Getting old and staying young

I've completely forgotten all the reasons I gave for not going out dancing every weekend (yes, this may just be the afterglow, but so what if it is?)

DJ -- house, trance, d'n'b (drum and bass) -- these are instrumental styles of music built on recorded bits of music -- a rhythm, an instrument noise, played and layered on top of each other, to create (as one sub-genre is named,) a trance-like state. A good DJ doesn't so much perform, as creates a space where dancers can cut loose, and then pokes and prods that space, through shifts in dynamics and sounds, to raise the crowd into a completely different place. After a whole night of this, the sheer sense of community, of having danced myself silly for four or six or eight hours, of having poured sweat with these other people, creates a sense of community among the dancers who remain as the party wears on. Everybody is your friend. The whole world is a beautiful place. Music is enough.

There's something wonderful about really dancing with abandon. For a cerebral fella like myself, who thinks everything to death and then some, to do something so physical is a return to my senses, to my body, like exercise or yoga, it re-balances me. This, of course, is quite healthy. I'm glad I went: I almost didn't. I've had a few other nights recently where I've thought, "Hey, I should go dancing," and then thought, "Oh, it'll be so crowded," or "I never make new friends when I go dancing anyway; why should I bother?" or some other excuse, but the fact is, once I'm actually out there dancing, if I'm actually there just to dance, the rest of the world backs off pretty quick. As soon as my heart-rate goes up, really.

As we get older, it seems many/most of us become less inclined to go out and jump into some new experience. Sure, sometimes those things are uncomfortable. . . but are they actually uncomfortable, or just unfamiliar?

Young people accuse old people of being too conservative, of never trying new things, of thinking too readily in the set forms. At what age, at what point, do our minds close, and is that a natural/almost inevitable part of growing old, or is it a choice we each make? I don't think it happens at one clear watershed moment -- or some people would be sharp enough, and sensitive enough, to realise, "this is the point where I choose to continue learning new things, or choose to stay in my groove until it becomes a rut", and choose new, adventurous paths. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote, "Cowards die many times before their deaths" -- each time he chooses the easy way instead of the path of right, or the path of greatness. Might growing old be like that too? Is it those thousand little deaths, those thousand little "no"'s piled up on top of each other, until leaning into the familiar and shunning the unknown/uncomfortable becomes part of our nature? Is there anything wrong with that, or is that another (negative) way of describing the natural process of putting down roots?

On the other hand, part of it is our responsibilities. It's harder to go out and dance all night if one is committed to a 10am Men's breakfast, or church attendance, or family Saturdays. As your life gets more involved, more rooted, one must make cancellations, if one would do something spontaneous. And let's be honest -- some people go have adventures because their friends are, rather than because of any open-mindedness on their own part.

Might it be that we forget to break routine, that it simply stops occurring to us?

I don't know. Anyway, I've been thinking about what it means to grow up, the difference between growing up and growing old, and such things, lately, as I've met people who have told me I'm young-hearted, and other variations on that theme. It seems that usually when I'm called young-hearted, it's closely connected with my willingness to try new things, or to try and understand things on their own terms, rather than trying to force my own filters of understanding on them. Among the people I've spoken with, there seems to be some kind of implicit assumption that one of the divisions between youth and age is some kind of . . . I hate to say shutting of the mind, so let's say some kind of entrenchment in ones' own ways. Of course, this entrenchment can be caused by a lot of different things -- I think often it's dictated by the requirements of one's commitments -- the schedule required by work, by family, etc., that leads people to becoming "responsible adults". Sometimes the main determiner is sheer physical health, or budget -- some people stop drinking heavily simply because their bodies start taking three days to recover from one night on the town, or because they need to make their car payments.

I'd be interested to hear what some of you (my lovely readers) think about this. What do YOU think is the difference between growing up and growing old, and, especially, what changes inside a person when they become an "adult" -- is it something external, or internal, or a combination, or is it another of those frustrating things that's totally different for every person alive? (Probably, eh?)

(For a really beautiful insight on growing up, watch the movie "Finding Neverland", one of the most touching, tender movies about growing up and staying young I've seen. It's so compassionate toward its characters, the movie loves its characters, which makes YOU love them, too. It's really wonderful.)

By the way: here are some of the movies I've seen that have made me love or care about their characters recently. They also double as some of my favourite movies of the last five years. (Go figure.) In my world, if you don't have compassion, why are you writing a screenplay, book, play, etc.?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- the truest look at how people love each other, and hurt the ones they love the most, I've seen. Might be the wisest love story ever to come out of Hollywood.
Million Dollar Baby
Finding Neverland
Leaving Las Vegas (so so sad, but also so respectful of both main characters.)

Going back a bit, you just gotta see Casablanca. Really.


k. love you all

later

rob


(addendum:) I read a few comments on this blog, and I want to add. . . how terribly judgemental I sound here! I've thought again about what I said there, about those thousand little deaths, the thousand little no's -- there is much more than that. Maybe there's a difference between closing one's mind, and simply choosing to focus one's mind in a chosen direction. There must be. Some people choose "no" -- they choose to stay in a rut, rather than working to improve their lives. However, I think some people also simply commit to the choices they've already made, and by doing that, they open up new channels that can't be opened if you don't commit to them.

For example: marriage. If looked at one way, it's a way of saying "no" to every other potential mate in the world. How terribly narrow-minded! Why would anyone ever do that? Yet in another way, it's a way of saying "Yes!" to a future with a single person. The options and possiblities that can open up when one commits to that kind of future, are amazing, and beautiful, and praiseworthy. So maybe, a person isn't so much saying "no" to some kinds of new experiences, as saying "yes" to deepening and committing to another kind of experience. That's another kind of growing old/growing up, but it's good, as long as one doesn't start insisting others follow the same path, and judging others who choose a different way (that's where crotchety old men/women come from. . . maybe). Some people choose a path, and grow. Some people choose a path, and grow old. Maybe you don't really grow OLD until you've stopped growing on the path you've chosen. . . and I bet you start growing old much faster if you start regretting that chosen path, but do nothing to change your outlook.

There. Is that a more even-handed, less "young-and-single"-centric view of growing old?

my most asinine post yet. (don't worry: the end is better than the beginning)

ok, dont bother watching, but hit play on this clip when you start reading this post: that way, you'll be listening to good music (well, good by MY measuring stick) while you read. More about the band at the end of the post. Push play, and then move down. Dont watch (unless you really, really want to). Just move on and read with music playing.

Frederica, by Do Make Say Think



I think I'm stealing somebodys wireless, but the fact remains, I have internet at home today. (Goodbye free time. Sigh)

The upshot of my loss of free time is that I can show you some of the pictures I've been taking.

I'm doing well -- even looking well.

Compare.

Here's me giving the toast at my brother's wedding, July 2005. One of my girlfriends* looked at this picture and her first impression was "Wow. You're fat in this picture." Not long after that, she went away. Banished for life from the glorious land of Roboseyo.

(* now ex)




This next picture was me in September 2006, I think.



Work stress and things, yah yah yah. (In Korea, instead of saying "blah blah blah", Koreans say "shalah shalah shalah" - apparently THEY're the ones who put the Shalah in the Shamalama-ding-dong! (you may come over and shake their hands if you like; I still don't know who put the bop in the bop shabop shabop, but it may also have been Koreans, because bap means "rice" here, and Koreans put bap in almost everything.) Anyway, since starting my new job, I've been eating better, because my eating habits have been more intentional -- rather than eating a comfort food at the end of a tiring day, and vegging out, my new schedule helps me feel productive, so that I'm making intentional choices toward better health, rather than just choices that help me feel better (as a reaction to stress/exhaustion/boredom). I've been walking more, doing yoga more, eating fewer snacks between meals, and making healthier food choices. See the next picture: that's how I looked three weeks ago. (I also weighed myself: I'm lighter, too.) You may think I'm just sucking in better, but I assure you, I still havent learned how to suck in my forehead.



Now that I've started doing Yoga every day, you may notice a slight change, even from three weeks ago, to these pictures I took of myself this morning.






It's amazing what healthier lifestyles can do for us.

Enough self-congratulation, then. I have to admit some details of the last few paragraphs and pictures were slightly exaggerated or fictionalized; I haven't actually started doing yoga daily, for example.

Yesterday night, after my friend went home, I was wandering around Jongno, the party district, at about midnight, stone-cold sober, watching drunk people walk around and have fun, but not feeling like drinking myself. Then, this blonde fellow came up to the street food stand where I was eating (I was also eating street food), and started a chat. He was a Polish/German tourist named Raphael, who was on a one night layover between Australia and Germany, and he wanted to catch a sniff of Korean culture in the ten hours he had in Seoul. Little did he know he ran into exactly the right person. Anyone who's come out to Seoul to see me (that's two: Dad, and Mom, for all you keeping score) knows how much I love to give a tour, so I took him to eat one of the most traditional dishes (barbeque pork with soju, strange-tasting Korean liquor) (soju and samgyupsal is about eighty percent guaranteed to be the food and drink you'll have if you go out in a group with more than five Koreans -- it's like Pizza Hut, Earl's, White Spot, and Red Robin's all combined, and cheaper, in Korea -- the safe, inexpensive, inoffensive choice that nobody will disagree with, that eventually becomes the default "can't think of anywhere else to go" choice.)

So we had that, and it was fun, and I talked about Korea's culture and history a bit, and he talked about his desire to experience new cultures, and I talked about the odd sensation of being a white, visible minority in Korea, the unique solitude born of being in an ocean of people speaking a language one doesn't understand, etc.. Anyway, it was great meeting another world traveller, another culture-chaser. Much more interesting and edifying than getting half-hammed and sweaty in a dance club, just like a hundred other nights. This guy was really cool and open-minded, and if I'm ever in Germany, I'll definitely look him up, and he'll return the tour, and show me around his town.

These two sculptures were right next to each other in the park outside Seoul's city hall. I won't go into detail, but I think the symbolism is overt enough that I don't need to.



Konglish persists in Korea. Try and guess what this shirt means.



Once I saw a t-shirt whose caption actually was:

Ill gosdfsdfsdfsdf
jlkjlkjlkljsdkljfsf
ghdfhghg

It was awesome.

I want to be the one who writes the nonsense captions for Engrish t-shirts. I want to make up intentionally nonsensical phrases that seem to have just enough intention behind them to make people shake their heads and say "what are they ACTUALLY trying to say?" because the best ones ARE trying to say something, but get it wrong. I also want to invent captions for shirts where the main fun is trying to find letters that look cool together.

What do YOU think is the coolest word just to look at? My nomination is "ogopogo" -- so many circles (plus, it's really fun to say).

(The other best ones are the ones the people wear and have NO idea what it means. Innocent, sweet girls wearing t-shirts saying things like "Deep throat" (and a picture of a giraffe) -- this was a secretary at our school. She turned violent puce when I explained to her why she shouldn't wear that shirt to work again.



or "I like to get it on with guys who vote", or just ridiculous phrases, like the fifty-year old woman who walked by me with a shirt saying, "you be breakin' on me, I be breakin' on you")

Spring is here.


I like spring.

Here are some fantastic foods available for you in Korea: my old boss used to brag that Koreans used every part of the animal. Including. . .

The intestines. I found a special restaurant dedicated to eating cow intestines! You can also buy pig's feet here; it's said to be really good for your skin, so you'll see young women holding a big ugly pig's claw, trying to gnaw the meat off it (without getting grease on their cheeks), as if they were holding a corn dog that accidentally had bone in it. At the pig foot restaurants, sometimes you can also see the entire pigs face, set out to dry (for what purpose, I have no idea. Haven't gotten around to investigating yet. The day is so short, you know!)

Fortunately, if you don't like all that, you can buy a toothpaste that will kill your bad breath. . . and your calculus.



I have some packages that ought to be arriving soon. . . I hope they do. They seem a tad late. I hope I got my mailing address correct when I sent it out.

I went back to my old school the other day. That was nice -- to see the little ones. They were SO excited to see me! It was like being a Beatle. . . if the Beatles were twice as tall as ordinary humans. All the kids who knew me crowded around and tried to hold my hand, and they all tried to tell me -- something. Anything. Really, it wasn't important what, just that they were talking to their old teacher, of course. "Teacher! I have a loose tooth!" Basically means "I'm happy to see you again," in kid speak. I do miss those people. . . but not quite enough to go back. Caleb and Heather aren't there anyway.

As the blog goes, I'm thrilled that people have been commenting on my posts. It really helps me feel like people are reading it, and know what's going on. The site doesn't count how many people come and visit my blog (or at least, I don't know how to check), so if you leave your "footprints" as one person said, it helps me know that you've been here. And that warms my heart.

The problem is this: I now have a myspace page, a facebook page, and a blog, all of which have different people who check them, etc.. While facebook etc. is nice (if you want to put in the time) to create a "me" space more individualized than a mere e-mail address -- you can put links and lists of friends up and stuff -- it's starting to get harder to keep track again; instead of getting an e-mail from a friend which I can immediately open, read, and answer, I now get an e-mail from the facebook administrator, or the myspace administrator, saying "xxx sent you a message in Facebook" or "wrote on your wall" and I have to click a link and log on to read what I used to be able to read immediately. Just funny, is all. I'm not really complaining: I've heard from people I would never have gotten back in touch with otherwise -- including some grade school friends, and long-lost connections. That's neat, but I wish I didnt need five different logins and ids and passwords just to keep tabs -- it's sort of like having six different discount cards in your wallet, each for a different set of restaurants and shops, and having to sort through your wallet each time you make a purchase, for the right card to swipe. Time consuming.

I wish they could consolidate all those into a single swipe card (or just a thumb print), instead of making me wait in line for the person ahead of me who owns every discount card on the planet, and needs to know if she can save 18% by paying with her debit card, rather than just saving 15% by paying with her CocaCola Credit Card, along with the JLX Fast Food Alliance Membership Discount Card. Yug. So I want to consolidate all the "internet in touch" services, instead of having myspace, facebook, blogspot, and yahoo e-mail (as well as a g-mail address), I want to just have a "myblogface G-hoo mail account". With one password.

I just made a set of cds called my "joy of life trio" -- it's a collection of all the songs that put a big old smile on my face, whether from silly happiness, from some kind of reflective satisfied feeling, or from pure elevation. Music is so wonderful at taking us to another place. If you ask really nicely, I'll post the playlists, so you can find those songs and be cool like me. (And happy like me.)

One of my favourite bands for "elevation" these days is a Canadian instrumental group called "Do, Make, Say, Think". This is a live clip of one of their songs -- I highly, highly recommend their CDs "You, You're a History in Rust" and especially, "Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn" Give them a try, if you like music that takes you on a journey. Really, seriously. You've been listening to a live clip of a song from "Winter Hymn Country Hymn, Secret Hymn" called "Frederica" that nicely shows how they play with dynamics and composition -- the sound quality's a bit poor (live recording), but the music is great.


Anyway, that's a little of what's been keeping a grin on my grill lately.

And here's one more music clip -- this might be the most beautiful live performance I've seen in my life. If you aren't into modern music, don't bother with "Do, Make, Say, Think", but if you love things of beauty at all, watch this one.

Landslide (Stevie Nicks) -- dead link. sorry.



Peace.

-Rob

Ooh ooh ooh! More Cirque!

I found clips online!

This is one of my favourite ones. The toys are called diabolos -- they're a juggling toy, similar (in a lot of ways) to a yo-yo, but bigger, and cooler-looking when you're in Cirque du Soleil.




This is a clip of the contortionist in curtains I described earlier.




The skinship act--in my show, it was a little different than this, but amazing, absolutely amazing:

Survey of the day.

Put your answer in the comments. They'll show up soon.

Question:

To you, what would be the coolest "first thing people say when your name is mentioned" possible?

For example, when somebody says "Hey, do you know Rob?"
I wish people answered "Rob? That guy enjoys his life so much, it makes me enjoy my life more, too."

I don't know if that's ACTUALLY what people say, but I sure wish it were.

What about you? What do you wish people said at the mention of your name?

(My runner up: "Rob. Yeah, he sure is rich.")

Cirque Du Soleil

Let it be known that Cirque du Soleil (Circus of the Sun) is one of the most remarkable entertainment companies in the world. It's the high-art version of a Chinese Circus (known as the best in the world, which I saw in Shanghai) -- instead of just stunts and cool costumes, it's all tied together conceptually, with themes and choreography and characters and some (highly symbolic) storytelling.

Now I am a sucker for circuses -- just to be clear. I saw a Chinese-style circus in North Korea, and as soon as the lady with the plate balanced on a stick balanced on another stick held in her jaw, started swinging through the air on a trapeze without losing grip of the stick in her jaw, or upsetting the long stick balanced on that stick, or the tea set balanced on top of that stick, well, I was sold. Heck, I wasn't just sold, I was six years old again.

Cirque Du Soleil takes that kind of "golly gee whiz" amazing-ness and adds cool costuming and choreography -- there was a part where the protagonist (the girl in orange below), and singer, sits, and groups of clowns in white run around her banging on progressively larger drums, perfectly evoking a thunderstorm, like rainy day at home, alone with one's imagination, transitioning into the next jaw-dropping set of acrobatics. That kind of stuff didn't show up in a regular circus, until Cirque du Soleil came along. They'd just throw some clowns on stage to distract people while they set up the trapeze. I liked this better. The music was all original, and. . . just wow. (*Plus, Cirque is a Canadian company, from Montreal, so that gave me bragging rights for a good, oh, three minutes!*)

The whole thing began with a girl putting on her imagination, in the form of a clown's purple hat. You can see her here, about to put the hat on.

Then, all the normal rules for the world, and her (totally) mundane house/nuclear family arrangement, fly toward the ceiling, and it's imagination time! (With the music, the way her whole house started to float when the hat touched her head, was an immediate entry into the world of awe. Just like that, I was, once again, six years old.





I loved it so much I bought the DVD, just so I could post a few pictures and show you an inkling of what I saw.

Disclaimer: I don't own Cirque du Soleil or the rights to these images, I'm posting them for pure fun and information, not for profit; if you like what you see, go see the show. Seriously. Go see the show. Hopefully that endorsement will cancel out my mild copyright infringement.

There were a bunch of elements in the show that involved so much speed and motion that to show pictures wouldn't do them justice, so I'll just say that you're only seeing a very small bit of what I saw.









This was probably my favorite element of the show. A woman, a contortionist, hung from the ceiling, wrapped in these two long pieces of red silk. At first, when she appeared, she was invisible, covered by the red cloths, in an image that struck me as primal -- almost foetal -- and then she came out dressed in a leotard exactly the colour of the cloth and the light, so that she seemed nude (in keeping with the sense of birth, and primal life), stretched between the sky and the earth in these fantastic, bent-around, straining shapes, moving between gorgeous frozen-ness and surprising tumbles up and down the red lifeline. It made me think of the old greek myth about the three sisters who cut each person's thread when their life is through, her twists and bends, moving up and down that blood-red line, slowly working her way down to the end.








When she finished her stretches, I felt like her journey had completed; she wrapped the silk into a noose and hung by her neck, and the silk cloth lowered her closer to the ground, until one of the lead clowns (the one in purple, helping the girl put on her hat above) took her and carried her away. She never touched the floor, and if she had, I don't know what I would have done, after seeing her stretched between the top and bottom of the silk cloth for such a perfect seven minutes.

Umm, self-explanatory. Just look at these guys!

These guys were tossing each other through the air like cheerleaders, except more intricate, more dangerous, and more wow. (Can wow be an adjective? Just for today?)

Then, when I watched the show, they were in a line, passing the light ones from one pair to the next one, with the light ones doing a flip in the air before coming down, head-first into the next pair's hands. One of them nearly fell -- he came down at the wrong angle, or misjudged where to place his hands, or something, and we watched the three performers scramble to stop the small one from landing, head-first, on the ground. The strangest thing is, seeing that wrinkle, that one imperfection, made the rest of the performance more exciting -- it reminded everyone in the room that these were humans, normal humans made of meat and bone, and not just costumed creatures made of air, imagination and wonder. If that guy fell, he might have broken his neck, and some of those performers did their acts three storeys above the ground, some without harnesses.

Exactly because of that imperfection, the Shanghai Circus, of the ones I saw, was the least perfect, but also the most exciting -- there were several spots where someone almost lost balance (while blindfolded, walking around the outside of a hoop-shaped cage set inside a large, rotating ring) and fell two storeys. People in the crowd shrieked, and for the rest of that act, and also while they had eight motorcycles whirling around inside a steel-mesh globe, everybody felt this terrifying, thrilling, "if anything goes wrong" tension.

These ones spun around in hoops. It was cool. I like this shot, because it hints at all the action and motion their act contained. Most of the circus was so dynamic and fast, or slapstick funny (which doesn't translate into written descriptions) that pictures or words can't do any justice to it at all. Sorry -- I'm totally incapable of describing a lot of this circus to you, but I still want to share it, kind of like when a four-year-old hears a joke.

I said:

"Why did the chicken cross the playground?"

"To get to the other slide."

Four year old says:

"So, there was a playground, and the chicken came in, and he saw, like playground things, and then, um, he's a chicken, and he saw a slide, so he went down the slide. ACROSS THE PLAYGROUND!!! HAAHAHAHAHA!!"


This next series of pictures was the achingly slow counterpoint to the rest of the show. Beautifully slow. These two are balanced on each other, using nothing but the traction of their own skin on skin. There's a word -- it originated in Japan -- called "skinship" -- it's a word for the kind of relationship that forms through touch, as well as the act of touch, as used to build intimacy and closeness. In this act, when I saw it, I was blown away by how aware the two performers were of each other's bodies -- the intimate, total trust that comes of performing this way together. I think it would be impossible to perform this act together without dearly loving your performing partner, at least on some level. It was incredibly powerful to see such intimacy expressed in feats of balance, strength and flexibility. I'm still kinda speechless (but not TOO speechless).

This is a sequence -- you've seen acrobats go from the ground to balanced, hands on hands, but these two did it in slow motion. It was amazing to see.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

I discovered a great spaghetti restaurant this week. These days, a restaurant needs to have five our six great dishes I've tried, just to crack my top five favourite restaurants in the neighbourhood. Boy I love my life!

I'm also still writing regularly, making some friendships, and finding my way around. I'm studying Korean more than I was before (though still not as much as I should).

A girl just sat next to me in the PC room, and she smells EXACTLY like one of my ex-girlfriends. It's almost frightening how evocative smell can be -- brings back memories as quick as a brick.

The other day an old man, drunk and stinking of soju, and wearing the traditional, ancient Korean peasant field-worker's outfit, came up to me and my friend, shook my hand, tried all his English out, and then gave me an alcohol stinking hug. It was fantastic, in its own odd way. I've witnessed four car accidents since I moved to this neighbourhood, and about a dozen shouting matches.

I don't know why but, in keeping with my people-watching habit, for some reason, watching people argue always gives me a kick. I think it's a bemused curiousity with the way, here in the big city, there really is just no privacy anywhere, so anything that has to happen between two people, pretty much has to happen in public. Couples don't go to each other's houses, either because of cultural expectations about the appearance of virtue, or just because most young people live with their parents, and nobody wants dad coming out of the bedroom to interrupt the fight by saying "Could you two quit arguing out here? I'm balancing the checkbook!" And this means that, in dark corners of parks, on subway station steps, in coffee shop booths, you can spot people arguing, confronting each other, fighting outright, as well as getting together, falling in love, praying together, and making amends. Some of these, I've done myself.

I also, perversely, enjoy watching arguments between family members, in Korea and in Canada -- watching how people argue with the ones who know them best is just interesting to me, the way people go immediately into the usual modes (be that passive-aggressive, or sullen-silent, or loud and angry, or whatever), and especially, the way family members know exactly which buttons to push to get exactly the kind of visceral, emotional response that can only be stirred by a scratch on a raw nerve or a sensitive spot. (Saw a couple get into a fight on the sidewalk today; last week, saw two ancient hobos ready to take swings at each other. I have no idea why this is to fascinating to me, but I can't look away from the raw human-ness of it.)

Take care, all! Go see Cirque du Soleil if you get the chance. It'll be pricey, but worth it, so pony up, and be ready for a really wow afternoon!

love:

Roboseyo