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 the last couple days but for right now I can only remember like one of them.

It's funny that humans seem to feel entitlement at all the wrong times. It seems to me that the easier life becomes for humans, the more they feel entitled to. This thought came to me when we were talking in a class about how defensive parents are of their children these days. If a kid gets in trouble at school, the parents seem to always immediately hop on the kid's side and fight against the person at school that punished them. Because there is just no way that YOUR kid could have possible done anything wrong, and they are always just being unfairly persecuted. It certainly didn't use to be that way, my parents definitely never took my side when I did something wrong away from them. The whole thing really makes sense, once things start coming easy to you, you start thinking that everything should come that easy, and when it doesn't, you get defensive and start believing that you were denied something that you should have been given, even though you didn't necessarily deserve it in the first place. Life works a lot better when you have to work for what you get. For me, I really don't feel like I've worked for much of anything in my life, but I've been given a lot. My parents worked really hard to give me a chance to be successful and for the most part I've just coasted through everything until about now. Things are going to change when I graduate, but I'm pretty glad that I have somewhat of a feel on entitlement for right now, because life seems to get harder and harder with every year that passes.

I've written a lot on this blog about how I feel that being able to deal with people will take you further in life than being really smart and qualified. Recently, one of my buddies got a job offer that he's underqualified for just because he impressed the person he interviewed with, so that backs my point up perfectly. The problem I'm discovering with the real world is that it's tough to even get an interview. I've sent my resumeé to 20+ companies and I've only had a couple calls back. I've only been offered one face to face interview and that was through a company that turned out to be a pretty big scam/waste of time. I honestly feel that if I could have had a face-to-face interview with every place I've applied to, I'd have a couple job offers, but that's not how it goes. My resume sucks, and that actually does mean something. Too late to change it now though.

The last thing I want to say is that it's pretty crazy how much time Americans waste with entertainment. I can't imagine where I'd be right now if instead of watching Pirate games, playing video games, and pissing around on social media, I would have tried to teach myself different useful things. What have I gotten from all those hours watching the Pirates and wasting time on the computer? Very, very little. I could be a programming expert by now, I could have done some big things that really would have helped that resume I talked about earlier, but instead I'm at a disadvantage. It's true for everyone really, unless you're a person that's super passionate about something that's actually good for your future (aka a nerd), you've probably wasted years of your life doing things that had no positive benefit to them besides temporary satisfaction. DUMB.

Humans are dumb, and I am a human. By the transitive property of geometry, I am dumb.

Read More

A few of my life's big questions

1. 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 that you can't really have A+'s, because there should be a clear maximum GPA, so my campaign is just to get rid of A-'s. We need answers. The entire grading system is mathematical, but there is an ugly, bulging, pussy mathematical flaw right at the top of it all.
2. Why do people get mad at me when I look at things mathematically? I try to use reason, logic, and math as often as I can. But I find that most of my friends don't like when I do so. They seem to want me to be more shallow minded and narrow-minded with my thought processes. Why is that encouraged? Isn't that just another way to say that they want me to be stupider? When did stupid become cool? And how can you be "too tired to remember something" that should be common sense? Do some people's brains just shut down at times? Like just because you haven't slept in 18 hours doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to multiply 7 by 8. I'm talking to you Clint Logan.
3. Why do basketball teams take out their players when they commit 2-3 fouls in the first half of a game? I don't usually do sports stuff on this blog, but this legitimately doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, you want to save your best players for the final minutes of a game, and if they get to 5 fouls (6 in the NBA) they are kicked out of the game, but why take your own players out when they don't have to be? Why not just wait and see if they do get to 4 fouls before taking action? You're letting the threat of a consequence hand you the consequence. That doesn't make sense to me. Leave them in and let yourself try to reap the benefits of your players not committing those next fouls.
4. Why do our minds change so much in the heat of the moment? It's happened to all of us, we get worked up about something and then we say and think things that we realize were completely wrong and out of line when we settle down later on. We become so short-sighted when our emotions are going. Is there a psychological reason for this? I think it's just that when our emotions are running away from us we become more selfish. We think that we're right and don't want to listen to anyone or anything try to tell us that we might be wrong. If more people realized that the best thing to do when you're angry/emotional is to just walk away from the situation and come back to it later there would be a lot less hurtful confrontation in the world.

Those are all things I thought about today. I also thought a lot about corn dogs, which was weird.

Read More

Competition

I have never been a competitive guy. I've been playing competitive sports since I was a child and I honestly can't remember one time where I let the outcome of a game/match affect my mood for more than a few minutes. Granted, there was never much at risk in any of those situations, but compared to the other guys around me who would let a pick-up game of tetherball ruin their relationships with their families, I was extremely uncompetitive. Double granted, I've never really given too much more than a couple shits about anything. For some reason, God made me widely apathetic, and personally I'm really glad He did. That begs the question, what's better? To care too much about everything, including things that don't matter, or to care too little about everything, including things that you should probably care more about? I think you could answer that question fairly both ways.

That's not the point I'm going for with this post though. Competition is naturally a good thing. It drives innovation, lowers prices, and does all kinds of other things that you would have to have some kind of grasp of economics to explain. That's the big picture, but it's a small picture world. In my first and last 16 years of education, competition has really pissed me the hell off. Do you know why that is? Because people get competitive over the pettiest things. You see it in elementary school, when the little kids get picked on because they didn't grow as fast as the other kids or because they have to wear glasses. You see it in middle and high school school when guys and girls start to figure out that their normally hidden body parts can make a pretty interesting connection. The first guy to have sex (or just the first guy to lie about having sex) is better than the rest of the guys. The guy with the biggest biceps is better than everyone else. It's all competition. Competition drives kids to feel really bad about themselves, the second they realize that they don't compare well to someone else in all the things that 10-18 year olds think are important is the second that they start not liking who they actually are. That's really jacked up, isn't it? Who are we to put ourselves down based on things we could never control? You have one life, one body, one mind, why would you ever want to even attempt to convince yourself that that life, body, and mind aren't good enough? Blame it on competition.

So now I'm a senior in college at the ripe age of 22. I'm about done with my years of spending the majority of my time around people of the same age and of the same situation as me, and I can say that I have learned a ton. The one big thing is that I am really glad that I've never been a competitive guy. I've lived my life not worrying about comparing to other people. I've just wanted to be the best Jon Anderson around... and that actually wasn't very easy since it's such a common name, but I think I've accomplished it, minus that damn country singer with all those awards.

You'd think that people would be pretty mature by the time they're in their 20's, but they really aren't. Especially at a division 3 college, where anyone with any coordination can join any sports team and almost always let the fact that they get to wear a fifty dollar jersey with a proper noun on the front of it go straight to their ego. Is playing a division 3 sport impressive? No, but that sure as hell doesn't stop anybody that does it from thinking and acting like they are better than everyone else around them that doesn't play. Could I play football for Waynesburg? Technically yes, there aren't tryouts for the team, but I wouldn't ever see the field.

The other thing is that this idea of competition keeps people away from pursuing things that are actually important in life. I'll just continue to pick on football players. We've got a bunch of athletes here that are so concerned with proving how much better they are than everyone else because they play football that by the time the graduate they have gained nothing else from their four years here than 20 extra pounds of muscle in their upper body. Guess what? You still aren't good enough to get paid to play football after college... and last time I checked it's pretty important to get paid in today's day and age. They spend their entire four years here thinking about sport and completely ignore everything else, and then they're four years behind everyone else and still have all the debt that the rest of us do, because division 3 doesn't give out athletic scholarships.

Competition is a good thing only when you compete in things that are important. Competing to have the best looking resumé is a good thing, competing to have the best grades in school is a good thing, and believe it or not, competing to actually be a good, moral person is a good thing as well. Intelligence is obviously a good thing, but by looking at my generation that's sadly not so obvious.

This blog used to be at least a little bit funny, maybe I'll get back to that sometime soon.

Read More