Censorshipwreck: when someone’s reputation sinks for trying to silence others

10. Zach and Kelly (Saved by the Bell)
9. Murphy Brown and herself (show of the same name)
8. Mr. Garrison and Mr. Hat (South Park)
7. Dale and Nancy (King of the Hill)
6. Fran and Maxwell (The Nanny)
5. Ross and Rachel (Friends)
4. Dharma and Greg (show of the same name)
3. Ted and anyone (How I Met Your Mother)
2. ALF and the cat (ALF)
1. Carol and Mike (The Brady Bunch)

Something most people probably don’t know about me is that I cross dress. Not so much anymore, though I still do on Halloween. I used to own three dresses in high school, though even if I still had them, I would never fit into them. I got a kick out of doing it just to get dirty looks from uptight Indiana natives.

I wouldn’t feel the least bit of shame in admitting I were gay if I was, but sadly, I am not. I say sadly because I would love to get away with casually throwing around a word like “fag,” but I can’t pull it off. I love tits too much to feel right doing it

I used to cross dress because it attracted the kind of girls I like: freaks. Forget well adjusted girls with good childhoods and self respect, I like ’em used and devoid of any limits, maybe even a little bit crazy. If there’s one thing that is true of a crazy girl, it’s that the sex is amazing.

So one day, my relatively liberal religious high school (Brebeuf Jesuit in Indianapolis, in case anyone is curious) allowed the students to come to school in costume for Halloween if you donate a dollar to some charity. So, I go dressed up in a slinky black slip dress. In case anyone cares, my costume was “whore.” My girlfriend at the time was dressed as my pimp. Pictures are pending (I think I have a few somewhere…). [Found them, and posted here.]

I didn’t even get through the first class before I was called to the dean’s office.

For anyone with any shame or insecurity, I imagine this would have been uncomfortable, but I was laughing with the secretary in the office while I waited. We knew each other relatively well, partially because I was always getting sent in to be punished and partly because I often finished my exams first and would be sent to the office with the class attendance schedule, so I would often linger in the office to shoot the shit rather than go back to sit quietly in the room as everyone else finished.

Things got a little heated when the former football coach saw me. Now, at the time, I was on the football team, and he was no longer the coach because of an… incident. After a game we lost, despite having a halftime lead, he flipped a table. Not a folding table, but one of those black stone-top tables I see primarily in chemistry labs. To be fair, we fucked up (though not me, because I wasn’t even good enough to take the field).

I was actually sitting in the front row during that incident. I remember looking over at another player, Chris, and he had the most strained look on his face. He was trying his hardest not to laugh hysterically, and it made me want to laugh. We definitely processed that situation differently than Matt in the back corner of the room, who was sobbing.

So anyway, the former football coach is braying, “Ohhh hell naw! No, Bret, no no no no no. No. No no no no no no.” I remember a lot of no’s. He sort of left the office shaking his head. He was still the acting Assistant Dean, because I guess they couldn’t revoke his position after he resigned as coach. He was gone the next year, however.

The actual Dean was the basketball coach. I had tried out and I had a good rapport with him, even though I didn’t make the team. I basically gave him an out: the dress didn’t meet dress code, since the straps were not two fingers width. I offered to wear a shirt over it, but he just shook his head and said he couldn’t let me do that.

So I changed. Even though there were people dressed up as devils and serial killers, I was not permitted to dress up as someone of the other gender… on Halloween.

*sticks hand out*

Oppression pity, please.

I’m kidding, I’m fine. Hopefully you had a good laugh at the whole thing.

We need to eliminate age restrictions on movies. If you can get to the theatre and afford a ticket, I don’t see why you should be prevented from seeing whatever movie you want. There are 16 year olds in this country we trust with the responsibility of driving, which puts the lives of others at risk, but they can’t see an R-rated movie without a parent or guardian because they might see a booby. If a child or teenager is watching a movie that will scar them for life, they can run out of the theatre screaming like the rest of us do.

If bad weather is punishment from God, what did the inhabitants of Jupiter do to deserve the Great Red Spot, a storm larger than the size of the Earth that has raged for at least 182 years?

People are demanding that Mitt Romney make a better apology for his actions in high school, but I don’t see what the big deal is. So Mitt Romney made some catty remarks about another guy’s hair and then styled it. I don’t think Mitt Romney should have to apologize for being gay.

Every time I see pictures of my or someone else’s family that were taken before I was born, everyone in the picture is ugly as hell, even people who look normal now. What is the deal with old cameras?

When I look at humanity, I don’t see the depressed, angry, selfish, greedy mob that we appear to be. Sure, it would be easy to see us this way, if you just looked at how we act, what we say, and why this means our values are all fucked up. However, I see something else when I look around: goals.

Everyone has them, even if some of us never talk about them. In fact, we not only all have goals, we all have the same three types of goals: the easy, the difficult, and the impossible. People are miserable because we as a society only seem to pursue and support the pursuit of easy or impossible goals, while meaningful goals which are difficult to achieve are few and far between.

An easy goal might be something as simple as, “I want a hamburger for lunch.” Maybe in some situations, that might seem like a difficult or even an impossible goal (like if you were, say… alone on a desert island). However, for most people, it’s not all that tough. These kinds of goals are not bad, they’re just not very rewarding in a significant way.

An impossible goal is equally as common in our society. Lots of people want to live forever, rule the world, or end all suffering. Impossible goals may seem pointless, but actually they are one of the only meaningful pursuits available to many people. While it may be an impossibility (or just seem like one), people working towards goals like world peace get a greater sense of accomplishment than when they are pursuing an easy goal they can actually achieve. Even when they ultimately fail, there is still a sense of accomplishment from knowing you dedicated yourself to something important and larger than yourself.

Difficult goals are not extinct, but they are almost indistinguishable from impossible goals for many people. Obviously, none of us can know if a goal is difficult or impossible, because we can’t know for sure if we can achieve it. Some might say it would be difficult for me to play in the NBA, but since I’m only 5’11” and I went undrafted again at the age of 28, chances are that it’s an impossible goal for me…

And yet, it’s also a meaningless goal. Most of the difficult goals in our lives are artificially constructed, and many of them are inherently meaningless. Most, if not all, of the difficult goals which we aspire to achieve have only the value which we attribute to them. Playing in the NBA isn’t a real achievement, in the grand scheme of things, unless you think a bunch of grown men throwing a ball around is fundamentally important.

So little of what people actually do anymore seems to have any real significance. Even many scientists and artists lead pointless lives, injecting lab rats with exotic chemicals in the pursuit of a cure for baldness or working for a marketing firm that sells sugary breakfast cereals to kids. There are so few people leading genuinely fulfilling lives that it should be no surprise that millions of Americans can’t get by without the distraction of anti-depressants or narcotics or useless hobbies which imitate the effort/reward model.

A great deal of humanity’s effort is wasted in distracting ourselves from how empty our lives are. Somehow, we dreamed ourselves into a corner. Some people even read “self-help” books that encourage them to busy themselves in the exercise of imagining grandiose goals for themselves as a distraction from how pointless their goals actually are. [Note: if you need a book, it’s not “self-help.”]

People envision themselves as one day being happy, if only they could be famous, wealthy, attractive, or some other inane, pointless distinction. Still others have just given up entirely, imagining that you can only be happy if you’re happy with what you have. Too rarely now does anyone recognize a problem, deliberate on solutions, put the effort in to solve it, and then reap the benefit of improvement.

I think perhaps that people today lack the experience of handling difficulty. Instead, we are busied with tending to simple tasks, unattainable ideals, and distractions of our own design. We would be immeasurably happier if we ignored some (but certainly not all) of the trivial and immense aspects of life, instead spending more time on the formidable task of achieving meaning through effort exerted towards real progress, not insignificant surrogate actions.