What Does Success Mean?

I recently heard the phrase “C Students in Life” (courtesy of Philip De Franco – video at the end) and was led to consider what it means to succeed in life. Now, De Franco describes a “C Student in Life” as someone who basically “half-asses their way to mediocrity"” and says he can’t respect someone like that. He raises an interesting point; life isn’t really worth anything, regardless of the end result, if you half ass your way through life, and end up not really earning it. This is the kind of thing that leads me to ask why people who work so hard end up living merely mediocre lives.

On the other hand, supposing you were born into, or undeservingly were given a great life, with money, people, and a myriad of happinesses, and you decided you wanted to work to earn it as an afterthought, or a thank you, by giving to charity, and helping people left and right, or opening your fortunes to the world (such as starting a software company, or, in a more abstract way, using your gift of a beautiful voice to sing and entertain people) then I can respect that.

I think in this same way, success has a lot to do with whether you’re grateful for where you are, or not, and how much you relate this gratefulness to that which you enjoy doing.

Via Philip De Franco (YouTube)

It looks like Autumn is finally starting to set in.

If You Can Hear Me…

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

He knew there was something out there. He heard it with his own ears. What it was was indistinguishable though, and despite his obviously strong will, he didn’t really want to go out there. He was out in the middle of nowhere after all.

Huff. Huff. Huff.

There it was again; he tried to go back to sleep. The sliver of moonlight in his eyes keeping him from drifting off; there was something out there, not that he’d wanted to know what it was.

“Who’s out there?!” His voice was raspy.

Huff. Huff. Huff.

The cold air and the dark outline of the trees was outlined by the stars, and against the wind blowing were the sounds of wolves and owls.

“Who’s out there?! What do you want?! Why are you here?” His voice was louder now.

He had given up on sleep at this point and just sat on his mattress, holding onto his cell phone, with its backlight on. But as he sat there, he heard noises which sounded only like pat, pat, pat.

Then he felt something.

Crash.

Having fallen over, he couldn’t tell who it was that was next to him.

“Who’s there?”

"I’m here for you.”

Has Anyone Else Noticed This?

Has anyone else noticed the fact that people at this time of year try to keep summer around as long as they can?

One of the biggest things is that people will try and make their lawns look greener than it ever was in the summer time. Oddly enough, it looks more like summer than it did in summer, in some places.

I think the true beauty of the seasons lies in the amazing colours of twilight – that’s when you can tell that it’s really autumn.

I have to say, the colours are absolutely a big part of the season for me, because it means that I get to take pictures of the world showing off. Even more than that though, I think autumn has helped me realize how much I wish it were summer still. I’ve done quite a lot of things with my friends despite it getting cold out, but I still want to do more with them.

View Full Album

My album consists of pictures from school, a trip downtown, Art Side Out, and other random things that happened in the past two months. The season’s not over yet, and Canada’s weather is completely unpredictable, but one of the things that often gets me moving and thinking about how opportune we are to be living where we do, and to get the chance to see the things that we do, no matter how small they are, is always a great time. If you’re interested, you can check out my other album, full of pictures taken of the autumn sky.

Cheers!

P.S. I’ll be blogging a lot more now, hopefully, because I think this is quite a relaxing hobby for me. If I don’t keep up, any of you are free to email and bug me to post something.

Write the Novel You Know You Have Inside You

So here I am, at around 12:30 am, and I’m searching the web for ideas for a list of things to do before I die. I came across this one. Interestingly, I’m going down this list, and checking off the things I’ve already done, like “get to know your neighbours” and “plant a tree.”

I keep going down until I get to this particular one: “Write the Novel You Know You Have Inside You.” How do I respond? By blogging. Of course, it has to be my first response because it’s what I’d prefer to do over going to sleep, realizing that I have to be up in about 6 hours.

Apart from that point, though. I thought I’d blog (after a long time) because thinking about where I want to be, and the kinds of things I want to do, made me realize that there is a lot that I know I’m capable of, but that I haven’t quite let myself do yet.

One of the biggest worries for me is what I’m going to do in the future, because despite the fact that I’m happy now, I’m not sure where I’ll be in a few short months. To some extent, I know what I want – I just haven’t pushed myself to get there, and the thought that I’m presented with now, that I already know that there is something inside me worth doing, means that now I have to live up to it.

So my question for myself, and that I often find myself asking, is “where do I begin?”

Where did many great writers begin? In the beginning. I guess for me, it’s somewhere I can start looking from.

The Way Society Rolls

It’s been an interesting past little while, and even though I haven’t been blogging quite as much, I intend to catch up. It’s been hectic, and among the groups of things that have been going on, there are a few that have caught my eye. Before I go into what they are, I just want to say that the reason they’ve caught my attention is because they solicit a kind of response from people that makes me want to think “What?”

I’m obviously not knowledgeable enough to go into details about everything, but I think that the effect that my attention turns to them is simply because they make me wonder if people really have a reason to react in the way that they do.

The first of these major things is the BP Oil spill. Now, with the idiocy between BP trying to clean up the ocean by saving the oil rather than saving the ocean by stopping the oil, period, and Obama imposing a ban on deep ocean drilling, and the US Judicial system giving Obama the presidential cock-block, I don’t think we have to look very far to see that a lot of this nonsense could have been avoided by sacrificing that oil well and just blocking it up. I know, it’s not that easy, but it should have been the obvious option, and I think everyone is just getting fed up of the whole thing. It is pretty obvious that the motivation for a lot of what’s going on is based on a background agenda. With BP Oil, they want to save the oil for economic reasons, and Obama’s pushing his agenda as acting out of concern for the country. The Supreme Court’s decision to lift the ban was done for political reasons, to show that they could still assert power and to some extent take power from the President and give it to the people(which evidently consists of the business that pay for a large portion of their payrolls).

Moving on, another interesting moment I think is interesting is the G20/G8 Summit happening in Toronto. The problem with these things is that they’re going to be congesting traffic and closing up a large chunk of the downtown core, and this is going to lead to several inconveniences for many of the people in and around the area. One of the major things is that protesters lately have been gathering to raise issues, and while it’s not a negative thing, I wonder if it has had any kind of effect on the politicians. I wonder if these protesters really think they can get through to the politicians and if not, why they continue to try.

Finally, there was an earthquake in Southern Ontario today, and it was apparently a 5 on the Richter Scale. All I saw on my facebook feed was earthquake related posts for a good half hour. I felt a slight tremor at best, and my mom experienced worse; my cousin and brother didn’t feel a thing though. I was frightened, but only slightly, while other people were overreacting to the situation. But what makes people respond the way they do?

I find this to be the question I would like to have answered, even though it won’t always be so easy to do so.

Social Motivator: The Olympics and What They Mean to Canada

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been cooped up in my room in front of my laptop (*sigh*), watching the Olympic Winter games. For some reason, they were a big thing for me this year, despite me not really being a sports fan. I guess it had something to do with the fact that they were held in Canada.

One of my interests as a scholar is to try and unravel what certain things mean. I don’t mean “mean” in the sense of semantics and definitions, I mean “mean” in the sense of value-meanings that people interpret within a context. Kind of like what peanut butter and jelly mean to bread; the difference between what it is for a four year old and a 16 year old is remarkable.

I was thinking about it before in terms of books and literature, such as Milton’s epic poems, and the works of literature we have now, and trying to figure out what it was about some works that enabled us to see their meaning in a context; one might ask what Milton’s Paradise Lost was about, and perhaps one might answer that it is about the historical moment Milton had just lived through. What does it mean though? Well, Paradise Lost means revolution and change.

But what about the Vancouver Olympics? I originally thought it was because it was just because it was home soil, but I realize that there is a lot more to it than that. The events surrounding the Olympics really displayed the quality of the Canadian spirit. From the death of the Georgian Luger and Joannie Rochette’s mother, to the amazing victories and moments to be celebrated throughout the past weeks, there is something in the air, all across the country, that affected me in an interesting way. So what does it mean? What does this vibrancy and energy stemming from the Olympics mean to Canada?

My own answer I think lies in the way Canada faced everything that happened this year. We embraced all those moments and faced them like Canadians, with Glowing Hearts. The pride that I saw come from all the Canadian victory ceremonies that I witnessed really reflected a sense of unity and solidarity that can only come from a nation brought together, not to win medals, but to show the world what we’ve got, and to welcome the entire world into our backyard.

Shane Koyczan, on the day of the opening ceremonies, recited one of his poems, “We are more,” and while he didn’t do justice to what Canada is (he couldn’t have) he did mention a few things that rang true of Canada’s aspirations: “we dream so big, there are some that would call our ambitions an industry.” It is a very real fact that the Olympics mean more than anything to Canada; it was a year of firsts – first Gold on home soil, record number of gold medals, and first time runs for some athletes in the Olympics. It was also a year of greats - great opening and closing ceremonies, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s flawless performances in ice dance, Joannie Rochette’s powerful and emotional performances during female figure skating, all around amazing hockey performances, record breaking scores for our girls hockey team, athletes that made our nation proud, and fans and supporters that made it all possible. But there was something more than all that. We had one more ambition; in the Vancouver Olympic Theme song, performed by Nikki Yanofsky and Annie Villeneuve, the lyrics at one point say “And in my heart there’ll be no doubt, the arms of the world will come reaching out and embrace me to be all I can be.” These very words are Canada’s aspirations; they have been since the dawn of the 20th Century, since we first found our ground on the world stage. This is what I think the Olympics means to Canada: it is a stage for Canada to perform, to show that it is something more than what the world tends to see it as. “We are all the ways you choose to live, a nation that can give you variety because we are choices, we are millions upon millions of voices shouting ‘Keep exploring!’”

Keep exploring.

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Links:
Nikki Yanofsky & Annie Villeneuve singing “I Believe”
For the Opening Ceremonies, visit this link and search for “Opening Ceremony” (without quotes).

Social Motivator: What Are We Doing With Our Lives?

I had a realization that I am a university student at UTSC. It goes farther than that though. I’m also a Humanities student. One thing that I realized though is that it isn’t a particularly humanitarian discipline. Over a lunch meeting with the dean and vice deans here on campus, Rick Halpern (UTSC’s Dean) told me (along with a bunch of fellow students) something which stuck with me; there’s a difference between Humanities and humanities, a tangible difference.

One of the questions I find myself asking is “Where am I going in life?” I find myself asking that question yet again, because the path of Humanities students is very obscure or interdisciplinary. There is nothing that is essentially Humanities. But then again, Humanities is often regarded as the field of study concerning humanity – human ideas and life. Saying we’re Humanities students does not entail that we’re humanitarian or by any means humanities students. The difference is that studying about humanity is not the same as studying and engaging with humanity.

So here’s the question again: Where am I going in life? Lately, I’ve been too busy to notice the world that needs help. I don’t have a goal, nor do I have plans on being a humanitarian. But I’ve been thinking about it tonight. And I realize that even if my future will take me no where near the purpose of humanities, as a Humanities student, I can’t forget that there is something more.

I still have a lot to figure out…

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