Dating/Relationships

Disclaimer: While this is a posting about dating it will not be a whiny “my life sucks because I’m single” kind of deal. It’s not going to be a look back on things that have failed. It’s just going to be a set of observations. 

First dates suck. It’s like an audition to see if the person is going to be the right fit for you. Having done enough music auditions, I know exactly how it feels to feel like you’re on display, having every bit of yourself being quickly analyzed by someone else. The main difference between a music audition and a first date (besides one being for a job and the other for a potential relationship), is that for a music audition you know exactly what to expect in terms of the things you’ll have to “perform”. First dates are all improvisation. 

You never know what the next topic is going to be when you’re on a date. You don’t know if the other person is going to like what you’re saying, how awkward it’s going to feel (and let’s be honest a lot of first dates are amazingly awkward), or how well the other person is going to open up to you. 

If you do happen to make it past the first date, then comes the period of time where you’re “dating” someone, but not “in a relationship”. This period of time has always felt like a bit of a grey area. The best comparison I can come up with is that it’s like an extended test drive of a car. You take it for a spin, try it out for a while, and then decide if it’s actually what you want or not. If you’re lucky, you’ve found someone that you actually want to start something serious with. If you’re not, you go back to the drawing board and try again later.

An actual relationship is a whole other thing in and of itself. It has different “rules”, different expectations, and different outcomes than just dating. It’s a step up in many different ways from dating. You end up putting more into it, and in return you get more out of it. Along with that though is the fact that if things end when you’re just dating, it isn’t nearly as bad as when things end after a relationship. By putting more in, you stand to lose more in the end, but at the same time you could gain a whole lot more if it all works out.

In the end relationships are tricky. There’s no set way to approach them, there’s no set way to start one. Most of the time you just luck into it, and then you work your hardest to keep it going. The thing is, when it’s right you never feel like it’s work. You never feel like you’re having to do anything particularly special for that other person. You just do what feels right with them and it works out. So when you do find that person, enjoy every moment of it, because you truly are lucky.

The Sequel That Wouldn't Die

How many Call of Duty games will we see before the franchise folds? How many different Halo games can there be? Even referring back to an earlier post (therssfeeds.blogspot.com/2011/02/who-can-catch-em-all-anymore-theres-too.html), the Pokémon franchise just refuses to quit. 

I get that there are certain franchises that have a story to tell and can’t fit it all into one game. I also get that the company executives want to get the most money they can out of something that is a proven success. It’s good business for them to do so and they’d be dumb not to, but sometimes enough is enough. You can only take an idea so far before it just becomes...old hat. 

You can’t sell the same thing with just minor improvements or changes either. Oh look you now have two wrist blades in Assassin's Creed 2 instead of just one. Look we added a new texture to this map, we can totally resell it as new now! That just doesn’t cut it, and yet it still happens. 

This holds true for anything artistic though. If we look at the movie industry they fall prey to the same problems. There are so many times that a movie series just needs to be ended. The Fast and the Furious movies, the Land Before Time series (of which there are thirteen movies and one TV series), or the Friday the 13th franchise which has twelve now, are all movie series that have just been milked for all they’re worth. They’re not even quality movies anymore. The Land Before Time was an iconic movie of my childhood (the original being released in 1988) and to think that there are now twelve other movies under that umbrella is just depressing. 

Stagnation kills when it comes to the creative field of work. If you look at some of the bands that have been around for a long time, you’ll notice an evolution in their sound. This comes from both the maturing of the artists as they age, as well as the changes in tastes of the majority of the listening base. 

If you don’t evolve as a franchise you’ll get looked over and eventually left in the dust. The worst thing that can happen to you is for people to think “Oh, I’ve already experienced the previous iterations of this...I don’t need to get/see the new one”.

It does take a certain amount of guts to abandon a system that was a proven way to make money and just say “We’re going to change pretty much everything”. To me the best example of a company doing just that was the Mass Effect series. Between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 the development team listened to many of the things that the fanbase was saying and did a major overhaul of the interface of the game. They changed some of the combat, streamlined the use of extra things, and just built on the successes they’d had in the first game. It’s great to see that there’s a company out there who really does take into consideration what the fans are saying. 

In doing so they created a game that was not only a sequel, but something that felt like a totally fresh game that just continued the storyline from its predecessor. 

Snow Day

I used to live for snow days when I was a kid. I would do all the superstitious things, like wearing your pajamas inside out, in order to make that blessed event come true. Sadly it didn’t happen very often, but when it did, it was glorious. A snow day was like a sick day, but instead of being cooped up by the house you had the freedom to go outside.

Logically, if it’s a snow day there must be copious amounts of snow on the ground. This makes for fantastic childhood fun. I would go out with my friends and build snow forts, have snowball fights, go sledding, or just act like a general goof. After we’d finished doing that we’d go inside, enjoy a nice cup of hot chocolate, and then sit down to play some video games. 

With today’s youth though, it seems they skip right to that last part. After sleeping in they sit down in front of their large screen TV and just play video games all day. They don’t have their friends over to play, they just are there by themselves in front of the screen. Sure they have the in game audio chatting, but that doesn’t have the same effect as actually having your friend right next to you, looking at your screen to figure out where you are (GoldenEye was one of the best games ever).

Even during the summer it seems like kids don’t want to go outside and play like they used to. I remember going swimming almost every day during the summer at one of the community pools in my town. If I wasn’t doing that I was outside playing with my best friend until well after dark, just running around and exploring the world. Sure I’d stay in and watch TV sometimes, but more often then not we were just out playing. 

I don’t see that as much anymore. Maybe it’s now where I live (going from the suburban to more urban setting), maybe I just don’t notice those things anymore, or maybe it really is that change from the outdoor explorers to that of XBOX Live talkers. 

That’s not to say that I haven’t changed as well. I find myself on my computer a lot more and enjoying the things outside a lot less. I play video games more often then I go for a walk in the park, I sit listening to music more often then I go for a bike ride, and I haven’t been swimming on a regular basis in a few years. 

Technology is an amazing thing. It’s provided people with an amazing resource in terms of being able to keep in touch with people across the world (hello readers in Brazil, England, Bulgaria, Canada). It’s provided amazing medical innovations. It’s made the world better in many many different ways. 

Let’s just make sure that we still take the time to take our eyes off the computer screen or TV and go outside. Let’s show the kids of the next generation how it’s done.

Object Permanence and Self Awareness

Somewhere between 8 and 12 months after being born, human babies usually gain the understanding of something called “Object Permanence”. The idea behind this is that, before this stage of development if an object is taken out of the field of view of a baby, that object would cease to exist.

Being slightly older than 8 months, I feel it’s safe to say that all the people I know have the concept of “Object Permanence” down. I know that my keys still exist, even if I can’t find them right away. Something I find myself thinking about sometimes though is not just objects, but people. Sure I know that they still exist when I’m not around them, but it’s interesting to actually think about how they are perceiving the world. They’re off doing their own thing, having their own experiences throughout the day, and probably aren’t giving a second thought to what it is that others are doing. 

We know that everyone is experiencing the world in mostly the same way as everyone else, but when you apply that thought to people who are “larger than life” (celebrities, famous company owners, politicians), it’s refreshing to have that commonality. It’s also interesting to think about how even the people you interact with daily perceive things. 

When I was younger, I would think about how people perceive the world, and what was common/uncommon in different people’s day to day lives. When I thought about the perception of people, it led me to some strange things. For instance, to me John is a normal fixture in my day, but to John I’m a normal part of his day. I’m used to seeing John walk about, talk to people, interact with objects and the like. You don’t see yourself for most of the day though, and while you may be doing many of the same things, I found that I wasn’t thinking of myself like that. 

This lead me to start thinking more and more about how my everyday actions were being viewed by other people. How my face was a common thing for people to see on a day to day basis. Basically thinking about what I was doing during the day, but trying to truly make it from a third person point of view. A few times while I was doing this, particularly on long rides on buses, I really started to be able to view myself in this way. 

In retrospect I realized I was having minor out of body experiences. It’s been years though since that has happened, and I couldn’t replicate it to save my life. I just remember closing my eyes and really being able to see myself and how I could be viewed by other people. There were no big religious revelations, there were no moments of depression or euphoria, just a sense of awareness of what was going on around me. 

I’m not sure that it’s not something I didn’t just imagine, or if it was just a dream (it’s very possible it was), but those few times it happened are intriguing to say the least. The things I took away from it I feel are still very important. Know that everyone sees you the same way that you see them, but at the same time they don’t see everything you do the same way you see those actions. Also remember that even if the person is rich, poor, famous, unknown, normal, or just a tad on the crazy side, that they experience life the exact same way you do.

Unless they’re on drugs. But that’s a whole other ballgame.

Blogger Disclaimer: Blog written at 4AM after inability to fall asleep. Blog may not make sense.

Owwww

I have a massive headache tonight, so I apologize to any who come expecting a blog posting today (all three of you who subscribe). More tomorrow...I hope.

Aggressive Driving

While I may not be the perfect driver, I like to think I’m pretty good and pretty safe. One of the nice parts about living where I do, is that I don’t have to worry about driving to work. Walking to and from work gives me time to think and time to decompress after a long day. 

When I was driving around town with more regularity, I noticed a few things that just made no sense to me. Other drivers are way more aggressive, and are particularly dangerous when snow hits. Many seem to just try to power through the slippery conditions, relying on their cars to take care of the rest. 

It’s also become apparent that drivers here have little regard for people who ride bicycles. Being somebody who’s been both a driver and a biker (and I’m not the only one I know), it’s kind of crazy to see the way that biker’s are treated, particularly on some of the side streets. I’ll admit it’s not the smartest of ideas for a biker to be on the street of a heavily traveled road, but at the same time drivers need to be aware of who’s out on the street. 

Many of you who read this blog I’m sure are not these kinds of offenders, so I know I’m preaching to the choir in this case. Nonetheless I felt like it had to be said. I’ve never been an aggressive driver. I’ve never felt the need to make a “Pittsburg Left” (a particularly dangerous driving maneuver for those not used to it), and I know that I should take my foot off the gas when my car hits an ice patch or starts to hydroplane. 

Being an aggressive driver doesn’t do anything for you. Laying hard on the accelerator makes you burn more gas, hard on the breaks wears them out faster, weaving in and out of traffic is just plain dangerous, and none of it gets you from point A to point B any faster. Even over a 130 mile journey, where you average 75 MPH vs 65 MPH, you only shave off an extra 16 minutes off your originally 2 hour trip. Even going 90 MPH you shave a half hour off your time, but that’s if you average 90 MPH (and don’t get busted by the cops).

In the end it’s really up to you as to how you drive, just don’t come to me when your knee deep in tickets, or have your car wrapped around a phone pole.

...Aggressnif (you know who you are)

Death of a Language

I’m no writer. I do, on occasion, put one word after another in a semi-coherent manner and then post them for other people to read. I’m just no writer.

Fortunately for me, this blog doesn’t really have to contain a plot. This blog doesn’t have to have a deep meaning behind it. It’s a dialog. If you were to ask me about these topics that I’ve posted about, you’d probably end up hearing many of the same things. 

I have to blame one of my friends for this (and they shall remain nameless), but I recently started watching “Californication”. An interesting point was made by the show about blogs in general, mainly how they are adding to a technological dumb-down of our society. 

I’m not sure I quite agree with that view point, but at the same time see the validity in it. In a cyber world of “lol”, “brb”, and the death of capital letters, the tweet, the text, and the IM seem to be in command. I’m not a pillar of perfection, I fall into this category as well, but I’m not sure how I feel about it.

My last semester in school I took a course called “Survey of Forms: Fiction”, where we looked at short stories, collections of writings, and wrote our own. I never wrote the next great story. I didn’t write something that was going to be completely riveting and that nobody could put down. What I found I was best at was writing dialog. I could write a conversation that would feel like it was actually something people would be saying. 

Is the world of the sound bite giving way to the world of the tweet? We are already a society with such a short attention span we can’t listen to one thing for more than 30 seconds. Are we now becoming a society that can’t read more than 140 characters at a time? Are we becoming a society so lazy that we can’t take the extra nanosecond it takes to type “you” as opposed to “u”? 

I regularly come across posts where people are mixing “to”, “too” and “two”, or “there”, “they’re” and “their”. With this change in mindset we may as well just have one version of the word that fits all three uses, since nobody seems to care which one they use. For that matter instead of letters we could just use “2” for all three forms and just start to phase letters out altogether. 

As I said before, I’m not a perfect writer. I am well aware that my grammar isn’t the best at times and my spelling is horrible (thank you spellchecker). However, I really fear for the day when I go to write a dialog and find myself typing a non ironic “LOL”, instead of having the character actually laugh.