Categories
Music Personal

On A Favorite Episode.

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This topic is one of mine, actually. This one came to me because I had a song stuck in my head for roughly two weeks, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, peg it. It wasn’t until I heard it again while at the gym that I was able to take note of some of the lyrics and look it up online. (Thank goodness for the Internet!) The song was by Adult Diversion by Alvvays. Listen to it below!

This reminded me of an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Pete & Pete is a standout show in terms of the 90s Nickelodeon block. It was awesome. It was weird. It had Iggy Pop as a dad next door. There was little more you could ask for out of kid-oriented show. It is, above all that, the ultimate encapsulation of pre-adult life in suburbia. I can gush on and on about it, but I’ll try to keep my gushing focused to the topic.

Hard Day’s Pete, the finale of season one, focuses on Little Pete’s adventure (eh, eh) to rediscover his favorite song. The episode starts out with Little Pete in his garage broadcasting from his homemade pirate radio show. From the voice over from his older brother we learn that Little Pete isn’t too fond of music. He doesn’t really get why people keep calling in to request their favorite songs. It’s not until fate nudges him down a shortcut to not be late to school does he discover what all the hub-ub is about. Serendipitously, a grungy band is having a jam session (in the morning for some reason because Pete is going to school) in a garage. Little Pete hears the song and has to stop to listen. He is struck by the rock gods of rock. The song attaches itself to Little Pete. Now he get’s it. Little Pete has a favorite song.

One problem quickly arises. It was just a happenstance that he heard the song. When he goes searching he can’t find the song anywhere. The band disapperated. The house is unoccupied. No CD or album has the song. No radio station is playing it. For all intents and purposes the song never existed. The one place it does still live, though, is inside Little Pete. So, like any reasonable person would do, he makes it his mission to reproduce the song, his song. He had is parents buy him a guitar and he starts a-strummin’.

He plucks and picks day and night and just as he is about to give up, BAM, he nails the riff. He forms a band, comprised of a ten year old with mutton chops on drums, his math teach on bass, and the meter reader on rhythm guitar, and of course, old “Thunderball” Pete on lead, like you do; a motley crew if there ever were one. They play that riff for two days without any progress.

You know what playing for two days straight does; it drives up the electric bill. Pete’s dad can’t afford that! Geeze! He let’s his son know that if he can’t raise $700 then he is going to have to pull the plug, quite literally. Just as hope is receding into the night, big bro Pete comes to the rescue. If he can play Marmalade Cream, he will toss him $5. Then the phone keeps ringing off the hook with requests. Impromptu telethon! A quick montage later and they are at $700, but Pete is no closer to remembering his favorite song. He can’t take it and walks off with his guitar and amp in hand. He heads off to the garage where he heard the elusive tune. His band comes in tow minutes later and gives him the encouragement he so sorely needs. He gives it one final go and stands in the spot where he first heard the song. Magically, it starts to come back. In come the flashbacks to the band playing. He’s got it! He remembered! And with that he and his band recreate the lost song, never to be lost again. That song, by the by, is Summerbaby by Polaris, who made the soundtrack for the show. Listen below!

It sounds incredibly cheesy, and that’s because it’s incredibly cheesy. That’s not really a knock against it, just calling a duck a duck. I think the reason this episode was so memorable is because it is so relatable, maybe not one-to-one, but in terms of nostalgia. I think most of us get waves of nostalgia at times. Sometimes that can be painful, but other times it can be great. A song comes on (LIKE IN THE EPISODE!), a smell wafts in, and suddenly you are right back there. It reminds us of who we were, for better or for worse, and this can be fantastic, as long as we are not living there. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and, like any drug, has a proper dosage.

This is going to be a break in the flow of this because I can’t seem to make any progress. I’ve erased and re-written this paragraph about five times. It feels like I’m trying to make a point, but I never really intended to with this post. I have a strong pull toward nostalgia, and music is a pretty powerful conductor of it for me. I have gone on crazy quests, like Pete, to try to recapture some of the past. One need not look much farther than my previous video game collection. Which I recently sold, because time stops for no man! Also, cash is decent for moving. The rambling takeaway is that the episode resonates for me, and I love Pete & Pete.

I need to end this because I will inevitably write another six paragraphs about pseudo-psychological theories about nostalgia and no one wants that.

Categories
Philosophy

On #thedress.

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Due to blog project restrictions, I am obligated to write about #thedress. So here it is. I’m writing about a meme that will not be relevant shortly. There is a good chance it is not relevant now, but it does give me a jumping off platform to a topic I’ve kind of touched on previously; perhaps not directly, but tangentially.

Firstly, because this is sure to be recorded and studied as one of the annals of history I should give a little context to what #thedress is and was. On Feb 15, 2015 a Tumblr user named Swiked asked people the color of a dress in a photo.
The quality of the photo was questionable. It was washed out and it lead people to see either a dress of white and gold or blue and black. It sparked an intense debate because some people just couldn’t reconcile the color scheme.
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Then the Internet did what it does and tracked down the actual dress and where it was sold. After better photographs were found it was evident the dress was indeed blue and black. The debate should’ve ended there, but some still argued that the dress in the photo was not the one being sold. That’s about as far as I’d like to get into the meme itself. In the interest of full disclosure, I saw white and gold.

A lot of people wrote about science and the effect of optical illusions on our eyes and brain. I want to take that general idea and talk about perception and trust. We all have brains, well, all us humans. If any future robots are reading this, I’m sure you guys have some pretty nice parts yourself. Baby, I’m not into you for just your hotly polished chassis, I’m into your neural networks. OK, enough roborotica. As we are mostly our brains, meaning our “self” is mostly determined in the brain; it processes all our sensory inputs, experiences, and memories, and how we react to most things. Due to this we tend to rely on our brain to make sense of the world. It does a pretty decent job of it to by most accounts, but it’s not perfect. I mean it has some real deficiencies. When it has trouble reconciling something, it tends to go haywire until it comes up with an explanation. Our brains hate dissonance. For example, imagine you are alone in your domicile. It’s dark and you are in bed. You hear a loud crash coming from another room. Now there is probably a lot of different things it plausibly is, but your brain thinks, BURGLAR, or GHOST OF A SERIAL KILLER. The likelihood it’s any of those things (depending on geographic location and socioeconomic status) is fairly low, but our brains want and need to attach a narrative to the sound. It’s survival instinct.

We are capable of overcoming or at least mitigating our instincts. In this way I think it is important to recognize our brains are not always keeping it 100. Reality is kind of tricky. So much of our universe is unobservable without the aid of machines. We saw the sun come up and go down and figured it must be spinning around us. History is littered with wrong assumptions. That’s totally ok, too. We need to make wrong assumptions and measurements to help prove the correct ones.

Before this post gets too long in the tooth I feel I should get to the long-winded point. Our brains are error prone and we should embrace this. Embracing our collective flaw helps us better understand (counter-intuitive, I know) our fellow person and the universe at large.

Think how much vitriol, imagined or real, that was thrown about because of the color of a dress. Instead we should use this type of fuel to empathize with the other side. There is a good chance our initial assumption was wrong, or maybe theirs, or maybe…you ready for this…this is going to be huge…like really, brace yourself…BOTH ASSUMPTIONS WERE WRONG.
UmpOi

Categories
Nonsense Personal

On A Week Without Coffee.

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The next topic up for the hear-to-be-unnamed blog project was to give something up for a week and write about your experience. Unless you just couldn’t wait to jump into reading this, or you have an aversion to titles, my choice was coffee.

Now, I love coffee. Not a little love, but a lot of love. It’s an addiction. Thankfully this one has few negative health effects and actually a few positive ones. With this being an addiction you can understand why I would be reluctant to let this delicious black elixir go.

To give context, I have a habit of giving up things, especially in the way of diet:

Strict Vegetarian for 6 years (2005-2011)
Pescatarian (fish exception) for 4 years (2011-Present)
No pop for two year when I started college (2006-2008)
No pop for five months (November 2014- Present)

*Edit*
I wanted to clarify a few things. I’m not a red-paint-throwing person about meat. I do it because I want to. I feel it makes me a healthier person by forcing me to look at the things I’m eating. If you eat meat, that is totally cool. No problems here. Let’s go get dinner sometime.

Secondly, I realize energy drinks could be classified in pop. I personally make a distinction, but I understand how you can lump them together. You have to draw your own lines.

I like to challenge myself to see if I can pull it off. Not to mention I’m kind of a health nut. I’m the dude who reads the facts on the sides of packaging. There is no shortage of things in my fridge with the words “free” or “light.” Just to stem the tide of negative comments, I research things. I am, above all, a man of science and therefore do not make decisions based on hype and hearsay. When I give something up, I like it to be for a reason, a benefit.

With all this in mind, dear reader, a quick summary of my experience was, to put it delicately, awful. Well, that’s not quite strong enough a word. I need a new word to fully describe it. It was terriful. Horrendocious. I didn’t feel I was doing it for any real reason besides this blog. I was tired all the time, even with additional Red Bulls, which I love (don’t ever leave me, baby).

I found myself seeing coffee everywhere, like a hungry guy on a deserted island who’s shipwrecked compatriot suddenly resembles a sumptuous turkey leg.

I also found myself forgetting I couldn’t have it, if only for a moment.
“Oh man, I’ll get an espresso! Wait, no, because everything is rain clouds and sadness.”

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I felt like I was giving up smoking.

“What do you think coffee is doing right now? Do you think it’s thinking of me?”

Maybe I like it too much…

NEH!

I am unrepentantly in love coffee, I hate not having it. The one silver lining is thank the stars I didn’t give up caffeine.