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Weekly Post-Ed #41

by Robert Hyma August 17, 2022

written by Robert Hyma

LIVING THE DREAM

A few weeks after graduating from high school, I went up to my varsity goalie coach to talk about where I could play next season. He was standing by the glass at the ice rink, watching another up-and-coming goalie, a sophomore who could potentially make the varsity team next year. He saw me in the corner of his eye, and I awkwardly put my hands into my pocket and approached.

“Hey coach,” I said. “Got a second?”

“Sure,” he said, still watching the sophomore practice. “What’s on your mind?”

“I was just wondering if…you know…you had any suggestions of where I could play next year?”

My former goalie coach turned away from the glass and looked to see if I was kidding. Pitifully, he saw I wasn’t. “You can always try the community college team. I hear they’re bringing the program back around.”

“I mean, I can go anywhere, right? What teams should I try out for?”

He turned back to watching the sophomore. “You played four games last year, Robert. Not a lot of teams had a good look at you, or even know who you are. I’d say the beer leagues are a great place to start.”

At the time, I thought that his answer was dismissive. However, from the vantage of my mid-thirties and looking back at my 18-year-old self that had just completed his first year of competitive hockey, this answer was gracious in hindsight. My former coach knew my story. He knew I started playing ice hockey three years before and started taking goalie lessons only a year after I had begun. He knew my knowledge about travel hockey was next to nil.

It was a gracious answer because he didn’t tell me the truth—which was that I was a dreamer who had no idea what the road to pro hockey looked like.

My former goalie coach was Carl Howell, a former pro goaltender who played minor league hockey. Carl played goalie in an era when wearing a thin layer of molded fiberglass over your face was the best protection available—you know, the “Jason” mask from the film Friday the 13^th.

His career ended when scrambling in his goal crease for a loose puck, and a stick struck him in the eye, plucking it out of the socket. This was also the era where dirty tactics were the norm. Many forwards pounded a nail into the top of the blade of their hockey sticks, which made it all the easier to hook a guy and cut him open in the process (because if you’re going to get a 2-minute penalty for hooking, you might as well cut an incision big enough for a surgeon on your way to the penalty box).

Scrambling in the crease, a nail stuck into his eye and pulled the eye clean out of his face.

The eye was saved and reinserted into the socket, but my former coach lost most of his depth perception, which made stopping pucks nearly impossible, thereby ending his career. He might have played in the NHL full time had he had better fortune.

“Ok,” I answered my goalie coach after he told me to play in the beer leagues. “Do you know which one I should join?”

He smiled, a brimming, knowing smile full of hockey knowledge I could never know or understand. “They’ll find you if they want you. Keep your phone on.”

It took years to realize that, no, I wasn’t going to be scouted to play pro hockey. I had a dream when I started playing, and only years after that did the bigger picture of the pro hockey life start to dawn on me.

All I had was a dream and I thought it was enough to make the NHL.

I’ve always pondered the phrase “Living the Dream”. To me, the phrase meant to have the ideal life where one was doing the work they loved, the kind where real struggle and toil were nonexistent. While watching the 2022 World Junior Hockey Championship over the last week, I discovered a vastly different view form what it means to live the dream.

Many of the players participating in the 2022 World Junior Hockey Championship are living the dream. To be chosen to represent your country is indication that you are the best of your age group. You see the names that have made previous Canadian or US World Junior teams and many have become stars in the NHL. To assume these young players are on a path to greatness seems logical. Aren’t these players living the dream?

Not exactly.

To have arrived at the World Junior stage, these players have grown up with a constant pressure to perform since they’ve put on a pair of skates and shown superior skills compared to everyone else their age. With these superior skills came a caravan of interested parties: parents, coaches, scouts, former pros, and everyone else who saw the potential of someone who, one day, could have his name on the back of a NHL jersey. All these young players had to leave their families to play in the top Junior Leagues in the country, living with host families in place of their own, devoting their whole life to playing the game they hope will lead to becoming a professional.

The 2022 World Junior Championship is just a steppingstone along the way to being a professional. It’s another measuring station to prove that these prospects are on task and exceeding even greater expectations. There’s no downtime. These players are still required to produce, to keep separating themselves from the competition, to put up the best numbers of their careers in their draft year just to move up a few spots into the coveted Top 5 of the NHL Draft.

These players know the road to pro hockey by 17-years-old because it has been instilled into their belief system since they started. They are the future, and they play every shift like it, too.

And after watching a few games of these future stars, I thought back to when I was 17-years-old with the dream of becoming one of them.

I can laugh at how absurd that dream was.

A year before talking with my varsity goalie coach, I was at my neighborhood park on a cement rink with a painted goalie crease and undersized net, donning plastic-shelled street hockey goalie gear. I spent nights duct-taping the goalie pads back together after they had disintegrated from the last time of sliding across the cement crease. A group of five of us played along with whichever neighborhood kids came around, ranging from elementary to high schoolers. Most everyone ran in tennis shoes or didn’t own a pair of rollerblades. Hardly any wore hockey gloves and had blisters on their hands after a few hours of shooting with old wooden hockey sticks.

We played in 90-degree heat. All of us wearing a replica jersey of our favorite NHL teams we had bid on eBay for cheap. We were the neighborhood all-stars without a clue about what it meant to play the pro game, but it didn’t much matter.

I was never going to play at a level remotely close to what the best players in the world could play at age 17. It still doesn’t much matter. I still play hockey even with a worsening arthritic wrist and pinched nerve near a hip flexor that feels like absolute agony after playing all these years.

I’ll keep playing because I’ve decided the dream is to keep it going for as long as possible.

That’s what I share with those 2022 World Junior players—the will to keep living the dream.

It’s not worth losing an eye over, maybe, but for a sore wrist and stiff hip?

I’ll keep my phone on.

***

GOODY TWO-SHOES

I struggle to write about movies because they inevitably morph into mini reviews. And truthfully, I don’t want to write reviews on this website. Reviews, and criticism for that matter, revolve around an air of expertise, that because a thing has flaws or was masterful in some way, it means that the reviewer had the pedigree to point out why. A good critic is a fine thing to have in the world (allegedly), but overall, I think an audience knows how they feel about entertainment without someone defining terms.

In the world of entertainment, I’ve seldom found a review useful before experiencing something first.

So, if you haven’t seen Luck, don’t worry—I won’t be reviewing the movie. Instead, I’m interested in the ramifications of the hero of the movie, the aged-out orphan, Sam.

Sam is fascinating because there isn’t much to her character other than the fact that she was an orphan with bad luck and was never adopted. She is good to a fault and wants nothing more than for others to succeed in life. Samrepresents the ideal kind and selfless person, someone willing to sacrifice her own wellbeing for the sake of others. Of course, this goodness leads to her saving the day and everyone lives happily ever after by the end.

Hey, this is a kid’s movie after all—why would everything not work out?

However, it’s the subject matter of the movie that further complicates the character of Sam. The movie is about “bad luck” and its value in the world. Can someone with bad luck still strive to be a good person despite how things have turned out? What would be different about our lives if we had had “good luck” instead of “bad luck”?

These are fun concepts to debate, but let’s think about it in terms of Sam’s character as the ideal selfless giver.

In Luck, the question the film wants us to ask of Sam is, “Will she ever get rid of her bad luck?”

And this was my problem with Sam: I didn’t really care if she got rid of bad luck or not.

Here’s the thing: I want to believe in the characters of the movie. I want to follow and cheer for them when they get what they need. With characters like Sam, however, I found myself rolling my eyes at her selfless acts and goodwill. She was SO GOOD that I began to see this as annoying. I started to feel the gimmick of bad luck following her around all the time was JUSTIFIED.

There’s a name for this wanting someone to have misfortune. No, it’s not schadenfreude, which is pleasure we derive from others’ pain. No, this was more of a feeling of wanting bad things to happen to someone attempting to do “too much” good.

We’ve heard the term before. We call these people who do good without reciprocity a Goody Two-Shoes.

We want a Goody Two-Shoes to fail. They’re the ones who always raise their hand in class because they have the right answer, the ones who always have a compliment or positive thing to say about someone, the ones who pitch in and help clean up a mess they didn’t make. While these are all wonderful qualities, we want terrible things to befall this person.

Why?

Because none of it is justified without acknowledgment of a dark side. Goodness is impressive with 3-dimensional characters, not as a moral set of instructions.

Sam is good for goodness sake (yes, like the Christmas song) and for no other reason that’s given. Perhaps there wasn’t time to further flesh out why she behaves this way, but I had a hard time empathizing with someone passed over for adoption, who certainly suffers from some history of childhood trauma or abandonment issues with no symptoms at age 18. This is someone I’m not rooting for because I don’t understand her.

I’d argue this choice of character doesn’t work. I like goodness, but like love, I want to see it earned. In a romantic comedy, the audience knows the leading man and lady are going to end up together in the end…but the fun of the story is the style and stakes of the obstacles that prevent this.

In Luck, without consequences to Sam’s “bad luck” other than the universe backfiring on her every waking move, there’s very little reason to care.

(Unless you feel the idea of a “good person” is enough…in which case, good for you—two enthusiastic thumbs up.)

Sam isn’t responsible for her misfortune; the universe is.

In other words, Deus Ex Machina, which is why I think the story all falls apart.

Something else influences Sam’s destiny, not her choices.

It’s difficult to root for someone who isn’t in control of their destiny. With Sam, I felt neutral about her misfortunes coming to an end. I liked her, but what else was there?

I wanted to know more about Sam.

I just didn’t get it.

Which is just my luck!

***

MY FIRST ESSAY IS OUT NOW!

That’s right, my first full essay was posted last Sunday! It’s about EVO, the Evolution Championship Seriesor the premiere fighting game tournament held in Las Vegas every summer. The tournament has undergone quite a storied couple of years and I wanted to write about my history following the fighting game community during that time. I’m happy with how the essay turned out and will link it below.

I plan on writing more essays like the EVO piece more often. I have a few in the pipeline but I haven’t much else to share right now, so to stay tuned!

Please give EVO: Reunion a read! I’m always looking for feedback and would love to read your thoughts!

***

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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,

August 17, 2022 0 comments

| Weekly Post-Eds |

Weekly Post-Ed #40

by Robert Hyma August 10, 2022

written by Robert Hyma

CLUELESS ABOUT CLUELESS

Apple Fitness has this masterful way of thematically curating music during workouts—and as it turns out a stint of Pilates (yup, not ashamed to admit it—Pilates kicks my ass) was rocking to the soundtrack greats from 90s romantic comedies, most notably 10 Things I Hate About You and Clueless. Since it has been a decade since I’ve seen the latter film, I loaded up my movie library Monday night and watched the cult comedy written and directed by Amy Heckerling.

After the first ten minutes of the movie, I realized I had undergone a time warp. Watching Clueless today was nothing like when I first saw it at 10-years-old (yes, on television, those dark days before on-demand streaming services). What I was watching today was masterful moviemaking; but this wasn’t how I thought of Clueless as a kid. In fact, I don’t think I knew what to think of movies back then.

At ten, I remember being aware of adult relationships but unsure of how they worked. Movies were the framework that I based my earliest experiences with girls on—a practice that landed me a 100% failure rate.

When I first saw The American President starring Michael Douglas, for example, the first “flirtatious” move I learned was to compliment girls on their shoes—a famous Aaron Sorkin line from the film. This confused many girls who wore dated Nikes and grass-stained Adidas sneakers, as rightfully they should have been. The compliment was meant for dressing up at fancy State Dinners at the White House, not for footwear that befell the wear and tear of Michigan winters.

I made a similar mistake after watching The Fast and the Furious when I thought a good move was to compliment a cute girl on her mother’s beat up red 1998 Grand Prix. “Your mom’s got a nice car,” I told her. She asked why I said this and I didn’t really know—I wanted to look knowledgeable about cars because that was impressive to girls in the movie.

My rule was that if a movie said it, I should probably say it, too. Why else would these things be in movies if it wasn’t a cool thing to talk about?

I don’t remember taking many social cues from Clueless, however. The relationships in the movie mystified me. For example, when Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher, has a romantic fling with Christian, the new boy in school, I was COMPLETELY unaware of why the relationship didn’t work out and he abruptly left after their date. He seemed like everything she ever wanted, they seemed compatible…what more was there to it?

I just assumed he was too cool for her…even though he didn’t compliment her shoes or her father’s make and model of car.

Even after Donald Faison’s character, Murray, explains in the next scene during a disastrous car ride along a LA freeway, “He’s a cake eater!…He’s gay!” I still didn’t understand. I paused the movie trying to determine what “gay” meant at ten-years-old. I just knew people made fun of you for being it, but that wasn’t Christian in the movie. That guy was cool. He stood up for Brittany Murphy’s character, Tai, when she was held over the ledge of the upstairs railing at a mall. He gallantly pushed the two jerk guys who thought it funny.

If Christian was “gay”, gay seemed like the way to go.

Coincidentally, a few years later, before the advent of my first girlfriend, there was a period of about two weeks when I seriously considered if I was gay or not. There was no evidence to speak of, but because I didn’t think all men looked yucky (think Brad Pitt or George Clooney at the time), I debated if other penises were in my romantic future. I guess I thought of being gay as a conscious commitment, like buying those orange/baggy cargo pants with a million little pockets down the sides. No one bought them unless they really wanted them.

For the record, I wanted those orange/baggy cargo pants but never ended up purchasing them.

I felt similarly about my choice with being gay—just didn’t make the purchase.

(Go easy on me, I’m joking—I was 10-12 when I thought things worked this way.)

Now, in the year 2022, I understand that Christian’s character from Clueless was a parody of 1950’s movie stars. He was a combination of members of the Rat Pack, with the wardrobe and slicked back hair donned by Marlon Brando. He even drove around in an old Nash Metropolitan, a car sold in 1953. All his lines are faux gangster, something that might have been said in the musical “Guys and Dolls“.

I also understand now that Clueless is a sharp piece of satire and an homage to another literary work. The film is based on Emma, the famous Jane Austin novel about a young matchmaker proud of her ability to match up close friends and relatives with what she feels is best for them (except, she falls prey to the monsters she makes of them, leading to betrayals, etc). She must become humble, which mostly comes from the subtly flirtatious encounters of an older gentleman in her life (Paul Rudd’s character Josh in the Clueless) who wins her heart and ends her single-hood, as all romantic comedies must.

The only thing that wasn’t lost on me at 10-years-old was that everyone in the movie didn’t look like sophomores in high school. They looked much older, much more mature than they ought to have been.

Oh yeah! That, and the item donated to Cher during the canned good drive was pretty obvious. Some have said it was a bong, but I know that it was, in fact, a potato shredder (similar to a pencil sharpener, but for potatoes). They existed in the 90s (it did not) and were a dangerous kitchen utensil.

Of that, I was correct at 10-years-old and still maintain that’s what the tinny device sorted as “Kitchen wear” was used for.

Why else keep it in the kitchen?

***

EVO 2022

I’ll be brief: this past weekend was EVO 2022, the premiere fighting game tournament held in Las Vegas, Nevada every year. It’s a storied tournament that was particularly eventful this year for several reasons, many of which deserve its own post on this website. So, this ~~Saturday~~ Sunday at 8 PM, I’ll be posting an essay of this year’s event and the storylines that unfolded.

Look out for that ~~Saturday~~ Sunday @ 8PM EST (Sorry all, put the wrong day! Sunday instead of Saturday)

***

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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,

August 10, 2022 0 comments

| Weekly Post-Eds |

Weekly Post-Ed #39

by Robert Hyma August 3, 2022

written by Robert Hyma

ROCK GODS

Why is music today so terrible?

It’s an argument I hear from anyone older (my generation included) who turns on any modern FM radio station: “Music isn’t like it used to be,” and “They aren’t even playing instruments now,” or, most frequently, “What do you call this crap, anyway?”

And I tend to agree. My golden age of music was from a post-punk UK indie movement where Bloc Party, Foals, Interpol, Kaiser Chiefs and the like were my Rock Gods and wrote the anthems that defined my adolescent years. They ruled the stage, sold out arenas, and changed the music landscape with a sound and attitude that still resonates.

My dad’s generation had The Beatles, Elton John, Chicago. The guys I play hockey with laud anything Rush, Led Zeplin, AC/DC, perhaps straying into the ~~cheeseburger~~ rock paradise of Jimmy Buffett. My generation likened teen angst to screamo ballads and frantic guitar strumming: Green Day, Foo Fighters, Paramore.

And on and on it goes, bygone eras where the music brought together droves of people and has lasted throughout our lives on Spotify playlists, blasting around campfires on JBL speakers the neighborhood over.

But not the music of today, it feels like. Why does it seem like today’s music lacks such defining bands and songs?

Where have all the Rock Gods gone?

That’s where it started for me this week. While at a friend’s house, I found an old instrument stashed away in a box in his basement. It wasn’t an old electric guitar, or the hard-shell case of an abandoned marching band instrument unused since graduation day. What I found was a miniaturized plastic guitar, shaped like a Fender Stratocaster, with six rectangular, rainbow-colored buttons assorted down the neck, one occupying each of the farthest frets. A large switch, maybe three inches long, clicked up and down, spring-loaded back into position where the strings would normally be strummed.

This was the controller of the game Guitar Hero and was instrument to some of the greatest Rock Gods that ever played.

Oh, I can see the grin of skepticism on all your faces. Don’t worry, I used to laugh at them, too. Why would anyone put all their efforts into fake learning “Sweet Home Alabama?” or “Thunder”? If they were so good at the game, why didn’t they just learn a real instrument?

And yet, everyone stopped to watch these Rock Gods play. The superhighway of colored rectangles flashed on the screen at breakneck speed, and these Rock Gods kept in rhythm with every chord progression, every solo riff, and we all watched in wonder while all the hits were played—Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe, DragonForce. We couldn’t help ourselves.

We watched because music isn’t concerned about what is real or earned (like an actual guitar versus as a two-foot-long plastic one), it was all about being involved.

It’s the same reason we love the Rock Gods that we do. They make us feel alive with their music, with their swagger, and we channel that into our lives. There’s nothing like seeing a live band perform the shit out of the songs they’ve made. Even cover bands qualify. The same goes for players of Guitar Hero and Rock Band who hit 100% accuracy after a session of “Through the Fire Flames” and “The Pretender”.

“Hey, remember Guitar Hero?” I asked my friend after dusting off the old controller.

“Yeah, I don’t play anymore,” he said.

“No one does. We should play it, though.”

So we did, pretending we were the same Rock Gods that hadn’t aged a day past 16-years-old. And the joy of playing those old tracks came flooding back, all from a guitar-shaped piece of plastic and six colorful buttons.

“Music is anything but math,” Andrew Bird, perhaps on the greatest musicians of the last decade, once said.

I believe that goes for why we love the music we do, even if it comes from the Guitar Hero catalogue, or from the auto-tuning synth-lords of this generation.

We all pay tribute to our own Rock Gods because they move us. They make our lives meaningful, perhaps in a way that only music ever could.

And as long as there is music, even if we don’t like it, there will always be its Rock Gods.

That’s what I thought about driving home from playing an hour of Guitar Hero. I turned off my Apple Music playlist in the car, switched to a non-static FM station, and listened to something from today.

And immediately shut it off after a minute.

I tried. These aren’t my Rock Gods; but I know now that they are somebody’s.

Even those who listen to Jack Harlow.

***

I’M HALLUCINATING, YOU’RE HALLUCINATING…

Here’s a thought to unsettle you for the rest of your life: everything you perceive, from sunshine beaming in through the window, to the sounds of people bustling around you, to the smell of the coffee steaming from the mug at your desk…all of it is made up in the mind as a glorious, biochemical hallucination.

Yes, this is the Matrix.

So, would you like the Red or Blue pill?

I’m joking, of course, but the premise of being plugged into our senses strikes closer to home when it comes to understanding consciousness than previously thought.

In Anil Seth’s TED Talk, he explains that what we perceive the world to be is really the body’s sensory system finely tuned over millions of years of evolution to calculate an accurate depiction of reality. We see color and shadow because it helps us identify contrast or danger (brightly colored berries, insects, reptiles usually signaled ‘danger’ in primitive man); we distinguish noises from loud to silent as we’re able to understand if danger is approaching. It became useful, through our evolution, to identify the world around us. Most humans interpret sensory signals in the same ways: grass is green, the sky is blue, a splash of water feels wet, etc, etc.

But within the finer points of our sensory organs, we are making approximations based on our own experiences and personal abilities to understand what is real around us. Even though we understand that grass is green (well, maybe not in your neighbor’s yard), the eye cannot actually “see” anything; rather, it is a bodily organ that translates wavelength frequencies to the mind, and the occipital lobe “determines” what is being seen.

And in some cases, the mind can be wrong about what it sees.

Take this famous optical illusion shown below:

The darkness of the checkered boxes outside of the pillar’s shadow seem to be darker in the checkered Box A than the checkered Box B, but this is only our mind’s approximation of what seems to be correct in terms of what we know of light and shadow. In reality, the two boxes are the same color:

So, who is to say our senses are to be totally trusted?

As Anil Seth says in his TED Talk: “Reality is the hallucination we all agree on.”

It’s a wonderful notion, isn’t it? To think this is why animals see things differently, like how dogs can only perceive different color spectra. We all see things in our own way…so long as we all agree that Jack Harlow is just ok.

I’m kidding. I have nothing against that guy, I just like his name as a punchline.

All of this and more is covered in the Anil Seth’s TED Talk below. It’s a cathartic 20-minutes and worth the watch:

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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,

August 3, 2022 0 comments

| Weekly Post-Eds |

Weekly Post-Ed #37

by Robert Hyma July 19, 2022

written by Robert Hyma

A TALE OF MILWAUKEE

I took a two-day trip to Milwaukee for two reasons: to get away from West Michigan and experience someplace else for a short while, and to meet a girl. I did both. And while writing this Weekly Post-Ed and describing my experiences, I felt that what I wrote wasn’t quite as true as the journals I kept during my time there. I was writing in a way that portrayed Milwaukee as mundane or uninteresting, which was far from the truth. There were mundane aspects about the trip: the drive was fine, the hotel was fine, the girl was – to put it nicely – fine. So, what gives? I traveled to some place I’ve never seen before, enamored with its architecture and history, a culture that was bustling and interwoven between every race, class, shape, and construct, like a fine soup streaming through the busy sidewalks of the city.

And yet, I was writing about these experiences with a certain expectation after the fact;

I was hoping for something cathartic to happen to me while I was there.

Maybe I was supposed to run into an interesting group of people who would invite me to a party and offset how I saw the world up until that point, or that I might bump into someone in a coffee shop that was intrigued by me. No such things happened, of course, and I’ve sat at my computer for the past few days pondering what exactly to make of my time in Milwaukee.

But maybe this isn’t such a complicated problem. I journaled all of my experiences on the road. The problem is that the length of these writings, even cut and pasted together, is a bit long for a Weekly Post-Ed. So, I’m going to compile these entries into a travelogue about what happened in Milwaukee.

If you can’t wait for the juicy details, here’s a rundown of what happened:

Drove for 4.5 hours straight until arriving in Milwaukee.
Checked into the Drury Plaza Hotel
Walked the streets downtown, saw the river, saw Lake Michigan from the other side (looked similar, really).
Had a date that evening with someone I’ve talked with sparsely from a dating app.
Went to bed.
Spent most of the following day in my hotel, exhausted from a variety of factors (the lingering fatigue of my previous bout with Covid as one of them).
Walked the streets of Milwaukee on a Monday—fun fact, most everything is closed on Mondays in Milwaukee
Had a second date with the same girl; regretted not kissing her when I should have.
Slept early.
Had brunch with this same date. No kiss, again. Regretted it, again.
Drove 4.5 hours home.

And somewhere in there was supposed to be this grand, ubiquitous breakthrough that would provide the foundation for a summer I’ve deemed as a fresh start, a way of cleansing the old for the new.

What I found was that all of this did unfold on the trip, just not in the way I expected.

In fact, I wrote it during my time in the hotel:

“I wouldn’t call it boredom, but there is a feeling of, “Is this all?” And, yes, I think that’s right. This is likely all, and the fun travelers have is the fun they make for themselves.”

The Milwaukee 2022 Travelogue will be posted this weekend. Keep an eye out for that!

***

PHOTOBOMBING

There was a social experiment done at the University of Florida with a photography class. The class was split into two groups: the first group was told they were to be graded on QUANTITY—meaning, they were to take as many photos as possible for the best grade. The second group was told their grade would be based on QUALITY—or deciding upon a select group of photos that best exhibited their skills.

The results of the experiment showed two things: first, that the QUANTITY group not only produced more photos, but that the quality of their photos was better. This was because the pressure to produce a select number of photos to be excellent didn’t exist. The QUANTITY group could take as many photos as they liked and the freedom to experiment led to considerably better results.

The QUALITY group, by contrast, produced a significantly smaller number of photographs. Since the grade was about excellence, the students in this group did not take excess photos that would, as a result, push the boundaries of what they knew currently about photography. In short, the QUALITY group played it safe in order to appease the professor, which led to a stunting of growth with their photography skills and the photographs suffered as a result.

The lesson that has been derived from this social experiment is that with more QUANTITY, it follows there will also be more QUALITY.

Now, I wrote all of that to say that my experiences with dating apps DOES NOT FOLLOW these findings whatsoever.

I’ve been online dating for 13 months (on and off, of course). Over that period, I’ve been on dates with 22 different women. Before this era of dating, I went on a grand total of 3 dates as a teenager and into my early college years, two of these dates developed into serious, long-term relationships (one a brief marriage), and I thought I was doing fairly well in terms of finding romantic partners that connected and resonated with me.

By contrast, the past year has introduced me to dates with such staggering backgrounds and belief systems that I’m often left speechless by stories that I could never fathom to make up as a writer (believe me, I have tried—these stories are much more complex and surprising).

My ultimate goal with dating is to find a meaningful, long-term relationship. And after 13 months, I have to ask: what’s been going wrong over the past year? Why haven’t I found a serious connection?

In short: I don’t know.

And after reading books, articles, and constantly introspecting on the matter…I don’t think anyone does.

It appears we’re living in an era where genuine connection is a trial in and of itself.

But I’ve certainly had a QUANTITY of dates (22 women in just over 52 weeks is a potent sample size in the greater dating world). So why hasn’t this led to better QUALITY in dates?

First, I think bad luck plays a bigger role in the dating world than it does with a skill that can be improved over time like, say, photography. Dating certainly depends on many elements not in your control: natural chemistry, a person’s background/belief system/social ability, which leads to how open and communicative they are as dates, as well as a willingness to keep curious and want to know more about another person. This listing doesn’t account for other social conventions such as access to to instant gratification that has become available – oh, I don’t know – EVERYWHERE in the modern age (streaming services, social media, the internet and the never-ending wealth of information available instantly and from wherever to name a few).

Since all of these variables are ever-shifting, it makes the practice of dating something impossible to master since you aren’t playing with a full deck of cards most nights.

To take the photography example from above a bit further: it’s the equivalent of snapping a photo, but the resulting image is either distorted or that objects shifted in the background without warning. Can you imagine? A tree branch moves in the way of a crimson sunset, a sandhill appears blurry – not because of the camera settings, but just – you know – because it can.

Essentially, everything in the image can “PhotoBomb”—the act of jumping in front, garnering attention, or taking away from the intended intention of the photo by some means.

That about wraps up what online dating feels like—a giant Photobomb that gets in the way of a genuine connection. Oh, things might have gone well except for (and I’ve experienced all of these and more):

“I have a close relationship with my ex, I hope it’s not weird that I sometimes go to his house to spend the night when I need to get things off my chest. He’s such a great listener…”
“I’m sorry, but I’m looking for someone that is seeking a relationship with Jesus like I am. It doesn’t seem like you go to church three nights a week like I do…”
“I don’t trust men. I’ve had a string of bad relationships, the last guy cheated on me with three different girls, and I just don’t see the good in them anymore. Anyway, I’m glad we’re on this date; how was your day?”
And on and on and on it goes…

How does it feel to be on the dating scene for just over a year without the ultimate goal of a serious relationship?

Picture that scene from the original Jumanji when Robin William’s character emerges from the board game and looks like a wild man who has survived the wilderness of a jungle that should have killed him since he was a kid.

Yeah, that’s the psyche of someone who has online dated for too long.

That’s why I take breaks. If not for my own sanity, but to remind myself that the results do not necessarily reflect the person. Will more practice lead to better results? Not really, but I like to think I gain something else with the more dates I go on.

I have Twenty-Two unique stories to tell, each one of them more unique than the last. Each felt promising but was inevitably photobombed by something unexpected. If you think about it, 22 dates without coming close to a functional fit is quite the streak to be on.

I should put together a photo album someday of all these experiences. Then, after this journey is said and done, I’ll pull out the album show a friend who wonders why I would ever keep such old, ugly things.

“Why would you keep any of this?” she would ask as I flipped the plastic pages to the next story.

And I’d shrug.

Because I didn’t know what else to do with them.

***

“Wonderful Life” by Two Door Cinema Club

“Ramona” by Jukebox the Ghost

“Out of Style” by The Wrecks

***

Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,

July 19, 2022 0 comments

| Weekly Post-Eds |

Weekly Post-Ed #17

by Robert Hyma November 15, 2021

written by Robert Hyma

GRATEFUL DREAD

Metroid Dread turned out to be a beautiful game. It was much more than its eerie environments and backstory into the origin of the X Parasite. The game was downright fun, which is saying something about a series that has used the same gameplay formula dating back to the original NES days. Samus’s movement of traversing rooms, finding secret chambers, and solving puzzles with upgradable weapon systems was challenging, but so smooth and fluid that its gameplay is what made the game such a sleeper hit.

I haven’t written much about the game because I’ve been watching its evolution since launch day. I played it, loved it, and then watched as speedrunners found glitches and skips to whittle down the any% time to just over an hour (the World Record being a 1:11.13 as of this writing), down nearly 50 minutes from the first couple days the game was released. Not only is this a fascinating process to watch as a game is beaten as quickly as possible, but it also shows the value of iteration and what it means to adjust and improvise depending on what else is found. In many ways I was watching what it means to be creative and discard or amend what existed previously.

Metroid Dread is a game that means so much to so many people. Like a Marvel movie today, connection is key, and to see the Metroid series receive accolades by new players and veterans alike (who fell in love with the likes of Super Metroid in the 90s), it says a lot about what the MercurySteam team was able to achieve.

Hopefully success brings another iteration to the 2D Metroid series because it deserves an encore. But I suppose in tandem, Metroid Prime 4 will need to deliver, which is a strange necessity in order to bring about another addition to the franchise. With a tentative announcement about a sequel to Metroid Dread, perhaps work is already underway for its successor and Samus has no choice but to fly again.

***

THE PROBLEM WITH EDITING OLD WORKS…

I’ve run into a problem with editing an older short story. It was written 10 years ago, at a time when my writing skills and story preferences were drastically different. When editing the story today, I’ve found that I’m not only editing a story, but also my older self that wrote it.

I can see a disservice here.

On the one hand, there’s a difference between cleaning up sloppy writing from when I was younger and changing it entirely. With the latter, I’m changing the intent and purpose of the story into something I prefer now. It isn’t a matter of changing the lines, or how events in the story are juxtaposed and delivered, I’m fundamentally changing something into something else.

My argument is that I’m not making it better, I’m making it something I can recognize today.

I’ve always wondered why Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, once said that they would delete the first three seasons of the show. They can’t watch them because, as they claim, the jokes aren’t funny, the pacing too slow, and the storylines are not as sharp. They are correct in a way—those older shows were finding their way, stuck in a time when the show was young and so were the creators’ ideas about what the show would end up being. Does this make those old episodes bad? No—just different from what a South Park episode looks like today. As we become aged with years and experience, we become someone else, someone who cannot fathom being less than the sum of what we are in the present.

From my experiences editing this recent short story, I’m coming to understand why creators/writers/artists do not revisit old works. Turns out, they appear to be made by someone else, and the wiser will not amend any word/paint stroke/film edit because the work was of its time. To make changes means to introduce something new, which falls under any scrutiny the modern audience makes of the work.

I’ll make my changes to this short story, I’ve decided, but I fully understand it exists as something modern and not as it once was when I wrote it ten years ago. I’m fine with that decision because I’ve kept the old draft, the one that I liked best.

I like this new thing, too, but I’m also aware it is something else now.

Not that any of you will know it when the story is posted.

But I thought it worth sharing there is more to the life of a story than what the published version denotes.

***

***

Wishing everyone as well as they can be. You’re not alone out there,

November 15, 2021 0 comments

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