Heroes and Villains

Indulging my paradox thinking last week brought me to the realization that nearly everything around us is a paradox.  

Plastic

It makes horrible knock-off toys from Hong Kong and it saves lives through pacemakers.

Porcelain

Craptacular babies with angel's wings for which your grandmother pays $400 and also toilets.

Paper

Gives you access to knowledge of the ages and gives your bird something to poo on.

Human Beings

Humans bring joy, pain, camaraderie, alienation, euphoria, torment, life, death.  We are cruel and forgiving simultaneously.  We want people to accept our differences and ostracize others'.

As terrible as it sounds, this type of thinking made me feel better.  There will always be some walking douche thriving on chaos and mayhem.  But knowing that life itself is a paradox means that there will always be someone who is the antithesis of said douche who rides in and fights back.

(Caution - Nerd Overload Approaching...)

Every Sauraman has a Gandalf.  Every Emperor has a Luke.  Every Alien has a Ripley. Every Biff has a Marty McFly.  Every Cobra Kai has a Ralph Macchio.  Every Kahn has a Kirk.  

They don't always look like wizards or Jedi but the heroes will fight oppression and hatred until the very end.


I don't think most people, myself included, are cut out to be traditional heroes.  We have our moments when we pull children from burning buildings and lift cars off of loved ones.  But for most of us our heroism peaks at finding the last blue ultra-mega-robot-man-thing in town for our kid's Christmas present.  Or volunteering our time/money to help less fortunate people in our town.

But looking at life as an amalgamation of paradoxes, heroes, and schmoes means that simple actions by regular people are some of the most important and heroic acts possible.

Every Frodo has a Sam.  Every Han has a Chewy.  Every Indiana has a Short Round. Every Kirk has a Spock.  Every Arthur Dent has a Marvin.

While the heroes are saving the day, the regular Joes find ways to make just as much impact on the world around them.  And without those sidekicks and regular guys, the world wouldn't be worth saving anyway.

(Also, if you understood all of the nerdy references above then we seriously need to be friends, like, now.)

The Paradox Parade

Do you ever have a day when you want to move to rural Montana and abandon anything that involves a battery or a power cord?

Do you follow up the next morning by blogging about a new gadget that's auto-posted to your Twitter feed and then blasted from there to your Facebook page?

I do.  All the time.  And I've probably said these same things a thousand times.

Welcome to my Paradox Parade.

I'm the guy who wants to have tons of friends but never wants to go out in public.  I'm the guy who can get up on a stage and scream and act like an idiot but I feel uncomfortable initiating a conversation.  Better yet, put me on stage in front of 150+ strangers and I eat it up.  I bathe in the attention and adoration of the audience and want everyone's eyes on me.  But put me on stage in front of 15 people and I become an awkward kid covering a Coldplay song during lunch break in the band room, too afraid to actually sing.  (high school...good times?)

So I can't blame people for not understanding me because oftentimes I thoroughly confuse myself.  I go through fazes of obsession.  My current obsession, to my wife's chagrin, is baseball.  A few weeks ago it was the Deadliest Catch.  Before that is was video games then comic books (love them, but too expensive for right now), computers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (What?!  I missed it when it originally aired), LOTRO (which has since been bastardized as a free-to-play shell of it's former greatness), etc.

My tastes change.  And when they do they're sudden and all-encompassing.

Looking back, I guess I've always been this way.

(The first time I can remember noticing this trait was several years ago after my mother and I got a large TV and HD movie stations (not paid cable such as HBO, we weren't THAT fancy).  I was flipping through the channels and found a movie I'd never seen before, Stargate.  I watched it, loved it, and wanted to know more about it.  The Internet heeded my query and told me there was a spin-off series staring TV's Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver).  In my mind it was obvious that I should immediately go purchase all eight seasons on DVD and watch them within a matter of weeks.  You know, normal everyday obsession style.)

My point:  Everyone is a paradox.  It's the interactions between the contradicting emotions and longings that make up our personalities.  And when those desires change and mature our persona changes.

Embrace who you are.  Own who you are.  If one day you find that you don't like who you've become, make a change.  You're the only one who can.

[Queue rainbow and Tony Robbins smile]

A Midsummer Night's Malaise

Work is wearing on me.  But it's not the "work" that is driving me insane.  It's the people.

I'm not sure how some of these people dress themselves.  Let me run through some fun facts for you:

-Not being able to type quickly is a computer issue.  Not being able to find the letters at all is not.
-Not understanding where to type your name is a computer issue.  Not knowing how to spell your name is not.
-Not understanding how to change from lowercase letters to capital letters is a computer issue.  Not understanding the difference between them when they're printed on a page in front of you is not.

Also, when did "auwruh" become a letter?  Apparently it comes right after Q now.

Don't get me wrong, I love the physical part of my job.  I love fixing computers and playing with new hardware/software.  I get geeked when a new piece of software comes out and it's my job to play with it and see how it works.  And I love working with an overwhelming majority of the people at my company.  But some of the people that I have to deal with make me question whether it's worth it.

Notice how I said some of the people.  I don't dislike people who know nothing about computers.  In fact, these are my favorites.  Give me a 50 year old man who's never touched a computer any day over a guy who skims Lifehacker once a month and thinks he knows everything about computers.  I have issues with the people who either refuse to listen or are entrenched in what I call Willful Ignorance.  And this adherence to their ignorance has nothing to do directly with computers.

I get it though.  Nobody wants to call me.  I'm PC Support.  I'm the Helpdesk.  No one calls these people by choice.  Has any tech ever gotten a phone call saying "Everything is working great here.  Keep up the good work."  Of course not.  It's the same reason why I don't call my cable company to say the same thing.  That's our job.  Make things work and fix them when they don't.

But for anyone who's ever been on the other side of the phone when someone calls for help they know exactly what I mean.  Every time you talk to someone is invariably one of the worst parts of their day.  And as long as they can hang up feeling better than when they first called then I feel like I've done my job.  Even if the problem is not something that can be immediately solved, the person should leave the conversation confident that it will be resolved.

And once I'm no longer concerned with this positive outcome then I'll know the malaise has won.

But until that day I will remain the honest, friendly, helpful nerd who helps you fix your internet connection so you can tell your Facebook friends how lame I am.

America the Ignorant?

What's that?  You would like my far-reaching generalizations about America?  Well you're in luck.  I just so happen to have this blog post sitting around for you to nod your head/wag your finger at.

Here is my issue with America as a whole:  We are a country of willfully ignorant people.


I don't want to learn how to change my password because then it will be my responsibility to do it.  


I don't want to  learn a new skill so because then I'll have to get off welfare and get a job.  


I don't want to research the candidates.  Can't I just vote for the Republican?  Or the black one?  Or the one that takes her kids to hockey practice?

And the worst part?  We reward this kind of behavior.

When is the last time you heard of a person being denied their welfare check because they failed a drug test?  NEVER would be the answer for me personally.  Let me see if I can wrap my head around this:  A man has a job working 40 hours a week bringing home just barely enough money to feed his family.  On the weekends he meets up with his buddies to smoke a little weed.  One day he fails a drug test and gets fired.  Now he's on welfare and can collect money comparable to his former salary AND he can smoke anytime he wants to.  Why get another job?  There's absolutely zero advantage to it.

Somehow we have transformed into a country so caught up in its own hype that we can't see how we're destroying ourselves.  America is the "greatest country in the world".  I completely agree with this.  But we could do MUCH better.  

We give billions of dollars to other countries to help feed their homeless and give relatively nothing to our own.  We go on mission trips to Belize or some trendy Florida city to build/repair houses but our neighbor three streets over has a garbage bag for a living room window.  We adopt babies from Malawi but won't adopt babies from Milwaukee.  Was there anyone clamoring to help the New Orleans residents living in glorified shacks before the national news was covering a hurricane?  

There is such a malaise over the entire country that even the people who genuinely want to help are drowned out by PR firms pushing celebrity endorsed Twitter hash tags.  90% of politicians are nothing but a perpetual reelection machine (completely quantifiable and scientifically researched statistic, of course).  Don't make a scene by standing for something new or different or you won't be reelected.  

Then get out there and run for office yourself you may say.  But I'm not sure I could handle the game that would have to be played.  I don't have the connections, lineage, military experience, or wealth required to even get started.  Some may say that's a bullshit response.  Some of you are probably right.

But honestly, I can't decide whether I want to run for office, work my way into the government, and try to make the changes I crave, and the changes I think America needs, or whether I want to give away anything with a battery or a power cord and buy a farm in rural Wyoming.  My desire changes daily.  And for that reason, I cannot allow myself to get involved.  If you're going to do something as important as serving in our government then do it with 100% of your being.  If you can't give 100%, then get out of the way.  

I freely admit I'm a cynical bastard, but am I really?  Do I look for the worst in people or do I just rail against willful ignorance?

I used to pity the poor bastard who trudged through life, paycheck-to-paycheck, never paying attention to the world crumbling around him.  But the older I get the more I crave the simplicity of here and now.

NYC Mosque

Hot on the heels of my last post about Islam, today I'm talking about the proposed mosque near ground zero in New York City.  I have a simple question:

Are we a country that claims to have freedom of religion?  Yes?  Then what's the problem?

The argument about whether this mosque should be allowed is once again focused on the wrong issue.  The issue is not about whether it's a good idea to build this mosque. (It's probably not.  It would have a target on it that anti-Islamics could see half a world away.)  The argument is about whether it should be allowed to be built.  And the unequivocal answer to that question is Yes.  If the people who submitted the plans deem that the time isn't right or it's too risky to build right now, then that's their decision.

We can't have freedom for some whenever it's convenient.  We must have freedom for all, at all times.

It's the exact same problem when talking about any of the other hotbed issues; abortion, gay marriage, right-to-die, etc.  It's not about whether you agree with the specific opinion.  It's about whether you agree that each person has the right to make his/her own decisions about his/her own body.