The Top 5 Species of CTECs

Welp, it’s getting to be about that time again. Just as you start to cram for finals and mentally prepare yourself for a few all-nighters, Northwestern decides to saddle you with your quarterly Course and Teacher Evaluations. (The second C stands for “Cooch”, or so my roommate tells me). So to use as you please, here are your top five formats to help you get through CTECs so you can start worrying about things that matter, like New Years plans.

5. The Pshhh

The Student’s Guide to Partying with Their Respective School: The School of Communication

So, it’s Saturday night. You’ve run out of tears to use as lubricant for masturbation things to watch on Netflix and you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m a College Student with Interests! Let me hit up some snazzy School of Communications kids for a wild night of debauchery.” Well, College Student with Interests, you’re not alone. It can be oodles of fun to party with The School of Communications! But, it can also turn into one clusterfuck of horrible decisions if you don’t recognize the warning signs. Here are some tips to get you through the night:

This is the future, and it is sexy: Disney Buys LucasFilm

Three of my top five worst sexual nightmares are included in this image.

So by now you’ve probably heard of the ensuing deal in which Disney is buying out LucasFilm and the rights to the greatest sci-fi franchise ever (come at me, Trekkies) for $4 billion. You likely found out on Facebook, where somebody posted a status being all “I FEELZ A GREAT DISTURBANCE IN THE FILMS L0LZ!” but don’t be fooled. This is a good thing. Hell, it’s great.

Regardless of what RTVF majors have to tell you, Disney is not the worst thing to happen to films since Howard the Duck. They have created numerous masterpieces of the moving image, and the succession of Jewish chief executives recently more than makes up for the fact that Walt was kind of a raging, yet deservedly cherished, asshole. Not to be on their dick or anything, but Disney has also used their acquisitions incredibly well. Their most recent CEO, Bob Iger[1], has channeled his inner JD Rockefeller and went on a shopping spree of potential competitors, buying up Pixar in 2006 and Marvel in 2009.  With these franchises, he has made: Up, WALL-E, Toy Story 3[2], the new kickass X-Men, the new attractive-people Spiderman, and the superb eyefuck that was the Avengers. Also, the people who directed Disney pictures and would probably be picked to do Star Wars Episode VII are like the pantheon of nerd heroes. You’ve got Brad Bird, Gore Verbinski, Brett Ratner, JJ Abrams, and freaking Joss Whedon. HOW AWESOME WOULD A JOSS WHEDON STAR WARS BE.

Oh yeah, this “article” is about Star Wars. This brings me to my next point: George Lucas is an aging hack. I know this has become a cliché among the fandom, but that doesn’t make it in any less true. He has his defenders, who will say that since he made this great story in the first place, he can make any movies he wants and should still be loved. Yeah, that’s like saying that Mitt Romney is undeserving of critique because he was a pretty good governor of Massachusetts. But according to soothsayer Nate Silver, Obama’s up by 20 in the state, and George Lucas left a huge blemish on my childhood with Jar-Jar and rat-tails and “This is so wizard, Ani!” He had numerous chances to do well with the Star Wars franchise after the 80s, and he failed in unique ways every time. I say, good riddance. Change is good, and Disney will do some sensational things with the franchise.

Our mousy overlords will probably rely on the immense Expanded Universe for the prophesized Episode VII, but they will come up with newer characters than the original trilogy. Han, Leia, and Luke are all WAY too iconic to replace, and the old actors simply can’t do them. Even though Princess Leia would have been the first Disney Princess to be elected to the Senate[3], Carrie Fisher is simply too coked out to reprise the role. Harrison Ford is only concerned with cashing his Medicare checks and saving people with his helicopter, and Mark Hamill would love to come back, but he reeks of desperation and cheap schnapps[4].  So this means the series will maybe take place in the Knights of the Old Republic Universe[5], but it will probably actually deal with the Thrawn trilogy which occurs after the original series, and shoehorn in Jacen and Jaina Solo, Han and Leia’s spunky twin kids. This will be sweet, since it can be political, endearing, deal with simple moral issues, and still have probably the coolest antagonist in the series, Grand Admiral Thrawn. This is an alien who succeeds in an institutionally racist organization because he is dispassionate, ridiculous witty, and learns from the enemy by studying their art. This is as close to a Bond villain as the Star Wars movies will get, complete with special death-dealing gadgets. Also, (old) Luke will have a romantic interest who’s not his sister[6], which is good. I’ll leave on that, with the glorious image of Scarlett Johansson as Mara Jade. This is the future, and it is sexy.

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[1] Who married some Catholic shiksa, this is the son I raised…

[2] That was us, remember!?! Except you can totally bring your toys here, just make them face the wall when you’re smanging someone

[3] Sorry Kirsten Gillibrand!

[4] Did you know he voiced Fire Lord Ozai? Do you think he has Zuko’s honor in his trailer?

[5] With the aptly named HK-47, C-3PO’s more badass and snarky cousin

[6] What is it with blonds and incest, amirite?

Things That Suck: Coffee

Coffee: Sir Twattingworth's anti-heroin

Fuck coffee.

I feel like a stranger in a strange land. Not because I’m the protagonist of a Robert Heinlein novel, but because I don’t drink caffeine. I’ll pause a moment to let your mouths fall agape as you shout “WAIT WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTT.”

True story. I’ve never drunk coffee in my life. Okay, wait, there was that one time when I was a curious young four-year-old and my dad let me taste his coffee and I was so horrified that I jerked violently and spilled it all over my Charlie Brown pajama pants. But other than that I have usually abstained from the black stuff. And from Red Bull. And Monster, too. Fuck that shit.

Final exams may be over at Northwestern, but I know there are a bunch of other poor unfortunate souls out there who still have to cram months’ worth of learning into their skulls before exams. As a result they may, in all their mortal vulnerability, be tempted to turn to the evil that is caffeinated beverages. I am here to hold up my hand and say the same thing I would say to anyone planning to read Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666: Don’t do it!

My body is like this temple, in that it is a temple.

That’s a picture of a temple. I included it in this article because, like the Baha’i Temple, my body is a temple. When I stay up till four in the morning writing a six page essay about what Henry David Thoreau would think about the Weather Underground, I do so simply on the sober strength of my own fucking willpower. I understand that if you start thinking about this metaphor, some obvious contradictions might jump out at you like the T-Rex face in my old dinosaur pop-up book. But I’ll remind you that most temples have alcohol in them. You can put wine into a temple without damaging it, and Christians have done so for ages. But something tells me that if you shot lightning at a temple to “give it energy,” you would really just blow up the temple. That’s my visualization of inserting caffeine into a human system.

Shoot a temple with lightning and it will never be intact again. Give me Red Bull and I will never sleep again. I have enough trouble as it is. The first time I stayed up past midnight on a day that wasn’t New Year’s Eve, it was all over for me. Once I crossed that threshold, it became impossible for me to ever fall asleep before midnight again. At night my productivity goes up, and I suddenly remember all the Grantland articles I wanted to read and all the episodes of Dragon Ball Z that I wanted to watch that I somehow forgot about during the daytime. Before I know it, it’s 2:30 and somehow the knowledge that I have to telemarket for three hours the next day doesn’t stop me from looking up YouTube clips of old Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches until my eyelids finally take executive action and shut themselves, only to be jarred awake hours later by an alarm just in time to swallow a mouthful of Cocoa Puffs before huffing it to my French class with all possible speed. No rest for the weary, and I am nothing if not weary.

I am not alone here. I have friends who drink coffee like it’s water. As a result, they go to bed at midnight and wake up at six every day. They think they’re fully functioning modern human beings. I think they’re more like zombie robots in danger of falling apart at any second. I don’t want to see that happen, so I’m finally coming out against the horrid black stuff.

She is hot. Coffee is awful.

That’s a subjective take on the general suckiness of caffeinated drinks, so I’ll throw in an objective approach as well. I feel like I shouldn’t have to mention this, since it is as inherently obvious as the blueness of the sky or the hotness of Kate Middleton, but caffeine is gross. Coffee is gross, and everybody secretly knows it. I’m not just talking about the people who pour mounds of sugar into their mugs to deaden their sorry souls to the fact that they’re drinking liquid poop. I’m talking about everyone. We all seem to have agreed to forget that coffee is disgusting, the way we all agreed to forget that George W. Bush was appointed President by the Supreme Court.

And not just coffee. Red Bull is gross too. I admit, I’ve tasted it a few times, and I’d sooner hang out with Michele Bachmann for a few hours than repeat the experience. But even if I hadn’t been capable of offering this personal testimony of awfulness, surely the list of ingredients – which looks like something Walter White might cook up in his basement to pay for chemotherapy – would probably be convincing enough. 4Loko actually tastes kind of good, but it’s illegal, so that’s a given. I won’t even talk about 5 hour energy drinks until they make better commercials. If my RTVF roommate could make a better commercial than the one you put on TV, you probably don’t deserve to exist, let alone be talked about in the valuable Internet real estate that is this website.

Would you rather drink coffee or eat poop?

I realize that this anti-caffeine argument is difficult. Sometimes the AP curriculum makes it seem as if the College Board just assumes that every AP student is injecting caffeine into their eyeballs (Either that or no one told them about the existence of time-consuming extracurriculars, but either way they’re a bunch of douchemuffins who gave me too much homework in high school). Then there’s the necessity of being a hipster in order to have any social currency in this hyper media-literate world. That means you need to read Pitchfork regularly and wear clothes originally designed for girls Europeans, but it mainly means that you need to spend a majority of your time in darkly lit indie cafes sipping black energy so you’re wide awake and prepared to unleash a shitstorm of ironic Tweets the next time Bon Iver releases a workout video. Caffeine has been so prevalent in our society for so long that we just accept it as a given fact of life. But the fact that people in the Eighties were accustomed to the idea of nuclear Armageddon didn’t make it okay. Nuclear holocaust is never okay, and neither is coffee, and don’t let Henry Kissinger tell you any different.

Society seems to have ordered its priorities like this:
1. Work
2. Sleep

But that is so, so wrong. Our society has forgotten the value of sleep. Let me tell you, there was one Saturday earlier this quarter when I slept until 3 pm. It was the greatest day of my life. We all need sleep to recuperate from the horrid heinousness of everyday life, and coffee prevents that. It sucks. Finals suck. Life sucks too. But you just need to get over it. Do it all natural or not at all, that’s my motto. Sleep well, my friends.

(And for those of you wondering about the fate of my aforementioned Charlie Brown pajama pants: They did not survive their encounter with coffee, and were promptly retired to the dustbin of history. The world is a worse place for it).