Sorry that I missed last week folks! I completely forgot. It was a really busy week, but that’s not a good excuse. Back to regularly scheduled programming…
On Bad Content
I just saw the Broadway show Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville. I was lucky enough to win one of the show lotteries, which granted me 2 tickets for only $42 each (a steal for Broadway). When I won, I was in disbelief, since it was the first time I had entered, and I assumed that it could be because the show wasn’t very good. A cursory glance at some reviews wasn’t promising, especially with one publication calling it "insufferably dumb." Despite this, I managed my friend Ross to go with me. On arrival, we were greeted by very aggressive ushers in Hawaiian shirts and ended up seated among a sea of older white faces until the curtain rose. After several hours of songs, beachballs and cheeseburger-related flight, we sat with enormous grins on our face. It was fantastic! The best $42 I’ve spent in a while went towards an incredibly fun show of laughs, almost tears and whimsy. There was a variety of dumb puns and shoehorned details of the story to match Buffett’s weird songs, but I didn’t care!
The whole experience had me thinking about the type of person I’ve become when it comes to consuming media. With the wealth of information on the internet, it’s rare for me to go to a movie or read a book without at least glancing at reviews. When every single piece of media is available to me, how else would I watch only the best stuff? This is a way to watch a lot of good content and never be exposed to the trash content. It’s also a way to become pretentious about everything in your life and take forever to make decisions. When there’s a lot of options, we become obsessed with finding perfect, sometimes to a point where we lose the ability to enjoy whatever we actually choose. Allowing yourself to watch terrible movies or read terrible books or eat at awful taco restaurants is an important character-building activity that I feel like I’ve lost. Even worse, I’ve lost the ability to just watch or read or eat something without wanting to rate it or think about how effective it is at its goal or the depth of its themes.
Essentially, all I’m saying is that it’s really easy to lose the ability to lose yourself in dumb or bad quality things. Some of my favorite things in the world aren’t exactly critically acclaimed. Taco Bell, Zoolander, any book by Dan Brown and all 720 episodes of Naruto are all great examples of this. So, I recommend that you make an uninformed decision. Check out a movie that you know nothing about, or pick dinner at a nearby restaurant without consulting Yelp, or pick a random book by its cover - it may surprise you!
Drops of the Week
where I *drop* recommendations of cool things this week
Article
“How to be a Professional Son (or Daughter)” by Ryan Holiday - this entire concept is super weird to me but there’s some historical backing to it, so it’s an interesting read.
Book
Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang - Chinese American kid grows up in Florida and gets involved with the wrong company. He’s raised by the NBA and hip-hop and becomes a famous and successful chef. One of my favorite memoirs that I’ve ever read.
Playlist
what love is - I don’t know what love is, but this playlist covers most of the songs that have helped me to guess what it might be like.
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:~)
Love,
Nikhil