AcDec, son

So my boyfriend and I are both 22 now, but we met during his Junior year and my Senior year of high school.

It all started when I joined the Academic Decathlon team at my school. I spent all summer reading “Grapes of Wrath” and learning a crazy amount of shit about the 30s and fucking Geology for 3 months straight. The first summer practice was a month before school, where we were going to met everyone on the team.

Let me tell you….I walked in the room and was like okay, I know some of these people, maybe this won’t be so bad. Then Jason walked in and I was like well damn, I’m not gonna remember shit about igneous rocks or fucking deltas, because he is absolutely adorable.

So I sat next to him for almost 3 weeks, low key gawking at him like a fucking child and saying nothing. I finally managed to talk to him about our shared love of star bursts of all things, and because he is literally the best person ever, he started stealing the pink ones out the giant 2 lb. bag and giving them to me because he heard me tell someone they were my favorite. That was when I knew I was a goner. Well that and he was tall, had pretty eyes, and a nice smile, but you know, whatever.

It wasn’t until the first day of school that I finally got up the nerve to have an actual conversation with him. Our coach made us get up in front of the class and talk about ourselves as practice for the interview part of competition. (Yes, we are nerds, obviously.) So I got up to start talking about myself and the guy was staring at me with his dreamy fucking bluish-green eyes and all I could manage was “Hello everyone, I have webbed toes. It’s kind of a family trait.” (The sad part is, I wasn’t making that shit up. Fucking genetics man.) And as everyone sat there staring at my flip flop clad feet, I hung my head in shame and made the slow walk back to my seat right next to Jason. As my coach quietly contemplated her life decisions and I tried to become one with my desk, Jason leaned over, smiled, and told me he thought my toes were cute in a strange sort of way.

Fast forward 2 excruciatingly long months and a handful of awkward encounters later (at one point I think I colored in his freckles with pink and yellow highlighters) in a baffling turn of events, he asked me to be his girlfriend.

And if you weren’t already convinced he is the best person ever, this boy took me to a fucking lighthouse on a damn lake for our first kiss. That is some Notebook-level shit!

Oh and you know how he asked me to prom? During AcDec practice we would get these prompts that our coach would put up on the projector and we would have to come up with a 3 minute speech on the spot. This boy made a prompt asking me if I would go to prom with him that my coach put up on screen in front of the whole team during practice. I had to read it 3 times and I was still like, that doesn’t seem like a real question they would ask.

dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain. 

dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)

so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.

but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing

in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement. 

so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.

related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this

you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:

and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:

x

got damm!!!!!! (im honestly still in shock)

Program your damn calculators.

Honestly it halves the stress of the test and can basically give you some freebie questions since you won’t have to memorize the formulas. And, yes, by Decathalon guidelines, it is perfectly legal to program your calculators unlike some people and their TI-Nspires.