Forever Young

Also known as "the depressing part of YouTube." I spend a lot of free time on YouTube, and eventually stumble onto things that are poignant. As probably everyone with an internet connection knows, the other day Glee actor Cory Monteith was found dead in a hotel room in Vancouver, Canada. As of yet, no cause of death has been released. I am not a "Gleek," nor do I watch the show, really. But at 31, it is always sad when a promising young person suddenly passes away.

It reminded me of a bunch of videos I had found the other night on YouTube, tributes to stars over the last 100 or so years who died young -- often before reaching their 30th or 40th birthdays. The tragic part about it, is the "what ifs" and the unfulfilled potential. People who at a very young age had accomplished a lot, had burst on the scene in a flash of blinding light. What else would they have been capable of?

And yet, when I watch these videos, and read about these people, sometimes I wonder. I wonder, is it better to have your youthful star burn brightly into the night, even if that star of passion must quickly flame out? Or it is better to live a measured life, slowly waiting for time and age to find you, while you go about doing whatever it is you do? The people in these videos, in many ways lived more than most who make it to two, three, four times their age. And they are forever remembered as their star was burning, not after it had long burned out. If nothing else, they had interesting lives, which is more than most can say. The real trick is, have the interesting life longer, keep the star burning long after day has broken. But very few people, it seems, in that way, get to have their cake and eat it too. But perhaps this is all romanticism. No matter how long you live, what matters is the life in the years, not the years in the life. How we all forget.

Incidentally, these lists are why I will never do drugs. Also, "the 27 club" is as tragic as it is unsettling. So many iconic figures (particularly from the Boomer generation) died at 27.

In case you are in need of quiet reflection:

A tribute to young musicians lost

It's sad to realize that the silent era is all but a fading memory now

The "27 club"

Forever young

To close, I leave some thoughts from smarter people than myself on the subject:

"They that love beyond the world can never be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies." ~William Penn.

"Oh how wrong we were to think that immortality meant never dying." ~Gerard Way.

"The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live." ~Joan Borysenko.

Random Things about D.C.

I have been in the District now for almost two months (more than halfway done with my time here...wow). In that time, I have observed some things about the city and its inhabitants that are idiosyncratic. Every city does have their idiosyncrasies, but DC seems to have a lot, and a lot of "ticks" that are rather unique to it. Here is a list of some of the more prominent things I have noticed:

1. Charter schools. On my walks to and from work, and around the city generally, I tend to observe the scenery and world around me (sometimes at the expense of looking where I am going...whoops). I have noticed something strange: I haven't seen one "normal" public school. All of the non-private schools are some form of Charter school, which is really more like a quasi-private public school. I know that charter schools are becoming more of a (somewhat controversial) thing in cities --Chicago has several, whose ads are always gracing the insides of El cars-- but Chicago and most cities also still have their regular "neighborhood" public schools. In two months here, I have yet to see one regular public school. This is actually one of the first things I noticed when I got here. It's weird, and gets me wondering if DC is on some kind of program or policy where all of its public schools are now charter?

2. There are three types of people (well, professionals anyway) in DC: 1)lawyers, 2) consultants, or 3)consultants who want to become lawyers, and vice versa. Literally everyone I have run into in DC --whether coworkers, or people at "networking" events, or the time on the Metro I randomly ran into a girl I graduated high school, operates in one of those three categories. I guess there is also the odd doctor, because people get sick and need hospitals, but like everyone else is a lawyer or a consultant. Even people who are not actively practicing in those areas, have some kind of degree (JD for law, idk what for consulting) that is geared towards law or consulting. I guess this is not surprising, since DC's industry is government, and government is mostly lawyers, and what private sector there is, is geared toward supporting or catering to government. But I have never really been in a city with such a generally homogenous group of people.

Image courtesy of memegenerator

3. No one is from here. Kind of an addendum to the above, but very few people I have met are from DC, or even the immediate surrounding area. Again, this makes sense, because it is the nation's capital, where people come from all over the land under the federal government's jurisdiction to (in theory anyway) govern the country. In a lot of cities --particularly New York and Chicago-- you get a lot of people that were born, raised, and stayed in the city or immediate surrounding areas, and have never left. Or they left briefly and then came back. Of course DC is physically smaller and has fewer people than these cities, so it is natural that there would be fewer native DC-ites, but just how few there are is kind of surprising.

4. People here talk in code. Again because DC is ground zero for government business and (more to the point) bureaucracy, there are lots of departments of the government all over the city. There are also just a lot of agencies --public interest, NGOs, think tanks, etc. And much of the work that is done in DC, is codified in and carried out pursuant to federal statutes. What do all of these three things have in common? If you guessed, "You can essentially boil the names of those entities down to easy-sounding acronyms," you'd be right: FEC, FTC, CII, SEC, ACLU, FOIA. All important and prominent thins within the District, all will fun acronyms. And for the most part, people only refer to these things by their acronyms. But, for the uninitiated, it means they pretty much speak in code: when every noun in a sentence is some kind of acronym, the sentence has no meaning if you don't know the acronym. May as well be speaking ancient Greek. So yeah, that took some getting used to. I guess that is why they call DC "alphabet city."

Pretty much this

Young and Beautiful

Since seeing The Great Gatsby yesterday, I have become a little obsessed with one of the songs that recurred throughout the movie, particularly in the scenes with Gatsby and Daisy. The song is "Young and Beautiful" by Lana Del Rey. I think the song, while maybe not "period appropriate," is very evocative of the story between Gatsby and Daisy. I found the official music video on YouTube. I tend to be fond of trace-like music to begin with, plus it is just a great song -- musically, lyrically, etc. Rather than go on and on about it, though, I am just going to post the video, so people can see for themselves. Enjoy!