Amazement is something for a special occasion. It is supposed to be rare. It is supposed to be worth a story. It is not for everyday use.

I amaze so easily, and so frequently, that amazement has ceased to be special to me. It has become mundane. I need to check my standards for amazement. I need to raise the bar. I need to make amazement once again worth having.

I must stop being amazed, for example, when a man rings my doorbell because he cannot figure out the house numbers on my street. “Is this number thirty”, he asks. I lean out, in a mock gesture, to gaze at the street number opposite my front door. It does not say thirty. I imagine this gesture will suffice to make him understand. Instead he reiterates his dilemma. “Is this number thirty.” No. It is not. I must not be amazed, even if it is a man in his fifties. With gray hair, an elegant tie, and a fancy suit. Who proceeds to reenter his expensive automobile. How does a person like that not know how to read street numbers. I must not be amazed.

I must not be amazed, either, at the communal workers. Who must necessarily have intimate knowledge of such complicated administrative intricacies as are street numbers. Through their work of visiting various addresses everyday. Who still ring my doorbell by mistake.

One wonders how such people can accomplish complicated tasks like air travel, which requires all sorts of documents, procedures, requires remembering important facts and following a timetable. How do they manage it? It seems amaz I’m sure they pull it off somehow.

One of the most important currencies of today is time. Of course, people have always been trading in time, paying people to do things for them that they were either too lazy, or “too important”, to do. But in today’s world time has gone as far as to replace money in the daily rhetoric of many people. I wonder if people in the past spent as much time complaining about not having enough time as it’s common to do today. We have more freedoms and opportunities than ever, there’s just no time to enjoy them all.

The biggest complaint among people today, once they stop complaining about lack of money, is lack of time. There is a strange kind of contempt for people who have time.
- Look at this cool thing these guys did.
- Yeah they really have a lot of time on their hands (those rich bastards!)

Strangely enough, there are also those who have a sense of pride about *not* having time. They just love fake-complaining to you about how busy they are. Well who decided you have to be so busy? Oh, I know, *you* did. Here, I have the solution for you. Ditch _everything_ that you’re doing right now and you’ll have more time than you ever dreamed of.

Being busy is also the standard way to lie to yourself when rejecting people. “Oh dear, I’d love to come to your whatever, but I’m just so darn busy”. No, you just decided that you’d rather do something else. *I* know what it means, and you might as well just have told me that you weren’t interested instead of telling yourself that you’re a caring person who never lets anyone down. Because that’s just plain obnoxious.

Now, what people seem to forget is that unlike money, time is very much your own choice. You don’t choose to be born into a wealthy family, but you can easily choose to be rich on time. Here’s a simple test: do you have a tv? Unplug it. You just won hours upon hours of time and it didn’t cost you a dime! (Unless of course tv is what you most want to use your time for, but then you shouldn’t complain about lack of time, you should revel in all the tv time you have!)

One thing that has been pretty much a constant in my life is the regular attempts I observe at cultural stigma by condemning someone to be a fan of “bad music”. Of course, this type of cultural stigma is no different from other kinds of stigma based mechanisms that play a part in the daily social power struggles and hustles over group membership.

But it’s interesting to me that it works despite how flawed it is. Obviously, the premise for the “bad music” stigma is that we all agree on some common standard for what makes good music. This may have been possible in the past, with three radio stations to choose from and little selection in a record store. But today, with the amount of choice we have, and especially among people who discover music online, it just isn’t.

You just can’t make a meaningful statement about bad music when just about every person you meet has something in their collection that’s just awful. And half the people (or more) consider this something a cornerstone of their collection.

As far as I’m concerned, metal was invented to help us agree on the definition of bad music. But that’s actually not the whole story. It turns out that if you take groups like Metallica and Linkin Park, and make them stfu, they do sometimes produce interesting instrumental music. It’s just that all the yelling gets in the way.

There are subtler examples. Take Katie Melua. She has a nice voice, her melodies are pleasant, nothing wrong with her it would seem. But then you hear the lyrics. And I often don’t even notice (or care) about the lyrics, but hers are so simple minded and annoying that I can’t stand it. Same goes for Maria Mena.

And so forth.

But the practical impossibility of a consensus is not even the biggest problem with the “bad music” category. The more serious problem is that we still don’t know why or how music affects the brain. In the future, perhaps, we will know why particular harmonies or rhythms induce a positive response. And composers over the ages have surely understood this intuitively, using precisely those “atoms” of composition that please us. But noone has been able to explain why those. So for the time being, musical taste can only be a purely subjective matter. And “bad music” continues to be a contradiction in terms.

Tell me how many times you’ve seen this. A guy is talking to a room full of people. He wants to do a quick poll, like “how many people are familiar with..”. So he asks his question, but while he’s doing that he raises his hand.

What the hell is this about? I mean what is the message here? “I don’t know where *you* are from, but around here we raise our hand in a situation like this.” Is that what it means? What else could it be? Is the guy really thinking ‘Well, in case there are some people here who have never been among other people before…’? Is he worried everyone is gonna yell out all at once?

What does it say about us if we really need this cue? Is this mode of response really that hard to figure out? Are there people in the room thinking “I want to give a positive response, but damn if I can figure out how to do it”? If a guy is sitting in the room who doesn’t know how to respond, and he sees people around him raising their hands, does he need this additional confirmation?

The strange thing is I don’t remember seeing this in the past. Somehow we all seemed to know how this works in the past. I mean if anything you would expect everyone would know this “new thing” by now. Next thing you know, the guy is gonna start saying “See my hand in this position? This is what I want you to do if you want to give a positive response.”

Have you ever noticed the way in which adults talk to little kids? I say talk to because it’s completely one way. It’s a conversation that doesn’t happen anywhere else. Kids up to a certain age are too young to assert themselves. It’s not that they can’t talk, they just don’t have any comments to make. They haven’t watched enough tv, heard enough gossip or seen enough popular culture to be fluent in the conversations. Kids do not talk for the sake of talking itself, adults do.

So when an adult talks to a kid of say 2 years of age, or 4, it’s a constant stream of inanities. And there seems to be an unwritten rule that says when you meet a kid you have to talk. It’s a precious opportunity for the adult to yap away without being judged on what he’s saying. “Look at how big you are!” I may only have been alive for four years, but I’ve figured out that we have such a thing as growth. Adults talk to kids like they’re idiots because adults have this urge to play idiots. They think “hey, a kid, what a wonderful opportunity to escape the judgment of my peers”. And adults of all ages agree on this, they’re just as eager to be around little kids whether they’re 30 or 80.

This wouldn’t be happening if the kid said “I’ll have to stop you there buster, what you just said doesn’t make any sense”. The adult, after recovering from the stunning blow, would mutter “you’re a clever one aren’t you” and turn around on his heel. Victory! But this is not gonna happen.

See, adults *know* that kids that age don’t have the confidence to talk back. There are so many factors in their favor. They’re 3 times taller, have a deep voice, have the approval of all the other adults, aren’t treated as kids by everyone. So if a kid doesn’t have the confidence to engage in small talk, he’s definitely not gonna have the courage to criticize. In fact, that’s what the liberation of puberty is all about. Finally you have the courage to criticize all the things that have been pissing you off since the start.

But that’s not what I do. I don’t like the talking. Why should I talk when the other person isn’t? Kids have this curious gaze in their eyes which is very conducive to mind games. “Does he think that I think that..”