Touristas...Don't Go Home.

Tourism

Your first thought when I say the word “tourist” is probably not a good one. We all picture tourists being these annoying foreigners walking around with outdated maps, huge clunky cameras, and bags, apparently filled with all their worldly possessions, on their backs; working in lower Manhattan, I’ve come to know the image of a tourist quite well. But what I now propose is a complete change in connotation for these travelers.

Just think about what "tourism" actually is. It' the act of a single person, or group of people (usually a family), leaving their native society, culture, or region, to travel to a completely different society, culture, or region with one sole purpose; to collect information and learn. To learn.

The single reason that tourists even exist is that people inherently want to learn about things that they weren't taught while growing up. The reason so many people flock to Manhattan is because of how much history there is here. A great deal of you reading this (if anybody is reading this at all) have all gone through history class in high school and learned a significant about Manhattan's history and wouldn't consider yourselves "tourists" if you went to the city.

But imagine a family from a small European country who have never even seen a building over three stories tall; Imagine the family from Asia who have never seen more than a few cars in their entire lifetime; Imagine the African family who live in a village with less than one thousand people. Just imagine their reaction to seeing New York City.

So the next time you see that couple walking down the street, getting lost in the hustle and bustle of a city we've come to call home, please, I beg you, stop and ask if they could use some help. They're just trying to learn.

Senseless

-We know that someone is blind because we can see what they cannot. We know that someone is deaf because we can hear what they cannot. The majority of the world’s population has all five of their senses; we can see, hear, taste, feel, and smell. But I now have a question for you: what if there was a sixth sense?

-Now I don’t mean some extraordinary ability to see and/or speak to the deceased; I mean that what if there was some other sense that let us experience a new part of our world? If everyone in the world were blind, how would we know we weren’t seeing something? If everyone was deaf, how would we know that there were sounds we weren’t hearing? What other world could we be missing?

-The fun part of these questions is how incredibly far you can go with them. Just try to imagine what this “other world” could possibly consist of. The first things that usually come to mind are extreme visual images or loud and amazing noises, but those are still within the limits of our world; they’re still just sights and sounds. The difficulty comes in trying to imagine senses beyond our own.

-Imagine a sixth sense of “being”. I am, you are, he/she is. A sense of actual existence in this world. More than just simply interacting with your surroundings, but becoming part of them. A sense where you could take an outside look at yourself and just see yourself as a part of a bigger picture.



-What could that bigger picture look like?

Rant-tastic

So, I'm Steve. I started this blog because I felt that it would be much healthier for me to vent my anger on the internet and not my walls.

Most of my posts will just be random thoughts that have gotten my interest (the first post was done sitting at my desk at work while two of my coworkers were playing Z100 on their computers.)

So visit often to find my thoughts on the popular and mundane, scientific and religious, boring and entertaining, pointless and world-changing topics that you will eventually come across in your own lives.

=]

Z100

The Trail of a Song Heard on Z100

• 6-8 months before hearing it on the radio, you will have found this song either on your own or by the suggestion of a close friend with good taste in music.
  
• The actual song was released about a month before that.
  
• About a week before hearing the song on the radio, the song has faded from the top of your “recently added” list on itunes.
  
• Upon hearing the song on Z100 at work, in the car, or somewhere else in public, you proceed to do one of two things; you either:
  
• 1. Immediately exclaim that you’ve been listening to this song for “SOOOOOOO long” and have tried to get everyone else around to listen to this band for a couple months (they obviously refused because of their crappy tastes in music. If they had good taste in music, Z100 would NOT be playing.)
  
  OR
  
  2. Purposely sing every word to the song as if it’s just another song on the radio and wait for someone to eventually ask how your are cool enough to know this seemingly brand new song.
  
• For the next 4-5 months, the song will be played around 12 times a day, every day. This amounts to AT LEAST 1,440 plays. Odds are, if you’re still hanging out with those friends, you will hear about half of those plays. After the first 6, you will grow to hate the song, fearing the other impending 1,434 plays. You may hate this time during your life, but it will be tremendously valuable later on in this explanation, and in your life.
  
• Once the song has reached the end of its radio life, you may have even deleted the song from your itunes entirely. Another couple of weeks after the 1,440th play, the radio will play it for about a week, thinking it’s a “throwback” to earlier in the year (no.).
  
• The last time you will hear the song on Z100 is at the end of the year, when they do their countdown of “The Top Songs of 20XX”. After that, Z100 kicks it to the curb.
  
• About a year later, the song, depending on the genre, will resurface on 95.5, 102.7, or some other station that isn’t a slave to the hands of the Billboard Top 5. The song will never play more than once in a week, but will always play at least once a month.
  
• At this point, even your friends loyal to the ten different songs being played on Z100 will hate this song. Any time it comes up on itunes shuffle, it will be immediately skipped, as per the request of the groaning audience.
  
• The next few years go by, and almost all memory of the song has faded; but then comes that one party.
  
• One of your friends will decide to let you make the playlist for his/her next party. Scrolling through your itunes, you put a mix of the standard, current pop hits and lesser known bands that you know just sound good. Then you get to an artist you haven’t listened to in a while, and you stumble upon a song. A certain song that you all of sudden fall back in love with. You forget all knowledge of ever hating it and realize that it is and always has been an amazing song.
  
• About halfway through the night, when everyone is decently buzzed, the song comes on. You immediately recognize the intro, having been the one who put the song on the mix, but the rest of the crowd collectively stares at speakers as if there was a billboard with the song’s name.
  
• Slowly, but surely, one by one, you actually see light bulbs flicker on above people’s heads. There’s a collective round of “NO WAY”s, “OH MY GOD”s, and “YESSSSSSS”s, reassuring you that everyone has just shit themselves.
  
• And remember when you had to listen to that song 720 times on Z100? Secretly, they were preparing you and all your friends for this moment. Everyone and their mother now knows all the words, and the next 3 minutes and 22 seconds will turn into a hysterical lyric screaming match to see who can drunkenly sing the loudest. It will be the highlight of the night and you will be praised.
  
• It may seem like Z100 was butchering the song way back when, but they were just subliminally implanting the lyrics in your brain.
  
• Ten years after this party, some singer will stumble upon this “oldie” and decide to make a remix of it. The song will once again find its way to Z100, but this time it’s actually been butchered.
  
• This new song will then go through the same cycle again; forever to be played and replayed, known and forgotten, hated and loved, until the original sounds are lost to the musical black hole that is Z100.