Twenty-five random things I’ve learned over the years.
1. As an English teacher I learned - and tried to teach - the difference between your and you’re, its and it’s, there, their, and they’re, to, two and too.
2. Most people (and dogs) can be trained, but few truly are educated.
3. Even dogs respond to the difference between lay and lie.
4. If I don’t do something now, and if I wait long enough, I usually don’t have to do it. Either someone else picks up the slack or few people notice and it seldom matters.
5. It’s (see, I know how to use it’s) easier to get forgiveness than permission in most cases.
6. Don’t sweat the small stuff. And it isn’t all small stuff; some thing really do matter.
7. Semicolons are pretentious.
8. I didn’t learn everything I needed to know in kindergarten and anyone who thinks they did is pretty stupid.
9. Life is one long journey of learning.
10. Love comes in a lot of forms and it’s all good.
11. But what too often passes for love is not always good.
12. Too many people live by rules instead of thinking for themselves. Focus on what’s right and true, not what some rule says: that is, think independently.
13. “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” is pure platitudinal nonsense. If that were true, there would be no one in mental institutions, no one in homeless shelters, and thousands of Congolese women would not face serial rape by the soldiers charged with protecting them.
14. We don’t get to choose our parents or our race or our nationality or our sexual identity, and any kind of prejudice is silly because who we are is an accident of birth.
15. I did get to choose a lot of my family, and some of them chose me: certainly my wife, grandkids, son and daughter, sister, and cousins. It’s great to have that much love.
16. Exercise is much easier to fantasize about than participate in. Damn!
17. You have to retire to something rather than from a job.
18. Cutlery and napkins are your friends.
19. I don’t worry about the weather because I have no control over it. The weather has no moral value: it just is. Thus it cannot be good or bad, merely comfortable or uncomfortable, violent or calm, and so on.
20. A lot of life is like the weather.
21. A lot of what I forget isn’t important enough to remember.
22. Guilt is usually a wasted emotion.
23. I cannot be anything I set my heart and mind to, despite the claims of certain platitudinous soothsayers.
24. Most of the things I worry about don’t happen, but the things I never foresaw blindside me. I worried about my son driving, and I never considered Daniel would be killed falling off a roof.
25. It's all right to dislike someone or something, and no one else has the right to tell you you're wrong.
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