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!