(The following is excerpted from berkeley.livejournal.com. Spelling and punctuation have been edited to standard English regulation, and copious profanity has been removed. — Ed.)

[mood:angsty]

[currently listening to: Fall Out Boy]

Okay, guys, it’s meme time! I know these are silly, but I think it’s really illuminating for you guys to be able to look at my motivations and my feelings. I mean, it’s a really good opportunity to get to know the real me! Which is why all of you read my journal.

So these are my top five pet peeves. I didn’t really put them in order because I want you to read them all, not just my number one.

1) So there’s a guy in my English class this semester who does all the reading and talks and basically sucks up to the professor for the whole time. And I’m just like, “Dude! Have some respect for the rest of us!” If everyone turns in a SparkNotes essay, no one’s going to stick out and look bad. But this guy always messes it up for everyone else who has a life and doesn’t want sit around and read Maya freaking Angelou all weekend. In my opinion, the caged bird sings because it missed the Sigma Phi party last Thursday. I’m just gonna say that if I’d wanted to study all the time, I definitely wouldn’t have come to Berkeley.

2) People who still like Deathcab even after “Plans” came out. I just can’t respect any band that gets played on the same radio station that plays “Umbrella.” Enough said.

3) I can’t abide people who don’t appreciate art in unconventional forms. Like, I was involved in some performance art a couple months ago, right? We all painted ourselves blue and wore masks of the President, and we went to the local Army recruiting center to stage an artistic vignette about how barbaric war is. I think the concept was really beautiful — the ancient Celtic war paint juxtaposed with the modern paper masks really made me think about how little time changes how men react to these kinds of situations.

Well, I’ll just put it like this: those military guys have no sense of the artistic at all. We were totally willing to start a dialogue with them about the justice of our current foreign policy — we’d brought a couple flyers we thought they might be interested in, stuff about war crimes and that kind of thing. I thought it was going to be this great, sharing experience where we could learn from each other. I’d even brought extra blue paint in case any of them wanted to join in on our performance. But the dude behind the desk threatened to call the cops on us if we didn’t leave immediately, which in my opinion is really just antisocial. Those guys totally needed to chill and just appreciate what we had to offer them. They have no idea what kind of artistic opportunity they missed out on by refusing to even let us express ourselves.

4) The word “blog.” This isn’t just some website I slave over for my health, okay? This is the collection of my thoughts on life, and calling this a “blog” is just too flippant a way to describe it. Don’t dismiss my thoughts on humanity just because I’ve chosen to present them on the Internet instead of writing everything down in a Moleskine like all the rest of you poseurs. You need to respect the fact that this journal is a work of art — an artistic rendering of me.

5) Chocolate flavored Slimfast! Like, what’s up with that? If I want something with chocolate in it, you better believe I’ll find something better than a diet drink. Mmm...now I’m hungry. Anyone want to hit up Ghirardelli Square tomorrow?

Peace out, guys!

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