Music and Words

Hi there, i'm back here writing some more stuff for those who have a lot of spare time to read my pointless gibber gabber written here. This one i feel an urge to write because of a conversation i had with a guy in a bar on the weekend.

See, as i have said before, when it comes down to it i am a writer, it belongs to me and i belong to it. My soul is made of words. My spirit is formed from phrases, the flit and flirt together through my mind at all time, whether i am sleeping or standing or shocked to speechlessness.

Anywho though, the guy i was talking to at the bar, he understood this in a way, but where as i focus on words and speech, he focuses on music. We talked about the idea of what came first, language or music, as well as what was the thing that expresses things better, words or music.

Our discussion became so involved that we stopped playing cool and switched bars so that we could focus on talking instead.

I have to say that tonight on the bus ride home from class i could understand his viewpoint when i was listening to my ipod. I have to say that if i was forced to choose between music or language i would still have to choose language but not by much.

I almost broke into song on the bus because the music i was listening to aligned so closely with what i was feeling at the time. And this just reminds me of something i have listened to on podcasts before. The idea is one concerning food, that people need to take their time and eat slowly. The idea with music is to sit and listen to it as well, and do nothing else but listen to music at the time.

Sit with your favorite artists, be they writers, singers, or even painters, and just focus on the art. Let it soak into you, let it feed your soul. Grow and learn as you do so.

New Family

Ok, been a few days, haven't posted, haven't written. Defiantly the start of a slippery slope. This blog post owes its existence to the prof who i work for (thank you prof i work for!). See tonight while i was working i had this idea that had to do with me learning to program using MATLAB and a computer which no one in the lab uses.

Anywho this post doesn't have to do with MATLAB or the computer, or even psych really. Rather it has to do with where i ended up when i went to talk to him about this. He was at an event that decides which book the new students of the university read in the fall. There are four books currently competing for the spot and though i am rooting for Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell one of the themes of the other books caught me.

To be perfectly honest i cannot recall what the other book was titled, so i can't give you a link to order it. But i can summarize the plot in a few quick points!
- Selfish woman gets in car crash
- Destroys car that is home to grandmother and kids who are going to another city to get work
- Mother of kids is in hospital dying of cancer
- Father of kids is MIA
- Selfish woman takes in family from car
- Selfish woman becomes unselfish

Quick and dirty summing up, i can't go into more detail because A) i have never read it and B) this is me recalling the summary i heard a few hours ago and things get fuzzy after a few minutes...

Anywho the reason that this book is bringing up the post you are reading is because the book is about a woman who creates a family out of people she meets (which is the reason that they want university students to read it). Me personally, i have never been one to find family such a brilliant reason for staying in touch with people i have less in common with than the chimpanzees who use tools at the zoo, but i am now starting to get a bit of the building a family out of friends.

The number of people who use the terms "love, family, best friend" over and over with regards to everyone they know horrifies me. I have an undying love for language, it is why i write, it is why i talk the amount i do, it is one of the many reason i am going for a degree in philosophy. Seeing words that have these deep meanings tossed around like leaves on an autumn day truly does upset me. They have been tossed around by people i know at university and yet i also know that myself along with several others have truly meant it when they said it.

And this brings me to my second story. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in January (do you remember January? it is getting to be far away...) there was a meeting in my residence, where most of my friends here happen to live. It was a painfully long and boring meeting filled with ideas like do your work ahead of time so that you don't get all stressed and do your readings after classes so you don't have to do them the night before the mid-term.... Anywho in and amongst the rest of the usual stuff that students ignore and mock the entire time (inbetween the yelling and cheering anyways) was the comment that this is the time of year people become close or fall apart.

The second semester was remarked upon as the time when people begin looking for houses, all the exams and assignments people should have been working all year long on become due, and the drinking goes up as more people turn 19. AKA second semester is stress central. And in this time it becomes so easy for people to develop a conflict and not talk it out.

We all are in university here, we are supposed to have left the high school drama behind. I know that it will never fully leave completely but as the guy who spoke for the book outliers said tonight "This is the time when we are becoming who we are for the rest of our lives" do you guys really want to be the type of "family" who doesn't talk things out and lets pride and lack of communication break us all apart? Or are we all going to take some steps and grow up, prevent that divorce and show just how much our friendships mean to all of us.

I don't really want two birthdays and Christmases, do you? Check this out if you need to think some more.

My Role Model

Alright so i am blogging from the public library today because of the fact that my computer is still being fixed and i refuse to use my sister's incredably old one at home. The thing is so slow that i am almost certain that it would freeze when i started typing on blogger. Not that the library is much better... oh how i miss my computer, this is deffinatly a wake up call to how lucky i am to have it. Anywho this is my first chance to blog about something that i have wanted to talk about for a while now.

Jason Mraz. I lucked out along with a bunch of other people who entered the Scene Contest for tickets to his recent show at the Molson Ampitheatre where he rocked out in an awesome show. The guy was... well he was the best preformer i have ever seen in concert.

To give you an idea of who i am comparing him to i have seen the following live, Seether, Three Days Grace, Avril Lavigne, Faber Drive, State of Shock, David Usher, and ill Scarlett. It may not be a very long list but there are some impressive people on it. And to me at least Jason Mraz blew them all away(as i sit in a public library in the t-shirt i bought there).

It was an impressive concert with a great venue and the opening act's lined up (at least in my mind) with the type of music that the headliner plays better than several others. Of course there was the concert enviorment from the very beginning, people all ready and waiting, the pressure building, anticipation wasn't the pleasue for people there but it was about as thick as the tension in a steriotypical murder mystery.

Then when he finally came on stage it went wild. The other acts had done great music and had nice lights but the set up had barely been used and it made it all the more impressive when Jason opened up and began to play.

So the enviorment was as ripe for a great experiance, people seemed to expect greatness from him and he did not disappoint. But there was more to it than that, for me at least... Do you remember the music magazine blender?

Well in their final print issue they featured Jason Mraz... That was the first time i found out that Mr. Mraz was and is someone who practices Zen, is a vegitarian surfer and scrabble junkie who grows his own organic food. Like dude, loved this guys music since i first heard it the summer between grade 10 and 11, i remember telling people on msn to download him dispite not having a clue at the time how to spell his name.

And now, after i have finished most of my spiritual search, and i have finished it when it comes to considering things outside of Buddhism, is it any wonder that my favorite male singer for several years now follows that very same belief?

Back to the concert, i guess what made him so amazing was... Well at Avril's concert she played the crowd, just like a good preformer should. But Jason seemed more genuine and he worked to spread a very hippie-ish message where he was trying to spread the vibe of The Gratitude Cafe through the world. Like the guy is actively working on spreading goodness and happiness through the world with one of his messages being live your life to leave things better than you found them, people and places.

The t-shirt i bought has a hidden message in it which i think is the Om symbol but i am not sure, and it is orgnaically made. His other message was don't let your mind stop you from having fun. I mean come on, that is a perfect message for people to hear, it resonated with me so well that i have had to spread it and rant about it to those people who i hoped would listen.

Because that is what worries me, his message was great, and he said it to a massive crowd of people. People of different ages and different orgins and behaviours all coming together to hear him sing. But i wonder how many people listen to the words in-between the music? How many people noted what the actual meaning was? And how many will carry it forward?

(P.S. If you haven't heard his music listen to the song The Dynamo of Volition for the music and Life is Wonderful or Song for a Friend for the words)

Alanis, How Right You Are...

So there is a song out i think you should listen to. Yes you. I don't care who you are or that you only listen to death metal. I don't care that you think Alanis Morissette is a terrible singer who should have her voice box torn out (best insult i could think of).

Go turn on your Limewire or Frostwire and download the song Versions of Violence. It is a great song (at least to me cause i like the singer) but also because i think that the topic is something that gets a lot of air time in discussions and school and TV commercials but doesn't really enter too much of how we live our lives.

We live our lives thinking (well me at least) quite often how actions could hurt other people. But though we can scream and yell at other people for causeing harm to still more people or to ourselves but how often do we consider how our actions harm others? I know i don't near enough. I am still a way better critic of others than of myself (so if you know me please call me on it).

But the second point i want to raise here is we tend to consider violence something physical and that it only tends to really have one basic form (hitting people, even stabbing someone is similar to a hitting action). Meanwhile there we (or i hope we do) aknowledge that there is more to a person than simply their body(note kindergarden: its what is on the inside that counts).

Violence comes in many forms, and this is one of the reasons i like the language latin more than english (even though i don't speak it and don't plan to take courses on it), words have more than one meaning and in saying a word you need to consider more than the single meaning. Violence should be considered in my humble (ha ha) opinion something that harms someone else.

Now we need to define harm, because face it, harm can also mean tonnes of other things. To be honest the first thing i think of when i think the word harm is the first aid symbol. But harm is so much more than that. To get at my definition of harm we are going to use another word.

Suffering. Thats right people, we are heading back into Buddhist territory! Noble Truth Numerio Uno, Life is suffering! But what is suffering? Suffering is anthing that is a negative, hunger, pain, depression, reliance on a substance, greif, basically any form of pain (not getting the prom dress you wanted? yep that counts too).

To me harm is simply the result of an act of violence which causes suffering to someone. The equation goes something like this suffering is pain,voilence results in harm to someone which creates pain which is suffering.

Now one of the points of becoming Buddhist (or in my case a buddhist practioner, not an actual buddhist) is to help reduce suffering in the world through mindfullness. Mindfullness is being aware of what your doing. To explain that i shall tell a story.

Yesterday i was driving with a friend of mine to pick up my little sister but while driving we were having a very animated discussion, which distracted me so i missed the turn to where she would be not once but twice! This is an example of not being mindfull, i didn't pay attention to my actions or their consiquences, instead going on insticnt which resulted in a waste of gas and time (luckily my little sister was also late getting to her bus stop so we were there first).

Now how does mindfullness link to suffering which links to harm which links to violence which links to Alanis? Simple really, if you are mindful of your actions then you notice when you are about to do something which harms someone through an act of violence (taDOW! oh i love it when a plan comes together!).

Alanis's song comes into play though because it shows how violence isn't just an act of hitting someone, it is the act of doing anything which may cause harm which causes suffering. That includes anything mental, as well as things people don't know you are doing. Harm and violence are not always ententional, this is something obvious that still needs to be stated, but please, take the time to think about in which ways you are violent and how you feel about that.