Where I Used to Think Babies Came From

Like most people, when I was little I had no idea where babies came from. The question never concerned me much because, as an only child, I didn't come into contact with a whole lot of babies. My mom decided that churning out one crying meat lump was more than enough for her and never had a kid afterwards, so I didn't have any siblings whose origins I could ponder. That being said, I did devote some time to considering one of life's baser questions, and the theories I came up with were pretty solid (at least until they tried educating my 5th grade class about sex, and shattered my sanity by explaining, in gruesomely intimate detail, where babies actually come from). The theory had two slight variations.

Theory 1: Baby Trees

I was thoroughly convinced that babies grew on trees. Generally, babies only have hair on the top of their heads, and I reasoned that it was because this was the remains of their stems, which was very similar in construction to an apple stem. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I thought there was a baby farm. Little baby buds sprouted on tree stems, slowly growing until the baby became too fat and it fell to the ground. Migrant workers would presumably pick the babies before they fell, gathering them in bushels and sending them to be cleaned and sanitized before they were shipped out to the masses via delivery trucks. I think at this age, I was confusing babies with human trafficking. 

There also could have been baby vineyards. I liked to keep it open to interpretation.

Theory 2: Potato Babies

Very similar to the first theory, except that babies grew out of the ground instead of from a tree. Much like the leafy bits on a carrot, the babies' hair grew out for...well, I never really figured that out. Come to think of it, I still don't know why carrots have leafy tops. 

?

Anyway. Much like carrots, the farm hands would grip the babies' hair and use it to yank them out of the dirt, once again gathering them in bushels or baskets and sending them off for cleaning. 

The end.

Aww, he's got his mother's malformed noodle arms!

Videogames Make Me Violent

If asked, most of my really close friends could easily identify the quintessential videogame that practically defined their childhood. One guy may have fond memories of Super Mario 64, while another may experience waves of nostalgia at seeing old screenshots of Diddy Kong Racing. They could easily recount every shortcut, every glitch and all  the little tricks that permeated their respective game because, due to the amount of time they devoted to playing it during their younger years, it's practically become embedded in their DNA. I myself am no exception. When choosing the videogame that defined my childhood, I'm conflicted between Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In my opinion, they're both unforgettable and timeless classics that I would absolutely love to play through again. So imagine my surprise this past weekend when, through a series of unusual circumstances that I won't bother to regale you with, I ended up with my very own Nintendo 64 and a copy of Ocarina of Time.

Clear the way; shit's about to get real.

When I acquired the game, I was in the company of my friend Javier. As Javier was the only one out of the two of us who owned an N64, we quickly made our way to his house to play it. Bursting with excitement, I eagerly inserted the game and started the console. The N64 logo flashed for a second, then faded into the beloved Hyrulian landscape that I knew so well. The opening musical notes were concentrated beauty, burning through my thick layers of sarcasm and cynicism and reminding me of a time when the entire world was a brighter place.

SO MUCH CHILDHOOD

A bit of background information: Javier has 2 younger sisters, one of whom is 6 years old. The other sister's age is of no real significance because she's in middle school and, as we all know, every middle schooler's status as a real human being is temporarily revoked on the grounds that they've been scientifically proven to be the worst things in recently recorded history.

Don't look into its eyes, that's how they eat your soul.

Anyway. Javier and I had a nice set-up in his basement, in which the N64 was hooked up to a massive flat screen TV and I was comfortably situated in a nice little rocking chair. It was surreal because the TV's high-quality features only served to amplify the ugliness with which the game has aged. Javier's 6 year old sister (who, for no discernible reason, will be referred to as Doorknob for the rest of the article) had been throwing a fit and, at some point, ended up crossing in front of me. Unfortunately, Doorknob's foot got snagged on the wire of my controller. Suddenly, the Nintendo console came crashing to the ground. The AV cables became disconnected and, for a brief moment, I thought that Doorknob's carelessness had just wiped away the last hour of my gameplay. After recovering from my shell shock, I turned my gaze to the little girl who had come so close to destroying my game progress. Still pouting, she said "Johann should watch where he puts his wires."

Whether she was trying to be funny or not is irrelevant. The fact is, I have never been so close to hitting a 6 year old in my entire life. 

She interrupted my childhood. I ended hers.

At the time, the console had been sitting in a rather precarious position on the rocking foot rest when it was knocked down. With all the delicacy of handling a newborn, Javier and I gingerly moved it to the top of a much more secure table and resumed our gaming. The console came crashing to the floor again half an hour later when Javier's dad came in to vacuum the floor and carelessly knocked it off the table. By this point, I was absolutely paranoid and ready to eviscerate anybody who came within spitting distance of me and my game.

The next day, I took the N64 (Javier had given it to me) and my copy of Ocarina of Time and brought it all back to my house. They now both reside in my room as a monument to all the hours I sunk into it. It's been over 10 years since the last time I owned a Nintendo 64 and, despite all the time I spent playing it, I've never actually beaten Ocarina of Time. It is now my life goal to remedy that.

Basically, the first 7 years of my life can be summed up by an aging fantasy adventure game that I nearly killed a 6 year old over. Life well spent.

Idioms

I've always thought idiomatic English expressions were always a bit random. Sure, they usually make sense, with a few out-of-left-fielders, but for the most part they're relatively sane. For example, a shot in the dark is a random guess that you're making with very little to no prior knowledge. If someone is taking a shot in the dark, then they're making a haphazard guess about something completely outside their experience. This makes sense because, if you were to actually shoot a gun in a dark place, you could hit a puppy or a child, and then people would wonder why you're senselessly brandishing a firearm in a dark room full of cute things that really don't handle bullets very well. That actually doesn't do anything to prove why it makes sense. Moving on.

My wildly irresponsible guess work ended in disaster. For the love of God, don't turn on the lights.

As another example, shooting fish in a barrel is a relatively easy thing to do. Fish don't generally do much outside of water, and if they're trapped in a barrel, they are limited to twitching and the occasional gasp for breath. This makes it fairly easy for you and your gun-toting self to senselessly blow them to little fish chunks and back to whatever aquatic god(s) they believe in. So the phrase easy as shooting fish in a barrel makes sense because it's relating the ease of your current task with that of slaughtering Nemo and all of his friends and family. 

That gimpy fin isn't a birth defect, it's a God damn war wound.

The point is, I've always thought English idioms were a little odd. I usually wonder what must pass through other peoples' minds when they're unfamiliar with English and they hear some of our quaint little expressions for the first time. 

Until the other week, when I was Skyping with a friend of mine who lives in France. I had informed him that I had gotten a new guitar for Christmas, and he jokingly replied "ca dechire sa tante la cochone qui mange des frites le mardi!" 

When I saw the sentence for the first time, I got a little confused and asked him for a translation, because I didn't think I was reading it right. I awaited his reply, slowly trying to puzzle out the sentence. He replied "that's as cool as your aunt the whore who eats fries on Tuesdays."

It was at that moment that I decided American idioms really weren't that bad. And the French, just like in every other story they're ever involved in, proved without a doubt that they're irrevocably insane.

Marlin was horrified to see, on returning from his vacation, a slutty middle aged woman dining on all his friends and family in the form of fish fries while she used a darkened daycare center as a firing range to shoot children whom she had trapped in a barrel

I Hate English

English is simultaneously both a very efficient and woefully moronic language, and the more I learn about it the more conflicted I feel about it. We'll do this in 2 parts.

Part 1 - What's good about it: Efficiency

The efficiency of English is due in no small part to a little something called the Saxon genitive. Here's a small example: a kid named John has a bike. In French, if we were to express this bike in a phrase, it would be le velo de John, or "the bike of John." If we were to describe his bike, we would say something like le velo de John est un piece d'ordures, or "the bike of John is a piece of garbage." This sounds rather weird to my fellow native English speakers and I. Were we to describe his bike, we would simply refer to it as John's bike. That little 's at the end of John is used to denote his owner ship of the bike, and does a great deal to shorten phrases. The 's, or Saxon genitive, is an incredibly useful linguistic tool that is used to decrease the amount of time explaining something. While other languages have similar morphemes, most of them are expressed as a different conjugation of the word, whereas English speakers are fat and lazy and prefer to just tack a 's or ' on the end of everything (a simple ' would be used if the subject ends with an s, such as Francis' bike or Jesus' teachings). English has all sorts of little tricks like this that make it terrifically easy for speakers to express ideas in a clear, succinct and precise manner.

If you wish to express the phrase "the tank of Phil has turned into a terrifying bird of death," you might want to reassess your priorities and focus more on running away from the thing.

Part 2 - What's bad about it: Everything else

This poem pretty accurately illustrates why I don't like English. Because English lacks accents or any indicators of pronunciation, the way you pronounce words is based largely on completely arbitrary rules that will randomly get up and leave depending on what word you're using. We have nothing to indicate which syllable to emphasize, whether it's a hard or soft c, if a word ending with the suffix 'ain' is pronounced like curtain (sounds like kerten) or pertain (which actually sounds like it's spelled). A thousand different kinds of problems arise because whoever invented English decided to be a trendsetter and chose to omit the accents that were becoming all the rage with other languages. This was a terrible idea on their part.

This next problem is more of a personal irritant than anything else, but English is decidedly more difficult to rhyme than other Romance languages. Take Dante's Inferno, for example. Were one to read Inferno in its original Italian tongue, they would probably find that it contains a pretty consistent rhyme scheme. That's because just about every word rhymes with each other in Italian. However, when reading an English translation, the rhymes are infrequent and completely optional, because one would really have to stretch in order to express all of Dante's ideas while maintaining a rhyme. English' nature is that of a very blocky and efficient language, one that excels at expressing ideas and couldn't give less of a shit about artistic endeavors or foreigners who are unfortunate enough to try to pick it up as a second language. Hell, I think most English-speaking rappers should get an award for linguistic proficiency because they are seriously using one of the most ill-suited languages ever to convey complex ideas and tell a story, all while preserving a consistent rhyme.

Hauling around 3 and a half pounds of metal on his teeth can't possibly make his job any easier.

So yeah. I don't actually have a way to end this post...but here's a picture of Ralph Nader.

Yo.