Fun

I have my appendix removed. Had been in the hospital for a few days. Feeling good, but out of shape now.

Another Failed Paper-Defense

This is a news story worth sharing.

FRANKFORT, Ky. —A Frankfort man is in jail accused of beating his girlfriend to death.

Brian Reed, 41, was charged with murder late Friday afternoon after the victim was found dead inside her apartment.

She was later identified as 28-year-old Gypsy Reyes. Police said she had blunt force trauma to her body.

They believe the incident was a domestic dispute that turned deadly and said the couple had a troubled past.

And here comes the pivotal moment;

Police said Reyes even had a standing domestic violence protection order against Reed, which was issued in 2010.

Read more: http://www.wlky.com/news/local-news/kentucky-news/frankfort-man-accused-of-beating-girlfriend-to-death/-/9718420/20106764/-/vnlp3x/-/index.html#ixzz2TB3x6Xno

Proliferation of poor personal choices aside, I’m surprised that protection order didn’t stop her from being murdered. Oh, no i’m not. Because that’s called life. When you have involvement, voluntary or not, with someone who beats you up, or is otherwise a criminal, you can probably count on it not bringing good news and cheer to your life.

We as a society have to realize that laws in themselves don’t protect people. Gun free zones and domestic violence protection orders won’t stop crime or criminals. Enforcing the law does, and that starts with recognition of that old concept called responsibility.

Blog Material

I know I’ve had a lot of personal posts lately, and you know what? I like it.

This effort has blogging has pretty much turned this into a site where I point out political inefficiency, hypocrisy, and failure.

Not that I don’t mind that stuff, its stuff that I’d like to turn it into something with some positiveness. One of the sayings I created mentions just that, “Don’t live against something, live for something”©.

That isn’t an opportunity to spin something like a smartass either. “I’m not living against men, I’m just pro-women”, “I’m not anti-American, I’m just pro-everybody else”.  People who want to operate like that can hit the bricks, you know what I mean so take the advice of keep going with your half-assed causes.

I’d like to turn this blog into something positive, at least a little bit, and I think I might know how I can do it. I used to be great at giving people advice. It wasn’t an advertised fact that I was good at giving advice, but when people told me about their problems I could them exactly what they needed to do, sometimes word for word. From married women, to single guys I knew what everyone had to do.

I still do (know), it’s just been so long since I’ve socially interacted with enough people to generate as much use as I had before. I’d like to try writing some more stuff like that.

I can’t promise it’ll be good, I can’t promise it’ll even work, and it’ll be tough for me to generate material, but I’ll do what I can for now and hopefully get some stuff going soon enough.

Life is the Leading Cause of Stress

I’m feeling stressed again. This tends to happen when big changes or events occur in my life. The last time it happened was last year in the first few days of my travels.

I was stressing out about making my trains, getting lost, and what I would do in these countries of which I spoke not a bit of language. I started feeling sick. The stress threw my appetite through a loop, I had a constant dull headache, and I’d say that when I bathed more hair than usual ended up on my fingers. All this transpired rapidly in a just a few days. Luckily, as I proceeded on my schedule I became comfortable that I would be okay.

Now again, nearly a year later and I feel stressed. Though this time it’s different. My head might feel a little…blocky, and maybe my body feels a bit off, but it isn’t manifesting itself so much physically this year. It’s more of a mental price that I’m paying.

As I wrote recently I have successfully gotten a new job. My first in over a year, so therefore it’s a big deal, and while I have the job, it isn’t so concretely established yet that I will fulfill my obligations. Not only that, but I still have quite some time before I actually start work and the anticipation probably isn’t helping. If I could get over my stress on vacation by getting through that first stage and becoming comfortable, then the same might apply here. If I didn’t have to wait so long it wouldn’t be so tormenting.

And this job means a lot to me. All my eggs are in this basket. I have a degree that I haven’t used, and no idea what I’m going to do with my life. This job is supposed to add some kind of a stable future to my life. I’m not thinking negatively, it’s just that I realize how important it is to me. If I don’t succeed I’ll probably be 30 and working at Wal-Mart in a few years. I’m smart and capable, but I can’t find an outlet for myself. Too much “Do what you love” and a crappy economy leaves a young man left high and dry. It’s scary to think that I might end up with not even a plan if this falls through. I will quite literally be lost. I may not have worked for the past near year and a half, but I at least had options to consider.

It also doesn’t help that my personal life at this point is non-existent. My friends are few and far-away so I don’t get much of a chance to be a part of a group. On top of that I haven’t even attempted to get a date in months, not since August last year probably.

This is what has smacked me hard today and caused me to write this post. How I would love an adequate job that allowed me to work and support myself with a nice little house, and to have a family as well. People who I actively care about and share my life with. No major stress beyond the day to day occurrences of home life.

This new job will give me the chance to meet people and make friends no doubt, and the addition of a female counterpart is equally possible. Still I have two months before I start and even then the job is not secure as I could easily be bounced out of the company, both before I arrive or at any time I’m there.

If there was anything I could change about myself, it would be to take life as it comes and deal with it without stressing out. I can deal with it, it’s just that when I know things are coming I start to worry and cause stress.

Socialism and Priorities

I just saw a documentary called Bulletproof Salesman. It is about a German armored car merchant who made money off the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan by building and selling armored vehicles to diplomats, news media, and the like. It’s interesting, non-political, but if you have other things to do, do those first or just have the film on while doing those things if you can.

Anyway, as I was watching the film I noticed work crews in Afghanistan tending to the road after a car bombing. As the road was mostly just a track in the dirt I thought, “gee these guys don’t even have paved roads and we think we’re going to change them?” Then I thought, well we’re probably spending a few hundred million at least to pave a few roads no doubt and it made me think of the free market system.

The Afghans don’t have paved roads cause they don’t need paved roads. Their economy doesn’t require it and when it does they’ll figure it out, until then there is no need to meddle with things they don’t need, that they won’t take care of, and will prove to be a waste of money.

Just another example that socialism doesn’t work. You can shower all kinds of luxuries on one of the worlds worst countries but that doesn’t change anything. It’s not that the Afghans have absolutely no need for roads, it’s that they have more pressing matters to deal with and roads aren’t one of them. I keep using roads as an example, but it can be anything. Cable television, internet, toys, barbershops, whatever their priorities are they’ll take care of it first. The only way they won’t take care of what they need first is if their government takes all their money, and ability to do anything for itself, which our efforts are only encouraging.

 

Life Updates

I don’t usually share much personal stuff, but I thought I would for this. After making it through it all the different steps I recently got a new job. It’s something new so I don’t know how it will go but it certainly promises to be exciting work and it even comes with a travel component.

What is the work? You’ll have to pardon my vagueness but it’s(could be) a combination of liaison, investigating, and analyzing. The exact work will vary over time but basically I’ll go around talking to people and trying to put together a picture of how things are going. It’ll be interesting for me because analysis of people is something I consider myself to be good at, but I’m not really a good chatter. I can BS and make a pitch, but idle chit-chat makes me uncomfortable, so I typically don’t. I have a good reputation for being candid and not full of it, which earns me respect even from people who know I’m not a chatter. Still it will probably be something useful to get better at. “Hey, how bout this weather?”

As I mentioned there will be a travel component. The company has offices in many states, as well as doing business overseas as well. In fact I am already scheduled to move in a few months for a short term(several months) assignment to get acquainted with the job and then I’ll be put somewhere else again. That could very well be the pattern of my life for the near future, regularly moving around and not really settling anywhere. On the one hand how can I know if I want to settle somewhere if I’ve never been there yet, but it still isn’t anything I ever expected even though I like travel.

I should also mention that this will impact my blogging, particularly in the upcoming months as I’ll be slammed with work for periods at a time. Though at the moment I’m in one of those swings where I don’t feel like posting much anyway, I’ll prepare posts in advance for when I know I won’t be able to write anything new and have them scheduled so there will be regular content, it just won’t be anything with current events.