I just got my first bona fide toothache. Not cool. It feels like my tooth is going to explode. I'd never had a real hangover. I'm told those are not cool either.
I drove by a psychic's parlor the other day, in a run down shack, in a run down part of town, and the sign on the wall boasted that she can provide, among other thing, lucky lotto numbers. Psychics never seem to win the lottery, but they seem pretty confident that, for a token fee, they can give me the information that would help me win it. How is that?
Would you sell out your friendship for a million dollars? Of course not. That would be downright vulgar. How about $20,000 a year? Do you still say no? I know a lot of people who would have said no to both questions, but took a job in another state that paid barely $10,000 more than they were making here. It effectively ended every close friendship they had. I guess if you're working for the money, it seems less crass than if you just take a lump sum and stop seeing your buddies without explanation.
Have you ever wondered how people do some of the amazing things they do? I did. And when I asked people, I found something remarkable. [This is going to sound like the promo for an informercial.] What I found is that people do amazing things by simply deciding to do them. Like starting a business: most people think that you need to be rich to begin a business. I look at local business people and realize that, before they started their businesses, many of them were nothing more than the dregs of humanity, fresh off a boat or a plane, who decided to do something and did it.
For example, during my first little league season, when I was really bad at baseball, and my play was limited to only the league-mandated three innings per game, I learned how to juggle. I still know how to do it.
When life throws me lemons, I'm more likely to bitch about it than to make lemonade. But sometimes I make the lemonade. If life ever threw me grapefruits, I would probably hit someone. There is absolutely nothing I like that comes from grapefruits.
When I was in high school, before those commercials had come out explaining how they developed Gatorade, we used to joke that they came up with that stuff because life threw them gators. When life throws you gators, make gatorage. My daughter piped in: "when life throws you gators, eat gator eggs."
I like emu eggs and ostrich eggs. I wonder if I would like gator eggs. I like gator meat. I like turtle meat, too. I wonder if I would like turtle eggs.
Isn't it funny how we value turtle eggs more than human fetuses? Can someone explain to me why you can go to jail for a long time if you ride your ATV across a sand dune and accidentally crush a turtle egg, but not for having or performing a partial birth abortion? Or why you have a constitutional privacy right that lets you have an abortion, but no privacy right to take a drug that isn't approved by your doctor?
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