Millennial rules for dating and blogging: “I have probably ruined countless relationships with my penchant for oversharing and the somewhat naïve belief that honesty trumps all else. Writing is my one true love. Everyone else-from sweet, corn-fed boys with curly hair to rough older men with adroit hands-will always come second. I’m probably not as sorry about that as I should be.” Jesus Christ, you kids, no one is going to be able to run for Senator in twenty years!

Our friends over at Taiwan’s most amazing animation factory are killing it. The Pultizer organization needs to make a new category for CGI animation of the news just so they get what they deserve.

by Sean McTiernan

There’s only one reason to write about “There’s Nothing Out There”: Mike. Because Mike, the man who inexplicably escorts three couples he doesn’t get on with to a cabin in the woods, is such a hypnotically bad-ass dude that he renders anything else of note in the movie (of which there isn’t much of anyway) completely irrelevant. Mike knows he’s in a bad horror movie and he’s not happy about it. At all.

The real shame about Mike as an aware horror character is that post-”Scream,” the conversation stopped being about how excellent his character is and instead became almost solely concerned with how he was first. I don’t need to tell you how the “firsties” phenom is killing all that is fun and cool about everything. If you do need help with that, here’s a drummer trying to get over his nerves by swearing a lot and also kind of covering that point. Not only does the “Mike Was First” argument stop people from just plain discussing how great Mike is, it also misses the crucial difference between “Scream” and “There’s Nothing Out There.” Everything that happened in “Scream” was a sly joke on the horror genre, artfully made by one of the architects of what it so effectively satirized. “Scream” is an entire fourth-wall breaking, carefully and cleverly constructed entity. “There’s Nothing Out There” is, apart from Mike, a below-average horror movie. Just a bad movie, actually. Without Mike, this would have been forgotten immediately. In fact the film’s low quality makes the genius of it seem all the more obvious: like Mike has wandered onto a set and started verbally abusing people.

The film begins in the middle of an action sequence with a girl being attacked in a video store. “It’s cool, film nerds will be psyched to see if they can recognise all the horror posters” is what I imagine the director said. Really the effect is to create confusion in the viewer. I should mention the credit sequence that follows the cold-open-dream-car-crash sequence. It’s fucking insane. The names of the cast and crew scroll over a weird tunnel of bad green bad graphics. This tunnel moves in a disorienting manner reminiscent of a poorly designed Rez level. And this whole thing is set to a terrible half-arsed electro song with quotes from “There’s Something Out There” dropped in over it, Batdance style. Even better, they obviously didn’t want to spoil any of Mike’s punchlines so the quotes are things like “look out!” and “don’t worry.” You should mentally prepare yourself for this as it happens early in the movie and if you’re not expecting it you’ll probably be overwhelmed.

In case I haven’t mentioned it, Mike’s the best. He doesn’t even bother making any concession to mocking people the way normal people mock other people, he just talks to the other characters as if they were on the movie screen.

The Nerdy Non-Mike: “Really Mike, it’s logically stupid for you to be worried about this.”

Mike: “Logically stupid? Is that what you said? ‘Logically stupid’? Is this really the person representing brilliance on our trip?”

Mike continues to question all around him and point out danger whenever he can. One of the great things about him is not only is he aware he’s in a horror movie, he’s also all about self-preservation. He only really hectors people when they’re putting him in danger and never seems to feel any great pressure to use his horror wisdom to help others.

Jock Non-Mike: “Oh there’s a noise in the kitchen, I’ll investigate.”

Other dude Non-Mikes: “We’ll go with you.”

Mike: “I’ll just stay here with the girls.”

All female Non-Mikes: “In that case, we’re going too.”

That’s the other thing. The only person really dealing with the monster for most of the early part of the movie is Mike because he’s the only one to realize it exists. So naturally all the Non-Mikes-yes, everyone who is not Mike-treat him as if he were an insane dickhead bent on ruining their holiday. Then he mistakes one of the Non-Mike couples for the monster and attacks them somewhat over-zealously while they are about to bone down. They fail to see the bigger picture and recognise Mike was trying to protect them. Instead they beat him up and lock in the cellar. With the monster. Of course, Mike makes easy work of the monster but not without flooding the basement and breaking the window. Not that this would bother him in the slightest. One gets the impression Mike’s not too worried about gaining the respect and friendship of others.

Mike: “Why don’t you put a sign on your chest that says ‘victim’? Come on, use your brains for a second. David and Janet haven’t made it back yet!”

Non-Mike: “They’ve been gone 10 minutes and they can take care of themselves.”

Mike: “Oh, sure, I’d call a penlight enough protection against anything.”

I don’t think there’s a second of dialogue from Mike in the first part of the movie that isn’t about how something he sees is an obvious sign everyone’s about to be murdered. Even the arrival of a weirdly relaxed group of metalheads (most of whom seem to be dressed like black panthers for some reason?) in the lake outside our heroes’ cabin manages to chill Mike to his very core. While Leaderish Non-Mike makes some “those crazy metallers”-style remark, Mike shakes his head and utters “foreshadowing.” When Leaderish Non-Mike tells Mike to relax, it’s clear Mike’s preoccupation with grisly death isn’t a humorous affectation:

“Oh good, thank you, I’ll remember that when I’m getting my face ripped off. Look, don’t you know what just happened? Those kids were born to be murder victims. Us seeing them was a sign!”

A hallmark of 80s horror is the nudity. Seriously, if you’re looking at any non-Mike, expect their clothes to spring off at a moment’s notice, with no context. In this case, they seem to not get some of the nude fundamentals. For instance, a male non-Mike gets surprised early in the film by his naked girl friend who wants to have some sex. He vehemently refuses and insists, non-euphemistically, that it is dinner time. This is a man who, minutes before, demanded this woman show her “titties” to a car full of people she barely knew. This seems odd to me.

Later we see a Non-Mike couple, both nude in a bedroom. Surely they cannot make a hash of things when they’re in this advanced stage, can they? They most certainly can. They should, of course, have begun engaging in the kind of Skinemax, carefully-arranged nude heavy-petting that 80s schlock movies thrived upon. Instead, before we cut away, the dude jumps in bed beside the girl and they both lie side-by-side, face down. Worse still, his “move” is to put his arm around her, like she is his male grandchild and he is bequeathing her the family hockey rink (though hopefully that scenario would involve more clothes). Nothing is sadder than seeing two non-Mikes attempting to be salacious and instead entering into some sort of bizarre pseudo-illicit Christian Side Hug.

This poor understanding of nudity continues. The aforementioned group of metallers all strip off when before swimming in the pool in front of the cottage. If “Dirt” didn’t lie to me, and by God I doubt it did, 80s metallers only get naked to get their blood replaced or to have unwieldy orgies of presumable questionable hygiene. But these heshers do neither. Instead, they splash each other. Like young, boring, children in a television advertisement. It’s startling.

Even the skinny dipping scene is a disaster, with the non-Mikes attempting to get together in water so cold their skin becomes translucent and they begin shivering with obvious discomfort. I think there’s an episode of “Seinfeld” about why this isn’t a good idea.

Eventually when about half of the Non-Mikes die or go missing, the rest are attacked by the monster frequently enough to realise they’re in mortal danger. Surely that now he’s with a group of people willing to fight for survival, Mike now becomes a fearless leader of an unstoppable crew, right? Nope, sadly the living Non-Mikes are still complete morons and the only real purpose they serve is for him to let off some steam by abusing them.

Harried Female Non-Mike: “This floor feels like mud!”

Mike: “That’s because it is mud. Dirt and water make mud, you learn something new every day, don’t you?”

Oh also the monster in the movie is a bit rubbish and has nonsensical powers. For instance, it shoots mind control rays from its eyes. This puts half of the cast under its control at various points in the movie. Mike? Mike puts on sunglasses and is fine, like a goddamn adult would do.

Sean Mc Tiernan has a blog and a twitter. So does everyone, though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. You should totally email him with your questions / insults/ offers of tax-free monetary gifts.

I never thought I’d see the day when the Daily Mail put together a factbox about John Cage, but it’s a funny old world: “A Christmas a recording of four-and-a-half minutes of complete silence could grab the prestigious number one slot this December. So far more than 20,000 people have signed up on the social networking site to support the download ‘Cage Against The Machine’ which aims to put avant-garde composer John Cage’s work 4’33” in the top spot.”

At first gloss, there are maybe two things that Ben Roethlisberger and Ernesto Miranda have in common. Roethlisberger is very rich, very famous, a two-time Super Bowl champion and was regarded, until a series of recent sexual assault charges fouled up what had become a very lucrative persona, as a prize example of the dull virtue of Ohio high school football — a big, unflappable, rocket-for-an-arm, all-beef archetype who could pull off remedial self-effacement in interviews and deliver a few lines in a television commercial. Roethlisberger is the fourth highest-paid player in the NFL, and he also looks like a boiled ham that has somehow acquired the ability to think highly of itself. That’s about what you need to know about Ben Roethlisberger.

Ernesto Miranda, on the other hand, was broke most of his life and could in just about every way have emerged, Freddy Krueger-style, from the bigoted, blaze-orange unconscious of leatherette Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. An Arizona-born — okay, that part fucks up Brewer’s narrative — career criminal, Miranda received a dishonorable discharge from the Army, drifted through Texas and later did federal time in the implausibly literary-sounding locales of Chillicothe, Ohio and Lompoc, California. The two things that Miranda and Roethlisberger have in common are a general ambient infamy and a place in the history books.

Roethlisberger is there because, in 2004, he became the youngest quarterback ever to win a Super Bowl. Miranda, for his part, is the reason why — had the Milledgeville, Georgia police arrested Roethlisberger on suspicion of sexual assault charges back in March of 2010, instead of posing for photos with him — the two-time Super Bowl champion would’ve been read his rights. It’s tempting to say that Roethlisberger and Miranda also have in common a predilection for coerced sex. But we can’t say that, really. Miranda’s 1963 conviction on rape charges in Phoenix was eventually set aside because… well, you know. And while Roethlisberger has been accused of sexual assault by two different women in the past 15 months, no criminal charges have ever been filed against him. So you could say that both Miranda and Roethlisberger should be presumed innocent, as they have never been proven guilty.

You don’t get to pick your martyrs on things like this. Miranda, who was stabbed to death in a dispute over a card game in Phoenix back in 1976, was a thoroughgoing butthead for seemingly his entire life, but the Miranda Warning is a popular and iconic component of America’s criminal justice system. (Well, popular among most actual citizens — the Roberts Court, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has written, has hand-picked cases involving sub-Miranda human nightmares in an attempt to chip away at the law.) Roethlisberger… well, I should probably stop comparing Ben Roethlisberger to Ernesto Miranda. But here’s why I did it in the first place: despite never being charged, let alone convicted, of any crime, Roethlisberger spent the first four weeks of this NFL season serving what was originally a six-game league suspension handed down by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

“My decision today is not based on a finding that you violated Georgia law, or on a conclusion that differs from that of the local prosecutor,” the commissioner wrote when he suspended Roethlisberger. “That said, you are held to a higher standard as an NFL player, and there is nothing about your conduct in Milledgeville that can remotely be described as admirable, responsible, or consistent with either the values of the league or the expectations of our fans.” So there’s that, and then there’s the not-picking-your-martyrs thing again.

There’s a reason why Goodell can do things like issue seemingly arbitrary suspensions and then, if he deems fit, reduce them. (There’s a hilarious bit of Wiki-trolling on Goodell’s page that I don’t want to spoil, but you should really find the hyperlinked words “personal conduct guidelines” and click them.) The NFL Player’s Association collectively bargained away its right to protest such decisions and allowed the league to rewrite the personal conduct policy to make it both more onerous and more amorphous, effectively giving Goodell the right to issue punishments of his choosing to players who violate an exceptionally opaque personal conduct policy. In exchange for that gesture of good faith (um?), NFL owners have proposed that the league set aside 18% less revenue for player salaries in the next collective bargaining agreement, despite record profits. They made that demand because they’re NFL owners and know no other way to be, but they did so secure in the same knowledge that insulates Goodell — no one in the NFL media is inclined to call bullshit on any of this.

That the authority-worshipping NFL media has treated Goodell to a vigorous and long-running rubdown isn’t surprising, necessarily — these are the same guys who insist on hymning loathsome rage-manatee Bill Parcells as a leader of men and subject home viewers to Jerry Jones’s alarmingly taut visage several dozen times per broadcast. Admittedly, it’s easy to think of greater human rights disgraces in the world than a lack of due process for the Jager-bombed clot of rapey deli meat that is Ben Roethlisberger. When enough witnesses describe a large, hugely wasted professional athlete following a 20-year-old woman into a bathroom with peen akimbo, I’m inclined to leave the principled indignance to professional civil libertarians and drill down on coming up with new ways to deride said wasted athlete. From each according to his ability and all that. But one doesn’t need to defend Roethlisberger — or like him, at all — to realize that there’s something sort of rotten happening here.

Roethlisberger represents a lot of things, some more flattering than others. Aesthetically, he’s something like the present-day apex of a certain model of quarterback — of the same demographic as the blue-collar Mitteleuropean-Midwestern gunslinger archetype, but a bit more fun to watch out of the pocket and, thus far in his career at least, impressively impervious to big-game pressure. Personally, though, Roethlisberger shows all indications of being an entitled, stone-stupid, epic scale booze-boner. By all accounts a pretty bad guy, in short, but — like Miranda — a disconcertingly good test case for the limits of authority.

The other players to have received long personal-conduct suspensions from Roger Goodell aren’t much more likable — Tank Johnson, DWI hobbyist and owner of a Branch Davidian-esque cache of unlicensed automatic weapons; Pacman Jones and his Zelig-like knack for being near heartbreakingly arbitrary incidences of strip club-based violence; Michael Vick, who is Michael Vick. All of them charged with crimes, all of them suspended by Goodell, all later reinstated amid the desultory trolling of daily newspaper columnists eager to see the tough-on-crime commissioner they’ve nicknamed Big Red (seriously) get still tougher. It has played, at times, like a suit-clad take on ESPN’s late, unlamented Sunday Night “Jacked Up” highlight segment — in which Stuart Scott clumsily slanged his way through the lighter side of helmet-to-helmet hits — only rewritten for the people who leave comments at the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page.

There are exceptions to this, of course — Ray Ratto, the great San Francisco Chronicle columnist who also writes for CBS Sports, neatly unpacked the interlocking uglinesses of the whole affair back in April. But in a football discourse that deals almost exclusively in violent certainties and crude power, the commissioner’s mandate to protect the NFL’s brand from the players who comprise the actual NFL doesn’t get the criticism it deserves. In part, this is because no one wants to defend Ben Roethlisberger, staggering disgracefully, ween out, in the direction of something very terrible. I certainly don’t want to defend him — if you’re just joining us, I want to compare him to a goateed olive loaf — but I also take no joy in seeing the imperatives of brand management supersede even the appearance of due process in his case. It may make sportswriters feel sophisticated to talk about brands and messaging — in the same way that it presumably makes optic-obsessed political writer-types like Matt Bai feel like something other than cheapjack soothsayers — but it’s a terribly insufficient way to describe goings-on involving actual human beings. And, of course, it’s a pretty weak way to avoid talking about things — from the crudest behavior to the crudest applications of power — that make us uncomfortable.

Yeah, I just wrote all that on the week of the “Pics of Brett Favre’s Penis” story. I don’t know, either. But as you’re about to be reminded, my decisions generally deserve a pretty vigorous questioning. The good news would be that I finally defeated the coin last week, five weeks into the NFL season. The bad news would be that both I and the coin picked poorly even by the standards of inanimate objects. Again, I don’t know what to tell you. Sorry? Bet the coin? The limping, Zombie Saints look weirdly terrible? Anyway, as per usual: coin flips by Garey G. Ris, lines by Sportsbook.com, incorrect picks courtesy of my own over-thinking brain-piece.

Week 4 (and overall): David Roth: 5–9 (28–45–3); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 4–10 (39–34–3)

Sunday, October 17
• San Diego Chargers (-8.5) at St. Louis Rams, 1pm — DR: San Diego; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Kansas City Chiefs at Houston Texans (-4.5), 1pm — DR: Kansas City; ATTLCTDC: Houston
• Baltimore Ravens at New England Patriots (-3), 1pm — DR: Baltimore; ATTLCTDC: New England
• Miami Dolphins at Green Bay Packers (Off), 1pm — DR: Miami; ATTLCTDC: Miami
• New Orleans Saints (-4.5) at Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 1pm — DR: New Orleans; ATTLCTDC: Tampa Bay
• Atlanta Falcons at Philadelphia Eagles (-3), 1pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Atlanta
• Detroit Lions at New York Giants (-10), 1pm — DR: New Jersey G; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey G
• Cleveland Browns at Pittsburgh Steelers (-13.5), 1pm — DR: Pittsburgh; ATTLCTDC: Cleveland
• Seattle Seahawks at Chicago Bears (-6.5), 1pm — DR: Chicago; ATTLCTDC: Chicago
• New York Jets (-3) at Denver Broncos, 4:05pm — DR: New Jersey J; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey J
• Dallas Cowboys at Minnesota Vikings (-1.5), 4:15pm — DR: Minnesota; ATTLCTDC: Minnesota
• Oakland Raiders at San Francisco 49ers (-6.5), 4:15pm — DR: San Francisco; ATTLCTDC: Oakland
• Indianapolis Colts (-3) at Washington Redskins, 8:20pm — DR: Indianapolis; ATTLCTDC: Washington

Monday, October 18
• Tennessee Titans (-3) at Jacksonville Jaguars, 8:30pm — DR: Tennessee; ATTLCTDC: Tennessee

David Roth is a writer from New Jersey who lives in New York. He co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. His favorite Van Halen song is “Hot For Teacher.”

Photo by Ken Lund, from Flickr.

Everything. Just everything! It delights me to no end!

by Ann Finkbeiner

Poor Alan Turing proposed a test by which you’d know whether The Machines are thinking: converse with someone you can’t see and who might be a human or might be a machine, and you’ll always know which. Test after test, we always know; machines are inferior conversationalists. But recently from the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-an extremely large, ruthlessly intelligent, highly organized professional association-comes troubling news. Change the test from conversing to killing, and all hell breaks loose: machines are indistinguishable from humans.

Computer scientists tinkered with a video game, “Ultimate Tournament 2004,” in which controlled avatars must kill or be killed. Some avatars were controlled by humans, some by bots. The bots were programmed not to act like a human but to think like one. And then the gamers had to figure out who was trying to kill their avatars, other humans or bots. They couldn’t. A computer scientist, no doubt grinning like a maniac, said, “There’s only a slender gap between the humans and bots now.”

Granted that the IEEE is less interested in killer bots than in artificial intelligence, and in particular-I think, but don’t take my word for it-whether AI should follow the rules of human cognition or of machine learning. Never mind. The information is out there now and can’t be recalled. You have been warned. Meanwhile, The Machines are known to be working on their conversational skills.

Ann Finkbeiner is a proprietor of The Last Word on Nothing, and is newly the author of A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery.

“Berlusconi is constantly under investigation because he never goes on trial.”

Silvio Berlusconi is in trouble with the law again. Yes, this is a new story.

Good news, fellas: Women are much less choosy about who they do sex to than previously thought. Researchers from U.S.C. surveyed the easiest demographic, “asking how much time and money college students spent in a typical week pursuing short-, intermediate- or long-term relationships. The proportion of mating effort dedicated to short-term mating was the same for men and women. Similarly, both men and women showed an equivalent tendency to lower their standards for sex partners, and men did not report feeling constrained to have far fewer sexual partners than they truly desired.” What a great time to be alive!

by Mary Shyne

When my manager at the test prep company called me to teach a summer school program, I jumped on the opportunity. I was six months out of New York University, and I was determined to stay in New York to become a writer. The only obstacle was New York’s price of living, and the impending deluge of student debt.

The summer school gig meant consistent work at a tantalizing $20 an hour. Conveniently, the school was located a five-minute walk from my house, and it got even better: “The hours are eight to one,” he said, “so you’ll have the rest of the day to yourself.” Visions of productivity danced in my head. Freelance work! Blog exposure! Agent pitches for a novel! And all while teaching no-brainer subjects like high school-level grammar.

The letdown came at our first meeting for the program. Since the program was sponsored by the test prep company, four classes were offered: one SAT comprehensive class, and three classes for PSAT-Math, Writing and Critical Reading. Two out of four of the subjects had already been assigned. My coworker and I had to choose between PSAT English and Math.

I spoke up immediately. “Look, I just graduated from college as an English major,” I said. “I really don’t think I’m cut out to teach math.”

“I really don’t think that’s appropriate,” my coworker said, pursing her lips. “I’m a trained English teacher, and it doesn’t make sense.”

I turned to her with Excorcist-like slowness. I always try not to hate on other women, but one look at her told me everything I needed to know. After four years of working at a college gym, I could tell a classic Yoga Addict when I saw one: the kind that’s always obliviously smacking you on the train with their yoga mat, or wearing yoga pants in the most bizarre situations-a garment I call “Sweatpants for Sluts.”

But being a peacekeeper/pushover (and desperate for work), I conceded. After three years of letting my TI-83 calculator gather dust, I was about to be a math teacher in a Brooklyn public high school.

* * *

At first, it was the students that intimidated me. Suddenly I was fifteen again, about to give a solo presentation to my peers. Doing my first bit of number crunching in eons, I calculated that I was only five years older than my students, making me closer in age to them than my coworkers.

Mercifully, the kids were great. The most troubling thing about them was their obsession with GPA. We bonded over our worship of Nicki Minaj. I could reference Internet memes without getting the cow-like stares I received from my coworkers. I got a chronic case of warm-fuzzies when I heard one of the grindcore kids say to her friend in the hallway that “I actually learned math today!”

If anything troubled me, it was my coworkers. I tried to set aside my reservations toward the Yoga Addict for the sake of workplace peace, but in addition to being bossy, she was something worse-boring. The Yoga Addict made me believe you are what you eat: she had the personality of her plain yogurt and unflavored rice cakes.

My second coworker described himself as a Professional Enthusiast, which should’ve been a warning sign. He had the attitude of someone who’d OD’d on Mr. Holland’s Opus. His go-get-’em attitude made us non-career teachers look like the jaded waged workers we were. When he started playing chess with the kids at lunch instead of commiserating with his fellow teachers, Adrian nicknamed him “Make a Wish Foundation.”

Adrian, by the way, was the one coworker I hadn’t nicknamed. He was neighborhood local as well, and as soon as I saw his vintage Nike running shoes and tortoise-shell glasses, I knew I’d found an ally. Our only issue was age. We lived blocks away from each other in Brooklyn, but we inhabited different generations. When we walked home together, he told me that on September 11th, he went to a job interview in Chelsea, and found himself watching the towers fall with his would-be employers. Every 9/11 story deserves another: “I was in my first period class,” I said, “in eighth grade.”

Although I liked Adrian-he was the grown-up version of the “Mom-Friendly Prom Date”-he made me nervous. He was thirty-plus and engaged. He was an artist, but the teaching gig sapped his energy. He told me that instead of going home and creating cartoons or sculptures, he would collapse.

The lines under his eyes read like the rings of a tree, only instead of counting years they counted compromises. I baited him at lunch, a 40-minute period in an already stuffy room made stuffier by one hundred adolescent bodies, talking about Brooklyn neighborhoods. “I can’t stand Park Slope,” I said, eyes a-rolling. “I feel like I’m going to trample a baby.”

“It’s not that bad,” he said. “It’s a family crowd.”

“Well, I guess that’s the direction you’re headed in,” I said, giving him the ol’ laser eyes. We spent the next ten minutes staring at Make a Wish Foundation’s chess game with a student, which got interesting when the kid’s pawn made it to the other side and became a Queen.

* * *

But my comparative youth ended up only serving as a temporary shield from the Harsh Reality of Teaching. Since teaching is the standard fallback of English majors-even grad school is a glorified teaching gig-I’d figured how hard could it be?

Oh. Well.

Did you know teaching is hard? While I was only actively teaching for five hours, I went home exhausted, knowing I had to plan the next day’s lesson and slog my way through half a dozen math questions. I yearned to go back in time to my own high school teachers, and shower them with gifts for their unseen dedication. Not only did the job drain me, it turned out three years of not taking math didn’t make me better at doing math. I routinely fumbled questions on the board, apologizing with a flippant “well, I fucked that one up.” (Which the kids loved! Turns out teenagers love it when teachers swear.)

But it wasn’t like I could quit. I’d graduated in January, and though I’d send out hundreds of resumes a week and gone on dozens of interviews, nothing came together. My two-suit “investment” for interviews was beginning to look like a net loss. I knew everyone was having trouble finding work, but I felt like the poster child for the post-collegiate experience: Liberal Arts Major, unemployed. Even though I sucked at teaching math, my mind drew parallels between math and my situation. Life was acting like one giant inequality problem, and I was persistently on the “less than” side of the equation.

After being told during a second interview that I was overqualified, I had a drama-queen moment at lunch. “Is life ever fair?” I moaned.

“You’re already white, in a first world country,” Adrian said. “I’d say your odds are pretty good.” I grumbled consent. Trust an artist to give you perspective (and trust a writer to give you terrible puns).

Unfortunately, my math mix-ups were the least of my woes. Instead of using my spare time to write like I had imagined, I burned all my free time on the Internet, absorbing mindless content, brought to me (ironically?) by algorithms. I had five different unnamed documents opened in Word ranging in creation date from late May to the present, each containing unrelated, unreadable paragraphs. I was beginning to feel Adrian’s pain. Was my writer’s block a product of mind-numbing math and overworking my left brain, or was I not cut out to be a writer, period? I couldn’t calculate the probability of getting a prize in a pink container, but I was pretty sure I could calculate my odds of achieving literary success.

After fudging yet another function in front of the kids, I went to Adrian between classes, feeling hysterical. “Adrian, if people say ‘those who can’t do, teach,’ does that mean we can’t do?”

Adrian looked up from the whiteboard. He put down the dry erase marker in his hand, a marker so worn out his words were was only visible because they made a negative in the board’s grime.

“No,” he said, with all the conviction of parent telling their talentless son that his cover of “Imagine” was ready for the Top Forty.

Then he caught my plural pronoun. His eyes looked over my shoulder, to the hallway. “Probably not.”

* * *

The e-mail came during my afternoon nap, which was more like a fugue state with a soundtrack of Sgt. Pepper. It was an HR person at a publishing company I’d had a phone interview with months earlier. My cousin’s ex-boyfriend was working there, and had forwarded my resume. It seemed too much like a pipedream at the time, and I hadn’t taken our conversation seriously.

My heart pounded just looking at the message preview in my Gmail. I clicked, teeth a-chattering. “Are you still looking for work?” it read.

Clouds parted. Wagner blared. Virgins swooned. It took all my self-control to not hit caps lock as I replied “Yes!”

We finalized during my lunch period the next day. I didn’t even need to duct-tape the lint off of my suit for an interview. I was hired. Overnight I’d gone from wading through a living nightmare made from polygons and the Pythagorean theorum to every English major’s dream: employed at a publishing company in New York City.

I skipped-literally skipped-into the lunchroom. I’m sure my announcement came off as bragging, but my coworkers responded with congratulations.

“You were just complaining about how life was so unfair yesterday,” the Yoga Addict pointed out.

True enough-but even if luck had skewed in my direction this time, it wasn’t like it had been fair. I hadn’t gotten the job through want-ad scouring-I’d had it passed down through a professionally connected family. Worse, Adrian asked if I could see if there were any positions open for him. In what America does a thirty-year-old ask a twenty-year-old to find them a job? Life was still a giant inequality, weighed against the many in favor of the few.

* * *

Two months into my new job and the triple-A batteries of my TI-83 had been moved to a more productive place (in my vibrator). I loved my job. I could afford beer that wasn’t Coors. My blog queue and Microsoft Word documents overflowed.

I kept in touch with Adrian, whose situation at work, in contrast, was deteriorating. I hadn’t been removed from the company mailing list, and I still received daily e-mails, with subjects touting New and Exciting Developments.

“Basically, everyone got fired,” Adrian said, “and has to re-apply for their position.” Only stooges like Make a Wish Foundation were safe.

I was sympathetic, but what could I do? I told myself that while Adrian might struggling career-wise, at least he was in a satisfying relationship. I reasoned that he’d achieved personal happiness, but struggled professionally; I’d remained alone, but had taken one step up the career ladder. In math, that’s an inverse variation equation: as one side gains greater value, the other side shrinks at a constant rate.

But maybe I needed to quit it with the math metaphors. When my new manager asked if I knew anyone looking for work, I asked Adrian for a resume. He sent one within the hour; they hired him within two weeks. Those who can’t do, teach; and those who do teach look constantly for a better job.

It wasn’t fair to my fellow graduates moving back into their parents’ places after a thousand interviews; it wasn’t even necessarily fair to the terminally unemployed and overqualified. Yet justice seemed beyond the point. In what America does a thirty-year-old ask a twenty-year-old to find them a job? This one.

Mary Shyne is a recent NYU graduate, Brooklyn-based writer and an employed person. She blogs here.

Photo by Mikey Angels from Flickr.