When I moved to the Chicago land area at 6 years old, I didn’t know that I was moving an hour away from one of the best cities of the world. Ever summer my mother, my brother and I would take the train from Vernon Hills to Union Station. We would spend the day on Michigan Avenue or visiting the Field Museum. In the winter our dad would come too and we would go window shopping. Or visitors from Canada would be taken on a trip to DOWNTOWN CHICAGO. There was always a new adventure waiting for us. My impressionable mind grew to love the city of Chicago, and my heart is still there.

On October 2nd, 2009, when the International Olympic Committee ruled that Chicago would not hold the Olympics in 2016, I was pissed. Frustrated. How could they? Chicago was the best city in the world! Their loss! We brought everybody. Barack and Michelle Obama, and even Oprah went to our aide. We had supporters like Hillary Clinton, Michael Jordan, and Michael Phelps. How could we lose (I take that statement back, e.g. Cubs)?

One issue, not so much for the IOC (for there is always money to be found), but for people in Chicago, is the budget. Chicago projected a $5 billion budget for the 2016 games. This, however, comes quite short from Beijing’s $40 billion spent in 2008 (money is easy to come by when you’re communist). 5 years ago, Athens’ budget was set at $2.4 billion. The final cost? $9 billion. Who isn’t to say that the Chicago games wouldn’t actually cost three times the projected budget? There has to be some tax money in there… somewhere. (With Chicago being the city it is, it could use all the money it can get for development such as schools and public service like the Police and Fire Department. This is just wasteful money to put your city on display for a gambling chance of revenue)

And of course, don’t forget who’s backing this: Richard M. Daley. I mean, of all Olympic mayors, this is not your guy. Hell, of all Olympic cities, this is not your cleanest. Corruption runs deep through the veins of this city, and Mayor Daley is the mayor of heart town. It didn’t hurt that their former governor Rod Blagojevich was described as instrumental in acquiring funding. I mean, they don’t call it the Windy City for nothing. It’s so windy because of all the bull shit coming out of the politicians’ asses.

And if you’re the International Olympic Committee, don’t you want your Olympics to be hosted in a city where people actually want the games in the first place? In September, The Chicago Tribune released a poll that showed that 47% of residents supported the Olympics, while 45% did not. The other 8% said that they would just rather root for the Green Bay Packers. But with a city so divided about such an important event, then why would you want to have it there in the first place? Display your games where people are going to love it and be proud of it. People in Rio seem more than happy.

Rio was obvious. Their time zone is only one hour ahead of Eastern Standard Time. The American media and broadcasters will be well pleased. This would also be the first games in South America. Rio is beautiful, and what would you not like. Plus, the people in Rio seem to actually want the Olympics. So you’re welcome Rio. We didn’t deserve it anyway. And congratulations.

 

Note: The only good thing that Chicago got out of this whole event was a really sweet Olympic logo, and even that was rejected by the IOC. Suck!!

Why do we believe this phrase “you deserve better”? Have the lies that we've heard become accepted as our fact? Have we become so enthralled with pleasing everyone, that we forgot to please our self, first? Why is it that when others bring us down and deter our soul, we hence embrace them. We embrace their poetry and we embrace their anger. We believe their sayings are true, and that their reflections upon us must be genuine. So, over periods of our life, we believe that we are not worthy, we are less, and we are unsatisfactory. We cannot see our strengths, because others have only restated our weaknesses. We cannot move on, because in order to move on, we must be strong, but we do not believe we are strong; we believe we are weak (that is our weakness). So we believe that we deserve less. It may not be true, but a lie repeated is a truth aired. And so when prosper enters our lives, we find a way to sacrifice it in name of the lies we believe. We do not deserve prosper, rather we deserve worse. And so the prosper leaves. The prosper deserves better than us. But that is only because we do not believe that we are good enough for the prosper. The prosper sees the good in us that we have hidden amongst our own eyes and the prosper wishes to reveal our strength. But we shun the prosper and crawl back into our darkness.

Maybe one day I will babble on about my emigration to the United States. But for today it is about you dumb Americans. In particular, I am writing to those of you who still think that Toronto is a state (it is not, and Canada has no states). I am writing to those of you who think that it snows all the time in Canada, we have no military, and that Eskimos run the country. I am writing to those of you who haven't even traveled to Canada (no, Niagara Falls doesn't count you idiot) and decided that Canada is this funny, comical land to the north that is full of hicks and shouldn't be taken seriously (you guys have hicks too, so who cares?). Do you not realize that one often does not know much about a place until he or she has actually gone there? Or is your brain too concentrated on what you're going to get next time you go to Wal-Mart or McDonalds (you see, I can do stereotypes, too). Our biases are often wrong, yet Americans are so self absorbed in their premises that they rarely have an open mind. They think that they know all about Canada as they guzzle down their Budweiser. It makes me sick! I want to throw my Molson Canadian in their face (which is now owned by Coors, bye the way... Oh god). So let's take at four simple stereotypes, shall we?

I am bored. School is over, well, for three weeks anyway. That is my summer vacation. It is Sunday night and I sit here at my desk, staring at my computer screen, waiting for it to come up with some sort of entertaining idea. Nothing.

8:00pm on a Wednesday. The time of a bible study in the dorm I was residing in. I had not been to one in a long time. Too long. But I was trying to change that. We all met on the ground floor in some piano room (I'm assuming because it had a piano in it). The building was old, over a century old, and air didn't circulate well in hot, summer days. But luckily this was still early March in Columbus. We wouldn't have to worry about the heat for a couple more months. The brick-lined room with green carpet small, ceiling windows gave the impression of a 1920's style basement.

On most evenings she walks down her porch, enters her car, and begins a conflict with her car's ignition. When she first puts in the key and tries to turn, she is met with a force against her hand that says the key won't go any farther. For the next 14 times she keeps on pushing the key clockwise, attempting to start her car, until maybe some creatures in her ignition decide that they have had their fun and that she can go on her way.

I now have a subscription to Netflix. I have to say that I am quite the satisfied customer and highly recommend it. As I started to watch a lot of movies, the thought of doing a blog came entering into my head. I thought, what better to write about than all of the movies that I am watching? That would provide plenty of material. So the idea would be to write my thoughts on the constant movies I would watch, criticize them, and more. My first two postings on this blog followed along that line, as you can tell by my critique of Eagle Eye. I even considered watching one movie every day for a year, sort of a Julie and Julia ripoff. This idea merged into the potential of a blog, a blog about my views of movies. And so, I needed a title for this intended blog. I needed something like movie madness, though that sounded like it had been done before. Suddenly the word Mayhem bursted into my skull. Movie Mayhem. Sounded catchy and original, it caught the meaning of the blog I wanted to convey. Of course, someone already had the html of moviemayhem on blogspot, so I did something like mayhemandmovies.

Every morning my cell phone increasingly rings, at my own setting, to consecutive beeping. It is 7am, and it is not time for me to wake up. It is time for me to touch the bottom right of the screen, where a rectangular shape says "snooze". I tap it, and 5 minutes later, the alarm repeats itself. This time I get up, as for the past three weeks my five minute warning has been helping me slowly get two legs out of bed. I proceed to the bathroom where I pick my nose and pick the crust out of my eyes. I then look into the mirror and pick the zits on me that have crawled their way to the surface of my sleeping skin, just like a soldier drags his belly along the deep grasses of vietnam. After I have taken my shower, eaten breakfast, and driven through traffic that is slowly creeping north day by day, I arrive in class.

I'm still struggling to get the vivid image of an innocent looking Shia LaBeouf, playing the role of a 7th grader named Louis on Disney's Even Stevens, out of my childhood head. His pranks on his sister Renee and his scheming with his bud Twitty were, for a few reliable seasons, what I grew up on. I was hoping Eagle Eye could take that image out of my head. I was wrong. I don't think anything can. But the movie did leave me with a bad "I think I've seen this before" taste in my mouth.

It's 10:51 at night. I'm sitting at my desk and there's a keyboard resting under my hands. I have just lost my virginity. My blog viriginty. At first it was always too unpopular. Too little people were doing it. I would surely become some sort of hysterical minority that types amaturical words (see what I mean) onto a virtual page that no one would eventually read. Yet blogging became too popular. I mean, I for one could not move in the direction that everyone else is moving at. I must move upstream, flow North like the Nile, and tell everyone else that blogging is for those who 'conform'. But here we are. I sat here, and I say sat, because by the time you're reading this it is no longer 10:...56 pm and it is no longer July (maybe). Instead, you're reading this at time whenever for whatever reason. I suppose that is the beauty of a blogg, of a story or an illustration. All of these capture time. All were at one point were being molded by their creator. And yet, for the rest of eternity, they sit still, a window unto the past. But enough with that. Let me stand atop and say I'm no longer a virgin.