Great post, Drew! You had me rolling with laughter at 12 & 12 1/2!!! As always the best thing about your posts is that you touch on the truths of day-to-day life with such clarity and humor that it’s an absolute joy to read them. Keep up the wonderful work :)
Thank you for your kind words!
It means a lot because sometimes I fear this site has has become a poor man’s version of “Diary of a Wimpy Whiny Writer” with me going on about the latest bit of nonsense that has been rattling around in my troubled little mind.
Not to place all the blame on you, but It’s enablers like you that keep this site going. . . ;)
Great post! Thanx a lot! I wouldn’t do anything different, if I could go back in time, or I wouldn’t be, where I am now, right?
Happy solstice!
Thanks Rita and you’re right of course. If I’ve learned anything from watching “Back to the Future” forty-five times it’s the fact that going back in time is probably only going to screw things up even more. Besides if I hadn’t acted like a complete idiot in my youth-ier youth, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to write this humorous bit of drivel ;)
P.S. Love your monster avatar, the tusks are a nice touch!
Thanx for the compliment! :D
The best advice I ever got was the day I got stuck on a ski lift for an hour. I was in my early twenties and I was with this other guy that was well into his forties. He had played professional baseball. But even though he had never made the Majors he said he had made the right decision. “It’s important to do what you want to do and the rest will come.” Right there, on that lift I decided to take another art class and start playing music again and start doing what I wanted to do. The only regret I’ve had is that I didn’t remember his name.
That does sound like great advice Mark, although getting stuck on a ski lift for an hour with a complete stranger had to be a wee bit awkward.
Personally I think that “failing” doing something that you really love is far better than succeeding doing something that really sucks. I know because I’ve done a lot of the sucky stuff, and now I’m busy “failing” at something I love to do (at least most days). And even if the “rest of it” never actually makes it to my doorstep, I can still say that I have enjoyed the journey and all of the incredible friends I’ve made along the way.
So great, that you got stuck! You had to listen!!! No excuses and disturbances!!! :D
Enjoyed your post – I would add: If you choose a direction, putting your heart and resources into it, and it doesn’t work out, don’t beat yourself up about it. Use it to choose a new direction and watch for the opportunities. Nothing is wasted if you don’t let it be wasted. This sounds simple and cliche, but it took me a long time to 1) not beat myself up for “failing,” and 2) open up enough to learn to see the opportunities.
Great advice!
We’ve been punished for “mistakes” at school for so long, that it isn’t easy to learn such thing as “mistakes” doesn’t exist actually! :) Everything is just a part of our way!
Thanks Sherri for stopping by and sharing your thoughts with us!
I think you and Rita make a great point here that we are trained early on that not coming up with the correct answer the first time is something to be avoided. Far too often in school we have been told that there is a “right” answer and an “wrong” answer, which is fine when it comes to a subject like Calculus or Chemistry, but far less useful in a subject like history or literary interpretation.
As most of us discover soon after leaving high school or even college, is that real life is far less black & white when it comes to judging our successes and failures. You’re absolutely right “nothing is wasted”. Every experience we have gives us something in return. We seem to have this instinctive need to automatically label every experience either good or bad. Instead we need to find a way to suspend our judgment and as you said, open ourselves up to see the opportunities. It’s only when we choose to close our eyes to these unseen opportunities that we truly fail….
Thanks again!
Love it! This really made me smile! 18 to 30 is such a long journey (i finished it this year!) And I’d love to give my younger self some advice….or maybe just some reassurance that everything will work out ok and its ok to be odd!
Thanks Cheney!
You’re right, 18 to 30 is an incredibly long and often baffling journey where very little turns out to be as advertised on TV. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that the 30-40 trek can be just as confusing (and even more frightening when you add in kids), until you finally stop trying to follow everyone else’s path other than your own.
P.S. My younger self could have definitely used some reassurance as well as good smack in the head ;)
Hey Drew,
Great post as always! Where do I start?
I was just talking to a friend the other day about the traps we all encounter in school. We were debating how one’s personality is formed and the influence of social circles. Does our genetic predisposition drive us from a very young age into the circles we establish thereby reinforcing our personality traits or is there more chance involved and we only ‘stumble into’ our future friends, dictating how each one of us is then defined and labelled? It’s a nature vs. nurture question… or chicken and egg scenario?
Either way it took me the better part of my 30’s to finally break away (at least a little bit) from who I thought I was and how I was perceived in high school. It’s not an easy process.
As for the Jägermeister, I agree 100%! Can I also add Sambuca and Absinthe to that list?
Ps. Thanks for adding #11. My dream to be a rock star sadly ended at about 19 years old when I came to the realization I was no Eric Clapton and I was never going to be. Although I still have my equipment and pick up the guitars sporadically, I’ve played very little in the last 10 years. I think it’s about time to dust off the old guitar and frighten the neighbours with my singing. :)
Go for it!!! Good luck with the neighbours! :)
Ha ha thanks Rita. I’m not too worried though actually. My neighbour is the guy who can’t sleep unless the BBC news or radio talk show is on so I wake up every night with this low, monotone rumbling going on in the flat below. I’m sure cranking out a little G n R, Paradise City or Ozzy and Crazy Train with my atrocious singing voice will just balance things out a bit. ha ha
yup Drew. It’s definitely not an ideal education system. Nevertheless, it’s the only one we’ve got and as it’s been developing over the centuries, it’s going to be near impossible to make any major shake ups. Everything is so intrinsically linked with so many other variables (economics, politics, systems in an outcome driven society, flawed elements of human nature etc) that its like the UK (NHS) National Health Service. It’s huge, unmanageable, and outdated and everyone wants change but no one is willing to make changes. “Change is bad!” :)
I always thought that its a bit ironic that back in “teacher school” we were taught to resist labeling or pigeon-holing our students into categories because we would end up treating (and teaching) these students differently even if it was only subconsciously.
Then of course, when we are actually thrown into the world of academia, we are handed a grade book and a stack of state-mandated proficiency tests that are ultimately used to put our students on the right “academic track” (i.e. honor students, college bound students, average students, and send-them-to-trade-school-and-hope-for-the-best students)
And that’s just the academic labels we slap on them. I won’t even go into the social labels that their classmates assign them. It’s no wonder that we have no clue how to define who we are and what we stand for once we are finally released from this institutional hellhole. No one’s ever asked. We’ve simply been assigned labels all our life by our teachers, parents, friends, and we’ve simply accepted them for the most part.
P.S. Will add Sambuca and Jägermeister’s bastard cousin Absinthe to the list — Pure evil one and all ;)
I really can’t get it, why we are doing this to each other generation after generation …
That’s a very good question Rita — It’s like some evil perpetual hazing experiment that we pass on from one generation to the next…
I’m gonna disagree with number seven, only because 15 yrs later, me and the hubbs is still going strong. But I’d guess that I’m the exception, not the rule.
My biggest regret #11. I wished I would have learned an instrument. Guess I still could but life does not allow it.
If we really want something, we find the ways to do so, I think.
So good luck learning to play an instrument.
It hasn’t to be perfect, but, if you want it, just start!!!
Hi Dana!
I’m always happy to be proven wrong (#7) especially when it turns out well :)
It’s never too late to learn to play an instrument. As long as you don’t plan on entering any musical competitions, sometimes just approaching a level of mere competence is good enough.
It’s not as much about being good (thankfully) as it is about having fun and creating something, even if it’s simply melodic nonsense that the world hasn’t ever heard. Being a writer, so many projects can take months if not years to complete, so for me it is nice to have a creative outlet like music that is right there at your fingertips anytime you may need it.
As Rita notes, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be yours….
Not a day goes by where I don’t dream of being able to explain to past-me that what you learn in class is just the beginning of your education and that his classmates who “get it” don’t just have some magical pool of talent that he lacks, but they’re the ones who went off and started doing side projects, figuring stuff out independently, and tracking down the guidance of communities that had figured it out in the past and were willing to share their accumulated knowledge with us newbies.