Sorry for the missed post last night. Let's just say that travelling for business tied with the end of a holiday travel weekend tied with some really nasty weather resulted in a much later night than I had previously expected. Also, this will result in a delay in my coverage of The Pick Up Artist Season 2 Finale. I know that this will be very disappointing to many of you. But look, if your goal is to meet the love of your life by picking up some drunk floozy at a bar I'm pretty sure that waiting one more day will not result in too much struggle.
(However, I love the fact at how upset people can get when flights are delayed. As if by getting upset they will have any impact on getting to their destination faster. Whereas in a car you can yell at someome for dawdling over the magazine rack for a few minutes too long when you are at the airport there is nothing for you to do other than sit there and wait. So do just that, saves a lot of hassle.)
(Oh and Notre Dame played football this weekend? I didn't notice.)
Given my time spent at airports I did have a chance to read a few books. The one I want to discuss is The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. You have heard of this one, it is based on the famous lecture given by a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who was dying of cancer and how even though he was facing a terminal illness he could still be happy knowing that he had achieved all of his childhood dreams.
It took me a few months to pick up this book. Partly because one of the first times I went to pick it up a friend of mine asked me: "Why would you ever want to listen to someone else tell you how to live your life?" In some ways it is a valid point. It does say something about our society in that bookstores have aisle after aisle of self-help books and instruction manuals as we all hope to find that bullet point list that we can follow in order to finally be happy. The thing is that doesn't exist and it never will. Life is just never that simple.
But even with that said one can still find much value in listening to another person's ideas on the subject. This book doesn't really cover anything that you don't already know (stay positive, work hard, always be open to new opportunities) but sometimes you need to hear things in a different format for them to make sense. The Last Lecture didn't cause me to slap my hand across my forehead and go "so that is what I've been doing wrong all of these years" but it did help shed some light on what is my biggest issue.
Which is that at times I wonder if my life is stuck in a meaningless cycle. Get up, go to work, eat, watch tv, go to sleep, repeat as necessary. I've been trying to think about past conversations and past events recently and they all seem to get muddled up with all of this meaningless plablum that fills up my life. While it is nice to make a living on knowing trivia at the end of the day it is not what you want to have to show for your entire life. And maybe that is what I am taking from reading this book. Try to really embrace the wonder and opportunity of every day of your life. I really wish that I can figure out a way to make this happen.
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