Thursday, July 14, 2011

Stefan and Music (Stefan Uses MS Paint Rather Than Photoshop This Time, Just For Kicks)

The world of "mainstream" music and I have a very interesting relationship.

Once, not too long ago, my friend challenged me to play a game in which we would go through his infinite playlist of super mainstream songs. I lost this game. I was then informed that I would be able to redeem myself with the next song because it was "beyond mainstream", which apparently meant that children in third world countries knew about it.

Please view the following example, brought to you from Thirdworldia, followed by an example of my reaction, and then commence empathizing with my overwhelming sense of being surrounded by bullshit.



Allow me to elaborate. Little children in third world countries knowing about a song that came out of Non-Thirdworldia makes it very mainstream, not "beyond mainstream".

Listen, people. Literally every "mainstream" title I have in my music library came from me being stranded in my truck (or a room of people) without my ipod, and suddenly hearing something on the radio that produced this reaction:
As you can imagine, I would like more of this amazing and strange feeling, so I then set out on a quest to find the song and download it.
Then I proceed to listen to the song to the point where I hear it in my sleep, and mutter the lyrics during every waking hour, and bring it up in conversation. Sometimes I even ruin the song for my friends.
But...that only happened like once.

But yes. A very strange relationship indeed.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

High School is, Indeed, a Lower Plane of Existence

Sometimes I feel like one's first day of college and/or enacting one's after-high-school plans for life is like some sort of crossing over into a higher plane of existence.



By that I mean that when one hears about high school issues after said crossing over, one views them with a sort of sardonic apathy.

When I was in high school, the classes directly above and below my class were ridiculously close to each other. It is because of this that I still have a lot of friends who are still in high school. I made friends with their friends, and of course those friends wanted me to meet their friends. So now here I am, a sophomore in college who has friends who are sophomores in high school (I prefer to refrain from using emoticons in my blogs, however there is only one way to put this, and that is "-_-").

My friends who are still in high school often talk shit about my other friends who are in high school, because I am friends with people in the Theatre department, and at Hays High, Theatre students don't fucking leave.

I don't know how the Theatre department was at your high school, but at mine, we were all best friends on the surface, but really there were cliques within our clique, and not only were all the cliques out to take each other down, the people within these infraclique cliques were always either plotting to stab each other in the back or fuck each other.

This system has persisted after my graduation, and as such, I am often confronted with my friends talking shit about my other friends when I happen to be hanging around the friends that have yet to cross over the rift.

I will now provide an example of this experience from both perspectives, since I have lived both.


High School perspective:
My perspective:

I'm sure that most everyone who's graduated high school understands this. Hell, I even know people in high school who have something of a grasp on this.

My crossing of the Great Educational Rift (or GER, as it will now be referred to) was indeed a welcome event.

Sometimes, however, I feel myself relapsing.