Create Something!

22 months ago I started writing this. Coming up on two years, I couldn't be more pleased with the results. I mean, no book deal yet, but still quite content. One of the results of my ambition in writing is this, a brilliant show-all be-all fashion for cheap blog, keeping you up to date on fashion trends while saving your budget. Even further, saves her own budget by featuring herself and close friends as models. Even if you're not big into fashion, there are still some awesome pictures to ogle, mostly taken by the author herself. One of her features is on a starting out musician and friend who has recently recorded a bunch of songs as part of the acoustic rock genre. While I've only dabbled in his music, it's clear that his sound and writing has staying power.

I bring up these two because along with my own endeavor in this blog, they both had a passion that was lying dormant, and instead of quietly watch them float away, they put in the effort to create something they could be proud of. This might end up paralleling my complacency post, but this time there are real results and real services. Yes, I write for myself, but the main reason I write is for others. If I help even 5 people tackle just one life dilemma, I consider my writing a success. As for my friends, I'm sure they have a sense of personal accomplishment and are proud of what they've done, but Fauxshionable is meant to help others, and Tyler's music was meant to reach out to listeners. We might be self-promoting, talking craft, creating Facebook pages, and doing everything we can to make ourselves seem more popular, but I can assure you, it stems from the desire to reach more people and help to change even the smallest portion of culture. As Chuck Palahniuk wrote, "the goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that does." That's what we're doing, as artists. And if what we've done influences a dozen people, the world is forever changed, and that's inspiration enough to keep on doing what we're doing.

Will these things launch us into stardom, strutting the red carpet in Hollywood, going to Catalina Wine Mixers? Probably not. Do we secretly hope that they do? I think that's safe to say. But would we stop creating now if you told us that we'll never be recognized by anyone besides friends and family? I know I wouldn't.

When I wrote about always wanting to take piano lessons, similar ideas were discussed. There was something that I thought fell by the waste side years ago because my parents (dad) got me playing 'baseball' when I was 5. (Just kidding with the baseball in quotes, it was the right choice.) But as you've surely read, I now own a keyboard and have taken the first steps to learning the craft. But that's about 95% personal goal and personal reward, the spare five percent coming from entertaining the crowd at dinner parties, of course. Motivating yourself to pursue something that will really only impact you can be challenging. But once an audience is created, once a 'service' is provided, once you understand your role in changing and influencing others with something you created, it can be exciting. It thrills me if someone comments on something I write. Not because I need the kudos, but because I know that I just positively impacted someone else's life.

So aside from promoting my good friends Whitney and Tyler, this is another kick in the ass to anyone sitting on a passion and neglecting it for any reason, be it time, money, or doubt. It's worth it to try. It's worth it to take a chance. If not for you, do it for the people that it might affect.

Wiggle Room

Back in May, I wrote about being the rash judgment we apply to people and situations before we have all the facts. I encourage you to read or reread if you haven't. I also touched on this topic after I read DFW's 'This is Water' speech where he made some of the same claims. I'm not going to bring up what you can find in those two posts, but this morning I thought of an interesting addendum.

Unless I leave for work before 6:15am, it's going to take at least 30 minutes to get to work, and I'm going to be caught in stop and go traffic. It's inevitable. Now that I leave my cube at the end of the day and head downstairs to the gym for an hour, I'm not leaving work until 4:45 or later, it's going to take at least 45 minutes to get home, and I'm going to be caught in stop and go traffic. It's inevitable. Not a day goes by, not a day, that I don't see a car buzzing down the shoulder, a motorcycle tip-toeing the center lane lines, someone running a red light, someone dragging ass in the left lane because they're on the phone, someone too oblivious to their surroundings that they don't have their lights on even though the sun has been gone for a half hour, or some other bad excuse for driving. I center this around driving because I do it for between 90 and 120 minutes a day and it's the most frequent test of my patience.

Typically I am a laid back person, so it's easy to be 'slow to judge.' If you're patient, if you like to get all the information before you react, if you don't let things stress you out, etc, then the small stuff doesn't bother you as much, and it's easier to reserve pegging someone as evil. There are so many situations throughout my day where I never have to stop and think before making a hasty decision on someone. Generally, at work, or at the store, or at the bars, things pretty much go with the flow and I don't bat an eye.

But driving as much as I do, encountering hundreds of drivers a day, my sample size is staggering.

Today was no different than what I've just described. Sitting on the Edens, approaching Peterson, crawling in the right lane, and sure enough two cars pull out over the solid white line and zip down the ample shoulder space. The first car coasts onto the off ramp heading west while the second car throws their turn signal on and eases back into traffic, passing a dozen cars in the process. The result of this story is not the purpose of telling it. When I saw both vehicles jerk out of their lane, 'Quick to Judge' popped in my head. Given my level of frustration on this cold, overcast morning, I thought they both deserved to be penalized. Right after thinking that, though, I thought about my own writing. I thought about my words, giving people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that second car thought it had to get off, then realized they were one exit too soon. Whatever the excuse could have been, it didn't make me dislike that driver any less. But just the awareness to stop and think for a second made me happy.

See, I make a lot of proclamations when I write. I offer advice, I try to provide the most logical, thought out response to an array of situations, and the theory is whatever you decide, whether it be to follow my words to find your own path, that you set some guidelines and you follow them. Well I just said that despite my own 'rule' to give people the benefit of the doubt, both drivers this morning pissed me off. But I was sated at the fact that I could back away from the situation and see what was happening before making my decision. In reality, I did exactly what I set out to do, which was delay my judgment. I reacted, thought about it, then didn't change my reaction. But thinking back over all the different tid bits of 'advice' that I've doled out in the last 22 months, there are countless times when I ignore my own words. And even though I've written about heeding my own advice, I think there is something to be said about acknowledging the situation, but choosing against it.

You can't cookie cutter every moment into something you've already broken down. You have to be able to play it by ear, to an extent. The rules you end up writing for your own life shouldn't be written in permanent marker. If there's no room for wiggle, there's no room for error, and that's an impossible way to live.

Staying Disconnected

So this past weekend, I broke my phone. Spilled a drink on it without realizing it was still in my pocket. Fell asleep. Fried it when I tried to plug it in. Not smart, I know. So I woke up Sunday morning without a functional phone. For those of you that don't know, I have been using an iPhone for 10 months now, and, needless to say, have grown accustomed to it. Not a huge app user, but I did my share of using my iPhone to its capabilities and generally enjoyed having it as a phone. Nervous about not having an upgrade through my AT&T account, meaning not me, or either of my parents, I wasn’t sure what this would spell out. I wanted to address the issue as soon as possible, but without fully knowing my options between AT&T, Apple, or any other alternative option, I didn’t want to rush into a financial mistake. Either way, I figured I would take a substantial money hit once I finally figured it all out, and was none too excited about this.

As it turns out, money is not the purpose of this post.

14 months ago, I wrote about staying connected. With the means of communication these days, there isn’t an excuse in the world that you can make to lose touch with those that you care about. Well, I fully understand that my sample size is miniscule at best, but there was something unexpectedly refreshing being without a phone. Please ignore the fact that I spent one of those days sequestered to the couch watching football and paying attention to my losing fantasy team. Also ignore that I pretty much never signed off gchat or Facebook. And keep in mind that two of those three days where spent in the office, where the beginning of the week rush was in full bloom, even as the outside was just the opposite. So to say I was ‘out of communication’ would be a bit of a stretch.

But let’s say that this refreshing splash of pseudo-isolation is one part lack of communication, one part decreased dependency.

Part one: Lack of Communication

So like I just said, I was barely ‘out of communication,’ and I have already written about the importance of staying connected, but there is a something to be said for being outside the loop for a little while. With the emergence of Twitter, gchat, and Facebook statuses, people are collecting information from their friends and peers at an astounding rate. Add in the cell phone, which not only allows you to access all of those things, but also includes phone calls and text messages, and it can be too much. There are some commercials out there advertising for Bing, claiming search engines like Google or Yahoo create search overload, and I think the same types of symptoms can arise due to overstimulation of we’ll call them ‘bits of social media information.’ It can be exhausting keeping pace with the constant flow of information. Without a phone by my side, not only was slightly more isolated from accessing others, but vice versa. There was a comforting delay in not hearing my phone vibrate and seeing it light up every dozen or so minutes, be it an email, text, phone call, or a new move in Words With Friends, because I am a nerd and I play scrabble on my phone. Now I know my phone doesn’t really blow up that often, because let’s be honest, who is really in that dire of a situation and needs to talk to me?

But I guess the point of being out of reach is that it makes the communication exchanged a little more valuable and meaningful. The overstimulation of bits of social media information saturates the content and floods the filter, so much so where the daily and mundane are piled in with the relevant and pertinent. It’s like when cell phone minutes were valuable, or when it used to cost 50 cents for a collect call; you had to pick your spots. A trend that is all but dead. Granted not having a cell phone meant no one would be able to call me, but you get the idea. Having one source of information eliminated does add value you when information needs to be passed along. For that, it was refreshing.

Part two: Decreased Dependency

This is a similar can of worms, and something my dad has preached about for years, but back when cell phones were first getting popular, he could not understand any reason (aside from emergencies) that someone would want to have a phone with them at all times. My dad loves the idea about being out of reach. Granted, more times than not, he wants to be as isolated as Jack and Elizabeth (See: Pirates of the Caribbean), so his opinion probably isn’t too ‘balanced,’ but the point remains valid. Think about why vacation is so appealing. I once wrote that it’s so appealing because they are escapes from everyday life and allow us to be independent. Well what could be a better escape and more independent than being unreachable? It’s a 2010 version of freedom.

And if I would have had a longer stay without a cell phone, there would have been a few more nuances. I would have had to take down numbers with a pen and some scratch paper. I would have had to actually go and see somebody instead of punching away at text messages. I would have had to coordinate plans days in advance instead of saying ‘I’ll just call you when I’m leaving.’ It wouldn’t have been an issue for me, but no more calling from the car to get the last few turns to your newest destination, you have to get the full directions before you leave. It got to the point in three days that I was forgetting what I could and couldn’t do without my phone. I’m going to the bank, do they need my phone? No, no, just I.D. What about driving? Nope, still don’t need it. Got pictures printed at Walgreens, and they ask for a number, but will they actually call it? So many questions.

But as it turns out, I walked into the Apple store on Tuesday and they replaced my phone with a new one, free of charge. There was pretty much nothing that I truly missed doing on my phone, except maybe Words With Friends. And the whole (3-day) experience left me realizing that I don’t need my phone attached to me. It’s nice to be dependable, but it’s nice to go rogue for a while, go dark, under the radar, and escape for a while. If you can’t find a way to get out of the country for vacation, and you live in such a hell hole that a ‘staycation’ won’t even be worth it, then how about you turn off the cell phone, log out of Facebook, why not even turn off your computer, and see what it’s like to be free.

Face the Truth

As I caught up on my TV shows last night, heavy eyelids eclipsing the waning moments of FX's newest show, 'Terriers,' a relatively disturbing scene left me restless at night. Lost in my thoughts on my now-dark drive into the office, the lingering effects still crept in and out, seeping between cursed out rapid breakers (1. (I can't do superscript for footnotes, so I'll just throw a number and a period in a parenthesis to show a side tangent. Read at bottom)). Killing the first few minutes at work, reading my favorite sports writer's new column, once again, the topic once again resurfaced. This is the reason for what you see below.

The scene in Terriers to which I am referring revolves around a cheating girlfriend. Scared, unstable, and noticeably upset, she invites her boyfriend's best friend to breakfast to confide in him, a scene eerily reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow and Morgan Freeman in Se7en. Long story short, Morgan Freeman's advice parallels the show, in which there can be a decided advantage to keeping a secret. While the topic of the secret varies, the message is still clear: to save the relationship, keep the secret. As Freeman says, "your marriage would just wither, and die altogether." In 'Terriers,' the advice is 'never tell him. That's what you do.'

My most often quoted line, 'you know there's a flipside to that coin' (mainly because 80% of what I do here is present the other side of the argument...). In this sports column about Randy Moss, the Vikings and Patriots, and Twitter, Bill Simmons has some principles to uphold. As he describes, "I am a big 'don't make it worse, come clean' guy... People are only as good as their word."

Thus begins the moral debate.

I wrote about keeping secrets back in May, but I wrote about them in a battling the dramatic, avoiding conflict, and keeping things simple kind of way. I see the previous scenarios as a different breed. We're not talking about covering up the fact that you've tried an array of illegal drugs, or that you really got a 2.5gpa, not 3.5gpa in college; those are the little things I was speaking to previously: cover-ups that might not affect situations one way or another, but added together, create a blanket of deception. This time I'm talking about relationship altering, life altering, people changing, big ass things. And not everyone comes across stuff like this. Some of you might go your whole life without there ever being an elephant in the room. But place yourself in a situation where you have something to have. Let's use that 'Terriers' situation. Say you're in a good, faithful, trusting, encouraging, blossoming relationship, a few steps away from engagement, seemingly perfect relationship. One drunken night, idiotic, barbaric, animalistic passion overrides logic and you go home with something you know you won't be able to have in the future. The person you commit infidelity with is not as important as the act itself. Now you scamper home, embarrassed, dirty, nervous, and completely regretful, the question looming: do I confess?

Scenario #1 ('he's hanging by his neck in his fxcking closet;' sorry, Baseketball reference.): Lock that little nugget in the deepest vault of your brain and tell no one. Do everything you can to forget it even happened. Convince yourself of the lie. Time advances, as it usually does, and the farther this event falls in the past, the easier it is to deal with. The relationship flourishes, engagement rings, congratulations, wedding planning, holidays with the family, the ceremony, the honeymoon, kids, school, etc. But for those last 10, 15 years, how have you been sleeping? How many times do you clench your stomach during a movie involving affairs, which, let's be honest, happens quite frequently. How long can you live with the guilt? And that's only if the secret manages to stay hidden. Let's say you run into that late night encounter while you're out with your significant other. Now there's trouble in relationship heaven. What if 5 years have passed, and now you have to tell the truth? What kind of outcome will that produce? As Bill Simmons says, "...the cover-up is always worse than the crime. Any good public relations guy will tell you that." Not to mention how much more will have been invested as time passes.

The counter argument is that confession will result in crushing the person you care about most, and you can bring yourself to hurt someone that much. Well the two outcomes that I just describe either end with crippling self-guilt or delayed disaster. Unless you're conscienceless, one of the two is inevitable. And neither seems acceptable.

Scenario #2 ('Coop went to Disney World;' sorry, Baseketball reference.): Face the music. Tell the truth. Confess. Lay your cards on the table. There is no bluffing, no games, no deceits, no tells. Your chips are all in, your hand is flipped, your sunglasses are removed, hat thrown aside, and nothing up your sleeve. Is there any other way to face it?

If you tell me that sometimes, 'scenario #2' is the worse outcome, I would agree. Sometimes, telling someone the truth about a major incident can lead to pain, suffering, separation, and misery. But, that's kind of how it works. If they forgive you, then all is well. If they don't, then you brought it on yourself. Your love was either stronger enough to prosper, or flawed enough to fail. But you owe it to yourself and to those involved to be honest.

There are certain situations where I am hypocritical and believe in the whole 'ignorance is bliss' thing. There are so many current topics, news stories, leaders, politics, and everything else in the world that I keep my head buried about. Those who know me know I don't watch the news, read the paper, etc. Right now, I have enough to worry about and to enjoy without adding the ebb and flow of the world. It's a selfish outlook, but for me, it's what I have to do to keep my head above water. I'm sure, one day not far from now, I'll look back critically at my early 20s self, but until then, I'm fine where I am. But 'ignorance is bliss' when it comes to personal matters, matters of the heart, is not comparing apples to apples. Not staying caught up in the current affairs of the world is one thing. Not being informed about current affairs of my significant other is a whole different story. You can't manipulate the lives of the ones you love. That should not be up to you to decide.

PostScript: This is one of the more polar opinions I've taken on any topic, and I understand there are outlying circumstances in which someone has the right to hold back the truth. As always, I try to write about across the board generalizations, and by no means is 100% ever the right answer.

(1.) Rapid Breakers: I drive 40 miles a day, 30 of which are on the Edens expressway. Depending on when I leave, I am caught up in between 30 to 90 minutes of stop and go, bumper to bumper traffic. Many days I've tried to brainstorm enough about traffic patterns to spawn an entire blog, but I just can't rant and bitch for 800 words and think that anyone will give a shit. So here it is in a nutshell. It is my firm belief that a large percentage of traffic is caused by shitty drivers. Mainly: people that brake too frequently, without paying attention, and people that have no idea how to merge. Bad mergers cause traffic, fine. I don't see them as often. But the assholes that are part of the four or five car group ahead of me that tap or hit their brakes every 5 seconds need to be slapped. Every time they unnecessarily hit their brakes, WHACK. These people are not paying attention, don't take into consideration the trend and flow of traffic, hit their brakes when a car in THE OTHER LANE hits theirs, and more times than not, is usually caught up talking on the phone, texting, eating, smoking, or jamming out. If not, they're just a waste of space and need to get off the roads. Pay attention, notice that the cars ahead of you aren't slowing down too much, try just taking your foot off the accelerator for a while. This isn't damn rocket science. But no. Instead, every brainless driver abruptly hits the brake, so the next person does too, without thinking, then all of a sudden, 30 cars later, complete stop, traffic, misery, and a long effing commute. Am I the only one that gets pissed about this????