The Case Against Willamette University - An Overview

I'm choosing now to speak out against what I feel is one of the worst periods of my life, a point that still reverberates to me now a good four years since graduating. Mainly I'm ready to speak now because before now I'd honestly be unsure of what I'd want to say. Sure, I could tell someone that my time there was "bad", but describing some place would hardly disclose the deeper reasons on why there was bad, and further, such a vague description would only confirm the intuition that I didn't know what I was talking about.

And for awhile, they were right that my views were blank. And for awhile, I was painfully aware of  such inadequacies.

Following college I was homeless, for a whole fucking year. The perfect icing on the shit cake of loneliness, ridicule and self-loathing: to be on food stamps, to not really be sure where I would sleep, to aimlessly look up and wonder what I had done...

The good news I suppose is that hitting rock bottom forced me to knock off the high-and-mighty bullshit of "knowing that I was good and they were bad" and recognize that my powerlessness in the situation was in no uncertain terms permanent and a direct function of the personal weaknesses that I had been harboring. My powerlessness in fact was made worse through the belief that, although my situation was dire, it could be solved through some plan or list. The pattern of thinking that I could commandeer reality to fit on my notepad was, in my extreme state of poverty, laid bare, its ugly mug looking at me straight through.

That broken thinking, the top-down approach that does not ever work except by and through the swindling of an untold number of suckers like me, is the thinking that I am now ready to assault.

And, if I am to introduce my case against Willamette University in one thought, I would say that WU is nothing other than top-down thinking manifested in its entirety. My fight against WU is a fight against a thought.

In Defense of Your Mediocrity

What's important is that he's a nerd and you're not.

In San Francisco you are permitted to see unattractive man-boys in their underwear. New fetish? It's actually a recruitment poster: connect/reinforce the labor with the management in any way you can.

San Fran thrives on the cheap, unthreatening computer guys in order to supply the city with the greatest economic "miracle" since Clinton called us stupid while sending our jobs to South America. It IS the economy, yet this time the economy only needs .0001% of the population to rapidly smash their hands on a keyboard for productivity/profits to manifest. To be sure, I sympathize with anyone who sees this and is scared for their future.

But honestly, did you laugh first? Nerds are really easy to laugh at aren't they? Yet now consider a question you may not have been led to: why might your laughter be needed at all? In other words, could there be a social necessity to your mockery (likely your contempt as well) of Alex the sex programmer?

You may also find it odd that he's wearing a watch while lounging in the almost nude. The oddity of his advances in fact is what draws us in, repels us, and in a way, reassures us. Alex may be 100x smarter than his peers, but there's no way at all that he's hot!

Completely unrelated/right on point: when a narcissist is confronted with a power greater than himself, he has two choices: (1) accept the higher power and relinquish his inflated sense of self, or (2) dig his heels in and find any way to expose the higher power as a fraud. A narcissistic injury is at stake here, and it's time to find out how we still get to sleep at night.

The lighting and vogue-like production of Alex's pseudo-CK promo let most know that he's trying; rather, we should clue on the fact that his pose is not at all natural and therefore the direction of someone who wants to make a point. And the point is this: you are still a beautiful person because no matter how much smarter Alex is than you, you are at the very least not a nerd. He on the other hand will always be a nerd, unable to spread his seed and destined to die right on his laptop.

...Or maybe the real truth is that Alex is NOT smarter than you but that he simply works harder. Either way, his "labor" (culturally contextualized since how in any possible reconstruction of reality could sitting in front of a computer all day be thought of as laboring in the traditional semantic of the word?) is both needed and needing in the Silicon Valley. The system of computer economics must grow and thrive, but only in such a way as to protect the other 99.999% from change. Hence the Dice ad, through your disavowed mockery of Alex, can simultaneously find others like Alex to exploit while leaving you alone in your bubble. Aurea Mediocritas