Oregon Fever

This last week my entire family was vacationing on the Oregon coast. The weather was mildly cold, but it's much more preferable to the heat we've had back home. My parents rented a cozy little condo near the beach, and we really had a great time. The downside though? No WiFi. Even the cell service there was pretty pathetic. So I guess that is sort of an excuse for not having a new video blog post sooner, though I did manage to film this gem:

If that video doesn't make you jealous of my sweet family, then I don't know what will.

The trip taught me a few things, and I'd like to share them with you. 

1. I can survive without the internet. I still had my phone and I was able to use it occasionally if I could pick up a decent signal, but most of the trip I was disgruntled for not being able to get my photos to post to Instagram. It was particularly annoying when we needed to look up information about a place, or find directions, and the phone wouldn't connect, but in the end everything worked out. And in a way it was a healthy break from the social media world.

2. Everybody just needs to relax. My family is great, but many of us have a tendency to get real stressed out on vacations. Seems counter intuitive doesn't it? I understand that vacations only last so long, and there's lots to see and do in that short amount of time; but for once we don't have to worry about hurrying so much. In the real world, you have to be on time for work and you have deadlines; but on vacation you can just relax. Nobody is going to fire you if you're late to the beach. 

3. Oregon is incredible. Oregon is just great. The weather is great, the culture is great; they even pump your gas for you. Oh, and did I mention no sales tax? Plus they pay you to recycle. Who wouldn't want to live there?

4: Family is awesome. Every time I get together with my family I'm reminded of how amazing they all are. Like I mentioned before, we might get uptight once in a while, but we are blessed to have a fun, happy family. We can just sit around for hours and laugh and joke. So imagine this vacation with all the kids and grand kids. We had a blast. This trip definitely brought us closer together and helped us form greater bonds with one another.

Thanks to my amazing parents for making this all happen. I love you both. 

And to the rest of you, join me next week for another episode of To Fuse is Richer than to Separate.

Don't Feed the Mediocrity Machine

After filming three episodes, I've discovered that the trouble with my video blog is being able to fit everything I want to say into a relatively short video. This was especially true with "The One About Movies." This particular video focuses primarily on the question, "How do you determine if a movie is worth watching." But I anticipate that there will be future discussions that will delve deeper into these issues.

Josh and I have a pretty similar set of guidelines when criticizing films, so we were entirely in agreement throughout this video, but I would really like to hear what every body else thinks.

One of the things Josh said toward the end there made me really think about the difference between people who critique films and those who simply enjoy them. I, like Josh, often leave a movie with a bad taste in my mouth while everyone else rants about how great it was, and I too have had that feeling of superiority because I seem to understand why everyone should hate or love a movie. But is this habit of over analyzing movies really a desirable one? Wouldn't it be better to just to enjoy every movie I watch? I thought about this for a while, but in the end, I still believe that being informed is more desirable.

I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with the occasional fun blockbuster that gets us all riled up and excited to go to the theater; to me these movies have their place but it's purely for entertainment sake. But overall I believe that movies have to power to change people and if we put forth the effort to find the good ones, we will not only be entertained, but also be made better.

I'm not saying that all blockbusters are bad, and only lesser known artsy films are worth anything. I'm not saying that at all. But there certainly is a different feel to a film when it's intent is expression vs. purely financial.

It seems that so many of us support explosions, sex, and poop jokes that those have become the only thing portrayed in mainstream media anymore. But I believe that when we are able to look deeper into the valuable depths of film, we can experience something so much more worthwhile. It's when you find this that you understand that everything else is just mediocre in comparison.

It's completely up to you, but having done it myself, I would simply recommend that you find this meaning in movies; stop feeding the mediocrity machine; and let the media change you for the better.  You'll be glad you did.

What Do Our Dreams Mean?

I've always had a slight interest in dreams and the things that fuel them, but I've never been interested enough to study it. In the process of making this episode of "To Fuse is Richer Than to Separate," I had the opportunity to learn some things I didn't know before. Perhaps the most interesting that I read was the theory that dreams are a means of clearing the scraps from our minds. This is the excerpt from Wikipedia that I read.

"Robert (1886), a physician from Hamburg, was the first who suggested that dreams are a need and that they have the function to erase (a) sensory impressions that were not fully worked up, and (b) ideas that were not fully developed during the day. By the dream work, incomplete material is either removed (suppressed) or deepened and included into memory. Robert's ideas were cited repeatedly by Freud in his Die Traumdeutung. Hughlings Jackson (1911) viewed that sleep serves to sweep away unnecessary memories and connections from the day.

This was revised in 1983 by Crick and Mitchison's "reverse learning" theory, which states that dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are off-line, removing (suppressing) parasitic nodes and other "junk" from the mind during sleep. However, the opposite view that dreaming has an information handling, memory-consolidating function (Hennevin and Leconte, 1971) is also common. Dreams are a result of the spontaneous firings of neural patterns while the brain is undergoing memory consolidation while sleeping."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams#Dreams_for_removing_junk

The thing that particularly interests me about this is the idea that during the day we are having impressions and thoughts that are not fully developed, and a dream is what completes or satisfies it. That is perhaps why so often our dreams contain people, places, or circumstances that we've thought of during the day, but they are usually thoughts that have only been on the back of our mind, not the things we've been dwelling on. 

I don't pretend to understand this theory that well, or even any of this information about dreams, but it's certainly interesting. If you're interested please, by all means read up on it yourself and share any insights that you discovered and found interesting

Also, please comment and let us know what the phrase "To Fuse is Richer Than to Separate" means to you, and feel free to add any insights on the other questions we posed in the video.

Thanks for watching!