Temple Square

I find there is great confusion when it comes to people understanding the Mormon religion. I generally classify these types into 3 separate categories; the ones who don’t know anything about the church and when asked or given the opportunity to talk about the LDS religion, usually mention they know very little except for what they have heard or seen on TV, from a friend, newspaper, etc. Then there are the ones who think, or claim to be very knowledgeable about the Mormon religion. These are the quote; educated religion specialists who have maybe read a book, or read a magazine article encompassing more than 8 pages of information abridged to sum up the religion. So of course what ever they claim to know, (or think they know) about the religion should be held with the utmost respect and regarded as true and correct… “Snicker”. And then there are the members themselves. Whatever group you identify with, all must admit that the headquarters of the church, is gorgeous.

Have you ever visited temple square in downtown Salt Lake City?

It is a must if you are ever in the area. Utah in and of itself has a lot to offer for tourists. Zion’s national park can take weeks to see, lots of great national parks, spectacular sites, outdoor recreation, etc. I had never been there, until last week. I was blown away with the architecture, the landscape, and the beauty of its natural surroundings. So today, and maybe for a couple of posts, I am going to be posting some of my pictures, keep in mind these were taken with a DSLR camera, also something I may post about latter.

Weddings are quite common. We ran into 2

Here are some shots of the surrounding area and landscape of the Salt Lake Valley...

One of the most famous places in temple square is the Tabernacle.It also happens to be one of the most photographed places on the grounds as well, and is widely recognized for its peculiar design. The Tabernacle was built before acoustic technology existed, not to mention it was built by the settlers by hand, with almost no construction equipment, very little supplies, and money.The Tabernacle was completed in 1847, which is quite remarkable for several reasons.One example for this is Carnegie Hall, a very well known music hall in NY which was built almost 50 years latter, and even then still significantly lacked the same acoustic performance that the tabernacle possesses. One other thing to mention is that Carnegie Hall was heavily funded, and was built when better sound technology existed, along with better construction equipment. Though the famous hall in NYC is better known, it is shamed when brought before the Mormon Tabernacle when it comes to acoustics and design. It is hard to say why this acoustic gem is so underrated; however, it also proves that most things that NY has are over rated. :-0 And yes I did just happen to have a picture of Carnegie Hall in my portfolio, though it is not a very good one.

The Tabernacles simplistic design has baffled many... Every hour a church representative goes to the front of the hall, and with out any use of sound amplification, demonstrates the halls acoustic wonders. The representative drops pins, and tears paper, which can be heard very clearly on the opposite side of the hall.

One last thing to mention is the pipe organ. It is the largest Organ in the world, consisting of over 1100 pipes, that is almost 400 more than the organ that resides in the new conference center, I will do a separate post for that building.

Other treasures that can be found within the grounds of Temple Square are statues.

The temple grounds are surrounded with beautiful floral and arbor arrangement, even during the winter time a balance of nature can be found anywhere one looks.Even the trees without the leaves have a natural beauty to them,Fountains are found trough out the grounds, and make for a nice place to sit and reflect.

As you can see, there are many great places to stop and think. Anna can be seen below, reflecting on why the flowers behind her have not bloomed yet.Speaking of reflection, I forgot to mention that there are 2 visitor centers found on the grounds, unfortunately I only got one shot of these 2 structures, and I am in the shot... Well that is it for now, next will be the Church's confrence center and the JS Building.

Creatures of habit

Now I am not one to initiate a conversation about wired habits… I am not even one to mock those that have more of the extreme ones. Notice I say more of the extreme; I do this only because we all have them in some way or another, but that isn’t what I am writing about. I am digging more for the weird ones, and the ones that we all do subconsciously. Again, I know better than to throw rocks, especially since my house is not just made with glass, it is made with non tempered glass… the type of glass that shatters and explodes all over the place, the kind that can impale… remember ghost and the window scene… “Shiver”, yikes. I digress, on with the post.

How many of you out can remember a time when you felt inclined to do something, only because it was something you do every time you face that particular situation. For example, a good habit or tendency would be to buckle your seat belt every time you get in a car. This unfortunately is not one of my own. This is a great habit that just about everyone that rides or drives in a car does. I have noticed people buckle up, without thinking of course, even when the car is not going anywhere. Another good habit would be switching off a light when you leave a room. Now I know I said that I was not going to talk about the common habits, but bear with me here, I am illustrating a point. We all are, to a degree, “creatures of habit”. I feel we all have the tendency to do what we feel comfortable doing regardless if it makes logical sense or not. Take online banking, I still know some people today that still get their paycheck, in the form of a check. They take the check to the bank, wait in line, waste the gas, and then get a receipt… confirming their transaction. These people like to pay bills with checks, then they go and mail the payment, and they can only mail it in a certified post office mail box… you know the ones… they are blue with the flying eagle. Now this particular example is not one of my own, my stories come latter, I do however feel the need to balance my check book twice, I have money management software, and yet I still keep a physical check log in my check book, which rarely gets used.

These habits are everywhere, I see the smokers in the office building where I work go out at the same time everyday. I think humans find comfort and security in redundancy, knowing that they will do the same thing over and over again gives one a sense of comfort and control. The real trick here is maintaining a healthy balance between habit, and compulsion. Some people just don’t want to change, some people can’t, and others choose not to. As mentioned above, smokers go out at the same time everyday, not only is going out at the same time a habit, but the smoking is another form of addiction that brings the comfort described above.That is the compulsive state that I define as not being healthy, along with the action. One compulsion that seems to always fall under the wire as being unhealthy is overeating. This has become an epidemic in the USA. What I find interesting is that smoking, drinking, and drug abuse are looked at by the general population as disgusting and wrong. Smokers are considered outcasts and are treated as such, and yet overeating has been widely excepted and looked at as a horrible debilitating disease that can not be helped, it is an industry that receives millions of dollars in research to find a cure... I seem to find it just as bad as smoking. It is addictive, it is something that costs the Health Care Industry billions of dollars each year, it causes similar forms of diseases, and much like everyone’s point of view towards smoking, overeating also is a choice, and can be stopped if the desire is there. On a side note, I am aware that this problem has received a lot more attention over the past couple of years, but it is treated with compassion, unlike the other addictions mentioned above. I also want to note that I am not referring to the average human being who could stand to loose a few pounds, I am referring to the obese and morbidly obese. (I honestly hope that I have given enough disclaimers to avoid some hateful emails...oh well) Changing the way we do things is hard; we all fight it to a certain degree. No one likes change; there is no stability in it. Breaking the cycle can be the hardest thing we face in life sometimes, but proving we can do it, also has its rewards.

As I mentioned, I want to discuss the extremes when it comes to being a creature of habit. I, myself, have some habits of my own that… well lets just say could be viewed as a little eccentric. I don’t feel the need to lock the door every time I go outside, even if it is for a minute, but I do feel the need to vacuum the floor when I have had a lot of company over… even if it is 2 in the morning. Anytime there is a spot on the kitchen floor, I wipe it up, why? By doing this I feel like it will prevent me from having to mop it. Cleanliness is next to godliness that is what I keep telling myself. I will just come out with it, I am a neat freak. (This drove me nuts one night)

Borderline compulsive. I can not stand chaos, disarray, or un-organization. I don’t know what it is, but I feel much calmer in an orderly environment instead of dwelling in a space where everything is strewn out on the floor. This is just one of my own weaknesses, and though I know it can be seen as weird, I have learned to embrace and laugh about it.

One of my other habits is to go off on tangents when I write, have ya noticed? I am not sure if this post will have much clout, or even scope, but it does feel good to get it all out into the open… that and realize that I am not the only one who is crazy. For further information about the more extreme characterized habits, mainly the Obsessive Compulsive Behavioral type, click link. OCD

Al Gore's Easter

Happy Easter:
Is it just me, or Easter coming earlier and earlier… must be because of global warming. Get Good ‘ol’ Al to scissor up his construction lift and show us a graph that is the size of the hole in the ozone layer explaining why Easter is occurring earlier and earlier every year. Rise in temperature of .5 degrees has caused a shift in the global weather to make the Easter Bunny get up 5 days earlier every decade. In about 2 millenniums we are going to be celebrating Easter before Christmas. Ironically, Christ was born near Easter, so this might just figure itself out. If it was not for peeps, Easter would be spoiled, but thankfully they keep for about a decade… or two. What are peeps, certainly you have heard of them. Candy that comes in the shapes of chicks… the baby chicken kind, and are filled with marshmallow. I think peeps and Twinkies are in competition with each other to see who can last the longest. I predict after the nuclear holocaust comes, notice it is pronounced nuclear, not “nuke” clear, and yes it is coming people… don’t be naive. The only survivors will be Cockroaches that will survive on uneaten Twinkies and peeps.

Every left wing militant hippie will confirm this theory, just go ask one… I DARE YOU. Not only will you get an ear full of granola, disagree with them and they will run you over with their Subaru Wagon. I hate hippies, doggone whining full of contradictions, looking for evolutionary growth from living a life like a vagabond with their head in the biodegradable MTBE that ended up being more damaging than the previous additive to fuel… ARGGG. Why does it smell like sandal wood? Definition of a liberal, someone who is so open minded their brain fell out. Speaking of marshmallow goo, when did Al Gore eat Al gore? Seriously, you want to talk about waste, the man has gotten huge. He needs to go and do a few laps on the information supper highway… he “invented”. All the while, Easter is still coming early; I can not remember celebrating Easter and Saint Patties in the same week. Crazy eh?

Ok, I originally was going to start this post out friendly, nice and happy. And for some, maybe it has kept that tone, and for others, I might have just lost viewer ship. Anyway, Easter is a nice time to spend with family, remember the ones we love… and eat ham. Didn’t we just do this about 2 or 3 months ago? But this will be the first Easter in a long time where not only will I be able to spend it with the one I love, but I will not be alone and unhappy. Seriously, I looked back over the last 4 years, and every Easter I have been alone, or been miserable. So I am turning a new leaf. So again, happy Easter everyone and I will see ya’ll next week.

Traffic (not the movie that stunk)

So I am resolved to post everyday this week or at least everyday until I leave… which is Wednesday… so really there will only be 3 posts… never mind.

I sometimes fear the future, and it is not always for the same thing. I fear for my children, I fear for myself, and then sometimes I fear for a specific reason. Today, it is traffic. I just spent the last 1.5 hours in traffic, in what normally takes me about 45 minutes to get to work. And what is more maddening, was that it was at the Richmond Bridge, the last leg of my commute... which should take 7 minutes max!

So why do I fear traffic, it is not so much that I would ever act out or suffer from road rage; though I think I might have brushed with a couple of people today who had it. No, I fear how much worse it is going to get, especially in my life time. I have never seen it get better, from the time I started driving until now, and it has never gotten any better. What has happened since I started driving…the tolls on the bridges have gone from $1 to $4. Gas has gone from $1.50 to $3.75, car insurance, ironically has also risen, and yes I have seen no improvement in the traffic. Any improvements that Cal-trans makes, are at least 10 years over due, and all it does it put a band aid on the problem. It seems when ever a plan for road and traffic congestion improvement goes into effect, it is obsolete by the time it goes through the bureaucracy that all planning and construction has to go through in California. Once the 1000's permits are acquired, all animals and species that stands to be effected by the improvements are relocated into a new habitat (note, they also have to not be in their matting season), and the environmentalists are appeased by some extreme measure that will only counter act any good effects that the project will bring in the first place; then the project can move forward. I hate hippies. (Do not even get me started on the salamander protection that delayed the Bart expansion to SFO, which cost us 500 million and delayed the project by almost a year.) So after making it over all these hurdles, lining the unions and agencies with green so that the project can move forward, hiring the required number of minority business and construction owners to meet the affirmative action requirement that supposedly doesn’t exist… you end up with a project that no longer will effectively fix the problem, it is 10 + more years too late.

This fear is for the future of traffic, it can not get any better, only worse. The population is exploding, it is too expensive to make major improvements effectively and at a justifiable cost, see comments above. But it more than just that, as I looked at what caused the problem today, which ironically was road construction, I have decided that the days of traffic are only going to get worse. It used to be that an accident or some small incursion on the highway during commute time would cause a small disruption, maybe a small back up and delay. Now, if there is someone getting a ticket, it can cause a 45 minute back up. Why is this? Simple, more cars on the road; all moving at high speed, one person hitting their brakes causes more of a disruption to the people following behind. The cars are closer together, all trying to get to the same place, meanwhile the amount of road has not improved so compacting more cars into the same amount of space that was there 20 years ago, leaves little margin for error. One small screw up can create more havoc than ever before. And then there is road rage... (Try and remain calm with this soothing picture of a leisure drive through the Bay Area at dusk.)

Just a quick note, I was the victim of road rage today. In the process of trying to merge onto the bridge I found myself getting in front of a car that believed I shouldn’t. He laid into his horn for the entire length of the traffic light, almost 2 minutes, I timed him. What makes this story great??? While he was doing this, I rolled down my window, grinned… all the while having my earphones in so it looked like I could not hear him, or barely hear him. I love pissing off already pissed of people. It is funny to see them get more enraged.

Chill'n in Chico

I must admit, I am not all that geographically savvy. Too often I overhear people talk about small towns in Northern California that I have never heard of, but instead of looking it up, or expanding my knowledge of the diverse communities we have here in Cali… I just brush it off and forget about it. Chico, for instance, was one of those college towns I had heard about while I was in high school. Party school! That was the first thing that came to mind when Anna mentioned she lived there and was getting her masters. After spending some time there myself, I was hoping to discover that the rumors were overly exaggerated. To my dismay, unfortunately, the stories and rumors ended up being an understatement of the truth. It is quite an interesting town, but that is not to say it doesn’t have some good qualities as well. There are a lot of tress, and if the haze does clear out of the valley, it can be sometimes beautiful. All you have to do is look past the drunken college kid puking in the bushes.

Anna is in one of the masters programs, and she by no means could be classified as meeting the normal expectations of a grad student... in Chico or otherwise. Not only is she a good student, but she has also taken on more responsibilities outside of what the curriculum requires of her. One responsibility is to design a website for the community to go to give feed back and check the status of a community project her class is involved in. This not only required more of her time than what the curriculum accounted for, but it also required her to learn new software. She took to Dreamweaver like a fish to water… what a girl. Anyway, I am once again off topic. Anna’s curriculum consists of a wide variety of classes this year; she is in an orientation class, and is also taking a yoga class. Keep in mind that she also has a full load of required classes for her masters program. She plans on finishing up by the fall, so obviously there is no screwing around here. She also works as a T/A… maybe this article should have been about her. Anyway, she is taking a class that as part of the curriculum; it requires the students to go on multiple field trips around the campus and around the town. It was this “trip around town”, that exposed me to the wonders in the outskirts of Chico. These field trips normally reflect the dynamic geological differences between the valley and the mountains that make upon the landscape of the city. (See above)

First off, this was no small jaunt around the town; the requirements for these field trips are quite lengthy, almost intolerable.

(This is Anna's Teacher... this shot was not intentional...

However it came out kind of cool. You are actually looking

at him directly on, not his shadow, neat lighting eh?)

I honestly wondered how a teacher expected an entire class to fulfill the obligations, 4 field trips are mandatory to pass the class. Most of the kids where still waking up and it was almost noon. The shot below is one of the stops in the mountains... hence the snow. So far I have only been on one of these. This particular trip that I went on ended up being almost 160 miles. Keep in mind; it is a 170 miles from Chico to where I live in Concord. Also bear in mind that the trip takes me about 2.25 hours… going very fast, which you could not do on this particular field trip... or anytime I guess. Needless to say, the day was shot completing this requirement. The day was not wasted, by no means. There were a lot of things to see, and a lot of scenery to be viewed.What I didn’t realize was how close the mountains were to Chico, it actually is surrounded on both sides. What surprised me the most was, there be snow in “dem dar hills”.Once we got above the smog level, the scenery and view becomes very beautiful. I never would have guessed that Chico had a softer side, a side of beauty… now that I think about it; I don’t think Chico encompasses the hills, but you get my point.

(This shot is reflects the valley facing East, Chico in directly in front of you)

Chico does have its "rustic" charm as well, and I was not all that surprised to find remnants of it through out my journey. (Note, all cities have there problems with pollution, and guns.)

(This is a road sign in the remote hills of the valley,

note the bullet hole blown through the metal sign in the picture above.)

("Man is in the forest Bambie")

Overall, Chico is not so bad, it is in the middle of now where, and if you need to get to an airport, you’re driving for 2 hours to Sac. The town is growing; it has all the luxuries of home, plenty of fast food, lots of malls, and it’s very own Movie Theater. It does have an Olive Garden… Very

Nice! Though I might be exposing my pallets lack of culinary refinement, I love this place, and sadly the closet one to me is 45 minutes. Here that Olive Garden, do some demographic research and plant one back in the East Bay… preferably Concord. The town also has its unique color, and I mean this in a good way, there is defiantly something there that can not be found in the bay area. A slower, more quite way of living. The affordable housing is also a plus. Lots of nice people, Anna’s ward is full of great people, and everyone I meet seems to feel the same about Chico, they love it! All in all, I would have to say that it might not be a vacation destination, but it does have a local charm all its own.On the other hand, I might not be a non biased person to judge it anymore; it is where Anna lives so of course it holds a special place in my heart. Not to mention she threatened me if I spoke ill about it.
Cheers Chico.

Why'd ya have to go make things so complicated!

I have to say, we as humans make our lives more complicated than it has to be. I have often thought about this, and today I feel the need to explore this theory, or thought process and see where it takes me. In general, life has become more complex, each generation deals with a higher level of complexity than the last. The generation gaps are increasing at an exponential rate. As technology improves, and therefore becomes more complex, so do our lives. Looking back at my own parents, they never had any concerns regarding the speed of their computer, or the speed of their wireless network, or even their phone. Back then, the only thing a male wanted that involved speed, was a car. This is still true today, except we now have tacked on additional devices and status symbols that need to be the latest and greatest if you are going to be anyone in a world full of every-ones and no ones. Which brings me to another point, in a world with an ever increasing population, it is becoming harder and harder to stand out in a crowd… to be unique. Isn’t that what we all are striving for, uniqueness. Look at the automobile industry for instance; there just simply are not enough makes and models out there to keep the adolescent searcher of uniqueness satisfied. The individual takes a perfectly good car, (one that the auto manufacture has spent millions of dollars fine tuning and researching the design to be reliable), and then he or she tears it apart so that it will be unique, one of a kind, one that shouts… “I am not like everyone else”. Unfortunately, taste and style is not uniform, and there is no law that says tacky is illegal. This type of behavior screams, “I am trying to find my own voice”. In a world full of multiple media outlets that tell us what we are to look like, how we are live, and what is “normal”; it is becoming harder and harder to understand and know what is right, and what is true. I foresee this becoming a greater problem as the population grows.

Life, in general, is more complicated. I seem to spend more time fixing life’s amenities that are suppose to make our world easier, and less time enjoying them. These luxuries of life are very temperamental, and if you know me, you probably are guessing that I am referring to my job. Not so, I am referring to my own personal equipment that always seems to break. I can spend on an average day, 30 minutes to an hour fixing something that is not working properly. For example, last night, I finished my taxes and went to submit them using turbo tax. This is supposed to simplify my life mind you. Where do I begin, first the software itself. I wasted so much time trying to figure out which forms would be provided to me if I paid online or mailed a check myself, and then I find out that I need to pay an additional 34.95 for another state tax package, plus 19.95 for each filing, not to mention 75 for the software itself… is life easier? Or even a better question would be, is it worth the added cost for the supposed peace and ease it is suppose to bring? After fighting with my printer that would not sync up correctly over my wireless network, which seems to always fail when I need it the most, I crashed my blue tooth keyboard and mouse which required a forced reboot… why you ask? Kind of an interesting scenario to face, one I never really could have foreseen until last night, especially when I needed everything to work the most. To explain this better I need to go back in time. Picture this, new computer, and with it, the desire to use the latest and greatest technological gadgets available to go with it. To simplify my life and make things easier/cleaner, I bought a blue tooth mouse and keyboard. No wire, lots of features, the doggone thing even tells me what the temperature in my room is. So… out with the old, in with the new. I dumped my archaic keyboard and mouse; which had, if you can believe it, wires!

So, back to my story, after fighting with my wireless network for an hour, I finally got the printer to work. I then proceeded to go and print out the tax forms, which I was still uncertain about. While I am doing this, I also begin to electronically submit my taxes. So when it comes to the final save and print, a function that basically requires me to click yes once and all would be saved; something happened, my mouse and keyboard stop responding. After doing a couple of diagnoses hard ware tricks, I find out that the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard are no longer connected to my pc, why…only the pc god knows why. So here I am, ready to finally proceed and finish my taxes that took more time than it would have if I’d have done my taxes by hand. And why didn’t I just give up and do so; once you are in this deep, there is no turning back, not to mention I was in the hole 150 bucks with tax software… There was no way I was going to give up now. After unplugging and re-plugging, trying to reconnect and synchronize the devices, all of which proved fruitless; I finally decide it is time for the fix all cure for everything, a reboot… But wait, there are 2 programs open windows tells me, one of which is, you guessed it, Turbo Tax! Of course it needs to be saved. “Before shutting down windows, please click ok to save progress in Turbo Tax”, windows tells me. Do you know how painful that is, to see hours of work hinge on such a simple task as clicking the mouse… ONCE, meanwhile in the back of my mind, I know that the only way to fix the problem requires a reboot, which will cause me to loose everything I had done. To be so completely helpless, and not be able to do anything about it! It was almost like not having any arms. So I think, wait, just plug in your old mouse or keyboard… oh yeah, you dumped those “useless devices”… smart!

Are you following me thus far? Needless to say, all these devices that are suppose to simplify my life, made things very complicated for me at 12:30 last night.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, why is it a natural tendency for humans to overly complicate their lives… I know I am not the only one out there that faces this. Life can not go on now if we don’t have access to our email 24/7, and email didn’t exist 14 years ago. This is something that is so new, that there are generations that don’t even know what it is, and yet it is life threatening for others of the younger generations. Email was created as a means to simplify our lives, but all it has done is create another leash and hassle that encompasses more of our time. It used to be if you didn’t answer your phone, you were not at home. Not a big deal, then came the answering machine, again you still could ignore the call, except now you are required to call the person back, why? Because they left a message. This was the proverbial foot in the door. Then came the cell phones, no longer could you ignore calls, it was expected that you would have your phone on you, so if you did ignore the call, you were not the only one who knew it.

This is the leash I refer to. Pagers’ were the slippery slope, almost like the answering machine of house lines. All they did was require a return call, when it was possible or convenient. Cell phones are probably the most handiest and intrusive technology today. They are life savers when you need them, and they create stress when you don’t. You are always reachable… always. This leaves little space for privacy. I tend to laugh at the person that always has the quick answer to this problem, “well you could always turn off your phone”. Obviously they use their phone for emergencies and the occasional discussion when they find it convenient, otherwise they never use it. In the real world, such an act would cause massive hysteria, for example. If you wanted to leave it at home for a week, people would call the police thinking you are dead. Don’t answer your phone for a couple of days, and friends and family members get livid. The only way you can get away with turning off your phone, is telling those that call you regularly that you are turning off your phone. When I have been on vacation, I have to change my voicemail, send out emails and create auto-responses, notify all family and friends… that way no one panics when I am unreachable for a week. Then again, everyone knows where you are… not that I need to hide mind you, it is the feeling one gets when they realize they have lost a certain level of privacy. I am guilty, I will admit it, I get my emails to my phone, do I truly need it, I think so. What did I do 5 years ago? Life has taken a turn towards the tech age, and if you are not onboard, you are left in the dust of the information supper highway. I still see the occasional resume come through where someone professes to be proficient with emailing… a skill they are very proud of. That right here shows a generation gap, and also illustrates a switch in the job sector. Knowing how to “email” is mandatory in the working world, not a skill that puts you above the rest of your competitors. Although it is illegal to ask someone for their DOB in an application, sometimes they show their age without ever telling it, especially when you read the skills they are proficient in. How can one truly be knowledgeable in internet browsing, I really wish I could have interviewed that one…

In conclusion, has life improved with all these new luxuries... sorta. As a final thought, I decided my remote control is the best example of this rant. As everyone who owns a tv/dvd/cable box knows, remote controls start piling on one another. You are constantly going from one to another to make all the equipment work, of course this all hinges on if you can remember which remote goes to which electronic device. So in order to, once again, "simplify" my life, I got a universal remote. Oh how simplified it was going to make my equipment...

As it turns out, getting this stupid thing to work properly was more work than switching between remotes. I just had to update the software and firmware the other night, I then had to reprogram the built in actions to fit a new configuration. After all was said and done, including the relearning curve I needed to go through due to the fact I had not used the "simple" programming software in months, it took about an hour and half... Is this really simpler? The thing constantly needs to be charged, and as often as it gets used, it hardly seems worth it. Has life gotten better than it was 20, 30, or even 40 years ago… with the exception of the 70’s era, I would say that question is subjective. I guess it all depends on how much one embraces the changes and the trends. We all need to change to a certain degree, to keep up; but that doesn’t mean we need to take our work home with us... I wait for the day when they create a switch in the back of our heads that allows us to truly “switch off”.

Gratitude

I have been noticing a behavioral pattern about myself that I don’t like, and I don’t think it is an isolated tendency proprietary to my own character. We as a people all tend to do this, and the more I discuss the topics with others, the more I believe that it is a natural human tendency. But enough with the cryptic verbiage, on with the topic.

It has almost been 3 months since Anna and I started dating each other. What I didn’t notice then, but am become more aware of now, is how happy I am. That is not to say that I didn’t know or feel happiness before, it is only now that I realize how much. The reason for this extreme state of euphoria should be obvious, and not for the obvious reasons. Yes I should be happy; I am engaged to a wonderful woman, the love of my life. That reason is justification enough for the state of bliss I am in. But there is more to it than that, looking deeper inside myself; I find that I adopted a laissez-faire approach about being happy. It was not that long ago when I was feeling unhappy, suffering, in pain… Back then I would have given anything to find happiness once again. Of course, we all know the outcome of wishing for that… When ever you want or desire something that badly, you never get it. It’s like we put out this negative energy that is so strong, it sabotages our efforts and the energy that we invest in an attempt to reach the goals we so desire. Back then, I would have given anything to achieve the bliss that I have now found; ironically, I didn’t find it until I gave up wanting it… and I do mean TRULY gave up wanting it. Now looking back in retrospect, I almost feel ungrateful and undeserving of what I have received… this happiness that I have found, and the peace that it has brought me. Why you ask? To answer this, I need to mention something about myself.

I believe in a balance, you need to give to receive, and when you receive you need to give. Giving can be classified under many different types of acts; ultimately the outcome is the same, the person shows and demonstrates gratitude for their life, and the situations that are making it happy. So how does this tie into my point of topic? Over the last couple of weeks I have been feeling apathetic, I feel as though I have shown no signs of gratitude, at least in the way I feel I need to; especially if I am to truly enjoy and experience the wonderful time I am going through. Sometimes I think that life has gotten to hectic to truly enjoy the things that make me happy, but that just seems like a cop out. When I am in pain, it encompasses my whole life, I am aware of it all the time. Now that I am blissful, I seem to not be aware of it nearly as often as I was when I was the polar opposite. Which brings me back to where I started, WHY? Are we, as humans, so callused that we can not feel joy, especially to the same degree at which we can feel pain? Are we so self absorbed that when things start to go right, we immediately expect them to continue on that way, always? I guarantee that as soon as the tables turn, we will once again become very aware of how much pain we are in and humbled by it. We curse our situation like it has always been this way since the beginning of our lives. Yet there is one thing we tend to forget… the good times… once again. I guess my point is this, why can’t we be aware of joy to the degree that we are aware of pain. This isn’t just me, it has happened all throughout history. The story is timeless; country is oppressed, country then comes to power, becomes empire, and then quickly forgot how they got there… you know the rest.

So where does this leave us? Ungrateful, self absorbed, arrogant people? Maybe, but I don’t think all are this way, or that there is no hope. I don’t believe that all humans are this way. I think some of this behavior stems from age and culture. We never take the time to appreciate what we have. I do believe that the older we get, the more we tend to appreciate the past, and appreciate what we had. This in turn makes us appreciate the things we still have. So what can I do, how can I implement a change in this behavior. Just to recap, I have spoken to a lot of individuals who feel the same way I do; they don’t appreciate the good times they have, just lament the ones they had, or curse their life during it’s time of trial. For whatever reason they feel the need to do this, and for whatever means they go about expressing it, is irrelevant. There is one things that connects us all, and that is the desire to recognize the good, that way we should not feel so self absorbed or guilty when the bad comes.

The change has to come from me, switching my mental attitude. Appreciating the good times does not require much, it basically is achieved by not taking those times for granted, especially while we are experiencing them. What does that mean for me, well for one, I need to take more time to stop and smell the metaphoric roses… which would basically be my relationship with Anna. Time is passing by quickly; already we are less than 3 months away from being married. So often we only pay attention to the finish line, or the prize if you will. I seem to only be looking forward to that instance, not appreciating this time that we are in. Wanting the days to pass by quickly may not be the best thing. Time passes by fast enough, not appreciating the scenery before the finish line is tragic. There is magic to be found in all shapes and walks of life, and the engagement period is just as magical as the wedding itself. I need to appreciate Anna more, appreciate the person she is now, and the person she is becoming. Right now she is my fiancée; she only gets to be that once, and for a very short period of time. She will be my wife soon, and that lasts a lot longer… hopefully. :-) Although this might sound good on paper, implementing this plan is a whole other challenge. It is going to take some conscious effort on my part, at least for a little while. Hopefully it will eventually become routine enough where it is like an involuntary reaction. I think we all could stand to appreciate the good things more, smile every once in while, realize that life can be, and is good. I am happy, dog gone it, smile, and act the part. Life doesn’t have to be tragic or depressing to be interesting. Sometimes stories with cheesy happy endings and beginnings are also entertaining.

My Indy picks for the next 20 years

If I were to buy stock in just a type of industry, I would buy 3. First and most important, the retirement home industry. This is an industry that is here to stay, as the baby boomers hit the retirement phase, and then the tapioca phase; we are going to see the need for rest homes explode. We as humans are living longer, though that is not to stay that our quality of life has also increased during this new found period of life. Ironically the whole aging process is a mirror image of when we are born. We are born bald, needing to wear a diaper, eating mashed up food, unable to comprehend the world around us, unable to communicate verbally with true coherency, no teeth, we can not walk, and as we get older we shrink back and start to crawl again... funny how the life repeats itself. When I reach this phase, I probably will not think it is that funny, if I am thinking at all. I am going to teach my children how to deal with me when I reach that point in my life. While they are young and impressionable, I will tell them that when I become a burden, they are to take me out into a field and shoot me. In all honesty it is sad, sad to see the deterioration of someone we love; they are never the person we remember. Back to the hearing aide brigade hospice. Already, I am seeing more and more of these places pop up, and in the weirdest places. It used to be that rest home communities were nestled in backwoods areas, off the radar from the hustles and bustle of the cities, no more. Land and space is a premium. I saw one being built in Richmond and not in a very favorable place… if there is such a place in Richmond. On my way to work, I now pass, from what I can see from the road, 8 retirement homes, 3 of which were built in the last year and half.
Take a dip in the pool, Man I wouldn't mind living here.
... A movie theater... I really want to live here.
I'm not so big on dancing, I wonder what their attendance is like...
Yeah, I'm sure this gets used a lot...

All around, it looks like a nice place, I checked on their map, and they have over 50 of these places just in Northern California... with plans to build a lot more. I also checked to see how many homes there were in Concord alone... I was surprised to see there are 6 on the main road I drive down just tom get to the freeway... who knew? That changes my theory above, I guess now I pass 15 homes on my way to work, that I am at least aware of.

Second, I would buy stock in the private school sector. The public school system is broken, and almost at the point of no return. The bureaucracy has gotten way to out of control, it is becoming impossible now-a-days to do anything without running the risk of upsetting some militant special interest group, or in similar terms, not getting sued. Public schools have so many hoops to jump through just to function. English as a second language, no child left behind, demographic merging, affirmative action, and don’t even get me started on the Admin staff that is way over paid, and the teachers who are not. How do you know if you have a bad teacher, ask them why they do it and if they say “for the money”, that is your answer. You have an institution with a broken staff, all of the “bad teachers” can not be touched, and it is impossible for good teachers to operate or survive. “Free thinking” teachers have to abide by all the rules of the machine that is the public education system, the teachers who are in it for the money, have no problem abiding by this set curriculum and protocol, because they could care less, they operate under the theory of, “why fix it if it is not broken”? The problem is it has gotten so far out of hand that a lot choose not to see it. This is a completely different topic, one that I will save for another day.

Last, aftermarket industry, if this really is an industry. Companies that provide add-ons to already built products. These aftermarket products make the user more unique. The aftermarket industry, in regards to automobiles, has exploded. And more and more, I am noticing this trend to be spreading to more than just cars. Cell phones, clothes, computers, hair, tattoos. Just an off topic mention, did you know that there are more people with tattoos than people without? What used to be a unique and defining event, one that made someone a rebel, can now be compared to the proverbial following the heard like a sheep. You are more unique if you do not have a tattoo, I find it quite ironic that the tables have turned. Now if you want to be unique, someone who does not follow what the crowd does, you don’t get a tattoo. Who knew? Statistically about 66 percent of the population has a tattoo. Anyway, this is the final industry I believe is going to take a strong foot hold in our ever changing economy. One company that comes to mind that has been very successful following this trend is Toyota. I know what you are thinking… how many hybrids do I pass on a daily basis? I am, however, not referring to the Toyota line, but the Scion line. Yes Toyota owns Scion. Scion came out about 6 or 7 years ago, and they have been very popular with my generation, Gen X, the seekers of the latest and greatest thing. What made Scion so popular was their forward thinking when it came to design. Ford has never left their original business principal that has gotten them into trouble numerous times. The famous quote, “we have a wide variety of Model T’s to choose from, as long as you like black”. Scion was started under the principal that the base car design would remain constant, but he purchaser could purchase, “add-ons”. I am not referring to A/C or floor mats here, these things are options with some manufactures, can you guess who? Scion allowed the purchaser to design their car online, add the equipment they wanted, and never have to negotiate with the dealership. BRILLIANT!
(I know it might seem like I am selling the Scion, but I am not. I am only impressed by their business model... not very fond of the car.)

With hundreds of different combinations available on one model, someone who wanted to purchase a unique car could, in theory, design a unique car all there own. One that would allow them to express his or her own unique personality, one that would define them as a unique and different person.