4 more wins

Man, did I think it was unlikely that my playoff beard would last more than 46 days.

With the Stanley Cup finals starting Wednesday, and the earliest it could be over (Game 4) being a week later, my beard will have been around for at least 55 days. That's easily the longest amount of time I've had facial hair at any point in my life (rather, the last 3 or so years, when I could actually grow noticeable facial hair). But I know that it's definitely worth it for this Bruins team...they've shown so much in the first three rounds of the playoffs that I know they have a good chance to take the Cup, even if in 6 or 7 games. Sure, sometimes I've wondered if they actually wanted to win a game, and they've shown lapses in execution and coaching (sorry, Claude, but there was a point during the Tampa series when I thought you could still lose your job this year), but they also have the playmaking ability to win any type of game (see: a 6-5 victory in Game 2 vs. Tampa, a 3-1 victory in Game 5 (with the last goal being an empty netter with 12.1 seconds left), and playing scoreless for about 53 minutes in Game 7). Point is, it's been unbelievably amazing to watch this team in the playoffs, and everyone better be pumped for the Finals against Vancouver. WE WANT THE CUP!

Being perfect

"It's about you and your relationship to yourself, and your family, and your friends. Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye, and know that you didn't let them down, because you told them the truth. And that truth is that you did everything that you could. There wasn't one more thing that you could have done. Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes, and love in your heart. With joy in your heart. If you can do that gentlemen, then you're perfect."

10 recently added songs

So for the last two weeks I've been adding a plethora of songs to my iPod, and I love talking about music, so why not another ten song post? Here are ten of the 50 songs in my recently added, in no particular order:

1. The Space Between - Dave Matthews Band. I've liked this song for a while, but never had it on my iPod - glad that changed. This song has 3 parts to it; the verse, chorus, and...that 3rd part that sounds cool. The chorus obviously being the part where he talks about the space between, the verse being every other part, and that cool 3rd part coming in at 1:49.

2. Home (Acoustic) - Daughtry. The studio version of this song is amazing as it is, but this acoustic version just sounds so full. What I love about Daughtry is that he doesn't do anything special in any of his songs. No ultra hard guitar solos, no 8 minute songs...he has his voice and he has his guitar, and that's all he needs.

3. Blackfield - Blackfield. Yes, this song has the same title as the band (not sure if the album is also called "Blackfield"), but that doesn't make it any less good. This is one of those songs you can just listen to on repeat and not even pay attention to it, which is exactly what I love about it. But after you listen to it enough times, you start to pick up on the intricacies of the song, as you would with any other piece of music.

4. Karma Police - Radiohead. There are just so many good parts to this song. The bass in the verse, the notes in each piano chord (especially in the chorus), and the great outro. I've known about this song for a while (it was actually one of the first songs I learned on guitar (only to forget it by this point in time)), but again, never had it on my iPod.

5. Rolling in the Deep - Adele. Damn, is her voice amazing. This is one of those songs you can sing in the car at full blast with the windows down and have people stare at you from the sidewalk, and you either 1) don't notice them because you're singing so loud, or 2) notice them and just don't give a damn because you're singing so loud. Also, think about mashing the chorus to Crazy by Gnarls Barkley with the chorus of this song. Sounds like it could be a sweet mashup.

6. Missing Persons 1 & 2 - OneRepublic. Oh, how different two parts to the same song can be. It's clear where the gap is in this song, and for the first few times I listened to it, I didn't like the drum over the string, throwing off the tempo. Nor did I like the...xylophone-sounding-thingy (I forget the real name for it I'll probably remember eventually and not change this) before the keyboard came in...but wow did that change. The lead singer's voice is so amazing in every song OneRepublic has, and this song can make you feel one way one minute, and a totally different way the next minute. It's something that can be done well so rarely, but these guys certainly pull it off.

7. I'd Do Anything - John Butler Trio. This song is the definition of chilling outside, preferably sitting on some grass hanging out, on Saturday afternoon. Either that, or just cruising driving with the windows open, tapping along with your left hand on the side of the door. So awesome.

8. Warm Whispers - Missy Higgins. I have a secret crush on Missy Higgins, primarily because her music is awesome, secondarily because of her fantastic accent (otherwise and henceforth known as "fantaccent"). She can sing a variety of songs, from upbeat to melancholic to sweet-sounding. This one is obviously a little more of the last two, but definitely more sweet-sounding. And who doesn't love harmony and pianos/keyboards?

9. Super Bass - Nicki Minaj. This song is just mad fun to listen to. I mean I don't know any of the words, but that doesn't stop me from trying to sing/rap it...but it probably should. Either way, everything is so bright in this music video that it makes me want to drive around an extremely well-lit street listening to this song (kinda how it was in The Hangover when they first got to Vegas).

10. The First Time - U2. U2 never ceases to amaze me. Every song they sing is either some epicly loud, powerful song like "Pride (In the Name of Love)", or a quiet song that slowly builds up, like "Bad" or "Running to Stand Still." And Bono's voice is at the top of the list for me. It doesn't range so much in this song as it does in others, but I strongly recommend everyone to U2. You're bound to find something that hits you.

Other songs to check out:

Zebra - John Butler Trio

I and Love and You - The Avett Brothers

When the World Ends (Live) - Dave Matthews Band

Secrets (Acoustic) - OneRepublic

Home Base

So this past Sunday I went to the Red Sox/Cubs game at Fenway, and as part of the game's ceremonies, they celebrated the Run to Home Base Program and all of the service that our country's troops have given to their country. It was truly magical to see people from the Army, the Navy, the Marines, and other servicemen and servicewomen on the field. People were recognized for their efforts overseas, and the ceremony was nice as it was, but what really hit me were the ovations from the fans. For a few minutes, the 37,000-plus at Fenway weren't fans of a baseball team...they were citizens of the United States of America, supporting the men and women who put their lives on the line for us and for their country. About 20 minutes before gametime, I got really excited because I could tell that the flag crew was standing in the front row of the Green Monster, ready to unveil the American flag draped over Fenway's 37-foot left field wall. Hearing that many people sing the Star-Spangled Banner and God Bless America was haunting and empowering at the same time. It has become one of those inescapable feelings, something that I can think about and get chills running all around me. It's absolutely beautiful to see the support for our troops and what they do, and it's even more beautiful to see their reactions of humility knowing that what they do is just part of their duty. I could go on saying the same thing in different ways about how amazing it feels to think about this, but I leave you with two pictures - one of the troops lined around the infield, and one of the American flag hanging over the Green Monster. I remember my blog post around Opening Day and how I talked about the American flag at Fenway being one of my favorite sights. That's still absolutely true.

The little things

Trivial things rule. Trivial things that rule also rule. However, trivial things that suck, suck. Makes sense, right? Well. I've decided that the trivial thing that rules the most is the snugness of your bed on the first night after your sheets have been washed and put on your bed. It's comfortable and warm, and it's the greatest little thing ever.

Now the worst little thing ever is getting shampoo in your eyes. Because it stings like hell, you have to rub your eyes in the hot water for like 5 minutes before you can even continue on with your shower, and then your eye is extremely bloodshot for the rest of the day.

Other than that, everything else is between the extremes of the spectrum.

Other than that, this looks like a really boring blog post. I'm not saying you will think that, I'm saying that I think that. Probably because it's so trivial. Good thing trivial things rule...

The meaning of life

It currently stands at 10:46 a.m., Monday, May 9th, 2011. I have no idea why I said that, but that's what it is. I'm listening to the most beautiful piece of Lost music I have ever heard, sitting outside with the wind blowing all around me. The sky is blue, the grass is green, and by this time in three days, I will be getting ready to leave Stonehill for the final time of the 2010-2011 school year. I was going to use this post to preface a philosophical internal dialogue about what we discussed on the last day of class, which was the afterlife, and some of the conclusions I've drawn from that discussion. Instead, This will serve as my last post before I return home, to offer some final thoughts on the end of the year. I feel as though this is going to be a horribly humbling blog post, and I'm already starting to feel melancholic. As I take this time to reflect on my first year at college, find some time in your life to just reflect. Everyone has some music that puts them in that indescribable mood, and for me right now, it's that Lost music. It's the last piece of music played in the series, where everything wraps up beautifully, despite the six years it took to get there. The last scene is Christian Shephard, the father of the main character, walking out of the church that resembles the afterlife, showing all of the characters together once again, as they were on day one, as they will be forever.

In regards to this afterlife, it's essentially all what you believe. Some believe in eternity, others believe in nothingness, and others aren't sure what to believe. I'm at a point right now where I'm not so sure what I believe. I know I believe that the mind cannot work if the brain is dead, because the mind is dependent on the brain. Based off that logic, it would follow that the mind dies with the body, and does not continue on into the afterlife. Which leaves the soul to question the continuation of. If there is no soul, then there is no afterlife, if you ask me. That's just what I believe. If there is a soul, then we still aren't sure, because we can't conceive of experiencing the soul living on after death. At least I can't. And I'm not entirely sure I want to necessarily believe all of this, but sometimes it is what it is.

Your view on the afterlife probably has an impact on what you believe the meaning of life to be, as well. There are beliefs that we can control what happens to us in the afterlife based on what we do on Earth. I don't think we can control something like that - it is not within our powers to dictate what happens to us after death. And because we can't know for sure what happens, we have to make the most of what we do here, while it is still within our control. And I'm not going to tell you what making the most of it consists of. It's not my place to, because it's your life to live. That's what's most important here. My dad once told me that "life is what you make of it." In my late adolescent stage, I nodded and pretended like I was actually invested in the conversation, while casting his words aside. Sorry, Dad. You were right.

It's now 11:09 a.m., Monday, May 9th, 2011, and I am once again unsure why I inform you of the date and time. I'm still listening to the most beautiful piece of Lost music I have ever heard, and I've been humbled by my own words like I never have before. But I leave you with the words of someone who put the meaning of life in much simpler terms than I did.

"Life is nothing until it is lived, but it is yours to make sense of; the value of life is nothing other than the sense you choose."

            - Jean-Paul Sartre

Colors

So my year at Stonehill is just about complete; right now, I'm in the midst of a break for my Psych final on Monday, watching the Celtics play phenomenal basketball in Game 3. It's about time they turned it on, too - they're feeding off of Rondo's energy, just like the Red Sox always feed off of Dusty. Speaking of our beloved local 9, a 15-18 start isn't certainly anything like we expected, but there are bright spots. Gonzo is hitting over .300, Lester actually had a good April (and if he keeps that up, he can win a Cy Young), and Papelbon isn't that terrible anymore. But of course, the story of the month is the playoff success of the Boston Bruins. I guess Claude can keep his job now, huh?

For whatever reason, as I type this, I have some sentimental feeling towards this post. Even though I was talking about sports, there seemed to be some underlying melancholy inside of me. I mean, I'm going to be home in about 4 days, back wreaking havoc in the streets of Watertown. But I kinda liked wreaking havoc around campus, too. And by wreaking havoc, I mean being a child, laughing hysterically in the quiet cafe, having epic jam sessions, either with friends or by myself, and walking around campus listening to mood- and weather-appropriate music. (For example, I walked to dinner in the rain listening to LOST music. It was really cool, and I actually started walking faster the closer I got to the Commons, since I could see the lightning and hear the thunder. SO awesome.)

Hopefully these last few days at school are filled with blue skies, sunny days, and the final goodbyes, until next time. And who knows when next time will be - hopefully not in August, because I would love to see my Stonehill friends over summer, just how my Watertown friends came to visit me at school. It's going to be a long summer with Camp P and Orientation in the summer and fall, but I know I'll be excited for it every day, and that's all I need to worry about.

Minesweeper

So I recently actually learned how to play Minesweeper (instead of arbitrarily clicking) this week and now I'm addicted to it. Especially because my laptop keeps stats on games won :) The end.

http://www.onlineminesweeper.com/

My most epic philosophy post yet

For a brief second right now I thought about just posting my notes (which are in bulleted form in Microsoft Word) and letting you draw your own conclusions from them, but I wanna discourse with myself again and see if I can shed any light on my own thoughts.

For starters, lemme lay down a few things:

- I will be referencing The Prestige again, so be on the lookout for spoiler alerts (I'll let you know when I get there)
- A necessary condition is defined as: "X must fulfill these conditions in order to be Y"
- A sufficient condition is defined as: "If X fulfills these conditions, then it is Y"
- For my purposes, I synonymized these definitions, since we never really separated the two in philosophy

Hokay. So. Let me take you through one of our discussions, which revolved around a ship, called the Ship of Theseus. This ship is made up of 100 wooden planks, let's say. It runs fine, but after a while, one of the planks needs to be replaced. No problem, and it's replaced with a replacement plank. Is this still the Ship of Theseus? One would figure so, since it's only got 1 replacement plank. What about 2 replacement planks? 30? 50? 99? What about 100? Once you get there, you have to take into account the sentimental value of the ship. Technically, it's not the same ship since it's made up of different planks, but sentimentally, it is still the Ship of Theseus. This deals with the numerical identity of the ship (i.e., there is one object at two different times).

So let's generalize that. What are the necessary and sufficient (n/s) conditions for an object to be numerically identical to an object at another time? For this example, I thought about a music stand of some sort. (I was really thinking about the the podium stand that holds papers while I was in class, but just think of a music stand. It's easier to picture.) You can paint the music stand a different color, and it still might be the same stand. You can change the shape of the vertical pole, and it still might be the same stand. You can change the height of the pole, or size of the base, and it still might be the same stand. The thing with that though, is that you're looking at only one component of the stand, and assessing the stand as a whole based on that one change. That centration is what gets people believing that the stand doesn't change. You can't look at only one aspect of your object (centration) - in order to assess the object at time B as opposed to the object at time A, you have to look at it as a whole and at its end product. Another example brought up in class was a door. If you take door A, and change its doorknob, paint the door a different color, and change the location of the window, you can look at any single one of those changes and argue that it's essentially still the same door. But if you imagine these two doors A and B next to each other, they're clearly different, since they don't have the exact same physical properties.

Well, arguing that seemed easy enough - I'm pretty firm in those beliefs and examples I just described. But what if we take it the next level up? Let's talk about the n/s conditions for the same person and the same consciousness to exist. As far as person goes (taking on a more physical sense), I believe that we're always changing, instantaneously. Our hair is always growing, our fingernails are constantly growing, and while these changes are minuscule and insignificant on their own, they eventually add up. And I'm not saying that these specific changes alter who we are - consciously, I'm not a different person compared to who I was 3 minutes ago because my hair is a little longer. That wasn't as fun as thinking about our consciousness.

One of the views of the n/s conditions for our consciousness to stay the same is called the memory view, which says that a person must remember the experiences of an earlier time in order to be the same person as the person at the earlier time. So take a person, and think about him when he's 60, 40, and 10 years old. The memory view argues that if the person at 60 remembers all of the experiences of the 10 year old, then they're the same person. I completely disagree with this; who you are at 60 isn't at all similar to who you are at 10. It's easy to argue - plenty of things change in those 50 years, including but not limited to higher education, marriage, children, and whatever else you can come up with in those 50 years. Things change, and just because you remember your experiences, doesn't make you the same person.

Next, we talked about amnesia and whether or not it destroys a person. And I think that it definitely does – it’s not that the fact that you don’t remember anything makes you a different person, it’s the fact that you don’t remember anything and you acted differently based off of that makes you a different person. It’s not about what you remember or don’t remember, it’s how you act.

Clearly I haven't run into any problems yet, but don't worry - here they are. (This is also where the spoiler alerts come up for The Prestige, so if you haven't seen it, tread carefully. I don't give as much away in this post than I did in my first one about the movie, but you've been warned.) Think about this example. You walk into a box. A box that will teleport you wherever you want. To make it simple, let's say locations A and B. As you travel from A to B, your particles are scattered, and a spontaneous rearrangement is constructed once you arrive at B. Same personality, same memory. Is it you? I first said that if there's no duplicate, then yes. Everything at location B is the same as it was at location A. The thing that contradicts The Prestige is that Angier was duplicated, instead of just teleported. However, that further disagrees with what I believe; if I believe that we're always changing, it shouldn't matter what happens to you at location B. At location/time B, you're someone who's been teleported, while that was never the case at location/time A. Alright, so why am I inclined to believe that but not what happened to Angier? I really wanna say that it's the same person (in the teleportation example), but I didn't believe that the "n+1"th Angier was the same one as the first Angier, since he's gone through the trick n+1 times. It doesn't matter what happens to his conscious or memory or whatever. I do feel like this is a cop out. In saying that it doesn't matter what happens to you (because you're a different person all the time), I'm not really making a decision regarding whether or not the person at location/time B is the same one as he is at location/time A. I suppose that that just means that I'm following what I believe steadfastly, but it's probably more likely that it's just cognitive dissonance (holding conflicting ideas simultaneously).

Then we took the example of bodies and brain. Take brain A and body A, and brain B and body B. Swap brains. So now, brain A is with body B, and brain B is with body A. Where is person A? I say that person A is with brain A/body B, meaning that the brain is the trump card in this situation. So, it would follow that since the person at location/time B has the same brain as he does at location/time A, then it would be the same person. So now it would follow that I'm saying that if the "n+1"th Angier has the same brain/conscious as the first Angier who performed the trick, then it's the same person. Which contradicts what I said about Angier during my discourse about The Prestige. +100 cognitive dissonance.

Last two weeks...don't fuck it

As much as we would all love to completely disregard the last two weeks (I'm talking to you, college folk), think of it this way - there are two weeks left, so why not go hard for 14 more days? Bang out those papers, study for those tests and finals, and stay on top of what you need to do. Easier said than done for most, so for those having a hard time getting off the ground, here are links to 5 songs by Explosions in the Sky, a band that consists of guitar, bass, and drums. No vocals. The perfect opportunity to let your mind do the talking as you regain focus for the end of the year.

ps. Listen to them in order. Forty-five minutes of continuous bliss.

1. First Breath After Coma
2. The Only Moment We Were Alone
3. Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean
4. Memorial
5. Your Hand in Mine