January 30, 2014

Law school downtime (YouTube finale)

So, it's my birthday. I propose postponing it to some more appropriate day, since I won't actually have much of one today. I guess if you count the time since midnight I got to watch a movie, but other than that, I'm just going to be here at the law school. I woke to an alert on my phone saying there was low visibility due to snow. Awesome. So I biked/walked to my 8:00 class. Luckily, I knew the lady who gives us powerpoint presentations on legal writing always brings cookies, so I skipped breakfast. So maybe it is like a birthday. I had like six cookies because there were leftovers. It's a bit unfortunate that the highlight of my day occurred so early, but hey, at least there was a highlight. I plan on making a foray to the cafe around 3:30 to scope out possible pickings there too. So there's at least a chance I wind up eating sugar for the majority of my food consumed.

All of my classes today were incredibly boring. Also, in legal writing we are discussing statutory interpretation, in criminal law we are discussing statutory interpretation, and the title of my last class: Statutory Interpretation. Go figure. The fact that they don't know how to clear streets here means it's not worth it to go home between now and my last class. And I'm still a bit bitter about missing handball for it, but like I was discussing with David at league, it's not like the club at the university is making me better at handball. I dread admitting it, but I really only go for the social aspect. Brrrgh.

So in the meantime, I suppose I'll finish up this tripartite post. And since I saved a lot for last, it might take a while. I might trim and post another entry of leftovers/amusement in a bit. Actually, let's plan on that. It will be a postscript post. Also, now I have a title for that post. And the entry after that will, naturally, be my "post 'postscript post' post." Awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkbWIfP3mLw
This guy is from South Africa and realized he was racist. He says that sharing secrets is a great way to get back to living. Share your big secrets and get on with your life. I don't know what my biggest secret is. I'm not opposed to sharing secrets, but I certainly feel more comfortable sharing one on one than on the internet. That being said, I totally get what this guy is saying: sharing them does make you feel more alive. I have shared secrets. And by that, I mean I have shared things I wouldn't normally consider sharing with people to whom I don't feel really connected. They might not be secrets, I suppose. There's a fine line between private and secret. Obviously the stranger I meet on the street has no desire to hear about how my night was last night, much less the inner turmoil I feel. So am I keeping a secret by responding vaguely? (The secret-sharing "point/lecture" of the talk occurs around 16 minutes in.) All in all, a pretty decent talk, from the beginning anecdote to the main point. I have started another post that will go up along with this. I'd include it here, but I started it and it got too long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjjlsW1MDmc
This man's introduction starts with a confession: he did drugs, killed a man who tried to molest him, and wound up in prison. His personal story is about how he went from no high school degree to a post-graduate degree while in prison. But the bigger point is about figuring out what your "personal prison" is and breaking out of it. He has five steps that aren't that interesting. So skip from minute 3:00 to 6:00. The only thing he says is that his eyes were opened when a safe-cracker demonstrated that a tennis ball and a heavy ash tray his the ground at the same time when dropped. So he wanted to educate himself. His story resumes at 6:55. Significant things he says: figure out why you want to change, not why others want you to. Pretty basic, right? But finding a personal impetus has always been a challenge for me. He goes back to his 5-step description at 8:45. His point at this time is that you need to actually make a change. Surprise, right? But as a procrastinator, I again sympathized. He even discusses wanting to be a writer, setting specific goals, of page numbers rather than "writing a book" which is too general. He resumes his narrative at 10:15 for those not interested in the silly steps. While this speech is a bit cheesy (he relapses into his 5-point program again at 11:15, coming out at 12:15) and accompanied by stupid generic slideshow images, I suppose my desire to find something I'm happy with has compensated for my normal lack of interest in these sorts of speeches. I still think his story is cool, though. He still doesn't sound like a guy with a doctorate. 14:40 relapses back into cheesy motivational speech stuff for the remainder.

If you're wondering, my intense need to justify linking these videos was prompted by my mother, who said she watched one of the ones in a previous post and thought it was bad. So now I'm watching them with a more critical eye, and yeah, they are "bad." But you know what? They motivate me anyway. So I'm sharing them anyway. And the stories behind the cheesy things they are saying are interesting. And I need to ingrain the cheesy things. So for me it's like killing two birds with one stone, while for the people reading this who don't have the same stupid problems I have it's like watching a cool-looking bird (the interesting personal story) trying to fly while carrying a heavy rock (the cheesy stuff) for no reason.

So as a result of that video and others provided in the previous posts, I have decided to cling to my creative side (what little of it there is). I want to write, but I know I might not have time for it during law school. This makes setting goals hard. I plan on writing here, of course, so maybe I could make time for it. I'll think about it. Nope! I can't procrastinate any more. I'm going to write for sure. I just need to figure out my goals. I am trying though. It helps even more when people request me to write. (Hint hint.) I included the result of a request in an upcoming post (check tomorrow, I think?)

I just got back from the cafe. I grabbed a doughnut and a muffin, continuing my free sugar streak (much different than a sugar-free streak). They also had soda that had expired. It turned out to be the one kind I would consider drinking (Coke Zero), so I grabbed a couple. I'm very gradually making my way through one right now. So fizzy! It says it has caffeine, so I'll probably be up late tonight. Which will be good, since I want to type even more. I'll save the second for a time when I need to get an assignment done late at night. It shouldn't last long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgMbUj-FqBg
This guy's talk starts out awesome. Again, this is relative. It reminds me a lot of myself (surprise), in that when I was writing my resume, I realized I sounded pretty good on paper. Then it continues, and I thought 'I had struggled in a similar way. He says his realization that the universe was unintentional is what led to his depression, which is pretty much what I feel. Of course, it wasn't me giving up closely-held ideas that triggered my "depression," but I sympathize with the sentiment. What I liked most was his psychiatrist's response to his request for medication. "You want me to put you on medication because you're intellectual?" He said that he was engaged in a process that would only be slowed down on drugs. I'm not sure that I'm involved in this process, but perhaps these recent entries are my attempt to break out, to go on with the process. I can't imagine ever thinking I've figured things out, and I certainly don't think I will be hearing voices like in this guy's illustration. This seemed to be his way of putting meaning back into life, while I don't have that compulsion. Perhaps this is because I didn't undergo some extreme "giving up" of this belief like he did. So the stuff after XXXXX becomes irrelevant, and he goes off the deep end a bit sometime around the ten-minute mark. I don't mind his idea of conflict between the conscious and subconscious, but he makes it sound a bit weird. He concludes by saying that depression is necessary, because it lets us know when our lives are insignificant and motivates us to make them significant. This is a pretty bold claim. I'm not opposed to believing that my life to this point has been insignificant, but like I said, I don't think that anything I do will magically solve the periods where I'm struggling. Also, I don't think there has been much correlation between the "level" of life I'm leading and when I struggle. I've gone weeks without a problem while being lazy, been freaked out for days at a time while being productive, and vice-versa. It occurs to me around this point that I will probably find some aspect in any person with which to sympathize. I should be more discriminating in the criteria I use to select a link to share. Also, I want my mother to approve.

That said, I watched another video that didn't even make the cut these other ones did. There was an interesting quote though: you don't change things by fighting the current system; you change them by coming up with a system that makes the current one obsolete.

That's pretty cool. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it sounds awesome!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Xw76SsHOM
Back to finding people with which to sympathize: this lady totally did what I did! Went to grad school on a whim, searching for meaning, putting herself on a path rather than living with her parents. Like me, she hasn't found some mystical path. She reached the conclusion that "finding yourself" is a myth and we should focus on the moment. Her biggest fear is dying without living in the present. There's really no need to watch this. I'm just supplying the link in case you don't believe me when I tell you what it's about. Will I reach the same conclusion she does? I doubt it. I already feel like I am trying to appreciate the present. I pause frequently to look around and take stock of things. I'm just always sure there's something I could do to improve it, so I press forward again. Even today, while eating sugar-crystal-coated blueberry muffin, I paused and just looked out the window thinking about a variety of things. Snow can be pretty, you know? So yeah, to sum up, don't watch this, but I'm not alone in my (maybe foolish) decisions!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLg46AVDD_Q
This person's search for passion led her to realize that failure was her passion. At least her temporary passion. (She worked on a four-year project and made it work through some difficulty, which she realized others would think was an example of passion, but never felt the stereotypical "passion" emotion.) As with any research, it's good to get all sides. These last two contrast with the ones before that assert firmly (inspiringly!) that passion is a real thing, but all of them are cliche
Around 6:00 into this video she discusses "dabbling," excelling at things initially and then switching when people start catching up. It rung a bit of a bell with me. That's about all that's relevant here. The book she cites about "dabbling" has a solution: learn to love the challenge. Which is obviously not helpful. It just restates the problem. The solution to every problem is "solve the problem." So she says to make failure humorous. She imagined the worst-case scenario and figured if she could laugh it off, failure couldn't be that intimidating. For me, that would be "drop out of law school, start writing, fail at that... then... ?" There isn't really a tangible downside to failure. It just puts me back to square one. Of course, by waiting a couple years, I will have a law degree to fall back on, so I still intend to finish my classes while trying to pursue as much as I can outside the classroom. She took her failure a step further to illustrate the failure: event a failure, friends read about it on the leading website and stop being her friends, becomes broke, moves back in with parents, etc. and then demonstrated the ridiculousness: her friends don't read websites, they would still be her friends, she gets along well with her parents, and she has her old job to go back to. Well, yup, all of that applies to me (assuming I can sneakily move back into my parents' house while they're not looking). So there's literally nothing holding me back. There really hasn't ever been anything holding me back, of course. And there probably never will be anything holding me back from anything. But it's good to remember that occasionally.

So I just got done with class and biked back to my apartment. Here are some things that seemed blog-able from that period of time:

I was going to make some snide comment about how not having my birthday on Facebook really shows you who your friends are. Then I realized that all my friends are smart/lazy enough that they know they don't have to remember, because Facebook does that for them. So never mind.

I discovered this really cool thing today. Don't worry about the circumstances. So if I don't brake at all, I can just dismount my bike from (nearly) full speed. This is because the streets are so poorly cleared that what happens is I wind up sliding on my feet. It's like an even more awesome version of taking a running start at a patch of ice. I'm taking a biking start, and the whole road is my patch of ice. (The circumstances were: I was biking, I don't have a light, I looked back and saw headlights, I wasn't sure if they saw me, I am a very defensive biker around here (especially in snowy conditions), I hopped off thinking I would run next to my bike, I slid instead, and it was awesome.)

My classmate was talking to me about the six people from our section and said he was quickly figuring out our roles. I said "Yeah, Greg's the outgoing nice jock-y guy, and I'm the confrontational asshole!" He didn't disagree.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. I am going to make time to be creative, write, etc. I'm going to commit to it. I'm going to set specific goals. It's going to be scary, and I'm going to do it anyway.

The thing that really drove me to decide this is a thing I need to do is actually sort of silly. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that it's competitive at its root. So this youtube-r Alex Day wrote a book last year. He says he doesn't even remember why, but he chose the topic of the London Underground (subway system) and wrote a book about it. And he got an agent, and it getting it published. My first reaction was: if he can do it, I can do it. He's writing about a train system for god's sake. It's nonfiction! Surely I can write a more interesting thing than that. Now granted, he has a million subscribers on YouTube, so finding the agent/publisher was probably a lot easier for him than it might (will?) be for me, but still, he WROTE A BOOK! He was describing his process, and he said he wanted to write six pages a day. He further said he usually started early in the morning and finished by noon. He further said that his rough draft pages were crap. I think that's the part I might be hung up on. I don't like writing bad stuff, even if I know I'm going to go back and make it better. I'm afraid I'll get too detail-oriented and be left frustrated when I can't get the small stuff out, and it will discourage the big picture from being realized. I can't decide whether I want to outline. I have never outlined anything, but I want something to fall back on if I feel lost as to what to write about. Referring back to an outline and being able to write different sections in different moods sounds really advantageous. So here's the goal: five pages by Saturday night. This is my birthday present to myself. I'm setting this goal, starting it in motion, and I'm going to write something. I have no idea what yet. It might be short story. It might be a long poem. It might be two medium poems. It might be a chapter. It might be train of thought style description if I really can't think of anything. But I will have written five pages by Saturday night (let's say by 11:00). I will link to them in this blog. I will hold myself accountable. You should hold me accountable. I'm going to do it. I'm not kidding.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I realized a lot of the videos I liked had nothing to do with being inspired other than the people talking were interesting and motivated me to be interesting also. They will be in the upcoming post along with a bunch of other random stuff. So this turned out to be a lot less YouTube-y and more me-y, but I think that's fine. Also, the reason it's not up yet is because I wanted to get all the related posts up together. I reference my "secrets" post here, and I reference my relationship-oriented post in that one, so it took a while. All in all, I have written around 6,000 words so far today, and I haven't really started the last post yet. So if it's not up as you're reading this, cut me some slack.

PPS: This uncharacteristic level of activity brought to you by: sugar. And my determination. My determination mostly to do something I wanted to do during my birthday, but more than that, my determination to finally be in pursuit of writing seriously. So I'm serious. Hold me accountable. If I'm not at least telling you I have been writing, text me or something. If I'm making excuses, call me out on it. If I give up? Well, I hope there's some way you can force me, but there's probably not. Try not to let me give up. I really do want this. It's weird committing without a subject to write about. But I've been trying to come up with "the idea" for years. It's not happening. So I decided to start with the writing and let the idea come second. Let's do it.

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