Growing Up

It seems like no matter what age I was, whether six or eighteen, I had this feeling that my life would plateau and lock into place a good four years down the road.

I was talking with the father of one of my good friends.  This is a man who I respect quite highly for having secured what is, to me, one of the most healthy and desirable lifestyles I could ever ask for.  He's payed relatively well because he's earned it through a harmony of impressive academic history, and immense drive and passion to prove himself as a person.  He has fully raised two wonderful, and intelligent children who now, in adulthood, amazingly seem to be independently set out to live as full and good a life as he did.  He is happily married to an incredibly insightful and intellectually complementary woman.  And his values in family, work, leisure, and curiosity are still strong as stone.

So, it should be no surprise that it felt somewhat daunting to produce a satisfactory answer when he asked me, "What are your plans after graduation?"

I don't even know what country I'll be living in, let alone the even finer details like post-graduate education or a career.  I offered the only honest answer I could provide:

"Well, that is the great question mark.  I've gone a good 4 years without facing one like it, so it seems like it's about time."

He closed his eyes and nodded in complete empathy.  Of course, this is a person who is no stranger to the feeling I've just expressed.  He raised his head, put on a smile, and proceeded, "Well, there'll be another great question mark every four years for the rest of your life".  This resonates pretty strongly with the echoes of my past.  Although, previously I had always thought each crossroads was the last major one.  Again, I felt like each was the last plateau that I had to reach before securing happiness.

Let's take the six-year-old Petar for example's sake.  He looked up at his nine or ten year old brother and thought "Once I can do all that stuff, I'll be completely happy".  You hit ten and all of a sudden you're in the big kids playground, you get to stay up a little bit later, your allowance is higher, you get to watch more TV shows, you're even taller.  Or at least that's how it seems.  Four more years has a tendency to emotionally, and at least as a kid, even physically dwarf you.

Four years down the road from ten?  At fourteen?  Go see 14-A movies, stay home alone, start using a cell-phone.  Odds are, one also has first hand personal experience by now about the true nature of what's underneath one's own underwear.

Four years down the road from there I'm eighteen years old and I can vote, buy lottery tickets, and drive independently. I've experienced alcohol, notably how simultaneously wonderful and devastating it can be.  I'd be graduating high-school soon.  And for many, there's a good chance to encounter at least some curiosity - to put it lightly - about exploring sexuality.

And yet 18 still seemed so unanswered.  It was probably one of the least confident and secure ages of my life, if I remember correctly.  This was the age where the physical and experiential disconnect among my peers and I was wider than ever.  Some friends were drinking, others had never tried.  Some friends had been having sex for a while now, while others hadn't started.  I watched friends get torn apart by both the fear, and conversely the abuse, of smoking pot.  It was not a comfortable age.

In my opinion, I feel very fortunate and thankful to have found myself on a sort of "middle ground" of all these differences.  Though, it seemed just as isolated as the extremes.  We were diverging, and we were worried that very few of us were getting life right.  And what made it worse is that we were too young to realize that divergence of lifestyles is not only normal, but expected.

And after all that, I was faced with my next major question mark.  What do I do after high school?

Perhaps in the next four years I would have finally settled into my appropriate lifestyle.  Like there was a train-track that I would find somewhere, and once I did I could cruise on it through the rest of my normal life.  And don't be mistaken, I was more worried of this than I was hopeful.  University, to me, felt like the end.  I would graduate, get a job at a desk, and do the same thing for the rest of my life.  I didn't want to move away from this last major fork in the road.

Well I'm standing here, four years past that fork in the road at twenty-two, looking back and thinking only one thing:  How beautifully and overwhelmingly naive!  And I was smart back then too!  I'm about to graduate and I'm still faced with so many decisions!  I'm about to experience genuine independence.

A lot of people think university life is independence but it isn't.  I more or less knew exactly how long I'd be doing it for.  I more or less knew exactly how much money I'd spend over the next four years.  It was pseudo-independence at its finest.  Hell, I didn't even have to worry about keeping the house clean when I had no dependants, or respectable guests* coming over.

*Friends, I respect you and all, but you know what I mean - your house was a full-on shit box too.

I'll be entering true independence soon, and I've never felt so off-rails in my entire life.  Perhaps I'll get a masters, but eventually I will find a career and when I do, I have no idea if I will stay with it for twelve months or twenty years.  In the future, I'll be moving in with someone.  I'll be marrying someone I love.  We'll end up searching for a suitable family home.  We'll probably have children.  This may all sound so normal that it's bland, but it's really not.  I mean, sexual maturity is something everyone goes through but it never feels bland.  Now we're talking about raising human beings!  Think about that for a second.  I'll never be so full of crossroads as when I'm the primary source of guidance for human beings.  Human beings who will be going through the exact crossroads I've just described.  And it won't end there.

"Well, there'll be another great question mark every four years for the rest of your life", he said.

And it's exactly what I needed to hear.

More Progress

As planned, the songwriting is really picking up steam since the end of exams.  I've got a good 7 written, which is wild.  I had this moment today where I was like "Okay, 7 done, and 5 left", and just paused for a while thinking about how there's more done than remaining.

This thing's actually going to get finished.
 

 Words are lucky to make it to the page before being recorded

Honestly, I couldn't be happier.  Ryan Kelly is doing the guitar work on a track tentatively called Love Your Hero.  We were listening to a bunch of the recently recorded songs in the living room on the surround speakers, and I almost felt proud of how well this thing is manifesting itself.

Only almost.  Can't let the pride sink in yet.  There's four to six more beautiful tracks just waiting to be written on to Emicrania.

Here's to headaches my friends.

Music on its way

I've been recording an album.

I have instrumentals down for around 5 songs.  It started off with just me recording these tracks, but recently I've decided there's too much musical talent in the people that surround me to keep closed doors on this.  So I've started inviting people in to record on tracks, which is yielding some unexpected (but fantastic!) results.

So far it's spiced with some of the heaviest, fun stuff I've ever written, along with some psychedellic euphoric explosions, might throw in some folk love songs about the world, and there will probably be some hip-hop on one of the tracks, which I'm really jazzed about.

It's set to be called Emicrania, and it's almost not fair to say that I wrote it, cause it feels so much like the album is just writing itself.  I'll just think of a riff, go to record it before I forget it, and then all of a sudden these ghosts enter my head telling me what to write next, and then what after that, and what after that - and I find myself having recorded for 6 hours straight without eating or going to the bathroom.

Changing clothes is for the distracted.

I'm going to be putting some serious work into this in the coming weeks, since there's a large gap between school and work.  Which feels amazing.  Because honestly, Emicrania is growing into this powerful wild beast ramping out of control, and I have to release it!

Hopefully I'll have a good 11-14 songs written by end of month, so I can spend my summer taking my time recording some high-fi tracks.

What makes (or rather, breaks) a politician?

Here is the story of focus:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/sex-scandal-leaves-void-in-race-for-toronto-mayor/article1463228/

Here's the moral of the story:

Want to make a contribution?  Not if you have a personal life!

Toronto mayoral candidate Adam Giambrone was well in the running to be Toronto's next mayor, until word got leaked that he had a year long relationship with a 19 year old woman, behind his girlfriend's back (not wife, girlfriend).

I'm not here to argue that what he did was okay.  Nor am I even here to argue that he was the one to vote for.

But he was someone to vote for.  And now he isn't - After the bad press and scorn, he stepped down.

This week the people of Toronto decided to oust a political candidate based on a scratch on an irrelevant record.  Apparently we care so much about how people live their lives, that we won't let anyone attempt to take on the role of a large public figure unless they live the way we want them to.

We all remember a similar scandal happening with Bill Clinton.  But his choices in that situation were not a reflection on his (very capable) ability to run a country.  If we start pruning our candidates based on their ability to never make a social mistake, we're left with a small handful.

And here I thought we lived in a progressively thinking country.

This "reason" that Giambrone had to actually step down from running is no different.  It had nothing to do with his ability as a politician, but people made a massive fuss about it anyways.  And that was downright stupid.

Downright stupid.

Google's great. Knowing how to use it cleverly is even better.

Ever been sitting down before, and a movie quote comes into your head?  You have no idea who said it, in what movie, or even exactly what they said, but it burns in your head hotter than a sunburn in the Sahara.

This happened to me, but a few moments ago.  I was sitting, minding my own business, when the whiff of this quote would rock my next 15 minutes to the ground.  "So am I ________?  Yeah, I'm (a little? a bit?)  ________"

I think the blanks may have been filled by upset, and I gave up doing this in my own head after 5 minutes, so I turned to my buddy google.  Typed (in quotes) "So am I upset?  Yeah, I'm a bit upset."  Perhaps the "bit" was off too, adding to my searching anxieties.

Nothing.  I concluded that upset wasn't the word I was going for here.  So I tried omitting it: "So am I ? Yeah, I'm a bit".  But that wouldn't work because there's a word missing entirely from the quote!  I take away the quotes, and the most distinctive keyword I've entered is "bit", which I wasn't even sure was right in the first place.  Effectively, this problem made a needle in the haystack look like a god damn lap in a bathtub compared to how hard it would be to search through the some 396 million hits which might not even contain what I was looking for.

Here I am, just an innocent man trying to mind his own business, but this movie quote won't leave me alone and I don't have the means to track it down!  I couldn't let this one go.  I remembered some basic command line searching strategies.

When tracking down a file, and you don't know how it ends, one uses the asterisk.  So, if you've forgotten "Malkovich" from the title "Being John Malkovich", and you're looking to find it on your computer, you don't have to worry.  Just search for "Being John *"

Furthermore, there's a bookending feature too.  Let's say you forget some words from the movie title "Don't be a Menace in South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood".  Hard to forget, I know, but just for the sake of argument, you forget exactly what you shouldn't be doing, and where you shouldn't be doing it in the title of this film.  Simple!  Just search "Don't be a Menace * in the Hood".  Should come right up.

Now I think you see where I went with this.  I thought it would be brilliant if google offered the same tactical advantages to searching (which was a likely thought, since google tends to like things that make searching easier).  I searched "So am I *? Yeah, I'm a *"

First hit.  I am Sam.  The prosecuting lawyer, on his sensitivity towards the subject matter: "So am I sensitive?  Yeah, I'm a little sensitive".

The I figured it out satisfaction was only multiplied by how much tactics I put into finding the answer.

So am I good at google querying?  Yeah, I'm a little good at google querying.

Don't care how much you want to prove a point

There's a fallacy.  One that's entirely unacceptable.  It's called the Straw-Man and it comes in many forms.

Here's an example:

Person 1 - I support capital punishment.
Person 2 - Person 1 thinks everyone who goes to jail deserves to die.

See what happened there?  Person 2 manipulated Person 1's words into something he never said, in order to make the speaker look foolish.  That's why they call this one the "Straw-Man", because you essentially make up a person (a straw man), and start attacking it to make people think you're attacking someone else.

Question everything you hear, read, watch... everything.  Cause this bad boy comes up all too much.  We want to prove points so badly that we do ourselves the disservice of not even trying to understand one another.  People tend to just listen for anything they can argue against, then argue against it without offering a charitable reconstruction of their opposers words.

I was reading today, and a writer named Bereano criticized other writers for offering a utopian vision for a different kind of society.  He - actually - goes on to say this:

But utopian means "nowhere."


Let's just forget the fact that utopian doesn't mean "nowhere".  That's absurd.  It means an ideal state in which everything is perfect.  But like I said, let's let that one slide.  We shouldn't, but we will.

The fact of the matter is, he offered no charitable reconstruction of the opponents' viewpoints.  He just changed what the word meant, and continued with his arguments.  Why all this charitable reconstruction business?  Why bother?  Well, if you're debating, the purpose should be to figure out what is right, not to figure out how to sound right.  If you misunderstand your opponent's view, you might as well just stop talking.  Cause you're arguing against a wall.

I know what you're thinking.  "But haven't you just done this?  You took an isolated part of his text, offered no context, and went on with your argument."  The difference is that I read it.  It has some interesting points, and that's what makes it so disappointing.  It's peppered with snarky, childish, blindly pessimistic aims towards debate.  It misleads anyone uncritical enough to overlook these fallacies, and it disinterests anyone critical enough to notice them.  Arguing - against - a - wall.

If you could just do me one favour today, please.  Try to understand what people are saying.  Make sure they understand what they are saying.  Only then will you find something to argue for.  Don't change words around to sound right.  It eats my soul.

Stop it.

Inner Adventure

Venturing deep into the bellowing insanities of my cerebral cortex, I find that my imagination has made good friends with universal infinitum.  Flattered by a prompt introduction, and an offering of privacy with such a welcome acquaintance, I lean in and ask my new friend questions about my own fleeting time.  Initially it apologizes for its need to destroy the walls round me, and proceeds to tell me:

"Time will never run from you, yet always, it will.  You will never be remembered, nor forgotten.  You are, and not.  You will always be, and never again."

I respected the honesty, however my appreciation was outweighed by my concern.  Beyond the destruction, I could no longer find my way out.