Heh

This bird needs to be the mascot of the social justice movement in El Paso.



Oh yeah, and Happy Halloween to the two people who read this.

Meanwhile, Back on the Ranch...

News from my alma mater, the University of North Texas. Apparently, we’re embroiled in some sort of controversy involving the campus hippie/pothead coalition and the campus Jesus-had-blue-eyes-and-hates-France lobby, and the eyes of DFW are upon us. OOO! Riveting!

ALRIIIGHT! Scrappy to the rescue! *Loads shotgun*

Basically, here’s a rundown of the story, as excellently reported by my good friend Shaina Zucker at the Dallas Morning News. A gay couple wanted to run for homecoming court. Our Student Senate said no. There were some protests. Then they had homecoming. Now, AFTER homecoming, student activists are using the power of protest to try and get the school to let two dudes ride a float down a freeway on what has to be the gayest day of the school year. And they want that to happen NEXT time.

Hey, so UNT – when’s my degree becoming more valuable again? I can’t even get a cashier job at Target in El Paso, and the only people who actually know where I went to school are over 40 and still think it’s called “North Texas State.”

Maybe when you guys build that abomination of a stadium that seats the same number of people as the old one, it will raise the university’s profile (since Texas IS a football state) and encourage rich guys who like to watch football to pay lots of shiny monies to watch our football team suck ass. We might even be able to get esteemed alum Dr. Phil to put his NAME on it! He's big shit. He has a Wikipedia page. In ARABIC! Then, once you're raking in the Benjamins, you can use that money to fund enough research to become “Tier I" and raise UNT's profile.

Or, you know – you could just let the gays do it and give me my money back.

The Drama of High School Game Shows

So I stumbled on an episode of High-Q on the local PBS affiliate. For those of you outside of El Paso, High-Q is what happens when teenaged nerds get drunk on the competitive pheromones football players emit in the hallways. It’s a gladiatorial war of wits fought with buzzers, an intellectual junk-measuring contest broadcast on public television officiated by a local TV personality commandeered for duty against their will.

And for a long time, I was king.

This is the Batsignal for when you want to know what the capital of Georgia is (American Georgia: Atlanta. Russian Georgia: T'bilisi. Bitches.)

I usually try to repress the fact that I was a nerd in high school from my memory, instead choosing to dissociate and wonder why my friends from high school only hang out at coffeeshops and absolutely refuse to go out clubbing. But watching Chapin’s team rip apart Hanks’ team made me reminisce about the good ol’ days. So here’s what I have to say about the state of High-Q today:

First of all, it’s good to see consistency. The hosts still can’t pronounce half the words in the questions. Second of all, what the hell did you do to the show? The new set is nice, purple, and futuristic, I’ll give it that. But eliminating lightning rounds AND the accompanying 1980 synth soundtrack? Big mistake. Watching nerds sweat to what sounds like Flashdance is half the fun. And please, give these kids some dignity. The concept of getting extra points for ringing in early and calling it a “power ring” was floated around my senior year, but NEVER on AIR! That just perpetuates stereotypes.

NERD: (nasally) Yessss! I got a power ring! POOOOWER!! Mr. Frodo is doooooomed…

Mostly, though, these kids have NO T.V. presence! Yes, children, the only people watching KCOS at noon on a Friday besides your parents are unemployed bums like me. That doesn’t mean we don’t care. Live a little. Back in my day, I was captain of Eastwood’s team, I made up a story one episode my senior year. When the host asked how I wanted to be introduced – and I want to say the host that episode was Caribe Devine, who currently works in Phoenix and who actually did a decent job as a reader – I told her to say that I was an Abercrombie & Fitch model who had just returned from a photo shoot on the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. AND SHE WENT FOR IT. You know what I looked like in high school? THIS…

White shirt

So why did I do it? Because I was an attention whore. And why did she do it? Because she had nothing to lose! And because it’s funny! Nerds are funny, whether you want to be or not. You might as well steer into the skid and endear yourself to the five people who actually watch the show.

Some of us still remember the seedy underbelly of the high school competitive trivia circuit. Oh the epic nerd rivalries simmering since middle school! Oh the agony of defeat most foul! O the SHIT-TALKING, the politics behind objecting to questions, the intimidation tactics, the mind games, the bawdy Mad-Libs in between rounds! Give us a taste of your secret nerd world.

And congrats, Chapin. Go celebrate with a Star Wars marathon.

My New Roommates

I graduated with my B.A. almost six months ago, but unemployment and the fact that I live with my family have kept me in a strange, suspended animation, quasi-college mindset.

For instance, in spite of the fact that it literally snowed in El Paso last night and there is still frost on the Franklins, the only place where I will wear closed-toe shoes is the gym, and that’s only because I have to. Since returning, I have also failed to adapt and develop “human” hours. My parents are still incredibly disturbed by the fact that I will eat or exercise at 9 p.m. since everyone else in the house is out cold by 9:45.

In a lot of ways, moving back in with my family…sucks. Aside from the batshit insanity (and I say that in the most loving, tender way possible), there are small things I took for granted at college that I’ve lost coming back here. College was the first time I had access to cable because my mom to this day still refuses to "cave." There were four different restaurants that were literally across the street. I could walk everywhere. I didn’t have to worry about exposed asbestos tiles in the dorm living room. We didn’t have to turn on the oven and leave the door open to warm up the building. And I never saw a single cockroach or mouse.

(The sad part is we're not poor. We are solid middle-class. We're just LAZY!)

The thing I miss most, though, is freedom and not having to answer to anyone. I’m not going to romanticize my college years. My living situation prior to graduating was less than ideal. Let’s put it this way – the day my roommate came up to tell me that he got his girlfriend pregnant, I knew that I’d probably heard that baby being conceived. However, while we weren’t particularly close, we were civil enough. He did offer me celebratory Smirnoff Ice, and I’m sure if I’d asked to join him and his lady in their athletic shower rendezvous he would have gladly welcomed the company. But more importantly, we stayed out of each other’s hair.

Yes, the paper thin walls told stories of young love. But I never had to tell him where I was going. He never questioned why I did anything. He didn’t care if I left a 7 pm and came in at 3 in the morning. And best of all, neither one of us ever charged into the other’s room announced in order to have irritating conversations.

My new roommates – they just don't get it. They're not as cool.

¿Que Onda, Mundo?

If you’re reading this, chances are you already know who I am.

If you don’t know who I am, you lead a sad, empty life. It’s okay, though. I don't judge. Much.

My name is Kirk. I was born, raised, and currently live in El Chuco. As a Chucoite, no matter how hard you try, it never seems like you can leave. You talk about making it big and how you're going to strike out to L.A. or Washington or New York. And sometimes, a few of us do manage to get away for a while. But even if you make it all the way to Africa like I did, you still somehow find yourself back at Chico's Tacos at 3 p.m. on a Thursday, eating soggy flautas floating in cheese water. Sure, you swore that you'd never go back to Chico's because they kicked those gay guys out that one time, but your friend refuses to eat anywhere else, so you really don't have a choice except to sit back and eat your double order with fries, like it or not.

That's a metaphor.

In a lot of ways, I’m a cliché hipster twenty-something. I’m unemployed. I have a liberal arts degree. I live with my parents. I’m indecisive. My life revolves around writing polemical liberal slogans into my Facebook statuses in hopes that I can goad people into fighting each other. I volunteer for a non-profit that helps immigrants. I use a messenger bag. Irony is my nicotine. In fact, that only proof I have that I’m still partially human and not a complete hipster is the shame I feel when I go to Starbucks and order a “Grahn-day mocha frappachino light.”

I even have a cliché twenty-something dirtbag goatee. To my credit, I wear it well. It makes me look ethnically ambiguous. When people ask what I am, I usually just say Lebanese. No one questions it because they don’t want to seem like racists. I also say that I’m 24. Actually, people usually just assume I’m 24 because I look old. If I tell people the truth – that I’m really just another barely legal Mexican half-breed who barely got his drinking privileges two months ago – they don’t believe me.

I went to college in the Dallas area. It's a long story, but they didn't believe I was Mexican over there, either. That worked to my advantage, though. Some people in my Spanish lit class spent an entire semester thinking that I was a full-blood Spaniard just because I could speak fluid Spanish and I wasn’t brown. If I’d known that little nugget sooner, I would have introduced myself the first day by saying that my favorite hobbies were killing Aztecs and eating tapas.

But it would have been wasted on them. Not because they wouldn’t have caught the cultural references (although they probably wouldn’t have). Rather, I think they would have heard “Yo soy” and thought it was some sort of Japanese company that sells fake milk. I didn’t go to what you would call a “good university.”

That's all you get from me for right now. This awkward introduction is over.