Totally Worth It

My dad is into snowmobiling. He is into snowmobiling in the way I am into Pokemon. He subscribes to about 4583720 different snowmobiling magazines, has two nice mountain sleds which he likes to customize and modify, and just upgraded his enclosed 5-sled trailer to a massive all-aluminum monstrosity. The man loves his snowmobiling.

Now don't get me wrong, I like snowmobiling too. It's fun. However, in my opinion, it is more trouble than it's worth. Take the amount of work it takes to buy and maintain nice equipment, multiply by the amount of work it takes to pack and load it all up, integrate by the 13 hour drive to and from the mountains. While I'll admit throwing a snowmobile around powder bowls and powering up 45-degree, 100-foot hills is great fun, it's not worth it to me. It gets boring too quickly. It's just too much work, and it's not even close actually. Dad, on the other hand, would probably make the trip every weekend, or every day if he could.

This echoes my opinion of several of dad's hobbies. Flying a plane is kind of cool, but not even close to worth the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars' worth of training required. Motorcycle trips are fun, but the exhilarating curves are too few and far between to be worth the hours of cold, straight, boring highway it takes to get to them. Fancy food is nice, but it's not worth the entire afternoon shot by shopping, cooking, and cleaning. As with snowmobiling, Dad probably thinks I'm crazy, and would pour countless more hours into these pastimes if given the chance.

What causes this disparity of values of work vs. fun? Is it just because Dad has a better work ethic than me, and doesn't attach as much inherent negative value to his hobbies' prep work? I used to think so, because he definitely has a better work ethic than me. But I changed my mind when I extended my thinking to one of my brother's favorite hobbies: paintball. My brother thinks nothing of the huge amounts of prep work and clean up associated with paintball, and he's definitely lazier than me.

There are all kinds of inspirational quotes saying something along the lines of "anything worth doing is hard work", and I don't disagree with that. But many things NOT worth doing are hard work too, and everyone seems to have a different set of values to determine what is too much work, and what is totally worth it. From now on, those will be my official designations. I will label activities or pursuits either "too much work" or "totally worth it".

Here are a few examples:

TOO MUCH WORK:

-Snowmobiling

-Flying

-Motorcycling

-Cooking fancy dinners

-Paintballing

-IV Breeding Pokemon

-Jazz

TOTALLY WORTH IT:

-A decent sandwich

-Playing hockey

-EV training Pokemon

-Digging snow caves

-Playing an instrument well

-Waterskiing or wakeboarding

-Blogging

All We've Ever Had is Time

There's this mentally handicapped guy that goes to my school. We are friends, though I'm not 100% sure he knows my name. Let's call him Doug (not his real name). He's not severely handicapped; he's independent enough that at first I thought he was just kind of weird.

Doug has the absolute definition of a one-track mind. The only thing, and I mean literally the only thing he ever talks about, is how time flies. Every single conversation we've had, every single conversation I've overheard between him and someone else, and every conversation with him that anyone's ever mentioned revolves around the notion that "time flies". Doug's gotten real good at this conversation, goodness knows he's held it enough times. He's got four dozen euphemisms for "time flies", like "yep, it just keeps chuggin' along, just like a freight train!", or "man, ______ sure is comin' up quick, it'll be here in no time flat!". Even his little blurb below his facebook profile picture is about how time flies.

Time does fly. Doug is right, perhaps more right than I'd like to admit. I need look no further than the little paintings that past residence students have left on the stairwell walls. Each flight commemorates a floor from a given year, a bunch of identical shapes personalized with roommates' first names and last initials, and a little quote or picture.

"WWF Forever" one reads. Another has the MXPX head. Girlier ones have things like "Laurie H. and Jennifer R. BFF 2001" or "Small town girl and city slicker meet, unfortunately, in 407". These little tokens of memories mean nothing to us that call this place home right now, but they are dearly beloved to people long since grown up and moved away, not really so very long ago.

Like Doug is always quick to point out, before I know it I'll be grown up and moved away too. I'll never get these days back. Doug helps remind me that it's a crime to waste the time I've been given at King's. He helps me remember that, every time I feel like just trying to get through the week so I can sleep away the weekend. I'm older now than I've ever been, and it only gets worse.

So truly, as cliched as these words are, make the most of every day. Doug does.

This is the Sound, of the Desperation Bound

I spent last weekend in Vegreville, picking up a few lifeguarding shifts, shoring up the bank account for Christmas shopping season. The other guard, instead of turning on our mainstay radio station (91.7 The Bounce), opted in favor of a new radio station: 95.7 The Sound.

The slogan for The Sound is "Because good music is good music. Period." Every time announcer lady smugly uttered it, I felt like I was taking crazy pills. In my opinion, no one, perhaps least of all this particular radio station, has a right to say such a thing.

Firstly, what makes music "good"? In order to proclaim that "good music is good music, period", there must be a clearly defined set of empirical guidelines for judging a song's "goodness", something that clearly does not, and cannot exist. If I were to ask the jazz saxophonists in my MacEwan graduating class, the girls on 4th Floor, and my mom what makes music good, I would get distinctly different answers from each group. For example, the jazz guy would look for technical proficiency and swing feel, the girls would be looking for catchiness and danceability, my mom would be looking for family values or something.

But, you might be thinking, isn't this flawed reasoning? Don't each individual's judging criteria all boil down to simply deciding how enjoyable the music is? This is true, but it doesn't give 95.7 The Sound any more right to say that "good music is good music, period". Every kind of music, regardless of how much one person hates it, is another person's favorite, or else it wouldn't get played. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Speaking as a person with very narrow and fickle musical taste, I can at least usually understand why people love the kinds of music they love. If 95.7 The Sound played an incredibly diverse cross section of music across genre, decade, and culture, they might deserve the benefit of the doubt. But 95.7 The Sound, from what I heard of them over 2 shifts of lifeguarding, plays mostly bland, monotone, mid-tempo, un-catchy rock songs from North America over the past three decades. For 95.7 The Sound to say, repeatedly and determinedly, that "good music is good music, period", they are saying that anyone who doesn't love bland, mid-tempo rock, and absolutely nothing else, is either misguided or stupid.

It may sound like I'm hating on 95.7 The Sound's choice of songs, and I am, but that's exactly the point. They are hating on my choice of music by saying that only the music they play is any good at all, and then not playing a single song I enjoyed. Other radio stations also play very specific kinds of music, but they manage to do so without dismissing every other type of music as no good. Each to his own, so to speak. Not 95.7 The Sound.

The statement "good music is good music, period" is nonsensical. 95.7 The Sound, if for some reason you're reading this, let me suggest some new, more accurate tag lines for your illustrious radio station:

"The music our very specific audience enjoys is, in fact, the music our very specific audience enjoys. Period."

"Good music doesn't exist outside an individual's perception of it, but hey, here's some bland, mid-tempo rock! Period."

"You should feel bad about the music you listen to, because it's not what we play, and we are better judges than you because we are a radio station. You should stop listening to what you listen to and, in an attempt to feel like a part of an exclusive group that is so much cooler than all those people who listen to something other than bland, mid-tempo rock, listen to only 95.7 The Sound from now on so we can maximize our advertising revenue. Period."

Back in the Day, When I Still Had All the Answers

I've had the same email address since Grade 8, meaning I've got an inbox of 6 years' worth of email. I never deleted anything unless it was straight-up junk, just in case I needed it.

Well this week, good old general_derez@hotmail.com finally gave out and started spamming everybody, so he's got 30 days before I have to put him to sleep. I remember the afternoon Nolan and I signed up for him. We named him general_derez because I met a kid at camp whose email was captain_clink, and I thought that sounded cool, but we figured a general is better than a captain. Derez was the name of Nolan's created character on WWE: Day of Reckoning.

I'm in the process of switching over to a brand new Gmail account, a service for which I've heard nothing but solid reviews. It syncs nicely with my blogger account, but I've yet to figure out how to make it work with MSN messenger. Oh well, maybe it's time to put MSN to sleep too. There's only 2 or 3 people I talk to on there anymore, what with facebook chat and all, and as a result I'm on blogger more often than MSN these days anyway.

I imported all my 6 years' worth of mail from good old general_derez@hotmail.com, and began the process of archiving it. The deeper in I got, the more surreal the experience became. It really was a window into the mind of 15-year-old Michael, and I could see the little gears turning in my crazy 15-year-old hormonal head as I read.

I found dozens of emails between myself and a girl from Powell River BC that I met randomly at an airport in Costa Rica, and I chuckled at the junior-high problems we would vent to each other about. We were the perfect confidantes for each other; completely uninvolved in each other's drama and totally objective, but 100% on each other's side. I messaged her on facebook to see how she was doing, and it was great to reconnect.

I found dozens more between myself and my Grade 9 girlfriend, who lived an hour and a half away in Beaumont. We emailed each other almost every other night for the whole 9 months we stayed together. We were so cute! It brought back memories of sheepishly asking my dad's permission to go on the computer in the kitchen, and even though he knew exactly what I wanted to do, him asking "What game do you want to play?". He seemed to get a kick out of making me say out loud "I want to email Michelle...".

I found a bunch from a girl that liked me in Grade 11, sent over the 5 weeks I was away in Europe that spring. I wouldn't date her because she smoked, but she would update me every couple days on how she was quitting smoking while I was away, and how much she missed me. Whenever our hotel had free internet, I would find a bundle of adorable emails from home. We did end up dating when I got back, and she dumped me after a month, but no girl has ever made me feel as loved as she did over those 5 weeks without seeing me once.

My writing was atrocious. I thought it was cool to punctuate and spell everything perfectly, but never use capital letters (I still do this on MSN, skype, and facebook chat). My thought structure jumped around like a drunken monkey, and I remember thinking how cool it must be to sound so unpredictable and off-the-wall; You never know what this guy is going to say next! My attempts at being subtly cryptic variably made me facepalm and laugh out loud.

The thing that struck me most about my former self was simply how oblivious I was. Oblivious of myself, of my circumstances, and most of all, what my correspondents were trying to tell me. I had many sincere moments of "what was I thinking" and "if only I knew back then what I know now".

I feel privileged to have taken this glimpse into my past self. This must be why some people so religiously keep a journal or diary; it's an entertaining and thought-provoking thing to read one's own writing from years gone by. Hopefully, one day I'll look back on this blog post and be treated to such a glimpse again.

Mighty Beans Are On The Scene

On one winter afternoon while on an impromptu Tim's run, I asked one of my fellow students how much he spent a month on coffee. I'd assumed it would be a significant amount, as a day rarely passed by that I saw this guy without a Tim's cup cradled in his paws at least once. Even so, I was incredulous when he answered that he budgets $200 a month for coffee. He continued that he literally couldn't function without it, and needs at least a couple cups a day to make it to the end without crashing. This guy specifically budgets for coffee, and shells out 200 bucks a month as a starving student!

The above being a case more on the extreme side, I've heard many such stories of people being utterly dependent on coffee, as if it were as important as food, sleep, or exercise. I wonder how someone ends up in such a tragic state? My guess is that they start drinking coffee innocuously, making it easier to get going in the morning, or to stay up late writing university research papers. The dependence must come as they gradually lose the ability to do these things by their own discipline and force of will.

I hope I never start drinking coffee. I'd like to think that I can will myself to accomplish things to the best of my ability, without ever needing artificial aid. That's what everyone had to do before they popularized coffee. Can it really be so hard?

But perhaps more relevantly, I couldn't drink it if I wanted to. Coffee is disgusting. Seriously people, it tastes really gross.

I'm breaking the habit tonight.

I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World the other night.

All Scott Pilgrim has to do to get the girl of his dreams is repeatedly risk his life in seven deadly battles. All I have to do is live my life and wait. Yet, I envy Scott Pilgrim.

Without question, it's harder having to sit tight while every burning passion of every shred of my being is screaming "FIGHT! CHASE! PURSUE!". But there's nothing to fight for, nothing to chase, nothing to pursue. Even worse, as I struggle to hold myself back, I kick out fiercely at the world around me, damaging myself and those close to me.

When I meet my Ramona Flowers, her Seven Evil Exes won't know what hit them.

Hope it gives you hell.

All I'll say is that a girl should know better than to mess with a guy who writes good music.