For some reason, my election recap was recently linked on collegehumor.com, buried in a November 9th list labeled “Hot Links! Hot Links!” between–I swear I’m not making this up–a site hocking beer pong t-shirts and a link simply called “crazy girl on girl catfight.” Somehow, my link managed to be the least highbrow of the three. I’m not even sure why it was linked on College Humor, as I have graduated from college and haven’t been humorous since the seventh grade, when my math teacher made an error on the chalkboard and said, “Boy, I sure feel stupid,” to which I quipped, “You look it, sir,” which I have regretted to this day.

After the recap was posted on College Humor, it was then passed around like a joint at a Ja Rule album release party, accumulating over 20,000 unique hits in a two-day span. While this might not seem like much for fancier websites that offer “content” and “reasons for visiting,” it’s an unprecedented sum for eKarjala. Most surprising is that the recap in question is simply an uncouth stream of invective, the joke being that I use nothing more than derivates of the word “fuck” to express my view on the Presidential Election. As can be expected, response to the recap was pretty divisive. For example, political maven FlutyMagic@aol.com wrote:

You’re pretty trashy.  Thats about all I can say to you!  You’re trash!

If you’ve never been at the receiving end of one of FlutyMagic’s cunning affronts, let me just say that they can be pretty brutal. Notice how the only thing FlutyMagic deigns to tell me is that I’m nothing but trash—common, everyday garbage, to be picked up on Tuesday morning in some nondescript Hefty bag. His peremptory exclamation points carry a poignant, debilitating weight that leave me dizzy, while his merciless observation that I am both trash and trashy is a terrifying redundancy I wish I could erase from my woebegone memory. Not since LittlePrincessPony wrote me have I been picked apart so ruthlessly.

Colleges are always appalled when students riot or get into huge fights after a major sporting victory, but this is kind of a mixed message when you consider that during games students are coerced into chanting so-called “fight songs.” These are spirited songs that sound exactly alike from college to college, and they’re job is to provoke fans into a state of high emotion necessary for properly rooting for their team and then rioting for their team after the game. God bless my alma mater, but the Michigan State fight song is a little ridiculous. Included in this lyrical masterpiece are the following lines:

On the banks of the Red Cedar/There’s a school that’s known to all
It’s specialty is winning/And those Spartans play good ball
I kind of wish Michigan State’s specialty was providing a quality education, but no. Our specialty is winning sporting events. That’s fantastic. This should go over well at my next job interview.

Spartan teams are never beaten/All through the game they’ll fight
Fight for the only colors: Green and White
Right. Spartan teams are never beaten. OK, but if we’re never beaten, how do you explain the fact that our football team is 4-5 right now? To me that means we’ve been beaten five times this year. But perhaps the song is merely suggesting that our team is never mentally beaten, that at heart we’re always winners, like when our quarterback got suspended for cocaine addiction two years ago.

Rah! Rah! Rah! See their team is weakening/We’re going to win this game
Fight! Fight! Rah! Team, Fight!/Victory for MSU
Rah! Rah! Fight! Rah! Fight! Rah! Rah! Fight! Fight! Fight! Kill! Kill! Start fires! Somehow MSU expects people to sing this song but also refrain from fighting or rioting after the game. This is kind of like making somebody sing a drinking song and then telling them to stay completely sober. I just flipped over my chair and set it on fire, and I didn’t even sing the song out loud.

Some people are under the impression that by tracing the etymology of their first name, they can infer traits about their personality. For example, according to this website, my name Eric is derived from ei meaning “ever” and rikr meaning “ruler,” hence signifying a mighty ruler. While it is true that I am going to become a mighty ruler, that is a happy coincidence rather than the result of being named Eric. In reality my parents were just uncreative and could think of nothing else–they probably picked up a book of baby names from the gas station on the way to the hospital and indiscriminately flipped to the E page. “OK, here’s a name that means ‘mighty ruler,’” they said. “That means he’ll grow up to be successful, and we won’t have to give him any attention during the course of his entire childhood.”

The flaw in my parents’ plan is that a person’s first name guarantees nothing. I know this because almost every name denotes a very flattering thing, like “powerful leader” or “spectacular lay,” but how many people that you know actually fit these descriptions? Despite what baby-naming guides would have you believe, every Eric cannot grow up to become a mighty ruler. If it were so, the world would be a chaotic place in which a million rulers ran around with the exact same name. Everybody not named Eric would have to listen to all the Erics’ confusing rules, and it would be impossible to keep track of anything. Eric would say, “Joseph, I told you to tend to the sheep! Who told you to pick berries?” And Joseph would say, “Eric told me to pick berries. He requested we make him a pie. I’m so confused right now. How come everybody named Eric gets to boss us around? This fucking sucks.” Then everybody would start naming their children Eric, and soon we’d be living in a bizarre fantasy world in which everybody was somehow simultaneously a mighty ruler named Eric. Nice try, baby-naming books, but that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.