Some people say, "Do something for yourself every day," but that's not what they mean. They don't mean "go fix yourself a sandwich" or "go buy yourself new shoes", or if they do they shouldn't mean that at all. The only thing you can really do for yourself every day is to accomplish something that is important to you.

Accomplish something for yourself every day.

Too many people go through their lives not accomplishing something on a daily basis. They think, "I feel restless and bored, I should go watch a movie or maybe buy something," but that is only going to make you feel entertained. You don't feel restless and bored because you're not entertained enough: we live in a world of 24 hour a day/7 days a week entertainment. There is no shortage of entertainment in our lives---in fact, there is so much that sometimes it can cause anxiety just trying to decide how to be entertained.

You're reading this on a computer, or some other device, right now that can entertain you in at least a hundred different ways, but chances are one of you (or most of you) still feel restless and bored. Why is that? It's because a lack of entertainment isn't the problem. Accomplishment is.

It's hard for me not to get judgmental here, because there are some things out there that are clearly not very good hobbies. I've talked about how my parents are "pin traders" at Disneyland, where their hobby consists solely of buying products from the Disney Corporation and talking about them with other people. Is that really a hobby? According to Wikipedia, yes, collecting is a hobby, but seriously. What are they accomplishing for themselves?

"Look at all this shit I bought! I am so awesome!" How does that work? Do people who collect things actually feel a legitimate, lasting sense of accomplishment and pride in their work? I somehow doubt that. I know from experience that buying things can make you feel temporarily elated, but it's a hollow feeling that is often fleeting.

To me, I think, and this is rather the point of this lecture, that a good hobby should make you feel like you are progressively getting better and better at something. Accomplishment and satisfaction shouldn't just come all at once, like when you buy something or go watch a movie, but slowly over time. You get better at guitar over time, much like you do at other good hobbies: building models, playing games (like chess or soccer, not like Halo*), flying airplanes (models or otherwise), cooking, and everything else listed on Wikipedia.

I've watched my parents retire without a hobby set out before them and it's a rather sad thing to witness. I think baby boomers in general seem to have lost sight of the value of having a legitimate hobby to occupy your time and fill your life with a sense of accomplishment. During the week days all they do is sit on the internet and sleep, and then during the weekend they go to Disneyland to talk and trade pins with other sad old baby boomers. What kind of life is that? I have a hard time believing that they have any real sense of happiness in their lives.

Witnessing this I have been desperate to lay down hobbies that I enjoy in my life. I don't want to hit 65 and realize that I don't do a single damn thing that brings me any real pleasure. I started with 'semi-extreme sports' like freeline skating and unicycling, but that didn't hold my attention much. Well, maybe that's not true: I really started with this website, in an attempt to get myself to regularly do the thing that I really feel good about---which is writing, obviously, and listening to music and sharing it with others.

But even this wasn't enough for me. This is maybe half an hour to an hour out of every day (if I am rigorous). So what else could I do? What else can you do? How does one even figure out what their hobby should or could be if you haven't any clue to begin with?

You have to ask yourself this: what do you love / what would you love to do / in your heart of hearts what is it that you really want to be? If you can't answer that (it's a tough question), try this: when you're jealous of the skills of someone else, what skills are you jealous of? There's nothing someone else can do that you can't do yourself, even if it's "running" and you're missing a leg (get one of those springy legs, those things are dope as shit). There's no shame is hijacking someone else's hobby or skill, 'cause there is already a hundred thousand other people out there already doing whatever it is.

There's a tremendously stupid remark people sometimes make about how "you should love what you do" in regards to your job. That's stupid. We're not all equipped with the ability to be professionals at what we love to do. I love to lay in bed all day, but no one is going to pay me to do that just yet, so what's the answer there? The answer is: hobbies. Do what you love on your own time, and your job will start to seem more bearable. Your job isn't your life (and those people you work with, they aren't your friends). Don't let people tell you that it should be.

Anyway... think about it. Next time you're going to go home after work and just turn on the TV, maybe do something else instead. Do that thing you've been meaning to get into. Dedicate yourself to it. Accomplish something real, tangible. Even if only you know about it, it'll be enough to get you out of that rut you've been in.

I promise.

* I make a distinction here some may argue with: "How are chess and soccer better games than Halo?" Well, the answer is timelessness. Halo is a game which will fade into obscurity and no one will eventually play it anymore. You can get really good at it, sure, and beat other people and feel better about your sad woman-less life, but eventually there will be no one left to play. Halo is a fad, not an actual sport or a serious game. Chess has survived hundreds of years, and other sports are much the same. If you acquire skill at chess or football, you can be playing those and perfecting your craft at them for decades and still be able to find opponents who can challenge you no matter how good you get. Halo, or other video games, not so much. ^

---

There's a profoundly ignorant comment on the SongMeanings page for this song. It reads as follows.

anyone can play guitar, but that doesn`t mean they should. just like anyone can make a record, but that doesn`t mean they should.

What a load of pretentious and judgmental bullshit. That's like me going "Ugh, I don't like Insane Clown Posse, they shouldn't make music." That's just not right. Just because you don't get it, or don't like it, or don't want to listen to it, doesn't mean you have the right to tell people they should or shouldn't be doing something. Anyone can do whatever the fuck they want, and that guy who said that can go fuck himself.

There's also a moron on there saying that Pablo Honey is "obviously a sophomore album", which is funny since it's Radiohead's debut. There's also someone saying that "radiohead didn't put any work into this song, it's just verse-chorus-verse". This is pretty much why Radiohead fans are dumb assholes who don't know shit. It would be nice if Radiohead were this good again, but whatevs. We all can't be Jim Morrison and just die right before everyone gets tired of our wankery.

Being very rational and analytical has its downsides. People like me---and I mean people who often use perspective to try to understand the way other people can feel, and use projection to try to understand the motivation behind the actions of others, and who also try to turn to science and reason when determining how they feel about things---miss out on certain small joys other, less aware, people might get to enjoy.

For instance, the lottery. I can play a scratcher now and then because it's kind of like a video game (though one in which you're going to lose most of the time), but I'll never buy one every day just hoping I'll get lucky and when big.

Lottery tickets, I take no part in. I'm just too aware of the astronomical odds involved in winning. Sure, it'd be nice to believe that if I spend a dollar every day on a lottery ticket, I might eventually be a lucky winner. But that's a costly bet, and at the end of it there would be a lot of regret. I'd keep track of all those dollars and then beat myself up at the end of my life when it finally occurred to me, on my death bed, that I spent a kajillion dollars for nothing. "I could have bought a nicer car stereo when I was 30, if only..."

So I don't get to enjoy being blissfully ignorant of the fact that I will never Get Rich Quick. I also don't believe I'll ever be a rockstar or an astronaut or a fireman or The Situation, so I differ from the majority of people (in the US) right there I guess.

One of the warehouse guys told me about this thing "his people" do (Mexicans, and hey, he said "his people" and he's actually a legal immigrant from Mexico so he'd know). They get ten people together and each person pitches in $100. They cut up 10 pieces of paper with a number 1 thru 10 on it, mix them up, and everyone picks one. They then take this $1000 and give it to whoever got the first number. For the next 9 months, every one of them pitches in $100 and then the next person gets $1000. This is supposed to be some way to get a cash bonus for everyone.

He asked me if I wanted to be in on this and I immediately thought: man, seriously, if I got anywhere past #3 I'd be pissed off. If I got #10 then I'd just bow out and put $100 under my mattress every month and then pull it out after ten months and have $1000 and I wouldn't be forced to give my money to other people. And what if someone pussies out or loses their job after they get their little $1000 bonus? Do we all just take the hit and only get $900 after that? Jesus, I'd rather just give myself $100 every month, and fuck everyone else. Besides, don't these people know that they could actually be earning interest, even if just a tiny little bit, if they got a savings account?

So that's no fun for me either.

But it's not just retarded shit like that, where you feel like you're gaming the system or you're more special or luckier than other people, it can also be good feelings that we miss out on.

Like believing that our pets love us.

I want to believe, I so want to believe, that this dog that I've known for the last 15 years of my life or so actually feels love (or comradery) for me. She looks at me with her big sad eyes and I feel a companionship there: we two are the results of the same fucked up parents, and our eyes are perma-sad exactly the same way.

But maybe that's just how her face looks.

So much of a dog's enthusiasm is expended in the desire and hunt for food. "Food? Food? Food?" is what your dog is saying to you when it leaps all over you when you come home. "Is it food time now? IS IT!?" It's not going, "Oh god, I missed you!" Unless it's saying, "Oh god, I missed you, oh bearer of food and other food like substances which are yummy! Are you back because it is FOOD TIME?"

Of course, it's just that we like to think our animals are like us. When a dog protects us or our child, we don't like to think that it only protected us because we give it food more often than someone else does, or because our child is simply seen as part of the food providing pack the animal is indentured to.

Sometimes I look at my dog and I feel so confused. She can't actually understand anything about me. She's watched me age from 10 to 25, but does she recognize me as the same person? (Factually, it is likely she does simply by my scent, since dog's noses are so acute.) Even if she does, does she care? If I vanished one day, would she notice I was gone? I was gone for a couple years once... I wonder if she remembers.

On the other hand there's no way to know for sure that my dog doesn't love me separate from the love of food. I don't speak dog just the same as she doesn't speak human. If dogs communicate telepathically to each other via some unknown medium we've never discovered, perhaps they talk about us all the time. I swear there was a point in my teens where the dogs would start excitedly parking a solid three minute before my parents would come home---at which point they would still be driving up the street about half a mile away. What does that mean? Are their senses of smell just that good or are dogs psychic... and if they are...

How scary! I wonder what else they know...

What makes other people who don't seem to think of these things---or at least if they do, they disregard them whole-heartedly---different? Why can't I turn off the analytical part of my brain and just play the lottery and gleam enjoyment from it? Why can't I see the worth in getting $1000 now only to pay up $1000 later? Why can other people say things like, "I KNOW my dog loves me! I KNOWS it!" with so much conviction?

Why not me?

WHHHHYYYYYYY?

The Grays were a "super group" composed of Jon Brion (fresh off a stint with 'Til Tuesday), Jason Falkner (fresh off Jellyfish's Spilt Milk) and then two other guys, whoever they were, who cares. They played together for a very brief year, producing a single album, Ro Sham Bo, before calling it quits.

As an album, Ro Sham Bo suffers mostly because of how needlessly slick it is. For an album that came out in 1994, the possible hay-day* of the grungy DIY indie-rock aesthetic, it's almost sad how well produced it is. It strips a lot of the feeling away, and this song is a pretty good example of this. It could be a powerful, angry piece of music but instead it just feels kind of... flat. Every instrument feels secluded in a room by itself without any other instruments around it. It's so lonely. There's not a lot going on.

Kind of like this blog for the last two weeks! Now I'm going to digress.

I go through phases. I'm currently in a "fuck this writing on the internet shit" phase. I became disillusioned. I'm tired of the endless wave of promoter emails I'm getting that are filled with pretty much relentlessly terrible music. I'm at nearly 100 unread emails and I just keep avoiding them because they have subjects like "CHECK OUT ANDREI'S NEW CLUB REMIX OF JUNIP" and I'm like, fuck, does no one pay attention to me when I say "I don't care about remixes"? And who the fuck is Andrei? Tarkovsky? He's making dance remixes now?

I think I just lost sight of what this website is about. From the start it's supposed to just be me, a regular guy, telling you, you regular but beautiful people you, about music I like that I have a personal connection to. Lately that hasn't changed much, but I've been writing about stuff that I only kind of like, and that I don't have a personal connection to at all.

I'm going to try to go back to what this is supposed to be about, maybe in a week or two, or maybe I'll just pick it back up tomorrow. I do not like music blogs, so it's silly that in the last month or two this has turned more into a music blog than I'd care for it to be. Let's go back to this being a "journal about music and me".

My experiments in music creation have been going OK. I've been dedicating pretty serious time to learning guitar and I think I've made huge, huge progress. It's stupid to think that I wasted so many years not playing guitar, and that with three different guitars in my hands in the past I totally squandered opportunities to learn. Guitar is not hard to play, and I think a lot of my prior stumbling was because I thought it was, so I was psyching myself out.

Learn some chords... strum them in time to a metronome... Boom! You're playing guitar.

I've been using MultiTrack DAW for iPad to record myself playing and fiddling with stuff. The iPad built in microphone isn't too bad, and if you want to hear what someone fumbling awkwardly between chords and scales sounds like, check out this shit. I'm already a lot better at actually fingering the chords properly. Yesterday I played for about an hour and a half, took a break, and when I went back to playing it felt like my fingers were going to split open. I have bits of skin hanging off my fingers.

ROCK STAR!

Also, the Em-G-Am progression is, like, my favoritest ever so far. I need another iPad, that way I can use a sequencer on one and record on the other... hehehe...

Also, fuck the iPad's 256mb of RAM. What a bunch of bullshit. I have no faith at all that iOS4 will run decently at all on the iPad. Ridiculous. Have to hard-reset the iPad every time you want to do something even minorly resource intensive. Still, I want to buy a second one...

* You know, like with horses. ^