him. Most concerning is that he can’t tell what instruments are making up a song, even when I’m pointing them out to him. I tried to see if he could recognize the upstrums of the rhythm guitar in Say It Ain’t So, and he could not, even after five minutes of pointing it out. He didn’t know what a bass, rhythm guitar, or lead guitar did or sounded like. I’m not sure how he can be a keyboard bassist if he plays piano poorly and can’t even hear the bassline in a song.

Anyhow.

I’m surprised Dahmer let me pick a Green Day song as our first choice, because he doesn’t really like Green Day and is into more obscure, experimental stuff. A lot of the stuff he wanted to cover seemed a little ambitious for a couple of wannabe musicians. It’s a good thing Green Day songs are stupid simple. The thing is, there’s no lead guitar part in Basket Case, so we’re currently trying to write our own addition to the song so Dahmer has something to do and isn’t just standing there. If only he would just sing, then he could be the vocalist while I play guitar and the goober plays “bass.”

But I suppose none of this matters because at the end of the day we don’t have a drummer.

I was thinking recently that I really needed some new friends. That’s not to say that my current friend group is bad, but I’d like to expand my horizons.  My current circle of friends is currently composed of a pothead, this goober Asian kid who has the worst opinions on the planet, and this guy who looks like Jeffery Dahmer. Then I have a few half-friends that I don’t really see outside of school.

Anyhow, the three I have now are decent enough, but none of them I would consider ideal, and it’s why I don’t really have a best friend, not that I’m into the habit of ranking friends. The pothead is alright enough, and I can comfortably talk to him. On an intellectual level, I can sometimes speak my mind to him, although I feel he only really gets half of it. Also, he has a lot more friends than I do, so we’re not particularly close. He’s more outgoing and crass than I am, so we don’t fit very well together.

The dumb Asian kid really annoys me because he never has anything to say yet speaks a hell of a lot anyway. He’s socially awkward, deeply insecure, afraid of girls, and his form of comedy is playing a meme on his phone loudly, like a middle schooler. It is a sad thing to see. I watch him squirm whenever he has a girl as his lab partner, and I want to knock him upside the head and tell him to stop being so awkward.

Sometimes, when I can get him to stop acting like a band kid, I talk to him on an intellectual level, but I don’t think he ever really understands what I’m saying. I’ll go on a three-minute rant about marijuana legalization and abortion rights and why I didn’t like a certain teacher and his feeble mind could only conjure up a four-word sentence that does not add to the conversation.

Dahmer, I think, is the only one that ever understands what I’m saying, so I do like him better than the other two. However, he has autism, though not to the point where he’s dysfunctional. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell after a conversation with him, and it’s only after months of being around the guy did I suspect he was on the spectrum. He’s normal most of the time, but sometimes he has his autistic freakouts which are pretty difficult to deal with. He’ll get upset over something dumb like us talking too loud and then do that hand-shaking thing, like they’re wet and he’s trying to dry them. When he has these freakouts, I get pretty annoyed and the only reason I don’t tell him to piss off is because that might make his freakout worse.

But when he’s normal, he actually gets what I’m saying, even if we have a lot of disagreements. We tried to make a movie last year, but whenever I suggested something he’d go like, “Um… no.” And then he’d suggest something I didn’t like and I’d say it was stupid and we argue about our creative visions and nothing would be done.

For example, he said he wanted the movie to start with an alarm going off and a person waking up. I told him that was cliched and overdone to death but he wouldn’t listen. Then I suggested my idea, which would start the movie in the middle of a conversation the protagonist was having, and he shoots it down. For whatever reason he was really insistent on the alarm clock thing. We never agreed on anything because we both believe in our artistic superiority. I think he’s a crap storyteller while he probably thinks he’s going to make a movie akin to the Godfather, which is totally asinine considering we’re just three teenagers with a camera.

There were actually three of us there making the movie, me, Dahmer, and the Asian kid, so you’d think the Asian kid would just vote on one and we’d have majority rule. But an emptyheaded kid like that has no opinions, especially on cinematography and storytelling, so he just sat there the whole time during our arguments. And when we’d ask for his suggestions he would have none.

So what I’ve been trying to do is find a likeminded intellectual such as yours truly. The issue is that I’ve been finding most of the kids in my school to be pretty emptyheaded, at least on the surface level. I expected this from the regular kids, but it’s the AP kids as well. That’s not to say that my classmates are dimwitted morons, just that a lot of them don’t ever think of things bigger than themselves, and the ones who do have something going on upstairs aren’t really going to advertise them as such. And it’s not feasible to make friends with every classmate and figure out which ones have ever had a thought outside of schoolwork.

A lot of people in high school are just too afraid to ever be real. Everything they say has to have some layer of sarcasm and irony, everything has to be a joke, and they can’t ever be genuine. That’s fine enough, but whenever I want to talk about something that means something to me, whether it be things I like, dislike, and what I think about everything, it irks me when they just try to brush it off by retreating into their fortress of sarcasm. You can’t even talk about how you like a certain book without people turning it into a joke. I’d like to hear about things that mean something to other people, but everyone is too insecure to ever be truthful about their passions and hobbies and deep hatreds.

This whole post has been a little nonsensical. And it’s stupid to expect anyone to open up to you. It’s a process that takes months or years even. I’m not going to try to explain what I mean because you either understand it or you don’t.

I was pissed today because my math teacher makes us do these homework quizzes. Basically, she picks out two random questions that you’ve done for homework over the past week and makes you copy down your answers for quiz points, the rationale behind this likely being so that she doesn’t have to check everyone’s homework every day. Each question is worth seven points for a total of fourteen.

She handed me back my homework quiz and I got a zero on it, which I found very surprising. The first question I got a zero on because I didn’t include a table for the graph I sketched, and the second one I got a zero because I had copied the homework question down incorrectly, so I ended up solving a different problem. This all really pisses me off because I got the first question right and did not need to use a table to fill out the graph, but you know how insane math teachers are because you don’t do it their way. The second question was more understandable, but it really was an honest mistake and I don’t see why I should get a zero just because I accidentally copied down the wrong question. I especially don’t see why I should get a zero for the whole thing, the same grade someone would get if they didn’t even bother doing their homework at all.

I complained to this about my friend, who also did not include a table for the first problem but still got two points for it. That’s not much but it is better than a zero, and I have to wonder why I was not afforded the same amount of credit.

If it was purely a “you either get it right or you don’t” sort of thing, I would understand. But you should make each question worth one point then, if it’s going to be an all or nothing system. If you’re going to make a single question worth seven whole points, then you should be afforded points based on how much was correct, not if the whole thing was correct. And you shouldn’t lose all seven points for not including a damn table.

I don’t know why she makes the homework worth so much anyway. It’s not a test; it’s practice material intended to help you prepare for a test. You shouldn’t be punished so harshly during the learning phase when you’re preparing for an exam. This single zero dropped my A to a B, which is absolutely ludicrous.

Speaking of the math test, I feel I did pretty poorly on it too, so I can only imagine how much further my letter grade will plummet. I wasn’t able to answer the first question because I felt pressured for time due to the two-part nature of the test. The rest of the questions I know I got right, but the math teacher is such a nitpicking bum that I know she’ll find some reason to dock points for the things I got correct. She is the type of teacher that will take half points off a correctly answered question just because you forgot to put parentheses around coordinates, or because you wrote “The horizontal asymptote is 3,” instead of “The horizontal asymptote is y=3.” It’s absolutely absurd how she grades things. I also don’t like the way she solves problems because I think she overcomplicates them, so I solve them my own way. But she probably won’t like that very much at all. So I’m pretty anxious over the results of the test, which I can’t imagine to be good. Imagine that: I’m still worried over my test score even though I know I got most of them right, purely because of the teacher’s nitpicking.

Anyhow, it turns out OSU does not offer a Creative Writing major, which is disappointing, but I’ve been thinking about money recently, and it seems like a lot of writers can only do freelance work and not hold down a steady job. Art does not pay the bills, and I already know I’ll be poor as hell in college, probably eating ramen on special occasions and starving otherwise.

So I checked out what other programs OSU has that are related to writing, and the only ones I saw were journalism and English. I don’t really want to major in English because the only job I could get then is being an English teacher, and I would rather not instruct a group of snot-nosed high schoolers. Journalism sounds nice. I don’t think they make much money, but it would be cool to travel the world, report on foreign wars, and get killed by the CIA. But in actuality I’d probably end up being stuck at some local news station reporting on the mundane happenings around town.

What I’m thinking then, is taking psychology as my major, because I know the psychology industry is lucrative, and also because I’m taking AP Psych so I can save some money that way. The thing is though, I’m not sure how many opportunities would open up with just a bachelor’s in psych, so then I’d have to fork over more money to go to graduate school and rack up more loans. I guess making money is not cheap.

I think I’d prefer to not think about college stuff right now. But then I feel as if I should be doing something, because I know those college acceptance boards will be sniffing around my high school record and how I loafed around and did not make myself stand out. These people want you to be doing volunteer work and be in seven clubs while you’re only a teenager. I think the standards are too high, and I have to be competing against these rich punks whose parents have been setting them up on a path to Harvard since preschool. I’d like to go to an Ivy League school, but it will never happen, not because of the admission, but because I could never afford it. And yeah, I probably wouldn’t get accepted anyway. I’m just a guy from a public school in nowhere Ohio. I didn’t go to a snotty college-prep school. It makes me jealous of those kids whose parents can just pay off the tuition without batting an eye. I want to go to OSU mainly because it’s in Ohio, so it’ll be cheaper. Actually, that’s the only reason: it’s the best college in Ohio. So yeah. I don’t really want to think about college right now.

What I don’t like is European people in the Youtube comment sections spouting some smug smugworth copy and paste comment about how horrible the United States is and how it’s a goddamn utopia over in Finland or something. You know, you could be on a news article about a Fourth of July firework show, someone in the comments would say something like “God bless America!” and then James Hackett from England will go on a page-long rant about school shootings and healthcare.

There is a strong animosity towards the United States, not just from Europeans, but from young Americans and the rest of the world also. I suppose you could say it is a sort of counterculture, stick it the man sort of thing since the US has been the strongest world for a few decades now. But as you know I am a free-thinking contrarian, and so I would like to start my own counter-counterculture revolution. I think that this all started as a genuine criticism of America, and then spiraled into a bandwagon where the correct and rebellious way to think about things is to dogpile on America and start drooling over some Nordic country like Denmark. As if Denmark is some kind of heaven on Earth.

In class today some “free” thinker said that our grading system sucks and that we should adopt the UK grading system, where a 70%-100% earns you an A and 39% and below means you fail. Now, why is this system better? I don’t know, they never said. All they said was that it is better, and then acted as if the explanation was self-explanatory.

Here is unstated reason why they probably thought it was better: because the American school education is the worst thing ever, and Europe is literally paradise and does literally everything better.

That is something a lot of people like to say. “The American school system sucks.” Ask them why it sucks, and there is either no answer, or they talk about Finland. It’s always some Nordic country. And it’s always the people who don’t try in school who say this too. I don’t know what you expect to get out of a system you don’t put anything in to. When kids say that the American school system is bad, they just mean that they want to have an easier curriculum, or three days off a week, or only six hours at school.

To make it clear, I am not a US shill. I think the country has its problems. I think the country is too car-centric and you can’t walk to places like you can in Europe, for example.

But the way people make it out to be some sort of dysfunctional hellscape is absolutely ridiculous. I once saw some smug European say that America is a third-world country wearing a Gucci belt, and the amount of people I found agreeing is actually unsettling. It is one thing to say that the US is the worst out of the first-world nations, it is an entirely other thing to attempt to suggest that the US is comparable to a third-world nation. The amount of ignorance and blind rage you’d have to have in order to form this stupid of an opinion is actually impressive. It’s shocking how one can have so much hatred for a country across the ocean that does not play any role in their day-to-day lives.

Anyhow, enough about smug European people.

Sleepy Joe just handed out $9 billion to ease student loans. I saw this on the community post of this liberal news source on Youtube. I consider myself more right-leaning but I still use this news source because right-wing news is so cringe and I feel embarrassed to be using. Left-wing news is also cringe and makes me embarrassed, but I know nobody is going to get on my case if I use it unlike a right-wing news source.

I think it’s a nice gesture, what good ol’ Joe is doing for the country, but it does not remove the underlying cause of student loan debt, and millions more students will be racking up debt over the coming years, so this just feels like using a toothpick to break down a stone wall.

But you know, if Biden wants to pay off my loans in a few years, I’m not going to say no.

A lot of boomers are complaining that their tax dollars should not be used to pay for someone else’s degree. I think that’s fair, but there’s something nice about a society that supports one another. And it’s not as if Brandon is blowing the money on crack or something.

Basically, I don’t really care. Because I don’t pay taxes.

In AP Gov the teacher asked us what we think are issues in America. And this conservative girl went on an unhinged rant about Lia Thomas and how transgender people are ruining women’s sports. And there were some people looking at her like she just murdered someone. I personally did agree that biological men should not compete in women’s sports, but I do think the girl could have tried a little harder not to sound so unhinged about it. Even though I agreed I sort of winced and felt second-hand embarrassment as she started speaking.

Then I thought about it some more and I guess I shouldn’t feel so embarrassed about it. I don’t think certain topics should become taboo or that you should not be allowed to question things. Gender identity is a very large topic today and I had to do a whole unit on it in French class. And I admire the girl for speaking so brazenly about the subject.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hate liberals.

Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day wears his guitar strap super low based off what I’ve seen from his music videos. In the Basket Case music video he wears it so low that it’s just dangling below his waist and he sort of has to slouch over just to strum properly. It sounds sort of silly but actually looks insanely cool.

So I’ve been fiddling around with my guitar strap to try to get it as low as possible.  When I was first figuring it out the guys online said I should set the guitar strap tight enough so that the guitar rests at the same height as it would when I’m sitting down and playing. And this made sense because I’d be already used to playing at that height. I had to set up the strap so that it was pretty much fully tightened and I had to wiggle my way into it.

Unfortunately, what I was not told is that setting up the strap this way makes you look like a total nerd. It looks really goofy, like a person wearing his pants way too high. I’d never noticed before, but all the guitarists wear their guitar straps pretty low. After observing myself in a mirror and wondering why I looked so uncool despite having a guitar strapped around me, I concluded that I should lower the strap and get the Billie Joe Armstrong strap level, because it looks really cool.

The problem with this is that it’s really hard to play. With my strap at its loosest my right hand can’t even reach the strings, which sucks because I look really cool when the guitar is that low. Adjusting it to the point where my right hand can sort of reach the strings if I hunch over, it still looks really cool and I can somewhat play. However, it hurts my left hand to play like that. If you want to know how it feels, stand with your arm limp and face your palms forward. Then mess around with your fingers and move your arm like you’re going up a fretboard and you’ll start feeling some carpal tunnel pain. I’m thinking either Billie Joe has practiced playing in this ungodly position just so he can look cool. Either that or he has freakishly long arms.

What I’m currently trying to do is find the right balance between looking cool and playing comfortably.