Pissborg

It’s important that I write this, so that I can look at it and try to decipher it.

As Michael Bluth says, “You certainly have a type."

While Pittsburgh seems to shrink, the job market corrodes and academia seems to expand and swallow me. Thus, I hole myself into this triangle, where the going is good, the sun never shines, and life is comfortably…comfortable.

I get why some people never leave Pittsburgh: because they can get away with being dirty losers (type 1) or, as a local entrepreneur told me, “big fish in a small sea”.

But the Steel City is hardly a sea, more a tributary, and the fish are more like shrimp. I learned this from my first college boyfriend and the company he kept. While at first I was entranced by his hipster entourage, the more I saw those people, the sooner I realized that most of them didn’t even have vocations. A lot of them were crusty and lame, and only in their little 412 micro chasm were they important people—to themselves. And while I’ve since learned to respect the music his band makes, I’ve also learned that it’s really easy to be a star amongst idle and inert hangers-on.

The factors that allow a young person to sustain himself in Pittsburgh are simple: low cost of living, ease of alternative transportation, and prevalence of college-aged fellow travelers. You can buy a house for less than $10,000 and fix it up, ride your bike everywhere most months of the year, and buddy up with kids you went to elementary school with—and never ever leave. For some, this is a respectable living, for others, this is a choice of immense economic reward, and for me, I’m really conflicted as to when to say “When”.

Two roads diverge in this yellow wood—attend graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and get a Master’s in Professional Writing. Then, make thousands more dollars when I enter a job market that, hopefully, will not be as dismal. This is option 1. Option 2 is, move to Hollywood and write for TV, the bravest and possibly most suicidal thing I could do. But this is something I know I could do. I love TV; TV raised me. What’s more, I write well, I’m damn creative, and I’m funny. And right now, if anything, people need to laugh. They need their faith in good television restored, by renegades like Tina Fey, and equally ambitious young bloods like me.

But at the end of the day, you gotta chase that paper. And at the end of the night, you’ve got to be happy. So somewhere around cocktail hour, you must strike a balance between profit and joy. Alas, Pittsburgh.

I certainly have a type.

PBR You Kidding Me?

Today Netta e-mailed me the upcoming feature in Adbusters. After reading it, I reflected and sent her the following e-mail:

Yeah, this article is so defeatist. After I took a minute to criticize the writer (step 1), I realized he must have been pressed on a Tuesday to meet a Thursday deadline, so he hopped to that club on Wednesday, ended up blowing lines off that girl's Polaroid with her and Bruce Willis's nephew, and hit the send from his DELL. DESKTOP. some time around 7 am on Thursday. This could explain the fixed-gear bike fallacy (they can, and often do, have brakes) that could have been easily warded off with that last, crucial Wikipedia scan.

Some counterpoints:

That last paragraph is self-obsessed just by being! The Lost Generation died off before WW2. And now that acid and cocaine are illegal, the only things we can rebel against are the war on drugs and gas prices and the Right's deathgrip on consumer efficacy, by getting high and going on a bike ride to the thrift store.

Here's something that "feels real": cash. So having a college degree, especially in the progressive sciences, not only allows you to criticize every aspect of the feeding machine your paycheck powers, but to do so with the backing of, you guessed it, a government-funded institution.

"We are the last generation." He's really given up. He considered throwing those rocks (at a vacant housing development? talk about subversion!) and decided to reveal the huge conflict of interest apparent in this article: the royal "we" and the titular "hipster" are inseparable yet unwilling to admit their point of intersection, the reporter.

Wearing non prescription glasses (I have some) and skinny jeans (I have multiple) and listening to Deerhoof (you've probably never even heard of them) on your iPod (I don't have one, or a Facebook) while making sure everyone on the bus can SEE that you're reading Bukowski (shhh--I haven't read Bukowski, but Pete Doherty interviewed him in VICE) probably has little to do with a disillusioned backlash (not to be ironic) to the West's ignorant overconsumption and excessive reproduction of style and standard. Maybe everyone feels so snubbed by Hollywood that it's less hurtful to create mini, Internet Hollywoods or even pitch them up under a 300-year old bridge (et voila, DUMBO--"Down Underneath the Manhattan-Brooklyn bridge" DUH!).

But before this sounds too optimistic, I'll acquiesce to the conservative evildoers who Barry O's obviously grinding a self-challenging, earth-conscious cog against: the American Apparel has been pulled so far towards the belly button that we've been looking for nipple on Last Night's Party instead of even glancing at the dynamic shift occuring in our history that accompanies any change in power. Call it our New Millenium American Dream: We won't take the President, but we'll take a tip from his pastoral origins. Cowboy-fit jeans, white v-neck, and the interning class's perverted darling, piss ass beer.