Adam Oster's Blog, page 15

Magic: The Gathering (of all my money to someone else)

When I first arrived at high school, I was nearly immediately introduced to a relatively new game called Magic: the Gathering. This little game of wizards dueling with magic, all through the use of cards, latched on to my brain (and my wallet) as soon as I saw it and I knew I needed to have all of the everything I could for this game possible. For the next few weeks, I would spend every single cent I had on getting more cards. I would constantly ask for rides to the comic book shop that had these cards just so I could spend all my money on them and completely ignore the plethora of comic books filling the walls of this small space. I was hooked.

And it only took me a few weeks before I realized I was dangerously addicted to this game before I decided I had to cut off all ties completely cold turkey before I spent another week unable to clean my laundry due to a lack of funds (as a reminder, I spent my high school at a boarding school, so laundry was my responsibility).

I didn’t touch the game again. Although I would spend years carting these cards around with me from place to place as I moved, I never played again past the realization of my addiction. At some point, apparently, I left the cards at my parents house, and didn’t see them for over a decade, until they found them while cleaning out their house and made to sure I took them home with me on my next visit. Upon seeing them again, and now having kids who love to play games, I regained an interest in playing, an interest that would take me nearly two years before I would finally follow through. Something which I didn’t do until two weeks ago.

And immediately after playing, I again started spending money on new cards.

Okay, so, I’ll admit there was definitely some of that same manic addiction energy behind the purchase of cards, but, in my defense, my cards are old and starting to acquire some value and since my kids were interested in the game, I decided I should pick up some cards for them to play with instead of using my possibly valuable ones.

That being said, I do keep looking at options for picking up more and more cards, even though I have enough new cards for seven decks, meaning seven players, in a house of only five possible players.

Because the truth of the matter with regards to this game is that although the game itself is fun, it somehow grabs a hold of you and convinces you that you need to spend more and more money on it. It has some sort of consumerism charm placed on those who play the game so that they must buy every card they can. I’m not even a collector by any real use of the term, but I still find myself wanting more and more cards so I can have more and more options to play with.

This is a dangerous game, folks. Only start if you know how to tell yourself no. Something I’m still working on for myself.

I Liked the Book Better

In a world filled with sequels, reboots, and remakes, it feels like the one situation where we can actually get some new material to be put on our screens really comes from adaptations of books. Which, I guess, if you’re being rather picky about it, isn’t exactly new material.

Not that film adaptations of books are in any way a new thing. We’ve been adapting books into movies for nearly as long as we’ve been making movies. And it’s makes sense, right? When you read a good book, you’re transported into a new world, filled with all sorts of visuals that you can only see inside your head, so it’s exciting when someone decides to take that book and turn it into something where you can see those visuals come to life outside of your own mind.

At the same time, this is what causes the problem of the book being better than the movie comes into play. We’re all familiar with the concept. We see a movie of a book we absolutely loved, and we feel as though the film simply didn’t do the novel justice. Honestly, I’m surprised that a ~2 hour experience could ever compare to that of a fully fleshed out novel, considering how much has to be cut out of the final product simply due to time constraints. Even if the words on the page of a book directly correlated to the idea of one page equals one minute, as it does with a script and its particular formatting, you’d be looking at a five hour movie for a three hundred page book. Even Gone with the Wind didn’t quite cross the four hour threshold.

While I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t had the kneejerk reaction to say that a certain movie wasn’t as good as a book, I’ve recently tried to take a different response to movies which don’t hold up to my expectations going in. Like, maybe, the movie just isn’t that good. For instance, the Hobbit is one of my favorite books of all time, and (I’m probably going with an unpopular opinion) I absolutely didn’t care about the films. In fact, I may have only seen the first of them. They were incredibly faithful to the source content. And beautiful. But, I just found myself bored. While this sprawling epic does an amazing job of dutifully presenting the world created by Tolkien, the reality is that the emotion of the story was lost because of that duty.

So, perhaps, instead of focusing on the films that aren’t as good as the books, we should actually be more impressed by the films which do an amazing job of letting us relive the joy of the book. Those movies that cut the books down to the most necessary items in order to make sure the story is told, while also keeping that same feeling we got when reading them. This is a true talent of any storyteller, to be able to dissect a book down to its most basic concepts and give us something which does a spectacular job of bringing that story to life in a similar manner to the book, even if it doesn’t contain all of the items the book does.

Really, it seems like movies not being as good as the book should be the norm, because of this simple concept that you can’t do the full book as a movie without overwhelming the audience. What should be more interesting, therefore, are the movies that are actually better than the books. Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was very loosely based on a book that was alright, but brought us a movie that truly defined a shift in filmmaking, but also was so good that the author pretended it was the first book and used that as the starting point for the sequels he wrote.

Or then there’s the movies that actually manage to mash up two books, like Julie and Julia, which actually was a combination of the Julia Child’s biography written by her husband, and a blog written by a woman who decided to try to cook her way through Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking.

In the end, I’ve been trying to shift my focus into being more directly aware of the beauty of the filmmakers who do a good job, instead of those who have a losing battle from the start, such as Steven Spielberg, who gave us the film version of Ready Player One, which is a book that has very little substance on top of giving us every single pop culture reference from the 80s that it can, who then got blasted for giving us a movie that felt like an enormous slideshow of characters from the 80s. Like, relax, the movie actually did what the book did, it just had different characters based on what licensing they had available, and recognizing that American audiences don’t have nearly the connection with Japanese pop culture as Ernest Cline’s original book wanted to believe.

In short, not all books should be movies, and sometimes because the author does such a great job of world building, I think we don’t recognize how difficult it must be to do some books justice. But those films which manage to bring those words to life in a pleasurable way, those are the ones we need to remember, and prop up. Because those are the ones created by a true artist.

A Death in the Family

As I noted yesterday, I spent most of last week in travel for the loss of a family member. I’ve lost a few family members in recent years, and as someone who hasn’t had to deal with a lot of death in his life, I’ve learned that I’m pretty darn bad at it. And considering the struggles I’ve had with my family and my place in it, well, this past week has been somewhat of an emotional rollercoaster. A rollercoaster that I simply haven’t had the time to fully dig in and reflect upon. A rollercoaster that I’ve been trying to deflect so I can make sure to be there for my family members in whatever capacity they needed. A rollercoaster that I’ve honestly been trying to hide from because I simply don’t know how I’m going to feel about the ride.

But now I’m home, and although things have been incredibly busy trying to do all the things that didn’t get done while I was out of town, I needed to take a second to breathe and try to reflect on what all has been going on in my mind since I learned of my aunt’s passing a week ago.

Like I said, I’ve long struggled with my family and how I fit into it. On my dad’s side, I’ve felt like an outcast ever since I left the church they all belong in (very likely a self-imposed feeling), and on my mom’s, there was a rift which kept some of us separated from the others for so long that I’ve never exactly been sure of my role in the family. This was the side that suffered a loss this past week.

These people mean the world to me. Even though there is a troubled history between us, they are still some of my favorite people in the world. In fact, although there was a rift, I rarely allowed that to get in my way of interacting with them, and often crossed the divide simply because of how much I wanted them in my life. But, stupidly, although I feel like my relationship with these people was strong, I’ve still struggled with the concept of feeling as though they accept me as their family. Even though they introduce me to their friends as Cousin Adam, I found myself questioning whether they were including me when they said the “family” would be headed into the back of the church prior to the start of the funeral.

My aunt was family, I viewed her as family, I had no reason to believe she felt any differently about me, but for whatever reason, because of something that really had nothing to do with me, I always questioned whether she or her kids actually felt the same about me.

And this was the primary thought going through my mind as I traveled to South Carolina to celebrate the life of my aunt. That I somehow didn’t belong there. That although I was spending a ton of money to make sure I was there, they didn’t actually want me there. I spent the first few days after learning of my aunt’s passing, feeling as though I wasn’t family enough to be family.

I was so deep into this thought, so worried about this rift which, by all accounts, has been resolved for years, and a rift that I have always felt able to walk across without problem, that I simply wasn’t capable of comprehending the actual issue at hand for me.

I missed my aunt.

It wouldn’t be until halfway through the ceremony, when the soloist was singing his gorgeous song, that I realized how I’d never be able to see my aunt again. And in the course of approximately five minutes, I went through all of the emotions possible. You see, although I’ve felt close to the rest of my family on that side for years, the reality is that me and my aunt didn’t have a great relationship for most of my life. Not only was there this rift between our families, but she was also my teacher from third to eighth grade. I had baggage. And because I had baggage, and acted on that baggage from time to time, I know she also had baggage. And it took me decades to deal with that baggage.

In fact, it probably wasn’t until within the last few years that the two of us really started interacting one on one like adults. After years of feeling regret for not having a relationship with her, I reached out and she responded as though there was never a reason for us to not feel the closest. Her immediate and gracious response caused me to question if maybe I was the one who had caused all of this baggage to exist in the first place. If maybe this constant insecurity about my place in my family had caused me to imagine being pushed away. And for the sake of remembering the deceased in the best light, let’s go with that. Because it honestly doesn’t matter. Regardless of the past, I felt like I had my aunt again. I felt like I had my family again. I had no idea of how much this reconnection would mean to me until last week. Really, until the soloist sang his song and I was finally left there, alone with my thoughts, with nothing to distract myself from them. Just there, recognizing that I would no longer have the ability to see her again. Happy for knowing that we had reconnected, wishing we had had more time together afterwards.

June would be the last time I would talk to her. I was traveling south for our annual peach fundraiser and the two of us chose to have lunch together during my incredibly brief period in town. She had been suffering from her health issues for a while already at this point. Everyone knew she was on the way out. I had been hearing about it for months how she didn’t have long to live. But I know the women on that side of the family. They don’t go until they’re ready to go. I honestly didn’t believe she would ever be ready.

We had a nice chat. Ate friend chicken. And I realized how much she had weakened since I had last seen her at my granddaddy’s (her father’s) memorial service a year earlier. Something inside of me realized that she might not have as long as I had expected, in opposition from everything I had been told.

Yet, here we are, nearly six months later, before she finally gave in. She would travel plenty in those last few months, looking progressively sicker, but never wanting to lose a possible moment with her kids and grandchildren.

I could go through and give all sorts of memories of my aunt. Things like proudly watching her graduate from nursing school after years as a grade school teacher (before groaning at the awkwardness of her graduating class singing A Whole New World from Aladdin). Or how I have this incredibly vague early memory of her shooting off bottle rockets from a 2-liter Diet Coke bottle with an almost metronomic rhythm. Or of her teaching me how to make coffee at the school, ultimately so that she wouldn’t have to make it for herself. Or when she helped me plow through a year’s worth of math so that I could get ahead a year and be better prepared for high school.

And most stories like this go that way, remembering the moments shared in a lifetime of moments. But I don’t even have those. Not enough to be worth focusing on. What I do have is that even with our families being split apart, she was always there. And even when I felt as though my relationship with her was more adversarial than friendly, she was always working to move me forward, to become a better human. Regardless of the insecurities I felt about our families, and how I viewed our relationship, she constantly worked in my favor, pushing me forward to be the person I needed to be.

And I might not have realized this until the exact moment I was forced to be alone with my thoughts as a young man sang a song he wrote for the occasion. A young man whose life had also been touched by my aunt. Just like so many people who filled the church I was in. I don’t need to tell stories about my aunt, because the stories other people tell are just so much better than my own. Because I didn’t even fully realize what I had, until she was gone.

And for that, I feel even worse. Because even if not all the times we shared together were the best, I never took the time to thank her for the ones that were.

And I’m really glad that I got to reconnect with her again as an adult.

Accepting Compliments

First off, I feel the need to ask if I’m the only person who has to constantly check to make sure he’s using the right word when writing compliment or complement…

Which feels like a fantastic segue into talking about coming to terms with my own writing abilities. I know I’ve talked on here before about the concept of feeling like a fraud. That although I’ve received accolades and personal comments regarding my writing over the years, I still, for whatever reason, find myself thinking that it’s all crap. Which, of course, makes it incredibly awkward whenever I receive a compliment of any type over my writing, because, well, I still don’t believe it myself, even if I find great pride in all the things I’ve done with my writing.

Over the past week, I’ve actually received a number of compliments. First, one of the rejection letters I received from a literary agent made the comment about how, although they didn’t think they were the right person to help sell my book, they thought the book was something “that should be out there” and that “the time may indeed be right for this type of story”. Those are awesome things to hear. And since I got this email while I was sitting around a table remembering the life of my aunt, it was impeccably timed.

Also, the professor for my music class keeps beaming about my writing, so much so that she put a comment on a recent concert review I wrote that I could “do this professionally”, causing me to wonder how in the world one gets that job.

But finally, last week we had a table read for my recently completed play, which will be performed this coming January. While I was unable to attend because of traveling for the funeral, I received comments from people I had never even talked to before about how much fun they had with it, and how straight up funny it was. These are not words I thought I’d ever hear about my writing, especially not from people whose names I never even learned.

In short, the past week has been pretty great for feeling propped up about my writing, even if I’m ultimately still in the same place of uncertainty regarding how to move forward with making it a profitable venture. It would appear that my years dedicated to putting words to the page have paid off and people are actually noticing. And that’s awesome.

But I still find myself questioning the legitimacy of it all. Obviously that’s stupid. Not a single one of these people have any reason to try and make me feel better about my writing. The agent could have just sent the same form letter every other agent sends. The teacher could have simply posted the grade and gone about her day. And the people who read through my script, well, they actually sought me out to tell me their thoughts. They started conversations that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for them wanting to let me know what they thought. Heck, they would have had to have asked someone who I was in order to even be able to know who to talk to as I walked into the theatre building with my mask on.

These are all people who simply appreciated my writing enough to give me a compliment and all I can do is stammer some sort of ridiculous response back, not knowing how to feel about the whole thing. I’ve spent the past week in this awkward combination of joy because people are loving my writing and sadness because it has to all be a sham somehow.

I’m really bad at accepting compliments.

I guess it’s good that I don’t write for the accolades, because no matter how much I love them, I’m really bad at accepting them as truth.

However, for all of you who have sent me similar messages over the years, only to have me mumble thanks and look toward the floor, causing you to wonder whether you somehow hurt my feelings: Thanks. Thanks for going out of your way to let me know how my writing made you feel. I’m still working on figuring out how to respond to these moments in a way which fully expresses how awesome it is (even if there’s that stupid part of my brain which wants to tell me its all a lie). But the truth is, it is always the best moment of any day that it happens. I always have to text my wife immediately to let her know. That’s how important it is for me. For the past week, I’ve been living on a cloud of pride, knowing that while I’m sitting here getting rejection after rejection from literary agents, I’ve still got people who are enjoying my art.

Here’s hoping I can find a way to get it into the hands of even more people yet.

Unexpected Departures

A week ago today (when I’m writing this, which Monday, not Wednesday, which is when you are presumably reading this), I received word that my aunt died. And while I have plenty of things I need to express about processing that death (still processing…), I feel the need right now to take a second to step back and actually look at the overall impact of a death in your circle of friends and families.

The last few years have taken a few of my loved ones from me, and although I don’t want to, in any way, discount the emotional toll that these deaths take, there’s a whole other piece of the puzzle that comes in to play, which is the absolutely upending of your life for the days following a death. It’s terribly sad to lose a loved one, and it’s hugely important to be there to remember their life with the rest of their loved ones, both for your own sake of closure, but also to serve as a support structure for the rest of those who feel left behind. But at the same time, there’s something that can sometimes be almost tragic about the way this can absolutely stop your life in its tracks, at least for a few moments.

My life, as of late, has been scheduled down to the second. Between school, work, yardwork, promoting a book to literary agents, beginning the workshopping of a new script, on top of the normal kid and wife and daily life stuff, well, I’ve spent the past few months of my life (maybe years), feeling as though I’m just barely scraping by with the things I need to get done in a day. Add onto that the fact that I also started a new job, which means I’m not only getting trained in the new job, but still having some crossover with the old job as I make sure all of my old work is still being taken care of, and you’ll find a version of me who really doesn’t feel as though free time is a thing anymore, even if I try to fit it in as much as possible.

But suddenly, none of this is supposed to matter. Because suddenly, something else, far more important, is the central action of your days. And suddenly, regardless of whether or not you’re ready for it (and let’s face it, you’re not), you have a person-sized hole in your life that you’re too busy to even fully recognize until you’re in the middle of all of your family and friends as they, too, are stepping away from their own busy lives to remember the life of someone who is no longer with us.

Funerals are important, both for you, as it forces you to actually take a second and allow the loss of life to be the only thing you’re thinking about, at least for a moment, but it also allows you to be there to support the others who are going through the same thing. And together you can realize that although you may have that person-sized hole in your life, you’re actually joined together with all these other people who now have that same hole.

Which means that regardless of how much effort I’m putting in right now in trying to catch back up on all of the things that I barely had control of a week ago when I learned I was going to have to freeze my life momentarily, I’m also happy that I took that time to remember that I’m not alone in my feeling of loss.

And that I’m also incredibly lucky that my wife was able to take the time to put in all the effort to make sure that we could actually make this happen. While I was busy trying to wrap up as many things for school and work as I could before leaving, she was calling airlines, booking tickets, hotels, getting babysitters, and making sure our lives, which can never fully be frozen in time, could go on without us.

Life goes on, as they say, but sometimes you have to just stop it as much as you can and allow the moment to recognize those whose lives have stopped going on. And that’s really hard to do.

A Night at the Symphony

During my early twenties, I used to spend a lot of time hanging out with the music nerds at the local university. As such, I would often find myself hanging out in the little concert rooms the college uses for music majors to perform in as part of their degree requirements. This meant that I would often get to experience very talented young people showcasing not only their skills, but the attributes of instruments that I probably wouldn’t have gotten such a fantastic perspective on otherwise. Like the time I saw a young man putting on a tuba concert, or the bass and double bass duo. It was these odd couple types of concerts which kept me coming back long after I was required to for the class which alerted me to this even happening.

It also helped that due to my time on the stage performing musical theatre, I made lots of friends in the orchestra pit, who were part of the music program at this college, so they would invite me to see them play, bringing me again and again to these tiny little dark rooms with only a handful of other people, getting to appreciate music that I would have never heard otherwise.

I’ve always had a love for the classics, but even more so when presented in new and exciting ways. When I worked as a bagger at a grocery store in South Carolina, where we would take the groceries out to the cars for people, I got to know a young man very well who played his violin for tips outside the business, so he could raise money for going to Julliard. It was because of him that I was first introduced to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but also the O’Jays, which is who he assumed I was talking about when I jokingly suggested he play Stairway to Heaven.

I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure what my point here is outside, I guess, of how music can be a common language, even if we don’t always have the same songs to talk about. But what I really wanted to talk about is how although I’ve held a deep love for all of which falls under the incredibly large heading we give “Classical Music”, you know, things from the Renaissance, the Baroque Period, chamber music, and honestly, far too many genres of music to classify so broadly, it’s been a long long time since I’ve actually gone to see a symphony.

Technically I went to see Ben Folds perform with a full orchestra a few years back, but considering it was simply an orchestral takes on his hits, it didn’t hit quite the same, although still spectacular.

But, as the local symphony orchestra had a performance coming up, I presented the idea to my kids for them to join me, something I do whenever I’m aware of an upcoming performance, and much to my surprise, all three of them decided to come along.

I’m not going to say they were perfect little angels during the two hour performance, but they actually did about as well as I did with sitting in a chair for that long. Considering the show started at 7:30, and my kids don’t often make it later than 8:30 before they are crashing into their beds, that alone is impressive. But as I sat there having an out of body experience, enjoying the music as it reverberated through me, I took a few glances over at my kids and could see them also being transformed by it. Sure, the youngest may have slept through most of the second half, but coming out of the concert, he told me his review, which was simply all about how much he loved all of it except for the song he considered chaotic. And I had to agree with him, the song which he aptly classified as chaotic was the definite low point in the overall experience.

I’m not sure that when I was their ages I would have been able to sit for that long and simply listened to music without people jumping around and making a show of it, but my three awesome kids sat in that enormous theater and had an experience that, in talking with them afterwards, sounds similar to the experiences I’ve had in my adult years of gaining appreciation of the talent these musicians can present. And I couldn’t be more proud.

And I’m so incredibly excited that they want to join me for the next concert which comes up in a month. I’ve never gotten to hear Tchaikovsky live, so I’m pretty pumped about that as well.

No Rest for the Wicked

I’m going to go right out and say it. I’m tired.

Like, legitimately, uncompromisingly, tired. And although I’d like to blame this all on the fact that I recently turned 40, the reality is that I’ve pretty much always been tired.

And this causes me one pretty significant question: Why?

I’ll admit right off the bat that I’ve long questioned the reality of the need for sleep. Maybe it’s some sort of government conspiracy, right? Like, I know that science has all these reasons they claim that sleep is important, but it’s not like we’re robots. Do we really need to recharge? Why in the world haven’t we evolved past the need for sleep already? What actually happens while we’re asleep anyways?

Tooth fairies and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny certainly seem to appreciate the fact that we become absolutely comatose for a few hours every day, so maybe that’s a part of the conspiracy? Like, maybe we have to sleep so magic can exist in this world?

All of that above, of course, are the ramblings of a tired man who really actually just finds himself wishing he had time for more sleep even though he spends a significant amount of time trying to figure out whether he should actually need it at all.

Of course, when I was a younger man, the reasons for needing sleep were a lot more obvious. I was not kind to my body about sleep. I would stay up for all hours of the night, catch two winks before moving on to the next day and starting it all over again. Rinse, repeat, until I’d finally collapse into a heap of drooling human for 20 hours before I’d get back into the bad habit of avoiding my body’s call for sleep.

I would fight sleep so hard that I finally started having significant issues with insomnia because I had trained my body that sleep was the devil.

But now that I’m older and have kids and a pretty boring social life, well, I don’t have quite the excuse for being tired anymore. I don’t stay up all night, in fact, I’m generally in bed reading by 10pm, and most nights I don’t make it past 11 before I have to put the book down and finally succumb to the call for rest. That means that with the 6am wakeup call for school for the kids (and the fact that my boys don’t like sleeping later than the sun), I get approximately 7 hours of sleep a night…which is pretty good.

Sure, I might wake up here and there due to back pain or dog barking or kid waking up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose, or what’s the weird sound, or I drank too much water before bed, or–

Actually, come to think of it, I’m probably not much better at taking care of my sleep needs as an adult as I thought. Here I’ve been really disappointed in myself for getting to the age where 11pm is the latest I stay up on a standard night, but, well, I also get up way earlier than I used to and have far more items that keep me awake throughout the night, even if they generally choose to bother my wife instead of me (she’s a far better parent than I am).

So, I guess what this all means is that I’m really not that indulgent when I decide to take a nap.

If anything, it’s for my health, right?

And so the Santa Clauses can bring me presents?

Seriously, I’d probably sleep a lot better if I knew there were presents on the line…Someone work on that.

Blogging with Coffee

My mornings right now, after I cart the kids off to school, and before I start my work day, consist of a brief period where I get to quietly enjoy my coffee whilesitting down to put together some words to put on here. Yes, this means that I am currently enjoying my little moment of zen before the busy-ness of work begins and after the chaotic process of getting the kids out of the house ends. You should feel special. Those few moments I have where I can just enjoy the quiet and the lack of expectations, I spend here with you.

Of course, considering this is before my brain has had its caffeine jolt to wake it up, I often spend a considerable amount of time trying to figure out what I want to write about. In fact, since I try to be a fair amount ahead on articles, in case I have some days in which I can’t write, I have over a dozen of these posts that I’ve written which I’m pretty confident will never actually see the light of day, because they are just that terrible.

I’m not the smartest in the morning.

Due to this lack of morning intelligence, most of my posts go through several edits to make sure they don’t sound completely idiotic by the time they actually reach the front page of the site. There are more than a few items that don’t even make it through the editing process simply because of how ridiculous they appear by the time they hit the light of a caffeinated brain.

Before my return to blogging, these fifteen minutes or so that I have between kids and work were ones I frequently donated to my job. Instead of allowing for the fact that I have this brief period of time available to prepare for the day, I would simply leap into work, not at all ready for what was to come. But with blogging, I have a minute (well, approximately fifteen) to wake my brain up, think through some of the things that are on my mind, and get into a solid mindset before I start the daily slog.

It’s actually pretty nice.

Although my life has been incredibly overwhelming as of late, I’ve found that looking for these little moments in which I can do something purely for me have really done a wealth of good in getting me into a better headspace. I’d suggest it. Find some way to break away from all the things you need to do, and just do something that might end up being an absolute waste of time, just for you.

Allow yourself not to worry about all the things which need to get done for those few minutes. Future-You can worry about all of that. For this exact moment, just allow yourself to exist for the present. Do a thing. Write something. Draw something. Listen to a couple songs. Anything which allows you to just be you for just a moment.

You might find yourself in a far better place after you come out of it. Even if you realize that you still have a bajillion things to get done that you weren’t doing during those fifteen minutes you stole for yourself.

College Makes No Sense

I know I’ve mentioned a few times on here how I’m in school at the moment, but if you weren’t aware, I’m currently in the midst of finishing up a degree in college. And, since I’m finishing up a degree, that means I’m also doing both the hard level courses to meet the requirements for my degree, as well as some easy courses to finish the general education requirements. In fact, at this exact moment, I’m working on my capstone project, while at the same time taking a 100 level music appreciation course.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time over the years in and out of college, it’s that for reasons that feel absolutely incomprehensible, 100 level courses take far more effort than the 300 or 400 level courses at any college. Like, for some reason, doing the work that actually applies to your degree takes far less time and effort than the little introduction to other subjects classes that you take to fulfill the “rounded” education colleges like to offer.

Which means that right now, as I’m working on my capstone, the penultimate project for my degree, I’m spending far more time and energy on answering questions about medieval Gregorian chants than I am on the stuff that I’m actually intending to pay to learn about.

Why?

I’m serious here. Why? This has been the case in all three of the colleges I’ve attended, and it makes absolutely no sense to me. I’ll give in to the concept that there’s reason to want to expand what we are teaching college students to ensure they are having an expansion of their mind, outside of simply preparing them for their career, even though I think that if you’re paying the exorbitant amounts of money to prepare for a career, you should really be mostly focused on preparing for that career. What I can’t understand, and maybe simply refuse to understand, is why we allow these classes which exist purely to give students alternative perspectives than they might have come in with to take up so much of their damned time.

I don’t get it.

I love the idea of being able to take classes that are a bit more fun than necessary. These classes can, in some situations, act almost like a palate cleanser from being stuck learning about one subject for far too long. But the idea that these classes can be so demanding that they are the ones that actually cause students to break down due to their overwhelming workload, well, that I have a pretty severe issue with. I’ve taken three credit courses on women’s history which have required three times the amount of effort/time on my part than the three credit courses on the ethics behind my actual degree program. This is a problem. While knowing women’s history is, for certain, important, I would think that knowing the ethics of the career you’re pursuing should be the more important one.

But, of course, part of this is probably due to the lack of actual requirements in place for governing what you get out of a class. All that really is required for a class to exist is a subject they can link to degree requirements and a schedule of class hours per week. Outside of classroom work doesn’t matter, just how much time you spend sitting in a seat.

I’ve never been a big fan of the higher education system in America, but if there’s one thing that bothers me more than most, it’s that we can have our students spend way too much time on the fluff courses and then completely gloss over the actual stuff they need to know to succeed in their jobs. This is why simply having an education isn’t good enough for most jobs today. They require on-the-job experience. Graduating college doesn’t mean you know anything, it just means you took the time to go to college. And this, my friends is a problem.

But, at least I spent two hours studying the sounds of Hildegard von Bingen this past weekend so I could write a paper about a concert I was listening to, while still failing simply because I didn’t call out enough of the names of her songs in the review. The professor actually congratulated the efforts of my paper, stating it went further than most students, but still gave me a failing grade purely because I didn’t specifically name out enough of the songs from the concert. So, now I get to rewrite the paper, which then, of course, will primarily be a rewrite mostly focused on finding reasons to list the names of songs which all sound the same because that’s kind of a main component of medieval chant music.

And then, of course, for the projects that matter because they are a part of the actual degree I’m pursuing, I can leave out entire steps of the process and they’ll pass the paper without even a comment.

This makes sense, right?

I Miss Movie Theaters

It has been over a year and a half since the last time I stepped foot into a movie theater. There were a few times I was in the building, in order to buy takeaway popcorn while they were almost completely shut down and trying to raise a little bit of money, but the actual experience of sitting in those chairs, staring up at the big screen, eagerly awaiting the previews to start while crunching down on popcorn before the kids steal the rest of the bag from me, the absolute immersion into the moment of a movie…I miss that.

Yeah, we put up a projector in the basement and set up some rather okay surround sound to give ourselves a basic set up for watching films on a big screen at home, and yeah, we’ve done a few outdoor movies on the projector screen as well, and overall have been able to watch most of the recent releases that have been important to us, but it’s really not the same.

For whatever reason, when watching a movie at home, I don’t feel as concerned about running off to the bathroom quick, or heading to the kitchen to get a snack, or talking with my family about what’s going on on the screen. But when I’m in the theater, I’m locked in that seat for the next ~2 hours, unless the little one gets bored and pretends he needs to pee so he can do something that’s not in the room for a minute.

I’ve been really craving that movie experience lately, and, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t gone. My kids actually went to a number of movies this summer as the local theater has a summer kids movie program, and their grandma took them almost weekly to see whatever cheap movies they had on display. Obviously, I’m not entirely against the concept of being in a dark room with other people. We’ve even gone to see a few shows at the local children’s theatre. I just haven’t gone to see a movie in a theater.

And the only reason I can come up with is that it already was something we did fairly rarely. We’d go see the biggest of movies and that was about it. And even then, we were usually a week or two late on those. And so when everything shut down for a year, this was simply one of those items that never quite made it back into the routine.

I’ve been noticing a lot of little things like this lately. Things like going out to eat. We’ve definitely eaten out in a few restaurants, but more often than not, we bring the food home and eat it here, something we used to only do for pizza.

Even our chosen activities are still primarily outside, as opposed to indoor ones like going to the local trampoline park.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a part of us that is still being cautious, because we are. We’re still looking at those case counts and knowing that our younger two are unvaccinated, and we’re wanting to try to do at least a little bit to keep things slightly safer for our family. But the other piece of it is just that this whole pandemic thing really modified our whole routine. And I’m not sure we’ll ever actually get it back.

Although, I’m really hoping to get the travel part of it back soon.