As you will recall if you read Page Two week to week, semester to semester, a columnist named Adam Wolf and I shared the page each Wednesday last year. While I tried to change my subject matter week to week with interesting and funny observations about life and media, Adam had a consistent set up in which he could write his article in 15 minutes and reap all the rewards that a successful Page Two columnist deserves: girls, money, fame, delusion. Now that Adam is presumably dead or graduated, I thought I would write my tribute to him and his infallible column. This is my Wednesday Morning Hangover.
Movie from your childhood that still kicks ass
“The Mask” (1994)—I had to re-watch this movie for a class and I forgot how violent it is. To be fair, it’s based on a dark series by Dark Horse Comics. In the comics, Stanley Ipkiss was more of a deranged killing lunatic than crazy superhero. But the movie is still hella fun and a great introduction to Cameron Diaz, who looks exactly like a girl Tex Avery’s wolves would go crazy for. A-WHOO.
First-World Hate of the week
My first-world hate of the week is the app Sleep Cycle. Sleep Cycle is supposed to wake you up at the point when you’re closest to being awake so you feel refreshed, instead of waking up in the middle of REM sleep and feeling groggy and like Garfield on Mondays.
It’s supposed to do that. However, these past few weeks I’ve been using it to give myself enough time to eat breakfast and drink coffee before class while trying to be energetic and ready for the day. Instead, I just snooze through my light alarm, spend the next 30 minutes contemplating how much time a shower would actually take and then rush to my first class with no food and no coffee inside of me. It’s a rough life, I know. Please, Sleep Cycle, do what you said you would do. Make me feel better in the mornings, not worse.
Song that Never Fails to fire me up
“Nosetalgia” (Pusha T ft. Kendrick Lamar, 2013)—Adam and I differ in our choice for pump-up songs; while Adam usually went with classic 1980s flare, I like to keep my iTunes fresh with new music. Pusha T released his first solo album My Name Is My Name and it’s undoubtedly great, but the first single from the album really stands out as a song that gets the people going. As a white man who has lived in the suburbs all my life, I feel like I live vicariously through King Push in this song as he details how he makes and sells cocaine (affectionately called Johnson & Johnson in this song). Think about how much Pusha gets through in his first four lines with “20 plus years of selling Johnson & Johnson / I started out as a baby face monster / No wonder there’s diaper rash on my conscience / My teething ring was numbed by the nonsense.”
Tough shit, right? And then Kendrick (who we’ve all anointed as the king of hip-hop in the aughties) leads his verse with “You wanna see a dead body” Chills. It’s a great song and now I feel like I’m ready to go to the streets of the Bronx and sell cocaine.
Unedited moronic Facebook status from a kid from my high school
None. Why none? Because I unfriend anyone that is idiotic from Facebook. I don’t understand why more people don’t do this. I don’t want everyone to see what I’m doing and I don’t care what they’re doing. Once I graduated high school, I deleted like 200 friends from Facebook. I’m at about 600 friends and they’re still too much. (Protip for unfriending: When Facebook tells you to say happy birthday to someone you don’t know, unfriend that person… happy birthday.) Please do me a favor and remove me before I remove you.
This one’s for you Adam, I hope I made you proud.
Happy to see Wednesday Morning Hangover again? Email Michael to tell him at mvoloshin@wisc.edu.
