I strongly recommend that you folks read Chuck Klosterman's "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto" if you haven't already:

http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Drugs-Cocoa-Puffs-Manifesto/dp/074...

Some will adore his writing style, others will hate it. As an essayist, his prose is about as far from PG's style as possible... which is exactly why I'm suggesting it.

Off the top of my head, he goes into extensive, gratuitous quasi-intellectual breakdowns of everything from MTV's The Real World to G'n'R cover bands.

In the chapter on sugary breakfast cereals, Chuck notes that "an inordinate number of cereal commercials are based on the premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it." Have truer words ever been written? He continues:

"Being cool is mostly ridiculous, and so is sugared cereal. That's why we like it."

"I eat sugared cereal almost exclusively. This is because I'm the opposite of a 'no-nonsense' guy. I'm an 'all-nonsense' guy. When a button falls off my shirt, I immediately throw it away and buy a new one. I can't swim; to me, twelve feet of water is no different than twelve feet of hydrochloric acid. However, I can stay awake for 72 straight hours. When flipping channels during commercial breaks, I can innately sense the perfect moment to return to watch I was watching. So the rub is that I have all these semicritical flaws and I have these weirdly specific gifts, and it seems like most Americans are similarly polarized by what the can (and cannot) do. There are no-nonsense people, and there are nonsense people. And it's my experience that nonsense people tend to consume Cocoa Krispies and Lucky Charms and Cap'n Crunch (nonsense food, if you will). Consequently, we nonsense types spend hours and hours staring at cardboard creatures like the Trix Rabbit and absorbing his ethos, slowly ingesting the principles of exclusionary coolness while rapidly ingesting sugar-saturated spoonfuls of Vitamin B-12."

If you're still reading... kudos! My point is transcribing this is simply that we geeks tend to see the world in a more or less specific way unless we consciously eat some Trix once in a while.

My grandfather used to often say, "there are no strangers in this life, only friends you haven't met." When he passed away, I was truly amazed at how many people he had met and befriended. It served as a wake-up call to me--for my generation the difference between "friending" someone and "befriending" someone is so great, and I am afraid I don't focus nearly as much on the latter.

As an aside on the article, Chuck Klosterman has a very humorous analysis of the "I'm not here to make friend's" meme in 'Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs' (http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Drugs-Cocoa-Puffs-Manifesto/dp/074...)