Random Bits of Vomit

1) A neighbor, Milt, passed away last week. He was 92 and one of the most decent, kind, and well loved older guys around. We spent many hours talking about drainage and such. I'll miss him. There's not really anything instructive to take from this, except that if you are nice, people will speak well of you after you pass. Maybe that's enough.

2) So my boy's Physics teacher resigned a couple of weeks ago. Turns out he was caught by the police, buck naked, in his car, in a park, in flagrante delicto with a sixteen year old former student. Ooops. And the thing is I met the guy, talked with him quite a bit, owing to my son's academic waywardness, and he didn't seem like that kind of guy at all. A good Christian, but not in an obnoxious or clumsy way. (Some Christians strike me as the kind of people that weren't good at anything until they found religion. I suppose that applies to all religions, really, and there's nothing wrong with that really, but I judge people by their competence in the here and now, because I'm a pessimist and I'm constantly trying to calculate how long it will be before anyone does anything that will fuck up my day.) I generally just shake my head when these teacher-student stories come up in the news, but this one hits a little too close to home.

Anyway, dude didn't seem like the type. As if I know the type. I suppose they were "in love". Which happens. But not to me. I look at a woman under 30 and I'm thinking "jail time." Well actually no, I think of them as my kids. So I'm pretty much thinking "You dork!" because that's what I think of when I look at my kids. So guys, if your sixteen year old niece has filled out to be an awesome cherry tomato, just remember that, on the inside, she's still Napolean Dynamite, complete with funky ass moon boots, Gosh!

Oh Boy! A Misery Index!

Anything with "Misery" in the title is sure to draw me in like a moth to flame, so when I saw the Wall Street Journal has come up with a misery index, I was sure to read it: WSJ Misery Index.

As it turns out, we in the Seattle area are pretty miserable, which is reassuring, because I was pretty sure I had been singled out unfairly. So I read this article and, as you would expect, it's a big disappointment because it's all about economic measures of misery. Don't get me wrong, I find economics as dismal a read as anything. Every economic nugget I read just reinforces my notion that everything is going to hell even more irrevocably than before. But this Misery index brings the "meh." and this is why:

So it focuses on three things: cost of gas, home prices, and unemployment. While these are all miserable things, they aren't really that terrible, well unemployment is, but the other two are really a folly metric.

Let's start with gas prices. Driving your own car is inefficient as hell. Going all the places I have to go is inefficient as hell, and If I really looked at it, I wouldn't need to go to those places, I could just cut them out of the equation. Send the girl to the crappy afterschool care program instead of the nice one with the pool. Quit farting around with kid sports. Quit taking them to tutors and counseling. Tell them to rub some dirt on it if they're hurt. Those weekend trips up to the ski lodge? forget about it. The point is that the pain you feet from gas prices is self inflicted, based on folly, vanity, or whatever compels us to do these things we do.

Home prices? Cry me a river. It doesn't matter unless you are selling one. If you're looking to buy, then it's a happy circumstance. Looking to trade one for another? Well, you won't get as much for the one you sell, and you won't pay as much for the one you buy. Underwater? Overextended? Don't reach so far next time. See the thing about owning a house is this: the goal should be to own it, free and clear. It's not an investment. It's not a source of capital. It's securing a place for yourself to live. Ideally, a place you can't get kicked out of. If you're not interested in that, home ownership is not for you.

Rising home prices didn't really make me happy. Oh sure, it was nice to see the assessment at so much more than I owed, but it was hollow money. I couldn't get it. If I sold, I would have to move, and that's not something I'm interested in. If I borrowed against it, I would have to pay it back. The only real effect of rising home prices was on the taxes I pay. So yeah, let them fall. Let the people that value home ownership for what it is buy homes. Let the others do something more suited to their values. And please God, let it run up to crazy land just before I have to sell.

So about that unemployment. Yeah, it's pretty miserable to be unemployed, but reflecting back on own my time as a surplus person, it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was actually a personally productive time. I lost some weight, I read a lot of books, learned a lot of new things, built some furniture, and had some new experiences. I can't say the time was a complete loss. I'd actually be kind of happy to be out of work now. I mean I could be happier, particularly if I was better prepared for it. (Being a pessimist means that your notion of economic strain is having less that a years salary stashed away in some emergency fund)

But that's the thing: misery doesn't come about as a result of a poor economy. Misery comes from a lack of preparation. The economists should measure that.

So are we miserable in Seattle? Nah. Just spoiled.

The Bug or the Windshield?

So we were yakking in the locker room at the club, bitching about the unreasonable difficulty of our workout in the sports conditioning class, and one guy goes "Well, some days you're the bug and other days you're the windshield..."

So I pipe in with "You know, I'm not sure which of those I like least.."

And we all laughed. Cause sometimes crumpling into a splattered mess is more appealing than standing up and getting shit splattered all over you.

It's all gonna suck, folks, but that's how you get better.

Rational pessimism

Today's guest lecturer: Link

So inspirational, I went out and started a blog about pessimism

First you get old and then you know what's coming next..

There is no more rational reason for pessimism than the simple fact of aging. One year you're motoring along fine and then suddenly you have trouble reading the fine print. And your teeth hurt, cause those fillings from long ago are getting to be of a certain age. And it takes two or sometimes three days to get over a vigorous workout. And you're not as fast as you used to be. And you get weird pains that appear and then leave.

Aging sucks, and you know what else? It's just leading up to death. Isn't that just fucking swell?

I shouldn't complain. I still have my hair. I'm am full of vim and vigor. But I know it's not going to last forever.

Disappointment

You know there's nothing like raising kids to give you those moments that feel like a complete kick in the balls.

Roughly a month ago, I was informed that my daughter has been permanently kicked out off of the ski team for attempting to shove another little girl off the chairlift. And let me just say that there are few things that make you truly question your parenting skills and maybe even your worth as a human being then the realization that you may be raising a sociopath. Cause you know I'm a pretty off the wall person, and I'm not the best at being Mr. Upright and Proper, but still... a 9 year old sociopath... really?

So my wife and I had a long and productive talk with the daughter, and I can see that she didn't mean for it to come out as bad as it sounds, cause basically she was thinking they were playing dare, and my daughter is really not a person that knows appropriate boundaries, and she tends to be a giant douche to kids that don't set boundaries for her, so I can see how she was thinking it was this and the other little girl was thinking it was that, and you know, once you've done something douchy enough, you're basically fucked. Not that I would know anything about that.

Anyway my daughter got kicked out for being a giant douche. So I'm sad for my daughter, who won't be able to make friends with a whole bunch of kids. And we talked about that, and how it was really a bad idea to play around like that, cause someone could get really hurt or even killed that way. And we talked about how disappointed we were that she would make choices like that. And as we were talking she was doing a great job of holding up the bravado, saying she didn't mean it like that, saying she didn't like it anyway, but then she went and wrote us each a note (she like to write a note any time she thinks she has something important to say) stating that she was sorry for being mean and

"this in my harth (sic) it is dieing.(sic)"

And she brought over the notes, and we read them then, oh did we ever see the waterworks. She talked about her birth mom and how birth mom never taught her to make good choices, and how birth mom never came when she was a baby, and she was crying cause she was hungry, and all this stuff that is really painful for a child to admit about their mother.

And it's not a place we go with her. We're very hands off about the whole thing of why she got taken away from her mom and her brother and sisters. We tell her the judge said it had to be this way because her mom was not making good choices.

But the daughter went ther on her own, and that was pretty much of a breakthrough moment, but she really cried some bitter, bitter tears. And you know, I've seen her cry out of fear, and I've seen her cry out of frustration and anger, but this was something different, this was her coming completely undone.

Fortunately she has the attention span of an incontinent gnat, so she's moved on to normal kid thoughts. But she's not the same. She's a kinder, more loving child now, still rambunctious as all get out, but a bit softer.

And me, I've taken a hit. And some hits make you wonder if you really wanted to get back up again. But I'm up, just a little dizzy.

Of course the reason I took the hit was having high hopes. If I'd expected a cold pail of vomit, well then I would have been right.

Success

I got this thought from an Esquire article on Sumner Redstone, though I'll be damned if I can find it. Anyway the thought is this:

People place too much upon being successful. Success does not come about as a result of previous successes, success comes on the heels of failure. Failure, failure, failure, failure, failure. It is only through failing that we get to the next level, and the only people that get there are the ones who fail, and find the strength to get back up and fail again. And again.

If you're not failing, you're not going to be winning. And if you just failed, remember that you might be one more try away from succeeding.

But expect to fail every day. If you want to move forward.