Day 10: Towards Comprehensive Commitment

[Tonight I began pounding out some percolating thoughts and as I pounded they just kept pouring, so though I did my best to avoid any awfully unrelated tangents, the flow is rather haphazard, for which I apologise in advance and promise to clean up at a later date.]

“Things always get worse before they get better.”

This is one of those quotes that has been being said for so long that it’s difficult to know who to quote as having said it. Tonight I’ll pin it on Batman’s Alfred, because I just finished watching Dark Knight for the second time. It’s a dark movie, yes, though not nearly as dark as I’d remembered it, probably because I was more awake this time. A lot of people no doubt find it distasteful for its darkness and violence, and I have no problem with people avoiding films for these reasons and more.

When in doubt on whether to watch something or not, choosing not to is the more prudent choice. How many movies can you really say changed your life or even the way you think about life? If the value of a film extends no further than its duration, can it be said to be worthwhile use of that time? I suppose there is something to be said for activities in which we can shut off and ‘relax’, but a) we already have something called sleep for precisely that purpose (and our mind even keeps working then without us), and b) there’s no reason we can’t better ourselves and be entertained at the same time, through active rather than passive entertainment; oddly enough, they used to have something for this…I believe they called them “books”.

I happen to like Dark Knight, and think that the story justifies the way in which it’s told. It contains themes, motifs, and messages, and brings out these fundamentals with very compelling devices. It blackens the darkness to whiten the light, to sharpen the contrast, though I’m not saying any of the characters are perfect or even completely right in their thinking. The message of a movie doesn’t necessarily have to be correct for it to be thought-provoking and worthwhile – as long as we don’t swallow these messages wholesale. Sadly, so often viewers opt for something that is easily swallowable, not realising that it’s whispering poison sliding softly down their throats. Compelling takes chewing – rubbish, clear or covert, deserves to be spit out.

A lot of people take issue with me for being so critical of screenplay. Just enjoy it for what it is, they say. To them I would first respond that nothing is ever merely ‘what it is’; a film downloaded free from the Internet is still paid for with two irretrievable hours of your time. And such people seem not to understand just how much influence content that goes straight through our eyes or ears to our minds really has. One can’t watch influence happening.

Secondly, can I really be blamed for expecting that, where resources go in, proportionate results should come out? Do you ever think about the enormous amounts of money that go into a single feature production? Or what that money could’ve been used for elsewhere. Now, I am peace studies student, and I could easily go into how much it’s estimated it would cost to end world hunger, various types of disease, or provide education, and how those costs are far within our reach, but I won’t because I don’t like doing that and I don’t want to insult your intelligence – you know these things. As for movies I simply want to make the point that we settle, we settle so far below full potential, but we let ourselves get away with it because we’ve never seen anything even close to what we’re truly capable of – we haven’t worked that hard, ever.

And that brings me to what I really wanted to say tonight. The media industry isn’t the only area in which we’re settling, and failing, and accepting that failure. I haven’t produced any movies or sold any records yet; I can only manage my intake, but even if I were consistently wise in my entertainment choices, I’d still be wasting the resources afforded me.

I believe that of the resources granted to us, time is the most valuable one, though it’s often the one we treat the most carelessly. I waste a lot of time, and I think that herein is where the value of deadlines really lies: not only do they get us being productive, as they approach ever faster they make us conscious of just how much time we’re wasting.

Yes, I do still have those two essays hanging over me, and no, I didn’t get as much done on them today as I’d meant to. Thankfully I did do some. But as long as those unfulfilled deadlines loom large on my horizon, I can’t feel good about focusing on other things. I start to want to finish them as quickly as possible so I can enjoy life once again?

Is this a good solution? I think not. It’s rather like only enjoying a movie while you’re watching it, and never thinking about it once it’s finished: surely there’s more to be gotten out of all the hours I’ve devoted than merely a hopefully decent grade. It’s also like living for the weekend, in which you’re really only living two-sevenths of your life, if even that. I’m always going to have deadlines, and according to what I said above (which I still agree with) I will always need them. So what a shame it would be if I only enjoyed the few short periods in my life when I was actually free of deadlines. I don’t want such an un-enjoyed, un-lived life.

This means that I need to find a way to enjoy both what I want to do and what I have to do. As much as I intend to pursue a career that I naturally find enjoyable and fulfilling, there will inevitably be things I initially shy away from. At this stage that includes essays. While I love the reading and the learning, and I learn more from researching for the purpose of writing than just reading, I hate the pressure of deadlines and the difficulty of cramming these huge topics into 1500 words. But I think I’ve found a way to make the doing as meaningful as the completion, and the experience count for more in my life than a number on a semester score card (or whatever you call them).

I’ve tried to pick not the easy topics but the ones I know nothing about, like Latin American history and the sharing of power in the various institutions of the British state, so that I’d learn the most in the process. I won’t deny that I question my decisions and feel a fool when I put in far more time than a measly first-year essay would warrant. But it always turns out.

Prime consideration is not only learning but connection. One of the essays I’m working on now is about obtaining British citizenship and the debates surrounding the issue, which I chose because I had no idea what those debates were. I joked on Facebook about the irony of me researching that topic when I’ve never felt like a citizen of any state, and I took the joke a bit further within myself by musing that I’d chosen the topic so I could figure out how best I myself could become a British citizen. But that personal connection is now, in part, transferring from an ironic mental smile to affecting the actual essay content, as I’ve decided to interpret the prompt a little more creatively and let my own sentiments weigh in a little more (with proper citational support, of course!). It’s a risk, and to be honest I was planning to hold in my wild streak (it’s okay, you can laugh, and you can probably keep laughing for the next few years until something happens that cuts you off or makes you laugh harder) a bit longer, but then there’s no time like the present. We’ll see how it goes.

Regardless of the grade I’ve made it into something I care about, can learn from, and will most probably use in the future. It may take more time than if I were simply doing it to finish it (that’s one thing that sort of connects to the quote at the beginning, but astute observers will see that I clearly have not said all that I intended to when I started writing this long-winded entry), but in the long run it will be worth it. I want to be able to say all of these things about everything I do – to be able to say that about the way I spend each minute of each day.

We haven’t seen what we could accomplish if we were all in, if we were serious about fully exploiting our available resources, if we let the long-term factor into our smallest decisions. What would it look like if we were completely committed?

I want to find the answer to that for myself, and I think this Christmas season is a great time to start (again).

 

Thanks for reading this far, and I’m terribly sorry if this sounded preachy at all – I write these for myself primarily, and like I said at the start, I’ll clean this up in time. For now it’s just a collection of what my actions lead me to think about me.

And to all a good night.

Bait and Trap (Or Was It Snatch?)

Similar to what I said in my last post, I’ve been thinking about how to make this site more appealing to draw more visitors. I was thinking of what leads me to a blog. Not much, to be honest. I don’t read many blogs, which is probably a result of my poor opinion of them. In general I find blogs to be painful due to the poor grammar, boring due to the blogger writing about things I and the rest of the world have very little interest in, and distasteful because of the often cheap backgrounds and website structure. And now I see that my blog, as much as I try to avoid calling it that, basically falls under the above description. I most fervently hope I can at least avoid the first faux pas, however. I’ll take a properly written boring blog over a grammatically heinous moderately intriguing piece any day. Is that true? I suppose it depends on how far ‘moderately intriguing’ can stretch. My point is, get the grammar right, folks. I can bear terrible structure and irrelevant content. Just please be a little more careful with the easy stuff. There’s no excuse. You’re doing a bad job of representing yourself to the public, no matter how much you swear that no one cares. I judge you when you use poor grammar, that’s why I joined a Facebook group saying just that. See, I’m an activist for positive change. Ha. As if joining groups changes anything. Remember that.

So now all of you will be jumping on my every typo, right? That’s the idea. I figure if I ask you guys to let me know of any mistakes in my writing you’ll feel like I’m using you and won’t do it, but if I give you the opportunity to prove me a hypocritical bastard, well, that’s just too juicy to pass up, isn’t it? That’s what I should’ve done in high school to get decent peer editing – claim my grammar was perfect, my flow was excellent, and my conclusions impeccable. Ever get the feeling your fellow students didn’t really care about your essay or what grade you got? News flash: they didn’t. Except in terms of how the comparison with their grade made them feel.

That reminds me of Zoolander, which I watched last night, like I said before. There’s a funny bit involving the phrase “Earth to…” which I would say is probably the funniest part of the movie. Yeah, it’s not too funny. I was disappointed. It wasn’t worth my time. So few movies are, don’t you think? One of these days I’ll probably put out some really harsh movie reviews just to let out steam and increase this load of content not getting read.

I think the main thing is that I’m just sick of Ben Stiller. I think I was sick of him the first movie I saw him in. I just don’t find him funny.

But that’s enough on that. I accomplished my grammar goal. My primary objective is to discover what makes a blog appealing, even return-worthy, and how I can utilize that to gain followers and make money. Muahahaha.

Kidding. I would like to make money, and I will shamelessly flaunt ads to do so (barring those Evony travesties), but this isn’t about gaining followers. I would like to someday be able to call it a community of creators and appreciators, so I need to spend time thinking about how to get to that point.

I just read a blog article entitled “The Top 10 Snipers in History” or something along those lines. I saw it in some list on WordPress and clicked on it because I’m very interested in snipers. So what my articles need are captivating titles. They also need relevant and popular tags so that they’ll show up in searches. I would say that so far I’m succeeding in these two things. What’s left is to enlarge my content stash.

And how to keep readers here once they arrive? Well, interesting articles, for one. That’s so subjective. In the future I may write to please readers – when I actually have readers – but for now I’m sticking with what interests and pleases and satisfies me (as far as content and style). I had another thought earlier. The blog has to do something for the reader. If I’m putting out wonderful works of literature and especially poetry, that’s good enough on its own because readers will be inspired by the works and attempt to liberate their own creativity, or simply bask in the beauty. But I’m not. I hope to, but I’m not currently. So I need to help you out somehow to motivate you to return here the next time you’re in need. Good but not great prose needs practicality – the interest keeps you reading, the help brings you back.

Something like a guide to further information. That would be the simplest, probably. That list of snipers would’ve been greatly enhanced by links to websites with more information, which I’m sure exist because the author definitely wasn’t writing off the top of his head. I haven’t really written any information articles yet – but then again all my posts are information to a certain degree. So I should consider offering links for further enlightenment. It’ll at least draw the frantically procrastinating middle schoolers.

DIY (not DUI) blogs seem to be fairly popular. So I might want to consider putting that sort of slant on some of my articles. Surely I have plenty I could teach how to do. Mm…like fruit revolutions, for example. I’ve been meaning to make a video about that and post it on Youtube.

Speaking of videos, I also thought of making a video on how to get a job in Japan, a detailed version of Andy’s which I embedded in another post, put it on Youtube as a reply to said video, and include a link to this blog in that description. That would surely draw a few bored surfers. Andy has a pretty sizeable fan base which I can take advantage of (I mean that in the most parasitic way possible).

Until then, I guess I won’t be seeing you, because you haven’t yet arrived, but you will.

-Brad