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< | "Viking Quest" |
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> | Ali in Wonderland |
| | -- By WilliamCoombs - 19 Feb 2016 |
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< | Danny |
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> | “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” – Muhammad Ali |
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< | My friend Danny’s shoe rack at his house in New Orleans has, among many, Margiela boots, Ronny Fieg’s collaborations with Asics, and Flavio Girolami and Prathan Poopat’s ‘Common Projects.’ I personally do not care or know anything about fashion, but I always walk a safe distance away from Danny to ensure I never scuff him. In an effort to better understand why he does care about fashion, I asked what his favorite pair of shoes were. “My ‘De La Soul’s.’” I know his Nike Dunk High Premium ‘De La Soul’s’ are far from his most expensive. I ask why. “Because they are a head nod to New York hip-hop.” Now, if there are two things that Danny, who grew up on the Upper West Side, loves more than fashion, they are music and New York. To him, these shoes symbolize all three. |
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< | The shoes were an intersection of three very different manifestations of creativity. And Danny loved each of them. He liked living in New York, he liked listening to hip hop, and he liked wearing clothes that made him look good. At the time, I had never been to New York, listened pretty much to EDM, and wore the same tattered Poolesville High School wrestling sweatshirt that I still wear now. Even if the ‘De La Soul’s’ represented creativity, what did creativity give him that was so worthwhile? |
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< | Me |
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> | Finals week can make people particularly prone to wondering, “What is it all for?” Personally, I wonder all the time. If I consider my life in a wide scope, it’s hard not to feel insignificant. I’m just one person on a planet in a universe, only here for ~80 years while time is infinite. And I’m just going to die in the end anyway, so what can I possibly accomplish that would be worthwhile? |
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< | When I thought about the kinds of creativity I love, television came to mind. True Detective sparked new ideas a for me, The Office made me laugh when I most needed to laugh, and Entourage made me think I want to be a movie star for a little while. I loved watching these TV shows, and simply because of the enjoyment the offered me, they added value to my life. |
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> | This makes it important to narrow the scope. When I was on chemo, my life was broken up into three-week cycles. One week during which medicine was administered, and two weeks to recover. I could never eat during the week I was receiving medicine because I was too nauseous. But as I gained my appetite back over the remaining two weeks, I would obsess over food. I couldn’t eat a lot in terms of quantity, but I have never been more aware or appreciative of how incredible food can be. Having only just recovered from feeling so sick, and knowing that another cycle was right around the corner, made the ability to taste a flavor and enjoy it something worth getting excited about. |
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< | Suppose that there is no afterlife. If the only time we have is our time as living human beings, then anything in life that creates enjoyment in people is worthwhile. Creativity, in the many forms it can come, can brighten lives. When a designer adds a colored suede to a sneaker in a surprising way, it can make people that wear it and people that look at it feel good. Teenage kids are going to listen to Kanye’s new album, and in it they might find a support system. They might view his model of the peak of confidence as inspiration to be be confident themselves, and they might find value in that. Girls Season 5 is going to make people laugh and its going to be relatable on a fundamental level. |
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> | Now I live on eggs and rice. I eat in the most cost-effective and time-effective way possible. I’ll find myself forcing myself to eat PB&J’s because I know I need calories and that’s all my stomach will allow me on account of my cold-call induced anxiety. If chemo-Billy could see law school-Billy he would slap me in the face because I’m being unappreciative and wasteful. Wasteful even of what could come out of one bite. |
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< | I love television. I do not want to be Vincent Chase, or an actor, or a writer, but I do want to be a part of the industry that spreads creativity to the public via television. So I came to law school. I thought maybe getting involved in entertainment law was the best way for me to fit into that industry. |
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> | Life can be a bite. You don’t have to look at it in terms of the universe or infinite time, but can instead view it in whatever scope allows you to see just how much value is really here. I can sit with my friends, in the sunlight, and drink a Coca-Cola, and enjoy it…That’s unreal to me. Out of an entire universe that will continue forever, somehow I am lucky enough to be alive and able to consciously enjoy what life has to offer. I have friendship and Coke right this very moment. Existential crises are easy, but they’re a waste of my damn time. |
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< | Now that I am in law school, I am not so sure. I wish I had more time to watch TV. |
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> | Remove the Impossible |
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< | I haven't previously run into such an interesting example of
contemporary middle-brow Epicureanism. I can't tell whether it's a
faux-naive effect or a genuine absence, this re-expression of
ancient Italian outlook in the aesthetic of American vernacular.
For a reader who has never in his life owned a television, and who
would rather be limited to one pen and one sheet of blank paper a
day forever than watch this crap, the replacement of the shady
garden with the vast wasteland is surprising and disconcerting
enough. But when one considers that the medium of "television" is
itself now obsolete, replaced by even more invasively surveilling
and pervasively disempowering modes of killing time, perhaps this
affection for a bygone way of wasting one's life takes on the same
elegiac quality one finds buried beneath the ashes of Herculaneum. |
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> | I used to think I wanted to be an actor. I felt that creativity added value to my life and other peoples’ lives because of the different ways it can bring enjoyment. Personally, I loved television as a form of creativity, and I thought contributing to the entertainment industry, which distributes creativity to people via television, would be a good career goal. So I signed up for “Fundamentals of Acting,” and realized that I hated acting. I then thought I wanted to be a screenwriter. I signed up for “Creative Writing,” and realized I was wrong again. I then applied to law school, hoping that as an entertainment lawyer I could still have a tangential connection to the industry. |
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< | In any event, I think the next draft would benefit from the removal
of the guy and his shoes; they are truly extraneous, and their
departure would allow a further development of your central theme.
It might also be helpful in the next version either to let us in on
the joke, or actually encounter Lucretius. |
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> | One year into law school, I don’t even know what an “entertainment lawyer” is, let alone want to be one. But what a ridiculous route I took if I had actually wanted to be connected to the entertainment industry. I entirely changed my “career plans” after taking one class in a subject. I didn’t even try to find out if I actually liked acting, or writing, or entertainment. They all just felt hard, or unattainable, so I quit and turned to something else. |
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> | One year into law school, I have learned that there are a lot of problems in the world, and I have learned that consequently there are a lot of ways to help people who have problems. If I can find passion in a career that helps people, then I can open up more room in those peoples’ lives for enjoyment – whatever that means to them. |
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> | Helping people with problems requires a commitment on my part with two important components. First, I have to choose how specifically I want to help, and accept that whatever I choose comes at the expense of at least some other choices. Here, it has helped me to realize that the benefit of “keeping your doors open” may not be so great, especially when every door you can dive through leads somewhere you would be happy to land. Second, I have to decide how deeply I want to commit myself. It can be scary to really try at something when success seems impossible. Maybe the people you want to help have such fundamental problems that trying feels pointless. But “if you don’t do what you can with what you have, then what does it matter what you have?” And furthermore, I’ll get to live through the whole thing anyway. The bottom line is that I have to make an intelligent choice about what I want to do, and I have to really try to achieve my goals. Otherwise, I’m being wasteful in the deepest sense of what I can give myself and of what I can give to others. |
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> | This morning I drank the best fresh-squeezed orange juice I’ve ever had in my life. Every sip had juice vesicles – extra pockets of juice within the juice. Tell me what’s impossible now. |
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< | Muhammad Ali
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
– Muhammad Ali
You need to conclude your own essay, not use someone else's words. If this is an epigraph that you feel you need, float it to the top. But consider how history dealt with these words in the person of the man who took the punches.
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