Rhymes With Steve

Since I’m too busy getting rejected for an interview with a movie director (among other people who are quite full of themselves, so much so they’ll decline to be interviewed but make sure to let you know they get “at least two or three interview requests per week”) for my ‘Big Question’ feature article assignment, I will blog for however long this tiny wormhole of free time stays open.

So, FaceBook. Of course that’s the first thing I would check. As we all know, I have issues with my friends. And yesterday, I randomly noticed I had 257 — of which I probably spoke to only 4 within the last week. But when I checked my FaceBook friends list again today, which, no matter what these blogs may convey, I seriously don’t check often considering I have a life, it show me having 258 friends.

I didn’t accept any friend requests within the past few days!

*creepy music interlude*

Unfortunately, I just now realized someone could have simply reactivated their account and theoretically gained me as a friend again. Shucks. So onto plan B. I had something else I wanted to blog about; pictures.

I don’t think “face book profile” has an exact definition but for the sake of this entry I’ll say it’s supposed to be a person’s life on a web page. Kind of incredulous when you think of it but I’m sure we all have friends who post everything within that one page. Like, some people post a description about themselves, favourite movies and the like, employment status, relationship status, frequent annoying status updates, pictures of weddings, a wall where other people can publicly comment about the person and their life… kind of perfect the perfect tool for a curious journalist.

But the thing is, that’s not really their life. I wish I had time to find the quote online but I remember Angela from My So-Called Life saying in yearbook class how the yearbook isn’t really an accurate representation of the year. It’s what we want to remember it was. Because if it was truly accurate, it would be a really depressing book. (Someone remind to find out who the screenwriter was for that episode.”

So I got to thinking about my FaceBook profile. I’m quite pleased with how it looks. Basically all my ‘friends’ can see is my schooling info, that I’m Interested In: Women, a few groups I joined, my profile picture, and that I have 257 — wait, what!? I lost another friend within the ten minutes it’s taking me to write this!? To quote one of my favourite quick-witted TV show characters, son of a…

Back to what I was writing. I like to post really interesting profile pictures. I find it cool and, actually, it’s usually a fairly decent representation of who I am, if I do say so myself. I’m eclectic, I’m bored. But then I think of the things I don’t post.

If there was a particularly unflattering shot of myself would I post it? Like, one where my chin is angling downward so that I have a double-chin or something. Or maybe just a shot of me where I was midway through sentence so that my face looks odd odder than usual? Or maybe those occasional days where I have zit somewhere on my forehead?

Luckily my face has been pretty good to me thus far and hasn’t broken out much — I’ll get pimple every now and then like the rest of the world. Although, I know of a few people with acne problems who use some skilled Photoshoppery to remove it from all their images.

It’s all instinct, I guess. If a relative just died, you’re crying and you feel horrible, would you get someone to take a picture of you in that state? In a way, I think I will someday. I haven’t cried in years but when I inevitably do again, I think it would be interesting to do some self-photography. With a tripod even, to really capture what’s really happening. This is partly because I think images of people crying can look really beautiful.

But, actually, is that the real me? I don’t routinely cry. It’s a very small aspect of me that happens when it happens. I use the bathroom a lot, I hope that never ends up online.

That said, even if that is the real me — at least in that point of time — do I want others to see that? I don’t exactly share a large part of my life online.

We are who we want people to think we are. At least on FaceBook.

You’ll never believe what I found out on FaceBook a few days ago. I, Steve, the greatest being on earth, was deleted off someone’s friends list! *end of the world music*

In all honesty, I don’t analyze my friends list. I have like 260 259 friends the last time I checked, there’s no way I’d ever be able to keep track of that. However, I do remember one friend acceptance that I made. It was pre-university and some girl I didn’t know friend requested me.

I skimmed her profile and it turned out that she was going into my program. She seemed harmless so I accepted. (I don’t put anything up on FaceBook that I wouldn’t mind having plastered across the Internet anyway, so it was fine.)

Flash-forward a month or two to a few days ago. I don’t know how exactly it happened but I clicked her name somewhere. That’s the beauty of FaceBook; you can read a wall message, click here and there, and somehow end up on an event page for some random person’s birthday party. It wasn’t even planned, I just happened to click her name at some point.

So, yeah, turns out she deleted me. I came to this conclusion because, as creepy as the feature is, I viewed her complete list of friends. We have 15 mutual friends and she, herself, has over 300 friends, which means someone didn’t delete all her friends. And it’s highly doubtful that someone would log onto her account and specifically delete little, old me.

Also, she’s been inundating me with cut-eye, yo. She had been doing it for a while but I just thought she was weird until, of course, I found out she deleted me.

This should all be sad in some kind of way yet it’s quite typical. I have this tendency to make enemies with people without knowing it. For instance, a few months back I sat beside an old lady on the subway. I didn’t do or say anything to the woman but that still didn’t stop her from dumping her (luckily) room-temperature coffee on me before bolting through the closing subway doors.

In September, the girl and I once rode my entire subway ride together because she had some cousin to meet up with. We talked about music among other interests. She talked a lot but nevertheless seemed fine. We certainly didn’t exactly appear to be initiating any kind of Clark/Lex rivalry or anything.

(I really don’t have anything against this girl. I could care less, really. And I’m not saying that because I’m bitter. We never really talked; I didn’t lose much. It’s just something I find funny and unusual.)

On Thursday, I joked about the situation with a few other students in my Information and Visual Resources lecture. While I’m one of those “just say what’s on your mind and confront the situation, damn it”-type of peerson, who will probably end up bringing it up in a conversation with her one day to get to the point, make her feel awkward and amuse myself with her presumably lame excuse all at the same time, we decided it would be only fitting to do one thing: add her back.

She was the one who added me in the first place, before we ever even met. It’s aboot time I repay the favour. But this time I have a plan! I’ll add her and then eventually delete her. Is that not the most brilliant idea on the planet (if I go through with it)?

I would like to thank you for putting a hold on my checking account this morning. As I was handed my breakfast sandwich, I loved hearing the cashier say it didn’t go through.

(There is, by-the-way, a procedure for handling declined cards as a cashier. As direct as it is, announcing the card has been “declined” to an entire store of impatient customers is quite embarrassing. As an occasional cashier, I’ve learned to simply say, “Oh, it didn’t go through for some reason… maybe you didn’t punch in your PIN number correctly.” Just sayin’.)

BMO, I enjoyed seeing the ambiguous “CARD LIMIT EXCEEDED, VISIT BRANCH” (or whatever it said) black text shoot across the yellow screen. It was a real hoot having to use my ‘only for emergencies/online payments’ prepaid credit card (I should probably get a real credit card now that I’m 18, shouldn’t I?) to pay for my $3-4 meal along with some most likely high transaction fee.

I was amused at how easy it was to juggle eating breakfast and dialling the 1-800 number on the back of my debit card as I scrambled, literally, across Yonge and Dundas to get to my Information and Visual Resources lecture. The operator delighted me ever so much as he told me that my card was disabled because of a recent purchase made at a rather dubious merchant. And I felt safe knowing that he wouldn’t be able to tell me where exactly my information was swiped from.

Finally, I had a ball finding a branch downtown, which I was told twice to visit, only for them to say all I need to do is change my PIN number at any old ATM machine. Thank you, and rest in peace old 1866 PIN number.

I guess it’s actually called my G2 Road Test, as my yellow paper reads. Anyway, today I had my G road test thing. I did it at the Downsview DriveTest Centre and… passed! Finally, I know. And I’m not surprise, to be honest. That location has served me well on two occasions now.

The evaluator I got was quite nice. In fact, at the end of the test I said, “You know, even if you failed me, I still would have told you you were great — much better than all the others I had.”

At one point in the test, as I drove east on the 401, he said I needed to change lanes to the left when it was safe and back again. There was some jerk another driver slightly behind me in the left and a truck slightly in front of me on the left as well. This went on for quite some time and I couldn’t pass/let them pass because, respectively, I’d fail if I sped and there were too many cars behind me.

So he said it was fine, that there was nothing I could do about it and that was that. What a nice man.

I was attempting to navigate the stupendously confusing Ministry of Transportation website today. So, as a nascent G-er, all this gives me is the ability to tow a boat and have point-something decimal of alcohol in my system? Woah, look at all the many doors that have just opened!

Oh, and since the majority of future readers of this entry are going to have found this post because they Googled “what do you have to do in the G Test”, and such, I’ll tell you.

It seems to all depend on which centre you go to. With my first and mighty awful experience at another location, I went on two highways. One had a speed limit of 80, the other, 100. The evaluator made me switch lanes at least twice on the highway, complete a three-point-turn, and parallel park.

At Downsview, I had to get onto the highway, switch lanes twice (as in: switched to the left, then to the right) going east and then west, emergency park, and do a three-point turn. That was basically it.

As much as I hate posting two essay rants in a row, this really needs to be rhetorically asked. Why on earth do we need to use secondary sources in essays?

Basically, in essays, secondary sources are references to other people’s work that compliments reiterates part of your point. For example: apples. You are doing an essay on how apples are better than oranges. In your second paragraph, you argue that apples provide a better crunch than oranges. Let’s say you have a crunch-measuring device that proves this point. Well, my friend, you’re only halfway there.

You need to scour the planet to find any kind of literature/film/other source that agrees with you — and I mean any! There can be an article about ponies and how they make great club-goers if the right music is played, and if there’s even just one sentence that reads, “Oh yeah, and apples definitely have a nice crunch to them,” you’ve got your secondary resource.

Now, rinse and repeat but with the orange angle; a source saying oranges don’t have a great crunch value.

So even though you can prove whatever you are arguing with proof stemming from something you, yourself, found, you still have to look online or somewhere to find someone credible to restate this.

I know I’m still moderately fresh to this whole university thing, but is this really how the world works? Aren’t essays supposed to be able to support themselves individually. Secondary sources are really just there to say, “Hey, someone else thinks the same way, see!” When, really,  they’re not. They’re are agreeing with one aspect of your argument.

Like apples, again. The make-believe person who wrote, “Oh yeah, and apples definitely have a nice crunch to them,” isn’t comparing them to oranges to our knowledge. They are saying apples have a better crunch to them, period — which we can already prove with our magical device — thus making the quote rather pointless and essentially twisted. There is little value in adding it.

For my essay topic, I’m doing Shakespeare’s Sonnets (should that be capitalized?). The title escapes me at the moment but I’m comparing one sonnet to Sia’s “Moon” song, which my TA has serendipitously heard of before because, get this, she has the CD! There are some excellent similarities and enough dissimilarities for me to write a compare and contrast essay.

That said, where am I going to find “credible” sources to fill this silly secondary sources quota? I need terribly specific quotes. Unless, of course, I post them on here, quote myself, and hope my TA won’t check my sources/realize it’s me. Hmm, I’m rubbing my chin now… this blog is “credible”, no?