You choose who you love, including yourself

I was curious over winter break as to exactly how many rock concerts I have attended. Fortunately, I have saved every ticket stub, and the number I came up with was scary. I have attended 101 concerts. \nNo. 100 was a Get-Up Kids show at the Murat Egyptian Room about two months ago. No. 101 was a Mission of Burma reunion show the following week in Chicago. No. 1 was a Tears for Fears show on a Saturday afternoon (?!) at the Star Plaza Theatre in Merillville when I was 16. \nIn between, there have been five Smashing Pumpkins shows at four different venues with three different drummers, including the Assembly Hall show they played in January 1997 -- good work, Union Board -- and its last arena show in Chicago in November 2000. I have seen Neil Young play with the Stray Gators, Crazy Horse and Booker T and the MGs. I have seen the Gin Blossoms open for Neil Young. I have seen Sonic Youth open for Neil Young and scare all the hippies in the audience to the concession stand. I have seen the Dave Matthews Band open for Neil Young. How's that for diversity in opening acts?\nI went to a Robert Plant show where a girl asked me -- completely seriously -- what band he had been in previously. I went to a Bruce Springsteen show where I was shouted down after jumping out of my seat when he started to play "Born in the USA." I went to a Lynyrd Skynyrd show where the band actually did play "Freebird." I saw a band twice in a six-month span play songs from an album that had not had its formal CD release yet -- and if you don't have it, I urge you to grab a hold of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.\nIn case I didn't have a reason to be proud, I have never been to a Woodstock, an Ozzfest or a Guns N' Roses show, and somehow, I have managed to avoid the Eagles despite easily affordable tickets.\nLooking back, the memories are fond. At the time, though, my instant reaction was one of denial and embarrassment. How could it have happened? I didn't really see the Spin Doctors headline a show with Soul Asylum and the Screaming Trees, two far superior bands, as openers. Oh, yes I did. I didn't really see the Cranberries at the IU Auditorium to impress a girl, did I? That number of concerts just sounds like too many. Couldn't I have been doing something better with my time and money? At some point doesn't the law of diminishing returns exist to limit my enjoyment? \nAfter 101 shows, have I become overly critical and unable to enjoy a show on its purest terms?\nThe answers to those questions are no, no and no, respectively. Going to concerts is something I love to do. I gave up on my baseball card collection when I was 16 to free up money to buy concert tickets. I worked jobs with the ability to buy tickets in the back of my mind. I have always worried about the law of diminishing returns, but after seeing Mission of Burma, three guys in their mid-40s with no chance of ever becoming a popular mainstream band, rock a small theater as if their lives depended on it, my joy of concert-going was revived and as high as ever. As for being overly critical, well, that's just another word for snob, and I don't think being five years older than 95 percent of the audience at a Green Day concert makes me a snob.\nThe whole self-doubt issue got raised in two films that I saw last weekend, both of which have opened to high critical praise. "About Schmidt" focuses on a man who realizes after his retirement, the death of his wife and the wedding of his daughter that he has wasted his life. "Adaptation" is about a famous screenwriter who develops severe writer's block related to his inability to turn a famous book into a screenplay.\nThe main characters in both movies have their self-loathing derived from loneliness, the same qualities expressed in Smashing Pumpkins songs that compelled me to see them five times and buy all their albums. In the end, though, your heart and mind directs your nature.\nAs Nicolas Cage's alter ego brother character says in "Adaptation," "We are what we love, not what loves us"