Skydiving 101

Everyone has heard that the things we want are often precisely the things we shouldn't have.

It's still interesting to listen to because no-one believes it. Take your dream job, dream home, dream car, and tell yourself that obtaining it will be bad for you. 

Don't think so? Me neither. That's why I'm still chasing a philosophy degree and a career in the navy. 

Why don't I think that's a bad idea? 

Because sticking with a plan is the only surefire way to really understand the magnitude of that plan's stupidity. 

Besides, in most cases your dream turns out more disappointing than harmful. 

In other words, it's not always such a bad thing that what you want is bad for you, as long as it doesn't take your whole life to figure out you were chasing the wrong dream. If it only takes a decade or so all the better. 

The only real problem with being a human is knowing that something is bad for you and wanting it anyway. Convincing ourselves to want a person or a thing even after it breaks down most of who we are is a talent unique to our species. We don't just follow a passion instinctively, we can dedicate a good deal of higher cognitive processes to explaining away a bad relationship or addiction. 

And every single person has plenty of desires they know not to follow and follow anyway. That's the failing of humanity at its most simple. In the end I don't imagine its half as much a problem to end up chasing the wrong dream than it is to know you're chasing the wrong dream and to stick with it because it's too late to change anything. 

When you go skydiving you only allow yourself two tries if something goes wrong. If you can't cut a tangled chute in you move on. You force yourself to get a new plan because you don't have time to try something that's failed already. If your dreams are on the timescale of 20 or 30 years, your life is at least as short as a skydiving jump relatively speaking. So the way I figure, you can have big dreams, but you need to know when they're not going to help you hit the ground softly. 

In the meantime I'm keeping my plans big and short term. 

Happy landings to all of you!

When in Rome

Due Santi is just outside Rome near the Pope's summer residence. People in the right circles all across America know the area well, despite its relative obscurity even in Italy.

Almost all of my classmates get the opportunity to spend a semester there, studying.

Most students who come to UD chose it in no small part for the chance to go to Rome. When I came I didn't understand the draw.

I very much like where I live, and I never really imagined wanting to leave. I thought going to Rome would be a strange chance to broaden my understanding of the world.

I hate that phrase now; it implies that the only way your worldview can change is by expanding, as if you could have a firm foundation for grasping things you've never thought to try to understand. Most life changing experiences don't expand your horizons; they show you that you've been looking in the wrong direction your whole life.

It's common for writers to say that they couldn't do a topic justice in so short a space, and that certainly applies to everything I'm about to say.

The idea of studying abroad seems very entitled, like someone's lifestyle is just another culture you go into debt to immerse yourself in. There's really no avoiding that point, but then again, just going to college implies a degree of privilege most of the world would envy.

But despite its elitism, or perhaps even, because of it, studying in Rome is trans-formative.

When you go to a place like Rome, you don't see the architecture or the paintings or the language. they become a fact of life, something that you miss when you get back stateside.

This argument, perhaps is the strangest way to think about studying abroad. You don't do it to learn while you're there, you do it to see what you were never learning when you come back home. Your mind is pivoted and you spend the rest of your time studying trying to fill the empty space.

One of the things you want to be able to say after spending an excessive amount of time, energy, and money on college is that it affected you in a way you could not have foreseen when you started; it wouldn't even have been possible for you to formulate the thoughts you now use on a day to day basis.

If that transition seems unrealistic then you're probably just as excited as I am to leave the states for a month or two.

Why Art isn't Terrible

Modern Art!

If you've lived a life anything like mine, I'm sure you've found plenty of artwork that most people don't appreciate.

As a kid I saw a Jackson Pollock painting for the first time and decided I was doing everything wrong. If he could make millions on such paintings what was I doing in school?

I still haven't answered that question but I have several points that make me appreciate the artwork of the last 2 centuries.

First, I've realized how much work people still put into learning styles they never practice. This is kind of a given point, but needs to be stated for those out there who think artists don't study to produce an original work.

More importantly I've learned that artwork isn't supposed to transport you away from your reality.

Looking at a great landscape is a great place to start illustrating this point. When we look at many paintings of classical scenes or the natural world we often feel like we are brought out of our day to day life and into something new, only to return when we move on.

With this attitude its easy to be dismissive of the realism of more recent artists. Who can feel transported away by a haphazard painting of homeless workers put together without any traditional perspective or by the cubist figures of guernica?

The problem isn't the painting its our attitude. Art doesn't have to be trans-formative; it can be informative as well. Most often the painter intends his work to be both. Take guernica, for example. A horrific event is captured there in a style that is not at all intended to draw us out into some transcendent reality. It's meant to inform our reality with a snapshot of a catastrophe.

My favorite example illustrating this point is Catch 22, by Joseph Heller. At no point while reading the book is the reader drawn into some fantastic world that transforms the one he lives in, but all throughout the work we see the nonsense of war portrayed nonsensically, as it should be.

All this is to serve as a warning: there is plenty of bad artwork, but few eyes keen enough to judge artwork fairly.

Why the Dude doesn't surf

So Halloween costume story time!

I decided to wear a beach bum costume because I have the hair and the shirts and the trunks. One of my first conversations someone told me, "Just tell people you're the Dude" (Big Lebowski).

No this is not about my life, it's an awkward segue into talking about El Duderino, since brevity is not my thing.

So when I first watched the Big Lebowski, I couldn't help but wonder, why does he not surf? He is within reach of living the California dream life, with a little apartment and no real need or motivation for income.

Full confession, the movie really went over my head. I have no idea why anything that happened happened and I also haven't seen it in a long time.

But still, over half the people I talked to today knew who the dude was. What can I say?

As long as we're over analyzing I daresay there is plenty of attraction to the possibility that we can just live. We don't need to work or worry about tomorrow.

Most of us find that possibility repulsive, not without reason. Most of us have plans for our lives that we would rightly feel ashamed to let slip away without a thought.

But the dude doesn't have that problem. He doesn't worry about plans for his life; he reacts. He is as simple a human being as one could imagine.

So I think that's why the movie stuck with bowling. Bowling is frowned upon by most people I know as anything other than an odd night out. Surfing is easy to romanticize, and easy to connect with the beauty of nature and humanity as that goes.

To be able to live like the dude, you have to let go of any thought about yourself, whether it's one that you have or one that you think someone else has about you, or one that someone else gives you about yourself. It's more than just not giving a Damn, it's leaving yourself out of your conception of the world.

Whether that thought process is healthy for most people, or anyone for that matter, is not a case I care to make at this point. All I can say for sure is that it's more fun to be the dude for Halloween than it is to be a beach bum.

What should I do with my Life?

So it can be hard not to think about the future.

I don't know how age changes this fact, but I do know that being young makes it easy to live your life with long term goals as pretty much the only thing you have in sight.

The main downside of that is that people have no idea what they should be planning on doing with their lives when they are making the plans about what they want to do with their lives.

Listen to the people that love their jobs. My dad is a great example. He works as a teacher at a local school, and loves the job most of the time, but my dad graduated as an Econ Major, got his masters and went into business.

He left that job after less than a year to raise our family, and I will always give my dad a lot of credit for being able to give up on his plans to do what was really important.

Nowadays we spend all of our childhood, adolescence, and most of our early adult life preparing for a job. Some of us may find ourselves where we want to be but most of us just have to make do with where we end up, and spending so many years working for a goal, whether it's to be a doctor or a PT or a lawyer, makes it so hard to give up and acknowledge that we may have wasted our time.

This is coming from a college student who is wasting his time, and none of this is to say that we shouldn't have plans. We just shouldn't overvalue them or build up our goal to where it will stop us from living a meaningful life outside our career.

A great irony of college life is that we're supposed to make plans for our career when we have the least possible idea of what we ought to do. Some of us realize that we made a gut decision and stuck with it and that's the only reason we're studying what we're studying or working where we're working, but few realize just how dangerous it is to overvalue your own ideas and dreams.

This reality check shouldn't destroy or even make us doubt our dreams; it should just remind us to keep our minds open to opportunities for relationships or experiences outside the course we've marked.

Goals of the Squadless

Hey everyone. Laptop broke but everything has been put back together.

In the meantime there's a post I've been meaning to write for a while and didn't get around to before I went offline. 

But I'm going to write that post some other time. 

In the spirit of Walden I'd like to submit my thoughts on living without technology for several weeks.

First off, I didn't. I had my phone and access to public computers. The big difference was that I didn't sit down with the sole intention of writing something.

So much of technology today is used to give us an audience. Many people you meet today are performers, people who choose to live their lives while being observed by other people.

We post small life events and take photographs of scenes we barely even thought to be a part of. We are never not aware of what someone else is thinking of us.

Is this bad? not necessarily, but this awareness puts undue pressure on our day to day existence.

Writing of the kind that I'm doing now is fun for many reasons, but one of the biggest motivations is that you are as much your own audience as your readers. You aren't presenting your life; you're expressing your mind. I find that to be a far more liberating enterprise, and while it's not as much fun to look at as pictures of a vacation to St. Petersburg, it's at least as enjoyable as looking at a picture of your friends at Starbucks.

In other words I'm glad my laptop is charging again.

Happy reading!

How James Bond Takes a Beating

Today I realized that over the next week I have three tests, a fair amount of grading, and a midterm project.

This is not a rant. 

My first reaction was, as you would expect, to think about how bad this week was going to be, how much work I was going to do and how uncertain the results would be. 

This is not a chin up motivational speech proposing optimism in the face of a dreary future. 

The second reaction I had to my realization surprised me. My brain relaxed and in as many words I thought, "This is going to hurt." 

Nothing mind blowing yet, but the more I thought about it, the more useful I realized an attitude of resignation to pain, whatever that pain may be, could be. 

First, it doesn't call for a denial of what is necessary. A positive attitude can keep you saying, "I think I can I think I can" right up past the moment you fail your midterm or lose your race or whatever. 

Second, an attitude of resignation doesn't require that one braces or over anticipates or overestimates a challenge. When we psych ourselves out or get pumped up we often pump up to the challenge and make it big enough to be worthy of our state. Then when the challenge hits we either shut down if it's bigger than expected or breeze through with all the energy we saved for it. 

Imagine you're on a long distance run. It starts to burn and you've spent the last thirty minutes mentally preparing yourself to beat the pain. But the pain is worse than you remember and it's augmented by the stress you have about it so you shut down and miss the time you were shooting for. 

If you got on your shoes and thought, "Whelp, this is going to suck," and went for your run, you aren't wasting energy stressing over the pain. You're just going with what you can. Then when the pain hits it doesn't surprise you and it's not blown out of proportion. At best you don't think at all, at worst you think, "Here goes nothing" and dig in with the mental energy you haven't expended denying or beating the challenge in your mind. 

If any of you have seen Casino Royale, there's one scene that illustrates the advantages of resignation to suffering quite well. LeChiffre walks in and sets the rope on Bond's shoulder. Bond knows his future is bleak but I could easily imagine a few thoughts going through his mind. He's not thinking about how he can't let LeChiffre get the password. That's his goal and if he realizes that's all he has to give up when he's in a ton of pain, odds are good he caves. But if he just thinks, "Holy S*** this is going suck" then he can start laughing and deal with what comes as best as he can. 

Resignation towards suffering looks like an ironic attitude: we're supposed to fight through the pain, not accept it. But if we look at incoming pain and think, "Here we go," were meeting suffering on its own terms. Irony takes energy away from pain and gives it back to us. Fighting through pain acknowledges its power and takes away our mental strength. 

And in the scene I mentioned before, irony gives Bond the upper hand. LeChiffre is supposed to be in charge; he's supposed to be beating bond to death, but with the right attitude Bond can just keep saying "Ouch" and laugh, while LeChiffre goes mad. 

Granted all this is coming from someone who's idea of pain is a long distance run or several hours of homework, not from someone dealing with a true loss. It's also coming from someone who is writing a blog post instead of dealing with the pressing issues causing the mental stress prompting the post. I won't delve into dealing with real suffering beyond the physical, but in my own life at least, an ironic attitude towards pain is the most reflective of reality. 

A good portion of our lives is spent in pain, and in the end we will never understand why we suffer or how best to suffer, and the worse the suffering the less we understand it. When pain is framed that way, there's no rational option but to resign ourselves to it. 

The Worst Type of Violence

A morbid thought occurred to me today: every act of cruelty we read about has at some point happened to someone.

There have existed humans capable of doing things to other people that we can't even imagine.

This isn't going to be a macabre expose on the nature of human cruelty, so stick with me.

You and I, the average person in the respect we're discussing, are not psychologically capable of most forms of violence towards another person. At the very least we would not be capable of being methodical about it.

So where does that leave the people that are? So often we simply designate people capable of horrific or intricate violence against another human being as a monster, someone we are incapable of understanding.

I'm not talking about the kind of person like Stalin or Mao or Hitler who orders mass genocide. It's chilling how easy it is to distance yourself from people to the point that mass murder can become easy. People like them aren't dealing with other people, they're dealing with numbers. I'm talking about the executioners.

Saying that such people are monsters is letting ourselves off the hook. Put one way, if we see a person who is good at something, like running, we let ourselves off easy if we just claim that that person is superhuman. Going the opposite direction, we let ourselves off easy if we simply call the executioner subhuman; we deny that we could ever become capable of what they do.

I know I started out saying that you and I are incapable of most forms of violence, and we are, right now. But we have to acknowledge the possibility that given terrible circumstances, we could degenerate into people we would barely recognize. Failure to do so leaves us unprepared in case disaster strikes.

The two following examples illustrate the point. The Stanford prison experiment took a group of college students, and using nothing more than a stimulated prison environment, they turned a group of boys into "wardens" who inflicted a tangible amount of psychological violence on the "inmates." I'm not going into details here but the premise still holds: it doesn't take much pressure to turn us into the people we fear.

The second example is another controlled experiment. In it a subject was introduced to a "participant" who was actually an actor, and told that the actor was going to answer questions. Wrong answers would be punished by a shock that went from harmless to fatal. Nearly every participant "killed" the actor with limited resistance to verbal coercion.

There are countless of more extreme examples from this century alone: the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the list doesn't end. If people capable of brutality inflicted on other humans in these conflicts were rare, violence would not happen on the scale it does. Every one of us risks being beaten into a weapon simply because we exist; we may rightly believe that we are at no risk of being tested in an extreme way, but if everyone did their best to understand their own limits as human beings, the world would be a much safer place.

Mass Misrepresentation

There's plenty of reasons to be terrified while watching the news. I lost focus months ago like an ostrich diving into the sand, but I still hear plenty. 

Serious world issues aside, one of the ideas that kept coming back to me is that today, we are accountable for everything we say. It doesn't matter how big your audience is or how important you are. If you ever become relevant, every piece of information about you is fair game. 

The internet is a dangerous place, especially for someone who records random thoughts on a daily basis. 

Does having this information help us? We can now see pieces of anyone's life from ten years ago. We can learn an incredible amount about people without ever knowing them. 

In many ways, we have access to people's lives that we have no right to. We see the most glamorous bits and pieces of people we will never know or care deeply about. This goes for politicians we claim to hate and celebrities we claim to love; it also holds whether or not they are presenting an image of themselves or whether someone else is spinning an image of them. 

We don't know the people we watch or read about. We can't love them or understand them as a person beyond a superficial level. We don't get to see their strengths and weaknesses in person. 

There are obvious objections. We may have a legitimate interest in a person's success or failure if that person is running for some sort of office. We may claim that how someone present themselves in public should give us an idea of who they are as a person. We may have followed someone's story for so long that we feel invested in their lives. 

We should absolutely be able to judge someone for a position based off their track record, but emphasizing who our celebrities or politicians are as people is a far more slippery slope. There is no way to unravel lifetime's worth of context less quotes and inappropriate statements from years or even weeks in the past to cut to the heart of who a person is. We have to get to know someone through human interaction to pass a true character judgement at a given moment. 

There are an impossible number of variables to quantify when it comes to understanding a human being. Even when we know someone for years they can still surprise or shock or disappoint us. Taking what we see presented to us about a person, even if what is presented is a person's own damning testimony or filthy slurs, and cutting a person to fit the description we design based off that presentation is dehumanizing. 

So what is the point of all this? We need information about our potential leaders, and a lack of media coverage, however convoluted the coverage may be, would be a recipe for disaster. I am not arguing that we should suspend our best judgement about who is fit for a job. I am making the case that the media makes its profits by framing and even tearing people's lives apart.

Our brains are designed to understand nuance and ambiguity in ourselves and others, and we can judge many aspects of a person without letting sensationalism and scandal drive us to deterministic conclusions about that person's character. 

Things Only People Who Brush Their Teeth Understand

Hey Everyone!

I made the most of my unintended one day hiatus, but I'm back at it again. 

So an idea that's been bouncing around my head for a while now is how little credit the survival mentality is given. Everyone wants to be excellent, but no-one wants to train unless they're in the right state of mind, or run unless they have the perfect workout; they don't want to take a class or try an activity or make a commitment until they're sure they can handle it. "They" includes me. 

But no-one starts out being good at an activity. They might have some talent, but that doesn't make anyone great at anything. This semester, for example, I haven't had any English classes or any courses at all that make me write regularly. I put this page together to force myself to keep writing every day, and every day I pick the best thing I can think to write about and run with it. 

We all want to produce great work every time we try something, but we can't be great at something without doing it day in and day out. Everyone has uninspired days where they don't have the energy to apply themselves to a task. 

In the end, being passionate about something is not a surefire way to become great. As soon as the excited state and eagerness goes, its easy to forget why you cared in the first place. 

I've heard a great analogy for maintaining a skill set: it's like brushing your teeth. You don't base your decision to brush your teeth on how you feel about brushing your teeth. You do it with a survival mentality, keeping the long term in mind; you are going to make it through the day with healthy teeth and make it through the year without a cavity. You don't even have short term goals; you just think about how little fun getting a tooth filled is and brush your teeth more carefully. 

The same thing goes for running or lifting or reading or whatever. Throw the best you can come up with together and get after it. Most of the time hard work beats meticulous planning, and when you're exhausted and out of ideas instinct is much more useful than deep thought. 

Thanks for reading and as always please share this blog. The posts will keep on coming. 

The Blue Bookmark

How do you view the Bible?

I'm kidding. Keep reading. That's just a really dangerous attention grabber. 

A bit over a week ago I was at the train station reading a book. A man carrying blue pamphlets came over and said, "Here, long as you're reading take a look at this." 

That's about as smooth as you can get when you're trying to talk to someone about Jesus. I've never met someone who felt comfortable talking about Jesus to strangers, and I've got to hand it to Jehovah's witness for sticking with such a thankless profession. 

I mean it; they must have some faith to get them through the day. Not enough faith to make me want to try their walk of life by any means, but enough to inspire me to write a blog post at midnight. 

That said, yesterday I posted a piece longer than many essays I've submitted, so Jehovah's witness isn't going to get too much out of me. 

There are two things to be said for them just based off of the pamphlet they gave me. First they didn't include a phone number. Second, the whole pamphlet was a list of reasons to read the Bible. So kudos for sticking with the program. All in all, it was one of the best put together opportunities for conversion I've been offered. 

The pamphlet is also a well sized bookmark once folded in half, although I've yet to use it in a Bible. I'm not exactly sure what the logistics of using a Jehovah's witness pamphlet to mark out scripture would be anyway. 

So thank you to the brave man walking the city with pamphlets of Biblical truth. I pray that you find the strength each day to keep on bearing the good news, or that you find a better job. Know that your work has ended my search for the place where I stopped reading when I closed my book. 

America's Challenge

Explaining the origins of this post boils down to the following: it's always a good thing to talk about America. Here we go!

You can't change anything without understanding what you are trying to change.

The founders of America knew they were trying to create something that was in many ways antithetical to traditional monarchies of the old world. And they did.

America is set to change by design. But now instead of understanding other governments to create a new one, we need to understand our own. Our government wasn't just designed to oppose monarchies, it was designed to oppose instability. Our government rose the same time half of Europe decided to lose its mind.

The constitution did not design a government with quick progress in mind, nor did it even intend for much direct input from the masses. It was designed at a time when the masses were the ones screaming for and often obtaining monarch's heads.

The design stuck. America has had one constitution for it's entire history, which is barely short of a miracle. England may brag about having the Magna Carta for three times as long but their common law has accrued into something two steps short of gibberish so don't let that get you down. The key point is that American government is a balance of progress and stability, with an emphasis on stability.

This discussion brings the hammer down on uninformed criticism of American government. For instance, there are often complaints that congress has too much power and Senators in particular need term limits. This criticism is valid but far too weak to accomplish anything. Congress was designed to be elitist, to keep the masses in check just as surely as it keeps the executive branch in check. It was designed to be out of executive and even public scrutiny to a large degree. Is this right for today? No. But it is how America is, and without understanding that we can't begin to change that.

Moving to less friendly territory, America is often shamed for having high violent crime rates. The first challenge issued regarding this problem is an attack on the second amendment, and that is a difficult position for anyone to assault. The second amendment is in the bill of rights, which is second in importance only to the constitution and the declaration of independence.

Moreover having a gun in your home has been a part of American culture from the start. At the time the bill of rights was published people had just come out of a war and had reasons to fear another. Americans had an insecure frontier and plenty of reasons to doubt their own safety even in rising cities across the east coast. The second amendment was entirely intended to preserve the right to bear whatever arms civilians could get their hands on to challenge the dangers of the frontier and enemies from overseas, regardless if those arms were smooth bore rifles or muzzle loading pea shooters.

To reiterate, this is not taking sides on an issue, just pointing out what people are trying to change. For decades so many people have underestimated the unambiguous strength of the second amendment, and forgotten that it was written in a time when citizens would have taken its protection for granted. I see so much legitimate frustration from people who rightly claim that we are getting nowhere on the issue. This is because the right to bear arms isn't just a detail in American Law. It is American.

I'd love to go on another tangent about socialism in America, but the last 8 years and even the last two months have given far more material than I can feel justified glossing over in a few sentences. For now suffice to say that just because we have a problem that another country has solved doesn't mean we have to or even that we can solve the problem the same way. We are limited and defined by our government, but we are also unique in our individualism in a way that the rest of the world has envied since our founding. Simple solutions to complex problems have a decent chance at failing period, but failing to acknowledge that a problem is complex will not make the solution any more probable to succeed.

And America isn't perfect. Being able to say that makes America great, and being able to change that makes America great. Most importantly, refusing to be beaten when we fail as a nation to resolve a problem like gun violence or unreasonable health care or systemic racism makes us great. And we make America.

I can't wait to write posts like this for a larger audience and spark some discussion, but for now, if you enjoyed any of the posts on this page please share this blog with anyone you care to. Thanks for reading!

Setting Dreams Down Gently

Going to college today you meet a ton of people who are studying what they're studying primarily to make money in the long run. I'm not writing to knock that; that said I'm sure I'll end up criticizing making education a means to money implicitly throughout this whole post.

Up until this semester I was a physics major. Then classes rolled around after summer and I realized just how much I didn't enjoy most things related to the subject. I'm good enough at this point in time to see the major through, but I have no wish to inflict that pain on my psyche.

More to the point I'm writing this post to avoid writing a lab formal. Either way, I have no regrets about dropping physics.

It's true that having a degree in physics impresses employers in some of the fastest growing and best paying fields around. But all that translates to for me is spending more time doing something I don't enjoy, after graduating with a degree in something I have only a superficial interest in.

Also, while it's possible to be bad at something you enjoy, it's very hard to be good at something you don't enjoy. Sticking with physics would limit my contribution to society because I would be looking to avoid work, not to do it.

Rumor has it that there are people that enjoy physics. Maybe I've even met a few, but it's clear that I'm not one of them.

I know I said I wasn't going to straight out attack doing a major for money, but some Majors are hard to defend. Has anyone really felt passionate about Sociology? And what even is Business?

Understand that this is now a philosophy major speaking, which is right up there with a classics degree in terms of practicality, even with my physics concentration tacked on. I've heard some people say it makes you look "unique, cultured, blah." The great thing about being a philosophy major is that the practicality doesn't matter. All that matters is that you're paying 10 grand a semester to ask hard questions and get few answers.

It's not improving my argumentation skills either.

But seriously, I've enjoyed philosophy from day 1. Breaking that down is more room than I care to take up, particularly towards the end of this post, but suffice to say that I want to spend time understanding how to live as opposed to being forced to live a certain way to make a passing grade.

In my case, sticking with physics could very well have decreased my value to myself and society in the long run, and while I can't speak for anyone else, there is a good deal of risk inherent in dedicating any part of your life to something you don't care about.

Poor Acting and Long Distance Running

Yesterday I watched a terrible movie. Two of my friends had been planning on watching a movie starring Nicholas Cage for some time, and I managed to get myself invited.

The  irony of watching Snake Eyes, which was the show we settled on, on the heels of writing a piece about how much I love movies and how good I am at enjoying them did little to balance out the loss of one hour of my Saturday evening. 

Beyond that irony, my friends managed to enjoy the show much more than I did, if only because their sole endeavor for the night was to poke fun at every possible aspect of the movie.  

This incident was more of a side note which, rather like Cage's performance, doesn't really match with anything that follows. 

So I'll just jump right in. This weekend I went for a run on my own for the first time in maybe a year. I bring this up to point out a skill set I take for granted. It's easy to assume that something we had mastered at one point will always be with us. In this case I've assumed ever since my senior year that I had better aerobic endurance than most athletes just because I was a solid cross country runner my junior and senior years of high school. 

I've done next to nothing to maintain my ability, but this lack of effort only shows when I run. Since I have avoided running since the end of my senior year of high school, the problem was solved, so to speak. 

It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that you're good at something just because you remember a time when you had a certain skill set nailed, but in the end giving ourselves extra credit for effort we haven't expended in months or years only builds unrealistic expectations. 

Today I put on a pair of worn out sneakers and went for a run. My stride rate was down, my shoulders didn't stay in a line, and most importantly, my lungs burned before I got to even three quarters of a pace I used to keep up for miles. But the feeling was amazing. Often when we abandon a skill set we don't just forget the details, we forget the whole reason we enjoyed doing a thing in the first place. 

I can only imagine that's how some people end up making the same facial expression into a camera for an hour at a time and get credited with acting.