What's up with my mouth?

Getting older is a strange and mysterious thing. I’m forever fascinated (and at times appalled) by the changes that occur with each passing year. The last 12 months have been exceptional in regards to one specific change.

My mouth.

More specifically, my tastes. Below is a list of things that I used to absolutely abhor, and now enjoy immensely. These aren’t items I was indifferent to and now just enjoy. These are things I despised with everything in my capacity for despisement. I didn’t graduate to indifference either. I graduated to great levels of enjoyment when these things are available. So be encouraged O picky eaters of the world. Try something new and you might be surprised.

#1. Alcohol
In my 2010 physical, I was told to start drinking wine to assist with some cholesterol issues. At the time I could not have disliked the taste of alcohol more. At the present date, I could not possibly like the taste of alcohol more. On a side note, I am wholeheartedly opposed to drunkenness and do not overindulge in my enjoyment. There was a period of adjustment and developing a taste for alcohol. Now I enjoy a glass or two of Red every night. Cheers. Apothic Red is the current #1.

#2. Onions
I’m still not throwing down on a raw onion like I would an apple, but I’m finding myself putting onions in all kinds of food and no longer removing them from my burger. The onion was once number one on my enemy vegetable list. Now the onion is welcome to visit any time. It is especially enjoyable in food of the Mexican variety.

#3. Coffee
I hated coffee. Absolutely hated it. I’m not up to black yet, but throw in some cream and sugar and I’m ready for the all nighter. I even learned how to use the coffee maker.

#4. Yogurt
I always found the very idea of yogurt repulsive. I treated it as the leper of the dairy community (which it really kind of is). I am far from all in on yogurt and so far I am only eating one particular brand of yogurt (Stonyfield Greek Organic Peach or Cherry), but I now open to the concept. I’m no Michael Westin, but I do eat about one yogurt per day these days.

Blessings.

Time Travel

So I’ve been thinking about time travel an awful lot lately.  It seems to me that time travel would be a very useful and dangerous ability to have.

It would certainly be wonderful to go back and tell the 16 year old me to do a few things differently. Of course I probably wouldn’t have listened to me anyway though, since I wouldn’t be telling myself anything I hadn’t already heard from a bunch of old people like me. Also there is that whole butterfly / trees falling down thing. The little changes made in time travel could drastically alter the present (future)and that could be bad. Or possibly good, but who could know for sure? Better to be on the safe side of not destroying the space time continuum. (Thanks Dr. Brown)

I think, more than time travel though, I am interested in the idea of a full knowledge intact do over. Meaning that I could know everything I know now and would have the opportunity to go back and re-do everything from a set age on. Probably from about 15 or 16 years old and going forward since most of my terrible decisions occurred between 15 and 22. There are so many things I would do differently. Assuming this mulligan were possible, it leaves me with two major questions.

1. Would doing things differently result in me ending up in a less desirable position than I am currently in?
What I mean by this is that there are certain parts of my current life I wouldn’t want to change. Would making better decisions along the way end up leading me into a place where it is impossible to still have the things I want?  Ideally I would still end up with the things I like about my current life and would only make decisions that would change the parts I don’t like.  Would that be possible though? I wonder if our bad choices are such an integral part of the path and if removing them would mean a different destination would be unavoidable. Could I make better relationship decisions as a teenager and still end up with my wife? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe it’s too risky.

2. Would some of my full knowledge be erased as I went through and did things differently?
By this I mean that if I chose to not do something because of knowing what would happen, would I then lose all memory of it ever happening since it now never happened?
This is a confusing question and I’m not sure how to clarify. It’s like this. Let’s say I murdered someone in my past. Hypothetically of course.
      Of course.
I would be going back and making changes to not repeat my mistakes and so I decide on my do-over to not murder that person (even though they deserved it). When that time passes and I don’t go homicidal, do I then forget it ever happened since it never happened? Then, losing the memory of why I didn’t want it to happen, would I then just decide to commit the same action all over again since I have no memory of the reasons why I wished I didn’t do it? It’s all very confusing.

Overall I still think it would be desirable to get to go back and re-live life knowing everything I know now, but since it’s so hard to make good decisions now, knowing everything I do, I don’t know why I think it would be easy to go back and make better decisions then, factoring all the angstiness of the teenage years. Those chemicals certainly conspire against us.

I guess it’s more important to just live in the now and make good decisions going forward. But I can’t help but wonder, what if....

What if....

Blessings

Who needs people anyway?

It seems to me that almost everything new these days is designed to keep us from actually interacting with other humans in person. Every new bit of technology makes it more convenient to just stay away from any kind of interpersonal interactions.

At the rate we are going, I think we are less than a decade away from near total isolation.

We can shop from home for everything but groceries, and some people even do that. We text so that we don’t even have to move up to the intimacy of a phone call (meant to be ironic). We can download our music and our books so that we don’t have to go to the store to purchase them. It’s all digital. Who needs actual friends when you can have so many Facebook friends with no more responsibility than to occasionally “like” the things they type?

And that’s not all.

We’ve got MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, and who knows how many other social networks. Most companies are now offering more flexibility to work remotely, so we can certainly cut back on our interactions there and most of our business is conducted via email now anyway. Why go to the concert when you can just watch them live on youtube? Gotta avoid those crowds after all. It seems that pretty soon the only people interacting in person will be homeless people.

I’m not a nut. Not entirely.

I’m not a believer that our computers will eat us (although they probably will) and I don’t think we’ll end up in a “Surrogates” type of situation (though I believe most people would go for it). I am concerned though about where we are headed as humans.

Combine the technology with the fear of letting your children leave your sight, and the next generation coming up is only interacting during school hours for the most part. And do we really need to have school in person? Those teachers cost a lot of money. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just do a computer based (video style) educational system? Kids can just learn at home with no parental responsibility to do the teaching.

Texas is safe from complete isolation because our West Texas towns would go vigilante on the world if they didn’t have their Friday night football games.

Just some thoughts. Thought I’d post them on here. More convenient than sharing in person. Eh?