You know, I love Scott Adams… He may in fact be the greatest human being ever. Take this quote from his most recent blog post Atheists: The New Gays:
Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.
Thank you, that is all…
There’s a bit of history there… Many years ago, we dated. It never became serious and didn’t last very long at all. When we didn’t get to see each other as often as I’d have liked, I ended it, and hurt her. I broke her heart, and it didn’t take me long to learn to regret it, as well as my somewhat mis-placed priorities.
Well, a while back, we started talking again. Nothing major, just general chit-chat. We caught up on some recent happenings in our lives and exchanged pleasantries about every day since.
Then the totally unexpected happened…
I hadn’t even seen her in over two years, and all of a sudden I’m having a dream about her. It wasn’t anything serious, and in truth, it didn’t make much sense at all (as dreams are apt to do).
I only remember pieces of the dream, as usual, but I remember we were at some kind of dance. She was wearing a beautiful white dress, much like a wedding dress. We had been talking about her potential engagement, as well as the problems with her relationship, so really none of that is surprising. I imagine my subconscious would focus on such a major event about to happen in the life of a girl I may still have feelings for lurking not so far below the surface.
It wa sjust a fairly unique experience in my dream world… almost like some scene out of the Hilary Duff movie A Cinderella Story, which may also have had something to do with it, since the last time I saw her, she had her hair cut to resemble Duff’s (and I think it looked much better than it does in the recent pictures I’ve seen of her).
Sigmund Freud said that every dream is a wish, either unconscious or otherwise. perhaps since she was wearing a wedding dress, the dream was trying to tell me I wish she were marrying me (since we were the ones dancing afterall).
Then again, since there was nothing else to suggest that I were the groom, the dream could just as easily mean that I want to see her hapily married to a guy worthy of her. Nah, that can’t be one of my dreams…
Freud also said that your wishes aren’t revealed in dream analysis for the purpose of conscious fulfillment, but rather for the conscious resolution of your inner conflict. If that’s our attitude, perhaps the dream was merely a sign that I want some type of female companionship in my life, not necessarily hers in particular. That in itself brings up an interesting prospect. It’s kinda like knowing the future, but not being able to change events that are about to happen. What’s the point in knowing if you can’t prevent bad things from happening and manipulate it all in your own favor? Why would I want to analyze my dreams, if I can’t find out some deep dark secret of my subconscious?
I didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night (about 3 hours total) to dream, maybe I’ll have better luck tonight…
Reference: Dream interpretation at Wikipedia
It was four months ago, almost to the day that I first found and read the 2005 Commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave to Stanford University, but the words still echo in my mind on a regular basis. When I wrote that post, I was trying to help out a friend who was having trouble seeing the path life was mysteriously supposed to take, and yet it now seems that I’m the one finding comfort and meaning in those words.
On a whim, I thought I’d see if I could track down an audio version of the speech and hear this magnificent and heartfelt advice given in Mr. Jobs’ own voice. Surprisingly, I found it. Not surprisingly, you can get it on the iTunes Music Store in the Stanford section, along with a video version.
For those who may have missed it the first time, here’s the entire speech, directly from the Stanford News Service, along with an MP3 version for live streaming. Feel free to follow along as you listen. Hopefully Steve can help a few more people find what they love in life…
[audio:http://chrismeller.com/user/files/steve_jobs-stanford_commencement_2005.mp3]
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005. I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5
I’ve got some friends going through rough times in life right now. One isn’t happy with her path in life, and the other doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life… Having gone through some similar periods in life (I’m not sure they ever really end), I tried to offer my somewhat more ag
I know you guys probably don’t find him as interesting as I do, but I’ve said it before (probably far too many times), and I’ll say it again: I love Wil Wheaton…
It’s probably not that his blog or life is anything spectacular or out of the ordinary, but rather the transition he’s been through. Everyone saw him as the dorky Ensign Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation for years, and most of them probably hated him for it. Then, years later, he comes back to show you just how much more dorky he can be by blogging about life, love and fulfillment beyond the Starship Enterprise.
Two books (soon to be three!) later, and he’s helping me get back some perspective on life with posts like this:
Isn’t that weird? It is so easy to take your friends for granted, all the while thinking about them, caring about them, and enjoying their company … but not considering what they actually mean to you, until you don’t see them for an extended period of time for one reason or another.
On the way back to the freeway, we passed this lumber yard on Ball Road that always has interesting sayings on its sign. Yesterday, the sign said, “No man is a failure who has friends.” The truth is, for a couple of months, I’ve felt like a huge, colossal, stinking failure in a lot of things that I’m not willing to go into right now. But spending a weekend with my friends, and a surprise Monday with my wife reminded me of some advice I’d been given and forgotten: Don’t let your work become your life, because when work isn’t happening, then what do you have? Work may be frustrating, but life? Life is good.
Those comments have really hit home for me. I haven’t seen some of my best friends more than a half dozen times in the last year, and lately I’ve been wondering if this is one of those transition periods… You know, where everyone slowly loses touch because life has pushed them in different directions. As much as I don’t want to lose them as “friends”, maybe it’s time just to let go and face the fact that we can’t hang out like we used to and no matter how hard we try, it’ll never be like it was back in high school.
I also went through a bit of a life-crisis involving work recently. I felt unappreciated and insignificant, like I was resisted at every turn whenever I tried to improve the overall quality of life there, and was just generally down-in-the-dumps overall because of it. With no one to turn to for consolation, I mulled over it and slowly worked myself into a deeper and darker hole as the weeks passed. Then, it was like something inside me just snapped… Suddenly, I decided “fuck it, it’s not worth it anyway” and stopped caring so much. If they don’t want to take my suggestions and improve operations, that’s their problem. I’m not going to work 10 hour days anymore, and I’m not going to work at home anymore. If all they want is the bare minimum of effort, that’s what they’re going to get, and I’m not going to worry about it anymore.
So Wil, if you happen to stumble upon this in PubSub or through a trackback, I just want to let you know how much some of your posts can mean to your readers. I may not have kept up for the past month or so as your blog got lost in the mix that is my life, but now that I’ve come out the other side of that tunnel, you’ve really helped me grab back onto my perspective. Thank you!