Dear 16 year old self

Dear 16 year old me,
Don't worry, you'll become something, you'll do something with yourself. Slow Down, you don't need to rush to grow up, be a kid for a little while longer.

Your world is going to become increasingly harder in the next couple of years. Don't pass up any opportunity to tell your parents that you love them, never leave home without letting them know just how much you appreciate them. You won't have them much longer, you need to spend what time you can with them and let them know that you will be ok because they've given you and your brother and sister the tools to do well in life, you just want to spend quality time with them.

Don't be a dick in school, you've spent the last 18 years telling your daughter that there are two roads that she can go down, the easy one where you can do all the work and go through the schooling and get the good paying job after college, or you can dick off and struggle.
Guess which one you decided to choose, don't do it, stay in school. You are good enough, you do deserve the good things in life, you can do it because you are stronger than you think you are. Stop torturing yourself, and for god sake stop giving your teachers grief. You can thank Mr. Garcia now for putting up with your crap and not strangling you within an inch of your life. He and your Dad were both right. You know what I'm talking about, no need to go any further into that conversation.
High school is NOT the best years of your life.

All those girls that you have a crush on who don't know you're alive, forget them, they aren't worth it. Stop being so narrow sighted, broaden your vision and you will see the girls who matter and who are willing to give you a chance. The girls you are going after will all end up addicted to something, whether it's alcohol, drugs or plastic surgery. The ones around you grow into beautiful women.

You're going to lose a daughter, it's going to be one of the hardest things in your life. The 10 years after high school are going to be the hardest experiences that you've ever had to deal with in your young life, you're going to struggle, you're going to fight, but you're going to claw your way through it because you are a fighter, and you are strong. You'll be rewarded with 3 marriages and have to deal with the failure with 2 divorces, but the best things that have ever come into your life will come out of these trials.

You'll be gifted with a beautiful, intelligent, damn hard headed daughter who is going to take the world by storm. Just remember to agree with her mom on the name, and then when she's doped up on the post birth drugs, you can give your daughter her true name. You'll have to wait, but eventually you will also be gifted with a wife who loves you, and who believes in you with all that she is. She's going to give you a beautiful baby boy. You're going to go back and forth over his name, but the right name will come in time.

 Dear 16 year old self, please take these next words to heart: GOOGLE, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco, anything internet.

 Be a good person, don't try to impress anyone else, live the way that you know is right. Follow the truth of "To Thy own self be true" and you'll do good.

 Love,
Your 41 year old self.

Low and Behold

The prodigal son returns. I've come realize that Facebook is the devil. It allows people who usually can't get people to notice them outside of their normal every day lives to seemingly become "interesting". It's been linked by psychological studies to increased narcissism. I mean, really, do I care what you had for lunch and with whom? No not really. Do I care that the same girl dumped your for the nth time this month? No. Do I care that you're out getting your duck face on while getting groped by a multitude of meat heads at a local bar? Well... ok, no not at all. This induced narcissism has permeated our media like a plague, it's every where you look now. On TV we're inundated with "Reality TV". There's nothing real about this. What happened to the good sit com or the non-reality drama? Why is it that a 16 year old pregnant high school girl is given more press than the teen age girl who has trained her whole life in pursuit of the perfect score at the Olympics? Why do we have meat heads who have the vocabulary of a fifth grader given a show when we have people in other countries fighting for the common man's right to vote? What the hell is a Snookie or a Honey Boo Boo? These are all fails our society is going to pay for when the generation growing up sees that, if they do stupid shit, they can get on TV for their fifteen minutes of fame and then feel entitled to getting money for doing absolutely, nothing. I'm already seeing this entitled mentality in today's younger crowd. Give me an XBOX, because I go to school. WHAT? So did I, you know what I got? I got to go another day without having a boot firmly planted into my ass for missing class. Give me money to go hang out with my friends? Really? And besides sitting on my couch, eating my food with your dirty ass feet up on the arm of the chair, what did you do to earn this money? I've been working since I was thirteen years old, that's when I could get a paper route and I worked my ass off seven days a week for two hours a day pedaling my bike and about 100 lbs of paper up the steepest hill in the area to earn $70 a month. It gave me a sense of accomplishment and pride in my ability to earn money. Mom, I need the newest, name brand clothes to fit in at school. No kidding, how about you get 3 pairs of pants and a couple of shirts and be happy with it, because well, that's what you've earned with your C's and D's in class. If you don't like it, I have three words for you GET. OVER. IT. I've since stopped using Facebook, Tweeter, Tumblr and most of the other "social" media outlets, except this one because I need an outlet. Not one where I put stuff up to get a friend to tell me "You're so great, keep your head up", just one that I can come onto and vent to get it out of my system and let it be.