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If you read this blog, you probably know that I like to talk about religion a lot. I am a strong believer in the Christian faith and I've been following it all of my life. While I'm pretty firmly entrenched in what I believe, there's still a huge unknown element for me that I'm trying to somehow figure out. I'm sure that there are an infinite amount of things that I'll never know about God or about life, but as I talked about last post, I think it's better that way. So this post is going to be about a part of Christianity, and that part is worship...

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Math and then Everything Else

This morning I started watching Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which is really entertaining, almost in a strange way. The first episode I watched was with Chris Rock, and right in the middle of it he makes this really subtle but really profound statement. Just all the sudden he says "There's math... and then everything is debatable" That's starting to actually feel right to me. The longer you live the more you realize how rare it is for people to agree on things. There are a few things that you really can't debate on, like math (although people...

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No Topic (Almost) Tuesday

It's close enough to Tuesday to just go ahead and assume it's Tuesday. I haven't written in almost a week and I've got a few things, so here it goes. Life's really weird, right? We all have to rely on money to live, so our lives are really determined on how much money we make. It doesn't take all that much money to literally stay alive, but everything is pretty much determined based on what kind of money we do make. If you make a little, you learn to live on a little, and you're still fine. Then you start making more money, and then you start...

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No Topic Tuesday

I used to do No Topic Tuesday on here (alright, so I did it twice... and one of the times was on a Wednesday), so let's bring it back this week. I've got a small smattering of things to talk about. The first thing is about girls, and one of the large characterizations of their kind. I'm not sure if it's a confidence issue or a preconditioning issue, but it really doesn't seem to like a girl ever goes out of her way to show a guy that she's interested. Girl might react positively when guy reaches her way, but it doesn't seem that girl will ever...

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Philosophy

I took one philosophy class in college, and I pretty much hated it. I think the reason that I hated it was because it was my first semester of college and I was this really close minded Christian kid who didn't like to hear people give their world opinions that didn't match up to mine. I thought anyone who believed in the big bang was stupid and couldn't teach me anything. That was one of the reasons I went to a Christian college, to try and avoid a lot of that stuff, so I was pretty surprised when my philosophy teacher would preach how we all...

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Thomas Edison's Lightbulb Test

Read this story today, think it teaches a valuable lesson: incandescent bulb, was an incessant inventor. When he needed to expand his staff, he employed an unusual technique for interviewing the engineers for positions on his staff. Every prospective applicant who came in for an interview was handed a light bulb. Edison then asked the engineer to determine the exact amount of water the bulb could hold. Edison knew very well that there were two basic ways an applicant could determine the correct answer to his question. The first,...

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Authenticity

Came across a quote in this Dale Carnegie book I was reading today: "Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind” I've basically said that myself a few dozen times in my life, but maybe just not with such profound wording. Maybe this blog is becoming just a bullhorn for me to say the same thing in two to three times a week, but I just feel so strongly about this one general topic that it's all I can ever end up writing about. Nothing is worse than someone who lacks originality,...

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Unwinnable Argument

I have spent a lot of time focusing on sports in my life. From my last year of high school to my last year of college, a large amount of my free time was dedicated to studying and writing about sports. While it didn’t really get me all that much, it did teach me a few things. One thing that has recently started to annoy me about sports and sports writers is when they criticize the fans of sports teams. First of all, I think people that take their sports fanhood super serious are kind of pathetic. While I was guilty of being one of those people...

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Forever is terrifying

I try to go to church every week, although often times I'm not very successful at that. Through my four years at Waynesburg I could never really find a church I really liked so there were a lot of weeks I didn't go at all. This summer was a bit tough to because for the first four months I was working every Sunday. But now I have a new job and I don't work weekends often and my old church now has a campus in the city, so I'm back to going regularly. The church formerly known as Pittsburgh East is now called Amplify Church and they have services...

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Squishy Lemons by Anthony Cooper

My good friend Anthony Cooper wrote this up and sent it to me, and I wanted to share it on the blog. Coop's one of the more advanced thinkers I know, so it might be kind of tough for us weaker minds to get a grasp on his advanced thought processes, but it's worth trying. For more of Cooper's genius, you can follow him on Twitter @acoop13.  Everyone has heard the cliche, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Most people have also heard the alternative saying that was brought to life in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, "When...

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Rescripting

This is another post inspired by the book I'm currently reading, The Seven Characteristics of Highly Effective People. Spoiler alert, the second habit in this book is "begin with the end in mind", although what I want to talk about doesn't directly fall under that umbrella. What I'm writing about tonight is what Covey calls rescripting, which doesn't really tell you much. A huge part of what this book tries to impress on its readers is the presence and impact of paradigms and paradigm shifts. Paradigm: a theory or a group of ideas about how...

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Confidence

It's really hard to get to know a person, and I think that's both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, it would be really lame to talk to someone for a couple hours and then know everything about them. It would be boring and there would be less reason to continue to pursue relationships with said person. On the other hand, it kind of sucks that you really can't gauge much of anything until you're really comfortable with the other person. I wish it was easier to tell what a person is really like the first time spending time with them....

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Life Fairness

I've recently become interested in "remarkable human beings", like people that live really interesting/impressive lives and do really interesting/impressive things. So just now I googled and found this website. I didn't get past the first article before I wanted to stop and write a blog post, so here it goes. Depending on when you are reading this, you'll see the first article on the site is about a 17 year old kid. You can read the full article...

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Viktor Frankl

This post piggy backs my last post about what I've been noticing about humans and the impact of our attitudes. You can read that post here. The name in the title of the post is the name of a man that who had just about as tragic of a life as you can imagine. He and his family were imprisoned during the holocaust in Nazi Germany. I read about him while reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I don't really see a point in re-summarizing the story, so here's a quote from the book written by Stephen Covey himself: Frankl was a determinist...

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Attitude is Everything

My good friend Anthony Cooper sent me a link to this blog post the other day and it really had an effect on me. The blog author didn't write it, it's actually a graduation speech given by a man named David Foster Wallace. It's a pretty lengthy post, so I'm sure that most of you won't bother to read it, but if you have like ten minutes I promise it's really worth your time. For now I'm going to summarize it and then share some of my thoughts. The bulk of the article, or at least the part that I liked the most, talked all about human attitude and...

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First Year in the Real World

So over the last four months I have graduated from college, acquired a full time job, and moved out of my parents house for good. I am approaching the one week mark of being on my own (with two roommates), and I gotta say doing all of this real life stuff makes you think about a whole lot of things. I've always heard that the first couple years out of college are awkward, scary, overwhelming, and kind of depressing. I've always been confident enough to think that every year of my life is going to be fantastic and everything will just keep getting...

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Average American Jealousy

I get a real kick out of my fellow middle classers and their reactions to the upper-upper/celebrity class. Just a fact of life of life is that we are basically all of the same mental and physical capability when are born. Where things go in the 80 years following that is where it gets real interesting. People get famous for good reasons, people get famous for bad reasons, people get famous for no reason at all. That's just a part of life. And naturally, all people want to be rich and famous. I used to think that there were exceptions to that statement,...

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Entitlement and Idolatry

The more you deal with people in the world the more you realize how kind of shitty they can be. I'm trying to not come off like I think I'm a really good guy who nobody could ever complain about, but that's probably what's going to happen. I'm guessing that most people that get complained about a lot don't feel that they should be getting complained about. You would think that if a person realized that people didn't care for how they acted, they would try to change the stuff about them that people don't like. I mean the logic of that makes sense,...

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"Haters"

So I think I've talked about this before on here... but nobody actually reads this blog consistently and this is something that I myself find really interesting so I'm just gonna do it again. Everyone always says that you should just ignore the "haters" and just do your own thing. I could sit here and explain it all day but you all get it. Ignoring disapproval is a big deal these days. And I don't disagree with that at all, I've dealt with my share of criticism and whatnot, but I'm gonna bring in another way to look at it. Despite what everyone...

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Superbad Inspired

Watching Superbad right now, because everyone should watch Superbad at least once a month. Anyways there's this one line that made me think about some stuff... "Is this about some girl man? Who gives a f*** she's a f***in girl, what are you gonna do, go out with her for 2 years? ... next time you're pissed off about something, don't keep it inside for 10 years say it like a f***in man." As ridiculous as of a movie it is to quote, the statement from a young, fat Jonah Keri holds some weight. I've been through 21 years of the majority of my...

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Post from the real world

So it's my first real life weekend. I went through more than 21 years of my life without ever working for more than like 30 hours a week consistently and last week I graduated and started my full time job as a Proactive Monitoring and Response Center Technician for Remote Database Administration Experts in Pittsburgh - heck of a title, I know, thanks for noticing. Anyways, finals week and senior week and graduation day was pretty much as expected, and nobody really cares about that stuff anyway so I'll save you the details. What I really want...

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Sneezing

This will be a quick post, but I have to say something. You know how people say "God Bless You" or other variations when we sneeze? That all came from way back when people thought sneezing meant you had demons in you, so they would say things to try and get the demons out, right? So now let me ask - why the hell do we still say it? It's pretty apparent that sneezing doesn't mean a person is possessed, right? If you do believe that, please, do all you can to get the demon out of me, but otherwise you don't need to say anything. What's the difference...

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Computer Lab Thoughts

I've got like 10 minutes before class, but there have been a couple things that have happened today that I feel like writing about. First of all let me reiterate what I have said in the past. While we as humans do not want to believe this is true, it remains something that far too few people understand. People generally care only about themselves. While some are better at faking it than others, most people are primarily conscious of their own lives, and the only reason they'd really have an interest in your life is if you can do something to...

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For the thrill of it

It has been far too long since I've written on here, and I can say I've got quite a bit to say this morning. Let me start with some good news. Last week I was offered a full-time job as an entry-level database administrator. The job is in the North Shore of Pittsburgh, an absolutely perfect location for me, and I am very excited about starting work there and seeing how far I can go. Now that's a good story right? A college kid getting starting a full-time job in his field days after he receives his diploma? Sure it is. What I'm about to tell...

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Sports Idolatry

This isn't really going along with the Pirates life lessons thing, but it really could if I wanted it to. I'm just going to get straight into it. When you step back and look at Americans and sports it's really not far off from straight up idolatry. Skipping all of the basic ideas that are probably obvious just from that sentence, let me say this. Doesn't getting happiness or sadness from things that people you don't know do seem wrong? Shouldn't the large majority of your life's time and emotions be about things you do, or things the people that...

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Pirates Life Lessons - Chapter 1

I have lived to see 23 different years, so my life is like 28% complete. The whole school thing has stopped me from doing too much with my life, but I'm hoping that changes in a hurry now that graduation is just weeks away. Anyways, the first 28% of my life has been filled with a lot of sports stuff and a lot of attempts to be funny. It has also involved me trying to establish myself as an individual, someone who doesn't think like, act like, or talk like most of the people around me. You guys can be the judge on how I've done at that. I dedicated...

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Prerequisites for Enjoyment

College teaches you a lot of things, going to a really small college in a really crappy town probably teaches you more than the average college does. One thing I've learned in my four years here at Waynesburg University is that enjoyability of life isn't about where you are or where you're going or what you're doing, it's all about the people around you. People, including myself, complain about the town of Waynesburg a lot. There's very little here. The buildings are ugly, the air is dirty, the townies are disgusting; trust me there's no reason...

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Think

Have you ever stopped to think about how you think? Because it seems to me that a lot of people don't do much thinking at all. It's becoming common practice for a person to hear something and have it just go in one ear and out the other, without giving its truthfulness or usefulness a second thought. People these days are so incredibly predictable and gullible. I say "these days" like I've been alive for more than a couple decades. How would I now how people used to be? Maybe they've always been like this. I need to talk to more real adults about...

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It's Wednesday

My mom got me this Pinecone & Lime Yankee Candle for Christmas and it smells awesome when you stick your nose right up to it and sniff it when it's not lit, but when I light it the room stays in exactly the same scent, which is horrible. I've been lighting it for two months now hoping that it'll start smelling good but it's not and I'm just becoming more and more disappointed every time I look at it. It's not your fault mom, but next time get me something more smelly. I actually have had a few things pop into my head to write about on here...

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A few of my life's big questions

How can schools give A minuses but not give A pluses? This one just doesn't make mathematical sense. It's a question of balance. B minuses balance B pluses, so what reasoning could a professor EVER have for giving out A minuses but not A pluses? It is legitimately unfair, and this isn't a student crying about unfairness because he wants better grades, I don't care enough about my grades to do such a thing (and most of my grades are B's anyways). It's just really messed up that school's are so blatantly mistreating their students. I understand...

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