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| By now everyone knows my obsession with lists. I still see a few friends here discussing music and I figure I might as well try to join in. If I have the time I'll write out my Top 100 songs of the 2000s, something I've been debating for a while. It always seems like I am on the receiving end of suggestions, so now I'll try to be the on the other side.
The list will be heavily biased toward 2007 and 2008 since I did a project to listen to as many albums as possible during those two years. | | |
| I'm going away from the place where I used to live and not coming back so I guess I ought to close this thing down. My apologies to everyone I may have insulted/angered/whatever. Hopefully most of what was on here was decent enough. Unless the demand is extraordinary (not saying it should be, as I don't mind not doing this again), I see no reason to continue preaching to nobody. I think that the fad of blogging to nobody is over in general. Maybe I'll comment, but I am fine moving on.
Later.
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| Episode 45: Creativity
“Please rise and face the flag to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flab of unite slates of American and dumb the number, one Nissan, under flub, indumnum, amnumumumum.
Thank you, you may be seated. I have a major announcement today. As you may know, No Child Left Behind is cracking down nationwide on schooling standards. The state is awarding this school money based upon how well people do in basic math and reading. So, from on, those two classes will be the only two classes everyone will have. Teachers will rotate into whatever class you are placed into and teach you math or reading. We need you guys to do well in these tests. The large pit in the back of the school where we dump trash is getting full. Do well.”
“This does not sound good,” Michael Wayne Smith told nobody very loudly. Jacob had mixed emotions. He was certainly bitter about the fact that all of those days of running around doing the most absurd adaptations to sports on his physical fitness class meant nothing, but he was happy that the only two subjects he excelled in—reading and math—were the only two he’d ever have to learn again. He also liked the possibility that the school could finally get enough money to buy an American flag so that he didn’t have to do the pledge to a portrait of George Washington posted on a bulletin board.
His homeroom teacher guided him and Michael Wayne Smith into another classroom with fourteen other students, each of whom looked vaguely familiar. They sat in three rows of five, and Michael Wayne Smith sat in a fourth row alone. The first teacher to teach this classroom was someone Jacob had never seen before.
“Let’s begin our instruction to score well on the math test. Everybody, count with me.”
And so Jacob spent until lunch learning how to count to ten. This concept was taught through a series of repetitive drills—basically, saying “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.” After several drills, the instructor would go to each student and ask them to count by themselves. Inevitably, somebody would mess up and so more drills would have to be done. It was during this time that Jacob was reminded that he really hated math.
Lunch was conventional, except that the principal now circled the lunchroom and talked to each student.
“How are you performing today?” He asked Jacob with a smile Jacob had never seen before. From what Jacob could remember, he had only seen the principal in his office doing large amounts of paperwork with a hopeless expression.
“Um, okay,” Jacob replied. The man’s beaming smile, bright cheery eyes, and wholesome attitude made it impossible for him to say anything else.
“Well, if you need anything, stop by my office. The school is counting on you to perform well, so make sure you study hard in the only two subjects you’ll ever need to know.”
“Okay. I will,” Jacob responded. The principal gave Jacob one more smile and then moved on to another lunch table.
“You know,” David commented. “At my old school the teachers taught well enough that we did not have to get rid of all of the other classes.”
“Who cares?” Jacob mumbled. Audible, Jacob added, “At least the faculty are kissing our butts. Maybe this change won’t be so bad.”
Jacob quickly changed his mind about ten minutes into the lesson after lunch. Each member of the class was given a copy of Hop on Pop and all were told to read it aloud. The instructor went from desk to desk evaluating the oratory skills of each student and asking each student critical reading questions. Once a student had completed the book, he had to re-read the book. After five read-throughs, Jacob decided to stare at a random page and mumble aloud gibberish. He tried to stare through the page, as if the words on the page would merge into a Magic Eye picture. He had forgotten how much he had hated reading.
As more time passed, everyone except the one or two people who thought this book was a challenge began to goof off. Michael Smith, to the immediate right of Jacob, passed a note to Jacob.
“Here, give this to Michael Smith,” he told Jacob. Jacob looked to his left and recognized the person as Michael Smith and gave that person the note. Michael Smith read the note and gave Jacob an angry look.
“This note isn’t for me. It is for Michael Smith,” he told Jacob. Jacob looked forward and noticed that the person in front of him was also named Michael Smith. So Jacob passed the note to Michael Smith.
“Do I look like the person this note is for? Pass it to Michael Smith,” Michael Smith told Jacob. Michael Smith looked diagonally from his position and told Jacob that the Michael Smith the note was supposed to be passed to was the Michael Smith in the other diagonal. The Michael Smith behind that Michael Smith, who wrote the note, nodded his head in confirmation. The Michael Smith to the right of him made a gesture to Jacob so as to say that this confusion was intolerable.
“None of us look alike,” said Michael Smith, in front of him. This was true. The Michael Smith in front of him was the only Michael Smith with a beard, and the one to the left of that Michael Smith was the only one with a mustache. Two Michael Smiths not mentioned yet, who were in the back row were the only one with blue hair, one a light blue while the other was a dark blue (who was not against a wall). To the left diagonal of the one with the light blue hair there was a so-far-unmentioned Michael Smith that was far skinnier than the rest while the one on the opposite side of the room weighed more than the rest combined. The two Michael Smiths, each one in front of one of those two, and one Michael Smith to the immediate right of one of those two Michael Smiths were the ones who had reading difficulties.
This was all very confusing to Jacob, so he told Syriack about his encounter with all of these Michael Smiths.
“I thought you said there were fifteen Michael Smiths,” the Sage commented. “Even if you count that one Michael Smith that sat in the fourth row, you still only mentioned fourteen Michael Smiths.”
Jacob pondered which Michael Smith he had forgotten to mention, and in the meanwhile asked Syraick a question. “Why does everyone give their children the same exact names?”
Syriack laughed for a long time. “Oh, Jacob, I wish you would be able to see the humor in this. You just came from your first day at a school that stripped away whatever final pieces of creativity that lingered. You should be surprised that you too aren’t named Michael Smith.”
And so they talked for several more hours since Jacob could now sleep during class. There was always so much to say, so much to think, so much to discuss, so much to learn.
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| Episode 44: Voice
There’s nothing more beautiful than a man who can fathom the reason for his existence. Or so somebody thought.
Meanwhile, in his Trigonometric Arts class, Jacob couldn’t help but stare at the young man in the seat in front of him. Though it was his first class in a long time, his reason for being in such a slump, a depressed torn fool scribbling gibberish into pages of his notebook, was far more endearing.
Jacob knew the story well. Chatty people would reiterate the tale of this befallen man, Michael Wray Smith, during any occasion they couldn’t think of something else to say. Michael Smith was an introverted boy, who, as everyone explains with a different story, used to be an average student that more or less performed proficiently but never achieved anything significant. He was short, slightly chubby, and had an aesthetically appealing face, though nobody paid him any attention because his voice sounded like someone accidentally stapled a cat’s tail.
He had an abrupt voice change one Sunday morning that transformed his voice into something so smooth, so persuasive and likeable that he was initially unable to realize that it was he who was speaking. Michael Smith rehearsed with his new voice the next morning in front of the bathroom mirror so that the day would be less awkward.
“Let me in the bathroom!” His brother pounded on the door.
“Give me a minute,” Michael Smith called back, prepared for even more door pounding and screaming. Instead, his brother merely stated “okay” and left Michael Smith in peace. It was then that Michael Smith realized that his new voice was something great.
Throughout that week, Michael Smith used his voice to get all of the things he normally got only when arguing at great lengths. He was able to extend his curfew by thirty minutes and get one of his teachers to change a grade on a homework assignment. Life had made a favorable turn.
His parents heard one way or another that there was a casting call for America’s Vocal Personality. “You would never have to fight and claw your way through school or crummy jobs ever again,” his parents told him. “If you won this, you’d be the next Don LaFontaine.”
Michael Smith did not really care for the contract for some movie studio, but the prize money was large enough to commit to trying out. So his parents drove him to a city four hours away so that he could have a chance at winning the contest.
The first round of judging was done by three people who Michael Smith never heard of. These three people dressed in casual clothes and herded person after person into a small room for them to speak. Michael Smith was expecting some sort of sound studio and was disappointed to see that he would be speaking into a curtain hung from the ceiling by a fishing line. From the moment Michel Smith opened his mouth, it was apparent that he was worthy to go on, so the three judges sent him to the “real” judges: three D-list celebrities. There his voice made the judges gasp in staged surprise.
“Michael Smith, that was absolutely extraordinary,” praised one of the D-list celebrities impersonating another D-list celebrity from another show. “You are going to The House.”
The House was the second stage of the contest, where 16 hopefuls had to stay in a one-bedroom apartment packed with hidden cameras doing ridiculous task after ridiculous task. There were sixteen hammocks in the bedroom and the two loudest housemates shared the closet. Aside from the cramped state, it was also awkward for Michael Smith because most of the people were three times his age. Everyone in the house believed that they had an upper hand in persuading other people and so most of the days spent in that apartment were frenetic fights for vocal dominance.
Michael Smith passed the first fourteen tests: reciting the Declaration of Independence while running, saying the ABC’s while upside-down and blindfolded, persuading people on the street to give him twenty dollars, talking so loud that it moved a wooded block across a table, doing the voice for a bad comedy movie trailer (“in a world” believability was most important), commentating for an absurdly boring baseball game, doing the “call now” part of a commercial while on the back of a whale, giving a famous speech in a room with helium while suspended in the air by metal wires, going to a church and reading parts where God talked, counting down hits while the co-personality made inappropriate jokes, reading a childhood storybook as if it were an advertisement, and talking about colors as if they were human beings while upside down, naked, strapped to a helicopter and an assortment of arachnids crawling all over his body. The final test pinned him against a forty-year-old man in the ultimate competition of vocal personalities: reciting the mumblings at the end of a radio advertisement. It was a grueling and occasionally painful process.
“Michael Smith, you have done an excellent job,” the judges told him. “Because you are so young and so full of talent, we vote you to be the winner.”
So Michael Smith got a contract with a major movie studio and began working two-hour days saying things persuasively. Soon, though, things began to take a turn for the worse. It began with Michael Smith’s parents demanding that they give them a large portion of the money he received from work.
“We drove you to the tryouts,” his parents told him. “We are in debt up to our eyeballs. You wouldn’t want to see your parents go to jail, would you?”
Michael Smith acquiesced. His living space was cut in half so that his parents could add the weight room they had always dreamed of. One of the movies he commentated also landed him into trouble: the person who wrote the script he read made a major pronoun error and none of the editors caught it until it was too late. As a result, everyone thought that he thought a popular movie character was a girl when he was obviously a guy. Other minor mistakes lead to the managers repeatedly threatening Michael Smith.
One day, Michael Smith woke up coughing up blood. The doctors told him that he had a tumor in diaphragm and that once it was removed he would never be able to speak again.
Now he was seventeen, and after four years of success, he was back in Westmoreland performing trigonometry. Nobody ever talked to him because he was considered an elite snob that was too rich and famous to be bothered with and those like Jacob were too afraid to speak up.
Jacob had asked Syraick many questions about the person he knew so much about. One question that the Sage was unable to answer was why adults were fascinated with kids who could do adult things very well.
“I am not sure why having a talent is considered an adequate reason for removing someone’s childhood by so many people,” Syraick told Jacob. “But remember this: by being fascinated with his tragedy, you too are part of this horrible system.”
I don’t know about that, Jacob thought. He agreed, though, with Syraick’s theory that life was more beautiful when you didn’t know the reason for your existence. Or so they thought.
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| I wanted to keep this thing running, but my computer's been unpredictable. I am in development of the last two episodes of TSS, then, depending on whether anybody ever reads this ever, I'll make a decision on whether to continue on sometime later. How about 45 episodes, though? That wasn't too bad.
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