Mini-bio/main creed

I've been accused of not taking life seriously enough from time to time. The irony in this is that I've also been accused of taking life far too seriously. In the end, I guess we can blame my world views, since I try not to look at the global problems as much as I try to look at the domestic problems. In the end, this tends to make my experiences, and what I gain from my experiences, very personal. On occasion, I'll do what I can to spread a message that I find very important, but people might get upset at me for not having something as profound as "Save Darfur" on my tongue. On the other hand, I do hope that people end up taking my messages to heart when they find out what they mean in their own lives.

I know that it's never easy to take somebody's word on personal advice, because for whatever reason we feel that our cases are unique. Maybe it's all of that "You're special because there's only one of you" crap that we got fed in the '80s and '90s, but we as people almost never learn from each others' mistakes. Douglas Adams once said, "Human beings are unique in both their ability to learn from others' mistakes, and in their apparent disinclination to do so."

The point is that no matter how much somebody wishes to be an example from which somebody else can learn, a good number of lessons in life just refuse to go through our heads until we learn them the hard way. I certainly learn a good number of lessons through pain, but I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. Still, it's a shot of benevolent optimism that I might be a role model for somebody out there in the world, that they'll actually learn from my failures before they make the same mistakes themselves. Of course, they would be the person to celebrate, as opposed to me, because they would be the ones to actually learn their lesson.