This I Believe - Edit

Based on a previous post, I decided to revamp it a little bit in preparation for a school assignment. The following came out of it. Still pretty horrible, but it's an effort:



I was at work the first week of my junior year of college, in the school’s ITS department, and I had to fix a media cart that was having issues in a classroom. The room’s vacancy was scarce, and a German class soon began session in my presence. The funny thing is, I probably learned more in that class during those five minutes than I learned that entire week. I learned how to say all of the months in German, and also learned that little kids are more apt to become fluent in several languages because the muscles in the human mouth grow in age to accommodate the language they speak. Thus, adults have a harder time learning different languages, whilst children can become masterful powerhouses of language fluency.

Little kids have power. This is especially apparent with the thing I love doing most: skateboarding. I started skateboarding when I was in high school, and I often wonder what I would have turned out like if I started earlier, like most kids these days, around elementary school. As I get older, the skill difference between me and younger skateboarders seems to get more and more tangible as the age difference widens. Little kids nearly the same size as the skateboard are able to pull off tricks I was just learning in the tenth or eleventh grade of high school.

And, sooner than I’d hope, much sooner than the rest of these kids, I will probably start to break down in time. I will feel the grenades of age ease into my spinal sockets and casually explode, shredding and fragmenting the discs in my back. I have far fetched visions of myself as an eighty year-old man carving a bowl or pulling off switch 360 flips, but really, I understand that inevitably, I will have to stop skateboarding for the sake of my own health. I will have to stop learning and teaching myself new tricks and daring myself to go beyond my own physical comforts for the sake of success. I will have to start learning and teaching myself about surviving in my physical body.

I am offered an oddly comforting reassurance though that, despite how early and how fast children seem to advance in skateboarding these days, they will still go through a realization such as mine at some point in their lives too. No matter what skill level they ascend to, all skateboarders will reach the same end result in time. It makes me feel less alone.

I’m not bitter of my own progression in skateboarding, nor am I bitter of the fact that kids are getting better and better at skateboarding at earlier ages. I condone such growth, and am hopeful that, unlike the filthy food corporations and their growth hormones, our youth hone their skateboarding skills out of pure love and nothing else. Skateboarding is more than just a hobby that people can talk about and express interest in. When two people meet while skateboarding, even if they don’t talk to each other, they are speaking to one another through the passion of learning at a unique pace. Each person has their own riding style, their own brands of boards, their own brands of shoes, their favorite tricks, and their favorite skate spots; these elements and many more mesh into a centralized message of love. Even if a person quits skateboarding in their later years and simply reminisces these elements once apparent in their life, they will look back on elements that captivated a sincere love, and will hopefully feel that love festering greater and greater for the skateboarders preceding them, offering zero traces of scorn or abolishment.

Skateboarding indefinably weaves itself into the lifestyle of people. Sometimes it’s a slow growth, and other times it accumulates like a fatal cancer. Skateboarding is a language, and I sincerely believe that those who speak it experience one of the most honest and satisfying methods of learning how to learn.

If Anybody Can Remember...

Nick Arcade. You know, the really really old TV show on Nickelodeon where the kids had to play arcade games and competed for prized. If anybody can remember this show, you may be my friend - instantly, at that.

...Two...One...Out

So the people in my life who are gradually turning 21 is starting to build up a bit quickly. In a weird way, my mind envisions it like a plague that makes the names fall like flies from the air. So many odd things about such an odd number. Although I think the act of celebrating a 21st birthday with lots of alcohol is a worn-out tradition, I'm sure I'll be imbibing my own share once mine comes, and I'm still happy enough to say it has been a great run with senor

Josh Kramer.

I dearly hope the day is great for ye. Happy birthday to one of the long-standing best friends.

Moneyzzz

Statistically, I wonder how much money is spent every year on workers sleeping during their shifts. I'm sure there are a grand amount of jobs out there that offer the opportunity for a worker to catch a few Z's here and there during their shift, and I would be very interested to know the total hours and total money spent. If anybody somehow found this information and sent it to me, I'd be pretty grateful.

Cedar Pee

It's absolutely disheartening to learn about stories of amusement parks using maximum fraudulent techniques to get people to spend money. For example, I was informed by somebody that really big places, such as Disneyworld, purposely waft manufactured scents throughout the grates underneath the park in order for people to smell them, get hungry, and go spend their money on food. The people are lead blindly by what they think is real - some sort of food shop nearby MUST be the origin - and then make the park even richer by purchasing their overpriced grub.

This technique is also commonly employed outside of amusement parks, where restaurants purposely vent their smells outside to attract customers. It's much the same ordeal, but it really sucks when that corporate spirit leaks into amusement parks. Those places really do seem to care for you as a young soul and harvest wondrous memories, until you get older and older and realize how it's all a plot.

Alas, the place needs to make money. It is a business, after all. It stinks though. Damn corporations.

Business Catch #1

I've got it! I've got it! Eureka!

I'll make a deal with Nike to invent (hopefully) the first series of pump-action push-up bras! And if not the first, who cares?! It's Nike. Ladies would wear them like sports bras. And then Nike could revive the deadened pump-shoes in a co-release and make double-bank off of a retro, slightly redesigned product.

Awexome.

Oh so Grand, the Rapids

So last night, while I was roiling about in a crowd of people I've never met, sponging up the bath of countless sweaty rivulets amassing together on my skin, mixed in with my own concoction of salt, water, and whatever the hell else is in there, I was thinking: "How many people probably touched me that have some strange disease? Owe some massive payment from debt? Just lost somebody close in the last month from death? Or even have some paper they need to write that they haven't started on?" I started thinking about the wildest things that would make somebody worried, angry, upset, confused, bitter...things people would sweat over, to use the phrase contextually. When the show was done and over with, I was a half wrung-out dish rag, and I wondered how many peoples' burdens of life I carried with me in the fabrics of my clothes. I wondered how many people had excreted those pains, along with their sweat, in joyous celebration of music they enjoyed, and left that place with just a little bit less of a reason to sweat. Of course, we were all in the same environment, so those people were inevitably caught in the same cycle as I was, and I equally transferred any of my own sweat onto them too. Thus, they equally carried along my sweat in their clothes.

The great thing with shows too is that you don't really get much opportunity to wash it all off until you get home. You ride along and the mixture of dog breath dances with your immediate memories. You play back the scenes from an hour or two before, over and over in your head, along with the hundreds or thousands of other people that are likely doing the same, and it all never really escapes you until the shower hits, and you're standing under a stream of refreshing water. No salt, no other chemicals: just straight water. Then you start to break away from the correlation of the other folk who plastered you in sweat. Then you are free to move on.

The power of live music is majestic. Curing. Persistent. Enthralling. Enlightening.