Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

So I'm researching various religions version of the end of the world, right? At this point, Hinduism. Which of course leads to Kali and Shiva, and there's a mention on Wikipedia about how when Kali's unleashed, often only Shiva can calm her down. And one of the examples of ways he contained her is "challenging her to the wild tandava dance and outdoing her."

An actual precedent for a dance-off. AWESOME. Now, I could confirm this with other sources, but the idea's too awesome, so I'm not sure if I CARE.

I'm sure most of you have seen this already, but I never let redundancy stop me. I love the Internet. A lot because it lets so many awesome things happen that wouldn't have happened before, and most of them done just by random folks.

Like these videos. There's a band, called Ok Go! They posted a pair of videos on YouTube, one for "A Million Ways", the other for "Here it Goes Again". The first video made the rounds a couple months back, the second's going around now. And they're both pretty awesome, even though it's just filming the four of them in the one guy's backyard, or the four of them in a coordinated dance on treadmills.Well, the coordination and choreography is pretty awesome. But y'know, the fact that it's just the four guys and the one guy's sister doing the choreography and filming them, literally, in their backyard or basement is part of the appeal. And the music's pretty good.

What makes it even more awesome though, is it worked. The one guy was interviewed on the Colbert Report, and they got a record deal in part (EDIT: Already had a record deal) because of the attention their videos got. That's pretty cool.

I wonder if they'll keep doing those kind of music videos. It's hard to keep low-budget cred when you have an actual budget to work with.

I think this idea might be useful in the philosophy of awesome. And it's a nice turn of phrase. So here's the link from which I swiped it: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/08/elaborate_mediocrity.php

This probably doesn't deserve to be called a philosophy yet. That, or somebody else has already come up with it. But I'm getting used to that happening, so here we go.

Most people only live a few days out of the week. If that. The other days are just sort of there, a blur of sameness. I know it's one of the things that makes me least satisfied with my job and my life. My job is really pretty pointless in the larger scheme of things, and it's neither interesting or enjoyable. So it makes the weeks go by fast and slow. Slow, because it takes forever to get through all the regular boring crap. And fast because when I stop and look back over the week, it seems like it passed in an instant since I spent all of it looking forward to the few times I got to do something cool, and basically fast-forwarded through the rest. That's pretty depressing.

Part of the rest of the problem is of my own creation, and this is where the Awesome comes in. Too much of the rest of time is spent doing stuff that's just okay. Or just interesting enough at the time, but not really that interesting in retrospect. Part of it is because no matter how cool something on the Internet is, 99% of things on the net just involve sitting at the computer and typing or looking at things. Video games are all joysticks and buttons and looking at pictures on the screen. Etc.

The point is, life shouldn't be like that. It shouldn't be fast-forwarded through. Life should be Awesome. Every day should have things that make you glad you did them. At least one. Really glad you did them, something you'll remember. Or something at least worthwhile. Whatever it is, as long as you're glad you did it. I can't tell you what's awesome for you to do. You have to do that.

I don't think I'm explaining this well. Dave, over at Dave's Long Box refers to "FUCK YEAH!" moments in comics (and movies), when you just want to yell "Fuck yeah!" because it was so awesome. Life should be more like that. Not all the time, because the human brain is a marvelously weird thing, and gets used to things really quickly. So then the amazingly awesome would become commonplace and boring as you became desensitized to it. Kinda like a drug, where you build up resistance to it, only this would be resistance to Awesome, which would be stupid.

And I think, perhaps, that might be part of the problem. At least in the US and the "West" in general. We're surrounded by marvels and so used to them we don't notice the kinds of Awesome permeating our every day lives. Hmm. That's a topic for another time, with the appeal of "natural" stuff because it's different than the normal Awesome we have, and the genesis of X-TREME! with Awesome junkies trying too hard to get ever-increasing doses of Awesome as everything becomes normal and boring to them. But that's for another topic, this is an attempt at a practical philosophy to make people's lives more fulfilling. Well, mine at least.

There's elements of Zen in this I guess, but it's more from Discordianism, because one of the whole points in that is to appreciate the moment. You're here, live it. Not to ignore the future, or the past, but not to focus on either or both so much you forget the rest. There's Awesome all around, and if there's not enough Awesome for you, then you should add more. If you're bored? Find something interesting to do. Don't just keep flipping through the same TV channels that bored you in the first place. There's a lot of Awesome things out there as it stands. Some people think they need to add magic or demons or High Weirdness to life to make it Awesome, but I don't think those are really any more than dressed up versions of the Just Barely Interesting, balloons of little substance with just a thin layer of Awesome on the outside. At least for me.

And the idea of Awesome is part of how I've become pickier. 90% of everything is crap, goes Sturgeon's Law. Probably even more. But there's a LOT of stuff and people out there, there's more than enough to keep to the good or great almost exclusively. If you're only reading something out of habit, or because it's Kinda Neat, is it Neat Enough to spend your time on? That's up to you. If it's not Awesome or Neat enough, ditch it.

I still don't think I've explained this very well at all, because it went a totally different way than I'd planned. My central point I was trying to make is this. Life should be Awesome. There's not enough time to waste on the Just Barely Interesting. Be picky. Go for the good stuff. Go for the Awesome. Don't let the Almost Interesting keep distracting you.

I'm going to keep trying to flesh this out and organize it into... something. I dunno. Maybe an Awesome Manifesto at some point. Or something. So I'm seriously requesting feedback, so I can try and figure out where I'm going with this, because just talking to myself only gets me echoes.