"What Planet Is This?"

Well, I'm starting to finally get in a better mood, though I'm still not entirely sure why I was so depressed/moody all of last week. Perhaps it was the change in the weather, or the fact that I was only able to run like twice (legs were killing me, and weather was not permitting), or maybe just a bunch of crap happened right at the beginning of the week that colored the rest of the week in shades of gray, black, and other murky neutral tones.

Anyway, in the finest tradition of my rants, I'm gonna make fun of stupid people, because they're so damn plentiful and make it too damn easy.

The first person I want to attack/berate/make fun of is this guy who writes for the school paper. I won't mention his name, because it's not really pertinent, but suffice to say he's got high ideas of himself and a low opinion of anyone who disagrees with him. He's also an English major, so I think that might have something to do with his basic pompous nature.

Well, on Friday last, this guy wrote an article for the paper advocating paying the student athletes for all the hard work they do. Because the full scholarships, room and board, and special perks (like having someone like me available to proofread their papers for them) aren't enough. Because having their books provided, laptops loaned to them by the school, and receiving a free education isn't enough compensation. No, since this guy maintains that student athletes have to work twice as hard as regular students to maintain decent grades, and since he believes most student athletes think they'll go on to play professionally (even though [1] he admits that only about 1% of them will and [2] most of them don't actually think that, except for a lot of the football players), we ought to give them monetary compensation. Basically, he wants to pay them for having delusions of grandeur.

If the school's gonna do that, I want them to start paying me because I think I might be able to become a syndicated cartoonist someday, or at least be able to live off my comic (and hey, if I can convince them to pay me, I will be able to, just as the student athletes would be professional ones if they were paid. That's sorta how "professional" is defined: you get paid to do it). The idea is actually rather perverse, I thought, and I was offended down to my very soul by the idea.

Hell, here's an idea--why don't we get rid of all the student athletes and just hire professional athletes? We wouldn't have to give them room and board, or provide them with the academic center, or pretend we're interested in educating them like we do the student athletes (because I'm fairly certain most of the coaches and administration at this school are only paying lip service to the idea of "they're here for education." They're really here to bring the university lots of money). It's the perfect set up; all it lacks is common sense and a healthy dose of reality.

That was rather therapeutic.

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Yoko Kanno & the Seatbelts, "Space Lion"