Erin The Great

I was driving home from work yesterday when I noticed one of my friends crossing the street. He was with what I thought was a friend of his and since it was about 3 degrees outside, I decided to pull over and offer both of them a ride.

Both of them had been in the car for about two seconds when the guy that I didn’t know started asking me some interesting questions that were pretty personal for someone I had never met before. Assuming that they were friends, I didn’t want to be rude so I vaguely answered as my friend in the back seat chuckled heartily at the awkwardness that had set in.

As I dropped the unknown kid off, I couldn’t help but feel that something was off about the situation.

Soon after I was told by my friend that the other guy was a complete stranger and that he was asking him a bunch of weird person questions as well and wasn’t leaving him alone.

This got me thinking. I live in a college town where everyone basically knows of everyone else, and if you see two people walking together, you can safely assume that they at least know each other.

I wonder if serial killers and predators prefer this scenario because the people around where I live just assume nothing is wrong. If there’s someone random lurking around your house, people around here just assume someone is playing a prank on you. If someone is bothering someone else and another person offers them a ride, and the friend was trying to shake the other person, does this potentially put both parties in danger?

Are people preying on others they feel are just too nice to tell them to go to hell? We as people don’t want to be rude right?

Is assuming getting people hurt or even killed? Are we just so imbedded in a false sense of security that if anything does go terribly awry, will others even know something is up? This is a spooky thought indeed.

I was watching a movie the other day at the theatre when I saw a preview for ‘The Bucket List’. For those of you who have not seen this preview, it shows Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill cancer patients. They come up with a ‘bucket list’ or a list of things they want to do before they kick the bucket.

            This got me thinking. Why should I wait until I’m old to create a pathway for experiences? At the young age of 25, I’ve decided I’m going to create a ‘bucket list’ of 10 random/crazy/fun things I want to do every decade until I finally kick it. So, having lived at least 5 years of this particular decade in my life, here is the list for the rest of the 5 years…

1. Write a fan letter to Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden of ‘I
Dream of Jeannie’.
2. Climb a billboard and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
3. Hit a parade on ‘Fat Tuesday’ in New Orleans.
4. Visit a foreign country, excluding Canada and Mexico.
5. Go ‘tray surfing’… This is when you take a food tray from a
food court or cafeteria and surf in a parking lot while holding
onto a car door or the bed of a truck.
6. Create my own parade. Get friends involved by decorating
trucks and cars and making floats and then drive single-file
down a road waving.

The rules of the ‘Bucket List’ require 10 things that you want to accomplish. The last four, I’ve actually accomplished in the previous 5 years.

1. Be an extra in a TV show… Accomplished at age 21.
2. Karaoke in a bar in Texas… Accomplished at age 22 and won
$50 in the process.
3. Start my own Blog… Accomplished at 24.
4. Run in a bikini in the snow on the campus of Brigham Young
University… accomplished at age 22 & 23, and even made the
campus paper.

There are other things that I’ve accomplished and have bragging rights to, but a lot of those were accomplished before I turned 20.

In the immortal words of James Dean ‘Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today’.

Where has common sense gone? The phrase ‘Do unto others as you would have them to unto you’ has lost all meaning. I do believe that we live in a country that takes everything for granted and gives to nobody unless we think it’ll benefit them. Granted not everyone is like this, but an alarming number are. We manipulate, take advantage, scapegoat, and generally treat everyone we come across like crap… for the love of Pete, when did we turn into the French?

It’s almost comical when you’re working, out shopping or just outside walking around, and see America’s finest lose it when some tiny little thing goes wrong or they don’t get what they want the second they want it. They digress into a two year old and throw some of the biggest fits I’ve ever seen when something doesn’t go their way.

I despise the fact that our nation has fallen into a sense of ‘entitlement’, it’s ridiculous! No wonder every other country wants to see our continent go up in a big old mushroom cloud. I honestly don’t blame them at this point. Anyone who has ever worked any job in customer service especially on a Friday understands the want of Darwin’s theory of ‘Natural Selection’ to be true.

Who ever came up with the idea that yelling and throwing a tantrum would get you anything you want, should not only be shot but have their arms ripped from their body and savagely beaten by them!

These are the people who should take trips to 3rd world countries and see how the other side lives. People there are mostly happy to have a roof over their head and or running water. Where has America’s priorities gone? I’ll tell you where they’ve gone… around the bowl and down the hole!

It’s pretty rare to find people who not only serve others but do it un-conditionally. It takes a remarkable individual to leave this worth un-scathed so to speak. People who continue to think people are basically good and in the words of ‘scrubs’ are not ‘bastard covered bastards with bastard filling’.

My hope is that one day the vast majority of the people in this world will stop being self serving and actually give a crap about the people you feel are beneath you or feel has wronged you and treat those people with respect.

Remember in the mid to late nineties when the solitaire computer game ruled the world? I do! I used to spend countless hours playing the game and wasting time instead of doing productive things like home work or even work for that matter. It was a simpler time back then.

Do I think solitaire is over rated? Absolutely not! It made even the type ‘A’ personalities learn to waste time, and anything that influential definitely gets a nod in my book.

Meanwhile… While we’ve been busy wasting time with various card games on our computers/ laptops/ cell phones and now iPods there has been an intruder.

The intruders name is ‘Sudoku’. Although it is an intruder, I never said it was an un-welcome intruder. Instead of wasting time on hundreds of different games, you can waste hours on ONE puzzle. How genius of a single puzzle, drawing you in and making you not only concentrate, but extremely anxious to get ‘that next number’.

One of the best parts of this game is there are different difficulties of the Sudoku puzzle , ranging from easy and moderate through hard and very hard up to fiendish and evil. The only thing better then this is the ‘Samurai Sudoku’ puzzle. It’s glorious but not for the amateur or weak hearted.

Do I think that Sudoku is over rated? As me again in a few years and we’ll see if it had proven itself worthy against the test of time. As for right now I believe this puzzle to be of heroic worship.