My Brief Experience with Psychological Warfare.

I had a lot of spares in high school so every day I would spend time in the library and in grade 12 we got a new librarian and it was evident right away that she was batshit crazy. She was flustered and would be really wound up and irritable and snap on even the nicest people. So people started screwing with her and, in response, she started making crazy-ass paranoid rules.

There were a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules that had to be followed regarding computers and books and bags. You had to sign in to a computer for an allotted time, you couldn't use certain websites even if the library was deserted. She would stand at the stacks and watch you as you looked for books. You couldn't bring any bag into the library which meant that there was a line of bags on the wall outside the library and people would steal shit so every time I had to go to the library I would have to go to my locker first.

One day I decided to voice my displeasure by breaking the rule about bags. I brought my bag into the library. When I did this, the librarian kicked me out. She told me to leave. I thought this was insulting and funny. I was a strait A student, I was always friendly with people, my mother worked at the school so I knew a lot of the faculty, I had a great relationship with the previous librarian and I was basically a fucking boyscout (my mother made sure that my anti-authority tendencies in elementary school didn't follow me to high school where they could embarrass her).

So I got kicked out and I didn't really have anything to do so when she kicked me out I went out into the hallway and sat on the floor in front of the library doors looking in at her through the window. I just sat there. A few minutes later some friends walked by and asked why I was sitting there. I told them I was kicked out of the library for bringing in my bag. We started talking and they sat down on the floor next to me. A few other friends joined but after a few minutes I was bored and went to get lunch. I left with about 4 people around and went to the cafeteria.

Later in the day I was called to the office and the vice principal gives me a talking-to. She starts off with something like "so what's the problem here?" and I'm thinking to myself "what the fuck is she talking about". Apparently, after I left the hallway for lunch the crowd grew and grew with students who were displeased with the new library rules. It turned into a sitting protest where students were blocking the doors and when a V.P. went by to ask what was going on the students mouthed off. Then when he asked who started the protest everyone said it was me. I was long gone at that point but I nearly got suspended.

So I was pissed and I blamed my problems on the librarian. My problems with unwarranted authority surfaced and I decided that I would start fucking with the librarian.

(Yes, I realize my logic may seem a bit off here. I nearly get in trouble and my response is to push the boundaries and flirt with more trouble. This is a bit of a trend with me and authority figures and it is mostly based on the principle that I will treat you well if you treat me well. You abuse your position of power and fuck with me once in a way that I consider unreasonable and I will take stupid risks just to throw that in your face, just so you know that I no longer respect you or your power and by disrespecting you I negate all power that you have over me.)

My response started out simple. I would sneak my bag into the library. And every single day I would play dumb. I'd walk in and breeze right past the front desk and she would try to stop me but I'd pretend like I couldn't hear her. And she'd say "leave your bag at the door" and I'd say "huh? what do you mean. Bag? What bag? My Bag? No this isn't mine it's Jack's bag." And this would go on and on for 5 minutes every day. I would try to get her to raise her voice to me and when she did I would say something like "HEY! This is a library calm down." And my friends would laugh. OH MAN that would annoy the shit out of her.

Eventually, my plans became more sinister. Like I would keep an eye on the librarian and when she would leave the desk for a moment I would rush outside and grab my bag and then rush back in. And eventually she would walk by my desk and see my bag and say something about why I brought my bag back in and I'd say like "oh yeah sorry about that" and she'd watch is I brought the bag back out. And then a half hour later I'd do the whole thing again and try to convince her that she was losing her memory in her old age or, maybe, that she was going insane. This then became a theme of mine. I wanted her to think that she was going insane.

I would sneak books out of the library by sliding them across her desk when she wasn't there and this would avoid the theft-scanners without damaging the book. Then I would return later in the day and return the book without entering the library. She would then scan it and be surprised that the book was never checked out. Eventually I started doing this over and over with the same book. Multiple times a day I would steal and return the same book without her seeing me. I would ask unknowing participants in my scheme to do me a favour and return the book I had ostensibly checked out. I hoped that the librarian would see that it wasn't me but different people were returning the same unchecked book over and over throughout the day. The librarian then started to hide these books behind her desk in the restricted area and I would sneak in and take these hidden fucking books and return them all over again! Sometimes I would do this with big stacks of books and try to absolutely fill the book-return slot with books that were never checked out.

When I would go on to the computer I would frequently pull up the administrator window that required a password in order to access. I would just pull up this window and type nonsense but I would do so for a long time. For 15 minutes I would be feverishly typing on this administrator screen until I attract some attention and when the librarian walked by I would stop and look wide-eyed and be as blatantly yet believably nervous as possible. "Oh hi Mrs librarian, lovely day today..." I wanted her to think that I was somehow messing around with her computer system and that I was the one who was responsible for constant technical issues that would arise every day. I'm actually not sure if she ever got paranoid about this... but it was one of my favorite schemes.

The library had a back door that had big warnings signs that said that opening the door would set off the fire alarm. One day I secretly saw her exit through these doors and no alarm went off so I knew it was safe. So, occasionally, I'd leave through the back door and walk in the front door and pass her desk and say hello. And I would repeat this multiple times in a single period. She would see me enter the library past her desk 10 times and not see me leave once. YOU'RE LOSING YOUR MIND LADY!

Once I checked out a bunch of books and then waited for the three weeks for them to be overdue, then I covertly brought the books back into the library and re-shelved them. The books were on the shelves but the computer system said they were checked out. I then let my library fine grow and grow until I got a letter from the library saying I owed 5 bucks or whatever and I went in and said something like "I returned these books on time". Of course she thinks I'm a lying punk just trying to get out of the fine so she makes me follow her to the stacks so she can prove to me that the books are missing and that I was the last one who had them. Of course, we get to the stacks and all the books are in place and I say something like "hey, mistakes happen lady" and I leave, subtly trying to make her think that she was going insane.

I even had a friendly relationship with the other librarian just to piss her off more. Just to show that I'm a nice likeable guy and that maybe she was being paranoid about me.

Now my favorite moment of all wasn't anything I did at all, it was a friend of mine. We were in music class and had to research something in the library so he left with his trombone and we went up to the library. He sneaks into the stacks and starts playing the trombone and I watch as the librarian is rushing around trying to figure out what is going on while my friend is evading her.

I'm pretty sure that the librarian went on a stress-leave the next year.

Some Funny Assignments From Third Year

I was immediately disappointed with the educational philosophy of university.

In third year I stopped caring about the failures of university and just accepted that it was too large a problem for me to deal with as a student. I accepted the inevitable letdowns of uninterested students, administration that lowers standards and overworked professors who don't even have time to read student's papers. I decided that I would just have fun (in retrospect, I wish I had my current mentality about education when I was at school - I was a bit too philosophically immature for my own good).

This decision to have more fun with school typically manifested with me mocking the educational value of the paper I was assigned (but only when I considered the educational value to be lacking).

I went through my old computer and pulled a sample of the papers to remember what I was up to in those days.

My housemates came up with the idea that I should insert random movie quotations into my essays. I agreed. At first, this started out fairly simple. This was the first quotation I used:

To quote Uncle Ben from ‘Spiderman’ as he gave advice to a teenaged Peter Parker “with great power comes great responsibility”. In the early 20th century technological innovations commanded great power indeed.

The quotation loosely related to the subject matter and I'm sure when my professor read it he thought "...ok...". But, from here, I became more adventurous. The next paper I wrote in this class began as follows:

To quote Norman Osborne in Spiderman, “Sorry I’m late. Work was Murder.” Similarly Robert Oppenheimer went to work every day with the ultimate goal of killing thousands if not millions of human lives. If he were ever late for a meeting he would almost certainly have used the quote above but only in a humorous manner, not the menacing ironic method of Norman Osborne.

I was pushing the edge of plausibility here. But I got bored of this and then started mocking my previous submissions by inserting movie quotes that had absolutely nothing to do with anything!

The third paper in this class began as follows:

To quote Peter Parker from Spiderman “Go web. Fly. Up, up, and away web! Shazam! Go! Go! Go web go!” At first appearance this quote may seem to be completely unrelated to both to the following paper and the impact of technology on society in the 30’s and 40’s...

I was getting cocky. In this same class, the term paper was a 3000 word essay about a futurist which I began as follows:

If the future were a dog, then the following quote from Billy Madison would accurately describe the sentiments which Arthur C Clarke had toward investigation into the future of technology.

The part of the story I don't like is that the little boy gave up looking for [his dog] after an hour. He didn't put posters up or anything, he just sat on the porch like a goon and waited. That little boy's gotta think 'You got a [dog]. You got a responsibility.' If your dog gets lost you don't look for an hour then call it quits. You get your ass out there and you find that fucking dog.

I didn't even explain why this quote had anything to do with anything. It just hangs at the beginning of my essay...

In other classes I was mocking the assignments in similar ways. But my mocking had become self-aware. I was now mocking my mocking by calling attention to the meaninglessness of my mocking. I wrote a paper on warfare and concluded it as follows:

When John Connor begins to cry in Terminator 2: Judgment Day the terminator asks “what’s wrong with your eyes?” What does this quote have to do with my conclusion? Nothing really… I just wanted to quote Terminator 2 because it was a badass movie.

In the same class I wrote a paper about religion that ended as follows:

In conclusion religion is lot like when Forest Gump says "Leutinent Dan ICE CREEEEEEEEAM". What do I mean by this? Who knows! But I had a bet with my housemates that I couldn't put this into a paper. I am now one dolla richa!

In the same class I wrote a paper on the potential future genetic-engineering of three-breasted women and I used the movie Total Recall as a source. I argued that these women would make great wet-nurses since they could nurse 3 babies at a time and that the number of breasts per woman would likely rise beyond 3 as wet-nurses push to nurse more and more babies simultaneously. Now, due to the geometry of the situation, a single large breast encompassing the total available breast-area would produce the most milk. This, however, would only facilitate a single nursing baby. With each additional breast the milk production decreases but the number of potential simultaneous suckling-babies increases. As such, I estimated that 6 breasts would likely be the most economical for wet-nursing as any more would result in breasts running-dry and any fewer would result in a milk surplus with no baby able to utilize that surplus through simultaneous suckling. Also I floated the idea of having multiple nipples on a single breast but I discarded this notion as absurd.

I got an A on the paper.

The final paper in this class was a 5,000 word essay on how a certain technology has been influenced by the media (or something like that). I decided to write the essay on the movie "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" and how this movie influenced the fictional technology of shrink-rays.

I did not get a good mark on this paper because the entire thing was entirely dislocated from reality... Also, in order to reach the 5,000 word mark I spent a couple pages explaining the plot and just talking about how awesome the movie was.

Now, my personal favorite paper in all of this mocking was a term paper for a religion course. We had to watch a movie about the life of Jesus and then address how the movie differed from the gospels and the historical Jesus. I watched Jesus Christ Superstar and the whole time I was thinking "this is the stupidest fucking assignment I have ever had in my life".

I spent the paper arguing that historical Judea was a live rock-opera and that Jesus Christ Superstar was a %100 accurate representation of the historical Jesus. That the writers of the gospels also lived in a rock-opera and, thus, did not mention that Jesus was, as I wrote, "rocking the shit out of his sermons".

Some quotations from this paper:

Jesus Christ Superstar - could there be a more aptly named movie in cinema history? I think not. What does it mean to be a superstar? Who is to say? Was Jesus truly a superstar? This movie addresses none of these questions, and neither will this paper. Instead far less interesting, and far less valuable topic will be covered, dealing primarily with the differences between the story of Jesus as presented in the movie “Jesus Christ Superstar” and the story of Jesus as presented in the Gospels.

It is obvious that the bible makes note of the importance of music and song. Ephesians 5:19 states “as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hears”. Even the Gospel of Matthew states that “when [Jesus and he disciples] had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives”. It seems, then, that there is some reference to Jesus and his followers partaking in group song. Seeing as how I cannot speak Greek and am not an expert on the time period and location in question, I cannot come to a definitive conclusion on the matter. However, it seems like Andrew Lloyd Weber’s representation of Jesus as a musical maniac may fit precisely with the character of the historical Jesus.

Finally, I concluded the paper as follows:

Andrew Lloyd Weber chose to represent Jesus as a messiah who could rock the shit, Judas as a tormented misunderstood disciple who could also rock the shit, and Mary Magdalene as the love of Jesus' life… who, oddly enough, could rock the shit. Personally, I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo T-shirt because it says "I want to be formal, but I’m here to party".

I got an A on that paper too. Most of the lost marks were a result of gratuitous profanity.