Eventually We'll All Have Lost Completely Everything We've Been

Last night, I ended up drinking in the hot tub with my two younger brothers and a few of their friends. It was totally unexpected. I came home around 9pm from collecting plant samples for a university biology course this fall, expecting to kill the rest of my Saturday night watching a movie in bed or something. Instead, I walked into my room to find my brother and 2 friends drinking Burt Reynolds's, and things just sort of escalated from there.

Alcohol is a hell of a drug. For all its vices and virtues, at the very least you can usually count on it to grease the wheels and make something interesting happen. One way it does this is making people open up and talk about topics they'd normally steer clear of.

My brother's friend started talking about how she'd been asked out to the movies that night by a certain guy, but turned the guy down. She told him she had to work til 9 and had to get up in the morning, but she ended up drinking in our hot tub til all hours and felt kind of guilty about her hypocrisy. I hazarded a guess that the guy wasn't that cool, fun, or attractive, and she didn't really want to go out with him very badly in the first place.

The girls in the tub rushed to this guy's defense, all quick to say what a nice guy he is. He's such a nice guy,  you guys are being mean. My brother chimed in to tell me how right I was. He described the guy as "if someone wanted to be a Hutterite, but wasn't a Hutterite. Skinny, old farmer clothes, good manners, and totally socially inept."

I was right. This guy, by all accounts, was a real sweetheart and probably deserved a date with this girl. But the proof was in the pudding. She blew him off, was prepared to go home to bed, but came right over without hesitation when a hot tub get-together with a bunch of fun, cool, good-looking people was  presented. I brought this up, and all the guys heartily agreed with me. A huge percentage of nice guys are nice because that's the only way they can get any attention at all; they have little else going for them. But the attention that they get is rarely the kind they want. "As a guy, you're never really going to nice your way into anything", I said.

That was the line that really set one girl off. "You know Michael," she snapped indignantly, "one day, a nice guy is going to trump you in a big way, and you'll be left in the dust." At the time, I thought she was wrong but didn't want to fight about it, so I went to my classic argument-defusing line: "You know what? Maybe you're right" and moved on to something else.

I thought about it more later, and found that maybe there was an element of truth in what she said. I stand by my statement that you can't nice your way into anything with a girl, but what if there was a guy with the complete package? What if a guy came along who was confident, funny, good-looking, didn't give a fuck, and didn't take shit from anyone, but who could also pull off the flowers and cute movie dates and telling her she's pretty, without one side compromising the other? That would be one guy who could get any girl he wanted.

I used to be a nice guy in the worst way. It didn't work very well, but it's not like it didn't work at all. When it did work, it was great because it was based on genuine care and feelings. But over the past few years, I've changed and I'm not that nice guy anymore. I've become more focussed on being confident and true to myself and what I want. People say girls love jerks, and they're right, but they don't love them because they're jerks. Jerks have attractive qualities, like confidence and not taking shit from people, that nice guys often lack. Imagine if you took a jerk, and then made him not a jerk. You'd have the perfect guy.

I don't know where to go with this. Examining myself, I see that I've become a jerk in a lot of ways. Its opened up so many new opportunities with new girls, but its also burned bridges with girls I care about.   Will I ever get the balance right? Is it right to be deliberately screwing around with who I am? Am I doing this for the right reasons? What's going to happen if I continue down this path?

36 Days

I have this thing I do. I make the titles of my blog posts out of song titles or lyrics. I'll start out with an idea of what I'm going to write about, then try to think of a song that captures it.

This post is about how long it is until I go back to school. I started thinking about songs to fit the theme of a set amount of time. The first one I came up with was 36 Days, an old school Hawk Nelson song that I like to cover on voice and keyboard. I opened up iCal and counted the days one by one. It's exactly 36 days until the eve of the first day of classes. 36 Days from now, I'll be curled up in my bed in my familiar apartment dorm room, my sheets freshly washed, my class schedule on the wall, my clothes probably not yet fully unpacked. Ready to hurl myself headlong into what will hopefully be my final year of undergrad. 36 Days it is.

It's going to be a good year. I know this. I'm extremely excited, because this year is going to be unlike any year to come before it. Sure, I'll be surrounded by my apartment bros again, a group of guys who I can get down with and who have my back no matter what. Sure, I'll be free of the crushing weight of being around my family for long periods of time, able to act like a responsible and independent adult capable of making his own decisions. Sure, I'll have a better body and more motivation to improve it, due to my newfound addictions to healthy eating, and to picking things up and putting them down. But these things aren't what will truly set this year apart. This year is different because I have a goal.

I've never really had a goal in my life, I mean really had a goal. There have been times when I've set goals like "high marks" or "better social life", but those aren't all-encompassing goals by which I could govern my entire set of behaviors. I'll bet you're wondering what this goal of mine is. Here it is: I'm going to dental school, bitches.

Did that come out of nowhere? It did for me too. I was sitting down in my room one day, and Dad came in asking me if I was studying for anything this summer.
I asked if there was anything in particular he wanted me to be studying for.
He replied that I was really wandering around with my career choice. I wanted to be a doctor, but then not so much, or maybe I should study more genetics because that's kind of cool, or maybe not, or maybe I should just finish my degree and see what comes up, or maybe not, but not really doing anything. He said in 10 years, I might look back and kick myself, wishing that I had just done something and gone somewhere.
I said maybe you're right, but what should I do?
He said he never wants to tell me what to do, and supports whatever reasonable choice I make, but he recommends I be a dentist like him. He said I'd be very good at it, and I would enjoy it. It's much easier than being a doctor and you make more money.
I said something about it not being all about money.
He asked me to guess how much he pays the first year dentist that works 2 days a week at his office.
I don't know dad, how much?
$5000 a month. Not bad hey? That could be you in 5 years. Working 4 days a week, making 120 grand a year.

It was the money part that really hooked me. It was like he looked inside my head and pulled out a set of words that I'd been struggling to form, or maybe looking for permission to think. This is them, paraphrased:

"There are things you want to do with your life, right? You like traveling. You like hockey and music and concerts and wakeboarding and all that stuff. Well, there are a select few types of training that will allow you to make enough money to buy those things, and give you time to enjoy them. Dentistry has been really good to me, and I really think it would be good to you too."

This was paradigm shifting. All your life, you're told to do something you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. What a load of shit. No one is going to pay me to do the things I love. It's just not going to happen, that's not the way the real world works. The best case scenario is getting paid for something I like and that I'm good at, and using that to get the things I love. From a practical and realist worldview, dentistry is a perfect fit.

Now, I'm indescribably excited. I've got motivation to study my ass off. The GPA benchmark I've got to hit is 3.8, the median GPA of accepted dental students at U of A last year. My GPA right now is 3.7. Even if I'm not able to pull it up and get into U of A, it's more than good enough to get into a whole bunch of American schools. I'm legitimately shooting for 4.0 this year. It will take some sacrifices, but I'll be the first to admit that I slacked off for long periods these past two years in Biology. Now that I have my goal, I'll stay focussed in every class. I'll do every reading, and study my class notes for an hour or two every day. This is totally, completely doable, and I'm going to prove it.

Best of all, now that my goal has given me an exact framework of how hard I have to work at school, whatever is left over is truly my own. I can let loose on friday and saturday nights totally uninhibited by guilt or anything else. As long as I've got my goal well covered, I can fill in the cracks with whatever I want. I don't have to worry about undergrad degree requirements of independent research projects or anything like that. I can take dental prereq's, other cool shit that I like, and peace out to University of Southern California next fall. How unbelievably fucking awesome is that?!?

36 days until this all starts going down.

Boy Moves To A New Town With Optimistic Outlook

Vegreville feels much smaller than it used to.

I've been back in town for less than a week, and I'm already starting to feel cooped up. I rollerbladed around the entire town last night. It took a depressingly short time, and I didn't find anything that interested me. I don't really have any friends here. My family is starting to get on my nerves. The whole place feels empty, stalled, a sort of hyperbolic time chamber where I wait for school to start again. For the first summer since highschool graduation, living at home and working in Vegreville doesn't feel like a good fit.

Unfortunately, it's too good a deal to pass up. Mom and Dad's roof over my head, Mom and Dad's food in the fridge, all of it for free. A full-time job outdoors with an extremely generous boss, who unquestioningly gives me time off whenever I need it, and pays me probably more than he should. A part time job where half my shift is standing around twirling a whistle, and the other half is sitting in an office surfing reddit on my phone. If a guy wants to make money over the summer, this is the way to do it. I don't even know what I'd do as an alternative summer situation, as this has become the default, but you can be sure that if this keeps up, I'll be looking for next year.

In the meantime, instead of sulking about being cooped up and not having friends in town, I've undertaken a project. When I got back from Florida, I noticed something in the vacation pictures: I was fat. I was noticeably, off-puttingly fat, and I needed to do something about it.

Dad had recently lost a lot of weight using Fitbit, a pedometer that syncs to an iPhone app where you record all the food you eat and activities you do. It tracks how many calories you burn and how many you eat, and puts it all in front of you to see. I got one too, and started the 500 calorie deficit per day program.

The first few weeks were tough. I couldn't get to sleep at night. I'd lay awake, craving fatty, meaty, starchy foods. Ginger beef. Steak. Pizza. Chicken wings. Burgers. Noodles. I was hungry all day, every day, even right after meals. Despite all this, I stuck with it and out-performed my program. I got my intake down to under 1500 calories a day. Coupled with my outdoor job burning ~3000 calories a day, as well as working out for at least an hour every evening, I started to shed pounds. Fast. I lost 12 pounds in 3 weeks. The whole family got into it, and we all started working out and watching what we ate. We even put in a kick-ass brand new home gym in our basement!

As I researched more about the topic of weight loss, I quickly discovered that while running a 2000+ cal/day deficit would drop the pounds fast, it was not a healthy way to go about it. I found that the maximum daily calorie deficit for cutting body fat, without losing muscle tissue as well, is a mere 800 cal/day. Since I'd been eating dramatically less than that for the previous month or so, I now feel like I'm feasting like a king! I fill up on lean meats, fiber, yogourt, vegetables, protein shakes, etc. No more empty starches or fats, like bread, white noodles, pizza, or pop. Feels good man!

I already feel so much lighter, quicker, more confident, healthier, and stronger. I can fit into some of my old pants again. Most of all, I'm looking sexier than I have in years, and it's only been a month! At the beginning of May, I was at 23% body fat. As of today, I'm at 15.8%. My goal is to be at 10% by the beginning of July, then start building some more serious muscle.

Who knows if I'll be able to keep this up during the school year. Probably not, at least not to the same degree. But as of right now, I can't imagine going back to the way I was, and I'm only a month in! I'm excited to continue sculpting this body for the rest of my summer in this tiny town, then hit the scene in the fall with a vengeance!

A Hangover You Don't Deserve

I haven't written here in a long time, in part because I'm in university and time is at a premium, but also in part because the things in my life that need writing about are largely no longer things I can talk about publicly.

Last night, I read a reddit comment about people believing that they deserve things. They believe that if they be good and work hard, they deserve a decent job, decent house, and loving partner. That's really the Western ideal isn't it? Go to school, get a job, get married, buy what nice things you can afford, spend time with your kids, retire, find a hobby, get old, and you're done. It sounds nice. The system seems to be set up in such a way that facilitates the largest proportion of people being able to accomplish this.

I have nothing against this ideal. People value what they value. A whole lot of people value that school-job-family-stability ideal, and for good reason. It seems like a totally worthwhile thing to pursue. If nothing else, there are surely much worse things to value than safety, security, and an attractive partner.

What I have a problem with, and what I found myself agreeing with the reddit commenter on, is the very idea of deserving something. The idea that if one does good and works hard then one deserves something good in return, or if one is lazy and kind of a dick then one deserves bad outcomes, is based on the antiquated idea of an omniscient higher power that directly enforces justice on earth.

This isn't to say that I don't believe in God, or don't believe in morality, because I do. What I don't believe is that morality is directly enforced on earth in response to an individual person's actions. The concept of an afterlife in which everyone gets their just deserts is irrelevant to the point I'm trying to explain. This isn't only about morality.

For example, I don't believe that anything says a person who puts hours into his resume and sends out hundreds of copies deserves to find his dream job more than someone who sends out 10. I don't believe that the guy who goes to the gym and runs a mile every day deserves a better body and a hotter girlfriend than the guy who does 25 pushups a day. I don't believe that the guy who studies 4 hours a day deserves a better mark than the guy who studies an hour or two a week. Of course, these nice things all seem more likely to happen for the motivated guy who puts in the effort, and in most cases, they probably are. There are actions and there are predictable consequences, but there is not a universal justice that makes sure, or even should make sure, they always turn out the way they are "supposed to".

You don't deserve anything. I don't deserve anything. If you are reading this on a computer, we are two of the luckiest people on the planet to be born into a country where we not only have all our basic needs looked after practically all the time, but have a free education and affordable creature comforts. We don't deserve any of these things, nobody does. If we want more of these things, we can work for them and get them, but we still don't deserve them. Nobody deserves anything, because in this life, there is no such thing as deserving something. You can get away with stealing and hurting people, if you're good at it. You can be a caring, interesting, fit, attractive person your whole life and never fall in love. You can put 8 years of your life into a Master's degree, and have to work at Starbucks to pay the rent in your 1-bedroom apartment. You can be a lazy piece of shit, and be handed a high-paying job because you hung out with the right guy in highschool.

I didn't deserve this study break, but I took it. I'll probably suffer the consequences tomorrow, or maybe I won't. More than anyone else, I am in control of what happens to me. If I bomb my Organic Chemistry final, maybe I should have studied more. But, just as plausibly, it could be an easy test and I could do great, and it wouldn't have anything to do with how much I studied or didn't.

There are actions, and there are predictable consequences, but even if I cause something good through my actions, that doesn't mean I deserved it.

We Are Midnight

I stay up later than I should. I pay for it incrementally every morning, a grumpy groggy shell for at least a couple of hours. Why do I do this?

It's not because I'm not tired. In fact, I'm usually mentally exhausted by 11:00 pm. I've never had any trouble falling asleep at night, not since 7-year-old Michael gave up his nightlight. I have the most comfortable bed in the world, and when I finally lay my head down, I'm out in 15 minutes max. It's usually a lot less.

I think the reason I stay up is because I know that I've failed to make the most of the past day. Maybe staying up is a desperate attempt to squeeze one last little bit of meaning, fulfillment, or happiness out of this, one of my tragically few days on earth. Maybe if I stay up just a little bit longer, someone will text me or facebook me. Maybe I'll stumble on a picture that makes me laugh. Maybe I'll read a reddit post that makes me think, or consider something I've never considered before. Maybe an old friend will show up at my door, and I'll be whisked away from this lonely room on a midnight adventure.

I don't hate my life like I did once. It's probably never been better. But late at night, when my thoughts start to wander, all I see is a life that revolves around forcibly stuffing my brain with things I don't really care about.

Is this the way of the world?

"We are midnight, on a fast ride

Held a ticket in our hands for anywhere
Out of our minds, thought we could fly
As the morning comes we start to disappear."

Thanks for Nothing, Mayday Parade

On the trip from Edmonton back to Vegreville on new years morning, I listened to the new Mayday Parade album. My attention span has been drastically shortened by the internet age of instant gratification to the point that I can barely read books anymore, and unfortunately listening to a full album end to end is becoming a rarity for me these days. My rating of this one: 7 out of 10.

That night, I went out to the garage to try to write some music. I settled in at the piano, picked up a pen, and started scribbling on the back of an old lyric sheet for Hedley's "Old School". I wrote a whole song pretty much start to finish, without much planning or changing things along the way. It came out sounding very Mayday Parade. Personally, I don't like it that much. But it's a song that I wrote in the spirit of the moment that I think captures the way I was feeling quite well.

Lyrics below, music soon to follow. Let me know what you think.

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"Thanks for Nothing, Mayday Parade"

Pack my life up in the back of my car

It doesn’t weigh much. The only thing that’s there

Is the weight of the memories that make us who we are.

I don’t have many, but lately I don’t care. Because...

I live at least two lies, and I’m making my way between them.

There’s an archive in my closet of the pieces that fall away.

I try to buy the perfect clothes, and hang them up for exhibition.

But I never wear them. No, I never wear them anyway.

15 bucks an hour is the Good Doctor’s prescription.

Guess it’s working, cause I don’t feel ill.

But I feel down and I feel out, and I have got to figure out

what turned a boy into a man in this position.

I’ve got nothing to say. It’s not like I’m not okay, but...

I live at least two lies, and I’m making my way between them.

There’s an archive in my closet of the pieces that fall away.

I try to buy the perfect clothes, and hang them up for exhibition.

But I never wear them. No, I never wear them...

Bring it on home, bring it on home, bring it on home now.

Bring it on home, bring it on home, bring it on home now.

Bring it on home, bring it on home, bring it on home now.

Bring it on home, bring it on home, bring it on home now.

(I’m an airplane with an anchor, I’m a cancer in remission,

I’m a warrior in battle without any ammunition.

I’m a lawyer, I’m a liar, I’m a sleasy politician,

I’m a celebrated future man that lives in contradiction.)

I live at least two lies, and I’m making my way between them.

There’s an archive in my closet of the pieces that fall away.

I try to buy the perfect clothes, and hang them up for exhibition.

But I never wear them. No, I never wear them anyway.

Maybe it's not my weekend, but it's gonna be my year.

Happy new year! For my new years celebration, I watched the Canada vs. USA World Junior game, ate too much stuffed crust pizza and chips with salsa con queso, and got wasted while playing Mario Party 7 and 007: Nightfire on Gamecube with 4 other dudes. What did you do?

When I made my New Years plans, I was upset at how lame they were. New Years, I thought, should be spent at an awesome party with lots of people (read: lots of girls) dancing, drinking, and generally being as social as possible. There should be a kiss at midnight. It should be the opposite of staying in and playing old video games with a few other guys.

Looking back at the night, I'm still think it was pretty lame in principle, but I'm not upset about it anymore. Sure, I definitely could have made much more of one of the calendar's cardinal party nights. But unlike in the past, I recognize that not doing so was a result of my own lack of initiative, and not some innate social failing. I could have gone out, been social, kissed at midnight, and partied the night away if I'd made an effort to, and I know that I'd have kicked ass doing it. Since I don't have to prove that to myself anymore, I can accept the night the way it happened. I rang in the new year surrounded by friends, and I had a great time. That's more than a lot of people can say.

I plan to go twice as hard at the first King's party this term to make up for it.