Realizations

The dangers of waiting so long to write a new sort of blog is that your mind can often get so full of ideas and plans and hopes and dreams that you can hardly come up with a good way to order written thoughts. As you may have guessed from this opening, I am suffering from precisely that problem. That's why this entry has the rather lacklustre title 'Realizations'. I briefly considered (just now) changing the title to 'Revelations', but I feel this blog is simply not epic enough to merit such a title. So we're doing a slightly not-so-exciting title in "Realizations'. That's not to say there's nothing good in it... Okay, I feel like I've almost buried this enough.


I can only blame myself, you can only blame me 
As some readers may have noticed, there has been a considerable length of time between entries here. Stilly and I decided, for the most part, to alternate in blogging, and thus you can blame only me, really. I had school, work, schoolwork, and other responsibilities. I'm not about to pretend that I couldn't have at least TRIED to get writing this. But I'm not a professional opinions writer (I sort of was, for a little while), and I generally only write when I'm feeling inspired. But I have been inspired! A few times, at least.

All I want you to leave me is alone 
I gotta say, I love taking refuge. I don't mean this in a pseudo-deep, oh-my-goodness-solitude-is-like-so-indie kind of way, but rather, just alone time. Right now, for instance, I have found an undisclosed location at Dalhousie from which to listen to live music on YouTube (check out CBC's Q for some Quality stuff!) and write. I won't finish this blog here, but it's still worth noting. Y'see, moments like this remind me that I can really take pleasure in the small things. Opening the window on a stormy night to hear the rain and have consolation in my comfort. Someone once told me that that was very St. Therese of me, enjoying the little things. At the moment, I didn't jump at that point, but now I'm thinking that's probably pretty close to being true. So I'm enjoying the little things right here, right now. There IS no other place I'd rather be... Well, that might not be true. I can think of a small city or two west of here that might fit me pretty well... Like, in Alberta.


Whatever you like
Something I've come to know about myself in the past little while (I find 'the past little while' a very good and very vague phrase) is that I really appreciate knowing the passions of others. I realized this when I had a sharp sense of joy after seeing a guy in class next to me looking up cars on internet forums, and another time when I saw a guy looking up European Football scores. People love things that I don't, and I find that very interesting. I remember a friend telling me about their sort-of-secret passion for tropical fish, and it added so much to the character of this person in my mind. And, for those at home, these small passions of mine include voracious news and blog consumption, as well as atmospheric guitar fills a la 'Bad' by U2. 


You know it ain't nothin' to drop a coupla stacks on you
I love how on the Blogger editing bar, there's a tab that reads 'Monetize', as if I could just translate what I write into cold, hard cash.


All winter, we got carried
This is a thought that came to my mind over a month ago, at least, and has bounced around my head since a few months ago for sure. Upon flopping into my chair-tablet hybrid in one of my favourite classrooms of the HHAAB (Henry Hicks Academic Administration Building, but with an acronym like that, why would you NOT use it?), I conducted a lazy scan of the room. A young man, roughly my age, strolled into the room with an Abercrombie & Fitch shirt on. This would be unremarkable on most occasions, but on the front of the shirt was emblazoned 'MAKE LOVE NOT BABIES', which alarmed me to say the least. And yes, it's a real shirt, Google the phrase and 'Abercrombie' and it'll pop up. While this might be somewhat tongue in cheek, it startled me a bit. I mean, I had always had a cursory knowledge that today's North American culture saw children born from the sexual act as a problem (after all, Barack didn't want his daughters "punished with a baby"), but to market that idea on a t-shirt for public acceptance struck me as pretty darn bold.

A few days later [ed. note: it could have been a week], I was on the bus to Halifax on a bright morning. Once again, I sat down on a less-than-comfortable seat, but I had a far more lazy scan going on. I saw another guy my age with a shirt that had a bride and groom on it, and it said underneath, 'GAMEOVER'. Now, this might seem like yet another relatively harmless shirt with a slightly provocative caption, but it does encourage a certain culture against marriage, just as the previous shirt did against family. A wide cultural perception of marriage being the end of your life is definitely a negative thing, with our culture being built on marriage, as family is built on marriage, and neighbourhoods on families, and can-you-tell-I've-heard-Christopher-West-speak? Okay, maybe your life is over in the sense that you can no longer really engage in sketchy escapades, but good. You shouldn't be doing that anyway. It's called sketchy for a reason.

So, my realization has been, in short, that there is, in fact, an attack on marriage and the family. Maybe I didn't need to report what I saw on some t-shirts to let you in on that...


After changes upon changes
I could go on and on about other things I've realized, as I have a little list on my mind while publishing this, but I think I'll draw it to a conclusion there, with one last realization. Y'see (yes, I did use that at least twice in this entry), that list on my mind, and actually in type below this very paragraph, is a change. Yes, that paragraph will disappear by the time anyone actually READS this, but whatever. Previously, when writing anything, from blogs to articles to essays, I used to do a somewhat ramble-rant, with any number of points emerging from a pseudo-brain-to-hand method. But now, I've realized that I'm better off listing things. This may seem like a somewhat mundane realization, but I feel like my writing productivity has just gone up! And that's sort of a big deal from a guy who finds writing to be a joy he can engage in every now and then. I'm more organized, and I like that. I don't know if that simplification of writing is clear to readers, but it is a big difference to me. 


We're making our escape
Without going into any detail, today has been a good day. So far. The first day of this calibre in what I feel has been months. So, I write this. And now I bid farewell to my readers, from the East Coast of Canada. I hope Stilly is up for a similar act of writing soon... We'll see, I guess.