Sledding
I went to the dunes with Mike today. We tramped for miles and miles around the state park, occasionally finding a monstrous hill to coast down. I had a great time walking along the lake and through the sand and snow drifts. I need to get outside during the winter.
The show went well last night. I enjoyed the venue; we need to play more coffee shops like the Metacafe. The crowd was receptive, and I got a few compliments on my playing (even though I was critical of myself; my hands cramped up within like 3 songs!)
I always feel more introspective and creative in the wintertime. Today I was thinking about my career as an English educator, and how many people within my family can sometimes look down on this. What, they say, is the practical significance of words set down on paper by people you will never meet? I got to thinking today, while walking along the dunes, that in our modern society we have difficulty translating experiences. For example, you often hear the phrase, 'He/she is going through a mid-life crisis.' (I use this as an example; I could also use such phrases as 'They had sex,' or 'Bob had a nightmare.') This will elicit certain images, ideas and conventions, perhaps of a person trading in the old wood-paneled-Chevy-Chase Nomad for a sleek, shiny cherry-red lamborghini. But all of these images are shallow, because it is very likely that one has never experienced a mid-life crisis, and therefore is unable to come up with the 'language' to express the motivations and emotions behind such an experience. Therefore, we boil such a thing down to its simplest form: a hollow word with little meaning other than as a reference point.
This is where I come in. Literature (and art in general, whether it be movies, music, etc. etc.) creates a 'language' and a 'vocabulary' through which such terms can be expressed. Watch 'American Beauty,' and a mid-life crisis is no longer a shallow word to grab hold of, but a moment in which the self reaches a climactic crisis point and seeks to redefine itself through a destructive process which involves the casting aside of labels and meaningless social constructs. Now a mid-life crisis is more than another thing, but a unique experience with power, force and conviction behind it. Our modern day information society is so inundated that we often lose this experience, an unfortunate mistake that often leads to alienation of the self.
The show went well last night. I enjoyed the venue; we need to play more coffee shops like the Metacafe. The crowd was receptive, and I got a few compliments on my playing (even though I was critical of myself; my hands cramped up within like 3 songs!)
I always feel more introspective and creative in the wintertime. Today I was thinking about my career as an English educator, and how many people within my family can sometimes look down on this. What, they say, is the practical significance of words set down on paper by people you will never meet? I got to thinking today, while walking along the dunes, that in our modern society we have difficulty translating experiences. For example, you often hear the phrase, 'He/she is going through a mid-life crisis.' (I use this as an example; I could also use such phrases as 'They had sex,' or 'Bob had a nightmare.') This will elicit certain images, ideas and conventions, perhaps of a person trading in the old wood-paneled-Chevy-Chase Nomad for a sleek, shiny cherry-red lamborghini. But all of these images are shallow, because it is very likely that one has never experienced a mid-life crisis, and therefore is unable to come up with the 'language' to express the motivations and emotions behind such an experience. Therefore, we boil such a thing down to its simplest form: a hollow word with little meaning other than as a reference point.
This is where I come in. Literature (and art in general, whether it be movies, music, etc. etc.) creates a 'language' and a 'vocabulary' through which such terms can be expressed. Watch 'American Beauty,' and a mid-life crisis is no longer a shallow word to grab hold of, but a moment in which the self reaches a climactic crisis point and seeks to redefine itself through a destructive process which involves the casting aside of labels and meaningless social constructs. Now a mid-life crisis is more than another thing, but a unique experience with power, force and conviction behind it. Our modern day information society is so inundated that we often lose this experience, an unfortunate mistake that often leads to alienation of the self.