Reply to "Tom’s Big Day"

Thanks, Augur, I really appreciate the support that you gave me when I was so ill.

I still remember, three days off the operating table, going to Lincoln Square and having that marvellous lunch and then playing with toys in that little shop in Lincoln Square. I could hardly walk, but it was so delightful to feel alive again after having the oxygen supply restored to my brain.

I had been toying with writing a “wise old guy” post today and thankfully you’ve given me an excuse to write one.

I am taking extreme pleasure in the fact that as of today, I can “put in my papers” if the powers-that-be offend me. There’s a lot of freedom in being able to tell “The Man” to go to hell. Lifetime paid health care at Carle is nothing to sneeze at, so to speak.

Being 55 is a very strange position. My youth is still very close to the center of my mind, but it’s tempered with years and years of new memories and new data explaining the events that I witnessed and in which I participated.

My grandmother warned me that I would, for all practical purposes, remain about 20 or so in my mind. It’s hard to describe in actuality. Sometimes it seems like I fell asleep one day when I was a Junior in college and woke up with pains in places that I didn’t know that I had. My essence (my “soul”, I guess you could call it) is still the same as it was then. What has happened, mostly, is that the little voice in my head that says, “Tom, you know that’s probably not a good idea” is a lot louder and I have a tendency to listen to it a lot more often.

While I was really sick and dependent, I realized that one of the practical reasons for being a good and decent person to your family is that you don’t have to die alone. It also reminded me that the more people you have in your family, the less of a burden you are to any one of them.

I can see now that this post is going to ramble a bit and sometimes dip into the maudlin, so please bear with me, I only had a couple ideas when I sat down at the computer and this is going to be stream-of-consciousness in some parts.

Advice to the blogger-boys here who are just starting out in your careers….

Try not to allow yourself to get totally defined by what you do to make money. You’re a lot more than your job. I’ve read a lot of Studs Terkel, as I’ve mentioned earlier, and his interviews point out that everyone has a story. A lot of the time, it has little or nothing to do with what the person does to make a living. The job that you do have, however, if you’re going to survive it, needs to be one that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. If that’s not true, you’re just killing time on the way to the grave, and believe me, you arrive there before you know it.

A college degree is currently vastly overrated in our society. I know that you don’t want to hear this, since you’ve gone way into debt in order to finance your future, but it’s often true. I figure that about a third of the students who come to university would have been better off to try something else–the competition for the jobs requiring degrees is too fierce for the lower third to do much but drudge work in the corporations hiring them. kitten sent me an old USENET post from a disgruntled physicist who said that he had more friends whose lives had been ruined by getting a Physics Ph.D. than by doing drugs. There’s a lot of truth in that.

Therefore, be careful in initial assessments of people that you meet that took the non-traditional paths in education. Often, they’re going to be the ones that are actually building your McMansion, with the help of guys from Mexico with sixth-grade educations. A degree right now increases your lifetime earnings by about 58%. That sounds like a hell of a lot, but keep in mind that once you have your housing, food and the care of your wife/husband/children taken care of, anything left over is usually either frittered away or spent on things that may not have any meaning in the long run. (You also have to spend your twenties and/or your early thirties paying for that expensive education, too. Sometimes it’s better just to detail cars.)

I have found that once those needs are met, day-to-day happiness trumps money any day of the week. Money really, really does not buy happiness (except in the possible case of Augur and drunken dwarf hookers.)

Politics….

I’ve found that a lot of liberal thought is based on the principle that humanity is perfectable. That’s a craptastic idea. I’ve also found that conservative thought is based upon the premise that humanity cannot be improved. That’s a depressing, as well as craptastic idea.

I think my Libertarianism is actually middle ground between those two ideas–it’s based on the perhaps radical idea that if you leave people the fuck alone, they’ll muddle through and occasionally come up with something that just might save the human race–or at least give us something to talk about on the ‘Net.

Speaking of the ‘Net, I cannot bear listening to the “blame America for everything in the world that’s screwed up” crowd. I mean, seriously, what other nation on earth would invent something like the Internet and then give it away?

At any rate, I want to take this occasion to thank and send love to my Wives and Husband and to my children and grandchildren out in the world. I love all of you more than I possibly can express. I know that I regularly screw up, but you keep loving me no matter what.

I want to thank Billy and Brian for the opportunity last fall to turn my ideas into electrons on a regular basis and put them out for everyone to see. You and the rest of the regular contributors and commenters on this blog are my best friends, even if we’ve not all met–you keep me honest and thoughtful at the same time.

And a special thanks to Augur–I wish you were my son. You make me proud of you every day.

I’ve been given a second chance at life. I’ll try hard not to blow it.

Tom