Legends Never Die

I was talking to a good friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, and he told me about this book he was reading, called “The Alchemist”. The main idea behind the book is that most people live their lives as if they are survivors. Everyday we get up and go to work so that we can get paid, so that we can pay off our debts and/or buy things we like. We get a few weeks of vacation every year, but aside from that, we are slaves to capitalism.

Somewhere in this endless grind, we lose sight of the things we really want to do in life.

This thought has been stuck in my head since my friend and I first discussed it. Just take a look at the question, “What do you do for a living?”. The question itself implies that we live to work. Isn't that just a tad depressing? The really sad part is that this is a necessity in a capitalist market, or almost any kind of market for that matter. The only way this could ever be changed is if we had a free resource economy, which is something that probably won’t happen in my lifetime, unfortunately.



So the real tragedy here is that people aren’t living their lives. And so my friend and I started discussing the idea of a personal legend. If you had the ability to live your life the way you wanted to, what would you choose to do? If a storybook were written that told tales of your endeavors, what would it say?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m not sure how I would ideally live my life. I never really thought about it before, as the cultural norms of our society depict everyone working for the rest of their lives. The only point at which we are released is when we retire, or in other words, when we are not physically capable of working any longer.

This disgusts me.

Here I am, spending the prime years of my life working under the arm of the corporate world, with freedom only given to me when I am sucked dry of my vitality.

I work at a bank during the summers and winters when I am home from school. At one branch in which I worked, there was a lawyer who would come in every afternoon to take care of his finances. I always enjoyed talking to him, as he had a lot of interesting things to say about the world, finances, life, etc. One time in particular, we had a survey that we were handing out to customers in which we asked them what their financial goal was. His response was one word, ‘independence’.

I thought about that for a long time, and I started to come to the conclusion that our monetary system is really messed up.

I mean think about it: A person loans out $5 to someone else, who pays them back $5 a week later.

That’s good human interaction.

Now, instead: A person loans out $5 to someone else, who pays them back $6 a week later.

That’s fucked up.

The whole idea of interest inhibits us from ever being free, and as a result, money makes people cautious. The only real way to escape the ‘monetary prison’ of capitalism is to obtain an exuberant amount of money, as while money doesn’t buy you happiness, it buys you choices.

Anyways, I got off track. Imagine if you had enough money so that you never had to work another day the rest of your life. You could choose to work, if you wished, but you could essentially do anything you wanted. Although I’m not really sure exactly what I would do, I came up with some ideas.

1) Become a beach lifeguard. For some reason, I’ve always had a desire to be a beach lifeguard. Just look at the URL to this blog. I guess I just get a kick out of saving lives. Weird huh?

2) Travel to major cities and then write about their restaurants, venues, and nightlife. I have always been fascinated with city life, and all the interesting places you can find. You know all those night clubs and restaurants you see on the silver screen and how spectacular they look? I want to experience all of that. All of it.

3) I want to be a personal trainer. I want to help other people get in shape and improve the way they live. Furthermore, with no obligations toward work, I could spend my time exercising to the peak of my own physical performance. I’m very health conscious and I make sure to get adequate exercise, but school and work make it difficult to really achieve the feats of strength that I’d like to. With so much free time, I could dedicate it to honing my strength, which has always given me an unrivaled sense of balance.

4) Lastly, I think I’d like to be able to express my opinion to the masses somehow, much like some internet celebrities do. Take a look at Philip DeFranco on youtube. He voices his opinion every day, and thousands of people watch. He’s opinionated, and as far as I can tell, always stays true to himself, regardless of what others think. That’s something I would like to do.

If you look at all of these, the main inhibiting factors are time and money. The time issue can’t really be alleviated, but the money problem can. I don’t want to just “survive” from day to day, and for those who would consider themselves to be living comfortably, I have a message for you: As long as you need to keep working, you are stuck in here with the rest of us.

I’m going to end this here, before it gets incoherent. So here’s your question:

What is your personal legend?

Stay frosty

Grenades

Recently I’ve been recalling a lot of random memories from my youth, and I have to say, I was a very misguided person in my younger years.

I remembered one instance in particular where my friend had a crush on a girl at school, and after he finally mustered up enough courage to speak with her, she rejected him.

Ah, how crazed puppy love can make you.

You see, after he got rejected, he got pissed. This was to my knowledge, the first time he had ever tried to pick up a girl, and he was obsessive on a scary level. He would actually write her name hundreds of times in his notebook, filling up entire pages with her name spelled in different fonts, sizes and colors. Side note: I’m pretty sure the only reason he did that was because tv shows at the time depicted the same thing thus turning it into an ensuing stereotype, but it was weird nonetheless.

Anyhow, after the rejection heard ‘round the world, you’ll never guess what lover boy did. Okay so maybe you will guess, I don’t know.

My friend ended up coming to me, angry, thirsty for retribution. He went from being completely infatuated with this girl, to obsessively hating her. We wasn’t asking me to do anything in particular for him, but he wanted something. So what did I, the level headed, unaffiliated friend do? I obliged him.

What? I still can’t believe I did this. There are red flags all over this situation, covered in caution tape, profusely telling me to stay uninvolved, and yet I decided to be the loyal friend and help my fellow man out. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll help out my friends any chance I get, but if the help they’re looking for is outrageously out of line, then they need to realize that. What I should have done to help my friend out was explain to him how vengeance isn’t appropriate and that this was not the end of the world. That would have been the best thing a friend could have done, but it was overshadowed by my desire to be seen as the loyal friend.

So anyways, what I did wasn’t all that extravagant or outrageous, but it is still off-putting to me. I ended up writing a letter to the girl which I planned to put in her locker. I don’t remember what I wrote, but even though it was much more level headed than what my friend had in mind, it still would have come off offensively to her, as I was pretty much calling her a bitch.

My mom ended up discovering the letter it in my room and confronted me about it. After the discovery, my better judgment finally took hold of the situation, and I never delivered the letter. The truth of the matter is this: The girl did nothing to deserve any of this. She was not interested in dating my friend, and my friend and I should have respected that decision. You can’t force someone to like you, and you definitely shouldn’t feel vengeful toward them if they don’t.

I’m disappointed in how I acted back then. All I was doing by agreeing to help my friend was asking for trouble, and I can only imagine what would have gone down should the letter have been delivered. Part of me says that I was still just a kid and didn’t know what I was doing, but another part of me says that I should have known better at that age. I guess in the end I’m just grateful that I was intelligent enough to learn from my mistake.

So today’s Q isn’t really a question:

Tell me about a childhood story of yours that taught you a lesson

Stay frosty

And Justice For All

So I saw the following video a few weeks ago. 

 

The reason that I’m making this entry doesn’t have anything to do with this boy taking his own stand on a social issue, however.  I’m writing this because that video made me realize how upset people get when you don’t recite the pledge of allegiance, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

I remember back in Middle School we had a substitute teacher one day, and on that day I just so happened to be talking with my friends before class started, and I didn’t hear that the pledge of allegiance had begun over the loud speaker.  I was laughing about something and didn’t take notice that everyone had risen to recite the pledge.  The next thing I knew, the sub came over and apprehensively grabbed me by the arm, and in an angry voice said to me,

“You choose not to respect this country, and that’s okay too”

Despite the way that sounds when you read it, rest assured she was not pleased.  I think the reason it sounds so contradictory is because she was initially angry at the fact that I wasn’t reciting the pledge, but half way through her reprimanding me, she probably realized that people have their own views, and by virtue of our free country, could choose not to recite the pledge.  I don’t know for sure why she said what she did, but it was the first time it occurred to me that the pledge was a pretty big deal to a lot of people.

This happened when I was in 6^th grade.  I didn’t understand the significance of the pledge at this point in my life, I’d be hard pressed to say that any 6^th grader did.  I always just did as I was told, and as far as I knew, you recited the pledge every day before classes commenced.  I never once asked why we recited the pledge, and to the best of my memory, it was ever explained to me.  Who was I to question such a thing as a 6^th grader?  And more importantly, why would I care?

6^th grade was all about lasting until lunch period, and then surviving the rest of the day where you got to go home, not challenging the reasoning to cultural norms.

So now here I am, a senior in college, and I can’t remember the last time I recited the pledge outside of High School. 

Here’s where my point comes in.  I can’t think of anyone I know who still recites the pledge every morning.  As far as I know, most of the American population stops reciting it as soon as High School is over.  Now if the pledge were so important, why do we stop reciting it when we graduate?  You see, here we have this boy who has chosen to sit down during the pledge, and he’s getting media attention on CNN.  That’s how important this is to people.  The pledge is important enough that if a student chooses not to recite it, it gets televised to the nation.

This just blows my mind.  I mean think about it!  Here we are broadcasting this situation all over television networks and the internet over an anthem that is hardly used outside of secondary schools.  I just don’t get it. 

I ended up asking my mom what she thought about this, and she told me that there are soldiers out all across the world who are fighting and dying to protect that pledge.  I understand that completely, and I realize the significance of it – in my opinion it is wrong to refuse to acknowledge people who are out defending our freedom, but that isn’t what I’m trying to get at.  What I’m questioning is why do we, as civilians, uphold the pledge so vehemently at early ages, only to abandon it later in life?  Actually, when you think about it, it doesn’t make sense that we teach the pledge to such young children, because there’s no way they could know what it stands for.  At such an early age, all you are doing when you teach the anthem is brainwashing the children.  What’s the point of the pledge if the people reciting it don’t know what it stands for?

In the end, I still don’t know how I really feel about this anymore.  Whether it be the pledge itself, or the stubbornness of our culture’s habits, I don’t know how I feel about it.

Because of that, today’s question is going to be simple:

How do you feel about the pledge of allegiance?

Stay frosty