Category: Rees’ Pieces

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Rees’ Pieces: Poor Planning?

Ben Rees
Columnist 

I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do wholeheartedly believe in a good plan. I respect well-thought-out endeavors, and I truly relish when someone throws a bit of humor into the mix. This sounds vague, but in every good plan, there should be something funny. For example, on a main drag right by my house, there are three businesses built from right to left as follows: St. [insert saint name here]’s Animal Hospital, Burger King and a discount fur mart. Let that sink in. Sick/dying animals, sub-par meat and a discount fur mart. Whoever in the city offices let that combo happen deserves a bottle of wine and a chocolate cigar. There is no way that this ordering is an accident, and I can prove that my strange town is not the only place where hilarious establishments remain incognito.

Look around campus. There are plenty of areas that are too strange to be accidents. Take a gander at President Bravman’s home. It is a beautiful piece of property that is exceedingly well maintained, but when I look at it, I seem to remember the importance of the phrase “location, location, locomotion.” The train that runs right behind it goes no faster than three miles per hour, which is clearly justification for its aggressive horn sounding.

We all know that the statue in front of Vedder looks like a penis. Everyone sees it, and everyone should be over it; however, someone needs to explain to me why administration put this phallic structure in front of a dorm. Living in Smith as a sophomore, all I heard most nights were entire halls walking back from registers at 10:30 p.m., giggling about the huge rock member in front of their building. If I haven’t yet proven to you that upperclassmen are far more capable of being mature around something like a large, onyx penis, then you must be hardheaded.

The Christy Mathewson gates are hugely sentimental, and they clearly have a place in the history of this campus. That being said, what are they keeping out? Isn’t the purpose of gates, to close something off? This is the first set I have seen that isn’t even connected to a wall. I know that it means a lot to walk through the gates, but isn’t that phenomenon somewhat stifled by my ability to simply stroll around them?

Somebody please explain the abdominal alcove in the gym to me. I’m not much of a frequent exerciser, but on the rare occasions I drag myself to the Krebs Family Fitness Center, I have trouble comprehending the area dedicated to bettering my core. They gave us the Harry Potter cupboard under the stairs and a foul set of gym mats for an exercise that everybody wants to do before they saunter home in their sweaty Greek crewneck t-shirts.

Before my position as a columnist is revoked, I just want to reiterate my message: look around for once. If, while walking outside, you take the time to objectively gaze at things, you will undoubtedly notice happenings and structures that were once foreign to you.  There are some really funny things going on in the world and trust me, a huge stone phallus and some disjointed gates are hardly the cream of the crop.

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Arts & Life Columns Humor Rees' Pieces

Rees’ Pieces

Ben Rees

Writer

Column History

When published in a history book, an individual is immediately lauded for his or her accomplishments while other vices he or she may have had are pushed aside. History has extremely selective hearing and, if you don’t believe me, I encourage you to be imaginative for the next 500 words and humor me–that’s right, humor me.

Let us start early with the masterful and innovative thinker, Socrates. He examined and tested the minds of men, and his methodology for questioning the general populace made him one of the most famous philosophers to date. Yet, what if we take him out of the limelight? Socrates was an older gentleman who, while walking around in a toga (which wasn’t weird then), approached unsuspecting people and bombarded them with questions.  He would hold court with the people of Athens, and was put to death for essentially being annoying or disavowing the gods; I can’t remember which. His sentence of corrupting the Athenians sounds grandiose now, but maybe, just maybe, Socrates was simply a roving wise guy who stepped on a few too many intellectual toes.

Noah Webster, the man who compiled the first American dictionary, must have been a huge bother. How frustrating is it when friends correct your speaking in a casual setting? Can you imagine having coffee with the guy who generated today’s standardized dictionary? He must have driven people up the wall with his nonstop conquest for proper language. Besides, anyone whose life goal is to compile and define an extensive collection of words must have been seriously anal (go ahead and look that one up).

I can imagine nothing worse than living with Ludwig van Beethoven. His renown is wholly justified; he is one of the most amazing musicians to have ever lived, and his works almost always sound great. I say almost always because in the unfortunate situation that he was a roommate of yours, his deafness would probably have impeded your sleeping. If a composer cannot hear how loud he is playing, then I strongly doubt he would have heard your attempts of asking him to kindly turn the harpsichord down.

Bill Gates was too smart for Harvard. He got bored there, so decided to do what many kids do–he moved into his parents’ house. Now, as glamorous as this sounds, Gates didn’t exactly sit around watching “Full House” reruns; he and his good buddy Paul Allen created Microsoft, which is the reason Gates is worth $66 billion. But, before all this success, Gates was just one of those kids who was too cool for playing Monopoly like the rest of us. Instead, he had to form a multi-billion dollar technological monopoly and make the rest of the world feel like losers for staying in school.

Everyone knows a kid who thinks he has a great idea and drops out of school, but we all sleep well at night because we believe that he will fail. But Gates and the others I have mentioned all succeeded at a massive rate because they had talent–talent and the ability to overcome anything that stood in their way. Most of us don’t have this talent, so, unfortunately, we have to control our quirks, because I know that in my case, I can’t justify my annoying habits with $66 billion or statues of myself.

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Arts & Life Rees' Pieces

Rees’ Pieces: Pets and their Owners

Ben Rees
Writer

Animals are not people. They do have rights, and no animal should be treated poorly; however, these rights are animal rights, not people rights. If I cannot pee on 6th Street without getting a ticket, animals should not be able to sit at the table. I know there is no rule that says dogs must abide by an established canine code of conduct, and luckily, most people who own pets are wholly reasonable and keep their dog’s food in the dog bowl instead of in bone china (go figure). This being said, some strange people interact with their animals in a very creepy and inappropriate manner.

I wasn’t joking earlier; I know people whose dogs sit at the dinner table with them. Because dogs physically can’t sit at the table, and under my chair is ever so lonely, they go above and beyond their call of duty as owners and actually sit their dogs on the table. This isn’t right. I don’t care how many times cleaner a dog’s mouth is than a human’s, if I bathed by licking myself, I don’t think I would be allowed anywhere near the house, much less on the dinner table. When I asked this eccentric couple why their beloved Jeremy sat on the table (note the creepy human name), they told me it was too cold for him on the floor. Now, I’m no evolutionary biologist, nor a veterinarian, but I can bet that the reason animals have fur is because it keeps them warm, especially when they sit on the floor.

In addition, as much as I enjoy providing a pooch with a good ear rub, I just plain don’t like when animals follow me around. When I walk out of my bedroom at eight in the morning, I don’t want there to be a furry bridge troll at my doorway who won’t let me through until I throw a ball down the hall.

Pets are not children, nor will they ever be a suitable indicator for whether a couple is capable of having an baby. They are not the same thing, and just because you can walk a dog every day doesn’t mean you can push a stroller full of Furbees while you breast-feed.

The moral of this column is as follows: people who treat their animals like people are exceedingly creepy. Having a conversation with your dog doesn’t stimulate its intellectual capacities, especially when it’s scooting around on the living room rug. The only thing worse than talking to your dog is talking to your cat. At least your dog is staring at you while you talk; cats are essentially Slinkies with fur. Talking to your cat is only a half step up from talking to yourself, and we all know where you end up after years of doing that.

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Arts & Life Rees' Pieces

Rees’ Pieces: May You Have a Short and Low Budget Life

Ben Rees
Writer

I was seriously disturbed after seeing the somewhat recent movie “Chernobyl Diaries,” or rather, the trailer (I’m sure you don’t walk away with much more after seeing the whole thing). It wasn’t the mutated goblin-people that got to me, nor was it the blood and gore. Instead, what truly scared me was the realization that people have a strange fixation, no, obsession with death. This morose obsession does not revolve around the consistent, inescapable encroachment of death; rather, it is fueled by our sick desire to not only see, but also comprehend all of the horrendous ways a human body can be destroyed. The simple Braveheart-esque sword plunge has lost its entertainment factor and now is being replaced by things like putting someone’s limbs in an automatic pencil sharpener, fueled by an electric current from a 1987 Honda battery into his unsuspecting nipples.

According to Spike TV’s last chance at any sort of ratings, there are “1000 Ways to Die.”  Why do we need to know all the obscure ways that our heads can possibly be smashed? It’s because we are constantly undergoing a kind of desensitization. Remember “ER?” The show ran from 1994-2009, making it a program that effectively spanned the equivalent of a millennium in the special effects galaxy. Even when blood looked like nothing more than barbeque sauce, in the early 90s, people grimaced and cringed. Even a few years ago, during the Mel Gibson “sugar-tits” era, “The Passion of the Christ” was thought to be the most graphic thing on the big screen. Since then, we have greatly surpassed anything that was thought up by “Mad Max.”

What happened? Why do we need to see horrible things happen to unsuspecting, innocent people? In these movies, the person who usually gets caught in a paper shredder isn’t even a bad individual. We’ve moved passed karma and have become fans of indiscriminate robo-shark attacks.

I’ll tell you what happened. We are bored. As people, we’ve become so accustomed to immediate gratification that we no longer care about what happens between the start of the movie and when the characters are killed off. We’ve written off all engagement in plot, and all we want to see is when the mutant bats eat someone’s eyes out. The best proof of this transformation I can give is this: when any group of people get together to watch the Oscars, absolutely nobody there has seen even half of the nominated films. I don’t just mean the obscure silent ones from New Guinea, but even the pictures that have a good deal of cinematic quality were unseen, which apparently nobody wanted to because it was over two hours long and didn’t show Channing Tatum’s testicles in 3D.

I don’t mean to accuse these low budget films of being total wastes of space and time, but please do yourselves and the greater American populace a favor: one time this year, just once, go and see a quality movie with a deep plot line. You’ll feel good about yourself and maybe, just maybe, you’ll enjoy a movie without a disemboweling scene.

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Arts & Life Columns Rees' Pieces

Rees’ Pieces

Ben Rees

Columnist

Ben Rees

Hobbies

Taking up a hobby isn’t easy. You need to find something you enjoy, which is far harder to do than most would believe. I didn’t wake up one morning knowing I would enjoy writing things to make people laugh; I was simply told enough times that I wasn’t funny and I knew it was my calling. With that emotional nugget on the table, I will politely remind everyone that hobbies aren’t simply frivolous activities. Hobbies require preparation and equipment.

Whether you take up horseback riding, hot air ballooning, archery or card tricks, no skill comes with ease–especially for me. Natural talent is not something I possess in most areas, so if I am going to develop a hobby, it takes serious commitment. Hopefully my failures will be your guiding lights as I recall my past shortcomings for the benefit of my readers.

I wanted to play piano for the longest time, so I finally convinced my dad to buy me an instructional book. I then purchased what all the piano greats had: a marble bust of Mozart. It sat right there above me as I plunked away at “Hot Cross Buns.”

After my piano phase and the release of Chingy’s “Holidae Inn,” I took up rapping. I would put instrumental versions of hit songs on my computer and pretend to be emotionally charged and talented. To go along with this, I, again, purchased what all hip-hop greats had: a marble bust of Dr. Dre. He sat on my desk with his immaculately carved Compton hat while I busted a rhyme.

In eighth grade, I took up fashion. I ditched all my Gap Kids polo shirts for some brand new And1 graphic tees, cargo shorts and Phat Farm shoes. I looked awesome.

Twelfth grade brought along my passion for weight lifting. I drank a nice big protein smoothie (or is it shake?) and headed into the school gym. I was tearing up the elliptical and could have won the gold medal in knee push-ups, but my enthusiasm and spirits were squashed once I saw other kids doing really intense things like weights.

Since college has started, I’ve gotten into investment banking. Due to the recent market climb, I have been pouring money into IRA’s and short-term startup IPO’s. I’m banking on the chances of a network effect influencing the arbitrage pricing theory, and my mom tells me you’re supposed to buy low and sell high. If I’m not mistaken, my financial folio will at least double in value due to the sky-high interest rates and the upcoming fiscal cliff.  That all sounds right, right?

Needless to say, hobbies take time, energy and usually money to develop. Hopefully everyone can learn from my mistakes and understand that unless you have a knack for something or a serious drive, you should probably save your money and not pretend that you’re good at everything. It always ends poorly.

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Arts & Life Columns Rees' Pieces

Rees’ Pieces

Ben Rees
Columnist

Since graduation, we have a new, fresh and generally unemployed senior class walking the halls of the University. Unfortunately, it is time for all these rapidly aging adults to find some sort of occupation. Different jobs demand different qualifications, but all of them require an interview.

For many, interviews are very stressful. You have 30 minutes or less to explain how great you are or, if you’re not great, to lie about yourself. Should you be serious or should you be funny? Do you go Windsor or half-Windsor? Is your skirt too short? Is it too early in the season to wear white? Fear not seniors, in a few short minutes you will know exactly what to do, and more importantly, how to act in a job interview.

First and foremost, dress appropriately. Unfortunately for all of you, Sperry’s are not dress shoes; they are boat shoes. Unless you’re interviewing for Prestige International, this won’t fly. Also, if you own a tuxedo t-shirt, burn it.

Next, you will want to floss your teeth. Nothing screams, “I’m impressive” like a big piece of bacon fat hanging from your teefers.

Do not ask your potential employer: “Where do you summer?” Summer is not a verb. His douche alarm will blare.

When your potential employer asks you to talk about a time you faced adversity, don’t talk about the time you went on a class field trip to the United Nations. Adversity and diversity are two different words–familiarize yourself with them.

Don’t be afraid to be different. Make a little joke here and there and tell them an interesting story about yourself. Standing out can never hurt.

I lied; standing out can hurt. It’s perfectly fine to be different, but it’s not okay to tell creepy stories about your life that you believe are unique. They want to know about when you helped a relative get through something tough, not about how you were breastfed until age 11. Saving Mrs. Wilson’s cat from choking on your little brother’s Lego isn’t a challenging life event either.

If your hero/mentor is Kim Kardashian because of how successful and spunky she is, then you need to lie. It is now your mother because of how successful and spunky she is. See how much better that sounds?

Lastly, a letter of recommendation from your parents or relatives goes about as far as the phrase “I’m only going to have one drink tonight.” It’s nice to hear, but at the end of the day, you only say it to make yourself feel a little bit better.