SAM

Answers to the problems you never thought to have

Ask Sam: The Environment

From: Josephine Hidajat

9:44 PM May 12th 2012

Dearest Samuel,

i am writing a paper on trash and its relation to consumerism.you are smart and wise and insightful and like to write and talk so i was wondering if i could interview you via here. doesnt need to be super detailed, if you could respond by tomorrow late afternoon it would be great. anything will help!!!!!

how often do you buy new things? clothes, electronics, etc.

It’s hard to say, as i’ve never kept any formal record or my purchasing habits of any of the aforementioned objects, so I will have to speculate. I would say I would buy clothes everyday, unless I already have clothes on that day. I purchase electronic objects about once a week, but I always remove the electronic components so that I can utilize the plastic casing, so I technically never buy “electronics”. I would estimate that I buy a car once a year, but that seems high. Granted, that is an estimation. 

do you ever separate your trash into recycling compost and landfill?

Oh, no. I would love to, but i’m just so busy. I do, however, cut those plastic circles that hold six-packs of beers together, to prevent them from strangling ducks, or making anyone aware of the number 888. More on that later. 

do you notice how much trash you throw away on a daily basis? and what?

Oh, you know. Normal things. CDs, candy wrappers, empty pens, spent espresso shots. Diapers, used and unused. All of my green shirts, depending on the fashion of the season, and if green gets ‘Jeers’ instead of ‘Cheers’ in my subscribed fashion magazines, which I also throw away. My Matrix collection box set assuming all of the DVD’s are, for some reason, scratched. Dead pets. Birthday cards, but only 9 months after my birthday. Expired milk. Non-expired milk if I don’t feel like owning milk anymore. Evidence and other possibly incriminating objects subject to locard’s exchange principal. You know, normal stuff. 

do you notice how long the things you buy lasts before you throw it away?

Let me answer your question with a story:
Last summer, I bought a new couch. It was grey and folded out into a futon. I was so excited to get this new couch, that I slept on it, did my work on it, I even did all my decoupage on the couch. One afternoon, while eating a subway chicken teriyaki sandwich, I spilled teriyaki chicken all over the couch. I cleaned most of it off. Three days later, I disassembled and recycled the entire couch, although, in retrospect, it was totally non-recyclable. 
Does that answer your question?

Citymatch™: Easing the Transition from College to Urban Life Since 1998

Thanks for coming to CityMatch™! We’re really happy you could make it. Please, have a seat over there. We here at CityMatch™ have been working tirelessly help to assimilate you to your first post-college, metropolitan city living experience. Our resident team of supercomputers use a randomized, 14-point compatibility algorithm to ensure that your transition into this new life will be smooth and painless. We know that giving up college life for adulthood is sometimes disappointing, but don’t worry, we here at Citymatch™ will teach you how to find the joy in your new-found adulthood. 

Here, take this pamphlet, and memorize everything inside of it, it has the complete vernacular used to express your exaggerated appreciation for all the foods the city has to offer. In no time, you will expand your lexicon to include essential city jargon like “Artisan”, “Brewmaster”, and “Gorgonzola”. Until now, you’ve spent your entire adult life going to “parties” and getting “tanked”. Well, that was college, and college is over. From now on, you will spend your time going to bars and restaurants, to talk to friends and coworkers about the bars and restaurants you were at yesterday. 

It’s important that you buy a Messenger Backpack right away. Sure, it just looks like an airplane-seatbelt that goes over your chest (and if you’ve been in an airplane before, you know that isn’t how that goes), but it’s actually a slated insignia of bikeliness. Proudly sash it across your personage, to make other city inhabitants think you ride a bike- Always giving people the impression that you ride a bike is a very important part of living in a city (possibly the most important part). Not only will this help expedite your assimilation into normative city culture, making people think you are a cyclist means you are pretending to be working towards doing your infinitesimal part in preserving the planet. Very important city stuff. Very important. 

In the mean time, here is a totebag.  Just write the name of your startup on the side of it. Yes, you work at a startup now, you just moved to the city, remember? It’s not hard work, just show up and be professional. Try to limit the frequency of bringing your cat to work to two days a week, and in meetings, take your nose ring out before you pick your nose. Remember, professionalism is key. You’ll do great, just think of every work day as a theme party, where the theme is ‘Cargo Shorts’. Look, here comes the Vice President of your startup now! His job is to wander around your company looking concerned, flailing his arms and violently flexing his face. Don’t worry If he constantly asks you ambiguous questions about ‘where you see yourself in 5 months’, that’s totally normal. The purpose of these questions are both to make you realize your own lack of foresight, and routinely call into question your job security.

Now, seeing as apartments are very expensive here in the city, you are going to need some roommates. Having roommates will allow you to not have to take residence in an unsuitable living situation, like in your car or in a lazily-gentrified ethnic neighborhood. Looking at the report that that our resident supercomputer has produced, we have matched you with some compatible roommates down to a level of .001% accuracy. The system is very good, it put the ladies from TLC together in a studio apartment in the 90’s. Let’s meet your roommates: Gwen, Ivan, and Roots. Now, Gwen spends her time in the living room drowning her social anxiety with a synthesis of pot and cat-ownership. Ivan will have no money, but an inexplicable plentitude of bicycles, and will often offer his least favorite bike in leu of paying his share of rent. Roots is an eco-terrorist who is intent on, as he puts it, “exploding congress”. He also bakes gluten-free muffins! You guys will get along famously.

I think you are ready to go out there. Thank you for choosing Citymatch™, and on behalf of myself and my resident team of supercomputers, welcome to the big city! Before you go, I want you to meet Tony. This is Tony, he’s a magical elf who will follow you around and talk about how your coffee place is inferior to his. All residents of the city are issued one, but you have to put down a deposit of 100$ and promise you won’t leave him locked up to a parking meter overnight. Now go make the best of everything this city has to offer, and start planning your inevitable move to a different city.

I am Saving this Nation, one T-Shirt at a Time

Let me be clear- I don’t stand outside of Urban Outfitters selling t-shirts all day in the rain for the money. I do this for every joe six-pack-the-plumber American who is outraged at how Mitt Romney’s moderate republican agenda has been drastically melting this country’s values into an ugly, un-American, melted thing. Yes, “Mitt Happens” is by far my bestselling shirt, It’s the the bread and butter milked from the very lucrative cash cow of anti-administrational swag. But I wouldn’t be able to send my kids to college if it weren’t for “The Mitt Just Hit The Fan!”, “We’re in some deep Mitt, Now!”, and my personal favorite, “Go on without me guys, I need to change. I just Mitt my pants.” 

It was two years ago that Mitt Romney defeated Barrack Obama to become the forty-fifth president of the united states. I knew i had to change the direction this country was headed. But in this day and age, change doesn’t come through campaign, or diplomacy, or even through organized protest. It’s 2014, and change can only be brought about by a rented screen printer, a bulk order fruit-of-the-loom crew necks, and an unprecedentedly cunning wit. 

But god knows, it hasn’t been easy. Last year, when Alec Baldwin went on The Today Show with a T-Shirt that read “Throw the Mitt at the Wall St, and see what sticks!”, my friends and family all tried to tell me that the golden age of this joke was over, I should pack it up and go back to my job writing headlines for The Huffington Post.  “Aren’t you worried that this joke is just perpetuating an overused and clenched anti-intellectual brand of humor?”, they would ask. To them, I say, “Neigh”, because they are neigh-sayers, and like horses, that is the only word they understand. They don’t understand that a T-Shirt can change the world, even if it is just a picture of Mitt Romney’s head photoshoped into a toilet bowl with a caption reading “Kids, Come look at the giant Mitt I just took!”

I sometimes stare wistfully outdoors, wondering what would have happened if it had gone the other way, and Romney hadn’t narrowly defeated Santorum in that last minute PR upset, where Santorum referred to the jews as “Imaginary”.  I would be standing here today, selling shirts saying “The Santorum Hit The Fan!” or “Something smells like Santorum!”. Oh, what a shirt that would be. What a shirt. 

Love and Lies on the Campaign Trail

Ron Paul shut the door and sat down, looking over his shoulder cautiously. Time was of the essence. Sure, he had sent his press secretary and assistants to go fix wikipedia’s habit of automatically redirecting searches for Libertarianism to Vegetarianism, so he had at least an hour before it was back to the seemly endless probing and all-demanding process that was running for president. 

“I thought you would never get away” Mitt whispered, as he stood up and embraced Paul. 

“This will all be over soon”, he whispered in Ron’s ear. They kissed violently, backing into a bookshelf and knocking copies of ‘The Biography of Joseph Smith’ and ‘Guns: Why One is Not Enough’ everywhere. 

“If it’s me,” Paul said, “I’m going to make you head of Libertarian Oversights. You will oversee a team of Jeep Commandos that drive though the midwest and shoot at farmers that try to steal cornhusks from other farms.” Paul chuckled. “Nugget is so sure the Job is his. But when it’s me, i’m making you the law.”

“Yeah,” Romney laughed, “It’s not going to be you.”

This had gone on months longer than it should have. What started as a dare in Jon Bohner’s Miami Beach condo, (The Tan-A-Torium, as Joe Biden had dubbed it) had now become a full scale occupation of the heart. That spring, they found themselves, along with anyone who was anyone in the GOP, spending spring break at Rick Perry’s Niggerhead Ranch Texas Tequilla Massacre. After several hours of doing body shots off of Bristol Palin and a woman who was either Gingrich’s sister or first wife, Paul and Romney found themselves outside in the Ranch’s stable. As things escalated, Romney tried to stop.

“I…I can’t.” Romney said. “We have to control ourselves.”

“Hey,” said Ron Paul, “I don’t believe in Gun Control”. Then they had crazy gay republican sex. 

But on the campaign trail, things were more complicated. They feared their secret would get out as the press had started to allude to them as having a “Partnership.” Romney’s love distracted him from campaigning, leaving Santorum to gain some inertia in the southern states. After awhile, Santorum even became aware of their secret, but that was OK. Santorum was cool. Nonetheless, they could no longer throw caution to the wind. 

Today, they could not stay. Romney’s aids were sure to return any minute from posthumously mormon-baptizing members of the Jefferson Airplane, and he was running out of menial tasks to send them on. Paul and Romney had to go stand in the light of day, shake hands, kiss babies, and bicker in front of CNN actors about who is going to make the government smaller. In their last moment together, as Paul rubbed his wrinkly grey face against Romney’s pinstriped lapel, he took out his necklace of half of a heart, and connected it to the one around Romeny’s neck, making their two heart halves whole, again. 


“I Will Love You Forever.”

Dr Strangeburger, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love McDonalds

Some things I do make people angry by the sheer virtue that I do them, like the fact that I can only watch a movie in 20 minute increments, starting from the middle of the movie. Perhaps my most pronounced habitual faux-pas, is that I love eating at McDonalds. I am well aware that McDonalds is perceived by most of my generation as a soulless corporation creating a highly fattening, chemically processed, hyperaggresively misrepresented product. This may be completely true, but I don’t care, because McDonalds offers me meals of utter savory delights. We are all adults who are free to make choices based on risk-assessment of consequences and subjective tastes. I eat my hamburger, and you listen to your shitty Bon Iver record. I don’t see a difference. 

That said, despite all my love for Mac-Do, i have to concede that the artwork inside of a McDonalds is weird. Really weird. It’s so Innocuous you would never think to look directly at it, it just kind of hovers around to create a soft and vague atmosphere- But when you look really at it, it’s really bizarre and blatantly manipulative. I’m not talking about that moment in the grocery store where you buy a Mountian Dew and suddenly realize that you are susceptible to advertising and equally malleable as any other joe six-pack-the-plumber consumer- I’m talking about how McDonalds is being totally crass an unimaginative about their manipulation. 

This is on the wall of the McDonalds down the street from my apartment. It’s a picture of a Big Mac, and next to it, a nice black family.

Ok. Sure. But…uh… why are these two images next to each other? Am I supposed to derive some unspoken significance from this juxtaposition? Wait. What kind of meat is this? AM I EATING THAT HANDSOME BLACK FAMILY? Ok, I should calm down. I’m sure the patty from my McDonalds Big Mac is not the flesh of a handsome black family (or vise versa). Like, 99.9% sure. But if there was like, a picture of Old Yeller next to a picture of a Big Mac hanging up in a McDonalds, dog-meat would be the first thing that popped into my head. Although I may have initially misinterpreted this, these arbitrary symbols of food and happiness right next to each other are pretty lazy forms of association- Here is HAPPY FAMILY, and here is FOOD. 

Here we have a salad, and a family who (almost definitely) just got back from snowboarding:

And then, of course, happy kids, who are ecstatic to be so close to french fries. 

Although, the way they are sitting does look like fun. 

Look McDonalds. We understand that as consumers, we are being always manipulated and coerced into making unnecessary decisions. We accept that, and know that on the road to getting everything we want, people will convince us to buy things we don’t need. But as consumers, we deserve not to be not treated like developmentally disabled sheep people. I’m totally OK with you manipulating me into buying McDonalds- You tell me it will make me happy, and I believe you and buy McDonalds, and then I basically am happy. Capitalism. Fine. But lazy and uncreative attempts like this, with where you try to condition us with words like FUN and CHOICE in stocks photos of tan snowboarding women and ecstatic symmetrical children, accompanied with your fast food products, it just comes off as lazy. And it makes us feel like idiots. Put some elbow grease into your brainwashing, because we’re not idiots, we’re consumers. Although, I know it often seems like an academic distinction. 

These guys know what i’m talking about. 

“But it was alright, everything was alright. He had won the victory over himself. He loved McDonalds.” 

Hamburgling your heart,

Sam