Ryan ChartrandA whole new year, a totally loathsome column.
Like most of you, I have a love/hate relationship with pop culture. (Yes, the pop culture columnist sometimes hates pop culture – no one’s perfect). When it comes to the films we watch, the music we listen to and the general trends we follow, it’s pretty easy to polarize the things we love and the things we just don’t. You either love it or you hate it. Or you hate to love it (exhibit A: reality TV on VH1). For example, I love iTunes free downloads and James McAvoy (from “Atonement”), but I loathe the WGA strike (come on, it’s the last season of “Scrubs”!) and an overloaded hard drive from the aforementioned free downloads.
Sure, there is some room for indifference in popular culture. I mean, just this week I’ve lost count of all the knocked-up and incarcerated stars in Hollywood, and I’m not sure I care to see another Heidi and Spencer photo shoot. I’m sure there are lots of movies, people and pop culture phenomena you won’t care about, but it’s my job to make sure you are at least aware (or wary, as the case may be) of them. Plus, “Eh, Whatever” didn’t seem to be a very catchy name for a column.
So I have doomed myself to find something every week that I either love or loathe that is relevant to our very cultured collegiate minds. In using this format, I have also cleverly given myself an out if I end up hating this idea entirely; I can just decide to loathe the format of my own column. It’s a genius plan, but I digress…
This week, just because it’s a new year, and what the heck, I’m new at the whole “come up with something edgy, significant and not from someone else’s blog” thing, I am going to start out with something that hopefully the readers and I might agree upon: I love Cal Poly.
I know what you’re thinking: “Very profound, Baker. You’re just saying you love Cal Poly because it is in direct view from your notebook.” Maybe I was having a Brick Tamland “I love lamp” moment, but as it turns out, Cal Poly really (and thankfully) is relevant to pop culture because of the creative, intelligent and diverse (in some ways more than others) students attending it. You’re welcome.
Just from the almost eerie amount of unsolicited smiles I got in the University Union today, I have a feeling that if it weren’t for the fact that people are here to take actual classes, San Luis Obispo would resemble something of an Enzyte commercial (way too much smiling). Even Lewis Black said San Luis Obispo was like “f***ing Candyland.”
But I admit that I didn’t always appreciate the anti-corporate America and small-town sentiments that San Luis Obispo prides itself on. The fact that there wasn’t a Nordstrom within 50 miles made me feel like I was stuck in some kind of Gottschalks purgatory. My snobbery led me to spend a summer in London and subsequently a quarter in Los Angeles, only to come back to Cal Poly with an acute appreciation for the fact that I can actually breathe and it doesn’t take hours to travel a few blocks’ distance. What I used to view as an inconvenience, I now savagely defend as sacred ground not to be tainted by drive-thrus or even Nordstrom. I think I’m growing.
Anyway, keep up the good work and don’t go changing, because Cal Poly, I still love you (at least for this week)!
Lovingly and Loathingly Yours,
Allison
Allison Baker is an English senior, Mustang Daily columnist and pop-culture enthusiast.