Why I Hate Humanity, Reason #6,921

Community college students listen to some whack music. Terrible stuff, really. Every single time I go to City College of San Francisco, there are always people driving in their cars and BLASTING their music. And they always listen to crap tunes. It's annoying and pathetic.

First of all, if you blast your music super loud with your windows rolled down as you cruise through the parking lot, you are an attention whore. You must have a skewed interpretation of reality if you think blasting cheesy pop music out of your lowered, spoiler-fied, and riced-up Civic makes you cool. Nobody thinks you are cool; doing something like that just shows what an idiot you are. Blast your music loudly on the open road, in the countryside, on a sunny day, as you enjoy your drive. No one wants to hear your garbage while they search for a parking space.

Secondly, everyone I have ever heard blasting music at CCSF has invariably played one of the following genres: crunk, hyphy, cheesy and bass-heavy pop, or radio rap. (Although there was one time I heard someone listening to salsa music, and that was probably the best thing I've ever been forced to listen to.) I would rather listen to another Shane Company commercial than anything from those genres.

Now, I don't care too badly if you enjoy listening to garbage. I completely understand that people generally don't think about what they listen to. I don't expect people to think about it. But if you're going to listen to something terrible, stop blasting it because I don't want to hear that shit. No one needs to hear Li'l Jon scream "Yea-YUH!" again. oh-KAAAAYE!!

Geez, I hate people who blast their shitty music on crowded streets.

Oh, and while I am on the subject of community college students... Here's tangential rant. [Originally posted by me on the Shoryuken.com forums.]

This one time, I took a Creative Writing: Novels and Plays night class at a community college. I tell you, lots of weird people take night class at a community college.

There was this one guy in particular who bugged me. I always referred to him, in my mind, as The Quintessential Douchebag. He had dark brown, curly, greasy hair that was semi-afro looking. He hardly ever shaved, so he had a half-grown beard most of the time, including neckbeard. He would always wear these brown corduroy pants and an orange sweater with a striped pattern. And he always wore these brown shoes... I don't know what you call them, but they are the kind of shoes that don't have laces.

Anyway, it was a creative writing class, right? So every week, there would be at least two or three people who would bring something to class so everyone in the class and the teacher could read and critique it.

The Quintessential Douchebag was such a loudmouth, egotistical, know-it-all. He would condescend everyone's work every week, offering pithy comments like, "The paradoxical ambivalence of this piece doesn't seem to resonate very well with whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish with this romantic-slash-slice of life fictional work. Nothing about this jibes with me. But keep trying, because I think there's some potential if you can weed out your negative tendencies."

I really wanted to tear this guy up when it was HIS turn to show us a story, but he never brought a single thing in to class for us to read.

At the end of the semester, the teacher asked each person in the class to go around and share one thing that we learned during the course. When it was The Quintessential Douchebag's turn, he said, "One thing I learned is that I'm not very interested in writing creative fiction. Even though I didn't bring anything in during the entire semester, I just came to the realization that poetry is my true passion. Good luck to everyone else."

And he was still wearing that orange sweater... I hate that guy...

A New Use for a Cell Phone

Earlier tonight, I was on the bus (technically, a streetcar - the L-car for those of you keeping score) and I observed these two dudes. They were sitting in the very back end of the streetcar. I think they were French (technically, cheese-eating surrender monkeys for those of you keeping score) because they were speaking what sounded like the French language. (It's possible they were Canadian, I suppose.)

So both of these dudes looked to be in their twenties, they were actually dressed like typical American college students (jeans, t-shirt, hoodie), and they were just chatting with each other. One of them was twiddling his cellphone in his hand. It was a silver RAZR, just like the phone I have.

It seemed like a normal enough scene: two buddies on the bus, around nine o'clock at night, enjoying a peaceful ride to their destination.

Then the dude holding the RAZR started wiping it on his hoodie. I guess he must have gotten some fingerprints or something and smudged the screen, so he probably wanted to clean it a bit. As he was wiping it on his hoodie, I started to think, Wow, he really wants to make that sucker clean. He wiped it for quite some time. I mean, we passed one or two bus stops and he was still wiping it.

After a while, the two guys stopped talking to each other. I looked over at them again and I noticed that the guy with the phone was now using his t-shirt to clean it. Only, the part of his shirt that he was using was the part that happened to fall right above his crotch.

It isn't an unusual location of one's shirt, except that this fella left that part of his shirt lying on his crotch. So it completely looked like he was just scratching himself. Blatant crotch-scratching! He left the phone and the bottom part of the front of his shirt physically all over his crotch area as he "rubbed" the "phone" clean.

It was strange. I know it's not polite to look. And in San Francisco, the fact that I stared (surreptitiously, I will add) could be interpreted as homoerotic (I assure you, that is not the case). I was just fascinated how vigorously the dude rubbed himself. It's not often that you see someone blatantly molest himself in public, and try to disguise his impolite action by pretending to clean his cell phone. In a way, that is sort of a clever use for a phone, although he needs to refine his technique to improve the stealth factor.

When I got off the bus, he was still workin' it. I'm guessing his phone is pretty much spit-shined by now.

Not a good week for Asians

My people have suffered alot this week.

Last Thursday in Constitutional Law, the teacher asked what exactly did the government have as evidence to use against the poor saps being held in Guantanamo Bay. As the class smartass, I immediately shot my hand up and said:

"They had *triple hearsay*, which might as well be like arresting a guy after u got a tipoff in a Myspace comment."

To which the teacher replied:

"Jonathan, I think they had more than that."

Jeez. It either went straight over her head or she just wanted to dick me.

(Editor's Note: For those who aren't in the legal profession, "triple hearsay" is the equivalent of "jack SHIT". As a layperson's example...it's like proving that PerfectDru is fat relying on the statement, "I heard my Garbage Man say he heard his cousin heard Bob Dole say PerfectDru is fat". Yeah. Jack. Shit.)

Anyways, throwing up a brick in class woulda been OK if some bitch didn't later comment in class (during a discussion of wartime Presidential power):

"I know internment camps weren't great, but basically, weren't they just gated communities for Asians?"

Memo to bitch: They were not gated communities. Mike Shinoda wasn't spitting fire about how his grandfather had to stay in Wysteria Lane.

And the worst part?
Everyone cracked up, even though I'm quite certain the bitch was not kidding.

WTF is wrong with folks?

Then
Then
Then, next school day? It's Discovery class.

We were learning about the ethical questions surrounding Conflicts of Interest (Example: Representing a Husband in a divorce proceeding when u banging his Wife or Bill Gates representing someone bringing an antitrust suit against Microsoft).

Essentially, if I have a Conflict of Interest with a client I accidentally (or not) accepted, I am supposed to stop representing that Client.

That's all fine and dandy, but does that mean my whole Firm (all my fellow lawyer co-workers) be unable to represent that Client any more?
Why can't the Firm just build an imaginary "Ethical Wall" against me and isolate me, pretend I don't exist, shut me out?

Well, the answer, according to another Bitch:

"Ethical Walls don't work because they're Chinese Walls."

Hrm.

Me:
"Why do the walls have to be Chinese"?

Bitch:
"Because they don't work! Look at the Great Wall!"

Me:
...
...
...

Damn. I had nothing. That was stone cold, man. Stone cold. Frickin' Mongolians.

Guilt Trip

I have been working at an afterschool program at a neighborhood elementary school. Technically, it is my job to tutor students and guide them in their road of personal knowledge and self-discovery. Some students are very competent and remind me of myself when I was a kid.

This year, there's this new fifth grade girl in the program. She's quite intelligent and so far she seems to be ahead of most of her peers, scholastically speaking. (I have noticed that the girls at this school are more mature and better at homework than most of the boys. Most of the boys would rather be playing, like, Connect Four or Uno. Sidenote to a sidenote: it really bugs me that kids are addicted to Uno but still don't obey the rules of the game and expect me to play with them.)

Anyway. So this girl seems to be able to carry her weight in terms of math and spelling and all that junk. Nothing too unusual about that because she also hangs out in the "smart crowd" with her friends. What's really strange is how absurdly polite she is. Almost every single time she speaks to me, she will take on a very deferential attitude toward me. Most of her sentences end with either a humble "please" or an overly enthusiastic "thank you!"

For example, this girl constantly finishes her homework promptly and needs very little help. I'll still look over her work to check it, even though she obviously knows she didn't make any mistakes. And then when I tell her that it's all good, she starts thanking me like I just pushed her out of the way of a moving truck and saved her life.

And then, there was this time when one of my coworkers gave the girl a challenging worksheet because she finished her homework so fast and needed something to stimulate her young mind. Well, this worksheet was pretty dang obscure. I mean, the whole thing was like this:

24 H, 7 D, 1 W

And the answer to that, of course, is to figure out what the H, D, and W represent, which is "hours, days, week". Only a lot of the other questions are weird, like "12 Signs of the Zodiac" and "3 Blind Mice" and "A 6 Pack on 50 Cent's Abs."

Somehow, I don't know how, but the girl figured the whole thing out. As a reward, she got TEN stamps for the day. (Usually, a kid gets awarded one stamp for successfully completing the day's homework. Stamps get tallied up later on and can be redeemed for prizes. I wish real life was just like that.) So I was impressed at her resilience and gave her the ten stamps. She must have said "thank you" for each stamp I placed on her stamp card. It was just ridiculous.

She was being so polite, I decided to give her an extra stamp just for the heck of it. And of course, she had to thank me for that as well.

It's really weird when a person keeps thanking you for something that they really don't need to be very grateful of. It's a strange feeling. It made me feel really guilty, like I had done something wrong. I can't explain it. I don't understand it, either. But just imagine how you would feel if someone kept thanking you all day long and you weren't doing anything special.

Thank you very much for reading this.