Blog: Articles filed under philosophical ruminations

Well here we are, the end of an era. Battlestar Galactica is over, which has made a lot of people very angry for various reasons.

Spoilers ahead.

I‘m too young to have seen the original Battlestar Galactica when it was on television, and I never watched the reruns. I’m not into it. The “reimagined” series ignited my interest, however, and I’ve watched the show since its miniseries became the backdoor pilot for a new television series.

To this day, my favourite episode remains “Kobol’s Last Gleaming”, the first season finale. It represents the best aspects of Battlestar Galactica’s storytelling techniques: the high stakes conflict, the spiritual and ethical themes interwoven into the story, and of course, the effortless use of the episode’s score to enhance the most emotional moments of the episode. Tonight’s finale was cast in a very similar vein to the first season finale, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much.

The show has received massive amounts of criticism in the last half of this season. To be fair, the Writer’s Strike caused the last season to be split in half, placing much more tension on the mid-season premiere than the writers had originally intended. From there, it was a slippery slope into the lands of Exposition, Retconning, and Plot Device that left many fans confused and upset. And I’d have to agree—the last episodes of season four, for the most part, are among the most terrible episodes in Battlestar Galactica’s run.

To the creative team’s credit, the finale did tie up most of the loose ends. It left just enough loose ends to keep things interesting—although it’s strongly implied that a “God” exists, we don’t learn exactly who Head Six and Head Baltar are—angels from on high? More importantly, we’re left wondering about the exact nature of Kara Thrace. Allusions to Mormon mythology aside, I understand those—like my dad—who are dissatsified with the lack of closure for Kara. But I wonder if an answer is actually superior to the question? Speaking of answers, however, I enjoyed the answer to the opera house vision. They dealt with that very artfully, mixing prescience with Cylon projection.

The first hour of the finale was just, in the vernacular, “frakkin’ awesome”. It was full of head-spinning action, Cylon centurions on both sides, old-school Cylons, and Baltar had a gun! Cavil had some great last moments, including when they almost had a chance for a Cylon-Human-Cylon peace.

I will never forgive Galen, no matter what Tigh says. And I will never sympathize with Boomer or forgive her for her choices. She had a chance for redemption until she kidnapped Hera.

Baltar, on the other hand, was more interesting. Right to the end he served his own self-interest—I have no doubt that he chose to go on the rescue mission to show himself that he could be heroric, and to save himself from being the pet of that annoying cult of his. I know I would have done the same thing in his place. Yet Baltar and Caprica Six manage to reunite and understand their place in “God’s plan” (if such a God exists). I loved the moment when Head Six and Head Baltar appeared to both of them.

The second hour was much like that part in Lord of the Rings between the end of the book and the last page—useless conclusion, in other words. Yes, it’s important for closure. I didn’t enjoy the idea that they would “abandon technology”—but whatever, I suppose if Lee thinks it’s a good idea, it’s got to be a good idea—right?

Overall, however, Battlestar Galactica’s final episode redeemed the series for the problems with the episodes preceding it. We received resolution to most of the major storylines. And we got some sweet special effects and amazing action scenes.

For those of who are reading this and haven’t watched an entire episode of Battlestar Galactica, you may be wondering why I watched this show. You may not even like “that sci-fi stuff.” You might think it’s uninteresting, or you might be passionately opposed to such “juvenile” tastes. The key to understanding a fan’s passion for Battlestar Galactica is to understand that it is science fiction—it’s the type of science fiction you get in novels by masters of science fiction, as opposed to the adventure-based space opera you find on television (sorry Stargate).

Science fiction is all about exploring ourselves, as humans, and our responsibilities as a species and to the universe. Battlestar Galactica showed us that science fiction television shows can be set in space, have killer robots, yet be relevant to current events. I’m not going to launch into an extended diatribe about how it tackled “relevant issues”—you can read blog posts aplenty about that, sure. If you doubt it, however, just remember that the cast of Battlestar Galactica were at a panel at the United Nations. Over the course of its four-year run, the series took a look at difficult issues about humanity—a laundry list would not do it justice.

Sure, Battlestar Galactica couldn’t keep everyone happy. That’s to be expected. Yet it resonated with enough people that it generated great debate. Yes, Battlestar Galactica is one of the best television shows ever because it made people think—not just about plot lines and character arcs, but about what it means to be human, what it means to evolve, and to question the nature of our world and our beliefs. Many television shows strive for such a legacy—few achieve it.

I do not like hard candy. I‘ve been aware of this fact for a long time now, but it’s at the forefront of my mind after consuming Ricola cough drops for the past few days to assauge my sore throat.

Hard candy’s just not worth the effort. You have to tease the flavour out of it, sucking at it as the surface slowly melts away onto your tongue. And if you suck too vigorously, as I’m wont to do, you can sometimes swallow the candy. While the danger of choking is hopefully minimal, the experience is seldom pleasant. I was reminded of this fact today when my mouth unilaterally decided to swallow a cough drop.

This got me wondering, what if I did like hard candy? Which aspects of my personality would need to change in order to result in me liking hard candy instead of disliking it? I suspect that my preference is some sort of hard-coded anti-choking prejudice buried deep within my genome, or perhaps the irrational result of a quirky neuron flickering on and off within the recesses of my brain. In any event, the fact remains that my dislike of hard candy is a subconscious response rather than a conscious choice—I can choose to eat hard candy, but I can’t choose to like it. If I did like it, then, I would be a different person.

We define ourselves daily by countless arbitrary preferences, justifications of taste as opposed to morality or reason. These are essentially meaningless in the grand cosmic scheme.¹ On a personal level, however, these preferences are the nuances that shape us into individuals.

So I was very interested to consider, just for a few minutes, the ramifications of this totally arbitrary preference. We all love to entertain the major “what ifs” in our lives—what if we were more adventurous rather than cautious, what if we were less enthusiastic and more laid back, what if we had won that championship, etc. In comparison, the minor “what ifs” don’t seem so interesting. Yet they are just as much a part of who you are as those major attributes.

And to all you people out there who like your candy hard, I say this: you’re crazy. Soft candy is soooo much better. Fuzzy peaches for the win.

P.S. I tried using Google’s image search on the phrase “hard candy soft candy smackdown” to locate a suitably-hilarious cartoon of a Jolly Rancher fighting a Gummi Bear. Suffice it to say, the resulting photos were not what I had expected. It appears that very few people share my burning desire to see Jolly Ranchers and Gummi Bears go mano a mano.

• [ 1 ] My like or dislike of hard candy will not cause a land war in Asia, hopefully.

For the second time this year, anti-gay group Westboro Baptist Church is planning to come to Canada to stage a protest, and people want to put a stop to it.

Every time this sort of controversy comes up in the news, I have to stop and consider it carefully. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Section 2) guarantees us the following basic rights:

1. freedom of conscience and religion;
2. freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
3. freedom of peaceful assembly; and
4. freedom of association

At the same time, however, we also have legislation in place to protect people from hate-crimes and hate-speech. So the question is, do anti-gay groups like the Westboro Baptist Church violate this anti-hate legislation? And regardless of this first question, are we violating their rights to freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, and freedom of association? Freedom of peaceful assembly is a separate issue—whether or not this group is “peaceful” is subject to debate altogether, and I would probably say that they are not.

I like to pride myself in being open-minded enough to truly believe in free speech for everyone, even if I think they are idiots. Yes, I will fight for your right to say something, even if I disagree with what you want to say. Yet when we enter controversial territory where the freedom of expression can be abused in order to hurt other people this admirable sentiment is put to the test.

So my answer is no, this group should not be allowed entry to Canada. Their goals and actions are appalling. I understand that some people find homosexuality morally objectionable. I even understand if some people believe that gay people’s souls are in peril of eternal damnation and they should repent now to be saved (I don’t believe that, but I can understand how others might). However, there is a large gap between holding an anti-gay opinion and inciting hatred of gays.

If you did not follow the link at the beginning of this post, stop now to read the article or at least look at the included image. Check out the signs that the leader of the group was carrying at a protest in 1999—look at the one on the right: “God hates fags.”

I did go to church as a child, and that’s not the Christianity I was taught. I’ve been under this impression that the Christian God loves everyone, and that if one repents, one will be saved.

Theocratical dogma on homosexuality aside, consider how this reflects one’s religion! Islam has often received criticism as of late because of the actions of a minority, those radicals who form Muslim terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. That is a concrete example of how the actions of a minority can harm the reputation of the entire religion. Likewise, Fred Phelps’ church shames his religion. I’m well aware that Christianity in general does not burn people at the stake anymore, but if all I knew about it came from that article and that disturbing image, I might jump to that conclusion.

Returning the sign for a moment, notice the pejorative term for gays. This is exactly the same as the dehumanising labels applied to minorities we oppressed and hated throughout history—some of which are still regarded with such shame and disdain that they are not repeated on television before the watershed hour. We pride ourselves so often on having “moved forward” and having put racism, anti-Semitism, and the like behind us, closing those chapters and contenting ourselves to teach them in history classes with various degrees of accuracy.

We haven’t moved forward. We’ve just switched targets for the time being, like a bored kid with BB gun.

We haven’t moved forward, and we won’t move forward until we stop trying to make people feel ashamed of who they are, until we stop teaching other people that it’s OK to hate somebody simply because they are different from oneself. ’Cause guess what? You are different from them. And what if they started oppressing you? Yeah, you wouldn’t like that too much, eh?

Sadly, those people who believe that inciting hatred is fine tend to do it because they believe they have some form of objective justice on their side (usually “God”, but sometimes it’s just personal conviction). They believe that they can do it to other people because they are right and others are wrong. And that’s the point where a government should step in, to protect innocent people from those would abuse our great freedoms for ignominious ends.

I shouldn’t be up this late. I’m going to bed. Really, I am. However, there is one advantage to staying up this late: infomercials.

Think what you like about infomercials. I think they’re annoying, sure. But open your mind for a moment and listen to those infomercial hosts—don’t listen to what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it. As I write this, YTV has started to air the Magic Bullet infomercial with “Mick and Mimi.” It’s probably a combination of his accent and his enthusiasm, but when I close my eyes and listen to Mick explain how the Magic Bullet is the answer to all my food-related problems (and some non-food-related ones), I can, for a brief moment, feel reassured that everything in this world is all right.

So praise the Flying Spaghetti monster for His noodly gift of infomercials. They are truly a blessing!

Let me begin by saying that I don’t support age rating of books (i.e., saying “this is for ages 8-12, this is for young adults, this is for adults…”). However, when you look at how we rate our other content by age, it seems hypocritical, does it not?

Games and movies receive official ratings that state whether or not the content of those products is suitable for a certain audience. Sometimes, the law enforces these ratings. That means if you’re under 18, you can’t get into an R-rated movie (without an adult). But you can go and buy a book that may have the same graphic scenes as an R-rated movie, and the cashier at the store doesn’t stop you. They don’t card you. (At least, they didn’t card me when I was under 18.)

Seems like we have a double standard here. I know, I know: books aren’t as “visual” as movies or games. Reading about mass violence or sexuality, reading a curse word, that isn’t the same as seeing and hearing it. Well I think that insults the average reader’s imagination. And even if it doesn’t compare to graphical depictions, wouldn’t a book’s descriptions, if done well enough, still be specific enough to scar immature readers? Should we continue to let unrated books be sold?! Where are you torches and pitchforks, people?

Luckily, since most children and young adults these days aren’t interested in reading for pleasure, we don’t have to worry about this crisis.

Every day I find myself becoming more of an autodidact whose primary goal is to propagate knowledge. Seems like a pretty worthy goal for a set of self-replicating DNA, no? After all, that’s all we—everything in the universe—are: information, in one form or another.

My thirst for knowledge is perhaps my most consistent trait as far back as I can remember. I loved and continue to love to read. When I first got MSN (because I was jealous of my younger brother), the next step I took was to learn HTML so I could create my own website. From there it … sort of snowballed (as this site evidences). The Internet is an autodidact’s dream: a nearly limitless, ever-updating source of information. Thanks to Google, Wikipedia, and the Oxford English Dictionary, I can learn the answer to most questions or the definition of a word (still not sure about that whole group of groundhogs issue, however). I read sites like Lifehacker regularly, learning about subjects as varied as technology to productivity to cooking. The Internet’s vast potential for education is enough to make me love it, despite of its drawbacks that some critics use to declare technology a destructive social mechanism.

And yes, asking about groundhogs was very weird. That’s me though. I ask weird questions because something comes up, and I want to learn it. I wouldn’t do well on a trivia show. Although I don’t consider any piece of knowledge trivial, my retention and recall just doesn’t work that way. It’d be cool if it did.

Yes, I love learning. I was the guy who always sat in the front of the class and wanted the rest of the class to stop talking so the teacher could continue. I was the guy who always had an answer—or question—and put his hand up, so eventually the teacher would say, “Does anyone know the answer—anyone except Ben?”

I‘ve changed my mind about buying books, too. Originally I borrowed the vast majority of my books from the library. I seldom read a book more than once unless I really enjoyed it. Now, because I’ve got a job and the money that goes with it, I enjoy buying books. I like giving them to people or lending them. I don’t care if that person reads the book. While I try to select books that I think my friends will like, ultimately, the act of giving is the crucial part. Even if my friend doesn’t read the book, maybe someone else will. If my friend does enjoy the book, and tells me, then that’s great.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is … every day, I am more inclined to read and learn. I can’t slow down. The clock is ticking until I die, and I have so much to know!

(P.S. Laura, I realize that this is the second time in two entries that I‘ve made you think during the summer. I’d apologize, but you‘d just tell me I didn’t mean it again. And you’re right. We only have so long to learn things, so go out there and think!)

Pretentious title, no? This is actually just something that occurred to me while having a bath (baths are great that way).

I don’t know which particular set of neurons collided to produce this aspect of my personality, but I’ve never been one to concern myself with body image—mine or anyone else‘s. Physically I’m rather lucky in that I lead a sedentary lifestyle but have a high metabolism and a slim build. So I‘m very tall and rather thin. If I were more physically active, I might actually be fit and perhaps develop some muscles, but those same neurons decided that I would prefer to sit in front of a glowing screen and push electrons about while writing blog entries discussing the pushing of those same electrons.

Where was I? Oh yes, body image. I’ve never been particularly concerned with my body image. However, since I bike to work during the summer—an increased level of physical activity—I started thinking about how this would affect my body. In the bath tub I looked at my thighs and thought, “Wow, are my thighs really that big?” That thought made me think about body image, and I realized that I don’t know if my thighs are that big, because I don’t know what “normal” thighs look like—mostly because there’s no such thing as “normal” thighs. I expect that everyone’s thighs are slightly different.¹

Society rams body image propaganda down the throats of self-conscious adolescents, adults, and Jack Russell terriers. But the “ideal” body image changes with the times, shifts and drifts enough that the idea of a “normal” body is completely fallacious. Unfortunately, there is no blueprint to the human body—we have our genome, yes, but there is no instruction manual that says, “The ideal male thigh will consist of the following measurements….” No doubt some cheeky scientist has done a study to determine the ideal proportions of body parts in order to construct a race of physically-flawless, mentally-superior supermen. The experiment has clearly gone horribly wrong, however, because it appears that they have produced the opposite result: increasingly obese, intellectually-deficient individuals.

This is where the epiphany would be if there were one. There’s not, however. Firstly, what I’m saying is not earthshaking (the number of earthshaking revelations remaining is quite low, and I possess none of them). Secondly, I‘ve completely wandered off on a tangent and have no idea what I’m going to say next.

So there.

• [ 1 ] Except for you clones out there, but don’t feel bad. You’re all unique on the inside.

If there were one thing I would change about myself, it is the fact that I lack the ability to inhabit the moment. I am constantly and consistently thinking only of the future—not necessarily the distant future, more usually the immediate, next-couple-of-hours-or-days future. And I find that this drains me more than is necessary.

Summer is supposed to be time off from school to relax, but present-day economics throws a wrench in that model. Students instead usually must arm themselves with resumes and hunt out at least one (if not more) summer jobs in order to pay for schooling, residence, food, gas, and whatever expensive habits they have acquired since they had enough money to buy expensive habit-forming items.

I‘m one of the lucky ones. I don’t have to pay for schooling, residence, or food. All I need to take care of are my expensive habits,¹ and sometimes gas, although my dad is pretty generous in that area. Otherwise, I‘m just saving my money for when I will need to pay for school, when I’ll need to start renting an apartment or put a down payment on a house or anyone of those expenses that seem to crop up in the adult world.² So compared to others, I have it easy. Either I just have a weaker constitution, or going through school and then working all summer is draining.³

My wondrous vacation to Ohio is over, and now I am starting full time at work. This means more money (yay) but longer shifts. The true downside is also the upside of my work (isn’t that just irony for you). At the gallery, the days are often slow—especially in the summer, when the weather is warm and people engage in outdoor activities. So when there is nothing for us to do, we front desk attendants get some downtime. I like to read. Working during the summer means that the first four hours of our weekday shifts are spent with the full-time staff, which means we at least have to look like we’re working. Anyone who lives in Cubeville knows how this feels.⁴

I get Sundays and Mondays off, but otherwise I’m biking to work every day that the weather is nice. That takes time and effort—especially on the way back, because that way is mostly uphill. When I arrive home, I’m tired and sweaty and all I want to do is collapse. Combined with working, this gives me the distinct feeling that I lack free time. And as a somewhat lazy, sedentary sort of person, free time is a very valuable commodity to me. I function best in an idle state of careful rumination.

Hence my lack of ability to focus on the present and “live in the moment.” Were I able to do that, I think I’d be better at coping with this sort of lifestyle. Instead, I constantly focus on what comes next, leaving me somewhat disorganized, discontent, and dissatisfied.

So every so often I say to myself, “Ben, you need to shape up and start living in the moment,” and every time I reply, “You’re right, Ben—and might I add, devilishly charming and handsome—I do need to alter my pattern of behaviour.” Yet nothing comes of it. The closest I‘ve managed to come is sort of use a to-do list, and even that hasn’t become a habit. I have flirted with the GTD philosophy, tried downloading ThinkingRock and using that, but it has gotten me nowhere.

I need to accept that I am not a very organized person. Those who know me may balk at this statement, but what you think of as “organization” is in fact just a deep-seated need for tidiness. It’s true that I enjoy cleaning. I need a clean, tidy environment in order to have a clean, tidy state of mind in which to work. If my room is messy, then I feel stifled, crowded, and I can’t work very productively. Don’t mistake this for organization, however. That is another beast altogether. I am usually very disorganized.

The question remains, however: if I cannot become an organized person—and I‘m pretty sure I can’t—then how do I improve my time management even though I’m disorganized? How do I avoid feeling so drained, grumpy, and … grown up?

The answer may be to “stop and smell the roses” as often as I can, and I do. Really. I spend a lot of time just vegetating—that’s the whole point of acquiring free time, so I don’t have to do anything except just soak up the wonderful ambiance of life in our little corner of the universe. What else? I’m going to try and read as much as possible in order to further expand my personal life goal of “know as much as possible, read as many books as possible before you die.” Lastly, I am going to remember to breathe. To try to separate the tough and grimy (work, travelling to work, cleaning, lack of free time) from the light and fluffy (movies, books, gardens, walks, friends).

After all, rain comes from clouds.

• [ 1 ] i.e., buying DVDs and miscellaneous computer stuff
• [ 2 ] Which is scarier than the trailer made it appear.
• [ 3 ] I think it’s a little of both
• [ 4 ] Except we don’t get a high speed Internet connection to abuse.

I woke up today to Lauren knocking on my door, telling me that her mom wanted me to go see a doctor about my eye. So against my will I acquiesced, although I’ll admit it’s probably for the best anyway. I went to see an optometrist, Dr. Henry, who was very nice. He gave me free samples of eye drops and an ointment and said that if I needed a follow-up visit next week, he wouldn’t charge me for it. So I survived my foray into the American healthcare system. :P

Later that evening, Lauren had some of her friends over for a games night. We played Taboo with Nisha and Jessica—I‘ve never played that before, but I really enjoyed it. I got to listen to lots of fun stories from Jessica too. Michelle, whom I met yesterday, arrived about twenty minutes later. She joined us for a second game of Taboo, then we went downstairs to play DDR. Now, I’m exceptionally bad at DDR. I’m not great at much in life, and DDR—or any form of dancing, actually—ranks pretty high on this list. Part of it is a distinct lack of regular practice; if I actually bothered to acquire a proper DDR game and practised regularly, I could probably pick up some reasonable skill. In general though, I just lack rhythm. So when Lauren tried to teach us the electric slide afterward, I got absolutely lost.

Nevertheless, I had a good time. It was probably the most sociable I had to be in a long time, and I’ll be stretching that comfort level more tomorrow, when I go to the birthday/graduation party of one of Lauren’s friends. I‘m not entirely sure this much human interaction is good for me. I’m sure that other people can handle it. But it’s like alcohol tolerance. Some people can hold their social interaction better than others. And now I’ve gone off on a tangent and I don’t remember what I was talking about….

Oh yes, now I remember: about the existence of Sasquatch…. I think it’s possible for such a cryptid to have survived for such a long time and gone undetected. Possible, but not probable. We’ve inhabited the New World for about what, 20,000 years now? And in all that time, the best we can come up with are some footprints and the world’s first YouTube video?

Now, if Sasquatch is real and intelligent, I could totally see it intentionally hiding its existence from us, then laughing as we try to figure it out. I could even see it staging the Patterson-Gimlin film for its amusement. It’s probably in some sort of secret Cryptid Society that meets once a week, where it and Elvis and Nessie play poker and share stories of how they toy with the rest of we humans.

The fact that apes rose to sentience on this planet must be some sort of great big cosmic joke … and humanity is the punchline.

You’re scanning a room full of people. Suddenly, there it is. Your eyes have caught those of another person, maybe someone far across the room. For a moment, you stare at each other. You wonder: is he staring at me? Am I staring at her? Which one of us started this? Then, just as quickly, you lose focus. You resume your scanning. The moment you shared collapses in on itself, and the night goes on.

In other news, Harper is suing the Liberal Party for libel. Only in Canada, eh!

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

Mr. Gradgrind, Hard Times by Charles Dickens.

Sorry Mr. Gradgrind, but I refuse to believe in a universe based entirely on fact. The universe can’t be based only on fact and science. If it were, why would we have emotions? Why would we feel terrible half the time and ecstatic the other? Why put ourselves through so much pain and trauma? If the universe were based on fact, we wouldn’t need this. We could be moist robots going about with logic and reason. But we aren‘t. And to me, that means that there’s something out there logic and reason cannot explain. Our emotions are our ways of navigating that which we can’t quantify. And that’s magic.

I had an awesome day today. I fixed a problem with VSNS Lemon’s new code, which I celebrated by playing the Hallelujah Chorus. Then Ms. Sukalo called, and we agreed to meet at 2:30 at Starbucks, as she’s in town this week. At 2:00, Carly logged onto MSN. She’s also a former student of Ms. Sukalo, so I thought it would be cool if she came along, and I invited her. So we both went to Starbucks and had a great visit with Sooks.

Then I picked Cortney up from Kakabeka and we went back to my house, where we cooked dinner. My dad was out of town again until tonight, so I cooked dinner for the second time ever from scratch. I did the same diced chicken type dish. It was good to have some help though. After dinner, Cortney and I watched the first disc of nip/tuck; she ended up lending me the entire season.

Too often I feel lonely over my lack of a real social life. It’s too easy to become withdrawn, especially when one doesn’t do things with friends often enough. Days like these that remind me of how great my friends are … these are days worth blogging about, so I can remember them years from now.

It’s scary, sometimes. My peers and I are growing up. Our parents aren’t driving us to each other’s houses anymore; we‘re driving ourselves around. While preparing dinner with Cortney, I realized this experience was one of the most adult things I’ve done since I turned 18, because my relationships with my friends are changing. No longer fuelled by the day-to-day interaction of high school, our friendships endure because of what we hold in common and new types of interaction, like making dinner together.

Now if I can survive this weekend from Hell, then there’s hope for the future after all!

We all do it. A celebrity—actor, athlete, whoever—appears on our television screen and tells us to do something, to support some cause, to buy a product. Because, you know, they use the product or support that cause, so we should too.

When that happens, I just like to remind myself that these are the same types of people whom we vilify for leading immoral, hedonistic lifestyles of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. We condemn these people for those actions and then turn around and succumb to marketing ploys that appeal to our admiration of these same people.

It’s just another facet of our wonderful brain that we‘re able to reconcile such contradictory value judgements.

Anyway, I have to go purchase more things that a celebrity tells me will change my life because it changed theirs too. And they’d never lie to me for money, right?

For a moment today, I was almost able to forget that it was Halloween. Not that I have anything against Halloween. In its present incarnation it’s a charming way for kids to dress up, express their imagination, and of course, collect as much Canada as they can. And really, if you can’t count on candy in a democratic society, then what is my government doing with all those tax dollars?

Somewhere between this year and last, however, I’ve lost my connection to the Halloween spirit. It might have fallen between the couch cushions—I’ll check when I get home. I haven’t trick-or-treated in a couple of years, and I don’t do the party thing. So there’s not a lot for me to do for Halloween. I‘d dress up, but I don’t have many costume ideas, and I‘m too lazy to put effort into creating an excellent costume. I do admire those who take the time. On campus here we’ve got someone dressed up like Waldo (as in Where’s Waldo?) and a pair of carebears. Occasionally I worry that this lack of Halloween participation is a sign I’m losing my will to be imaginative and expressive and am slowly turning into a boring, practical person.

/me pauses to look at blog posts. Yeah. Riiiight. Not likely.

Let’s face it. Halloween is about the candy. I can buy as much candy as I went whenever I want, so Halloween has lost its lustre. I’ll probably stay home tonight and give out candy. Maybe I’ll put a scary movie on and watch that while I wait for kids to show up at the door. That’s vaguely Halloweenish, right?

Just wait for Christmas….

Not in the literal sense (yet), but in a metaphysical, vaguely sort of philosophical manner of speaking. So many little things have intruded upon the scope of my life that I find myself adrift without a schedule, without priorities, attending to tasks as they pop up or as they flag me down with little urgent signs that threaten to bludgeon me if I don’t take care of them.

We’re moving into a new house across on Friday, so the past few weeks have been a whirlwind of the cardboard box variety. The primary inhabitants of our house are now cardboard cubes that contain stuff from the soon-to-be former occupants. So tomorrow we finish everything up and then Friday the chaos continues. Hopefully we should be installed and connected to the Internet the same day, so I will only be absent for the time it takes to move boxes, unpack, and then collapse in the heap of empty cardboard and sleep for a few days.

Unfortunately, university has not provided the satisfaction of which I dreamed four months ago. Most of it is…easy. There are some hard parts, of course, and it is bound to get harder. Second year will be better because there’ll be less people who are taking math because they need it for another discipline—smaller classes with more interested people. But for now, at least, it’s just another way to pass time. The schedule is good in that respect. It just didn’t fill the void that opened up after I finished high school.

So now I’ve got various projects and responsibilities and commitments all on the go in order to fill that void. I need to stop making commitments, but—as I‘m sure you’ve realized—it’s hard. And I don’t know what to work on first, so I jump about, which is never as efficient. I‘ve been working on two new websites, one for a friend and the other as a personal project with two other friends, but I’ve become mired in code for the latter with no escape in sight. I need to pull back, re-evaluate, and then finish it as quickly as possible—but as cleanly as possible. Bah. So everything is half-done and nothing is fully done, and I hate leaving my stuff in a state of undoneness (muwahahah)—it just feels so messy. I just haven’t had the time (or, in some cases, the inclination) to actually finish some of them.

And I need to write more. But in order for that to happen, I need to reignite a spark of inspiration within so that when I force myself to write it doesn’t come out stilted. The story is a microcosm in my brain—everything is there, I can feel it. I know it. But how do I express it accurately in the English language? It doesn’t come out right, not yet. I’m working on it—please stand by.

Bah.

I need a vacation.

As I‘ve said previously, I’m tired of the repetitive fearmongering being done in the name of our “global warming” crusade. It’s another example of herd mentality exacerbating a crisis that it is supposed to be solving. Last century it was nuclear weapons, this century it’s global warming.

Well wake up people, and stop being so selfish! After all, we are not the only planet in this universe. There are many other planets out there that are heating up. In fact, I’ve “discovered” a dangerous new phenomenon that must be stopped! Universal warming.

Here’s how it goes. We constantly produce information. Information is useless without transmission; it only becomes usable when conveyed from one state to another (i.e., from person to person). Transmitting information requires energy. As energy is used, entropy in the system increases. To demonstrate, take talking for example. If you talk about something, you are transmitting information. This means you are increasing the net entropy of the universe. Everything you do increases entropy, unfortunately.

Why is entropy bad? Because entropy is the tendency of a system toward increasing disorder. As entropy increases, the amount of usable energy declines. Eventually we’ll suffer the heat-death of the universe and the end of all life as we know it!

This is a serious problem. If the universe ends, then Paris Hilton won’t be able to make any more movies, which means she’ll have to get a real job. We must all work together as a community to decrease the Earth’s universal footprint. The fate of reality depends on it1 My first recommendation is that Al Gore create a new documentary entitled An Incomprehensible Truth. That would be the best way to further spread this information to as many people as possible.

Let’s get on this, people!

School is not over yet; exams have yet to come, but tonight I went through the complicated tribulation of the graduation ceremony and emerged (although somewhat tired) unscathed. The ceremony was long, and at times dull, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. I cried when our teachers sang, because not only did they sing well, but I thought about all they‘ve done for us during our schooling. It’s part of the reason I’m going into teaching, I think—not to sing, but just to affect others‘ lives in such a profound manner. I’ve been lucky to have a great number of dedicated teachers who do more than impart facts. They‘ve supported me and shaped me as a person. Similarly, valedictorian Cassie Graham’s speech was moving and flawlessly delivered. I mean, Dr. Seuss?! That alone deserves mucho kudos—there are very few people wiser than that man, and the quotation that Cassie chose was spot-on. But it was much more than that. It was personal. There was something in there that let everyone stop and nod and say, “That was me.”

It was surreal, in a sense, as I walked away from the stage, proceeding out the auditorium doors and into the much-needed fresh air. I‘ve graduated high school. It’s one of these seminal moments that define our culture, the kind of special ceremony portrayed with honour and reverence in TV shows and movies. It is our coming of age. I‘m also so focused on the future that I forget the present. I’m a seventeen-year-old who has just graduated high school.

Whoa.

I‘m scared. I’ve been coddled for the last 17 years. Now I’m on the cusp of adulthood; now I have to make my own choices and actually guide my own life. While I am intellectually ready to move on to higher learning, I’m going to miss the social setting of high school. I am not a terribly social person, but I still have my little group of close friends, and they mean a lot to me—and I‘m not sure if I express that enough.

I’m going to Lakehead University next year, so I won’t even be leaving the city. My goal is to become a high school teacher. Rather simple, eh? But it’s what I want to do (and write novels!). Many of my friends are staying here to go to LU or Confederation College, so I will still see them. Two of my closest friends, Cortney and Vivike, are leaving for southern Ontario to pursue their goals, and I’m going to miss them so much—and this is an awareness that has only quickened recently as the end of the year approaches.

For you see, I am afraid of change. A basic aspect of my personal philosophy has and always will be that change is good. Change is a fundamental aspect to humanity without which we would not survive. We should embrace change. Yet I‘m afraid of it all the same. I’m scared of what’s out there, this big unknown in front of me. What am I going to do?

This isn’t unique, I know. And right now, that’s the only thing keeping me on track: the fact that I know I’m not alone. It’s just an expression of what everyone goes through at multiple points of their life, when they reach this crucial turning point that will define a new portion of their story. It’s not even poignant or profound, but give me a break—after all, I just sat through a three hour ceremony. My diction isn’t exactly well-rested.

I’m not even sure what I wanted to say anymore. I just wanted to collect my thoughts about this whole graduation experience. After all—now we‘re people. And I just wanted to say how immeasurably proud I am of my peers, and especially of my friends, for all of our accomplishments, and for our bright prospects.

I’m going to miss high school, and I‘m going to love university. I’m sad to go and happy to move on…. I don’t know. I’m going to stop now, because I‘m not making any sense, I don’t think. There’s just too many emotions clashing in my heart right now to talk about any particular feeling. I’ve done my best, too, to avoid as many of these cliches that seem to dogmatically follow graduation (although I‘m sure there’s a few in here somewhere).

Here’s a random thought! We’re six billion apes crammed onto a moist rock hurtling through the vast expanse of space. No steering wheel, no brakes. We think we‘re special because we’ve got fire and a stick.

And yeah, I think that digital watches are a neat idea. I‘m Ben Babcock, and I just graduated high school. Now someone gimme a stick. It’s my turn to make fire.

Often you’ll read one critic or intellectual or another say something along the lines of how Hollywood is destroying the movie industry, creating cheap flicks at the expense of “art” and “culture”. And as much as I am sometimes tempted to agree with this cynical evaluation of our entertainment industry, I can’t bring myself to jump on that bandwagon. I just can’t.

I have observed that more movies are “packaged” these days. What are “packaged” movies? Well, these are the hits that look and feel like the director simply sent in a form from a mail-order catalogue—he or she filled out the title and main characters, and the company sent back a pre-packaged movie: special effects, music, etc. Movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, and—especially with its third installment—Spider-Man are packaged blockbusters.

Are packaged movies inherently evil? Does it make a movie bad? Of course not. I like each of those three movie series above—although none of them are particularly spectacular—but they aren’t moving and they aren’t cathartic. And sometimes you need that. Sometimes you don’t need a purging; you just need some action, some humour, and some explosions. The only reservation I carry is that it’s too reflective of certain negative aspects of our society—namely, this increasing dependence on pre-packaged items, like food, that we just buy in bulk at a grocery store.

There are the “indie” films, complete with festivals, to attempt to carry on the art-form that Hollywood has—so some say—left behind. The problem with this phenomenon is not its goals, but rather, its demographic. The people who go to film festivals are precisely the type of people who like the films at film festivals. Which brings us to the hilt of the matter: the audience. Do people really want art? Or do they want entertainment?

The answer has and always will be both, and this is why I can’t endorse those pessimistic and pretentious pundits who pretend to put-down Hollywood. I’m going to use Shakespeare as an example. Take King Lear, for instance. King Lear is one of my favourite plays and one of Shakespeare’s best. It has pithy intellectual themes, and as a tragedy, is carefully written to move us to pity and compassion for the terrible tribulations of the hero, Lear, and his descent into madness. But Shakespeare was no fool. His plays weren’t wildly successful just because of these themes—they were successful because they were also entertaining. King Lear has humour aplenty—ribald or otherwise—and that’s why it has endured 400 years’ worth of Eberts. If the jokes seem stale (or you just can’t get them), it isn’t because they’re silly. They just get lost in translation; the language differences over the past four centuries make Shakespeare a tad hard to understand at times.

Yet I digress. Shakespeare and his ilk knew something about how to get a crowd’s attention, and how to leave a part of their work with the crowd when the play was done. That’s why the movie industry isn’t in “decline”. This perception of decline is just a misinterpretation of the charts. We‘re changing all right, but we’re always changing—it’s what culture does. It’s a reaction to the last two decades of increasing technological development. Technology affects movies faster than it does stage or books (and to a degree, music) because of the visual nature of the medium; advanced technology means advanced movie-making techniques. Technology has developed more in the past two decades than it has in the past century. And it shows no signs of plateauing, so we have to be ready for more change.

Culture is dead. Long live culture!

For the past week we‘ve been watching The Patriot in history class. The movie is moving in some parts. There are incredibly tender moments, like when Susan finally speaks to her father and breaks down just as he’s leaving again. That part almost made me cry. Unfortunately, the latter part of the movie lacked that same emotional fervour, simply because I was too busy laughing.

And this is through no fault of the director. The movie was very accurate. I just can’t get over how silly warfare was back in that time.

Everyone arranges his- or herself in nice, neat lines. Then the two sides march forward. One side fires, reloads, while the other side fires. If you get shot, you get shot. It is, as Mr. Nowak puts it, “gentlemanly warfare”. And watching it on a television makes it look so absurd! The melée part with bayonets and swords isn’t so bad. But just the initial firing of musket volleys looks so ridiculously polite that I completely understand why guerrilla warfare surged in popularity afterward. Sure, you had to clean your uniform more often—but at least you were alive.

So that got me thinking. Some current rules of war make sense, like treating members of the Red Cross, Sweden, and American Idol with neutrality, etc. Others are just weird. Like one (well, it’s not really a rule so much as a “strategy”) is the idea of “mutually assured destruction” as a deterrent to nuclear war.

What are some current rules of war or military strategies/policies that you think are absurd?

If I look out my bedroom window, I can see spring arriving in the pond that used to be my backyard. The snow—which is actually now semi-frozen ice—and the ice proper beneath it is melting, flooding entire portions of my backyard. The end of a little ice age.

Bits of autumnal debris slowly raise themselves up from the muck: leaves and branches, planks of wood. Hey, look, a shovel. The meltwater flows around these objects, pooling at the depressions in the yard. It flows around the garage too, and the wood and barbecue sheds. This microcosmic clash of human urbanity and nature strikes a chord in me, because it demonstrates how much humans have shaped the face of the Earth.

If I look up from the ground, straight ahead, I can see the houses behind mine, the ones across the back lane that face outward to another street. And beyond them, more houses. Two or three storeys high, that’s all. I don’t live in a crowded metropolis like New York, nor a sparsely-populated rural area like Kakabeka. And that makes the subtle distinctions even more refined, because I‘m at that midway point, where we’ve built up our suburbs, but nature is still evident in the carefully manicured boulevards and precisely planted birch trees.

It’s the ice, though, that gets me. The ice melts and flows around our man-made structures. I look across the yard and notice that during the winter it was entirely covered by snow and ice. Patches of brown grass are seeping through now. And I wonder, what would this look like without the buildings? Why, it would be a huge plain of ice, ice covered by snow, snow being blown about by a wind that was free of the interference of tall buildings. Such places, I hear, do exist, for I have seen them on TV.

Humans (at least those of Westernized culture) are quite backward creatures really. We gave Darwin a miss and decided that, instead of adapting ourselves to the environment, we should merely adapt the environment to ourselves. Heck, we can move mountains if they are in our way. The mere existence of the word “cityscape”, (which Firefox does not mark as incorrectly spelled, even though it believes “Firefox” doesn’t exist) emphasises how we’ve shaped the Earth.

I‘m not drawing any real conclusions here, nor are these observations all that original or revolutionary. But it’s good to stop and think about this stuff once and awhile. Again, as a species we‘ve sort of removed ourselves from the environment and created this own, extremely elaborate fictitious universe that we collectively inhabit. It’s only healthy to break way from that fantasy every so often and actually look at the world around us.

If you haven’t seen it already, you need to watch Karl Fisch’s Did You Know? presentation. My history teacher showed us the version by Scott McLeod (which removes the school-specific slides).

You can watch it on YouTube, and I encourage you to do so. It’s quite impactful. At first glance they might seem just like statistics, but take a moment to just consider the ramifications of the statements. We have moved from a local society to a global village in a few hundred years.

The frightening thing is that we are showing no sign of slowing down—as a species, we are continuing to progress at a geometric level. As a graduating student who is about to enter the “real world” of university, employment, and life as an adult, the idea that careers and our level of information exchange may be radically different in ten years is disconcerting, to say the least.

We have also discussed the nature of memory in class as well. Medieval peasants had incredible memories; they couldn’t write down information, so they had to remember it. Nowadays, we can find information through a variety of resources. Of course, the amount of information that we use has vastly increased as well. The presentation’s estimates of our sum total of knowledge, and its increase, is staggering. That’s just for the human species. Imagine how much information comprises the total universe?

Is this a good thing? A bad thing? I don’t know. I think that there’s elements of both to the changes in society. The most important thing is to be aware of these changes, to acknowledge the fact that life isn’t a steady-state universe. And we have to be ready to implement our own change, for better or for worse, if we see something we don’t like.

Millions of years ago, a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings who manifest in our dimension as white mice built the second-greatest computer ever to exist. It was called Deep Thought, and it was given the task of calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Deep Thought, after 7.5 million years of computation, discovered that it was, in fact, 42. The problem, however, was that no one really knew what the Question was, so the answer was out of context.

Of course if you‘ve read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy you already know this. If you haven‘t, then you are a worthless strag and should read it, because it’s a pretty good book.

Lately I have been meditating upon the meaning of life and why we‘re here. If you think about it, our mundane life is pretty much meaningless. Why do we go to school? To get educated so we can get a good job. Why do we get a job? So that we can make money. Why do we make money? So that we can spend money on things we need to survive. Why do we survive? Well, because it’s what all species try to do.

And that’s the thing. Thus far, all of humanity’s achievements, no matter how great, really all depend on this arbitrary worth assigned to them by humans. Everything in our society has been constructed on the basis of an arbitrary fiction, starting with the economy and ending with digital watches. It is really just a complicated system of survival, however, and does not remove us from non-sentient beings.

So what’s the point? Why are we here? Why do we live, exist? Well, to quote Dr. Stephen Hawking…

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

There you go. We are able to comprehend that there’s more out there; we are able to reach out for it, search for it. That’s why I am so enthusiastic about science fiction and actual space travel and space exploration. Some people like to complain that space exploration is a waste of money that can be better spent on decreasing crime or feeding starving mouths. But it’s not. Because there is more to life than perpetuating the mundane fiction of civilization that we have manufactured for ourselves on this planet. And it’s out there for us to discover.

That’s what we do as human beings to expand our understanding: we ruminate and philosophise. However, the universe is very, very big, and the Earth inhabits only a small, tiny, minuscule portion of it. So in order for us to better comprehend the universe, it only makes sense that we need to step out of our own backyard and take a look around.

I refuse to believe in the anthropic principle because it’s a cop-out, and because life seems a little less exciting if there isn’t any more to living than toiling away for the sake of little green pieces of paper. There is more out there, and we have to find it.

Of course…

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

So there you have it. Really, do you have anything better to do? After all, we know that the amount of good television on is inversely proportional to the number of channels you have. So with some people having upwards of 400, even 800 channels, you really have nothing to watch. Since nothing good is on TV, you might as well take some time to explore the universe!

Imagine shooting a film of your life using two cameras. One is set to a permanent closeup of you. The other one is set to the widest possible angle, covering the span of the entire universe, although still focused on you. There are reasons why we can’t fathom the entire nature of existence.¹

No one is perfect—no one can be perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. And everyone sees everyone else make mistakes. And everyone sees everyone else seeing everyone else make mistakes. Everybody is always watching you watch other people. YouTube, MySpace, and reality television haven’t changed any of that; they‘ve just made it more overt. It’s always been there.

But what happens when you consciously commit yourself to being imperfect? Is it laziness? Or is it a slip from one rung of the ladder to a new low? That is, what happens when you see a little injustice—nothing big or earth-shattering, nothing life-destroying—and let it slide? What happens then?

This happens all the time. People see other people making these little mistakes, and for one reason or another, consciously let it go (as opposed to the mistakes no one notices). Little choices spiral outward and affect other choices, which affect more people. Butterfly effect. Boom. This chain of cause and effect is what makes the universe work.

So now take free will away. Remove it from the equation (as it is, after all, just a fancy illusion). What happens to injustice then? Aside from the fact that it becomes all too easy to succumb to moral relativism, how can one prevent or right these injustices if they are just predestined events in the inexorable chain of cause and effect?

But that’s not the problem. It may seem like a quandary, but it’s just a complicated facade to disguise the true issue: significance (or lack thereof). When you strip away the “injustice” from the little thing, paint it grey like the rest, it becomes even more insignificant. Our actions are insignificant. Or is it really?

Throughout human existence we have looked up into the sky and pondered our place in something so vast and incomprehensible. And we keep on running into this wall, this towering monstrosity, the knowledge that we are a single planet orbiting one in a trillion stars in one galaxy in one small corner of the universe. It does seem a tad insignificant, but only because we’re taking ourselves out of context. And if you take something out of context, then you lose the ability to interpret it properly. Comparing a Coca-Cola can and a North African weeping turtle (which aside from being nonexistent is not as tasty, I hope, but is probably more nutritious…) doesn’t do much, because they’re so different that it’s hard to find a common frame of reference. Unless you’re in marketing, don’t try it.

So back again we come to the little things, especially the wrong things. The ones that we know are wrong, deep down with every fibre of our being, yet we let them happen anyway. They are such contradictions because they are so infuriating and so wonderful at the same time. I love them but I hate them because they are that one step away from perfection, but simultaneously a tribute to the greatest part of being human: being flawed.

I actually have no clue what I’m trying to say here. The clock just hit 1 AM and I think I’ll go to bed, but still … I don’t know. The burden of trying to be perfect is heavy enough as it is to take the small things too seriously. So don’t take it upon yourself to shoulder all that responsibility. It’s heavy and icky and probably won’t match the furniture anyway, so you’ll have to take it to a weird-smelling interior decorator and get it upholstered and repaired at great expense to you, all the while knowing that by doing this you’ve destroyed what it was in a vain attempt to make it something it can never hope to be.

Besides, you’ll end up with bad posture.

• [ 1 ] Panasonic just doesn’t make a big enough lens.

Smoking is bad for you. This should not be news, since we know it has been bad for people for a very long time (even if we didn’t want to admit it). Second-hand smoke is also bad.

Now, the entire premise behind smoking is to ingest nicotine, no? (I realise that the tactile experience of smoking a cigarette may be important to some people, but let us set that aside for the moment.) Surely there must be better ways to get that nicotine fix.

Why hasn’t some sort of big evil corporation developed a sports drink or something similar which contains the quantities of nicotine needed by addicts? It would be way more convenient than cigarettes: one could drink it anywhere, whereas smoking is becoming increasingly prohibited. One still gets their nicotine fix, so they don’t have to do those difficult things like, oh, say, quitting. And, of course, the tobacco companies can still make money, just on sports drinks instead of cigarettes. It’s a win-win-win scenario.

The debate over the morality of stuffing one’s lungs with smoke will not go away anytime soon. I have no problem with someone smoking if they want to do it; that is their choice. I am, however, very paranoid about second-hand smoke, partly because I have asthma, and partly because, well, it just doesn’t make sense to pollute the air that other people breathe. Common decency and all that.

So I’m just rather surprised that no one has come up with a smoke-free alternative to smoking. (I’m aware of the nicotine patch, but I am under the impression that such a device exists purely to help people quit, as opposed to what I am suggesting, which would be a replacement.) Maybe someone has; maybe someone did and it proved impractical.

Anyway. Just a thought. If any representative of a large tobacco company happens to drop by, feel free to let me know why my idea is totally unrealistic. Or steal it and revolutionise the industry. Doesn’t matter.

I‘ve been rather single-minded about finishing my novel lately, and as such I’ve noticed that my posts here are becoming more narratives about my life (which is, frankly, very boring) instead of interesting glimpses into my mind (which is slightly less boring). So consider the following.

I don’t really like Disney all that much. I find Disney a souless corporation with humble beginnings. That said, we owe Disney a huge debt of gratitude that few movie studios could claim. Because Disney has done over the years something spectactular, something that I’ve just realised is really amazing.

I look at society today and see an overemphasis on transitory values, mostly because we are a materalist society. This focus on materialism is at the cost of spirituality. Even religion is a materialist world nowadays. We put more stock in the numbers on our bank statement than we do the worth of someone’s actions or words. Kind of cold, really.

But it isn’t always like this. When children are growing up, they are taught that lying is wrong, not to steal, and to share with others. Somewhere along the blurry line between prepubesence and adulthood, these wholesome values get lost, replaced by the cutthroat attitude necessary to survive today’s capitalist age.

The most obvious culprit is, of course, the media, and they do share a lot of the blame. They bombard adolescents, like me, with images of what society considers “perfection”. I’m talking mainly about the attacks on adolescent self-esteem promoted by companies that sell makeup or clothing or (Zarquon forbid!) that evil stuff known as “body spray”. The media gives adolescents their second set of life values: beauty is to be pursued at all costs; ugliness is to be shunned. Outward appearance is more valuable than inward personality. Oh, and money is good.

Take a step back and look at the stuff that goes on in a child’s life compared to that of an adolescents. And for the better part of a century, that “stuff” includes Disney. Disney movies, in particular, lead the vanguard in the tireless crusade to communicate humanity’s core beliefs to our children. I’ll use Beauty and the Beast because it is the most obvious example: the beast, even though he is ugly, is the hero. Shrek and its ill-advised sequel, Shrek 2, are more contemporary examples based on the same theme. Even Mean Girls, a movie aimed at adolescents, has those values in them.

So where do they go? Why do we suddenly discard them when we realise that we need to get ahead in the world or be left behind? I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t realise it until now, but we owe Disney a lot for doing its part. And I think I’ll stop getting annoyed at the blatantly obvious plots in Disney shows, considering that they were designed for an audience younger than me, content in the understanding that maybe, just maybe, some of those young people will resist the media-saturated images of their adolescent years.