A Return Muse

I think that I set the bar a little bit too high for fun in my other blog, so I am going to continue to post some of my musings here for the time being. This means that I am moving back to. My other blog started to become strictly about my academic life and I started critiquing my own writing so much that if I had a finished essay it would not be posted because I was scared that it was not "smart enough" or "proper" for the context. I started to miss the times that I would write without any care for what would come of my various thoughts. These are the main reasons that I have decided to move back to my Blogspot account. This blog has a stigma of freedom attached to it that I enjoy.

A few days ago, I looked back at my Diary/Journal entries from when I was a child. It was daunting to think that just ten years ago I could hardly construct a sentence. Through the huge font scrawling of my childhood I began to humble myself. I am only 20 years old. 20. That's one fifth of a century old. My understanding of the world –still shaping today and probably forever- began to take shape less than 10 years ago, well after my little Goosebumps journal. I was just in Elementary school and High school and I have only began to dig into what kind of resembles something familiar to a real life (with all the props in place for me of course). I deal in big numbers while concentrating on small numbers; that's Anthropology. Half of a century can be expressed in one sentence without a second thought. That is a lot of time that I have never seen before. I can sum up whole civilizations of men women and children with a key word or two and I have only just begun my journey of understanding the world.

When I was ten years old, my world consisted of a big encyclopedia stack that I was scared to read, Lego and Super Nintendo. My parents supplied the rest for me. I ate, kept play dates with friends and went to bed at my mother's whim. My view of the world was much smaller than it is now. Within the last ten years, my scope has focused and widened and I have opinions about things that matter and I am considered an adult with consequences staring intently, waiting for me to fuck up. In a years time I could be applying for graduate school, then in two years, I will be doing something important, hopefully. But what importance can I bring to anything that I do if the things I talk about are not experienced? Time, places and everything else that I have yet to see and try to understand simply do not exist for me, and doubtfully will in two years.

When I think along these lines, I inevitably compare myself to other people. I look at other undergraduates that are in my field of study and think about how they see themselves. I base this on observations and conversations that I have with my fellow undergraduates. Mostly, they make up for lack of experience information with biting criticism of everything or everyone that does not sit on a completely neutral fence. I can see myself doing the same thing and I feel trapped. It's a popularity contest to see who can find the most irregularities and flaws. It makes me sick.

I can only wait until the time I can actually say that I have something to bring to the world without feeling hypocritical and amateur.

Changing Blogs

Yes, I am changing blogsites to Wordpress. I'd like to thank you all for reading and commenting on my silly life. If you still want to read what I have to say (I'm not sure if I would to tell you the truth) then you can read it here:

http://ajerk.wordpress.com/

Thanks,
Sean Hitrec

Moving and Creativity

I moved away from the bad part of my city for solitude and artistic/scholastic freedom. I figured that I would be able to feel safer and become more enlightened by moving away. Now, I’m not so sure that this is how freedom works. You cannot feel free if you’re bored as hell!

I moved from one of the more angry areas of East Vancouver to North Burnaby. North Burnaby does have its share of crime as well, but the magnitude is not nearly what it was where I used to live. I also moved near the mountains (my school is kind of on a mountain as well) and there is lots of fresh air and trees and wild stuff within walking distance of my apartment. It is nice here; I have nothing to complain about. I also have nothing to write about, no serious quandaries to ponder on or no dilemmas to keep me on my toes and to rework the way I look at society or myself. It’s just dull here.

The ironic part about all this is, by the time I left my last house I was screaming for some piece and quiet. I lived along one of the busiest streets in the area; the corner that I walked by every day had a high number of drug trafficking; there were multiple gang things going on under the radar; there were police screaming down my street every morning; there were prostitutes; there were people sleeping in dumpsters; there were meth heads; I was jumped twice while on my way home. I had had enough and was beginning to become mildly paranoid when walking to places, such as the store or work. I was even semi-scared while living in my own basement sweet because one of the groups who jumped me had told me they were going to be back to hurt me really bad. I also had the RCMP come to my door, looking for the guy who lived in the suit right next to me.

Then I moved away. I moved to the very far end of what can be considered the city of Burnaby (Burnaby is right next to Vancouver). I found a bigger suite in a peaceful area that was (and still is oddly enough) beside my university. I live on the bottom floor and when I look out my window I can see a beautiful tree and bushes (and other suites, but I don’t pay attention to those). Since living here I have been much more relaxed. The ulcer that I was developing while living in east Vancouver is not bugging me at all, I can go for walks and runs at night without fearing for my own peril and I can take trips outside the city to beautiful places in a very short amount of time. It is very perfect for me. Jesus, the apartment that I live in is even from the architectural period that I like.

It has taken me about 4 months to get fully settled in at my new place. I find it usually takes that long for me to be able to refer to a place as ‘home’ and to long for the bedroom at night (before this I would be in a state of limbo, semi-missing my old room). Now that I am all settled in and organized, I feel like writing and pondering. Every time I have had the inkling to do those favored activities at home my mouth dries up, my tongue melts into my lower jaw, my brain 404s and my fingers form little blisters that pop and puss everywhere when I try to hold my pencil.

There is nothing here to force me to think. The only things that I think about these days are school, debating with people from school, and my quaint social life. If I’m not doing homework or seeing my girlfriend/friends/family (which is a rarity) I am bored. Going places does not have the same adventuresk qualities as it used to. It’s hard to say, but in a way I miss being scared and a little puny wimp in a big tough community because I was forced to try to understand people and situations. I was forced to walk through dingy areas to go to work. Was forced to establish rules and boundaries for myself, for if I didn’t follow them I would either have to fight or run like hell. On top of that, there is less of a community of the oppressed. When I used to work at the coffee shop near my house, I would have many conversations with the older and geekier crowds of people on my break. I think the reason for this lies somewhere around the fact that I listen to people and don’t beat everyone up or act like an asshole (unless I’m being an idiot, which sometimes happens). The topic of conversation varied, but often touched on the craziness of the area we lived in. Now that I live in a nicer area with people who aren’t so eager to make new friends, there is no talking and no sense of community (especially because I live in a rental apartment block that has people coming and going all of the time).

I guess I just need to find some new inspirations to write and think about.

Video Games and Scholastics

I have recently been reading a dissertation about video games. Being quite into video games myself, I thought that reading something of this nature would bring me a heightened sense of what the video game is all about. What it has done, however, is made me realize how stupid and non-holistic the anthropology community can be. My original reason for majoring in anthropology was because it happens to be one of the most self-reflexive and the least ethnocentric studies in academia. My recent reading of this book has left me wondering about anthropology and what it actually has to offer, besides some good descriptions.

Ethnographers travel around the world in order to live with different people and bring back information about them that seems to tell some truths; or at the very least some good descriptions on how different people live. Some ethnographers also stay close to home and study micro-cultures in every day life. Based on a wealth of theories, ethnographers, as anthropologists, write books and papers about their experiences living with their group of people and enlighten the other western anthropologists with their uncoveries of social and cultural things that happen in the world. This interests me a lot. I love reading about different groups of people from all over the world, how they do things, whose oppressing who and so on. Of course there are many problems with this process. The anthropologist might not have got his/her descriptions of the community right or might have emphasized the wrong areas leading to a misrepresentation of data. There are a lot of other things that can go wrong; take anthropology if you want to know them all! I generally assumed that the people who went around doing the studies were smart enough to ‘get’ at least the basics down of what they were studying. I think I might be mistaken, however. The inaccuracies might be much more than I had originally thought.

I wanted to read this book on video games because I like video games. For as long as I can remember I have had at least one version of Nintendo. I have also played a lot of computer games. I figured that I would be part of a target culture in a study about video games, so I read a dissertation about the theatrics and video games. The dissertation titled Theatre and the Video Game: Beauty and the Beast by Katherine Lynn Whitlock, not only disregarded 90% of the video games ever invented, but shot down some of my favorite video games as being simple minded and kill oriented. According to this masterpiece, the only real theatrics, performance, sense of drama and so on comes from role playing games. The researcher also decided to reduce games such as Starcraft and Diablo to battles of religion and state that Quake, Doom and Half-life series are pretty much pointless and not filled with any sort of suspense or drama because they are bent on killing things. She states that the MMORPG is the height of all gaming experiences because it allows for the most variability in in-game options. This might make sense to someone who has grown up only playing final fantasy and then jumped ingto Ultima Online and Everquest, but it is not a very likely reality, unless you are a fat single 50 year old man who enjoys mining gold for days on end in a virtual world. It is quite obvious to me that this researcher has never played video games with friends or actually paid attention to why so many people like first person shooters and strategy games.

The elements of theatrics are just as prevalent in other genres as they are in the Final Fantasy realm; it’s just not as easily laid out. For instance the 'drama' in Quake is not so much in the killing as it is in the interactions that people have with each other outside the game and the internal struggle of the gamer trying to get better at winning by incorporating different strategies. Some people might think this is unanalyzable, but this is anthropology.

This confuses me. The reason for this is because the dissertation passed the committee, who probably thought that the researcher had done a great job, not being into playing video games themselves. This ruptured a thinking valve in my head. Now I know that in order to be ‘smart’ all one has to do is write something about a topic no one really knows about! That’s really all anthropologists do, so I figure that there is a lot more misrepresentation out there than just the odd fact. Maybe nothing is true, I DON’T KNOW! YOU DON’T EITHER!

Morality and Choices

Morality is easy to discuss philosophically. One can come to a conclusion on a virtuous and ethical act while pondering over a few philosophers’ outlooks. Doing the right thing, however, is completely different than theorizing about it. There is an overlying sense of responsibility and guilt that come from making proper or improper decisions in life. Take, for instance, misfortunes applied to strangers by other strangers. When is it proper to act to stop these misfortunes? How close does someone have to be before the morality of a situation becomes imminent and obvious? How involved is too involved with the happenings and misfortunes of others?

I raise these questions because I have been struggling over moral decisions that I have made which turned out to be more complicated than merely ‘doing the right thing’. In the following example, all of the moral and virtue bells were singing in my head, telling me I was doing the right thing, but the outcome left me feeling alienated and unsure about myself.

I was studying in a coffee shop about a year and a half ago when I noticed a van pull up and park in the ‘taxi only’ parking zone. I was sitting near the window and could see inside the van. The man in the van looked to be about forty five years old. He was dressed in a ripped bomber jacket and jeans that had probably never seen a washing machine. I was staring at this man because he was parked in a ‘taxi only’ zone, which is illegal, and he didn’t seem to notice it. I figured I would tell him that he had miss-parked if he was here get a coffee in my coffee shop, but those plans were cut short when I saw him lift a rag up from over the ignition and stick a flat-head screwdriver in the keyhole to turn the car off.

‘Could this guy really have stolen this minivan?’ I kept asking myself. I could not hold back shivers as he walked into the coffee shop and sat down without buying anything. My thought patterns were concerned on morality. I thought about how I would feel if my car had been stolen. It was a minivan too; a family was without a vehicle in Vancouver! But what if this man just got his van stolen and had to start it that way because the ignition keyhole was messed up? Despite this possibility, I had to make sure it was not stolen and I knew who could find that out for me.

My hand shook as I dialed 911 on my cell phone. I turned my head away from the man and reported that I thought that someone was driving a stolen car. I told them about how the man turned the van off and how he was sitting in his seat nervously as if ready to flee at any moment. The operator lady asked me for a physical description and told me to ‘hang tight, the police will be there soon.’ I was scared and excited. The police would probably park behind the car and run the license plate through their system to see if the car was stolen (or so I thought). If it was stolen, I would have done a good deed for society. Thinking about this made my legs shake as I pretended to be studying.

Fifteen minutes later, four police cars pulled up outside the coffee shop in unison. Four burly officers then jumped out of thier patrol cars, stormed my little coffee shop, grabbed the man and dragged him outside. My mouth dropped. I thought I must have really done a good job for this to happen. My feeling of triumph soon ended when I realized that they never actually checked the van’s license plates.

They had the man handcuffed on the sidewalk while they broke into his van and searched for the registration. He was sitting there for about fifteen more minutes, completely helpless and guarded by two officers until they finally threw him into a squad car and drove off. For fifteen sad minutes, the man had to sit in full view of the public who stopped to stare and wonder what he had done wrong. His eyes were staring at the cement and his face was ghostly. I felt bad for the man. I could not keep my eyes off of the guarded lump of sadness sitting on the cement outside the door and wonder if what I did actually helped anyone.

One of the officers stayed behind and immediately picked me out as the informant. After congratulating me for a good call, he told me that the man claimed that the van belonged to his girlfriend and the matter was being looked into. He also told me that this man was stealing coffee beans from the coffee shop and they were in his jacket when he was arrested.

I felt a little bit better as the officer walked away. I was then subject to questions by everyone near me in the coffee shop. ‘Wow, what did you do?’ was the common question. ‘Good job,’ was the common compliment. I was having a great deal of praise for something that might not have been all that good.

After explaining myself to the inquisitive folk, I left the coffee shop and went for a walk. Something wasn’t right in my brain. What if he did not steal that van and had to spend time in a holding cell because of me? I just ruined his whole day in this case! Conversely, if he actually did steal that car I did a good thing, didn’t I? He did steal the coffee beans after all. But, what if he was innocent? The public scrutiny on the sidewalk outside of the coffee shop cannot be taken back.

It seemed like such a simple moral problem at first! My thinking would look something like this: ‘There is a good chance, given the physical description and actions of this man, that he has stolen the van. The right thing to do is to call the police when I see these signs and let them figure out if he is innocent or not. Therefore I should call the police.’ But had I invaded an innocent man’s privacy, and literally got him locked up for no real reason? I never did hear if he was guilty of stealing that car or not. He was obviously very poor and has probably seen more hard times than I can imagine; why did I just supply him with one more bad experience to top his horrible life off?

I still have not come to terms with what I had done. It is very easy to say I should have done what I did. But, what about the harm I caused to this person who I don’t even know? It is also very easy to say that I should mind my own business and stay out of affairs that are not my own. How far should that be taken then though? I really hope that sort of mentality is not practised when I am in trouble. Life is not black and white, or shades of grey, or anything that can be discussed at a dinner table over a glass of syrah; it’s full of things that don’t have answers when faced in reality and this scares me.

a big category

There is a big category of people that make me uncomfortable. Every time I think about these people I get nervous and quickly divert my thoughts to another topic so I do not get too distraught. The category of people I am talking about is so extensive (especially here) that I feel silly writing about this. Yes, this post will prove my uberdorkiness if I haven’t already done that. The group of people who rattle my sole and make me afraid are better named by descriptions of their actions (they aren’t physically different than any other people) than one word to sum them up.

I feel uncomfortable around the people who boast about things such as the amount of women they have gone to bed with or the amount of drugs they do. I feel uncomfortable around people who go to clubs a lot and dance around and hit on people and try to get laid. I am apprehensive around people who have multiple partners at the same time or cheat on their partners behind their backs. More simply put, I am uncomfortable around the real life Alley McBeals, Sex in the City girls, Men who follow the persona described in rap songs, the promiscuous -and proud to be- people.

As if my culture couldn’t get any more careless, it has jumped into the realm of human materialism. I view this as an extreme result of materialism and commodity fetishism. The same principle as buying lots of unneeded stuff applies in the personal and sexual realm. Certain people view relationships as they do a pair of branded shoes, they look really good in the store window (or at first glance), and when the shoes start to get warn out or get dirty, it is simply time to buy another pair and get rid of the old shoes. Some people even have hundreds of shoes at one time!

I told you this would prove my uberdorkiness. It makes me uncomfortable. I was recently wondering why it makes me so stressed out and I came up with one answer so far. It revolves around my lack of social contact. I think that if I was a “cool” kid in high school I would have a different perspective on this. After all, the “cool” kids in high school were always the first to have sex and lots of girlfriends. My lack of social contact extends to the present time, where I only have a few friends and I rarely see them. I cannot wait to get back into school sometimes just so that I’ll be socially interacting with people.

I am trying to be as impartial as I can towards the category of shameless hormone driven people I have described because I don’t think that I have any ground to judge what they do as morally inferior. The fact is that the majority of people that I have talked to think this way. Of course, I surround myself with the few who think as I do in the categories of perm… … OH GOD I FEEL LIKE SUCH A CONSERVATIVE FANBOY!
I AM NOT I SWEAR!

I understand that I may not be “grasping” the more dominant culture that plagues my city today and it might be because I am a dork and prefer a good book to a good bar. Also, I feel as if I have been defining myself as an outsider who doesn’t understand things that go on in the real world. This doesn’t make sense for some reason.

I understand the idea of the culture I’ve been describing, but I choose not to participate because I feel that I would not be acting morally. However, if I had been brought up differently and had been social throughout my life I might have become a part of this demographic. So, though it sounds that I’m being conservative, I’m not being that way. Conservative would be to say that the promiscuity and boasting is blasphemy and I cannot justify making it such.

It’s 4:30am and I’ve resorted to stream of consciousness to finish this blog… I think I’ll regret posting this in the morning.

A Town Story

It was night time. The town held a silence I could hardly recognize. My girlfriend and I sat outside under streetlamps, talking in low voices as if not to ruin the pristine quite that clouded around us.

We heard rushed foot steps from around the corner and our conversation stopped to listen to the new sound. We both turned out heads and noticed a kid running towards us at full speed. He was looking right at us, and it made it seem as if we were his destination.

While he ran my entire focus turned to his body language. I recently moved out of a drug-ridden, filthy area of Vancouver where I learned to be weary of scenes such as this. I watched his hands as they shuffled passed his baggy shirt to see if he would reach for a weapon. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if he had a weapon such as a knife, but I figured I’d gain a fair start on running if I could see it early enough. As I watched I noticed the path of his running was a meander. He would run from one side of the side walk, almost fall off onto the street, and then run to the other as he gained on us. So he was on some sort of drug. This was confirmed when he stopped to stagger and lean against a fence one-hundred feet away from my girlfriend and I.

I took a step forward as he approached so that he would reach me first and not my girlfriend. This must have been a primal “protect the woman” instinct or something because only after reviewing my actions did I notice this foreword step and feeling putting myself first into the unknown. I was scared that this beautifully calm and relaxing night would turn into something horrible as the kid sprinted towards us.

He arrived and stopped, then got within two feet of my face, started swaying back and forth with sweat dripping down his forehead, and promptly collapsed onto the grass beside the sidewalk. He fell with his head narrowly missing the sidewalk and metal grate that was obtruding from the grass. I didn’t cushion his fall; in fact, I moved away and let his body thud onto the ground.

His mouth opened and he closed and I could see in his eyes that he was going into a semi-comatose state. My girlfriend stepped forward, asking him if he was okay and we wondered if we should call an ambulance. But before we could think too deeply into what just happened, he opened his eyes and grabbed my girlfriend in an effort to stand up.

He was shaking and swaying from one side to another. He told us a long story. In this story the only coherent things that I could understand were “Denver” and how they have “weak cold shots” and his words were horribly slurred. He shook and looked at both of us for approval before continuing to different parts of his tale.

He eventually stopped talking and looked at us helplessly for a few moments. He refused offers from my girlfriend and me to walk him home and then abruptly started running towards the area in which he lived.

Afterwards my girlfriend explained that “that is just what happens here” and that someone can actually walk or run home totally wasted and not see another person, let alone be jumped or mugged. This was in stark contrast to my experiences in the city; the last time I walked home drunk, a car with two burly men pulled up and the two chased me home. My mind was now thinking about cultural dynamics between towns and cities (I believe this was so because I am an anthropology student and read about things such as this daily).

In this small town, and probably others, it is apparently completely normal for a man or woman to be walking around at night without a dog or other people to protect them. The reality of this strikes me as odd, as we were less than an hour’s drive away from the downtown core of Vancouver where it is simply not safe to walk around. The risk of walking home at night is almost negligible in comparison.

Another thing I noticed that would not happen was the openness of his conversation. He was talking as if he knew us. Even though he was terribly drunk and probably on other drugs as well, I have never seen a random person on the street in Vancouver, no matter how intoxicated, openly rely on people to do things such as help him up. His open seeking for approval, though exaggerated, was also something I have never seen in the city; the drunk people I have seen tend to ignore other people and view themselves as right or at least mask that ideal.

There are major differences between town and city life that transcend the classical categories such as housing costs and conservatism. I hope to touch on this subject some more in the future.