Last Chance to Tell-off UBC, This Year

This was a fun rant. It's from March of 2003, and I still pretty much agree with everything I said before. I supppose some of it might be getting a bit dated, although Bush still is an arrogant cowboy.

Well, I’m back. After nearly a whole terms hiatus when I was actually (gasp!) putting time and effort into my courses, I am returning my ranting and cynicism services to you (this being my last chance to do so before some of you inevitably graduate or, more likely, go insane from stress, drop out, and raise sheep in Utah). I’ve held in a lot of bitching so far, and now I don’t know where to start. I guess I’ll go from the top: I hate all of your motherfucking cell phones! I know this has nothing to do with how UBC’s going down the shitter, but I had to get it off of my chest. I’m all right with cell phones that don’t make any noise; it’s the bloody ring tones that drive me crazy. People set their phones to play REALLY annoying versions of classical and pop music REALLY loud, and then get REALLY embarrassed when they go off. It’s interesting to watch really small, timid-looking people with a phone that’s blaring “Fur Elise” answer it really quickly and quietly as to not draw any more attention to themselves. It’s just setting yourself up for embarrassment, simply set the phone to vibrate and the problem solves itself; if you miss a call because the phone is in your bag, who cares? Is it really urgent? Are you a doctor? Probably not, if you’re reading this. Another small cell-phone issue I have is with couples that just walk beside each other, or sit across from each other at a restaurant, both talking on cell phones. Way to kill the romance people. Nothing’s quite so big a turn on as staring into the eyes of someone you love (or, in many cases, are trying to sleep with) and having a conversation with somebody else.

Anyways, on to the real rant. God damn UBC and their University Town! I have this flyer that says they want to increase the number of people living on campus from roughly 10,000 to 21,000 in the next 15 or so years, not too bad. Then it goes on to allot the housing to various groups: student residences and graduate housing will increase from 8,100 people to about 10,200 people. That leaves an extra 9,000 people to make up this forecast population. The propaganda tries to go on and say that 50 percent of new housing (for the extra 9,000) is for people who work and live on campus. So let’s see, if students and grad housing is already accounted for, who does that leave us with? Faculty, shopkeepers, Plant-Ops, and cleaning staff. Do you think that the people who are cleaning the Bio Sciences building can afford to move into the million dollar condos they are building right now, and if they could, would they be the ones cleaning the Bio-Sciences building? I don’t think that there are 4,500 faculty members working on campus who do not already own houses in other areas of the city. Why would they want to move to campus? It would be like never leaving work, and when the university forces them to retire at 65 (farewell Ed Piers, you king of hexagon artistry) not only are they out of a job, but are out of a home as well. They’re probably content to live where they do and pay off the house they own than take out another mortgage the day they retire.

So who, then, will be occupying these glorious new million dollar abominations? That’s right, yuppies. Condescending, Starbucks-drinking, BMW-driving yuppies. So to make room for the yuppie housing, we need to make room for yuppie parking; how better to do this than to mow down Pacific Spirit Park to make more B-lots? Look, it will even create more jobs on campus: the engineers can figure out how to remove all the trees without damaging the roads, arts students can design pretty metal plants that look almost like real plants to adorn the entrance to the lots, and the humble science students will have to figure out a way to get rid of all the pollution the cars are going to make in order to pull the UBC Planning and Development fuckheads out of the festering cesspool they’ve created for themselves.

Then, just when you think it’s at it’s lowest point, the pedestrian only areas on campus are reopened to traffic overnight without warning, and the next day, as you’re running to ‘Help the Fuckheads 305’ or HFKH 305, you get run down by a beamer on Main Mall. Then a white guy in khakis and a black turtleneck sweater with chrome, square rimmed glasses gets out of his car holding a Starbucks cup, turns off his cell phone, and says to you as you’re writhing on the ground in anguish, “It looks like you’ve broken your hip and you’ll probably need a new kidney judging by the colouration of the liquids you’re emitting. I would know, before I made my first million selling sweatshop children on Ebay, I was a pre-med drop-out.” Then he’ll then look up and flash his laser-whitened teeth at a first-year girl who saw the whole incident, then he’ll say “Listen, going to court’s really blasé, so if you don’t mind, I’m late for my affair with my marriage counselor.”

And that will be it, you’ll be spending your time getting dialysis and looking for kidneys, and sold relatives who may still have kidneys, on Ebay with a plastic hip that locks up whenever it rains. UBC will become the next downtown, with high-priced condos whenever you look up, students (now homeless) begging for food and textbooks whenever you look down.

So how do we fight this prediction of what is obviously going to happen? We fight it like Canadians. No, I do not mean democratically or by making apologetic yet true passive-aggressive comments to those we wish to pacify. Not with guns either. Guns are for fat, lazy, and stupid people who have to kill things from far away because they are too afraid to get close enough to their enemies to actually reason with them (on a side note, to George Bush: the only thing that having a large gun says about a man is that he has a really small penis). I mean fight like real Canadians, with hockey sticks and pepper spray! I say we march down to the University Town planning headquarters and jersey those bastards! Tell them what we think of their yuppies, and Starbucks, and BMW’s we can’t afford!

Well, that’s it. I guess the crux of what I’m saying is that we should be investing more money into UBC students and student resources like classroom facilities, labs, and TA wages; rather than pouring it into something that’s not even the least bit education-related. Don’t be fooled by the propaganda, no one who goes to school here will be able to afford the new housing they are building. I have to go now, I think I can hear “Fur Elise” playing somewhere in my apartment, somebody’s probably trying to get a hold of me.