A few months ago, I woke up with a nagging pain in my side. After a week it hadn’t gone away so I started to worry. It escalated pretty quickly because here’s how my brain works:

1. Ow, my side hurts.
2. Oh no, I have cancer.
3. I have pancreatic cancer (because I just checked the internet and that’s apparently a kind of cancer that occurs in that general part of the body).
4. I have inoperable pancreatic cancer and…
5. I will be dead within the next year.

This is all, of course, without any professional opinion or even casual knowledge about the disease which I have self-diagnosed. So in five steps, I’ve gone from a mild abdominal pain to planning my own funeral, and that’s not an exaggeration. I was actually planning my own funeral, which is okay because now I won’t have to do that again. Now I know in advance that I want them to play “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong and just bum the hell out of everyone. That’ll save me some time in the future.

During all of this, I don’t go to the doctor. Even though I have already convinced myself that I am going to die, I don’t want a doctor to tell me that, because then it’s real. Somehow I’m completely resigned to my own imminent demise while at the same time being in total denial that anything is wrong with me. I was postponing having cancer until a more convenient time. This was back in August, and my girlfriend was going to move to another city at the end of the month, so I was telling myself, “I will wait until September to have cancer.”

After three more weeks, the pain had gotten worse. I finally went to the doctor. They took some X-rays and didn’t find anything, told me it was probably just muscle pains of one kind or another. Within three days, the pain had completely disappeared.

But as I was driving home from the doctor’s office, I realized that on some level, I was disappointed. I had spent so much time inside my own head developing this premature death fantasy that I had grown pretty comfortable in it. I think part of me had even started to like the idea.

Right now, I am 22 years old. Not over the hill by any means, but I have finished college and have probably become some version of the person that I’m going to be for the rest of my life. I’m getting pretty close to the age where I am no longer allowed to just die with potential.

I mean, if you die at age 22 and you haven’t really accomplished anything, that’s more or less okay. Obviously it’s sad, but if people bemoan your wasted potential at that point, it’s not because you wasted it yourself. No one who dies at 22 has really had the chance to be a total failure. Even if you’ve done nothing worthwhile by that point, people will just assume that you were going to. Conversely, no one ever dies at 40 with people saying, “What a cruel bummer. He could have really been somebody.”

I don’t mean to overstate my own suffering because, even if my ailment wasn’t entirely psychosomatic, my reaction to it was completely ridiculous. But however little actually happened in my body doesn’t change this insane thing that occurred in my head. By the end of the episode, I’d reached a kind of peace that must be akin to what happens to other people when they accept religion, only to tumble back into the resolvable issues in my real life, for which I have actual responsibility. Is it possible that I am less afraid of death than I am of having a life?

Honestly, I can see the appeal of being dead. It’s one thing that’s impossible to do wrong; it happens and then nobody expects anything of you. And people will say wonderful, nice things about you that they never would have said while you were still alive. And the younger you die, the less you have to do for it to be considered a tragedy. Death is easy. Life is hard.

I know that this is all pretty morbid, but before my family starts planning an intervention I think I should say that I doubt I’d ever seriously consider suicide. But if I did, I know that it wouldn’t be for a good reason. If anything really bad ever happened to me, I’d be too shattered to get out of bed, let alone buy a rope and write a note and whatever else I’d have to do. Even now I’m getting exhausted just thinking about it.

But this morning, I got out of bed and went into the kitchen to get some breakfast and I realized that I didn’t have any food in the house. And I really didn’t want to walk the three blocks to the grocery store. And for just a moment, I was like, “That’s it. Today’s the day.”

Then it passed, and I went grocery shopping.

There are two main arguments being made in favor of this initiative. One is that the state should legalize marijuana because the laws prohibiting it are silly and irrational, having accomplished little other than promoting a violent illegal trade, undermining common respect for the police and the rule of law, needlessly turning millions of perfectly sane and productive people into criminals, and so on and so forth.

However, it’s no mystery why the initiative is first reaching the mainstream now, and why in California. Which brings me to the second argument in favor of this bill. It goes like this:

“Look, we’re not saying that legalizing marijuana is necessarily the right thing to do, and we have considered the possibility that this will turn the bulk of our population into lazy, stupid, violent sex maniacs, but, uh, we are out of money. And as it turns out, scruples are a luxury item we can’t really afford anymore. Seriously. It’s either this or we just turn off the power for the next couple of months.”

With this in mind, the bill contains provisions that will allow taxes to be applied to the sale of marijuana on a local as well as a state basis. This may provide a big boost to the ailing economy on both levels. Advocates also cite the positive impact that marijuana legalization will have on the state’s badly overcrowded prison system. However, the unavoidable truth of the matter is that legalizing marijuana falls woefully short as a solution to either problem.

America, these are desperate times, and I’m beginning to think that our measures just aren’t desperate enough. If we are to counter the many negative factors currently affecting our economy, we’re going to have to do something drastic. Luckily, it turns out that our values are worth money, and if we’re having a yard sale, we might as well go all the way. I guess what I’m saying is — isn’t it time we start talking about legalizing violence?

Now I know what you’re thinking, and don’t worry; I’m not talking about legalizing all violence. Some things, I think you’ll agree, are simply beyond the pale. Therefore, I’m proposing we begin by only allowing certain kinds of violence (say, anything you’re allowed to do onscreen in a PG-13 film) and then see where that takes us.

So, for example: cutting someone in half with one of those two-man lumberjack saws would still be illegal. The same goes for skinning them alive or pulling them inside out with some manner of powerful suction device (I’m not sure how this would work, but I expect that it would be pretty gross). Shootings and stabbings are okay, depending on how much the victim bleeds, or whether their resultant verbal exclamations are appropriate (e.g. “ouch!”) or not (e.g. “Hey, what the fuck was that for?”). After all, many violent crimes are committed in public spaces, where children might see.

For that matter, many will be concerned about rates of violence skyrocketing in their own neighborhoods, so perhaps it would be advisable to, at least at first, limit legalization to only a few specific areas (say, areas where poor people live). Violence-free zones will be clearly marked in the traditional fashion, with a regular distribution of posted signs depicting stick figures doing something ambiguous inside of a red circle bisected by a diagonal line.

Now — and this is where many of the benefits of this proposal lie — the things we do legalize, we tax at a significant rate per instance. Those who take advantage of legalized violence will be required to keep detailed records and declare annual violence on a special tax form with blanks assigned to different violent acts (one line for vehicular homicides, one for poison dart attacks, etc.). Homicide units will remain intact, but be subordinated by the IRS in order to prevent tax evasion. This way, we can also avoid losing government jobs.

Aside from the additional tax revenue this represents, imagine all the new entrepreneurial opportunities that could be created. Guided safaris of East St. Louis and Detroit will bring in wealthy thrillseekers from around the globe, come in hopes of hunting the most dangerous game — underprivileged minorities. Violent tourism could provide a much-needed injection of currency into some of our most destitute local economies.

Finally, the legalization of violence would also virtually eliminate the problem of prison overcrowding. We could take thousands of violent offenders off of our government’s hands, getting them on to the streets and out of our hair. This would free up all kinds of extra space for crack addicts and people who burn the American flag. Not only will we have ended our economic woes, we’ll have solved the crime problem as well.

America, we stand here today in danger of being cast beneath the rising tide of the brave new world in which we live. I know that my ideas may seem radical, but if we are to maintain our position as a global leader at the forefront of innovation, a radical approach is necessary. While there are many things to be said for holding true to one’s principles, doing so at the cost of economic expediency is not only foolish, it is unpatriotic. Remember: this may not be the only solution to our current woes. Or even the best. But it’s almost certainly the most convenient.

As I climb aboard the Airport Express bus in downtown Oslo at 6:05 a.m. to make my morning flight back to London, I hear that familiar Romance tongue and see elaborately spiked black hair poking up above the tops of the seats.

Unbelievable.

Of course, it’s one of the innumerable moments of deja vu I’ve had since breathlessly sprinting into Heathrow Airport eleven days and nineteen or so hours ago. I would almost have been surprised if I never saw my fellow passengers from Milan again. I smile and give one (a walking stereotype: he’s wearing a fucking ascot for God’s sake) a slight nod of recognition. He narrows his eyes, and I immediately realize that was a weird thing to do. He doesn’t share my appreciation for the strangeness of the universe — at least not right now.

Two days ago it was May 17: Syttende Mai, the National Day of Norway. I didn’t even know about it when I booked my flight to Oslo — just lucky I guess. It was a pretty impressive to-do. The morning was dominated by a three-hour parade marched in by at least half the schoolchildren in Norway, and in the afternoon, the streets of Oslo overflowed with Norwegians in myriad states of drunkenness, men in suits and ties, those gorgeous Norse women in frilly traditional costumes. Student groups from Lillehammer and Trondheim wandered the waterfront and drank Carlsberg in joyous clusters of garish red overalls.

After the parade, I walked amid the street vendors and the miniature Norwegian flags, eating bacon-wrapped hot dogs and sweet baked goods with unpronounceable names. I kicked around a soccer ball with some locals in Vigeland Sculpture Park and watched the 9:30 p.m. sunset from a bluff overlooking Oslofjord and the whole while, intermittent thoughts of home — Minnesota — kept popping up from the back of my mind somewhere. Familiar accents and baseball on television and shitty public transit. I’ll be there in sixteen hours.

Sitting next to the fjord the day before yesterday, that notion seemed sad beyond all measure. Three days earlier in Milan, I’d had a conversation with a friend about all the things I was going to do immediately when I got home (see my friends, play my drums, have Taco Bell for the first time in four months), but I sat and watched the Syttende Mai sunset with a lump in my throat, intoxicated with sick European nostalgia, the cold realization sitting deep in my guts that I could take a thousand photographs but this moment would only last until it was over.

Two weeks ago, before I left London, I bought a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road from a street vendor on the south bank of the Thames for £2.50. I’ve been carrying it around Europe in my backpack, pulling it out to read a chapter whenever I have a few minutes to sit and breathe. It’s provided some special moments on its own — I spent one of the best half hours of the journey reading chapters of Kerouac’s frantic jazz during a Newcastle sunset on the Tyne River, and when Sal Paradise wildly suggested “Let’s go to Italy!”, I was sitting on a pew in Milan’s Duomo, catching funny looks from German tourists.

It’s also unified the experience for me. There’s an appeal to it that I think Kerouac would’ve appreciated: Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty zigzag across one groaning continent while I cut a demented trapezoid around the corners of another.

Moreover, I think it’s heightened my appreciation of the experience in all of its forms, increased my awareness of the little things, the coincidences, the strange quirks of the universe. Five days ago, I sat in front of Sforza Castle and watched an Italian man who looked stuck in the late ’70s as he set up a drum set and a donations bucket on the street corner and played along with some Bee Gees song over and over again. On Syttende Mai, I showed up at the morning parade and found the marching band playing a Sousa-fied version of the same disco tune. On the way to the bus station this morning, I passed an Irish pub named after Galway Bay, the nook of Ireland where I spent my first night out of London an eternal week and a half ago.

And then there are these familiar Italians, chattering away all around me as I write this.

By 10 p.m. on Syttende Mai, the sun was gone, but the sky hung in limbo, maintaining a shade of noncommittal gray. I wandered up and down the shoreline of the fjord, smoking the last of my Lucky Strikes and listening to the Germanic gobbledigook of straggling revelers. I savored the final pangs of narcotic homesickness and said an inward goodbye to Europe. After months, only hours. Hours before I land in Minneapolis, broke and exhausted, nothing left of Europe but memories and photographs and cheap souvenirs. Each moment lasts only until it’s over.

So after all that, what’s the point?

No point. Just this: In the past eleven days, I’ve met friendly Ulstermen in Irish pubs, celebrated victory with the incomprehensible Geordies at Newcastle United’s St. James’ Park, dodged African hustlers outside Milanese tourist traps, and seen one hundred drunk Norwegians sing along with “Play That Funky Music White Boy.” I awoke in Oslo this morning, and I’ll sleep in Minnesota tonight. I hope I always find some wonder in little things like those. Kurt Vonnegut said, “We were put here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

After passing the landmark at least twice a week for the past two-and-a-half months, the novelty has worn off. In fact, the stadium is used so rarely that it’s easy to forget it’s there at all. That makes weekends when Wembley hosts an event all the more jarring, like when both semi-finals of the British soccer’s main cup competition took place in the stadium.

On Saturday evening, I was riding home from the city, picking my way through a British history textbook when the tube reached the Wembley Park station. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by jubilant Chelsea supporters, liquored up and noisily celebrating their 2-1 victory over Arsenal. Trying to be subtle, I took off my red sweatshirt (Arsenal’s color) and soon gave up the absurd notion of getting any more reading done.

The following afternoon, I boarded the tube on my way into the city to find a smattering of Manchester United jerseys, the wearers of which slumped low in their seats a few stations later when the train was flooded with the blue shirts and painted faces of Everton F.C. (United’s semi-final opponents). Once more, I quietly put away my book as the blue-noses pounded on the ceiling and sang “Manchester is shit” for the next three stops.

“We’ve been waiting years to go to Wembley,” one grinning Evertonian told me above the din.

It’s hard to explain just how big a role soccer plays in the British national consciousness – there’s simply no American sporting equivalent. Take America’s favorite pastime, for example: Major League Baseball consists of 30 teams spread across the U.S. and Canada. Beyond that, there are a number of minor league franchises that mostly act as feeders to major league teams. In American sports, there is a clear division between the major and minor leagues.

Almost everywhere except the United States, professional soccer works within a series of leagues, or pyramids, with a tiered hierarchy from world-class clubs in huge stadiums down to tiny semi-pro teams that play in front of fewer than a thousand spectators each week. In England, the Premier League is the top flight, home to heavyweights like Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool. The next three tiers are the Championship League, League One, and League Two, all governed by an organization called the Football League. At the end of each season, the bottom finishers from the Premier League swap places with the top finishers from the Championship and so on down the pyramid.

It sounds confusing, and it is (if you’re lost, Wikipedia explains it better than I do). Within these top four leagues alone, there are 92 clubs and, if anything, the supporters get more devoted the further down you go. The most notoriously overzealous supporters in England are associated with Millwall FC, a club that has toiled in anonymity for the past 25 years, never reaching the top division. Granted, brick-throwing is probably not the best show of club loyalty, but I feel it’s a point worth making: I can’t think of a time when I’ve heard about anyone getting violent over the result of a St. Paul Saints game.

Clubs are closely and inextricably tied to communities here. Last month, my friend and I went to see Queens Park Rangers FC play at their ground in West London. It was an unremarkable stadium, about a third the size of most NFL arenas, and the intimate, energetic atmosphere of the match was something we simply don’t have in the United States.

Many of these fans come from families that have supported their club for decades, and whether it’s Manchester United playing to be the Champions of Europe or the Queens Park Rangers playing Sheffield Wednesday for tenth place in the second tier of English football, the supporters show a level of pride in their team, a kind of camaraderie among the home supporters that no American ballpark can match. There’s just something about match day in London that we never had back home.

By afternoon, the tone took a dramatic turn for the worst. OBAMA’S BIG DAY MARRED BY VIOLENCE, declared one headline. ANARCHY GROUPS FIGHT FOR CONTROL OF THE CITY, screamed another.

What? There I was, smack dab in the middle of central London, and everything seemed to be business as usual. No angry mobs, no overturned cars or shattered glass, not even the ominous scent of smoke in the air. The papers announced Armageddon—how had I missed it?

On Wednesday morning, swarms of protesters descended upon London’s financial district. A friend and I followed to gawk at the spectacle. In the days leading up to the summit, the media speculated ceaselessly about the possibility of riots. Armies of neon-clad metropolitan police cordoned off streets, shopkeepers boarded up their front windows, and banks warned their employees to come to work dressed casually to avoid harassment.

But even as my friend and I wound up right in the thick of the morning’s demonstrations, never once did we witness any acts of violence or feel we had a reason to fear for our safety. Still, I arrived home that evening to find my Facebook page and email inbox inundated with messages from concerned friends and family, asking if I was okay.

The simple truth is that the urban war zone portrayed by much of the press on April 1 was almost entirely fictional, a manifestation of the sensationalist media’s wishful thinking. At best, they portrayed a tiny portion of the actual events. Of the thousands of protesters who packed the streets of the financial district, there were about 60 arrests, a few broken windows and, sadly, one death (from a heart attack).

The story, in other words, was the same as ever. Thousands protested, most of them peacefully, but the substance of their message was inexorably swallowed by sporadic violence.

So what happened? These hordes of people congealed in a public place with signs and flags and home-made t-shirts and unflattering effigies, so presumably they had something to say, right? What happened to their message?

One reason why the demonstrators’ message was so thoroughly eclipsed by the tired narrative of cops versus protesters is that the latter is simply a sexier story. It’s the one that the media had been gearing up for well before April. Crowds with painted faces and crude representations of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are somewhat newsworthy, but they don’t have the shock appeal of beleaguered policemen wielding batons or protesters smashing windows.

The cover photograph of Thursday’s Times depicts one demonstrator launching a piece of debris through the front window of a Bank of Scotland branch. It might have been iconic, were it not for the wall of cameras in the background capturing the exact same shot. One anarchist, 25 photographers. Somehow it all seems a little artificial.

However, the press doesn’t deserve all of the blame for the protesters’ point being lost in the scuffle because the protesters never had much of a point to begin with. The crowd in front of the Bank of England on Wednesday seemed to be a confused mishmash of opinions and causes, not all of which necessarily had anything to do with the G20.

Good old-fashioned populist rage certainly fueled a good portion of the crowd; many of the demonstrators shouted angry chants like supporters at a soccer match.

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,
Put the bankers on the top.
Gordon Brown in the middle,
And then burn the fucking lot.

The core of the crowd was anti-banker, but signs and banners indicated individual protesters’ other stances: anti-capitalism, anti-socialism, anti-government. Some in the crowd appeared to be anti-police. Some inexplicably held signs declaring their positions on climate change, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One protester waved a Tibetan flag. Others voiced their support for Palestine.

In short, it was a clusterfuck. Instead of a coherent protest for a specific cause, the entire left side of the political spectrum came together to shout randomly for the entertainment of the onlooking police. What resulted was not a demonstration for a political ends, but an inarticulate scream for attention, political discourse on the level of children. It’s just as well that the news story ultimately turned to violence because, for all the demonstrators assembled in London, I neither saw nor heard a single constructive idea.

“We’re as mad as hell, and we’re… well, we’re as mad as hell.”

So when it’s all over, when the last shard of glass has been swept from the streets of London, when the mainland’s anarchist groups have packed up their black ski masks and returned to France, Italy and Germany, when every angry Briton has gone home and replaced his megaphone on its hook in the garage, will it have really meant anything at all?

Or was it just another car wreck for rubberneckers like me.

But I’ve found myself cut adrift from the news since arriving in London, particularly when it comes to the happenings back across the pond. This may come as a rude awakening to the ugly American who believes the USA to be at the center of the global consciousness, but it took me a full three days to even find out who won the Super Bowl.

In fact, most of my news over the past few weeks has been what I’ve been able to glean from The London Paper, a free periodical distributed by an army of glum-looking newsies every day when the sun begins to set. It’s just about impossible to catch the tube after 4:00 p.m. without having one of these thrust into your hands.

The London Paper isn’t exactly a tabloid in the traditional sense, although the UK has no shortage of these either (the sheer viciousness of popular rags like The Sun would make even the most brazen Us Weekly editor blush). This daily edition does cover politics, sports, and everything else a respectable publication would, but those sorts of stories can be conspicuously difficult to find within its pages.

You’ll almost never find stories concerning affairs of state on the front page—this space is typically devoted to the sort of stories you might see on Maury. Most recently, the depressing details of the current financial crisis have been bumped to page three or four in favor of the ongoing saga of Alfie Patten, a thirteen-year-old boy who recently became a father.

The British fascination with the cult of celebrity also appears to dwarf any level we’ve approached in the United States. On top of the obligatory style section, entire pages of “news” track the antics of a gaggle of vapid semi-celebrities called “WAGs” (that is, Wives And Girlfriends of famous soccer players). If I am a bit hazy on global affairs of late, the same ignorance does not extend to such pressing concerns as what Victoria Beckham is wearing these days, or where it was that the girlfriend of Chelsea FC midfielder Frank Lampard went out for dinner last Friday. The level of obsession with these banalities wouldn’t be quite so unsettling of these stories weren’t crammed in alongside (far briefer) articles concerning the ailing economy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This kind of frivolity seems to taint even the more serious stories. Regardless of actual content, I’ve found that many British editors will regularly disdain conventional “Dog Bites Man” headers for their articles, opting instead for the most offensive pun within easy reach. Political coverage appears to be a bit of a joke as well; if local journalists are to be trusted, London Mayor Boris Johnson’s executive duties have taken a backseat to his full-time job of making off-color remarks and providing ongoing commentary on the same sorts of trivial stories I mentioned before.

In America, the rising prevalence of the 24-hour news networks has seriously dented the print media, and many of us feel a growing frustration with what we perceive as a slavish sort of devotion to high concepts and short attention spans. To those who are nostalgic for a more dignified era of journalism, cheer up—I’m getting the idea that we Americans may be luckier than we think.

After making snarky comments about Zack Snyder throughout the buildup to Watchmen’s release, after seeing previews that suggested at least three-quarters of this film would be played slow motion, I went to the theaters last week and saw the movie. And I loved it.

Sure, it wasn’t perfect by any means. Certain parts of the plot felt rushed, so the first act probably confused anyone who hadn’t read the graphic novel and the soundtrack was, shall we say, utterly bizarre. But the story was told coherently enough, and I thought Snyder did a very good job of trimming the graphic novel down to a film that played to his strengths.

The suggestion from many reviewers (including Bureau Editor Kevin) is that Snyder remained too faithful to the source material, but in response I have to ask, what exactly did you expect? Did anyone really want to see Zack Snyder’s “interpretation” of the graphic novel? No matter what they tell you, Zack Snyder is not a visionary; he’s not an auteur. He’s a midwife. In Dawn of the Dead, he took a great zombie flick and turned out a pretty good remake. In 300, he took a brainless, gratuitously violent graphic novel and turned it into a brainless, gratuitously violent movie.

Watchmen is no different. Snyder was doggedly faithful to his source material and did as well as he possibly could have to convert the whole beast to the big screen with considerable style. The visuals are fantastic, the action scenes are fluid and gut-wrenching, and I was surprised that the movie maintained all of the Cold War themes of the book—the overwhelming feel of fear and impending doom. Watchmen was a better movie than 300 only because it was a better graphic novel.

Zack Snyder is a skilled music video director who has caught some tremendous breaks, and I hope he knows how lucky he is. Personally, I think he’s bound to overextend and expose himself sooner or later, but he didn’t do it this time. It’s too bad that Alan Moore wants nothing to do with this project because it’s a good film, and it belongs to Moore at least as much as it does to Snyder.

After getting my luggage and converting all the cash in my wallet to Pounds sterling, I purchased a latté (less for the caffeine boost than for the comforting knowledge that, an ocean from home, this is still Planet Starbucks™) and sought out my cabbie, an Indian with a nervous grin and rudimentary-at-best understanding of the English language. As he drove me the fifteen minutes to Eastcote, a suburban neighborhood on the northwest corner of greater London, I sat zombielike in the passenger seat, panicking quietly every ten seconds or so at the oncoming cars on the right side of the road.

I staved off much of the bewilderment of my first 48 hours in England by sleeping for at least 60% of them. I’m still in the process of working out how to stay awake past 9:00 p.m. without a lengthy mid-day nap and I haven’t yet conquered my internal clock’s insistence that I get up at 5:30 every morning. But at the very least I’ve achieved some sense of familiarity with my surroundings.

For the next three-and-a-half months, my study abroad program has placed me here in Eastcote in the home of a couple named Kay and Antony—respectively a quiet London social worker and a genial, slow-moving Trinidadian whom I’ve yet to see outside the house. An awful lot of walking has given me a decent feel for the general area, and through trial and error, as well as careful study of my Underground map, I’m starting to get the hang of London’s geography. I feel like I’m starting to make the slow transition from a dazed tourist to a Londoner who can’t properly pronounce “aluminium.”

One thing that’s been somewhat helpful in this transformation is the Underground commute from Eastcote to my classes in central London. On any given day, the trek can take anywhere from 45 minutes to well over an hour, and I’m sure I haven’t seen the worst of it yet. It gives me and the other students the opportunity to join in a highly popular Londoner pastime: griping bitterly about the Tube.

The London Underground is a notoriously unreliable beast, and I’ve already encountered multiple mysterious “signal failures,” which delay the trains exclusively when I’m in a crunch to get someplace on time.

There are certain other elements of the Underground’s character that have also taken some getting used to. The pedestrians in this city roam the sidewalks at a breakneck pace, but that doesn’t bother me; as a gangly praying mantis of a freak on stilts, I’ve always been too fast a walker for most cities. What I can’t get used to are things like the unappetizing choice between squashing into an air-tight lift with at least 50 too many people and climbing the 200 stairs to street level, or the unnerving silence on a jam-packed station platform—four or five of us seem enough to fill even the most crowded train with American voices.

After a week of worrying about my backpack getting caught in automatic doors, being squashed against smudged windows and buffeted up and down escalators, I feel like I’m starting to understand just what the hell T.S. Eliot was talking about in “The Wasteland.”

Maybe next week I’ll work up the courage to give the bus system a try.

Now, your initial instinct is probably just to add this person without giving it a second thought. Resist this temptation. No matter how cool they seemed at first, this person may still turn out to be an asshole, and you don’t want to just let any asshole leave you birthday wall posts or make comments on out-of-context photos of you from years before you met them. Check for the warning signs:

Do they have one or more lines from John Lennon’s “Imagine” in their quotes section?
That song sucks ass. There, I said it. Okay, it’s catchy and has a positive message and whatever, but I can’t possibly be the only person on the planet who thinks the lyrics sound like the sentiments of a ninth grader who just tried pot for the first time. “You might say that I’m a dreamer/ but I’m not the only one.” Whoa. I am floored by your vague idealism, man. Give me a fucking break. Do you believe in ghosts? Because if I die and you decide to make a slideshow of my life and set it to “Imagine” at my funeral, I will come back from beyond the grave to scream obscenities at you every time you try to go to the bathroom.

Is their profile picture a blurry snapshot of them playing the bass in what appears to be a high school auditorium?
This one should probably be self-explanatory. It could have been any instrument really, but I went with the bass. Don’t take it personally.

Have they used their “About Me” section to place a free personal ad?

I’m a warm-hearted, hard-working, laidback, easygoing, outgoing, personable, down-to-earth guy who loves to have a good time. I love my friends and family and my job and my dog. I’m relatable and approachable and I’m an excellent conversationalist. I’m always interested in meeting new people who are cool.

Other common adjectives include “chill,” “honest,” and “easy to talk to.” Let me guess: you hate it when people are fake. I can’t tell whether you’re desperately lonely or running for public office. I’m not sure if you noticed this, but the section where you listed your turn-ons is called “Interests.”

Do they use complete sentences to fill out each section?
You are listing things that you like. You really don’t need to get all prosey on us. If your favorite music section involves an apology for half the bands on it (“I loooooove Panic! At the Disco and I don’t care what anyone thinks. Also I like Aqua I am a dork lol :)”) then you are almost certainly an asshole.

Do they advertise every embarrassing detail of their failed romances in the status section?
Last year I had the unique opportunity to observe a bitter status battle between two recently broken-up acquaintances. It was fascinating from an anthropological standpoint.

Boy X has fallen and landed on his heart and it hurts bad.
Girl Y is sorry it had to be this way.
Boy X has decided it’s her loss.
Girl Y doesn’t love you anymore and wishes you could just accept that.
Boy X ACCEPT THAT?! HWO COULD I FUCKING ACCEPT THAT??!?

And so went the bitter argument for several days, and thanks to Facebook, they were able to broadcast it to every person they’d ever met who happened to own a computer.

Do they have the copied lyrics of any significant number of boring radio rock songs posted in their notes?
It’s not that song lyrics have never affected me on a really personal level before. It’s just that none of them have been by the Killers.

Any Dane Cook in the quotes or posted items sections?
You’re also an asshole if I even need to explain this one to you.

“Somebody shit on the coats!”

Die in a fire.

Is their quotes section crammed with out-of-context inside jokes?
These can be any number of things. Typically, they consist of dirty-sounding misspoken phrases, potty jokes, and any possible variation of “That’s what she said,” attributed to a stupid nickname (usually something like “Big [capital letter]” or “The [Surname]ster”). The issue here isn’t whether or not these jokes are funny, because they almost never are. The important thing to note is how many of these there are. The rule of thumb goes like this: “Three dumb quotes is fine, four dumb quotes is okay, five or more dumb quotes, you’re playing with yourself.”

Ravenous 24-hour news stations have grown fat and lazy after feasting on two years of presidential election like worms on a carcass, and since November 4, they’ve lurched forth in a bewildered haze, checking to see what Obama’s doing every twelve minutes, simply because they’ve forgotten how to report on anything else.

I’m not too worried. Any day now, they’ll find something new to swing a sledgehammer at, and the whole cycle will begin anew.

At any rate, there’s a perfectly legitimate reason that none of them have been talking about Minnesota’s ongoing senatorial election: nothing appears to be happening.

The race between Republican incumbent/John Kerry sound-alike Norm Coleman and Democratic candidate/snarky comment artist Al Franken is currently lumbering through an interminable statewide hand recount after Coleman won the initial count by fewer than 300 votes. The margin has since shrunk beneath 200 votes, and it really is anyone’s election at this point.

If Coleman wins this election, Democrats will almost certainly point to Independent candidate Dean Barkley as an important factor in the outcome. Dean Barkley pulled 15% of the electorate, receiving almost 440,000 votes from a voting base more closely aligned with the political views of Al Franken than those of his opponent. Had Barkley not run, the Democrats will argue, Franken would certainly have won.

They certainly have a fair case. As one of the people who did vote for Barkley, I can tell you that given a 50/50 choice between a scumsucker like Norm Coleman and anyone else, I’ll vote for the other guy nine times out of ten.

Some would argue that this makes my voting third party somehow irresponsible, that if I had any real interest in the race’s outcome, I would have voted for the more viable candidate. On Election Day, a friend of mine asked why I voted the way I did when it became clear just how close the race was going to be. I told him it that I thought Barkley was the best candidate for the job.

“But he didn’t have a chance of winning,” replied my friend.

It seems ironic for this election to have occurred the same day that 2000 presidential spoiler Ralph Nader spectacularly ended his fall from relevance, pulling only 1% of the popular vote, and then calling Barack Obama an Uncle Tom on television.

I was in seventh grade when Nader garnered 3% and Al Gore lost Florida by a minuscule margin, after winning the popular vote by a few hundred thousand. It seems like nobody really learned anything from that mess.

Despite how bitterly many Democrats complained about Nader voters yanking the rug from under Gore, what happened in 2000 was a third-party candidate doing exactly what a third-party candidate is supposed to. People voted for Ralph Nader because neither of the major parties was speaking to them. Ralph Nader had very little funding and almost no media exposure, but he swiped three million votes from Gore, and all it accomplished was scaring everyone out of voting third party in the future. The defeat should have made the Democrats take a closer look and find out what they were doing wrong. It didn’t—just look who they nominated in ’04.

So my question is this: what good are third parties if everyone is too jaded or nervous to vote for them, no matter how they feel about the issues? We are a nation of more than 300 million people, and yet nobody ever seems to question the ability of two monolithic parties to represent the country’s entire spectrum of political beliefs. We cannot have true democracy in this country without any viable alternative to the two major political parties, but our current system is stacked so heavily in favor of the big two that it’s almost impossible to happen on any meaningful level.

The plurality system currently in place for most of the country’s elections drastically reduces the power of so-called fringe candidates, limiting them to the role of spoiler, splitting the votes and causing defeat for the major candidate whose views are most similar to their own. Many countries (and some states) require one candidate to win by a clear majority. If no candidate pulls more than 50% in the initial vote, a runoff is held between the top two vote-getters, eliminating the possibility of a spoiler candidate and allowing people to vote their beliefs in any election, safe in the knowledge that they will be afforded a second chance to vote for the lesser of two evils if necessary. The downside is that runoff elections are expensive and time-consuming, but it seems a small price to pay for a more open democracy.

Also, if the 2000 election should have taught us anything, it’s that the electoral college is fatally flawed. However, the issue more or less vanished after a year or so of bitter complaining from Gore voters. The first-to-270 system is arbitrary, silly, and antiquated. The intent was to level the playing field for the states with lower population density, but its only impact has been to set about half of the electoral map in stone for any given year. It marginalizes huge numbers of voters, totally voiding the relevance of Republicans in states like Minnesota and New York, Democrats in Texas and Alabama, and Independents in, well, everywhere. The electoral college needs an update not just for the sake of the smaller parties, but for anyone who doesn’t want to go through another goatfuck of the kind we saw eight years ago.

The reason that I find the stigma of the third-party campaign as an unconditional lost cause to be so unsettling is because this is a country where our politicians are supposed to take their power from the people but how can we be sure when in the end everyone just feels like they have to vote for whichever two guys the major parties throw at them? As usual, George Carlin put it best:

There used to be seven oil companies. There are now three. It will soon be two. The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice: there are two political parties, there are a handful of insurance companies, but if you want a bagel there are 23 flavors because you have the illusion of choice.

As it stands, the Democrats and the Republicans are very well entrenched and very powerful. They have all the funding and they hold all the cards, but in spite of all of their power, all their visibility, and all of their resources, the only reason they’re still there is because people keep voting for them.

So if the Democrats and the Republicans are not really earning your vote, I’m asking you to find someone else who is. The power in this country is supposed to belong to the people, but they will not work for us unless we make them. Vote for the candidate you want to win instead of against the one you don’t. You’re not betting on a horse race here. If your politicians are not using their power properly, stop giving it to them.