Redirect

I realized that in my excitement over having a real website to blog on, I have neglected this one. However, I have little faith that I will be able to drum up enough interesting things to talk about on two separate blogs so I will direct you to www.sketchesinc.com for information about future thoughts inside my head.

And suddenly it was pouring

How did two weeks go by since my last post? And how is it that I continue to be surprised when I fail to blog meaningfully on a consistent basis?

I was just about blogging about "eco-fatigue" which I read about in a newspaper a while back but I Google searched it to find a link to what it was and discovered that the entire concept was actually a rumour started by a Danish trend-watching site (appropriately) www.trendwatching.com which scours the internet for the latest trends and publishes them. The trends were taken down but here's the official response.

I was feeling jaded and cranky before I read that. Now I realize that it was the suggestion of the existence of a phenomenon like "eco-fatigue" that really got me down. It made me feel as though the whole eco-trend was just another fad which, because the environment is actually something I'm passionate about, made me really disheartened.

Funny how much of an impact the media has on our state of mind. We really have no other way to tell what other people in the world are thinking and whether or not that aligns with what we think. In reality, it shouldn't matter what other people are thinking. We should just act the way we believe is right but I guess it's an indication of our own insecurity that we care so much what other people think. If we were able to simply act on our intuition (essentially, our moral compass), we might not always make the right decisions but at least we'd be true to ourselves at the time. And that isn't to say that constant evaluation of our actions shouldn't occur. I'm just suggesting that instead of tiptoeing around playing it safe all the time, why not act on our intuition all the time? Why do we need 100% proof from multiple sources that acting one way or another is okay? If I believe that recycling and living sustainably is important, why should I wait until a hundred or ten thousand people are doing it too before I start? Clearly they had the balls to start before it caught on and if they can, then we all can.

It relates to the practice of voting defensively in elections. If we all just voted for the party that most closely aligned with our own beliefs without worrying about whether our vote would "count", we might have some weird vote divisions for a while, but in the end, I think we'd end up with more national parties because people would demand parties that stood for what they believed in. It would just be so much more honest. And coming back to how we need affirmation of our own beliefs from other people, I think a lot of people vote for the big parties because they are the safe parties to vote for. You can say "I voted Conservative" or "I voted Liberal" and people might not agree, but they won't be surprised. If you say "I voted Green" you're automatically labeled an extremist. In other words, it's a lot more of a risk to vote a colour other than Blue or Red. It's stepping far out of the accepted norm.

It's not surprising that we constantly look for affirmation of our beliefs from the people around us when you think about the way we are socialized from childhood: we do something and decide whether it was a good thing or not by the reaction of the people around us.

I'd like to think we're capable of growing out of that.

The magic of music

I can't decide whether fourth year is inherently interesting or whether because I'm in fourth year, I find fourth year interesting, if you know what I mean. In any case, doing an assignment today for my Psychology of Music Education class completely blew my mind. The task seemed simple:

Pick a song/piece and describe it (in words) avoiding the use of musical terminology (i.e. find ways other than through musical terms to describe the piece).

No problem, you may be inclined to think as I was. And yet, an hour after beginning my description of Phages by The Most Serene Republic, I had succeeded only in describing, in general, the ways that music can be considered interesting without capturing any of the essence of the song. As someone whose current aspirations for the future depend heavily upon the ability to write about what is being heard, this was obviously distressing. And so my heart rate picked up a little and I tried even harder to capture the essence of that orchestrated noise being played through my speakers. But I could no more translate what I was hearing into words than I could translate the English language into units of cheese (i.e. The sound of a keyboard playing three notes is to _________ as the word "excellence" is to Havarti).

Now I realize that even had I been able to use musical terms, I wouldn't fully be able to describe what I was hearing. What about the timbres of the instruments combined to evoke the sense of urgency I was feeling? Why did it matter if the texture thinned? Even if I described, second by second, what was happening with the rhythm, melody, harmony and instrumentation, I still wouldn't have captured the essence of the song.

I don't even know if I'm fully communicating how blown away I was, or if it's another thing that must just be experienced (in which case, I highly suggest that you try it so that you will understand what I mean). Try. Try really hard to describe your favourite song in written prose and come out of it with a paragraph that, when taken as a whole, means that same thing as the song.

In the end, I did find a way to describe it. Listen to the song and have a read (not too quickly). This is what I hear. What do you hear?

"Phages"

Waking up before your alarm clock and watching the sun rise while still in your bed.
Your alarm clock goes off so you jump out of bed into the shower.
You go through your morning routine.
The smell of bacon cooking already; your housemate is awesome.
Seconds pass slower as you look up and see dark clouds in the sky as you step out the door.
A cyclist passes outside your house. You recognize them.
You head off to work on your own bike.
You blow past people sitting in traffic thinking about how lucky you are to be alive.
You get caught at a light; you look around at the zombies around you: people in their cars completely zoned out in their morning commute, people with briefcases staring at their feet.
You feel an overwhelming sense of empowerment. You want to change things. You want to grab people by the wrists and dance in the street.
You imagine everyone getting out of their cars and dancing with you in the middle of the intersection.
You come back to reality.
The light turns green.

Clever ramblings

It's day two and finding something interesting to say is already difficult. I read an article by Christie Blatchford in the Globe and Mail this summer about the impact of blogging on the field of journalism. It kind of dates her, but she brings up some interesting arguments including the argument that writers only have so many words in them before they're sapped dry. I thought that was a little romantic-sounding but her point stands that a lot of bloggers tend to waste their breath (er...dextrous capacity) on posts with little to no thought-provoking content in them. Things like what they ate today, how long the bus took this morning, how many toy poodles there were in the park...all moderately interesting biographical facts about a person's life (although a bit too voyeuristic for me) but as Chrstie brings up: not too engaging.

I don't know much about how the field of journalism is evolving, but I find myself in the Blatchford camp thinking that accounts of everyday occurences do not qualify as journalistic writing. This type of record has its place, perhaps in a book titled "Everyday life in _____ culture" for people who want to know what it's like to live in another culture without actually experiencing it, but don't call that journalism. In my naiive little world, journalism presents everyday information in a way that sparks controversy. It takes a position of some type and makes people compare it with their own opinion.

That is the kind of thing I hope to pull off with what I write here. Let me know if I stray.

Check out The Acorn. I saw them at the Hillside Festival in Guelph this year and was really impressed.

Another chapter...

It seems a peculiar and rather morbid thought, on the birth day of something new, to think of how its life will end, but I can't help it. In cyberspace, there is no sound when another blog pops into existence. It's just another drop in the bucket, a miniscule addition to the collective pool of thought that floats in nothingness, awaiting the validation (read "hits") that all blogs require.

Blogs: the bold new vehicles for human expression which satisfy our inflated egos and transform your average Joe into T.S. Elliot and your average Jill into Virginia Woolfe. The brain child of free speech and the Internet, turning the Web into an unending bazaar where every vendor has an opinion or a heartwrenching biography to sell you.

Already I sound jaded and cynical - hardly what you want to hear. And to top it off, I'm a hypocrite! Blogging about the asinine nature of the blogosphere: how original. But I really can't bring myself to make any excuses or apologize. I do harbour resentment for blog culture. You'll notice this is "Inside the mind of a genius" version 2.0. I had a blog a while back. I ranted about politics, religion, philosophy, popular culture; I posted links to things I found on the Internet and made a photo album of webcam photos of myself. I did all the things bloggers are suppoesd to do except post with any sort of regularity. And then I stopped altogether. I thought, How arrogant of me to be posting my opinions in a public place as if anyone will care to read them! It's completely pointless. The only people reading this are the people I've talked to about the very same subjects I'm writing about. Do they really need electronic summaries of our conversations on the Internet?

You'll notice that I'm back at it. Do I still think that blogging can be pointless? Yes. Do I think it is always pointless? No.

I thought about the implications of such an enormous expressive movement and I realized that it is fairly remarkable that the blogosphere exists. At the very least it is an extraordinarily candid look at the lives of human beings. There are people who post every detail of their day online, people who post essays, photos, poetry... When you think about it, the blogosphere, when taken a whole, is the most accurate peek into the minds of average people that exists. When we study history, we study fossilized remnants of ancient cultures, rely on stories passed on from generation to generation and pore over a handful of ancient texts. In short, our difficulties in understanding our ancestors arise from a shortage of information. Future generations, on the other hand, will have to contend with an excess of information about our culture - but it will all be perfectly in tact and virtually complete (barring some massive Electromagnetic pulse wiping out everyone's hard drives...but that's a topic for another blog).

But I'm not blogging because I hope that one day I'll be part of some futuristic reconstruction of our society. I'm blogging because I need to write. Maybe one day I'll get paid to write for a publication that is read by thousands of people worldwide, but for now, I need to just keep writing. I am not so arrogant to assume that people will read by blog, but the mere fact that I chose to blog and not to write in a secret diary suggests that I think it would be nice if people did read it.

I hope you like the way I write, even if you do not agree with what I am saying, at least enough to come back and read it again (or even keep tabs on my RSS feed *nudge nudge*). In return, I will do my best to be a consistent blogger.

To conclude, here's a quote from R.M. Rilke's "Letters to a young poet" which I find particularly inspiring, not just as a writer but as an artist of any sort:

"Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. "