Kids suck

In my Friday evening CAD/Drafting Methods class last week, I came across some general shittiness from a fellow student of a more youthful age. I was showing a group of students how to go about downloading the student version of AutoCAD 2010, warning them that the program could be a little temperamental if one has an older computer system. I explained that I owned one of these older computers and had crashed it multiple times when attempting to run the program while listening to music with a media player at the same time. Then this kid, who couldn't be older than 18, relayed the following to me.

Oh yeah. When my grandmother heard I was going to college she gave me like 30,000 dollars. So I bought this ridiculous HP system that has like 100 GB of RAM. So AutoCAD runs no problem.

I was quiet for a second. But the kid had on a shitty Poison "world tour" shirt. So I asked him why he'd bring that up after I'd confessed to the poverty of my computer. Why would someone do that? After one person admits a deficiency - be it personal, financial or what have you - what drives another person to essentially say "I'm better"? I would understand had I taken the route of bragging about how nostalgically bitching my 2002 Gateway is, plastered with its AFI and Sick Of It All stickers. That might induce a competition of sorts. That was not the case.

The kid didn't have an answer for me. Half jesting, I told him he was a fucking asshole. His response: Well, now you're calling me names. So why should I be nice to you? After witnessing his inability to reason, I explained to him - with the tact of a kindergarten teacher - that I wasn't calling him names, but assessing his character. That was pretty much the end of that. But what the hell is wrong with kids? Maybe that one is just upset that he's a trust-fund, string-bean wuss and that I'm a meatless beast of unparalleled wit. That must be it.

Switching gears, I saw Where The Wild Things Are this past weekend. Absolutely fantastic. For the past couple days I've tried and failed to come up with something profound to say about it so I could post it here. Allow me to use the words of someone else in place of my own.

There are different ways to read the wild things, through a Freudian or colonialist prism, and probably as many ways to ruin this delicate story of a solitary child liberated by his imagination.

The New York Times critic who said this was referring to the book, but the view appears to have been shared by director Spike Jonze. While it's clear that a good deal of addition needed to take place in the film to supplement a 40-page story consisting mainly of pictures, Jonze chose to primarily expand upon the liberating imagination of a child. What happens in the book happens in the movie, but with less parameters. The world of the wild things is boundless, with more variance in the environment and that which can be encountered and created within it. The wild things are recognizable in form, but now carry distinct personalities and tendencies. It is in the interaction with and between the wild things that film steps beyond the book, fleshing out why it is that the Max would want to quit his fantasy to return home to his family. (Not a spoiler. Happened in the book.) So go see it. It's rad. I told you I had nothing profound to say.