It's Official.

USC is shipping me off to Cuba in May. I hope they let me in.

What's So Funny About Depression-Era Institutional Pedophilia?

We're playing a competitve simulation game in Marketing class, and I have twice this week completely and unilaterally overhauled our group's strategy. We went from 36th place to 3rd place, and still fear I may be deposed as group leader (although that fear is based on absolutely nothing). School's weird like that.

It's disturbing to the point of amusement (well... almost) that people in places of political prominence like George Allen and this guy can launch themselves over the handlebars and people are still convinced that a Freudian slip from the eternally idiotic John Kerry can actually hamper the Democrats' bid to reclaim Congress. I'm sure if we looked at video footage of that Kerry speech, you'd see a disguised Karl Rove lurking behind stage with whiteout and a sharpee.

The OC is done. Details (in the form of 24 more poorly-written episodes) to follow.

Even after a reported 18 gajillion youtube streams of Ok Go's treadmill performance on the MTV whatever awards, they've still only shipped a paltry 230,000 records. Viral marketing is an urban myth.

If you hang around the USC business school enough, you'll start to wonder why you overhear "what's your vertical?" throughout the halls. I'm not a particularly athletic person, so I can't say I'd be comforted by people being so concerned with my vertical leap, but this buzzword replacement for "major" is sort of a silly concept. Instead of "majoring in" something, you are "aligned to" your vertical. People actually talk this way. Hi, I'm Kevin, and I'm aligned to the Entreprenuership, Small Business, General Management and Nonprofit vertical.

Gawker's "Great Moments in Journalism" feature has been somewhat enjoyable recently. I still have trouble remembering the site exists, however, so I occasionally have to mention it here. This blog is here for me, not you.

I'm considering just starting to lie a lot on here. Thoughts?

Suck Failure

USC lost their first regular season football game in something like 48 years today... to Oregon State no less. I love it.

Damaged Goods

Education is the only good for which people will pay top dollar and refuse delivery.

My economics professor threw in this aside to a lecture on whoknowswhat last month, and it has stuck with me more than any other topic from that class. I guess I just illustrated his point.

I know people can get stressed out by minimal things, but hearing that there are students in our school blowing rails in the parking garage before class because they just can't handle the socratic method makes me chuckle. School isn't hard, and class is definitely not hard. This holds especially true for a department that requires teachers to curve grades up to an absurd degree. People spend far too much time confusing hard with time consuming and misallocate their stress; I just wish it weren't so contagious. I'd much prefer to reserve my stress levels for things like traffic, bad grammar and the obnoxiously high price of Morningstar Farms products, not largely intuitive Marketing assignments or -- even worse -- coordinating various school spirit-related activites. Please.

I'm quite amazed by how much the 30-40 hours a week I spend on campus right now exceeds the three hours a week I spent on campus in my final semester at Virginia Tech (by 27 to 37 hours?). I'd skip entire weeks of class in undergrad. Actually, my perceived work ethic is probably still in the bottom 10% because the business school is rife with ass-kissers and overachievers, so I guess nothing's really changed. In fact, you can see from the picture to the right that one such overachiever arranged for our entire class to wear the same shirt to our first exam, and you can further notice that I clearly (excuse the upcoming cliché) didn't give a shit.

Eighteen months from now, we'll all get the same 8.5"x11" sheet of paper with the USC president's signature on it. The only difference is that I plan to accomplish this without cannibalizing my normal daily life of nothing in particular.

Maybe I should just write a manifesto for marginally motivated pseudo-academics. People love books justifying their less than perfect existence.

How To Make School Seem More Thrilling: Volume 1

Show up for your first day of class having bought none of the required textbooks.

Holding All Other Variables Constant

I've spent the last week sleeping on an entirely too confusing schedule for my body to comprehend. I wake up at 6am every day, alarm or no, and after my few hours at school, I return to the sanctuary of my bed for another, oh, six or seven hours. With the completion of my statistics exam this morning, my first quarter of graduate school is officially over. I attended the post-exam reception, featuring a wine tasting with our Microeconomics professor, for about fifteen minutes, before taking off. The emotional high of finishing the exam an hour before 98% of the other 220 students in our class kept me moving in the direction of the parking garage so I could get another afternoon's worth of rest. Plus, the wine sucked.

After an incredibly liberating nap, I woke up just in time to stroll down to the Key Club (we'll ignore the return trip I made to the house because my roommate misplaced his wallet) to see the Riverboat Gamblers, who until a week ago I never would have thought about going to see live. Volcom has a reputation as a label for putting out utterly terrible records, so that stigma remained with the Gamblers when I started to hear their name in the press, even after I read that they put on the best performance of anyone at this year's SxSW festival. I'd just like to personally thank everyone that steered me back towards the band. The Gamblers' live show has the urgency of a hardcore show and the fun factor of a skate punk show. There are enough singalongs to keep the songs tenaciously stuck in your head for weeks, and the singer's distaste for remaining on stage reminded me of the first time I saw Death By Stereo (in front of a crowd of, oh, twleve people at a cafe in College Park, MD about six years ago). Many thanks go out to Mike Cubillos at Earshot Media for the free beers.

The final paragraph of this entry has been removed because I'm not ready to offend people here... yet. It concerned a record label I used to shame on the internet quite regularly.