This is my Homework

This is my homework.

My favorite part of this photo montage is that all the raw footage was taken with our new DSLR.  It's incredible how much I learned about Photoshop even in just the first two weeks of class.  I've gone back to re-read one of my favorite books, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, to keep the concepts therein fresh on my mind as I move through this semester.  In spite of everything I knew about Photoshop over the past decade or so, my Digital Design professor is still finding ways to make me feel like a beginner.

There is a Taoist saying that reads:

The man who can renovate himself for just one day:

That same man has the capacity for daily renovation.

I created this blog as a repository for all the off-the-wall ideas and concepts birthed by the unorthodox way I interface with the world.  The slogan I coined, "one man's ignorance is another man's bliss" is a play on the old adage, "one man's trash is another man's treasure."  It speaks to the idea in 1 Corinthians 1:25 - something to the effect of "God's foolishness is wider than man's wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than man's strength."  Basically, I'm placing myself in the position of the fool who follows behind the wise, collecting the discarded scraps of insight that they leave behind as they walk their paths.

Thus the name, "A Fool's Gold."

I don't think I've ever explained that.

I'm learning how to let my mind be creative so that I don't have to.  Whenever a problem presents itself, I simply acknowledge and accept the problem, take a second to commit it to my subconscious memory and let it percolate for a few days.  Then one day as I go about my daily tasks, the answer jumps out at me like all those annoying pop-up windows we hated so much in the late 90's.

Well, the other day, I was smacked in the face with one such idea.  I realized that midway through February, I started slacking on the whole "living life in HD" thing.  Seeing as how I was hoping to spend the entire year improving in humility and discipline, I've been seeing this as a 87.5% failure.  I should have seen it as a 12.5% success.  The answer that hit me like a ton of marshmallows* was simply this: set twelve one-month goals instead of one big, vague sweeping New Years resolution.

So, around this time every month, I'm going to start pontificating on what my goal for the next month should be.  Since I realized this halfway through the month, my goal for the rest of February has been to get myself onto a regular schedule to keep dishes, laundry, trash and litter box taken care of.  That hasn't been that hard, since I've pretty much already been doing that.  I have a few ideas about my March goal, but I need to spend more time in prayer about it.

To tie this all together, I've had plenty of opportunity to stoke the fire of self renovation, and I've been squandering it.  So, come March, I'm getting serious about getting serious.  ...again.

We'll see.  I've also been spending just about every car trip recording (upwards of 10 hours of) my thoughts into my iPhone.  Expect to see a separate blog page dedicated solely to the [uncensored] transcriptions of these recordings.

This is all for now.
-R.

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*It came out of nowhere and I was slightly confused at first, but then became very glad it happened.

These are my officemates

These are my officemates.

It's this sculpture of these two old dudes in a horseless carriage.  They just sit there day in and day out, just as happy and carefree as they were the day before.  I often look at them and wonder who they would become if I had the key from The Indian in the Cupboard.  We got a new camera because we had to.  And by "camera" I mean Canon EOS Rebel T2i.  And by "we had to," I mean it was recommended in the syllabus to my Digital Design course at UTA.  Which I start tomorrow.

God told me that I was going to spend this year learning humility and discipline.  I've been entertaining the idea of calling it "living life in HD."  I have a sinking feeling that I know how he intends to teach me those two things, and if I'm right, it'll be a severe case of killing two birds with one stone.  Or more like a flock of birds.

In the Spirit of Humility

I have gotten to the point where I'm okay with not saying something.  More often than not, I honestly believe that what I have to say will benefit the recipient of my words, or provide meaningful input to the conversation at hand.  I'm learning, though, that humility is not found in the process of changing this mindset; instead, it's the decision to hold my tongue in spite of it.  It doesn't matter how deep my thoughts or how insightful my perspective - if I'm talking, that means I'm not listening, and thus actively making the decision to pass up an opportunity to learn something.

Be of exceedingly humble spirit,

for the end of a person is the worm.

In the Spirit of Discipline

I've managed to drag myself kicking and screaming into a regimented daily and nightly routine, which I created  on the principles of balance.  I found that my mornings were too heavy and my nights were too light, so I started making my (and Glennda's) lunch each night for the following day.  But even beyond the whole routine thing, I've taken it to the world of daily and weekly tasks that I have convinced myself that I simply must do.  I've put a white board on the wall of my room, so that every Sunday night I can map out every task that needs accomplishing the following week, and resolve to get them done.  But still, none of this is demonstrative of discipline.  It's easy to keep anything up for seventeen days.  The discipline element will really come into play when it's not new and exciting anymore.  When it's April or July or September and I don't feel like making tomorrow's lunch at 11:30 pm.

The one who conquers others has physical strength;

The one who conquers one's self is strong.

It all comes down to August.  If I find myself entering the month of August this year and still have my weekly task map, if I'm still reading a couple books a week, if I continue to pursue a humble attitude and a beginner's mind, if I still make my lunches every night, if there's a noticeable change in my speech and the way I relate to other people - then I will be able to look back and say that I have begun to learn discipline.  Of course, there are other ways to learn discipline . . . other more crash-course-ish ways.

I'm hoping to learn my way.

We'll see.

This is all for now.

-R.

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These are my books.

These are my books.

My boss bought them for me.  He decides I need to learn something, so he buys me a book about it.  These are all the books he's bought me since I started in September of last year.  That's about a book a month, which is quite an accomplishment, considering the thickness of the books and the fact that I'm a ridiculously slow reader.

This time last year, I was all about reinventing myself.  I had my new creed (which I still live by), and I had concrete expectations for what the following 52 weeks would look like.  Around February I started realizing just how hard that creed was to live by; by June I'd stopped taking my daily pictures for Project 365, and in August I was faced with the startling realization that I hadn't really learned anything or grown at all that year.

Well, it's round 2 and I feel like I'm being catapulted into 2011 with tons of momentum and more ammunition than I know what to do with.

I'm plowing through a book that is giving me a fresh set of eyes for studying the Word.

I'm in the process of shifting to a new paradigm that will allow me to absorb insane amounts of written information in minutes.

I'm forcing myself to be okay with waking up insanely early to make time for things that are (or should be) important.

I'm going through a process of re-learning everything I (think I) already know, and keeping a beginner's mind about everything.

I am learning how to view the world with a "soft focus," which widens my field of view and allows me to be more alert to my physical surroundings.

I am studying how to be more in-tune to the needs of my wife.

Last year I took this so seriously that I ran it into the ground.  One common element I'm finding in all of these new concepts is a playful sense of curiosity.  This is truly where exploration meets revelation.

So am I going to totally reinvent myself and try to become the best version of myself possible?  No.  I'm going to learn to practice humility and discipline and reconnect with my Father.

This is all for now.
-R

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This is my Rubik's cube.

This is my Rubik's Cube.

I've known how to solve these things for over a decade now. My dad showed me how to solve it using 5 moves, ranging from 4 to 16 turns. Each of these 5 moves can be used as tools to put the pieces where you want, in a 3-phase system from start to finish. But being able to complete these three phases requires a knowledge of how the cube is built and how it was designed to move.

Although I am still able to impress people by my ability to solve it, I myself have grown bored with this method and have started developing a new way of thinking about it. See, I will never be able to use this method to complete a cube in 20 seconds. There are too many steps. As I study the cube and the way the pieces move across the 3 axes, I find new ways to do the things I already do, but in a significantly reduced number of turns.

The key is to think of the entire cube all the time, rather than the two or three pieces I'm dealing with at any one moment. This doesn't mean to memorize where everything is all the time. What this mindset does is afford me the freedom to combine the functions of the moves I already know, without having to go through every single step.

When I think in terms of the entire cube, I am able to create new moves that are specific to the current state of the cube. Furthermore, if I pay close enough attention, I can engineer my current move to set up the cube for my next move. In time and with practice, what will eventually happen is that the entire process will be one giant improvised move. This is how people look at the cube for 15 seconds, then solve it in 20. They don't have a vocabulary of set-in-stone combinations that they use at different points in the process - the entire solution is one huge combination.

I'm trying to learn how to live life like this. To learn how to treat my relationships like this. To look into the systems that we mere mortals have put in place, and see the underlying elements that make them what they are and understand why they function the way they do. It's looking at a person and seeing the world they live in. It's looking at a system or mechanism and asking "why." Because just like with the Rubik's Cube, I can't change my way of thinking until I gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the cube itself. Can I solve it? Yeah. But could I solve it more efficiently? You bet. It just takes determination, time, and paradigm shifts.

I think I read that somewhere...

This is all for now.
-R.

UPDATE:
I was lying in bed at about 3:30 this morning staring at the ceiling, and it came to me: the best way to explain this new mindset I'm trying to adopt.  It's the difference between a local and an out-of-towner, with regards to driving.  If someone from another state visits Dallas, I can give them directions from point A to point B.  They'll know that one route, and if they stay long enough, they'll start to memorize it and learn other routes.  But some people choose to limit themselves to memorizing routes.  Then there are locals who have lived in the city their entire lives.  They've got a map of the city burned into their brains.  These people can come up with new routes - routes with shortcuts, scenic routes, routes that avoid freeways - because they just know the roads.  I want to have the "mind of a local" when it comes to the Cube.  Actually, when it comes to everything.

'NOTHER UPDATE:
I've been playing with the Cube every day at work this week, between tasks or whenever I needed to get my mental juices flowing.  I've been counting my moves and timing myself, and when I averaged everything out, I've been pretty consistent about finishing it in 2:30 minutes and using (an average of) 75 turns per solve.  This is using my new system where I apply the "mind of a local" to the whole cube.  I solved it a few times using my old system, and the averages were about 4 minutes and a couple hundred turns.

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This is my final.

This is my final.

This semester, I've really been struggling to get back to where I was when I had a tight rein on my day-to-day routine, my habits, and all the things I was interested in incorporating into my lifestyle.  I've gotten to a point where I realize what I need to do to get back to that place.  This was my final project for my drawing class.  I completed it in 3 hours, as opposed to the 18+ hours it would take me to do similar drawings a few months ago.  I really think it captures where I'm at in life right now.

I've been meditating for about an hour a day these past few months, and have started to have some pretty interesting revelations.

The Macroverse

Everyone I've met in my life lives in their own world.  Some worlds overlap, sometimes completely.  I live in my own world.  Yet I see a bigger picture in which all these worlds coexist, connected to one another to create a giant web of life and experience.  I call this big picture the Macroverse.  Each of these worlds exists as both a cloud and a node, containing a nebulous collection of common experiences and ideals, shared among its members, yet serving as a point of intersection between the pathways that link these worlds.  Many worlds are strongly connected to one another, some are faintly connected, and others are completely disconnected.  Lately I've been learning to not only see the worlds people live in, but where those worlds fit into the Macroverse, and how they influence it.  Often, when people are discontent about who they are and where they are in life, what they really have their eye on is another world in the Macroverse, and they just don't know how to get there.  It's simply a matter of showing them the path that links the two worlds.

The Voidness

When I peer into myself and am asked what I see, it's very much like peering at a sample through a microscope with an ever-increasing focus.  On the surface are my actions.  This is what people see with the naked eye, that determines who I am in their world.  For everyone who actively perceives me, a slightly altered version of me exists in their world.  Therefore, I have as many alternate selves as I have relationships.  On the cellular level, I find the ideas that govern my actions.  On a molecular level are my beliefs that shape my ideas, and on the atomic level are my experiences that form the beliefs that govern the ideas that determine my actions, which in turn create more experiences.  But between the nuclei and electrons of the experiences that make up the person I've become, there exists the Voidness.  This is the space between the space.  It's who I am when you strip me of my beliefs, my experiences, my thoughts, ideals, morals, opinions, habits, goals and actions.  This innermost part of myself is both the most beautiful and the most terrifying part of my being.  There, I see my true self peering back, and my world is suddenly saturated with the realization that I am being introduced for the first time to this pair of intensely focused eyes whose obsidian gaze has waited 24 years to be met.

The Triune Law

There are three sets of laws in existence: Human Law, Natural Law, and Supernatural Law.  I'm still discovering what each of these entails, but what I do know is that everyone has a veritable pie chart in their mind that reflects how much weight each of these laws carries in their life.  These three schools of Law do not carry equal weight in the universe.  Those who subscribe to the Supernatural Law have been known to break not only Human Law but Natural Law as well.  There are those who would follow Natural Law and in doing so can escape Human Law, but not Spiritual Law.  Those who desire only Human Law live in the smallest of worlds, as they necessarily must follow the other two, to exist in this universe; they are often completely unaware of the existence of Supernatural Law.  The primary school of Law a person follows can be determined through several factors, including the density of meaningful content in their speech, the motivation behind their actions, and the subject of both their attention and intention.  The Law each person seeks to follow directly influences the world in which they live in the Macroverse.

I had to write this down before I forgot it.

More to come as more is revealed.

-R.

This is my set.

This is my set.

It looks like a garage...because it is.  I recently shot (most of) my next short film.  It's mostly an exercise in camera tricks and sound editing, but it's been quite a learning experience so far.  I definitely bit off more than I could chew with this project, but that's the best way to work up my chewing skills, I guess...so we'll see how it turns out.

Okay people, I must take a break from this post to mention that Watermelon Dream by Guy Clark just came on my Pandora station, and I was subsequently reminded of the time my dad devoured an entire watermelon in approximately 90 seconds to win a contest at one of the many food-centric summer events held in the parking lot of the baptist church in which I grew up.  It made me laugh out loud because the mental picture is something you just can't not laugh at.

Aaaand we're back.  So, in case you haven't heard, I've officially changed my major to Film and Video.  Now, that doesn't mean I got all starry-eyed in my Intro to Film class and bought a one-way ticket to L.A. to spend the next 30 years gunning for the director's seat at some major production studio.  It means I realized that I'll have a better chance of becoming an animator if I jump into the film industry, rather than wander aimlessly through the world of drawing/fine arts.  As much as I love painting, studio art is becoming less my cup of tea and more my cup of espresso.

Plus, all of my Drawing Fundamentals friends say I'm a better fit for the film industry anyway.  I chose to take it as a compliment, even though I'm quickly learning that it could simply mean I would fit in well with a room full of pale, overworked starving artists who are strung out on crack and all seem to have Tourette's.

All this to say...I actually have no idea what I was going to say.  I'm still listening to online radio, and somehow something I listened to made me think of people Googling their names.  So of course, I did mine because it's 4:30 on a Friday and I've been typing it up all day.  But I already know what websites will pop up, so I made things interesting by searching images and videos.  Here are the top three entries for each.

Videos

All you really need to see here are the thumbnails.  The first is my first short film, the second is a home video I made for a friend when putting together a dance/painting performance thing we did, and the third is what the freaking crap is that video doing on my results page.

Images

Left: my Myspace profile pic, which I totally forgot about because who cares about Myspace anymore?  Center: coincidentally, this is the person for whom I made that painting video.  Right: my wife and I during our first year of marriage.  Neither of us looks like that anymore...it's kinda crazy.

So, I'm going to need to come back to this post at a later date, because while posting those pics, I started listening to a man and a woman conversing in the lobby of our building.  Against his better judgment, he thinks that she is helplessly fascinated by his extensive knowledge of exotic cars, and she seems to think her son is a crash test dummy.

Anyway, to wrap things up, I'm officially pursuing a career in film making now, and from the way this post went, I guess the job suits me well, because while running a crew on set, you must be able to pay attention to multiple things at once, much like writing a blog post while reminiscing about your distant past, Googling your name and eavesdropping on old people.  It's one of the only lines of work where being constantly distracted can actually be a good thing, so we'll see how it goes.

This is all for now.
-R.

This is my cat.

This is my cat.

His name is Maximus Leopoleon.  He is a mystery of sorts, deathly afraid of everything but that which he feels the dire need to overpower and destroy.  A cross between the Cowardly Lion and King Leonidas, he encompasses all the qualities of a stereotypical house cat.  Also, he drools like a freaking pit bull.

But when I think about him and how he conducts his business, he really has boiled down the essence of catdom to a simple, concise message, and surprisingly, it's not "feed me."  He's like the haiku of the cat world: it is what it is, and there's really nothing more to him than what needs to be.  It really made me start to think about how much "boiling down" I could stand to do in my own life.  If I wrote a one-page summary of my entire life as it stands right now, what would be excluded?  More importantly, what would be included?

There's an exercise in which many a seasoned thespian takes part, in which a pair of players generates a two-minute dialogue between themselves, following it up with a compressed rendition thereof, lasting only one minute.  This process continues through thirty seconds, to fifteen seconds, and finally to a ten-second dialogue that is still meant to capture the essence of what was truly being communicated in the original two-minute scene.

The idea here is brilliant.  If time were money, narrowing a two minute discussion down to ten seconds would be a 92% savings.  The idea of minimalism has always been extremely appealing to me, but this concept isn't minimalism.  It's reductionism.  It's the simple act of viewing the complex system that is life in terms of the interactions of its individual moving parts.  It's weeding out the things that don't need to be there.

I'm not about to go on another one of my purging sprees - I did that in college and wound up sleeping on a mattress on the floor with a thin blanket and no pillow.  This is just another one of those introspective moments that happens to me every once in a while to make sure I'm still growing - still reaching for that next part of me that's just out of reach.

These blog posts will probably start getting shorter.

At least for a while.

But not less meaningful.

I hope.

We'll see.

This is all for now.

-R.

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This is my Drive Home.

This is my Drive Home.

I know it's a little abstract.  It's not really a picture of a drive home; it's a car, it's a sunset, it's the silhouette of the trees sitting on the horizon.  It looks like the album cover to an emo punk band who sings nostalgic ballads about the golden teen years when everything was fun and nothing was hard and love was simple.  But all those things encompass what goes on in my head on my drive home.

I've always been introspective.  But when I drive home from somewhere, it's like my inner monologue is on crack, spouting out some kind of esoteric narration about where I am in life and what I'm learning and why it matters.

I got a new job.  My official title is "marketing rep," but my day-to-day tasks are mainly comprised of blog posting.

I get paid to blog.

Ironically, between that and school and being married, I haven't had much time to hop on here and write about my own life.  All this introduction aside, what I really want to write about is what's been going on in my head on my drives home recently.  I know it sounds morbid, but for the past week or so, I've been pondering what I would say at the funerals of my dearest friends and family.  This morning, I found something on my computer that I wrote a long time ago, about one of the most important people in my life.

I don't know why, but growing up, my dad hated not being able to open our bedroom door all the way.  If he ever went back to our room to check on us or say something, and something was blocking the door, it was never a pretty sight.


We had these toys called "no-ends" when we were kids.  They were named as such because there really was no end to what we could build with them.  We built space ships and weapons and "life-sized" people to play with.  We went through a phase where we built tents.  They were basically giant igloo-shaped wireframes with blankets draped all over them.


One night, my brother and I had had the same igloo-tent sitting in our room for over a week.  It used every single no-end piece we had, so it took up a lot of space.  Well, my dad came in to tell us dinner was ready, and sure enough, the tent was blocking the door.  Naturally, we were inside the tent at the time, so we were greeted with my dad pulling back the makeshift blanket-curtain doorway and asking "what are y'all doing!?"


We instantly accepted the impending reality that we would be made to disassemble the tent.  But instead of issuing the orders we were all too ready to hear, my dad simply said "I'll be right back."


I remember my brother and I looking at each other, dumbfounded.


He returned minutes later with a desk lamp, a portable television and a power strip.  He asked if he could join us in our tent.  We weren't in the habit of telling him "no," so we moved aside and watched him crawl awkwardly into our tent and plug everything in.  He had us affix the lamp to the top of the tent while he messed with the antennae and tuner on the TV.


We sat there watching a baseball game in grainy black and white, in our new and improved tent, fully equipped with interior lighting and a slightly larger entrance.  And my mom came in later and got all three of us in trouble for not going out there to eat.  But as a young lad, there was something to be treasured about my father being in trouble with me.


It's the unexpected moments of fatherhood that scattered themselves throughout my childhood.  It's the random decisions to get in trouble with me rather than get me in trouble.  These are the times that I remember when I think about my father.  It's not even that I choose to focus on the good and not the bad - no, not's not that shallow a sentiment.  It's the overwhelming depth of love I remember feeling as a son, knowing full and well that my dad was letting go - even if just for a moment - of his adulthood, to assume the role of a child, so that he may relate to his son in a way that would be understood.

Herein lies the true nature of a father's love.  This is how I will always remember my dad.

-R.

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This is my drawing.

This is my Drawing.

Fundamentals of Drawing is a course in which I expected to learn the fundamentals of drawing.  Go figure.  I've learned a lot in that course, and some of it has actually been about drawing.  But I have this weird way of absorbing all kinds of things just from being around people and listening to what they have to say.

One of my classmates is ex-Air Force, and was talking about a tattoo on his arm.  It came up in conversation that it's a Latin translation of his brother's life motto.  He explained that he got the tattoo because his brother died before he could get it.

"That's why I quit the military.  Not because he died, but because he made me realize that life is supposed to be lived."

It's amazing how deeply meaningful a couple sentences can be.  It really hit home when I realized how directly it applies to a concept I've had brewing for the past few weeks.

People often quantify their devotion to something or someone by what they're willing to do for that person or thing.  It's the idea that drives the age-old Klondike marketing campaign: "What would you do for a Klondike bar?"  I find that there are (at least) three stages of devotion on this scale.

Things worth FIGHTING for.
Other than things not worth fighting for, this is the lowest form of commitment in my opinion.  If you won't fight for something, it can't be worth much to you.  Being that it's the lowest, it also covers the largest variety of items.  It could range from your material possessions to your pride to someone you love.  I think, however, that this also depends on maturity.  I find that the older I get, the less willing I am to fight people.  I think that goes hand-in-hand with the fact that I'm learning the truth behind the saying "a gentle answer turns away wrath."  Still, no matter how mature I may become, there are some things I will always fight for.

Things worth DYING for.
I know that seems like a jump, but it's really just an exaggerated form of the last one.  There are often things that we would like to be able to say we'd die for, but the truth can only come out when the opportunity presents itself.  Being that most people will live their entire lives without ever facing the challenge of dying for something they love, this question all too often remains in the realm of the hypothetical.  Nevertheless, we all have things that are important enough to us that I think we would genuinely give our lives for them.  This category encompasses a much smaller group of items than the last, being that there are plenty of things that I would fight for, but would gladly forfeit were my life on the line.  Most people stop there - if you would die for something, it must be one of the most valuable things in your life.  Not necessarily true.

Things worth LIVING for.
If you think about it, this is the hardest thing to do.  Fighting for an ideal is a win/win situation because even if you lose the fight, you've still got that underdog integrity and the knowledge that you have the balls to stand up for what you love.  Dying for something isn't necessarily easy per se, but it is a one-time deal.  Once you die, that's it - there's nothing more you can do; it's over.  But try spending 60 years protecting and treasuring and fighting for something.  It goes back to what my ex-military friend said.  How can you live for something if you're dead?

I love my wife.  Sure, the first thought in my head when someone disrespects her is to Hulk smash them in the face.  Sure, I would take a bullet for my wife (although I can't imagine anyone wanting to shoot her).  But getting up early every morning to make her breakfast and pack her lunch, taking care of house chores to give her time to rest, working to provide for her; I plan on doing these things (or at least things like it) for the rest of her life.  Not to make light of martyrdom, but when you consider the weight of spending one's entire life devoted to something, death starts to look like the easy way out.  When John says that Christ laid down his life for us, this means that he could have had a life of his own, but he gave that up to live for us instead.  So even if I never die for my wife, I would like to think that I will lay down my life for her.

So there you have it.  Again, this is a work in progress - there are probably more intermediary steps that I haven't yet realized.  But it's been my experience that there are some things I'd fight for that I wouldn't die for.  And there are things I'd die for, but would have a hard time living for.  And I also find that the things I live for, I would also gladly die for, and have often fought for.

I used to love the idea of being martyred.  I've always accepted that death is inevitable, so I've always wanted my death to be the sacrificial - where I stood up for a person or ideal that I loved dearly.  Preferably God.  But my uncle told me that if I wanted to give my life for God, I should give him my entire life; don't cut it short.  That advice stuck.

A little exercise: list the things that are important and valuable to you, and categorize them in this fashion.  You'll be surprised to find what things are more important to you than others.

This is all for now.
-R.

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This is my dessert.

This is my dessert.

Grocery stores are very strategic in where they place their products.  You need fruit because you're a good person and want to try to be somewhat healthy, so you head to the produce.  Of course, the apples and bananas are right up front screaming "you can't buy fruit without buying us!!" because of that stupid song they made you sing when you were a kid, even though I was always the frustrated one in the back of the class, holding his hand as high as possible saying "Teacher, what in the world are ooples and ba-new-new's??"

So you get your apples and bananas even though you know the bananas will go brown before you have the chance to eat them all, and you say you'll make banana bread but you never do, and then your wife eventually gets on your case because one day she'll open the fridge and get knocked unconscious from the stench of the three rotting banana-turds sitting in the very back, decaying everything around them.

But then...

...sitting right next to the apples, hidden awkwardly behind the similarly packaged grapes, there sits among the rest one single plastic container filled to the brim with the most radiant, lush strawberries you've ever seen in your entire life.  You can't take your eyes of them, and you're pretty sure that just one bite will grant you the knowledge of good and evil.  So you take them.

But wait!

Conveniently placed just adjacent to the succulent red morsels of heaven you now hold in your hand, lest they be stolen from your shopping cart and you go to jail for murder over an 8 ounce box of fruit, there sits a package of undressed shortcakes.  Individually molded, sitting naked in their plastic prisons, begging to be lavished with strawberries and whipped cream.  Thaaat's awkward.

But where's the whipped cream!?

Of course!  It's right above the short cakes!  Yes, there is a whole whipped cream section in the back of the store, and yes, you can probably find a better deal back there.  But it just wouldn't be the same.  They must have put this whipped cream here for a reason.  It must have been hand-selected because the grocery store people knew that this whipped cream would be the most perfect fit for the strawberry shortcake masterpiece they know you're going to create as soon as you get home.

So you buy the strawberries.  You buy the shortcakes.  You buy the whipped cream.  You buy a jar of maraschino cherries because you think you'll want to put a cherry on top, but when the time comes, you'll actually feel weird about mixing strawberry and cherry in the same culinary venture, even though there's no real reason to believe that it won't turn out even more delicious.

Well, turns out the cakes are dry, the strawberries are soggy and the whipped cream is frozen solid, even though you could've sworn it was in the refrigerated section and not down the frozen aisle with the ice cream treats that never look as good in reality as they do on the front of the boxes in which they're packaged.

The moral of the story: The bigger your eggs are when in Rome, the harder they fall if you keep them in the same basket, as the Romans do.  But if you love them you'll let them go, because nobody puts Baby in the corner and there's no crying in baseball.  See, when life gives you lemons and the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, you start smashing little kids' lemonade stands.  And if you lead a gift horse to water and give it a fish, it will be fed for a day; but if you teach the horse how to fish, you still can't make it drink the water if you look it in the mouth.  A penny saved for your thoughts is a penny that earns good luck all day if you find it and pick it up.  If you break a mirror while swallowing gum, you'll have seven years of unlucky indigestion.  Shoot for the stars; if you don't make it, you're still pretty on the inside and social acceptance is overrated anyway.

I've completely lost track of where I was going with this.

This is all for now.
-R.

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