Thinking about 100 wise words

Allegedly, "an econ teacher gave his senior high school students his personal list of wisest words...and they make a lot of sense."

Thoughts about them...

• 2 - I'm gonna disagree. Text messaging is more and more acceptable.
• 4 - Valid...always be more generous than you think you should be.
• 5 - Disagree again. You aren't part of the home team. You aren't a Red or a Bengal or a Buckeye - unless you attended Ohio State University yourself. Otherwise, you aren't part of 'we.' The government this, yes, 'we' are part of the government.
• 9 - Know your audience. Sometimes you have to dumb things down for the audience. Don't undersell them, but sometimes you have to bring the level down to them.
• 13 - We're all entitled to legroom and comfort. The means the person in front of you is allowed to kick back.
• 14 - First fish? Who gives a crap? I'd say to take picture of everything - your first house, first dog, first boy/girlfriend, date, anything.
• 17 - True...they need to know it all.
• 18 - I'm not a gun guy, but this one's totally true.
• 20 - That's sometimes tough, but yes, wear their presents at least once in their presence.
• 21 - For a week
• 22 - Man, sometimes bread is awesome.
• 23 - Seriously, who gives a crap about an autograph. That'll just end up in a drawer somewhere. The handshake, though, is a far better memory.
• 27 - I'd say do it about a week before.
• 31 - I need to take that advice, myself.
• 33 - No, it isn't ever too late. Apologize if you were wrong - or even if you weren't but they think you were.
• 38 - It's not funny. Don't push anybody into a pool or off a dock.
• 39 - Yeah, if she wants you to know, she'll offer.
• 42 - When giving any speech, really.
• 47 - Be appreciative. Don't say, "oh, is it..." because the best that happens is that you ruin the surprise and the worst is that you make them think you want something other than what they got you. No good either way...
• 55 - Say less rather than more, always.
• 56 - See #33.
• 59 - Add in everybody who helps or serves you, anyone who makes your life easier by them doing their job. Admittedly, I have no idea how or when to tip, though.
• 60 - Correct. The person you're with is more important than whoever is on the other end of the call.
• 62 - One clean one, one dirty one, one short, one long...match the joke to the audience.
• 63 - We're all trying to do our best. Nobody deserves to be boo'ed.
• 67 - It's okay to do just about anything by yourself. If there's a restaurant that you want to eat at, a movie you want to see, a view you want to see, do it whether you have somebody there with you or not.
• 69 - Be strong. Be sure of yourself. Be assertive. But don't lose your cool.
• 70 - See #59.
• 72 - I'm awful about that one.
• 74 - It's far more valuable than talking.
• 75 - Possibly more important than anything else on the list.
• 76 - Yup...back row is for people who aren't interested in being there. Don't be that person.
• 80 - Occasionally that's not the case. Everybody has their thing.
• 82 - I should do that.
• 97 - Nobody needs to see a sourpuss.

Looking more powerful

Time's article on "5 Scientifically Backed Ways to Seem More Powerful" hits at least one thing that I already do.

I'm not exactly wearing red sneakers, but I have worn nothing but the same jeans (three identical pairs that I bought a month and a half ago), white shirts (I bought a couple of those then, too, but stupidly ran one through the dryer with a red ink pen), and ties to school every day since.

Now I just need to work on the eye contact, because I don't know that I can do the big-picture language crap. I don't have any patience for those kinds of people. Sadly I'm rarely in elevators.

It's a pretty outstanding world out there.

Thanks for Chris Hatfield for recording this and to Neatorama for linking to it.

Remember folks, everything is awesome.

Simplicity itself

"Take it easy. Nothing you do matters as much as you think. Your greatest achievements aren't yours at all, they're accidents and jokes. You're a puppet, the universe does the work, and it gets the most done when you're moving the least. Surrender, flow, relax. Don't be hard on yourself, don't put pressure on yourself, life is just a chain of experiments and results, and you'll be perfect when you're dead." ~ Dan Harmon (source)

A little small talk

Small talk, man.

It's just small talk.

It's not rocket science. It's just a way to pass the time when we see each other in the hallway, when we bump into each other at the library, when we happen to be at the same restaurant at the same time.

The ability to make small talk is a pretty strong middle class skill. It's something that puts everybody at ease, and the lack of it makes you seem creepy. (See the cartoon up top.) If you can't make small talk, you're gonna make other people not want to be around you.

Sure, it's great to have great friends with whom you can share the most intimate details of your life, with whom you can talk through the great problems that you're dealing with. Those people will probably be more important to you in the long run than will all the of the casual acquaintances that you'll have through work in your entire lifetime. But you'll probably spend more time with those casual acquaintances, and you might as well put them at ease while you do.

So, let's get the basics out of the way.

Acceptable topics for small talk with example openers:

• weekend plans
• What do you have planned for this weekend?
• sporting events
• How 'bout those Bengals?
• pointless news/entertainment stories
• What the heck with with Charlie Sheen?
• television shows
• Did you happen to catch The Office last night?
• weather
• Man, we need the rain, but c'mon...
• movies
• Have you heard if Transformers VII is any good?
• your own tiredness
• Dude, I am whupped. I'm totally looking forward to three o'clock.
• family
• What do you have planned with the kids this weekend?

Those are generally pretty safe. You're not going to learn a whole lot about the other person, you're not going to make a deep friendship connection there, but you're going to pass the time. You're going to be acknowledged as a decent enough person. Those are the two goals of making small talk: pass the time and seem like a person who cares about other people. Notice, I didn't say you have to care; you just have to seem like you care.

There are, of course, topics to totally avoid:

• politics
• So, whatta ya think about Obama's health care bill?
• money
• Are you doing okay since your husband lost his job?
• the boss
• Can you believe what we're supposed to do now?
• controversial news
• Do you think we should have invaded Egypt?
• religion
• Are you Catholic?
• death
• How're you taking your mom's death last week? You doing okay?

All of those are going to give you better insight into you small talk partner - if they happen to want to discuss them, but they're far more likely to be way too familiar, way too invasive for what you're looking for.

Of course, there's another side to the whole small talk back and forth. Even if you have the opening questions down pat, you're going to have to practice the other side - the answering and the getting out. You need to provide answers that keep the conversation going but don't really push things to go any deeper. Try to keep everything on a pretty superficial level here.

When asked about the weather, don't come back by saying how the rain could ruin the big plans you have for today. The other person doesn't really care. Just mention that you're frustrated or happy with it and give the other person an opening to say pretty much the same thing.

Good - "I know, it's gorgeous out. Here's to hoping it stays through the weekend."

Bad - "Isn't it awful? I've been planning my son's briss for months, and we're counting on using the backyard for the picnic. If it keeps pouring tomorrow, I'm out a few thousand dollars in tent rentals."

Worse - "Could be worse, my son's in Iraq dealing with the heat and improvised explosive devices."


Horrible - "Yeah, it's nice out, but all I can think of on days like this is how my mom died on a day just like this." (By the way, the love interest in The Town dropped a line just like that. I swear.)

See, the good one keeps things going and leaves the other person something to talk about. The bad one went to money, a topic to avoid. The worse one took thins into a far too serious place. The horrible one took a lighthearted topic and turned it into a conversation ender - death. Death - as a topic or an event - is to be avoided.

You also need to have a few flippant, joking answers and a couple of conversational outs. Outs can be as simple as "Don't I know it. Well, I'm running late for an appointment." or "Yeah, I was wondering about that, myself. Hopefully we're not the only ones." It doesn't matter what it or that is, really. You're not presenting any honest opinion here. It's just small talk. You're just passing the time and trying not to look like some kind of weirdo.

If things start to get a little too serious, like if the other person mentions they're frustration with something at work, give it a light-hearted "Yeah, but there's nothing to do but to keep banging away at it." or "But that's why they pay us the big bucks, right?"

So, how's the weather with you folks?

Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist

I initially found Penelope Trunk's blog from her post about Asperger Syndrome in which she explained how she deals with her own sensory integration disfunction at her office.

Rarely do I find a blog that is actually useful, but this one does a marvelous job of actually providing usable pieces of information that could help all of us in the workplace.

Words, words, words

Sometimes they're just words, and sometimes they're really well put together series of words.

Enjoy the new year, folks.

Advice from the right wing

I can't believe that I'm doing this, but today I offer up fifty pieces of advice from Right Wing News. The compilation of advice is titled Fifty Things Every 18-year-old Should Know, and I can safely say that I agree with nearly all of them. In particular, I recommend that everybody keep these in mind:

1) If you are buying something that you will use often and for a long time, never go cheap. You'll end up replacing it sooner or paying more in maintenance costs than if you had spent more on good quality in the beginning. Plus, you'll enjoy the nicer product throughout its lifetime, rather than cringing every time you use something that is falling apart.

23) When you move, sell, throw away, and give away as much as possible or you'll just end up moving boxes from one closet, where they have been sitting for five years, to another closet, where they'll be sitting for the next five years.

30) When you're 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you; when you're 40, you don't give a darn what anybody thinks of you; when you're 60, you realize nobody's been thinking about you at all.

Check out the rest, folks.

Some more advice

I know there are a few folks reading this who are either in college or headed that way most soon, so I thought I'd offer some advice for living on your own...

Plus it's been a while since I offered up any advice 'round these parts...so...

When you're cooking for yourself, you may find that some things are a little bland or just not quite good enough. Try these things to make the food taste better:

• Fry it
• Glaze it
• Top it with cheese
• Put bacon on or in it
• Dip it in maple syrup
• Batter it
• Fry it again after wrapping it in bacon

And if somebody (parent, friend, friend with benefits) is coming over and you need to tidy the place up:

• Put it under your bed
• Put it in a closet
• Light a candle
• Open the windows
• Take out the trash
• Put on a clean shirt...and undies if it's that kind of a friend
• Vacuum

If it's the first spring day, the first day after a long winter freeze and the sun is finally out, the temperature's finally above like fifty five

• Get out
• Go hiking
• Play frisbee golf
• Frolic
• Skip (unless you can't, which is sad)

Just thought you should know...

Advice, Part 9: Ignore

Simple enough and done.

Ignore
No honest, meaningful, universal bit of advice or knowledge can be summed up in a pithy statement.

Every bit of advice has a situation in which the action of taking and following that advice would be absolute worst choice, and every bit of advice has an equally valid and opposite bit of advice.

• Look before you leap.
• It's best to dive right in and get started.


• Pride goeth before a fall.
• Razzle dazzle 'em.


• Take a minute and wait. See if things get better.
• There's no time like the present.

So no matter how wonderful and seemingly meaningful a bit of advice is, it is going to absolutely be the wrong thing to do - at the very least - a quarter of the time, so you might as well chuck most all of it out the window.

Find your own path. Look at every situation as unique and evaluate every choice individually. It might be like previous situations, and it might be as frickin' new and different from those situations as is possible. So the thing you did before that worked might never work again.

The fates might be against you.

The whims of luck and fortune might be blowing an entirely different way than you would like them to.

So, do whatever the heck you want to do - whatever you think might be the right choice, and see where it takes you.

Might be a good result, might not. Could've been better; could've been worse.

Doesn't matter.

What's happened is happened, and all you can do is look at the next situation and see what're your choices from there.

Thanks for reading.

Pay no attention to anything that I've said whatsoever.

Advice, part 8: Learn

Ok, bear with me. We have two more weeks of this - including this one.

Learn
Seems a simple enough thing, eh?

You find something you don't know about, hunt down a good book or watch a tv show or ask somebody, and then you know more about it.

There's a whole bunch of reasons to learn something:

• Lording knowledge over the less knowledgeable
• Impressing girls with your knowledge of Batman
• Winning every trivia game you enter
• Meet people and have a bit of fun
Get to know another people and culture
• the ability to create your own future

But I'm going to endorse learning for a reason that's different from most all of those: learn because it's fun.

Ignorance doesn't even know that it's ignorant. Knowledge and intelligence, however, are always looking for more knowledge.

It's a quizical thing to think that knowledge is something that gets hungrier and hungrier the more you feed it, but that's almost how this works. Once you learn something, you find more and more questions that need to be answered. Instead of a vicious circle, it's a wonderful, self-catalyzing cycle.

Plus there's the sheer joy of udnerstanding how things work, how everything is interconnected. Life is - in my eyes - so much richer if you see where the lynch pins of everything are held.

It's a question that I ask of my honors chemistry students early in their year: is the world more beautiful if you know how it works, or does that knowledge tear away the beauty for you.

I am always disappointed when one of them writes that knowledge does tear away the beauty, but it is simply a very different world view than the one I have. For me, knowing about the atoms and forces and reactions of the world, knowing the motives and history of those involved makes that world much richer for me.

So, do yourself a favor and pick something taht you've been wonderfing about and start learning.

Go read about a music group, learn how to make something, find out about something you never knew existed.

Advice, part 7: Love

But now faith, hope, and love remain-these three. The greatest of these is love. - 1 Corinthians 13:13

Love
There are so many different quotes about love out there, and most of them are basically cliche, adopted already by any of a hundred thousand cutie college coeds for use on their flashy, cutesy website.

But love is not something that should be summed up in one cutesy quote - sometimes it takes three:

Love is a many splendid thing.
Love lifts us up where we belong.
All you need is love!
~ Moulin Rouge

Love isn't something that can be summed up in any sort of quote or cliche or movie line; it's simply too much and too important for that.

If you have it [Love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.
~ Sir James M. Barrie

But we struggle so much with attempting to define it and nail it down so that we can say just why we love who we love. So that we can help our friends to find the happiness and joy that we have in it, we search for the right words to do love the honor and justice that we feel that it deserves.

Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
~ Franklin P. Jones

But our words cannot do love justice. Love is too big, too wonderful, too much for us to do anything more than hint at its true essence. To capture even a snapshot of love is to do it a desservice by leaving out every other aspect of its being.

He loves but little who can say and count in words, how much he loves.
~ Dante Alighieri

Love is more many-faceted than a d30. Love is the most wonderful thing in the world, bringing us to greater heights and happinesses than we will ever experience otherwise, and love is the most hurtful thing possible - taking everything that we believed in and allowing it to be broken and twisted and hurt in ways we never thought imaginable. Love is laughter and tears, friendship and anger, calm and exciting.

Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important.
~ Lisa Hoffman

And love is nothing that anyone can ever tell you about. No two loves are ever the same, because love is a combination of two people, each depending on and needing the other, and at times, each subsuming their individuality to the greater good of the combination. No matter how I or you or anyone attempts to describe their love, their lover, their joy to anyone else, the words are but a pale shadow of the truth.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.
~ Helen Keller

We are no more able to touch and grasp love, to hold it in our hands, to disects its being and number its parts than we are to hold onto the air, to freedom, to sunshine, to joy. Love is the ultimate failing of science because no matter how long we number the carbons and analyze the chemicals of our brains and our pelvises, we engage in the ultimate act of reductionist thinking, believing that we can put love to a board, pin its wings open, and allow every other member of the lab to coldly explore our finidings.

Love is a rose
but you better not pick it
It only grows when it's on the vine.
A handful of thorns and
you'll know you've missed it
You lose your love
when you say the word "mine".
~ Neil Young, "Love is a Rose"

This week's advice, then, is the simplest of all and the most impossible to give:

Love
Allow yourself it be open to love wherever you happen to find it.

Take care of love once you have it.

Do not take love for granted for their is nothing more important than it.

And cherish it with all your heart, soul, mind, body, money, and time - for there is nothing more important than it and nothing that is so horrible to waste or lose.

And remember to wish your wife a happy birthday as many times and in as many ways as you can manage. Happy birthday, cutie pie.

Advice, part 6: Visit

Before we delve into the deep and murky recesses of my brain and the advice the spews forth from such a messed up place, allow me to throw in a follow up comment from Calencoriel regarding last week's monologue about dealing:

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

That's about right. Be happy and, amazingly, you'll end up being happy.

Now, ever onward, upward, and inward...or rather northward, southward, and up.

Visit

I miss my grandfather, the one on my father's side.

He was a very simple country man, a man who never made it into rather than through high school. He wasn't politically correct in any fashion of the word - calling buckeyes by a very different nickname and kept one in his pocket most of the time. He created some of the most beautiful wood worked pieces that I've seen - gorgeous halltrees, wonderful baby cribs, plant stands, and lots more - some of which I have in my house now. And by the end of his life, he couldn't recognize us and spent his last years in a nursing home, dying of Parkinson's disease.

And I don't know nearly enough about him. I don't know all of the jobs that he did growing up. I don't know how he met my grandmother or how he felt when he bought the bigger, more expensive house next door and moved his family one house over on Ekin Avenue in my hometown. I don't know how he left the farm and headed inot the city or what his wedding was like, and I don't have nearly enough things around me that make me think of him.

Most importantly, what I didn't know is that I would care about these things when I grew up.

Take some time. Visit with the old folks who seem so crabby and dated to you. If you've got the opportunity and time, come up with a half dozen questions and record the answers.

The old folks will thank you for taking time to visit with them; it'll make those boring holidays a little more tolerable because the old folks won't be hassling you nearly so much; and somebody will thank you in a number of years from now.

Soemtimes it's tough to have enough foresight to think about what you'll want later in your life but that you'll have to get now, but I promise you that many of you will regret later the time that you haven't spent now.

Advice, part 5: Deal

Bit of a short bit of advice this weekend as it's a rather busy weekend between last night's HFS dance, tonight's PHS homecoming, and tomorrow's volunteering at the Bengals' game. So...

Deal

Let's be honest, crappy stuff happens to everybody, and often it happens at what seems like the worst of possible times. Your car won't start on the one morning that you're already running late for that big presentation. You're almost ready for the big dance, and your face picks today to betray you with a giant zit right in the center of your forehead. You're getting your house resided, and the guys tell you that your chimney's going to collapse unless they rebuild the whole thing.

First, remember that bad things happen all the time - we just notice them most when we're already stressed because of something else. I really doubt that there's some sort of all-powerful diety who is taking the time to watch you through all your days and just wait for the right moment to throw down the banana peels. So, stop moping and thinking that you're somehow the most unlucky person ever.

You're not. You're just a person like the rest of us.

Next, let it go. Just let the anger and pitty and other crap that comes with the bad luck go. There's nothing to be done other than to deal with it. Suck it up, scrap the dropped cake off the floor, call work to tell them you'll be a little late (they'll understand because it's happened to them before, too), change your clothes to get the strawberry icing stains off of you, and head in as best you can.

Moping and crabbing about it isn't going to get things right any more quickly, and it's just going to piss of the people who'd otherwise be willing to help you and cut you some slack. Instead, shrug things off and move on.

Even if it is something legitimately horrible, it, too, shall pass. You'll get through whatever it is. Give yourself something else to do, get your mind occupied by something else. Set some sort of moping timetable. Give yourself a week to mope and cry, and tell everybody about that. But add in that after the week's done, you're going to suck it up and deal. Make sure to tell them about that part, too, so they can remind you when the week's up, so they can help out and get you headed in a healthier direction.

And while you're at it, let the people who care about you help you when you are in a bit of a downturn. They care about you and honestly want to help out. If you are too stubborn to accept help, you'll never really know just how many people are in your corner.

All of us have bad luck and good luck. The man who persists through the bad luck - who keeps right on going - is the man who is there when the good luck comes - and is ready to receive it. - Robert Collier

Advice, part 4: Improve

Wait, it's been a week already? Then, clearly, you must be waiting for my words of wonderful wisdom.

Improve

Two of my favorite books are by Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Neither would be things that most people who know me would likely predict.

On the back of my copy of the latter novel is a simple quote that seems relevant for this week's wisdom:

Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.

The world is what it is. The people around you are who they are. You are what you are. None of the three is anywhere near perfection.

Do what you can to improve them all.

I'm not saying that everything you do has to make the world or the people around you or even yourself better every minute of every day, but be sure that you're doing something from time to time. But start meking some sort of difference here and there.

For some of you, that means that you should set big, hairy, audacious goals so that you can see the big picture, the whole direction in which everything is heading. These are the whole-to-part folks. These are the ones who write big goals on the fridge: be a millionaire by forty, run a marathon, fit into 34-inch pants by June. The goal is always kept right in front of them, and they let the small things fall into place.

The rest of us need to take small steps here and there and let those steps add up to something more. We're the ones who instead choose to invest $50 a month, exercise daily, stop eating pop-tarts. These little steps grow over time and become something larger.

Both approaches work for different people.

But do something.

"Make you the world a bit better or more beautiful because you have lived in it." - Edward Bok's grandmother

Make sure that the world that you leave behind you is a little better than the one that you entered. This ties in nicely into last week's bit of advice: give, but this week adds in the advice that you need to remember to take time to improve yourself.

Advice, part 3: Give

Let's see...it's Saturday, and we've got work to do 'round here...here's some advice...

Give

My first bump with giving and charity wasn't exactly a wonderful and truly altruistic one. Instead, my dad was told by one of his coworkers - a principal, maybe, a counselor, perhaps - that I needed to add some charity work to my high school resume if I wanted to get better scholarship or to truly compete for any sort of honors. "Get him some volunteer work, Bob," they said. So, off to the local recycling center, I went. Every couple of weeks, I headed to crunch plastic bottles, to throw grocery bags of newspaper, and to try to hold down the hurl instinct that came from the smell of sour milk in dozens and dozens of milk jugs.

I was there to get something, not to give, and therein lies the twin secrets to this week's bit of hubris: Give because giving is good and give whether you're giving for the right reasons or not.

That bit of giving back in my high school days didn't take a huge hold, but in college I gave a little more here and there: broadcasting for 24 hours on radio and supposedly trying to raise money in the process, volunteering with kids who had trouble reading.

And then came Princeton. The single thing in my life of which I have been the proudest is my involvement in the Pasta for Pennies campaign. In my few years running that campaign (with some help, admittedly, from a great friend), I have come to giving very late in life, but I feel that I have begun to embrace it wholeheartedly.

It wasn't anything intentional, really. I signed up because I was willing to make a fool out of myself in front of my students. I don't know that it was any sort of altruistic gesture but rather a bit of fluff and fun - nasty-looking fun, but fun. Then the next year - because two of my new friends at the new job were involved and seemed to be having fun - I got a little more involved. Then the next year I stepped in as co-campaign-leader-in-waiting.

Since then I've thrown myself into the giving as fully as I can. I've taken to volunteering outside of the campaign - at the Light the Night Walk, at next month's Taste of the World, at last month's Oktoberfest. And, amazingly, it's starting to feel really good.

It doesn't matter whether you're giving because you want to build your resume or because you really care about the cause. Either way, the people you're helping can use the help. And there are lots and lots of people and causes who can use the help.

So, here's my specific, suggested actions:

1. Ask friends around to see if they volunteer. (If you're going with friends, you'll have fun. If you're having fun, you'll go again.)
2. If they don't, keep asking 'til you find one.
3. Ask if you can join in and help out next time they are.
4. Have fun. If you don't, try something else with a different friend.
5. Repeat until it sticks.
6. Once you find one you enjoy, start bringing a few friends of your own.

It's simple. Giving should be fun, and if it's not, keep giving until it is.

Advice, part 2: Enjoy

Let's see, I've warned you that it was coming, then I gave you week one, now it's time for you to sit back and

Enjoy

It seems a simple enough concept, but one fraught with duality. Stephen Stills put it beautifully with "[i]f you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with," and therein lie the two sides of Enjoy.

First, there's the side that says "be with the one you love".

Take some time to figure out what it is you really enjoy. It might be running or playing tennis or sitting in the bathtub eating spaghetti and drinking a beer. Whatever that thing is, find time for it in every day. Maybe it'll only be a few minutes here or there or maybe it'll be something you do every Saturday all day long, but make sure that you do it.

No matter the hectic, the tired, the must, the hafta, the anything else, find at least a little bit of time to do what you enjoy. It'll keep you sane. It'll keep you going. It'll be the carrot dragging you forward just long enough to make it to the finish line.

And when people tell you that you're not accomplishing anything by playing around with those pewter miniatures or reading that fluff celebrity magazine or screwing around on the magical interweb box, remember that you are accomplishing something. You're enjoying.

---

The flip side is to "love the one you're with".

There is so much that happens day to day, moment to moment that we can't quite control. Tires blow out. Pipes burst. Your wife backs into your car in the driveway.

And almost none of it is really all that bad. Most of your life is pretty good. You're still alive. You're still eating. You're still breathing. You've got some friends, maybe even a pretty girl (or guy, who am I to judge) to spend your afternoons, evenings, and - if you're lucky - nights with.

Everything else that happens is just stuff along the way.

Smile through it all.

And I don't even mean to say this in the high, preachy voice of that tells you over and over again that it could be worse...at least you've got your health...think about the less fortunate. Nope, that's not what I mean.

I mean that the most random series of events had to take place for you to exist. Your mother had to meet your father. Your grandma had to meet your grandpa. Your dad had to look past all of your mom's faults and love her - at least for a few moments, if I understand my biology. On the most microscopic of levels, the exact sperm had to find that exact egg at that exact moment.

Why waste the rest of your life moping about.

You are a miracle.

Shut the hell up and smile.

---

And the invariable flip side - enjoy in moderation.

Almost no matter the enjoyment - beer, swimming, playing with dolls, horseback riding, whatever - when it's more than just carving out minutes and day as you can, with everything there comes a level when you're enjoying just a bit too much.

Maybe the signs will be that your pants are quite fitting as loosely as they did last fall, and you might want to consider enjoying the pumpkin milkshakes just a little less.

Maybe the bank's knocking on your door, and you're answering with "take the couch, take the tv, all I need are my mint in the box action figures from Titanic".

Or maybe it's when your friends start saying that they haven't seen you in months, that they miss you, that your collection of belly button lint is really starting to smell.

Just note that enjoy doesn't mean obsess.

Advice, part 1: Do

(ok, big breath, take it nice and slow, here we go)

The much anticipated series of one-word advices (with long-winded explanations) starts...RIGHT NOW!


Do

I hate starting with something that seems to tightly tied to a corporate slogan, but Do feels like a quality starting point. It's the essence of so many things, the antithesis of so many mistakes.

Whenever you have something that you want or need to do, do it.

Don't procrastinate, don't put it off, don't reason it out of your life, just get up off of your backside and get it done.

The drip in your chimney is just going to get worse if you don't get it fixed.

The grass is just going to be harder to cut tomorrow when it's a little longer and you finally get around to cutting it.

The Red Sox will never again win the World Series in your lifetime - or, if they do, it won't be the same - so buy the frickin' tickets. Mortage the house, sell the baby, do whatever it takes to buy the tickets, moron.

And you've been telling everybody that you desperately want to get to Europe for years, so go.

Don't let anything stop you; don't make up reasons to not go, to sit and wait for a better time to do it.

The best time to do whatever it is you want or need to do is now.

If this means that you have to start making lists everyday and posting them huge on the refrigerator for eveyone to see so you'll be accountable, then do it.

If it means that you should grab one of those books that list places to see (or things to do) before you die - or to write one of your own - then do it.

This bit of advice - Do does have one correlary that you need to be aware of, however, and that's the also important Do No Harm.

We are not beings who live in isolation. Every action that we take has reprecussions, like ripples in a still pond.

Before you take that leap and throw yourself willy nilly into the great wide open, remember that your actions have reprecussions. Make sure that those reprecussions won't hurt other people.

That is the only way that I can suggest tempering today's simple directive to Do, because as Lincoln told us...

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."

Thanks for getting this far, folks...

Some advice (a preview)

It would be an act of the most ridiculous hubris to believe that anyone came to this blog looking for advice on anything more than which entertaining video to watch today (heck, for that, TransBuddha would be the better choice), and yet I feel like taking a stupid step.

Over the next half dozen Saturdays, I will be doling out advice in drips and drabs, one word a week.

It's a format that I have been attempting to put to words for a number of months now: single word advice explained in a larger context, somehow attempting to sum up my best life lessons (admittedly meager though they may be) in one word.

The list so far:

• Do
• Enjoy
• Give
• Improve
• Help
• Love
• Be
• Learn

So, next weekend, tune in here - or feel free to tune right out if you would rather wait for the Sunday's typical offering of frivolisoty - for whatever words of wisdom await.

If you'd rather get some classic sitcom goodness, learn about the greatest Thanksgiving Day radio promotion ever.

Posting tomorrow today...

I'm lazy, so I'm posting Friday's entry on Thursday night...deal...

Because I know so many of you look to me for advice, I give you 100 Mark's Remarks by Mark Gruenwald...enjoy...