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In This Issue

• Life After Graduation? You're Kidding!
• Touched By Tom Brokaw
• Mr. McLaughlin's Culturally Confusing Neighborhood
• Livejournal: Hardcore Gateway(TM) Drug
• Columbia Decompiled
• Looking Back At Evolutionary Monkey Business
• How Right You Are!
• The Fed Kidz Page
• Veganism Sucks
• iPod Shuffle Advisory
• The Great Debate: Tune In or Pass Out?
• Weapons of Ass Destruction
• Letters to the Feditor
• THEY WATCH
• The Blue And White

Alice F. Xie

“i h8 u gise! only x_xBright Eyesx_x understandz m3!”

M. Theodore Holden

Look, if Cathy’s throwing up, you know it’s pretty bad.

I have a confession to make: I am a Livejournal addict.

Now, that may not seem like a big deal to you, but Livejournal is the online equivalent of shooting a syringeful of pure heroin into your eyeball. I blog just about every day, sometimes twice or three times a day, broadcasting the complete inanities of my life to any random weirdo that wants to read about how much I love sleep or how my menstrual cycle is doing. After using for some years now, my body chemistry has adapted to Livejournal; I have to post, even if I don't have the time or the content. The payoff is just too sweet: writing each post is like masturbating my ego, and the comments that ensue are friendly extra hands.

So imagine my surprise when I logged on to post my daily wank: instead of the familiar homepage, there was only a short notice saying something like, "Livejournal's data center has lost all power. We'll tell you what's going on sometime later. Until then, fuck off." It was as if my syringe of heroin had been replaced with carbolic acid. How was I going to write about my existential angst and post quasi-erotic pictures of myself in the hopes that some art school student with a username like x___brokentears would call me hot? Though my fellow junkies also reported similar problems, I managed to convince myself that this message was just the result of general shittiness on the part of Internet Explorer, and resolved to stave off the cravings until I could get another hit the only way I knew how: I went to sleep.

The withdrawal symptoms started appearing while I napped. Considering that I don't usually have dreams in which I have sex with the corpse of Jean-Paul Sartre while being loudly applauded by the United Nations, I knew something was up. I awoke in a cold sweat, hyperventilating. That's when I noticed that my hands were shaking so violently that I could no longer type "livejournal.com" into my browser without adding eight or nine extraneous letters. The longer I went without sweet, sweet Livejournal, the worse the shaking got. My computer chair creaked under the constant shifting of my trembling body. Realizing that my new medical condition would be a great topic on which to base a begging-for-pity journal entry, I tried to log on again and failed.

After my fifty-sixth attempt to log on was met with defeat, my stomach began to churn, and the withdrawal moved into its next stage. I had always thought that copious projectile vomiting was an amusing topic, but I had never experienced it firsthand until then and have now changed my opinion on the subject. Do you know how hard it is to shout, "Fuck you, Livejournal!" and shake your fist at a computer while you're spraying bile everywhere? Not to mention the fact that I'd have to explain to my roommate why her possessions were coated in a thick layer of everything I'd eaten in the past day or two.

My lowest point occurred shortly before the site went back up. I grew delirious, which had progressed so that a blue axe-wielding ape now appeared in my room. Luckily, my roommate was out, so she did not see me locked in vicious combat. The ape and I fought fiercely; I managed to land a few right hooks while he swiped at me with his axe. One time the axe landed a bit too close to my laptop, causing me to go through a Hulk-like transformation. My skin changed from its usual pasty white hue to a bright green, and huge, rippling muscles appeared on my body. I charged, letting forth a battle cry, and began to pummel the giant simian. After stealing his axe and getting a few good hacks in, I backed off, surveying the damage as I returned to my normal state. Oh, great, I thought, now I have to clean up vomit and ape blood and dispose of a body that definitely will not fit in the trash can in Hewitt Hall. Fucking A.

Before attending to this disgusting task, I tried to log on to Livejournal once more. This time, instead of being greeted by a giant middle finger, I once again saw the site layout and gave a sigh of relief. When Livejournal came back up, it was a virtual push of the plunger, a flow of sweet e-junk filling my cranial cavity. Plus, the entire ordeal made a fucking great post - fifty-six comments and growing!