Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.
There’s something about “fake” drinks that appeals to me.
Yoohoo? Not chocolate milk, but I like it. Tang? Some kind of orange colored sugar water, but it’s delicious!
On second thought, maybe I just really like water with high fructose corn syrup in it that looks like something more. Yeah, that’s probably it.
I’ve never been a big conert-goer. Before high school, I didn’t listen to much popular music at all. It wasn’t something that I had been exposed to when young and the first contact I had with it was probably through the BMG CD club. Remember those?
You’d get 10 CDs for $1 each, but then pledge to buy one CD at full price each month for the next 6 or 12 months or something. They’d also do something annoying, like send you a “featured” CD each month that you’d have to send back if you didn’t want to charged for it. Although the actual BMG CD club seems to long dead, the sentiment lives on with subscriptions like eMusic or the Disney DVD club.
Still, I never really went to many concerts in high school. The first concert I ever went to (aside from perhaps some free summer outdoor concerts where I don’t remember the artists at all) was a Moxy Fruvous concert in late high school. I would then see them another time and They Might Be Giants a number of times, as well as Ben Folds. But, aside from them, that’s about it. Throw in a few random concerts (Dispatch and OK Go, one time each) and that’s my life’s setlist in terms of live music.
Concerts are loud and only fun if you know the band’s music well. I don’t tend to get to know many bands’ music that well. I’d rather go to a musical, or listen to a band on a CD, or play their music in Rock Band. And, recently, I’ve felt that concert prices have become a big extravagant.
I think other people tend to disagree. Lots of people love live music and going to concerts. I understand the excitement of being at a concert, but it’s just not something I really “get.” Kind of like how other people probably don’t “get” why I enjoy watching something like curling so much.
Everyone and their mother seems to have a DS nowadays. I bought a used DS back when they were fat, and then upgraded to a DS Lite on the day they released. I considered, ever briefly, upgrading again to a DSi, but the new feature set wasn’t compelling enough.
I also don’t play my DS as much as I used it. The height of my DS use was back in Pittsburgh, when I rode the bus to and from work each day. It offered me a goodly hour plus each day when I was doing nothing but sitting on a bus. If I had owned my iPhone then, I would have certainly listened to a lot more podcasts.
Instead, I played my DS a lot. Now that I carpool with Katie, there’s not much other time during the day for me to play. At home, I’d usually prefer to play on my consoles or PC, and there’s not much time at work to break out the DS. I end up playing every once in a while in bed or just randomly lying around, and on vacations/trips. It’s become only partially a portable game player, and it’s lost a bit of my recreational time to random iPhone games I’ve started playing (Flight Control, anyone?).
This got me wondering: tons of people have DSs (I’m pretty sure a hearty majority of everyone who works at EA owns at least one), but when do they play them? Do they face the dilemma that I do, where there isn’t really a good time during the day to play them? Do they take public transportation more? Do they just make time during the day?
Maybe just owning a DS is enough. Or, maybe, I just need to ride the bus aimlessly for an hour each day.
When I was in elementary school, we had some reading challenges. We would track our personal progress in terms of how many books we’d finished reading within a certain amount of time and we’d get little stickers or marks on a poster. I can’t remember if finishing a book was a point or every 100 pages was a point, but it was certainly one of the earliest competitive achievement-based reward systems I encountered.
And I did what I tend to do when faced with such a situation: I tried to win. I tried to win pretty badly. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything but read for a month. And I did win. I obliterated everyone else in my class. To top it off, I’m pretty sure I even lied a little bit about finishing my very last book (something epic, like Moby Dick).
I don’t really read anymore. I flip through the Entertainment Weeklys that come each week and read a novel out loud to Katie once a week or so. I sometimes read something in the public domain slowly on my iPhone. But that’s pretty much it. With no stickers on a poster, I guess there just isn’t enough incentive.
So, I guess the trick is tricking myself into thinking there are stickers for reading or actually reward myself for reading with ice cream or something equally compelling. I do want to read more. Convincing myself that it’s worth the effort turns out to be the tricky part.
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