Changing Perceptions

I recently met up with some old family friends who were in town and in between gorging out on delicious Italian fair, we had a few discussions about life, love, the pursuit of happiness, you know, the usual, “I haven’t seen you in too damn long so what the hell has been going on in your life” chat

At some point during our discussions it was pointed out that no one at the table, save the children, had to endure the sufferings of a public education system in the coming weeks when the world’s future heads back to school

I relished in the fact that I am likely done with school forever (in the traditional sense), and raised a glass with my drinking buddy to celebrate no more teachers, no more books, dirty looks!

It was at that moment that my jubilee was called into question, “What about a master’s degree? That could open a lot of opportunities for you, I know it did for X person”

I nodded my head and shifted the conversation to clubbing baby seals or something far more entertaining and less threatening

Now, if you keep up with my ramblings, you know where I stand when it comes to the general education system, but that’s not what this post is about

I became interested in the notion of how perceptions change over time, as there is a lot of truth to the idea that a master’s degree can do a lot for creating opportunities in one’s life. For most people though, in most walks of life, this held true over two decades ago and not today where it is often believed to be common knowledge that a master’s degree is nothing more than a more expensive piece of paper than the one you already hold in your possession

Maybe the MBA’s are printed on cocaine incrusted Woodrow Wilsons?

But I digress, the fact remains that things change over time, and perceptions are not immune to this all powerful force

With a personal preface, I have seen myself go through such polar changes as a computer geeky engineer wannabe to a seedy night club manager with dreams of Vegas club ownership. From a animal petting overzealous china study health Nazi to a ravenous zombie that craves meat flesh.

Everyone goes through this in some capacity in their life, it’s like the ying to the yang I talked about when I said some things never change

The key to this melodramatic concept is just the same; embrace that fact that how you feel about X thing now has a chance of being perceived as the bubonic plague in a few years or even months time

No need to fight it, this is the essence of learning and growing as a person

I mean, if we all wanted to hold onto our perceptions from childhood then we would likely still think that girls had cooties and were never to be allowed in the same fort and that mac & cheese and hot dogs were all that one needed to survive

Now we have grown up, gotten out ass kicked a few times, and learned that not only do girls not have cooties but if you don’t bring them back to your fort at the end of the night then you will likely suffer carpal tunnel. You also quickly learned that the zombie apocalypse was upon us and you were relinquished to mac & cheese and hot dogs without the hop of steak tartar or coffee flavored ice cream, you might just jump on the brain eating bandwagon

So don’t fight it, don’t fight with others about it, learn to love the fact that tomorrow you might develop a taste for sashimi and never want to touch a hamburger again, or maybe your pig headedness about proper child rearing or career opportunities might get thrown into a tornado of uncertainty.

Life will not only be so much less stressful, it will be a hell of a lot more fun

Prepping for the apocalypse

Gabriel