Current Tunes: Live feed of UN Security Council summit on nuclear disarmament
Two days in, I have incorporated two new habits into my mornings. Very simple ones; lying on the floor to relax/meditate for ten minutes as well as doing as many push ups as I can (this idea of course at the suggestion of Charles). I’m encouraged so far, and I believe these small practices will have good and positive results. Push ups are peculiar to me. I don’t believe I’d done real push ups since middle school, or maybe earlier. Yesterday, I think I only did three actual push ups, but today I did more like 13. I suppose the first day I was probably doing them wrong. I don’t think I had my arms spaced out far enough. So, already we have met with small progress! Great success!
A second weekend in a row in Florence will be had. It appears highly possible I’ll be attending the Tide & Arkansas game on Saturday, and that is immeasurably exciting to me. Going to the three Alabama games I went to last year was incredible; I’d go so far as to call it uplifting, invigorating, maybe even life-changing. We really need a huge showing against Arkansas. We need to beat them by three touchdowns or more and show the country just how serious this team is. Well, I suppose we don’t need to, but we’re just one victory like that away from replacing Texas in the #2 spot in the polls.
Game aside, I suppose I’ll spend half of my time helping pack up items in the house, and the other half working on class work or hanging out with the usual crew. Wish I didn’t have to wait to leave so late on Friday, but those are the breaks.
It occurred to me that Halloween’s only a month away, and as a consequence I’m going to do my best to make some solid, exciting plans now, not later. My last few Halloweens have been squandered at home, sitting around doing nothing in conjunction with what’s essentially the most fun holiday. I’m sure most of you might want to jump on me and say, “Hello?!?! CHRISTMAS???” but I would remind you, after the early morning presents and all that, you’re still left stuck in the house with nowhere to go except the movies (because everywhere else is closed) and you spend all your energy for the day in that first hour of the morning. With Halloween, you can wake up in the morning, slip on your Batman costume and wear it all day. And if you work hard enough at it, you can end up with ten times as much candy as you would get in your stocking on Christmas. Christmas is a sprint; Halloween is a marathon. That’s today’s lesson.
I had tuned into this little UN meeting (see Current Tunes) thinking it would be filled with insightful comments and possibly even a new idea or strategy for rethinking world disarmament. I should have known better, all I heard and saw was world leaders glad-handing each other, barking out pure and pointless rhetoric on how nuclear bombs are bad and we have to get rid of them, and keep certain other nut bags from getting them. That's real progress, woo boy. Stop saying what everyone already knows and get something done for once, please? Maybe I would actually like you, United Nations, if you did something meaningful.
Want to know the truth though? I'm really only ranting about this meeting because I can't find anything else that particularly catches my attention in regards to politics right now. Which actually, now that I think about it, this is a prime climate for me to be super-charged when it comes to politics and government, but I'm not. Everyone's running around at town hall meetings crying about the sky falling, or how global warming is going to turn the world upside down, or how North Korea's on the verge of sticking a nuke up our tailpipe, and none of this has me worried in the slightest. I'm not really sure why. I worry more about my own personal crises instead, and those I worry about too much.
That's what I've come to conclude: I worry too much when it comes to my own problems, but when it comes to the problems and concerns of the world itself I'm probably far too apathetic. I didn't always used to be that way, but things change and you have to learn to accept change, right? It happens. What can I do to change the problem of nuclear disarmament anyway? I'm not a nuclear physicist, and I'm definitely not a politician. That's a discussion for another time, really. I don't feel like going all 'it only takes one voice to change the world' right now, but maybe next time.
24 September 2009
21 September 2009
Non-Habit Forming
Current Tunes: Insomnium - Down with the Sun
Man, what a way to start out a new season. If "House" isn't the penultimate of what television can accomplish, then they should just give up on the medium as a whole. Television almost without exception is terribly pointless and bad for you, but not "House." That's one of my favorite things about it.
Continuing with media related topics, my compliments to the Emmy Awards for being the first snobby, mindless, glad-handing award show in history to actually give an award to an entity that wholly deserved special accolades. I’m talking of course about the award that Joss Whedon and Co. won at the Creative Arts Emmy ceremony for “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” I especially love what Mr. Whedon says at the end of the acceptance speech he gave that night. It’s good that the mainstream television industry is acknowledging not only good storytelling and creativity, but also a changing of the guard that’s happening. The Internet is not a deterrent to good television and storytelling; it’s a new and more efficient delivery system. I could very well seeing this as being a moment when media historians look back and say “When ‘Dr. Horrible’ won an Emmy, that’s what opened the floodgates.” My congratulations to Whedon, and I enthusiastically await the next part of the series. Especially when I consider how I think they have so many different angles to grow the show into.
I stumbled across an interesting little link today, via the Twitter account of one Mr. William Gibson. I don’t know if this report will get the needed circulation that I feel is really necessary, as the media can be quite unreliable when it comes to reporting stories that don’t involve the sex lives of pop singers. The real reason though I believe I’m pointing this article out is that it reminds and saddens me that I wasn’t more staunchly outraged by all the reports and facts surrounding how our government sanctioned torture for multiple years in multiple cases.
A younger me, a 17-year-old me, would have been so angered by such a revelation he would have demanded excused absence from school in order to more faithfully protest the extreme insanity and ignorance of our government representatives. But it was just another footnote for the current me. Perhaps though this not-so-stunning-to-me information will help awaken people to how we should proceed with not just complicated socio-political issues, but will serve as a reminder to treat our fellow man with a little more dignity and respect.
I feel I’m finally coming around to appreciate the real value in integrating positive habits into my life and routine, so now I must begin that process. I'm approaching this concept like a class; I have to assign myself practice exercises in order to teach myself the concepts and actions that represent comprehension of the material. With any process where you try to learn, where you’re starting fresh, I feel it’s probably a good idea to try first with something small. So I need a couple of good ideas for a small, almost-but-not-quite menial habit to ingrain in myself. One idea has been to just simply lie on the floor for half an hour a day, listening to my iPod and not getting up from the floor until the half hour has passed.
My other ‘simple’ idea had been to stop being so negative about everything in life, but after a moment I realized that’s a terribly complicated and difficult. Even then, it's not really creating a new and positive habit, it's eliminating a negative, preexisting one. The iPod idea isn’t great either, I feel. I don’t think it generates anything positive in my life; it’s merely ‘neutral.’ I suppose a habit is truly doing something and laying on the floor listening to music isn’t really doing. Working out daily is a highly desirable habit for me, but I’ve tried that before and couldn’t make it last. Maybe I should try again.
Man, what a way to start out a new season. If "House" isn't the penultimate of what television can accomplish, then they should just give up on the medium as a whole. Television almost without exception is terribly pointless and bad for you, but not "House." That's one of my favorite things about it.
Continuing with media related topics, my compliments to the Emmy Awards for being the first snobby, mindless, glad-handing award show in history to actually give an award to an entity that wholly deserved special accolades. I’m talking of course about the award that Joss Whedon and Co. won at the Creative Arts Emmy ceremony for “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” I especially love what Mr. Whedon says at the end of the acceptance speech he gave that night. It’s good that the mainstream television industry is acknowledging not only good storytelling and creativity, but also a changing of the guard that’s happening. The Internet is not a deterrent to good television and storytelling; it’s a new and more efficient delivery system. I could very well seeing this as being a moment when media historians look back and say “When ‘Dr. Horrible’ won an Emmy, that’s what opened the floodgates.” My congratulations to Whedon, and I enthusiastically await the next part of the series. Especially when I consider how I think they have so many different angles to grow the show into.
I stumbled across an interesting little link today, via the Twitter account of one Mr. William Gibson. I don’t know if this report will get the needed circulation that I feel is really necessary, as the media can be quite unreliable when it comes to reporting stories that don’t involve the sex lives of pop singers. The real reason though I believe I’m pointing this article out is that it reminds and saddens me that I wasn’t more staunchly outraged by all the reports and facts surrounding how our government sanctioned torture for multiple years in multiple cases.
A younger me, a 17-year-old me, would have been so angered by such a revelation he would have demanded excused absence from school in order to more faithfully protest the extreme insanity and ignorance of our government representatives. But it was just another footnote for the current me. Perhaps though this not-so-stunning-to-me information will help awaken people to how we should proceed with not just complicated socio-political issues, but will serve as a reminder to treat our fellow man with a little more dignity and respect.
I feel I’m finally coming around to appreciate the real value in integrating positive habits into my life and routine, so now I must begin that process. I'm approaching this concept like a class; I have to assign myself practice exercises in order to teach myself the concepts and actions that represent comprehension of the material. With any process where you try to learn, where you’re starting fresh, I feel it’s probably a good idea to try first with something small. So I need a couple of good ideas for a small, almost-but-not-quite menial habit to ingrain in myself. One idea has been to just simply lie on the floor for half an hour a day, listening to my iPod and not getting up from the floor until the half hour has passed.
My other ‘simple’ idea had been to stop being so negative about everything in life, but after a moment I realized that’s a terribly complicated and difficult. Even then, it's not really creating a new and positive habit, it's eliminating a negative, preexisting one. The iPod idea isn’t great either, I feel. I don’t think it generates anything positive in my life; it’s merely ‘neutral.’ I suppose a habit is truly doing something and laying on the floor listening to music isn’t really doing. Working out daily is a highly desirable habit for me, but I’ve tried that before and couldn’t make it last. Maybe I should try again.
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