Selling Himself Short

So if you auctioned off your life on eBay, how much do you think someone would offer for it? Maybe less than 5800 bucks? That's what Nicael Holt, a 24-year-old Philosophy major in Australia, got for his. This man actually sold his name, material possessions, job, one-on-one training to acquire his skills, and everything else he deemed possible in order for someone else to replace him in his life. You can find the complete list of spoils on his eBay page here.

When it comes to people's lives, I fancy myself a speculator: I'm always looking for the best deals. Here's what I'd have been interested in acquiring through Mr. Holt:

-His surfing skills
-His "two nemeses"
-His birthday, complete with a party and presents from his former friends ($5800 for a additional birthday, alone, may be an investment with decent returns)

A bizarre experiment, this, but an intriguing one regardless of Holt's true motives (making a "statement" on identity and the self, trauma from his breakup, Philosophy-major cry for attention). It's startling to go down the eBay listing and see how thorough this self-destructive act will be, but even more alarming are the areas to which he perhaps should have given more thought. Take this portion, for example.

Please note winning bidder does not receive ownership of the following:
- Degrees/qualifications
- Drivers License
- Passport
- Future Inheritance
- Formal/Legal Identity

Now, I can see most these items being left out because they can't legally be transferred, but the no-future-inheritance bit, that's unfair. If this fellow wants to keep his parents' money, then he should be the one spending Christmas with them. But apparently he's giving up his family as part of the deal, which, by the way, forces one to imagine the following exchange:

Nicael's former mother: Well, (sob) I hope you're happy with your thousands of dollars. I have just lost a son!

Former Nicael: I'm sorry, I don't know who the hell you are. (But can I still be in your will?)

Actually, if you take Nicael's word for it (on his Web site, at least), his parents find this whole exercise very "amusing". Their flesh-and-blood creation, it turns out, is worth less than a '98 Explorer, so either that's not actually true or Australians are very strange people.

Anyway, Holt insists that the effects of the sale are permanent, "or for as long as you want anyways.. its[sic.] your life :)"

That being the case, I see this auction winner flying in and gathering up all of Holt's stuff (which includes a laptop and 300 CDs), taking the mandatory 4-week "training course," and then having the 170 cited friends throw him a goodbye party. Once that's over with, the new Nicael can go home and listen to all the 30 Odd Foot of Grunts albums or whatever else is in that monolithic stack of music.

Toward the end of the auction, Holt announced he would donate 30 percent of the proceeds to ARAFMI, an advocacy group for dealing with mental illness. Now, I know what you're going to say: "He should probably make a personal investment for that." Personally, I seldom knock a guy for donating some money to a well-meaning non-profit, especially when he's just nuked his social life and could probably use that warm fuzzy feeling of altruism. I mean, he sold all of his clothes.

But speaking of mental disorders, imagine if this young man were schizophrenic. He would have had so much more to offer.

We Have Constructed a "La-ser"

I've been waiting for this like you don't even know.

The U.S. military now has a functional ray gun. All that's left is for jetpacks to be produced and sold on the consumer market and I'll feel like we've finally made it to the 21st century.

The current prototype isn't deadly by any means, but the electromagnetic beam it fires makes the victim feel as if he were burning alive without really burning him. Much like how waterboarding makes someone feel as if he were drowning without really drowning him, so I can deduce at least one way in which this technology might be routinely used.

Once produced, the weapon can be mounted on armored ground vehicles, helicopters, ships, and airplanes. It apparently has potential for riot-dispersing, making it, they say, ideal for keeping order in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. But the technology won't be put into service until 2010, so that last part's not what you want to hear.

In the demonstration, the "rioters" were played by army servicemen who volunteered to be shot by a giant ray gun. This bothers me for two reasons:

1. The article did little to quell my suspicions that there are no side effects that'll emerge down the road from skin exposure to a giant ray gun. If I volunteered, my buddies would definitely be impressed by my story, but not by the possibility that I'm gestating an alien fetus.

(Okay, a bunch of them would still think that was pretty rad, too.)

2. In the military, you do what you're told, and that's the end of that. And they've got a weapon to sell, essentially. I can't help but cynically imagine Col. Mark Kymes or some other officer ordering the participants to add some theatrics upon being hit. You know, seize or something once you hit the dirt and this thing'll look like a real humdinger. Maybe it is a humdinger, but it doesn't have to be, is all I'm saying.

Traditionally speaking, we've got this thing backwards. Mankind tends to invent the lethal technology before it ever tones it down to develop the non-lethal version, like rubber bullets. Here it's unsettling because you can imagine this concept eventually being taken to sci-fi proportions of destruction. If you're going to one day invent a laser cannon that grinds open its mechanized maw and proceeds to atomically discombobulate vast swaths of people and objects in its path, I suppose the starting point is constructing a beam, like this one, that causes unruly discomfort.

That's assuming Marvin the Martian hasn't already beat us to the patent.

It Averages Out

A new semester. My last semester.

I don't know what to think about that. See, people inevitably ask me what I'm going to be doing with my English degree, and I tell them that I've got lots of options open, which is to say I'm not so damn sure. Truthfully, there are quite a few opportunities for English majors in journalism, publishing, law, and marketing to name a few professions that, coincidentally, present great potential for evil.

My most likely starting point is an internship at the Gazette with a side racket of copy editing, all the while scoping out other writing forays with the assumption that the world is my oyster. If nothing works, I'll pull the cord and apply to grad school...

...

Classes! That's right! I want to talk about classes now.

Before graduation, English majors at UCCS are required to take a Senior Seminar course that obsesses over some of the faculty's favorite authors, and two choices are offered every semester. I waited on this, repeatedly rolling the dice to see if any appealing authors would come up each successive term, but seldom emerged a class that didn't revolve around Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters. Naturally, I jumped on the novelist who was oft-accused of misogyny.

Philip Roth is (and I'm using this term loosely) widely reknown as the greatest living American novelist. It is no exaggeration to say that he's won every major American award for fiction, and that he "does not smile." For the course, we will be reading the following novels:

-Goodbye, Columbus
-My Life as a Man
-Portnoy's Complaint
-The Ghost Writer
-Zuckerman Unbound
-The Anatomy Lesson
-The Prague Orgy
-The Counterlife
-The Facts
-Patrimony
-American Pastoral [won the Pulitzer]
-Operation Shylock
-The Human Stain
-The Plot Against America

... which is everything he ever wrote, ever. I had to double-check and make sure no Updike got in there by mistake.

(Recognize The Human Stain at all? It was adapted to film a few years back, though unsuccessfully. Let's start with casting, which starred Sir Anthony Hopkins as an African American and Nicole Kidman as an illiterate janitor. That'd be a tough sell if the movie were animated. The book, though woefully unfilmable, is terrific in ways that I might expound on some other time.)

So I figure that since I started on this list during Winter Break, I should finish all these novels before I can file for Social Security. Dr. Rubin-Dorsky admits that this reading load outdoes even any Graduate or PhD courses he'd taught before, so in his defense, he's fully aware of what he's doing. I asked him if he was excited to have an entire shelf in the campus bookstore. He said there was a mildly satisfying intimidation factor in that. "Prof-cred", if you will.

Literary Criticism is another class I'm taking, which serves as a foil to the aforementioned one. This will become immediately apparent.

Its course reading is as follows:

- Regeneration by Pat Barker

That's it. We spend the semester dissecting a single book with a half a dozen different scalpels (Deconstructivism, Psycho-analysis, etc.) Find this book title in my Profile over there and you'll know why I'm peachy keen with this.

So I'm not quite feeling overwhelmed, even when taking my four other classes into account. For one thing, it gives me plenty to think about in terms of literature. Which is the easiest thing to think about nowadays.

The Fire

Castle West was an apartment complex that once -- in spite of my knowing better -- caught my eye because it had the cheapest rents in the local Apartment Blue Book. It was located in the center of town, which is not a pleasant place to live. Despite some assumptions from the locals, Castle West did have fire alarms that did serve their purpose last night. But once an incendiary begins devouring a 40-year-old building at a jaw-dropping pace, not much can be done. I can't imagine the breathtaking helplessness that all those people experienced, and will continue to experience.

One of Colorado Springs' worst blazes rendered scores of people instantly homeless last night in the midst of a 5-degree deep freeze. Though it was contained to one building, the entire 135-unit apartment complex is gone, and we don't know how many people with it.

The fire is all the more disheartening when one considers that among the displaced residents are Katrina survivors. Yet again displaced. I can't comprehend what it's like to lose everything I own, let alone multiple times, but...

...

I don't know how to complete that thought but to say that it's not right.