Forget Your Name, Forget Your Fear

All credit for the gifs to iwdrm.tumblr.com

I've often thought of expressing myself through visual means, but my skills of an artist leave much to be desired. So I'll shamelessly show these cyclic animations which about sum it up.

I can't decide if New York just sucks in the rain or if in my transition to adulthood the rain has lost all it's power over me. I was always the kid running outside in thunderstorms. Soaked completely through and chilled to the bone, shouting challenges to the gods of fury, which seem to have gone largely unnoticed.

It seems ridiculous to say the rain has changed, but maybe it's just the kind of rain. Lacking in intensity, it seems incapable of soaking anything, just making it all damp. Rain without the fury is just, well wet. But it's getting harder to imagine myself running through a thunderstorm these days. Maybe I've romanticized it too much. Without someone to run to in the rain, I'm just as well off watching it from inside, behind the closed curtains.

I used to have a balcony and would sit out and watch the thunderstorms but the buildings here make it difficult to see the lightning, especially from my lowly vantage point. It's like smoke with no fire. It lacks that primal mesmerizing feature and instead of entertainment really only provides with you smelly clothing.

So when it rains here, I expect it to be like this

But the reality doesn't leave me feeling cleansed at all. It just leaves me feeling like it should be better. Just, angry that I"m wet. More like this, well minus the wet.

Again, all credit to iwdrm.tumblr.com for the amazing images. Oh and bonus points to you if you get the film references and even more if you get the reference in the first paragraph.

playlist here

Led Zeppelin - The Rain Song
Electric Light Orchestra - Standin' in the Rain
Cam Wilkinson - Song of Storms
Massive Attack - Pray for Rain
Echo & The Bunnymen - Ocean Rain
The Who - Love Reign O'er Me
Yoko Kanno - Rain

We Are Very Busy People

To say that I love learning is commit an extreme exaggeration of Mission Accomplished proportions. I hate studying, that's why I never really did it. At best I'm capable of grasping onto facts for 32 hour periods. I almost always understand, I just never bothered getting the space to commit things to memory. Sure I know all the words to "It's the End of the World as We Know It" but triple integrals? My calculator does that. Biatch.

Because I don't love learning. I love knowing things. Preferably more things than you, but I'll settle for more things than most people. Maybe just more things than the average fifth grader. None of the ones on that tricky show, though. Clever bastards. I just like finding things out. The more useless the knowledge the better as far as I'm concerned.

I hate to veer radically on topic, but I think this is due to the way education has always been presented to me. When you think about how you learn things naturally, it's a rapid progression of whatever catches your eye on any given explanation. When a child asks a question, they invariably ask why after you answer. Let's say that the answer given has 3 parts. Do they ask about part A, then part B, then part C? No. They ask about which part catches their ear, and the same with each following sentence. I like to think of it as conceptual tree branches, one after the other, more and more specific, until you get to the leaf. But that isn't how any class I've ever taken has evolved. It's strictly confined and covers A, B and C before going onto the next sentence. Maybe it's just residual resentment, but I really do believe the way we learn and the way we are taught often diverge to a significant degree.

This is why I love the internet, specifically wikipedia. Because it lets me learn about anything, and go immediately to the points that interest me. It is, to put it mildly, amazing. I remember the feeling of being a child without a computer. I read my books. I looked through the encyclopedia to try to find more about the things that caught my eye. I had to wait until someone took me to the library to get more books. To be so anxious for new information. It was like a great fanning out, starting with the very vague book on animals, then reptiles, then prehistoric reptiles, dinosaurs, the cretaceous period, bipedal carnivores. I think wikipedia works in this very casual, general to specific kind of way, that our minds, and more importantly our curiosity works.

I don't mean to denounce the whole education system because it has entirely different goals. It's goal is to cram certain knowledge into you, with a certain percentage of accuracy (grades). With wikipedia alone I could probably not be an engineer, despite the fact that I use it frequently. I will always be a proponent of free education, but I think that wikipedia, like many classes I have taken, promotes knowledge and not necessarily understanding.

That is to say, it's very easy to see an equation on wikipedia and memorize it, but to know all of it's uses and limitations can be very difficult without information that isn't apparent. This all applies mostly to math and science, but I always assume there are similarities between everything that I just might not be aware of. Historical events may not seem as significant without their background. Plays might not have the same impact without a knowledge of the symbols involved. Context. Somewhere to place the knowledge.

All of that being said, I could have been a much better student than I was. The only thing I really seem to excel at is failing upwards. Because information I am not interested in, I have always viewed as completely useless to me and therefor had to force myself to learn (temporarily). I suppose that is what separates me from the driven, who are easily capable of learning things they don't want to, and the intelligent, who can pick it up casually enough that force is not required.

Stars - The Night Starts Here
The Limousines - Very Busy People
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth
Harvey Danger - Sad, Sweet Heart of the Rodeo
Modest Mouse - Out of Gas
Against Me! - I Was a Teenage Anarchist