Ted Pillow

Whenever I see a particularly diverse group of friends, I make cynical, outdated references to the Burger King Kids Club. Well, this one makes me feel old and kind of racist.

In most cases, kids only really care about the things that directly involve them. This is normal; at least, I like to think that it’s normal, since my main concern as a child was whether or not I could have Dunk-a-Roos for lunch.

After all, that’s what’s oddly inspiring about Fred Durst’s lyrics — you could have written them, but you didn’t. It’s like patting yourself on the back for not crapping your pants.

He couldn’t have noticed how much I was sweating, could he? Oh god, but he shook my hand… he must have felt how disgustingly sweaty my palms were. Christ, that must have been like shaking hands with an armpit.

MyPlate, which allows you to track the calories and nutritional facts of your daily diet, has definitely helped me improve my eating habits. While I recommend it highly, being honest about my diet has been a bit awkward at times.

An elderly contestant dies during a particularly heated immunity challenge. His tribe members unanimously attempt to vote him off during the next tribal council, but they can’t write his name down because no one remembers it. “Perhaps death is the greatest immunity idol of all…” whispers an unusually cryptic Jeff Probst, who has begun to suspect that all of the players are just figures of his imagination, anyway.

Instead of only recognizing the awards, scholarships, and honors bestowed upon graduates by professors, let’s include some student-voted awards, like “Most Undistinguished Track Record of Questionable Hookups” and “Outstanding Achievement in the field of Day Drinking.”

Sometimes I wish I could be like a Hollywood franchise and just “reboot” my identity every five or six years and pick out some poor schlub walking the down street and be like, “Okay, from now, you’re me… and Go!” And it’d be like, okay, now you’re the guy with a $60 bank account who’s banned from the library. So, uhhh… good luck with that. Sucker.

You have absolutely no school spirit. You’re pretty sure your school’s colors are a light color and a dark color, but you can remember which ones. You also think your school’s mascot is a half-man, half-goat with black eyes that tells you to burn things, but, then again, you haven’t slept for days because you have five finals next week. Maybe you should go take a nap or something.

Somehow both surreal and grimly realistic, Gammell’s black-and-white art depicted everything from ominous rocking chairs and mossy caskets to hollowed-out skulls and floating eyeballs.

Projecting John, Paul, George, and Ringo onto the members of other famous quartets is just the kind of useless minutia I can’t help but spend hours contemplating; in fact, the margins of my high school and college notebooks were already filled with like-minded endeavors (you know, which members of the Full House family correspond with which members of the Wu-Tang Clan… the usual).

I visit Florida’s Disney World with my family, the Mecca pilgrimage of middle-class American children, allowing me to proceed toward young adulthood without incurring the wrath of Walt Disney, the vengeful God of American youth.