A Rain of Frogs

This is not a post about children, despite the title. It is instead a post about people. I have been harboring of late a secret suspicion that boys have lost the war of the sexes. In fact, it is distinctly possible boys lost the war of the sexes before it even began.

I consider myself lucky to be exposed to a vast number of young adults on a regular basis. This exposure comes as a side benefit of being a performing musician. I regularly get to watch and converse with people who are 10 or even 15 years younger than I am, and it’s interesting to observe how they are different (and how they are the same) than I was when I was there age.

One of the most notable differences between myself then and them now is that when I was there age I was a parent. This alone has a moderate impact on one’s outlook. They are still growing up and figuring out how the world works, while I was pretending to be an adult and trying to guide a child through its first steps into humanity.

That aside, I see remarkable and fundamental shifts in the dynamics of being a young adult. When I drive by the high school down the street from my house, I see dozens of students out doing what senior high school students do – smoking and trying to look cool. That’s not so different from my experiences. What is difference is how hopelessly outclassed the boys look in comparison to the girls. At the grade 12 level, I see boys who look like boys, and girls who look like little supermodels.

While I am sure the boys love looking at girls that are that attractive, I am unsure they notice how its impacting their ability to concentrate on schoolwork. What (straight) boy could focus on math when a girl who looks like she stepped out of a wet dream is absently flipping her hair in the chair in front on him?

I can hear people telling me it’s always been this way, but that’s crap. It wasn’t so much this way when I was younger. Yes, girls were on my mind somewhat more than 99.5% of the time, but the girls didn’t look like hollywood actresses. These new girls know how to take care of themselves. They are healthy looking, intelligent, driven and admirable. They are amazing people, despite their often abhorrent taste in footwear.

I know an 18 year old girl that fits this description. She is intelligent, thoughtful, kind, mature and beautiful. She’s in her first year of university studying the sciences, and by almost all measures is a girl that once would have been described as having her “head screwed on right”.

And then she has this boyfriend. A skinny kid who works at a dead-end retail job and has no hope of getting into university (not that I consider this particularly telling). Sure, he’s sort of cute, in a boyish, waif-like way, and he’s not unintelligent, but – like those boys outside the high-school – he is so hopelessly outclassed by his girlfriend that it becomes almost laughable.

What’s worse is that his (possibly subconscious) insecurities about being in a whole different league than his girlfriend might be causing him to pressure her to leave university and pursue an education in college. While I have no problems with college, I think that if one has an opportunity to attend a university, one should. She can attend college post-university and receive a hands-on education should she so choose. Why not? Is there such thing as too much education?

Whether these observations are indicative of the general state of young adulthood, or some sort of regional abnormality is beyond my ability to gage. It’s an issue I see becoming more and more of a problem as the boys fall further behind the curve.

I don’t know the cause (though I have many pet theories) and I don’t know the solution (though again, I have some pet theories), but I think its something that maybe it will have to be addressed in the near future.

We’re playing in the Big Smoke on Saturday April 22nd:

Jetté

with special guests

August

Live at the Hooch

Saturday April 22nd
doors at 10.

$5 cover – Second Floor Gypsy Co-Op
815 Queen Street West, Toronto
(416)703-5069

You’re sure to enjoy it, so come on out.

So, I had a gig last night.

It’s unusual for me to play on a Tuesday. Wednesdays fairly regularly, Thursdays somewhat less regularly. Fridays and Saturdays often. But rarely Tuesdays. Tuesdays at the bar I usually play at are locked up by a fantastic musician named Mike, who occasionally has to go on tour with the big Canadian Idol tour. Yeah, he’s that good.

So we played last night. As usual, I was there before the guitar player, on account of me living three minutes away and him having an hour drive. I was sitting, talking with this girl I know about her job. She was saying how hard it was for her to change careers without a new education, because her Early Childhood Education degree wasn’t really transferable. I sympathized with her. There’s no way in hell I could look after other people’s kids for a living. I’d end up drowning them or something.

Eventually the guitar player arrived, so we set up. As we were setting up, he explained to me that he was in a crappy mood. Woke up that way, he said. It seems that he had one of those introspective watershed moments when you look at your life and realize that you’ve done a lot less with it than you thought.

He explained that he was upset about being a musician playing cover gigs on the bar scene, and in his thirties. Not a smashing success, by any stretch. He wasn’t ever expecting to be a rock star, but all that time learning music… for what? It’s not like those skills can be transfered to any other career path.

We played the show. It was pretty good. We have some pretty original sounds, even though we’re playing other people’s music. I personally thing we put on a good show. The music’s good, the band is fun, and we make nights race by in a frenzy of acoustic funk and dancing. I’m not a professional musician like him. I have a day job, doing something pretty fun and pretty enjoyable. For me, music is stress relief, as much a safety valve as this web site.

At 2:30 this morning, while coiling cables and packing away guitars, we were approached by a guy who had been listening to us for a while. He told us how much he enjoyed the show, how much he liked our slightly unusual renditions of common radio songs, and our energy on stage. It was a nice compliment, a perfect ending to the night, for me at least.

My guitar player continued to quietly coil the cable in his hand. Eventually he looked over at me, smiled and said “You know. I piss and moan about being a musician. I whine about all the years I spent learning to play music. That guy would give his left nut to be in my shoes.”

Last week it was the execution of a man for changing religions from Islam to Christianity. This week, more theological absurdity:

Sawing marriages, not logs

A Muslim man in India, apparently prone to talking in his sleep, must now divorce his wife, have her marry, sleep with, and divorce another man, and wait 100 days before he’s allowed to marry her again. All this because them man talks in his sleep.

Apparently, he spoke the word “talaq” three times while asleep, which constitutes a binding divorce under some form of Islamic law. The couple had been happily married for 11 years, and have three children. Perhaps both him and his wife, who told her friends about it, would be better served keeping their lips sealed.

You’re healed!

The Devil went down to Tulsa, looking for a soul to steal. What he found in stead was Bob Larsen, the Devil’s worst nightmare.

In front of hundreds, sometimes thousands of witnesses, Bob Larsen performs Christian exorcisms, banishing unclean spirits from the bodies of believers and sending them back to the pits of hell, forked tail firmly between legs.

In recent years, exorcism has become what I can only describe as “big business” in modern times, what with science and medicine being unable to cure all our ills. According to the article, more than 600 Protestant churches have set up elite groups of crack exorcists in recent years.

As one respondent noted, “Mr. Larson is to true spirituality, what fast food is to proper nutrition.”

Hell yes.

A “moderate” muslim cleric in Afghanistan, among others, is calling for the death of a 41 year old man because – and get this – the guy converted to Christianity. This same cleric was jailed three times by the Taliban for being too moderate.

What the hell is wrong with people?

I think this sort of Muslim must carefully consider Christianity for a moment. The religions are actually not so different. Fundamentalist Christians could make a case for killing all non-Christians, ie; Muslims.

They have all the suicide bombers, its true. But Christians have all the bombs. And they don’t have to die to set them off. A simple flick of the wrist, and poof, the problem vanishes in a cloud of fungal proportions.

Of course, Christians for the most part don’t want to do that. For the most part, Christians, even the fundamentalist ones, are more than content to watch the Simpsons and eat McDonalds. Sure, you get the occasional whack job that bombs an abortion clinic or something, but on the whole, Christians can’t be bothered with religious wars any more.

The nation of Islam has some serious publicity issues. The rest of the world thinks they’re a religions of rabid Xenophobes, and while its true that western press is probably fueling this fire a bit, but they aren’t exactly inventing the footage of muslims stoning other muslims, right?

The sooner the true moderate Muslims can get the fundamentalists out of high places, the sooner we can all get down to watching some really meaningful television. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for America to get the fundamentalists out of power either.

Pass me that Egg McMuffin, would you?