Andy Gapin

This is kind of a spur of the moment post, a quick reaction. My wife emailed me an article from No Meat Athlete a little while ago (I don’t read his site, but I’m familiar with the content since my wife talks about it sometimes and even has one of his shirts) and it got me thinking. If you’re not going to take a minute to click the link and read it, the article is a response to a conversation he had with the writer of ZEN Habits regarding living life without goals and how maybe that’s a better way to live.

The point (or at least a point) from ZEN Habits is that if something isn’t enjoyable at any point, why are you doing it? Is achieving a goal what’s really important if the process of getting there isn’t enjoyable? Shouldn’t you be trying to enjoy every moment of life instead? No Meat Athlete seems to have a hard time fully agreeing with this idea and I’m with him on it. His example is ultramarathons, but for me, it’s just plain old marathons (you know, the easy stuff). These long races are painful. Doing them physically hurts. A lot. And training for them isn’t really all that fun all the time either. I enjoy running, a lot, but there comes a certain point, usually by mile 10 or 12 where I’m not really having fun anymore. Sometimes, that point comes way earlier…like say mile 4 or 6, but for the most part, I enjoy running up to a certain point.

If pretty much no part of running a marathon is really fun, why do it? As No Meat Athlete points out, I don’t need to run excessively for the sake of exercising, I can run much less and supplement with other fun activities as well. So I don’t need to run long races and the fun parts of running could still exist in my life without having a goal and doing the hard stuff.

When I was running the Philly Marathon there was a spectator holding up a sign that  said “it doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.” Seeing that sign was a kind of weird moment. It just kind of clicked in a way for me, I knew exactly what was meant by that. I could really feel the sentiment behind that sign. That sentiment kind of carried itself with me through most of the race, even in the last few miles. I was in crazy amounts of pain and, by most definitions, I was not having fun, but yet, what I was doing was still fun to me as a whole and I knew it would be fun after crossing the finish line.

It was fun to know that I was pulling off something a relatively small portion of the population has done. It was fun to know that after just a little more pain, I’d have this for the rest of my life. No matter what, I could say “yup, I ran a marathon.” Nothing could take that away. And it’s not in an “I’m better than anyone who hasn’t run a marathon” kind of way. It was more in the vein of how we all have something that makes us stand out or some accomplishment that we can be proud of, and this was both of those things to me.

That was my first thought as I was reading, my justification for why I put myself through something that wasn’t fun for the majority of the time I was doing it. But there was a second thought that came after that about why most of us have to have goals.

If life was reduced to doing only the things that were the most fun at the moment, I wouldn’t leave the house. Ever.

As I’ve mentioned, I truly do enjoy running, but that doesn’t mean that when I come home from work the first thing I want to do is change and head out the door to run. Really, what I want to do is plop down on the couch, have food handed to me, watch TV, and at some point have sex with my wife (hey, we’re being honest here, right?). I don’t want to go run. On the weekends, when I don’t have plans, I want to move from the bed down to the couch and just watch TV. I don’t really want to go for a run.

If you’re keeping track, I really just want to hang out on the couch and watch TV. But the thing is, I don’t want to do that! After doing just that, I hate myself. I feel like I’ve wasted my time when I could have been doing something else. But doing something else that I enjoy would be more work, at least to start. That initial work, without some other motivation, a goal, if you will, isn’t fun. If we’re trying to maximize fun and only do things that are fun from start to finish, then anything that requires me to put on pants is going to lose to plopping down on the couch.

This gets us to the poing, having fun is the goal.

Much of the time, getting to the fun part isn’t fun itself, but without it, there wouldn’t be fun at all.

Like I said, I don’t want to go for a run when I get home, but once I’m out there and a mile in and all warmed up, I’m happy. I’m having fun and I’m glad that I didn’t take the immediate fun (i.e. the lazy fun). And on top of that, the fact that I chose the delayed fun for my run means that I’m working towards being a better runner and therefore having more fun running in the future.

I know I’ve been doing a lot of running talk here, but there are other examples. I hate having to book vacations. You can just ask my wife about booking our honeymoon, it was one of the worst and least fun experiences I’ve had in the last year. But, vacations–especially, that honeymoon–are fun! If I chose to only be doing things that are fun from start to finish, I wouldn’t have chosen to plan a vacation…and I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to deal with TSA and the airport.

I have fun going to shows and seeing bands, but I generally abhor having to drive to Philly or, even worse, trek into New York City to actually get to the show.

I have fun going through my photos and discovering new favorites or realizing that a photo I didn’t think much of six months ago is actually really awesome. But I don’t have fun post-processing photos and tagging and organizing them so I can find them later. If I didn’t put in the not fun work, I wouldn’t be able to have the fun later.

I had a blast running the ZEN House and putting on shows in college, just thinking about the shows I did is fun. But doing the work to make it all happen wasn’t fun most of the time. In fact, it usually sucked.

Most of the time, you need to do things that are not fun in order to have fun. You have to choose the less fun option up front to have more fun in the end.

Having the sense of accomplishment from completing a long race or making a new personal record is fun. Getting there may not have been fun, but without doing the unfun stuff, I couldn’t have had this fun.

Having fun is the goal and to have the most fun, you must have a goal.

If an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time will eventually product Hamlet, who makes the typewrites and fixes them when they break from monkeys jumping up and down on them? And who cleans the poo out of them?

Think about it, we need monkeys to produce the typewriters themselves which then means that we need monkeys to run the power plants and to produce and transport the individual pieces of the typewriters. Then we would need monkeys to build the roads and to serve as traffic cops. Really, we’d need a whole judicial system made up of monkeys just to keep them in order (wait, can we trust the monkeys to police themselves?). Then we’d need doctors to treat the monkeys that get injured. Which would mean we’d need lawyers to handle the malpractice suits as well. We would need monkey bus drivers so that the monkeys could get to and from their jobs. And of course, we’d have to provide paid time off to the monkeys so we’d have to have HR departments (possibly unions too?) and vacation resorts.

This all gets very complicated and before you know it, you have an entire monkey civilization just because you wanted to produce Hamlet. Is it possible that maybe this is how Hamlet was first written? Is all of human existence just an experiment to produce a single literary work? An experiment that has gone horribly out of control?

Think about it.

It’s funny how sometimes we discover new things that we love about our favorite things. Whether it be a joke in an episode of the Simpsons that you’ve missed for the last ten years, something in the background of a scene in your favorite movie, or a trail you never noticed in your favorite park, it’s always nice to find something new to appreciate. It helps keep old things fresh.

I find that I do this with music all the time. I’m always finding a new favorite song by one of my favorite bands. Jawbreaker, for instance, they’re my favorite band and I’ve heard everything by them hundreds of times, but just a couple weeks ago, I became obsessed with the song “Into You Like A Train.” Up until then, it never really clicked for me how much I like this song.

But what really made me think about this, is the song “Turnstiles” (or “Turnstyles” as the original version was called) by The Lawrence Arms, (fittingly) one of my all-time favorite bands. I think it’s a pretty big favorite among longtime fans, judging by the fact that everytime I see them, a ton of kids are shouting out for them to play it. But for me, it wasn’t until last week that I was really all that into it. Usually my listening to them is confined to Oh! Calcutta!, The Greatest Story Ever Told, or Apathy and Exhaustion so it’s not a song that is ever in my listening rotation. But last week, somehow it got stuck in my head. I don’t know where it came from since I hadn’t listened to it in ages. So I threw it on and immediately became obsessed with it. I’ve been listening to it on repeat since then and I just can’t seem to get enough of it. I’m really into it musically, but more than that, I’ve become completely consumed by the lyrics. Some of them kind of hit me really hard for reasons I won’t go into, but they make the song feel really personal to me.

The personal feeling I get from the lyrics are probably why I’ve been so obsessed with this song over the past few days, but things like this make me really wonder how much we all miss everyday as we go about our lives. Some things we’re just oblivious to because we’re either too focused on one thing or focused on too many things at once. And some things I don’t think we’re capable of getting right away even when we’re looking for them.

The Replacements are one of those bands that I can’t seem to go a week without having a conversation about with somebody. It’s usually the same few people, including one of my good friends whom I don’t think that I’ve hung out with in a least a year without them coming up. The other day, him and I were talking about “Answering Machine” which is arguably my favorite Replacements song ever. We were talking about how despite the re-release of Let It Be, kids growing up today will never be able to fully appreciate the words to this song…

1, 2, 3, 4

Try to breathe some life into a letter
Losing hope, never gonna be together
My courage is at it’s peak
You know what I mean
How do say you’re O.K. to
An answering machine?
How do you say good night to
An answering machine?

Big time’s got its losers
Small town’s got its vices
A handful of friends
One needs a match, one needs some ice
Call-waiting phone in another time zone
How do you say I miss you to
An answering machine?
How do say good night to
An answering machine?

I get enough of that

Try to free a slave with ignorance
Try and teach a whore about romance

How do you say I miss you to
An answering machine?
How do you say good night to
An answering machine?
How do you say I’m lonely to
An answering machine?
The message is very plain
Oh, I hate your answering machine
I hate your answering machine
I hate your answering machine…

2-1-2
3-1-3
2-1-2
3-1-3
2-1-2
3-1-3

It’s not even just because the answering machine is a dated and obsolete device either. What it comes down to is that today’s communication technologies make it extremely difficult to not be able to get a hold of someone. With cell phones that have texting and picture messaging, email, IM, twitter, video chat, your favorite social-networking site, etc, there are so many ways to contact someone now that it’s very rare you won’t get through to them. And if you don’t connect to them directly, you can be certain that any message you leave for them will be received within two hours. It used to be when you left a message on an answering machine, you knew that that person wouldn’t get it until they got home and you had to wait until whenever that happened to be. These days, if you don’t hear back, it’s not because that person couldn’t be reached or didn’t get your message, it’s because they didn’t want to be reached.

The song is obviously about being far away from someone that you love and feeling completely helpless because you can’t hear their voice and tell them directly what you’re feeling. And while this certainly isn’t a good thing to feel, I think that it’s an emotion that can be important to feel in a relationship. Not just a romantic relationship, but with family and friends as well. These days, it’s too easy to take for granted that people are always there.

For me this kind of communication can never even come close to touching face-to-face time spent with someone, but more and more, I find that I’m reading articles online about how youth are growing up engaging in more and more electronic communication and less face-to-face communication. When I was growing up, most of my interactions with people were face-to-face. The web was still pretty young and most people didn’t have it so it was either phone or face-to-face. And in those days, there were still long distance charges for calling just a couple towns over.

You spent quality time with people and really connected.

I kind of fear that today’s youth are growing up in this world where everything is right at their fingertips so none of it can be truly appreciated. I know that I can get like this with music. It used to be that to find out about new bands I had to go to shows and watch the openers or read the thank yous in the linear notes for a albums or rummage through a friend’s music collection. When I found a band that I really liked, I felt so accomplished. And to get my own copy of the music I had to actually go out and find a copy of the album to buy. It was a lot of work, but it really meant something.

Now, I get at least 20 new bands a week shoved in my face without even trying. And if I like it, I can have it instantly. I don’t have to go find a place that has the album or anything. It just doesn’t mean as much and the music means less. While there are always going to be the bands and albums that no matter how easily they come, blow me away and that I can’t get enough of, most of it just ends up meaning very little.

And I guess that coming from a person like me that is so into technology and having instant gratification, this may seem a bit hypocritical, but I don’t think I could ever say that I’m not a victim and a part of some things that I think are killing the very things that I feel are important.

Yesterday at about 4:30pm, it seemed like the entire internet got taken over by Heath Ledger’s death. It was only an hour after he was found dead, yet almost every site had something about it. The message board that I post on everyday became pretty consumed by it. There were about a dozen threads. Some were serious discussions about it. Some were discussions about the upcoming Batman movie, Dark Knight, in which Heath Ledger plays the Joker. And then there were the parodies and jokes. CNN.com and MSNBC.com had huge banners at the top of their home pages with the headline.

Honestly, Heath Ledger dying is the most important news from yesterday?!? Nothing else happened? Nothing that might actually affect more than a few people? Anytime someone dies–well, unless they’re a douche–it’s sad and I feel for his family and friends, especially his two year old daughter, but really, he’s just a dude. His death means nothing more or less than anyone else’s death. Being famous shouldn’t mean that everything else stops when you die.

Unfortunately, in America, this is the news that sells. Americans care much more about celebrities’ lives than things that actually matter and affect them and other people around the world. We, as a population, would much rather be entertained than know what’s going on.

Sigh.

If you could choose between being able to fly or read minds, which would you choose?

This was the question that was proposed today on a message board that I read. And weirdly, it’s something that I often think about. To me the answer is a no brainer. Fly. I’ll get to the reasons why being able to fly would be awesome in a moment, but first I’ll reveal how much of a nutcase I am and why I would NOT want to be able to read minds.

Being able to read peoples’ minds would be cool as hell at first. You could really mess with people and get away with all kinds of stuff. Imagine how good you’d be at poker. You could probably make a living off it and quit your day job! And even better than that, you could instantly tell if a girl was into you or not instead of trying to decipher all the games and mind tricks. But this would get old fast. I would imagine that 95% of what you would be reading from other peoples’ minds would be utterly disturbing as all hell. There is a reason why we (well most of us) have the ability to think things without saying them.

I catch myself thinking all the time, “I REALLY hope no one around here can read minds because what I just thought about is some really weird shit.” I refuse to believe that most people aren’t like this too. I think about some really weird shit. Most of the time it’s not even intentional. I’ll just be minding my own business and then BAM! weirdo thoughts jump into my head. I’m not going to go into detail about them, but let’s just say that some are so weird that I’m embarrassed to have even thought about them even though I know no one even knows that I did.

Let’s move on to flying. If I could fly, I would have so much more free time. I’m not asking to be able to fly fast, we’ll just say like 65mph. Since the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line, you’d first have a shorter distance to travel. And second, you wouldn’t have to deal with traffic, shitty drivers, or potholes. It would be my personal heaven.

My ten mile drive to work would be reduced from a half hour down to ten minutes, giving me an extra twenty minutes of sleep every morning.

Sure, you might be saying that the elements would take their toll on you and you’d probably be right. Flying wouldn’t be for all situations. In the dead of winter or the melt your face off days of summer, a car may still be a better solution, but for most days in between it would be excellent.

Now…time to figure out how to get my fly on…

It’s interesting how things work sometimes. I was just reading this article online about how to live better. Nerdy, I know, but I subscribe to the RSS feed for a site that has all of those cheesy articles about how to do things better, improve yourself or be more productive. Cheesy, yes, but I kind of enjoy them and sometimes it’s nice to be reassured about how you live when you can go down these lists and realize you already do most of them.

While I was reading this article I was also talking to my friend online. He was complaining about hating his job (we work together) and I was trying to say some things to make him feel a little better. At one point he was talking about how he barely gets by with the money he makes and I said to him, “being thankful for the things that you do have is much more productive than worrying about what you don’t have.” It’s something that I truly believe, but interestingly, two items down from where I was in the article I was reading was this:

78. Be Grateful — So you don’t live in a mansion and drive a fancy sports car. It’s easy to get caught up in lamenting the things that you don’t have. Take a moment to reflect on all the things you do have. You might find that you are richer than you thought. Focus on these things that you can be grateful for each day.

I kind of thought it was funny, I hadn’t read ahead or anything and I didn’t consciously know that that was there, but it’s almost exactly what I told him literally seconds earlier.

Things like this happen to me all the time and it makes me think a lot about things I learned in all my psychology classes in college and how they can cross with philosophical ideas. In psychology there is this concept of “priming” that suggests that when you are doing things, your brain cues up other things that are related. When you think about something or someone says something, not only does your brain react to what you just took in, but it also cues up ideas and concepts that are close to it. It can also happen when you unconsciously take in input. Your brain might cue it up or make that information available to you before you even know you took it in.

So in actuality, what probably happened is that my eyes saw some of that text without me consciously knowing it and it primed the idea for me. But what gets me is that even though this is what happened from a scientific point of view, philosophically, why did it happen at that particular moment? The moment when I was talking to my friend about something related to what I was about to read. How is it that just seconds before I got to read that part of the article, a logical place came up in the conversation for me to say practically the same thing that I, at least not consciously, had no idea that I was about to read?

Sometimes, I wish that we lived in a world where we could just say what we were thinking. Like all of those times when you’re bitching about something someone else is doing or saying and you come up with all of these really blunt (but great) things to say, but never actually say them. Yeah, I wish it were socially acceptable to let it all out. We’re too afraid of hurting people’s feelings these days. If I screw something up or say something dumb, I want to know about it. I hate how people just try to be courteous in these situations. I’m a big boy, I won’t be offended, but I will appreciate your honesty and it will definitely cause me to think more next time.

For example, yesterday I received an email from a co-worker asking me a question. I replied and then a few hours later they wrote back with a second question, the answer to which they could have easily figured out on their own just by paying attention to what was going on around them. I wrote back with a nice response and even gave him more information than he asked for because it only took me a second to get it and would have saved him five to ten minutes of work on his end. A little while later he replied to an old email I sent over a month ago asking the same question again, making it completely obvious that he didn’t even see my last email. Now really in the general scheme of life it’s such a little thing that I shouldn’t even be bothered by, but come on! Try a little! I really wanted to hit reply, attach my original response with the answer, and say “Please see the attached reply to your email with the same question that was sent yesterday, jackass. Stop wasting my time by asking me the same question twice because you’re too lazy to read through your entire inbox to see that I already answered you and I did it in a very timely fashion.” Of course, that response would more than likely get me fired and is completely socially unacceptable. But why? Someone’s feelings might get hurt? Oh boo hoo! Our country is too afraid of people getting offended and upset. Grow up and stop taking everything personally. We all make mistakes and we should be called on them so that we can learn from them and not make them again.

It’s like how today with kids in school teachers can’t do or say anything without fear of parents flipping out. We baby our kids too much these days. I know that when I was growing up it definitely wasn’t this bad, but now we’re just raising bratty, whiney kids who won’t be able to handle the real world at all.

Sometimes, I think that honesty needs to be given a higher priority. Maybe my example above was being more rude and abrasive than honest, but at least being able say something along the lines of “I already answered this for you, please check through you inbox to find it” would be nice to be able to say without people thinking you’re an asshole.

As I was typing this, Against Me!’s Piss and Vinegar came on. It was complete song karma, the lyrics are exactly how I’m feeling at this moment…

I’ve heard the hype about your band, Ive seen your video playing on the TV. Publicity photos in magazines, no none of it makes me feel anything. I would be lying to you if I did not say something that would make me feel like a politician. A middle of the road opinion that no one finds offensive or challenging. I’m not interested. The stage is not a pedestal. I don’t think you’re bad people I just think that your aesthetic is horrible. Please treat me with the same respect and candor. I would appreciate the honesty. A little less professional, a little more upfront and confrontational.

Just say what you’re thinking.
Say what you’re really thinking.

Last night, we got through three movies, which hasn’t happened in a while. Fido was awesome. Imagine The Sandlot if it were a zombie movie…Better yet, imagine crossing Stand By Me with Jurassic Park and replacing the dinosaurs with zombies. The idea of the movie could easily be seen as a follow up to Shaun of the Dead…even though it took place in the 50s. The movie takes place following a huge zombie war that is ended when one man starts a company that helps to return normalcy to peoples’ lives. They fence in the populated areas to keep the zombies out and develop collars that the zombies can wear that will not only curb their thirst for flesh, but also make them domesticated. Because of radiation, all deceased rise to become zombies. The only way to stop this is to decapitate all dead bodies and bury the head in a separate coffin. Or, the deceased can come back as a zombie and be put to work. Only 10% of people end up having funerals, the rest become zombies.

Now for the crappy one…I, Zombie. I had high hopes for this movie. It had been on my list of horror movies to see for a while and I figured that since it was made by Fangoria it would be half decent. No. It was boring as hell. Homeboy decides to try to help some girl that he finds in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere only to find that she is a zombie and wants his flesh. After he gets bit, the rest of the movie chronicles his slow deterioration as the zombigitis spreads throughout him. The entire time he is still alive, so he is not technically a zombie yet, but he finds that he can’t go more than a few days without eating flesh. The movie is filled with semi-pointless flashbacks and dreams that really just confuse you half the time…or maybe I was just confused because I kept falling asleep. There are two masturbation scenes that are just a little more than you bargained for. While you don’t see his wang, you do see his upper body and face as his hand strokes up and down. Leading up to the first scene, you kind of think it might be going there, but you are still shocked to find that it actually does go there. The second time provides one of the only bits of amusement throughout the movie, though I could have done without it, when his body has deteriorated so much that he literally masturbates his wang off. But the makers of this movie felt it completely necessary for him to actually hold the wang up in front of the camera afterwards.

I should also mention that I got emotionally bitch slapped by a fortune cookie earlier in the night. The fortune was “no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

I say this from time to time and usually there’s at least one person who doesn’t get it, but I don’t really regret anything that I’ve done in my life. It’s cliche, but I really only regret things that I didn’t do.

Everything that I’ve done, I’ve done for a reason. Maybe the reason wasn’t very good or it was just a bad idea in general and ended terribly, but I did what I did for a reason. If the reason was good enough at the time, why should it not be good enough now? I didn’t have the benefit of hindsight at the time and just because I know how it ended up now doesn’t mean that I should regret it.

Even the things that didn’t turn out so well, I would do them again rather than living wondering how they would have turned out. It’s easy to not do something, but actually doing something that you’re unsure of takes guts sometimes. In the end, no matter what happens, you can live with knowing that you know how it turned out and that you had the balls to go through with it.

I hate the idea of not doing something because there’s a chance that something bad can happen. (I’m not looking to do something stupid that will result in me dying or someone else dying so those situations are exempt from this). Things can always go south, with or without your intervention, but if something feels like some good might come from it, I go for it. Yes, things might get complicated, but that happens and I think that it’s worth it for a shot to see the good.

And I say this with a history of making many decisions that completely backfired and blew up in my face. But many of those decisions were made after a lot of thought about them. Had I not gone through with them, I would still be wondering to this day how they would have turned out. Some of the bigger ones would have eaten me up inside and drove me nuts.

So my advice to anyone who wants it is that if you are unsure about something, go for it. If you think that something good/wonderful/amazing/awesome could come from it don’t waste that opportunity. If it blows up in your face, deal with it then (though, maybe having a general plan of how you would handle this situation isn’t a bad idea). And don’t just half ass it, really go for it. Your decision could turn out to completely change your life…for the better.