2010 in a Nutshell

I’ve spent most of the day today lying around with my puppies. The pit bull in particular is the perfect little cuddler, she loves to lay under the covers just like me so we spent this entire morning huddled under the covers napping or with me thinking over the last year and everything that’s happened. This year was a BIG one! New Years Eve last year I was in Mississippi with my buddies preparing to go to Iraq, this year I will be hanging out with some of those same guys but at a party. This year saw a lot of things happening. I spent the first half of the year away from home in Iraq, while I was gone my daughter had a birthday, I had a birthday, and Nashville had a flood. This year is also the year of divorce, when my unit got back from Iraq there were several of us who for one reason or another lost our marriages, myself included. It’s been a very tough and trying year for everyone. In the midst of deployments and natural disasters lives were still moving forward. The flood didn’t automatically make a couple decide to stay together; it would be nice if it worked like the movies. The truth is that those stresses of things like being apart for months at a time or losing everything you have can strain a relationship to its breaking point. Every one of us has been through so much this year but looking on to next year I see big things as well. Like I said, last NYE I was getting ready to go to Iraq, this year I will be going to several countries and once again while I’m gone there will be a year’s worth of birthdays and other celebrations I will miss, but next year there will be no anniversary which at least saves me money on gifts. It’s hard to look back on a year like this one and pick out two or three events and say “there’s my year folks!” but in my case I think that about sums up the year. Sure I got some new rifles and a new truck, I shot a deer during hunting season, there’s been some other stuff in there but the deployment, while hard, was fun and at times rewarding. Hopefully next year will be an awesome year, it will be away from home again but it’s certainly got potential! 

Anything Goes

Are we becoming too tolerant? I’m all for people living their lives and having fun. I’m not one to go around pointing fingers and calling names, I do think somebody should though! It’s what we call a necessary evil. It’s like civilization’s own system of checks and balances. While I’m a little more in the middle morally, I’m glad that there are people on the extreme edges of it. Without people screaming obscenities at good decent folks minding their own business where would we be in this world? It happens on both sides. Several countries have legalized incest citing that what happens in the bedroom is nobody else’s business. How can it be that an entire country becomes so morally corrupt that the whole society believes it’s ok to sleep with your children!!!! It’s just one more reason I hate the French. Generally I like the idea of your bedroom being none of my business; I don’t care if you use whips or special leather masks and baskets, I do however care if you are taking advantage of a position of authority or abusing a child. There is a reason that children born of incest are all screwed up, because it’s friggin wrong! No one should ever have to introduce their boyfriend/girlfriend to their uncle-dad or sister-mom! I have my own moral limits and while I may not agree with what some people do that doesn’t mean I believe it should be illegal, but there has to be limits on what we are willing to put up with as a society. Your society is judged as a whole by what it does or does not give its people or allow them to do. It sounds simple but you have to find the middle ground. We need to start bracketing in on a solution to the limits of our freedom, slavery, obviously not free enough; sleeping with your daughter, way too free. We go so far in one direction trying not to bruise any one person’s fragile little ego that we are willing to offend large groups of people to do so. I only believe in the right of the single or the few over the rights of the majority in basic human rights cases. It has to be that if the vast majority of a society agrees on something that the law shouldn’t punish them for it but bend toward it. Title 9 of the education amendments of 1972 is a great example of this, it was meant to prevent sex discrimination in athletics but what has happened in actuality is that it has caused the destruction of literally thousands of men’s sports teams. There have been several thousand men’s sport teams, including national champions, which have been disbanded because the school didn’t have as many female athletes and was forced by law to even the athletic numbers. We have become so tolerant that we are punishing success. You are not allowed to be better than the people next to you because everyone has to be equal. That’s JUNK! I know that there were sports that I would never have gotten a trophy for playing as a kid, that’s why I concentrated on what I was good at. Why should you get a trophy for sucking at football? At some point you have to tell these kids they should try something else! As a parent I don’t want to pay for my kid to spend years being told she’s great at something she’s no good at, I’d rather find her something she truly is good at and foster that ability. There is nothing wrong with realizing you are better than someone as long as you realize you are also worse than someone else.

Positively Negative

I’ve been spending years trying to make people laugh and be happy. I really do try to make the people around me smile. When I was little I had to be the center of attention, as I got older it just turned into this exhaustive act in my 20’s. now that I’m in my 30’s I have decided to start making me happy, I think I’m going to start putting me number one for a bit. This is acutely timed since I’m leaving the country for the third time in 6 years. I’m what I like to call positively negative, I try very hard to be positive and happy, outgoing and funny, it’s just not what my nature is. I’m not a very pleasant person naturally but I try very hard to be. That’s not to say I don’t think I have a good heart, don’t for one second think I believe myself to be a bad person. At one time I might have but these days I know I have a good heart, it’s just that smiling at strangers and being nice when you’re frustrated have never been my go to skills. Not everyone can be a truly positive person, it’s that whole yin and yang thing, for every Mother Theresa there’s a Jeffrey Dahmer. I’m certainly not a Dahmer but you get the point, for every bubbly person there is another one out there who can’t stand bubbly. They say it’s the thought that counts but I think sometimes it has to be the action that counts. If you’re having a bad day and I crap all over it that’s much worse than me making you feel better all the while screaming bloody murderous rages in my own head. I choose to be positively negative, a naturally negative person behaving positively. They have found in scientific studies that just the act of smiling can make you feel better, even if you force it on yourself. We are social creatures designed to be amongst one another, when people are alone for long periods of time they talk to themselves because the sound of voices is calming to the brain. So now you know if you see someone smiling like a goofball and talking to themselves (me) they are just doing their dead level best to prevent a meltdown. My prescription to stay positively negative is spend time in the sun, smile, talk to people, and hope that eventually I will turn into a positively positive person. Until I am a positive person I can keep myself smiling by remembering a quote, “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.”  ~Herm Albright

Irresponsible

So I haven’t been out running with the pups much since the cold got here. It’s gotten me into a crazy state where I don’t even want to exercise anymore. After taking some time off it’s hard to get back into stuff, but not for the dogs, if I utter the word run they jump up and down and head for the door. They love it like crazy and no amount of time away can make them forget that. It seems I need to be a little more like them in so many ways. I talk about personal responsibility but I can’t seem to get myself out the dang door. It’s not just with running but with several things, the cold came in and I turned from a hard charger into a great big procrastinator. Seriously though who would rather be out in the cold working than in front of a nice warm television set? As of today I’m going to take responsibility for my actions a little better. I have a simple philosophy, as a society we are obligated to prevention through education, prevention of what? Well anything really, it all depends on what you educate people about. Education about nutrition and exercise, along with benefits and consequences could save billions in health care. Education about crime statistics and the comparison of life after jail versus life after college could possibly prevent spending millions on prison upkeep. As individuals we have an obligation to do what’s right as best and as often as we can. Basically as individuals we have an obligation to each other to try our best to be our best. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about trying harder. Everybody slips up but you don’t get buried in a piano box by exercising good discipline or self control. The same thing goes for recidivists who end up returning to prison over and over. While part of personal responsibility is self control the other part is owning your actions. After you’ve made a mistake you have to own up to it and try that much harder next time. The national health report that came out last month listed Tennessee as 42^nd in the nation, we’re up two spots from last year thanks to higher immunization rates and lower binge drinking rates. Obesity rates are extremely high, and I don’t mean fat, I mean people who are at least 75lbs overweight. Tennessee teen obesity rates are 36.5%; more than 1 in 3 teens are 50lbs overweight or more. Nearly 33% of adults in Tennessee are 75lbs overweight or more. Mississippi has similar numbers, now I know that fried food is absolutely delicious but I don’t think that’s it. It’s a combination of video games when kids are little turning into desk jobs behind a computer as adults. Too many companies don’t offer a gym in the building or a discounted gym membership somewhere else. Yes I believe that companies should take the initiative to offer health clubs or gyms at or near the office, if you have dozens of employees who sit at a desk all day then you have an obligation to offer them some activity. I didn’t mean to turn this blog into a health issue; I also believe that crime can be extremely reduced by education as well. I believe that the entirety of society has to tackle that one. Everyone has a role to play in educating the people around them on right and wrong. Too many people sit on the sidelines hoping for the best. No war has ever been won by a spectator. You have to get personally involved and change the world around you. It’s not other people who create the world you live in, you decide how you’re section of the world looks.

True Colors

I’ve heard that when the chips are down you get to see what people are made of. They say that when people get angry you see their true colors. You find out just what kind of person someone is by the way they handle defeat or loss or any number of other things that happen to people in their lives. I don’t really subscribe to this. That means that you’re focusing on that one event in a person’s life that caused them to be in a different place. You can’t base the whole of a person’s character on how they react to one event. The human personality easily has as many traits as there are people in the world which means that you judging someone on one of them is like judging the population of the world by one person in it. As we go through life we’re all going to face adversity and how we handle it is our own. Not everyone is going to handle each situation correctly the first time, or the second for that matter. Situations you handle well might crush me and cause me to lose it. Perhaps it’s more appropriate to judge your friends on how they handle your adversities. If you are going through something that causes you to go nutso or get sad then while it’s not recommended it is also not unexpected of you to do something stupid. That doesn’t mean you are a bad person or that you should be judged, it means you fell on tough times and needed a minute to regroup. Your character was tested and stressed because of life happenings, what did the people around you do? How do the people around you help/hinder your progress? The luckiest people in the world are surrounded by people who understand their brand of crazy.

Letting Go

I haven’t been on here in a bit; I guess I’ve been in my own head a bit. I have a lot coming up. I’m going to Kansas to visit my brother and his family when he gets back from Iraq. I have my third deployment coming up very quickly as well. Of course there’s that Christmas thing happening.  I’ve been trying to focus on some cool stuff I might get to do. If all goes well this next year I will be able to go hiking in the Alps, the Balkans, and possibly the Hindu Kush mountains. Not sure about the last one but I’m hoping. That’s all I can do any more is hope. I’ve decided to let go and just hope things happen instead of trying to make them happen. It seems the more I push things to be the way I want them to be or I try to make things happen then the less happy I am. I recently got into really being concerned about what’s going to happen in my future. How is this next year going to go for me? Will I come home a whole person? Will I be able to save up enough money? Will I get a job when I come home? Will I ever meet someone? It’s pretty nerve racking and I decided to just let go. It’s not up to me what happens and I can’t force it so I should just quit worrying about it. Right now I’m focusing on my hopes. I hope while I’m in Germany I have enough time to hike the Alps. I hope while I’m in Bulgaria I have time to hike the Balkans and swim in the Black Sea. I hope while I’m in Afghanistan I get to see the Hindu Kush range. I hope that I can always remember that there is no night without the day. I’ve had a pretty cool life and it seems like it’s just gonna keep on going! For every dark hour I’ve ever had in my life I have always endured knowing that while I may not always be able to predict or control it I can always persevere and come out the other side wiser and happier.

Artificial Power

Once again, I had an epiphany while I was exercising. All power is artificial. People and things are only as important and valuable as the world allows them to be. I don’t mean in the spiritual, every life has meaning, every person has value kind of way. I mean in the Time Magazine most powerful people kind of way. It’s all temporary. There are very few things in this world that have a value that wasn’t given to them by the general populace. It’s all a big lie we tell ourselves, that we have power or that someone else has power over us. You are the only one in charge of what happens in your life. Some magazine might say Donald Trump is one of the most powerful men in the world but he can’t tell me what to do so in my life he really isn’t powerful at all. Many people get jealous or envious of others who seem to have it all. I’m really considering downsizing, I don’t need a big house or all the best stuff. I think from now on I’m only going to keep the things in my life that make it better.