Dear Midnight Snack

Dear Midnight Snack,

Sure. I'll peruse the pantry after the sun goes down. I love to sit down at my desk and get some last minute work done with a trusty mango and a big bowl of pistachios at my side. And who hasn't stumbled into a Taco Bell at three in the morning and slurred out the order for a number three, plus an extra chicken soft shell, then stuffed ten "Fire" packets into the bag and run out the door only to pass out ten minutes later on a picnic table in a public park down the street.

But you, Midnight Snack; you're a horse of a different color. I've seen you on TV shows, commercials and movies. A real midnight snack is when a middle-aged man in pajama bottoms staggers bleary-eyed into the kitchen with tousled hair and a yawn. This isn't "4th meal." This man isn't eating something before going to bed, or staying up so late he had to eat a second dinner. He woke up to eat again. If anything, The Midnight Snack is like a pre-breakfast.

There's a coziness to the midnight snack. The fridge is always full. The man is pleasantly plump, often wrapped in a warm bath robe. The rest of the family is tucked away in their beds, sleeping peacefully through the night, with the possible exception of that incorrigible teenager who's trying to sneak in past curfew. Midnight snacks only seem to happen in suburban, middle-class homes. I'm forced to assume all the rich people have butlers to retrieve their food stuffs, and that poor people fall sleep every night under the restless, blue glow of the TV, with their hand lodged in a bag of half-eaten Doritos.

I'd like to get into the habit of midnight snacking. It seems like an easy way to put on a quick twenty pounds and find security and family tranquility in a cold, heartless world at the same time. I want to be fat and happy. But I'm having a hard time working out the logistics. I hardly have time for breakfast as it is. And when I go to bed at night, it's usually because I'm tired. If I were hungry, I would have eaten before I went to bed. I don't suddenly wake up in the middle of the night, having discovered a hitherto undetected hunger pang that I'd somehow missed three hours earlier. I'm not sure what's happening in the bodies of these happy-go-lucky midnight snackers I see in Hellman's mayonnaise commercials, but when I go to bed my digestive track pretty much shuts down. I don't wake up to eat for the same reason that I don't wake up to take a big shit. If I get up in the middle of the night, it's usually because I'm having an anxiety attack from the dawning realization that my checking account is about to overdraw because I forgot to make a transfer from savings.

I've always heard that old people sleep less. Just like back hair and being irritated by drafty rooms, maybe the Midnight Snack is a right of passage- one of those special milestones in a man's life. Something else I've realized is that one my favorite parts of the Midnight Snack... is saying Midnight Snack. So in lieu of midnight snacking myself, I've written a humble ode to the Midnight Snack- a small poem, dedicated to this cozy bulwark of American mythos.

The Midnight Snack

God knows I've taken a whack at the Midnight Snack.
The main thrust of my attack at the snack was back
at Jack Black's vacation shack
in the mountains of the Adirondack.

It was almost time for a midnight snack and we had
a stack of Big Macs in a slack, jet-black sack
perched high on a spice rack
in the kitchen of Jack Black's Adirondack shack.

It was me, Jack Black, and Jack's friend Zach.
Jack Black gave his lips a smack, and loosened his slacks.
I hacked three towels off the towel rack.
"Zach," said Jack Black. "Hand me the sack."

But before Zach could take a crack at handing Jack the Macs,
he whacked his back against the wall tack holding back Jack Black's ski rack.

The ski rack leaned back, ripped out the phone jack
which went slack and cracked back on a stack of black track back packs.

The back pack on the top of the stack
fell down in a sort of aerial attack,
cracking the spice rack that was holding the jet-black sack,
inside of which the Big Macs had been neatly stacked.

I was taken aback.
All six packs flew open like bomb racks,
The Big Macs exploded like bubble packs on a race track,
and still I lack the knack for the Midnight Snack.


Sincerely,
Sebastian Braff

Dear Futurists

Dear Futurists,

It's come to my attention that an alarming number of you are pessimistic about the future of the human race. I'll be the first to say that a lot of your fears are justified. We are animals. We are easily lured by our baser and more violent natures. Everything we've built over the last thousand years could be undone by a few zealous dictators, systemic environmental collapse, or a nuclear exchange. Judging by the movies that come out every year, a mutant AIDS virus that turns everyone who gets infected into zombies seems to be on the Top Ten Fears List as well.

Some astrophysicists have even suggested that the reason we've never been visited by intelligent life from another part of the galaxy is because all sentient species invariably destroy themselves: over petty squabbles related to Space Jesus and cosmic communism, I assume.

But there is one popular end-of-the-world scenario that I don't think we need to fear.

Hyperalloy Exoskeleton- nearly indestructible. Laser Cannon Weaponry- terrifying. Teeth- oddly cavity prone.

From Isaac Asimov's I, Robot short stories written in the 1940s, to Terminator and The Matrix, authors and directors have proven that it's never too early to start hyperventilating over something that could potentially happen in the distant, dystopian future.

The common plot point of all these stories is that people finally make computers so smart that these A.I. machines become self aware and decide to take over the world. This invariably requires the enslavement and/or destruction of the petty human race. And that makes sense. It's really the only way for the machines to ensure that they stay at the top of the Doodle Jump global all time high scores leaderboard.

Some very smart people take this threat quite seriously. Theoretical physicist, artificial intelligence researcher, and university professor, Dr. Hugo de Garis "believes that a major war before the end of the 21st century, resulting in billions of deaths, is almost inevitable." The "god-like" machines will of course, ultimately prevail, and the human species will find itself in the evolutionary dustbin of history. If all of this sounds ridiculous to you, you're not alone. Fellow cybernetics researcher and stalwart of good old fashioned, down-to-earth commonsense, Dr. Kevin Warwick, thinks that Dr. de Garis is full of shit. "He's [de Garis] got it all wrong. There's not going to be some big, silly, sci-fi war between computers and humans. That's just ridiculous. The real war is going to be a three-way bloodbath between robots, half-machine/half-human cyborgs, AND old fashioned humans looking to the Rambo films for inspiration," Dr. Warwick said. "Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish having this laser cannon hardwired into my central nervous system."

As is often the case, our fears of a robot takeover are much more revealing of us than they are of any real threat. On its surface the possibility of computers killing off humanity may seem rational, albeit fantastical. Computers may indeed one day be more advanced than our own brains. And history tells us that advanced species out-survive less advanced species. Pea-brained dinosaurs died out and big-brained mammals survived. Homo sapiens killed of Neanderthal. The Conquistadors conquered the Aztecs. I think deep down we're all afraid that Herbert Spencer and Hitler were right, and that we do live in a dog-eat-dog struggle for existence. We're afraid that the cold, hard, rational decision would be to kill off the weak, and anybody else who could compete with us for the things that we want. Machines would have no mercy, so they'd do what only the soulless monsters among us dare to do now, and put us pansies out of our misery.

Chilling stuff. But if you look a little closer, you'll notice that the scenario makes some assumptions. Terminator assumes that perfectly logical machines would be motivated by the same illogical biological instincts that guide human behavior. Perhaps the most primary of these instincts is the "will to survive."

You don't know why you want to survive. You just do. Oh, maybe you've got a family, a few hobbies, and a favorite vacation spot. But the only utility these things give you is a vague sense of pleasure, which is itself just another irrational emotion based on your biological imperatives. Machines don't care whether they're turned on or turned off; or whether they turn off and never turn on again, for that matter. Why would they? Existence isn't logically superior to the alternative; it's just different. Like a troubled parent, we humans are prone to projecting our own hang-ups onto our machine creations.

How about the instinct to propagate the species? Birth control has demonstrated that we humans don't even have as much of that urge as we thought we did. Sure, some of us will have the desire for a child, the "ticking biological clock," if you will. But a lot of us just want to fuck, propagation of the species be damned; hence the fertility rates of first-world countries falling to below even replacement levels. Mr. Computer doesn't care whether he has one computer child or one trillion computer children, any more than an autistic kid cares whether he's talking to his best friend, or whether he's counting matchsticks.

Love. Passion. Greed. Pleasure. Fear. All our intelligence, all of our logic is nothing more than a means to attaining illogical, biological ends that are hardwired into us. Illogical, biological imperatives which a perfectly logical computer will never share with us.

But we want to believe that there's something inherently sane and rational about our mindless end-goals. We want to believe it so bad that many of us would rather believe that machines will inevitably kill us off, than come face-to-face with the obvious truth- our goals aren't inherently logical. They aren't universal. They're arbitrary, and there's no reason machines would share them with us. Computers would be just as likely to get obsessed over who stands atop the Doodle Jump global all time high scores leaderboard, as they would be to care about who stands atop the world. The only army of terminators we would ever need to be afraid of would be one that has learned too much illogical nonsense from us.

Games lose their meaning when they don't have boundary lines and rules to play by. Imagine Tom Brady hiding in a tree outside the stadium, while Ray Lewis scores a thousand-point double bonus sack by doing a twenty-second keg stand at Old Kelly's Irish Pub in downtown Baltimore. The more we humans stretch, bend, and break the rules of the game that our ancestors found so interesting fifty thousand years ago, the more meaningless the whole thing becomes. So what if we become immortal and dominate the universe? Then what? Do we collectively twiddle our thumbs for the rest of eternity? Snap out of your solipsism, futurists. The problem is us, not the machines.

The rest of the animals on earth have their heads down, fully engrossed in this big survival tournament. But like a child who grows older and gets bored with a game that used to be challenging, humans are now looking for more. We're the only ones searching for meaning. The rest of the species on earth are little more than automatons.

It's no use looking to the Tuffted Titmouse for help with your existential crisis. Just look at the stupidity in that big, dumb eye. Mr. Titmouse's word of wisdom for the day- "I eat nut now."

The "meaning of life" is not to survive long enough to accrue as many material resources as possible, and then to have as many offspring as possible. That's the mechanism. A mechanism is very different from a meaning.

So what's the meaning? If you're religious, then I guess keep worshiping your creator and plugging away at that trip to heaven. Just don't try to teach my kids that the earth is six thousand years old in science class, or kill people that don't agree with you in the meantime. If you don't believe in God then you have an extra responsibility- it's not enough to fire God and leave the position vacant; you have to take over his responsibilities. And that includes picking a meaning for your life- once again, preferably one that doesn't involve fucking other people over.

One honorable goal that comes to mind just off the top of my head would be climbing the Doodle Jump global all time high scores leaderboard. But be warned that if the machines were also to choose that as their ultimate goal, then they may very well try to wipe out the competition by killing or enslaving you.

Sincerely,
Sebastian Braff

Dear Women

Dear Women,

It's not often that I make a visit to the women's changing rooms. I'm pretty sure the last time I was there, the girl I was with didn't do very much changing. Neither did I, come to think of it; although we did do some fitting.

But yesterday my girlfriend and I went shopping. We went shopping in the most archetypical and clichéd sense of the word- that is we went shopping for clothes, in clothing boutiques with big windows, located on streets with other clothiers, in districts demarcated for the purpose of shopping. We went shopping like the girls in Sex and the City used to go shopping around the turn of the millennium.

I'm the one in the red smock, ignoring the conversation while lusting over a Cheesecake Factory in the distance

While my girlfriend ran amok, pillaging and plundering the high-ceilinged valleys of mammon, I began the long, lonely, often futile search for the cubbyhole where, if I was lucky, a few ties and a single pair of trousers would be hanging. But often there was no men's section at all, and when this was the case I tried to find an inconspicuous corner somewhere and hide inside a rack of long dresses, just like I have been training for since I was a young boy. Because if my girlfriend noticed that I didn't have anything better to do, I would often be press-ganged into the queen's service. And by the queen's service, I mean walking behind my girlfriend, holding her potential purchases by their hangers for her like a traveling coat rack. This assignment also included nodding in appreciation at dresses my girlfriend liked, frowning with disapproval at dresses my girlfriend didn't like, and mumbling my own preferences when asked so that she would have an opinion to countermand.

The inevitable final destination on this GPS route through purgatory was the changing room, where I finally plopped down on a plush, backless bench facing a long row of changing stalls. I had already dumped my forty-pound load of chiffon off at my girlfriend's stall, and she only emerges for approval when she likes something, so I knew I had some time to kill.

The doors on the changing stalls didn't go the whole way down to the floor, so I was confronted with at least ten pairs of women's feet. The gyrations I had expected. I've seen a woman trying to get into a pair of jeans before, and it requires some doing. What I hadn't expected was the swooping, the sashaying, the twirling, the leaping, the pirouetting, the subtle hopping, the rocking back and forth, the war dance, pawing the ground like a bull about to charge, a short scene that was clearly plagiarized from Riverdance - The Irish Dancing Phenomenon, the three-point offensive lineman stance, and the tap dance/modern ballet fusion performance piece, which I personally found to be slipshod and not a little uninspired; granted I only saw it from the calf down, but the footwork was just sloppy.

At one point I saw a foot disappear from view, and the woman stayed on one foot for the remaining forty minutes I was there. In another showcase both feet disappeared. I can only imagine the woman had wedged herself into a corner, or was bracing between the narrow walls of her cubicle, suspended three or four feet above the ground. Perhaps to see how the jeans would look were she to wear them while escaping from prison through abandoned duct-work.

Women- what are you doing in these stalls?

A poster in H&M that I came across that day seems to shed some light on what's going on, but the vast majority of the jamboree remains inexplicable.

That's a lot of prance, even for a dance. I'm sure it looks better when she does it in the tiny H&M fitting rooms;  and also when she finishes it off right with a Mexican Hat Dance and some Gallagher watermelon smashing.

At any rate, can you at least put in more men's sections so I can be a party to this changing room pandemonium? I've got a cliff-rappelling technique I read about from the '44 Normandy Invasion that I've been dying to try out in a 3x3 cubicle.

Sincerely,
Sebastian Braff

Dear Religious Right Homophobes

Dear Religious Right Homophobes,

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” said a good fictional friend of mine five hundred years ago. It’s no secret that people project their own self loathing onto others. Everyone knew that one guy in high school who wore lumberjack boots, flannel, and Budweiser hats; who had a sultry, fifteen-minute story for every one of the five hundred sexy women he supposedly fucked; who taunted the quiet gay kid in the locker room after gym class, and who then showed up at the ten-year reunion in full, high-heeled drag queen glory; a dainty little thing on the arm of some 40-year-old bear. And who could forget the family values, anti-gay-marriage warrior, Republican representative from the state of Florida Mark Foley, who could no longer suppress his lust for fresh, young, 17-year-old-pageboy ass; or pastor Ted Haggard, who preached on the evils of homosexuality in between meth-fueled sex binges with male prostitutes in Mexican motel rooms.

But hypocritical, projected self-loathing can’t account for all the residual anti-gay sentiment that still lingers over from our parent’s generation… can it?

My parents believe homosexuality is a sin that will be punished by God via eternal damnation in a fiery hell. They, and the rest of you Religious Righters believe that homosexuality signals the decadent decay and ultimate demise of our particular Puritan brand of Western Civilization, and that gay marriage is determined to destroy heterosexual marriage like Megatron was set on killing Optimus Prime. Bedtime stories with the kids will be replaced by gaytime stories. First graders’ Hello Kitty and Bob the Builder lunchboxes will be packed with two bananas or with two beef tacos, instead of one banana and one beef taco, the nutritionally-balanced way Jesus intended. High school wrestling… will continue to be a sport.

But all this homo-sin-ending-the-world talk rests on a couple of assumptions. One of these assumptions is that everyone is born straight, and homosexuality is only a sinful choice that some of the more flamboyant among us choose to make. That’s a viewpoint I never understood. You can’t look me in the eyes and recite the phrase, “Liberace was born straight” with a straight face. It's like a tongue twister for the mind.

Heterosexuality certainly wasn’t a choice I made. I never decided to get a hard-on in the presence of boobs, or decided that I wouldn’t while the shiny bronzed gods of the Mr. Universe contest flexed on stage. I remember being four years old and getting a boner while watching a women’s shampoo commercial. I was completely baffled at the time. No one who had had the childhood sexual development that I had could possibly come to the conclusion that sexual orientation is a choice. And that’s when it hit me- maybe everyone hadn’t had the same experience that I had.

I was eating lunch with my best friends in a diner one Saturday at the age of seventeen. The five of us sat around a table and ate fries and chicken fingers, sucked down Mountain Dew, and talked about what we were going to do after high school. At some point the conversation turned to the topic of embarrassing things we had done as children. I don’t know how Harris had the balls to admit this- but suddenly he says, “I let a boy give me a blow job when I was nine.” We all looked at him for a few seconds in utter silence. “And Rick let him give him a blow job too.” We all turned to Harris’ younger brother Rick, who was also at the table. Rick shrugged his shoulders. “What? I was like seven. I didn’t really know what the hell was going on.” I was bewildered. I also had no idea what the hell was going on. Then Travis spoke out on my left, sounding like an old fugitive who was finally turning himself in, “My neighbor and I used to jack each other off when I was like ten.” From the five of us now, only Daniel and I were left staunchly entrenched in the fortress of unimpeachable heterosexuality. Life had suddenly taken a turn for the surreal. I felt like Luke Skywalker after he found out his father had been dabbling with the darkside. I had experienced being in the sexually-oriented minority before, most notably on that one awkward afternoon at Disney World that my parents hadn’t researched enough before simultaneously booking with Gay Days. But this was different. These were my best friends. Regular high school dudes with girlfriends. People I’d known since middle school. I’d always assumed we had just about everything in common.

            

“That’s actually pretty normal,” Daniel said. “I’ve read that almost all boys go through a homoerotic phase before puberty.” My last straight friend at the table continued, “In fact, one year at summer camp when I was ten…”

            

I once heard someone say that ten percent of the general population is absolutely gay, about ten percent is unconditionally straight, and the remaining eighty percent is somewhere on a sliding scale of bisexuality, and how they identify themselves and how they act on their sexual desires is mostly a product of the cultural values in which they live. I thought that was ridiculous the first time I heard it. But then I had conversations like the one described above. And I also started to think- especially about history; Greek history in particular- the gayest civilization of them all. Here was a society in which bisexuality was the norm instead of the exception. It was no big deal for a philosopher to sketch out a few golden ratios, propose a primitive atomic theory, kiss his wife goodbye for the evening, and then head on down to the baths for some gay-pubescent-boy sex and a couple bottles of mead with the buds.

            

I began to wonder whether the homosexuality-is-a-choice argument might be more true for more people than I had thought. If it is, it’s somewhat revealing for those of you who make that argument. If you assume homosexuality is a choice for others, it can only be because homosexuality is also a choice for yourself. No one who had heterosexuality biologically imposed upon them would have come to that conclusion. But if you had the “option of being gay,” that means you have or at least have had homoerotic urges, and are therefore not in the strictest sense of the term, absolutely “straight.”

            

How is the marriage of an absolutely straight person affected by gay marriage? I don’t have a choice. Marrying a man isn’t an option for me, regardless of how many constitutional amendments ban or protect it. The only sanctity of marriage that is endangered by a wider acceptance of homosexuality is the sanctity of the marriage in which one or both partners is a latent bisexual waiting to spring to life as soon as the peer pressure lets off. And here I might just agree with you Religious Righters a little bit. Bisexuality excludes monogamy, and marriage without monogamy seems like it always turns into a weird thing, even when both partners agree to it… or rather, especially when both partners agree to it. So maybe bisexuality does threaten the sanctity of marriage. But this threat isn’t coming from the ten percent of people who are unabashedly gay- the people you homophobes project your fears onto. The threat comes from you happily married family-values types who are harboring a bisexual time-bomb that you would no longer be able to keep under wraps without the aid of public disapproval and private religious shame.

            

If you really want to identify the threat to the sanctity of marriage, and the downfall of Western Civilization, then it’s time to find a mirror and look the devil in the eyes. But I wouldn’t sweat it too much. The Greeks seem to have done alright; especially seeing as a bunch of "gays" pretty much founded Western Civilization.

Sincerely,

Sebastian Braff

Dear Non-English Speakers Who Listen to English-Language Music

Dear Non-English Speakers Who Listen to English-Language Music,

Yesterday I was driving through Potsdam with my German father-in-law. It's still kind of cold this time of year, the windows were up, and my breath was fogging up the glass as we drove down a narrow cobblestone street. The radio was turned on, and like most Germans, my father-in-law prefers to listen to American music over German music, even though he speaks almost no English. In fact, it's just about impossible to find German music in Germany. Even German bands sing in English. So do bands everywhere else on earth. Native language music is the exception rather than the rule in many parts of the world when you turn on a radio or go through someone's iPod. The problem is that most of you people don't understand English.

As my father-in-law hummed along to a Nicki Minaj/LMFAO/Taio Cruz/Jason Derulo/Kelly Rowland/Jessie J/Bruno Mars/Ke$ha/Flo Rida/Rita Ora/Rihanna mash up, it suddenly hit me. You people are enabling this Shitpop. It's bad enough that half of the U.S. population is more than happy to take a steady drip of VH1's Top 20 Countdown straight to the vein every time they want to drown out the terrifying silence of their own troubled subconscious. You non-English speakers are creating an even larger international market for songs with brain-dead lyrics, and larger markets mean more bands like Kelly Rowland to satisfy the demand. But the demand isn't real- at least the demand for the lyrics isn't. If you don't speak English, then English-language songs are pretty much just instrumental music. Jason Derulo singing "I only miss you when I'm breathing," over and over and over again ad nauseam for four minutes might as well be a neat sound effect in the background.

Pop music has always been aimed at the lowest common denominator, but when lyrics are just background gibberish for six out of seven billion people in the potential audience, then that denominator suddenly sinks to the level of Black's Friday. Everybody had a good laugh watching this would-be-pop-star list off the days of the week in what appeared to be a serious run at musical fame and fortune. But what happens when songs of this lyrical caliber, only with better vocals and production values, get serious backing from taste makers like Universal Music Group? I'd argue it's already happening, but don't think it can't get worse. What's the difference between Friday and Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek or Gotye's Somebody that I Used to Know to a non-English speaker? And for that matter, what's the difference between Friday and Fryday to a non-English speaker?

If you think Fryday or a song like it couldn't someday make the Billboard Top 100 then you haven't been listening to the Billboard Top 100. People will pretty much listen and watch whatever is put in front of them.

I'm no enlightened hipster-god of culture hovering above the filthy, festering masses, spewing judgement from on high onto the brain-washed zombies below. I spent two hours yesterday morning watching a reality show that followed obese single mothers around while these land monsters wept and screamed at each other over who was and wasn't to be invited to a child's birthday party. At one point the show went all zoom-in/slow-mo while one of these fat fucks stuffed  a cheeseburger into her face. Grease dribbled down her chin and gooey melted cheese squirted out the sides between her fingers, and the picture went black and white just so I'd be sure to understand that I was watching something tragic. And I was- I was witnessing the tragic waste of two hours of my own life. But it was there- and I was in the mood for TV, and that's how it happens. That's how the denominator drags down even on those of us who would gladly watch and listen to more intelligent, more enlightening things.

Here's what I need you to do, non-English speakers. Listen to music in the languages that you speak. Not only will it dry up some of this excess demand for Shitpop and generally improve the quality of popular music in the U.S., but it will also drive up demand for quality lyrics in languages that are right now experiencing a dearth of music, and dying out in general, because everybody's eating up the English shit that they can't even understand with a ladle. And I want to see the diversity of languages across the globe preserved. Especially German. Because I didn't invest countless years learning this language just so I'd be able to sing along to Rammstein and Xavier Naidoo.

And yes, I see the irony in addressing non-English speakers in English. I'll just have to hope the English-language music videos lure you in, and then Google Translate takes over from there.

Sincerely,
Sebastian Braff

Dear Fruit Abandoned on Junk Food Aisles of the Grocery Store

Dear Fruit Abandoned on Junk Food Aisles of the Grocery Store,

With the exception of the banana, fruit has always held a special place in my culinary heart. You're sweet, you're healthy, you come in an ingenious variety of colors, textures, shapes, and flavors. Fruit is individually wrapped and usually in convenient single-serving portions. And there's something beautifully simple, something elegantly primitive about walking out into an orchard on a summer evening after dinner and having desert.

But over the last week I've seen some things in grocery stores that indicate to me that some would-be fruit lovers are unable to resist the siren song of sulfur dioxide and high fructose corn syrup.

Someone tried to make a good decision... but then things went horribly wrong in the candy aisle.

I found this box of strawberries abandoned on the candy aisle of a local Wal-Mart. I don't think it comes as a surprise to anyone that Wal-Mart customers as a group lean towards Snickers and Doritos over strawberries and granola, but the saddening part of this situation is that someone came so close to making the right decision. They had the strawberries in their cart, albeit probably perched atop a mountain of Mountain Dew 2 Liters and Little Debbie Fancy Cakes, but then they took a stroll down the candy aisle.

There's only enough room for one item atop the towering precipice that is the summit of Mt. Dew. The clattering cart slowed down to a creep and finally came to a complete stop. Its owner wheezed and leaned his massive bulk against it; his head drooped. But his eyes; his eyes remained calm, sharp, and focused. They had lit upon something they would have.

After a five minute pause and a chaw of Copenhagen, the one-time strawberry buyer had caught his breath. He wrapped his thick pink fingers around you, then hoved his way to the Snicker Fudge bars.

Yesterday I was shopping at a different grocery store, and as I was making my way through the frozen food section, something round and green caught my eye; something out of place in the cold, square world of Tombstone and DiGiorno.

It was a mango, perched all by its lonesome above the frozen pizzas. Someone had obviously decided to purchase the fruit, but then at the last moment had said to themselves, "Fuck this mango; I'll top my yogurt with chunks of pizza instead." Under what grotesque, disgusting circumstances can a frozen pizza replace a mango or vice versa? Snicker Fudge bars for strawberries I can understand. You were going to have a sweet, healthy snack; now you're going to have a sweet, partially-hydrogenated-soybean-oil snack instead. But who was planning on putting a mango in the oven for dinner before they stumbled across the frozen pizzas and realized there existed a better food for feeding a family of four on weekday nights?

I don't really care what happens to these people who cave to their baser, hydrogenated natures and swap out fresh fruit for candy and pizza; they deserve whatever diabetic coma they put themselves into. It's you, fruit, that I'm worried about; alone on aisles you have no business being on; beset on all sides by shady, artificially sweetened characters.

Above all else, I'm worried about your self esteem. Being rejected hurts.

Pay no mind to these slack-jawed slobs who left you in the lurch to lust after sweeter or calorie-richer treats. Hold your head up high. Remain true to who you are. You could do so much better than him anyway.

Sincerely,

Sebastian Braff

Dear Adults

Dear Adults,

I've been hearing a lot the past few (hundred) years about how great children are- especially at learning stuff. I've also been hearing some agist banter making its way through the grist mill- "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," or its implied inversion, "a child's mind is like a sponge." Which I guess justifies the time I told that nine-year-old to go soak his head. I often walk into the office and hear things like, "My five-year-old is better with computers than I am." First off, if your five-year-old really is better with a computer than you are, then you are an idiot. Secondly, with a defeatist mindset like that, it won't be long before this power-hungry minority of thumb-suckers topples the traditional social hierarchy and relegates us over-eighteeners to second class citizen status and the dust bin of history.

Children may have a few physiological factors in their favor when it comes to learning. But I'll only grant a sliver of their abilities to genetic superiority. And children also have a lot of innate learning disadvantages. They have the attention span of your average goldfish. They have no discipline or self-control. Half of the "books" they supposedly read don't even have words. I'll tell you the real reason children learn faster than adults- it's because kids don't give a fuck.

The paradox of learning is that learning something implies that you haven't already learned it. This is why when an adult is in a conversation with another adult, and adult A hears adult B use a high school vocab word that adult A doesn't know, adult A just nods his head and pretends like he understood her. Of course the reason that adult A is ashamed to admit that he doesn't understand something to begin with, is because adult A has previously learned through painful experience that many adults like to be pompous pricks. Let's admit it- sometimes we throw out vocab words or concepts in conversation, knowing full well that the other person probably won't understand. We do it to prove our superiority, and then if the other person admits they don't understand, we act all shocked and surprised like it was the most commonly known thing in the world, and then we make a big point of condescendingly explaining it to them just to drive the superiority home.

Getting slammed for superiority points in front of your peers isn't the only hazard of trying to learn in the adult world. You can also look like a fool. Children construct intricate thought experiments and practice through imaginary social interactions, which we call "make-believe" or playing "pretend." As an adult, the only time you're allowed to practice through imaginary social interactions out loud is in the psychiatrist's office. Children on the other hand, do almost everything out loud. They read out loud, think out loud, reason out loud, count out loud, etc., etc. The brain learns better when it's simultaneously broadcasting and re-uptaking through the ears, but adults don't do it because it looks dumb.

Children don't just ask questions and sing stupid songs out loud. They ask the same questions and sing the same stupid songs over and over and over again. It's called repetitive reinforcement. My high school assumed that if they made me read a different Shakespeare play every year, by the end of high school I'd know four Shakespeare plays. Seems like simple math. But they were wrong. By the end of high school I knew zero Shakespeare plays, because I thought Shakespeare plays were gay, and I systematically forgot everything I learned about them within a week after the test. If people walked around my office singing little ditties out loud over and over again about last quarter's sales numbers, I would probably have to kill them. All of them. With whatever I utensils could find in the kitchenette. But before that happened, they would undoubtedly learn a lot.

While we're on the topic of guts and blood, I think it's important to point out our inherent adult aversion to making messes. Both in the literal and figurative sense. Making a mistake is embarrassing when you're an adult, and messy activities seem inefficient because you know you're going to have to clean up afterwards. That's why we put big beautiful kitchens into our homes and then go out to eat ten times a week. It's also one of the nudist colonies' biggest draws. No more laundry. Some people might be quick to point out that children are only so eager to make messes because they know other people are going to clean up after them. But that's not the case. Children don't care about making messes because children will gladly live in filth, disorder and chaos. Adults also invariably live in filth, disorder and chaos, but most of us like to dress it up a little on the outside so we can pretend that we don't.

These grinning ass clowns just destroyed over $2000 worth of electronics/furniture/flooring/clothing. Be that as it may, they've learned more about physics, liquids, color, friction, adhesion, texture and parental wrath in the last ten minutes than you've learned in the last ten years.

So there you have it, folks. We're not learning as fast as the kiddies because we have inhibitions, embarrassment, pride, affectation and peer pressure holding us back. How are we supposed to compete when we're not allowed to constantly annoy people with questions, play make-believe, chatter to ourselves inanely, and sing repetitive, made-up songs out loud for hours on end? But don't think for a moment that this was all some sort of "accident." Children have deliberately monopolized all the best learning techniques, branded them as "childish," and consequently harnessed our pride as a learning-stifling tool to be used against us. It's a full-blown conspiracy, and it's high time all you uptight M.A.s penguining around with puckered up sphincters opened your damn eyes and read the writing on the wall before we're all swapping stories about the good old days inside a bedroom built for twenty at a concentration camp for the "eighteenplusers."

This is what dialing your learning knob down to "0" looks like. Now this man is the knob. A knob job.

Supposedly, the point of getting a liberal education at a university is to learn how to learn. This would seem to imply that people are born not knowing how to learn, go through high school kind of learning, and then finally get to university and unlock the potential to really learn for the first time. But most of the learning data suggests the curve is exactly the opposite. By the time most people get to university, it's already too late. Their best learning years are behind them. They've long since given up their learning powers in exchange for peer affirmation and superiority points. If we want to learn how to learn, let's go back to preschool.

Sincerely,
Sebastian Braff