Interestingly, I felt like I should add a disclaimer after that paragraph about how I’m not a generally morbid person. It just makes you wonder about living in a culture where stuff like dying and pooping— that everybody does, mind you— isn’t supposed to be talked about for whatever reason. I think there is, in fact, a great deal to be learned by examining these topics.

Anyhow, rather than discussing my beliefs and what weird metaphysical awesome place you end up to make you feel better about dying and all that philosophical junk that just leads to religions and arguments, I’d like to talk about what happens to you after you die here on Earth. Besides rotting. I don’t really feel like talking about rotting because there’s plenty of that going on in my refrigerator and it’s frankly sort of disgusting.

I have been rather fortunate in my dealings with people to have not lost anyone to whom I was very close over the first long portion of my life. I find it rather understandable that the people who lose family members and best friends when they’re in the process of growing up would have a lot of very sticky psychological issues to resolve. I think I can definitively say that even as recently as 2 or 3 years ago I was in no shape so deal with such a life-altering occurrence. Fortunately, I never had to find out just what a difficult process it would have been.

This said, in the last year I did lose two persons, with whom I was fairly close for rather disparate reasons. In the interest of preserving their memory in the way that is most meaningful to me, I will talk about their respective legacies, now that I am at least a few months removed from their passing and I can level-headedly compare and contrast my own memories with the newspaper clippings and memorial services.

Shadows of Samantha Spady

Not too long ago, a very smart man wrote a very smart book. The name of the man is Orson Scott Card, and the name of the book is Speaker For The Dead. The idea that inspired Card to write the book was that of speakers who travelled about and spoke about people after they died. The speaker’s job, however, was not to eulogize, but instead to discover and tell the truth to the best of their ability, no matter how painful. Now I first read this book when I was in middle school I believe, so I found it mostly boring. However, I’m quite glad that I did, because given the events of the last year, it’s nice to know that someone else thought of this before I ever did.

As I said before, Samantha Spady’s death was college-related. For those of you who have been to college recently, you may have surmised what this implies. She died of alcohol poisoning after a long night of partying, at the age of 19.

For the uninitiated, here is the way that college works these days. Parents send their kids off to live in a place (where parents aren’t) for rather extended periods of time. For many of these kids, this is the first time that this has ever really happened; so, as you may expect, they don’t really know how to deal with it. What ensues is a several year period where the kids act in a very kid-like fashion. I don’t want to say “stupid” … well ok, I do. They act stupid. Now as a parent or friend of such a person, more or less all you can do is be a good influence and hope that they make it out okay on the other side. Understand that for every you there are several hundred stupid-acting kids telling them to do exactly the opposite of whatever you tell them. So you don’t give up giving them advice, you just realize that it’s going to take them a little while to sort out the good advice from the bad, and stabilize themselves. In any case, most of the kids come out of this little phase and make it to adulthood just fine. Unfortunately, a few don’t. Sam happened to be one of the unlucky ones.

Any student death tends to be highly publicized, and even more so with someone as popular and well-liked as Sam. It’s probably not difficult to imagine, based on what I have said so far, that there was quite the media blitzkrieg after her death. I actually didn’t find out about it until about a week later, because I was in the process of moving to Boston at the time, and had no internet access or TV. Much had been written by the time I sat in Berklee’s media center those long hours, wading through article after article, trying to piece together what exactly had happened.

It is a surreal, surreal experience reading about someone you knew in the news like that. It’s weird seeing their life encapsulated in a few short paragraphs. I think the thing that makes it the most weird is that the person about whom is being written is not the person you knew. Or I should say, it is about the person you knew, but it has been heavily edited and carefully worded to the point that it no longer resembles them that much. And as I was reading all that stuff I knew that to the majority of people, this is Sam’s legacy. This is what they know about her; in fact, all they know about her. And it’s not her.

The first wave of press about the event included all of the positive things people had to say about what a wonderful person she was. “Almost perfect.” “Never made a mistake.” Typical responses to any sort of personal tragedy. The next thing that happened were that some investigative reporters got turned loose to try and do a bit of dragging her name through the mud. Trying to make her look like a wild party girl and get a different and more interesting angle on the story. Then came the rush of anger from the first-wave people, tempers flared, letters were written, and it got ugly.

I think it ends up this way with a lot of problems when you get a lot of people involved. You get people on one side, and you get people on the other side, and they’re too busy fighting to see that the solution is somewhere in the middle. The first-wave people weren’t talking about Sam, and the second-wave people definitely weren’t talking about Sam, the real Sam was somewhere in the middle. And interestingly, the people who realized this weren’t really part of any waves, most likely because their story wasn’t nearly as interesting to people who, without the help of waves to tell them what to think, probably wouldn’t have cared that much.

In any case, in the time that has passed, Sam has become an acronym, a week, a foundation, and a concert, among other things. In short she’s been sainted, turned into a sort of martyr for the cause of student alcohol education and awareness. Not that I don’t think that this is a worthy cause. I’m just not sure that if you had asked her, she would have told you that she wanted to be remembered for the way she died. It’s probably much more use to everyone who knew her to remember who she really was and how she lived.

This is what Orson Scott Card knew that I didn’t in middle school. The eulogies and newspaper clippings and concerts and foundations are not the person. It is wholly unsatisfying to remember them as these shadows of the person you once knew. It is much more useful to have someone try to capture the essence of what that person was. It’s more important to know the truth, so you aren’t left to wonder. It’s more important for someone to try to replicate the Samness of Sam, so that you can say, yes, that is her. Now people can know.

A bit longer ago, there was another very talented man, who made a very interesting painting…

[I've decided to split this up in at least 3 parts, since it has gotten very long and is taking me a while to finish writing the subsequent chunks. Part 2 should be done in a couple weeks. Maybe.]

Having lived in the city for the last two years, I’ve come to realize that a large body of the American people spends a great deal of time under stress. A few weeks ago I was actually early for class, so I stopped to talk to a guy on the street who was asking for donations for some charity walk that may or may not have existed. I ended up giving him the only dollar I had left, because hey, at least he made an effort instead of just asking for a handout. He even had fliers and everything.

Anyway one comment that he made while we were talking was that people in Boston are always in too big a hurry to give a moment of their time. Which, when I thought about it, is true for me most of the time too. You’re always running late for something, be it class or an appointment or lunch or whatever. Events are tightly scheduled in our solitary worlds.

That said, it seems like people can always use a psychological break from the tension, and a lot of times these come in the form of time savers. Anything that saves time, or even appears to save time is a wonderful thing.

Which brings me to my point. Life needs more buttons. Allow me to elaborate. Have you ever been in an elevator pumping the “Door Close” button, and stop to think about how the elevator doesn’t actually operate any faster while you’re pushing it? My theory is that the button isn’t even connected to anything, it’s just there so people can push it and feel better about themselves.

One can’t deny though, even if it doesn’t in fact do anything, that it does feel rather soothing to have a time-saving button that you can lean on. I think many of the buttons at intersections, you know for pedestrians, operate on the same principle.

So ultimately this begs the question, why not more buttons on everything? Why shouldn’t subways and buses have “Go Faster” buttons all over them? Or maybe clocks could start having “Slow Down Time” buttons that you can just push when you’ve got fast-approaching deadlines. I could go on.

But the fact is, most people don’t understand enough about anything to ever question whether the buttons do anything or not. Heck, I don’t know anything about elevators, so how can I know what the buttons actually do? So why not give people more buttons to press? In the end, I think it would lead to an overall healthier and slightly more stress-free existence.

A couple weeks ago I wanted to get on here and moan about expectancy and that sort of thing, due to some goings-on that had left me a little disillusioned, which isn’t an altogether uncommon occurrence as you may or may not already know. As could be surmised from that last entry, I wasn’t having a particularly articulate week, and I couldn’t really find a thread to be able to adequately discuss what I was thinking at the time.

Well, even though my outlook has changed slightly since then, I’ll still discuss expectancy some. I feel like my go-with-the-flow attitude has been developed in no small part due to necessity as much as to natural leanings. The reason being that expectancy causes a great deal of superfluous stress, and stress causes me to not function as a human being very well.

From an early age I have been taught through school projects and being stranded places by my forgetful parents that you can’t really count on anyone but yourself to have your same priorities, and to contribute fully to those ends that you yourself deem to be important. I don’t mean to imply that all people are untrustworthy, but that with a high degree of probability, they have something that they would prefer to do than what you would have them do. It’s simply a matter of perspective.

The end result, however, is that you learn that the only person who shares your priorities is you, and chances are you become jaded and isolationist believing that the world is out to get you and the like. I’m not really an exception to the rule, although I’ve more passively decided to just count on myself and not expect much of other people, to avoid the feeling of being let down.

Of course sometimes I still manage to become excited at a prospect, and almost invariably it seems that the more I allow myself to get worked up, the less likely the prospect is to come through at the scheduled time. Of course my view is probably skewed, but every time such a thing occurs, it strengthens my resolve never to rely on outside sources for satisfaction.

This isn’t to say that one should sit in a state of idleness and complacency, for there is another aspect of this way of living, and that is the element of surprise. That is to say that as you create your own world in which you can live happily, then there is the possibility of the unexpected to take place, which is where further delight and wonder can enter into your life. The stipulation is that you must do enough to allow these surprises to take place. You must partake in acts of risk-taking without expecting any return on your investments.

I don’t mean to imply that I live my life as the perfect ideal of what I just described, far from it. I’m just trying to put forth a model of how my own personal life could work to make me happy within my own structure of morals, ideals and abilities. This way I can encourage myself to continue in the taking of risks and the doing of good deeds, which are things I try to do day by day to improve myself and my life.

Anyway, as I mentioned I had suffered a couple of setbacks wherein I had gotten excited and let down, but in the ensuing weeks I received a series of wonderful surprises that more than restored my faith in humanity and in the way of things, and I just wanted to take some space to thank the purveyors of these surprises, because it is you who make my little life-system work.

So it would seem that the golden “Do unto others…” rule does indeed apply after all, but the “others do unto you” part typically won’t come from where you expect it. When you start expecting things, it seems that’s when people get hurt and stressed out and so on. This is just my own observation based on experience.

That’s all I have on this subject, but I’m going to go ahead and write a Thanksgiving entry too.

Yeah yeah yeah.. I know. I’ve been slacking. Luckily, nobody really cares that much.

I started off with so much momentum, started the blog, was writing a whole bunch of tunes, keeping up on schoolwork, taking care of myself and my apartment, studying at the library, submitting stuff, just generally trying to make myself useful. And now I’m reeeeally starting to drag again. It happens every semester. Not just during the semester, during the summers too.

So anyway, I’ve just kind of felt like I don’t have anything interesting to write about. Which is stupid, because I can write a blog entry on anything, like that pungent rotting fruit that I have to trudge through on the way to class, or the fact that I woke up this morning and the water had been shut off, or that I just got another invoice from my realtor and have to go back over there again to straighten out more stupid crap, or even my projects that I’ve been working on, or the weather which is getting all cold again.

It’s kind of funny that all of the things I just listed are things that are out of the ordinary, or things that are in a state of flux. Things that aren’t new and exciting kind of fade into the background. I wouldn’t probably write about that stretch of Boylston I walk down every day, unless they were doing construction, or shooting a movie or something. I probably wouldn’t mention anything about my apartment that I’ve been living in for several months, unless I had gotten something new to put in it, or if it had burned down or something.

It’s just the way we are wired as people. Our brain has this amazing ability to focus, to ignore everything but what has changed. Otherwise our senses would be completely overloaded constantly. Imagine always being aware of the soundscape at the same time that you feel every current of air passing over your skin, taste the inside of your mouth, smell your own deodorant, and see every object within your field of vision equally well. Just imagining it is enough to make me want to lie down and pass out.

And so nature has given us this ability, in order to avoid overstimulation, to filter out that to which we are accustomed, to acclimate ourselves to the surrounding environment. It is a revolutionary talent, it is one of the things that man has yet to understand or reproduce in his own creations. It’s what allows us to perceive the world, and still have some brain power left over to interpret what we are perceiving. It’s what allows us to understand.

Yet however revolutionary and incredible the benefits are, as with everything, that’s how tragic the downside is. Whatever it was that made you happy a month ago, has faded into the background. We are not allowed to forge a perfect, happy world for ourselves and then sit back and relax and enjoy the rest of life in a state of unadulterated bliss. It just doesn’t work that way, because soon we would find ourselves craving something new and exciting. We were meant to struggle to be happy. Because without unhappy, there would be no happy.

I don’t necessarily mean to imply that it is all related to our brain chemistry. Part of it may very well be societal. I think about how tribal people who lived on the same patch of land their entire lives and were never exposed to the rest of the world must have lived. They didn’t know that they had the option to change their lives. Maybe they were perfectly content since they didn’t even see a choice there. Maybe I simply feel worthless at times because I see the opportunities and possibilities around me every day, ones that I choose not to take. If I decided one day to take all of those opportunities, my life would be completely different at the time I go to bed from how it was when I woke up. And then, boy, I would have a lot to write about. For a couple weeks.

In any case, maybe we do have a sort of innate need for some sort of constancy after all. Because the farther I go, the more I realize that there is nothing I can count on to be a permanent fixture in life, and it’s scary as hell. Leaving everything behind, well that can be a revolution too. And, as I mentioned, there is an upside and a downside to everything. New stuff to write about, yet no one left to read and understand it.

I guess my point is, you can’t count too much on things to be constant. Not even *gasp* this blog. Because it just may let you down someday.