Things I Learned From Reading A Cosmopolitan Magazine While Bored And On Break At Work

1) 32% of guys will forgive a girl who has cheated.

2) You are only masturbating too much if it gets in the way of you doing your job and making money (note: I do not know if they included getting paid to masturbate in these findings).

3) The term “Party Rape.”

4) Blake Livley, of the CW’s Gossip Girl and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 fame, thinks her best feature is her eyelashes.

5) If you are friends with a guy and you would like to know how large his penis is, getting close to him and “accidentally” knocking your hand into his member is perfectly acceptable behavior.

An Excerpt From Something I Am Working On That At This Point In Time Does Not Yet Exist Outside Of My Head

“How honest do you want me to be with you. On a scale of one to ten.”

“Eight.”

“All right. I was kind of expecting you to say ten, so I need a moment to figure out how to lie to you.”

55 Words

For an assignment in my creative writing class in high school, we were instructed to write very short stories that were made up of exactly 55 words. Here are a few of mine.

Save

He sees her struggling. He stands up and blows his whistle as he points to her in the water. His legs push off the chair as he makes his flight into the air. He crashes into the water, a huge wave is created as he swims to save her. It turns out she was faking.

Race

The racers sped around the track, their colors combined into one orangish-red. We thought it would have been a little longer. The fanatics were there, cheering for their favorite like it was their own son. Oh no! One racer curves off towards the side. He’s out of the running, he cramped on the hurdles.

Flight

After sitting for twenty minutes, the plane finally took off down the runway. I felt us aim towards the sky, I was leaning back without reclining in my chair. My ears popped. I released my breath and pushed them back out. We finally leveled out. I glanced out the window as we hit the mountain.

Mirror

She saw everything behind her, the street lights made it all clear. There was something else coming up. She started to slow down. It was another thing she recognized. She thought back for a second about everything in her past. She stepped on the gas. Everything got smaller as she looked through her rearview mirror

Running

The bright lights and sounds made him realize he had to leave. He cut across the sidewalk, burst through some bushes, and tucked and rolled onto someone’s lawn. The footsteps were approaching, he could hear them getting louder and the shadows became larger. He couldn’t run away any more. He had lost in flashlight tag.

Andy

He makes his way out to the jeers of the crowd. He declares he is the real King of Memphis. He makes an open challenge to the audience for a match. The challenger steps through the ropes, but she’s quickly defeated. One. Two. Three. Andy Kaufman remains the Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World.

My Big, Dumb Rock Song

by Paul Mikesell

This is my big, dumb rock song.
Chunky chords and a flying riff,
Nonsense lyrics
That seem to stick.

The old fans scream, “Sell Out”
As my face is splashed on MTV,
Those same fans are still at my shows,
The crowd goes back as far as I can see.

The arenas are booked
And my hair is gelled up.
To get the crowd in my hands
All I need to say is some random stuff

Like, “Hello Boston,”
“Hello California” and “New York”
My face on the Rolling Stone
Can erase my past life as a dork.

We play the intro of the hit
And we hear the crowd roar,
They’ve never ever even heard
The other songs we wrote before.

“La La La La,”
We sing on the hook,
The masses will never realize
That all that this took

Was just ten minutes
To write this big, dumb song,
When you write about girls and parties and cars,
On the radio you can do no wrong.

My indie-cred is show
Until they release the next single,
We’ve weaned the masses
On this stupid jingle.

The next single’s still catchy
Like the Beatles or the Stones,
But a little more raw
Like the Clash or the Ramones.

The difference it comes
By the words in the song,
They mean so much more to mee,
But you’ll still sing along.

Reducing Classroom Size

by Paul Mikesell

One of the major issues in the current academic system that continues to be a source of controversy is class size. As the research presented throughout this essay will illustrate, students greatly benefit from being placed in classrooms with a greater teacher-to-student ratio. While many see agree with this position, it is often seen as unlikely to change. This is simply due to the economics of the issue. To reduce the class size, more teachers would need to be hired and the money to do this could not be found in many schools. It may appear difficult to institute, but I feel that smaller classroom size will greatly increase the quality of education given to students and be worth the economic costs.

Woody Allen: The Director and the Character

by Paul Mikesell

The collective works of Woody Allen tend to feel as though they are parts of a larger work better than most modern directors. Part of this feeling comes from the fact that Allen directs, writes, and stars in nearly all of his films. Even as he experiments with various genres, his films maintain the feeling that is present throughout his other films. Three of his most well-known and respected films are Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. 1977’s Annie Hall is often considered Allen’s best film and won the Academy Award for Best Picture (beating out Star Wars in what today would seem nearly impossible). It describes the beginning through the end of a romance between Alvy (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). Allen’s comedic follow-up to Annie Hall, 1979’s Manhattan, reunites him on film with Keaton in an extremely stylistic film shot in black and white that tells the stories of multiple relationships and the accompanying loneliness. The final film I will be looking at is 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters. This film presents three sisters, Hannah (Mia Farrow), Lee (Barbara Hershey), and Holly (Dianne Wiest), who all face instability within their relationships with their family, friends, and significant others.

The Sausage King of Chicago: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Urban Text

(Note: I don’t think this is actually a very good paper. However, I received an A for it, so what do I know?)

by Paul Mikesell

John Hughes’ 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is essentially two different films when placing it as an “urban text.” A portrayal of the suburbs is presented at the beginning and the end of the film, and a portrayal of the city is shown in between. Both portrayals can be utilized in completing an analysis of Ferris Bueller as an urban text.

The term “urban text” refers to a genre that any text can fit into. It is important to note at this point that “urban” does not simply refer to the city in an urban text. The same techniques can be used to analyze a text that is set within the suburbs. As this film takes place in both locations, I will analyze both the city and the suburbs and their relation to the urban text.

There are certain expectations of a text once the reader knows and understands which genre(s) it fits into. The primary expectation of an urban text is it having the theme of the individual versus society. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, this theme is presented through the title character’s drive to skip school and spend the beautiful day on his own terms. In a broader sense even, the theme is reflected through the dichotomy between inside and outside. In an urban text, society is often represented through the inside, while the individual is at odds with this by being outside. One can view Ferris as the ultimate individual as he spends his day outside in Chicago, as opposed to inside a classroom at school.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - Nabokov’s Lolita and Fiction

by Paul Mikesell

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a work of fiction. It is a made up story. Humbert Humbert is not a real person and his actions did not happen. The issue that arises while reading Lolita is that Nabokov essentially tricks the reader into believing that the story is real, that a work of non-fiction is being read. Nabokov writes with a modernistic intent: his purpose in creating Art is to lie to the reader. Lolita is Art through lies being presented as fact.

End of Year Music Blurbs: 2005, 2006, 2007

On a certain music message board that I frequent, we conduct a yearly poll for our favorite albums of singles from the past year. For the last three years, I’ve written up some blurbs for a few of the releases. Note: most of these were done about three minutes before they needed to be posted, so I do not really vouch for the quality of any of them. I actually do really like the BSS, Hold Steady, Feist, and Dinosaur Jr. ones, though.

2005:

Kanye West - Late Registration

Beck - Guero

Spoon - “I Turn My Camera On”

2006:

Broken Social Scene - “7/4 (Shoreline)”

The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls In America

2007:

Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond

Feist - “My Moon My Man”

R. Kelly - “I’m A Flirt (Remix feat. T-Pain and T.I.)”

A To Z: A.C. Newman to Billy Bragg (Catching Up)

A couple of months ago, I decided to try and listen to all of the music in my iTunes library (that I all found from legal means, wink wink) that was listed at a play count of zero. My reasoning behind this was that I found I had an insane amount of music on my computer and it was almost reaching the point where I was running out of space for it all. I have lots of things that I either haven’t listened to or will probably never listen to because they actually aren’t all that good. Also, I kind of shamelessly stole the idea from The AV Club.

I’m going to try every week to recap some of my thoughts about some of the artists I listened to. Since I started back in April I’ve made it about half way through the Bs. We’ve got some catching up to do (Note that bands I actually really like, I’ve listened to most, if not all of their albums since I got my new computer and new iTunes library set up in the fall of 2006).