Music Holier-than-Thou-ism

Hi Readers,

First, an update. I'm sick =( boo. Unfortunately last Sunday night I began to cough a lot, and this entire week has been in the cesspools for me. Good thing that the sickness looks like it is subsiding. The only thing that remains is the periodic coughing to clear the phlegm. Eww. Anyways, one thing that I thought I would start writing about is music. Since I've had a lot of music background, I wonder why I didn't start writing about it earlier.

One of the funniest cultural phenomenons that transcend cultures is that of music. It is prevalent over most of the world, though the style and characteristics of the music varies from place to place (obviously). Why did I say "funny"? Because no matter where you travel in the world, people everywhere have strong opinions of music and music styles. And when I say strong, I mean judgmentally-strong.

A generational gap seems to be the most common factor that defines music groupies. Grandparents often like operas and classical music that would induce z's amongst most everybody else in the family. Parents tend to like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Europop style old-ish rock songs, but hate the new pop songs. Teenagers tend to gravitate towards pop songs like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber (ick), and Ke$ha and the likes. The funny part is that each older generation will say, "What the hell happened to good music? We had it so much better back then."

Each group will always defend their turf when they feel intruded upon. Go to an LGBT party and declare that you hate Lady Gaga - it's an open invitation to be banned from the next party. Ask a music hippie what their favorite bands are, and 99% of the time you'll be treated to a list of obscure indy bands, and while you nod and say "cool", you're pretty sure 99.9% of the world has not heard of them. Want to piss off country music folks? Tell them their music is always about them driving their tractors or their wives leaving or their dogs dying. Want to piss off other music folks? Tell them that country music is better than their music. It is like trolling in real life, but you troll at your own discretion.

Part of this is of course related to the associations of the music genre. Many people feel that their music collection is an extension of their personality. In my opinion, what a person likes to listen to is a pretty definitive guide to their lifestyle and their beliefs. For example, if someone likes dance-y music like Rihanna or Kesha, then I'd peg partying and clubbing as one of their hobbies. Indy fans tend to come across as kinda pretentious and rebellious at the same time, since they almost always reject mainstream music for "better" stuff that's not well-known. Classical music people claim that all other kinds of music are lame and less sophisticated.

In a sense, all of these observations are kinda correct. I personally like alternative rock better than all other types of music, and I tend to identify myself better with those that listen to the same type of music. I think it's a matter of personality. In general, people who like Radiohead or Coldplay or other alternative rock music are more chill and relaxed, while those who like Katy Perry or Rihanna tend to crave social interactions like bars or dancing or partying. I'm sure people have noticed this about other people, and even use it as a judge of the other person's personality before even getting to know them. For example, looking back now - I'd say my initial judgments on my first roommate was pretty accurate, based upon his posters of Incubus and Rage Against the Machine.

Ultimately, I think the big arguments that always come up during music bickering extends out to a bickering of what type of personality is better. It's not about whether the music is better or worse, but rather about which personality is better or worse. And when the issue at hand touches your own personality...well, it's expected that people would claw each other's eyes out over it.

Just a bored and not-intellectual observation for this week. Till the next post!

-FCDH

The Excitement of Snowboarding

Hi Readers,

After coming back from my recent snowboarding trip to Chestnut Mountain with some friends, I thought I would write a blog post about snowboarding. I snowboarded for the first time in grade 10, and since then I have really fallen in love with it, much more so than skiing. I have my own board and all the equipment, which are currently a thousand miles away in Vancouver (grr). I really miss the mountains in Vancouver - I never thought about how convenient it was to live by so many ski hills until it was all gone, to be able to have a choice of three different ski resorts to go to within an hour's drive from my house. Now I have to drive at least 4 hours to reach a ski resort that is much less in caliber than the ones I had. Such is life.

I'll start off by saying that snowboarding is hard. Period. I haven't yet met a single person who has gotten through their first day of snowboarding without lots of bruises, sore knees, and butts. It may not seem like it, but there is a very big difference between having your body face the direction that you are traveling (ski) and having your body perpendicular to the direction your are traveling (snowboard). It makes for a lot of face plants at first, especially when learning to turn. There are two ways to orient a snowboard so that it is parallel to the slope (for gliding). The regular style means left-foot forward (so left side of body is facing downhill), and it is called regular because most people fall under this category. The goofy style is for right-foot forward, and is less common. To determine whether a person is regular or goofy, the first time they snowboard, an instructor will often shove them without any warning, and take note of which foot they step out with first. It will become their leading foot.

Unlike skiers, snowboarders do have an easier time with stopping. To stop, all a snowboarder has to do is to put the board perpendicular to the slope and push down hard on the edge, so that it pushes the snow downhill. Since there are two possible ways of putting a snowboard perpendicular to the slope, the terminology of toe-side and heel-side edges refers to the side of the snowboard that the pressure is being put on. Heel-side is the more natural way, where a snowboarder faces toward the bottom of a hill and puts pressure on their heels, while toe-side is where the snowboarder faces uphill and puts pressure on their toes to stop.

Snowboarders generally start learning with zigzags down the hill while alternating between regular and goofy style, as well as how to stop toe side and heel side. After this is done, they begin to learn how to turn. A turn is basically a move to go from toe-side to heel-side or vice versa, and when done properly, it looks like tracing a semicircle down the slope. The notion of "turning" is the key focus of snowboarders and is basically the precursor to carving. Skiers can carve by transferring their weight between the right skis and left skis between turns, and snowboarders can carve by transferring their weight between toe-side to heel-side. Snowboarders can carve simply by joining turns together to form an S-shape maneuver, and eventually by making the S-shape narrower.

It's during turns that snowboarders are most likely to fall on their butts. In the beginning, switching from toe-side to heel-side is fraught with dangers of falling, especially to knees and butts. I'm usually a regular style snowboarder, but I've been trying to learn carving goofy-style, and I've been falling as much as a beginner has. Regular and goofy style really are not transferable between each other, so I've come to love the pain that accompanies my attempts at goofy-style.

Despite its intricacies, I feel like snowboarding is really not that hard to learn. The first day is the worst. I remember the first day I learned snowboarding. Despite being tired as hell that night, I could not fall asleep because my knees and butt hurt so much. In my opinion, snowboarding is most easily learned when several consecutive days are spent learning snowboarding. That way no progress is lost and you can progress quickly to carving. Once carving is mastered, snowboarding becomes so much more fun than skiing. Plus it has the "cool" factor.

I'm pretty sure that I will not stick around in Illinois for graduate school. Wherever I may end up, I want to make snowboarding a part of my life there for the next 5 years. There's just something about it that makes it so much fun. Perhaps it's the thrill of flying down the hill on the edge of your control, while constantly pushing the boundaries of that control. Knowing that the control may disappear the next second and you might crash and generate a huge puff of snow, but living for the present all the same. It's how I want to live my life.

-FCDH

On Dreams and Sleep

Hi Readers,

I love to sleep, because it energizes me for the next day, because my bed feels good, and most importantly - because I am tired. But the daily nocturnal experience that most everyone encounters is not colonized or civilized. Instead, it is a swath of wilderness, filled with what is hidden in the deepest recesses of our mind. I am sure that everyone has had their own forays into the hinterlands of their minds (and for those who haven't, I truly feel sorry for them), and I am just trying to share some of my own experiences with the various weird experiences of sleeping and dreaming.

One unusual skill that I developed and recently lost touch of is the ability to know exactly the moment I am falling asleep. It sounds weird, right? Everyone has seen the land of conscious reality and dream reality separately, but the transition of "falling asleep" is another matter altogether. I don't know how common it is, but I am offering tips to readers about how to experience it.

You can start by lying on your bed, and rehearsing a scene that you know extremely well through your mind. For me, it is a scene that I saw at the Roman amphitheaters in the ruins of Ostia Antica, outside of Rome in Italy. The scene has to be familiar for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to be falling asleep at the same time, so you should not be thinking too hard. A familiar scene is perfect. The second reason is the following. As you fall asleep, you will inevitably cross what I call the "crazy" boundary. This is the boundary where crazy things (the things that, when you wake up from a dream, you said "how in the world did I think this was possible/normal in my dream?!?) begin happening. As you cross the boundary, the scene in your mind will become usurped by the "crazy" you hiding in the recesses of your brain.

However, in my personal experience, this boundary does not always correspond with the boundary of lucid awareness. So what will happen is, you will start seeing weird things happen in the scene in your head. (I'm walking up the stairs of the amphitheatre, and then I turn around and begin going on facebook in the computer lab in Engineering Hall, and then I notice that I have to shift gears to go to a higher speed in the car - etc). With a little training, you'll learn to recognize the "crazy" line, such that you'll be able to say, "Things don't make sense. Oh my god! I'm about to fall asleep!" before actually falling asleep.

And then there are dreams. Dreaming is such a quaint yet sublime experience. It is where creativity dictates reality. It's where you can live out your fantasies and horrors as if they were real. Most importantly, it allows your to escape from reality, into a world that you cannot experience anytime you are conscious.

My personal experience with dreams has been spotted. Back in elementary school, I had a period of a month when I would have the same nightmare night after night. I still remember the nightmare. I would be hiking with my family, and I would be in the lead of the hiking group which was hiking on a trail next to a drop-off cliff. Everytime I would turn to check on my family, one of the family members would jump off the cliffs to their death. Another nightmare that I remember from elementary school was that my mom and I were in a train when it crashed, and then a tornado came and sucked her away from me. I remember waking up from that nightmare in tears.

On the other end of the spectrum comes the awesome dreams . I love the dreams where I have superpowers, such as flying or telekinesis, because it is literally like acting out a dream in real life. Except it seems so real in the dream. You think about flying - and you fly. You want the door to open - and it opens. My first superpower dream was in elementary school - I could snap my fingers and make anything happen. I made it rain when my dad was trying to mow the lawn. And then I laughed so hard (in my dream) that I couldn't snap my fingers anymore and lost my superpower. Good times. =)

Along with the awesome dreams, but in a more taboo direction, are - what else? - sexual dreams. I definitely have lots of dreams about it (probably too many) involving the most random people that I would not think about in real life. It was almost never the people that I thought were hot, or had a crush on, or anything like that. I still remember my first 2 dreams. The first was about a guy in my class, the second was about a girl in my class. These both happened during middle school, which I guess was still a time when I might have still been attracted to both sexes (another blog post about this later). But it was the only time I ever dreamed about a girl sexually. Sexual dreams are the weirdest dreams ever. Sometimes I didn't even really know the person well, or at all. Sometimes I made the move, sometimes they did. Sometimes the person turned into a non-person. Sometimes weird, sometimes awkward, but always unpredictable.

I have read up on "lucid dreaming", where your consciousness is able to control the dream, so you can try things in your dream that you would never try in real life. Unfortunately it only happened to me a couple of times...but I think it would be awesome to actually master how to do it. But I have been able to influence what I dream about a couple of times. Sometimes I find that I dream about the last thing that I am thinking about when I fall asleep, so I'll be able to control that aspect of my dream.

Regardless of the control I have over it, dreaming is just so cool in general. I'd like to think that dreams are an outlet for the side of yourself that you are not able to let out in everyday life. If true, that would mean that, in order to take your understanding of yourself to the next level, you would look toward your dreams.

But for now, I am looking forward to another night's rest.

-FCDH

Running in Circles

Hi Readers,

I've been very busy, so I haven't been posting many new posts. I am hoping to post a myriad of posts tonight covering everything I wanted to post on in the past 2 weeks. Hopefully it will give me time to sleep and wake up in time to go ice skating and/or rock climbing tomorrow.

One of my life goals has always been to advance myself athletically. In high school, I kind of stayed away from sports of all kinds (except swimming), and I was definitely not good at anything. Therefore, I adopted the goal during my college years as a measure to develop some athletics that I could enjoy and be good at as I head into the future. A more specific goal was to run a full marathon - a goal that was unimaginable and laughable for me in high school, but a goal that now is looking more realistic.

For those of you that don't know, I ran the half marathon (13.1 miles) last year in May. I started training for it last winter, and successfully did the half marathon at around a 9 min mile. Before that training, I could only run around 3 miles non-stop before I had to stop to catch my breath. My training and improvement in running and rock climbing really helped advance my self confidence. It's a source of pride for me, and it has helped me lose weight that I carried into college from high school.

For the marathon (26.2 miles), I started training a few days after finals ended and winter break started. I tried to find some running buddies on Craigslist at first - which didn't work out. I decided to screw finding running buddies, and instead run by myself. So after New Year's Day, I began running every single day that CRCE was open. I improved quickly - my mileage increased quickly from 3 miles to 11 miles, with my best runs being two consecutive days with a 9.5 mile run at 7:30 mins per mile, and an 11 mile run at 8:16 mins per mile. I am putting up both a mileage and a pace that the me a year ago could only have dreamed about.

My daily schedule has fallen into a predictable schedule. I wake up in the morning and go to work at the study abroad office. After work is finished, I nap for an hour, and then go to CRCE and run around in circles on the indoor 1/8 mile track.

I don't feel bored when I run. I constantly feel energized. At the beginning of the run, I randomly hum 6 notes, and then my minimalist mind will take it, loop it, and expand it into a symphony worthy of zoning out to. It is almost like techno - except sometimes the 6 note sequence forms themselves to the tune of "Silent Night", or other Christmas songs that were stuck in my head. It's not the most glamorous way to run, but it's definitely the cheapest. Although it doesn't make much difference to me personally, I feel proud of myself when I see other people with their iPods or other mp3 players strapped to their arms, because I know that I didn't have to spend any money on it.

I keep an active inventory of the runners on the track as I am running, and I can constantly see - nobody is putting up the mileage I am. Some runners may pass me, but they stop a lap or two afterward and go working out. For all runners that are doing distance running, I tend to run faster than them all. I am wary about the fact that I may be getting too over-confidence and will need a reality check soon on just how much more I have to improve, but as of right now - I am constantly on cloud nine when I run. It gives me satisfaction, that I am able to do this only a year after taking up running seriously.

It really shows the power of human will. It gives me hope about accomplishing things that I set my mind to. And finally, I have an athletic skill in which I may rank as "above-average". The next challenge will be to keep up the running and the mileage as classes start. I am looking forward to it.

-FCDH