Thoughts on ‘thinking outside the box’
Random musings from Dave Matthews to homophopia
Commentary by Tim Dragga

First off, let me say something to all you people out there who listen to Dave Matthews Band because you believe it says something about your great musical taste and how unique and different you are.

Oh well, you’re not. You’re just like every other college student.

I mean, with respect to Dave, he’s a good artist and “Stay” along with “Crush” have found permanent spots on my mp3 play list. But Dave Matthews CD’s and posters are about as ubiquitous in college as empty tequila bottles in a frat house. Own up to the fact that it’s popular entertainment the exact same way that ’N Sync and Limp Crapcake are. You want to be arty or hip, pick up Radiohead’s “Amnesiac” or the new Spiritualized or Alicia Keys CD’s.

Now before too many people accuse me of advocating pretentious music that sucks, I’d like to mention that I reject the modernist and post-modernist notions that it’s up to the audience, not 7the artist, to derive meaning from art. Of course art can mean different things to different people, but Radiohead’s “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” were filled to the brim with the exact kind of pretentious ambiguity that has the people who loved “Magnolia” claiming the two albums as genius.

I think Leo Tolstoy put it best when he said, “To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.”

If I hear one more business management major in khaki pants and those nondescript brown boots, and the navy brass button blazers talk about “thinking outside the box” I may puke. Guys, you are the box, and if you have to resort to a clichéd phrases like “think outside the box” to communicate a desire to approach things from a non-conventional perspective then that should be your first hint.

Has anyone else noticed that the most homophobic people tend to be the least likely to ever be hit on by any gay person? Whenever I overhear some overweight, acne ridden, bigot with an asymmetrical face going on about how “no queers better try to touch me” I can’t help but think about how that’s really the last thing he’ll need to worry about.

I’m sure that mentioning this will plunge me into the lower depths of geekdom in some of your minds, but the new Star Trek series “Enterprise” launched this season. I think a lot of its success will depend on exactly how much that naked blue thing in the commercials is actually in the show.

At one point in my life I was tricked into sitting in a booth for a local community theater at a “trekkie” convention. After watching the people there for about fifteen minutes, it became extremely clear to me that I don’t like anything that much. Now maybe that makes me the truly sad one because I don’t have any real passions in life, but then again I’m not the 35-year-old virgin living out of my parents basement with rubber Vulcan ears glued to the sides of my head introducing myself as Supreme Commander Larry Milton.

I guess you could say the importance of having passion is relative to what the passion is about.

Tim Dragga is a junior political science major from Lubbock. Tim’s column can be seen every Wednesday and he can be contacted at (t.c.dragga@student.tcu.edu).

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