That's The Way Stealing Works

Man oh Man. Just got a book on the GRE. Barron's 2008 to be precise. I was leafing through the questions and man, some of them are really difficult. I'm going to University of Phoenix I can tell! I better start reading the Economist cover to cover. I'm such a sucky reader. I rarely read the good stuff. I just read blogs and half a paragraph of a newspaper article.

It looks as though there's not as much math as I feared. That's nice. I'll have to see how much math there is. I'm still enjoying my math and will probably continue with it until I think it's not necessary. Math is a good skill to have. To what end I have no idea. What's a calculator for?

I was thinking about values and choices today; If we make a choice, we therefore think it's the "right" thing to do. If someone else makes a different choice, we get upset (slightly to very) because it's not "right."  But we all have to justify and rationalize our choices in life--so we consider everyone else's choices wrong or less than. If we know that we're doing something wrong, and we do it any way, we have to rationalize and justify that, too. I think it has something to do with cognitive dissonance. I have to look that up. Knowing one thing and doing another stresses us out; we don't like it. So we rationalize and justify. Of course, if someone else does something other than what we're doing, they're wrong. And that makes it all right again. Because we can't possibly be "wrong" if what we think we're doing is "right."

And it just makes us all miserable. For example, I was reared on farm time. Up with the dawn and to bed after dusk. Early to bed and all that rot. So if someone sleeps all day and stays up all night, there's something wrong with that. S/he is lazy and unambitious. And being unambitious is the worst thing in the world. Because if you're up with the rooster, you're on the right track. The early bird gets the worm. Which is more and more difficult as the world gets more and more flat. Not only do you have to compete with everyone locally, you have to compete with everyone nationally and internationally. I have to compete with photo retouching firms in India. All I have against that is a name and a number and some skill. And a price.

I let myself down constantly. Every day I say I'll do something and every day I don't do it. And that gets me down. Especially on myself. It's the only thing I want to do and I don't do it. What an un-rich life I'm leading. I live the life of a nun up here in the Bronx. I always thought it would be cool to retire to some female community and I realized I'm already there! I live my spartan little life. I make my bed and do the dishes and make sure there's enough toilet paper in the bathroom.

Chris emailed me today. He evidently had a small charge on his credit card and thought it might be me. It was on itunes; someone had charged a buck to make sure it was a viable credit card.  That's a proper fraud right there. I told him it wasn't me, but I'm sure even if it was me, I'd tell him it wasn't me. That's the way stealing works.