Outliers

A few months ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and it changed my outlook on what it takes to be successful in today's world. In the book, Gladwell provides case studies - biographies, if you will - of a variety of succesful people, from lawyers to hockey players to Bill Gates. But rather than just charting their career histories, as would happen in a business case study, Gladwell probes beyond the surface to discover the hidden secrets or advantages certain people had. For example, Bill Gates is successful because he know computers. Okay. We all know that. He dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft. He didn't need college anymore. Why? Well, by the time he started Microsoft, he'd spent almost 10 years working on computers full-time, not to mention studying them in school. He surrounded himself with computers, and even though he might've been frustrated with them at times, he was never bored. And by the time he quit school, he'd probably logged 10,000 hours working on computers. He'd been in the high school computer club (which his school had because he was from a wealthy neighbourhood), because computers were so new when he was in high school, him and his friends got jobs setting up networks for large companies arround Seattle. Then he bought a "make your own PC kit" from a magazine, and that was about that. 10,000 hours.
This is the secret, says Gladwell: if you do something for 10,000 hours, you become an expert in it. If you play hockey for 10,000 hours, you're probably really good at it... and you're probably in good shape, too. If you write for 10,000 hours, you're probably good at it as well.
So the other night I sat down and tried to calculate how many hours I've spent writing. I took my 12th birthday as the starting point, because that's when I started journalling, and calculated up till Saturday. I figured that, on average, I've spent 3 hours a week writing. Sometimes more, of course, but I've also gone months writing nothing except emails. And I came up with a figure. According to my calculations, I've spent approximately 2340 hours writing since the age of 12. That's well short of 10,000. It's possible this number could be higher or lower - I haven't really been keeping track - but it just goes to show that I have a LONG road ahead of me if I want to become an excellent writer.
And it also goes to show that our professors are right. The only way to become a better writer is to WRITE. Constantly. Even if you're writing shit, you have to put in the time.
If you write 20 hours a week for 52 weeks, that's 1040 hours. Do that for 10 years and you're past the 10,000 mark.
If I write 20 hours a week for 8 more years, I'll become an expert. Most likely I won't do that. So if I keep writing 3 hours per week, it will take me another 49 years to log 10,000 hours.
Look for my first book 2058!

So Mickey Rourke walks into a bar...

...and walks out with an open beer. Sorry, it was an Italian restaurant.
How is this news, people? I mean, really? I thought news was supposed to be about things the average person wouldn't do. I've done worse than that. I know someone who stole a complete set of cutlery from Earl's - they really liked the fork-spoon hybrid thing they had.
I mean, really. Isn't smoking a bigger crime than taking an open beer out of a restaurant? In Victoria it is. They'll confiscate your beer, but they'll fine you for smoking.

http://www2.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=956d25ed-59d1-4c9b-875b-94bcb525a8ed&k=66036

Now, for the record, I quit smoking a while ago (and as far as my mother knows, I never started. Although there was this one time I was smoking a Camel Light out my bedroom window, and the dog started pawing at the carpet, trying to dig a hole through the floor and save me... mom came running up the stairs and asked me what was going on... she must have known, but ignored it. Like she ignored so many things for the sake of politeness. I wish I was able to be as demure as my mom sometimes. But anyways, I digress...)
And I think every smoker should quit, if only for the extra lung capacity. But I don't think the government should have so much control over where and when people do things they want to do. Smoking isn't the greatest thing in the world, but it's a choice people make. If the government is allowed to outlaw smoking, what next?

I remember the first time I had a cigarette. I was 11 years old, in seventh grade. My friend Jess snuck some DuMaurier Lights from her mother's purse, and we stood outside my apartment building, right next to the intercom. I lived in this strange multi-building complex on a hill. Next to us was an empty parking lot, and beyond that, an abadoned pool. The pool had been dry since we'd moved into the building. The buildings were labelled A, B, C, D, and each was named after a kind of tree. We lived in the Cedar building. Once I found human feces in the stairwell. But anyways, I digress. Again.
My mom was still at work, and I was in seventh grade. I'd skipped a grade so I was younger than everyone, and even though seventh grade is like desperation in a can, I was extra desperate becase I was younger. I'd changed schools the year before because the girls in class picked on me - I was younger than them but had boobs, and they didn't. They wouldn't let me join the "special girls" club, where they all talked about "growing up" and getting their peiods and having boyfriends and french kissing. They said I was too young. Even though, like I said before, I was the only one with boobs. And house keys.
And once again, I digress. Jess and I are standing outside, in front of the intercom. Bushes hide us from view of the cars that, if they drove by, would be parking in the abandoned parking lot. Ghosts froliced in the empty swimming pool. Jess was extremely short, and she wore big glasses. She kinda looked like Velma from Scooby Doo, except she was 12. And she hated her life. Then again, what kid in grade 7 doesn't hate their life? Jess was so desperate to be in what she perceived to be the "popular" group, which at our school consisted of pretty much everyone. There was the one girl who was, like, the head of the group, and we'd all meet up before school and walk to her house and meet her, then walk to school - there was a group of, like, five of us that would do this. She only lived a block away from school, though. Anyways, she was the queen, and anything she said was gold. She said it was cooler to smoke filterless cigarettes, so Jess snapped the filters off the DuMauriers she'd stolen from her mom's purse and threw them into the bushes.
"It's cooler to smoke them without the filter," she said, as though she was telling me something I hadn't heard before.
She'd stolen a lighter, too, although lighters weren't hard to come by. Everyone in my class had a lighter, although we only used them to light schoolbooks on fire or to burn illicit, filterless cigarettes, as Jess and I were doing.
It took a few tries to light the thing, although eventually the smoke filled our little orb of secrecy. It smelled, to my nose, like grandfathers. And like when my mom would come home from the bar and kiss me goodnight. And Jess's house. What it didn't smell like was coolness.
Jess smoked first, of course, since she's the one who stole them from her mom's purse. She put it to her lips and sucked in the weird-smelling smoke, quickly, as if gasping. Then she blew it out right away. Her saliva soaked into the paper, turning it from white to dirty grey. She handed the cigarette to me. I took it and, following Jess's lead, inhaled quickly. The paper felt wet, and wrong, against my lips.
"If this is smoking," I thought, "then I don't like it."

In high school, everyone smoked. They stood outside at lunch time, across the street from school grounds, and smoked like there was no tomorrow. The cool kids, the weird kids, the stoners. Everyone smoked at one time or another. It intimidated me. I wanted to hang out with the punks, but I didn't have access to cigarettes. I didn't have anything to offer them. My best friend smoked, her best friend smoked too. Seriously, the only one who didn't was me. I was even in a movie, "The Politics of Saturday Night," holding a lit cigarette but not inhaling. The voice-over said "look at me, I'm cool. I smoke. Really I do. I do. I'm cool."
One friend, Angela, was so addicted that she'd scour public ashtrays for butts, collect the tobacco into little piles, and roll her own. She became an expert at peeling the foil from the back of the paper in the cigarette pack. In the morning, on the way to school she found a whole cigarette on the ground. It was a bit wet from the rain, but whatever. It was part of her persona, though; part of what made her so endearing. She was a slave to her bad habits. But she could laugh about it. It was a great joke she'd tell to her friends, you know, yesterday she went to the pool just to dig through the ashtrays.
Then we were all 19, all old enough to buy our own cigarettes. And alcohol. I started smoking when I got drunk, "bumming" them off friends, saying I'd pay them back but never actually doing it. My favourite were Benson & Hedges, because they sounded British. Classy. I smoked "Black", which in Port Alberni was known as "Black and Gold." Why? Because that's what the guys smoked, and if I smoked it too, there was a good chance a guy would ask me for one and that means they'd have to talk to me. But on special occasions, like birthdays and picnics, we'd all split a pack of Camel Lights. Why? I don't know. It was a tradition that I stumbled into when it was already in full-swing, but it's something I did even just a few months ago. Even if I wasn't going to smoke them, it somehow seemed important to have a pack of Camel Lights.
Cigarettes were good, especially for someone like me who isn't really a "party girl", to make conversation with strangers. I knew if ever a scene got to be too much, I could escape outside with a cigarette and make small-talk with someone. Everyone wanted a cigarette at some point or another, you know?
My first serious boyfriend and I bonded over cigarettes. Vanilla cigarettes. I have an empty package of them somewhere, and it still smells like... those times. Like losing my virginity. Like standing on the veranda, him holding me from behind, cooing sweet (though overly intense) nothings in my ear. Like his family home, which in it's former life had been a slaughterhouse, but at the time made me feel serene. I could see the Alps from every window in the house, I could smell cigarettes from every room, and I felt comfortable. Like being in Austria in 9/11, imagining that the whole world could explode and I wouldn't even notice.

What am I trying to say? I don't smoke anymore, and surprisingly, I haven't even felt tempted to. But I don't fault anyone who DOES smoke. There is so much attached to the act of smoking, in our culture, over and above the health issues. Smoking, for me, marked quite a few rites of passage, and I don't feel bad about that. If people want to smoke, it's their choice, and the government shouldn't be able to regulate rites of passage.

Update:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/quit-smoking-or-theyll-abandon-this-kid,26109/