intertribal | "i want you on my team." "so does everybody else."

I almost could not find this song on YouTube - then I realized I was searching for the wrong artist. I always thought it was by the Postal Service (it's by one member of the band on a solo project, Dntel). It was not I who mislabeled the file.

Ugh, I assigned this song to a character once. This song has scared me from the first time I heard it, because I'm terrified that it applies to me, and now I'm pretty sure it does - so I may as well just admit it. And the video scares/depresses me even more.

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Oh jesus, Bones is using "A Pain That I'm Used To" in their crappy episode, spare me. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the television show Bones? I had to watch it in Surabaya because it was my boss's favorite show (I think she wanted to be the main character). It is seriously the worst police procedural I've ever seen. Yes, worse than CSI: Miami, because at least with CSI: Miami you can tell they don't take themselves seriously. Bones, on the other hand, seems entirely devoted to congratulating its own characters by making every other segment of society live up to its worst stereotypes. The most horrendous episode I've seen is "Player Under Pressure", about a dead college basketball star.

Now we all know that I am not a jock. I can't play any sports. I can (sort of) run, and that's it. I mildly enjoyed roller hockey and lacrosse in P.E., but basketball and I, let me tell you, do not agree. Basketballs have a tendency to zero in on my head (even from half a gym away!), and I don't even watch it for entertainment. I did not associate with jocks in high school, and there are no jocks worth mentioning at my college. The ones that exist look disturbingly like skinheads, I'm not sure what's up with that. I know that from time to time terrible scandals break out about student athletes. Duke lacrosse, Lawrence Philllips, the University of Colorado and their strip-recruiting. As a sports fan I know about them all, and as a sports fan I do hold everyone involved in college athletics to a high standard (as is horrifically obvious from my football posts). And yes, we all hate how the jocks got all the attention in school, and no one cared about the collective us. I was on a state-championship-caliber speech team that never got recognition within our own building (but we were a bunch of snobs, so I don't really blame the rest of the school), so I know. Oh, the temptation to tar and feather those jocks now that we're all grown up and "over it"! Except, you know, you're not over it if you do that, just like Indonesia isn't "over" colonialism if it's still accusing the U.S., a country that never actually colonized them but who sure did look like a colonizer otherwise, of trying to usurp its national sovereignty by having a naval research center in Jakarta, sixty years later.

Is that a basketball? Sports are dumb. Only dumb people like them. By the way, I'm better at basketball than you.

The point of this episode was basically trying to make college athletics look as bad as humanly possible. Not just via the main female character's snippety remarks. The dead player's cheerleader girlfriend didn't care who he slept with ("he can have anybody he wants"), as long as he came back to her, made the NBA, and set her up in a mansion. She actually said this. All the basketball players were unapologetic manwhores who slept with their (female) T.A.s to pass classes, even the ugly ones, and they all had STDs. So did all their cheerleader girlfriends, who were all whores too. It ends up that the cheerleader who was giving him a blow job minutes before his death was engaged to the player that eventually replaced him on the starting line-up (they were the only committed-looking couple in the whole episode, up till then - it was not a ruse on her part, she just "couldn't resist R.J."). The star was killed by this chick's father. Why? The father, now a campus security guard or something, was a failed basketball star himself, and he always "used women like that, under the bleachers". Now that he sees his own little girl being used that way, well, he just lost it.

Of course, this is all hysterically preposterous and comes off as nothing more than the producers' sad attempt at Revenge of the Nerds - pushed over the edge with the main character, the "nerdy" female doctor, being considered "hot" by the basketball players and being able to shoot a basket on her one and only try. Very, you know, cannibalizing the source of power. It's not the Societeit Concordia, it's the Freedom Building, and it's mine! Ja ja, Soekarno, sure it is. So it was funny in a pathetic sense, but also painful to watch. That sort of sums up Bones. Let's not get into the time they mocked Chinese arranged marriages and ancestor worship and used it as an opportunity to show that their heroine can speak Chinese on top of everything else (but the Chinese are still a backwards people).

There is no power, my pretty power.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

i don't really like Dntel, but i guess that song's alright. But yeah, I mean, the Postal Service is like a side project for the guy from Death Cab, and Dntel is a further side project. but not solo, it has other people. i made the mistake of buying one of their albums on the basis of this once and was very disappointed.

this is a good post.

also, somehow i no longer have "A Pain that I'm Used to." Seems my Depeche Mode is all messed up too. Sigh. My poor music.

Yeah, I wasn't fond of the other songs by Dntel, but I've had a soft spot for Umbrella since freshman year.

LOL, thanks.

I'll send you a Depeche Mode rescue mission.

Also, what are you taking the song to mean?

*it was my honest reaction*, haha.

oh, man, you are awesome. also, i of course have the Ultra album because i have the actual CD.

obviously I hate cities, so that's part of it, but the most telling part for me is "when you wrap yourself in a highway strip, don't expect any warmth from it". I associate that with the Foreign Service hardcore, or at any rate with the kind of enterprising, globetrotting ambition that I went into college with.

what are the asterisks for??

ok.

strangely enough, that's basically what i thought you meant. i know you way too well.

um...just a strange tone. i don't know how to describe it. mockingly defensive? it's an 'i'm actually serious but i'm mocking the idea that i would need to state that i'm serious because that is defensive and i don't feel defensive, i am just being ridiculous because i am laughing too' tone.

well, that's not surprising that you guessed correctly... on a related note, I can totally hear your voice as you describe it in the second part there.

haha...yeah, i wrote it in more the way i talk, i think.

"i want you on my team." "so does everybody else."

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