300 lbs And Rising: Mindless drones: come to me

Twenty-two years ago yesterday, I was born: a fat mass of uterine secretion and post-colonial hypertextuality. I expect the world has recovered by now. Really, it wasn’t a bad thing, because the losses in humanity’s self-respect are more than made up for by the profits in the Butter Industry.

My parents, eschewing the Nahasapeemapetilon for something a tad catchier, christened me Kazi Khaled Arafat Anuragh Huda. I had a fairly good childhood. No friends really, but I had an anthropomorphic toy soldier. When I was five, I dropped him and broke both his arms and legs. Or, as I prefer to tell it, an elite team of paramilitary psychos performed a terrorist act on him. After that, life sucked. I graduated from school and eventually came here to college.

I’m sure most of you guys are breaking out the world map right now, pointing to an unpopulated island in the middle of the Pacific and saying “But Arafat, the people that care live right here!” Well, buddy, that may be true, but it was my birthday last night. I turned 22. Friends who know how much I love hot wax brought me candles. And, for a birthday present, I am asking my editor to let me talk about my life, pathetic though it is. I even have his permission to use prepositions to end sentences with!

So, I won’t break out the Wacky News Story today. (How about those two chicks at the Hayward High School in California who were elected Homecoming King and Queen though? A girl! King? How bizarre is that?). Neither will I use said news story to talk about a) the American Dream, b) how I’m brown, c) how I’m fat and like to eat, thus causing hilarity to ensue, or d) how I don’t have a girlfriend.

Instead, I’ll give you some good advice on how you can be awesome like me — well, in some respects. It’ll take too much hard work and good eatin’ to achieve the corpulent dimension, and possibly cancerous extremes at tanning salons to get the desired brownness. And if you have a significant other, it’s just one less person who’ll reject me. But other than that, you can mirror the persona of Arafat Kazi, Consummate Columnist and Man About Town.

First of all, smoke. This is the foundational building block of all coolness. If possible, smoke more than one type of tobacco. That is, smoke cigarettes when you’re out with your friends. Inhale. Enjoy the soothing carcinogens as they billow into your lungs, there to form Rorschach Tests of tar. When you’re at home, rocking your list of friends on LiveJournal.com, smoke a pipe. A pipe is very soothing and complements your room’s bouquet in a way that body odor alone can’t always manage. I would suggest smoking a pipe outdoors too, but you have to be over 50 or British. If you’re not, people will just pop you one in the snoot.

Secondly, be passionate about literature. When I, a litterateur, say literature, I tchah at your puny beat poets and faugh at your American-poets-who-aren’t-Poe-Whitman-or-Dickinson. You pretty much have to be an English major for this one though, because if you’re not, you end up thinking Ayn Rand is literature. Ayn Rand is not literature; she is excrement. Believe me when I say that excrement, while finding commode a large part in literature (you can read Ronald Paulson on Lord Rochester’s constipation), is not literature itself.

Paradise Lost is High Art. If you must read literature that is not High Art, read good low art. When the nights are cold and you don’t have anybody to love, read Victorian erotica. You can learn words like “pego” and “gamahuche” that you can use in ordinary conversation without anybody being the wiser!

The best course I’ve ever had is Detective Fiction with Professor Charles Rzepka, and that deals in good low art. Which brings me to my third dictum: whatever else you do, read the Sherlock Holmes at least 7,000 times in your life. It’s crass to care overmuch about Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter books, while great reads, are even more plebeian. But Holmes! Consummate Sherlock, who smoked! And didn’t have a girlfriend! Whose brother was fat! Who was best friends with John (or James) Watson! As Vincent Starrett said, “though the world explode, these two survive.”

Amen to that. And if you’re the type of person who fills gaping holes of friendlessness in his life by collecting life-size faux-buddy effigies of Darth Vader, you’re going to love the endless debates people have about whether Holmes preferred his cherrywood pipe over the briar.

My fourth pronouncement is get yourself an online journal, or web log (“blog” for short). Another columnist in these very pages ripped on blogs the other day, but I think he’s mistaken. The internet is the perfect compensation machine, and I would argue that it’s also where you can, if you’re so inclined, find love, adulation, even celebrity. There are many sites to choose from, but I would personally recommend LiveJournal.com because of its great community. If you’re vain though, know HTML and can afford the eight bucks a month, you can even get your own domain. I’ve met some of my best friends through LiveJournal. Hell, I’ll even admit that the one girl who slept with me in the United States, in November 2001, was someone I met through LiveJournal. (I guess she was a “blind” date in more ways than one, huh?) Ultimately, when you realize that even Kevin Parker Allen of North Carolina has a LiveJournal, it’s time for you to get one too. And how can you possibly hate a site that features the community “NonUglyFats”?

So, if you follow all these commandments, you too can become like my large, but perfectly formed, self (as Michael Kelly was wont to say). The much quicker method would be to eat a stick of butter, drink two six-packs of Newcastle Brown Ale, soil yourself and spend a passionate night with a sheep. But I can’t advocate that, because what if you like a different beer?

Arafat Kazi, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press and can be contacted at futhman@thewatsonbrothers.com