JJ Bersch

Jurassic Park

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:40:18 -0500

Haha.

Hey you guys.

How are you?

I am good, yes. Just been busy updating this blog like every damn day. Sometimes I am so busy maintaining this blog that I literally have no time to do anything else! I have bills to pay, taxes to collect, kids to feed, and 401k’s to something but I never do any of it because of this blog I am charged with constantly updating. So, yeah, like I said, I am good, but really, this blog is wearing me out and I think I’m going to have to slow my roll a bit. I just can’t keep writing posts once every six months. It was always inevitable that such a quick pace would eventually burn me out.

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I wrote something on a blog that you and I presumed dead.

I don’t know exactly why I’m not asleep right now, but I think it has something to do...

Thu, 09 May 2013 04:17:55 -0500

I don’t know exactly why I’m not asleep right now, but I think it has something to do with the parody of a parody twitter account I just created being the most satisfying writing I’ve done in a very long time.

Pretty interesting exchange of ideas occurring on the YouTube...

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:36:00 -0500

Pretty interesting exchange of ideas occurring on the YouTube video for the new Vampire Weekend single.

We’re all just having some fun on the Internet tonight.

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 01:18:23 -0500

We’re all just having some fun on the Internet tonight.

"Comedy is denying something that is blatantly, obviously true. Tragedy is embracing something..."

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 23:01:11 -0500

“Comedy is denying something that is blatantly, obviously true. Tragedy is embracing something blatantly, obviously false.”

- Steven Soderbergh

A Fun Exercise!

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:49:02 -0600

Here are the IMDB ratings for this year’s Best Picture nominees:

Django Unchained, 8.6/10 from 215,436 users, Top 250: #41
Life of Pi, 8.2/10 from 108,930 users, Top 250: #188
Argo, 8.0/10 from 117,692 users
Silver Linings Playbook, 8.0/10 from 96,916 users
Amour, 8.0/10 from 20,210 users
Les Misérables, 7.9/10 from 81,747 users
Lincoln, 7.7/10 from 60,874 users
Zero Dark Thirty, 7.6/10 from 56,890 users
Beasts of the Southern Wild, 7.4/10 from 28,889 users

So, yeah, I don’t know. Movies! We know them. We love them.

As I walked up the ramp leading towards Northwestern’s student center earlier today, I felt a rush...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:53:00 -0600

As I walked up the ramp leading towards Northwestern’s student center earlier today, I felt a rush of blood to my head and nearly passed out. I was between midterms, this having been the busiest and most stressful midterm week of my undergraduate career, and it seemed like a nightly dosage of four or five hours of sleep and a diet consisting entirely of Cheetos and tacos was no longer enough fuel to function at even a below-average level. I sat down at a table on the center’s lower level and stared at Lake Michigan, its composition not unlike my own, cold, immobile, and brimming with chemicals and garbage.

There was a time when this was not an uncommon occurrence in my life. My freshman year of college was defined by sleepless nights of tossing and turning and crying. I fell asleep during every single algebra class my sophomore year of high school, and often sang incoherently during the time our teacher allotted for working on homework. I almost quit my job a couple of years ago after I slept through an alarm for the third consecutive day. I once wrote an AP English essay at four in the morning after watching The Big Lebowski, only to have the teacher use my introductory paragraph (without my name attached, thankfully) as an example of how not to write an essay. I would have been more embarrassed had I been able to keep my eyes open. My average night in high school involved watching Late Night With Conan O’Brien, attempting sleep, failing, repetition of the last two steps, and finally turning the TV back on and hoping to fall asleep some time before five o’clock thanks to the white noise of ESPNews.

But that is in the past and today was an anomaly. I sleep easy now, for the most part, except for when I step on nails or get sucked into internet rabbit holes. Life is good, and I am happy.

I drank a Red Bull while my eyes consumed the lake earlier, and I just made myself a coffee, my second of the day. I am hoping the caffeine assuages my haziness, as I have to drive home in an hour or so. Home is Milwaukee right now. It is the city that I have lived in for the majority of my life, but that is not what makes it home. It is home because she is there.

The key to college, especially in an essay-heavy major, is to remember that you are being judged by...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:27:17 -0600

The key to college, especially in an essay-heavy major, is to remember that you are being judged by people who are fundamentally no better (or worse, usually!) than you.

I took the girl I liked’s best friend to the homecoming dance my sophomore year. I did not...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:45:00 -0600

I took the girl I liked’s best friend to the homecoming dance my sophomore year. I did not know her much at all. I purposefully pricked my finger with the flower she had attached to my shirt pocket earlier that night and stood by a fan for the entirety of the dance. At one point a few of my friends and I rapped along to “Stronger.” The injury was serious enough to sideline me, I’m sorry, I told her afterwards, and showed her a slightly bloodied paper towel. She elected not to hang out with me after the dance, so I regrouped with the girl I liked, her date, one of her friends, and that friend’s date. The former two and I went to a grocery store and picked up a few bottles of Gatorade. I grabbed a bottle of G2. When they noticed my mistake, I told them I liked G2. I actually wanted Gatorade Rain. We met back up with the friend and the friend’s date at the friend’s date’s house. We sat in a hot tub for a bit. My swim trunks remained perpetually inflated. I do not think I moved more than three inches in total. The night sky and the water kept my chest covered. I put my shirt back on and sat down in a chair a few yards away from the hot tub while the girl I liked used the bathroom. She eventually reemerged from the bathroom and hopped back into the hot tub. I clung to my chair, alone, but safe, with my shirt on. The girl I liked’s date drove me home after maybe an hour of this. He started dating her a week or two after.

I feel like I felt in that story right now as I stare at my Twitter feed, surrounded by people, some of whom I like, yet alone and motionless, talking up G2 and its carcinogens as I slyly attempt to deflate my swim trunks, as the people I like carry on as if everything’s fine, because everything is fine, and I have always had a flair for the dramatic. But maybe everything is not fine, and they are sad right now, too. That’s a nice thought.

An E-Mail I Received From A Son Of Tom Hanks On The Fifth Of December, 2011, At 4:09 AM, Eight Hours Before The Paper In Question Was Due

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 22:18:00 -0600

What Up Everybody,

My names Chester Hanks, I’m a junior theater major, but some of you may know me better as “Chet Haze.” Or maybe you dont, which would be embarrassing for me…..Anyway, if the sound of receiving this email on your phone woke you up at this hour, I sincerely apologize. Hopefully, there may be a few of you (like me) who for some reason just need to wait until literally the LAST MINUTE to get any work done—this final paper being no exception. I was wondering if anyone had notes from after November 1st to the end of the course on their computer that they would be willing to send my way. It would be much appreciated, and we could possibly work something out as a reward for the generosity. I’m really crossing my fingers on this one. Thanks! Happy studies.

-Chet

I stepped on a nail tonight and my foot hurts a lot. I am awake and will be for awhile. There are...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:11:00 -0600

I stepped on a nail tonight and my foot hurts a lot. I am awake and will be for awhile. There are plenty of things to do. I will choose the worst one.

It’s strange to know that you don’t know some people you once knew, and you wonder if these people feel the same way. Everybody wants to leave their own mark on the world, but the world is enormous so we settle for a few people. We fail to leave a mark more often than we succeed. We lose people. We gain people. We lose them again. Some we keep. But not forever. Because forever is not a thing.

My foot obviously hurts because I stepped on the nail and not because part of the nail broke off in my foot or an infection fought through my tetanus vaccination and the several layers of Neosporin I’ve applied or the nail was poisoned. No, my foot hurts because it was punctured by a nail. Though I guess it could be something else. I suppose I have to think about it a little more.

Kevin McAllister was kind of an asshole. Sure, the wet bandits were assholes, too, much bigger assholes, in fact, but the nail he set as a trap for Marv was much bigger than the relatively small one that made a temporary home out of my foot tonight. Did you know Marv was in Whip It, the movie Drew Barrymore directed a few years ago? I didn’t. I do now.

I called a cab service to pick me up and take me to the hospital tonight. They did not have any cabs available. This was a good thing. It’s been about a year and ten months since my last emergency room visit. This is a funny scene from Seinfeld.

My foot is now numb, and I am positive I’m dying. Except, no, I’m not dying, I’ve just been positioning my foot awkwardly. I shake it. It’s alive again.

Marv also starred in A Christmas Story 2, a straight-to-DVD sequel to TBS’s annual holiday programming block. CelebrityNetWorth.com states he is worth $12 million. I do not know if this website is accurate. Allegedly Chris Kattan is worth $8 million.

My computer makes me numb, and I am positive I’m dying, because I am, and I am never not dying, and there are many places on the internet with artifacts from the past, and each one of them is terrible, even the good ones, and they are all killing me, and I will look at them until I stop thinking about my foot that was punctured by a nail earlier tonight.

In eighth grade, one of my closest, nicest, and most thoughtful friends devised a master plan to rid...

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 20:29:00 -0600

In eighth grade, one of my closest, nicest, and most thoughtful friends devised a master plan to rid the world of its malignant gay menace. It was a simple plan, brutal in its effectiveness with little-to-no chance of failure. The entirety of the world’s homosexual population would be shipped off to New Zealand. Once there, the United States Army would drop a giant penis bomb in the middle of the island. Overcome with intense sexual desire, the gays, erect and salivating, would race towards the giant penis bomb, unable to differentiate a giant penis bomb from an actual giant penis, ultimately meeting their demise when the giant penis bomb landed, blowing every single one of them into a billion tiny, gay pieces. Okay, so maybe the plan’s a bit more flawed than I initially stated, especially when you consider this friend’s undying fandom of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (presumably he never watched any of the special features) and, oh, I suppose, that gay men have brains (all of them, in fact, have brains) and can use said brains to resist the raw sex appeal of a giant penis bomb. So, yes, actually, it’s a terrible, hateful, no good, very bad plan.

But I think of this friend’s plan every time BuzzFeed or Uproxx publishes a listicle of “Terrible Tweets from Tweens!” and @boring_as_heck or some other denizen of weird twitter goes on a retweeting spree (I have done this twice, by the way, I’m sorry). The appeal of these articles and retweets is fairly obvious: we’re initially shocked by the ignorant content of the tweets, and we take joy in the shame their publishing brings. It’s something people like Harris Wittels and Joe Mande have been capitalizing on forever, but the bulk of their fodder is either innocent enough or concerned with the celebrity/corporate worlds. When these people venture into the shaming of children, however, it becomes troublesome, because they are children.

I downloaded my Twitter archive a few days ago and, oh boy, was there some shit. Most of it lame. I used to be quite fond of adverbs (one tweet contained five! five adverbs in only 140 characters!), interminable @ reply conversations, and using “haha” in every tweet. I was very melodramatic, and once went on a falsified twenty tweet rant about a relatively minor conversation I had just had with my loving, eternally supportive parents. My first tweet ever (“I got a five!”) was in response to someone touting their AP US History test score (a three). I also had a proclivity to throw around “gay” and “faggot” (in tweets I have now deleted, sorry) as freely as the aforementioned adverbs and haha’s (okay, maybe not quite as freely as the adverbs). It was shocking to me, as I had presumed I’d weeded out the slurs from my vernacular by my first tweet during my junior year of high school. But, nope, there those words were, plenty of times, setting me up for multiple posts on Uproxx (they really would have loved this one: “Justin Bieber is a faggot. A plain and simple, old fashioned, classic example of a faggot.” Holy fuck what?). By total coincidence, I deactivated my Facebook today as prep for permanent deletion. That profile stretches all the way back to my sophomore year of high school, dear God, and unlike Twitter archive, Facebook’s timeline is available for the perusal of any one of my Facebook friends, while my comments on their timelines are likely visible to anyone with an Internet connection due to Facebook’s privacy settings. No thank you. Goodbye, Facebook. You mostly bummed me out anyway.

So, anyway, these kids. These kids are kids and kids are dumb and they are always going to be dumb and because they are dumb they are going to say some really dumb shit. They’re going to fuck up an infinite number of times, and they don’t need storify listicles further cementing their stupidity for time immemorial. Eventually the kids will grow up and horrify themselves and struggle in the job market enough without anyone else’s help (excluding family, teachers, peers, etc.), and if they don’t they will surely experience plenty of shame in the “real world” or just join their fellow assfucks in the Republican party. I grew. My friend grew. We’re lucky our lives weren’t entirely broadcast on the Internet. The future generation won’t be as fortunate. Let’s let them embarrass themselves without any help from us. Don’t worry, they’re going to do it a lot.

My grandfather was retired for the entirety of my existence in his life, and this provided me with...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 01:06:00 -0600

My grandfather was retired for the entirety of my existence in his life, and this provided me with enough contact to grow very close to him. He lived in a condo off of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. It put you at eye level with holiday fireworks, and the glass of his windows muffled the bloodcurdling boom. It was magic, as were our repeat visits to the movie theater to watch The Lion King. There was no muffler for Mufasa’s death, but the love in his eyes did its best. There is a scene in that film in which Rafiki, our protagonist’s spiritual guide, states that when we die we become the stars in the sky and watch over our loved ones. While scientifically incorrect, Rafiki’s words remain emotionally gratifying.

I am not sure of the exact date of my grandfather’s death, but I am fairly certain it occurred after I reached the age of three but before I turned four. Not a day goes by where I don’t consider how he would view my progress as a human being. How he would be resistant to my liberalness. How he would find tremendous pride in the majority of my academic work at Northwestern. How he would scold me for the C+ I received in that shitty mess of a lecture on modern warfare. How he would feel for instilling in me my love for film. How he would perceive my relationships. How he would love me no matter what.

Way back, not a night went by without me looking into the stars, searching for Grandpa, hoping to see his rounded, rectangular eyeglasses showcasing his gentle gaze. It was a restless series of months characterized by confusion and depression. I hadn’t been on Earth for very long. I didn’t grasp its limitations. I had no idea of its boundless sadness, of its frequent trips to the hospital, then later the church. My Grandpa was one of the first people I ever loved, and the first I lost.

I’m particularly troubled by how my grandfather would view my freshman year of college, an era defined by rampant hypochondria, X-rays, and fear. My right lung collapsed twice in the summer after my senior year of high school. My mother suffered a debilitating stroke the prior March. My dad found himself constantly ill and in pain. My little brother battled a heavy bout of depression. After a prolonged stretch of relative slumber, death seemed to be rapidly creeping its way back into my life, and I found myself unable to sleep, worried about the litany of diseases and ailments that could be destroying my body at the very moment. I became a regular at multiple hospitals. I had panic attacks. I missed work. I skipped classes. All because of what might happen to me, all because of that over which I have no control. I worry about how my grandfather would view this period of my life because I was hopelessly, unceasingly selfish.

My grandfather was a big donor at Marquette University. There’s some story my mom used to tell me about the school offering to name the wing of a library after him, though he said that they could do that after he was dead. To my knowledge there is still no such wing, though there is a tree dedicated to my grandmother. I never met her.

These days I worry about death, but not my own, except for in the ways it would hurt and strand others. I worry about those around me and how little control I have over their fate. I do not want to search for them in the stars. I do not want to lose them to the earth. I want them to know how much I cherish them. I want them to feel what I felt when I watched those fireworks.

Photo

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:49:00 -0600

buzzfeed: This seems like it’d be a pretty good book for some...

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:03:04 -0600

buzzfeed:

This seems like it’d be a pretty good book for some people!

Oh SNAP, Buzzfeed. You did NOT just go there. WOW. Hahahahahah. Wow wow wow.

"It’s stressful for the most part. I want to make beats all night, but fuck, I got to get up and be..."

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 00:33:09 -0600

“It’s stressful for the most part. I want to make beats all night, but fuck, I got to get up and be ready to go to class at 8 and sit through an hour long lecture. It’s even worse when you get up and you got ideas to make beats, but you keep looking at the clock like, ‘Shit.’ You don’t want to be late, you don’t want to be absent.”

- I feel the fuck out of this Key Wane quote, as a fellow 22-year-old graduating in December who has ideas at night and classes in the morning. (via andyhutchins)

buzzfeed: awlmusic: Bitch, Don’t Kill My VibeKendrick Lamar...

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 15:56:03 -0600

buzzfeed:

awlmusic:

Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe
Kendrick Lamar Feat. Lady Gaga

Wow! Excellent! So Kendrick Lamar, a young rapper from Compton who Dr. Dre signed to Aftermath/Interscope Records last year, recently released an album called good kid, m.A.A.d. city that has had much of the hip-hop community arguing about whether it is the best rap album of the year or the best rap album of all-time. I mean, it is really good. I’ve been listening to it a lot and it puts me in the mind of A Tribe Called Quest’s first album and OutKast’s second album. But apparently it could have been even better. Kendrick was reported to have recorded music with Lady Gaga earlier this year, but due to an unfortunate, all-too-standard industry snafu, none of the material was included on the final version of the album. Well, last night, Lady Gaga released a video she made of the version of the second song on Kendrick’s album, “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” upon which she does appear. And it is great. Hooray for Lady Gaga! Hooray for Kendrick Lamar!

You can watch “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” and a ton of other videos on the Awl Music app for iPad. We pick the best, our favorites, just for you. And it’s free!

—Dave Bry

Definitely check this out. It is awesome.

This is all so wrong. I can’t even process all of the stuff that is wrong with this.

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:16:44 -0500

Congrats to you and Jay but how could you leave Kanye out of...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:25:45 -0500

Congrats to you and Jay but how could you leave Kanye out of this?

Rango Unchained

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:33:02 -0500

Rango Unchained