Letters from a Suburban Jail

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely."

While Dr. King was able to ultimately vindicate his actions as anything but unwise or untimely, I will merely present the circumstances of my own captivity and allow the rest of you to judge my actions. 

My family has recently decided that our house which has functioned perfectly for over 40 years has become far too warm, cozy and wonderful. Consequently, they have already painted the walls a gaudy hue of orange-pink and are currently in the process of gutting our home of its fantastically fuzzy and toe-toasting carpet, leaving a hollowed out shell of a structure covered only by cold, hard wood flooring. 

The carpet is being removed and replaced with wood in all of the other rooms as well as the hallway leading up to my bedroom. My bedroom however, is going to remain carpeted because I don't like my feet to be cold. This means that the carpenters cut out the carpet in the hallway up to the point right outside my bedroom door, leaving a free (non-attached) edge

 of carpet extending outward from my room just past the door frame. As such, when the door was left wide open I had no problem walking into my room to get my things, but when I closed the door behind me upon entering I failed to realize that the freed edge of that carpet had bunched up by folding under itself, thus raising the carpet above the crack of my closed door making it impossible for me to open my door and escape. I am trapped.

I would provide an actual picture of the door being jammed, but I am still stuck in here and my camera is on the outside. Now I must fend for myself in a room without food, water, or proper cooling facilities and insulation on a hot summer day. Oh cruel fate! To think I feared the cold with the coming of these wood floors only to find myself slowly dying in the heat... Wood is still to blame. The carpet and door never tried to capture and kill me until wood came into the picture.

Whether wise or timely, my incarceration is certainly ironic. You see, it was only mere days ago that I sat before this very keyboard calling for all of you to prepare yourselves both physically and mentally for the next move of the squirrel menace, and just as I would have had you trap and remove them from society, so have I been forced into isolation myself, cut off from the rest of the world.

This is a Havahart animal trap, which is used to trap among other things, squirrels. The trap operates by leaving the door or doors to the cage open after leaving some form of bait inside for the animal and setting the tripping mechanism. When the animal enters the trap (by its own accord) the mechanism closes the door and traps the squirrel inside... This is exactly what happened to me in my bedroom.

It has been nearly two hours. My family is gone and they are not answering their phones. The floor layers were initially on the other side of the house, unable to hear my cries for help over their music and loud power tools. They have since left for their lunch break, but I am still here. Should I not last until someone is able to rescue me, know that this was no mere accident or unfortunate remodeling casualty.

The wood and the woodland creatures have formed an alliance and are both highly suspect in this crime. Please take this message and do what you can with it. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.

Pest Control

The squirrels on the CSUN campus are much smarter and far more cunning than naturally occurring squirrel populations in the rest of the world. Do not mistake my tone. I do not proclaim this as though they are some type of novelty as is Yogi Bear with his reputation as being “smarter (and better dressed) than the average bear.” The apocalyptically perverse spike in organization and intelligence in these squirrels is more akin to the super smart sharks created in Deep Blue Sea or the Mensa-level raptors from Jurassic Park.

However, this upset in the balanced hierarchy of man and beast is not the result of cartoon animation or genetic manipulation. No, these college-educated squirrels refuse to know their place because of the poor, naïve habits of the college student. It does not matter how cute, furry, or entertaining they may appear; they are evil.  Deer are cute, but they kill more humans annually than any other animal in this country. Spiders are furry, and some of them are poisonous! You know what’s both furry and entertaining? The white tigers from Siegfried and Roy’s Vegas act and we all know how that ended.

Between attempted murders when these squirrels scare me in front of the path of an oncoming bicyclist, retaliation attempts at murder on my part when I try to crush them in the press in the photo lab, I have had my fair share of run ins with these squirrels. Just last week I was walking

 on campus with my friend Deborah who was in town from UCSD when a squirrel came out of nowhere and barred our path, glaring at me in a way, as Deborah put it “looked like he wanted to punch you.” Given my history with these creatures, I would still argue that I was smart (and not at all impractical) in my attempt to hide behind Deborah as we passed this demon despite the fact that she is 5 or 6 inches shorter than me. 

I don’t care if they’re tiny and if they look hungry or sad or bored… or whatever! Do not yield. Fellow frequenters of the CSUN campus and all college students alike, these animals are just that: Animals. The following is an exchange between my friend Maryam and I about her complacency in feeding the squirrels on her own campus.

Maryam: I fed them pop tarts... and I think the cinnamon might have gotten them high or something... They were all getting real frisky!!! With each other that is!! 

The Voice of Reason: Your relinquishing of the pop tarts sends an ideological message that it is all right for them to accept, eat, and by extension take food from humans. It's the blind snackers like you that have allowed a climate of impotent naivety to flourish in a world built on false securities about the divisions between Man and Critter. They tricked, robbed, and assaulted me in broad daylight, Maryam! What's so "cute" about that? You're supplying the enemy, and what's worse, the friskiness you've observed and have brought about only leads to more squirrels!

I only speak so passionately because of what I’ve been through. I was once like the rest of you: Happy, safe… ignorant to the horrors of this world. But one day the veil of adorable cuteness was lifted, to reveal the hellish truth. It was October and I had been at CSUN for little more than a month. Still caught up in the whirlwind of delight that was to be felt in having a candy shop and a Burger King both a stone’s throw away from my classes, I went and jovially ordered my regular meal of chicken nuggets, fries, and a chocolate milkshake. I sat down at one of the small tables behind Manzanita, enjoying my food when the cutest little squirrel scurried over my way from the large trees on the grass across the walkway. At first it kept its distance staying on the ground behind a nearby bench which was separate from my table. Then, it hopped up onto the bench and looked at me for a bit. I was surprised that it was comfortable getting so close to me, but by no means was I alarmed or scared. After all, it was just a cute little squirrel who was probably more scared of me than I was of it (Oh, how wrong I was.) What it did next can only be described as the opening move in a sick mind game that ends with this squirrel (who has since become known as Lucifer) moving me into checkmate. It collapsed flat on its stomach and flattened itself with its legs spread out behind it on this bench which was near me. Having never seen a squirrel do this, the “Aw, isn’t that precious?” switch in my brain went off as I was equally enthralled with and pitying of its pose. While adorable, it looked like it was

 dehydrated or about to die the way it was just laying there.  Only now do I realize (that while books will say this is what squirrels do against cool surfaces to regulate their temperature when it’s hot) that this was not him fainting at all, but was in fact him getting into the same flattened, crawling spy-like position that Tom Cruise sports in Mission Impossible. Unable to resist the urge to capture this moment yet simultaneously not wanting to startle the squirrel (which I now know is beyond my power as only one man) I carefully reached into my pocket and withdrew my cell phone so I could snap a picture of it, all the while keeping my gaze trained on the squirrel who was a few feet away on the other bench. I looked down at my phone only for a couple seconds, however long it took me to press the camera button and adjust the exposure notch and when I looked back up to take the picture, the squirrel had vanished from his spot on the bench and was nowhere in either direction. Before I could even finish the mental sentence “Where the heck did he--?” Lucifer flies up at me from below my own table and lunges at me from my own lap knocking me backwards and off my seat! Because this was one of those tables where the seat is actually connected to the table as one piece, the bench did not fall back with me, so I was on my back having fallen on the ground with my legs tangled up in the seat still. Unable to immediately get up or chase after him, it was a simple matter for the hell spawn rodent to make off with my bag of Burger King… and my dignity. When I finally stood up, I arose to an empty table and incredulous laughter from onlookers eating lunch, left only with a chocolate shake and a newfound sense of purpose on this Earth. I would make him pay. 

For those of you who have yet to open your eyes to the war that has been waging for generations, just look at the CSUN enrollment posters around campus… Sure, they look harmless enough at first. A nice, wide picture of the Oviatt, students on the grass smiling and people going up and down the steps. But lurking in the periphery of this picture of bliss, looming like sentinels sending a subliminal message about who is really in charge on this campus... CSUN Squirrels!

For those of you who are also curious as to how a squirrel can flatten itself, Tom Cruise-style… here is some enlightenment not only into their unearthly powers of deception but as to just how much of a menace they are to society. 

Those are professional Major League Baseball players! If a single squirrel can knock them on their steroid-injected asses like that, what chance do the rest of us have?

I would take solace in the fact that this might have been a problem localized to my school, but unfortunately that squirrel from last week was just the beginning of Deborahs’ problems as I have it from a reliable source, that just as the grounds of CSUN have been overrun, the skies of UCSD are equally riddled with danger.

I advise you to heed this call to arms, lest you cower and take shelter enjoying what little you can in our last days on this Earth! Armageddon, thy name is Sciuridae…

Glorious Economics

As an Economics major, I would like to believe that my life, my actions, and my decision making are all governed by a rational mode of thought involving complex, yet naturally occurring processes of cost benefit analysis and an intrinsic motivation to efficiently maximize my utility.

Ideally, these attempts to achieve with efficiency are carried out on both a large scale and a small scale. So earlier this afternoon when I wanted to have a bowl of chocolate ice cream to combat the heat of the summer another principal concern of mine was how to acquire and prepare this ice cream efficiently, saving both time and resources. In a stroke of economic brilliance I endeavored to let the ice cream thaw for a short time and then simply tilt the carton and slide some into the bowl. 

While you may think that allowing the ice cream time to thaw would actually make this process take longer, the time it takes ice cream to thaw is in fact shorter than the duration of time it would have taken me to scoop or spoon frozen, hardened ice cream from the carton with the use of my schoolgirl forearms.

Another key concept one learns to appreciate from the study of Economics is the relationship between Supply and Demand as stated in terms of chocolate ice cream consumption in the following graph:

This shows an efficient relationship between the two curves where they meet at an equilibrium point, but in situations NOT such as this in which the quantity of ice cream supplied exceeds the quantity of ice cream which is demanded, there is a "surplus."

Surplus: Surprise! It's two scoops plus everything else!

However, there are many variables in economic situations such as this... and where many would see a surplus, I see an external benefit "a good which I consume but do not pay any price (any extra labor and time scooping) for." I can not wait to internalize this benefit...

In conclusion... 

Ice Cream + Economics – Upper Body Strength = A Whole Mess of Awesome.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to eat/drink my way up the Diminishing Marginal Utility curve.

Paper’s Thinner than Blood and Water

They say you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. First off, I’m adopted so I happen to know that this is a blatant lie, and even when you can’t choose your family, you CAN choose to not open the door when you see that it’s them knocking. For the past few weeks my Uncle Joel and my 5-year old cousin… Joel have been visiting from Alaska. Relatives are to my home what rock stars are to a hotel room: late hours, loud music, empty bottles (both beer and baby), and Transformers toys everywhere. The only difference is that every time rock stars step outside of their hotels tons of screaming girls show up to toss themselves at the band. Whenever my uncle and cousin leave, the only screaming woman who shows up is my mom yelling at me about how the house it so messy. Because yeah Mom, clearly the The Hulk  action figure which is missing an arm and covered in pop tarts belongs to me. Idiot. I hate pop tarts! Plus, everyone knows I keep all of my action figures in their packages.

Among the rest of the toys my cousin has left behind, there is also a black Cadillac Escalade. As someone who doesn’t really know car culture and usually thinks like a child himself, I could not understand why a 5-year old kid would want to play with a toy model of a car that actually exists. That seems so boring and unimaginative. When I was a kid, the cars and other vehicles I played with reflected what I thought was fun and were idealized representations of what I wanted to be: racecars, rocket ships, flying DeLoreans, and my personal favorite from Hot Wheels… the Hot Seat.

None of these were things I actually encountered on the street though. So whereas I had aspirations to be an astronaut or a time traveler, he has dreams of being a drug dea-- hip hop star. Now I realize this may seem somewhat judgmental of me, but I like the idea of a world where ill-fitting clothing is seen as problematic…

...as opposed to preferential.

Fun Fact: Despite the very uncharacteristically wing-like pose this man sports in this photo, nobody calls him chicken. 

Just so everyone knows the score, the guy who actually rolls up his ill-fitting sleeves not only has a self-fitting, self-drying jacket that talks like Stephen Freaking Hawking but he also drives a car which flies, is powered by recycled cans and trash, and time travels. I'll let you judge for yourself how gangsta the set of wheels these low riders are scratching their heads over is. Hint: Where they're going, they TOTALLY need roads.