I didn’t write anything yesterday. Thinking all the way back to 24 hours ago I can’t even remember exactly what it is that distracted me. I know I played some poker but I only usually play one or two games. I also tried to start watching an opera.
What am I turning into? I’m reading Plato and watching opera for fun and the reasons why aren’t entirely clear. There are two distinct possibilities. By the way, I love distilling things down to two or three possibilities. It makes everything… uh… I’m not sure what it does to ‘everything’. I like doing it anyway. But, those two possibilities are;
Possibility 1. Opera is awesome and I’m just getting started understanding it. Opera has just gotten a bad rap this whole time because of the unfortunate coincidence that its core demographic is The Wealthy. When your core demo is The Wealthy it, like everything else in the world, is a mixed bag. On the one hand, you can get real conceptual and high minded and people will think better of themselves for understanding it because they desperately want to look “better” than the other Wealthy folk. On the other hand, you basically guarantee that only the most hoity-toity of regular people will ever watch it because if there is one thing all poor people have in common it is that they aren’t exactly big fans of The Wealthy and they have a belief that The Wealthy like stupid things. How many times have you heard someone suggest that opera is stupid and or boring. Usually people say ‘boring’ if they aren’t assholes about it. How many of those people have really tried to watch an opera.
There is an important distinction here about what “watching” means. To me, most people, when they are watching something new to them, lean heavily towards any preconceived notions they had going in whenever they start to form an opinion. If you go to a movie you think will suck then odds are that, at least for you, it will suck. I’m not saying that your preconceived notions are always wrong and that you’re an idiot, I’m just saying that opinions you might have before you even experience the thing you are judging typically have a very low chance of being accurate. My strategy has always been to make predictions on the quality of a thing and then experience that thing to see if I was right or not. The key difference here is that I would actually much rather be wrong if it meant that the movie, or whatever, is good.
I think I’ve said before that I pride myself on being very unbiased about things. objectivity is a surprisingly powerful and important skill. If you can be objective in life it can lead to a whole host of new realizations and understandings. Honestly, objectivity is probably up there on the Mount Rushmore of mental skills, along with Empathy, and…
I sat there for like 20 minutes, debating in my head about what the other two skills on Mount Rushmore would be and I couldn’t come to a definitive answer. There was no hesitation in putting Objectivity and Empathy up there but what would the other two be? Honesty? Is that a mental skill? Isn’t honesty kind of the same thing as objectivity, when you really think about it? Aren’t things like Kindness or Calmness simply inevitable outcomes of being Objective and Empathetic? Does Understanding count as it’s own thing and even if it does it might be too much based on something like intelligence. Is intelligence something that you can change or are you really just changing how much you understand something? Also, does Understanding actually just stem from Objectivity? I’ll have to ruminate on this more later but for now lets circle all the way back to the Opera.
Possibility 2. There is a second possible reason for my new interest in opera and Plato and all this ridiculous stuff. Maybe I’m just like an ant hill. That’s a strange connection to use in a simile but hear me out. I, like an anthill, reach out, on a constant and voracious pace, for sustenance. Anthills find a source of sustenance and attack it with vigor and a total lack of self control. Am I the same way but instead with art and story for the sustenance of my mind? Anything new and interesting is latched onto by my mind and consumed at an alarming rate. I have already watched every TV show ever, it feels like. I have consumed the mediums of books, television, movies, anime, sports, video games and esports. I’ve listened attentively to music of all genres from Gregorian Chant to Saint Seans, from the Ink Spots to Tupac, from Bing Crosby to the Beatles to Led Zeppelin. Now, I’m not saying that I have completely finished exploring any of those mediums. Obviously, it is completely impossible for any human being to live long enough to actually read all books, or listen to all music, or watch all sports. My mind focuses on that deep exploration but at the same time it is craving the discovery of new lands to explore. I don’t finish with one land before I inevitably and involuntarily move on to the opening exploration and discovery of new lands. The pace of knowledge intake is much faster with an entirely new land and my brain happens to like fast pace learning.
What all of that fancy metaphor boils down to is that Opera, like every other genre of entertainment, is inevitably going to be explored by me. I’m sure there is some other medium or genre that I will dive into after opera because, well, I have zero self control on these things. I’m into opera now because it’s new to me and is also full of rich history and thousands of years of content to sift through. Eventually, I might come to the conclusion that operas, aside from a select few, is mostly pretty boring and or hoity-toity.
I guess I’ll change the title of this from a Daily Journal to something else. Usually these daily journals are pretty random and eclectic but if I happen to focus entirely on one subject maybe I should change it to a different sort of post. I’m a lazy guy so if I can change the title and have it work without having to do any big edits then I will. Maybe I should give each daily journal a subtitle so that I can get the best of both worlds.
The Mind of Joshypoo 