Summer sucks

Remember when summer used to be great? When there were people and parties and opportunities and time to just relax? Those days are gone.

This summer has been one of the worst summers ever. I've lost all my friends and I don't even know why. Maybe it's the recession and everyone is working, maybe it's that we're growing up and moving apart, maybe it's that I've been miserable for the past 6 months and no one wants to deal with me anymore. I suppose I don't make much of an effort to see people anymore. Maybe it's that too many things have fallen through. Too many times schedules haven't lined up. And the more time that passes in between, the farther we are pushed away from one another.

I think we need to fix this. I'd say that we start now, but people probably have work in the morning so I don't want to call so late.


Or maybe it's time to tear everything down and start all over.

But the truth is...

I miss you and this is so much harder than I thought.

Thinking about love

So, I've been thinking a lot about love lately and I've come to the conclusion that it isn't as cinematic as I once thought. The concept of unconditional love is simply insane. I understand that it sounds really good of a person to be able to love unconditionally, but the term 'unconditionally' is misused or misunderstood.

Unconditionally means without any conditions. I was in love with a girl once. She left me for someone else. That sort of condition radically changed the way I felt about her and allowed the dismantling of the construct of love in my head without any remorse. Actually, that happened twice, but details...

We all understand that this is an extreme case (although suspiciously common to me) and isn't exactly the kind of thing when you consider when it comes to love. But, as I am proof, it happens. Furthermore, the reciprocation of love is something worth taking a critical look at. The romantic weight of loving someone that doesn't love you back is incredible. It shows... well, I can't exactly put my finger on what it shows. Maybe shows that you're crazy.

Let's take a look at an analogous situation. Say you're a sports player and you go to the training camp for your favourite city's team. You work hard and give it your best, but your best isn't good enough. The team refuses to sign you a contract. But you are dedicated to this team. In fact, you are so dedicated that you submit to only playing for that team. You practise and you train and you ignore the scouts from any other team because you will only play for that one team. But they never ever recruit you. Maybe you're not good enough. Maybe their roster is full. Maybe the team just can't afford you. You're dedicated to a team, but you're giving up a chance for a mutually beneficial relationship with another team. To give up your shot at the big leagues (in other words, love) because you've committed to a team that hasn't committed to you is, although romantic, absolutely fucking insane.

To this respect, love is to be earned and some of us are just too eager to give it away.

Of Boats and Breakups

When it comes to breaking up/being left behind by someone you love, the initial reaction is to think that it sucks because it hurts. I, however, have come to the conclusion that, in the long run, that is not the fact. In truth, it sucks because you've failed, and that brings along all the baggage of failure.

Let's look at it from the perspective of several years ago. You broke up with someone, it sucked, you hurt, you moved on. Today, you can't honestly say it hurts (if it does, you need to get her back whatever the cost; she's the one! (ladies, I can't even imagine you having these kinds of feelings; boys aren't that special)). Today, you can't say that you feel the same way you feel when it first happened. So is it even a bad thing to break up? After all, you learn something each time it happens. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? Well, yes. Are breakups a good thing? Well, no.

The problem with breakups, like any other failure, is not the pain, misery, dejection, remorse, what-have-you of failure, but the fact that you have to reset the experiment. You need to find someone else and start all over! What's worse, is the more promising a social experiment like dating (the hypothesis being that she is the girl for you) the more resources are poured into the experiment. Now, I'm not talking money here, so all you raging feminists can put a sock in it right god damn now. I'm talking about less tangible resources. Time (we've only got so long on this planet), ideas (perhaps this is a personal thing, but once you use a good idea on a girl that idea is spent forever), songs (like ideas, one per customer. "Everything I Do" was such a good one...), love (though a renewable resource, a resource that shouldn't be wasted nonetheless), and, one of the more obscure and less thought of resources, brownie points.

Yes, brownie points. I have a collective 6, if not more, years of generating brownie points and I've traded them in for nothing! I'm always saving up for that boat! So after a breakup, where do those brownie points go? They're lost forever! They're non-transferable! Your ex isn't going to tell your current girlfriend that you're awesome because you're not dating anymore! It carries no value! Shit, if I got to keep all my brownie points, I could have had a turtle by now!

And before you say that I could buy a turtle now because I'm single and I can do what I want, that's not the point! The point is that it's part of the continued experiment. When the effects of Alex on Girl are very well known and things become stable, you have to use brownie points to introduce something new (because the effects of introducing something that she wants are negligible. She gets something new. She's happy about it for a bit). If I was in the same relationship, I could be testing Alex+Turtle on Girl. Can you imagine the ramifications of that equalling win?

Seriously, God's gotta throw me another bone (no pun intended) or I'm going to end up an arsonist.

They Don't Make 'em Like They Used To -or- Kids These Days

So, I was watching a bit of this movie, Born Free, with my mom while I was eating dinner and we were at this part where they are trying to introduce a captive lion back into the wilderness. The wild male lion roars. The captive female lion roars. The male lion roars again. The lioness roars back. The male lion roars some more. The female lion- well, you get the point.

Now, this is where my mother and I disagree. I said that they have learned a lot about making movies since 1958. My mother says that it's just because we kids have no attention span. I think it has nothing to do with attention spans, but rather the conduction of information. If you want to convey that the lions roar at each other for quite some time, you have a shot of each of the lions roaring followed by a wide shot of both lions roaring with the sun in the background. Dissolve to later where the sun is lower on the horizon. Cut back to the couple in the jeep and start the dialogue of them giving up. Seriously, a 5 minute scene from 1958 consisting of at least a dozen straight back-and-forth cuts would today be replaced with 30 seconds, 3 cuts and a dissolve.

And it's not that I'm uninterested in what is happening, but rather that the marvel of on-location cinema is no longer wonderous on its own. It is much the same way a portrait is neat, but no longer compelling in this day and age. Art has progressed past the marvel of simple replication.

Though I wonder if perhaps one day children will scoff at the backwardness of the films of my day. They almost certainly will, and I will almost certainly defend my time.

Sadness

I was going to write something depressing, but I'm listening to KC and the Sunshine Band and I can't focus well enough on being upset to blog about it.

So, instead, I will tell you that music is the ultimate emotional narcotic. The trick is knowing how to use it to direct your emotions forward or backward.

I think I'll need double ska soon.

Coordination

I have no brain-girl coordination.