As a recent grad who is virtually unemployed, depression creeps in on me a lot. That’s why my online presence has been lacking lately – it’s hard to get the motivation to write a blog entry when you feel like you want to die.

I know more than a few people who have advanced degrees and are working minimum wage, and we all hear that familiar refrain, that the poor “just need to work harder.” So whenever people ask me what I’m doing (especially older people), I feel the need to explain that I’m not apathetic, and if I weren’t either overqualified or under-experienced for every job I’ve found, I’d be working my ass off to repay those tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. I’d save up my money, maybe enough to put a down payment on a house twenty years down the line.

When you go to college, they say they’ll help you find a job come graduation. Nope. Once they have your money, the only communication they’ll have with you is to ask for more money. The career center at SAIC told me to update my LinkedIn profile, and that was all the advice they could come up with. The University of Iowa career center, on the other hand, won’t even return my phone calls. Sigh.

So the depression makes a lot of sense. It’s not so bad, though. I’m not always full of despair – sometimes that emotion is overtaken by blinding rage. For example: I was downtown a couple of months ago (I was actually delivering physical copies of my résumé because that’s the only way I get outside anymore) and overheard two middle-aged men complaining about how my generation is lazy, and one of them actually says: “Kids these days won’t buy houses because they’re too lazy to do all the yard work.” Wow. Really? It’s pretty ironic that these crusty old cranks are so out of touch that it doesn’t even occur to them that some of us can’t afford a car let alone an entire house, and then they sit at a bar, drinking cocktails at two in the afternoon, yelling about how all the damn young people are “overprivileged.”

It all makes my blood boil. It makes me want to spit. I need an ice cream.

I’m house sitting this weekend to fund my upcoming trip to Chicago. As a consequence, I’ve been watching television, and am shocked by how much more entertaining the commercials are compared to the actual shows. This is not to say the commercials are good, like the one that tries to sell Fiats by filming them in a series of horrifying crashes.

The commercial is called, “Immigration,” so the next time a redneck calls into C-Span to yell about putting marines with semi-automatics on the border, I fully expect him to cite the Fiat commercial in his rant.

I did, however, thoroughly enjoy watching Sofia Vergara subject herself to social humiliation for a mediocre soft drink with fake sugar.

One of my favorites, though, is a commercial for a fashion school that opens with the solemn appeal: “The world needs fashion designers.” Because there are countries in Africa where there are no fashion designers. That is true plight.

I also really like the shows on MTV. Not the shows themselves, just the commercials for the shows. I don’t know who any of the people are, or what the context is, or why they’re screaming right now, but their unexplained outbursts are delightful.

I guess this means that I, myself, have become culturally irrelevant. I’m okay with that. I’ll just hang out here in my sweatpants reading I, Claudius (which is an amazing book, by the way). Don’t cry for me. My last remaining connection to popular society died long ago.

Also, someone could make millions of dollars launching a show that just features strange and baffling commercials. Has that been done? It has? Where was I? Probably going to grad school or something. God, I’m an idiot.

In no particular order, these are a sampling of actual terms some anonymous folks have entered into search engines, which subsequently led them to my blog. I realize that posting these terms will probably just make the problem worse, but some of them are just too hilarious (read: baffling) not to share.

1. Corn pooh
2. Ugly distracting buildings photography
3. Cat vomit warning sign [ed note: if it helps, in my experience, cats vomit more often than not]
4. Naked girl in snow
5. Smoke city fly away
6. Would you like a copy of my butt?
7. I’m so happy I could shit
8. Llama facial expression chart
9. Bijou penis
10. Naked dancing Nazi
11. Vicky sucks salty milk
12. How do u know if ur ribs broken
13. Under the same moon kid
14. Dance toples [sigh]
15. Eternal anal canal
16. Ham ful
17. Target lady
18. Cormac figgis, what now? north men, south men? nury [Dude, maybe you should google, "how to use search engines"]
19. Kevin and Hobbes sex [SIGH]
20. Festival of the steel phallus [No idea what that one is, but it sounds awesome]
21. Naked girls and hedgehogs
22. Movies with guys from the Renaissance being chased by topless women
23. Dried out crabs
24. No dice grandma
25. Creepy toilets
26. Masterbat [an amateur bat that's gone professional]
27. Was St. Paul ugly [inquiring minds want to know]
28. Does the sun always come out on Saturdays because of our lady [...yes?]
29. Bad things to do while naked [cooking bacon comes to mind]
30. ulrich et son overbike [I typed this into Google Translate, and apparently it means, "Ulrich et son over bike"]

To be fair, some of these kids may very well smell like colon.

I’ve been watching some old episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia lately (yarrrr!) and realized recently that I don’t actually have the hots for Charlie Day, as I’d previously thought. Maybe it’s the stress of the job search, maybe it’s the pressure of perfecting the thesis, the obsessive redrafting and revision, maybe I have finally lost my mind, but I must admit to myself and to the world that the man with whom I’m smitten is not Charlie Day, but Charlie Kelly. Yes, that is Day’s character on the show. Yes, he is a completely dysfunctional manchild – no, not even a manchild. He is beyond damaged. He lives in filth, he huffs glue, he has unpredictable fits of screaming rage, but what really gets me, right in the pelvis, is that he is functionally illiterate.

Who wouldn't want to be all up in that?

This is it. I have come full circle from high school grammar nazi to fangirl for the feebleminded. I’m like the kid whose mother spanked him when he was naughty and now he pays a dominatrix to step on his balls.

I wanted to understand this counterintuitive turn, but I wasn’t willing to put too much effort into it, so I turned to Google. Articles about the psychology of sexual taboos are disappointingly sparse – though I did find a few interesting (read: creepy) things. For example, Jess McNally, a contributer at Wired Science, wrote an article about incest taboos that included a quote from psychologist R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois: “People appear to be drawn to others who resemble their kin or themselves.” I am enamored with the title of this article: “You Are Sexually Attracted to Your Parents, and Yourself.” Hooray for oversimplification, alarmist language, and an unnecessary comma ALL IN THE SAME TITLE! As if anyone reading Wired Science would notice.

Pubic schools helps me learnding.

So… is my ideal mate a dirty idiot? If so, what does this say about me? Maybe Charlie is who I am, deep down – who I wish I could be. When a barista screws up my drink order, I smile politely, say, ‘Excuse me,’ and let it go with a shrug, but what I really want to do is flail my limbs and scream about government conspiracies to limit my intake of stimulants.

Perhaps I just have to blow off some steam. I think the best course of action at this point is to follow the fantasy. All I have to do now is find the diviest bar in town; a place where someone will try to sell you a fake Swatch and a baggie of rock salt that they insist is ‘the good shit.’ If anyone out in there in Binary Land knows of a bar in Chicago where no sane human being would ever go, please let me know in the comments. I’ll be scouring Yelp.

Tonight, the class I t.a. is turning in their papers. I’ve never graded papers before, so I have no idea how long it’s going to take or how frustrating it’s going to be, but my supervisor keeps reminding me, “Now, remember… just try to stay calm.”

In class last week (which is on Latin American and Caribbean Cinema), we watched a Chilean film from the early 1970s called, “El Topo.” It is an allegorical, surrealist western heavy with magical realism, symbolism, and more blood than all of Tarantino’s movies combined. One of the densest pieces of cinematic work I’ve ever seen, I hope to god no one tried to write a paper on it in a week. If you can sit through it, it’s goddamn amazing. Oddly, some of the bloodiest scenes are the most beautiful – there’s so much of it. The director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, uses it like a painter would.

Also, if you can sit through it, here are some of the things you’ll see: A sheep jesus, gender-bending religious icons, fifty or so dead bunnies, a street-corner death match, a few pairs of tits, one tiny penis, Russian roulette in a small-town church, a bird lady, a self-immolating busker, and the most enthusiastic actor/director/writer (Jodorosky’s a cult renaissance man) I’ve ever seen. He looks like his head is going to explode the entire time.

Yes, that's him.

This is, too.

I have a sore throat and a cough. I try to make myself feel better about it by imagining that there’s a nest of baby hedgehogs living in my trachea.

I picked that post title because it’ll publish to my Twitter feed, and I know my friends well enough to know they’ll click on that link. I didn’t do this just for frivolous attention (though I do love frivolous attention). There are two reasons.

The first is that in less than five hours, it will already be February. The date of graduation glides steadily, ominously closer. I have no job lined up for May, which is tragic because I am a model employee. Together, we can bring me into the working world. For humanity.

The second reason: I totally went ahead and made up rules for a drinking game you and your buddies can play next time you go to a coffee shop/independent book store/someone’s living room to indulge your literary sensibilities. You’re welcome. That’s called “taking initiative.” Employers love that.