Good Taste/Bad Taste

It bugs me the way people talk about taste in media (particularly music). They act like the rule is you either have good taste, liking good music and hating bad music, or bad taste, where you either don't care about or dislike good music and love bad music. Most people think, or at least talk as if they think, that it's impossible to have both. Well, it's possible.

I have good taste in music: I like the Submarines, the Weepies, Maria Mena, the Beatles, and half a dozen others you're even less likely to have heard of than the first three I named. And there is some music I cannot stand, like Taylor Swift's "Love Story" (addressed briefly here). But there is some genuinely BAD music I like. For example, I think Nickelback is incredibly fun. I'm not saying I "enjoy them ironically," whatever that is supposed to mean. I just like listening to them. I know they lack compositional talent. The song "Nickelback sucks" demonstrates that by pairing "How You Remind Me" with "Someday." They have the exact same chord progression and remarkable similarities between the two videos. That doesn't change the fact that I like them.

In summary, just because someone has bad taste in music, doesn't mean they don't have good taste in music, or vice versa.

Nightmares

I have a semi-recurring nightmare.

In it, I have finished college (or, when it started, I was in college), but my highschool has contacted me, saying that my diploma is invalid because of some irregularity or other. Sometimes I had forgotten to take a required class, and they just now noticed. Other times, some teacher or another had faked their degree or missed something that would have made the class count. At least once, I remembered having agreed to putting off this one requirement until such a time as I was free. The bottom line is, I need to go back to highschool for a semester and get this taken care of.

This is not a terribly disturbing nightmare. Perhaps it is only an unpleasant dream. I just know that I always have this panic of going back.

It doesn't help that after graduating, I've been living at home and still cannot find a job.

Demons

My Senior year of High School, I worked for about three months at Meijer. One day, one of my coworkers—a self-described "pagan"—went around asking people whether they believed all demons were evil. Most of the self-described Christians, agnostics, and atheists who worked there gave a tepid "I guess" or "I don't know." She smugly pointed out that they hypocritically condemned what they did not understand and did not understand what they believed. When she asked me, I did not know yet that she had asked my coworkers for their thoughts, or what answers she had received. Our conversation went a little like this (not word for word—it has been four years):

PAGAN: Do you think all demons are evil?
ME: Yes.
(PAGAN descends into sputtering rage at my certain and confident answer, babbles about being self righteous)
ME: Wait a minute... what do you mean by "demon"?

At this moment, I realized that she and I did not agree on our terms. I took demon to mean fallen angel. It's very definition meant that it was a being which saw God in all His glory and turned against Him. She did not have the same definition, as her answer demonstrated:

PAGAN: Any kind of demon!
ME: No, I mean...
PAGAN: Take a succubus for example. It has drains the life out of humans by having sex with them. Is it evil?
ME: If such a thing really exists; yes.
PAGAN: How can you say that?!? It's only doing it to survive! That's like denying a person the right to eat!

Here, again, we were hitting a wall in our conversation. One from which it did not recover, as I was called away shortly thereafter to do my actual job. However, I know how I would have responded: Angels, fallen or otherwise, are eternal beings. They don't die. Demons, therefore, do not need to feed to survive, whether on libidos or Fritos. It would be ludicrous for a Christian to respond any other way to her questions.

I suppose I'm thinking of this because I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately. (I just finished Season 6, and haven't seen it before, so please no one who reads this ruin Season 7 for me.) It's gotten me thinking a lot about different things: occult, demonic, magic, and mythic. I've done a lot of considering lately. Most of my thoughts are unimportant, and I will keep them to myself for now. I may have follow-up posts, however, wherein I discuss individual ideas in greater depth.

Emotional Experience

When I applied to Los Angeles Film Studies Center, they asked for a narrative of my most emotional experience. The following is what I wrote, with minor changes:

In my junior year of high school, I met a girl I'll call "K" (whose name I will omit for the sake of her privacy). We were both on our high school's forensics team, and were both of the intellectual persuasion. By this, I of course mean that we were smart and knew it, with (I am ashamed to say on my part) varying degrees of humility. Throughout the course of the semester, we became as close friends as I was with anyone during my pre-collegiate years. Much of our time was spent preparing for or going to speech competitions, and so we spent much of our time in each other's company. She was phenomenally talented and immensely kind to everyone to whom I ever saw her speak. I admit I may have even had a crush on her, but I never acted on it. Then, at the end of the year, she transferred to a private girls school and we lost touch with one another.

Throughout the course of my senior year, I would send K an occasional email. I didn't say anything special, just some updates about who had done what that we both knew and the sort of things I was up to. I knew that her new school's curriculum was much more intense than mine, so I thought nothing of it that she didn't really respond to my emails. Perhaps this was mere foolishness, perhaps self-delusion. Whatever the reason, I kept sending her emails every month or two for the first half of the year, then began to get less frequent. One day in the spring, I realized I hadn't written her in a while, so I sent her one last email. The act did not seem significant to me at the time.

A day or two after I sent that last email, I got a response from my not-so-long lost friend and was elated at the fact. I opened the email reply to my message and was horrified at what I read. It has been nearly four years, and those words were not “burned into my mind,” but the general gist of her message was. Her message essentially said: “I thought ignoring you was enough to send the message. Apparently not. I do not want to hear from you. I do not care how you or anyone you know is doing, and I hope you never talk to, write to, or in any way contact me again.” She expounded upon this theme for well over a page of writing. Likely, she thought this necessary, as I was too “dense” to pick up the subtleties of being ignored and so might miss the direct point as well. While I did not understand her reasoning, I respected her decision and so immediately deleted her from my email contacts, instant messenger, and any other list of contacts in which she had previously appeared.

For many people, this would only be a strange occurrence and perhaps slightly disappointing. But I have always had a fear of rejection (a full discussion of which would take well over a the allowed length of this essay on its own). I am reluctant to use common platitudes and metaphors, so I will not describe her message as a knife in the chest. That is exactly how I had described it at the time, but I have since thought back and realized that the feeling was nothing at all like a knife. What I felt was not pain, or sadness, or anger. It was a sort of internal reordering. The best I can think of to describe it is the way I imagine a surgery patient would feel after having had an appendectomy. Something of which I had not been normally aware had been taken away from me.

What was even worse than the feeling, however, were its aftereffects. I cannot make myself make first contact with any of my high school friends. Those with whom I have reestablished contact already, I may call, but the fear that they too will without explanation or reasonable provocation demand that I sever all ties between us grips me with all its might. Those who have not contacted me I have simply lost. Thankfully, there is such a disconnect between my high school and college careers that I do not have this problem with my college friends who have graduated or transferred. I am reluctant, perhaps, to call unsolicited, but I still do try from time to time, and most often my efforts are rewarded.

I have felt stronger emotions than this unclassifiable feeling K gave me, both before and since then. I have not, however, had any event trigger such a long-lasting shift in my emotions. I may never be free of her influence in my life. This strikes me as perhaps the greatest irony, that in trying to sever ties between us, K permanently won herself a place in my heart as the friend who didn't want me.

One might wonder what prompted me to post this now, over a year after I wrote it. The truth is, I recently googled "K"s name on a whim and found out where she goes to school. I still respect her decision, and will make no attempt to contact her. I'm just nostalgic, and a little sad.

Twenty Three Years of Madness

So, yesterday was my twenty-third birthday. It was somewhat interesting. I don't like this blog to be about my life so much as it is about my thoughts, but birthdays tend to make people think about their lives, so I'll call this post a toss-up.

Two days ago, I took my guitar out of its case for the first time in months and decided to genuinely practice. (For those who don't know, I don't ever claim to play the guitar — I practice. I'll call it playing when I can goof off and still not sound like crap.) I spent a while working, but then I remembered that my fingers were no longer calloused and decided to stop. With luck, I'll stay with it this time and end up actually playing the guitar.

Also recently, I started telling a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story on my facebook, run by popular vote. My hope is that this will motivate me to keep up with writing more (and possibly increase my audience, and provide me with feedback — lots of pluses to this plan).

I could go on, but I honestly feel this is better left short and sweet. I feel like I'm being more productive and responsible. Now if only I could find a job...

Looking at My Friendslists

I decided to look over my facebook friendlists. I learned a few things. Here are some of the things I learned.

By my definition of Friendship, I have 8 facebook friends I consider True Friends. I went over the list 3 times and grouped them together. 8 out of nearly 600.

As near as I can tell, there are 25 girls on my friendslist who I at one time or another had a crush on. Some of those it's hard to believe I ever liked. Exactly 2 are also on my list of "True Friends."

I have 17 Family Members among my friends, including my entire immediate family.

There are at least as many people on my list that I keep around in the event they might be helpful to me later in life as there are true friends - I stopped counting after 7, and know there was at least one more.

There are 7 people on my friendslists who have betrayed me at one time or another: at least four of them would have been on my list of "True Friends" if not for these betrayals.

All of my facebook friends who are on none of these lists are either people who I think are cool, but don't really know that well, or people whom it would be awkward and potentially create drama (for me or for our mutual friends) if I unfriended.

Tell me, does this seem normal to you? Are any of these groups unusually skewed, as you see it? I'm just wondering.

Some Things Change, Some Things Make Me Angry

When I was in early high school, I disliked country music—among other things, I disliked how hick-ish my high school was, and felt that country music exemplified this problem. Every semseter, we had a spirit week including a "Dress Like a Farmer" day. Most people didn't have to change that much. But I digress.

My junior year of high school, we moved to a new building which was no longer in walking distance from my house, and though I had a license, I had no car, so I started riding the bus. The driver liked country music, so that's what we listened to. Throughout the year, I learned to deal with it. I accepted, but did not like country music. This continued through much of college.

My junior year of college, however, my roommate talked me into going line dancing with him at a club called "The Dusty Armadillo." Not wanting to be a stick-in-the-mud, I danced. Dancing, I learned to love the music. That isn't to say I loved all country music, or all the time, but when I recognized a song I knew I could dance to, a new thrill shot through me. Thus I began to like country music.

Since graduation, I have moved home, and during my frequent visits to the Chiropractor (another story, for those who do not already know), I typically listen to one of our local country stations. Today was one such day. And now the reason for my writing: "Love Story" by Taylor Swift is a terrible song in every way, shape, and form.

I hate the music, I hate the lyrics, I hate the story the lyrics and music come together to tell. And not just because I feel that Mercutio should have been the hero of the play, because it completely ignores the actual plot of the story! Don't mention Romeo and Juliet if you're going to have a happy ending, Miss Swift! No! I had thought there was no way it was as bad as I thought it was, so I forced myself to listen to the whole thing.

It was worse.