Monday 17 June 2013

Horrific Hypocrites

The other day I was having a conversation with a man I was doing a project with, he had asked me if I had any concerns with the project. I wanted to be honest with him, I didn't have many concerns but I was concerned with the closing song. I felt it didn't suit and that the audience wouldn't understand. Now I wasn't saying that we had to change the song, I was simply expressing my concern because he asked. I felt, being a music major and having had previous experience with film composing that he would have valued my musical input. I was very wrong. He proceed to tell me it was not my place to criticise the project and I shouldn't question his creative artistry. He justified why he chose the song but that wasn't enough, he had to tell me I didn't know what I was talking about and I shouldn't be worrying about the music and just do my job. I was shocked, this man ask me for my opinion and then turned on me when my opinion wasn't all praise. Granted he was the leader of this project but I was under the impression he was just after my opinion. I never once told him he was wrong, yet he got defensive and struck back. 
This happens all the time in life. People rarely ever want to hear someone's genuine opinion unless it's the same as their own. People don't seek contradiction, they seek approval and reassurance. This means they can easily turn on you if you don't give them this reassurance. And for those of you out there asking people for their opinion you need to first stop and think, do you want an actual opinion or just reassurance, because if you're after reassurance maybe it's best if you don't ask. 

Monday 10 June 2013

Learning Loans

So as I am sure you are all aware, I'm a university student in Australia.  What a lot of you might be unaware of, is I'm not Australian myself. I was born in Canada and therefore I'm a citizen of Canada. This was fine and I have never had any problems being a Canadian citizen living in Australia... until now. Because I'm not an Australian citizen, I am required to pay my university fees up front. That's around 3000 dollars a semester. Being the poor writer/musician/student that I am, I can't afford to pay 3000 dollars a semester. So, I've started the process of getting my Australian citizenship (even though I've lived in Australia for 11 years). I am getting my citizenship  so I can borrow money from the government to pay my fees which I will repay at a later date. This might seem like a brilliant idea to a lot of people out there, but I disagree. Over a 3 year degree I will rake up a debt of close to 20,000 dollars to the government. To me, the price of wanting to further educate myself seems a little excessive. Yet, the government continues to cut university funding, which in turn rises the cost of our fees.

The budget of Australia's military is 50% more than that of Germany, France and Canada. And if you compare Australia to Iceland we are paying, on average for all the students, over 200% more than Iceland. To be fair, Australia isn't the worst when it comes to its spending priorities. In my opinion, the USA takes that prize. 25 % of the US budget goes to necessary spending (this includes medical, education,environmental  cots; you know all the things we would class as important) yet 19% is given to the defence secretary to spend on military needs!

I find it hard to fathom that in a world where importance is placed on the value of education and the opportunities education brings, we still don't have free higher education. If we were able to have a free (government funded) higher education system we might find that more people who have incredible minds but are at a financial disadvantage are able to reach their full potential. It's in my opinion all education should be free and treated as a fundamental right rather than an upper class commodity. 

Wednesday 5 June 2013

Fictitious Fame (A John Green Tribute)

Before we get on with this weeks blog I'd just like to make a quick apology to everyone for releasing it a little late this week. I was actually in a minor car accident on the day I was supposed to publish, but obviously didn't get the time to have an edit then publish. I'm perfectly fine so there is no need to worry!! No one was injured, however the blog was late and I'm sorry for that.

This week something extremely exciting has happened! We have reached over 1300 views on the blog, which has made me extremely excited and I wanted to thank everyone who has visited the page and anyone who continues to return. Getting these views got me thinking, how many more do I need to be well known in the blogging world? To be honest I have no idea, but I'm assuming a lot more. This thought lead me onto thinking about other people who are well known in there sphere of work but not necessarily in the public eye. One person who springs to mind is John Green.
John Green is an incredible person. He is a New York Times best selling author, he runs one of the most popular vlogging channels on YouTube (the vlogbrothers, I strongly recommend checking them out), he is one of the owners of the DFTBA record company and is currently working on bringing one of his books to life in movie form (the book is called The Fault in Our Stars and is fantastic). Yet when I ask people of the general public if they know of John Green the large majority of them don't. It baffles me how someone with so much talent can remain relatively unknown in the world. Yet someone such as Nicki Minaj, who in my opinion is no where near as talented as John, is known by basically everyone.
It seems our society today is less concerned on the skills that that people have and are more concerned on if they can sell themselves. John Green has never been about selling himself, he just goes out every day and does the best he can and has fun with life. He isn't worried if the public eye will accept him or not, as long as he can continue to do what he loves, he is happy. I think we can all take a little something from John Green, whether it's not worrying what people will think and being ourselves or if it's showing us that we don't have to stick to just one career. We need to go out and apply the lessons that John teaches us to our lives everyday. So until next week I shall leave you with the wise words of John Green DFTBA (don't forget to be awesome).