…So Hard for it Honey

(First off sorry I haven’t posted in ages, I’ve had trouble coming up with ideas for posts. If you have any please share them with me here.)

I did some depressing math recently in my head… OK, I lied because I can’t do math in my head. But it’s alright because that’s why God created Texas Instruments who in turn blessed us with advanced calculators. Anyways, getting back on track. I figure the average person works from about again 20 at the latest to say age 60 give or take a few years on either end and  that’s roughly 40 years.  A year as 52 weeks so if you figure about 2-3 weeks vacation/sick time that leaves you working at least 49 weeks every year.  Are you keeping up with me here? And at 40 hours a week that’s (40hrs) x (49weeks) x (40years) = 78,400 hours of an average life spent working.

You read all the time about the amount of time people spend watching TV or sleeping etc. Correct me if I’m wrong but while it might not be productive to watch TV at least it’s entertaining and enjoyable… unless someone else is holding the remote in which case these feelings may be slightly deminished. And sleeping… well a.) it’s not like it’s a stressful activity, b.) you usually feel better after doing it and c.) you have to sleep to live. Work on the other hand for most people, myself included, is often stressful, is not fun or entertaining and I usually don’t feel better after doing it.  So the question is… must you also work to live?

All of these facts plus my astounding deductive reasoning skills have led me to the conclusion that I will most likely spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 78,000 hours of my life working at an assortment of jobs I don’t like. And countless others complaining about people there that I like even less, and dreaming of ways to somehow become independently wealthy. And all for a paycheck. Unfortunately, in the real world in order to have the things we want: houses, vacations, cars, clothes, food, etc. we have to have the money to by them. And unless your last name is Hilton, Trump or Bloomberg,  there is only one way I know of to get that money; working. So that answers our previous question.  I suppose the key at the end of the day is finding a job you really like doing, with people you like doing it with, so the remainder of your days can be spent toiling away in happiness. Who am I kidding… the key is alcohol and drinking it when you get home from work so that you can build up the courage to go back for just one more day, or… get drunk enough to rob a bank.

What are you Talking About?

It is a major pet peeve of mine when people who clearly know next to nothing about a given topic insist upon talking about it at length regardless.  This most often seems to be an issue when it comes to current events. In today’s world we get our news from so many sources in what is literally a 24-7 news cycle. There are tons of TV networks, radio shows, the internet, etc. and somehow people still seem to be clueless.  For example at work the other day I over heard a guy at work asking another co-worker “Did you hear that Venus and Serena Williams bought the Miami Dolphins?” I interjected that they had bought a fraction of the franchise but that I was 99% certain that no team was owned by just one person and that when people invest in teams they buy percentages of the franchise sort of like stock.  He rebutted that “you don’t think they can afford to buy a team? They both make like millions of dollars a year.” And I had to educate him to the fact that teams aren’t worth millions of dollars, NFL and MLB franchises are valued in the BILLIONS of dollars, I mean think about it… the players all make millions, just put that all together and think about how big we’re talking.  He still thought I was crazy. And I told him that if Serena and Venus Williams had just bought THE Miami Dolphins that there were going to be a lot of pissed off people like Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony and Gloria Estefan etc… because they just got their asses bought out.

The conversation somehow moved from The Williams Sisters to Jay-Z when he proudly told me that “Jay-Z owns a basketball team.” I corrected him that once again he own like %1.5 of a basketball team and some Russian dude just bought the majority share of the team.  I mean apparently this guy thinks that celebrities buy teams like us regular people buy socks. It just frustrates me to no end when people talk about stuff with an air of authority like they know what’s going on and fill the mind’s of others around them with crap and all the while have no freaking clue that they’re completely wrong. And I’m not expecting people to know everything about everything in the world, or even something about everything. I just ask that people be aware of the fact that they’re talking out of their asses and… therefore, shut the hell up.  There is an old adage that I remember Thumper from Bambi teaching me as a child “If you don’t have something nice to say, then don’t say nothing at all.” Now I’ve never followed that one very well myself and this blog is evidence of that, but I did adapt my own version of that thought. “If you don’t have anything smart to say, then shut your stupid ass up… I mean, don’t say nothing at all.”