It’s mealtime on the UBC campus. You are a blissfully ignorant first-year student, breathless with anticipation as you make a right turn then another right turn, fatefully arriving in the Commons Block at a doorway marked Dining Room.

Vaguely, you recall that halcyon first day on campus when your parents crammed wonderful food into your fridge before they bid farewell. Now that food is gone, some sacrificially scattered on your carpet – like the box of Ritz crackers you knocked over reaching for your biology text. Then there was the apple stuck in the top of your fridge, freezing so hard you nearly broke your tooth on it. Much of the parental food of the snack variety was devoured in a mad frenzy, sharing it with buddies after an anxiety-induced rant about Chemistry. That’s right, the food is gone and your rumbling bowels must be satisfied, so you follow your nose through the cafeteria door.

Once inside, a smorgasbord of choices awaits. Turning to the left you arrive at a fruit bar. You adventurously swirl a spoon around in the yogurt and are about to reach for a bowl when you notice bean sprouts bravely poking their heads above the white surface. You hesitate then decide to not indulge in sprout-flavoured yogurt. On the right side of the vast cafeteria you find the salad bar, but the neon colours of the salad dressing is alarming and so once again, you retreat.

Spread out like a battlefield front and centre is the main food bar, where a long line of males nervously clutches slips of paper declaring wildly varying food choices, ranging from burgers to cheeseburgers. Like the living dead they stare blankly and shift from one foot to the other, watching the beef simmer on the grill. You decide not to participate in this grim conflict with cholesterol and move on.

Here, you encounter a Wrap Stand that reminds you of familiar fast food store except the line is longer and slower. The customers at the stand consist of boys who decided the burger line up was too long and girls eager to avoid gaining the “freshman 15.”

In quiet desperation you scout the flanks of the cafeteria, noting the ethnic food choices, including Greek and Indonesian, which you decline after recalling last week’s unfortunate incident with the unpronounceable dish marked with 1 red pepper symbol when it was really a 5.

At the drinks aisle you are surrounded with tantalizing options. Girls conscious of their jean size delicately reach for “Arizona Green Tea with Antioxidants”. Sick, bedraggled looking students opt for the “Vitamin C Vitamin Water” and its hope for a cure. There are the earthy types in North Face jackets and hemp jewellery that lunge athletically for bottles of turbid green Mango Chutney Wheat Grass Extract. Other patrons dash madly past you, grabbing whatever drink is available to accompany oblong piles of bagels and cream cheese crammed into brown paper bags.

After making your choices you proudly march to the cashier, confidently swiping your card before heading to the seating area. Once there you discover flocks of young females grazing on leaves of iceberg lettuce flavoured with a few drops of low fat salad dressing, sipping ice water between bites. Beside them a table of disheveled students with clothes still unchanged from the prior night of partying nurse their coffee and wait for the pain to subside. They are in stark contrast to the perky crowd of pre-med students at the next table, the food on their trays obsessively arranged according to caloric density and glycemic factor.

Finally, you find a table of calm relatively normal people and settle in for your meal. Proud of your newfound independence you rush back to your dorm room after the meal for some heavy studying.

But something gnaws at you and you can’t concentrate. Oh my god, it’s 7 p.m. and you’re hungry again! Then the self doubting “if-only’s” start: if only you’d bought the lumberjack meal plan, if only you could stop thinking about Jelly Belly’s and Oreos, if only you felt more passionate about Chemistry and most painfully, if only you hadn’t left home. Home? Ridiculous! Home is for wimps. A strong, mature, independant university student like you doesn’t need the convenience of a fully stocked stainless steel mega fridge. Of course you don’t!

Self-control, you must exercise self-control. But as you stare numbly at the Periodic Table, something incredible happens. Against your will, your hand uncontrollably moves from the book, picks up the cell phone and dials ten familiar digits. You hear the ringing, anxiously listening for the familiar voice. Incredibly, you start to speak and the words spill out of your mouth as if a demon has taken over your body.

“Hi, Mom?” you say. “ I was, uh wondering, when are you coming to visit again? So soon? Wow. Do you think maybe you could bring some more food? Really? Get a pen and paper mom, cause I’ve got this list.”

A personal favorite “quick laugh” web site of recent has been awkwardfamilyphotos.com. Not all of the photos are awkward per se – some are ridiculous, others are just ugly. However, they are all highly entertaining.

I enjoy the site mostly because it is so relateable; a great equalizer. No one is so cool that they don’t have a family story in which they did something like scream and cry during visiting a mall Santa Claus. Photos taken with your middle school girlfriend/boyfriend can make you wince in years of more advanced sexual maturity. Years from now, children will see pictures of you in your fashionable scarf or up-to-date haircut and they will laugh unreservedly. Those brazen monsters have Awkward Family Photos put these memories on display for the world.

It was only a matter of time, really. Everyone with a family that kept any sort of photographic evidence of their past has some terribly embarrassing photos, which we all enjoy seeing. This universal truth was going to be exploited, and this web site isn’t the first instance I can think of. Victoria artist Tim Gardner started producing photo realistic paintings of painfully uncool family portraits years ago. AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com isn’t giving us anything new, it’s just making the old accessible world wide.

One of the great advantages of going to an international university like UBC is the amazing degree of ethnic diversity. You can meet someone from Mexico City while waiting in line at 99 Chairs, head off to meet your half Senegalese, half French friend at Irving, and then attend a tutorial beside your Chinese partner. There are so many people from so many places, it’s impossible to know what their lives back at home are like, as well as distinct aspects of their culture. This leads us all to the common mistake of stereotyping. I have done it myself, and have also faced being stereotyped as a Brazilian foreign student. I have been asked questions which I was willing to answer, but have also faced comments that make me want to laugh.

Apart from getting awkward glances towards my butt when I walk away (Editor’s note: Brazilian women are not singled out for this) and being asked if I have to wear a bullet-proof vest when I walk around back home, the most interesting experience I have encountered was during my first year at Totem Park. I was playing pool with my friends on a Friday night, the drunken cries of my fellow Totemees outside our evening’s soundtrack. A fellow came up to me and introduced himself with a handshake, which was awkward to me since introductions are paired with hugs and kisses on the cheeks in Brazil. We inevitably got into the “where are you from” domain quickly. After saying I was from Brazil, I got the same question I get 9 out of 10 times; “How is your English so perfect?” Given that most Latin-American international students at UBC come from American, British, or international schools which they have been in since grade school, it surprises me that people are still amazed by my clear English. Many of us learn English since the age of five, together with our mother tongue.

So, after explaining just that, he asked me a question that made my jaw drop and my pool stick slam onto the table, “Do you live in the Amazon?” I assure you, the curiosity in his face gave away the fact that he was dead serious. I couldn’t contain myself, I had never considered the possibility of having to answer that question before. “Yes” I lied, “I live in the Amazon. It sucks because I had to ride a canoe to school sometimes when the river rose too high, you know?” I think his jaw dropped a little further than mine had before and he was rendered speechless. I was scared I would burst out laughing so I just had to walk away from him. I never saw him again.

Perhaps that was a bit mean…We international students should be tolerant towards erroneous views of our country, and attempt to clarify any doubts while explaining what life consists of in the place we are from. People can lose common misconceptions and gain a better understanding of our nations this way. International students, apart from having to deal with a new culture, have to keep in mind that wanting to or not they are a representative of the country they are from. When you’re in a bad mood with nothing else to do on a Friday night other than play pool, you can’t help but be an asshole just to get yourself some form of entertainment.

The New York Times and director David Lynch recently began similar internet-based projects. David Lynch’s Interview Project is a series of video interviews which were conducted by David Lynch, his son Austin and partner Jason S., and their team during a 20,000 mile road trip across the United States. The New York Times’ One in 8 Million is made up of audio interviews accompanied by photos, all with New York City residents. Interview Project clips are released once every three days, while One in 8 Million pieces are released once every week.

The Lynch crew trekked across the United States profiling people they met on the street and in bars. Most of the interviews they have posted were conducted with old men in the American Southwest and South so far. They are not camera-friendly, frequently quite directionless, and I found myself often drifting to sleep as they talked about their tedious lives. But almost exclusively from the lower echelons of the working class, with lives fraught with ups and downs, they tell stories that are likely to resonate with many.

Although One in 8 Million’s introduction proudly proclaims New York to be a city populated entirely by “characters”, truthfully The New York Times profiles colourful eccentrics exclusively, not the average New Yorker. Some interviews include a book store clerk with a Taxidermy hobby, a blind globe-trotting wine connoisseur, and a retired firefighter who hunts for antique bottles. The audio is accompanied by attractive photographs of the subjects and the things they discuss. The interviewees are not universally beautiful, but they are all at least camera-friendly. They are also more reliably interesting those in the Interview Project. Those sneaky storytellers at The New York Times are out to portray New York City as a Mecca for the unique, daring, and beautiful.

Underneath the sometimes-boring initial impressions one gets from the Interview Project bubbles a more submersive message fraught with bleakness, regret, and even the sinister. One interviewee bemoans not being able to see his three children. The most recent had a son during her teenage years; he went on to take his own life at 18, leading her to a period of substance abuse. Another is on parole for helping his girlfriend bury an abusive ex-boyfriend that she had killed, and is waiting for her to be released from jail.

The Lynch interviews aren’t all that sobering, but compared to The New York Times’ project they seem a lot more honest. Although One in 8 Million does include some more melancholy tales (the most recent is about a cancer patient), they are predictably laced with an overwhelmingly hopeful message. As a result, the interviews come off less a series of character profiles, and more a masturbatory offering to the shrine of the New York City mythos. If you did a tally of quirky characters following their whims and dreams in NYC, how would it compare to the number of people breaking their backs just to get by in a city that smells like rotting garbage all Summer long?

Not that the Interview Project profiles more “realistic” characters; it’s just telling the American fairy tale Brothers Grimm style, while The New York Times has the inspiring Disney version. Even if the Interview Project’s subject selection method isn’t as heavy-handed as One in 8 Million’s, who would agree to be interviewed David Lynch and his friends/family? Lynch is an abstract man, who can’t open his mouth without sounding like he came from the Moon. He once appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s radio show, purportedly to discuss his 9/11 hoax theories, but instead insisting talking about how Transcendental Meditation can save the world*. His interviewees are bound to be either so boring they don’t have anything better to do than talk to a man that looks like an old lesbian, or tuned into the same weird frequency as he is.

So which is better? It depends what you’re looking for. In an world quickly unraveling through economic crisis, some are going to be looking for escapism while others are just looking for the support of knowing they aren’t alone in their troubles. The New York Times trumpets the ongoing triumph of the American dream, while David Lynch reads its eulogy.

*When I found out Lynch planned on opening a Transcendental Meditation school in Scotland with 60’s Folk/Psych-Rock artist Donovan, it was the first time I realized I was just as susceptible to excitement over celebrity gossip as your average National Enquirer reader. I’m simply interested in different celebrities, and they have to be doing more unusual things than getting fat or dating another celebrity.

Fmylife.com is a site of user-submitted of microtragedies (maximum 300 characters.) It’s the online equivalent of drinking with your buddies while discussing fucked up things that happened to you.

An example: Today, I had drunk sex with a girl that I barely know. I didn’t have a condom and was nervous about getting her pregnant, but she assured me that I could pull out. Right when I was about to pull out, she wrapped her legs around me and yelled: “BE MY BABY’S DADDY!” I couldn’t get out in time. FML

Absolutely hilarious—except for the person it happens to. And that’s why the site has become massively popular. A book deal is in the works. As an acronym, FML is on its way to becoming as ingrained as LOL and WTF.

FML combines gossip, rumour, and elements of black humour, making it like a car wreck—you might feel bad, but your eyes are drawn towards it. Of course, no one wants to feel like a bad guy, so the FML staff only accepts stories with a punchline instead of ones that are truly tragic.

But most people’s lives aren’t fucked all the time; usually they are average. Enter mylifeisaverage.com, home of the mundane. Spawned as an imitation of FML, it is on its way to becoming a phenomenon in its own right. A typical entry: Today, I was typing in my password. I knew I had spelled it wrong but I pressed enter anyway. It didn’t work. MLIA.

Reflecting the site’s origin, some of the stories are parodies of fmylife.com, subversions of what you would expect from a typical FML. Today, my girlfriend told me on the phone that we were breaking up. I went outside and the signal improved. MLIA

These sites will be visited every so often for a few minutes of amusement for most, nothing more. But, hey, that describes half of the Internet. MLIA.

Welcome to the Ubyssey’s Culture blog, also known as the clog. And I’m sure that many would consider it a clog in the Ubyssey’s already malfunctioning drain of bad taste; the metaphorical plumbing which allows terrible ideas to siphon away, east of our Eden (the print edition) into the realm of Nod (the Internet). The clog will cover two areas of interest to students. The first will be UBC student life, and the second will be technology and the Internet.

So welcome, new friend. Although words may be inadequate to describe the feelings you should be experiencing, I will try my best to describe them. Imagine a banner, superimposed by the eerie powers of the Internet, reading “Abandon all hope, ye who enter”. It hangs above the entrance of a great cavern, which expels flashing neon lights and the sounds of delight and torture. From within comes a procession of impish 14 year-olds; chubby, slothful, clad in anime t-shirts and backwards baseball caps, they flow from imageboards inside. In unison they bring forth an array of brass to announce your arrival. As they bring the instruments to their Cheetos-powder dusted lips, you feel a chill down your spine. You know that once you enter the cave there will be no turning back, yet a force propells you ever forwards.