Someday, I will learn not to dislike people before I get to know them. I just finished reading “Gone with the Wind.” I’ve always had a comfortable dislike relationship with Scarlett O’Hara. She’s a selfish, hard, cruel, workaholic, man-eater. Her word means nothing, there is not promise she won’t make or break, and she treats her nearest and dearest like dirt. Oh, and she dislikes her own children. Not I wonderful sort of person. And, after reading the book, she really is all of the above. But, I’m beginning to see another side of her. She’s got energy and a strength. She is utterly loyal to the few people she does actually love. She is a protector, willing to give aid and shelter to people she hates through thick and thin. Unfortunately, these are the traits that destroy her. Her strength walls her away and makes it impossible for her to feel or find love. Here desire to protect and defend makes her ignore her family and her children as she fights to provide for their physical needs, her utter love and devotion to the few means that she will waste her life loving another woman’s husband and neglecting all three of hers.
She’s a woman who managed to make all the wrong decisions at all the wrong times. And her virtues, without the benefit or consolation of religion, became only ropes to strangle her. It’s a terrifying read—to see how little good “virtue” actually does. I am not sure how the Stoics did it, but virtue without an external guide means nothing and can make nothing, and a person forgets it at their peril.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Tangents
I’m having a birthday…and birthdays have this unfortunate tendency of making me look back at the last year and wonder things like, “what really have I done with my life?” Am I supposed to be here? Where else would I have been if I’d taken different roads?
Lessee…
If I’d followed plan one, I’d be evangelical, married, and probably have two or three children, Lord willing.
Plan two. I’d have finished my Associates degree, and gone on to get a degree in nursing. Probably living somewhere in the environs of D.C. Probably living alone somewhere in D.C.
As for Plan three, I would have stayed a government major, and be more than halfway through law school at the moment. Not sure if I’d be happy or not. I’d be working, probably still some stripe of evangelical, and probably alone.
Plan four? I’d be halfway to my Ph.D. in Medieval Literature. I’d be High Anglican or Catholic. I would be working frenetically hard, I would be busily burying any real world experience I’d ever had.
Can’t say I miss plan five. I would still be working for Smyrna, living out of the cottage. Trying to make life work, and generally wondering where I was going and what I was doing.
Plan six was just about as nebulous. Be a vet’s assistant, make good money, start working on an online degree in something.
And now the numbers are stacking up. Plan sever, work at Hobby Lobby until I got a teacher’s certificate, and then take a job in a high risk, under-funded and overloaded school system. Hard path, decent plan, but it would have been working long hours in a difficult arena for a “Something.”
I miss Plan eight. I want it back someday. Go to community college for the pre-reqs in psychology, and then start a distance learning program at some University or other, Wheaton or Liberty, for a degree in Christian counseling. It didn’t work out. But it sounded good. It would be an incredible amount of work for a tentative gain, and that is about it. Sometimes I worry that I am happy with so little.
Plan nine? Possibly the most hare-brained of them all, but I haven’t given it up yet, so, it is not technically part of the “dispensed past plans” list. Join the Army, pay off debt, work like I’ve never worked before. Study, fight, study, work, live quietly, keep my head down, and hope to get out in five years with a minimum of new scars and a debt free lease on life. I regret the motivation, but not so much that the plan is unappealing.
Not so bad where I am now. Hobby Lobby, no plan, crafts, doing things at church, keeping busy doing almost nothing of any quantifiable worth or long-term significance. At least I set the bar low for next year.
Lessee…
If I’d followed plan one, I’d be evangelical, married, and probably have two or three children, Lord willing.
Plan two. I’d have finished my Associates degree, and gone on to get a degree in nursing. Probably living somewhere in the environs of D.C. Probably living alone somewhere in D.C.
As for Plan three, I would have stayed a government major, and be more than halfway through law school at the moment. Not sure if I’d be happy or not. I’d be working, probably still some stripe of evangelical, and probably alone.
Plan four? I’d be halfway to my Ph.D. in Medieval Literature. I’d be High Anglican or Catholic. I would be working frenetically hard, I would be busily burying any real world experience I’d ever had.
Can’t say I miss plan five. I would still be working for Smyrna, living out of the cottage. Trying to make life work, and generally wondering where I was going and what I was doing.
Plan six was just about as nebulous. Be a vet’s assistant, make good money, start working on an online degree in something.
And now the numbers are stacking up. Plan sever, work at Hobby Lobby until I got a teacher’s certificate, and then take a job in a high risk, under-funded and overloaded school system. Hard path, decent plan, but it would have been working long hours in a difficult arena for a “Something.”
I miss Plan eight. I want it back someday. Go to community college for the pre-reqs in psychology, and then start a distance learning program at some University or other, Wheaton or Liberty, for a degree in Christian counseling. It didn’t work out. But it sounded good. It would be an incredible amount of work for a tentative gain, and that is about it. Sometimes I worry that I am happy with so little.
Plan nine? Possibly the most hare-brained of them all, but I haven’t given it up yet, so, it is not technically part of the “dispensed past plans” list. Join the Army, pay off debt, work like I’ve never worked before. Study, fight, study, work, live quietly, keep my head down, and hope to get out in five years with a minimum of new scars and a debt free lease on life. I regret the motivation, but not so much that the plan is unappealing.
Not so bad where I am now. Hobby Lobby, no plan, crafts, doing things at church, keeping busy doing almost nothing of any quantifiable worth or long-term significance. At least I set the bar low for next year.
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