Coming to the defense of my arts degree

I was having lunch with a friend the other day and this dude comes along and jumps right into our conversation. With his pizza and his little stare, he started bagging my arts degree. He started with saying, “I can’t believe the entrance scores for Arts and Science are the same. Clearly Science is much harder.” Clearly! It went straight downhill from there until all I could do was cross my legs and my arms and gaze off into the distance, biting my tongue. I don’t know why I was so mad. I’ve had people bag my arts degree before – my brother, my cousins, and all those articles on Yahoo! that tell me my degree is useless. And it probably is, for practicality’s sake, but what about the place of beauty and pleasure in the world?

My friend asked me, when we had left (under the excuse that I was freezing and needed to be indoors), why I hadn’t said that, why I hadn’t defended my arts degree. And…I don’t know. Probably because there was absolutely nothing witty that came to mind to defend my degree just because there’s something intrinsically important about the arts that I had never thought of defending it before. All I wanted to say to the dude was, “You. Me. Outside. Now” (add threatening hand gestures here).

On living in the present.

“For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

Lev Grossman, The Magicians

Sometimes I wonder if all I’m ever meant to do is wait for the next big thing to come. Okay, I don’t wonder about it or wish it upon myself so much as fear that this might be the recurring pattern in my life, the groove in the wheel that I’ll forever be stuck on. All this web-surfing, this blog-reading is making my miserable ethics essay seem even more and more miserable. Of course these beautiful sunshiney days we’re having doesn’t help one bit either.

What's in here. Compared to...

Why social media sites will be the end of me.

1. There’s information, and then there’s TOO MUCH information. Ever get the feeling that you know something about a person that really wouldn’t have bettered your life in any way, shape or form, if you didn’t? New babies are cute. Being able to gush over your best friend’s new summer haircut is nice. Browsing through pictures of a classmate’s holiday in Africa is interesting. Watching your friends graduate from college, get jobs, and grow to be adults is educational. On the other hand…hearing friends complain about said jobs while you are struggling to find one of your own, being inundated by five-times-daily posts about how perfect and how in love a former group mate is with her flavour-of-the-month, seeing that quiet girl in 4th grade’s tongue in another person’s mouth – NOT COOL. At all.

2. They take up a lot of time and you don’t even know it! Raise your hand, who here has ever found themselves panicking at the end of two hours, after supposedly taking a 10 minute break from writing a paper/lab report/essay/lit review/insert-other-supposedly-official-and-therefore-important-thing-here? Seems like this is a more common problem than it seems since, from experience, an alarming number of friends disappear from cyberworld come exam time. My cousin, on a regular basis, asks her boyfriend to change her password just so she can’t access facebook when she’s supposed to be working towards a deadline of some sort. Of course this works every single time since there are absolutely no other sites out there like pinterest and tumblr to keep one busy. Problem solved.

Just when you thought stats couldn’t get any worse….

They go and put a flag counter to go with your stats. How in the world are people supposed to concentrate, step away from the obsessive allure of stats, and actually get some work done(!) when you can now see almost-exactly from where people are reading your crap from? It’s not like there wasn’t enough pressure to blog interesting, semi-intelligent, definitely intelligible things to begin with. Nooooooo. Now I have to think whether my readership from the Czech Republic (Czech Republic!!! I knowww!!) is gonna have fun from the things I say!! This is like being new to uni all over again…meeting people from Peru, having drinks with friends from Spain, being good friends with a Norwegian! Oh WordPress, you really know how to press my buttons!

My newest obsession. I can see how this could be a problem....

Just when I thought I was getting over this whole stats thing (I’ve even managed to go a few days without checking!!!), the WordPress guys have to revamp things and add a heavy load of fuel to the fire! I see what you did there WordPress people. I’m on to you…..

Why I wouldn’t trade my best girlfriend for Michael Fassbender on Valentine’s Day

 

 #1 While we try to dress up and look pretty for each other, it’s fine for us to mess up our makeup, or see each other in our home attire as well, even before we’ve washed our faces and/or brushed our teeth.

#2 We can talk about everything and nothing at the same time. We can talk for hours and hours on end, yet, we can also shut up and sit quietly watching people passing by. We can gossip and be generally catty girls, yet we’re also able to talk about the bigger things in life, like what do we do with our lives, where do we go from here, or what to get for dessert! I can discuss with her the plot of Jane Eyre or my favourite telenovela (hey, no judgment. I’m learning spanish!) without shame, and maybe even get her hooked on one or the other.

#3 We roll our eyes together or let out a not-so-silent ‘Ugh!’ at the sight of couples kissing on escalators or holding hands like there’s no tomorrow, and it’s perfectly acceptable.

On glorifying sadness

What is it about dark things that draw art to them? Every masterpiece (every painting, every great novel, every great poem) was about sadness or death or heartbreak. The greatest artists are those who have suffered and managed to churn out something heartbreakingly beautiful from their suffering. Heartbreaking beauty. What is up with that? What is up with liking/loving/wanting to be sad and frustrated and lonely? Nobody would ever wish this upon themselves, but we talk/sing/write about it as if there were no nobler pursuit. 

What I learned today from tv

As per usual these days, life lessons come in the form of tv episodes. I’m learning a lot about being a woman, being in love and loving, but mostly,  about self-respect and about leaving some for yourself because no one else will. People take and take while you give and you give, and this is as it should be. However, upon the disintegration of the relationship, or whatever it is that’s happening at the moment, there is no giving back, even if you both wanted to.

It’s s terrifying how love turns us into animals – hurtful and hurting, left with nothing to arm ourselves with in the fight to save ourselves.

On not knowing.

 

Maybe there is a certain kind of joy that is to be reveled in in not knowing. Maybe the excitement of waiting for what the future will bring is and should be just that – excitement. Maybe it’s all a matter of perspective, what the future holds.

Maybe the joy is not in the answer we seek but in the question itself that we ask.

Maybe i’m not meant to know everything and anything these days, at this point in my life. Maybe this epoch is for exploration and learning, of discovery of myself and of the greater world. Maybe the beauty is in the world surprising you with what it can suddenly offer.

Maybe I should love the freedom of choosing instead of being boxed in by the array of choices before me. Maybe there are no shoulds, only mays and cans. Maybe there is something in letting the dice fall where they may, letting water take its natural course, going with the flow.

On the here and now and the allure of tomorrow.

Looking through the collection of thoughts via tumblr and random files in my computer, I notice a recurring theme in the collection of quotes that at one time or another have struck a chord in me. That is, to slow down, take a breath and enjoy the present. I guess I have always been a worrier, rushing from one task to the next, either anxiously awaiting what the unknown will bring, or silently despairing about the present. Oh me of little faith.