What have we come to?

It's been a while since I've written. I've done a lot of thinking, though. I'd like to start blogging more, it's always good to get your thoughts onto digital paper to reread later.

The world is fucked up. We'll never be able to change anything with the mindset and values that the people of earth have currently chosen to adopt. You've got poverty-stricken, war-torn countries that harbor murderers relentlessly feeding off of the poor. You have to stop and ask yourself how we've gotten to the point we're at today, where the blood of the innocent is used as a means to justify an end that no one has a say in. We have the ability to feed everyone in the world, but no one wants to do it because they'll lose money. And so, we meet the root of our problem; Money.

The idea of currency seems so flawed to me. Pieces of paper that WE give value to and that we use to measure the value of virtually everything. The way I see it, money just segregates people from each other by adding an extra layer of categorization. Not only are you a black guy from Jamaica, or a white man from Ohio, but you're now either upper, middle or lower class on top of that. The biggest issue with money is that the people who have the most of it control most of the earth. We can't break out of this chain unless THEY agree to drop it and join the rest of the world as equals, but why would they do that when they're in a position of power? A position that most people would kill for. They're not willing to give up their elite status in the monetary hierarchy.

I'd like to say I can't blame them, but they're exactly the ones to blame. Everyone needs to drop their ego and focus on the betterment of humans as a whole. We're still in the infant stages of our technological advances and while we have made major progress, we're still not nearly functioning at the level we could be by now. I'm not advocating the abolishment of the monetary system, that would be impossible because we're been so entrenched in this system for thousands of years. I just think the system needs to be revamped completely. The word "profit" holds one of the most dangerous implications because profit is synonymous with greed after a certain point. It seems like once you're used to having a lot of money, you grow a hunger for more. You used to be happy with your family sedan and your two story house, but now you need a porsche and a mansion. Why does your idea of comfortable have to change once you can afford things that will always be luxury over necessity? Imagine how much better of a place the world would be if everyone who had excess amounts of money (I mean the people making millions of dollars a year) would contribute the extra money they don't need to scientific research labs? That's just an example of an institution that would benefit society. You could donate the money to so many different causes if everyone was down to do it.

Status plays such a big role in our society these days. It's all really a power trip, if you ask me. It's just a competition to feed your ego. It's all appearances, though. The appearance of living an extravagant lifestyle that others can only dream of. Where will that get you at the end of your life? Knowing that I could have made a change that would have been beneficial to my species as a whole but didn't due to my own inability to let go of a few million pieces of paper would haunt me as I grew older.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time thinking about that lately. Interested in any sort of feedback or thoughts.

What does the future hold?

At one point (Hell, at many points) in your life, you've asked yourself, "What will I be like in ten years from now?" I'm scared shitless thinking about what's going to happen in my life, but I'm also very excited to find out. I feel like being in school is a safety blanket that coats me from the harsh realities of the real world sometimes. It scares me to think that in just three years I'll have to dive head first into the "real world" and try to make a living out of something that I love doing. Something with no guarantee of monetary success, might I add, but that's okay because I'd rather be poor and happy than rich and unhappy. Money really can't buy happiness- only temporary fulfillment.

I don't know what kind of situations I'll be thrown into or where the path I choose is going to lead me. I guess no one ever really does and that uncertainty is what causes waves of trepidation to wash over me when I think about the future. It's only natural to want to know that you're going to be taken care of, but I don't necessarily have that security. Knowing this, however, alters the way I work. Working hard is the only sufficient way to work when you know your stomach depends on it. That's something I realized this summer. I slacked off in school for most of my life because I always had everything taken care of for me. Unfortunately, my parents and family aren't going to be there when I have to fend for myself. I'm not going to have my rent handed to me on a silver platter every month. I'm glad about that, though, because it would be more unfortunate, still, if I didn't learn the lesson that independence has to offer. Ignorance is bliss, I know, but I'd rather be learned and miserable than naive and happy. Of course it would be "easier" to be happy and unaware, but where will that get you? Really, you're subconsciously creating a mental barrier that you'll never be able to get passed. I know that there isn't a direct correlation between your intelligence and whether or not you have to work to survive, but it's not really a question of your intelligence. Simply put, having to fend for yourself completely alters your disposition on life and ultimately changes the way you perceive everything around you.

If I want to go far in this career, I have to learn what my capabilities are and constantly test my limits. I have to make it my goal to soak up as much experience from every situation I encounter. This is why I'm so angry that I never took school seriously. So many terrible habitual patterns have manifested themselves in my work method that I'm currently, and slowly, breaking. Procrastination is a prime example of a bad habit that won't get me anywhere. I've worked very hard this year on eliminating this trait and while it has been a struggle, I do believe I am succeeding.

I have an odd feeling that no matter what I do, I'm going to do well at it. I hate thinking that, though, because it's incredibly stupid. What I'm doing, essentially, is giving myself a reason to cop-out of working hard. Because I FEEL like I'm going to do well, what's the point in trying? It'll just happen! It's not based off of anything real. I seem to assume that my boyish charm will allow me to float on in the world, but that's not what I want. I don't want to float on by, I want to excel. If this year has taught me anything, it's that I now know I'm ready to live up to my potential and make it a reality. I was always the underdog who surprised people when I tried, but I barely tried. I'm passed that now because I realize that I'd rather be seen as the guy who consistently pumps out good work.

So, as I sit here contemplating what the future holds in store, I also try to tell myself not to take the here and the now for granted so that I can be ready for whatever life throws at me. If I put a bit of myself into everything I do, I don't think I can go wrong.

Will Power.

I've always been somewhat amused by the idea of "will power." I'm lazy in many respects, but there are other aspects of my life that I don't like to wait on. When I was in grade 12, I used to weigh 170 lbs. For a height of 5'9", that was considered obese. It eventually got to a point where I was fed up with my image. I decided to run every day for 30 minutes and eat healthier. In 2 months, I dropped from 170 to 145 lbs and I'm maintained my weight there ever since.

Ever since I decided to take my weight issue into my own hands and eliminate it, I have a hard time hearing others talk about how much they want to lose weight but not doing anything about it. I knew a guy who told me he wanted to lose weight very badly, yet I used to see him eating two slices of pizza, an order of fries and a litre of juice from Pizza Pizza for a single meal. There's more calories in that one meal than you're supposed to have in a full day. It's an enigma to me how someone can contradict himself like that.... But not really (See what I did there?). I haven't worked out for about 6 months and it's now at the point where I'm way too lazy to start up.

The reason I had the drive to continue working out every day in grade 12 was because I had gotten to the point where I wasn't going to take no for an answer. It took a lot to get me to that point. I'm happy with my body image now because I know what I used to look like and how far I've come. Unfortunately, I use this as an excuse to avoid working out. I've become the very person that puzzled me. I don't feel the necessity to work out, but I know that it would only be beneficial to me.

I've been a lot better with my work ethic this year than I've ever been before, but I have also noticed myself slowly losing the drive to do my work. Fortunately, I have a few projects I'm working on that have refuelled my passion to work hard. However, I understand that I need to learn to continue to work hard even when I don't have anything to work on. That's the difference between a professional and an amateur. "Being a professional means doing what you love even when you don't love doing it."

I speak about will power as if it's some external essence that can't be trained. It can be trained, it's just extremely difficult. Honestly, though, when is the right thing to do ever the easy thing to do? Discipline doesn't come easy, but it's the people who learn to discipline themselves that succeed in life, whatever your definition of success is.

With all the crazy decisions you have to make in life, it's hard to always keep in mind that you need to do what benefits you. Unfortunately, sometimes that involves putting work before pleasure. While it might hinder me temporarily (Cutting an hour out of my video game time to get on writing that sketch), it'll be much more beneficial to me in the long run and I'll have something to look back on and be proud about.

Your life is in your hands, even when it seems like it isn't. You just have to understand you can take control - then do it.

Anyway, that's what I think about that.

- Umed Abdullah

Why Final Fantasy 8 is better than 7.

So, here's my issue. People always rave about Final Fantasy 7 being the best FF game, but I think 8 was better in almost every way. Yeah, Sephiroth was a badass, but you can't rate a game because the antagonist is cool. The DRAW/Junction system in FF8 was much more versatile than FF7's materia system. The love story between Rinoa and Squall was much more interesting than Cloud and Arieth. Also, Rinoa lives? Yeah, she was in a coma for 3 disks, but that just shows how much of a romantic Squall is. The fact that you can critical hit with a button click is amazing, too, because you can do extra damage until Squall does 9999 base dmg without the critical hit. Lionheart was WAY cooler than omnislash, and you go out into space on the 4th disk. The Guardian Force (GF) system was much cooler than the summon system because you could use your summons to absorb DMG and you could boost their attack.

The flashback dreams with Laguna, Kiros and Ward were really interesting and they tied back into the story very well.

My only issue with FF8 is the fact that all the main characters were in the same orphanage as kids and they ended up fighting evil together later on. They call that mechanical coincidence because it's possible but not probable unless you design the story that way. They could have done without that. Or at least have Squall and Ellone from the orphanage and no one else. I mean, you mean Zell's mom in disk 1/2 and then find out Zell is an orphan later on.

All in all, I honestly think FF8 is better than FF7. I think FF7's fanbase is mostly Final Fantasy fan boys that think 7 is the best because everyone else is saying it. Beat both of them, then state your opinion. What do you think?

I appreciated FF7 more after playing Final Fantasy: Crisis Core for the PSP, I will admit, but I still think FF8 is a better overall game.

FF7 was still a great game, too, don't get me wrong. I just find it weird that die hard fans of FF7 argue that it's way better of a game than FF8 because they think Cloud and Sephiroth are cool. They are really cool characters, and FF advent children added more depth to them, but I'm talking about an overall gaming experience here.

What do you guys think? Agree? Disagree? Don't care? Post away!

- Umed Abdullah

Why energy drinks control my life.

Where to begin my story. In my first year of university, I used to pull all-nighters pretty frequently. I quickly learned that consuming multiple energy drinks throughout the night/next day could keep me up. I would drink 2 monsters just to stay up all night and then another monster at around noon to keep me up for the day. I really only consumed energy drinks when I had papers due the next day and I needed the energy boost to stay up.

As the year went on, I found myself slowly drinking energy drinks more and more often. It became something of a ritual to have an energy drink before a show or performance. Then I'd start having them before classes.

Before I knew it, I had replaced coffee with energy drinks as my "pick-me-up." However, I started hearing about many energy drink related deaths. A basketball player took 4 Redbull before a game and collapsed on the court. There were other similar stories, but it seemed like the common factor in every story was the large amount of energy drinks that were guzzled down prior to the death.

Naturally, this scared the fuck out of me, so I decided to do my own research. The problem is that none of the deaths can be specifically tied to the energy drinks themselves. We know that Taurine (The main ingredient that energy drinks are comprised of) causes your heart to race and dehydrate you. We know that mixing Taurine with Caffeine might not be so smart an idea, since both of them have the same effect, therefore increasing your heart rate even further. So I guess it makes sense that a kid who drinks 4 (It tells you not to exceed one per day on the back) before a basketball game might die, especially if he had a history of known heart conditions in his family. I mean, 4 cans of caffeine plus taurine dehydrating you while you're hustling your ass off to chase a ball and sweating even more on top of that? Bad idea.

Here's what scares me, though. There's no link to the deaths, but that doesn't really matter. I'm afraid that energy drinks are going to kill me slowly, speeding up my heart rate unnaturally until I eventually have a stroke.

I'm now at 1 energy drink minimum a day (I don't usually exceed that). I tried to not have one today and I ended up having a bad headache. I'm at the point where I've trained my body to rely on them to alleviate me of fatigue, so I'm extremely tired when I go through the day without an energy drink. The main reason I started drinking them instead of coffee was because coffee stains your teeth, but if energy drinks are as dangerous as some people seem to think, then I could actually die in a number of years. Stained teeth or death? Doesn't really seem like a hard choice to make. I was naive to start drinking energy drinks without doing research first because now that I'm addicted, it's really hard to stop.

I'd like to try and wean myself off them slowly, but at this point I've grown accustomed to one every single day, so it's going to be hard. Like anything addictive, you can't just quit cold turkey. I want to slowly lower my drink count until it's at about 1 a week or 1 every 2 weeks and then stop abruptly.

What do you guys think about energy drinks? Have your experiences been totally different from mine?

- Umed Abdullah

Why 2012 Is Not The End.

2012 is an enigma. It's either going to be life-altering or it's going to be a bullshit myth. Here's the thing. Even if something happens on 2012, I really don't think we'll know about it until at least 2015 or even 2030. So many things ARE going to happen that we'll be waiting to find out which one of these new innovations is going to be what changes the world. Will the "invention" that catapults us into the next step of human evolution be genetic engineering? Will it be the discovery of an infinite fuel source? Will it be anything at all?

Now, you've heard or read about how 2012 is supposed to be "the end times," correct? Wrong. 2012 isn't the end of anything. It's supposed to suggest a transition into a new era; a new beginning, if you will.

Since the introduction of science, major innovations have gone from being few and far between (For example, the Printing Press in 1455 to the Gregorian Calendar in 1582,) to where we are now with fantastic technological innovations happening only months apart. Science helps humanity grow at an exponential rate. Think about it; more has happened from 1900-2000 than has from 0-1900 CE. We've transcended evolving at a linear rate to one that is exponential because our capacity to intake and output information has increased vastly. Think about where we were 10 years ago. I couldn't have imagined where we would be now in just 10 years, yet things used to stay the same for hundreds of years at a time earlier in history. I remember when my family talked about getting a cell phone "in case of emergencies." Now, 8 year olds are texting each other on BlackBerrys.

The problem with the myth surrounding 2012 is that it wasn't created in our time, which is the case with Y2K. The theory behind Y2K manifested itself within the last decade of the 20th century because of the trepidation around entering a new millenium. 2012 is supposed to be an idea that has been around for thousands of years. People seem to think that because the myth has been around for so long, it must hold some truth to it. Because of this, so many people have put faith in 2012 due to some obligation to believe the Mayan's because of their advanced astrological marking system.

If 2012 holds any weight, I think it's going to be because humans have given it meaning. In this day an age, mythological tales have been replaced by science and facts. So, with a myth that might have been founded on science, it's only natural that human curiosity has piqued so close to the date of. The key words are "MIGHT HAVE." For all we know, the Mayans could have been tired of mapping out stars and decided they wanted to start their own basketball association only to give up astrology entirely.

Because of this uncertainty, I think the most probable answer for what will happen in 2012 is a shift in global consciousness. I've read too many books filled with too many theories about what's going to happen in 2012 and the one realization I came to is that it seems like everyone and their dog has a theory on 2012. The more I read about what's going to happen, the less I believe that anything will happen. Shifts in the earth's axis, spiritual enlightenment, Tupac being resurrected with a new and improved Kung-Fu grip, it could very well be that people know this is a topic that will sell so they just write about creative ways for humans to die. Naturally, we'll be invested in a story about us dying because we have so much at stake. 2012 is a hot topic on any market right now because WE are the generation that will be affected by it. There's money to make in that.

Knowing that science is increasing at an exponential rate, I think there definitely will be a technological innovation (Hell, there'll be many!) that sends us spiralling into a new era that people will use as a scapegoat to validate the 2012 phenomena. Humans love doing that. If you're looking for something, you'll find it. Honestly, I think this is what's going to happen and I don't think you'll be able to convince people who believe in mystery of 2012 because they WANT to believe in it.

Regardless, I'm just happy to grow up in the era we're in. If we've progressed as much as we have in just 10 years, imagine where we're going to be in another 10. Or 20. I hope you're as excited as I am.

- Umed Abdullah