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In This Issue

• First Aid Failure
• A Recipe for Delicious Choke-O Puffs
• Senior Giving '06 to Fund Expansion
• Letters to the Feditor
• When That All-Night Nominee Still Only Gets a C
• Less Well-Known Choking Placards
• Sexual Perversion in Legoland
• Drink-Or-Treat!
• Minutes from the Debate Between Yes and No
• Silly Catchphrase Spreads Like Plague
• How Fight Club Ruined My Teenhood
• The Green Bodice of My Love
• Can't You Smell That Smell?
• Not Your Average Science Fair Project
• The Adventures of Snakey the Snake
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.3

Kimi Traube

"This Colt 45 resonates in my gaping adolescent void."

My high school years as a vague and directionless social parasite were graced with mercifully few transformative experiences. My friend once told me to read something by Chuck Palahniuk, all-important or perhaps just self-important heroic figure of the disillusioned teenage rebel set for his masterpiece Fight Club. I, like every other member of my generation with a penchant for gratuitous violence and an astronomical capacity for self-indulgence, had seen the movie, though I’d failed to feel the Pixies song at the end resonate in my gaping void of an adolescent soul like some of my perhaps more-troubled buddies, but being the naïve and trusting individual that I was—we deep and meaningful young nihilists had to stick together, after all—I stole the novel off some file-sharing service onto my sparkling new depressingly material laptop, which was totally weighing me down and preventing me from being free to pursue my dreams in life, but I was about to remedy that situation.

    Reading the book, however, I felt a small tingling in my frontal lobe. Was I getting dumber? There was a dictionary on my desk; I was feeling this definite animosity towards it. The idea of polysyllabic words began to nauseate me. Yet at the same time I had an overpowering urge to rush across the street and buy a cheeseburger that I would eat while no one was looking and then complain about its exploitation of the cow population until the sullen enzymes in my stomach had finished digesting it. Then I would head down to a coffee shop and pay six times the price of the cheeseburger for a cup of coffee I wouldn’t even drink because it got cold while I sat at a table with my laptop discussing postmodernism on an online forum. Postmodernism gets really distracting, especially when explained in words of one or two syllables. I had to be blunt! Realistic! Gritty! I had to stop bathing, ever! I had to smoke cigarettes with my eyes because my mouth just wasn’t enough!

    I came to the end of a chapter and looked outside, expecting to see some quintessentially grimy, hopeless city street, but it was just my yard with some rosy-cheeked future leader of America selling lemonade, outfitted in the gingham checks of the suburban dream. I really wanted to go out and punch her in the face but she’d probably tell someone and I had to pay attention to the first rule of Fight Club so I could make references to it in conversation forever after and pretend this somehow made me look terrifically clever. In case my horribly contrived cartoon character t-shirts shrunken to the size of my self-confidence weren’t enough. I suddenly felt that reinterpreting the Care Bears as the all-powerful masters of nihilism would be easier than getting out of my chair. I reopened the book to contain my dangerous enthusiasm—if I started to care about things, all would most certainly be lost.

    At this point—three quarters of the way through the book—my solid expression of self-consciously uncultured disdain was the only thing keeping my face from collapsing under the weight of my own burgeoning pretension. As the blood in my veins gradually replaced itself with testosterone and my scowl hardened into a permanent defiance of evolution—I am ape, hear me spout Nietzsche!—I felt I could grasp my teenage alienation in an iron fist and squeeze the life out of it, all while shouting empty pseudo-profundities! I wasn’t a beautiful or unique snowflake, but god-DAMN my hands were itching to pour lye on themselves! If only I had overpaid movie stars to use my name in foreign lands like California while I thought I was sleeping!

    On finishing the book, though, I just felt full of holes. Maybe I should pierce my eyebrow or something to reflect my PERFORATED SOUL. I don’t dare read books anymore but I’ve really gotten into sitting in coffee shops staring at the pages until members of the intelligentsia approach me with publishing deals. I grunt and peer through greasy hair strands at them and they swoon. Thanks, Chuck Palahniuk, for giving my life meaninglessness!