Why Is It Always About Me?

Back in my college days, one of my favorite meals consisted of mixing mac n' cheese, tuna fish and cream of mushroom soup. A plate full of this fine cuisine, along with a hefty helping of mustard pickles, and I was a happy camper. To be honest I'd like some right now. Contrary to what this savory delight might imply, I was not studying the culinary arts. I ate my fair share of Top Ramen just like everybody else, but sometimes I got a little creative. It doesn't happen much anymore though, not since my wife threatened to padlock the cabinets. But she hasn't been able to stop me from having my bowl of peaches with a big scoop of chunky peanut butter.

I used to think there was something wrong with me when other people didn't like the same things I liked. I wanted to blend in, not stick out. I wanted to be accepted by others. Who am I kidding, I still feel that way. The way I behave is largely determined by my surroundings and whatever is expected of me. I'm like a social chameleon. I'm pretty sure all of us are that way to a certain extent. But every once in a while there is somebody who breaks the mold.

A friend of mine, we'll call him "Reff" (á la Scooby Doo), recently went to a popular local mall where he sat himself in the outside courtyard, pulled out his guitar and busted out some tunes. Not for any specific reason, he just wanted to do it. Now to me that just doesn't compute. First of all, he hadn't been invited there to play music and, on top of that, he was doing something very different from everybody else. If you can imagine social behavior as a stream of water then he was most definitely swimming against the current. This makes alarms go off in the 'proper behavior' sector of my brain and everything goes into crisis mode. Lights start flashing and I start searching for a bunker to hide in.

So Reff plays a couple of songs and then a security guard shows up. Public recognition that what he was doing was out of the ordinary. To me, there is nothing more terrifying! The alarms are still sounding in my brain as I imagine the situation. The guard politely asks him to leave and I'm thinking, okay, this is where all propriety returns and I can climb out of my bunker. Wrong! Back in the bunker I go. He starts trying to convince the guard to let him keep playing! The guard refuses but Reff still isn't giving up. "What about one more song?", he asks.

Huh!?! The audacity of some people!

Again the guard refuses, so he casually packs up his guitar and leaves. He wasn't angry, I'm pretty sure Reff has never experienced anger in his life, he just went on his way.

So how is it that some people have the gift of behaving out of the ordinary, without regard for anybodies opinion? How do you survive without society's acceptance? I think I stumbled upon the answer a few years ago when I was a missionary. I know what you're thinking "how could this social coward have ever been a missionary?" Well I was.

I've always been overly sensitive to what others think of me. I had lots of good friends growing up but I wouldn't say that I was very popular. I just didn't fit the 'popular' mold. When I was a missionary I still harbored some of those insecurities, but mission presidents don't take that into account when they assign you to a companionship. All of my companions were quite popular in the mission. Everybody knew them and liked them. I felt very insignificant compared to them, not because of anything they did to me, that's just how I felt.

Right here I should interject that in elementary school I was often brutally beaten by little girls. That should explain a lot.

By the way, in case you aren't familiar with LDS missionaries, they always travel in packs of two, known as a companionship. Sometimes it's three, occasionally four, seldom five and almost never six. Unless it's a donut run after district meeting. But, if you ever see seven of them crammed into a Mazda 626 sedan, then you can be assured that there is one more in the trunk. That would be me.

So I observed how these companions behaved around other people. They seemed comfortable in almost any situation. Unlike me, they didn't feel looked down upon, rather they were accepted as equals by their peers. What was wrong with me? Finally one day it hit me; they don't have to be accepted as equals by their peers because they have already accepted their peers as equals. I had been looking at the whole situation backwards. I was waiting for an invitation to be part of the crowd when I should have been inviting the crowd to be part of me. Does that make any sense?

I'd like to say that since having this epiphany I've never felt insecure again, but old habits endure. At least now I know how people, like my friend Reff, can go so unabashedly against the grain without succumbing to insecurity. Still, between him and the security guard, I would rather have been the guard in that situation. Actually, I would rather have been the passerby, pretending not to notice what was going on, but giggling like a bully school girl on the inside.

Home Is Where You Hang Your Rope

A friend, who I grew up with back in Idaho, recently asked me, "why are so many Californians moving to Idaho?" You must understand that, where I grew up, the word 'Californian' is used as an adjective instead of a noun. (A noun is a person, place or thing while an adjective describes a noun. Just a quick refresher on parts of speech, for those of you who haven't pulled out the Mad Libs in a while. No charge.) Back home the word 'Californian' is somewhat synonymous with the words "intolerable" or "meddlesome". Naturally this is the reason, as explained to me by my government teacher, that there are so many so called "Californian" legislators in the US Congress. There is even some disagreement as to whether California is actually a state in the sense of a geographic area or if it is more like a state of denial or a state of confusion. We still capitalize the word for the same reason we still put a 'k' in front of the word 'know'. It doesn't really have a purpose we are just too lazy to change it.

It may be obvious at this point that I have no idea how to properly use the ' and the " symbols. I know that you are supposed to use the " symbol when you are directly quoting someone or when you are referencing a title or when you need Bozo the Clown hair for your new emoticon.

""(°0°)""

Beyond that I'm pretty much clueless. I just throw one in now and then for dramatic affect. Besides, where I grew up, Grammar was just the old gal that married Grampa all those years ago.

Please don't get me wrong, I mean, there could never be a better place to grow up than where I did. I loved it and I often wish I could go back so that my kids could grow up there too. But you see, I live in California now. So, although I may deny it, I'm somewhat confused. Should I stick to my roots and hold on to the dream that, someday, California will fall into the ocean? Or should I embrace my new home and try to set aside old prejudices? I have found, after all, that there are many Californians who just don't fit the Californian description that I once thought to be universal.

I guess that brings us back the the original question; why are so many Californians moving to Idaho? Is there something terribly wrong with California that makes them want to leave? Is it because Idaho offers the next untamed wilderness to be exploited by over regulation, misplaced values and underproduction? No, it doesn't have anything to do with California, or Idaho. The reason they are leaving is very simple, it's because it gets them one step closer to their ultimate destination... North Dakota! Clean air, no people and close enough to Canada that you can hear the Caribou stampeding, eh! Since moving down here I've learned that countless Californians secretly dream of living in North Dakota. They're just too ashamed to admit it. Why would they be ashamed? Well... wouldn't you be?

It just so happens that North Dakota is leading the way towards legalizing the growing of Hemp as an agricultural product. Hemp has an amazingly broad range of uses. Hemp ropes, for example, have been used for centuries. They don't seem to last long though, perhaps due to the traditional burning of the rope after each use. It's an odd tradition and nobody knows where it came from, but everybody loves it! Growing Hemp has of course been discouraged because of its party prone cannabis cousin. However, there are many who still promote its merits as a food and fiber crop with diverse, shall we say, benefits. Canada has been growing it for years and see the wondrous results from that country, eh. Californians from all walks of life are drawn to such free thinking.

So don't worry Idaho, the Californians won't stay long. North Dakota is calling to them and literally roping them in. You can't stop the migration so just try to enjoy it. If you watch carefully you might even catch a glimpse of a real life Idacalifornigonian like myself. Be kind to them while they are there, but remember to keep your distance and whatever you do don't feed them! They tend to have ravenous appetites, so you don't want one to cozy up and hang around your place too long.

Of Time and Space

Waiting... Waiting... I'm just not made for waiting. I'm part of the generation that doesn't have to wait. We have everything at our fingertips. Waiting is for museums. They like to wait. Moments frozen in time, waiting until this world comes around full circle and the past once again becomes the present.

It seems funny that we are so fascinated with the past while at the same time we can't wait for the future to come. What is it about the present that we don't like? Why can't we sit still in the moment and enjoy what is happening right now? I don't think we do it on purpose. Keeping your focus on the present is sort of like trying to balance on top of a log in the water. You might be able to do it for a short time but as it begins to roll you will eventually fall into the water. Just as gravity pulls you from the log, so too will anxiety drag you from the present into the hopeful anticipation of the future or the known outcome of the past.

At times I'll be in a place and I'll think to myself "this instant, that is so real to me right now, will soon just be a memory in the past." I can remember this thought coming to me on several occasions. It usually happens to me at times that are special like going to Disneyland. In fact it was on the Winnie the Pooh ride at Disneyland coming around the last corner before you leave the tunnel, but that's not important.

It also happened to me on a recent trip to Idaho to visit family. As I was pulling away to leave, I sat for a moment in my parents driveway and really drank in my surroundings. The scenes that had been part of my every day life growing up were all there in front of me, reminders of times and places that are now a thousand miles away and many years in the past. How is it that all I wanted when I was younger was to get to the future and now that I'm in the future I would give almost anything to get back to the past. Being in the present has never been part of the plan and frankly it still isn't. Of course there is nothing I would change about my life right now, I would just like to transfer it either backward or forward in time.

Living in the present is tough. Imagine you're driving down a road that is lined with trees. If you keep your eyes fixed on one spot then all the trees go by in a blur and it's hard to distinguish between them. Whereas, if you turn your head to follow each tree then you get more detail but, if you're like me, you also get sick to your stomach. Living in the present is kind of like watching the trees. If you live life with undeviating focus then you might miss some important detail in the flurry of situations constantly coming towards you. However if you try to focus on each situation as it comes then the gastric juices of your psyche may begin to gurgle with the distress of ever changing circumstances. Isn't that a pleasant picture?

Come to think of it, it may be impossible to actually live in the present. By the time you process the information around you it is already in the past and you are already anticipating the next moment in the future. So does the present even exist? Maybe its like the beginning of a circle. It can be where ever you want it to be. Oooh I smell the makings of a sci-fi novel. Nah, it's probably already been done.

Well this has been fun and all, but I'm not sure what we've accomplished nor am I positive where this is going. I guess if this discussion has no past and no future then maybe it does have a present. Oh my, I've found the present! Aw dang, there it went.

The Best Laid Plans

There’s no shame in seeing the glass half empty. A little realism could absolutely benefit some folks. I mean really, what good does it do to skirt about the truth with a bunch of pointless optimism? It doesn’t accomplish anything except to delay finding a resolution to the deficit of water in the glass. What, you thought the glass was a metaphor? No were just talking about a glass of water here. Get your head out of the clouds Socrates!

Why is it called pessimism anyway, and what makes it optimistic to say that the glass is half full? As if recognizing unfulfilled capacity is somehow flattering and positive. If the glass were simply half its current volume then everything would be hunky-dory because it would be filled to capacity and the argument would be over. So wouldn’t it be just as appropriate to point out that the capacity of the glass is exactly double the amount of available water to be put in it? What a waste of precious materials! I digress.

Back to the point at hand, what to do about the ever egregious deficit of water in the glass? It seems that if this problem could be solved then much of life’s troubles would be ended. It happens every day in countless conversations. Case in point, while having an argument, a wife might point out to her husband that he “always sees the glass half empty”, when the argument was actually over finances or politics or children or some other unrelated subject. Think of how many marriages could be saved if we could just fill the glass!

So let’s get down to the root of the problem. First we must assume that there is sufficient water in existence to fill the glass, after all nobody has specifically designated the actual volume of said container. Well then, for all posterity I now proclaim that the inside volume of “the glass” is exactly 0.5 liters. We’ll use SI units, or liters, instead of gallons as these are the accepted norm when establishing international standards. Therefore, knowing full well that there are at least 0.25 liters of available water in the world it can be established that the glass can indeed be filled to capacity. The difficulty arises in making sure that the 0.25 liters used to fully replenish the glass are not the same 0.25 liters that are currently in the glass. Only when using resource conservation rhetoric does this actually fill the glass to capacity, otherwise the status of the liquid level in the glass will remain unchanged.

In reality filling the glass could conceivably require an Act of Congress as is the case with most water transfers. Both the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers would love to claim the prize of filling the glass, the problem is the scale. It just isn’t big enough. So naturally we will have to enlarge the scope of the project in order to bring enough congressional leaders on board. The water should come from an area with surplus water resources such as Oregon or Washington, west of the Cascade range. This particular area of the country is chuck full of ideological people who love to embrace a cause. They will dearly want to be part of solving one of the greatest dilemmas afflicting mankind and they know how to mobilize political leaders. Not to mention that every significant event should include at least one person wearing wool socks and sandals.

A large pipeline would then need to be built to transfer the water from its point of origin to the location of the glass. Where is the glass, you ask? Well it should be obvious that the filling of the glass would be located at the happiest place on earth. Disneyland! This will aid in getting the southern Californian congressional delegation on board, after all, they’ve been trying to get water from the northwest for years. The pipeline can be built along the coastline which will require no pumping because anybody who looks at a map can tell you that California is below Washington and Oregon. Besides, even if there were a small pumping requirement, there is more than enough green energy generated by the pixies in the coastal forests to satisfy the requirement.

Unions will want to be involved in the effort as well. They will insist that even the lowliest position be filled by organized labor groups. To that affect, the diameter of the pipeline must be at least the height of an average sized human in order to accommodate the worker who is carrying 0.25 liters of water from Seattle to Los Angeles. Anything smaller would violate OSHA regulations for proper ergonomics in the workplace.

It is true that this idea has once before gained traction at a national level. It was decided in the early 1970’s that the glass would be secretly filled from a tap at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Unfortunately some news reporters caused a leak and the whole operation failed, to the embarrassment of all who were involved. The Republicans eventually took the entire blame leading to the resignation of the President, even though it clearly took place in a building owned by the Democrats. Ever heard of Watergate?

We must learn from the past and not be covert in our actions this time. This should be an event to be remembered and commemorated for centuries. The date should be carefully chosen as a day that represents the magnitude of the endeavor. Only July 4 could be appropriate for such an occasion. Not only is July 4 the celebration of our independence from oppressive ideas, such as the perpetually half empty/full glass of water, but it also signifies birth, as in the birth of our nation. Birth, after all, is the original act of every human being in breaking the watery barrier which constrains us.

The plan is in place, the date set, all that is left is to set events in motion. Take a stand for liberty and join in the effort my friend. Be a part of history and help make this happen. I’m sure you’ll never look at a glass of water the same way and every sip you take will haunt you if you let this opportunity pass you by.

Or we could just dump out the water and throw the glass in the trash. Hmm…nevermind.

And Workin' Overtime

The phrase "taking care of business" has many different connotations. It can refer to methodically achieving individual objectives on the way to an overall goal. It can also refer to activities which may be less than appealing but must be done due to some constraint, be it real or only perceived. When we take care of business we throw aside all feelings and do things that may be uncomfortable to ourselves and to others simply because they must be done.

So what's the deal with that? Why do we have to take care of business? I blame it on the capitalists! Obviously we wouldn't have to take care of business if it weren't for folks who encourage business in the first place. If it weren't for capitalists then I would never have to annoy the other cars as I "take care of business" and merge onto the freeway because there wouldn't be any cars driving to begin with, nor would there be a freeway. How simple is that? Let's examine this a little bit further, shall we?

When I take care of business I am fulfilling certain obligations. Again, capitalism at its finest. Obligations are nothing more than the overbearing initiatives of folks who, for whatever reason, don't know how to chill out. They feel a constant need to progress and transform what they have into something better. No, not me, I just want things to stay the same. In fact a little regression couldn't hurt. Let's try taking a step backwards for a change. Instead of a more efficient shower head let's turn that sucker into Niagara Falls. I think we could really do with some hotter burning, dimmer light bulbs instead of those new bulbs that flicker for half an hour when you turn on the switch. Now that I only change my light bulbs once per millennium, I just don't get any exercise anymore. Speaking of exercise (which is much funner than actually doing it) since when do we need a mountain of bars, cables, pulleys and ghastly over sized iron weights just to get fit. Simply take away the tractor and hitch up the oxen. That'll do the job.

Taking care of business can sometimes mean hurting people that you care about. At any other time poking numerous needles into a small child would be considered heinous abuse, however, when we "take care of business" and get our small ones immunized it is considered lofty and wise. What a crock! Sometimes telling the truth can cause emotional pain in others. Don't tell me this can't be helped. The capitalists are at it again! They just have to inform you that your clothes are too 'last year' or your hair is too brown/blond/red/beige/gone. The truth drives you to change what seemed to work so perfectly before.

Now I suppose that some might point out what wonderful things have been accomplished by capitalists who were taking care of business. They like to show off the diseases that have been wiped out and the comforts that we now have like indoor plumbing and George Foreman grills etc. Blah blah blah... Did anyone ever stop to think that disease might have its place? Why if it weren't for immunizations I might have been eliminated by some terrible flesh eating disease as a child and you wouldn't have to be wasting your time reading this.

So to wrap this up, let me take care of a little business. I'm sure I've hurt people that I care deeply about just by doing what I'm supposed to do. Which may, or may not, have been a direct result of doing something that I wasn't supposed to do. Do you follow me? While I take full responsibility for my actions, still I wonder if things would have been different if it hadn't been for ... the capitalists!