Streetlight People

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.

-Hellen Keller

Hellen Keller was absolutely correct in her statement about apathy and the human kind. That exact apathy is most prevalent in a specific breed of human beings; The elusive college student. One would expect that said apathy would be much more ubiquitous among the non-moz crowd, but unfortunately nowadays that simply isn't the case. I'm not talking even about moz issues, but in general, apathy is a killer disease, and it's starting to grate on my nerves that it's so visible in so many of the people I know and in so many aspects of their lives.

I've blogged before about guys that are apathetic towards a lotta things, and how I used to think it was so cool and how that opinion has changed. I thought of a really cool, but really cynical sounding quote a while back, "Expecting anyone to care is expecting too much of them." While I don't totally hold faith in that really depressing sounding statement, I'm sure I can think of more then enough scenarios where the quote applies, and fittingly so.

With how much is going on in today's world, it's hard for people to try and sift through all the information. I used to play a lot of video games where they talk about this upcoming "information overload" and the subsequent way to control it. It sucks though that people are turned off from learning about such contemporary and relevant worldy issues. Things like the cartoons, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, all these are really, really important issues, yet most of us know so little about it. Why is that?

My answer to that question is that we just flat out don't care. It's not that our lives are that busy and that filled with information that we can't accomodate reading a ten minute article on the death of Slobodan Milosevic, and its consequent effects on the world. On the contrary, I think people just are so apathetic to such important issues with no reason other then that; They simply don't care.

This is by no means a new issue that I'm discussing. People always attribute different reasons for why our generation seems to be so polarized. One on hand are the ultra pro-active, the ones involved in civil rights organizations, going out to rallies, and raising awareness. On the other hand are the rest of us, the lazy, the ones that may on occasion stop by the rock for a peaceful demonstration for ten minutes, and then think "oh I'm done, I've done my duty."

One of the hardest things to do in the world is to motivate people to do things. To spur people to action is an incredible feat, one that the most eloquent and charismatic of speakers wrestle with every day. There's no easy formula to getting someone to care, and in many cases it's next to impossible. Some people would venture to say that it's not worth the effort put in. You hand out 1100 flyers raising awareness for the cartoons, and maybe four people will be motivated to do something, like write a letter to the vice president of MSU's student affairs on how they don't support the cartoons, or do as little as telling us that they support the cause. At the end of the day is it worth it?

Of course the cliched answer, and also the one I present to you, is that it is worth it. At first it seems illogical to put forth so much effort, only to in return reap such a seemingly small change. One may be tempted to give up, but therein lies the caveat, and the only way to really "lose" this battle. By you giving up, and thinking "Oh damn, this isn't worth it", you become little more then one of the people you're trying to convince.

I realize that it's not fair to make such generalizations. There are a lot more subtleties to this then "people who care" vs. "people who don't care", and I also realize that I sound little more then a preacher attempting to motivate people to "reach foh the blessings of the loowd!" (my impression of an evangelist), but it really honestly in my opinion is that important. We are, in my honest opinion, fighting a losing battle to apathy. Like I said, I realize the world isn't polarized into those who care vs those who don't, but it seems every day like the seperation between the two grows more and more. I think that's weird, life as we know it seems to just be the widening of rifts between two groups of people. People always throw out examples of the gap between the rich and the poor, the progressive west vs the backwards eastern cultures, and now I present to you another growing conflict; That of the empathetic vs the apathetic. Which are you? And if you're the latter, how in the hell could you become the former? I really wished it was easier, but at the end of the day, the apathetic don't want to try and become empathetic because: Ta-Da, of course; they don't care. Journey put it best when they said:

Don't stop believin'
Hold on to the feelin'

For everyone out there who hasn't lost it, in this world that it's so easy to lose in, keep on going.

All I need is just to hear a song I know

The title of this post has a significant meaning to me, for several reasons; The first is that it's a line from one of my favorite songs, Praise Chorus by Jimmy Eat World. Downloading and listening to this song (Not that I condone the illegal piracy of said music...) may aid one in better understanding this post.

I'm sitting here in the computer center while I write this post, having not had any sort of human contact for about three hours at this point. To be frank, it's a bummer. I usually will sit around and do homework for a bit, then check to see if there are people on AIM to chat it up with. That's usually a mistake. Because as soon as AIM loads up, there pretty much goes an hour of my time. That hour I spent isn't because I'm having productive, meaningful conversations with between five and ten people, but instead because I'm asking people "how their day went." I've recently begun to see the cliche swelling in that phrase, and I'm beginning to wonder if people can actually go their whole lives asking that SAME question every day, over and over again, to however many people they choose to interact with. The fact of the matter is it becomes boring very quickly. I think at the end of the day people have trouble remaining particularly interesting, most people just aren't dynamic enough and spend too much time with each other to be able to maintain that interesting-ness. The notion that absence makes the heart grow fonder is a very true one then, if spending too much time with the same people makes life boring, and it does.

Back to AIM, it's the second reason for the title of this post. When I hear that phrase, "All I need", it tells me that what they are asking for is so little. And it's much the same way with me. I don't really want too much, I just want for someone to make the first move, the hello before I make it. I'm jealous of how when certain friends of mine sign on, they're almost immediately met by a hello, or two, or even three. What that means is that these people care so much about you that even when you walk into the "online" room, they want to speak with you immediately. That almost never, if ever happens to me, and I'm jealous of that, while they take it for granted, citing how annoying individual A, or individual B is for striking up a conversation as soon as they see that the person is available to talk. I don't like being the one to proactively say hello, not because I'm lazy or don't care to talk to the person, but instead because I'm afraid of being that annoying person no one wants to talk with. I'm afraid people take my online presence, (as ubiquitous and common as it is) for granted, and I really would like for that to change, which I could do my cutting down on the time I spend. Or maybe if I just started getting a hello now and agaain. All I need is just to hear a song I know.

This same notion applies in real life though. Many people, myself included, don't like having to invite themselves along on trips/adventures/excursions, but many times thats the only way to go. At the end of the day, people (at least the people I know) don't care enough to make the first effort to let you know something small and spontaneous is going on. To expect a phone call or an invitation or for someone to be thinking about you when you're not there is usually expecting too much of them is what I've found out in experiences here. I wish more people realized that, and attempted to be more thoughtful and inclusive in their actions. All I need is just to hear a song I know.

The third reason for titling this I've already blogged about before. It's no secret that I don't feel like I get along with many of the people here at State. As much as I try, we just have different foci, different interests, and at the end of the day it kind of sucks. I guess it's unrealistic to expect to be able to find someone that really has THAT much in common with you, but it's kind of disheartening when you first meet someone and find out they have a few things in common with you, i.e. music (sense a trend with this music thing?), or movies, only to find out that these people also drastically differ from you in so many respects, i.e. what seems to happen to me the most, religiously, and it kind of makes you feel lonely. The best I can do is to hope on to the little that I do have in common. All I need is to hear a song I know.

I feel like I have to make the reassurance that I'm not going to go cut myself lonely, but it really does suck that I feel like I have so little in common with everyone I know. It's cliched to feel left out for stupid reasons, and I at least have that much in common with most people; I'm different, just like everyone else. My roommate's brother says that I just think too much about these things, and that I'm over-analyzing a lot of these situations. He's probably right, as I could probably list a handful of examples of where that seems to really fit the bill, like the fact that I get annoyed when people respond slowly to me on AIM, because then it makes me think that they've got a lot of other conversations going on, while I'm sitting there staring at my two windows waiting for them to respond. AIM in general is a really unhealthy habit, one that I whole heartedly wish I didn't spend as much time as I do on, as I don't think it's really helping my social life, like at all. It's now 10:30 P.M., and I haven't gotten a single IM in over an hour. Sigh, it's ironic then that the last line I heard was the guy from the all american rejects yelling "Speak to me!" The other great irony is that re-listening to the song, the first few lines of the song just made a lot more sense to me:

Are you gonna live your life wonderin' standing in the back
lookin' around?
Are you gonna waste your time thinkin' how you've grown up or
how you missed out?
Things are never gonna be the way you want.
Where's it gonna get you acting serious?
Things are never gonna be quite what you want.
Or even at 25, you gotta start sometime.

I may not 25 yet, but I don't want to wait for it. I'm on my feet, I'm on the floor, I'm good to go. Now all I need is just to hear a song I know.

Don't Look back in Anger

It's been a rather depressing past few weeks for me. I'm not quite sure, but all the little things have gradually started to get to me. I haven't updated in a long while, mainly because I've been busy most nights with MSA stuff, as we had our annual dinner last Friday.

First a description of the dinner. The turnout was really good, 434 people, and 51 children. We had a children's program, the venue was really great, we didn't run out of food, the MCs weren't really funny, Siraj Wahaj was really good, poetry slam was pretty bad, skits were alright though I was in pretty much all of them, and I think that looks bad, since I was supposed to be in charge of them, but I couldn't even get other people besides the regular crew to be in them. To be fair, the computer we were editing skits on crashed the day of, so the guy editing threw the skit together in about a four hour span, but he pulled it off and it went rather well given the circumstances. I had to interact with a lot of girls during the course of the dinner (OH GOD) and towards the end I had a talk with one of the girls that I had promised to talk to earlier in the day. We were outside on the balcony (in plain view duh) and my dad walked in (our out rather) to tell me they were leaving. He didn't say anything, and I don't think he'll even mention it any further, but it got me to thinking that maybe I cared about this guy/girl issue even more then they did. Overall it was a good time though.

Now on to other issues. Today was a really bad and depressing day for me. Nothing particularly bad happened to me, but I think that that's what the problem was. Nothing at all happened to me today. I only have one class Tuesdays, and work at night, so I usually hang out in between, but today absolutely nothing happened. I sat in my apartment until 6:00 P.M. and just studied. I didn't get a single IM, I visited one friend for a grand total of five minutes, and I said no more then ten words to my roommate when he got back later in the day. Sure he had plenty to say, with the incessant phone calls he was getting from people with whom he was coordinating a surprise birthday party for one of the girls, but not to me. It was one of those "nobody loves me" moments. That's really depressing, especially when you couple it with the whole being in the apartment all day portion.

The other thing I wanted to vent on was a miscellaneous individual who shall remain nameless. I don't know if it constitutes backbiting to put my thoughts on him/her in a personal journal, but I guess I'll have a little bit of dead brother/sister flesh between my teeth if that's the case. From now on I'll simply refer to this person as a guy, too much effort putting that /her afterwards.

I used to think apathy was cool. I used to think that if you didn't care about anything around you, if you just lived your life with utter disregard for those around you, if you didn't listen to anyone else, their criticisms (constructive or otherwise) that you knew what you were doing. I've learned through my good buddy that that may not be so true after all. See, here's the thing: This person gets a reputation for being "mad chill." That's exactly how everyone I know describes him. "Mad chill." He doesn't care about anything, anyone, he just live his life and people flock to him. He doesn't understand the meaning of the word thoughtful, let alone grasp it well enough to make a thoughtful gesture here and there, or appreciate one in return. I don't understand why so many people take the first effort to spend time with this guy. While I love him to death, he's not a particularly good conversationalist (not that I am either), he's not really reliable to do things on time, and he's probably one of the laziest, if not the laziest, people I know.

But at the end of the day, people flock to him, and I can't understand why. I'm happy for him, because he's a lot like me in the respect that if people don't make the effort to spend time with him, he doesn't make an effort to spend time with them. That's not good obviously, but it works a lot better for him then it does for me. It frustrates me that someone who has such disregard for and is so seemingly devoid of human emotion nonetheless maintains such a large rabid following.

To be fair, he only acts this way around guys. And his rather rabid following, is all girls. That's right, he's the type of guy that is devoid of human life around guys, but the moment a girl enters the room, BAM, he's all over them. I'm fairly sure he never took a class on touching etiquette, given the way he treats them. Pokes, hugs, tugs, pulls, its all good, regardless of whether or not the girl rocks a hood. Does it sit well with me? No, but do I have a say in the matter? No, because remember, when it comes to guys, this person is absolutely apathetic to what they have to say. I hear and read about how women always have complaints about double standards, how they don't get treated fairly, and they're right majority of the time, they don't get fair treatment, and it isn't fair. Well here's a double standard that I don't think gets enough attention.

The way this guy acts you can extend to a much larger portion of guys. I absolutely do not think its fair that guys suddenly change their mannerisms as soon as something with boobs enters the room. They go from being total idiots, talking about how hawt this girl or that girl is, to suddenly being suave, sophisticated, witty and charming idiots. It's almost like I don't know which one is the real guy. I hate that just about all those around me do this, change the way they act to try and impress someone, it's fake, and I hate it. Did I already say that?

I don't expect that one can act the same way around each gender, but to have such a drastic change also seems rather suspect. I've definitely learned a lot since Tosif 2.0 came out, a lot that's upset me, but as Oasis put it, Don't Look Back in Anger, and I intend to follow that advice. Sally can wait.