Some Might Say

Hello again after a long break. I don't know why I haven't blogged more often but I guess I have been going through yet another one of my periods of laziness, which seem to happen more and more. So what has been going as of late? Well I went to the first week of class and I think I have my class schedule down finally. It is as follows:

SI684 eCommunities
SI688 Fundamentals of Human Behavior
SI551 Information Seeking Behavior
SI702 ICOS

I did attend this network theory class but it turns out that the class is really hard core network theory. I was more interested in say social networking ala Friendster and stuff so this class was too hard core for me. I also went to semantic web over on North Campus and to my surprise it contained a whopping four people. It is an interesting class but you really have to be into the web and web technology to really appreciate it. So what do I think of my last semester of class. Well I am taking eCommunities which violated my class picking rule of trying to select classes with the least amount of work. It is being taught by Paul Resnick, for those who are not in the information science realm, who did some early research on eBay and is considered a leading scholar in the field of reputation systems. For you long-time Dave Blog readers, he was also the author of the 540 placement test that I took when I first arrived at SI that I aced with a whopping 39% to get out of taking that class. In my opinion, he also resembles Buster from Arrested Development. And hopefully he doesn't read this blog. But one of the things I am grateful for is being able to take classes from some world class researchers like Resnick, Judy Olson, and Gary Olson.

Aside from class, I have been training in my new job as a SI Career Services Assistant. When most people heard the news that I got the job, I got two general reactions. (1) congratulatory and (2) bewilderment. I had my first appointments last week and I think they went pretty well. Aside from work and class, SI social life continues as it always has. Last week, I went to the happy hour, The Raw's Egg Nog party and Rasika's party. This past weekend, two old friends came into town. Zahra was in town on Friday night and Nabeeha on Sunday.

I haven't done much ranting of late. So for those of you who want to quit reading my long entry now then I suppose this a good place to stop. Because this rant is gonnas be long. I will now chronicle my grievences against a new set of people. So who will it be?

Right-wing conservatives? Nope too obvious and I have done that already.
Another SI classmate who is either (1) a plagarist or (2) a terrible team member? Nope I have done that already and most likely will do that in the future
People who are in lines for about 10 minutes and when they finally get to the front of the line, still haven't decided on what to order? Nope but I will probably get around to that sometime
People who order super complicated orders from fast food places and then complain about crappy service even though they are only playing 3 bucks for their food? Well I would rant about these people but I feel compelled to rant about some people first.

Today I will rant about edge-less people. Who exactly are edge-less people? I don't blame you for not knowing. Edge-less people (also known as irony-deprived people) are people who have no "edges" and are proud of it. Meaning that they are proud they have no blemishes, no conflicts, no bad habits, and have not experienced any fuck-ups in their lives. You probably know a few of them. They are perfectly happy that their lives are complication and conflict-free. They are the exacty opposite of "edgy." Edgy means original, creative, boundary-pushing but can also mean dramatic, unstable, and bizarre at the same time. But you remember edgy people whereas edge-less people are bland, forgettable, and interchangable. Probably the most well-known edge-less person is Ned Flanders from the Simpsons. A man who is perfectly happy living a sheltered, simple, and bland life where he tries to make everyone like him. Don't think these people exist in real life? Think again.

I think the first time I really noticed edge-less people existed was as a freshman in high school english class. We were discussing the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, a great American classic and one of my favorites. Anyway, this girl says that she doesn't like the book because of the ending. Sorry if I am going to spoil this for anyone who hasn't read To Kill a Mockingbird but then again if you haven't read it then you should or you are an edge-less person who doesn't like to be confronted with ugly racial issues in the book. The ending to Kill a Mockingbird is that Tom Robinson, a black man, gets wrongly convicted of rape of a white woman (in reality the white woman willing kissed him) and is sentenced to jail. Robinson is killed trying to escape. There is some consolation in the end because the white woman's racist father gets stabbed to death by Boo Radley. But anyone who has read the book will agree the ending is pretty sad and shows the consequences of the pervasive racism of the South. Anyway this girl says she doesn't like the ending. I ask why and she says, "becasue it is sad." She then goes on to say that a better ending would be that Tom Robinson gets acquitted and the racist father gets sent to jail instead. Put aside that it would totally ruin the book's story and message and turn it into a Lifetime made for TV movie, this "edge-less" girl dislikes the ending simply because it is sad. Well if there was a happy ending, then it would totally ruin the impact of the book and the lessons trying to be conveyed. Yes Virgina there are sad endings and that doesn't make it a bad book. Would Romeo and Juliet be one of history's greatest plays if both of them had lived happily ever after. Probably not. Vishnu once said someone said he didn't like Clockwork Orange because it was disturbing. Isn't that the whole point? It is kinda like saying you don't Porches because they go fast or you don't like airplanes because they go high-up in the sky.

Let's cut to another example. I used to know this guy, let's for argument's sake call him Riff. Riff was a guy I knew from highschool and we were friends up until my sophomore year in college. Riff like to boast that he lived a fairly simplistic life in his opinion. His musical tastes were that of Top 40 radio and never missed a Disney movie. If you couldn't tell, I am a fairly judgemental person whereas Riff like to boast that he didn't really dislike any person and many people didn't really dislike him. That is because nobody knew who the hell he was. In a conversation, if you were to talk him out and say replace him with a metal bucket with a tape recorder that periodically would say, "okay", then you wouldn't miss a beat. Me and some of my other friends were more "edgy" than him (it was college so like most kids in college I had my fair shares of fuck-ups, drama, and stupid things I should not have done) so he starting distancing himself from us. I would write him long emails about what I was up to and he would reply with literally, "Doing okay. Bye - Riff." The curious thing was that he only distanced himself from me and the friends who had more edge, meaning we had a lot of drama in our lives. He kept in touch with his other edge-less friends, who I guess provided him with less complication. He went off to college out of town and met even more edge-less friends so he apparently gave me and some other people the boot. He stopped returning IMs, emails and phone calls and I eventually gave up on him. The kicker is that a few years about we got ditched by him, I hear from the grapevine that he is sad that I, namely the guy who wrote all the emails, made all the calls, and sent all the IMs, ditched him! Anyway, I looked him up on Friendster and saw his what he wrote in his profile, I nearly gagged. This is taken verbatim from it:

I treasure my friends - those people that stand by me, in spite of myself
I do the same for my friends
I may not always agree with their actions or their beliefs
but I will always be there to support them, and I will not be shy with my opinions
Because I am fiercely loyal and to do any less would be unforgivable

Gee asshole since when does fiercely loyal mean pitching all your friends who happen to be going through shit in their lives and surrounding yourself with bland, edge-less, clones of yourself? My major point in this long rant, is that (I have learned his the hard way btw) both the bad and good life experiences shape who we are. I wish my life was full of just good experiences but I would definitely be a different person than I am today. My family troubles, the times I struggled financially , and even meeting lousy people like my fake friends from highschool, racists, and even edge-less people like Riff has given me a fuller perspective and appreciation of things. Hopefully for the better. Real people go through bad times. Real people dislike people and things for sometimes petty reasons. Real people mess up. Real people have faults. Most of all real people acknowledge this and try to make themselves better from it. Edge-less people don't. They brush it aside as things only "bad" people have and fail to see it in themselves. Edge-less people always want happy endings and be surrounded by friends who act like game show hosts (except Ray Combs of Family Feud who killed himself). Not that is a bad thing or anything. Edge-less people can be perfectly nice, for example the many Mormom interns at KPMG I worked with during the summer. It just they don't have anything deeper.

So to end this overly long macro-content post, I'll relate just one more story. I jokingly call some of my friends and classmates "lame." For instance, if not a lot of 1st years show up to a happy hour, I call the 1st years "lame" for not showing up and being too focused on classwork, the criticism that a critical part of grad school is socializing and interacting with your fellow students. It's not true of course, there are plenty of non-lame first years but I joke that they are lame to (a) make myself feel better in a petty way and (b) well there is no b I guess. Anyway one of my classmates challenged me when I called her "lame." I replied that since nobody dislikes her and she dislikes nobody, then in fact that is kinda lame. She doesn't even think she dislikes the plagarzing classmates I ranted about earlier or other people clearly deserving of scorn. She replied that it was not true she liked everybody. I then asked her to name someone in our program that she held any, even minor negative thought about it. She paused for a few seconds and then replied, "I can't think of anybody right now." Perfect example of being "edge-less"