My thoughts on “gay”

Society in general abhors abnormality or so we are led to believe.The LGBT community is out of the ordinary so we should hate them right? Well what about celebrities, people whose lives we celebrate. Their lives are abnormal. Why don’t we hate all of them?

 

I am a heterosexual male. Many of my friends are either gay or bisexual. In my local group my preferences are abnormal. Should my friends tear me down for my choices? They are open and loving and accepting of my way of being just as I am of theirs. Having different sexual preference just means that we are not compatible sexual partners. We can still be good people and good friends.

 

My point of view, I realize is very liberal. As long as you aren’t trying to enforce your way of being onto me and saying that I have to be just like you, I really don’t care what you do behind closed doors. And I don’t think anyone else should either. It’s not like homosexuals are going to out breed the heterosexuals. So what’s the problem?

 Click here to read on

The truth behind the excuse pt2

The truth is you always have a choice.You have a choice or even multiple choices, in every single circumstance. If a man holds you up at gunpoint and gives you the option of losing your gp or your hp(gamer humor), he isn’t forcing you to give him your money. You are free to ignore him, his threat and his gun. If you do, you stand a very good chance of getting shot. Perhaps you could struggle with him, get the gun and shoot him instead, chase him off or tell him to give up his money.

 

Most people, being intimidated by the person wielding the gun, choose to give the thief their money. They do not want to deal with the potential consequences of defying the person with the gun. It is easier to lie to themselves and everyone else and say that they were forced to give up their money.

 

Back to the examples above. You did forget to take the trash out. But it was only because you didn’t want to do it in the first place. It was not important to you. Regarding the audition, you kept the agreement because you didn’t want to anger your spouse or disappoint your child. Plus if you hadn’t kept it, it would be your fault if your kid didn’t make it into that prestigious school. Unlike the first example, there were real consequences here.

 

Yup, all these things are true but still don’t answer the question of why we make the choices that we do. The proceeding paragraphs do. Click here to read on and find out for yourself.

Why should you do the right thing?

Life is full of choices. Everyday we are constantly bombarded from every angle with different options of what to do in literally hundreds of different circumstances. There’s all these different things that we could do, what we might do, what we should or shouldn’t do. It is often hard to make the right choice.

 

As adults we know the difference between right and wrong. And eventually, in most cases, we sift through the vast ream of  possibility and come up with the right choice. It isn’t always easy though to make ourselves do the right thing. It shouldn’t matter though, right is right, right? Not exactly. Motivation matters also. Don’t believe me? Let’s see what I can do about that.

 

There used to be a person living here that very strongly wanted to do what was right. And if that’s all that mattered things would have been just peachy. Unfortunately, she had a habit of badgering other people into admitting that she did the right thing. She wanted others to pat her on the back or give her a cookie, figuratively speaking of course. She needed to be seen doing the right thing. For her it was all about recognition and the reward for doing good. More time and energy got spent on making sure other people recognized whatever good deed got done than went into doing the thing in the first place. And it quite often overshadowed and cheapened the whole thing. It felt like she was trying to buy karma.

 

If recognition isn’t the reason you should do what is right, what is? Click here to read on and see.

Are you a grown up?

What is an adult? To many different people the question could be answered many different ways. As I am sure you will see, my definition is pretty strict and excludes a lot of people.

 

According to dictionary.com an adult is a person who “is fully grown or developed or of age”.  Saying that a person who is any one of these three things is an adult does not seem right to me. I believe that you must have all three of these things in order to be an adult.

 

I look at the term fully grown and I think physical development. Developed makes me think of mental development. And age as a metric seems to be a generalized yardstick saying by x point in life a person should have had y number of experiences. Now how about some examples that show why I think you need all three of these traits in order to be considered an adult.

 

To start with, look at the character played by Tom Hanks in the movie Big. In the beginning he is a child. Something happens and one day he wakes up in the body of a fully grown male of the human race. At first this seems awesome because it lets him have access to many parts of life that a child is not allowed to take part in.

Is he an adult? What about Doogie Hauser? Click here to read on.

Responsibility. What is it?pt2

So the last post was an example of how differently two people can react to the same circumstances.

 

The victim has no control. He has no idea what is out there or what is coming at him next. all he can do is react. So that’s all he does and usually he reacts badly. He knows and really does believe that the world is out to get him. But this really is a ridiculous concept. Imagine the level of conceit that it takes, the massive belief in your own self importance that one must have, in order to believe that everyone else cares enough about you and what you think for them to spend that much time and energy trying to ruin your life. In all honesty strangers generally just don’t care enough to even notice you exist much less to put forth any amount of concerted effort to bring you up or down. It just does not happen.

 

The responsible person though knows that life happens according to a formula. Everything that he says does thinks or doesn’t say do or think sets something into motion. All of the things that happen are as a result of these actions or inactions. The responsible person knows that rain doesn’t happen to him. Rain just happens. The police officer didn’t wake up this morning and decide he was writing the responsible guy a ticket. The police officer didn’t even know this guy existed until he started speeding. The responsible guy knows that he is the source of the ticket. He has no reason to blame the officer. The officer is just doing his job. If you don’t speed, then you don’t get a ticket for speeding. If you don’t speed you don’t have to sit by the side of the road and wait for the officer to write you a ticket for the speeding that you did.

 

Click here for the rest of the article on responsibility

If you could, would you go back and make different choices?

When I was in second grade, my mom got her GED. I went with her and just because I had nothing better to do, I took the pretest while she was taking the real thing.  We both did very well and the person giving the test jokingly said I should come back next week and take the real test and get my GED and get an early start on college.

 

I remember thinking to myself that would be insane.  I was seven, who could have possibly taken me seriously? Many hours were spent pondering this concept. And I could never imagine it, literally.  My main reason for not doing it was peer pressure, or really imagined pressure from my peers.  And I just could not shake the belief and possibly even fear, that due to my age, I would get taken advantage of in one way or another. What person between the ages of 20 and 50 is gonna give a seven year old the time of day, especially if that kid is acing classes that they are struggling with.

 

I have thought about it a lot over my lifetime. This was like thirty years ago, before the once popular TV show, Doogie Houser.  When that show came out I thought about it even more. Oddly enough, I never have watched a single episode though. It has occurred to me that I could probably have gotten a triple doctorate by the time I was nineteen or twenty. I mean scholarships and grants would not have been a problem. I have seen first hand that if you maintain a minimum of a 4.0 GPA, schools will bend over backwards to keep you.

Click here to see how things could have been

Lack of belief system pt1

If you have been following along for some time now, you probably think I am either pretty smart, enlightened or crazy. Regardless of which one you believe, you are probably correct. And here today, I offer up even more proof to support whichever one you believe.

 

One of the biggest problems we face in relationships with one another is miscommunication . A person will say something and we will think that we know what it is that they mean. But, most of the time, we actually do not understand what it is that another person says. We just think we do. We take what they say and translate it into something that makes sense within our own belief system. We assume that that thing, that makes sense within our own belief system, is what they meant and we move on. So, we will step away from that conversation and make decisions and choices based on the new information that person gave us. We will build other things we believe on top of that information and make even more choices and decisions. And then we come back into contact with that person and tell them about the things that we have learned based on those choices and decisions and …hey! Why is that person looking at us like we just grew three new heads? Here is where we realize there is a breakdown. They have no idea what we are talking about.

 

Where is the breakdown though? What causes the miscommunication? Person A gave us information. We just took in that information and started doing things with it right? So if there is any flaw it has to be with the information itself, making it the fault of person A right? Not exactly.  Person A did provide us with information, that much is true. And we did start using that information to begin making choices and decisions with. But not right away. First, we filtered that information through our belief system, so that it made sense to us. And that is where the problem comes in. When we did that, we changed what they meant into our understanding of what they meant. Quite frequently, this leads to being wrong while still thinking you are right.

Lack of belief continues here