Elevators

I work in a building with 20 floors, and unless I feel like walking up the 18 flights to my floor, I get to ride an elevator. To answer the inevitable, yes, I've walked up the stairs many times. Not a big deal. But dealing with elevators for many years, I've gotten to observe how people act around them, and it really is an odd thing how people act with elevators.

Start with the basics. To call an elevator, you walk up to the button and press the direction you want to go: up or down. If you're on the first floor, there is one choice. In fact, most people will push down from my floor because there is rarely any reason to go up to 20 (when I have done, I just take the stairs; it's quicker). Anyway, just like when children want to do something, there is this odd competition that goes on for who presses the elevator button. I don't even know if they realize they're doing it, but it happens.

I'll be walking up to the button, being the first one to approach it when someone else appears. Seeing that I am going for the button on the left side of the hall, they'll make a high speed beeline for the button on the right. We're on the first floor. Which direction am I going to push that doesn't work out with their plans? Maybe they are the type to call "First!" on YouTube videos. I don't know. I'm three inches to their three feet from the button, so I continue my prearrange trajectory and push the button. As soon as the light goes on, they put on the brakes and pull their hand back like it was a huge shock that I was doing exactly the same thing they were.

So we wait forever for an elevator even though it is 6:30am and there is almost no one in the building. That's another rule, though. Even though there are five elevators that express from floor 1 to 11 and go from 11 to 20, only 2 or 3 of them work at any given time. They appear to have a minimum wait time as well because you can almost never press the button and have the doors immediately open. No, you have to begin your awkward elevator journey nodding at the guy who's either still upset because you pushed the button first or can't figure out how his telekinetic ability worked to make the light come on before he touched it. After the minimum 30 to 60 second wait, the doors open, and you do a last minute check to ensure you commit no social taboos and get on before someone who should get on before you.

You see, while women's lib has been embraced by the world and the sexes are supposedly equal now, God forbid you commit the social crime of forgetting the rule of "ladies first" or at least persons of the female gender (in cases where you're clearly not dealing with a lady, if you follow me) first. If there is any rule left over from the old days of chivalry that women don't mind clinging to, it's "me first." Everything else can fall by the wayside, but you must let her go in first even if you're standing next to the door, and she's wandered to the other end of the waiting area (you know, because she wanted to push the button, and she's sulking).

But wait, before you go in the elevator, you notice there's already someone in there. There is a sort of elevator etiquette that not everyone knows about, and I hope you'll remember. Everyone in the elevator gets to come out first, and then new riders can get on. Hopefully, you can see the logic behind this. Some people don't. I've been pushed aside (literally) for someone to get on before I got off before, and I wondered what their hurry was since they aren't going anywhere before I get off. Maybe they were afraid I'd push their floor button before I got off.

So, you're finally in the elevator, but there's yet another problem. There is this odd mindset (probably related to the minimum elevator wait rule) that this elevator is the last elevator in the world and it's never coming back. If someone misses this elevator, it's the stairs for them. The only time you will see overweight chap with no arms on his office chair for a very good reason run full tilt is when the elevator door is open, and he thinks he'll miss it. God forbid you have to stand and wait for the next one because then you have that awkward moment when two people missed the last elevator in the world and have the fight over who gets to push the button to call the next one. In addition, the people in the elevator believe this as well because they'll hold that elevator door until the alarm goes off to allow someone to catch it.

This creates another awkward moment if you happen to be the small percentage that knows that you can just call another elevator when this one leaves because someone going into the lift sees you coming. They decide to hold the door for you, and you notice. What do you do now? You were walking along at a leisurely pace not caring for anything in the world except getting to that call button first, and suddenly, you're deprived of your button and now have someone holding the door for you. To show that you care about their time, you have no choice now but to take up a jog that honestly goes no faster than you were walking to begin with. You can't run because the security guy will look at you funny (because people look funny when they run).

Once inside the elevator, you waive and smile at the worried face running to the closing doors with a shrug because that open doors button is a farce and doesn't work anyway, and I'm sure not sticking my hand in the closing doors. Those sensors don't always work (I've seen Final Destination 2). Now, you're riding up with two people from different floors who are pissed off at you because you got to the up button first. You stand in awkward silence ensuring you don't break the rule of "Don't you dare talk to me. I don't know you and can defend myself." The three of you stand as far away from each other as possible in the small closet-sized space waiting patiently for someone to get out so the other two of us can have more space.

We reach 11 and the guy gets off. Oh, super awkward now. The doors close and she moves to the opposite side of the lift and tries to squeeze into the cracks into the wall since anyone who would deprive a defenseless woman of her button pressing right is creep material, and she's going all the way to 20. But now there's another problem.

You know, elevators are there to make life easier. I get it. But I only take them because opening my day with  432 steps from ground floor to 18 (Yes, I know how many steps there are. Why? Is that weird?) is not fun. So we stop at floor 14. Some guy who looks like an image of fitness walks onto the elevator and presses...15. Really? You interrupted our awkward elevator moment to come in and go up one floor. I could sleep walk up one floor. Rock Girl could walk up one floor without hurting hers-... wait, no she should take the elevator. Anyway, in a moment of mutual disdain, my fellow rider at I glare at this guy who stands three inches from the door trying to avoid the heat of our gazes behind him as he rides up one floor knowing he was wrong and regretting his button pushing obsessions. He all but runs out, and I have three floors left to look anywhere but at my fellow rider.

Before I know it, I'm at my floor and can't even see the woman flip me the bird as I stroll happily on solid floor again instead of that tiny closet that could plummet me to my death at any moment. In between happy dance steps, I ponder taking the stairs and avoiding all those awkward moments and button competitions, but then I remember the landing incident where I was going down, a woman was exiting the floor, and another woman was coming up, and we stood there staring, wondering who should go first. At least in an elevator, we could have just avoided eye contact.

Audiophile

So as you may well know, I'm all into music. It makes me happy. I speak the language. I can't get enough of it. A guy at work (who I noticed I had referred to as The Mixer at one point) called me a media mutt when it comes to what I listen to and watch because there are no limits with me. I will listen to and evaluate anything. New or old makes no difference. There is nothing before or after my time.

Right now, for example, I'm listening to Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, his 15-16 hour epic opera cycle. Yeah, it's in German. Anyway...

I have the Amazon Cloud Player and for the first time since the iPod, I am able to organize a large amount of music, but unlike the iPod's 80Gb limitation, the Cloud has a limit of 250,000 songs, regardless of size. This is staggering. They do this by having space available for upload along with linking songs with their own download library so that some of the dongs are your own while others are those they've matched to theirs. Anyway, my count after all the burning and uploading that was to be done over a 3 week period tranferring everything from iPods, hard drives, and CDs came out to a little over 32K tracks. I cannot say songs because not everything is a song or even music, but tracks accurately describes it.

I believe the oldest pieces date back to the 1600's while I have stuff from 2012 as well. Haven't grabbed any 2013 stuff, cause the year is too new to know what's worth getting. That may seem like a lot and even raise an eyebrow, but I've been buying CDs and downloading from a variety of (legitimate) services since high school. I would blow hundreds of dollars when I was in the military buying entire artist catalogs on a whim (I specifically recall doing this with Billy Joel, Oingo Boingo, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Stephen Sondheim to name a few). If someone said "listen to this," I'd have the CD before going to bed. I went through hundreds of CDs in my garage determining what I had on my iPod and what I hadn't. And I was not alone either. The Queen listens to different genres of music than I frequent, so she had her own catalog of CDs to review and upload.

Now, I'm going through music I've not listened to in years simply because I never had room on my iPod for it. It was stored on CD, so that was enough. Now, it's accessible. In addition, because of how the cloud player works, anyone (in my family) can get what they want from the library and place it on their iPods to listen to. Whenever and wherever without waiting for me to plug in and find it for them.

Rock Girl was excited anyway.

For me, it means I can delete some things off my iPod that I've kept on there for storage and free up some space for music to actually listen to. This thing is going to completely change my iPod's purpose. It's very cool.

Wisdom

You know, as I sit here at a job I never anticipated in my younger years, I ponder what people once told me. You see, I wanted to write music. Specifically (at the time), musicals. That was my goal. And I could do it. I was always asked, though, what my fall back plan was, and I always replied that I didn't need one because I would succeed. Here I sit almost twenty years later still not having succeeded, and I note that they asked me the wrong question. They always worded the question like "when you fail, then what?" You can't tell someone with determination that they'll fail. It's uncool. The angle should have been, "what do you want to do while you're working toward that goal?" or even "what will you do to make enough money to pay for that goal before they pay you?"

What I'm faced with in reaching this goal now is the monetary side of it. I can succeed if I have enough time and money to throw at it, but I honestly make enough to pay the bills. That's it. If I had planned my life out better, I would have gone for a psychiatry doctorate, worked as a psychiatrist during the day (hey, a head shrinker sounds like fun), and then by night, I would have had the excess scratch to pursue what I want to do. It would pay better than what I do now anyway.

We've passed this wisdom on. Rock Girl said when she was little that she wants to be an astronaut. We encouraged this, and now when she's about to hit high school, we're digging deeper to find out what she would do as an astronaut. After all, people go into space for a specific reason, so she would have to specialize in some field of science to be necessary on a space mission. She actually loves astrophysics. So we're taking the angle of while you're not in space, what job would you like to do that will make you happy and give you the skills to go into space, should the opportunity arise (since the space program is currently floating at the top of the toilet waiting for the guv'ment to pull the handle). She has embraced this willingly.

So it's sort of a matter of living my life vicariously through my children, but if she achieves her goals and lives an even better life than I did, then I believe I can say we've done well.

Last Night's Castle

I've watched the TV series Castle on Monday nights for a couple years now. It follows new episodes of either the Bachelor/ette or Dancing With The Stars (both of which are shows that the Queen watches). The series has its ups and downs, and at the moment, it is on a down. The episodes remain entertaining, but the cases are a bit weak. In addition, Castle's involvement in the cases have run very minimal the last couple of shows. He is there to give some key piece of insight, but what was clever about the show before was that he was the one to fully solve the case by thinking completely outside the box. The cases themselves remain fairly textbook for a crime show: the one who does it is the one you usually meet first and then forget about completely through the course of the show.

And then last night, they had this plot. It is a well known fact that screenwriters and/or producers (can't figure out which) are some of the most out of touch people on the planet. They put forth things that people will kind of accept, but if you have any knowledge at all about the topic, you're stuck shaking your head at the naivety. This is what happened last night. The big twist (and apologies if this spoils it) was that there are two rivals in the music industry: one older, one younger, just like the show, Nashville produced by the same network. The younger is coming into prominence while the older is dropping into the shadows. The older tries to sabotage the younger by (and I'm not making this up) stealing the master recording of the younger's next album, giving it to a "hacker friend" who was going to upload it to the "Internet" (you know the place, right?) at the same time the album comes out to undermine sales of the album.

Hm. Having the knowledge I have, and knowing the people I know, I have some reasons that real people (not the bloated record company statistics) have for downloading music from the all-powerful and mysterious "Internet" as well as how this process works. First of all, stealing the master files for the album and releasing it online at the same time the album comes out is one of the dumbest plans ever. Why? Because people rip and upload the album in its full quality to the mystical Internet within hours of the album's release anyway. In fact, they'll go one step further and buy it from Amazon or iTunes and just keep the files going right out to the online file storage.

And now, would this move actually undermine sales? I really doubt it. The record companies will tell you that piracy is a huge deal and they're losing billions. They're probably guessing that number based on how many downloads they can estimate are going out from sites that host them. The reality is that they're not losing as much as they claim. Here are reasons that various people I know download music along with the amount that the record companies lose in that process.

1. They already have the album and have misplaced it, but want to get ahold of the music while trying to locate the missing disc. Money lost: 0.
2. Would never have bought the album in a million years, but are curious enough to give it a listen, yet too lazy to check it out from the local library. Money lost: 0
3. The target album is out of print. Money lost: 0
4. Want to hear the music now, but intend to buy it anyway. Money (ultimately) lost: 0
5. Not sure if they would like the album, so listen to it now to evaluate it, and then buy it because they wish to support the artist if they feel the music was worth it (don't laugh; I know someone who does this). Without listening first, they would not purchase it. Money lost: 0
6. Is flat broke and cannot afford to buy anything, so wouldn't have bought it. Money lost: 0. When they do buy music, they generally get it at a second hand store anyway, so the music companies still made no money on them.

I would imagine the subset of people who want the album, can afford the album, and can equally choose between buying it or downloading it is actually quite small. In addition, despite being in the technological age, a lot of people have no idea where to go to actually download anything. They probably lose more when people shoplift the album than when people download it.

So the fictional person went to jail for murdering someone who caught them in the act of a pointless crime that would not have changed anything. It was another one of those plots that was more of a public service announcement than it was an actual crime drama.

I suppose I should also throw out that this is not a commentary on the validity or legality of downloading unpurchased music, but a notation on the ridiculous nature of the plot / crime in this episode of Castle.

A Word From The Radio

So I was listening to the radio coming into work this morning, and on the Christian station, they were talking about grandparents taking kids to church, and how many people went to church because their grandparents took them. One told a story of being a greeter at church and helping one grandmother get her kids checked into the kid classes for the first time, and she was so happy they made since it is a big job getting kids ready, etc. Another story was of a kindergardener who basically preached to his class about Jesus (because public school teachers aren't allowed to, but he knew the answers that some kids was asking). When the teacher asked how he knew all that, he said his grandma took him to church. They were happy and all that, making a deal of it, and not wanting to be Mr. Negativity, I had one question: where were the parents?

You know who took me to church? My parents. Not my grandparents. You who takes the princesses to church? The Queen and I. Their parents. It's all well and good that the grandparents want to be involved in the kids' lives, but why aren't the parents taking their children? Sometimes, church can stick, but if the parents aren't going, then all the time these kids spend is going to be largely wasted because the parents' non-church lives are going to eventually derail anything learned in church. Kids learn by example and 99% of their example time will be spent with the parents who (with obvious exception where the parent is absent or incapable of going; I'm referring to those who simply refuse to go) apparently have no desire to be an example. Kudos to the grandparents, but the grandparents should be working on getting THEIR children to go to church rather than writing them off as hopeless and proceeding to the next generation.

It kind of steamed me a bit. I'll admit that.

I'm sure excuse number one is (ahem), "but the parents might not have the time." Once, I worked for an idiot, but this idiot gave me a superb tidbit of wisdom that never left me when I tossed the excuse out that I didn't have time for something. Think on this. When it soaked in, I knew he was right.

"You have time for what's important."

Could the parents have unforgiving bosses who make them work on Sunday morning? Of course. I'm not talking about them either. Could they have worked all night Saturday night? Of course, but they have a choice. I once worked overnights at Wal-Mart over the weekends while I was working 40+ hours at my current job. This means I worked 10pm-7am Saturday night, and then I went to church at 10:30am and played with the worship team. It was important to me that the children went to church, and that I took them, so I made the time to do it.

What is important to you?

Music

A friend of mine calls me a musical mutt. Actually, he referred to me as a media mutt the other day. What this means is that I will watch and listen to anything. I think I've covered this before where my iPod will shift centuries and genres between songs as I keep it on a good, random mix. And random means totally random. He says it would make an average person's head explode.

Anyway, I acknowledged to myself that I was not up on current music the other day, and resolved to have a listen to see what sort of quality the most popular songs have in common. In any era, there is something the songs have in common that people expect to hear. So, I (your perhaps not-so-average 37 year old) grabbed me some Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Carly Rae Jepson (Call Me Maybe), Rihanna, and some other stuff that was at the top of the Grammys the last couple years. I had already listened to Adele; the Queen loves her.

As I've been listened, there is a common musical thread that flows through these songs. To an extent, it is something I noticed when we've played new stuff at church also. It's kind of hard to describe, but there's a particular groove inherent to the music. A lot of songs are almost like concert pieces where you sit, listen, and take it in.You're not supposed to do that with new music. Even ballads. Every song has a groove (be it fast or slow) and you're supposed to keep moving (keep dancing). I imagine chairs exist in modern concerts, but I doubt people use them. If you're not dancing, you're not experiencing the music. It is supposed to get into your bones and keep you going.

Of course, the other big characteristic is that it is largely electronic: keyboards galore, loops and sound effects, and drum machines. The beat is king more than the horizontal and vertical sheet music, though the beat is somehow inherent in printed page.

A couple of other things that occur a lot of time are tone correction on the voices and instances where the hook is actually the counterpoint on the chorus. Tone correction is obvious when it comes up. The human voice is not capable (in most instances) of making certain sounds on its own. One of these is a direct slur from one note to another without glissing through every pitch inbetween. And yes, "gliss" is a musical term short for glissando which is what I described. Tone correction forces the vocal line sung into it to go from one pitch to the next in perfect pitch, which skips every partial between those notes. It means the singer just has to get close to the note without exactly hitting it. It's more than a bit of a cheat, but it is used a lot as much for a sound as actual note correction for people who can't exactly sing but are pretty in front of a camera.

The other thing about the counterpoint is when the chorus has background singing a line over and over while the lead vocalist sings something about that topic but in a manner that is often musically easier to sing than that counterpoint. You, as the listener, will walk away singing that counterpoint over and over without remembering anything else about that song.

Those are my observations about much of the music I heard. It obviously doesn't apply to all of it. Adele, for instance, is still all about the beat for many of her songs, but it sounds largely acoustic in nature, and I don't think I've ever heard tone correction on her. She is a really good singer in her own right, and her music is quite catchy. Many of the others are extremely similar.

Lazy

As I mentioned on Friday, I managed to rack up my maximum overtime last week, so to start out this week, I opted to just come in later than I have been. I slept in till 6:00 (some of you will understand this as sleeping in; others might consider it going to bed early), and got in at 7, which means with a full half hour lunch, I'll still split out of here at 3:30, which is quite a nice time to leave work.

What's funny about leaving at 3:30 is when you do it, people are all like, "must be nice," but you know, deep down, they know you get in super early, and have no desire for 6:00 to be a "sleep in" time.

After a lazy start, I got to find emails waiting that were sent only moments after I left on Friday where a fire I had put out on Friday turned out to not be fully out yet. Oh well.

Regular People

You know, there are a lot of magazines and tv shows dedicated to telling everyone all about the life and times of the rich and famous. We read about their lives and lifestyles without the slightest thought to the fact that their lives are completely inseparable for us. I mean, completely. I saw one today where there was some realtor to the stars making people guess who owned some multi- million dollar homes, as if we're supposed to be impressed or wowed by such a thing. of course, were not wowed anymore. We know they also have 8 or 9 figure salaries. We read about there clothes that we can't afford, the jobs they do that we won't get hired for, and the lives they lead that we can't. this isn't bitterness on my part, but a sort of wonderment of why we aren't interested in stories about us. About people with normal lives so we know we're not alone in the world. Stories that tell us how other people just like us overcame the problems we' 're facing right now. I suppose you can call that your local news, but you never hear of those people again.

Well, stick with me. I'm pretty normal at the  moment, facing life,a regular job, a regular family, and enough money to live on, but not enough to splurge with. I vow to male my posts even more normal an  mundane, and maybe I might even run into something interesting.