The Golden Rule of Dating or What I Wish I Knew What I Was 15

   From time to time I like to look back at the various choices I made when I was young. Today is one of those days. What brought this on was a Taylor Swift song about being 15. I'm not entirely sure what the song is about actually. But as I was listening to it and doing the dishes I thought about this post.
   When I was a teenager my parents moved from Vallejo, California to Orem, Utah. It was for me a very difficult transition. It was further complicated by the fact that at the time it occurred I was in the middle of my first real social experience with the opposite sex. What I mean to say is right before I moved I was presented with what I perceived as the first possible relationship ever. And really that is what I want to talk about, my perceptions.
   Really the story doesn't start when I moved to Utah. It started years earlier when I had a school boy crush on a girl named Christine (I use the real name because I am fairly sure she will never read this). I went to school with Christine for about 3 years. She was the smartest person in our class. I actually decided to become a straight A student because I saw that she was. As a little boy I thought she would be impressed.
   The first year we barely got to know each other. I had a crush on her but she could never have known it. The second year we were seated close to each other. Close enough to interact but not close enough for my personal liking. The third and final year was sixth grade. On the first day I was shocked to see that she was seated on the other side of the room. About a month into that year the teacher moved her next to me where she stayed the rest of the year. Eventually the two of us were moved close to the teacher's desk with a couple of other students that I now think the teacher wanted us to help. The rest of that year I remember with fondness. I could talk to her all the time. And I did. At one point the other guy at our table, Ryan, basically let me know he knew about my crush and tried to tell me to go for it, whatever that means to kids in elementary school. But I was scared.
   You see I was afraid of rejection. The truth is that now as an adult I can see that there was very little to be afraid of. The girl I had a crush on obviously had one on me. I was blinded by my fear.
   Sometime about a year after leaving grade school she moved to upstate New York. That was the last I have ever heard about her. I think I once found her on Facebook but it could have been someone else. I never did tell her how I felt about her and I still feel like it was stupid.
   Fast forward back to my previous story. I was 15 about to be 16 and I had another crush. I was afraid of telling the girl I liked her but this time I had two things to help me along. First, there was no real consequences because our family was already packing for Orem. Second, I was haunted by what had occurred to me before.
   So, one night before I went to bed I wrote a little note. I can't remember what it said but it must have been like this, "I like you. I know I am moving but I wanted you to know before I left." And as I gave it to her the next day I felt like shooting myself rather than give it to her. However I did give it to her and the results were very positive. That time I felt like an idiot because by the time I found out she liked me too it was too late. We moved.
   I withheld the name of this girl because she might read this. If you do don't be mad, the experience is illustrative.
   Once I got to Utah I vowed to learn from my mistakes and not hold back ever again. What did I have to lose anyway? Nobody in Utah even knew me. I understood very little about how we as kids interacted and even less about myself. Because I made the same mistake again even while I was believing that I had grown out of it.
   I had a neighbor in Orem, let's call her Julie. She treated me better than anyone else in my neighborhood (for some reason there were a lot of people that didn't like me but that is another story). She would say hello to me in school. She was just about the only person that didn't look away when I was around. It was strange. But I thought she was too beautiful. I thought that she was above me. So, rather than talk to her I talked to the girls that I thought were more at my level. And when I asked one of them out she turned out to be really boring and I never asked her out again. But all the time I thought I had grown out of my shyness.
   Years later I ran into Julie in a store. I had a girlfriend with me. It was awkward and kind of enlightening. My girlfriend pointed out to me that Julie was obviously interested in me. It was in that moment that it all clicked in my brain.
   Years and years of heartache and all I needed to know was one simple thing. That thing is that women are people too. They are subject to the same feelings as I was. They had their own desires and fears. Once I realized that my life changed. Or it would have had I realized it when I said I did. I learned the fact right then and there but it was not until years later that I really understood it. In all truth I think my wife really helped me understand it.
   So the Golden Rule? Look at people as though they were you. Try to see what they see. You may see that they have a crush on you.

Harmony

Harmony is the balance of life. All things have balance that when perfectly struck allows for the greatest peace and the greatest prosperity.

I think that it can be agreed that today there is a certain harmony that is missing from our nation. Even now our elected leaders seem to be scrambling to recreate a harmony. But where is it? I don't know. I was taught my whole life to put faith in capitalism. Our leaders don't share this belief. They seem to believe that large companies shouldn't be allowed to fail. They seem to think that success is required once you become so large.

The things that I was taught would claim that large companies like GM, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac should have the right to fail. In failing they create a vacuum that others can fill and take over. Who is to say that someone else couldn't do the job better.

I think about all the factories that GM owns. I know they have a lot of people employed in them. However I am not concerned too much about the jobs because I think they would ultimately be preserved. I think that if GM were allowed to fail, as they inevitably will if they remain on the path they are currently on, their assets could be sold off to smaller companies hoping to fill the void. Companies like Toyota, which already builds its truck lines in GM plants.

Maybe I am oversimplifying. I really don't know because I am not an economist. However, I have some experience with failure. I have already opened and shut 2 businesses in my adult life. Both were more or less failures. In both cases the failures were neither good nor bad. They were just failures.

My first attempt to run my own business was a simple wedding video company. The entire company consisted of just me. I offered full service video taping, editing and DVD production for my clients. In just about 4 years I did about $6000 of business. I took out ads in newsprint and built a website. I worked out a referral deal with a wedding planner. I even did some work as a collaborative company of some really cool people. However in the end I spent $4000 more than I ever earned. Most of that was spent on equipment. Simply put, I failed, at least financially.

My second attempt was a company I formed with my older brother to build homes. Our business plan was developed so that within 5 years we would have something like a small property development company. Unfortunately we started this business right before the housing crisis of 2007. It failed due to no fault of our own. The market just wasn't going the way we thought it was.

In both businesses I learned a lot of things. Though I may have failed to make a ton of cash like I hoped to I did earn some information. I learned that in the video world technology moves very fast. It really moves faster than the business and the market do. I learned that once you have the knowledge you really don't need to own a lot of equipment. In fact I learned that it is more sensible to rent equipment using money budgeted into the project you are working on. This way you can have low overhead and the latest technology. You can give your clients the best mics and best cameras they are willing to pay for in every way.

In the housing market I learned that the only way to make money in homes is to specialize in an area and become very good at that one thing. I also learned that you should always deal with the people that make money because they are the people that have the most information.

Now, I guess the point is that there are lessons to be learned in failure. If those lessons are not learned then it seems to me that the failure is more likely to occur again. With GM I can't help but think that our leaders are doing nothing more than postponing the ultimate demise of GM as it is today. They have done everything they could do in the last few years to avoid failure. To their credit they have revived 2 discontinued cars, gave a lot of employee discounts to people and hyped up the Volt (which I bet will be delayed by the bankruptcy until after other companies beat it to market with something better).

Despite their best efforts GM is still struggling to survive. The market changed and GM didn't keep up. They failed to recognize the trends and paid the price. They overproduced vehicles and paid the price.

There is just one problem with my last couple of statements. GM didn't pay the price for their mistakes. The American people get to pay it for them thanks to our leaders who decided that it would be a good idea for them to use future taxpayer dollars to bail out this company as well as others. No lessons will be learned. All we can hope for is that GM and others will come out swinging and become profitable again to the point where it will pay us back in the long run. That's a pretty big gamble if you ask me.

Journals

I wrote in my journal today. It was kind of neglected. I realized that this blog is also kind of neglected. Still, I haven't written in my journal for about 3 years.

Have you noticed how a lot of blogs these days are becoming journals? I have a few friends who use their blogs as personal journals. I guess I can kind of understand but not fully.

I recently read through my journal. I actually have 2 but the one I read is the one I have been keeping as an adult the other was a class assignment in 3rd grade that I occasionally took time to write in until I was about 16. My adult journal starts about January of 2000 leaving about a 4 year gap in my personal recorded life history, who cares?

I wrote my journal expecting one day that nobody would ever care to read it. I did that because I was taught in my youth that journals should be kept for our posterity. Once I seriously considered this I realized it was retarded to think that anything personal to me would ever be as valuable to someone else as it is to me. So I wrote to myself and was able to open myself up to write pretty much as freely as I could. Honestly I still think that reading my journal for anyone else would be tedious and boring because of all the stuff that got left out.

Anyway, I learned a lot about myself. I learned that when I was single I wasted an awfully lot of time thinking about a couple of girls that I thought I would always be in love with. If either of them read this I am sure you know who you are and I hope this doesn't embarrass you. On second thought, if it does that would be weird. This should embarrass me and yet it doesn't. I guess it's because I grew up. In fact I would say the act of reading the journal helped me grow up just a little bit more.

One of the recurring themes from my journals is that I wanted to be a writer. I seriously thought at the time that I was a great writer. I know now that I wasn't very good at all. To be honest I am not sure that I am a good writer now. If you read the first entry in this blog you will see that I created this as a way to practice writing. The thing I left out is that I am writing this as though there were people who actually read this blog, though I know there are only a few. I write as though I have an audience.

In contrast to this there are many blogs out there that are publicly available that are written by someone as though they are writing to themselves. That seems odd to me. Doesn't it make more sense to keep really personal things on a pad of paper in your night stand next to your bed? I think it does.

I guess where I see the largest problem is in the potential pain and upset it may cause. For example: let's say you write something very personal on your blog, one of your friends reads it, then in conversation they comment on it in a casual manner or a dismissive manner later. It could hurt your feelings. The thing is that you placed that personal information out there for someone to read without thinking about whether or not it should be publicly available or if it should be just for you.

Okay, so maybe that scenario isn't too likely. Really it is just a point, though small, that I want to make. After all, this is my blog and I can make any point I want, valid or not, because I have comments on so you can disagree. That's fair.