Things That Don't Matter

A quick disclaimer: While the setting is real and the character playing my friend is based on a real person in that I’ve known him from the time we were in elementary school I entirely invented his personality here and none of his lines are in any way based on anything he has ever said, done, or thought about (that I know of).

The Discussion

The grass was now a deep green, and at last the majority of trees brandished thick foliage of the pale sort that would later in the summer acquire its dark green hue. The air was warm and not yet of the season to be humid. The shadows lengthened as the evening aged. They stood in the field about 15 yards apart, tossing the Frisbee between them. He loved Frisbee. If there was one thing he valued from his time spent in the boy scouts it was the skills with a disc he’d acquired through several years spent struggling for recognition until at last he was one of the best. Then he’d quit. His friend was not quite so able, but could throw and catch well enough. His friend standing across from his was his oldest friend, from the time that he’d moved here up until now, the last remaining from the elementary years. There was something to be said for that. He had no clue what that thing was, but surely there was something. Maybe just acknowledging that there was something to be said was saying something and thus resolving the issue right there.

“You know what I hate?” he said as he released the Frisbee in his friend’s direction.

“What?”, said his friend as he caught it.

“Those stupid common sayings or phrases that don’t really mean anything.”

“Like what?”

“Like ‘there’s something to be said for that.’ If there’s something to be said then say it. It’s just one of those things people say when they know they should be able to see a deeper meaning but are too lazy to actually look for it.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of things like that, designed to get you through a conversation without actually thinking about it.”

“People are so lazy.”

“Uh huh.”

Part two coming tomorrow! (Maybe!)

So the other day I experienced something that really gave me a lot of insight into our government and allowed me to be a bit more sympathetic towards them. Whenever there’s a problem that the government must fix, there are always flaws in their plan. When the plan goes public, everyone goes nuts. People say these flaws are so obvious, how did they not notice them, is our entire government full of idiots? These people often include me. Hell I’m probably one of the first to jump all over a flawed policy, especially if it’s a flawed Republican policy (is there any other kind?). But the other day I learned that it’s not like that at all. I was presented with my own problem to fix, and when I reached the end I found I much more understood the way things probably work. The Situation: In my history class we were given two assignments and a day and a class period to work on them. One of them was just a busy work type homework thing that should be done overnight so you could work on the other more in-depth project during that class period. However, neither assignment would be collected until the end of class, during which you could work on either. Naturally, I totally forgot about both of them, leaving me with only one 52 minute class period to complete them. Then of course earlier in the day we have a lock down drill, cutting all the rest of the day’s classes short. I now have roughly 35 minutes to complete both of the assignments. I started with the busywork, because it was worth more points than the other. It took me roughly 20 minutes to complete, leaving the other assignment only 15 minutes. This second assignment was far more complicated than the first. We were given a scenario and asked to provide an FDR-like solution. The situation was that textbook companies had stopped selling books to the schools because the schools took forever to pay them. The textbooks that students were using were now 8 years old. We had to come up with a plan that would solve the immediate crisis and then protect against this happening again in the future. Sound familiar? I’m not going to go into what my plan was, but I had a basic idea of what to do, however the assignment required much more detail. As I wrote out my plan I realized that there were several obvious flaws with it, but I only had five minutes left of class before it would be collected. I figured that my plan was good enough to at least get me a 90, even if it wasn’t a totally realistic solution. I got it back a few days ago, with the expected 90 and some notes pointing out where my plan wouldn’t work, and I had this epiphany. Faced with a problem I didn’t really understand and not a lot of time to solve it I came up with something that could possibly work, but was in no way perfect, but enough to get me credit for having done it. People who sit around at home and complain about how bad a job the government is doing do so because they have time to sit and mull things over after the fact. The government has to do it on the spot with an enormous amount of pressure and whatever complications are thrown at them, so have a little sympathy.