Posts tagged with “ideology”

Life Achievements

So today I was thinking about a video that I’m making for the father-in-law of a friend of mine. He’s being honored with a lifetime achievement award, which got me thinking: what exactly quantifies a person’s achievements in life? What would make me happy to walk away from life having accomplished?

What I came up with was kind of a multi-part response. I think first off, everything you’ve done in life can be divided into four classifications:

1. Class 1: Unimportant - Something that you’ve done that is inconsequential to the betterment of the human race. An achievement that doesn’t affect others.
2. Class 2: Noteworthy - An action, role, or status that you’ve invested yourself towards, though has no lasting effect on the other people involved. i.e.: Your position could be filled by a replacement with little difficulty.
3. Class 3: Important - Once-in-a-lifetime opportunities and roles that define you as a person. Your position could not easily be filled by a replacement and you have permanently left your mark on the role.
4. Class 4: Critical - Something that others dependent on. Your position could not be replaced, the well-being of others rests solely in your hands. Your absence would be deeply unsettling for others.

Class 1 items on my scale are the small things: you helped someone out in math class, you made honor roll, you learned to ride a bike. Stuff that nobody else really cares about but means a lot to you. It might be important to you, but it doesn’t define you in any larger sense. These achievements are sought by the vain and the petty.

Class 2 achievements are more substantial. Perhaps you had a job where you pushed papers. Surely your role helped to improve the quality of life for others—you’ve helped to better the company as a whole. You haven’t really done anything ground-breaking in a class 2 achievement, though.

I would imagine that a lot of people consider class 2 achievements to be “a big deal,” and they would be partially right: to go through life without experiencing the “small stuff” effectively results in one missing a lot of what life has to offer. Perhaps it’s something as simple as getting a promotion, placing well in a sports event, or helping a friend through some hard times. You’re doing something at least a little worthwhile and that’s something to be proud of.

On the flip side, these aren’t important enough to land you in any history books. In fact, chances are, they aren’t even likely to land you in any written records whatsoever. Think of these things as the tiny, metaphorical finish-line tapes that you run through. They don’t mean much in the end, but they’re not much more than symbolism.

Class 3 achievements are rare—the average person only achieves a handful of these throughout their life, if any. These are the big ones: working your way to the top of your company or organization, becoming a leader in your community or region, making a significant contribution to a worthy cause. These are the things that define a person’s character in the biggest ways. Your name might not be a household word, but you won’t be forgotten easily.

The last class of achievements is class 4. A class 4 achievement might just be the easiest (or most difficult) to attain: start a family. What’s more sacred than your genealogy? To start a lineage, to have dependents and raise them right is fundamental to our nature as humans. On the flip-side, though, if you raise your children badly, then it isn’t much of an achievement, is it? Anybody can pop out a kid, but it takes a dedicated and sensible person to teach them how to function in today’s world.

In the interest of being brief, I’ll close up with this: as it stands, I feel like I’ve got plenty of class 1 and 2 achievements, and who doesn’t? Anybody that’s done something with their life (up to the age of 20) should have a few under their belt. I don’t know if I’ve done anything 3 or 4-worthy. A lot of that is stuff that comes later in life, I would think. Obviously having a child is something that anyone that’s gone through puberty can do, but doing it responsibly is another story. I’ll just have to wait and see how the rest of my life turns out to know for sure, I suppose.

Morning

Sometimes I get to work or school and I feel like some sort of conspiracy theorist on the edge of a breakthrough. Today I had one of those mornings.

About a week ago, my friend Brian Price moved back into town, and he’s staying only about ten minutes away. Nice! I spent my evening chilling with him and a friend: we made pasta with meat sauce (NOM).

Now I’m not saying that I was drinking, but I did have some wine. More than one glass in fact, but apparently not enough to get tipsy. Nothing. Didn’t even feel it. Maybe it’s my liver in turbo mode after drinking 96 fl. oz of water during the work day. I really don’t know. I was actually kind of disappointed, really. Even some of my friends get tipsy on wine at family gatherings, no less. Don’t really know what’s up with that.

This morning, however…

1. I made pancakes for Brian and I. I never make pancakes during the week. Ok, so this isn’t really part of the greater conspiracy, but I figured I’d throw it out there.
2. Somebody hung their hat on my gate and left it there.
3. The train this morning was unusually quiet.
4. At Van Ness station, a couple got on the train. I think it was a couple, anyway. The woman was kind of tranny-ish. They were both wearing sunglasses. In the subway. And were wearing long jackets. And their conversation involved them talking about “moving between zone three and zone four.” Secret agents? Not quite. Creepers? Definitely.
5. The train made weird noises as we approached my stop.
6. There was a MUNI supervisor overseeing the turnstyles to get out of the subway.
7. Two cops were entering the subway just as I was leaving.
8. As I was walking to work, one of the zero-emission MUNI buses got its contact poles all tangled up on the overhead lines.

It’s all so strange…

Quick Takes

So here’s what’s up for me. I think I should start calling these “gym takes” because more than half of them involve my experiences at the gym. Whatever.

• Today I went grocery shopping. At the store, they had Looza Banana Juice. I was immediately interested for a few reasons:

  1. Jay (my trainer at the gym) told me that I should be getting some simple sugars with my protein after a workout. I never knew this. For those of you that are unfamiliar with what simple sugars are, I’ll explain it to the best of my knowledge: a complex sugar breaks down slowly. Take bread, for instance. Bread and pasta are good examples of this: you get energy over a span of time. Simple sugars, on the other hand, get digested immediately and provide a quick burst of carbs directly to your bloodstream. These include candy (which also includes bad things, too), fruits, and juices.
  2. I like bananas
  3. How the hell do you juice a banana?

  So I bought it and plan to drink it over the course of the week. I also bought regular bananas, too, but I’m going to see what I can do to make the most of this stuff.

  The verdict so far: it’s cheap (like $3.00) and DELICIOUS. Exactly what I want in an absurd tropical fruit drink.

• There’s this little old woman that goes to my gym. I see her every Sunday, but I’ll assume that she goes to the gym more frequently than once a week (probably while I’m at work). Let me say this about her: I would not want to have cross her path twenty years ago. This old lady (at LEAST 70 or 75 years old) does a ridiculous leg press for her age, more assisted pullups than I could do when I started lifting, and even sometimes takes a crack at the bench press. Now granted, the weights she uses are very light, but her age/weight ratio puts her well above most of the general population. Bravo, sweet little old lady, bravo!
• On the way home from the gym, I saw someone (and I use the term “someone” as a safety measure) that was a black transvestite version of Wayne Newton. That is all I have to say about that.
• Today at the gym, I started a new squat routine. My ass is so sore. I can barely stand up. Honest to God, I’ve been planning on going running tonight, but that’s definitely out of the question for at least a few days. And in a few days, I’ll be doing more squats, so I probably won’t be running for a few weeks. Which puts me back at home. Nice job, squats. You’re a pain in the ass (pun intended).
• I’ve been meaning to write a post about BSA for a while now, but I haven’t mentally worded it quite right. I’ll post something the minute that I’ve got it fully figured out.
• Damn this banana juice is good.
• I was walking past a wine and cheese shop earlier in the week and I said to myself, “Damn, something around here smells like it’s been moldering in a basement for like ten years.” And then it hit me.
• I love how when you’re walking down the street and you see a dog tied up to a bike post, you can tell right away whether the dog is friendly or not. You’ve got some dogs that give you the sad eyes and look in the store like, “Why have I been tied up? I just want some lovin’.” And then you’ve got those other dogs that are like “PET ME NAO STRANGER.” And then there are those dogs that are chill and kind of half-sit/half-lay and stare off into space like, “Yeah, whatever. We do this every week or so. No biggie.”
• If I saw a magic beanstalk and climbed to the top, you can bet that I wouldn’t steal a chicken that lays golden eggs. There’s a lot of speculation that one could make about whether the eggs are solid gold, what the quality of the said gold is, etc. What biological processes cause the chicken to produce eggs composed of metallic substances? Does the chicken have the ability to conduct nuclear fission within it’s body? If so, are observers of the chicken exposed to radiation? That are many unanswered questions which would warrant great scientific exploration, though would also come at a very high cost. For now, I’ll consider cutting down the beanstalk and selling it for lumber.

Timing

Today around five o’clock, I left to go to Tommy’s Joynt, a San Francisco restaurant that happens to have been featured on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives (a show that I watched probably more than I should have during my freshman year). It took me quite a while to find exactly where I was going, and I spent quite a while deliberating over whether to bring my freshly-charged camera. While waiting for the train, somebody walked up behind me and stood just off in the periphery of my vision. Glancing over, it turned out that they were really hot; carrying a black messenger bag and wearing a light gray jacket. We both got on the next train, which was only about a minute wait. While I stayed on the train until Van Ness station, this individual got off at the next stop (Duboce and Noe). Basically that maneuver gets you to the opposite side of Buena Vista Park (a MASSIVE hill).

Thinking nothing more of it, I headed north on Van Ness to the restaurant and had pastrami on sourdough with coleslaw and a slice of cheesecake. The meal was extraordinarily filling—but delicious nonetheless.

After eating, I headed west over to Gough St. and went south. On my way, an older woman was struggling to move an old-fashioned grill out of the trunk of her car. I stopped to help her move it (damn was it heavy). She was so happy that someone helped her! It really wasn’t a big deal, it’s not like I was going anywhere anyway.

I kept on going south, dodging over a street here and there, eventually drifting down Church St. and taking a break in Dolores Park. The sun had just started setting, but the fog had also started rolling in. I left when a band of teenagers pulled in on a J train. They were up to no good.

After I left Dolores, I kind of wandered around, eventually finding my way to the Castro Muni station. I took a train back up to Van Ness and then transferred over to an N train to head back home. It took ten minutes for a train to arrive, and I made my way into the first car.

As the train made its way out of the station, I was able to see out the driver’s window (he didn’t have the shade pulled down) and I was awed by the vastness of the labyrinth that is Muni’s underground. The train eventually pulled back onto the street, bringing my sense of wonder to an end.

Two stops later, we arrived back at the entrance to the Buena Vista tunnel. As the train’s doors opened at the East Portal, who steps on but…yes! It was the person from earlier! The aforementioned individual was now holding a paperback book stuffed with little slips of paper. I stood across the aisle from them, and we both got off the train at my stop.

It blows my mind how the timing here was so perfect. I can only imagine that with all my meandering around the city, I could have been held up by any number of things…a traffic light, a homeless person, a fire truck; hell, if those teenagers hadn’t showed up, I might still be at Dolores Park! In short, the odds were astronomically compounded; I find it amazing that two people could be so geographically in sync.

Even for us to be on the same departing train is nothing short of impressive: trains leave every five minutes or so from the the West Portal and I could have just as easily forgotten something and have needed to go back. I don’t think it takes any more convincing than this to prove that everything happens for a reason.

Conservative

I think today was the first time that I’ve ever considered myself a conservative in my entire life. Politically speaking, no, I do not consider myself conservative. The political conservatives have had their chance in my mind and their beliefs are hateful and discriminatory. Rather, I’m referring to social conservativism. On innumerable separate occasions (today alone), I have passed folks on the street and been simply amazed at what I’ve overheard. Not that I’m creeping, but the three to five words that I pick up have been absolutely outrageous.

Now what does the conservative think is outrageous (and by “the conservative,” I’m referring to myself)? Well, I’m not going to repeat the things that I’ve heard for the sake of decency, but the vast majority of the conversations that I’ve picked up on are intensely sexual, by both gays and straights alike. Maybe it’s my Pennsylvanian upbringing, but I think that there is a line that needs to be drawn somewhere about what should and should not be talked about while walking down the street, and sex and its many forms is definitely outside the Venn diagram.

Something else that I’m simply amazed at is the number of people that are either hopped up on something or are baked out of their minds—and are comfortable with it to such a degree that they carry on conversations regarding it within earshot of people that could potentially do something about it. Though I suppose your judgement is fairly impaired when you’re tripping on acid, I still wouldn’t get on the Muni and brag to all of your friends about how much you managed to do in the last 24 hours.

Maybe I’m just a douche bag or I’m just not in the San Francisco mindset, but there’s a certain level of decency that one maintains…not for your own sake, but for that of others. Considering that I’m apparently one of the few people that this bothers to a great degree, I’m going to go ahead and keep saying that I’m a social conservative. Maybe I’m just not enough of a forward-thinker.