Random, but necessary.

I just want to confess my sexual attraction to Microsoft Word’s autosummarize tool.

Annoyed.

I just wrote a 12-page paper on Plath’s The Bell Jar, so if I sound vitriolic for the sake of being vitriolic, which I’m entirely in the mood for, it’s because of Plath.

So. I finish my paper, and I log into Facebook for some “social interaction.” I look at the menu on my right: a list of “Highlights,” a handy tool for seeing all the great and wonderful things my friends have been doing the last couple of days. There are the usual 25-random-things-about-me notes, the house/birthday party events, and the sacred photo albums. Ah, the generic Friday night outs, bar hopping on Tuesdays, Summer 2009s (I swear there were like eight identical albums) and then… then there was “</poverty>.” Yes. </poverty>, a photographic journey through the dregs of Kenya. I tried not to laugh out loud — because no one likes a haughty upper (I don’t even know what “upper” even means anymore) middle class Asian boy laughing at photos of starved Kenyan children while he sits in the air-conditioned library of his 50-grand a year New England college — but I laughed anyway. I laughed, not because of the aforementioned reasons (i.e. being haughty, taking pleasure at starved Kenyan children, 50-grand a year (I think it’s 52-grand now)), but because this person who decided to publish “</poverty>” thinks by going to Kenya for a week and then flying back to a frat party at Michigan he or she is something remarkable. Yeah, I said it. But if one didn’t think they were something special, why would they feel the need to advertise their “altruism” to all 1,515 Facebook friends (Yup I’m goin’ to be that specific).

Trust me, even after that rant, I do have respect and admiration for those who go abroad to help the underprivileged. (Although, I hate the notion that “white privilege” can only/can/must save those who do not share in this whiteness and this privileged-ness.) I don’t think a Facebook photo album earns you the right to be defined as revolutionary. All right, Maybe this person just wants to share his or her summer vacation with the rest their virtual buddies, although I find that hard to believe when the title of their album suggests some erasure of poverty. Keep the Facebook albums to drunken parties and beer pong photo-ops. Thanks.