Imagine my surprise to find myself suddenly single again.  I mean, I thought I was rising from the ashes before, but to one day be suddenly ejected from my family… my head is still spinning.  I’m going to spare the gory details at present, as those who need to know what’s going on already know what’s going on.

I suppose the biggest aspect of this change is the fact that I’m not there with my kids, able to see them and their daily changes at the moment.  In the interim, my son has sprouted 2 teeth, including one on the bottom right that’s coming in a little less than straight.  I guess that’s what he gets for gnawing on everything.  Oh, and he’s mobile now.  So it was bad enough before when he discovered he could get places by rolling, now he’s found a faster method of locomotion.

I’ve lost things before in my past, only to take whatever lessons could be gleaned from those situations and move on.  I guess that’s what I’m obligated to do again here.  Thus, I again get to experience the lesson “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

One thing I’ve learned over my relatively short life thus far, is that people tend to expect people to view life through the same eyes that they do.  Generally, a dishonest person feels justified in their dishonesty because they figure everyone else is just as dishonest as they are.  A liar figures that they’re being lied to.  A trustworthy person generally trusts other people.  At some point or another, most people eventually realize that this is not the case, and then tend to gravitate toward other people that think as they do…  Look at San Francisco.

One of the reasons I’m afraid of Barack Obama as President is his overwhelming need to talk and negotiate with other, often hostile, foreign leaders.  Even without knowing what his pre-political profession was, I could tell he’s a lawyer, primarily because that’s the thought process of a lawyer.  He somehow believes that he could talk hostile countries out of their hostility, most likely because he could be talked out of his own opinions with a sufficient argument.  How do I know this.  It’s a system that I employ with my own children.  If you believe you should be able to do something that I say you shouldn’t convince me otherwise.  I’ll consider it and I’ll likely acquiesce, provided that the argument was reasonable and well thought out. 

This is NOT an attitude that should be possesed by a PoTUS.  He should have vision, and operate under that vision.  He should be looking after the interests of the citizens of his country, not trying to appease world opinion.  He shouldn’t be trying to win friends by humiliating his people.  He shouldn’t trade respect for pals.

One of the hardest lessons that life has taught me is the fact that it’s usually easier to do something convenient than it is to do what should be done.  I mean, speaking generally, it’s a lot easier for me to put a dirty plate in the sink than it is to rinse it off and put it in the dishwasher… especially since it’s also easier to wait for someone else to empty the diswasher than it is for me to do it myself.

Life tends to throw obvious instances of this fact in your face.  For example, there’s trash on the ground right around the wastebasket, but you didn’t put it there.  What do you do?  Most of us would walk right past it… unless we’re in Iraq, at which point we call in the Bomb Squad.  Someone left their lights on in the parking lot.  I COULD go tell someone in the store, or I could say to myself “I hope they have cables”.

But what about when it actually costs you something to “do the right thing”.  I’m only going to be a minute, should I put money in the parking meter?

This is more of an entry to my future self more than anything else.  The mind has a way of editing the past so that it doesn’t seem as bad as it was.  Sort of in the fashion that an oyster makes a pearl out of a grain of sand.  In this case, I’m referring to the fact that the number of times I’ve quit smoking is probably higher than the number of report cards I’ve gotten during my entire scholastic career.

Look, quitting is hard, made even moreso by the fact that I’m LIVING with someone that smokes, smokes FREQUENTLY, and has no real desire to smoke LESS.    It takes a lot of discipline, and analysis of the reasons for smoking.  So far, hunger, exhaustion, and boredom seem to rank at the top of the list, and each time I DID manage to quit, I do recall addressing one of the requisite issues.  Fact is, I plan on having quit again before the month closes out.  If it’s anything like the LAST 3 times I tried to quit, it’s going to be another challenging series of me talking to myself, and myself trying to talk back. 

Look, if you happen to pull this off again, make sure you read this before you get the urge to smoke “just one, because one won’t hurt”.  Don’t do it.  I repeat “DO NOT DO IT”.  Sure, one won’t hurt.  But it won’t just be one.  It’ll be one now, and then it’ll be “Well, that wasn’t so bad”, and next thing you know, you’re down $25 a week.  You’re about to SUFFER for this, don’t make it all in vain…. again!