Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Unexpected acts

Sometimes things happen out of the blue that server to restore my faith in humanity, in the short term at least.  A few weeks back I lost my driver's license somewhere in the Ala Moana area.  I had taken it out of my wallet so that I would only be carrying a minimal amount of valuable things, i.e. car keys, license, phone, water; nothing of value that I would be particularly stressed about losing.

Suffice to say, in a rather ironic or perhaps tragic way, I lost my license.  It must have fallen out of my pocket at some point during my workout boot camp.  I spend a good 30 minutes after the class was finished looking for the darn thing in the sand, but all for naught.  I had to use my phone as a flashlight to keep looking.  I resigned myself to the fact that it was gone for good.

The replacement process was surprisingly quick and relatively lacking in headache; I only spent a half hour at the satellite city hall getting a replacement.  I had to walk away with a paper copy since the real license would take 4-6 weeks to arrive (not sure why that would be, but at that point I wasn't in a complaining mood)   If nothing else, it provided a talking point / ice breaker.

Fast forward a month / month and a half, I receive a letter from the DMV with my replacement license.  In the same bundle of mail is a letter from someone I did not know or even heard of, but it was addressed to me.  Inside was my original license that they had found.  I was very surprised to say the least since it is not common for such acts of kindness; small as it might be.

So, while the world blows up around us (it's always going to be blowing up from what I can observe), we can take comfort in the fact that there are people around that will do the little things to make things a little better.

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

Crazy? Possibly.

Insanity.  Albert Einstein described insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Hawaii is definitely insane according to this definition.   Originally a French saying, "The more things change, the more things stay the same" is a quote that is equally apropos.

The same politicians get voted into office, the same problems happen every year time and again ... and people have the same complaints year after year which they, themselves, caused by voting the same politicians into office.  And even if there is a new face, they do things the same way as those that came before which amounts to the same person being in office.

There are spots of change here and there from the Republican side which shakes things up for a little while, but then they are replaced with another establishment Democrat who does the same broken, and even somewhat crooked, things as before.

I have to state the caveat that I am not affiliated with any party so it is not merely an "unga, democrats bad, smash" reaction.  I object to the fact that there is virtually no opposite side to the equation and that is a major problem which would be the same if the situation were reversed and Republicans were the extreme majority.

So what is the solution?  I honestly am not sure.  I know what the answer is, but getting things changed to make things better is a Quixotic task.  I am fairly certain I will be ok when the ultimate break down occurs, but I really do not want that to happen any time soon.  Time will tell.

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Armchair quarterbacking

I have to say that reading the comment sections of articles is both entertaining (get some buttered popcorn and watch the show) and disturbing (how can anyone be this retarded).  I'd hazard to say that most of the comments stem from a distinct lack of information and a heavy focus on the emotional vs the rational.  While it is not necessarily a bad thing to become emotional about a topic, people should always temper that with logic and facts.  Too many times there is a conclusion drawn based on incomplete information.

People also do their thinking from the safety of their home in a comfortable chair rather than in the moment of an event which could be wrought with high stress and high emotion.  A person could react very differently from one set of circumstances to the next and often the general public is not privy to every detail of the situation.  That in itself can lead to widely different conclusions.

This is the main reason why decisions should never be made from an emotional stand point.  Too many times they are reactionary, completely wrong and do not solve the problem.  Doing something just "to do something" is by far the worst reason to do something.  Doing nothing and accurately evaluating a situation before acting produces the most effective results.  One does not need to look farther than their local government to see how many screwed up results come from knee-jerk reactions.