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The best thing about being a pessimist...

...is that you can always think of a worse situation.

Aut-Six

WHOA! What a year this is going to be? We have milestone years in our life, but this one will perhaps be the most significant for me. Things to do this year:

1. Turn Thirty.
2. Graduate from Law School.
3. Take (and pass) the bar.
4. Have another baby (not me personally, of course).
5. Begin my professional career.

Here I sit January 1 at a Starbucks thinking about all of this--kind of surreal.

Happy New Year.

Black Friday and Bed-head

While the world gently rested, a chaotic storm was brewing. The commercial captains were still tallying their less-than-Wall-Street's predicted sales, and in that crimson balance the goal of profitability loomed large. Black Friday came and the soldiers camped out all night for a crack at the best deal. Armed with pulp advertisement, the troubadours of trade waged war against the marketing moguls capitalizing on every early bird and doorbuster special.

Fat on turkey and Ms. Shuman's dinner rolls, I sat back in a recliner with an eight pound lap full of advertisements and vowed to form my own merry militia. I twice made my list and checked it as many times. With googlemaps as my navigator, I too was going to save a buck or two. Shortly after 5:00 am my wife and I fought off sleep and the cold brisk wind to join the ranks of retail rangers. K-mart had a line 150 deep waiting for the doors to open.

We ventured to Wal-Mart. Armed with our “key-item” lists, and we tried to make our mark. Line by line we crossed items off our list like pro’s. Then Target. Then Kohl’s. Six, seven, eight, nine o’clock passed and finally we made it to the mall, but despite our best intentions we were just no match for the true treasure troopers. With checkout lines criss-crossing shopping aisles and buggies bumper to bumper, we had enough.

With a jeep full of the best discounts in town, we made our way home and crashed from exhaustion. The Christmas spirit, I now know, smells like sweat, hot cocoa, and bed-head.

Halloween

Here they were before trampling through the neighborhood extorting the neighbors. How cute...

Pedestrians Beware!

On the way home tonight we hit a pedestrian, and it got me to thinking—we have constructed the most pedestrian unfriendly cities. We design cities without one thought of pedestrian traffic. In the most distant places, hours away from civilization, we construct subdivisions, so that we can walk 12 feet from front door to automobile and then 12 feet from automobile to the office.

I have never known how to be a pedestrian. The world that I have always known includes hours of commuting on roads where pedestrians are aliens. I am lost in a sea of automobiles. If I were forced to travel my normal routes without the assistance of my vehicle, I would be forced to travel on routes where I am not welcome (i.e. the federal highway system). The nearest public transportation could be in another state for all that I know.

What would our world look like without all these roads?

Eat, Drink, and be Merry

Pat Robertson doesn't have to tell you that the world is a seemingly scary place to live right now. Natural disasters, Wars, and Terrorism are all around. Now, the threat of a pandemic is evolving into a perfect storm with the spread of the bird flu through the East. To all of this doom and gloom I say, "Eat, Drink, and be Merry!"

This saying connotes, strong middle ages usage. In that time there was little predictability to health and mortality. But somehow in our modern world we feel that we can predict our lives. We plan our lives out for 5, 10, 25, 50 years into the future, but we have no guarantees. The one guarantee that we do have is that you are reading this right now. Talk about carpe diem. You may finish reading this post and be wiped off the face of the earth, which figures poorly in to your life's plan. So, my advice is: make sure you have a good life insurance policy, a well drafted will, take seriously the serious things in life (family, friends, and beer), and Eat, Drink, and be Merry!