First Breath After Coma

Man, dying sucks.

I guess I need to rephrase that, since I’ve never died in my life. Having someone die that you know and love sucks. As a completely ill-timed aside, I find it comforting that I can still take on the same tone of voice when I blog, even in the wake of my great aunt’s passing. It lets me know that there’s already a part of me that can move on, even if there are other parts that are really sad and upset over this. As I type this, I’m sitting on the same bench behind New Hall that I sat at the last time I talked to my aunt. A few weeks ago. It’s been even longer than that since I saw her, and it was one of the last days before I left for school this year. I remember sitting outside with her, just taking in the sunlight and crisp air around us. It was a stillness that felt alive. Now, staring at the trees around me, it’s a stillness that feels…well, still. It’s like I’m suspended from just carrying on as if nothing happened. Which I suppose is normal. I dunno...I’ve never had to go through this, really. It sucks, and it will suck for most of this week I assume, and it will suck this weekend when I go home and see her one last time. It will suck to see my parents crying, and my grandparents crying, and my grandma Connie crying, and my sister crying. It sucks now just thinking about that happening.

I was going to name this post “Memorial,” after the Explosions in the Sky song, and obviously in reference to my aunt, and to remembering the life she had. But I believe that life is more than what it was. In fact…

“Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.”

      -William Wordsworth

See? It’s right there. Life is approximately three times as much as what was. Life is that which is, and which will be. And as sad as it is to lose someone who I’ve come to love throughout my entire life, and who I’ve known to only do the same in return, I know that I’ll be okay, and that life goes on. There will always be a first breath.

Rest in peace, Auntie B. I love you and will always keep you with me.

Conflict of the Soul

One thing that I've never really talked about directly on my blog is my poetry. Currently, it would be a "lack thereof" case, but there was a period of time where I regularly wrote a poem every few weeks. And I suppose that this is what precluded my blog, as far as a representation of me goes. Well, actually, no. Well, actually actually...to hell with it. Allow me:

The Only Thing I Could Do
My first anthology/batch/whatever of poems came throughout high school, and ten out of the thirteen that I ended up finishing and included in this particular Word document were about the girl I had a crush on at the time. Made for some real compelling stuff. A lot of it was just a crafty way to put all of my thoughts in words -- I remember telling one of my friends that I wasn't writing poetry, I was just putting thoughts together with awesome word selection. Which was exactly what I was up to - I got an idea in my mind and just ran with it, writing words down in my agenda book or something. I would never (and still haven't) spend a week writing one piece, because the thoughts would just not be the same from the moment I initially had them. (Editor's Note: Seems like a pretty prominent theme of this blog, huh?) Oh right, the title. I think I've talked about "The Journey" enough. Specifically here and here. That should be enough to draw some conclusions.

Pilgrimage to the Elements of Life
My General Religious Studies course was awesome. The professor lives in Watertown, I still chat with him whenever I see him on campus, and he had some really cool stuff to show us. When we got around to Christianity (after Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam), I remember this one passage from a book about people going on pilgrimages (the theme of the course) to a sacred place in France (Lourdes). And these elements of life that the book talked about were rock, light, and water. If my memory serves me well, of course. And having gone through Religious Studies, and then Philosophy in the spring, I was all spiritual and stuff, going to mass most weeks, thinking about stuff like that, and just embracing any uncertainties that I had. I wanted to name my second collection of poems after some goal, or something I was doing. Kind of like the first bunch. A pilgrimage to the elements of life wouldn't be about rock, light, or water. It would be about finding what elements were in store for me, on a mental, emotional, and sometimes spiritual level. It was a little broader than just navigating my possible spirituality, but I think that some of my best poetry is in there.

Love is a Verb
After my run with spirituality, and getting the fill of another batch of poems, it was time to move back towards the emotional expressions with words; something I had a little more craft with, instead of simply writing down my thoughts as they arrived. A lot of what's in here is kind of a storytelling affair, but again, with that careful placement of what my thoughts are and how they seem to me, how they resonate. I remember even now some of the surges I had that led me to these poems, and what I was doing, where I was sitting. I can picture some cozy winter night, bundled up beneath a blanket, sitting in front of words that just became incredibly meaningful. And having just said that makes me kind of crave winter. And I hate winter. (Actually, I've been less hating of winter since I got to college. Potentially more on that in a couple of days.) Coziness and comfort seems to just take away hatred, I guess.

Conflict of the Soul
I've been saying it a lot this month, but I totally mean it - soak in whatever philosophy is thrown at you; something will stick eventually. In my reading for class on Wednesday, I came across the idea that would eventually become Freud's iceberg, with the id, ego, and superego. And how the id (irrational desires) and ego (rational thoughts) are always at conflict with one another, creating a conflict of the soul. We've talked about the soul a lot in class, too. Not as something spiritual that moves on into the next life, but more of a being, an intangible existence within us. Something that needs to not be in conflict, essentially. After alternating between poems of love and philosophy for a few years, it feels like it's time to go back to exploring these unanswered questions. I can't think of nearly as many as I had freshman year, though. I also don't know what to do with the handful (if that) of poems I've written since my last official Word document. Maybe an EP? I just like this phrase, conflict of the soul. I want to let it linger in my mind for a couple of days and see what I can pull out from it. Obviously, if I blogged about it, something good will happen soon, since I had enough of an idea to put this together. Until then, we'll see...

My #stonehillprobz

I wanted to fire off this post before my tour at 2:30, so I don't have a ton of time. Probably not as much as I'd like, but that means that I have to work and think quickly, which is good, because I'm agitated. As many people might or might not know, I have a Twitter. I also go to Stonehill. A by-product of those two facts is that every once in a while, I'll see #stonehillprobz pop up on my Twitter feed. And sometimes out of curiosity, I'll go see what people are complaining about. A priest riding a bike. Our sprinkler malfunction issues. Emails. Slow wi-fi. You get the idea.

WHAT THE FUCK, EVERYONE.

Sorry if I sound higher and mightier than everyone, which isn't my intention, but can we care about something that matters!? Can we complain about something that actually means something to this community? Who cares if there's a priest riding a bike. Is he not a person, just like I am a person? If I were riding a bike, would that be a problem? Sure, maybe everyone's being clever and tweeting about trivial problems that happen at Stonehill, but why is no one tweeting about what makes us thrive as a community and a society? Why is the It Needs To Get Better movement not on #stonehillprobz? Why aren't bias incidents there? How come I don't see anything pertaining to the nature of Stonehill, and the soul that this community has?

A couple of self-limitations that I'm aware of:

• I'm not saying that I have nothing to complain about. I have something right here, and I'm letting it all out on the table. Because this matters to me. If you really think that it's a fundamental problem with Stonehill that our sprinklers don't work, then you're not seeing the big picture.
• I understand that the couple dozen tweets I read is not a representation of the Stonehill population. I know a damn lot of people here that really care about many things, and I'm glad to know them.

But come on. Every single time I talk about Stonehill, I talk about how much I love this place and how good it treats me. You have to let it treat you this good. If you sit idly by and punch out 140 characters about the long lines in the Dining Commons, then nothing's going to happen. You're cutting yourself short on all that this place can do for you. When you actually go out into the world, whether it be on campus, in the community, internationally, or wherever, and do something, you start to eliminate those problems. Real problems, I mean. The best thing about Stonehill is its community. You go around and ask a random sample of 100 students what their top three things about Stonehill are, and I'd be surprised if any more than ten didn't mention the word community. All I ask, or implore, at this point, is this -- if you're going to have a problem with some aspect of Stonehill, make sure it's something you actually care about. Make sure it's something that matters. If you genuinely care about our sprinklers not working, then fine. That matters to you, and I respect that. But if you're just calling something a problem because you can, or because you feel like it, then please don't. You're discrediting all that this place is, and what everyone has done to make it exactly what it is. And to me, there's no bigger discredit than making Stonehill anything less than the incredible place that it is.

Mathematical Matt

Cool so psychology is awesome and fun and interesting and stuff, and that's why I'm minoring in it/might want to double-major with it. I'm in the middle of reading about self-perception/self-cognition for my Social Psychology class, and I was going to blog about that stuff in general, or ten studies that I thought were really cool. Like one that concluded that people tend to favor letters that appear in their own name more than other letters (suggesting the existence of implicit egoism). Then I read this, verbatim, from the text:

"For example, men and women are more likely than would be predicted by chance to live in places (Michelle in Michigan, George in Georgia), attend schools (Kari from the University of Kansas, Preston from Penn State University), and choose careers (Dennis and Denise as dentists) whose names resemble their own."

And my immediate line of thought was something along the lines of "Oh, that's silly....wait...I'm a math major...the adjective I used during my summer Orientation that started with the same letter as my name was "mathematical"...WHAT"

This is why psychology is awesome.

Time, pt. 5

"How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal, and you have to be willing to work for it."
  - Jim Valvano, 1993 ESPY Awards

The first encounter I had with time on my blog ended like this - "I have a theory. Time is always changing, so something good is bound to happen eventually." After toying around with the concept of time for a little while, it escaped me until today, where we talked about it, very briefly, in (none other than) my philosophy class. Turns out my theory is totally wrong. Well no, not wrong, but I just don't believe it anymore. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that time is neutral, and can be used destructively or constructively. Time is just there, and what really matters is what we do with it, for justice or injustice. This makes perfect sense now - you're somewhere, at a juncture in life, or in society, and you want to be somewhere. Sitting around waiting for it to happen will get you nowhere. Don't let time hang around and control you. You need to be on top of the time that you have so you can make the most out of it.

"Time changes everything."
"That's what people say. It's not true. Doing things changes things. Not doing things leaves things exactly as they were."
  - House, "One Day, One Room"

I'm in love with your honor

Another Wednesday, another philosophical blog post. Hopefully this doesn't become exclusively what my posts are, but after having some decent ideas for posts slip away, this one has seemed to stick. Thus, I blog.

Socrates. Long story short, he went around asking everyone in Athens about essentially everything. Let's clump that into "justice." Finding out what is just and unjust in the world (not necessarily in the legal system, but morally). What Socrates came to realize was that no one really had any idea what they were talking about, and were as a result ignorant of everything in the world. (Think of The Little Prince.) He, for understanding this, had much more wisdom than everyone else. Fairly convoluted, but when you break it down, the man knew what he was talking about, ironically enough. But anyway, everyone in Athens starts getting on Socrates' case, saying that he's corrupting the youth and all this other stuff. Socrates makes his defense to no avail on trial, and gets sentenced to be executed. Instead of having someone else pay off the courts, or escaping into exile, Socrates accepts this fate, to be killed at the hand of society.

Well why, Socrates? Why opt for death? In his acceptance of the penalty, Socrates was standing in perfect accordance with everything that he lived his life for until that point - it would be cheating the system to bail and run away in exile. The just thing to do, the morally sound reasoning, would be to be put to death. Which is something that I can only fathom to be incredibly hard to do, let alone actually follow through with it. He's lived his life in a certain way all along, so why should death get in the way? Death doesn't change his logic and reasoning, just in the same way that life never did. Even in the face of death, Socrates is able to uphold his honor and to live, until the end, with a steadfast moral compass.

The most resonant part about all of this is how Socrates explains death. He begins by saying that being dead is to be non-existent, or that the soul undergoes something in dying. To the former, he says, "why, imagine that someone had to pick the night in which he slept so soundly that he did not even dream...on that assumption the whole of time would seem no longer than a single night." One night that lasts an eternity. That's what death could be. Why should we fear that? On the other hand, Socrates explains the transformation of the soul into a place where one can question great leaders of the time, and to truly gain an understanding of what is just.

Death could be the greatest thing, and so many of us fear it. Which makes it all the more impressive when anyone embraces it, greets it. To live one's life all the way through, even in the face of death. I can't say that this epiphany has made me unafraid of death, but it does make it a little bit easier to think about.

Pride

God, am I glad that I have a philosophy class again. My GenEd Philosophy class brought me many, many insights into my own life, the lives of others, and the world we all live in...it also brought a surge of awesome blog posts. Two classes into my "Self and Society" class, I'm going back to that same place. I don't know what it is about philosophy, but it just makes me think in ways that I normally wouldn't. Which is kinda the point, I suppose.

Anyway. Today we talked about what you as an individual owe to your society. War generates societies, but these wars are often fueled by certain, conflicting ideals. These wars come specifically from these ideals and concepts. And we inherit our societies and ideals from those who came before us - namely, our ancestors. Our ancestors hand all of this down to us - but what exactly is "this?" And I think it's a way of life, a certain knowledge/intuition about how to live it. We're brought into this world be a certain group of people, whether it be a family, society, or ourselves, and we take what they have made us into the world. One of the quotes we talked about was that everyone "should wish to spend [themselves] in [the city's] service." Basically, live your life as a sacrifice to the city, to what made you you. So that's what we owe to society, or to the city. Who we are, what we have to bring to the table. And by dedicating ourselves to society or the city, we are repaying our end of the deal.

This got me thinking about Stonehill. I always talk about how good Stonehill has treated me personally, and I think that it has done the same for many of the people that pass through here. So what do we owe Stonehill? What do I owe Stonehill? What do any of us owe it? I think that it's a direct parallel - we owe Stonehill all that it has done for us, and the way we go about this is by devoting ourselves to Stonehill. By thinking outside the bottle. By spreading the word to end the word. By welcoming classes of freshmen, or by assisting residents with their experiences. By being a person that students can go to in times of faith, or lack thereof. By serving the community, and Stonehill in general. By redefining what it means to be a Skyhawk. By making everyone else realize how incredible this place is, and how much we love it.

This is what we owe Stonehill. To be as good to it as it has been to us. To make Stonehill as good as can be for everyone else. To take a real sense of pride in the community and home that we live in, and have the opportunity to be in for four years, and to spend that time serving what has made us who we are.

10 future recently added songs

Another problem I have in the world of music, in addition to failing to ever have a good, sustained playlist, I have a tendency to rack up handfuls of songs that I need to download. Having been devoid of a blog post in almost a week, and having gone much, much longer without a "10 Things" post, here are ten songs that I hope to take off my list of songs to download, and will thus fall into the category of recently added songs.

1. Hold On - Alabama Shakes

2. Ladies Night - Preston Reed

3. Boy With a Coin - Iron & Wine

4. Lazy Eye - Silversun Pickups

5. Fader - The Temper Trap

6. Every Teardrop is a Waterfall - Coldplay

7. Warning Sign - Coldplay

8. I Will Wait - Mumford & Sons

9. I Believe in Your Victory - This Will Destroy You

10. It's Natural to Be Afraid - Explosions in the Sky

"The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place" running diary

I haven't had a running diary for anything since I blogged during the season 3 finale of Glee, and that's something I want to do. I also want to talk about my favorite album ever, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky. I always talk it up, saying how powerful it is for me, but I think that the best way to truly represent that is to go through each song and talk about specific parts that resonate the most. I'll be listening to the songs on my iTunes (better quality), but if you want the YouTube videos to follow along, here is a good place for that.

First Breath After Coma
0:15. The bass drum comes in first after the guitar, in a heartbeat sort of way. After listening to this music for so long, I think that the heartbeat is a part of a lot of music off this album. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but I notice it in Your Hand In Mine, which I'm sure I'll get to in approximately 40 minutes.

1:16. I'm also just sitting in front of my computer, looking around my room. Nothing special really going on. Just a man and his music.

6:16. This is my first real favorite part of the song, mainly because of how the guitars come together, following one another. It's also a little ways into the first time that faint ringing note in the background is there. I feel like this verse, or whatever you want to call it, is the prelude to the ending, which is over two minutes away. Having an ending to a song last for that long makes it seem like forever, which is exactly what this song means to me.

7:40. First goosebumps while listening to the album.

8:10. The ringing note comes right to the front, stronger than ever before. Everything picks up at the ending. This might be my favorite part of the entire album...for a decent amount of time now (let's say months), I've felt that I could die to the ending of this song. Everything could come together at once, leading up to the end, exactly as it happens in the song.

9:18. The last note.

The Only Moment We Were Alone
0:45. I've always wanted to be able to actually learn every part of every song on this album on the guitar and piano. Finding some way to put all three guitars together on the piano would be absolutely perfect, and this is one of my favorite parts of the album to play on piano, with that one bass note hitting every eighth note.

3:24. Again, two guitars coming together, and again, another favorite part of the entire album. This just makes me think really good things.

5:33. I wonder how instrumental bands make music. When you use lyrics in songwriting and music making, you can easily convey your mood, tone, and feeling. But when there's no story to interpret other than what you hear, what exactly can you draw from it? How am I supposed to know what the drum beat represents? I guess that's the beauty of instrumental music. It's just there, right in front of you. What you do with it is up to you. (Can I get that extrapolated to a metaphor for life?)

7:52. I remember during Values Game during Orientation that I said that this part was when I feel most alive. The buildup to this starts at 7:19, and ends with the explosion at 8:30. During those pauses though...when nothing is going on, I feel everything going on. It's like all the music went from my headphones to everywhere within me. So incredibly powerful.

9:27. Click.

Six Days At The Bottom Of The Ocean
0:00. When I'm laying in bed listening to this album via laptop or iHome, I kind of forget that the first few minutes of this song happen. I remember realizing that once and thinking that that's what the first few days of being at the bottom of the ocean must feel like. A little while in, you just wake up, and you're there. It's too bad I never really hone in on any part of the beginning, because there is some really good music involved.

2:07. Of Explosions in the Sky's six albums, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place sounds so unlike any other. I can find similarities in their latest work to music dating all the way back to 2001 (this album was released in 2003), but there's nothing in these 45 minutes and 37 seconds that's close to anything else. Which might be why I've never really been able to put words to the feel of it. It kind of just happens. Going back to that whole "it's just there" thing.

4:48. I forget how I even got into this band, but I do remember the first imagery I had of this album, and it comes at this part right here. The time signature (6/8) and guitar picking pattern makes it seem like a game of cat and mouse between two people. The chase, the hunt, the games. The slow, patient process of it all. This culminates with the strongest imagery at 6:59 and the eighth notes of the guitar, making it seem like the ultimate dance, the ever-elusive ending.

8:18. I love the cymbals in this part, and the drums leading into the next song.

Memorial
0:00. It's weird, I don't remember getting goosebumps at all during Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean, but I immediately get goosebumps at the start of Memorial. It has to be because of the harmonies, and how they just dig into me. Kind of reminds me of the moment after the dust settles in some desert war. In winter. With snow. I know there's no snow in the desert (I think), but I feel like snow should be included in here somewhere.

1:39. I love how the harmony comes into play three seconds before this part (1:36), leading into the chord. You can clearly hear it too (2:04). Everything comes back home eventually.

3:55. There's the heartbeat again, and I noticed it some 15 seconds into it actually happening.

4:42. I love the bass line in this part. I mean I love the bass part throughout the entire album, but it's best in Memorial. It kind of leads into the next note, where you can feel where it's going to go next. Maybe I have an unfair advantage, having listened to this song dozens of times (83 since January, according to iTunes), but the bass line just makes sense. It feels right.

7:20. Another crash that's preceded by a lengthy lead-in. Man, those are awesome.

7:53. I absolutely love the guitar that comes in here. It feels so powerful, almost like someone's screaming.

Your Hand In Mine
0:00. This is probably the most-known song off the album, but I can't decide if it's my favorite or not. It used to be, and if it's no longer, it's not for any bad reason, but I'm just not sure. I definitely remember this song being around since junior year of high school, so I guess that answers how long I've been listening to Explosions in the Sky.

2:27. Another "good feeling" part of the album (see: 3:24 in The Only Moment We Were Alone). And then the drums pick up, and everything once again comes together.

3:34. There isn't any minor tonality to this song, and there's a little bit of that in each of the other songs. So I suppose it only makes sense that this song is the feel-good one of the album.

4:38. I love the drums in this part. It's almost as though they cascade down upon something, as the guitar shoots up through the sky.

5:02. This begins my favorite part of the song, where all of the little intricacies come into play at the same time.

5:27. The reverb here...I feel like my entire body is set on reverb when I listen to this part. And there's the heartbeat again, just as it was at the beginning of the album.

6:46. You can very faintly hear one guitar note playing the tonic on eighth notes. That will stay from here until the end, which I only started noticing after many listens to the song. Everything comes together one final time, for four phrases, and then just stops, leaving that one note (7:42). Thirty-five seconds of that one note, reminding you that there will always be something after the end.

Well then. Three-quarters of an hour later, after about ten rounds of goosebumps, the album is over. I've done my best to put my feelings into thoughts and words, and I sincerely hope that you give these songs another listen. Eventually, something will stick, whether it's something I mentioned here, or something you pick up on your own. Try and find time to just be. To listen to this music, and to have everything in front of you at once. Just be.

What kind of Stonehill do you want?

Yesterday during Fall Orientation, we had a speaker present to the Orientation groups about sexual harassment, and it was an incredibly good program. I took a lot away from the presentation, and more than one thing resonated with me. But what stuck in my head the most was when he asked, rhetorically, what kind of Stonehill we want. I love that question. And I love that it's something that every Stonehill student can ask themselves, and work towards.

So what kind of Stonehill do I want? I feel as though Stonehill is almost exactly what I want it to be - a place that I can simply look around and know that I'm at home. Where I appreciate the people I know, the knowledge I take in, and the world around me. The reason that everyone gets so involved at Stonehill is because we love it so much, and want to treat it as good as it treats us. It feels good to give back to Stonehill, but sometimes, it doesn't even feel like that. Take the Peer Mentor Team as an example. Sure, one could look at the team and see people who want first-years to have as great an experience as they did, but you could also realize that we get something out of being a Peer Mentor, too. It's not a one-way street, and nothing is at Stonehill. The kind of Stonehill that I want is a Stonehill where everyone appreciates how lucky we are to be here. Where students get involved, do what they love, and go out of their way to show everybody else how much they love Stonehill.

So how do we get to the Stonehill that we want? It's about making the right choices, believing what you want, and always being aware of the beauty of this place. Aware of how much this place can be a home for you. And being active in your efforts to make this as incredible as you want it to be.