This Guy is Smart (and also a good talker)

This guy talks about what I guess I knew intuitively when I was younger.  You can’t have a great job and a great career (and marry the person of your dreams) just anywhere.  You have to go to the right place where the right opportunities are available.

I left Hamilton and went to Toronto and didn’t look back. I knew that I was more likely to meet people I would like and have career opportunities I would excel in in a big city.  Steel town was never going to do it for me.

I think of my friends who are still in Hamilton and I know, to some extent, their lives and careers are shaped by being there.

Immigration has been driven by this forever, but for some reason moving and “leaving home” still has a stigma for many.  Sometimes you get called opportunistic or ungrateful.  I think that every person is different and has to go where they will get to be the person they want to be.

A Lesson in Differences

I just read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and The Mysterium by Eric McCormack. They were very different books. The thing that popped into my head as I was reading The Mysterium was a trip to Stratford that I did with a drama class in high school. Once of the speakers we met talked about the “Actor’s Craft” and recounted a conversation with one of the better actors at the festival. She asked him how it was that he was such a good actor, he replied “I’m constantly surprised by what the characters say next, so the audience is surprised along with me.”

This sense of discovery upon reading what happens next made Middlesex a completely spontaneous and believable story, despite events that would have been at home in summer blockbusters. No matter what, I always believed it because of everything I knew about all the characters and the complex relationships between them. The events were always completely logical. Even the ones that sound ridiculous out of context.

The Mysterium was the opposite. The story was dripping with contrivance. The story is kind of a murder-mystery on it’s head. The author does not want you to “solve” the mystery. His frequently stated goal is to tell a story that can’t be fit together nicely into a logical series of events. In such he goes out of his way to completely mislead and inject (at the last minute) bits of information to try and make it seem all the more “mysterious.” The effort feels constructed. It wasn’t so much a series of weird and strange events recounted, but a series of mouth-pieces giving clues. Nothing was a surprise, nothing was a discovery. The purposeful hand of the writer was always visible.

There’s This Place With Free Books. . .

I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but how awesome is the library? It’s crammed with books and they’ll just let you take them on your word. Sure, it isn’t as nice as your local Chapters, and it doesn’t have Starbucks built right in (actually, I’m pretty sure there’s a no food policy) but so what? It’s free.
What I also love about the library is the built-in recommendations of others. In a store, all you have is stickers saying some pretentious book-store clerk liked this book, or maybe Oprah liked it, that’s not any good. But in a library I can see the well read spine’s of books. I can see the ones that make people read them all the way through and also the ones people started reading, and never really finished. But best of all, you are free to read terrible, terrible books! Especially the trashy ones you know will be bad. You can read them guilt-free then return them like you had no idea they would be so awful. Joy.

In case it’s not obvious, I just got a library card after almost 10 years of not having one. That will never happen again, I guarantee you.

First books I got out? Tomb of Horrors, a novel based on the dungeon (a bad book as referenced above) and Dune – the classic – which I have never read.

ToH was AWFUL, it’s like the guy’s only experience with dialogue is successful diplomacy checks.

Dune is phenomenal. Blows my mind I haven’t read it before now.

Math Rock & Funk

Lately I’ve been really loving this song from Minus The Bear. It’s got that Math Rock offness to it that I really enjoy.

What’s got me thinking today though, is a piece I heard on Quirks and Quarks. It’s a book called “This Is Your Brain on Music” and one of the many things he says is that when music surprises us, we’re more likely to dance to it. That our brains recognize octaves and such as “perfect” transitions, but when music doesn’t move the way we expected, it piques our brain’s interest. According to the piece, one of the most danceable songs is Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” because the drums have subtle changes throughout the song that tease your brain into being more excited by the beat.
While I don’t find Minus The Bear that danceable, I do find myself listening harder to one of their songs than I would to, say, Metric, which despite the name is not Math Rock because it’s very ordered and doesn’t mess with timing.

Still Waiting For Mr. Big

I just finished reading “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” by Toby Young (previously blogged about here). I’ll spare the review, but there was something else in the book that got the wheels turning. Toby Young becomes friends with Candace Bushnell the author of Sex and the City (who Carrie was based on, essentially). At one point Toby asks her why New York women are so discriminating about the men they date, and her response is:

I feel like I’m successful, I’m gonna be more successful. . .I wanna be with someone who’s like maybe famous, you know? I wanna be with someone who’s like me. I sort of feel like I earned that.

That quote got me thinking because it’s so typical of the contradiction plaguing women today. Essentially, despite our success and liberation, women still want to marry up, while men still seem to want to marry down.

That quote is from the 90’s when she was in her 30’s, she is now in her 40’s, and as far as I can tell from the web, she hasn’t been married. Obviously there is nothing wrong with that in a specific case. However, her story is becoming increasingly more common among successful, independent women. Mr. Big, who is more successful than us and appreciates our independence, just doesn’t seem to come along in real life.