Sorry 'bout that

Yeah, my last post probably casts the image that I am indeed another angry teen with confidence problems due to my excessively bad acne. But this is not the case. I am a happy person overflowing with joy and love and all that crazy bull. Whatever.

Today I'm going to attempt to counterbalance the negativity of my previous post with some enlightening over-optimistic philosophy. That's your only warning.

In english today, I was asked to think of a time I had revenge. This whole concept of 'getting even' seems silly to me, but a lot of the kids in my class were very serious. everyone had a great story about how this person wronged them, and to get retribution they made the aggressor's life worse. What upset me most was that no one even momentarily considered how their retribution would improve the situation for anyone. The only way to 'right a wrong' is to forgive, and try to understand why the aggression happened in the first place.

Who really does benefit from revenge? Certainly not you. You must spend time and energy thinking of the perfect way to get back, time that could have been spent doing something that would benefit yourself, or someone else. Instead, you use your powers of creativity to hurt and harm others. Is this the best way to achieve a peaceful society?

What people have to see is the cycle of revenge can be broken, and very easily. Stop caring about revenge. The past is past, and its time to move on. Dwelling on the unpleasant is never a good thing. True, there are some situations where one has to stare straight into the face of negativty and bad situations, but simply because the situation sucks doesn't mean you have to feel bad and get upset. Anger and hatred are feelings we choose to feel. So are happiness and forgiveness. Which do you choose?

But dude, what about people who constantly take advantage of you? Those assholes who are constantly getting in the way and forcing you to deal with them? There's two ways of dealing with these kinds of situations: be a buddhist and genuinely don't care, but this method doesnt work for a lot of people. The other is to learn that some people need to be avoided, and using negativity to deal with problems is never constructive. Thats a hard lesson to learn, and it takes some time getting used to it. When someone comes and tells you, "Uh, Jeremy... I accidentally smashed your beautiful antique guitar over a giant multi-dimensional butterfly. Hope you're not upset." its hard to react with kindness and understanding. But getting angry won't make the guitar piece itself back together, stop the butterflies from manifesting themselves in this dimension, or make your friend any more sorry for breaking your guitar.

In conclusion, you should never have to ask the question, "Is this squid or vagina?"