I know that mistakes are not pleasant. Sometimes mistakes hurt. They might even hurt a lot. But just because something is unpleasant or hurtful does not necessarily make me want to avoid it. While I do not relish pain, I do appreciate lessons learned. No lesson is as well learned as one through a mistake.

As I go through life I have grown to appreciate silence from others. It’s a good thing to fall off the bike and get up to try again. The problem is that people that have fallen off of the bike before do not want others to fall off, too. They want them to go straight to riding perfectly. Or maybe they want to ban bikes altogether.

While I like trying things out, I can definitively say that I do not know much in this life. I know some things. I will learn other things. And hopefully there will always be people around me that I can turn to for some advice. The thing is, I only want advice if I ask. And likewise I will only try to give advice if asked for it.

In this day and age apparently people’s perceptions of human rights are changing. We are entitled to a good job (even if we do not deserve or cannot do the work), keeping our house (even when we cannot afford it), health care (even though it’s an optional service since our right to life is not an entitlement to a set number of years), and high speed internet. So while all of these things really deserve their own respective thoughts, I just have to say this: really, high speed internet? What an entitled and distorted society we live in.

On initial glance, it would not seem that importance and urgency are as diametrically opposed as big and small. However in daily living, decisions that are strong in one aspect seem to butt up against other decisions that are strong in the other aspect. The question that we should (but do not often enough) ask of ourselves is whether we are making choices that we are comfortable with. It is easy to answer choices on paper, but actual actions indicate our actual choices.

I doubt that there are many of us who would say that answering a phone call about work is more important than continuing a discussion with a friend. Nor would anyone say that clean dishes are more important than spending quality time with a child. But when we step back and evaluate it, it sure does seem like we make some decisions that we regret, doesn’t it?

Maybe it is time to let the house get a little bit dirty, let voicemail fulfill its intended purpose, be cured of our iPhone ADD, and put work away. Then it just might be easier to look back and be comfortable with what we have decided to do with our lives.

Unless of course they are old. Yeah, that is probably an ageist statement no matter how you slice it.

Anyways, my whole point is that an old person should not be running in 85° F heat with either a plastic suit or a sweatshirt/sweatpants on. There are some things that are good and important (like exercise). There is also a fair amount of wisdom in knowing when to take it 100% and when to err on the safe side. A young guy trying to sweat out some water to make weight for high school wrestling can take the plastic suit a little better than an older gentleman in his 60s who is just trying to slim down for the ladies at the retirement home.

So remember, friends don’t let friends let their grandparents go on a crash diet to get ready for cage fighting. What, cage fighting? Yeah that definitely seems like the only reasonable place for anyone over the age of 22 (i.e., post-collegiate wrestling) to wear a plastic suit.

Equipment

• At least 1 deck of cards
• 2+ players
• 1 cup for each player

Gameplay
Deal all of the cards to each player (as in war). Players are not to look at their cards. Play occurs in rounds (“battles”) with each player revealing the top card in their pile. The highest card (ace is high) is the winner. All players with cards lower than the highest relinquish their card to the player with the highest card as well as drink an arbitrarily small amount of water (i.e., a sip). If the 2 players have equally high cards, they are now to engage in a “war” with each player placing their top 3 cards facedown and revealing the 4th card. This continues until one of the players engaged in the “war” has a higher card. The loser of the war must relinquish all cards as well as drink the rest of the water in their cup. Once a player has lost all of their cards, they are eliminated. Each loser must drink the number of cups of water relative to their standing (i.e., the first person eliminated with 6 players has a standing of 6th and will then drink 6 cups of water).

Alternate Versions:

• Winner must drink the water
• Use food instead of water

The Perfect One is the ideal that you have in your mind of whatever it is that you are looking for. It is going to be recognized and apparent. You are sure of this. Far be it from me to doubt that you could possibly know this for sure.

For example when you are dating, you are looking for the Perfect Boyfriend/Girlfriend. If you are a little better at seeing the bigger picture, you are looking for the Perfect Husband/Wife. But through the good and bad dates, you are evaluating the other person by holding them up against your ideal. Once the other person does not match, you are going to move on. Don’t pay attention to the fact that the person would make a very good match for you despite being slightly too short. Much more tragically than missing a good match in search of a perfect match, though, is being married to someone who you eventually believe to not be the perfect match. When that happens, you might find that you have found the Perfect One in another person. At the very least in this situation you are going to imagine the possibilities of a different life, and at the worst it can lead you to pursue your fantasies. This will obviously hurt many people around in addition to making you a liar (since you could not keep your vows).

Another instance when people look for the Perfect One is when they are house hunting. When you are searching for a house, people often advise you that you will “just know” once you walk into a house. That is rubbish. It is just another way of saying that you should be looking for the Perfect House. Forget the fact that you are looking at houses that would work out just fine. And forget the fact that any house will have its problems. Forget the fact that it’s just a building that will not last!

The horrible thing about this mindset is not that you should have standards. When someone fails to meet your standards for a mate or if a house is completely broken, you should move on. That just makes sense. However, the horrible thing about this mindset is that it will fool you into doing things that do not make any sense at all. You will fall in love with the Perfect One with your heart but not with your head. And then when (not if) reality comes in the form of imperfections, you will be horribly disappointed. And it will hurt.

Can this be fixed? Yes it can! Today you can realize that there is no perfect one, whatever it is that you are looking for. Realize that settling can be just a negative take on this and realize that settling is not always so bad. Settle on something that is acceptable (this seems obvious but don’t settle on something that is unacceptable). If you do not settle, then at least start to believe that the Perfect One will never be found. Move forward with the knowledge that you will NOT find the Perfect One. And if the results match up to your expectations, you are much less likely to get into trouble.

Even when we are not so far removed from the origin of things we begin to see disagreements about the facts. As time moves on, opinions diverge. Sometimes no opinion even leads to the truth. Sometimes people become fanatical about their opinions. In any case, we can see this phenomenon here and now.

Give a new idea a couple of years, and it will be as if they had always existed. Nicknames just need time before they become the preferred way of referencing things (case in point: not too many people could tell you that “blog” is actually just a chopped up version of “web log”). Games are invented and taught to others with no regards as to why certain things are the way that they are. It is amazing, really, to think of how much information we pass on without even stopping to think about where that information comes from.

It seems to me that the most important aspect would be the origin of information. I know that I want to know if I can trust the source of information before I willingly pass it on.

Oh by the way, Lean On Me is a song by Bill Withers. You cannot use it for worship.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me

It was assumed that this saying would protect us from other people’s mean words. And when you’re a young child, it is easy to trick yourself into believing it.

But then you get older and you realize the truth. Words are, in fact, more powerful than physical pain. Physical pain definitely has its place. Broken bones, strained joints, diseases, and so on are all painful and uncomfortable (to say the least) to go through. But all of that pales in comparison to the effect that words and emotional trauma can have.

While it’s rather debatable what can hurt a person more, it is pretty easy to see how emotional trauma can scar people for life. The life of a child who has verbally abusive parents can be negatively impacted for good even with counseling. While I do not want to undermine the damage that physical pain can have, the emotional pain is the one that I have seen with my own eyes because it happens all of the time. One can toil for great lengths of time over something, and sometimes it seems like it takes only a single word to make all of that labor futile. Words get at us even through our armor and shields. They needle their way through kinks and prick us to death. And the worst part of all is that it is the words of those closest to us that hurt the most. Well maybe even worse than that is the fact that we are all so horrible in regards to how we use our words.

The tongue: so mighty and so horrible. No one can tame it, but we must try, eh?

In a USA Today article, we find out that things are in fact not too good. People are being paid quite a bit nowadays, don’t you think? It is especially interesting that there has been such a boom in government increases during the same time as the private sector losing so many jobs. And by interesting I mean awfully disturbing. The government is becoming a behemoth that is going to continue growing until it collapses and knocks down the support columns that hold up this house.

The thing that I do not understand in the least is how people in government positions can work without the fear of being fired! Whether incompetent or able, they will keep their job (unless perhaps they are grossly ill-performing where even then it will take quite some effort to make a move on them). So when people are presented with the option to try their best or do as little as possible with both seeming to result in the same outcome, what would people do? Exactly, they would do the least possible. There is no incentive for people in government jobs to continue to do their best. Now you see what I am saying about the government employees being similar to a union.

Just as the unions have been able to cripple portions of the private sector (such as the American automakers), it is going to be the government employees that are going to bring down the government. If you have not read what unions can do to the world, I suggest that you read the ever popular Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

All of the signs are there. Health care reform that will dictate much more than we need or want it to, a growing government influence in our lives, a government that dictates what companies will do (since it owns them), perhaps even the degradation of freedoms to which we are rightly entitled to under the Constitution. This is something that concerns all of us, and we all need to care about it. Because we sure are going to have the live with the consequences together. And disregarding warning is a terribly foolhardy thing to do.

I am rather tired of hearing the endless stream of:

• “I do not have that information”
• “We are not aware of that at this time”
• “I cannot say whether that is true or not”
• “I do not know the answer to that”
• “We have not heard of that rumor”

I do not understand any of the people that are involved in putting these spokesmen out there!

If you are the agency or group that is being spoken for, I would think that you want to seem competent. You want to put out someone who is excellent because they are going to be the face of your group. You do not get that if you present someone who cannot even answer the questions that they field.

If you are the person who is to be the spokesman, I would also think that you would want to be knowledgeable of everything that you are supposed to know. Otherwise, as so often happens, you will get roasted by the questions that the audience has. They are going to ask you about what they have heard and apparently their sources are better than yours. So you will sound clueless and lost. Who wants that to be them?

And me? Yeah I just want someone who will give some answers. I can get tired real quickly of hearing people avoid the questions that they just don’t know the answers to. No, lame answers are not better than no answers.

On another note, salesmen are just specialized spokesmen that are trying to get your money. Time to get those salesmen up to speed on what they’re selling, huh?