She Said "Yes"

Wednesday, Oct 19, 1:30 pm.


"Love doesn’t make the world go round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.”
- Elizabeth Browning

 I never thought I would make a post about this so early, but I just could not help myself. The joy and elation that springs from Wednesday simply forces me to cyber-write this epic coming-of-age. That's right folks, we have a milestone on our hands. I have a girlfriend.

Leading up to this point, I have had many crushes, and some of them came close to a mutual fondness. My love life has been an awkward spiral of paraphrases, such as "wait a minute, what?", "I just don't see it that way", and "I'm sorry, have we met?". Then She came along.

She is an optimistic ball of 'nice' that I'm going to call "She" because public name permission has not been given yet (She kinda doesn't know about this blog yet), She laughed at all of my jokes, She is there for me, She will never hurt me, make me feel small, or separate me from my humanity.

-note- I just made a paragraph in past, present, and future tenses, used an improper pronoun as a proper noun, and I took the mega-sentence and just ran on with it (which is just wrong. Sentences should be walked). All I can blame it on is the fact that I adore Her. -note-

She*** and I have been friends for the better part of this first semester of college. Once we shared a couple breakfast, lunch, and dinner dates, I decided that it was time to explore my feelings (since when do men do that? All the time, actually). It took more balls than one would imagine. If I were speaking to Her right now, I would remind Her that I would never harm Her, judge Her, or separate Her from Her humanity. At the same time, I will never miss the chance to compliment Her herr (hair).

Will this have an impact on my everyday life? if only it were a small one. Choices like this are continuous active decisions that enable empathy to be galvanized with your habits. This status should also trigger an emotional barrier to be broken (as if the status shows up and goes like, "Sup son. I'ma break u!", and the barrier's like, "Whoa! I'm totally broken, dude..."), as this will allow personal truths to be revealed to the targeted love interest. Complete and total honesty is required for an extended period of time while inside the metaphoric tunnel of love, which is what I shall practice. In closing... "All you need is love"
- John Lennon

... they said I couldn't do an academic analysis about love. They were so wrong that they were like, wrong or something...


What I Learned:

• Rewards make risks a little more bearable
• To know love is to master empathy
• No, you're not disgustingly unattractive. Look inside, and it is quite the opposite
• *** I can use improper pronouns as proper nouns only in blog format

My Question to You:

1. Is there or was there someone special to you (he or she doesn't have to know you)?
2. If yes, would you give a brief description the specific type of love between you two?
3. Troll question: WHY DON'T YOU LOVE JESUS THAT MUCH!?!  >=( 

Leave your creative, critical or constructive responses in the comments. Please enjoy your time that you should be using to do useful shtuff.

After a Transition

"Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward."
- Author Unknown

 Welcome back. I hope you had a great month. I sure did.

In the interest of what has happened in the past month, I am happy to report an almost flawless transition and assimilation into my new home.

Truthfully, I was feeling anxious about my new circumstances at Saint Mary's College when I typed my last post; I felt not an overwhelming sense of fear, but of awareness for the coming change. The reason I reveal this to you now is because in order for this blog to achieve the transparency I want for it, I need to be completely honest with both myself and the internet.

Okay, I was scared of it. So what happened? Where you scared as it happened?

In the first weeks of college, I met more than fifty people, won a brain-damaging 'contest' to enjoy my first Redbull, hiked to a local landmark at night wearing questionable items of clothing, spontaneously sang in Italian to a full class, and got lost while navigating from my new home to my old home... and I did it all clean and sober (I'll make a post about that sometime).
Does that sound like a person who's afraid?
Yeah, didn't think so.

Here with me, I have a special guest. I may have special guests on this blog for the following reasons:

1. It's mah f@#$ing blog. I thought we already discussed that...
2. It's a new and exciting formula that nobody really tries out in their blog

With that said, I now turn it over to Becca.

" Make awesome friends like Andrew, and maybe one day, that awesome friend will let you sleep in his comfy chair. The end."
*clap clap *

She says thank you for the applause. I can honestly say that this college has been my best decision that was only my decision. The process of choosing to go to SMC could have not gone better for me. The challenge before me is to make sure that was a good decision. Like, for instance, I should avoid staying up at a time like this (yes, the time that you're reading this counts as well. I totally know you read this when you're high at two in the morning. It's okay to admit it. I won't tell...) when there are more important things to do.

So, I'm not perfect. That doesn't mean I'm going to make this post a rant. I just think there is always more to be done, but I'm one of those people who can say everything well but then only execute what's said when forced. That's how I am. It's important to recognize certain things like this about yourself, because it plays a huge part in your personal growth.

What I learned:
  

• It's important to track your personal evolution as you grow
• Begin with the end in mind
• You won't be afraid of change after it's all over

My Question to You:
  

1. How different do you feel when Summer vacation ends?
2. Do you feel older after a month? 
3. What is your favorite flavor of pumpkin pie? (trick question) 

Leave your interesting, creative or constructive responses in the comments. Thank you for stopping by. Now if you excuse me, I have to go be awesome. 

Transitions

To illustrate my current emotional journey, I point to an amazing song to listen to while reading this post. With this song, I hope you will read this with a calm mind. It is called "Time Forgets" by a South Korean pianist named Yiruma. Please open up another window, copy/paste this link and come right back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anicaKGED00

Ready? Great, let's begin.

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened"
- Dr. Seuss

Think back to when you were an infant. Imagine all of the responsibilities you were expected to do; all zero of them. Yes, there indeed was a time when we would only have to worry about eating our food and crapping our pants. A very simple obligation indeed.

Now, think ahead to later days of your childhood. You were learning to walk and speak, and eventually, you were enrolled in school. At first, you might have scoffed at the idea of doing work, but you would eventually enjoy meeting new persons, crushing on your hot teacher, and most importantly, recess.

This is an example of a transition. For this blog, I shall create a definition to add to the MANifesto lexicon.

Transition = an adjustment period that one uses to ready oneself for new challenges and experiences.

I, for one, need this time in between schedules. If I do not receive the proper adjustment time I need, my life collapses and I am overwhelmed with stress. I am beside myself when I say that emotional collapse is terrible. However, I'm not going to dwell on breakdowns while I'm commanding you to listen to a clearly not-terrible song. Then what kind of all-powerful, blog-commanding Internet overlord would I be?


Still, I can't help but shake the feeling that I will miss being a kid in high school. My greatest memories were of my time in choir, and with my great friends, and I would be lying if I said that things will not be the same. Still, there is a golden opportunity for me to broaden my knowledge of life in one word: college.

In a short while, I will be studying Health Science at Saint Mary's College of California, a Catholic private college in Moraga, California (a twenty minute drive from my house). I will be living in a dorm with no other person to rely on but myself to eat, study and be a grown man. This is an obviously different circumstance for me, but I look forward to emerging from this as a different person; a person who measures his life in love and the occasional tear, the occasional epiphany. That is a life I can look forward to, so I cannot wait for my next life to begin.


What I learned:

• Life is what happens in between transitions
• Each new challenge is different and harder than the last one. Prepare yourself accordingly.

My question to you:

1. Do you consider yourself "ready for anything"? By that, I mean "what are your tools that you use in life's many tests"?
2. What is your next big goal? (This can be school, work, or another kind of personal achievement)
3. What should I write about next?

Leave your responses, questions and criticisms in the comment section below. Your input is always appreciated.

Friends

Before I begin, I just wanna make something clear. In this blog, there may be some troll posts, or nerd-rage rants. There may be times when my sanity should be rightly questioned (look down at the post before this). There may be times when I'm even more pissed off, and I just don't care what I say. I apologize if that is the case. Now, sometimes, you have to feed the trolls, or in this case, be the troll. It's part of life, and it sometimes it catches you by surprise. OR, I could be messing with you right now being not sorry at all. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

" A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In life, some of your most important resources are relationships. These relationships often change as you transition into different phases of your life. For example, if you go to college, you are not as likely to spend more time with your parents, as most college students move out. One of the most magical relationships are the ones between friends. Friends are there to comfort you and give you things (could be anything from gifts to inspiration to advice). However, I don't need to tell you how awesome your friends are. You already knew that.

My friends are awesome, too. One of them is my oldest and dearest companion who schools me in guitar, one of them has a nickname on Thursdays and is the inspiration for me to blog, one of them is a personality magnet who you could exchange compliments all day with, hundreds of them are connected with me on facebook, and a couple are just random people who I don't even know. These people are so important to me, I am okay with using run-on sentences to describe them...

So, you have friends? Now, how do you keep them?

Long story short, you can't keep every friend you have ever met. Some move away, some grow apart from you, some just make a couple bad decisions in middle school and end up hating you, and sometimes you move away. It is very hard to keep in contact with everyone. Granted, some of us have facebook, but I imagine some people might even grow out of that. Scary, right? Sometimes, all you can do is make an effort to reconnect with someone whenever you can.

Tonight, I have had the pleasure of reconnecting with my oldest friend. He is still the cuddly hippie I remember him to be. He and I almost separated when we went to rival high schools, but we still found ways to hang out at the boy scout meetings we both went to. He is still my best friend ever, and my life would not be the same without him.

Another friend of mine is the reason you are reading this. His blog is the cooler, more epic predecessor to the one you see now. He is just a little younger than I am, but his maturity and humor far outmatch mine. Together, we often ponder meaningful life questions, like "When you hit the shut down button, are you commanding a computer to kill itself?" and "What is one pant?". We hang out, and then I immediately miss him very much. Here is his blog:

http://www.ecbproject.blogspot.com/

There is a transition that I will have to make, as I will be going off to college soon. In less than a month, I will not be living in the house I stayed in for more than a decade. This is hard for me, because I will not have the same foundational relationships as my primary ties to society. Instead, I will be surrounded by new friendly faces in a new house, with new role models and new mentors. Did I mention I have a hard time making new friends? Now that everything is about to change, I have a massive appreciation for the time I have been given to say goodbye, if only for a little while.

In closing, cherish the time you have with your friends, because they are the people with whom you can truly be yourself. I simply cannot stress enough how important it is to have loved ones to stick by you. Take it from me.

What I learned:

• Friends become more valuable when they are or will be no longer with you
• Friends are easy to make but much harder to keep
• Make the effort to reach out to someone, becuase you may be sad when they are gone

My question to you:

1. Picture a day without communication to any of your loved ones. With that in mind, how important are friendships to you?
2. Do you share secrets with your friends that you never share with anyone, even family?
3. Would you please name one friend who you can trust with your life, and one friend who you would like to know more about? Give a brief description of both.

Absence of Talent: The Current Music Industry

[disclaimer]: This post is brought to you by nerd-rage, trollin' and Four Loko (A.K.A. Haterade, or Gatorade for haters).

"Houston, we have a problem"
- John L. Swigert, "Apollo 13"

I am sad to say that mainstream music is not what it once was. When we once had classic hits like "Stairway to Heaven", "Bohemian Rhapsody", "You Raise Me Up", "Let It Be", "Beautiful", "Your Song", "Somebody to Love", "American Pie", "Don't Stop Believing", "Drops of Jupiter", "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing", "Blackbird" and "Shower the People", now we have "Friday"...

Rebecca Black, performer of "Friday" (literally, the worst song ever), is the problem that we (Houston) seem to have. She is a celebrity only because she shouldn't be, but deludes herself into thinking she has talent. She does not write her songs, and then alters her voice in a studio so much that it made some poor employee of ARK Music Factory work a double shift auto-tuning, adding reverb and cutting and pasting her off-tempo vocals to a synthetic beat (among other futile arrangements. The list goes on). However, "Friday" is still popular, though it is only popular because persons laughed at it hard enough that everyone else heard. If I go on about this song, I might just explode.

I may seem to be blindly (and quite harshly) bashing this artist and accusing her of the musical equivalent of cheating on the SAT. To clarify, the only expertise I have in music is ten years of playing piano, multiple music scholarships to college and being in a two-time first-place winning choir in an annual northern California choir competition. Needless to say, I grew up with classical music. Due to that, I cannot casually hear music without listening to every note and every artistic decision in that song. Long story short, I'm a musical purist.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled nerd-rage.


What makes current pop songs so bad in my mind is the repitition and lazy songwriting shortcuts that everyone seems to take. For example, pick a random Black Eyed Peas song, and count how many times they repeat themselves. Honestly, they could make a drinking game about taking a shot every time they say 'do it' in "I Gotta Feeling". That would equal about thirty drinks and a bunch of hangovers (or blackouts). This song was 5th on the Billboard Top 100, and was on that list for 14 consecutive weeks (feel free to fact-check if you don't trust wikipedia). Believe me when I say this has become the "gold standard" in pop music. In the real world, the songwriting used in this song is called repetition. In the MANifesto, It's called cheating. However, there is still hope for music.

Any song can be taken and modernized to create a new song, and it can be done very well, if not better than the first time. Take, for example, the classic "Let's Stay Together". Originally performed by Al Greene, the reverend of soul, this song made a huge transformation in the reality tv show "The Sing-Off". This song was performed by an acapella group who would win that competition the next day. I encourage you to listen to both recordings, and notice some of the differences between the two. Feel free to say which one you think is better in the comments. In my opinion, I prefer the acapella version because the all-vocal arrangement adds another human quality to the music, and Committed has nearly mastered the art of six-part harmony as well as their individual solo voices. However, you can make your own decision by watching these two videos.
 (Al Greene)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COiIC3A0ROM
 (Committed)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPEq_SdB56M




What I learned:

• There is hope for the future of music
• You can't go wrong with the classics
• People have the same taste in music, but every person has their own list of favorite songs

What do you think?:

• If you watched both videos, did Al Greene or Committed do a better job?
• Do you prefer the pioneers of music (Beethoven, Bach, Mozart), 20th century music (The Beatles, Queen, Jimi Hendrix, Elton John, Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston), or brand new music (Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Chris Brown, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga)
• If you had a favorite song or artist, who would it be?
• Who or what did I leave out in terms of the best or worst artists or songs?
• Am I wrong about pop music?

People and Persons

"I love persons, but I hate people."
- Andrew Terrence Smyth


If you have watched the 1997 "Men in Black" movie, then you would catch one of my favorite quotes of all time:
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- Agent K
This sums up my view of the world. What does this mean?

Short answer- don't trust strangers.

Long answer- Do not assume that when you call for help, people will help you. This is because the average "one of the people" is most often ignorant to others when called upon to do his/her part. Said one of the people lacks a basic sense of humanity in favor of self-centeredness and personal gain.

Case and point, charity. How often do see a commercial in the middle of watching "Jersey Shore" about sick cats and dogs missing an eyeball, waiting for someone to save them from the hourly beatings of their (likely) alcoholic, irresponsible master? For me, it is quite often... except for the "watching Jersey Shore" part. Anyway, forget for a moment that these particular commercials appeal to guilt-tripping their viewers into getting money for their cause. Forget that. Instead, focus on why these commercials exist in the first place. There are people who are sick enough to neglect, abandon, beat or even kill a helpless animal. This is my immediate proof that 'people' exist.
Whenever I say 'people', I mean 'BAD people'.

So, why trust persons? They're people too, right? Let me be clear. In this blog, I will never type the word "people" in a positive context (look at the bold, underlined statement above staring at you). On the opposite side, you have...
Persons: a specific group of individuals.

The reason why I love persons is because they are names and faces. They are my friends and family. They are personalities that I can personally identify with. They are persons, therefore I share humanity with them.

For more subject matter on personhood and sense of humanity, I recommend listening to "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson. This song perfectly portrays a decision to take a positive change and an active role in everyday life. Here is a link to one of my personal favorite performances of this song.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwu3D-Luo-E

To relate this back to manhood and maturity, it's painfully clear. People don't pass the maturity test; persons do. We can learn a thing or two from certain persons in our lives, so we would do well to listen to the persons we can trust, whomever that may be.

What I learned today, in terms of my own personal growth, are these:

1. Don't trust strangers
2. Do your best to make a positive effect on the world around you
3. Michael Jackson is still the king of pop

My question to you, in no particular order, are these:

• Who is your 'man in the mirror'?
• Am I wrong to believe that people are "dumb, panicky, dangerous animals"?

Let me know in the comments section. Thank you for reading, and come back soon!

Okay, Let Me Get One Thing Straight

For this (continued) introduction, I would like to focus on what this blog is about. It's about saying what I mean without the constraint of outside pressure. I want this blog to be a place where persons can openly speak their mind without being victims of the judgement of people. Only then will I feel comfortable in my Internet sanctuary, and the same goes for any guests.

My wish is to have the MANifesto be an unbridled tool of self-discovery and personal growth. To do this, I need to have an open and honest environment for such wishes to occur. For my virtual reality to be complete, I will also need a jetpack, a liger (preferred animal of Napoleon Dynamite) and a grilled-cheese sandwich. These are not rules, but guidelines to follow in the course to become truly understanding of not only our world, but also my seemingly outlandish demands.

Keep in mind that there may be uncontrollable ranting (A.K.A. nerd rage) in posts to come, but I'll try to keep that to a minimum. After all, I lose my faith in humanity over and over again, but something always brings me back to hope. Today, I continue my quest to find that hope, and I hope you will join me.

In the future, I plan to blog about my thoughts on world events, pop culture and my personal stories. I will also relate these to how to become truly virtuous persons. My ultimate goal is to not become one of the people. I will explain with more detail in my next post, so I'll see you then.

The First Steps

Dear Internet,

You may not recognize me, so let me introduce myself. I, like many other people, am slightly anonymous to others. The reason I have come out of the depths of wherever people get trolled is because, well, nobody likes trolls; that should be quite obvious. Besides that, I am deciding to blog because this will be my manifesto to the world. I call it the MANifesto to imply a humorous sense of maturity, as well as to prove my knowledge that there is an ALL CAPS KEY.
Once again, this is my first step into becoming my online adult self, so I want to do this right. I do not know what direction this MANifesto is going to be driving, or even if it had a couple drinks first. What I do know is that it is time to be heard. So welcome, readers, to the MANifesto.

Warmest personal regards,
AndrewNONYMOUS