Friendship, it's complicated

I have a friend with a blog, (you can find it here...http://scott-williams.ca/, but wait don't go there yet, cause once you do and you experience his awesomeness, you won't be back) so he is a pretty good friend, the kind of friend who I would drop anything to help and I know would do the same for me (well if I am being honest, I know he would drop anything to help my wife, and I'm only pretty sure he would drop everything to help me), anyway...

Scott is a great writer, I mean really great. He makes me laugh, he makes me cry, he makes me embarassed and shameful, he challenges me...all with his writing. So what I want to say is "Screw you Scott". I don't want to read your blog and feel inadequate, I am pretty good at feeling inadequate all the time already, I don't need your help. I am supposed to be a professional communicator and I pale in comparison to your worst post. AAARRRGGHH! (okay the all caps were excessive).

I like Scott, I really do, I would just like him better if he was less good, more adequate like me. i wonder if he'll do that for me?

Is it all about habit?

I think a Friday near the end of January is the perfect day to reflect on all the New Year resolutions that I did not make this year. As I reflect it occurs to me that I have not been as successful in past years with my resolutions mainly because I do a poor job of making any new behavior become a habit. Instead I have the intended behavior remain as merely an intention. I intent to do more of this, or I intend to do more of that. Tomorrow I will make sure I do this and that and the other thing.

Actually doing those things is hard. Creating the routine where I give time and energy to remembering what it is I value and what it is I want to accomplish is hard to do. I imagine it is similar to the concept of some advertisements I have seen recently where there are snapshots of many different kids and they tell what they want to grow up to be. "I want to be a drug addict.", "I want to work for the man.", "I want to die an early death due to heart disease.". You've seen this one right?

We, meaning most of us, do a poor job of dreaming, of creating a vision of the future, of planning our own lives to become who we want to be. We instead react to the situations around us and through a combination of good and bad decisions we end up on a path. My path is not a bad path. Most of you are also on decent ones. Some of you are on poor ones at the moment. And we have all heard of the poor souls who are on really bad paths. The enlightening for me, as I sit here and reflect, is that the path, no matter how good or bad at the moment, is both behind us and in front of us. And we can choose to leave the path and trail-blaze at any moment. And perhaps the real solution to finding the good path is to get off the current path as quickly as possible. To do this I need an idea of the path I want. I need to be active and plan ahead to allow me to step off this path. This visioning will allow me motivation that I can use to channel time and energy into creating habits.

My future path:
I will become a steady writer who regularly puts time into reading, writing, editing, and submitting. I will take care of my physical health through regular exercise and conscientious eating. I will take care of my spiritual health through regular bible study and prayer.

My habits:
1. I will write every day. (A least one sentence towards a current project. Minimum.)
2. I will exercise five times a week. (And yes, Wii Fit counts...for now.)
3. I will read my bible every day and I will use that reading in at least a daily prayer.

The order may be wrong, but those are the habits I am choosing to focus on.

Tuesday disguised as a Monday - Shame

Tuesday after a long weekend...yes I am addressing you!

You should be ashamed of yourself, acting as if you are a Monday after a normal weekend. it is morally repugnant to deceive us in this way. You should step up and act like a Tuesday. By pretending to be a Monday you create a false pain on this day. We should come to work ready to celebrate not only the joy or the lengthened bonus weekend, but also the shortened and therefore less painful work week. Somehow, though, you steal this joy, we feel the agony as if you were a Monday. I say again, this is not right. Be ashamed, be very ashamed, and shape up, let us get back to enjoying this glorious and short work week, with ... oh bliss, another weekend ahead, and at this time, only 3 1/2 days to get through.

Consider yourself warned, oh spiteful Tuesday!

I have a Dragon in my garage

I recently read this...

The Dragon In My Garage

by Carl Sagan

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

I Actually agree here. Why, as Christians are we offended that someone chooses not to believe as we do. This is in some way a rejection of us and what we believe, but it is not personal. They simply need more than we can show. I used to be them. I used to not believe, and could not see the "Dragon" either. I do now, and perhaps because I used to be a non believer, I am not offended by those who don't believe. I am offended when they choose to attack me, but non belief, well that does not offend me at all.

Yes, I have a dragon in my garage, you cannot see it, cannot physically prove it, but it is there nonetheless. You do not have to believe it, lets just agree together thateither you know something I don't, or I know something you don't, and leave it at that. I will leave you alone, and you can leave me alone. I won't attack you, you won't attack me...if only.

Some comments stick with us

I was recently on a canoe trip with several friends. It was one of those guy trips where people make fun of each other and make rude comments and help each other out where necessary, a sort of male bonding ritual. I may or may not have expressed before that I am quite sarcastic and I used it to great extent on this trip.

Now I think that for the most part everyone had fun, and lots of verbal "shots" were taken by everyone. One night around the campfire one of the men commented to his brother about me, "everything he says is mean, haven't you noticed?"

The comment wasn't meant as anything big, it was in a way a put down of the brother, but it really hit me hard. I don't want to be mean and I definitely don't want people to think I am mean. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I am kind of mean. I certainly am very good at it, if it is not a defining trait, it easily could be. Do I want it to be though? Is that how I want people to remember me?

Nope.

The challenge for me is that I don't know how to be a part of a group like that without being sarcastic and funny and well...mean. I need to learn though, I need to change this part of me. I really like those guys, a few of them are more important to me than I will ever be able to express. yet, I put them down, and perhaps, just perhaps, hurt someone when I meant to be funny.

I don't have a solution about how to change this part of me, and my relationships in these settings, but I do know that today is the only day I can begin to change, and so today I will begin. I will accept advice from anyone, because I am simply lost in this regard...suggestions anyone?


Dave

Emperor and the half wit

Today I read this quote...

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. - Neil Gaiman

I strongly suspect that I am the half wit that spends all his time pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes on. Perhaps if I spent less time seeking other's faults and working on my own, I would be a better, happier person...or not.

Lawyer steals Hot dog!

Each week I receive a news compilation email called This is True. I enjoy the stories and get a kick out of Randy's comments. This week one of the stories got my goat...

PROSECUTOR, CHARGE THYSELF: A hot dog vendor in Athens, Ga., called police after someone ate a hot dog, then refused to pay for it. When officers caught up with the suspect, he denied knowing anything about it -- but officers noted he had mustard and ketchup on his shirt. The officer gave William Michael Olson another chance to pay for the dog or face arrest. "You are going to lock me up for a f---ing hot dog?!" Olson demanded. Sure enough, he refused to pay and was arrested for theft and public intoxication. After he was booked, Olson, 36, who admitted he had been drinking, resigned from his job: until then, he was an assistant district attorney. (Athens Banner-Herald) ...Red wine for meat, white wine for fish, rose for hot dogs.


Here is what got me riled up, this guy was a lawyer! How does a guy like that get through law school, and pass the bar. How is it that we have decided that the knowledge alone is enough to do a job like that. It makes me quite upset to think that this guy represents us in court. We need to stop just taking "good" students and start taking good "people" into these programs. We live in a litigious world, and one of the reasons is that we have stopped caring about right and wrong, and seem to only care about win or lose. In that same vein, as i was watching College Basketball this weekend I was struck when Missouri (who were up by two points with little time on the clock) were fouled, the player who was fouled is not good at shooting free throws, so all of a sudden, his "injury" was too bad for him to shoot his free throws, instead the coach got to substitute someone form the bench. They hit both free throws and won the game. The coach followed the rules, but really is that what was right in this situation? maybe this player was really hurt, but I doubt it, I am sure he could have shot, but win at all costs seems to be the motto, not win honorably or lose honorably, just win.

It is an unfortunate thing that we have fallen to this lowly and miserable state. I find it embarassing to me as a human, that we are settiling for this lowly state.