60 - AL 18 - The First Cheese Week III

Apricot & Almond, and WOW you guys missed the point of cheese week.

I’m imposing a new rule. Since both of you love being so serious and philosophical about this blog, whenever I sense that you’re getting a bit too into it, I’m going to impose a cheese week. Cheese week is when you lighten, recount a nice lighthearted story that’s happened to you recently, and you take a break from trying to improve people’s lives. People don’t want their lives improved, they want to be miserable, that’s kind of a fact of life. It’s admirable, but kinda pointless.

Then again, I don’t know how much else there is to write about, so I guess you guys at least are keeping it entertaining for yourselves.

So, to help lighten things up, I’m going to talk about hyphens, and how they can change everything. My favorite kind of cheese will be involved, but really I’m very busy right now, and don’t want to write a whole blog.

“Man, that is a huge-ass boat”

A statement where the word ‘ass’ is clearly being used as an emphatic word, meaning very, very big. There are many possibilities that could replace the word ‘ass’ in this situation, but this is more about the placement of the typo. Consider this:

“Man, that is a huge ass-boat”

All the words are the same, in the same order, and the definition of each one is the same when considering them separately. But because that hyphen has jumped one word further along, the meaning totally changes. It raises some questions:

-       What is an ass-boat?

-       How huge are we talking?

-       Why are your pronouncing things so weirdly?

Etc., etc.

“A heavy-metal detector”

An obvious enough title for something, one that describes the object neatly and curtly. We know exactly what it describing and what it does. But:

“A heavy metal-detector”

Suddenly things are a little different. Now we are not describing the a device and it’s function, we are describing it’s weight, and it’s overall purpose.

-       What metals do you detect?

-       How heavy?

-       Why are you still pronouncing things weirdly?

“A 15-page document.”

Again, simple enough. But:

“A 15 page-document.”

Now you’re just talking gibberish. Of course a document has pages, do you know of any that don’t? Perhaps your document is made up of audio recordings, but then it wouldn’t really be a document, it would be a collection of ramblings in audio form.

“You’re a second-rate plumber” ~ “You’re a second rate-plumber”

“A money-back guarantee” ~ “A money back-guarantee”

A sentence that that guarantees nothing but that you will get something back, and that money will be involved somehow, probably from you handing it over to them.

You get my point. Hyphenate things properly, or you’ll run into any number of facepalm worthy moments.

Andrew Lyons.

59 - DL 10 - The First Cheese Week II

I’d say my favorite kind of cheese is mozerella, but really, I’d like to talk about blank page syndrome.

This is a syndrome that effects everyone, or at least, everyone ever who has ever had to write something. It doesn’t matter if it’s a script, or a musical score, or a painting canvas, or a plain grey wall, everyone suffers from blank page syndrome. Starting something is never easy, especially when it involves being creative, because being creative means drawing on something from within yourself. As such, when people look it, sure they are looking at a book/film/painting/musical score, but what they are actually looking at is a little piece of you. It doesn’t matter how much you hated it, or love it, it is you that is on display. And this thought, naturally, stumps some people. How do you know that what you’re expressing in that particular moment, is even a little, tiny bit good.

Short answer, you don’t. That’s why people enjoy working in groups, instant responses to your ideas.

That’s why whenever you get to a new page, you often have a long pause. Even if you were on a blazing trail for the previous page, and you were right in a stroke of inspiration, you suddenly feel reflective of the page, blank. It’s happened to me all the time, and no doubt it’s happened to both of you, Andrew & R. A..

Of course, it doesn’t happen all the time. Usually, when you’ve planned out whatever you’re working on beforehand, you can push past it quite quickly. And actually tricking yourself by just pushing stuff from a previous onto the next page, and then continuing from there can work very well.

But I know what you’re all asking, what does this have to do with Mozerella cheese.

Well I’m glad you asked, strange other me…

Mozerella is a cheese that, when you start, you don’t really know what to do with. It’s a bit like a blank page, it has the potential to achieve greater things that cheeses like cheddar or Craft-Plastic-Wrapped-Cheese-Impersonator, but you can’t see it. Even if you were at the end of a trail blazing cooking session filled with steamed vegetables, and cup-brownies (delicious by the way) and pasta (a healthy kind) you’ll suddenly get to Mozerella and be at a blank. Do you sprinkle it on your vegetables, or find some bizarre and probably not tasty way of integrating it with your brownies, or do you mix into a cheese sauce and mix that into your pasta? So many options, each just as valid as the next (well, expect the brownies thing) and you’re up to a blank.

But here’s how you get out of it.

Change how your mind is approaching the topic. When we look at a blank page, we think big. There is a whole blank page in front of us, and we need to immediately fill the whole thing with brilliant invention that people will love. An entire page, just like that. Now, when you phrase it like that, it sounds perfectly ridiculous to expect ourselves to fill out an entire page the moment we start looking at it, but we’re not thinking that way at the time.

What we’re thinking is that we have just another small, insignificant page, part of something much bigger, and we are just moving through it one small step at a time. So in our minds at the time, we are just looking at one small page, so expecting us to take the whole thing on at once is perfectly sensible. What we should be thinking, is much, much smaller.

Start with a single line. A single string of musical notes, a single string of words, and single bit of pencil outline. That’s all you have to do. It doesn’t have to be any good, but you’re not making a masterpiece of this page all at once, you have only to start. And what is the most useful thing to start with, how annoyed you are that you suddenly have nothing to write/draw/notate. Your own feelings are the best way to burst through blank page syndrome, thinking and feeling the right way about it, and suddenly, you’ll find that you’ll succeed in breaking it.

Just like cooking with mozerella, you’re not making an entire meal of this cheese, you’re making one, maybe two small things. So pick one (or two) small ways to use it, and suddenly it’s potential to be a delicious cheese gets unlocked.

Daniel Lyons.

58 - RA 19 - The First Cheese Week I

I think my favorite kind of cheese is going to a boring blog, but I’ll do it anyway

I doubt that I have the same wealth of cheese knowledge that you do, Andrew, being morbidly obese and all, but I’ll do my best.

My favorite kind of cheese would have to be Jarlsberg. I wouldn’t pick cheddar because it’s too common and obvious a choice, and I only know of those fancy, sour, bitter, moldy cheeses besides cheddar, so my answer is Jarlsberg.

We don’t often have Jarlsberg, but when we do, I make sure to carve out at least some of it for myself. This is much easier to do seeing as neither of you live at home anymore, but I still have to race to beat dad. It is quite a different texture to other cheeses. It’s more rubbery, and more robust, and probably wouldn’t melt if you left it in the sun (not that any cheese really does, it just gets more flexible.) But it also has a nice taste. Cheddar tastes like cheddar, and pizza tastes like pizza, and the others taste all bitter and gooey.

It can be used for any kind of sandwhich or wrap you want, is also good to melt on thing like pasta and grilled sandwhiches. So it tastes nice, is versatile, and easier to come by.

But on a more serious note (huh Andrew? You want us to lighten up? Well you didn’t listen to me when you were wiring our speaker system backwards, so I’m not going to listen to you,) our favorite cheese can be something of an indicator of who we are.

Cheeses come in all different varieties. There are hard cheeses, soft cheeses, cheeses that are meant to be grated, cheeses that are meant to be sliced. Those meant to be melted, those meant to be spread on crackers, and those meant to be eaten alone. Everything we do forms a part of who we are (something Dan, you’ll definitely agree on,) no matter how minor, like what our favorite cheese is.

My favorite kind of cheese is a sturdy, non-gooey, very elastic cheese that is general purpose. What does that say about me? Am I sturdy, non-gooey, elastic, general purpose person?

In some respects yes. I have an amount of morals and principles that I stick to, though I do make small breaks where necessary. I suppose that qualifies as being sturdy.

Non-gooey could refer to several things, like how emotional or overdramatic I am. It must mean being neither of those things, just being a calm, soft-spoken, suave gentlemen in the corner that all the girls want to buy them a drink. (There’s a short film for you Dan.) Sadly, I am absolutely not that. You can ask any of my friends.

Elastic? Hmmm… Well I am pretty agile, and can maneuver obstacles pretty effectively. But I guess it can also mean resilience, when things haven’t gone right, or I’ve been disappointed, or failed at something, being able to pick myself back and look forward. That’s something I can do.

General Purpose? I do have a range of quirky and largely useless skills. But I can perform just about any job that involves manual labor, or simple managing of things. But I guess it refers more to being able to adapt to various situations, even if you’re in them for the first time. In that regard, I think I spectacularly fail. I very easily freak out and get overwhelmed, so now, not really general purpose in the second interpretation.

So 6/10 as far as being like Jarlsberg goes.

But you see that simple decisions like that our favorite kind of cheese is can be a reflection of who we are. Like anything else in our life, it helps make us the person we want to be (yes, that was a Dan quote.)

R. A. Lyons.

57 - AL 17 - The Serious Silly Slide

I think we are taking ourselves entirely too seriously

I enjoy trilogies as much as the next person, but Dan and R. A., you both need to lighten up.

Dan, you have just spent three weeks going into copious detail about how people change, and R. A., you just spent three weeks talking about how if we want to be writer’s, which not many people want to do, we have to only write when we’re feeling inspired. I’m gonna be honest, neither of you have much mass market appeal.

As such, I’m going to usurp the theme of the week, and demand that next week we have to talk about favorite kind of cheese, why it is our favorite kind, and what our favorite way to use it is.

As for this week, I’m going to jump onto the serious bandwagon, and talk about a divide that I’ve been noticing lately. There is a serious divide, and usually it happens between older people and younger people, though of course there are numerous exceptions. This divide is about people who want to live in the past, or simply keep living in the present, and people who want to move into the future.

This first group I define by saying that they try to make what we currently have work, or even replace it with things from the past. Now the present is made up by a collection of things from our past, and these things range in age from a few weeks to several decades. Broadly speaking, things that are more modern that replace things from the past are vast improvements (CDs over Vinyl records for example,) and people tend to just go along with these things, partly because it doesn’t cost them much. But when it comes to more culturally integrated, sentimental things like newspapers, and tv broadcasting, and filmmaking (Yes Dan, I’m stepping on your toes a little,) there are a wealth of people who stubbornly refuse to change their ways. People like Rupert Murdoch are regularly fighting the internet and its ability to deliver news fast and in good quality because he wants to maintain his newspaper empire. TV broadcasters (again Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (Fox)) have been stepping in to fight the internet because they want people to watch news and television shows on their tvs. Think about the Australian NBN debarcle. It is a plan to replace Australia’s century old copper wiring that was originally designed only for phone calls, but now supports Australia’s internet, with modern Fibre Optics which is a superior technology in every way. Many people are stepping in the way because they don’t want to (or don’t think people can) adapt to this much higher quality infrastructure. These people want to make the Australia of right now, and like I said, right now is comprised of things from between a few weeks, to over a century ago, work.

One doesn’t have to think very far for how all of these people could benefit from embracing new technologies. TV broadcasters for example could shut down their broadcast technology and simply use the internet to deliver tv to the people (and it would be more reliable and higher quality,) but they don’t want to do this, so they are standing in the way. Rupert Murdoch and his news empire could use this internet to deliver lightning fast, up to date news across the country, and this would actually cause more people to use their service, and they would sink less money into printing newspapers and using their broadcast equipment, basically a triple win for them. But no, they live in the present, which is really the past, so they are going to fight this huge benefit to their own company to the bitter end.

You might say it’s a case of money, but that is exactly the same mindset. Spending money now, so you won’t have to spend money again for a long time afterwards, and be able to reap the benefits for even longer. People would rather spend as little as possible now, and keep spending as little as possible for a long time afterwards, even though this might end up costing them far more in the long run, than spend a lot now. Living in the present, which is the past.

There has recently been a resurgence of vinyl record sales. They were revolutionary for their time, allowing people to hear the music they loved whenever they wanted from the comfort of their own homes. It is pretty terrible technology, especially by todays incredibly clean, high range sound. Records have no high end sound, and don’t even think about low end, and they also have a tinny, boxy sound to them. When CDs first came out, people have the identical reaction to the NBN. CDs required new technology to play (CD players, an infrastructure basically) and people didn’t want to pay for that. So they declared that CDs would never match the quality, or have the same wholesome feeling that Vinyl records did. This last sentence was of course a complete lie, with no factual backing, and said simply because people didn’t want to pay for the new infrastructure, to use this far superior technology.

Well, we all know what happened there. CDs did eventually because the standard audio delivery format, with their clean, crisp, broad range, two channel, high bit rate, 2+ hours of music storage. And aren’t we all glad that that happened?

Join me in two weeks as I continue this discussion, because next week is cheese week.

Andrew Lyons away…

Andrew Lyons.

56 - DL 19 - The Great Change III

And now the conclusion of my series about whether people can change.

I’ve looked at this from a few ways. What exactly happens when we encounter people, and why we think in this way. Overall, I think it’s been a rather grim and depressing look, so this blog I’m going to completely turn this around.

To start with, I’m going to tell you the big secret why all of this happens. Are you ready?...

We are afraid of changing ourselves.

That’s it, it’s that simple.

We know ourselves, in fact we know ourselves inside out in every way. After all, we are the ones who made us that way. There is no other way to put it. We created ourselves, through all of our decisions, and experiences, through every book we read, and film we watch, game we play, every punch we take, every punch we throw, we created ourselves.

And what’s amazing about this, is that we have control over it. We decided how we change.

But of course, we live in a fast moving world. Everything around it changing all the time. A new Call of Duty copy-paste comes out every year, a new Iphone Generation, a new sequel to whichever film series are popular right now. There is so much going on, that keeping our integrity intact is something the only thing that we can hold onto, so instinctively, we don’t want to change.

And this has somehow morphed into, we can’t change.

We have an image of ourselves, who we are, what we think, and this sometimes isn’t any truer than the snapshots we take of other people.

But the secret to this is, we can change.

Changing is scary, a huge part of which comes form the meaning society places on things. Whether you use an iphone or an HTC, an apple or windows computer, whether you play a playstation or an xbox, even utterly arbitrary things like whether you wear boxers of briefs becomes some kind of signifier of who you are. And no-one judges this more than you yourself.

Whatever decisions we make, we read into far more than anyone does, judge it, think about how this reflects on ourselves. What’s funny is that, when you think about it, no-one does this to anyone else, and yet we’re still terrified of it. But really, you don’t do it to anyone else, all you take from someone else is a surface impression, so why be scared about it?

With this in mind, that really, no-one is reading that deeply into you, except yourself, a small mindset change can come into place. We can, even in some small way, change.

It’s not that we don’t want to, because we do. Every movie and tv show, and book has characters who change, and we love it when they do, when they get new experience, and conquer old and new challenges. We want to do the same, to grow and change as people, to be able to do more than we used to, and do what we currently do better.

The real challenge is actually something very simple. So much changes around us all the time, that keeping ourselves the same is often all we can do. Our successes and failures, and achievements and shortcomings, can all just be attributed to the fact that that’s just who we are.

The real challenge is telling ourselves is: That it’s ok to change. And once we realise that, we can start swapping phone companies, computer operating systems, game console manufaturers and underwear, and start becoming the person we really want to be.

In short, people can change.

Daniel Lyons.