Two major things tonight.....

First.....

I was thinking today about how we really live in a results-based society. Managers/coaches are hired and fired largely based on whether they win or not, or whether their moves succeed or fail. We elect politicians, and throw them out largely based on how happy we are with the country at the present moment. Networks pull TV shows when they don't meet a certain ratings level. Everything is results...results...results.

It would be right for you to now say "So what?!" because on face that seems like a logical way to do things. But in practice it is a horrible way of evaluating things. When we put too high of a value on results, we ignore important things like the quality of the decisions made by people given the information they had at the time. A manager could pull a starting pitcher, only to see the relief pitcher lose the game, and it could still have been the right decision. As fans and as people, we forget that many times and simply criticize the manager for "losing the game." There are a whole litany of Presidents who made good decisions during their tenure in office that were good ones, based on solid reasoning with the information given at the time, and they didn't work out. Despite having made good decisions they suffered in the polls, and maybe even were thrown out of office at the next election. There's also a whole other catagory who made bad decisions that by some lucky circumstance worked out, and get praise heaped on them because the country was well off during the time they happened to be in office.

The danger in all of this is that we don't make decisions on who's going to lead our country/manage our baseball team/whatever based on who seems most capable of making the best choices in the future. We make them on who, by luck or whatever, had the most sucess in the past. So I'd just ask you all that when you make a decision about someone/something don't just consider the results, consider the decision making/potential behind those results.

Second....

Refer back to my previous post and you see my anxiousness to change. I think my life is coming to some sort of head where it takes a new direction. At certain moments in our lives we come to realize that the way we are doing things, and the way we think about ourselves is not working out correctly. Things have to change, we have to readjust our goals in life, and how we view our relationships with others. For me, I can really identify this happening twice before in my life:once when I entered high school, and again when I came out.

As for this current bout of personal regime change, I really have begun to feel myself falling into a pattern that I've repeated over my life. I've gotten stuck in a rut, and it's not a rut I'm very happy with. I need to change my way of doing things and start to build new/more quality relationships and a better self image.