Don’t wish your life away, complete with Catch-22 and bikini picture

“Mr. Frond.  He’s a tall glass of . . . annoying.” – Bob’s Burgers

I guess you could say that Bernie engages in wishful thinking.

A few years ago I was in a meeting with my boss, who has since retired.  It was a particularly hectic time at work – we were looking down at a calendar of 13 hour days, 7 days a week, for the next few weeks.  We had already been on that hellish schedule for at least 20 days.  We couldn’t have been more exhausted if we were a car muffler or the guy charged with keeping Joe Biden away from functional microphones.

At this point, the most dangerous place in the office was getting between me and the coffee pot.  HR had cautioned me about my threatening language when I found someone in the way of the coffee, but I responded that growling wasn’t really a language.  They said I was being intimidating, but I stared at them silently and then they went away.

So, we were busy.  As I said, I had a meeting with my boss.  My boss leaned back in his chair.  In a very tired voice he said, “Well, I don’t want to wish my life away, but I’m looking forward to finishing this.”

The part of that sentence that really stuck with me was, “I don’t want to wish my life away.”

When faced with something unpleasant, I want it to be over, and the sooner the better.  I think that’s just human nature.  I’d actually never given that desire a second thought.  “Let’s finish the bad times so we can get to the good times, right?”

It serves you right, you knock-kneed slobbering tuna monger.

I also recalled another, slightly different example of this kind of thinking.  When I was a child waiting for Christmas, I wanted the days before Christmas Eve to dissolve into the past like all of those bodies in Bill Clinton’s basement so I could begin unwrapping presents like a Tasmanian Devil® with chainsaw arms.  A similar example is how people can’t wait for the work week to finish so that they can get to the weekend and live their “real” life.

But life isn’t just the good times – it’s also the crappy ones, too.  It’s also the dull ones.  It’s the hours spent at work.  And it’s the hours spent in a dentist chair.  And that really is the sum of life – it’s not the great moments, it’s all the moments.  It’s what we live in every day:  that’s life.  Life isn’t just hopping from peak to peak, victory to victory, Christmas present to Christmas present.  Nope.  Most of life is spent in the valleys and hillsides and Bill Clinton’s basement.

I will say the one time I had Tequila I did end up on my knees.

I did an experiment once on a warm spring day.  I was in the parking lot of a liquor Bible store to get some beer to buy extra Bibles for the Bible room in my house.  For whatever reason I stopped and just looked around.  I observed as closely as I could.  I looked everywhere.  Up into the blue sky and the wisps of clouds moving lazily to the east.  I looked at the grain of wood in the gray sun-bleached privacy fence by the parking lot.  The staggered brick pattern of the store wall contrasting with the evenness of the mortar joints holding them in place caught my eye.  From the natural to the manmade, I looked deeply.

As I spent time that afternoon really looking at and observing my surroundings I was struck by how much beauty that I was surrounded by, day after day.  This was a beauty that I never noticed – it was just visual noise in my daily life.  But that beauty really was there, hidden in the small things that are everywhere.  Also it was in bikinis, but those really weren’t hidden.

It has been mentioned that I needed more bikini.  I assume you mean on hot chicks, because it’s considered an international war crime if I posted one of me in a bikini.

There was a weird majesty in the moment.  Most days I don’t take the time to look for it.  But I know that it’s there if I want to take the time to look.  After that, things weren’t really the same.  I began to look closer at all aspects of life.

Not too much later I read an article that said that even when it gets fairly cold, say -5°F with a wind of 10 miles per hour, it would take up to half an hour to get frostbite.  I’m not making fun of those temperatures – they can be deadly.  But if I was walking around outside and the temperature was 40°F with a wind speed of 10 miles per hour I might be a bit uncomfortable, but a healthy person with exquisite DNA that was the result of a secret government breeding program named Project Lunchbox (like your humble host) could easily stand those conditions for hours in just a light jacket with no lasting negative impact.  Shiver?  Sure.  But I’d be fine.  And so would anyone else without a weird medical problem even if they weren’t part of Project Lunchbox.

When we had to do a group project in school we were in trouble – we were all “that guy”.

The same is true about high temperatures.  Yes, I might sweat – it’s not like I’m a member of the English royal family.  But for the most part, most ranges of heat you’d encounter in the United States isn’t life threatening to a healthy person.  Uncomfortable?  Yes.  Sweaty?  Certainly – we already established that.  But only uncomfortable, not in danger.  One summer the air conditioning went out on my car.  My response?  I rolled the windows down when I headed home from work.  After a week or two, the heat ceased to bother me at all.

As I kept at it, I realized that there were a lot of other conditions I could simply ignore if I chose to:

• Hunger – Most people reading this have never been really hungry in their lives.
• Thirst – Water is important, but it how many times are we actually thirsty versus just drinking because of habit?
• Airline Seats – Okay, these really are from the fifth circle of Hell. But I can scrunch up in one for an hour or so.
• Ear Hair – If I let it grow long enough, I can braid it like the bride at a Leftist wedding.
• Bad Smells – How many of them are just annoying? I mean, besides the French?
• Disorder – Not everything in my life needs to be perfectly arranged, but it would be nice if Pugsley put the Vise Grips® back after he was done braiding my ear hair.

After all of this, the minor irritants of life ceased to irritate me on most days.  As I became less irritated, the thing that oddly became more irritating was people complaining about minor irritations.  I then had yet another realization:  some people just like to complain.  So I added another thing to my list of things I could ignore if I chose to:

• Annoying People

I’ll admit that not everything in my life is always exactly the way I’d create it if it were entirely up to my choice.  And that’s good.  It’s that difference (along with carbohydrates) that forces me to grow.  Bad times give me an excuse to call my friends and discuss my problems with them.

Jesus told me I could turn water into whine.  I guess he had enough the third time I brought up airline food. 

Also, I am human.  Annoying people, especially the professional-level annoyers, still annoy me.  And the list of things I can choose to not be angry about is just that, a choice.  From Catch-22:

Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly.

…

“Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?”  Dunbar asked Clevinger.  “This long.”  He snapped his fingers.  “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air.  Today you’re an old man.”

“Old?”  asked Clevinger with surprise.  “What are you talking about?”

“Old.”

“I’m not old.”

“You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission.  How much older can you be at your age?  A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise.  Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon.  Zip!  They go rocketing by so fast.  How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?”  Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.

“Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone.  “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long.  But in that event, who wants one?”

“I do,” Dunbar told him.

“Why?” Clevinger asked.

“What else is there?”

Joseph Heller was probably a bit more pessimistic than I am.  I don’t think that living a life filled with unpleasant conditions is required for a long life.  If so, people would be lining up at chiropractors to have them misalign their spines.  But, on the other hand, someone did marry my ex-wife . . . .

And you pay half of all your stuff.

No, the wisdom that my boss shared with me is clear.  Spending your life torturing yourself isn’t productive, except in California.  But even during a bad time or when you’re anticipating a good time in the future, don’t wish your life away.  Each minute is a precious one.

Use them all.

I suggest skeet.