on having reasons

i threw a bit of a party at my place on the weekend.  i decided that i really wanted to have the BEST PARTY EVER complete with party games and...loot bags.  i was completely fixated on the loot bags (even though they never even happened in the end because when you invite EVERYONE in law school over to your house it's hard to say how many will come and how many loot bags you'll need and i didn't want any single person to not get a loot bag...so in typical emily all-or-not-at-all fashion i kiboshed the idea), so off i went to the bulk barn, aka heaven on earth, and proceeded to buy ALL the valentine's day candy they had to offer.  why valentine's?  no good reason except that hearts are precious.  that's the whole reason.

and then i LITTERED my house with candy.  i just put it everywhere.  sadly...nobody really ate it and so NOW there is SO MUCH CANDY just everywhere in my house.  it's overwhelming.  i am addicted to sweets and am already excellent at procuring all sorts of processed sugary delights without them just being readily available every which way i turn.  i don't need yet another reason to just sit there and eat cinnamon hearts.

the reason why i am writing this blog actually has to do with that word, reason.  i would usually think that it's not a reason why i am devouring candy, but instead would call it an excuse.  i have excuses for eating processed sugar when i know i shouldn't, and excuses for not practicing singing more often, and excuses for not going running lately.  but as i was thinking about all these excuses for these things, i was plagued with this memory of music school and being told by a prof that she didn't want to hear any more of my excuses for not knowing my part better that day; no more excuses for why i was wearing stress on my face instead of my character (which was actually pretty rad because it was an enchantress - ummm sounds both magical AND sexy, non?).  this person just did not want to hear any more of my excuses.

but what was so funny was that my "excuse" was that my sister was sick!  in the hospital!  and my mom was even coming all the way into the city from five hours away because we were so worried!  and it was like panic panic panic zone.  and this was my "excuse".

what i realized by thinking of this memory (that unfortunately left a terrible taste in my mouth for Dido and Aeneas and poorly kept curly hair) was that this word "excuse" is inherently just negative.  it takes away all of a person's ability to be able to rationalize and prioritize.  it makes a person's reasoning inherently incorrect, and wrong, and inconvenient to another person.  had this prof asked me what my reason for not being prepared that day was, i might have been forthcoming, and she likely would have felt compassion for me, my sister, and we would have been at a bridge and would have crossed it to some peaceful other side.  but by calling my reason an excuse, she immediately insulted me.

an excuse is an admission that you are unable to manage your time.  you're not strong enough to refrain from eating chocolates.  you're incapable of motivating yourself to go for a run.  however, usually, the reality is much closer to an identifiable reason: "i didn't care about singing this song because i wanted to talk with my sister and there aren't enough hours in the day" or "i actually think chocolates are completely delicious and #YOLO" or "i need to write this horrible, entirely un-analytical piece-of-crap essay that's due ASAP and i would rather get it done than go for a run".  by calling my excuses reasons, i immediately re-instill myself with autonomy and decision-making power and positivity and strength.

life is just a series of reasons.  we reason ourselves into any given decision and that's that.  we move forward.  and when we make positive choices we are generally pleased to go ahead and call our motivations for the decision reasons.  and it is positive and it is empowering and we feel oh so good about ourselves.  however, whenever we make a decision that we don't actually feel good about because of this thing or the next thing, we lean heavily on excuses and we're sad and we're sorry.  and the more we bend over backwards on that word, excuse, we just continue instilling pervasive negativity into our states of being.

i wonder now about that prof - if she saw more of her students' excuses as reasons how much better would each and every rehearsal, lesson, performance be?  and, in turn, how much happier would she be?  despite our impasse (in that moment annnnd unfortunately thereafter...), she really did teach me a lot.  just not in regards to anything she endeavoured to teach me about.

in respect of the ocean

When we were young we had no respect for the ocean.  The pervasive summer smell of sunscreen and warm skin was thick, clinging on to all the crevices of our summer universe – the walls of our houses; the wheels of our bikes.  It was a scent that followed us around as we ran haphazardly through July and August. 

We waited all year to be water creatures, and as soon as the last school bus left the parking lot at the end of June we emerged from our land-dwelling skins and dove into the Atlantic Ocean.  People tried to tell us to be careful, but we didn’t know how.  The tragedies of the ocean were beyond any kind of nightmares we were capable of having then.  We swam on poor days, in the middle of thunder and lightning storms.  We dove and jumped into water from wharves when the tide was out.  We went out from the harbour in rubber dingys, ocean black and sky grey.  We swam out to the middle of the harbour without thinking of being tired, or being dehydrated; of any harm ever coming our way.  We swam and swam, our legs turned to jelly and we didn’t care; we swam some more.  The ocean was our comrade and we had waited all year to be lost within the billions of droplets of salt sea water that made up this faithful friend.  No one could tell us what to do here. 

As we got older, we began to watch the lines set in on people’s faces: widows and widowers; mothers; daughters.  These lines were not the crow’s feet created by a life of smiling too much.  They were permanent marks of sadness; despair; hatred.  They were the lines of fearful respect that we hadn’t had growing up, running wild in a cove surrounded by ocean.

That morning that the town woke up to flags at half-mast and to empty wharves, the ocean seemed to look different.  The blue sky made the waves look aqua and cheerful, but all of a sudden we knew different.  We hadn’t understood how to respect that great, deep water when we were young, but suddenly the heavy-gutted responsibility of those depths was seated at the front of all of our tables.  We tried to look away, but this time we couldn’t. 

on being excellent (and why money does matter, but is meant to help one be excellent, not get in the way of it)

a good friend of mine has an excellent dad.  i don't mean he is really awesome or cool or off-the-charts-with-deadliness (although i'm not saying he's NOT these things of course!).  i mean it completely literally: any time you ask my friend's dad how he is, he says he's excellent.  completely just excellent.  one day somebody asked him what happened for him to be so excellent and he was a little confused by the question before explaining that we can choose to be whatever we want to be, so, because that is his choice, he chooses to be excellent: "why would i be anything less than excellent, since i have the option to be excellent?"

i never really questioned how excellent he was.  i didn't doubt that he was actually feeling quite excellent since this person has a rather upbeat, positive disposition, but ever since i heard his explanation of his being excellent i cannot shake his outlook on things.

when people ask me what i'm up to, i've become rather prone to responding with "learning about the law".  it's my favourite joke-pretentious phrase.  as IF i am sitting there, learning all the things about "the" law, this exceptionally broad discipline.  not even just a subject.  i'm not just learning about the history of chopin or some discrete subject, i'm apparently learning just everything there is to know about a discipline.  every time i say it it cracks me up.  it's not that i really AM that pretentious, i just think it's a hilarious sentence.

however, regardless of how funny (or not...) that sentence is, it's also synonymous with "i have to sit here and continue to read all about [energy law/defamation/the conflict of laws (ewwww)] and what i'd really like to be doing is [making music/reading a book/going running/drinking medium priced gamay noir with my favourites] but instead i have to do this".

i think a lot of people do this.  perhaps they're not all dropping some go-to silly comeback about what they're doing, and perhaps they have no interest in doing any of the things i'd rather be doing, but nonetheless - lots of us spend lots of time thinking about what we'd rather be doing and how this deflates our mood and so we're not excellent.

i'm quite certain my friend's dad doesn't mean to insinuate that there aren't reasons why one might be feeling something less than excellent.  perhaps his thought process is that for all the things that happen that are not excellent, you try to handle them while feeling as close to excellent as possible.  for example, just because i have to write a paper on something i don't know anything about, and i'm freaking out and panicking and i have to get my friend to reformulate my question for me (shout out to Stan who is the reason why i will (most likely) not fail janterm!!!!) doesn't mean i should just start sitting around feeling all down in the dumps and not turning my knowledge-less existence into a better one.  if i really hated what i was doing (i don't), perhaps i ought to go in search of something else because i'm just wasting my time.  and, if you guys gained anything from my post on time, it ought to be that i simply cannot abide by a life of time wasting.

the balancing of being excellent with having things going down that make you feel less excellent brought the "What if Money Didn't Matter"video to my mind.  for those who haven't seen it (likely nobody...):




there's the rather obvious criticism of this video that how the heck can one be expected to be happy if one is out endeavouring to become the world's best skip-rock'er and has literally ZERO dollars?  spot-on criticism.  i think being starving and having no home and no friends because you smell bad because you can't afford a shower will definitely get in the way of achieving happiness.  i think perhaps the message is meant to contribute to one's self-construction rather than become the literal method of attaining excellency.

my new years resolutions for 2013 are plentiful - drink more water (failing so far), drink more green tea (failing), call home more often (succeeding!), and be excellent every day.  if it's simply a choice i get to make, it really is that simple - why would you choose to be anything less than excellent?

on time (and why beethoven seven is exactly like time (in a nutshell at least))

this little electronic part of the world used to be jam-packed with my musings and ramblings on various issues.  thoughts on music, the law, little anecdotes...it was all here for your viewing pleasure.  and because i'm addicted to instant gratification, for my collecting fb-likes-and-page-views bliss.

however, as you may have noticed, i deleted everything from the last two years.  it's because i'm the opposite of a hoarder.  i actually wish i'd hoard a little bit more because i often throw away or delete things that later i wish i had - pictures, clothes, phone numbers, stuffed animals with sentimental value.  you name it, i throw it away.  in rash gestures of self-cleansing and closure, i can't hang on to anything for very long.  

in the last few months i really started to question why this is my jam, and i think the answer comes down to my perception of time.  i spend a lot of time thinking about time, and timing, and time wasted, and time well spent, and how to beat the man who made time, and whether or not it's true that the man who made time actually made a lot of it and an endless list of other temporal questions.

time, as far as i am able to discern, only exists in the most fleeting and short lived of moments.  the past obviously does not exist because it is already extinct.  the future does not exist because it's yet to be.  and the present is only tiny little milli-moments because as soon as you've moved from one teeny moment of existence it has already become the past.  so, in the end, we are left only with these lightning-speed pockets of life that are the 'present' and that evaporate just as quickly as they're born in the first place.

this of course isn't my unique creation... let's be real.  i spend all my time thinking about music and posting shit on facebook, i don't have time to come up with intellectual thought!  i love to read books about journeys...Brida, and Why is God Laughing?, and most recently some completely loveable parable-esque works by Francois Lelord about an inquisite and compassionate psychiatrist called Hector.  Hector has searched for not only happiness and love, but also for time.  i picked up this fleeting-moment-get-it-while-it's-hot conception of time in Hector and the Search for Lost Time over the holidays.

everyone's view towards time is different.  you see people racing to the next finish line in an endless journey of finish lines, and people who can't see the finish line from the track to begin with.  people who love thinking about the past, and people who can't sit still when swimming in all these old moments.  as you may have guessed, i'm in that last category.  i can't help but get stuck in the thoughts that without movement and life, the old moments don't really have value.  so i can learn from the old moments to make my present ones run a little better, but i can't just meander through the dead space that is the past.  somehow it seems like a waste of these fleeting moments i have that are my present.

in Hector's search for lost time, he finds himself in Japan surrounded by centenarians who teach him something about time.  perhaps i'm just a sucker for anything about music, but this quote just will not exit through the same door it came in through (a superstition for those unfamiliar with it!):

'Life isn't like a bottle you can fill,' said the centenarian with the bow tie, 'but more like a piece of music, with some less successful or boring moments, and others which are more intense.  Music is a very good way of thinking about time.  A note only moves you because you remember the one before, and you're waiting for the next...Each one only means something wrapped in a bit of the past and the future'.

music is ephemeral.  as soon as the notes are played they're over just as fast.  but, of course, my love (aka i'm obsessed with it and think everyone else should also be obsessed with it)  for the second movement of Beethoven's seventh just wouldn't be the same if all the notes weren't present.  it's every moment that comes and goes that keeps me longing for the next second of sonic waves.  but once that second movement is over, then comes the scherzo, and if i keep sitting around and listening to the second movement, i'll never get anything done.  i'll never hear the finale, i'll never feel the release that i need to feel after all the steady prodding through a minor jungle of landmines (in my opinion it is soooo beautiful and rich, but also quite heavy and just begs to have something a teensy bit brighter to follow it).  so i have to let go of that second movement, even though i desire it sometimes in this out-of-my-control sort of way, and carry on into the next present moment.

i'd love to hoard that second movement a bit more, but if i do, i lose sight of how many more extraordinary moments there are (i.e. how can i appreciate the arcade fire, dvorak and nicki minaj if i'm just listening to beethoven ALL EFFING DAY LONG?!  answer: i can't).  so, onwards and upwards: i'll probably carry on being an anti-hoarder, regretful sometimes, but existing in this present made of moments fully in motion, educated a little bit by the moments that came before and always hedging forward to the things yet to come.