Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

Whether the new Sherlock Holmes film is well done or not, I wouldn't venture to say at this point. However, killing off the romantic interest within the first 20 minutes of the film is a surefire way of making me lose interest in the fate of the main character. JUST SAYIN'

Are we, as a society, trending towards the nocturnal? How is it permissible for any store's hours of operation to BEGIN at 12:30 in the afternoon? When did this become socially acceptable?

Re: university/college being a waste of money.

"I learned almost nothing in college and got jobs in fields totally unrelated to my major."

The part about getting a job in a field unrelated to your major, fair enough. The fact that you learned almost nothing in college doesn't mean that college is a waste of money - it means you're an idiot.

For some reason, I have never seriously considered this before but it amazes me that despite some of the best on-screen chemistry I have ever seen, Ross and Rachel only officially dated for the equivalent of one season out of ten. I plan on turning this into a longer blog post as soon as I have the time.

Reasons why Tiffany Alvord made it big as a YouTube cover artist:

1. She's pretty (but then again, many YouTube artists are and don't have nearly as much success).

2. She implicitly understands that when you cover Bruno Mars' "It Will Rain," the first syllable of "baby" in the line, "if I lose you baby" must be sung with additional abdominal chutzpah.

That's pretty much it. The second point is a specific example of a more general principle that is, "Find the musical/emotional apex of the chorus and nail it."

I seem to have developed a taste for wine as a social lubricant.

A Pittance of Time

"Take two minutes, would you mind; it's a pittance of time..." or so goes the Remembrance Day song by Terry Kelly. The message behind the song suggests that people (rightfully) ought to observe the two minutes of silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month to honour the soldiers who fought in WWI. As the title suggests, two minutes is a mere pittance of time and its significance is symbolic; a gesture to show that we acknowledge thet sacrifices others make on our behalf.

Lately, though, I've been thinking that there's a more deeply rooted problem at the heart of all this. I thought of writing about this on Remembrance Day but I didn't want this idea to be associated too much with that specific occasion. The question I kept asking was, with all our advances in modern technology, why are we still unable to think of others on occasions when they are worth considering?

I won't deny that people are generally self-serving. Dr. Morrison once proposed a thought experiment in which he posited that if Shakespeare and his mother were both trapped inside a burning building and he only had the time/opportunity to save one person, then to hell with Shakespeare, he was going to save his mother - even if it meant denying the English language its most prolific and influential writer. This makes sense to me. In all likelihood, I would have done the same. However, I can't seem to grasp scenarios where people deny a very small gesture that could affect another party in a greater way. For example...

If you cancel an appointment, offer to reschedule. The gesture to reschedule is the difference between making that person seem like they're low priority and making them feel like you still care about their time.

If someone's done something nice for you, let them know. Really, why the hell not? It's like we have some phobia of saying, "that was nice." Come on, people...

If you are going to be late for something, even for legitimate reasons, why not let the other party know ahead of time rather than wait for them to ask you why you're late before telling them said reason? Not doing so makes it seem like if they didn't ask, you wouldn't bother to tell them.

The central idea, here, is what seems like an inability to think about how our actions will make others feel. When people do nice things for us or agree to spend time with us, they do so because on some level, they value who we are. And if we don't at least acknowledge this (to say nothing of reciprocity), we're throwing it back in their face. For some reason, this seems like a difficult idea to grasp.

I really have come to appreciate what an enormous undertaking it is when my principal told us that one of his goals for the new school was to foster a sense of empathy. It astounds me that in this day, when almost every person we know is a simple text message away, we can't even take the time to let people know that we're thinking about them. That's all it takes - a gesture as simple as a text message. And if we can't even do this for people we supposedly care about, then it's no wonder that people don't observe the minute of silence on November 11th.

So the next time you have to cancel plans, or if you're going to be late, or even if you think of something nice to say, take 2 seconds, would you mind? It really is a pittance of time.