Kacper Niburski
Opinions Editor

I’ve never been one for zombie series but when I heard that Community was coming back for a fifth season, I prepared a rise-of-the-undead-kit.

On paper, the show should have wilted into television death ages ago. Season three saw the loss of Dan Harmon and a series of public catfights between Chevy Chase (Pierce on the show) and the director, Harmon. The fourth season was born from this tumult. In the chaos and unrest, the show soon devolved into a slaughterhouse of comedy: each episode was caught on an automatic conveyor belt that was hurtling towards a blunt, gear-squealing meat-grinder. No matter the screams and furious backtracking, the cash cow of a series was a bloody mess.

Though the characters were still the same and though Greendale was still Greendale with its cartoon-like reality and improbable plots, the fourth season’s episodes could never mesh. Any movement seemed like a botched homage to the show’s past; any attempt at a hijinks felt rushed and premature. Everything was steeped in the show’s darkest timeline, including Community itself. Something always appeared to be amiss, despite the efforts of everyone on the cast, the talent behind the scenes, and the recycling of previous plot devices.

So as I sat down on Jan. 2 for the episodes, I prepared for the worst: my zombie-kit was beside me. In it, I had ready-made popcorn, a battalion of tissues, and a little bit of alcohol just in case I needed help getting through the horror show.

And yet there were laughs instead of grumbles, smiles instead of tears. The impossible had happened. Community was back, and this time it really, really was.

Under the aegis of Harmon’s renewed creativity, the two episodes scaled back to their origins. “Repilot” and “An Introduction to Teaching” flashed a brilliance that gave the show its name in the first place. In fact, “Repilot” kicks off the dirt of season four by mirroring the first pilot episode ever aired – the crestfallen Jeff Winger (played Joel McHale) gets help by an old acquaintance, unassumingly brings together a beloved but fickle study group, tears them apart through wild lies, and then by stressing little, worn domestic truths, helps himself and the group reassemble their shambled together lives.

It is almost like a dream. In season five, we are caught in a beginning of a beginning, an end of an end. And unlike season four, it is not a nightmare. The repetition is purposeful. The blemishes of season four are adroitly dealt with. It is a five-season cycle. We are spun backwards and forwards and backwards again.

There is no telling when we’ll have to wake up from this dream and when the show will soil this newly found honeymoon period. Who knows – maybe in the next few episodes the luster of the old will fail, they’ll Britta the whole thing, and all the hype around the fifth season will be blamed on a gas spill.

Or maybe none of that’ll happen and the truncated fifth season will keep the “pop, pop” until there are six seasons and a movie.

In elementary school I always had difficulty remembering which year it was. On each assignment that required a date, one could often find a scribbled number that hid my embarrassment. 2006 and onwards became 200X, where X can be any number between 0 and 9. 2005 and below lurked around in the 1990s, fitting for a decade of gelled hair, boy bands, and the creation of Nunavut.

If I were a psychologist, I’d guess this indifference to one year or another was because I always hated new years. To me, they seemed an arbitrary date of importance decided by nothing more than the Earth’s helical axis, an Earth, mind you, that would keep spinning with or without our champagne, party hats, and countdowns.

Perhaps we realize this insignificance, and that is why more often than not New Years is spent bamboozled enough to forget the last year. We poison ourselves in the hopes of happiness. All the failures and regrets, the sadness and unresolved depression are washed in party plans and alcohol. Our insecurities drown, and for a brief moment, we feel happy with a bottle for a baby in our hand.

Then when the morning comes, and the day shambles itself together, we need to come up with aspirations for, well, ourselves. I did this below with the weight of responsibility after a night that was anything but responsible. It is, of course, satirical because nothing is quite as funny as oneself and the goals they set and set again.

It’s happening again.

It really just sneaked up on me. One moment it’s one year and then the next – poof, it’s gone like that, and I’m diving head first into one drink then another, and I kiss a girl, and I start to feel woozy, and my stomach celebrates the New year with its own colourful pyrotechnics.

I didn’t have time to plan is what I’m saying. But hey, that’s okay. There’s still time, right? January 8^th isn’t a bad time for resolutions. Better late than never, someone once said. I wonder if they thought about the implications of that statement. I mean – I’d rather never be sick than be late to get the bubonic plague. But maybe I’m just picky. The bubonic plague was all the rage in the Dark Ages, and doesn’t fashion have a way of coming back?

But anyways: resolutions. Well, the first one is easy: come up with new years resolutions.

Boom, just like that – I’ve already completed one. I’m on fire. As it were, it’s so easy to complete your goals when you have none.

Maybe I should take a break? All this success is tiring me out. Yes – a break will do me well. It’ll give me energy to combat this oncoming annum.

And besides if I’m using words like annum instead of year, I must be confused because I’m tired and tired because I’m confused. Does that make sense? I’m not sure. I guess that just proves how tired and confused I am. Sleep will settle everything.

I’m awake and I’m feeling groggy. Nothing is better. At least this page is still here. So what’s next? Ah yes. Writing. Need to do more of that. Don’t I want to pen the sentence that has never been penned before? Maybe something like purple hippos are the unsung heroes of Canada or “Hey, you should eat more McDonalds because it’s good for you” or I promise I’ll go to sleep tonight before 2 am tonight.

Well, look at that – those sentences exist now and I wrote them. Another new years resolution finished. I shouldn’t have worried. These are coming easily now. Maybe I can do with another nap?

How about that: let’s make a third resolution to sleep more. I mean – I am tired from the previous nap. I need a rest from the rest. Please wait as I accomplish this resolution too.

Done. Now, a fourth? Workout. Wait a second. Last year I wished for something similar and that didn’t work out, if you mind the pun, so well. Maybe I should say, “Work out some more." That’s a good qualifier.

Wait… I used that one two years ago as well, and again, not my finest failure. Besides it implies I already work out and let’s not lie to ourselves this early in the year. Fine. How about “Get less fat.” That’s something I can stand behind, if of course, I can still see my behind by the end of the year.

I’ll admit that these lofty ambitions need specifics. Generalities hide the responsibilities of each independent goal. Therefore this year I’m going make sure that every day I wake up, shave, shower, eat breakfast, drive, work, study, read, drive back home, eat again, work, study, read, go to sleep, repeat.

There – my days have now been planned for the rest of my life. And better yet, I have resolution after resolution after resolution lurking in daily existence.

Next: do stuff. This might be contradictory to the specifics required in the daily ritual resolution – note: add don’t contradict oneself to list – but anything I write can be reduced down and qualified. I’ll have to stipulate endlessly. So doing stuff allows me to accomplish my goals without knowing I accomplished my goals. And hey, I’m already reaping in the rewards. I’m completing this post. I’m breathing. I’m doing stuff.

Last but not least, know when enough is enough. Some stuff is too much and some stuff is too little, and other times, some stuff is just some stuff. This year, there’ll be a lot of stuff coming my way, stuff both good and bad that I’ll be unable to prepare for no matter how foolish or grand or intricate my goals may be. Against a million upon million of variables beyond my control, all I can do is start what I want to do, this post for example, and end it when I need to, right now for example.

 

I was told that if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right the first time. Otherwise you might find yourself wondering what the hell went wrong with your hands full, your shoelaces tied in knots, and your pants on the ground.

A year and a half ago, I was found myself in such a snafu. Personal circumstances not withstanding, I was struggling with academics, my extracurriculars were demanding and thankless, and I was surviving on a diet of peanut butter sandwiches and coffee. I was miserable. I was depressed. And worst of all, I didn’t admit any of these things.

At the time, I was limping along in The Silhouette as an opinions editor. Having previously worked as a news editor the year prior, I felt I would have a good grounding. I wasn’t green anymore. I was experienced.

The year was going to be different. It had to be: it was my third year. By then, I was supposed to have figured out what I wanted to be, who I was, who I wanted to be and how I would get there. I was told that by then I would have a plan and I’d be happy in achieving it. My successes would be numerous. I’d be loved. I wouldn’t feel alone – there would be hundreds of people cheering me on, not exempting myself.

But as the year picked up, I had my doubts. I was alone, I failed, I had no plans beyond the next morning, and I wasn’t looking forward to even that. Every day, I felt as though I had been kicked in the gut before I got out of bed and every night I felt the same.

There are hundreds of reasons for why this was the case, but none of them are important. To some they may be ancient history lost in the bygone texts and appeals. All that matters is what I did, not what was happening to me, and I’m sorry to say I did very little if anything at all. I let myself get the better of me. For a while, my despondency defined me, and all – my family, my friends, my work, and my academics – suffered as a result.

After sloshing back and forth between ideas reserved for darker days, I wrote the longest sentence in the history of humankind. It consisted of only two words, but it took two weeks to compose. I had to bleed it out. It was: I quit.

For most of my life, I thought quitting was a sign of weakness. In letting go, it was as though one couldn’t handle all aspects of one’s life. Not only were they letting other people down, but they were letting themselves down most of all. No longer were they full individuals; they had excised a part of themselves and a part of who they could be. And in this butchered extraction, in selecting one part of themselves over the others, they poured their blood everywhere.

But this, I have since learned, is false. Eventually all people are worn down and fail. For some, it happens very early in life; for others, it happens when they're old fogeys and their dentures find themselves on the floor and they try to pick it up and there goes their back and there goes their bowels and there they go, wobbling along with a squish squish to the bathroom.

To quit is not to admit that one is a failure but instead that they have boundaries and they understand them. It is not a sign of weakness but of strength; it says, “I can’t do this now but maybe one day I can.” We won’t necessarily be stronger or smarter or faster when that day comes, but we’ll be us, a person who isn’t limitless but so fabulously limited instead. We won’t be a thin paper bag trying to collect all the groceries on one go. We’ll take multiple trips. We’ll plan accordingly. And if nothing else, that will make us stronger, smarter, faster.

This is why after a year and a half, I’m back here writing once more as the opinions editor. I fought. I lost. And now I am ready to battle again with one word, then another, then one more.

 

It was the vaginal swabs that caught my eye first.

In wire thin black marker, the words were embossed on a plain white box. The corners of the white cardboard were ruffled, a deep crevice bled into the edges. Sitting there on the green plastic chair, I wondered how many times the doctor put his fingers into that worn, tired, little box.

“Kacper.”

His hands were old and dilapidated, a broken leather of human flesh that was neatly distorted. In each wrinkle a story could unravel, and I’d be brought out from this hospital room and into Poland where he was studying medicine twenty years ago or Spain where he met his wife or those precious, private moments when he first cradled his daughter. A life would sprawl from these hands, hands that were now shaking along a medical clipboard like a seismograph.

But as I waited for him to find the words and the appropriate papers, no story was told. Instead all I could see in the poor lighting was his dawdling hands swaying left then right and the words “vaginal swabs” scribbled in front of me.

“You’re healthy.” He sounded tired.

“I am?”

“Completely.” A strong Polish accent licked his words.

“Then what about…”

“Growing up has its mysteries.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem, though.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing a daily dose of exercise cannot solve.”

He clapped, drawing his hands together. Their jitter had since calmed down to a mere tremor and now they rested on his lap. For a second, I think he was trying to flex.

“Do you work out, Kacper?”

“Not really.”

“Well, that isn’t very good now is it? In my day…”

He droned on and on about how he used to work out at the beach because girls were there and how he managed to pick up a few and how working out boosted the immune system but it also boosted something else if you thought long and hard about it.

I smiled and said I’d work out. That, dear reader, is why I’m here. For this, under a doctor's orders, is my daily dose of exercise. It is a finger flexing over a keyboard, a brain firing off random thoughts, and a fight against my exhaustion and sleep.

Every day, I’ll post here discussing some opinion, personal essay, journal entry or comedic piece, and every day this will become a place where I’ll try to convince myself that I’m right about being wrong about being right. It’ll make little to any sense, if any sense is worth making that is.

In these entries, you’ll also find the happiest story known to human kind and you’ll find the most saddening one too. I’ll write about every sinner and saint, every mother and father, and every continent and littlest city where everyone knows each other’s name and the pancakes are cooked to a light brown and there’s always work if you need it. And there’ll be posts about croquet too.

The entries will be short. They’ll be long. They’ll be romantic and they’ll be antiseptic. There will be laughs, disbelief, moments of anger, and there will be cussing about how stupid the writer is and how his glasses aren’t straight on his head and why hasn’t he shaven and is he really wearing sweatpants again? There’ll be a lot and there will be a little. Some days, a sentence will be enough. Other days, you’ll have this and it’ll be exhausting and you’ll scroll down to the end to see if anything good will come up.

Sometimes there will be something good, sometimes there won’t be, and sometimes all you’ll find are a story about vaginal swabs. Other times there’ll be nothing but me there smiling and prodding you on. “Read,” I’ll say, “it’s the best medicine. It’ll keep those chest pains, and the gnawing emptiness that fuel them, away.”

I’ll add, “Heck. This is your daily dose as much as it is mine.”

And maybe you’ll be having a bad day or maybe you’ll be bored because god knows in a time when we can see anything on the internet, looking at nothing is sometimes enough, and you’ll feel better because you’ll know that each day I’ll be there with you at the corner of these pages, laughing if you laugh and crying if you cry.

So let’s write and read and find out what a vaginal swab looks like before this prescription – the Silhouette’s daily dose – runs out. See you tomorrow.

Kacper Niburski
The Silhouette

When I was eight, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. As a boy with a flawless mushroom cut, a wide-set grin, and teeth that could make a jigsaw puzzle look straight, I was insatiably interested in the world. I wanted to learn and learn and learn in that order, and on one particular day, a new word I had just discovered tickled the tip of my tongue. “I don’t want to be mediocre.”

Admittedly I didn’t understand the implications of that sentence because I fumbled around for the next eight years of my life as children are poised to do. Yet part of me still believes that I don’t fully comprehend the importance of my answer to this day. More often than not, one can find me collapsed in my bed mindlessly squawking at videos online or tearing through another bag of chips for an inexplicable all-nighter.

After four years of an undergraduate career that has bordered on eclecticism, this indolence may very well be the cost of pursuing multiple interests. We get burdened with everything we have to do, and we slowly start conforming to the idea that maybe normal would be alright for a change because at least we wouldn’t stick out and we’d be like everyone else, and hey, that way we’d belong after all. Then we’d get a career, have a family, and we’d work, and work, and work.

Then boom, just like that some forty or fifty years later as the world keeps spinning and people keep doing, feeling, and wearing funny hats, we’d die, and that would be that. In life, in death, and in between, we’d be mediocre and that’d unperturbed streamline would make us happy.

But as I recently read Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth, I found myself caught in an avalanche of harsh reality checks and constantly being reminded of my childhood ambitions. Because while much of the book is rife with tales of space exploration, the nitty-gritty details of otherworldly experiences, and the tedium of being an astronaut, it is more about not letting, as Chris said, “life randomly kick you into the adult you don’t want to become.”

Written almost entirely in the spirit of an average Canadian voter – one who would drink Tim Hortons coffee and wear a Leafs jersey (both done in the ISS) – Hadfield recounts how his entire life was built upon the possibility of being an astronaut, rather than on the idle expectation of it. As a boy watching the Moon landing on a grainy television set, Hadfield understood that despite dreams that soared into the night sky his chances of selection to rocket into space were slim to none. So rather than see success above all else, he visualized failure, and as a result could steer away from it.

Much of the book continues on this 180-degree shift from conventional wisdom. Hadfield sweats the small stuff to the point of obsession. He embraces negative thinking, constantly thinking about what could go wrong and how he would react to it. And he thinks about defeat rather than the end goal of triumph as a way to develop confidence.

While almost counterintuitive, this astronaut-think led him to be one of the most seasoned and accomplished pilots in the world. He was the top graduate of the U.S Air Force Test Pilot School in 1988, U.S Navy test Pilot of the year in 1991, Director of NASA Operations, Chief of Robotics for NASA, and Commander of ISS just to name a few accomplishments. As Chris says, “A funny thing happened on the way to space: I learned how to live better and more happily here on Earth.”

Humbly told and filled with hilarious anecdotes from the dangers of crying in space to trying to be a better father here on Earth, Hadfield reminds us that while Earth and space may seem different, they are part of the same whole and both relate to each other almost symbiotically. As species knee-deep in the cosmos, we can affect both by trying to live ensure that “success is feeling good about the work you do throughout the long, unheralded journey that may or may not wind up at the launch pad.” We do not need rewards. We need to feel good and competent about ourselves, what we’re doing, and how both relates to others.

Hadfield’s perspective, nuanced by his experiences in space, reminds us – or me at least – that to live idly is not to live at all. Gravity may feel like it weighs a ton sometimes. It may be overbearing. You may want to just crumble in your bed and open up another bag of chips.

But to acquiesce it is not the answer for there are places in the universe where humans can float free. To get there you’ll have to face an army of hardships. People will pull you down. Work will suffocate you. Success will always seem to be amiss. And it will go on like that for a long time because it’ll be the hardest thing in your life. In fact, it’ll make your life.

But this, Hadfield highlighted throughout his book, is what makes it worth it because the very thing that makes it hard, that brings you to the edge and almost makes you topple over, gives you a view few have seen before, and boy does it look beautiful

Kacper Niburski
The Silhouette

 

My mom always wanted big, broad, impossibly large windows.

When we moved into our new house after searching for months, that’s the first thing she said. In a subtle tone that only the stress of three childbirths and years of parenting could bring, she said that it was all so very nice – so very, very nice – except for the windows. “They’ll never catch the light,” she said.

And for the most part, they didn’t. On cloud-drunk days, the house was the center of a black hole with the slivers of ambient light being vacuumed into the corners of the windows. And on summer afternoons when the sun would stretch on a smile that beamed endlessly, we still needed a flashlight to navigate some of the rooms in the house.

Living there for a year, I decided to come up with a solution myself. Though I think of my six-year-old self as a boy soaked in sunlight rather than cloaked in darkness, back then I raced towards my mother with bundles of paper and drawings. On an avalanche of disordered sheets of white, I presented my mom a design that would brighten up her day in all senses: a glass house.

I told her to imagine it. Imagine that the windows wouldn’t be a subset of the house, but they’d be it entirely. Imagine that every day the sun would greet her and me alike with a rosy glow that warmed our feet and toes. Imagine that in all directions the light would be reflected and reflected again from all angles. And imagine that in doing so, the rays of sunshine wouldn’t be blocked by the house but instead pass through it. We would be sunlight entirely, a single point on a wave of yellow, and our house would be lit up daily.

Poring over my scribbles and doodles, frantically pointing to one warped blueprint after another, my mom gently smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “But not now. Maybe later.”

At first, I was dismayed at her hesitance. Here was the life she craved, one with windows for walls, one where light flooded rather than trickled, where every day would glow unimpeded, and where no matter the location, everything would be illuminated in sunshine. It was perfect not simply because it was what she wanted, but because it was so much more than that.

But through the same nuance she used to veil her original disappointment in the little mousetraps we had for windows, she was trying to tell me that a glass house is not what she wanted.

Only 20 years later, after a flurry of facial hair and braces and etching out my own individuality, did I learn why. The revelation occurred on June 9, 2013 (and refreshed yesterday with leaks regarding Australia and Indonesia) during a breakfast of eggs and coffee. As the light dripped through our windows and I scrunched around food while watching television, I learned of the National Security Agency’s indiscriminate collection of nearly all forms of data and metadata both foreign and domestic, and more importantly, what my mom was trying to tell me.

Born in Socialism Poland and raised there her entire life, my mom was stressing to a six-year-old Kacper that while light is important, it is not all-important. There are curtains for a reason, and there will be days when they will have to be drawn, when the light glinting through the glass is overbearing, blinding even.

Though my mother experienced an iron curtain in Poland and though I may be reading into her subtlety with too academic of an interest, I feel that underpinning her words was the innate idea of privacy. Living under a longstanding, parasitic tradition of invasive dictators who minutely scrutinized the actions of the masses for their own political gains – from compiling long, arbitrary dossiers or tracking citizen’s movements with intense vigor – my mother’s experience under a quasi-totalitarian regime led to a deeply ingrained belief of modern-day privacy that is both physical and digital.

The NSA, I feel, have worked against this belief through apparently, though certainly clandestine, democratic means. While arguing against the legitimacy of these constitutional claims is a case law consideration, the important fact is that our private lives have been invaded into for the supposed public good. By allowing analysts to track, chart, dissect and determine relations through our digital data, we are fighting terrorism by ensuring that we aren’t terrorists ourselves.

This, of course, is horseshit. Forgetting that little data serves to support the claim that terrorists have been foiled by such dragnet collection and that politicians and NSA supporters alike have refused to divulge the extent of the mass surveillance, the spy agencies have succumbed to full-blown myopia. Instead of standing as a vanguard against terror, they have wrought it. By collecting all, people begin to self-censor themselves. They may no longer keep a domain of individuality where they are free to influence themselves from other parties and instead comply with some broader mandate. In the act of being charted up, analyzed, and held hostage by their opinions, they may no longer be autonomous.

The freedom that was supposed to be guaranteed through mass surveillance is limited in the degenerate pursuit of it. For though the intentions were good, if they were trying to stop the vulnerability against a global threat by surveying all, they have failed because everything has become dangerous; if complete surveillance was a means to ensure hope against fear, then those same invasions – the fear-inducing perversions that senseless violence can cause – have become commonplace; and if it was avoid the sacrifice of liberty in the hopes of security, then they have lost both.

For no matter what is said, the terrorists won when we became them.

My friends shrug indifferently at these revelations. They say they aren’t doing anything wrong so they need not worry. But I don’t think so. To be guilty before being considered innocent is a slippery slope. Besides not knowing a concrete definition of terrorism or the certain key words that will result in flagging and further government scrutiny, I think back to my mother’s nuance and my crayon-scribbled glass house and I am reminded that the moment you open the window to the world, you’ll catch a cold.

No matter the amount of light that shines, you’ll no longer be private, you’ll no longer be yourself, and one day – maybe after you’ve been scrutinized, judged, and deemed a threat, and it’s cloudy and rainy and thunder is on the way – you’ll pray for blinds.

Kacper Niburski
The Silhouette

To the surprise of no one at all, I nearly failed grade eight art. I could pretend that I was one of the greats that were denied critical fame with avant-garde masterpieces, but I won’t. I think back to the artwork I submitted over the years and I remember them as bubbling masterworks of creative fervor and passion  – whatever the heck that means. But this is just an abstraction of the past, where time makes complex situations simple and memories into ideals.

What they were, and what they will always be, are the deranged scribbles of a young boy whose brain moved faster than his hand, whose reality was a diluted failure to capture his imagination, and whose artwork was the result of grand ideas that lacked consistency and practise. In short, I got a D.

Maybe I’m still trying to justify the mark. I don’t think so, however. I am very aware that I’ll never be a great artist. I am no Van Gogh; two attached ears give me away. I’ll add that I’m not Picasso either – my best attempt at stenciling out a life portrait looks less like a caricature and more like a blunderbuss to the face would.

Yet despite lacking the panache necessary to paint or to draw, somehow and for some reason I am given the chance to comment on art as a whole. With no more weight than a feather, I can brutally, unrelentingly, dim-wittingly, shamelessly vocalize all my qualms about a given piece. We all can.

That is not to say my, nor your, opinion is worth a flying fuck, of course. In a cacophony of voices, I’d hope a voice as self-indulgent, prone to misspellings, and ridiculously exhaustive as mine would drown at the first instance. But it is as though by just being human, by just breathing, eating, and shitting like the animals we tend to grown into, I can judge all things human.

It is a metaphysical assertion at best. No more than some innate predisposition guaranteed the day we are born, even though everyone else we know was born once, we find our judgment. Whether it be the in the tomes of literary jargon, academic highfalutin, or those who believe that by tilting one’s head to look at a painting ruins the “regal elegance” of the whole piece, we criticize the world and its fruits as if we own both.

For the record, fuck those people. I’m sorry for such a vulgarity, and I should probably elaborate, so I will. Listen: fuck us humans. We’re no more entitled to judge art, books, or anything for that matter. We aren’t experts on anything. We aren’t even amateurs. We are all just chewing on broken glass while staring into the never ending abyss, hoping, praying, to make sense of it all.

Sure. We can read. We can write. But that doesn’t mean diddlysquat in a Universe, a World, a damn bedroom that is so much more complex than we can imagine. We are not the Rulers of the Universe, even though we can type that we are. Instead, as humans, we are worse than diseases because at least a disease looks after its own kind.

But some hope at an egalitarian diatribe is not what I’m trying to get at; rather by suggesting humanity’s limitation in judging art – a limitation that is both found and originating from our own birth – I am attempting to determine what makes great art. Undoubtedly my pieces in elementary school were far from it. As is this writing. But there seems to be some general consensus that such and such by so and so is great art.

Maybe it is. Who the hell am I to say different? But maybe in the same line of thought it isn’t. Maybe works are no longer reviewed but revered, and simply the name suggests an unquestioning greatness. Of course, I am not implying that Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, and the like aren’t great. To be honest, showing those three artist alone to an alien race would be enough to make it look like we were bragging. What I am saying, though, is that there comes a point when our paragons are accepted simply for being paragons.

Certainly I can say that Shakespeare was a twat that forced his plots and character foibles and didn’t damn near mean the things we attribute to him, but would I be right? Most likely not. Nor would any expression of my most outlandish statements about a given work be merited. I’m a nincompoop, and even that may be an insult to nincompoops.

Yet even though such works are unperturbed from any of the foolish and poorly worded assaults I could muster, are they still great? And if so, what makes them great?

I think there is no simple answer, and I won’t dissolve the discussion into some vague abstraction about human values and potential and the works. God knows I do that enough. Instead, I’ll admit viagra lowest price that great works differ by great margins and great people will have greatly different opinions on the matter. There will never be a sliver of agreement, and that is something you can agree on, dear reader.

But at the same time, great art is great for the same reason it is created: because we are human, and in between two milestones that are no more in our control than anything else, we feel, we need, and we die trying to digest an overwhelming amount of information in such a short amount of time. Most of us are lucky if we can even find a matching pair of socks in the morning.

For this reason, I purport that art is not know for its artistry, but for its humanity. A great piece – whether written, drawn, sung, or whatever else it could be – will not simply move you. A fart moves you, for heaven sakes.

Rather, a great piece of artwork will make you close your eyes and imagine that you were having breakfast with the author of the piece and they just told you a funny joke and oh how you both shared in the laughter and they decided to make a day of it and they told you why they painted this and that and why they didn’t paint that and this and why both really don’t matter anyways.

In the little time that you’re drawn into the microcosm of their work, you’re convinced the two of you are friends, author and audience, much longer than your gaze will last.

I have been lucky enough to have a handful of such occasions in my lifetime. The first time was with Kurt Vonnegut. Since then, I have drank with Heller, laughed with Bradbury, cried with Dostoyevsky, triumphed with Dante, entered hyperspace with Card, died with Camus, questioned with Burgess, danced with Bach, wallowed with Kafka, hummed with Chopin, wondered with Sagan, loved with Orang, and more. I have spent the few moments I could control with a lifetime of people who devoted themselves to something greater than themselves, and in that pursuit, became themselves a greater thing than they originally intended.

That is great art. It is a feeling like one’s time isn’t wasted despite living in a Universe that is as much as a hysterical accident as we are.

Kacper Niburski
The Silhouette

The first thing you learn is that you can’t expect things. They won’t text you goodnight. They won’t tell you about their day. Your phone won’t ring no matter how many times you check it. In a way, their memories won’t last either.

In two years, they won’t remember that day in the park or how the sun glimmered underneath that waterfall or all the silly faces you made in one of the many photobooths. Days like December 18 or October 16 will go unnoticed, their significance even more so. You’ll understand that in order for one to remember, another must forget.

You learn to hate the cliché “finder’s keepers, loser’s weepers.”  Your song will play on the radio. Little notes will clutter in your closet. A whole life will haunt you in each and every step because you made sure that in each and every step, they were your life. You used to know everything. You had a personal invite into their troubles and success. Now you are strangers and nothing more. You learn that’s the way it goes, and you learn that no matter what you do, what you say, or what you feel, some things are final – goodbye being one of them.

You learn that not everything needs an explanation. Sometimes words just weigh down the gravity of the scenario. It’s not that some things are indescribable. Certainly they can be defined, measured, and quantified. Rather, you don’t want to characterize how you feel or what it meant to you. All the good words have been stolen, and even those offer little condolence. Besides, those words are just another way to describe the world. Before you simply described it with their name.

You learn that some days drown into the night. By the time the sun swings itself into a cheery blossom, you forget why you were out in the first place. You visit one bar. Another. You learn that sometimes a name is all that is needed to start a relationship. So the names pile on and on and you tell yourself that it takes someone to get over someone else. All you need is another pair of lips. Or another body in between the little naked spaces of your bare body. Then one day, as the dawn peeks through the blinds and finds you in a bed that is not your own, staring at the stenciled symbols in the ceiling and wondering if you should get up now or later, you learn that you loved what you lost and hate what you found.

You learn that you can’t take this burden by yourself. You’ll have to tell someone. Anyone. The unimposing relationship you were in, the comfort you found, the happiness you discovered. All of it. The beginning. The end. Every sweet middle bit. Because you’ll learn that only until you talk about them and what happened – the way they played with your hair, the way they caught you in the most unflattering pictures, the way they talked to complete strangers like long-lost friends – you’ll never be able to think about anything else.

You learn that the saying is true: love and death are the only things that have the power to change everything. In a way, it makes you laugh: your love has died. So you are left only with the memories, the soft kisses, and the days cradled in each other’s arms. You are left with everything you had, everything you felt, and everything that can be no more. In the end, you are left with everything that has to change.

Most of all, you learn to forget. Forget those letters you wrote. Forget that you said you missed them, and that you meant to say is that you loved them. Forget that you were once afraid to use the word love. Forget how they liked when you kissed the back of their ear. Forget their laugh. Forget how their tears matched the rain. Forget that you wrapped your arms around them, buried your head in their hair, and that you held your breath because you just wanted to stay there forever. Forget that you are still waiting for forever to start.

And always – no matter the day, the weather or the lingering thoughts of doubt – remember to forget.

Kacper Niburski
The Silhouette

It is a universal truth that Monday mornings are the worst and mine was certainly veering on astronomically bad: I committed a double homicide.

I didn’t mean to, really. I was just driving along and one thing led to another and before I knew it, I found myself knee-deep in the offal of another man. His liver wobbled underneath my tire as I put my phone away.

Sure it could be argued that his Monday was undeniably worse – he was nothing more than a meat pillow now after all - but I had to deal with the messy aftermath and car washes certainly weren’t cheap these days. I’m sure that my fender was bent too and I liked my fender. It shined in the sun.

While I was considering these complications, I heard the scurrying of feet behind me. A different man who had witnessed me mow down the ground-beef lookalike underneath my car was screaming and running. As if my mechanical problems weren’t enough – I couldn’t have any loose ends. So off my car went, spinning bright red tires and fading maroon tracks as I roared towards the high pitch shrill in front of me. I might have even put on my blinker as I performed the U-turn. I can’t be sure – sometimes these things escape me on Mondays.

I wouldn’t call this a regular Monday though. Instead I would call it a tradition that has lasted some seven days since the release of Grand Theft Auto V, a seminal electronic masterpiece that has not gone without its share of controversy and senseless diatribes. Despite its high anticipation, exalting reviews, five years of development, an extensive original soundtrack and spellbinding portraits of real individuals captured in the minutia of a video game, the common critique is that the game is a juvenile, shortsighted, and degenerate caricature of life.

As these critics myopically see it, GTA V dissolves life into a cycle of carnage, carnage, and more carnage in that order. It is violence unbridled and unadulterated, which says nothing of the potential for senseless malice and misogynistic tendencies. Choppy, unrealistic and driven by sociopathic tendencies for brutality, some say the game is a gross, uninformed cliché of reality.

This criticism, I feel, is absolutely true and that’s the point. What so few seem to understand is that Rockstar, the game developer, is not trying to hide this overt excess in human indecency; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Debauchery is relished, vice defines the norm and the world is nothing short of ugly. The hellscape is entirely intentional and familiar; it is a reflection of ourselves rather than an impression – and for this reason, GTA is the most authentic, most provocative and most compelling piece of art I have ever experienced.

Though it is difficult to unanimously define, art is meant to subvert and change. It is a manifestation of cause and effect in order to reverse that process inherently. By viewing a painting or a statue or reading a book, the viewer is meant to vicariously experience something emotional, psychological or mental, and in doing so, they are meant feel, act and do. For art is not a depiction of what is necessarily, but what has been and what should be instead.

The world of GTA V - Los Santos - is exactly that blend of unique, creative temperament distilled down to encapsulate humanity’s dirty, crude, and abhorrent nature. As a complete globe littered with desires and insecurities stretched to their extreme, the player sees their own world – this world – without its filter. Behind the sunlight, roaring mountains and endless beaches, everyone is driven by self-interest. Whether it is corrupt FBI agents, plastic wives, duplicitous TV hosts, people are either being exploited or exploiting someone themselves. In the game, all are victims but none are innocent, us included.

But it is also more than just a simple mockery of perverse lifestyles, contemporary pop culture, invading social networks, ridiculous political systems and our own vices magnified. Because unlike other art forms that simply mirror life, GTA puts life back into art by putting the player in control of the world and its ramifications.

In each mission or event, we see our actions run their course and we find ourselves in an inescapable torrent of contempt and pain. Wherever we go, suffering follows and we hate it. We don’t enjoy it. No character is happy. No character is left unscathed by their proclivity for violence. Lives are ruined. People are killed. And though the game goes on, we are not enamored by the violence. We are rebuked, chastised and horrified by it. Not because of its grotesque nature or because of how ridiculous it seems, but because we see ourselves in that world of Los Santos and we see how recognizable it is to our own, and that scares us.

There is one scene where a raging psychopath must perform torture on another character in the game. But there is no enjoyment. There is no fun. The controller vibrates. The screams are blood curling. And after it all, we are left with the imprint of our action, the despicable, disgusting, and fruitless action for very little information is gleaned if any at all.

And we hate ourselves for it. Or at least I did.

That is art. It is the agitation of a cruel universe only to provide a message afterwards. In GTA, the message isn’t violence though some people can only see that limited end. Instead it is a cry that with moral choices and consequences, we are responsible for our actions and how society comes together as a whole. If we breed hate, hate results. If we are selfish, others will be too.

Though GTA is a world inhabited by these sins, it is not an embodiment of them. Among the bloodshed and bodies, it whispers that as humans we often get caught in our excesses and mistakes, and this is not right. Earth need not be Los Santos. By showing us what is disgustingly possible in an extreme sense, GTA is a hope that we don’t have to succumb to our selfishness, vanity, and depravity. We are better if we want to be. Like the characters, whether we are good or evil is our choice. It always was. And in order to realize that, sometimes we just need to have a bad Monday morning.

 

Kacper Niburski
The Silhouette

The first time I tried to join the humdrum of the work force was in grade 12. After two months of disapproving glances in McDonald’s while donning a suit and tie, handing resumes to anyone who would read them, and stressing over a comma here or there on a stupid paper that would most likely be thrown in the garbage, I was called to an interview for the zombie-shift at Costco.

“Lift. Place. Repeat,” they told me. I had no qualifications and this is exactly what they wanted in an applicant. For the first time in my short life, I was happy to be a real nobody. All I needed were arms, and god knows that I had two good ones.

You see, I was told that getting a job in this shambled-together economy was more difficult than winning the lottery because at the very least, people won that regularly. Employment, I was told, was like striking gold in the Sahara desert with nothing but your finger to dig with.

Whether this was true or not, I walked into that Costco interview at five in the morning rosy-eyed and cheerful. It was a beautiful winter day; the cold air was crisp and I stretched like the sun, greeting everything I saw with a smile and a nod. I might’ve even bounced when I stepped.

The interview came and went and I felt like I aced it. They asked me about ethics and I babbled on about Nicomachean versus more normative utilitarian approaches. They placed me in numerous situations – a man is on fire, some all-important Gatorade shipment has fallen, the works – and damn if I didn’t answer like the CEO would. Weaknesses? I had one of course: the incessant desire to always want to do things perfectly. Favourite animal? An ant because they work well in a team. Black or white? Issues are never black or white because gray colours this world and… blah, blah, blah.

I felt and still feel like I was never more prepared for the throes of professionalism as I was that day. Jump back to that morning and you could’ve even asked me a stock quote for Costco and I would have given it to you plus the third quarter projections with a wink of an eye and a shake of a hand.

And yet.

Two weeks later, my phone sat still like a dead fly. I bit my nails. I barely ate. And when I called them back hoping for the miracle of a managerial mistake, I was glossed over, asked who I was three times, and finally told, after waiting some fifteen minutes to what could unquestionably be the jazz-tunes of Hell, that I hadn’t received the job because all spots were filled and they were sorry I hadn’t made the cut.

Out of rash temerity, I asked  what the cut was, then. Maybe because they had a bad drive in, or they had forgotten snacks in their lunch that day, or because I was just a snot-nosed brat parading around in a suit. Anyways, they said quite tersely,  “Not you.”

To this day, I remember those words well, words I am sure that have been parroted in a variety of ways to a generation born in the time of “no, sorry, and please apply next year.” After I placed the phone down, I wondered if it was my fault, and in between now and then where failure after failure after wretched failure roared on before me, I convinced myself it was.

Yesterday those words and sentiments once again lingered as I read a recent article cycling among my friends entitled, “Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy” by blogger wait but why. Among the crude drawings and succinct, accessible writing is the idea that our Generation Y, those born from the 80s until the early 90s, are so miserable because we have expectations that do not meet the cold realities we face. Unable to meet our hopes through sheer work alone, the inequity grows from the fact that we believe, and have been led to believe, that we are entitled and special. All of us, from the self-absorbed Tweeter to the hermetic introverts, think of ourselves as unique fingerprints among other unique fingerprints, even if we aren’t.

This misplaced sense of self-importance ultimately leads to our inevitable but avoidable self-imposed sadness. And in order to quell this misery and feed the insatiable gnawing of our narcissism, we become lazy, self-righteous sloths who undeservedly document our life on various social media platforms. We become a perpetual problem, not a solution.

Though it is beyond the scope to offer an entire summation of my generation and any sweeping generalization will fail on a variety of accounts, I want to say that the article was horseshit.

To have the audacity to say otherwise, to say that I’m my own problem because I am so green and inexperienced and why don’t I just have a job yet instead of quibbling on and on, is insulting. It’s downright laughable.

Before me and before my generation was penned as being so apparently unhappy and consequently hedonistic, before I even applied to Costco, the future looked bright. The early 20th century promised wonders of scientific inquiry that spurred great innovation and progress. Then war, destruction, and war came again, and the future was pissed away on endless battles, an addiction to fossil fuels, and a financial climate that provided handjobs for bankers and hand jobs for everyone else.

Now, unlike ever before, our generation is choking on college debt, toiling under unpaid internships, suffering the consequence of weakening unions, poor job prospects, housing markets that have the volatility of a tropical storm, worsening and worsening education that somehow keeps rising in price, and despite it all, the article claims that we are to blame for this aggregate of misery because we just can’t sink our teeth into the mold and smile while getting punched from all sides.

Part of me feels that our self-motivated drives of frivolity – the sins of Facebooking, Instagraming, and Pintresting that the article suggests have come to both define and nullify our generation – are a way to forget about all of these problems if only a little while. It is a way to think that maybe not everything is going to shit and even if it is, we can try to have fun while swimming in the crap of others before we drown.

And yet I also feel that while this may be true quantitatively and the previous decades of being roaring drunk on petroleum may have very real concerns and consequences for my generation and myself, it is just as wrong of a viewpoint. In fact, such an approach is no different than article itself; it simply displaces the blame from myself to the people before me.

Any kind of role reversal is detrimental. Like the old generation who harp on about the young and like the young who nag on about the old, every generation complains about one another. We are no different. Our younger selves will be no different. The ones after that won’t be either. And so on.

What is seen as delusional obsessions in us is really just the same hogwash recycled again and again and again with great accessibility generation after generation after generation. Like other youths with their problems at various times for various reasons, whether it be wars or famine, burgeoning industrial cities or idyllic farmlands, the skepticism of religious phenomena or the settled belief in them, the helter-skelter environments we all found ourselves in promoted us to feel special even if we aren’t. Especially if we aren’t.

Not because we necessarily are special but because like all the generations of yesteryear who were belittled by their elders just as we are now, Generation Y isn’t the problem. We are the only solution. We are all the future has. And we must believe this wholeheartedly.

When I failed to receive that Costco job, I learned all this by understanding that I wasn’t vitally unique or even mediocre really. I also learned that I wasn’t part of some grander ponzi scheme I was born into. Sure the economy was bad, but it was bad for everyone else all the same. Instead, such a rejection taught me that if only I got up, applied to other jobs, and kept that smile on my face even if it was fake at times, I’d ensure my arms would be good for something, even if they weren’t lifting packages. Example: writing.

I still feel that. If we are to make any difference at all, then we must stop these patterns of cross-generational bickering. We are all together on a tightrope of planetary consequence. Any which way, and we’ll slip into the same excesses or eventual catastrophes aforementioned. One wrong step and poof – there goes the future.

 

But together, if we all take our weaknesses and strengths and combine them to complement each other like I did after my failed foray into professionalism, then we can ensure that when the next generation complains about us, they’ll complain about how good it is rather than bad and we – reduced to nothing more than bags of sagging skin and graying hair – will be able do the same.