This semester I started by drafting a rough outline of how I’d like to spend my time outside of classes–which I currently have a lot of, only having class three days a week. It didn’t go well. If I scheduled a practice session for myself from 9-12, I felt guilty if I didn’t make it to the music building until 9:20, and then again if I got hungry or tired at 11 or 11:30. I spent a few more weeks telling myself the exact schedule was just a guideline I could go by to inspire myself. Then I let go. A couple years ago I made this graph and still it’s accurate to the lengths I go to to try to control my life:

By attempting to meticulously outline all my activities and goals, I appear to have guaranteed myself success: just look at the calendar a month from now and obviously I’ll be that much closer to all my goals. In this kind of thinking, I’m lying to myself about how much I can take on at once. I go too far with planning and time management that I lose sight of the fact that the point isn’t to reach some set of “goals,” however concrete or abstract they happen to be. To me, the point of having goals is to change my daily habits to a point where I’m consistently living in alignment with becoming the person I want to be.

My attitude significantly shifted when I started focusing on the idea of managing my energy instead of my time. Inside looking out, it makes total sense. For the past five days, I’ve been sick in bed. I’ve had TONS OF TIME. In the past week I’ve been to two full classes (those of you who know me, I seem to be saying that a lot lately) and I’ve not done much else. Oh, I finished The L Word and downed (if this is the right verb) about 100 cough drops, but I haven’t accomplished anything. I’ve had plenty of time, but simply no energy. Obviously this is an extreme example, but I think the idea holds even in more balanced situations.

Last semester, I took on way more than I could handle academically. What made me think I could handle 24 credits in a single semester was the mere fact that I appeared to have plenty of time to do that if I wanted to. That fact remains true. Hiding in the details is the snag that I simply don’t have the energy to take this many classes. This semester I’m taking 18 credits, which is still more than a full load, and I’m no less busy than I was last semester.

One of the difficulties in this realization is letting go of things that seem like such great ideas. For example, going to the gym every morning at 6:30 sounds wonderful, especially to me. I love the mornings, and I love the idea of being an early riser. I love the idea of starting my day out with a run so I can feel energized and refreshed. But the thing is, as much as I love this idea, it just hasn’t worked out this way. For whatever reason, getting up at 6:30 to run just isn’t compatible with my current lifestyle. It very likely might be the winter, or the fact that I’m in college, but whatever it is, the reality just doesn’t match the theory. Whenever I do end up exercising this early in the morning, I feel uncomfortable and sleepy when I start out, and then later in the morning I feel exhausted. When I sleep well, I have plenty of energy in the morning (often I feel the best) and I get the most out of exercising in the afternoon because the rush fights against midday tiredness. And that’s okay. (There’s always the shower dilemma, as in, if I shower when I wake up in the morning and then I exercise in the middle of the day, do I need to shower again? I say, hell no. But then, I remember to wear deodorant about twice a month, so feel free take that comment for what it’s worth.)

Now, I’m taking each day and doing what I can with it. And somehow, I’m getting much more done than I was.

“That song was really great until that car commercial ruined it.”
“I used to love that song but now it’s just overplayed.”
“It would have been a good song if the radio didn’t kill it.”

This kind of stuff makes me just want to shake everyone’s shoulders and say, “What guys!?” What do you mean.

The philosophy behind that kind of thinking really gets under my skin. I don’t feel that any music I enjoy could ever be ruined for me by any kind of external force. If the radio can ruin a song for you, how could you claim to have ever really enjoyed it, if liking it is so dependent and conditional on how many other people like it too? It’s a shame that it has become both common and socially acceptable (even expected, in some cases) to use reputation and popularity as factors in determining whether or not you claim to enjoy something, and, in too many cases, likely whether or not you actually do enjoy it.

I know I shouldn’t speak for others, but I will speak for myself. I catch myself subconsciously wanting to scorn stuff that is really popular. I catch myself wanting to go for the less obvious favorites when picking a song from an album, because there’s this small part of me that’s wired to believe that if I think an artist’s most popular song is actually their best, then I’m just appreciating their work on the surface and not diving in deeply. Why do these thoughts exist? I don’t want to blame some vague, distant object like a society or a culture, so I’m going with this reason: deep down, I have some insecurities, and feel that I need to validate myself somehow, and appreciating stuff that other people don’t get (being misunderstood) seems like a pretty good way to do that; seeing stuff that other people don’t see gets me thinking that I have some deeper, truer appreciation for art and it feeds my superiority complex. Or: I have doubts about my self-worth, and getting to believe that I get something more deeply than the masses gives me not just a sense of connection with the art I’m appreciating, but a sense of ownership, and then I get to walk away happy with a feeling of validation and worth. Getting around those misguided ways of thinking is totally my problem. But something tells me that I’m not the only person in the world to have experienced these kinds of thoughts. Something tells me that it’s common.

Like I said, I don’t want to speak for others here. I do want to speak for myself. Frequently, I have to consciously correct these ways of thinking. I have to stop my thoughts and go through a process to realize how ridiculous I’m being. Thankfully, I started realizing this a long time ago, so for the most part, those misguided thoughts don’t get in the way of my actual opinions. When they come up, I know that giving in to them doesn’t bring me any closer to music that I enjoy, but rather it pushes me further and further from the point of it all: connection, sharing, joy. Music should bring people together, and not be a means for a person to become separate.

It bothers me as well that artists sometimes get this way with their old material—that they too come to feel and believe that songs of theirs have been ruined by popularity. I can understand being an artist and not wanting to feel like you’re eternally defined by one song you wrote that you don’t even believe is a good representation of your music as a whole. But I think there’s a big difference between wanting people to look past the hits and between denouncing a song you wrote because you don’t like the rep it got.

Using an example from the list that I frequently think about, I believe it’s a shame that Thom Yorke is both so adverse to the idea of performing “Creep,” and so resentful of the song’s fame. I think it’s a shame that in general, in my experience, Radiohead fans have such a negative reaction to Pablo Honey. I’ve heard Radiohead fans brag that they’ve never even listened to the album the whole way through, and I still can’t figure out what about that would make anyone think it entitled them to bragging. Do I think Pablo Honey can be favorably compared to any other album in Radiohead’s catalog? Not so much. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a great album! It doesn’t mean that “Creep” isn’t a really good song. “Creep” captures the desire we all have to be and feel accepted, and it’s beautiful. It blows my mind that there are probably tons of people who’d scoff at me saying “Creep” is an awesome track because they believe feeling superior is a means to feeling accepted.

I’ve also taken notice that Brand New has adopted a similar attitude toward most of their first album, Your Favorite Weapon. I feel similarly about their debut as I do about Radiohead’s: it doesn’t even touch upon how profound and amazing their later releases are, but that in no way negates any artistic validity the record does have. I understand that, in some ways, Jesse Lacey is resentful of Brand New’s first album because of the false image it promotes of the band. He wants fans to see past the angst-filled boy wishing diseases and car crashes upon ex-girlfriends because he wants it to be realized that he’s got more than that youthful anger inside of him. I think what it gets down to, for me, is that I think it’s unnecessary to denounce your youth to prove that you’ve grown up. To quote Dumbledore, “Old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”

The reason I think Your Favorite Weapon is a great record, and the reason I will always think it’s a great record, is because the stories it contains are timeless. That’s always the reason. Whether or not we mature and move past that point of angst, of wanting to stay young, we were there. It’s the same reason why I think children’s books make up some of the most important literature ever penned. There is something beautiful about being young, naive, quick to give into impulses and emotions, curious…that we too often grow up to forget. Ultimately, I think there’s more maturity to be found in embracing the parts of your past that have changed, than there is in resenting, or even just ignoring, them.

Some bands are pretty good about it. Wilco has progressed from the alt-country days of A.M., but every so often they throw in a song from their debut into their set. When I saw Jeff Tweedy do a solo show in March 2009, he played “Casino Queen” and it was really fun to watch. He also played “A Shot in the Arm” and “I’m Always in Love,” both of which are from Wilco’s third album Summerteeth, and two tracks from their double sophomore release Being There. He’s not saying, “Hey we have some ambient sounds now and ‘Less Than You Think’ is unnecessarily 15 minutes long so we don’t play old songs anymore.” Songs represent moments in time, and I think it’s so admirable when artists not only realize that, but embrace it. (Keep in mind, I don’t want to throw stones at any of my favorite bands, even if I do disagree with some of the attitudes some of them have adopted.)

I think it’d be cool if one day Radiohead opened an entire tour with “Creep,” or if Brand New started rotating all the songs from Your Favorite Weapon into their show. I already have great respect for both those bands, but that potential gesture would increase my respect far beyond what it already is. I hope we can all take time to remember that songs are songs, and most of them were probably born in someone’s basement or kitchen or shower or car ride home, a voice and a guitar, and the ones that get popular are no exception.

I first started noticing this trend when I was in high school. About halfway through my time there, a Dunkin’ Donuts opened up in town, and suddenly the best thing to do before high school was to go to Dunkin’ Donuts and get an iced coffee.

It started to really infuriate me when I would walk down the hall to my locker, and I’d pass about a dozen girls all holding iced coffees inside styrofoam cups, as if it was the coolest freaking thing ever. They looked sorta like this:

But don’t let that image trick you into thinking that Being Awful is limited to girls who got to go to high school with me–just the other day I saw three police officers banded together with styrofoam cups outside their iced coffees. See?

Why does spell-check keep on telling me to capitalize ‘styrofoam?’ It’s so Awful it doesn’t deserve a capital letter! I guess it’s a proper noun somehow, but who cares?!

Why is styrofoam bad?

Instead of boring you (and me) with science or whatever, I’ve composed my own list of why I think styrofoam is bad.

1. Every pore of styrofoam is equal to a thousand tears.

2. Styrofoam separates children from loving mothers.

3. Styrofoam kills butterflies.

Styrofoam would have killed the butterfly as a caterpillar, but gets greater joy from destroying more beauty.

4. At night, styrofoam burns your house down with fire and laughs.

5. Dementors eat styrofoam, and it makes them sick!

6. Styrofoam is mean to the earth.

7. Styrofoam doesn’t like muffins.

I think it’s bad enough that Dunkin’ Donuts sells actual drinks inside styrofoam cups, so seeing people get extra styrofoam because they want to avoid getting a few drops of water on their hand or because they want to look stupid is almost too much for me to wrap my head around. I’m actually operating under the assumption that anyone who gets a styrofoam cup with their iced coffee is trying to look like an idiot, because I’d like to believe that no human is so awful that they think avoiding getting their hand wet should be a higher priority than not trying to kill the environment. I guess another reason someone might get a styrofoam cup is to not get their hands cold, and all I have to say to that is get a freaking pair of gloves.

Because I have a lot of faith in humanity, and really just believe there are awful things but no awful people, I thought it would be beneficial if I explained some Awesome And Acceptable ways to hold an iced coffee. I came up with 7 ways, but I’m sure there are more. Here they are conveniently explained for you with words and pictures:

How to Hold An Iced Coffee Without Looking Stupid Or Being Awful

1. With your head.

2. With your hands.

3. With your hands and your body.





4. Cradled in a hat like a cute little iced iced baby.





5. With your knees.





6. With your hands like this.





7. With your hands like this.





I’m saying ‘You’re Welcome’ in advance to anyone who was previously unsure what the best way to hold an iced coffee was. Here are 7 best ways. You are totally welcome. I hope this was informative for everyone reading, and remember, styrofoam is bad guys!

Thought of other ways to hold iced coffees? Discuss them here or email me!

I’m worried about how I’ll pay off my college loans, and I’m worried because every time I go to the grocery store to get something for my parents I think about how much I love grocery shopping, and how there are so many delicious foods that I want to eat and buy for myself when I’m older, and man, what if I can’t afford that? I’m worried because I never want to have to pass up a concert I really want to go to because of money, and I’m worried because I’d like to travel after I graduate. I’m worried because I’d really like to be able to afford an electronic drum set. I’m worried because I guess one day I might want a car, and I might have to pay my own cell phone bill, and man, what if I become too tied down with bills to fully realize all of my passions?

And so I want to be careful with my money, and at the same time, I don’t want to constantly operate under principles of fear and hoarding. You know? Are there purchases I should make now that I’m scared to, but that will ultimately provide me with more value than having that extra money in my bank account? For example, I’m just realizing now that I want to invest in my own pair of climbing shoes immediately, and I even wish I had done it sooner.

I’ve wanted to get my own climbing gear for a year now, but I’ve yet to make the jump (hehe). It’s been mostly for financial reasons. When I climb at home, I get rentals for free because I have a membership, and at school they’re free anyway. I’ve always explained to myself (and others), “It’s difficult for me to justify spending money on climbing shoes, because I can rent them for free at school, and because I’ve already spent a lot of money on my gym membership.” But really, I think I’m justifying the decision to hold out on buying them more than I am anything else.

Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite. At my core, I’m very idealistic and I believe there’s more value to be found in doing what you truly love than in having financial security. But then, when I imagine the security I have disintegrating, it’s like I go into survivor-mode, and everything I really believe is total crap as long as I’ll be able to eat this week. I login to my bank account and open up a calculator, and crunch how much money I’ll have in six months if I buy absolutely nothing. Sometimes I figure how much money I would have if I didn’t buy this and that, and I wonder if I’ve made mistakes and been too careless with my money. And then I feel so bad, because if I only wanna fight when it’s easy, then I can’t really care that much, can I? Ultimately I’m okay with having conflicting moods and thoughts, because I think that there’s more hypocrisy to be found in dismissing these conflicts as unacceptable than there is in admitting I have doubt sometimes, too. Without doubt, there is no choice.

The other night I stumbled upon David Cain’s blog, Raptitude, and was especially taken by the recent post “Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed.” I’ve been intending to write some of my thoughts about spending money, and this post spoke about reasons why we often make purchases we don’t really believe in: “to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is.” I boil all these reasons down to because we feel we should and not because at our cores, it’s something we want. Imagine how much happier so many people would be if they ceased living the life they feel they should want, and started living the life they actually desire.

Want vs. Need
“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth.” -Francisco D’Anconia from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

There are things we actually need to physically survive: food, shelter, and so on. And then there are things we’ve convinced ourselves we need to mentally survive. The difference between a purchase that helps you and one that hurts you is whether you’re honest with yourself about whether it’s something you need or something you want. If you can’t get through the morning without a mocha latte, you’re not helping yourself by continuing to make that purchase. But I think if you actively acknowledge that you’d have a happy, productive morning even without the latte, it can be a good thing to make that purchase—as long as you’re sure it will bring you joy. My next example is silly and laughable, but the application is sound. When I traveled to New York City to see Kevin Devine in June, I bought a Red Bull inside the venue. This cost me five dollars! It was totally overpriced, but I was happy to spend the money because it was something I wanted to do. Over-spending on an energy drink at a concert is about the most ridiculous I ever get. I don’t need to throw down five dollars for a drink every time I see a show to enjoy myself, and knowing that is what made the purchase worthwhile for me.

Every Purchase Should Be A Celebration
If you’re saving your money and hating it, then stop. And if you’re spending your money and hating it, then also stop. I believe that every purchase should be a celebration, and if it doesn’t feel like one, then you should hold off. This is something I’ve been working on and have yet to fully master. But when I am living this ideology, I can really feel it. For example, when I bought tickets for the Barenaked Ladies concert I recently attended, I was happy for that money to leave my account. When I went to see Kevin Devine this past June in Boston, I bought one of his t-shirts, and I was extremely happy to pay for it (it made it more fun that I bought the shirt directly from the man himself). The purchase felt good. I’ve fallen out of the trap of going out to eat too much, and of buying coffee every day, but when I do go out for these things, I feel really good about it. And I’m glad to hand over $3 for a coffee that’s made for me exactly to my specifications. I think it’s awesome that for $5-10, I can go out and get a cheap meal, and not worry much about preparation or clean-up. It doesn’t feel good to sleepily go to Dunkin’ Donuts every day and always be scrounging the car for another quarter, or to get pizza every weekend just because it feels socially acceptable. What does feel really good is conscious spending.

Spending should always feel really good. If you have money, you should feel good that you’ve done something that another person believed was worth whatever it was they paid you. You should feel good that you’ve earned something you can exchange for pretty much anything in this world. If you don’t feel good when you spend your money, you’re better off just hanging onto it. You’re losing value because whatever you’re buying obviously isn’t worth as much to you as having that extra money is. Every time you buy something, you should consider it a celebration of the work you have done to get there. Every purchase should be a celebration of gratitude toward the forces that make it so easy to exchange money for something else.

Beyond Breaking Even
When you make a purchase, at worst you should feel as if you are breaking even. What you’re getting is worth just as much to you as what you’re paying for it. Beyond that, I believe in a deeper kind of exchange. This goes beyond breaking even and getting what you believe your money is worth, and breaks into the realm of creating more value. There isn’t a constant amount of value in the world, and we must always be aware to ways we can create more value. We must always be living and telling stories (remember The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman); we must always be making conscious choices and adding value to the world.

When you make a purchase you really believe in, that really empowers you, not only are you breaking even and getting what you paid for, but you’re adding something good to the world that just wasn’t there before. And, if it’s a sound deal, so is the party you’re buying from. In the most moral kind of exchange, both parties feel that not only did they break even, but they each got the better deal. By using the term ‘the better deal,’ I’m not talking about getting something for yourself at the expense of another person. I’m talking about getting what is the better deal for you, about walking away happier with what you have than what you had. A sound, moral purchase happens when two parties come together because they each have something that the other will appreciate more deeply. Each consciously acknowledges what the other has, and they make that exchange happily.

I’ve heard people say, “I always feel bad spending money,” and I feel really sorry for them. Sometimes it’s difficult to control your impulses when it comes to money, but I think it’s easy to distinguish worthwhile purchases from shoddy ones, as long as you’re capable of being honest with yourself. When you’re about to buy something, think of how you’ll feel after the transaction is complete. Will you feel empowered, proud, and happy, or will you feel guilty and as if you’ve made a mistake that you wish you could hide? Ask yourself that question, and it will become easy to distinguish which purchases you should gravitate toward and which you should walk away from.

Right now I’m following along a bit with the Facebook group for students entering the Smith College Class of 2014, and a lot of people are concerned about what they should take. I’m sure this is true of incoming freshmen (or first years) across the country, and even for many older students.

Pretty frequently, I see incoming students being advised to explore their interests, not jump into their major, not overload too much, and stuff like that, to strive for the perfect balance of breadth and depth. That pretty much sums up a lot of the advice I received when I was starting my first year. I had a really successful first year of college, and I didn’t really follow any of that token advice. I’m not writing to say that you *shouldn’t* follow that advice. I’m writing to say that you should take it into consideration, but at the end, follow the advice you give yourself, because only you know what you’re really capable of.

My first semester, I took five 4-credit classes, one more than the norm. Three of them were math classes, another was Hebrew, and another was a poetry class. I remember attending a Meet-the-Faculty event the week before classes started, during which I introduced myself to a few teachers. I told a member of the math department that I was planning to take a course she was teaching, and then I went on to explain how there were two other math courses being offered that semester that really interested me as well. She shook her head a bit and went on to tell me that this is a liberal arts college! I have to admit that I was a bit shook up by her disapproval. A couple days later, when I had a meeting with my adviser to discuss my schedule, he also expressed a lot of hesitation about me taking three math classes at the same time, and told me that he felt even two maths during the same semester was a lot to take on. My adviser was very nice, of course, and told me that ultimately I could do whatever I wanted to. I felt pretty good about that, but still his doubt and hesitation crept into my mind and made me doubt myself a tiny bit. I left the meeting with the idea that I’d sign up for 5 classes, and then drop one of them. So what happened is pretty simple: I signed up for 5 classes, and just kept them all.

I’m writing this because if you’re out there in a similar position, and that little bit of doubt is maybe gonna stop you from doing what you really want, well, don’t let it!

Here’s why “branching out” was a bad idea for me: Part of me is not even sure if I believe in branching out! I definitely don’t believe so many colleges should have “general ed” requirements, and I’m very happy that Smith College doesn’t have any. Everyone does so much forced branching out in high school that it seems totally absurd to me that most colleges require you to waste your time all over again with their silly requirements. I’m not saying that there’s a kind of learning that’s a waste of time—as in, I believe there is value in *all* learning—but forced learning most definitely is pointless. If what you’re learning about doesn’t excite you, then it’s a waste of time. If it’s not keeping you up nights, then what’s the point?

In high school I spent four years “learning” about stuff that I didn’t really care about, and the very last thing I wanted to do when I got to college was take classes just for the heck of feeling like I’m getting a “diverse experience.” I knew that I wanted to learn a lot of math, and I was more sure of that than I was of any other academic goal. So that’s exactly what I did. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being sure.

My choices last fall are really paying off. The three math classes I took first semester are the very three that are required for all math majors at Smith, and combined they’re the prerequisites for all the advanced courses (at least until a point; together, the three get you to a new tier). If I’d only done two of those my first semester, I would have had to take the third in the spring, and it would have been difficult to fit in another math class I had the background to take. I would have really stalled myself and likely I would have had to fill my schedule with classes that I would have taken just to get enough credits, and not because learning those subjects was something I truly wanted to do at the time.

Now I’m on the verge of entering my sophomore year, and not only am I 50% complete with my major’s requirements, but I’ve got 9 extra credits to play around with since I took extra classes throughout the year. And because of this, I have a lot of freedom in my class choices. I’ll never have to face a semester with a bunch of classes I’m not really interested in, or with too many difficult classes packed together, or with any constraint that I’m not enthusiastic about.

If you can, I think the #1 thing you should look to avoid as a college student is getting into a situation where your major or graduation is at the stake of having to take a certain class at a certain time, and missing out on something else you wish you could do to take that class. I’m hoping that this will never happen to me, because the idea of missing an interesting and exciting learning experience because of poor timing or because of a requirement just makes me feel sad, like I’m in a frosting store and my parents won’t let me have any sugar, or like I dropped 400 blueberries on the floor, or someone hurt my feelings.

And now that I’m secure in both my major’s requirements and credit requirements, I have the freedom to take pretty much whatever I want. I could take an entire semester off from math and still be on track with, if not ahead of, most of my peers. This isn’t something I plan to do immediately, because currently there are several math offerings that I’m very interested in. But in the future it’s something that might very well happen. Math is an academic priority of mine, but I’m really interested in learning many other disciplines. But I’d rather save that until I feel that I’ve got that math priority under control, so that when I do “branch out” further, I can do so with full focus, enthusiasm, and discipline, and not as a half-hearted gesture of doing something just because I feel like I should want to.

I know a bunch of people who were encouraged to “explore their interests” at the beginning of their time in college, and because they did that, they’re now in crams trying to fit in all their major requirements, and they can no longer take classes in other departments. So their initial branching out is what’s preventing them from actually branching out. The idea that the beginning of your college experience should be exploring stuff until about halfway through when you should lock into a major and stick to it is pretty counter-intuitive to me, as far as my Learning Intuition goes.

What I’m really getting at is I think conscious exploration is great. If you go to a great college, you must know that there are so many more meaningful and enriching things you will want to do than you will have time to. So it should make sense to make the stuff you choose to spend your time on the most important stuff. And that should be the most important stuff to you, not to anyone else, even faculty, advisers, and other authority figures.

I’ve felt the weight of going against advice and know that it can be tough to do, because probably the most sucky thing in the world would be to fail at something and be surrounded by a bunch of I told you so‘s. One of the most helpful strands of thought I frequently keep in my head—you know, whenever things do seem a little tricky, complicated, or difficult—is just, “You can do this. People don’t know what they’re talking about.” Or, as I was telling a friend last night, whenever I am looking for inspiration, I recall the Pokémon episode where Pikachu has to battle Raichu, and eventually wins despite being Raichu’s evolutionary lesser. He wins because of agility. That always stood out to me. But I think that’s a different story.

In the spirit of this post, and in the vein of different stories, stay tuned for “Why Rooming With Your Best Friend From High School Is AWESOME” in a month or so.

I’m aware that this is a common human complex. It’s simple even. This is something we all experience. I’m not writing with a perfect solution, but I’d like to share some of my experience.

I think the point is that when you feel this way, you’re already at a spot where you know what the solution is, but you hesitate when it comes to execution. I’d like to quote parallels between two songs that I really enjoy:

From Kevin Devine’s “Me and My Friends”:

I wanna stop it
I wanna stop it
I wanna stop it
But it’s the only life I know how to live

and later,

I wanna stop it
…
but tonight, brother, pour me one more

And from David Bazan’s “Bless this Mess”:

Through a darkened mirror I have seen my own reflection
And it makes me want to be a better man
…after another drink

The main problem that I understand here is a universal tendency of viewing the present and the future as two distinct realities. I do this all the time. In the spring, I was dead certain that I wanted to spend the vast majority of my summer learning to play piano. I was facing four months of freedom from school, and it seemed obvious to me that I’d find plenty of time in those four months to become rather proficient at piano. But here I am, past the halfway mark, and I’ve barely made a dent of progress. Why? Because I haven’t practiced, obviously.

Practicing piano was something I expected I’d just do when I had time for it. When I was at school this past semester, I’d frequently wander into a practice room (at Smith, a practice room is a beautiful, cozy little place with a piano, a music stand, one or two chairs, a window, and a mirror that you can go into at any time, and we have dozens of them) and sit down at a piano, and feel truly content, and like I could spend an entire day fiddling around, as if I had an entire world in front of me that I was itching to explore. But I was so busy with schoolwork friends babysitting sleeping exercising life that I never had time to do this. But I always told myself that I’d do it when I had the time to. This can be a really good way of thinking (setting goals) but I made one big mistake: I made it a priority in my future, but not in my present. At the time, I could only realistically make it a priority in my future. But I never actually shifted my frame of mind into making it a priority in the present.

I’ve only practiced piano about half a dozen times this summer. And for most of those sessions, I sat down, played through a few familiar things, and gave up after ten minutes because I felt frustrated that I didn’t have the focus, or rather the structure, from practicing regularly. Even when I had the time and thought, “I should practice piano now,” I’d mess around for a few minutes and then give up. I’d sit back and think that practicing was useless because I’d never get better because I was only practicing once every couple of weeks, and so trying to get better was just a big waste of time. But of course, it’s this very attitude that has been stopping me from getting better!

Long-term goals are important and can be both very valuable and useful. But it can be very detrimental to set certain kinds of long-term goals, for example, goals that can be accomplished in a shorter time than you’ve allotted yourself for the particular task. Stuff like: in two years I’ll be in better shape, in five years I won’t be a smoker anymore, I’ll run every morning next month, I’ll stop eating chips tomorrow afternoon… There’s a fine line between what are real, productive goals, and what are ways to excuse present harmful behavior masquerading as goals. But I think it’s easy to spot the difference. If you have a long-term goal that has you convinced it’s okay to slack off now, you’re cheating yourself because that’s *not* a goal, it’s an excuse. Every goal you have should empower you to do something you’re proud of, not hold you back by making you think it’s okay to be lazy. If you always keep a “goal” tucked safely into the distant future, you’ll be just like a dog going after a treat attached to a moving string: moving through time and space, but never really getting anywhere.

I had this same complex with updating and maintaining this website as I did with practicing piano. One of my summer goals was to have a t-shirt. It was something I decided I’d do, and when I looked past the summer and into September, I envisioned my winter cap with a t-shirt for sale. Then I realized that the summer was halfway over and I hadn’t done anything to make this a reality. I would think, “It’s silly of me to get a t-shirt because I haven’t updated in months.”

But then one day I decided to make having a t-shirt a priority of my present. And I just jumped into it. Now I’ve been doing what I can to update the comic, and I’ve got a t-shirt for sale. This has only been going on for about a week, but it’s going well. The most important part about it is it’s becoming a habit; it’s becoming an engrained part of my present, which gives the habit the power to become a part of my future as well. What I need to do to become better about practicing piano is apply this same mindset there. It’s what any of us needs to do with any goal we might have: we’ve got to stop separating the present and the future, and realize that one is the direct result of the other (and realize this in the present, and not in the future, and…).

I used to buy CDs compulsively. I have about 500 CDs laying around, which I think is a lot when you consider they were mostly purchased when I was between the ages of 7 and 14. I had these huge CD leather books that I would carry around with me everywhere, and every time I got a new disc, I would fervently move everything around so they were perfectly alphabetized. When I traveled to Washington D.C. with my eighth grade class in the spring of 2004, I carried around about 200 of my CDs with me. When I was a freshman in high school, I carried anywhere from 5 to 15 CDs in my backpack every single day. Back then I was frequently sleep-deprived, and the wear and tear on all my CDs began to wear on me, and finally, I bought an iPod. And slowly, I stopped purchasing CDs. My parents stopped paying for my concert tickets, I didn’t have a job, and the money I’d received for my bat mitzvah was dwindling. And so I had to make a choice: concerts or CDs.

It was a slow process. The first time I went to New York City (fall of 2005), the thing I was most excited about was buying used CDs at music stores. I still think there’s something exciting about making a physical purchase of music. Holding something in your hand, remembering that there’s so much to be found in just one album, which is something that isn’t as easily visible when it appears to you as just one of a few thousand 12 song playlists in your iTunes library, from which you can tear and shuffle songs from with a few simple taps. But even so, purchasing a physical CD these days is my absolute last resort for acquiring music. Every few months I buy half a dozen CDs from Amazon, but usually because I’m getting stuff that’s too unpopular to be found anywhere else (for example, solo Aaron Sprinkle albums, music by songwriter Stephen Duffy, Dryve’s first album Hum, and a Japanese import of Fastball’s The Harsh Light of Day because it has the bonus track “Love Doesn’t Kill You”).

I’d like to digress from my personal music listening and purchasing history into a specific story of how I started listening to Kevin Devine. Instead of going on about how downloading music can be a really positive thing, here’s a story about how it has been a really positive thing.

Kevin Devine has been my most listened to artist for about 18 months now. The overall time I’ve spent listening to his music stretches back a few years earlier, but I didn’t get really into it until the beginning of 2009. Better late than never. I’m a big fan of Brand New, which is how I first heard of Kevin Devine. It’s hard to be a Brand New fan and not know who Kevin Devine is. I’d listened a few times to a few KD albums before a year ago, and I’d actually seen him 2 or 3 times as an opening act. I do remember really enjoying his set. But even so, for some reason or another, it just didn’t really click with me at the time. Like it is with any form of art, listening to music is a two-way street. If you’re not meeting anything halfway, the greatest record in the world will sound like nothing to you. And what we are ready to meet halfway today might very well be very different from what we will be ready to meet tomorrow.

As an avid listener of music, I sometimes have trouble finding something that really, really hits me. There’s so much that I like, but with everything I listen to, after a while, the initial magic eventually fades. That’s why it’s the initial magic. In my experience, the longer I listen, the more I enjoy stuff, and there’s more stuff I find that I enjoy. But it becomes harder to come by that feeling of complete euphoria and absorption in a song, album, or artist. I’ve heard a thousand well-written songs, but it takes something beyond “well-written” for a song to wow me and stop me in my tracks. I mean listening to an album a dozen times in a row and feeling like you’ve still only heard it once. Then taking a break for a day, and going back again, and everything sounds not just as new and amazing as the first time, but even better. This is what happens when you discover something that you know you’ll keep with you forever.

That’s how I felt with Kevin Devine. Feverish.

A blurry shot of Kevin performing in New Haven, CT a month ago

But let’s get back to how it unraveled. Kevin’s most recent full-length release, Brother’s Blood, leaked about two months early. It’s common and expected that albums will leak before their official date of release. When I know a record is coming out, one of the first thoughts I have is, “I wonder when it’s gonna leak.” But two months is a bit premature. I heard about the leak from one of my friends: she’d downloaded it, and scrobbled the tracks on her last.fm. Shortly after, she’d received a message from some folks at Favorite Gentlemen asking her to delete the album from her computer and stop listening to it, and to likewise spread the word. I don’t remember if they were especially cheeky, but they were rather upset about the entire ordeal. That’s something I do understand. In the past I have debated a lot internally about whether I think downloading music is morally sound, and by last spring, I was 100% decided that it was. It’s the industry that needs to change, and not the fans. I have a lot of respect for independent artists, and especially for the folks who run Favorite Gentlemen. But at the time I did feel like their anger about what happened was being taken out too much on the wrong people. So I think I downloaded the album, and left a slightly obnoxious post in Kevin Devine’s shoutbox on last.fm advertising that I had the CD, and offering to send it to anyone who wanted to listen. I got flamed a little, and rightfully; I was acting like a jerk. But I’ve been using the internet for years, and have sometimes been vocal and opinionated, and flaming happens sometimes. So it didn’t phase me much.

I actually didn’t send the album to anyone, and I didn’t even listen to it straight off. But the whole thing put that “Kevin Devine guy I’d seen touring with Jesse Lacey” on my radar, and on a whim I listened to his third album, Split the Country, Split the Streets, because I remembered enjoying that one a few years back. I’d like to say that it blew me away immediately, but as a record, it didn’t. It took time still. But “No Time Flat” stuck with me, and soonafter, so did, “Lord, I Know We Don’t Talk.” A month later it was all I wanted to listen to. Even now, there are some tracks on that record that don’t stand out to me; I have mixed feelings about “Afterparty” and about the mesh of Kevin Devine’s style with the feel of the typical 6/8 ballad in “Probably.” But there’s something about him that’s just completely captivating, even in those tracks that aren’t my favorites. I was sad that the subsequent Put Your Ghost to Rest didn’t live up to how great I thought Split was. But then that hit me too (along with his second release, Make the Clocks Move), and I felt the same disappointment in Brother’s Blood. Everything hit me so strongly that it fully shook my world every time I introduced a new album to my listening schedule. It was in the same way it was difficult for me to read An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L’Engle (which I still haven’t finished) because I couldn’t cope with seeing Meg Murry as an adult and not the young protagonist.

But a year and thousands of listens later, I’m positive that Brother’s Blood is one of the best examples of clear, timeless songwriting that I’ve ever heard. What I found with Kevin Devine was a feeling I thought I was doomed to never find again. Some people wear their feelings on their sleeves, and I wear my interests (or possibly both). The stuff that really gets me going does it so well that I explode with enthusiasm to nearly every person I converse with. Sometimes I fear that I participate in open, blatant gushing more than I do in any other form of talking. So, what I’m getting at is that most people who know me are aware that I’m a die-hard Barenaked Ladies fan. It’s been going on so long that it usually feels like an inherent part of my character as opposed to something that I acquired one day. Some of the best memories I have are of listening to their music. For years, listening to BNL was almost all I did, and it never, ever got old. It only got more exciting. I would sit down and listen to an album and thoroughly enjoy every single second of it. I’d listen five times in a row to the same album because I’d focus my listening on a different instrument each time around, and every time was a different experience. Nowadays, I don’t spend a lot of time listening to BNL. I don’t want to say it’s gotten old, but it’s true that as certain magics appear, others fade. As I get older, more songs speak to me in deeper ways, but there’s not as much for me to discover anymore. And I listen to so much music that I simply don’t have time to listen to a hundred BNL songs every day. (Still, I’ve never forgotten: the first and most primary reason that I decided to branch out and listen to “other” music was because I felt that I’d reached a point where the best way for me to appreciate BNL’s music more was to try to appreciate where it was they were coming from, and I’ve only branched out further from there.)

Moving on, I’ve fallen in love with lots of bands in the past decade. But the further along I get in age and listening, the less frequent it is that I get totally immersed in something for a long period of time. Before I got really hooked on Kevin Devine, I thought I’d never find another band or artist that I was that into. That I’d want to listen to over and over again for year, or that I’d want to see in concert as many times as I could afford. Becoming a Kevin Devine fan was a hugely important event in my life. If you asked me to spout off the most important things to happen in my life in 2009, I’d immediately respond with three things: listening to Kevin Devine, my babysitting job, and rock-climbing. More importantly than giving me something to sing along to, Kevin Devine gave me something to get truly excited, inspired, and passionate about. Kevin Devine’s music gave me a place to feel truly alive, and a way to rediscover myself as well as the world around me. And all that is something I might have never found had not Brother’s Blood leaked the way it did.

I’m certain that I’ll be following Kevin Devine more closely than any other artist I listen to for years to come. And I think I’m a good fan for an artist to have. Once I’m hooked, I’ll purchase every release; hunt down every b-side, EP, 7″ I can find; see your show as many nights as I can travel to; buy your t-shirts; recommend you endlessly to every person I meet; and always come again next time (for some examples, I’ve seen Barenaked Ladies 30+ times, and been to dozens of Guster concerts, and seven seems like a sheepishly small number to me when I reflect that that’s how many times I’ve seen Kevin Devine). There are some artists you like to see once in concert, and some that you want to see again and again. For me, Kevin Devine is one of the artists in the second group. There are artists who think what they do is about making music, and others who know that it really boils down to connecting to people. When Kevin Devine takes the stage, he does it as a friendly face, not as a fabricated image of the art he’s created. Kevin, when I started listening to your music, I spent zero dollars on your CDs. But in the past month, I’ve seen your concert 3 times, and spent $90 on your merchandise. And to me, that’s only the beginning.

A shot of me with Kevin at one of his recent shows

I have two automatic answers to both questions, tidied away for these situations. I think I come off a little fresh and a lot closed, which I realize and believe is “wrong” and unfriendly, but it’s the weathered result of telling the truth and getting dull stares as a response. So, why math? Because it’s easy, I always say. Or, with a slight shrug, Eh, I just figure it’s the easiest thing. So I come off as smug, because even though the question seems innocent enough, I often feel as if I’ve got to ward off a kind of, “wtf math?” have-fun-going-back-to-middle-school attitude. I think in good conversation, an answer does better raising a new question than answering the one at hand, but in this case, I don’t leave it at all obvious what that next question is.

When I say easy, I don’t mean without hard work. I rarely think of things in term of work; I usually just consider things in terms of enjoyment. Majoring in math is easy for me because I enjoy it immensely, and I’m convinced that I’ll enjoy pursuing a math major more than I would with a different discipline (I feel like there’s a slight asterisk I could put here, where I recall my interest in music production, but I won’t discuss that now).

So why math, really? Joy alone can’t be enough to justify spending four years primarily focusing on one subject, or at least it can’t justify singling out one subject out of a handful that I thoroughly enjoy. Well, what I mean by, It’s the easiest thing, is that a math major allows me to sacrifice the least amount of time that I would like to spend on other interests. Since elementary school until about halfway through high school, I was convinced I would go to college and major in English. My plan changed, because I realized that what I loved about reading and writing just wasn’t what I would be doing if I were to study English in college. I read about a quarter of the assigned books in high school because I felt so annoyed by the way literature was taught in school. If I majored in English, I’d have to spend years doing assignments I thought were silly, and on top of that, I’d want to devote more personal time to the reading and writing that I’d want to do. It’d just be a major time-suck for me, and I’d likely feel guilty, and rarely satisfied and productive. I would like to say that two of my best friends happen to be English majors at Smith College, and I do indeed respect them both immensely for what they’re studying. And I think college English courses can be less hokey-pokey (by this, I mean “absolute nonsense”) than what I got at my high school, and that I would actually enjoy an English major quite a bit (definitely much more than I would have let on at the peak of my resistance to hand in homework during high school). So yes, I would enjoy it, but right now, not at the expense of all the Englishy-stuff I didn’t want to do, and not at the expense of a math major.

I feel lucky that I enjoy math so much. Because you can’t really cut it any other way: math is math. You can’t corrupt numbers the way you can corrupt literature, music, film, and art. I don’t want to imply that math isn’t creative but I don’t think I do, since creative doesn’t mean without rules. So you see where I’m going: by making math my primary focus in school, I feel productive and happy because I love math and I’m actually doing it and enjoying it. I don’t feel guilty at the end of the day because I wasted all my time and still feel like I haven’t properly done anything. And that, to me, is what makes majoring in math easy.

And now onward to: What are you going to do with that? How do you plan to use your degree?

Here’s what I usually say, and what is mostly true: Nothing. And, I don’t.

What I’d like to communicate in this post is that I’m a firm believer that, when done properly, everything is an end in itself. Of course, we could get all specific and argue little, silly things such as reading a word is a means to reading a sentence is a means to reading a paragraph, but let’s not argue for the sake of it, and think practically. At this point in my life, I would say that true happiness is being always content with the rate at which time is passing, and never wishing moments to pass more slowly or more quickly. That happens when you stop thinking of your life as a string of means to accompanying ends.

Think of reading a book. You feel satisfied when you finish, sure. But the joy you feel from reading doesn’t come all at the end. If you’re doing it right, you’re enjoying it all the way through. Every chapter isn’t a means toward the end of understanding the whole story, or another box you’ve got to check to say you’ve read a new book. The classes I take aren’t a means to a degree. A degree is a nice thing to have, but I’m not doing this so one day I can use my degree to get a job. Here’s another thing I believe: degrees can help, but degrees don’t get jobs. Or do much of anything. People do those things. My college education isn’t something I’m getting now to use later; I like to think that I’m always using it, and always will be. If I never do anything related to my math major after I graduate, I doubt I’ll feel as if getting the degree was a waste of resources. I’ll feel that I used it because, if nothing else, I enjoyed the process of getting it every day, and I think that alone is more than enough. I think too many people think of their lives as things that start or end at certain times, and lose sight of the fact that joy is supposed to be constant.

We don’t read books expecting that it’s gonna suck the whole way through, but the end will be worth it, and (what’s more) no one tries to write a book like that. I definitely believe in sacrifice, as in giving something up in exchange for something greater. And I’m not at all trying to promote that we blind ourselves to the responsibility of the future in pursuit of instant pleasure. I believe in trudging through the chapters that don’t make sense, listening to the whole album, watching to the end of the movie. There’s a difference between giving something up because it’s straight up bad, and because it challenges to extend yourself a little bit. I’m saying that every moment is important, and moreover, that every moment being important doesn’t in some way imply that since all moments are important, no moments are.

I’m not getting a math major because it has potential to sound and be fancy, to get me somewhere. I’m happy because I believe it’s a versatile major, but being completely honest with you all, right now when I picture my life after graduation, I picture getting a cheap apartment, a part-time job, and either starting or joining a rock band. The question just doesn’t make sense to me: what are you going to do with that? To me it’s like asking, “What are you going to eat for breakfast two Thursdays from now, and how, specifically, will doing that nourish you with the energy you’ll need to go about your day?” I have respect for people who know what they’re going to do, and I have appreciation for goal-setting and for commitment, but at the same time, it’s important to realize that you don’t need a reason or a purpose, rather, to do something that’s separate from just doing it. I like the end result of being fit, and when I’m exercising, I thoroughly enjoy every moment of it, both for what it is, and because I can feel it’s getting me somewhere. There are no contradictions there.

When I was younger, I believed that getting dressed was something I did when I had somewhere to go. Otherwise, I reasoned, why waste clean clothes? I might want to wear them later. Now I’ve come to realize that it’s mostly the other way around. I waste more saving my clean clothes than I do having a little more dirty laundry. I find that I don’t shower and get dressed every morning because I have something to do, but rather that I am dressed, and therefore I have things to do.