My weird interpretations...

Have you ever interpreted a movie/show/song differently than everyone else around you? And then you feel like you're taking crazy pills.

I'm going to give 2 examples.

The first is the latest Taylor Swift song on the radio. It's important that I say "on the radio" so that no one thinks that I have this sitting on my ipod....

Anway, the song is called You Belong with Me. It's a song about a girl who has a guy friend who is dating the cheerleading captain - and the girl thinks that the guy friend should be dating her instead. It's supposed to be one of those cute romantic songs. Here are some lyrics...

But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts
She's Cheer Captain and I'm on the bleachers
Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find
That what you're looking for has been here the whole time

If you could see that I'm the one who understands you
Been here all along, so why can't you see?
You, you belong with me, you belong with me

So, I don't see a romantic song here. I see a delusional girl who thinks too much of herself. I see a girl who thinks that she knows what's best for other people. I see a girl who never stopped to ask herself if the guy even likes her. All she cares about is that she likes this guy so he must obviously like her back. ...Songs like this lead to crazy murder-suicides.

**WARNING** The next segment involves plot spoilers for Pan's Labrynth. ***

Ok, here's another one. Last year I saw the movie Pan's Labrynth. It's a movie about a little girl during WWII in Germany. Because the world around her is so bleak, she withdraws into her own fantasies. Unfortunately, the fantasies keep telling her to do things that get her in trouble. So the movie does an interesting job of letting the viewer decide if they think she really interacts with these fantasies, or if she's just a crazy stupid girl.

I took the stance that she was a stupid delusional girl. Everything she did made me so mad! And it all builds up to her stealing her baby brother at the end of the movie and running off into the woods with him. If she were allowed to get away with it then the poor baby would have surely died. Thankfully, her "step father" pulls out a gun and shoots her at the last minute. I don't think I've ever cheered when a little girl died before... but I cheered this time.

I guess this is kind of like when there's a movie that everyone loves but you hate it. Like a friend of mine walked out of Garden State. He's the only person I have ever spoken to that didn't love the movie. Seriously. Everyone likes it. But he hated it so much that he walked out of the theater. Go figure, huh?

Ok that's my rant for the day...

Treating symptoms instead of core problems

Right now I'm taking a grad class on how CEOs make decisions. One of the first steps is to accurately define the problem statement. It might be something as simple as "Do we buy computers, or lease them?" or as complicated as "How will we meet our 4th Qtr projections?"

One of the common traps that a manager will fall in to is that they don't identify the real problem that needs to be solved. They just look at the issues that are right in front of their faces and solve them instead (the symptoms).

Well, more and more lately I feel like our government does this. Or at least important people in the country try to do it.

1. In the past couple of days, a 9 year old boy in delaware was attacked by 2 pit bulls on the street. Now all these interest groups are proposing legislation to ban pit bulls from delaware. But that's not the real problem. What they need to do is crack down on who can own certain dogs and make sure that they are trained and housed properly. When someone is shot you punish the shooter, not the gun. Well this is the same. A dog will act how you train it to act.

2. Right around the Inauguration, there were a lot of stories about some groups trying to get a US law passed that would ban all cell phone use while driving. They say that cell phones cause distractions and cause accidents. Well here's a reality check - people cause accidents. Instead of wasting time on this law, let's put some money into actually teaching kids how to drive before we throw them on the road. I am constantly amazed at some of the bad decisions I see from drivers on the road. It should be much harder to get a license - and it should be hard to keep one. If we put better drivers on the road then we'll have fewer accidents.

3. How about safe sex? How many schools aren't allowed to teach anything but abstinence because they would lose their government funding? How many pharmacists refuse to dispense birth control because it's against their beliefs? How can a teenager make an informed choice about sex if they aren't given all the facts? Abstinence really isn't a choice if that's all you show them. If they want fewer teen pregnancies and STD-issues then teach people how to be safe. You can still tell them to not have sex if you want... but let it be their choice.

I guess the real point of my rant is that I'm tired of regulation before education. We spend so much time punishing people who do something wrong, and not enough time teaching people how to do something right.

ok I think I'm done.

You give Driving a bad name

I think driving is an incredibly underrated activity. On a daily basis, we climb into big metal juggernauts and fly around at speeds that were once only dreamed of. And somehow we manage to do it with only a few people dying each day (in comparison to the number of people who drive each day and don't die).

Don't get worried. Death isn't the point of today's lesson. I just wanted a good opening statement. My focus is really road signs.

In life, we take certain things for granted. We assume that the cashier in the grocery store knows how to work his/her register, and count money. We assume that a guy walking on a sidewalk won't suddenly jump in front of our car because that would just be stupid. We assume that airplane pilots have actually been trained on how to fly a plane. These are all safe assumptions (I hope).

But sometimes we make an assumption and are surprised when it is wrong. We assume that someone sitting at a poker table knows the basics of poker. We assume that someone working in the IT field knows how to defragment their own computer. We assume that when we call help-desk support we'll talk to someone who speaks the same language and can actually help us (ok we really shouldn't be surprised when that doesn't happen).

Well, recently I was surprised (and fairly terrified) by something. Let me recap my tale:

One day, not so long ago, I was driving home from work. On a side street near my house there are 2 traffic lights. Sometimes they are normal red/yellow/green lights, but other times (when traffic is really light) they are just flashing yellow/red (yellow for one direction and red for the other). As I pulled up to the light, I stopped because my direction was blinking red. Ok fine, this acts like a stop sign. I stop here and wait for an opening to cross the road. As I waited, a car on the intersecting street drove up. He had a blinking yellow light, so I expected him to perhaps slow down a little but otherwise continue driving past me. Once he did that then I was clear to go.

Now, this is when something strange happened. The man started to slow... and then stopped. So this screwed everything up. He seemed to think he was supposed to stop and let me go (I guess)... but I couldn't do that because now another car was coming in the opposite direction of this guy....and they knew the rules of the road so they just kept driving. But this guy just sat there. Well, after a few more seconds I decided to go along with it pull out on to the road.

Everything was fine. I drove home. No crazy ending to this story. But I was completely dumbfounded. You have to take a test to get your drivers license. To do that, you have to learn the rules of the road. How does someone not know something as simple as what to do when encountering a flashing yellow light??? If you don't know what to do in a given situation then you become dangerous... because you'll act in a way that other drivers aren't expecting.

So moving on. A few days later, I was in the car with a friend (my friend was driving). I won't identify this friend so as not to embarrass them. We were going to a store together and came upon a traffic light that was flashing yellow. He slowed down and began to stop. I couldn't believe it! The guy in the beginning of my story looked like he was probably old... so I let it slide. But this was a young intelligent member of society! I just wanted to get out of the car right then. I didn't feel safe.

Driving is a huge responsibility. If you make one small mistake then people can die. It is CRUCIAL that you know the basic signals and signs on a road so you can minimize the risk.

I think it should be a lot harder to get a license. You should have mandatory lessons, and so many hours logged behind the wheel before you can go out alone. Plus you should be retested every few years. Driving is a privilege, not a right.

This rant has been brought to you by Rob.