Kevin’s Rapture

I am predicting that this blog will come to an end on May 25 at 4pm MST.

I have done extensive studies, the creator (creator of the internet, not the universe) will make his final judgement on all blogs May 25 and will create an exalted server to place the chosen blogs.

Al Gore, aka the creator, will then let loose a virus on all other blogs making them useless rantings and completely boring posts.

I am going to sell my computer and begin removing myself from all social media in preparation for the Blog-rapture.

Appropriate Ass-iness

I may be giving myself too much credit here, but I think I’ve always been the nice-guy. I tend to do my best to avoid arguments and confrontations by withholding my anger and bottling it up. As you can guess this is probably not the healthiest approach to life.

In the past few weeks things have come up that I would have EVERY right to get angry and blow up. But being the passive aggressive that I am, I have done my best to calmly discuss the issues and try to come up with a solution.

My question is…at what point does it become appropriate to be an Ass. Even though blowing up won’t help anything and might even cause more issues, is it ever appropriate and necessary to have a meltdown?

Who can you trust

There are very few people through life that we can ultimately trust their opinion.

Friends can give wonderfully helpful advice. Friends choose to associate with you and enjoy your company. But friends don’t give truthful comments about you if it is going to be hurtful. A friend always wants to build you up. Therefore they cannot be trusted to give an honest opinion of you.

Family can also be counted on to voice their opinion. They generally want to help you succeed and will give you honest advice on what to do. But family doesn’t necessarily choose to associate with you. Family is in a sense stuck with each other, for better or for worse. Family also doesn’t want to be hurtful and would cannot be trusted to give an honest opinion of you.

The one person you can judge yourself by is your partner. This is the one person who voluntarily chose to be with you. This relationship is the best indicator of your personality, your looks, and your worth. Any other person has no reason not to avoid the truth or lie to you.

I’m not saying the world is full of liars, but when you cut away all the layers most people have a reason to not tell you the truth.

Middle East USA

With soaring gas prices there have been many ideas given to help solve these issues. Since I don’t like to be left out, and I have ideas on most everything…here is my proposal:

Step 1.
Locate oil. The United States government will survey and map out the best spot to find vast amounts of oil in the middle east. Look for the best reserves that we believe contain large quantities of oil that will last for the foreseeable future.

Step 2.
Alert the local residents. A massive effort will need to be taken to ensure that all inhabitants in the designated US oil area know the land is going to be taken by the US government. ALL residents must leave immediately.

Step 3.
Make the land ‘Unusable’. This is the tricky part. In order to allow the US to maintain the land in such a hostile and violent area of the world we must make the land uninhabitable. If people cannot survive in the Middle East USA then conflicts will be minimal. My solution, drop a nuclear bomb and make the area radioactive. I’m not sure how long this will destroy the area, these details can be worked out later.

Step 4.
Send in the robots. Since the area is now unlivable for humans, we will need robots controlled from anywhere in the world to build, run, and maintain our new oil plants in Mid-e-USA.

Step 5.
Reap the benefits of deep oil reserves coming from our newest US territory.

**Warning**
This could possibly damage the image of the United States more than it already is.
Also, this could launch the beginning of a Robot takeover. If the machines rise up in this new uninhabitable region of the world we could unleash Armageddon upon our own species.

But as long as gas prices go down, what’s a few small risks?

Carried Away

You know how easy it is to get carried away trying to make something perfect? Here are a few examples to illustrate my point.

• Painting. A painting project always starts out as something simple like painting the inside of a closet. But then with the inside looking so new it makes the outside look old and dirty. Then the walls in the room need to have a new color. Until finally every room in the house has been painted all because of one stupid closet that didn’t need to really be painted in the first place.
• Trimming a tree. You look at a tree and think, “If I just cut that one annoying branch off…”, so you get your utility scissors and snip off that annoying little new growth. That one snip now makes the visual look of the tree lopsided so you take the branch cutters out and attack the other side of the tree. Obviously this will end up with a gas powered trimmer cutting the tree down to a barely living stump. But at least that annoying twig won’t hit you any more.
• Tetris. One of the most successful games in history tetris plays off this need to keep trying to be perfect. The game relentlessly sends down different shapes and the desire to fit them all together neatly is addictive.  Failure is not an option and you always think if I just play one more time I can do better.

Keeping these things in mind, I discovered another area to watch out for. I was in the shower and finally got so annoyed with a small patch of hair growing on my shoulder that I grabbed my razor and just like that it was gone. I’m sure you already know where this is going…but I’ll continue this harrowing story anyway.

Once the shoulder was now looking fabulous, I thought “why not just level out the top of my chest hair”. So on I went, naively thinking I could just stop at any point. With the top of my chest now nice and even, focus lowered down my stomach and I removed the pesky small amounts of hair on the sides and only left the trail of hair from my chest down my stomach to my navel. I will note that this was NOT a complete shave and if you hadn’t known the hair was there before you wouldn’t know I had even shaved. Just a bit of trimming.

Now is where I will take a bit of caution and proceed with more euphemisms. The trimming went lower…

The razor cut a groomed line along the edges of the ‘yard’. The ‘grass’ was trimmed around the base of the ‘tree’ and the ‘boulders’ were completely cleaned off. After all of this I trimmed the whole yard nice and short with the clippers.

As I’m sure you are all now shocked, bewildered, disgusted and intrigued…I will say that I am happy with the results. But be warned! If you take a razor to anything and think it will stop there, it won’t! Proceed only if you are willing to finish the job.

So I must now become one of the many men who ‘man-scape’. For better or for worse!

Owners manual

I ran across this page today and thought it was hilarious. I never knew there was an owners manual.

And since you’re wondering, I got the full size, extended cab edition! The specs listed are for mid-size

Owners manual

The wee-hours of the morning

I’ll start with a disclaimer that I know to some this might not seem early…but to me, any time from 1am to 6am would be considered early.

With that said, I feel that calling it the “wee-hours” sounds too positive. Maybe call it something like the “screw this-hours”, or “piss off hours”. Just something that lets people know it’s not a good time to mess with me.

I think I might lean towards the “piss off hours” since the “wee” in wee-hours is similar in peeing references/jokes to “piss” in piss-off hours.

I hate waking up during the piss off hours! I think that works much better.

Aphephobia

Aphephobia: Fear of touching or being touched.

I think I may have a slight case of aphephobia. Not so much the fear of being touched, but a keen awareness of touching. If you were to rank it on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is a life dabilitating issue and 1 is not caring at all, I think I might fall at about a 4 or 5.

It doesn’t negatively impact my life, and I don’t necessarily care if I do touch someone, but I have to make a conscious effort to make physical contact. Whether that is a handshake or a pat on the back, my mind races through a billion scenrios before I touch.

Right now this isn’t a problem…but when I’m old and senile will I be some weird shut-in who has billions of baby wipes and rubber gloves? The future is a scary scary vision for aphephobia sufferers.

Suck

Sometimes things just suck. But you have to just keep going.

“In” Love

I was having a discussion about what Love is and this soon turned into a discussion about the difference between Loving someone and being “In Love” with someone.

Since this is my blog, I can write what I want and you can disagree with a comment that I may or may not accept. That’s the beauty of blogging right!?

I think that Love is a simple emotion of caring about someone. Just as you can care for people on many different levels, you can love people on many different levels.

Level 1: A general caring for others and wanting people to be happy and get along.
Level 2: People you see and associate everyday affect your life for better or worse just as you affect them. These people take on a new level of either hate or love just from simply interacting and being a part of their lives.
Level 3: Family. This doesn’t have to be just family, but it’s the best example of this level. This is a group that you didn’t necessarily choose to be a part of, and you don’t have to see them all the time either. But through years of knowing each other and years of sacrificing and enduring life struggles you grow very close.
Level 4: This is the group reserved for very special people you trust and choose to let into you life. You choose to go through life together and your happiness is tied to these people. This is mostly reserved for the person you choose to marry. This is the group that is mistaken for being “in love”.

Love is a choice, love is hard, and love feels different for each group and goes through phases in each group. I believe the phrase being “In Love” is only a phase in any of these levels.

When you see a couple “In love” in the movies, or you feel that energy and tingling excitement when you see that special someone walk in the room really has nothing to do with love, and more to do with physical attraction. Too often people think that this feeling will last forever and that’s what true love is. So when that magical feeling of newness and excitement wear off they have just as magically “Fallen out of love”. This is a basic misunderstanding of what love is.

It’s fun to try to continue to re-create that feeling of excitement and exhilaration in a relationship, but that feeling will not be there constantly like it is during courtship.

That’s my diatribe for the day. Let me know what you think.