Personal and Philosophical: Blurring Some Lines – Interpretation, Emotion, and the World

I have waited a to write this post, in fact waited a week from the incident that set me off, to make sure I could write it as calmly and analytically as I could, and also to make sure I still wanted to write something that might be so inflammatory.

I have seen and heard the song Blurred Lines discussed a few times, and I stayed out of most of those discussions because they get so nasty – people insulting each other non-stop over the lyrics. I've tried to refrain from referring to the song as art, but what's at issue here is personal interpretation of a performance, which is generally regarded as an artistic medium even if the song in this case is pretty trashy.

I'm not going to waste a bunch of time arguing about whether or not it's a good song, but when I first heard it last July (in my work truck, on my way to a stop) I couldn't understand the lyrics and just thought it was a catchy tune. It's so rare for me to find a hip-hop song I can listen to because they usually have the pounding bass lines that give me a headache and the lyrics are usually much more graphic than this song.

After I learned what the lyrics were, I thought it was a pretty cool song about self-restraint – the guy's in a club and he sees a girl he really, really wants, and despite how hot she is and how he can't help fantasizing about doing demeaning stuff to her, he knows she's a good girl, and besides she's there with someone else, so he keeps his hands to himself and just fantasizes about what he'd like to do. He has to live with the Blurred Lines of what he wants to do and what he knows he has to do.

It was December before I heard there was another interpretation, and that was about rape. Here's where the real-life lines start blurring, because rape is a horrible thing and people (meaning men, almost exclusively) shouldn't be doing it. So I get why the people who interpret it as a song about rape don't like that and wish it wasn't such a popular song.

Here's where things got personal – a good friend of mine, who I've known since childhood, shared something comparing the lyrics of the song to words actual rape victims heard from their rapists. I'm not sure why someone's looking for things said to rape victims and seeing if they match song lyrics, but they found their Wizard of Oz for this Dark Side of the Moon.

Here it is, for reference http://www.psmag.com/culture/mouths-rapists-lyrics-robin-thickes-blurred-lines-66569/

Where I got involved in the discussion was when I asked her what course of action she recommended, with a popular song she and others deemed to be about rape. Her words: “I just want people not to be blinded by the catchyness (sic) of the song and to understand what its (sic) actually about. He's not flattering her. He's not being sexy. Hes (sic) NOT sexy. He's being a misogynistic jerk. Perhaps if people understood the theme it wouldn't be quite so popular. But then again.... most all of rap culture dis-respects (sic) women and those songs are still loved. Still I can;t (sic) help but feel people don't totally understand that theyre (sic) singing about rape. Honestly I didnt (sic) really get the song until i read this article.”

My first though was based on the last sentence she typed – this isn't actually her interpretation. It's the one she got from reading the online article. Even though she may not have had this opinion before, she was pretty emotionally invested in her new one. Look at the words she used - “Perhaps if people understood the theme” “to understand what it's actually about” “people don't totally understand that they're singing about rape”. As far as she's concerned, this is the only interpretation. The song is about rape. Period. I didn't, and still haven't, told her about my own interpretation, because it's such a hot discussion and I didn't want to ram directly against the current. Here's what I did say back:

“I get that it's misogynistic and jerky, but I've been wondering why it's such a big deal. Like you said, most rap or hip-hop songs by male performers about women are, and really most of them are worse - Unless I missed it, he never goes through with his thoughts in the song. So I guess I don't understand why I'm hearing about this one song for the third time when there are so many others to choose from.”

Her response? “Because this one is more popular and its (sic) more so about rape than just women objectification. Even the title "Blurred Lines" has to do with the sexual consent vs rape issue and the whole song is FILLED with a little thing called victim blaming. Maybe you should look that up if you dont (sic) know what it is. Also i think the music video has a lot to do with it. Apparently it was one of the most risque videos yet on TV.”

And the one that provoked me to write this whole thing: “If you can't see whats (sic) wrong with that song after comparing it to quotes other peoples (sic) rapists/molesters have said to them (the lyrics and the quotes are one in the same) then there is really no hope for you.”

There you have it – Because I don't agree with her interpretation, and am apparently too stupid to know what victim blaming is, there's no hope for me. I'm just as bad as the guy who wrote the song in the first place.

Is this acceptable? Can two people not have different interpretations of a performance and still be friends? Is that really where we are in 2014? Something another friend of mine posted from the Duck Dynasty boys in the past week comes to mind – that we can love someone without agreeing with every little thing they say and do. I've noticed that over the past few years people's opinions have gotten more and more tied up in pop culture – this entire post is about a discussion of a popular song and I just referenced a popular TV show I've never even seen – but why has it reached this level?

Emotions are so tied to what we see and hear that childhood friendships are in danger because two people don't hear a song the same way? I don't know if I like this world. I don't know if there's anything we can do to change it. But if you have some ideas, now would be the time to start putting them into practice. Because in another few years, no one's going to care what you have to say if you don't like the same movies they do.

Personal and Philosophical: Thoughts About Thinking

I came to a realization that I don't think the way a lot of other people do. I adjust my opinions based on received information. It seems like most other people adjust information based on their pre-existing opinions. That doesn't mean I just change my mind every time I hear something new. As seen with my recent change of attitude on global warming, I demand a lot of evidence and check things out before I will change my mind on something. And I don't mean that I never adjust things to fit my own opinions. I'm of the opinion, for example, that I should never have children because my genes are flawed and I have a duty to the human race to prevent their transmission. It would take a lot of evidence to change that opinion. But my point is that I will change my mind if I find out my information is flawed or incomplete.

I've learned only fairly recently that this isn't how most people form their opinions. In my observation, they get their opinions ready-made from other sources – from friends, family, or other influences, and they choose the opinions they like the best rather than the ones that are provably the most valid. Then they evaluate anything they learn in terms of those opinions, rather than the other way around.

I realized several years ago that there are basically only four choices you can make when you learn something new: you can accept it, reject it, ignore it, or modify it. And if you modify it, you go back and decide again what to do with the modified form.

I had to rework a lot of that when I was recovering from my mental illness. I had to learn early on that the way I'd been thinking most of my life was bad, and I needed to develop a new way to do it. I ultimately arrived at my present method by trial and error, and rebuilding my conscious mind from the base upwards. The basic postulate was that I couldn't trust my own thoughts, and so when everyone I knew agreed on something, I had to accept they were right, whether I liked it or not. I think that last clause is the part that came to separate my thinking from others. I had to stop taking whether or not I liked an idea into consideration when I formed an opinion. But once I got strong enough internally to be able to resist some opinions I received, I still did it in terms of whether or not I thought the opinion was right, not whether I liked it.

I asked a question once, a long time ago – Which do you care more about, who is correct, or who agrees with you? I decided it was more important to have the right answer than the most popular one. Now I think a better addition might be, Why do we care about either? I accept that people have a right to be wrong, and I care more about being factually right than popular. Yet it bothers me that I don't think the way others do. I don't want to change how they think, because that's not my place. I don't want to change how I think, because I believe I'm right. So why do I care that they don't agree? Why do they care that I don't agree? I don't have a solid answer to that.

I always used to be a passionate and emotional man, and people who have only gotten to know me recently don't think of me as emotional at all. Things have changed. I'm not who I used to be, and the main difference is that I've bleached a lot of emotion from my mind.

I guess I can't say that my reliance on facts always produces the best results – part of the reason my life feels so empty since I've gotten better is that I don't have any driving passion anymore. I exist to continue my existence. I need a job to earn the money to pay my bills so I can keep going. But there's no ultimate goal. I still desire death, really, more than anything else. So you can hardly say I've got a healthy way of looking at the world. And my idea that being accurate is better than agreeing to the consensus is emotional – I hold that view because I like it, not because there's a lot of evidence for it. So I'm not really sure where I ought to develop my mind from here. I can keep on the path I'm on, which seems to lead to accuracy tied with despondency and emptiness. Or I can try to find something, anything, I have positive feelings for, and develop that into a broader pallet of emotions like I used to have. This could make me happier, or less happy, or have no effect on it. It could make me susceptible to things that are wrong. Or it could change nothing. I won't know unless I try.

Political: Global Warming Redux - Potential solutions

I have been partially convinced on global warming. I looked up some of the IPCC's reports, and I learned a few things.
The most important thing I learned, really, is that I don't understand it. I got about 20 pages into one report before it got over my head. 20 out of 1000 pages, and that was just one of four reports from the IPCC for that year. And they release new reports every year. I'm never going to get through all of that well enough to know what it says. It's largely technical, which was good since I was looking for something hard with no spin, but it was also impossible to read unless you have a solid background in chemistry, physics, and reading scientific jargon. I don't have the last one at all.
That said, the huge number of people who write and contribute to the reports tells me there's something there. These aren't just professors looking for funding either, or Al Gore types trying to get attention, but serious and respected academics who know what they're talking about. I looked a few of them up and they're by and large not people who would just slap their names and reputations on something just to look important or go along with the crowd. They believe the information is accurate and they sure know enough to say better than I do.

I didn't even get far enough into it to really tackle the issue of whether or not we're causing the problem. There was something called 'radiative forcing' I was just getting to when I sort of got lost. It had to do with how the presence of certain gases in the atmosphere affected the temperature. Some increase it and some decrease it, and I'm still not really sure how, but their data say that humans are responsible for most of it, and that burning fossil fuels contributes more than agriculture, and those two are most of the positive radiative forcing, the ones that increase the temperature. Aerosols are in the column that decrease it, which makes it sound like banning them has contributed to the problem more than other things, but I don't know well enough to argue it.

On the topic of "Why isn't the sea level rising?" I finally did get my answer - it is, but so far it's only risen about 50 mm around the globe, which is measurable but not really noticeable to the average person. But it's quite likely to continue rising, and by the time it's really noticeable it'll be too late to do anything about it. So that was answered at least.

Anyway, even though my comprehension of our role in global warming isn't clear, I think it's pretty obvious that we can do things to combat the problems. What I can understand is that we need to decrease the carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere, and that there's a lot of possibility for reflecting light back into space that will help too. So I've come up with four ideas that I think are economical, effective, and on a scale we can do right now. They're all things we have to build and maintain, so they will cost some money, but they will also create jobs and infrastructure, including new areas of study and new careers we don't currently have. So they will cause a temporary reduction in the economy, followed by a sustainable and significant increase. Also of importance is that none of these solutions require the average person to change their lives, and aren't in a position to rob power and money from oil, coal, and other energy interests, so they won't face the fierce opposition that a carbon tax and other such ideas have right now.

For each idea, I'll give a general description, the benefits I think it will have, and the potential problems I can see.

1. Dome Screens for Major Cities.

I figured I should jump right in with the most radical idea first. This one is the most complicated and the most unusual from the way we do things now. What I'm thinking of is a large structure that covers over a city, either partially or completely. It would reflect light the area of the city back into space, as well as collecting rising gases in changeable air filters. It should be made of adjustable panels, which ideally should be able to go from transparent to opaque, and also pivot from open to closed. I think the structure should be open on the sides and only cover up the top, more like an awning than a tent. I know this is a really radical idea, but remember there was a time when sewer systems were a radical idea, and aqueducts before that. Both of them were created to solve an environmental and resource problem, and both revolutionized the lives of the people in the cities where they were first installed, and they're now commonplace. So just because they've never existed before doesn't mean we shouldn't build them now.
Benefits - Lots of jobs, both in construction and maintenance. Thinking about the local city that could use one of these the most, I kept coming back to New Orleans. The adjustable panels would allow them to divert rain out of the areas prone to flooding and block quite a bit of damaging winds, and the air filters would pretty well eliminate smog and other air pollutants from the city. There would also be a huge crime-fighting potential because you could put lights and even cameras on the underside of the support structure, enabling people to light up the whole city even in the darkest nights if they needed to, and record everything that moved. Businesses could pay to advertise on the supports as well. A giant hanging banner over your business would let everybody know where you were and what you had to sell. You could also use it for some civic pride. New Orleans as my example could have a giant fleur de lis on display to the world.
Potential problems - Obviously any time you build something above something else, there's a risk part of it could break off and fall. We've handled that pretty well up to now, though, and I'm sure it could be built as safely as anything else. I think more objections will be raised about how it will change the look of a place. People objected to the Eiffel Tower when it was first built for that reason. You couldn't avoid that it would alter the light coming into the city as well, so everything under it would look different from how it always had. There would be other complications with putting a roof on a city just in terms of things like satellite images - you'd just see the dome. I'm not sure if GPS would work inside. Of course, you could put things into the structure so that GPS, WiFi, cell phones, etc. would be amplified rather than suppressed. All the crud filtered out of the air has to be put somewhere as well, and there's no knowing how that might affect landfills, or what other environmental thing might suffer for the gain. There's also no telling how things like birds nesting or bats roosting or other animals might affect the panels, and if a motor responsible for moving a panel broke, somebody would have to climb up and fix it. Lastly, the potential for a terrorist attack would be pretty high since collapsing the structure would do massive damage to the whole city.

2. Artificial Polar Caps
Pretty straightforward - undo some of the damage by freezing sea ice into massive blocks and tow it back to the poles.
Benefits - This one is probably the easiest in terms of method. We'd need facilities for the process, but it's pretty easy to make ice. It's pretty easy to ship it too. If the ice is frozen to a sufficiently low temperature, once it's dropped back in the polar waters it'll freeze up the water around it too.
Potential Problems - Problems of scale. This has never been attempted before, and there's no telling how many people, ships, and resources it would take to do it. Also, arctic and Antarctic travel is always dangerous. Even if the caps are melting it's still dangerously cold. There are potential diplomatic problems with forming new shipping lanes, although they're surmountable. The most serious problem is that it's not going to address any of the other aspects of global warming - just the melting ice.

3. Dry Ice Oceanic Ice Cubes
Sort of a combination aspects of 1 and 2. Filter carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases out of the air, and freeze them into giant blocks of dry ice. One problem with the ocean absorbing the increased levels of CO2 at the moment is that it raises the acidity levels, so the dry ice would need to be sealed up in containers that would take hundreds of years to corrode. Then haul the sealed ice to the center of the ocean and sink it to the depths, or tow it by submarine underneath the arctic pole.
Benefits - Clears CO2 out of the air, reintroducing it slowly and much later into the ocean depths where is can be safely reabsorbed. Also cools the ocean water around the dry ice containers. It treats both the causes and the symptoms and would reverse massive damage in a short period.
Potential Problems - Similar to the above idea. It would be a massive operation, requiring international cooperation and there's no telling how much it would cost to run, or what environmental impact it would have.

4. Giant Solar Mirror and/or Algae Farm
People usually think of trees when they think of plants that turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. Only the green parts of trees perform photosynthesis. Algae is much more efficient, because it's single-celled and only photosynthesizes. We build a giant reservoir, out in the desert, or in the plains of the Midwest, or somewhere else similar. It would only need a few inches of water in it, and enough algae on the surface to start it up. It will spread until it covers the whole thing, and will become an enormous carbon sink, sucking up CO2 and throwing out oxygen. The uncovered parts of the reservoir will reflect light, especially if the water is clear and the bottom is polished enough to shine. It should get covered over by the end of the summer, at which point you drain the pond and let it work as a mirror until spring.
Benefits - Intensive maintenance will employ hundred of people, and they won't need much education or specialized skills. The more of these we build, the better for the economy and the environment. It will treat the major causes of global warming and heal some of the damage already done. There would be a lot of options for funding, and it would be much easier to get corporate sponsors than some of the other ideas. Oil companies could be persuaded to send in money in exchange for the bragging rights about how they're cleaning up everything.
Potential Problems - Construction expense is the biggest. Also needs to be tested on a smaller scale first. I don't know what the relationship is - if you had 150 square miles of algae, how much CO2 would that absorb? Can we possibly make one big enough? Once again, massively changing existing landscape will have other environmental impacts as well, and we can't always know what they will be in advance.

These are the best ideas I've had so far. I don't know if any of them will work, but I think they're probably all worth trying.

Political/Single Issue: Language War - Making Something Out of Nothing

I don't know if there's really anything to this, but it certainly seems to cause more problems than it should.

You ever know someone who just can't say a word the right way? Maybe they think there's an X in especially or forget how many Rs there are in library, or just can't remember how to use their punctuations correctly. There is, of course, a modern term for people who go around calling others out on their minor errors which do not actually affect communication in any way - Grammar Nazis.

The thing is, we all do this a little bit, even though we're well aware it's a dumb thing to do. You know where we don't realize that? When we're dealing with a slightly different culture.

Words are different in different parts of the country. Down here in the south, for example, we commonly refer to the lights that hang over the roads and tell traffic whether to go or not as red lights, regardless of what color they are at a given moment. This caused some confusion a few years back when we were giving directions to some family from Michigan. "Wait, you want us to drive through the red light? Isn't that illegal?" That's because they call them traffic lights. We had similar trouble driving around up there, where street signs mentioned that you could only turn from the center lane. On a 7-lane highway, it took us a few missed turns before we realized that they meant what we call the turn lane. This is the stuff mildly amusing family anecdotes are made of.

Once you get past that, though, it stops being so amusing and starts getting unnerving. Did you know that Wikipedia has been edited 11,751 times over the spelling of Brazil? They spell it Brasil there. And someone has "corrected" the entry over ten thousand times changing an inconsequential detail that doesn't really have a "right" answer. Source

That source page has lots of examples of time being wasted over the tiniest of details, but it gets worse when we start drawing the lines and pitching the tents over similarly meaningless details.

 

This is Sean Lock. He's a British comedian, something you may remember I'm quite fond of. He has a joke about how British English is being corrupted by American English, in the form of people going into a Starbucks and saying "Can I get a cup of coffee?" instead of the 'correct' "Can I have a cup of coffee?" I get that it's a joke. I'm not complaining that he did a joke I don't like. I'm concerned that the reason that joke works so well is because people think he's right. People think there's a real and valuable thing to protect there. We use different words in the same language in America than they use in Britain, or Australia, or other places. But they're different. It doesn't mean one of us is wrong and really needs to change to the other way. It certainly doesn't mean we need to be prepared to wage passive-aggressive insult wars with everyone who's different. Go read a YouTube comments page and count how many arguments start over someone saying something perfectly reasonable but with a misspelled word. Watch how nasty it gets from there.

 

There's too much hate in the world. People used to pick up guns and go to war over who owned which patch of land. It's less violent, but just as destructive to have people pick up insults and hurl them back and forth over who can't speak the one true language properly. It's so common, so brutish, and so accepted. You don't usually get those three adjectives on the same topic.

 

I don't know what the solution is here. Why are people in different parts of the country, or different countries, ready to divide and conquer over the right word? Why, if not that, are they willing to spend hour after hour mercilessly editing and re-editing to make sure their version is the final version? It is dividing us into antisocial, mental fortress-bugs as much as social movers once feared. Why do we want to pull away from each other? Why will take any excuse, no matter how small, to cut each other apart from ourselves?

 

If you know, make sure you spell the answer correctly.

Personal: Lowering the Bar

I am writing today a different person from who I was a few months back. I've changed jobs, and no longer work nights, and my world has expanded from its little three-square-mile patch of existence into a much larger patch of existence. A change of scenery has had no effect on my mood so far. I want to talk today about the effects of raising the bar, and about those moments that give life fullness, meaning, and joy, and especially why you shouldn't have them too early.

These aren't accomplishments of mine, so they're not something I can take great pride in, but they're experiences I've had. Most of them were engineered, directly or indirectly, by my mom. We didn't have a lot of money growing up, but she was determined that I be a well-rounded person with a lot of experience to draw on. She pushed me into the Chattanooga Boys' Choir, which is a professional boys' choir in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It tours both nationally and internationally, and gave me some amazing performance opportunities, all before I could even drive. I missed most of a summer band program going into my freshman year of high school because I was out on my third and final tour with them.

She also pushed me into 4-H, and as much as I hated it at the time, it was probably the best decision I ever had taken out of my hands. I learned more useful things in my peripheral association with 4-H than I did in all my years of formal education. The bar was set very high for me at a very early age, and I usually met the challenge.

One quite memorable experience had almost nothing to it – pure dumb luck, I suppose. My college was hosting a Nobel Prize nominated poet from Nigeria and I knew both the professor whose house he was staying at and the professor who had invited him to come speak, and as a result, I got to meet him in person at the little get-together they were having after his lecture. I wasn't the only student there, but I got a little more personal treatment than I really deserved. As a favor to my professor, he agreed to come to our class the next day and read the poem that had earned him the notice of the Nobel committee. He read it out to us, and as I was sitting there thinking about it with the rest of the class, he finished, and he looked up and our eyes met, and he said “Now, you.”

Words still fail me. In seven years since it happened, I cannot describe the emotional height I had reading that poem TO THE MAN WHO WAS ALMOST GIVEN A MILLION DOLLARS FOR WRITING IT. I was exhilarated, anxious, nervous, and all of those other words to a degree I can't really name. It ranks right up there with my first kiss and the day I was baptized. And when I finished reading he gave me a small round of applause, which the rest of the class joined in, and I was so drained from only a minute's reading that I thought I was going to pass out in my chair.

I was twenty years old when that happened.

I am now 28 years old, and here are just a few of the experiences I've already had -

I've traveled all over the country, including to Alaska, where I stayed up all night on the summer solstice and watched the sun not set.

I've traveled to England, where we saw the Queen Mother, who got into her car and almost ran over our accompanist. Royalty always have the right of way in England.

I've written two novels.

I've performed in two operas and one touring Broadway musical.

I've met four or five published authors and talked about their work with them.

I've seen most of the works of Norman Rockwell.

I've swum with dolphins, and also petted sharks.

I've been to Disney World so many times I had the layout memorized when I was 13.

I've been camping in the Tennessee wilderness and escaped from a bear and a scary old man, on separate occasions.

I've taken photographs of Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty, Pike's Peak, and the World Trade Center when the twin towers were still standing.

I've sung on national television with a contemporary gospel music star.

I've met a Nobel Prize nominee, a CEO, two congressmen, three TV stars, and seen one ex-president playing tennis.

 

I rode in one of the first electric cars ever manufactured.

I've eaten fish and chips in London, baked beans in Boston, pizza in New York, crawfish in Louisiana, cheese steak in Philadelphia, lobster in Maine, and barbecue in Memphis.

I've clawed my way back to functionality from a crippling mental illness.

I've paid my respects to the Unknown Soldiers and broken a known one's collarbone when he wanted to see which of us was stronger.

Now, at 28, I'm living on my own, working my job, and generally trying to figure out where to go from here.

Where do you go from here? That's a list of things to do before you die, not before you turn thirty. What can life offer me that can possibly compare to what I've already had? How do you go from a list like that and work upwards? I think perhaps I have to accept that I've probably passed my prime. Life from here is mostly about paying the bills for the good time I had.

I don't have the right to sing the blues. I've had a good life. Now what am I supposed to do to pass the time till my clock finally runs out?

Personal, Philosophical, and Political: Educating the Next Generation

I don't have kids, but I have noticed that there has been a shift in social consciousness recently that's been very negative towards parents, teachers, and other caregivers. Part of it is the pedophilia scare. Part of it is the anti-discipline crusade. Most of it comes down to what George Carlin termed "Child worship" - the idea that kids are pure and perfect and we ought to encourage and support whatever they want to do instead of trying to make them into little versions of us.

There are several problems with this attitude in application, and there are plenty of people willing to explain those problems, in language more emotional than I'm prepared to publish.  What I'd like to do is list some of the things I think the next generation needs to be taught, by teachers, parents, and all the rest of us adults in their region of influence. It's not my responsibility as a single, childless person to try to parent a child or to give parenting advice to a parent. But it is my responsibility, as a human, as an American, as a Christian, and most importantly as an adult to model the behavior I want to see in others and to explain to people who ask why I do what I do, and why I do it that way.

These are the things I want kids to learn -

1. You are special. Cynical people will tell you you're not, and they're wrong. Naïve people will tell you that's enough, and they're wrong too. You are not unique. There are other people in the world similar to you, but no one just like you. You can do things other people can't, or can do things better than other people can. But being special isn't enough. You can't just say "I'm special" and expect people to give you whatever you want, or even what you need. It's up to you to figure out what makes you special and find some way to use that to better yourself and those around you. If you don't do anything with your specialness, it stops being special.

2. Nothing is always right or always wrong. You can't judge things without context. Sometimes you won't know what is right, and maybe there's no way you can. Sometimes you have to accept that you just don't know the answer.

3. There is a difference in someone doing things you don't like and someone being a bad person.

4. You will not always do better or worse than anyone else. It's natural that you will compare your own state to the state of the people around you, but you shouldn't put a lot of importance on your observations. Sometimes the people you think aren't doing as well as you have done much better in the past, or will do much better in the future, and vice-versa. People are successful and unsuccessful in different quantities at different times. Also, this doesn't mean that any of the people you compare yourself to are any better or worse than you are.

5. You need to decide for yourself what constitutes success and failure, and also what degrees of each you're willing to live with for the short term. You also need to know what society considers a success and a failure, and to be prepared for harsh criticism if your standards are different. Criticism doesn't mean you should change, but it is a cost you have to pay to do things your own way.

6. People will lie to you all the time. Sometimes because they want something from you, sometimes just to be mean, sometimes as a reflex without even thinking about it. You won't always know which is which. Try not to rely on information you can't verify, and try not to make decisions based solely on what other people tell you.

7. People can change, but they won't unless they want to and think they need to, and even then there's a lot of work involved. People who want to change usually try and fail many times, but if they never stop trying they will eventually succeed. "Wanting to" isn't the same as trying, either. Acknowledging the need for change is important, but doesn't usually cause the change on its own.

8. Don't be afraid to chase your dreams, but remember you can't chase all of them, and some of them won't come true no matter what. Does your dream seem unreasonable? If you want it, go for it anyway. If it doesn't work out, try again. If it doesn't work that time, try a different approach. But if it seems like it never works, no matter what, then you should probably let go and chase a different dream.

9. A lot of times, people will present you with choices limited to two extremes. Usually, the more emotional the issue, the more simple they want the extremes to seem. It's almost never true. Remember, if the right choice is easy, people don't argue about it. If they're arguing, it's not because one is right and one is wrong. It's because they both think they're right, and really there may be more than one good answer or even no good answer at all.

10. Most difficult things in life aren't tests, challenges, or secret riddles disguised as problems. They're just difficult. Most things worth having are difficult to get. That's why people want them.

11. There's nothing wrong with being idealistic, but there's a difference in being idealistic and being naïve. Idealists find something they want to change about the world, talk about it, come up with a plan to make it happen, work the plan, solve problems to the plan as they arise, and keep working and re-working until they make their vision a reality. Naïve people find something they want to change about the world, talk about it, and then pretend they already have it.

12. There's nothing wrong with being cynical, either, and while it is likely to make you smarter, it's not likely to make you happier.

13. People have a right to be wrong. If you disagree with someone, even if you're right, most of the time you're better off letting them be wrong than trying to change them. Also, most people will say they see the world differently than they really do. They will say they see it the way they wish they saw it. You'll never make any progress arguing with them.

14. Most of the people who get what they want out of life do so according to a time-tested and nearly foolproof formula - you have to have natural talent, you have to develop that talent into a useful skill, you have to have a workable plan for that skill, you have to work really hard, and you have to be really lucky. Most people will acknowledge everything but the luck.

15. You should learn where to draw the line on the following things. They are all gray areas with no absolute answer, and wherever you draw it, you will run into someone who disagrees with you eventually. You should know the differences in:

quitting and accepting defeat and moving on
persisting and uselessly banging your head against a wall
telling someone the truth, telling someone what they want to hear, and telling someone something that's unnecessarily cruel
what is right and what you want; and vice versa
winning and not losing; and vice versa
chasing a dream and tilting at a windmill
being cautious and being cowardly
being brave and being foolhardy
being successful and being respectable
being successful and having prestige
being feared and being respected
being feared and being loved
being accepted and being tolerated
loving someone and liking someone
friends and contacts
hurting someone and harming someone
encouraging someone, criticizing someone, and helping someone
living with a purpose and living without one

16. Most importantly, you should know that you are responsible for you. It's increasingly popular to find something, a concept, an illness, a group, a person, a policy, an adversary, etc for all the problems in life. The truth is problems exist for everyone, everywhere, all the time, and they always have. They're not the same, and they're not all the same degree of severity, but they're always there. You will never be happy if you wait for them to go away, and especially not if you wait for someone to take them away. You have to make your own choices and accept the consequences of them. Bad things will happen to you that are not your fault, but if you just wait for them to get better, or for someone to make them better for you, they become your fault. You must either make them better or decide how to proceed in spite of them.

Personal and Religious: Maybe I Finally Get It

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in Heaven.” - Matthew 5:16

I've thought for years about that verse, and that the concept of personal ministry begins with that idea. Nobody ever converts people by scolding them and telling them how awful they are, although that technique is still popular no matter how ineffective it is. I've always thought the only effective way to lead someone to Christ is to show them that there's something in being a Christian that you just don't have otherwise. No matter how righteous your behavior, and no matter what good you do in the world, if you can't make it visible that it's only because God lives in you, you won't save any souls.

Therefore, I reasoned, my principle duty as a Christian is to live a life that makes Christianity look attractive to others, and makes following Jesus look like a good idea and a desirable choice in life. That's caused me a lot of consternation because I'm generally not a happy person, and I'm not good at hiding it. If I couldn't be happy in Christ, then how could I convince anyone else that they could? And as I pointed out in a previous entry, if I was so miserable following God and only did what the Bible tells me because I feel like I have to (and usually hate it even while I'm doing it), then what good was I going to be, leading others to the same burden I have to carry?

It now occurs to me I may have been interpreting the verse and its application wrong all along. As I've also pointed out in another entry, a few years back when I realized how unhappy I was I started changing things in my life to fix it. Over the past four years I've changed nearly everything. I've put down all the bad habits I picked up in my college years, changed my diet, picked up my regular exercise routine, and all the other stuff I mentioned. Now I'm beginning to see that my most recent depressed/angry period may have been exacerbated by the fact that all that stuff I changed in an effort to be happy didn't work. Really, all I've changed in potentially lengthening my lifespan with healthier behavior is that I'm going to be a miserable git for a lot longer than I previously anticipated, and that's depressing on its own.

But, through all my struggles, and with everything else I've tried to change, my faith is the only thing I haven't given up. I've looked for ways I might be able to, and I haven't found any. No matter how I feel, whether I'm angry, sad, frustrated, or hopeless, I've never been able to let go of God. Maybe that's the way I need to look at personal ministry – I can't make a life for God look like something that's fun to do and a path to happiness and fulfillment. But I can make sure people know that I'm willing to give up whatever I have to for health and happiness, except God. My faith is the only thing in my life I can't live without. That is the light I shine.