Ivory Angel #9

My friends, there are no secrets between us. I must admit, I am consulting with...Evil.

Before, I thought I only drank Evil, drove Evil, shopped Evil, hell, even bathed with Evil, but now I know the truth. Evil is everywhere...everywhere being deep inside my best friend's roommate.

On the surface, he appears oddly benign. You'd expect him to be one of those tall, jet-haired gel-balls with lips perpetually grimacing and jowls that droop to the waist. At the very least, he needs some eyes glowing scarlet, or a virgin babies' blood dribbling fresh off the chin. Instead, the vision I am presented with is a slightly short, very skinny, blonde-haired boy with watery eyes and thick glasses who is stil, after three months, miserable after the loss of his girlfriend (and too good a person for me to sully with my inability to have long-term relationships due to debate). He doesn't even wear a trenchcoat. Eschewing black, his sticklike frame is coated with non-descript yellow T-shirts and baggy jeans. There are holes in the knees, and in the backside, but nobody comments on this.

I didn't know he was truly dark and Evil until yesterday, when I learned the ugly truth. You see, "Ryan" literally works for the Evil- Evil incorporated. Ryan is a Nike Intern.

And not just any intern. Oh, it gets worse. Ryan is responsible for the recruitment campaign for football players to my University. He designs customized ads for some of the most prized players in high school history, spending ridiculous amounts of money to seduce them into visiting campus, where they are exposed to a brisk campaign of relentless brainwashing. They are driven around in their own Nike luxury hummer, packed into uniforms that each cost about half my dad's annual salary, paraded in front of a band who has been gifted with free, backbacks, bags, laptops, workout suits, and tuxedos, free of charge. All this is courtesy of the incorrigible Phil Knight, who also paid for our law school, our sporting facilities, our new logo design... My school has gone undeniably corporate. I blame the state for barely funding some 15% of the University's budget. The rest comes from corporations, and as more and more budget cuts continue, the situation will only worsen.

I don't rememeber being recruited like these football players were, and that makes me feel just a tad cheated. Who will save the world one day? Not the athletes. Who will actually matter to generations that come? Not the athletes. Who will increase our safety, enhance quality of living, rewrite universal law, and teach our children? Not the athletes. I accept that the football program brings in so much money, but when Ryan asks for a Wacom to do his work with and gets one free of charge on top of a $1000 a month salary for very limited hours...it's a little disheartening. I want to be showered with wealth and fame for my natural talents. I will never get to see a giant bilboard painted in my honor, won't have my picture on the front page of every newspaper as I rise to make that winning shot. Instead, I lurk in the background, alone and forgotten, without friends or girls lurking on my arms with my Nike-stamped, free martinis. It makes me very sad, sometimes.

And I can't help but think of the starving factory workers striving to make my comfortable Nike shoes that I can buy in cheap truckloads. Cambodia, China, Mexico- poverty is the majority of the world's birthright, along with oppression. It's not just Nike, I know that, but Nike is a symbol. The Swoosh of Repression. Unfortunately, I know that even while the labor standards of our sweatshop companies are torture compared to U.S. home standards, and I feel for my fellow femmes in the heart and bowels of sexual-harrassment central, I know the jobs are eagerly sought after and they raise the quality of life for some people abroad. And help me get cheap products at home. I am complicit in this. I have a tight budget, I know I am dependent. I just wish the monster of globalization could be fluffified somehow, sharp teeth and slitted pupils replaced with a happy, hippy smile. But capatilism encourages the Walmarts of the world. Lawsuits may come and dung be flung, but in the end, as long as someone lives well, someone will be living less well, and the consuming bulldozer becomes unstoppable.

This is simplistic rhetoric. The spit of the left. I acknowledge this and have no wish to expound great truths of macroeconomics, but there is no denying that for some people, life just sucks, and those people are probably less lazy and better people than I ever will be. Our football coaches get in trouble when they encourage our sportsmen to lay back and think of themselves as Gods, our centers of higher education and our tax monies diverted to fund a rapist's legal fees. All in the name of sporting entertainment, the elites born with abilities I will never have because of my genetics.

God, I wish you'd get a little dirty sometimes. I wish the teachers would stop picking up after you. I wish you'd be judged on your humanity, and not your talents. If I were held to the same standard, I admit I would be in trouble, but at least then, there'd be some sense of fairness, some sense of justice. Tear away your veils of blissful ignorance and acknowledge that freedom occasionally runs amok. Maybe understanding is a first step. Or maybe it's merely allowing us to feel self-righteous, to say that by writing a blog I can go out justly and purchase my regular items at my regular prices, because God knows I've done my share.

"I also get tickets to all football games, home and away," Ryan says with a smile. "Fifty-yard line, however many tickets I want. No lines, no prices. You wanna go?"

"Oh," I giggle. "Well why didn't you just say so in the first place? I'm, like, so there!"