Patience? Ain’t Got NO Time For Dat!

In todays world of instant gratification, patience seems to be heading the way of the dinosaurs. Soon to be extinct. If it isn’t already.

Everybody is so wrapped up in getting their instant reward that they simply refuse to take a minute or two to stop and smell the roses as it were. That fear of missing out on the next best latest greatest super duper thing keeps everybody goin’ full speed ahead, never bothering to take in any of the scenery along the way. Patience be damned, they want their satisfaction guaranteed and they want it NOW!

Which is fine for some people as they’re not interested in the small stuff. The so called little things in life that others believe are what make life as wonderful as it is. Nope, some people are purely on a mission. A fast paced journey, doin’ what ever it takes to get there, wherever there is. As quickly and as painlessly as possible.

They seem to feel that if you haul ass through life, none of the pain will affect you. At least it won’t tend to sting as much anyway. They seem to forget that in their haste to avoid the bad stuff, they also tend to miss out on lots of the good stuff as well. And after all, shouldn’t life also be about the good stuff?

Isn’t that why we’re here, to experience life to the fullest, to squeeze out everything life has to offer? If that’s the case, then you have to be willing to accept it as it comes. Both the good as well as the bad. Like they say, without the bad, how would we know when things are good? I don’t know about you but it makes perfect sense to me.

Sure, nobody likes the bad stuff but despite how much we don’t enjoy it, there’s no way to avoid it. It’s gonna be there, regardless of whether we like it or not. But I’ll be the first to admit that I’d rather be here to battle through the bad stuff than the alternative, which is to not be here at all.

Yes, there’s always a way out but it’s without a doubt an extremely permanent solution. No thanks, not for me. I’d rather give each day my best shot and let the chips fall where they may.

Which brings up another wonderful saying, one that pretty much sums it all up as far as bad days are concerned. It goes something like ‘Every day is a good day, it’s just that some are worse than others.’ If you endeavor to take on each new day with an attitude like that, there’s not much that’s gonna get you down.

That’s not to say all your days will be full of roses with perhaps just a mini thorn here and there. Let’s not get carried away now. After all, this is reality we’re dealing with but if you approach each day thinking that yes, there’s a chance that you’ll run in to a bump or two in the road and to be somewhat prepared for it (not planning on a for sure downer but being aware that a possible glitch could be heading your way) then you’re already way ahead of the game.

Nobodys life is 100% perfect. Sure, we all know those people that seem to have it all figured out, never seem to have a problem and everything just goes their way. Well, I’ve got news for ya. It only seems that way to the casual observer, looking at things from the outside. I can pretty much guarantee you that they have their bad days as well. They go through stuff just like everybody else. And while they might not show it outwardly, on the inside they have their own battles.

And those same people also battle with the patience thing as well. Even good things have a way of taking too long, no matter how long they take. And isn’t that what we’re all after, that feel good feeling? And that’s without a doubt a feeling that can’t get here a minute too soon. Definitely another test of patience.

Unfortunately more often than not, once that feel good feeling arrives, it tends to leave just as quickly and we’re instantly off and running, searching for another source of feel good juice. Something to fill the void, to feed the need for happiness. And hopefully we’ll have the patience required to see us through until we’re feelin’ good once again.

Now, as much as I’d like to hang around a bit longer and finish my thoughts here, to be honest, I just don’t have the patience for it.

If you can relate to a need for more patience or the lack thereof, I’d enjoy hearing your comments below and if you know of anyone who might enjoy this post I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with them. Thank you.

Tags: Attitude, Discipline, Life, Never Give Up, Patience, Personal Growth, Writing

Big Trouble Out On The Information Highway

Hello, Microsoft? Yes, I’d like to report a crash that just occurred out here in Cyberspace, just outside Farmville. Uhhhhmmm, let’s see. I don’t have any maps with me but if I’m not in error, I’m actually parked right next to the 404 road marker. Yes, just about 1/3 mile North of the Information Highway offramp.

I’m breakin’ up? Oh, sorry, I apologize if my voice sounds a little shakey but everything just unfolded right in front of me without much warning at all and it’s taking me a bit of time to process what just took place. Hang on, let me change positions real quick. Can you hear me now? Ok good.

Well, as I started to say the entire incident basically seemed to happen out of nowhere. There we all were, just surfin’ along the highway and next thing you know, the entire cyber world was spinnin’ out of control.

Near as I can tell there was mainly one vehicle involved. Why yes, as a matter of fact, it WAS the Adobe Flash that crashed. How’d you even know that? He must have OnStar.

That Playaa is flippin’ out of his mind to say the least. Sounds like you’ve heard all this before. Oh really, that many times? A DAY??? Wow, I surely don’t envy you.

No, I didn’t call you Shirley, I merely said the word surely as in being sure. Sure that I don’t envy the fact that you have to hear about so many of these crashes on a daily basis, that’s all. How would I even know your name unless I Googled you. I mean, it’s not like we’re friends on Facebook or anything. Are we? Ok, anyway, back to my story.

There we were, all of us just cruisin’ smoothly along at about 65 megabytes per hour, minding our own online business and next thing you know, these two cars in front of us started to swerve back and forth a bit side to side. At first I didn’t think much of it. I thought they might be friends yelping at each other as they were cruisin’ along on their way to a Foursquare Check In somewhere down the highway.

It’s a long, straight, boring stretch of highway through there so again, I didn’t pay much attention to what they were doing. But then I saw someone purposely stick their arm out the window of one of the cars and try to poke somebody in the other car. That’s when I thought to myself that something’s wrong because nobody and I mean NOBODY likes to get poked.

Of course the people in the other car weren’t havin’ any of that action and so they immediately swerved to avoid getting poked. I mean, can ya blame ‘em? Especially if it’s some other dude tryin’ to poke ya. I mean what the hell is that pokin’ thing all about anyway. They should have stricter rules when it comes to getting poked. That whole thing is just plain weird if ya ask me.

Anyway, as I watched these two cars still sorta swervin’ back and forth, almost makin’ constant contact with each other and the people inside still yelpin’ back and forth at each other, it was becoming increasingly apparent that they weren’t friends. Neither online or off and that this wasn’t gonna end good. They were both doin’ some hard drivin’, that’s for sure. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

It appeared to me that the car in the left lane, having just barely cleared his cache, had made contact in some form with the car in the right lane and as if triggering an autoresponse, the car in the right lane immediately swerved to the right as if to unsubscribe from any further contact and in doing so, seemingly lost his cookies, which caused him to crash in to the firewall on the side of the highway.

Without a doubt the car in the left lane saw the other car crash and instantly put the pedal to the metal and sped off like a mouse that just lost it’s tail. And that’s when it dawned on me that they weren’t friends at all and that this was an obvious case of Load Rage!

Since I had witnessed most everything that was just layered out in front of me, I felt obligated to pull over and see if I could help in any way possible. Without a doubt the other car was long gone by now, speeding away at a pretty good click and no amount of tracking was gonna get him to reboot and turn around.

I pulled over as near as I could to where the Adobe Flash had come to rest and as I approached the drivers window, I could see the driver sitting there looking quite a bit dazed. I proceeded to signal him and as I began to ask him questions, it became increasingly apparent that his retinas were spinning like little green circles and he was definitely still in shockwave. He told me that he had very few bars and wasn’t even loading. Hey, I never claimed to be a Cyber Cop so I guess I just have to take his word for it.

As far as the Adobe Flash goes, it still appears to be drivable but it looks like he lost quite a bit of chrome off the front bumper from grindin’ along the firewall. But now that you tell me that this situation happens quite often, that could just as well be damage from a previous incident. I’ll leave that up to the guys at McAfee Security and Online Insurance to determine who’s at fault here.

Strange thing is none of his story seems to line up with anything that I physically witnessed myself. It’s unfortunate that I didn’t have access to my Flip Cam or I could have uploaded the video to YouTube and let the online community be the judge.

It’s almost as if he either has a serious concussion or he’s just created the perfect scenario to stay out of trouble with the Cyber Police. I don’t think he was tweeting nor texting as I didn’t see his phone anywhere close by.

According to him he was on his way out of town to go exploring on safari when a firefox dashed across the highway in front of him, causing him to crash.

He then told me that he was forced to make a split second decision as to whether he should attempt to save the life of the firefox by swerving to avoid hitting it or should he save what’s left of his chrome and just go ahead and run it over and not risk having a crash.

Apparently he felt at the time that it was better to swerve and save the life of the firefox, all at the risk of causing another horrible crash. Not sure he feels the same way now. Not sure he feels much of anything right now. Looks to me like he’s still loading.

Believe me, I hated to send this crash report but I felt it was important for microsoft to be made aware of just exactly what transpired here. Yes, I’ll be more than happy to keep tabs on him until support arrives.

Judging by his past I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he just logged back in the Adobe Flash and hopped back on the highway, only to crash again a short time later.

I have a feeling he’s in enough trouble already and the last thing he needs is to face the blue screen of death. As we all know, it gets pretty dang crazy out there on the information highway and before you know it, you’re liable to catch a virus out of nowhere. And everybody knows that’s big trouble.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d appreciate hearing about it in the comment box below and if you know f anyone that might enjoy it, I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with them. Thank you.

Tags: Blogging, Information Highway, Short story, Shorter Blog Posts, Texting, Writing

A Lil’ Sumpin’, Ya Know, For Da Effort….

Why? Why on earth do they do it? Why do people jog. Even worse, why do they run? Yes, we’ve all heard the default excuse, that it’s for the exercise but I’m sure we can all think of better ways, less strenuous ways to get some exercise.

Not to mention ways that are much less traumatic to the body. Have you ever actually tried to jog, let alone run? I mean lately?

I’m not talking about back when you were in 7th Grade and you were forced to do laps around the field, all while wearing those stretchy blue shorts and that damn triple thick tshirt (the one you could turn inside out to yellow so you’d instantly be on the other team in touch football) that was like wearing a Snuggie on a 95 degree day.

No, I’m talking this century. Well, if you haven’t, I’ve got a bit of news for ya. Jogging sucks! And so does running. Yes, believe it or not, they both suck. Majorly.

Now, that could come as a shock to some of you. More than likely to those of you that haven’t run …. in like forever. That’s the only way you wouldn’t be fully aware that running sucks. Yep, pretty much sucks bad enough to where you might think getting run over by a car might suck less. Yeah, it sucks that much.

How can it be then that this world is virtually flooded with adoration for jogging. For running. For whatever term you want to use for relentlessly jumping up and down while making minimal forward progress as your kidneys, spleen and numerous other vital internal organs scream to leave your body immediately, if not sooner!

That doesn’t even take in to account your knees, your hips, your feet, your ankles and everything else on your body that is being abused for no known reason. All those aching joints that while you think they’re sore and stiff now, just wait until tomorrow morning. That’s when running to the bathroom begins to take on an entirely different meaning.

If only you hadn’t run so damn much the day before, perhaps now you could actually run to the bathroom because lawd knows you need to. But no, the best you can do is crawl. And no, not the on your hands and knees kinda crawl either because as I mentioned earlier, your hands and knees are just too damn sore to even attempt to use them.

Nope, this is more like a G.I. Joe sniper in Desert Storm kinda crawl. Sort of a grab ‘n slide technique. One where you’re basically face down on the carpet, all the way down, using your nose as well as your fingers to claw at any chunk of carpet fiber within your grasp, all in hopes of inching your body forward to the land of the pee. To the land of relief, the place you wanna get to most.

Pay no attention to the dust bunny that just passed you. Surely you’ll catch up to it at some point. Hopefully anyway. Those dust bunnies can be a bit tricky as they’ll run away at the very last second. Just when you think you’re gainin’ on it, whoosh, in a featherlight tailspin it’s off and runnin’ again.

Just as you reach out to grab ‘em (yeah they’re clever like that), they begin to twist and turn, taking on all kinds of different shapes, doing everything possible to avoid being captured. Where the hell do they get all their energy anyway.

It’s almost like they’re super human, floating on air and gathering momentum as they fly. Either that or they’re just layin’ around all day, goin’ lowcognito and hidin’ out, saving up all of their energy until some carpet crawler comes along and disturbs their slumber.

Then, seemingly mocking you with their agility, the same agility you once displayed only a few weeks earlier, they jump to life and scramble off in every direction.

Oh, if only you still possessed that type of energy. Unfortunately ever since you jumped on this jogger~not from hell, things have changed drastically. And might I add, not for the better.

Simple things such as buttering your toast, brushing your teeth or blinking one eye aren’t quite as easy as they used to be, now are they? No Sir, not even close.

How in the hell can my eyelids hurt? I didn’t even know my eyelids had muscles. Thinking back to the last tub crawl you did, it’s becoming painfully clear just why they ache so badly. It’s because you used them, along with your toes, your nose, your chin, etc. to propel yourself across the carpet to reach the bathtub. Ahhhh, that also helps to explain the rug burns on your retinas.

But isn’t finding all of these as yet undiscovered, cleverly hidden muscles supposed to be a good thing?

I mean, isn’t this exactly what every exercise fiend strives for, that burning pain, that rush of endorphins, that oh so elusive Runners High? Well, that’s what they’d lead you to believe anyway.

After all, if there wasn’t some kind of an incredible euphoria, an uber amazing reward of some sort at the end of each session, then why even put yourself through that torture in the first place? Why on earth would these people continue to do what they do.

Why the hell would they, day after day after day, relentlessly beat themselves nearly to death, to continually abuse each and every muscle, joint, tendon, you name it inside their bodies just to be physically beaten to a pulp at the end of it all.

Sure, they do their very best to trick us all in to thinking that the only reason they do it is because they feel so fantabulous when they’re finished with their workouts.

And we’re relentlessly informed that the only reason we have yet to reach this feeling of fantasterrificness is because we aren’t trying hard enough. We aren’t working hard enough. We aren’t sacrificing enough of our bodies to get there. Wherever the hell there is.

So those with the fortitude to chase that elusive high continue on, treadmill setting after treadmill setting, elliptical session after elliptical session, cross-training their brains out mile after mile, all in search of that oh so elusive high.

But one still has to wonder, do they ever truly find the buzz at the end of the runbow? Or is it merely that just about to pass out from a lack of oxygen to the brain feeling that they’re experiencing? Is THAT the feeling they’re addicted to after all.

Just like all the cool kids in school did their best to convince everybody else that they had it goin’ on. That they were livin’ the cool life when the rest of us weren’t. Oh yeah, all the Kings Of Kool were just oh so bitchen!

Telling us that they knew something special, that they had a secret of some sort, something only the cool kids knew and the dweebs (not that I was a dweeb, I just heard other dweebs talk about this stuff while us dweebs were hangin’ out in the Quad) were just too dumb too ever get it. No way would the dweebs ever be able to join the Kool Kids Klub. We just weren’t cool enough. Ok, movin’ on.

Well, as we all know now, most of those totally cool kids turned out to be the basement dwellers, glued to their Playstations or better yet, those 4′ 6″ guys that somehow squeezed through (can you say multiple shoe lifts and bone stretching anyone?) the Rent A Cop entrance exam and now they’re currently patrolling the Food Court at a Mall near you. Yeah, so much for bein’ cool.

Sometimes I wonder if these exercise addicts are basically doing the same thing by continually telling us non exercisers that there’s a pot of glee at the end of the exercise rainbow, just to insure that we don’t think of them as complete masochists.

Which to be honest, runners high or no runners high, you gotta be semi sadistic anyway to beat yourself to a pulp, fall out of bed the next morning, moobs aching and then go right back out there at O Dark Thirty and do it all over again. And again. Don’tcha?

Dang, I sure hope that’s the case anyway. I’d hate to think that I’ve never experienced any sort of joy whatsoever from ANY type of so called exercising merely because I didn’t give it my all, didn’t put forth the effort. Didn’t test my fortitude long enough to gain any benefit from it.

Dammit, I need a better excuse than exercise just plain sucks and there truly is no visible benefit to it because if that’s all I got to go on, I’ll never be off the hook. I’ll never be emotionally released from this lack of exercise guilt trip.

As it turns out, fewer and fewer people are buyin’ in to the old excuses of ‘I don’t have time to exercise’ or ‘It’s too expensive to workout’ or another all time goodie, ‘I don’t want to exercise because I already look so much better than all my friends and I don’t want to permanently crush them by looking even better’. Yeah, that last one’s a definite ego crusher. NOT!

Nope, nobody’s buyin’ what you’re sellin’. These days you can grab any one of an endless number of exercise DVD’s, a couple cans of veggies (instead of the official Jane Fonda workout weights), a giant rubberband, maybe even a Hula Hoop full of cement, head to your living room, pop in the dvd and get your work out on.

All in the safety, comfort and non embarrassing cocoon that is otherwise known as your living room. Dammit, that’s pretty much the end of the excuses then. At least the reasonably legit ones anyway.

And I don’t believe there’s anybody out there that can argue that some form of exercise isn’t in some way beneficial to every person on the planet. Sure, not all of us are cut out to run a 4 minute mile or even a 24 minute mile but we can at least walk around the block after dinner. Hey, it’s a start anyway.

Nobody said you have to be another Bruce Jenner. Thank God! Just a bit of something to get the blood flowin’, the heart pumpin’, the muscles movin’ and you never know what might happen. You just never know what kind of good could develop from a little bit of movin’ and groovin’.

Crazy as it sounds, you just might end up feeling better. Better about yourself, your health as well as your well being. And even crazier yet, you might actually enjoy it.

Oh hell, who am I kiddin’, you’re gonna hate it. But what’s it gonna hurt to give it a shot. After all, all the cool kids are doin’ it. Don’t you wanna be a cool kid too?

If you can relate to exercising or the lack thereof, I’d enjoy hearing about it in the box below and if you know of anyone who might enjoy this post I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with them. Thank you.

Tags: Attitude, Exercise, Focus, Goals, Life, Motivation, Never Give Up, Personal Growth, Writing