Author Archives: Spencer J Smith

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An Incomplete Thought About Being Exotic According to Musical Tastes

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There’s a race going on, and it has nothing to do with running. It has to do with media consumption.

It used to be that when someone asked me about a show, a musician, a book, a movie, if I hadn’t consumed it, I became apologetic. I went out and found it immediately. I thought other people saw it as an affront to my intelligence or culture if I didn’t know what they were referencing. I had to be in on the conversation. It was important.

When you are constantly consuming media that people tell you is life-changing and essential, you start to learn something. You learn that everyone has their own list of life-changing and essential media. It’s not really the same for anyone.

I really like the Dave Matthews Band. I started listening to them in high school because a lot of my friends were. But then I grew attached to them because I liked them. Then I got to college. And almost no one I befriended listened to Dave Matthews Band. Everyone else became really exotic and different and sophisticated and cool because they listened to the xx and Bon Iver and Grizzly Bear and stuff like that.

What I failed to realize is that I was just as different and foreign to my Bon-Iver-listening friends as they were to me.

Media should never be a race. It should be enjoyable.

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When Bad Things Happen to Good People

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In fifth grade, my class held a contest to see who could read the most books. I had the credentials to win this contest. In the third grade, I had set the record for most books read over the year. It was somewhere in the sixties. And some of those books had been long. The Hobbit was on that list. Every summer, I participated in the library’s reading contest. It took me a week or two to get to the t-shirt reward for 1,000 pages read. I was not a reader to be messed with. It’s what I did.

That’s why it hurt so much when I lost the fifth grade contest.

See, there’s another lie that the world tells us. It’s that if you put in the work, if you do the right thing, and if you are a good person, then good tings happen. Sometimes, bad things happen to good people. 

I was listening to a podcast from Shane Hipps. He was talking about all of these righteous people that don’t get to experience the fruits of their righteousness. One of the stories was about Dirk Willems, a sixteenth century Dutch Baptist. Dirk Willems was being chased by a magistrate who wanted to execute him, and Dirk went across a thinly iced river. Dirk made it across, but the magistrate wasn’t so lucky. Dirk, feeling compelled to turn the other cheek, went back and saved the magistrate. The magistrate then captured him and executed him. Sometimes, bad things happen to good people.

Dirk Willems saving a magistrate and condemning himself

We are trained to believe that we should do good things because they lead to good rewards, but sometimes they don’t. We should do good things because they are good. I may not have won my fifth grade reading contest, but I did read a bunch of books for it, and that was good because it was good.

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Why Life is Cooler than Fictions

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I cleaned my apartment today. It’s something that’s been hanging over my head for some time. My life feels much more manageable now. It feels like I can actually get things done.

As I have procrastinated cleaning my apartment over the past couple of days, I have spent a lot of time watching television and movies. Television and movies are cool, I guess, but the more I watch them, the more I think that I use them as a crutch. I feel like I watch TV because I am too afraid to go out and live my own life.

It used to be cool to spend a lot of time in fictions. I got to experience things I couldn’t. When I was a kid, this was huge. I didn’t have the means to go visit a city by myself when I was a kid, and so reading stories about cities or watching films set in cities was really cool. But in a little over a month, I’m going to be 21. As far as the law is concerned, I will be an adult. But I’m still stuck in this notion that fictions are my gateway to experiencing life.

I know this seems a little crazy but I think life is my gateway to experiencing life.

I don’t think it’s as simple as walking out of my apartment every once in a while. That’s not going to fix anything. I think I’m afraid that I’m going to make a wrong decision, that I’m going to say something I don’t mean, write down words that don’t make sense.

But this is where television and life have a really convenient similarity: you are always allowed to change the channel.