Choices

Editor’s note: I fucking hate writing impassioned stuff when I’m feeling passionate about it because it’s always clumsy and sloppy and has no flow or rhythm it’s just me blurting out random sentences with regards to how I feel about whatever it is I’m talking about. And inevitably I’m always writing late at night and can’t be bothered to read through it. I blame this phenomenon as a whole for the general poor quality of this blog.

People make an issue out of everything, and really it doesn’t matter. If anyone ever asks my opinion on an issue, by and large my response is “pro-choice”, even if it doesn’t really apply to the issue. But really, it is about choice. It’s all about choice.

It shouldn’t matter whether I would or wouldn’t get an abortion (physical limitations aside), whether I would marry another man, or whether I would buy a gun, because what matters to me only pertains to myself. Whether or not my neighbour, my teacher, my bus driver, or my dentist wants to do those things only pertains to them. (That was a badly structured sentence, but let’s just move on and forget about it.) I’m not affected by the abortions going on that don’t carry half my genetic material, so why should I make the choice for anyone else?

Society doesn’t want. Society is an arbitrary group of individuals who try to push their own personal wants on the rest of us, so that we all want the same thing. I, as an individual, have no more right to set the wake-up alarms of the people around me than I have the moral right to tell them how to live their lives. Individuals can take care of themselves. Nobody can know what I want but myself, and nobody can decide what’s good for me and thus decide how I should live because nobody has a stake in my life except me.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I mean my parents have put their lives into shaping who I am and how I live and as much as they’ve given me I owe them that much; I owe them my life, to cliché it up in here. So they have a stake in my life. But John and Jane Doe don’t give a rat’s ass about me as an individual, just like I couldn’t care less about them.

Choice is important, though. Choice is everything. If nothing else we are free beings and how we live is made up of the choices we make. Which is why I don’t believe in apathy of choice; no matter how small the choice is, just make it, because the smaller it is, the less it will affect the outcome, but the more important it is to be made decisively (because if you’re good at always making a quick choice when it’s not important, you’ll get better at making the decisive choice when it matters; practice makes perfect). If you’re in a restaurant, chances are this isn’t the last one you’re going to be in a restaurant, so just pick something on the menu that sounds good, and live with that one small decision. And if you have a bad meal, so what, I’m sure we’ve all had bad meals at some point, but it’s not going to matter in an hour. You’ve learned not to order that the next time, but at least you didn’t make the waiter come back four or five times to see if you’ve decided what you want. You were decisive, and in command of your own life. You chose to have the soup instead of the salad. And the chicken primavera.

And then you went and got an abortion.

And I couldn’t care less.

DFTBA

Moustaches

The other day my friends and I got into an impassioned argument (on Facebook, admittedly) regarding the moustache of Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Ian White, and its legitimacy and effectiveness as an aid to the team. Some thought it was silly, and had no place on his face or in the locker room. Others thought it could kick certain nay-saying parties’ asses. And still others spelled it ‘mustache’. This was my reply:

Speaking objectively (for we all know I don't actually watch sports), Ian white's moustache (and I always spell it moustache) is reminiscent of a bygone era where the moustaches wore the men, and you could only be called a man if you had such a moustache. His moustache is the moustache of a turn-of-the-century man, or a rugged mid-western porn or action star in the 70s or 80s. His moustache is a classic one, one that is synonymous with cowboy boots and grainy film and middle-aged whores. Ian white has more balls in his moustache than he does in his balls, and you can't mess with a man that ballsy.

DFTBA

Awards

The thing about awards shows is that basically they’re all boring as shit. They try to spice them up, but in the end I’d rather just read who won and see the skits and maybe look up a few acceptance speeches on YouTube, because in the end I don’t care about 95% of what’s going on. There is no single awards show that has everything I care about in one nice package, although the Golden Globes comes close.

The GGs have no skits, no host, just friends giving friends awards, which is a nice atmosphere to peek in on, but even with the combination of movies and tv, I can’t be bothered to listen to what most people are saying, because I’m watching to see if my favourite shows/movies win, and if they don’t I don’t care anymore. I have no stake in these awards, so it’s not thrilling to bet for one or another, and inevitably there’s going to be some disappointment.

As for the more specific shows, namely the Oscars and the Emmys, they’re both too long-winded and self-important/self-congratulatory/self-indulgent/self-gratifying with their host and skits and whatnot. They’re trying to make it fun for everyone, but we’re not here to see this or that person do this or that lame skit or sketch or speech, we’re here to see some fucking awards go out.

I would immediately respect any body that can condense an awards show into an hour or so, because it would prove that people are there to honour the winners, not pimp their own shit.

Like the Oscars this year, where each actor/actress nominee had their own personal celebrity brown-noser to make them seem all like incredible people while making themselves look like incredible people, and I’m sure it made the actors uncomfortable to be waxed poetic upon by some old Oscar-winner, especially when what was said was either badly written or badly performed, or both, or just the fact that the person doing it was either way not into it or way not appropriate to be doing it. Like Adrian Brody doing it for that old guy nobody knows and said “If you Google [this old man], you’ll find he’s been in over 60 films in the last 25 years.” What a fucking compliment that is, that Adrian Fucking Brody had to Google you because he doesn’t even know who you are. That’s inappropriate casting.

But beyond that, whenever they have two people present they have to try to make it funny, and it’s always shit, and even if it is funny it’s not worth it, I’d rather they just walk out and be either serious or jovial but simply read out the nominees, announce and congratulate the winner, and leave more time for them to speak, because they’re the ones who deserve the time on stage, not the fucking presenters. And it’s especially bad when the presenter is clearly better than the recipient. That’s awkward. They should have thought of that.

DFTBA