Theory 11: The Longest Run. Part A: The Rebirthing

I have the Internet again. Nice work friend who taunted me two posts ago. Now I can resume my foolishness.

Please close your eyes and imagine the instant before the moment when you were born.

Wham! You’re born.

Just like that, you have begun the experience of life on the planet earth. You know nothing and you can’t even see. Life is a complete mystery for you.

It is, however, only a partial mystery in my eyes. Being a grown-up of moderate intelligence, I can feel confident that I know at least this much:

1) Roughly nine months ago your parents’ hormonal urges somehow collided in a manner that allowed for fertilization. You are the fruit of a moment of orgasm, so you can rest assured that it’s mostly downhill from here. Just hope and pray that this is the only time that you have any direct connection to getting your parents off.
2) Your parents, with an assist from their respective parents and so on, have uniquely combined their gene pool to create the blueprint for your personality. Your genes are a substantial part of who you are now and who you will always be. There is nothing you can do to improve on your genetic toolbox from here on in, so you are going to have to make the best of whatever that you have.

As your mother sets her eyes upon you for the first time, she wonders what type of person you will turn out to be. If by chance she knows the identity of the father, and even knows a fair amount about him, she can already take an educated guess as to the overall potential that your genes will probably give you. Now all that is left to determine is how your experiences will interact with your genes to determine what decisions you make during the course of your life. Nature and nurture can argue all they want about who deserves the most credit for who you really are, but it is your decisions as a living person that will ultimately define you.

Early on, the decisions are automatic and have little impact. However, gradually, as you realize that you control the movement of your hand, or that you have the power to hurt others, or that you are ultimately accountable for your own choices, you begin to have a larger impact in your own life, and in your own development. Unlike the problem with inheriting your genes, you learn that you do have some control over things through your own life decisions.

Bear in mind, you aren’t just controlling your own movements; you are playing a part in controlling the world around you. You make a decision, and your action causes reactions throughout the cosmos, which in turn generates even more results that happened thanks to your original decision. It is fairly clear that is in your best interest to make the best decision whenever possible. The value of your choices generate the extent to which subsequent results are favourable (Cdn spelling) to you.

At least you assume they do, but themost intelligent decisions don’t always cause a fair result, do they? Irony would never let that happen. Sometimes you take the safest route and get mugged; you take every precaution and get unlucky; you exercise and live healthy and still end up getting lung disease faster than a smoker can say “I would kill for a cigarette.”

Life isn’t always fair.

So, even though we last left you as an infant who doesn’t know anything, already you face the three-headed challenge of (1) living with the fact that you can’t influence your own genetic makeup; (2) needing to understand that you can control your fate to some extent through the decisions you make; and (3) needing to accept that this won’t always help and will sometimes even backfire. We all know that the right choice can produce the wrong result.

There is a great deal of gamble in life. I myself have been coming across a fair amount of forks in the road lately, and wondering which direction to head in. I like to think that I am pretty good at making decisions, ample evidence to the contrary aside, because I, in my own way, take decisions very seriously.

In Part B – The Gamblers Code, I plan to tell you what I think the key to making the right decisions is, and why I think that a lot of people screw up both their decisions and, in turn, their lives.

In order to try and keep your interest through yet another dragged out two-part theory, I will leave you with a quiz:

Clear your mind.

A woman is driving home with her child in a car seat. The child had begged to be allowed to ride in the back seat without being in the car seat. The child may or may not be old enough to ride without a car seat but the mother had decided that it was probably safer, and definitely easier, just to strap the child in the seat.

The mother, as we all do in life, comes to a fork in the road.

Both routes can take her home, but the left turn is a little faster. However, as the woman arrives at the fork, she has a funny urge to turn right solely to mix it up and break from routine.

“Another time,” she thinks, because she remembers that she is in a hurry and has important reasons to get home sooner. She turns left.

A giant truck pulls out onto the street without warning and is headed straight for her. While an excellent driver might have been able to avoid the truck, the mother is only a slightly above-average driver. She collides with the truck. A horrible accident occurs. The mother survives but the child dies. The paramedics comment that, unusual as it may be, the only hope in this case would have been if the child was thrown clear of the car.

It is a simple question, but I suggest that it will help you determine whether or not you have some important problems with your own decision-making.

So I ask you: What was the mothers’ biggest mistake?

Stay tuned for Part B: The Gamblers Code, wherein I get nice and arrogant and try to tell you how my vices can help you make better decisions.

Intermission 2: How do I suck, let me count the ways.

No theories of life this week. As we all know, theories of life are for people who can function reasonably well in society.

First off, let me just say that it takes a strange combination of vision, incompetence and external stimulants for a former IT specialist to go 6 weeks, despite all reasonable efforts, without Internet access in a big city like Toronto.

I have some pretty cool stuff coming in the book of Mark: I am going to harshly but constructively criticize people that think everything happens for a reason; I am going to help you visualize your loved ones dying; I am going to both attack and support a deterministic vision of existence; and, I am going to try and explore racism with some brutally honest statements about how our cowardly minds (mine included) really work.

Is it just me or do I use colons and semi-colons more than most people? There’s a Crohns Disease joke in there somewhere.

Sadly, I am not going to do any of this until next week at the earliest. It’s pathetic to even talk about it, and I am about to prove how pathetic it is: I was watching a rerun of Beverly Hills 90210 today, which I haven’t actually done in over a month for the record, and Andrea tells Dylan that the best advice you can give a writer is to not talk about writing but just do it. Great advice for a teenager, though as I vaguely recall the actress was 37 at the time and the actor portraying Dylan was 30. In other words, even though I am watching a teenager’s show, I am at least relating to actors in my own age group (as they then were).

In spite of Andrea/Gabrielle’s wise counsel, I promise I will get going again as soon as I have the Internet. Life is hard without knowing what craziness he is up to, or how she will react to Lucas winning Rock Star, or even how the world will react without its greatest podcast. I need food for my hungry brain in order to provide you with the mediocre level of writing that all 17 of you have become accustomed to.

The really sad thing is that, in every different situation that I have had problems getting Internet access, I have had friends in moderately high places willing to help me out. At the time that I was being screwed over by the first telco giant, whom I finally fired after months of poor service including two weeks of down time, I actually knew a senior executive who I have been friends with since high school. Impressive? Apparently not, and he has since quit that company since anyway. After a week of working with another friend who is a Professor of Computer Science, I came to accept that I couldn’t just access the Internet for free with a wireless card. (Note: I am stretching by including him on that one.) That was three weeks wasted and I began to develop my little inferiority complex. Now another friend who mocked my last post in the comment section, and who holds an impressive title at my new telco giant letdown, is on the case and is trying to figure out why my technical issue has been escalated three times without any feedback. He still doesn’t know. My complex has mushroomed to the point that I can’t buy toilet paper without asking the stranger in the grocery store for her advice, when the facts suggest I ought to be an expert.

In short, I have learned two things:

1) My friends aren’t as useful as they claim they are.
2) I probably couldn’t survive without them.

When I do get the Internet, I promise to come back with incredible enthusiasm, which renewed access to pornography can only do so much to alleviate.