Hello World Post

Life rarely makes sense.

Many of us lead average lives at best, caught up in the whirlwind that has been dubbed the human experience. We move from place to place, from one task to another, rarely getting the chance to sit back and reflect on our own situations. We get caught up in the small moments and fail to see the bigger picture.

We fall in love, we go to war, we laugh, we make mistakes, we have regrets, moments of triumph and moments of utter failure. We often cannot connect the dots by ourselves. We need a guide.

To get a better handle on the world we live in, we make connections to things that are not even real: books, movies and music. Yet it is in these artificial pieces of work that we find truth.

Why do we read, watch movies or listen to music? Sure, entertainment plays a part. But at some level we look to our favorite authors, directors or musicians to provide voices of sanity. Whereas we cannot always make sense of our own worlds either because we don’t have time or lack the means, they have complete control over their worlds. They play God to their characters and musical notes. Through this, we can unravel the mysteries of the most important human condition: our own.

Why do you like some books more than others? Why do you watch a select set of movies over and over again? Why do some songs play hundreds of times more on your iPod than others? The simple reason is that you made a connection to these works of art. It feels like these works are about you.

Most of us might say J.D. Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield was just like we were in high school. The music of the Beatles has probably helped more than a few of us understand the tumultuous world of love. And movies like Anchorman probably made us laugh more than we ever thought possible.

The format of this blog is going to work like this. I’ll come up with a question about anything (i.e. a relationship problem, or the intersection of cultures in a big city, or why bad things happen to good people) and try to find the answers using these voices of sanity as my guide.

In this blog, I will search out a random selection of these voices of sanity that seem to connect to what’s happening right now, either in the world or in my life. I will take passages from books, scenes from movies and lyrics from songs and try to find the truth in them. These connections will be my own and often relate to my own life, but I’ll try to make them as universal as possible.

I’ll list some of my favorite voices of sanity so you know the flavor of work I’ll mostly be dealing with. This is not by any means an all-encompassing list but rather more of the first few names that come to my mind.

Authors: Kurt Vonnegut, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Italo Calvino, Ken Kesey, Tim O’Brien.

Movies: Gladiator, A Clockwork Orange, Wedding Crashers, Stranger than Fiction, The Dark Knight, Fight Club, I Love You Man

Musicians: The Beatles, Coldplay, Muse, Interpol, Explosions in the Sky, Jackson Browne, The Killers, Radiohead.

They will provide the map and I will simply connect the dots.