I have been watching the economic struggle of our country for a while now. I have learned a lot in the last year as it has been my first year of real, honest-to-science employment. One of the problems that our economy has utterly failed to solve, regardless of any political or fiscal policies, is the jobs problem. There are simply not enough jobs and a lot of people are out of work. I have a few theories as to why this is the case, but I want to present my strongest one here. Why? It’s not just a “Hey here’s what I think!” post. I sure hope you don’t think I would waste your time in that manner. Instead, I hope that you take it as a way that you can improve your own game as an employee, employer or unemployed person. After all, it helps to know what the problem is if you’re going to solve it, right?

The way I see it, everyone has done something really stupid to get us to this point. Everyone is two groups: employees and employers.

Employees

Let’s begin with you. Don’t worry, the employers are going to get their ass reamed below. If it would make you feel better, you can skip to that section and come back to this one (although I would just man up). Employees is a pretty broad term. I want to keep it broad, but note that there are marked differences that you can draw between older and younger generations. That said, let’s dig in.

The biggest mistake employees are currently making is the one you see all of the Occupy Wall Street kids making. Simply put, they want to start at the top. I’ll admit that I haven’t figured out exactly what Wall Street is trying to accomplish but, to the best of my ability to tell, I see a couple of major themes in the “movement.” There are a lot of people who are complaining about how hard their lives are. For most of them I have little to no sympathy because their current situation was due to extremely myopic planning, or even downright stupidity. The other theme I see is naive college kids wanting a job handed to them on a silver platter. It is the latter I want to tear apart.

Take a look at the baby boomer generation. Most of them have worked the same old job since they began working.  Most of them aren’t college-educated and they work jobs like receptionists, mechanics, maintenance, construction, etc. Maybe they haven’t lead particularly illustrious careers or made a name for themselves that will go in a book, but one thing they did do was work hard and get really good at what they do. For as much complaining about my own father as I do, the man is one of the most accomplished mechanics I have ever met. He doesn’t just work on cars and shit. This guy maintains a fleet of concrete mixer trucks. I know tons of older folks for whom I have immense respect because of how hard they work and how good they are at doing so.

By contrast, I can’t really say I have that kind of respect for anybody my own age. This is the meat of my argument right here. Every kid in college right now has this delusional dream that they’re going to be hired for six figure salaries right outside the auditorium doors after the graduation ceremony. Forget going out to the sewage lagoons and taking sludge samples. Forget getting down in a manhole and measuring the flows. No, these kids want to be the engineering manager. They earned it. With their pretty, $100,000 degrees. And what’s more: they deserve to be engineering managers in Newfucking York City. They’re the best of the best.

Bullshit. Pure and simple. One thing that no college graduate has is experience. Kids are electing to stay in college to get master’s degrees and even doctorates. Why? Well, two reasons, I think. One is that it helps them stave off the real world of work and keep living the dream as they know it. The other is that they think it will help them get hired. In my business, it doesn’t matter if you have a master’s degree or a bachelor’s degree. You start out with the same salary and same position because you have the same thing: zero experience.

And experience matters. Experience matters more than any education you can get. Experience made the baby boomers into one of the most formidable, successful groups of employees history has seen. To all you college students and soon-to-be graduates, you could take a serious piece of humble pie from our parents.

Here’s a quick little story about myself, because I’m a bit of a narcissist. I was one of the best civil engineering students in my class. Not just at my university or in my state, but in the entire Midwest. I know that because I’ve been all over the Midwest, by the way. I have as good a college career as any graduate. I, too, thought I deserved a great job doing awesome sustainable projects utilizing all of my “special training” in hydrology and water resources. I was on track for my master’s degree while working – the works. Guess where I got hired? Woodward, fucking Oklahoma. Possibly the shittiest backwater outpost work camp the country has to offer.

A little about my job: I go out to sewage lagoons and take sludge samples. I frequently pull manhole lids in the field and check out lift stations and pumps. I go out to jobs and get dirty and muddy all the time on inspections. I get down into the trench to check out the pipes being laid. I travel all over Northwest Oklahoma, traveling from small town to shitty small town. Each place takes a little bit more of your soul with its shittiness. When I go home at night, I stare at the walls of my apartment. I try to catch up on the sleep I didn’t get the night before. I don’t go out. There are no places to go to besides the gym. There are no girls to meet. There wouldn’t be a neutral public place at which to meet them even if there were girls. There are no concerts. There are no sports teams to join. There are no classes to take at night. There is only work.

But what do I get in return? Experience that far exceeds anything my peers get. Our office has so much work we can’t even see straight. I have a nationally recognized mentor to work under. I am allowed to take on as much work with as much complexity as I feel I can handle. Sure, it’s not glamorous. There’s nothing thrilling about standing out in the middle of a semi-arid desert without a tree in sight watching sludge being dug up. But at the end of this hellish period in my life, I will be better equipped to work in a nice place than any of my peers.

The point of this anecdote isn’t to complain about my job or ask for your sympathy. The point is to tell you to suck it the fuck up and move to Woodward, America and work a shitty job. If you really want to make yourself into the glamorous professional with an illustrious career, you’re going to need as much experience as you can get. And waiting around for a few years to get into that struggling MEP firm in Phoenix isn’t going to get you any experience. You don’t start at the top. You eat shit at the bottom for a long time until you’re WORTH moving up. And like it or not, you’re not better than Woodward, America when you graduate college. It’s called earning it, and you should try it.

Employers

Employers are at least as responsible for this problem as employees, however. In fact, if I could say anything about employers as a group, it’s that they have the same problems as employees but they have more power. What do I mean? Well, I’m thrilled you asked!

Take a look at any company actually hiring these days. And for a real thrill, take a look at the good ones or the ones whose offices are in places where you might actually want to live. My favorite example is URS, a renowned environmental/civil engineering firm. They do fantastic work and great projects that I would have killed to be a part of in college. Not a single one of their entry level postings requires anything less than a master’s degree. You can’t even apply without a master’s degree. Without having worked at URS, I can say with certainty that a good bachelor’s degree candidate would be more than capable of their entry level work. Yes, URS, I am calling you out. That’s partially for not hiring me but it’s entirely the truth.

But this is just one case of a thousand. URS is not the only company at fault. Most hiring managers are trying to do exactly what college graduates are trying to do: “start at the top.” Except in hiring, starting at the top isn’t about getting the best job without having worked up to it. It’s about getting the best employee without having invested anything in it. Open engineering positions are all asking for 200 years of experience, knowledge of local regulations (how could you if you don’t live there or work there as an engineer already?), and about eight or nine certifications of which you have never heard. If I was guessing, the interview would involve some sort of test in which you part the seas and walk on water.

The only jobs that are open are the ones to which almost no one can apply and meet the minimum requirements. I use engineering as an example because I’m so close to it. Engineering students that graduate college, whether it be with a bachelor’s master’s or Ph.D., must work for a certain number of years before they are even eligible to sit for the PE licensure examination. This means that the young engineer is not able to sign or stamp drawings, construction documents or design calculations. This means that, to a company, the young engineer will be something of an investment. Even if the young engineer is extremely capable and produces more work (measured in dollars) than he (or she) costs, he will not be able to work without supervision until he has the license. Therefore, EITs are in a massive hiring slump. Almost no one will take on an EIT.

Now, this has something to do with the concept of “career security.” Without going on a tangent, career security is the idea that job security is a thing of the past, but if we keep up our qualifications and continued learning we will always be hireable within our chosen career SOMEWHERE. This concept was brought about by massive corporate layoffs in the past decade, which urged or even forced most professionals to become self-reliant for training and continued education in order to recover. The employees have responded by screwing over companies by moving around a lot. The idea is there’s no employer loyalty to the faithful employee, so why should the employee be faithful? It’s difficult to say who is at fault and for what, but it seems clear to me that both parties have a degree of guilt here as well.

Regardless, the main problem is that employers simply are not being realistic in their expectations when they hire. The only group of people in the country whose skills are in demand are the ones with all the experience already under their belts. There is very little room for newcomers in almost all industries. If all of the engineering firms refuse to develop new talent, what will be left when the old talent retires? It is simple common sense, but when was the last time you encountered a hiring manager with common sense? Hiring managers try to sound clever and profess to know what they’re doing when they give the vaunted hiring advice on public message boards and in “exclusive” interviews, but really they are just playing politics and contributing to the problem like anyone else. The fact is there is legitimate young talent out there, and lots of it. And if hiring managers were really as good as they claim to be at what they do, they would have found it by now.

Anyways, there you have it. My brief opinion on what’s wrong with the economy. Lazy employees and myopic employers. If you’re looking for a job, the best thing you can do right now is go to where the work is, which is where the shittiest quality of life is, incidentally. Suck it up and get your experience. Stop expecting to have a downtown loft and a glamorous job right out of the box. Alternatively, move to Canada. Employers need to come back to earth with their expectations and start thinking long-term. And, if you ask me, they need to stop pushing specialization so hard and focus on the fundamentals. But so do students.

Social conditioning has taught both men and women that the ideal life involves marriage to another individual (genders aside in our new age). To that end, there is a series of games and trials that each gender must go through. We “win” the game when we figure out how to play it. The rules are unspoken and sometimes unclear. However, by their mid-twenties, most men and women have figured it out.

For men, the game is actually quite simple. You need to amass as much money and power as possible, and flaunt it. Examples of this might be a sports car or an enormous pickup. I have already ranted at length about this. You also need to figure out how to be a tool – the right kind of tool. The kind of tool you have to be varies from woman to woman with a few fundamentals staying the same. Check out my previous rant for more info there.

For women, the game is a little bit more complicated. In fact, I’m no expert at this half of the deal and I only have the information that I have gathered from my side. So far as I can tell, the game involves getting “up the ladder” to richer and more powerful men. I thank ladder theory for that insight. However, getting there takes many forms. This could be using jealousy, emotional manipulation, sex or any other number of despicable, underhanded methods.

Most people have figured out the game by their mid-twenties because they have lost it enough times to know the rules. This is why society generally views males as cynical and bitter after that time and women as bitches.

Me? I’m a bit of a misogynist myself. Now, that doesn’t make me a sexist. I have no problem with women getting paid as much as men IF THEY ARE AS COMPETENT AS MEN IN WHAT THEY DO. I have no problem with women having a job AS LONG AS THEY CAN HANDLE THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES AT HOME. Feminism, to me, comes with a qualifier statement in every aspect. If women want to be treated equal to men, they need to be able to act like men. Be competent in what you do at your job if you expect to be paid well. Don’t forget your responsibilities at home if you want a job (you might hate me for that, but how many women bitch about the man not doing enough at home?).

I’m no sexist, no. But I definitely do not like women that much. Now, each time I meet a new person of the fairer sex, I give her a chance to earn my respect. There ARE women I respect, and deeply. But they are countable on one hand. Eventually, most women find a way to disappoint me. I do have high standards for people, but I have plenty of male friends who have earned my respect.

Feminism is out of control. It has always been that women gravitated towards men who had more money and power. But women of past generations didn’t have the attitude modern feminism imparts to younger women these days. They were willing to compromise in some aspects of their life to be with a man. They knew how to respect and support a man during times when he may need it. They also knew that men are not bulletproof and should not be expected to handle every task perfectly. Men played to their strengths – providing for the family, technical skills, important decisions and finances, and women played to their strengths – raising children, taking care of the family, providing emotional support. I don’t think feminism had it wrong to begin with. Why not let women do other things? I’m all for it. Where it went wrong was when it decided that men should handle EVERYTHING and women should handle nothing. Men are expected not only to be good at providing for a family, looking after the house and yard, etc., but they are also supposed to be willing to all the things women traditionally do. Again, it’s not really black and white. Men can do those things, sure, but it isn’t their forte. Women need to do those things, too, and they seem to take considerable offense when the man asks them to.

But enough about that. The point of this entire discussion is that marriage as we once knew it is dead. Perhaps the reason our divorce rate is sky-high has nothing to do with the typical stupidity of young people or religion or any of those social issues and completely stems from the fact that people don’t want to be married anymore. Oh, sure, people want to be married. The idea that another person could love you and take care of you and look after you in times of hardship is a very comforting idea. They see the positives, sure. But they don’t see that marriage doesn’t work within the confines of modern feminism. Men haven’t really changed much – women have changed a lot. And they don’t see that marriage takes work no matter what fucked up social regime you may be operating under.

So why get married? You might still be able to make a case for marriage, I’m not sure. You might know more of those exceptionally grand, rare women who are still good candidates for a wife. But let’s take a look at the dating scene next.

If the world of marriage isn’t enough to convince you the world is fucked, then the dating scene should. One thing that modern society has taught young men and women alike is that you shouldn’t compromise. This is another time where the idea started out ok but was badly misinterpreted. Don’t compromise on your values. Values are things independent of social demarcations. Essentially, the original intent was to teach people they shouldn’t settle on a domestic abuser or a mass murderer. The idea quickly got out of hand though. Instead, people took it to mean things like don’t compromise on what kind of vehicle you want. Don’t compromise on what kind of look you want. Don’t compromise on where you want to live. All of these stupid, material things. The world as a whole has lost values and prized materialism in its place. And when it comes time to compromise in order to keep a relationship alive, they would rather kill the relationship on the (incorrect) belief that their perfect fit is somewhere out there already just waiting for them. Newsflash: NO ONE is perfect. And no one is perfect for you.

So, basically no matter what you do, every relationship is destined either to fail or to end up seriously dysfunctional.

You might say I’m being overly cynical or bitter. Maybe. I am a bitter man, and it has a lot to do with losing over and over. I’m also a very different person, so finding someone that lines up with me at all is a challenge. But I don’t think I’m really bitter. I’ve perfected the bachelor lifestyle. I don’t need a woman’s approval or touch to feel complete. I don’t need a pretty face at the end of a long day of work. I can cook and clean and look after myself. I can do anything I want whenever I want. And I’ve reached the point where I need sex so little that it can’t be used as a tool to manipulate me by women. I used to think being single was a terrible thing. Now, I think it’s the only sane move a person can make. Why should I be bitter about being rejected by mainstream society? Who in their right mind would want to be part of that? If anything, I see it as a compliment. My countless rejections by women stand together as a testament to my old-school manliness.

But this is not bad news at all. The life of a bachelor is good news. In fact, let’s take a look at a few points that men can look forward to living the single life.

1. Health: Single men are healthier than married men. I don’t think anyone can dispute this. Even age has nothing to do with it. Take a look at older single men – they’re still in great physical shape for their age. Though the line is somewhat less obvious between single men and boyfriends, it’s still true that single men win out here. Sure, there are some married guys who stay in shape, but most of them have “won” the game and don’t have to worry about it anymore. Plus, they’re so busy bringing money home for the woman to blow that they don’t have time to get to the gym. And with all that extra stuff feminism loads onto married men, it’d take two lifetimes to get back in shape.

2. Money: Women are the biggest hole you can burn in your pocket. That and children, but at least children won’t fuck you over. Single men and men who never get married are generally a lot healthier financially. Now, it should be noted that this doesn’t include the super rich. This is just your average, middle class guy. Another reason single men have more money is because married men usually have to blow a lot of money on pointless, senseless things to get a woman to marry them (say a huge truck or a sports car, as discussed earlier). One exception to this is the single man who is TRYING to get married – he will be dirt poor for the aforementioned reason. But men who have consciously made the decision to stay single will generally have more money. NOTE: another possible objection to this rule is that married men support a family and have bigger houses, etc., so they must make more money. This is a fallacy, however. Married men have a bigger gross cash flow but their net flow is much smaller. That is to say, most of a married man’s money is out the door before the paycheck gets to the bank.

3. Sanity: Women have a way of wearing on a man. It’s not a universal rule, but it’s generally true. Women teach men that they shouldn’t be selfish and should put the needs of others before their own needs. They do this while subtly gearing men to work for them. This is obviously hugely hypocritical, but it goes unnoticed a lot of the time. Women complain that men just “aren’t real men” anymore. Yet whenever a married man tries to be a man by, say, watching football games with the guys or going fishing, women are the first ones to object. This kind of conflicting data can drive a man nuts. The “successful” married man submits entirely and lives a mediocre existence to the end of his days.

4. Sex: If there’s one thing that most men find scary about marriage, it’s the idea of committing to having sex with only one person for the rest of their lives. I myself find this distasteful. Women collectively (perhaps without even knowing it) work against this attitude men have by pairing off early. A single man can’t have sex with a married woman, and married man (usually) can’t stray. If the single man who stands by his biological desire to have sex with a variety of women won’t play the game, there are others who will. Married men essentially make a choice between not having anyone left to have sex with later down the road or having sex with only one person for the rest of their lives. It’s obvious which way they go. Nonetheless, single men do enjoy a better sex life with more variety for the first 25-40% of their lives. I’d say after 40 years, I’ll probably be mostly done having sex. So why do I care?

5. Freedom: Women try to shame men and take away their freedom by calling it selfishness. Single men enjoy a lot more freedom. They can sleep in on the weekends, watch football all Saturday, wait on the laundry or simply go naked if they want to. A wife would badger all of that away.

For years, women have been urging men to believe that it’s the woman behind the man that makes the man. Women have collectively perpetuated fallacies like this for generations. The game hasn’t changed appreciably until now, though. Feminism has gone too far and exposed a lot of the games women play. It has also changed the dating scene hugely in favor of women, so that men are forced to make difficult, unpleasant decisions quite often. Add to that the fact that a woman’s value in a marriage has been all but lost and you’ve got plenty of excellent reasons to not get married.

But hey, if you’re still pathetic enough to need a woman’s approval and companionship so badly that you’ll put up with all of the bullshit just to be with one, make sure you at least sign some prenuptial agreements when you sign your life off.

But on a more serious note, I feel like venting. When I think it’s unwarranted, I usually try to keep my ranting to myself. But this is totally not unwarranted. I can’t guarantee that it will follow any sort of coherent structure – I have a lot of things on my mind to get out, but I think they’re all “pretty” related.

I still keep up with “green” happenings even though I’ve been cut off from the world in all forms except electronic. I’m definitely excited about some of the changes happening and the continued progress of the overall movement. But I’ve steadily grown more and more disillusioned from the people spearheading it – at least on the internet. One of my main sources is treehugger.com. When I originally got a Google Reader account and added them to my feed, it seemed like an alright source of information. They had well-written articles backed with good, solid numbers and research. That is in stark contrast to its current state, however. Now, the articles are a few paragraphs long and seem more like incoherent blurbs of information from science knows how many contributors. It’s as though the author sees an article somewhere else and copies it into treehugger with his or her own garbage opinion interpretation.

Now, the point of all this isn’t so much to destroy treehugger. I’m not that kind of guy. Wait, yes I am. I love taking down other people when they are stupid or incompetent. That includes organizations. But really, what I’m getting at is that this kind of behavior really reflects badly on the entire green community. Maybe that’s not necessarily inaccurate though.

Moving to the country and being absolutely surrounded by conservative Jesus lovers who tend to hate progress or change has really given me a new perspective on how things are done. No, I’m not a right-wing conservative or anything. I can definitely see how people can become easily skeptical of the kinds of far-reaching, ill-informed claims that the green community is wont to make. Take, for example, a recent article on treehugger about “smart” water infrastructure. If you’d call it an article (here’s a link). I actually happen to be an engineer who designs water distribution systems and improvements. Even though I’m in a rather backwater region, we use what is called telemetry all the time. SCADA systems are exceptionally common. Even rural water systems in Oklahoma (trust me, you know what that means if you live here) are beginning to install automatic meter reading systems. Wells, pumps, water towers, valves and treatment processes can be entirely automated. Even irrigation systems can be put on automatic control, reducing the need for operators to use as much fuel for the daily tasks required in running a system. It is also possible to monitor for problems and notify operators at all times of day, rather than having a problem spiral out of control before it is discovered or repaired.

Now, granted, I can school this guy because I work in the industry. But a quick Google search would have been enough to convince the author that automated water distribution is already an industry norm. Am I saying there’s no room for improvement? Absolutely not. I just don’t think that this kind of “blogging” (I prefer the term ‘public brain shit’ for posts like this) garners any kind of respect. Maybe you think I’m being overly critical or unnecessarily harsh, but look at the last part of that blurb. The author claims that there is no reason why ALL water distribution systems shouldn’t be using this kind of software. That claim REEKS of ignorance. A skeptic knows the first answer: money. Telemetry installation and programming for a really small rural water system cost about $15,000 a few years ago. So, immediately, I know two things about the author: he obviously lives in a big city with an enormous tax base as he seems to think these kinds of improvements simply form out of some hardass republican’s tight asshole, and he’s most likely an academic, left-wing liberal. You can spout off environmentalist idealism all day, but you’re no one until you’re out in the world MAKING A FUCKING DIFFERENCE, asshole.

So, that brings me to my next point: new-age hippies. And the real point of all this. I would say that the majority of posts on websites like treehugger represent skewed, uninformed left-wing liberal idealism. But this kind of thinking isn’t at all limited to the authors on treehugger.com. In fact, I have been following this debate on the government debt ceiling quite closely. While it’s just politics, it does offer some insight into mainstream America’s political leanings. I would offer the idea that 75% or more of the population is more left than right. The number comes from the verifiable figure stating that over 75% of the country’s population lives in large population centers (think KC, Dallas, etc.). I can tell you that life out here in the middle of fucking nowhere is pretty much a total 180.

So why is everybody that lives in a city more on the liberal side of things than the conservative side? Look around a city. It’s gorgeous. There are plenty of things to do, public places to see, concerts, parks, water features (most man-made) – a utopia of public facilities. The buildings are made of masonry, the sidewalks are landscaped and the grass is neatly trimmed. In a city, you never think twice about a water distribution system unless a main breaks – and even then it’s fixed in a matter of hours. You don’t think about power coming to your apartment or your mobile web coverage. Those things are just givens in a city. Coming from a municipal/public works engineer, I can tell you right now that at any point in time in a big city, you are looking at millions, even billions of dollars. Take a look out your window. Millions, maybe more. Downtown is billions – even trillions. That money doesn’t come from nowhere.

I know I’m taking a roundabout route to my main point here, bear with me. Or don’t it’s my fucking rant. Whatever you want. Ignorant academic liberals aren’t the only offensive group of people with a dangerously narrow view on the world. Everyone who has never had to spend time in the darker, lonelier parts of the country has a skewed view. I know this because I was one of those persons. I lived in Omaha my entire life up to the age of 22, and I thought the entire world had a tax base the size of Omaha. Every time I visited a small town I thought “Why doesn’t someone clean that up? Why are two out of three buildings caving in and abandoned?” The answer is reality.

The current debt predicament represents, to me, a macroscopic view of the larger part of our society today. The government has expanded tremendously, even exponentially. They are supposed to use tax money to support its activities. Instead, tax money has shifted from things like roads and infrastructure to places like unemployment benefits and welfare. Then there’s medicare and medicaid. I’m not here to offer any opinions, but I am here to state the obvious: the government is in debt because it spends more than it receives. Now, to me, what the government takes out of my paycheck every year is WAY TOO FUCKING MUCH. Yet it has been stated and proven that our taxes are close to the lowest in the developed world. What blows my mind isn’t the amount they take out of wages though. What blows my mind is the amount they take away from businesses. If you know anything about investing in stocks, especially those that pay dividends, you know that the government is essentially driving away business by taking too much. Add to that consumer pressure to get prices as insanely low as possible and you’ve got no one really earning anything. When all of you pricks and idiots living in your tiny, government-supported world complain about income inequality, I urge you to consider it from the other side. Say you own a successful national corporation like AT & T or Bank of America. Since it costs a billion fucking dollars just to eat every month and your profits are below 5% on the dollar for all your production costs, why would you create jobs? Why would you opt to put any of what’s leftover after the government takes its huge chunk back to the people? I wouldn’t. I would keep it all for myself and hope it was enough to live the standard of life I had earned by creating a massive, nationally successful corporation. So when you wonder where the jobs are, and when you’re pressing really hard for that cushy government job with huge benefits and steady job security, remember where they went.

So new-age hippies don’t care about free love and marijuana. That’s a thing of the past. But they resemble hippies because they think they deserve a high standard of living while being expected to contribute nothing of value to society. That right there is the absolute bread and butter of what I am saying. One of the articles I read on a far more reputable source (CNBC to be exact) compared our taxes to our expenditures in a pretty straightforward way: taxes are essentially what they were in the 1950′s, but we expect services to continue to increase? Taxes would have to increase for that, and I’ve already lamented at how an increase in taxes is going to destroy what little is left of America’s economy.

If you don’t really think I’m right about my general view on people, consider the fact that most people are massively in debt. Consider further that almost everyone lives a standard of living they don’t earn. The reason the CEOs of GM or GE or Exxon-Mobil drive nice cars, take long vacations and bang tons of women is because they built enormous, vastly successful companies to finance that kind of life. What did you do? It is most often the middle class crying out against the rich for having “too good” of a life. Treehugger.com wrote an article about how income inequality makes people unhappy. Ha! Pathetic! You can deny it, but the concept that income equality is “fair” is straight out of Marxist communism. I’m not saying communism is bad, but I am saying it doesn’t fucking work. The middle class is the class of people who are financing exceptionally expensive, five- and ten-year educations in order to “get a good job.” It’s getting to the point where a college education doesn’t even make sense from a financial standpoint. If the goal in life is to be materially comfortable/secure, shouldn’t you take that into consideration? I mean most people work for ten years or more paying off that school debt. And I suspect most people only pay it off because they have to. Some don’t – I know a lot of people who get loan forgiveness because they go to work for the government. In a life where everything is simply handed to you, how can you learn to be grateful for anything? It’s no wonder young people across the board don’t value hard work or innovation or creativity.

Young people are generally idealistic, ignorant, lazy, apathetic and entirely oriented towards their own material satisfaction. I should qualify that further by saying young people TODAY. It’s absolutely pandemic, and it’s incredibly easy to verify. What kinds of activities require lots of practice and hard-earned skill to be good? Take something like musical instruments or sports. Actually, we don’t even have to go that far. Take simply being in shape. How many people are in shape? Anything that takes any kind of sustained, focused effort is largely outside of the realm of young people today. I’m a bona fide hater of “alternative.” I’m talking about the music. You can see the kind of cultural degeneration young people are inundated with in this particular genre of music. A lot of alternative appeals to young people because it reflects their most sacred values in life: apathy and material comfort. Alternative lyrics are dripping with things like entitlement to a good life and absolute abandon for other people. It subtly promotes a selfish, reckless attitude towards life in general.  You can see it in the job market, too. Young people go to school for four years, get a degree in fucking ENGLISH and then expect a cushy office job that pays six figures. That’s right – EXPECT. The sense of entitlement young people have is disgusting. Let’s say our test subject gets a degreen in English and manages to get a half-decent job. Chances are he knew the owner or supervisor or HR agent. Next, he expects a big paycheck. Since his degree in English is worthless, however, and his written and oral communication skills are on par with the general population’s skills (that of a first-grader), any sensible executive sees that he is more of a draw on company money than a contributor. Long story short is he doesn’t get the big paycheck – he gets a salary that is entirely undeserved, but still in the range of say 35k a year. That’s not really enough to pay off school debt, pay for groceries, a girlfriend, a new car, an enormous home theater system or a data plan on a smart phone. But that’s just too damn bad, because those things are all “essential” to his live-it-up lifestyle. Who cares if he didn’t earn it? Loans! Loans are the answer. Besides, the government is doing it. It can’t be that bad. And now we have come full circle.

George Carlin made a good point in his final years that you really don’t have any “rights.” The idea of “rights” is a gimmick. For someone who has nothing of value to offer to society, that is a rather scary thought. Since most people have nothing to offer, most people reject the idea that you don’t really have any rights. Think about it though: you’re a free person. You can choose to travel around after college, financing your travels with credit cards and not giving a care in the world about actually getting a job or producing anything. You can go out to expensive restaurants and bars with all your friends on the weekends and live like you’re a millionaire. You’ll eventually end up in default or in jail, or working a shitty job you hate that you only got because you knew someone doing the hiring. The only real “right” or “freedom” in the world is money. The only thing with a political voice is money. The only thing that speaks to most women is money. The only thing that really makes sense is to do everything you can to amass enormous wealth. That is the only way in which you will be free to actually enjoy life instead of working for the rest of it. It is the only way you will ever get married or have a sway in policy-making. Money is freedom in our world, and if you’re just a punk who can’t produce you’re going to lose hard.

Anyways, I’ve listened to an entire As I Lay Dying album and am hitting 2600 words here soon, so I’m done. I hope you all rot in hell with your god damn friends and Facebook and facetious relationships and smart phones and big cities and sushi restaurants and lives in general. I hope hell is real and that you go to it. Go die in a fire. I’m going to go do nothing for the rest of the evening.

It’s taken me a while to realize it, but the game changes slightly in our “civilized” world. The objectives aren’t different, but the means by which we go about it are. For example, a silverback male gorilla’s prowess might lie in his physical strength to overpower competitive males, his ability to gather food and his ability to command others of the species to do as he wishes. Certainly this is the example of the alpha male, holding all the cards. In human terms, it’s a little muddier. We aren’t still foraging the land for food or fighting each other constantly in a physical way (unless you live in the South). But, males are still looked upon to be providers.
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We all know men are shallow. They want a hot piece of ass to fuck and that’s really 90% of what they care about. Even the noblest of men can only get that percentage down to around 80 or so. But women are really that shallow, too. They just have a different set of indicators. What are they? Well, after much “growing up” and many “studies,” the answer is pretty clear. Women care about social status (i.e., power), money (ability to provide) and looks. What they’re into might not be so clear though. Ever wonder why that insanely hot, smart girl goes for the dickwad, skinny pale programmers? That’s her version of hot. That’s the most unpredictable piece of the puzzle in figuring out what women go for, so you’re better off focusing on the other two: money and power.

That’s right. Get lots of money and power and you are a very secure provider. Women are shallow in that they are extremely materialistic. Take a look around. It doesn’t take long to figure that all the trophy wives are fucking someone who has what seems like an infinite supply of money. They have a boat, several cars, a few trucks, a house or two, land, work for themselves, the list goes on. They’re the guys who, week after week, you wonder how they’re paying this and that. They’re the guys dumping money into a run-down property that you know they’ll never get back if they sell. You know who I’m talking about – and they have the hottest wives and girlfriends. Sometimes they even have several. And when you look at things like this, it’s no wonder fugly politicians who are complete slimeballs get an infinite supply of tail.

But how does this amount to women being the root of all evil? Well, it’s quite simple. Put on your treehugger glasses for a moment. What are some things we typically see as being bad for the environment? Huge, shiny pickup trucks sitting in stop-and-go city traffic are a fantastic example. It’s clearly a kick in the face to mother nature, it’s absolutely unnecessary in the city, it’s shiny and brand new so it couldn’t be used for work anyway and it’s 100% there to say “I’m a bigshot with money to burn (literally).”  And women fucking love it. Women LOVE a man who can pour thousands into the tank whenever they fill up each year. Why? Because it means they have a huge disposable income (or at least appear to). And that means that not only will their children be secure, but they won’t have to work and they can enjoy life by spending tons of money on pointless materialistic things like clothes, coffee with the girls, going on road trips, flights, etc.

Women want all the rewards of hard work with none of the hard work. They want an endless pile of cash to burn through, but they don’t really care how it gets there. Now, they’re smart about this. They know they have a good body and that men will do anything for it. If what they want is a huge house and a luxurious life, they’ll sleep with whoever they have to sleep with to get it. You see it all the time – it shouldn’t even be a surprise, really.

So, as a man, what is the logical thing to do? The first thing to do is to attempt to legitimately get rich. But if it were easy, every guy on the face of the earth would be a millionaire. So, only some men make it to the top of the business world as owners. Some are born into it – they really have it the best, with a brand new Mustang or Jaguar in their 20’s and a huge cash flow from a family-owned business they will inherit. And threesomes every week. The good kind.

The next-best thing is to PRETEND like you’re rich. For a man, pretending to be rich has less to do with competing with the neighbors (keeping up with the Joneses, as the saying goes) and more to do with fulfilling his biological purpose: having sex with as many of the hottest women he can. If women basically hand him a manual that says “The amount and quality of sex you get is directly related to your disposable income,” he’s going to do everything in his power to become rich and powerful or ACT rich and powerful. Thus, we see a vast majority of the population living far beyond its means and financing its wealthy lifestyle with debt. A debt-ridden economy full of unproductive employees is a sure recipe for economic failure, and here we are today in the midst of a seemingly endless economic failure.

This whole transparent shallow game of attraction does raise one important question, however: the question of whether or not an emotional bond is possible, desirable or even a well-defined concept. We grow up as children with these fancy ideals of romantic love that lasts forever, and we see it replicated in movies and sometimes in our lives (we don’t see what’s really happening, we’re too young). Understandably, our first relationships are centered on the idea that we could find someone to love us and enjoy life with. The part where you become a cynical adult is when you realize that all the shit they told you growing up was a lie. Sure, you may have an amazing experience with someone in college or something, but there’s always something to end your relationship. Note that there’s always SOMETHING that ends the relationship. The only thing that will keep men coming back is a beautiful woman, and the only thing that will keep a woman faithful is an ever-increasing material status. Note that as women get older, their husbands buy them progressively “nicer” vehicles, progressively larger houses and progressively more wasteful, unnecessary furniture sets, TVs, decorations, clothes, etc.

So is an emotional relationship possible? I asked a wise friend of mine for some insight. His idea was that it is possible, but that it follows the shallow materialistic attraction. If the materialistic needs of the woman can be met and she can hold his physical interest for long enough, and both partners are of the age where they would both consider getting married, then a marriage will happen. Usually, women will not consider marriage until their biological clock starts ticking, by the way. When the marriage doesn’t end in divorce, the two “love” each other in the sense that they come to deal with the things about the other person that they don’t like. You might liken it to a state of equilibrium where each party perceives that the benefits derived from the relationship are better than the drawbacks. Sometimes, the mutually perceived disadvantages of breaking up keep a couple together, although this is somewhat unrelated.

As for myself, I’m a single, frugal, financially responsible male. With frugality and fiscal responsibility comes great loneliness and frustration. I turn my air conditioning off during the day, and I only turn it below 75 degrees well after the sun has gone down. I drive a small car that gets phenomenal mileage and looks like a fairy princess next to a diesel hemi extended cab (which I’m surrounded by every day because I live in Oklahoma). I put no less than 30% of my salary into liquid assets that generally appreciate in value or earn me passive income. I rarely go out to eat and I don’t have any luxuries like digital cable, a data plan on my phone or expensive electronics. I plan travel months in advance and generally spend as little money as possible on trips. I live out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by grumpy old men and bugs. There is almost nothing desirable about where I live, so it costs me next to nothing to live here. In so doing, however, I forego most of the marriage pool that is my age. After all, what woman wants to live a financially responsible life? I forego countless opportunities at shallow, short-lived relationships that could result in sex. I forego countless opportunities at friendship and I live mainly in isolation. I am also throwing away the best years of my life, from a physical perspective.

On the rare occasion that I do go on a date with a girl, I usually insist that the bill be split. Unless she’s REALLY hot. Why? Because I figure it’s a fair trade. The chances that she has sex with me on the first date are exceptionally low. The chances that she has sex with me on the first date if I pay for it are marginally higher. I figure that it’s still too negligible to justify. Of course, you could figure that the chances she goes on a second date with me are higher if I show off some money and power. That’s probably true. But usually women hold out for a good, long while before they have sex with you or perform any sexual favors of any kind. That makes it a pretty expensive lay (or blow). And as much as I love fucking women, I know I can’t afford most of them right now. And most of them really just aren’t worth their asking price, quite frankly. Nor are they worth the drama they cause when they realize you just used them – kind of like they just used you. Except it’s bad when guys do it. Yeah.

So, the moral of the story is that women are indeed the root of all evil. They are a great excuse to destroy the environment, be it by owning a destructive but efficient business, a huge vehicle or house or just living an immodest lifestyle in general. They have had a huge influence on where our economy is today with their ruthless, unapologetic spending and the way they require men to be everything that is the opposite of financially responsible. It’s really quite comforting to know that women are just as shallow as men, though. Even if it is in different ways. What ticks me off is that they go about touting noble things like honesty, personality and other bullshit. That’s what sends me to the end of my tether. They don’t care about that shit any more than men do. Your shit stinks, too, my vagina-possessing friends. You’re no better than the rest of us. I think you’re even worse, really. I’ll save my money for more useful things.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the phrase “real world” means. I’ve been missing the hell out of college life and trying to put my finger on exactly what it was. I mean, looking back, my college life wasn’t actually that great. I spent most of it around really arrogant, smart rich people without any sense of character whatsoever, and I spent Fridays doing homework or at the gym most of the time. So what was so great? Why do so many people, like me, spend the rest of their lives wishing they could go back to college? Is it regret? Is it not wanting to work? I couldn’t really decide until recently.

I think my answer to that question is this: college shields you from the real world. Before I define what the real world is, let me explain what it is not. The “real world,” as we know it, is not college life. It is not spending most of the day in a classroom or walking around a beautiful campus. It is not spending the afternoon in the shade of a large tree with friends. It is not eating dinner every night with your roommates or suitemates, talking about your respective philosophies and speculations on life and growing as a person. It is not staying up until all hours of the night playing video games or drinking. It is not hooking up with every girl or guy that tickles your fancy (double entendre?). It is not random roadtrips on the weekend, or pleasurable trips to the beach or the river with good friends in the summer. It is not a place where you can typically say anything you want or are free to think of anything. And certainly you are not encouraged to do so. I’ve seen wonderful, beautiful things happen at college that can happen nowhere else. I’ve seen a normal person put his or her brain to use and come up with extraordinary solutions to problems. I’ve seen fantastic engineers and scientists solving the problems of tomorrow for what is basically free.

But none of that is the real world. In the real world, you’re either a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer, or you’re nobody. You’re either making money or you’re out on the streets. In the real world, your old friends are off married and busying themselves with children and paying off endless bills, or they’re out of touch, or they’re enemies. In the real world, you can’t say what you want to say because it could mean your job. You can’t publicly support change for fear of being ridiculed by the so-called realists. You can’t dare to dream because the real world will dash your dreams against the sharp, unyielding rocks of living in an economically driven world. So forget your bygone leisure days of college where you were free to socialize, philosophize and grow as a person. Forget the days of being able to naively trust someone the second you met them, or the freedom that comes with an unburdened heart. You’re in the real world now.

So, you graduate college and join the ranks of millions before you who, just like you, will work for the rest of their lives paying off bills and muttering about the management and the government. You give up your friends, your life and maybe even your values just to walk home with the almighty paycheck in hand. You forget all the things you learned in college because the real world is about a millennium behind academia (you know, because it’s the real world). No more leisure time, no more time camping with friends, no more nights turning into mornings with substantial conversation. Your mind closes off to possibility. Change becomes the enemy. You become trampled and crushed by the weight of the real world. You cling to whatever tiny sliver of happiness and positivity is left in your life, whether it be your kids, your wife or your family. You might keep a few close friends, but your ability to open up to new people and trust new faces is gone. You’ve become inelastic. As you get older, you spend so much time and effort resisting change due to this inelasticity that it’s all you have in you. At the end of the day, it’s all you can do to accomplish your obligatory daily tasks to “hold down the fort.” It’s no wonder college was such a paradise.

Am I complaining about the way things are? Am I yet another person up in arms that the government does not do enough? Or does too much? Do I think we are being overtaxed? Should we tax the rich and use it to provide services?

No. I’m none of those things. I’m a dreamer. I’m a person with a heart and soul. I chose not to accept the “real world” as my reality. I’m someone who believes that reality is what you make of it. I’m someone who believes that anyone can do anything they want to do. I don’t believe in being crippled, whether it be physically, emotionally, mentally, financially or otherwise. I believe that what you tolerate is what you accept. And I believe that if you do nothing, you have still made a choice. I believe that change is good. I believe that practicality does not apply to personal philosophy. I believe realism is a sad, pathetic way of admitting that you live controlled by fear instead of something better. That is my mantra. That is my reality. I control my life – not god, not the government, not people who hurt me in my past, no one but me. And I’m leaving this bullshit you’ve built for yourselves called the “real world” for something way better – freedom and independence.

What about taxes, Frank? What about bills? What about your credit score? Gotta have money to eat. Gotta eat. What about a car? Kids? A home?

I will pay my bills. I will pay my taxes. I don’t give a shit about my credit score – I won’t need one. I will eat just fine. I will have a nice, reliable vehicle. I will have kids, and I will have a home. Someday.

In fact, forget all that. Not only will I pay my bills and my taxes, but I’ll buy organic food. I’ll support the farmers I believe are doing the right thing. I’ll buy and drive a hybrid, because I believe in it. I’ll teach my kids how to fend for themselves, I’ll give them a good education and I’ll provide them with a wonderful home. And independence. I’ll even give money to causes I believe in. What’s more, I’ll do it without working for my entire life. Or even most of it.

That’s a tall order, you say. Is it?

No one surpasses the American citizen when it comes to distaste for communism. Communism. What a great idea, in theory. In fact, its implementation wasn’t even half bad in China. But it all came crashing down. In America, everyone’s all about capitalism. Everyone believes in free will, independence and the power and personal choice to be whoever you want. At least, that’s what everybody thinks they believe in.

I see these same people screaming out that we should be taxing the rich. Tax the rich – they don’t need it! They’ve got all the money they could ever need. We’re poor people – WE need it. Everyone demands health care and demands that it be less expensive. Everyone believes in a right to cheap goods and services. After all, if everything is cheap, we can have more of everything, and everybody can prosper. Everyone can have a good life and nobody has to suffer. Robin Hood taxes are the mantra of mainstream society, and the solution to all our problems.

If that were true, why is everyone suffering? Robin Hood tax schemes are the very essence of socialism and communism. Ironic, then, that every layman and laywoman in the country is screaming out against communism, don’t you think? Here are some incredible facts: the top 10% of wealthy people pay roughly 90% of the taxes in our country. Income tax was first voted in by the poor and middle class to tax the rich. The idea was that the rich would pay higher taxes and those taxes could be used for schools, infrastructure and other public needs. But it backfired. The government got a taste of money and started blowing up like a balloon. But rich people didn’t think it was fair for their hard-earned money to be taxed so unfairly, and they found ways to protect their wealth. The government came after the poor and middle class next. And now, over two centuries later, the middle class is almost completely wiped out and you’re either rich or you’re poor. That’s the REAL history of income taxes.

If Robin Hood taxes aren’t the answer, what is? If the government and the rich people aren’t to blame for your misfortune, who is? Well, I have an answer to that: you are. That’s right, I’m putting responsibility on you. On your fear and your ignorance, actually. Fear and ignorance are to blame for where our country is today. Ignorance because everyone is so short-sighted and uninformed. Fear because no one wants to take a risk – a risk that might be necessary to get to a better life. I mean, think about it. If people had nothing to fear, why would they be so averse to change? We all know people whose lives could be vastly improved if they weren’t afraid to take a risk.

What if you didn’t have anything to fear? What if tomorrow if you lost your job, you could continue to comfortably pay your bills and support your family indefinitely? What if instead of becoming a lawyer, doctor or engineer, you could be what you wanted to be? What if you could stand up for your values every day and drive a hybrid car, or buy that more expensive food JUST to show your support for ecologically sensible farming?

Well, you can. But Robin Hood taxes aren’t going to do it. And neither is your realist attitude. I know some rich people. And I know how to get rich – and I am doing it this very second that I write this. You may laugh at me now, but you won’t laugh in 5 years when i quit working because I don’t have to, after starting my career this year.

So what gives? What makes me so confident? What makes rich people rich and poor people poor? I must have had some kind of advantage over you. That’s bullshit and you know it. That’s your fear taking you over. Every time you say something is impossible because of money, time or some other common excuse, you’re putting on your fear mask and disguising it under a heaping pile of steaming, unadulterated shit. Because the biggest difference between rich people and poor people is this: attitude. The only people who have money and are complete jackasses and idiots are the ones that inherit it. I challenge you to prove me wrong. Sure, rich people can be jerks just like the rest of us, but I guarantee you everybody who has made it out of the “real world” has some kind of courage and strength you simply can’t stop. And, baby, you can’t stop me.

So I guess the point of this rant is this: stop complaining and start doing or shut the FUCK up. I’m sick and tired of listening to everyone tell me how Obama is destroying the world. I’m tired of listening to how you can’t do the things you want to do because it isn’t economical. I’m tired of hearing how you sacrificed values in the name of staying alive. Or, rather, seeing it. I’m tired of you all telling me what I can and can’t do. I’m tired of your realist bullshit. I’m tired of watching you all fail at taking a single step towards your own betterment. You may opt for a life of 9 to 5 work, dashed dreams, an irreparably damaged past or whatever the fuck emo bullshit you wanna call it, but I choose something different – something better. You can keep muttering and yamming away at whoever will listen about the government and how people have no values or character, but I’m going to do something about it.

You all sicken me when you call yourselves believers and funnel every bit of your strength into hoping for an afterlife – a second chance where everybody gets everything they want and nobody has to do anything ever. I find that belief so offensive and pathetic I’m not sure there are even words to describe the feeling. This is your life RIGHT here, RIGHT now. Every second that goes by that you waste speaks volumes more about your character than anything else ever could. What if there is no second chance? What if there is no afterlife? What if it doesn’t matter what we do here? What if it’s ALL OVER when you die? What’s the point of living some celibate, abstinent life where you forego pleasures, hopes and dreams all in the name of getting them in another life and just surviving this one? You want to be a believer? You want to make a difference? Believe in YOURSELF. Believe in now! The power of presence! Stop thinking about tomorrow or crying about yesterday and do something TODAY. That is where life happens – the present. Life doesn’t get any better unless you force it to. God’s not going to come fix everything up. The government is bankrupt. Take responsibility for yourself. Take responsibility for your actions and your thoughts. Be proactive.

And fuck your real world. I’m better than that.

I decided to deal with the problem using a multifaceted approach.  On one end, I have implemented some pretty hardcore “waste prevention” changes in my life.  On the other end, I’ve decided to keep a stash of things to take to the next town over periodically.  In order to justify the trip just to recycle, I need to have a lot and be saving a lot of resources with what I recycle.  Therefore, I keep paper and cardboard.  You might not think it, but paper and cardboard are huge resource users.  They use a ton of freshwater (because they come from forests) and they take up a lot of energy, especially oil, to get to your door.  I’ve also found that some metal recycling can be done locally.  I’m working on figuring out plastic.

I have also switched to as many ‘green’ products as I possibly can.  Wherever I can make a replacement with a wiser choice, I do so.  I’ve decided to share the changes I’m making with my readers.

Waste Prevention Tips

If you can’t recycle, the next best thing is to reduce the waste you produce in the first place (it’s the soundest practice of all, really).  I’m also aware that many of the people with access to recycling are what we call “lazy piles” in that they refuse to take action and do the right thing.  If that sounds like you, then this section should really help you out.

Reducing Junkmail

Not only is this a great thing to do environmentally, but many of us hate receiving and sorting through a ton of junkmail anyway.  Pre-approved credit cards, insurance offers, Victoria’s Secret catalogs (ok, maybe some of us want to keep those), or unwanted solicitations and promotions from local chains.  Many people think there’s no way to fix this problem – after all, if you ask at the post office, they’ll tell you they are legally obligated to deliver anything that says “current resident” in the address line.

However, you CAN significantly reduce your junkmail through several services.  Many of you have heard of the “Do not call” list to get rid of unwanted phone solicitations.  There is also a “Do not mail” list.  You can find it here:

http://environment.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=environment&cdn=newsissues&tm=2&f=20&su=p504.1.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=1&bts=0&zu=https%3A//www.dmachoice.org/dma/member/home.action%3Bjsessionid%3D15B51561CD238A52EBA4FA4A8708B583.tomcat2%23

You’ll be required to sign up and give them your email address and the street address you at which you would like to stop receiving junkmail.  If you’re worried about email spam, make use of a temporary email service such as 10 Minute Mail or Mailinator.  These services are handy any time you don’t want a service to have your real address, as long as it’s a one-time activation.  You can opt out of credit offers, catalogs, magazines and a bunch of other junkmail here.  It will take a little bit of effort up front (you don’t have to screen like they say you do for a week or whatever), but it’s definitely worth the reduced headache.  Take a look at these statistics, which I quickly pulled up from about.com:

• 5.6 million tons of catalogs and other direct mail advertisements end up in U.S. landfills annually.
• The average American household receives unsolicited junk mail equal to 1.5 trees every year—more than 100 million trees for all U.S. households combined.
• 44 percent of junk mail is thrown away unopened, but only half that much junk mail (22 percent) is recycled.
• Americans pay $370 million annually to dispose of junk mail that doesn’t get recycled.
• On average, Americans spend 8 months opening junk mail in the course of their lives.

Go Paperless

When you stop the junkmail flow, you’ll still receive things like monthly bills from utilities or statements from your bank.  Most utility companies offer you the option to sign up on their website for electronic mail instead.  You can completely opt out of receiving paper bills at your address.  This reduces emissions and paper usage.  You can save these bills to your hard drive if you want a record.  Many utility companies offer a small reduction in billing if you go paperless or authorize payments such as direct debit or similar services.  Also, if your energy company offers green energy sources, you can find ways to opt into it on their website (for example, I have opted to receive a certain percentage of my monthly power from wind energy, and I pay a small fee for this extra service).  It’s a great way to support alternative energy sources and make them cheaper and more economical for everyone.  Supply and demand, anyone?

You can receive your bank statements online as well.  Usually, you want a way to keep these for your records so you can save them to your hard drive or print them at home.  Either way, you’re still saving a significant resource footprint when you do this.

Reduce Your Dependency on Paper Products

I talk about this one all the time.  If you’re still using a roll of paper towels every few days or eating off of paper plates, then shame on you.  It’s not hard at all to buy a pack of matching cotton kitchen towels and use them to clean up the counters, stove, dishes, whatever.  See my post about kicking the paper towel addiction here.  You’ll spend less at the store and throw away less at home.  It’s a no-brainer.

Use a Water Filter

Another inconvenience of living in the country in a small town is not having access to drinking water that is *quite* as treated as bigger city tap water.  We have pretty good water where I’m at – especially when you consider they do nothing other than pump it out of wells and disinfect it with chlorine.  But some people are just pissy about the taste of their water and demand a higher quality (whatever that is).  Most often, people simply buy an assload of bottled water at the store and toss the bottles when they’re done.  How many people who are ignorant enough to rely on bottled water as their primary source of drinking water are smart enough to recycle?  Ok, maybe that’s not fair, but ya’ll piss me off sometimes.  Anyways, a friendlier alternative is to use water filters.  There’s only a million ways to filter your drinking water – on the fridge, straight out of your tap, in a pitcher, you name it.  There’s a water filter to fit everyone’s desired level of convenience.

Use Tupperware or Pyrex Instead of Baggies and Plastic Wrap

Tupperware and Pyrex are brand name food storage containers.  What do you do with a plastic ziploc bag when you’re done with it?  Throw it away.  You can’t really clean them out that easily.  And what about plastic wrap?  Not only do you throw plastic wrap away, but you also lose the use of your dishes by using them to store food in the fridge for weeks.

Instead, consider using Tupperware.  Tupperware comes in varying degrees of quality and provides a pretty good seal for your food.  I suggest its use in most applications where you want to store food in the fridge.  Its square-ish shape makes it great for storing partially used blocks of cheese, which is something I have a problem with when I use my Pyrex.

For those of you who demand a higher food quality, Pyrex is a great solution.  I personally love this stuff.  It comes in any number of varieties you can think of and it’s ultra-convenient.  For example, you can bake a meatloaf in a glass Pyrex baking dish.  Then, without removing it, you can store it by putting the plastic lid it came with on top.  Voila!  Effortless food storage.  Pyrex also comes in circular storage containers that make it great for storing pasta dishes, sauces, or liquids.

Another advantage Pyrex offers over plastic products is that plastic doesn’t leach into your foods.  I hate that plastic taste you get from Tupperware and baggies.  And when you use Pyrex to heat something up (such as microwaving), it doesn’t change the taste of your food by getting hot plastic into it.  Heating that dish up at work won’t suck as much.  And one final thing I like Pyrex for is the ability to store foods like tomatoes or pumpkin, which ordinarily leave Tupperware stained red and orange, respectively.  Pyrex cleans up GREAT in the dishwasher since it’s glass.

Using Tupperware or Pyrex means you won’t be throwing away single-use baggies or plastic wrap, and it will also save your dishes and pots and pans from being used up as storage in the fridge.

Reusable Shopping Bags

This is another thing I talk about all the time.  Despite the fact that it’s a great idea and ridiculously easy to implement, most people haven’t made the switch yet.  If you use these bags instead of taking home a new plastic bag from the store each and every time you go, you won’t have a buildup of unused plastic bags below the sink.  You’ll avoid throwing them away, where they sit in landfills and never deteriorate.  They won’t blow around in the wind or in the city, get caught in trees or creeks or in your gardens.  They won’t make that annoying plastic sound that makes me want to crush babies.  But most of all, you’re saving a huge amount of oil when you do it, since disposable plastic is a major waste of oil.

The biggest problem people face with making the switch to reusable bags is breaking their old habits.  Of course, there’s difficulty involved in breaking any habit or making any habit a new one.  I suggest you keep the bags in your car.  I know it’s somewhat annoying to do so at first, but put the bags in your car every time you’re done unloading them.  Don’t wait or you’ll forget.  Soon it will become second nature to you.  Or, if you’re really worried about it, keep half in your car and half in your home.  I think six is a good number to have.  If you’re worried about what people will think of you carrying around a blue shopping bag when you go into the store, let me ease your fears by saying this: people respect you for it.  I’m not shooting that out my ass.  I’ve had more people come up to me in the store and verbally admire the fact that I’m doing the right thing than I can remember, and I have never once heard anyone say anything negative.  Most of the time, people say “Oh, yeah.  I need to remember to do that…”

And one final plug.  A lot of developed countries and even some states are starting to ban plastic bags.  I’m convinced that the banning of plastic bags, by and large, will take place in almost all the states in the next few years.  You’re going to have to get used to the idea of responsibly transporting your purchases one way or the other, so nut up and stop bitching.

Get a To-Go Cup

This is all dandy and fine.  If you can do any one of the above things, it means you are capable of planning to some extent.  But what about when you’re out?  My father always complains about how “big business” does little to curb consumption.  He doesn’t see offices recycling paper or reducing plastic use, even though it happens.  What he does see is fast food places giving all their food out in disposable containers.  To some extent, he’s right – this particular sector needs to grow up and stop throwing everything out.  But instead of sitting on your hands and complaining (or worse, using it to justify your own inaction), take a proactive approach.  One of the things I’ve done is bought a to-go cup that you can wash and reuse indefinitely.  You can get tumblers or cups that close at the top for when you’re on the go driving or in a hurry and don’t want to spill.  These are a fantastic choice if you frequent coffee shops or go in to order at restaurants.  When you order a drink, instead of taking their disposable (or at best recyclable) cups, you can use your own.  It’s a great way to do your part while the corporations get their shit together.

Green Products

Waste reduction is a fantastic first step in making environmentally responsible decisions.  But you can also alter your behavior in a more meaningful and more influential way by changing what you buy at the store a little bit.  Think about it: each time you buy a product, you’re using your money to say “I support this product.”  If you think about each dollar you spend as a vote, you can begin to see why restaurants haven’t changed their environmentally destructive habits yet.  Or why green technology is still so hard to afford.  Here are some items you can buy at the store to put your dollars to vote for greener practices in business and at home.

Recycled Paper Products

Another no-brainer.  Even I have to use paper towels from time to time (like to clean up that massive tomato soup spill on the stove).  Even if you’re as awesome as me at reducing your dependency on paper products, you’ll still need to use them some.  And while there certainly are alternatives to toilet paper, it’s best not to go there.  Instead, when you buy a paper product, make sure it says it’s made from recycled paper on the label.  You avoid putting your dollars to vote saying “I want to destroy forest to clean up my kitchen,” or “I want to wipe my ass with trees instead of paper.”  Most major brand paper towels and toilet paper are made from what is termed “virgin wood.”  Yes, laugh, get it out of your system.  It means that the paper is coming directly from milled, processed logs out of the forest.  Recycled paper products obviously don’t share that immediate source.  Not only does buying recycled paper products vote for a reduction in deforestation, it also votes for increasing recycling.  Think about it: if you’re actually using recycled material, your dollars are saying you want to see more recycling opportunities available for everyone.  Help bring recycling to primitive areas of the country like the one I live in!  Ok, just kidding.  Sort of.

Recycled Plastic Products

This is the same idea as before, just with plastic.  Plastic is a difficult thing to manage.  For the most part, it doesn’t ever biodegrade.  Until recently, plastic was made from a huge number of different manufacturing processes, making it difficult to recycle or keep track of.  Nowadays, almost all plastic is one of six kinds, and the type is stamped somewhere on the plastic.  This allows conscientious people to recycle their plastic.  Where does all that recycled plastic even go?  Well, most of the time, it goes to making new water bottles.  Types 1 and 2 plastic, used for making water and pop bottles and milk jugs, respectively, are the most frequently recycled types.  But some other kinds get used in places you wouldn’t expect.  A lot of toothbrushes or handbrushes are made from recycled plastic.  You can see by reading the package.  I bought a broom recently with its bristles made from recycled plastic.  Usually, you can read the package a bit to see if what you’re buying makes use of recycled plastic.  If not, try another brand.  See what you can come up with.

Wood Fiber Sponges

This is one of the most fascinating products I’ve found recently.  The sponge works and looks just like any other sponge, but it claims to be made from wood fibers and is, as such, completely biodegradable.  There are all kinds of interesting products like these available, especially in places you wouldn’t expect to see them.  Just check things out.

Natural Soaps, Shampoos, Detergents, Cleaning Products, Etc.

I’ve talked about all this before, but one of the easiest and best changes you can make is buying soap that is made from natural sources (usually plant-based cleaners).  Nearly every cleaning product you can think of now has a natural alternative: dish soap, dishwasher liquid, laundry detergent, body wash, shampoo, Windex, Mr. Clean, you name it.  And, no, these products are not inferior in cleaning power.  The “green” Windex cleans without leaving streaks.  The Green Works all-purpose cleaner is just as powerful as 409, which is one of the worst chemicals you can buy (both from a health standpoint and an environmental one).  A lot of these natural soaps offer advantages over others.  For example, nearly all plant-based soaps are hypoallergenic.  This means that if you have an allergy to soap, this is safe for you.  Well, really, when you think about it, should that be surprising at all?  Of course not.  Should it surprise you that harmful chemicals and synthetic bases give you an allergic reaction?  No.  Should it surprise you that these same soaps exacerbate already existing skin conditions?  No.  Should it surprise you that skin cancer wasn’t around until we started using these kinds of products?  No.  Ok, you get the idea.

Buying natural soaps is better for your health and better for the water that receives treated sewage flows from cities.  This is because it doesn’t load YOU up with toxins from artificially made bases and manufacturing processes, and it doesn’t load natural waterways up with toxins that sewage treatment plants aren’t capable of handling.  You can read more about this whole natural soaps business here.

Conclusion

I hope this has given you a few new ideas for easy, simple changes you can make to make your life a little greener.  It’s a lot easier than most people think.  As a long-time environmentalist and activist, I’m used to dealing with peoples’ intrinsic resistance to change and the kind of incredible laziness to which convenience has accustomed our society’s fat ass.  The bottom line is that no matter how easy making green changes is, you’ll need a little bit of initiative to get started.  Any one of the things I mentioned above is a fantastic way to see fast results with minimum effort, and maybe get you started along a more meaningful path to environmental responsibility.

As you read it, also consider that this philosophy can easily and readily be applied to anything in life – not just engineering.  As I have gotten a little older and left the artificial world of college, I’ve happened upon a new, ugly world that most people like to refer to as the “real world.”  No, it’s not ugly because I have to get up at 8 AM and the man keeps me down.  It’s ugly because I see SO many people with such heaps of wasted potential in their wake.  So many people, who could do so much in the world and have so much to offer (when the world needs it most), are stifled by fear of change and this illusion of security that so many seek, whether it be through marriage, reproduction, a dead-end job or plain old inactivity.  Keep these these things in mind as you read through the article.  And now, without further ado, the article itself.

“Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

These are the words of the woman who became the poster child for overcoming adversity.  A woman who was isolated into the two dimensional world of touch and smell at the age of 19 months.  Yet, she went on to inspire millions around the world.  Sightless and deaf, Helen Keller resolved to make something of her life.  She lived with a keen understanding that change is inevitable, but growth is intentional.  Unwilling to give in to her blindness, she chose to strive for a normal life.

Motivation is all about motion or movement.  In other words, if you are comfortable, if you are happy and content, then you DO NOT move.  you do not change.  Why would you?  On the other hand, if you are uncomfortable, if you’re unhappy, then you want to change.  you want to move back toward your comfort zone.  There are millions of motivators in the world and all of us at any one time are being motivated by a dozen or more: Hunger, Safety, Sex, Love, Enlightenment to name just a few.

Interestingly, you can take all those motivators and boil them down to a variation of two basic emotions: Fear and Desire.  You are either moving toward something you desire; or you are moving away from something you fear.

Fear, however, can become paralyzing and will keep us in one un-comfort zone because we fear the perceived discomfort that comes with change.  We fear that change could open a Pandora’s Box of more and scarier things.  I’ve seen it in relationships and in business.

I know a married couple who over the years have drifted apart and their marriage has become stagnant.  I know they both desire greater intimacy with the other, but they both fear rejection and so they do nothing.

I know a small business owner who watched his business shrink in the recent recession.  His self-esteem is closely tied to his success and his falling income triggered fears of inadequacy.  Frozen by fear into doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, he has not adapted to the changes going on in his market.

Helen Keller once again has wise words for such situations, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

When couples try new things together they actually stimulate the receptors in their brains that invoke the feelings of romance.  Taking a class or starting a new hobby together is a great way for couples to renew their feelings for each other and discover a greater depth of intimacy.

For small business owners, a recession is a great time to try out a new idea or innovation.  It attracts renewed interest in the business and can even create new customers and open new markets.

The trick is getting comfortable with change a little at a time.  Start engaging in simple changes at home.  Low risk changes will generate immediate rewards.  Here are a few you can make that will help you get into a habit of adapting to change:

If you drink coffee every day, switch to tea for a week.  If you always listen to rock music on the radio, switch to country, jazz or classical for a week.  Rearrange one piece of furniture in your house.  Read a section of the newspaper that you’ve never read before.  Take a continuing education class in a subject not related to your career.  Join a hobby group on MeetUp.com.  Taste an ethnic food that you’ve never tried before (as an alternative revisit a food you think you hate).

I’ve got a few follow-up ideas and points for discussion or critical thinking.  First of all, I hope you take this to heart and seriously think about it.  People are always searching for a quick fix to their problems – problems that have developed over years or even decades.  But I’m here to tell you there is no quick fix to a lot of things.  We’ve been trained by medicine, technology and society that there’s a quick fix out there for everything – a chemical to cure depression, a pill for anti-aging, a technology to clean up our public waterways or disinfect our mass-produced meat, even a quick fix to personality disorders or ways to manipulate people into getting what you want (how many persuasion science books have you seen out there?).  That’s just not true.  The solution to your problems lies not in instant gratification but in the true strength of character – perseverance, courage, integrity, grit, etc.  You can’t build those things in a day.  And NO one is born with them – we all have to work for it.  Genetics play no part.

In the article, he makes a few points that he doesn’t elaborate on that I’d like to call attention to.  First off, he says that you can “make a habit of adapting to change.”  This is really important.  This suggests (and rightly so I think) that people not only have the ability to adapt favorably to change, but that it can even be adopted as a habit or perhaps a skill.  I think that not only can it be done, but that it might very well be the most important habit or skill that we can create/acquire.  I firmly believe that the ability to adapt to change is of the utmost importance on both a personal and a societal level.

For example, the happiest old guys I know are the guys who adapt to change throughout their lives.  My boss is a great example – he went from using a slide rule in his youth to AutoCAD and calculators in his old age, nearing retirement.  He keeps current on all the new water treatment and water supply technologies, making him an asset to his company, instead of an unnecessary draw like so many other old men who get “let go” because they simply cost too much.  He conducts his personal life and his relationship with his wife in the same way, leading them to have one of the happiest, strongest marriages I have ever seen.  My grandfather is another great example, having the ability to adapt to changes in his market for cars and trying new things in his retirement with my grandmother.  They are two of the happiest people I know.

The crankiest old guys I know, whose level of dissatisfaction with life is beyond anything words can express, are the guys who can’t adapt to change at all.  They remain fixated on their youth or their “golden years,” when everything seemed so much better.  They spend all their time and effort trying to get back to a situation that simply doesn’t exist anymore.  They remain focused on the negative things, depend heavily on their illusions of job security and represent a threat to the company they work for because they refuse to change the way they do business or do their job.  They constantly talk about when a gallon of gas cost a quarter, or a gallon of paint cost $10.  They quit doing the things that make them happy because of some perceived change they can’t adapt to – changes in their market of business, aging in their bodies “keeping” them from being active, etc.  They have become inelastic and unbending, and strain every day under the stresses and strains of simply continuing to exist because of it.

On a societal level, the ability to adapt to change is more important than ever.  I’m in the middle of a book called Collapse, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Jared Diamond.  The book focuses on how previous civilizations have failed or succeeded.  The main issue with civilizations that have failed is actually the condition of their environment.  I won’t go too much into detail, but here are a few examples – civilizations on Easter Island and in the American southwest failed because they grew beyond the constraints of their marginal environments and did not adopt policy or changes in lifestyle that were consistent with their surroundings.  The failures scream eerie semblances to our own society today as a global community – semblances that we could learn from.  But we fail so far as a society to do enough because we fear change.  People fear the slight inconvenience that comes with recycling, or the perceived economic peril from investing in clean energy.  People continue to drive enormous, gas-hogging vehicles and ignore the hybrid car market.  People continue to purchase and use extremely energy-expensive television sets and avoid purchasing products made from recycled material.  Even simple changes, like buying detergents that are safe for natural waterways or electing to get power from wind or energy sources through the local utility company are overlooked.  I can buy a bottle of natural detergent for $1 more.  I can elect to get wind energy for $4/month more.  I have literally heard people say they cannot afford such luxuries.  Why?  Fear of change.  Fear that something on the other side will make life more difficult and perilous than it is now – when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Give this article some thought.  It can be applied in so many different ways, and it can solve a lot of the problems you deal with in your life.  People keep putting off change in their lives and assume the government will fix everything, or put blame on others when a change that needs to happen doesn’t.  They keep waiting for the price of clean technology to drop and the economy to get better, or they hope for some other change that they feel is beyond their control but will make everything better for them.  If we all sit on our hands and do nothing, we will surely doom ourselves to failure.  Remember this quote from Eckhart Tolle: “The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens.  It cannot happen anywhere else.”  I hope that you’ll take something positive away and try a simple change in your home or life.

Pretty soon though, this becomes a way of life.  It becomes automatic.  I used to think my father was the only person who turned the TV on from the second he got home to the second he left for work the next morning.  But that, as usual, was setting my expectations too high for the human race.  Prompted by both of my current roommates’ LOVE for TV and the fact that I pay their ridiculously high cable and power bills for their obsession, I am going on another rant.  This time, it’s what you can do INSTEAD of watching TV.

So, why waste time?  Let’s get to the list.

• Join a Gym. This, without a doubt, is my favorite suggestion.  I could rant and rave on the benefits of choosing the gym over television for a long time.  Here’s the short list: engages your mind, gets you moving, gets you around other people (with a positive attitude about life), gets you interested in something that’s not TV, and makes you look and feel better.  And that, my friends, will just cause a chain reaction where everything gets better.  And the best part?  Most gym memberships cost less than your TV bill per month – especially if you have expensive digital cable or some fancy HD power-hungry TV set.
• Join a Sports Team.This is along the same lines as the gym suggestion.  Think about it though.  You know the primary excuse for not doing things like the gym or sports is time.  People whine about not having time.  And then they spend all their time watching TV.  Fucking idiots.  Get your head out of your ass.  If you’re fortunate to live in a moderately large city (or bigger), chances are good there’s something that will interest you.  Club sports like soccer, flag football and even sometimes rugby are available.  Also, slow- and fast-pitch league softball, for recreational play – almost every city has one of these.  If you’re the individual sports type, try tennis or frisbee golf (or real golf if you’ve got the money to put forward on the initial investment).  And you’ll MEET REAL PEOPLE doing this.
• Learn to Cook – and then DO IT. This is one of the best.  And, really, you can watch a little bit of TV here and there while you’re waiting for something to heat or bake, so it’s a good way to start getting off of TV.  Everyone who doesn’t know how to cook seems to have one or more of the following ass-backwards ideas about cooking:

1. It’s too hard.  But of course, we all know it’s easy.  It just takes some initiative.  Start with easy things like grilled cheese, soup, stew, grilling, veggies and eggs.  Then branch out.
2. You have to learn from someone who knows how.  Again, you’re an idiot if you think this.  While some recipes are highly personalized and definitely DO need to be passed on this way, a lot of cooking is easy to look up on the internet.  You’d be amazed what’s available.  Think of something you’d like to eat, then google it.  It’s that fucking simple.
3. You need lots of money.  Well, for one, no.  Granted, we all have a food budget, but I’m guessing that if you don’t cook much, you eat out a lot or buy frozen food.  That’s WAY more expensive than cooking a wholesome meal at home.  And in the event that it seems to cost the same, take a look at the amount you get.
4. It’s time-consuming.  Yes, it certainly can be.  And what are you doing with all that time you could be using to learn to cook?  You’re fucking filling your brainwashed noggan with bullshit TV shows, that’s what.  Again, head out of your ass.

• Read. You’ve probably heard this often.  Maybe you’ve even tried it.  The trick is to find something you care about and then read that.  You can read news, self-help, professional development, fiction (any of the endless genres available), textbooks or even technical literature if you like.  Who gives a damn.  Reading can only make you more informed and smarter – and you’ll retain what you read if you’re really interested.  If you keep a reading list, it will help to keep you focused.  Reading before bed, instead of watching TV, is a great way to help you get to sleep at a more “regular” bedtime (take it from a bona fide insomniac).
• Start a Blog. Writing is one of the best ways to learn.  Writing about things we are interested in helps us learn about where we truly stand on issues that matter to us.  You may think that sounds stupid, but consider this: how much do you know about the last class you took?  Probably not much.  But you certainly remember your paper topic, and even maybe some intricate details.  You LEARN when you write.  And not only do you learn about what you’re writing about, but you get better at writing – a skill that is becoming a lost art thanks to Facebook, texting and IM conversations.  Your vocabulary will get better and you’ll sound more intelligent when you speak – another thing that is mostly gone from the world today.
• Go Back to School. Take a class in something that interests you at your local university.  It will get your brain working again.  It’s good for the brain to learn – it keeps the mind fresh in many other ways.  Why do you think old people are so set in their ways?  They stop using their brains and stop growing.  Also, they probably don’t stay active and the constant pain they live with probably makes them cranky, too, but that’s another rant.  And this is another one of those things that will introduce you to new people and, potentially, new friends.
• Get a Hobby. Again, the possibilities are endless here.  Do something you’ve always wanted to do.  You could build model ships or airplanes, take up photography (maybe even sell your work, or start a photo blog), learn to play an instrument, learn to sing, join a band, start a band, learn to knit or crochet, take up woodworking or just whatever the fuck you want to do.  It’s fantastic, this whole living thing.
• Home Improvement. It takes more money, but get off your ass and fix that leaky faucet or replace your worn-out garbage disposal.  Maybe you should repaint?  Maybe you should even redrywall!  Or get that guest bedroom looking tidy and inviting, just in case.  It will give you a sense of having accomplished something real, and it will get your mind working.  And, hey, maybe you can even lower your monthly TV bills to put some money towards your house.  Or maybe you can jazz up your yard and really have something awesome to come home to, who knows.
• Volunteer. If you’re one of the few persons left on earth that still has a passion for ANYTHING other than watching Youtube videos and TV, find a way to turn it into a volunteering effort.  You could volunteer just about anywhere – your local botanical gardens, a wildlife shelter (with birds!), the zoo, a pet store, a daycare, a cleanup crew or maybe a recycling plant.  Whatever your interests are, you can find a way to volunteer.  I’ve always been curious about how recycling plants operate, so I’m going to volunteer.  I’ve always wanted to be close to a red-tailed hawk – maybe even make friends with it.  Wildlife shelter!  Or, if you live in Omaha like I used to, the Fontenelle Forest is awesome for that.  Volunteering gets you out of the house, gets you exposed to new things and, best of all, new people.  You can make friends and have a great time volunteering.  Shoot, I’ve even gone to clean up creeks in the city before, all by myself.  You get such a great, wholesome feeling when you’re done.  If you’re REALLY having trouble finding a way to volunteer, talk to a nearby university – they have volunteering services that will notify you via email when there’s something that fits your interests.
• Get a Part-Time Job. This is volunteering on the next level.  And it brings in an extra income.  However, this suggestion is a bit temperamental because you shouldn’t get a part-time job and then hate it.  That will just make you go back to your familiar TV surroundings.  Again, another great way to make friends and expose yourself to new aspects of life.
• Get a Pet. Another (evidently from the naysayers) time-consuming thing that you could do without TV monopolizing your life.  Cats and dogs make loving companions that can give you some sense of emotional connection, even if you live alone.  Of course, I’m not suggesting you become “that cat lady.”  It’s just something I thought I’d throw in, mainly because I love birds so much.
• Set a Long-Term Goal. Set a goal for yourself.  And don’t just fucking think of something in your head and say, “Ok, I did it.”  Write it down.  Then break it into steps that you can achieve.  Then give each one a due date.  It will give you a sense of direction if you lack one (most people with TV addiction do).  It will give you a feeling of accomplishment to even have achieved as much as writing it down and setting a definite course of action.
• Go to Church. Yes, I’m an atheist, but that doesn’t mean I filter my messages when it can do some good.  If you’re religious, start going to church again.  Or get involved even.  Or, if you’re a religious person who left your previous church, find a new one that you like more.  Whatever.  I don’t know how these religious things go, but apparently you’re all happier with religion, or something like that   I can GUARANTEE, however, that you’ll be happier if you’re not addicted to TV, and this is just another way to break the habit.

Ok, so now that I’ve got that list up, let’s talk about why people watch TV in the first place.  Now, before I begin, I’ll assure you that no argument you can come up with will be worth a shit.  Here’s the ones I anticipated, along with my rebuttals.

1. Entertainment.  Ok, so my first question to you is do you REALLY find that garbage on TV entertaining!??!?  Ok, sometimes some shows are funny (1000 Ways to Die, Dexter, etc.).  But they are exceedingly rare and you don’t need 3-4+ hours per day to watch it all.  If you think reality shows (Jersey Shore, Keeping up with the Kardashians, Teen Mom or anything A&E does) are good, you have simply sunk into self-delusion due to TV addiction, and I’m here to help.  The point is, there’s other shit that’s far more entertaining.  And also, you weren’t fucking put on this earth to be entertained.  I feel like that’s all people do anymore – seek entertainment.  In a broader sense, entertainment is what life is.  But we both know that isn’t what I”m talking about.  Get the fuck over it.  Go to a comedy club.  Go dancing.  Go to a local band – THERES a thought!  Support your local fucking economy.  Go out to eat with friends.  There’s REAL life shit you can do for entertainment, people.
2. Social Activity.  First of all, when did watching TV become an acceptable substitute for talking to your family at dinner?  So many families just watch TV while they eat anymore that I’m fucking disgusted.  Talking to your family and friends while you eat is a fantastic way to provide support in REAL LIFE issues that your children may need, or to evaluate how the day went.  Teaching the art of critical evaluation is important for things like this – do people even know how to reflect on life anymore?
3. Source of News.  If you can find news on TV, you can find it online.  It’s better for your mind to read a news article rather than have someone read it to you from a prompt and broadcast it over some distance.  What I’m saying is you can get your news in the newspaper (newspaper companies really need support nowadays) or on the internet (where you can also support local newspapers, by the way).  And, what’s more, if you get your news from the paper or the internet, you can get more than the rapes, murders and suicides that happened that day.  Your life and your world will be a happier place to live.  I personally love to keep up with the “green revolution.”  And, lastly, it’s worth mentioning that while most news is biased, you at least have the option to evaluate the bias of the reporting source if you get your news online.
4. Source of Noise.  This is another side effect of TV addiction, really.  Look it up.  People went to sleep in the 1800′s without noise to fall asleep to.  It’s a mental disorder that you voluntarily feed when you NEED the TV to fall asleep.  It’s like quitting smoking – it will take some serious effort at first, but it’s a change WELL worth the investment.  Try something a little more neutral like a fan or a humidifier.  Or open your windows if the weather is nice.  My father can’t sleep if people are making noise in real life, but he can sleep through Saving Private Ryan if it’s on TV.  It’s a fundamental difference in the way your mind interprets the sound, and it’s not good for you.  If you use it as a source of noise while you study or read, why not listen to music instead?
5. Education.  Really?  You claiming you receive any sort of educational value whatsoever by watching TV programming these days is like trying to say you read the articles in a pornography publication.  You’re a fucking idiot for even trying to claim it.  The ONLY exception to that is a documentary from a legitimate source (NOT A&E, MTV or Discovery, morons).  Some examples include Food, Inc. or Planet Earth.  Of course, a bonus you get with watching legitimate documentaries is your ability to critically evaluate the source.  Where did funding come from?  What agenda might that company have?  But, one step a a time, grasshopper.  And as far as little kids’ education – why are you leaving your child’s education and development to TV?  Haven’t you seen what it’s done to high school kids these days?  It’s said that the leaders of tomorrow are the students of today.  I’ll be surprised if we survive as a species when these kids I live with are the leaders of the country.
6. Sports.  This ONE SOLE purpose for TV existing is the only legitimate argument.  You can get a lot of sports programs broadcast over the internet, but it is very sensitive to what part of the country you live in.  Furthermore, some companies (like ABC) own exclusive rights to broadcast sporting events on their station and, as such, prohibit their broadcast online.  This, hopefully, will change soon.  Sporting events from dicks like ABC are the ONLY reason anybody needs a TV anymore, and I suspect it will change eventually.  In the meantime, why not go to a sports bar to watch a game?  It has several advantages: it gets you out and about, around other people, it supports local businesses, it prevents you from having to pay for digital cable to get HD sports channels, it prevents you from paying for PPV games and it develops relationships with existing friends if you go with them.

I’ll offer one final piece of advice.  A lot of times, people use TV as a way to entertain guests or provide entertainment at a social gathering.  This is, what’s the word I want…LAME.  Besides being boring to some of us, it doesn’t really develop relationships you have with the other people there at all.  A few alternatives:

• Motion Gaming. Most people have a Wii or a PS3 with some damn sensor that allows you to do things like bowling, golf and other sports.  It’s a social activity that involves maybe 4-8 people, but it forces your brain to work and it gets you up off your ass.  Also, if you’ve never done this before, it can be pretty entertaining.
• Board Games or Card Games. Before you write it off as lame, I’ll just say that some of the funnest parties I’ve ever been to involved Cranium, Twister, charades, trivia and the like.  Card games can also be a blast, really.  I’ve never bee one to gamble, but I have a life-long dream of participating in a LEGITIMATE game of strip poker with people I’d actually not mind seeing naked.  See, look at that – setting a goal.  You can turn a lot of card games and board games into drinking games if you insist on alcohol being involved, too.  And most people need alcohol to remove their inhibitions against strip poker anyways…

So, there you have it.  Eliminating TV from your life, or even just cutting back by several hours per day, provides such a vast improvement in quality of life that it really can’t be done justice by a simple blog post.  You really have to try it.  But, just like any bad habit, don’t try to quit cold-turkey.  You’ll just end up frustrated and deeper in your addiction.  Instead, start slow.  Here’s one possible route (and one final list – really, it’s the last one, I swear):

1. Begin breaking your addiction by going to sleep without the TV on.  Instead, maybe 30 minutes to 1 hour before you’d like to fall asleep, turn off the TV and get a book you’re interested in reading.  Turn off harsh lights.  If you’re having problems focusing because there’s no noise, turn on a fan (you don’t have to point it at you) or other source of gentle, white noise.  This will also lower your power bill.  And, perhaps in the beginning, you’ll need even something more to help you fall asleep without the TV on.  This is where melatonin and herbs come in.  Try valerian root, or try Sleepy Time from Celestial Seasonings – it’s an herbal tea with some mint in it and it’s delicious.  They also have extra-strength varieties.
2. Once you can fall asleep without the TV on, begin to crunch down your TV time during your awake hours.  Turn it off during dinner and try talking to whoever you eat with on a regular basis.  Or, try cooking dinner and only watching the TV while you’re waiting for something to cook or heat or whatever.  This is a good way to knock out two birds with one stone – learning to cook AND cutting back on TV.
3. If you watch TV in the morning, try this instead: cook yourself a nice breakfast (something with eggs, pancakes or whatever you like) and brew some coffee.  Subscribe to the newspaper and read it while you eat.  This is a fantastic way to get local news, support local business and get a wholesome, decent breakfast in you, all while avoiding the TV.  It will also get you used to starting your day with a little less noise.
4. Another good way to cut back on TV time is to do something on one or two nights of the week.  It’s a good way to start things slow.  If you take a night class, it’s easy.  You can also go to the gym a few nights per week.  Or join a sports team that practices a few times per week.  Anything to get you out of the house.  If you’re away from the TV room, you’ll be less likely to go back to it.

Most of all, remember to start slow.  You have a legitimate addiction and it’s not going to go away overnight.  Set reasonable expectations, work towards small goals at a time and remember to track your success.  If you really try hard, you’ll be in a chain reaction of amazing before you even know it.  Your life will be better, people will hold you in higher regard and you’ll just feel better all-around.  You’ll have the ambition and the drive to do a lot of those long-standing things you’ve just never gotten around to.  Stop letting TV ruin your life and start living it.

As you may or may not know, most of the really “up there” professions are becoming more and more stringent on their requirements for practice.  Take, for example, doctors, lawyers and engineers, generally accepted to be the big ones (yes I know I’m probably missing a few).  All three professions require anyone participating to have a license.  In some cases, the licenses are extremely difficult to get and take many years.  Sometimes, the licenses must be “kept up” and renewed on a regular basis.  Generally, participation in the field requires continuing education (and proof of such), participation in professional development courses or seminars and some degree of public accountability.  Although these professions make a lot of money, they are high-stress and require a great deal of work on an individual’s part.

Since I’m an engineer, I’ll talk about engineering education and the problems I see with it now.  If you want to be an engineer, you first must complete a 4-year degree program that has passed scrutiny by a national board of advisors known as ABET, or the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.  It takes a lot of effort on the part of a school to have its program certified under ABET.  Once the degree program is complete, students may apply to take a test called the Fundamentals of Engineering Examination (FE Exam).  Successful completion of this very rigorous exam will give the examinee the title of “Engineering in Training” (EIT) or “Engineering Intern” (EI), depending on where you live in the country.  Once there, students have two options:

1. Enter the work force and work under a Professional Engineer (PE) for no less than 4 calendar years.
2. Pursue a master’s degree and work under a Professional Engineer for no less than 3 years.

After the specified period of time under the PE, the EIT may apply to take the PE licensure test.  Until this even more rigorous test is passed, the EIT is an investment to a company – he or she may not stamp, sign or prepare construction or design documents lawfully.  This means that companies must select EITs wisely because they will be investing for 3 or 4 years before they make a return for the company, making it difficult for engineering students to find jobs (especially in our current economy).

This is all good and well.  Here comes the big problem: with these already rigid guidelines that are arguably rigorous and trying on young engineers, ABET and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) are currently passing an addendum that requires practicing engineers to have 30 hours of education beyond a bachelor’s degree and provide proof of continuing education.  Generally, 30 hours beyond a bachelor’s degree leads to a master’s degree.  Thus, civil engineering students are being pressed to continue their education beyond the bachelor’s level, investing an additional 1 to 3 years as a full-time student or as many as 5 years as a continuing education student in education.

But why would ASCE be passing this addendum?  To me, the answer seems simple: graduating engineers are less competent than the work demands.  Today, engineers are specialists in various branches of design, whether it be hydraulics, hydrology, highways, bridges, foundations, structures or whatever.  Engineers are strictly limited to passing drawings prepared directly under their supervision in their field of expertise only.  This means companies need more engineers to do the same task.  From a company’s perspective, if you’re going to have to have specialists within specialties, they may as well be highly skilled, competent individuals – thus giving rise to the need for further education.

But I have a problem with this.  Even after being on a full-ride scholarship for almost all four years of my undergraduate education, the thing I need most is money.  If I were forced to continue my education for another 1 to  3 years, I simply couldn’t.  And I’m the most successful case, really.  Most students graduate after 4 years buried under a mountain of debt.  Given the slow economy and the fact that engineers are an investment at first, entry-level engineering salaries have decreased and don’t provide nearly as much in the way of climbing out of debt as they once did.  And even if money weren’t a problem, I’m just sick and tired of school all the time.  And I’m sure that you are, too.

So, after some consideration, I’ve come up with an alternative plan.  Instead of requiring MORE education for professionals (as I’m sure this problem goes beyond engineering), how about making existing education worth more?  Once again, I’ll use engineering as my example, since I am most qualified to speak on that topic.

Here’s a typical 4-year engineering program:

Yeah, I didn't feel like doing an HTML table this time.

It’s a pretty rigorous schedule.  But, out of all of that, only the latter two years really teach engineering.  The first year is almost exclusively to develop technical (problem-solving) skills and teach some very basic engineering fundamentals like surveying and drafting.  The entire schedule is padded throughout with “Humanities” electives, which involve such irrelevant topics as literature, music and art.  These are not so much requirements of the Engineering college as university requirements.  However, they present, altogether, an entire semester’s worth of hours that COULD be devoted to engineering coursework.

Now, being lucky in having attended the most technically advanced high school in the city, I was able to transfer in a lot of credit.  I transferred in credit for calclulus 1 and 2, general chemistry and both semesters of general physics.  In effect, I had completed my entire first year of coursework.  I decided to double major as a result, and I even ended up repeating some classes just to make sure I was solid.  I took differential equations in high school and, by all measures, that class was much more difficult than the college equivalent I took later on, but the university would not recognize it as sufficient to cover for their version (I know, right?).

There are, however, some hidden requirements in that chart.  For example, one cannot simply enroll in technical writing without having already passed several basic composition courses.  Many students I knew at the time were stuck taking composition so that they could fulfill their technical writing requirement later on.  Although rare, some students do not qualify to begin their math classes at the calculus level and must first prove themselves by taking lower-level classes.  Sometimes, this caused students to have to spend an extra year in school.

Now consider that an additional 30 hours of coursework is generally required for a master’s degree.  Although it varies, master’s degrees are generally earned by either doing extra coursework or by substituting some hours for a thesis (a written account of original research).  For practicing engineers, the former is often the route taken.  For a graduate student, 9 – 12 hours is considered a full-time schedule.  This means that master’s degrees take, at a minimum, 1 year to complete, and often longer.  For distance education students, 30 hours can take upwards of 3 years to complete.

So, why not concentrate education more and make it worth the time in the first place?  My proposal centers on the idea that most of the electives required by universities are irrelevant and, at best, shameless money-making scams set in place by greedy regents.  Yes, I can see how some knowledge of humanities and social sciences is a desirable feature of education but, for technically oriented students, it is admittedly irrelevant and not really helpful at all to the immediate goal of becoming a well-trained technical professional.  Here is a short list of areas where engineering education is generally lacking:

• Training in communication – written, oral or otherwise
• Design training – these classes come the closest to actual design engineering work
• Advanced technical knowledge

The last one is a bit vague.  Let me elaborate.  All students take a course in soil mechanics.  More advanced soil topics might be foundation design, designing with geosynthetics or perhaps pollutant transport and fate.  Basically, the things they want you to take during your stay at the university while earning your master’s degree.

So, my proposal takes advantage of the fact that many of the most basic technical classes can be taught before college and much of the university padding can be dropped in favor of more relevant topics.  Here is my revised plan.

My Proposed Alternative

As you can see, I have completely eliminated calculus 1, 2 and 3, chemistry, physics and 9 of the 18 humanities electives.  It is reasonable to expect that students in high school can be taught calculus 1 and 2, and most of the time 3.  However, I contend that calculus 3 is really not necessary to most types of engineering (especially civil), and can be completely omitted if necessary.  Chemistry can be taught at a college level in high school, and really the standards for science in public schools are disgustingly low anyway.  And before you flare up with your objections, let me point out that other countries have already successfully done this for years.  There is no reason these things cannot be taught in high school.

In the event that the students were not able to complete the courses in high school due to falling behind academically, the courses can be offered at the college level.  They will, however, NOT be a part of the specified curriculum for engineering itself.  This is just like how students often have to take composition and grammar courses before they can fulfill the technical writing aspect of the degree in the current situation.  It seems pointless and irresponsible to include basic technical courses as credit towards an engineering degree.

The table below summarizes the differences between my plan and the plan currently being used.

Differences Between Programs

My plan offers several advantages over the current plan:

1. More Engineering: I have eliminated a lot of humanities and a lot of general education requirements and replaced them with engineering courses.  Altogether, my plan results in an additional 21 hours of engineering credits, which is almost enough to amount to a master’s degree.  If the remaining 9 hours of humanities are exchanged for engineering, the 30 required for a master’s degree can actually be reached.  This results in engineering graduates with far more engineering training than current graduates.
2. More Specialization: Because companies desire a higher level of specialization in engineering hires, it makes sense that we should attempt to train more specialized engineers.  Although my proposed curriculum offers more engineering electives, it also offers them after all major “core” engineering courses are taken.  This enables students to find, by experience, which of the branches appeals to them the most and allows them to pick relevant courses in that area.
3. Fewer Total Hours: Although it’s almost negligible, my plan accomplishes far more engineering and does it all with 4 fewer total hours in the program, amounting to a small net savings in cost.
4. More Meaningful Degree: The value of a bachelor’s degree has steadily decreased because the better jobs now require more education to even qualify an applicant.  This is analogous to the inflation of money: the same amount is worth less down the road.  This plan fights “degree inflation” by making a bachelor’s degree worth more.  Because of this, it also makes a master’s or a doctorate worth far more as well, ensuring that individuals holding these degrees have the depth and breadth of knowledge generally assumed to go along with these prestigious titles.
5. More Competent Engineers: When it comes right down to it, the first and foremost goal of any engineer is to hold paramount the safety and welfare of the public.  With more competent engineers and specialists in the field for longer (because they won’t be in school for as long), the engineering industry can continue to do just that.  With a more meaningful bachelor’s degree, everyone in the field will be more competent and better able to serve the public.

In a professional development book I was reading, one chapter argued that there is such a thing as too much “experience.”  However, I put that in quotations to indicate that experience can be any number of things, including training.  There is definitely such a thing as overeducation, and it seems to me that an entire industry of practicing professionals holding nothing less than a master’s degree is overkill.  Sending an entire industry of employees back to school for another 1 – 3 years seems unnecessary to me.   And besides, if we force our engineers to stay in school, we do more bad than good: we force people to continue to live on no income, incur debt and loans and keep them from gaining valuable experience in the actual field.

Disclaimer 1:  This post contains a ton of swearing, adult language and adult references.  So man up or leave.

Disclaimer 2:  There is a lot of negativity because THIS IS A TOP 10 HATE LIST.  So shut your fucking mouth in advance if you want to keep living in your denial-driven, perfect happy little world where you ignore problems.  And cut off your testicles, too, asswipe.

Disclaimer 3:  This is an OPINION post, and there’s a decent chance you won’t agree with a lot of the shit I say.  I won’t be debating anything.  Fair warning.  Flame wars are a waste of your time (or maybe they aren’t if your time is that worthless, but I won’t be wasting any of my time).

This is the list.  It is in order with 1 being the thing I currently hate the most and 10 being the thing that I hate just enough to make it onto this list.  A short explanation follows each one.

10.  Large, unnecessary trucks

You know what I’m talking about.  You see those shiny, brand new F-350′s with their 4-wheel rear axles, extended cabs, lined beds (you know, to keep them from looking used) and hemi engines.  And it gets better.  People stupid enough to fork out for these monstrosities usually add all kinds of after-market upgrades, like enormous wheels, truck balls, offensive bumper stickers and whatever other unnecessary waste of money you can think of.  I can sum this up in a few sentences.  The first is a ratio:

(Number of people who actually use these trucks for their intended purpose – i.e., work)/(Number of people who buy these trucks) < 0.10.

Secondly, you know that most of the people who own these vehicles are compensating for something else.  Sometimes in a major, major way.  That warm, fuzzy feeling by itself relegates this pet peeve to the bottom of the list.  And you can also rest assured that those people decided, when they bought their enormous, unnecessary vehicle, that they considered displays of social status to be more important than financial independence.

So, in conclusion, while absurdly large vehicles that never see use beyond urbanite commuting really piss me off, I know that those people have already lost at life in so many ways that it quells the axe murder rage inside me.

9.  Deplorable grammar and spelling of nearly everyone

Texting, Facebook and a severe lack of grammar classes in primary school have combined to form the perfect storm in which most of the American form of the English language has been lost.  I recently took the GRE which, for those of you unfamiliar with education, stands for Graduate Readiness Exam.  It supposedly measures your skills in mathematics, analytical writing and “verbal,” or vocabulary and reading.  I scored in the 98th percentile for verbal.  I don’t want your congratulations or admiration – I want your shock and disgust.  I AM A FUCKING ENGINEER.

At any rate, the blame for this problem rests with everyone.  It rests a lot with the primary schools for completely failing to educate children on the correct use of words and the formulation of coherent, intelligent sentences.  I had a few grammar classes, but no one ever actually taught us anything.  It was basically learning by trial and error and teacher feedback.  I learned to write by reading.  Then, later, I got better at it by practicing.  I know, some next-level shit right there, eh?  (Look at that formation of a compound adjective using a hyphen.)  Tucker Max, world-renowned professional douchebag and writer, has better grammar, spelling and vocabulary than most of the students I’ve seen who managed to eak out a college degree.

Facebook and texting have made everyone into idiots.  And perhaps Twitter and all of those other social networking sites as well.  I’ll admit, I’m not on my best behavior when posting on Facebook, but I use punctuation and correct capitalization.  So this part of the issue is in using each other as excuses to forget how to read and write and your own apathy towards shit that matters.  Go kill yourself.

8. Needless trimming and cutting down of trees

Maybe it’s just because I lived in Omaha and, in particular, lived with my father for most of my youth, but this kind of shit pisses me off to no end.  Omaha and my dad take the cake for the needless, senseless trimming and removing of mature trees.

The City of Omaha uses nepotism (see rant below) to fill a bunch of unnecessary “maintenance” division jobs each summer.  These are kids in school who want some source of income but don’t want to suck dick like the rest of us at a grocery store job or some other dehumanizing experience that makes us stronger as children.  The City runs out of work and sends their crews and equipment on asinine “tree raids,” where crews arbitrarily mark off older trees on the streets that have some kind of “defect.”  I have seen broken limbs with diameters under 2 inches claimed as “hazards” that merit the entire tree be cut down.  I have seen normal, natural holes and knots in tree trunks earn the proverbial spray-paint ‘X’ mark.  I have even seen, disturbingly often, perfectly healthy trees with no visible defects whatsoever be cut down.

And what the city can’t cut down, my father can.  My father is an outstanding example of a paranoid homeowner with an itch to run a chainsaw and rent a lift.  The two large, mature silver maple trees I grew up with were progressively destroyed.  Every other year, my father would rent a lift and spend a few days locked in epic battle with gas-powered chainsaws in the garage.  He told me the trees needed to be trimmed.  His main rationale is that the trees might, at any time, fall on the house.  He told me that the copious amounts of house insurance he pays do not cover this sort of catastrophe.  Over time, every branch within reach of the lift had been cut off the tree.  Wounds left in the tree trunk started rotting, left exposed to the elements and insects.  The trunk began rotting away and the health of the tree declined at an ever-increasing rate.  Currently, my father is planning another pointless chainsawing appointment with the two trees.

I can’t put all of the blame on my father.  I’ve seen a lot of homeowners with the insatiable need to feel manly run down their perfectly healthy, property-value-increasing, mature shade trees with a chainsaw.  The reason it pisses me off so much is because trees do nothing but good.  Especially mature shade trees in residential neighborhoods.  Here’s a quick list of the shit that mature shade trees do well:

• Increase property value
• Increase shade, decreasing cooling costs
• Decrease runoff from storms, which in turn increases the water quality and health of nearby streams and the overall health of the watershed, hydrologically speaking
• Maintains or improves soil health
• Provide wildlife shelter
• Provide visual appeal to any property
• Decrease heat island effect of cities
• Provide carbon sinks

In fact, mature shade trees are so desirable that LEED has specified their use in a great number of their site development criteria.  And every fucking time I see some asshole out there cutting down a tree for the fucking giggles, it pisses me off because it takes YEARS to grow trees.  Do people not understand that they are undoing decades of growth?

7.  Uninformed political opinions

How many people do you know who supported Obama before the election and then jumped on the criticism bandwagon less than a year after he took office?  Yea, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Or, how about this situation: you log into your e-mail service and you find a family member has loaded you down with several pages of FWD: Nancy Pelosi caught fucking kindergarten boys while husband films!!  Do you think these people who send around these forwarded, inane e-mails ever bother to check the veracity of the contents?  Of course not.  Sometimes, people don’t even want to.  But what really bothers me is that SO many people are idiotic enough to be fooled by people with an agenda.  People watch Fox or CNN and think the news they are getting is truthful.  HA!  My hairy, white, radiant ass!

I don’t even engage people in political discussion anymore.  People forgot how to intelligently debate several decades ago, and no one can present informed opinions about anything.  My brother informed me that he hated “Obamacare.”  I asked him why.  He told me because it was bologna.  I asked, “Why is it ‘bologna?’  What in particular about the plan raises your ire?”  He had no specifics.  He had nothing to give me, except that “They had to pass it in order to read it because it was 1,000 pages!  And they made it 1,000 pages so that no one could read it!”  Yea, right.  And we wonder how crooked politicians get elected.  People have neglected their duty to be informed voters, on the rare occasion that a citizen exercises his or her right to vote at all.

So, fuck you and your idiotic, uninformed political opinions.  As long as you keep doing what you’re doing, Congress will keep doing what they do because NO ONE CARES.  People say that, historically, revolutions have been sparked as a function of the difference in income between the rich and the poor, and they point to the fact that we are way overdue for a revolution.  But a revolution won’t happen because no one gives a shit enough about politics to even have an intelligent opinion.  So shut the fuck up.

6.  People who live in denial

I didn’t want to get too philosophical with this rant, lest you not understand it.  And besides, we all have our own opinions about society and how people live and behave, and even I can admit that they vary far too much for one person to be right or wrong.  But one thing in particular does bother me a lot, and I think it covers a lot of the things I hate about other people: denial.

And I’m not talking about that temporary denial that occurs as the first step of grief.  I’m talking about the countless herds of people whose lives have become so shitty and pointless (due to their own shitty pointlessness and weak mind I might add) that all they can do to go on every day is huddle in a corner of their own pathetic denial.  Examples of this include women with abusive boyfriends, people who think “the man” is keeping him or her down, people who are depressed, my ex-girlfriend and her slimeball of a pseudo-lover (you know, filling the holes in their souls with meaningless sex), and people who just can’t WAIT to call “Debby Downer” on someone who brings up real issues.

But here again I can convince myself to wrest the axe murder rage within by noting that these people are empty and hollow shells of existence.  There’s a reason I don’t avoid pain – even embrace it.  Because through pain we learn.  And through error and failure we learn.  We gain nothing by ignoring the elephant in the room, or by making excuses or procrastinating.  We gain nothing by living only within the ever-shrinking confines of our comfort bubbles.  Nearly all of us can point to degenerate parents or friends whose lives have become shining examples of denial-ridden, worthless existence.  If you really want to avoid that fate, all you have to do is stop ignoring your problems.  And it’s not that hard.

5.  Almost all new video games

Maybe I’m getting older, but what happened to games like Unreal, StarCraft, Tribes and Half-Life?  Sure, they’re old games, but gamer culture has traded storyline and team play for MMORPGs that waste weeks or even months of life at a time with no point.

• StarCraft: A ground-breaking real-time strategy game with a truly epic storyline.  If Hollywood wanted to make a series of movies that was actually amazing, StarCraft would be the story to glorify on film.  Of course, Hollywood would probably overdo the character development and put in too many cheesy, predictable lines for it to be good.  So nevermind that idea.
• Unreal: Another absolutely epic storyline.  Unreal was also a ground-breaking game in terms of graphics and gameplay for a number of reasons I won’t go into.  Unreal also had atmosphere, and the developers were better at creating atmosphere than any other game to date.
• Tribes: The most innovative team-play game in history.  The game was built around team dynamics and actually did online play right.  There was a little bit of single player, but it was mostly training.  The entire game was built on the idea that you and your friends could communicate and work together efficiently.  They didn’t rely on flashy graphics, 20-minute cut scenes or shitty dialogue to produce an epic work – they made the game worth playing.
• Half-Life: If there were some kind of continuation of all the greatness that was Unreal, it was Half-Life.  Half-Life had a really creative storyline and a great atmosphere.  It also didn’t boast graphics forged in the fires of Mount Doom itself, it was bad ass enough on its own.

And what of new games?  New games are just money-grubbing schemes built on their successors that the sheep of Gaming World eat right up.  How many Tomb Raider games are there?  How many Call of Duty games are there?  And more to the point, why is it even enjoyable to play them?  The idea went stale after the first one or two installments.  You can play CoD or WoW for years on end and not really make any progress.  I guess that’s the miracle of it.  That, and the fact that most of you assholes are too stupid to wake up and demand something better from developers.  Oh well, I guess I’m better off without video games anyway.

4.  DC Comics Movies (and most of the mass-produced bullshit Hollywood churns out)

Every time I see a preview for a DC Comics movie, it takes all the discipline I have to stop myself from walking out of the theater.  I think once upon a time when I was a wee lad, they made Batman into a movie.  Then, when Hollywood ran out of fresh ideas, they decided to make a new version of Batman.  And another, newer version after that.  Then they made Fantastic 4, X-Men, Superman and a host of other DC Comics.  They got so desperate that they started hitting old video games, and now we can expect Tron to premier within a year.  Puke.

I think I hit the wall around Iron Man 2, with the disgustingly overdone character development and the predictable lines.  Specifically, it was where the woman in red was doing that bullshit in the hallway where she effortlessly disabled several dozen guards.  Or maybe that was a different movie, the shitty ones tend to run together for me.

I could spend a thousand years elaborating on each and every little facet of why I hate these movies, but I’ll just hit the big ones.  First off, ORIGINALITY.  I know it’s not totally gone because Gran Torino and Slumdog Millionaire came out recently.  THAT is how movies are made.  You know something is up when you have to take a story that’s already been written and try to put it on film.  And even then, it wasn’t bad until it got to be several a year, or several dozen, or however many it is anymore.

And what really pisses me off is this (and maybe this is overstepping my boundaries as a fairly uncultured person): DC Comics were precisely that: comics.  They were greatest in their original form – framed comics preserved forever in comic books.  That’s how they were meant to be.  When you take them from that form and put them onto film, it must be done carefully and with respect for the original material.  Tron was an 8-bit (call me out if I’m wrong on that, I’m not sure) video game.  It didn’t have enough story to fill a 2.5-hour movie.  That means you’re getting 10% adulterated, modified classic video game and 90% Hollywood HFCS, bullshit filler.  Why would anyone go to see that?  But I guarantee someone you know will.

3. Rap and hip-hop music

The hate machine is really starting to turn.  I recently moved to Kansas and I’m around a lot of the “Johnson County” folk.  They are mainly rich white kids from suburbs and they think Eminem is really cool.  And all that other bullshit.  And let me just say that I have legitimately TRIED to appreciate it for what it is.  But there are no redeeming characteristics whatsoever about rap.

The same goes for hip-hop, but I actually hate it even more.  I was watching my 9 – 13 year old nieces and female cousins dance provocatively to P-Diddy.  I was thoroughly alarmed and disgusted at the same time.  See, because children are regrettably so impressionable (and even the dumbass 18-year old kids I’m around from Johnson County all the time), they think it’s cool to “brush your teeth with a bottle of Jack” and shit.  Rap and hip-hop glorify this kind of bullshit lifestyle that not even the singers live in reality.  Those who do end up dying (like Tupac).

And while I’m on that note, the message in rap and hip-hop is worthless.  Most of the time it’s just stupid, but sometimes it’s even damaging to people who admire the artists.  Take “I’m in Miami, Bitch” as an example.  I know you’re going to think I’m ridiculous for this, but I don’t really give a shit.  Young kids who hear that song are going to think that you should “drink all day” and “play all night” when in Miami.  I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t, but I am saying that when you’re 10, you ought to be outside riding your fucking bike or getting burned by a cigarette lighter in a fucking car.  You shouldn’t be in Miami, bitch.

And, finally, why do people even think it’s fun to listen to?  If nothing else, you could potentially claim that rap or hip-hop has a good sound.  But it fucking doesn’t.  It just doesn’t.  There’s nothing redeeming about this genre of music whatsoever.  In fact, I don’t even have neutral feelings about the way it sounds.  I have rage feelings.  I hate the sound so much that it makes me want to punch bears.

2.  Nepotism

Nepotism is my second most-hated thing ever.  It would be the first if I didn’t hate TV so much.  For the vast majority of you who are too stupid to know what that word means and, worse, too lazy to look it up, let me define it here:

nepotism: favoritism shown to relatives or close friends by those in power (as by giving them jobs)

Nepotism is the source of so much evil in the world it isn’t even worth laughing about.  Nepotism gets incompetent people jobs.  It puts capable people out of work, especially in times like these.  Let me give you an example.

Frank applied to the [company name redacted] for several positions one summer.  One required specialized knowledge of hydrology.  The other required some rudimentary knowledge of dams and soil properties.  Both require some familiarity with civil engineering and the practice itself.  These are not simply “grocery store jobs” that could be filled by any schmuck.  Frank interviews.  Admittedly, Frank doesn’t nail the interview.  But who gets the job?  A kid who just graduated high school who is planning to go to school in INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY.  Not only is this kid less qualified than me in terms of what is relevant to the job, younger than me and less experienced in almost every way, he’s NOT EVEN IN THE RIGHT MAJOR.  You can guess why he got the job – his father works there.

I’ve been turned down for a lot of positions I’ve been highly qualified for in favor of less qualified relatives.  I bet you’ve been there, too.  In fact, most of you have jobs because someone you knew had a contact and got you in.  I even did that once, a long time ago, out of desperation.  Plus, it was offered to me, I didn’t ask.  At any rate, nepotism can go fuck itself.  Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done to stop it since there’s virtually no way to fight it legally.  Nepotism is the means by which incompetence is born and perpetuated.  Seeing so many incapable people in great jobs that I wanted fuels my rage daily.  And for those of you wondering, I can proudly and honestly say that I earned my first real job without the corrupt help of nepotism.

1. Television

This is it.  The number one pet peeve.  The thing that fuels such rage and fire within me as to melt the devil himself.  I have everything about TV, and I mean everything.  This kind of hate deserves a list.

• Programming: Let’s hit the most disgusting of them: CSI, V, Two-and-a-Half Men, Grey’s Anatomy, Californication, and EVERYTHING aired by MTV, E! or Discovery.  That’s right, Discovery.  The Discovery channel sold its soul to HORRIBLE TRASH reality TV shows like Deadliest Catch, Swamp Loggers and the Orange County Choppers.  To those of you in denial (see rant above), THEY ARE ALL FUCKING SCRIPTED.  You FUCKING morons.  And even if they weren’t scripted, THEY FUCKING SUCK.  Get a FUCKING life.  And almost every drama, comedy or what-have-you is absolute garbage as well.  Take Two-and-a-Half Men.  That kid gets paid disgusting acting compensation.  Charlie Sheen plays some kind of douchebag womanizer who, in real life, would have had his nuts chopped off with a bolt cutter by now.  And a chiropractor who can’t afford a house of his own?  Yea right.
• Commercials:  If I ever do anything worthy of the national news, it will be because of rage fueled solely by television commercials.  Commercials have gotten even worse than movies.  They are melodramatic, predictable, mass-produced and ANNOYING AS SHIT.  And not only that, but you see the SAME fucking commercials OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER.  And what’s with people not muting?  Who the fuck WANTS to listen to commercials?  The pure hatred burns in my very retinas when I WATCH that shit, I don’t need two senses to split skulls.  Your religion knows nothing of the depths of my hatred for commercials.  Watch this:

1. Cell phone commercials: upbeat, indie melody music in background.  Computer-rendered graphics.  Some kind of presentation of applications or abilities of phone.
2. Car commercials: Pacific Northwest auto tour highways, peel out turn and FINANCING AVAILABLE FROM AS LITTLE AS $350 PER MONTH WITH SIGN-AND-DRIVE SAVINGS WITH A SIDE OF FUCK-YOU-IN-THE-ASS CREDIT!
3. Shitty TV Show previews:  “They said they come in peace.  They lied.”  Meaningless cuts of melodramatic, run-of-the-mill scenes.  Series like “V” and “Super Family” make me want to vomit.  The commercials make me want to vomit and forge a viking axe blade and use it to cleave the bones of whoever decided they should air on public TV.
4. Shitty domestic brew beer commercials: Cut scene of guy who sucks at life.  Cut scene of same guy with gorgeous women and all kinds of friends, perhaps a tailgate or even a worship session.  SucksAtLife is holding a beer.
5. Insurance commercials: Fucking geckos, guys pretending to be inanimate objects and some douchehole in a suit answering his own question with another of his own questions and then a “witty” cut scene.  You know what I’m talking about.

• The noise: I grew up with my father, as I may have mentioned several million times before.  My father has the not-so-peculiar habit of coming home and immediately turning on the TV.  From that time until the time he leaves for work the next morning, the TV is on.  Shitty commercials and shitty shows polluted my eardrums for 18 miserable years.  The sound was inescapable.  The continuous drone of advertising voices and actors made me metaphorically claw at the boundaries of anything you could consider sanity.  Every time I woke up in the middle of the night, the sounds were there with me.  They were a constant companion.  I know what it feels like to be in a legitimate insane asylum, unable to control your reactions to seemingly harmless things.
• Degradation of culture:  Like it or not, people are influenced by others and by what they see on TV.  The impressionable Johnson County crop I mentioned earlier has fallen victim to the pointlessness of shows like Teen Mom, Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Jersey Shore.  But TV has done far more to invade our lives than just putting shitty reality shows on the air.  People now have a TV in their kitchens, in their dining rooms and in their bedrooms as well.  Many families have  a TV in every room of the house.  I’ll use a TV reference to get the point across, since that’s how so much learning is done today.  Fry of Futurama said it best when he said “Human families need a TV to watch during dinner so they don’t have to talk to each other.”  How many couples sit endlessly in front of the TV watching pointless shows and failing to interact with one another?  Why do people not know how to talk and eat at the same time anymore?  Perhaps this is where our lack of social skills and our desire to avoid life’s problems comes from.  If we just drown ourselves in TV, what’s the real world matter?  My father just finished remodeling his kitchen and it just looks fantastic.  It’s possibly the best thing to happen to his house ever.  And what’s he going to do?  Put a TV in.  He’s even got a TV in the bathroom.  And he’s not the only one.  My roommates constantly watch the TV, or play games on it.  If one of them isn’t on it, the other is.  Sometimes they are using different TVs.  And let’s not forget how much power TVs soak up.  And on TV commercials you can see ads that promote the idea of having a TV in every room of the house, so “you don’t miss a second when you want to change rooms!”  Soon, I fear people will have small TV sets implanted in their retinas.  What happened to reading, learning, sports and enjoying the outdoors?  TV has truly destroyed culture and all that is intelligence or reason.

My hatred for TV goes so much further.  The intensity with which most of you drones claim to feel love is a mere shadow of the depths to which my hatred for TV extends.  God himself, as you fancy him, would bow to the undeniable fires of my soul fueled by rage against the TV, were he real.  I have not even begun to do justice to how much I despise TV, but I can only put so much into words.

There you have it, folks.  The top ten hate list for Frank.  The top ten things that I hate so much, I decided to devote several hours to a blog post for it.  I have topped 4500 words, so I’ll call it a day.  Thanks all.