WARNING: extreme lame-ity to follow

met my dad for breakfast today. just me and him. whenever it is just the 2 of us, we always seem to bounce our ideas and perceptions of the world around us off of each other. i'll start a conversation about something that has been on my mind, he'll antagonize whether it is just devil's advocate or whether he truly believes what he's saying. then i'll attempt to either add on to what he has said or try to prove my original view through the eyes of someone from the opposition. i absolutely love it.

so throughout the series of conversations regarding the media in america, history of nixon (1960 debate with kennedy, republican wire-tapping/intelligence gathering throughout the 1960's, the outcome of watergate, nixon's successes as a president, etc.), comparisons between iraq & vietnam and why hagel chose to speak out the way he did when he did, america's foreign policy throughout the last century, and who knows what else in the midst, he managed to convey his concern that the citizens of this country never seem to be satisfied. i don't know how much anyone knows about any of the things i listed that we talked about, but the majority of it had to do with someone bitching about someone else's decision/plan of attack or whatever. then, as whatever current issue was solved, the public seemed to grasp ahold of yet another irrational fear or scandal to fill their time complaining about.

dad explained it well when he spoke of a major incident in the 1980's. ever since we decimated hiroshima & nagasaki, the majority (if not entire) of the american population lived day to day with this now irrational fear of a nuclear attack. he said he remembered the drills they performed when he was in school in the 60's and said it was terrifying. as far as they knew, an attack could come at any time. so as history has shown us, the cold war lasted all the way until the gipper himself landed in office (i think for the 2nd term).

after november 9, 1989, the world as my dad had ever known it completely changed. yeah, yeah, he had never before experienced the magic of pop music sensation david hasselhoff, but he also had his first sense of life without fear. now, obviously there were times in which the cold war was the furthest thing from his thoughts. but if someone would have mentioned the russians, that fear would be present. after the wall fell, he said it felt almost as if something was missing in his life. the persistent antagonist. the omnipresent fear of attack. we are seeing the beginning of the same thing today. children born since 9/11 will live their lives in fear of suicide attacks from the arabs until the day we win "the war on terror" which realistically could be never. just as boris and natasha were symbols to the youth of the canniving ways of the russians, so too were the arabs in paris in team america.

now that i've spent way too long backgrounding my initial point, let's continue.

now the threat of war or attack is definitely a dramatic example of this issue; but if we are honest with ourselves, we can all realize that we are always looking for the negative in life. sure, we do look for the positive side of things, but the negative always seems to jump out without much difficulty and seems to stick around in our minds longer than the positive. at least that is my perception. more or less, it is so much easier to complain about a situation than it is to turn it into something good and positive.

there is no way that i could possibly get myself off the hook for engaging in this sort of a thought process. in fact, i think that i might be guilty of it more than most people i know. but i am going to try to change. i know, i know. i've said it so many times before in this journal, but i really want to teach myself to look on the positive side of things. and that's not to say that things won't make me angry or that i will never complain again. i just decided that each night, i would make a list of the positive things that happened to me that day. no listing of the negatives, although it could be used as an attempt to analyze my perceptions towards the world around me. no, i just want to have something tangible that i can look at to remind myself that although i may initially think otherwise, the day was actually worthwhile. amidst the heartache, loneliness, loss, etc. that we are all bound to experience, hopefully this will help me stop taking the good stuff for granted.


"no i won't cry on the outside, anymore."