If a train leaves Los Angeles at 12:25...

I had to take a train to go to a job interview. It was just far enough away that taking the train made more sense than driving my own car. It might have actually cost a little less in fuel costs than the ticket ended up being, but who wants to deal with L.A. traffic? So train it was, and the interview went reasonably well. I just might get the job, actually.

The thing that turned out to be the real problem with the day was the return trip. The station nearest to where I interviewed is one of those stations where the train doesn't stop every time. I had to get up at five to drive to the station and catch the right train, which is not that big of a deal, but interviews take all of...well I couldn't imagine one going longer than two hours, tops. So about an hour there, about an hour with time in transit from the train to the office and waiting for my interviewer to get out of a meeting, then an hour and a half of interview and tour of the facility. It's about 10:30, and the next time a train stops at the local station is 3:30. I briefly bemoaned not checking the train schedule more carefully, but it was a tad less than four hours, and I was bound to have lunch anyway, so no big deal, right?

So, I get a ride to the central station, which should actually have trains stopping, but I'm faced with a choice. It turns out there's a train leaving the station at 12:25 heading my way, but it's not going all the way to my station. I can take this train and wait for a train about two hours later that will take me all the way, or I can take that later train from my present location.

Once again, this should be no big deal. It's really a matter of deciding which station I'd like to sit at for two hours. Of course, not being a regular train rider, I have no idea what the other stations are like. I’m thinking about lunch, as I said, and there are a couple of snack bar/hotdog stand-type places where I am, but I wonder, could there be something better at the next station? I decide to stay and have a hotdog, which wasn't bad, although perhaps a bit pricey, and I ended up spending all my cash. I went to the platform and waited.

Soon, I started to wonder if I'd made the wrong choice. I don't know if you've ever been in a big city and spent time hanging around the train station or bus depot, but you wonder (okay, I wonder, I can't speak for you) whether one of the big problems that people have with public transportation is the sort of people who hang out at train stations and bus depots. I suppose like everywhere else, the majority of the people there are fairly "normal" as fine as one can expect of your average citizen, but then...

Well, I'm sitting there, and this guy comes up and strikes up a conversation. No need for fine details, but the guy turns out to be this homeless ex-convict who just got kicked out of his rehab home, and is on his way to another one. Actually, as homeless guys go, he seemed to be set up pretty well: he had a big duffel bag full of clothing which seemed to be clean, and much of it new; he had some food and some books; he had some money and a ticket for the train; and he had spent the previous night in a hotel.

Still, he was obviously not in great shape. Rehab seemed to have done him good, as he was adamant that he wanted to stay away from drugs (although he wouldn't mind a beer or two) and out of jail, but still, drugs are tough on you, and after all, while it didn't seem likely that he was going to end up sleeping on a bus stop bench that night, he was still homeless. Already feeling wiped out from the day, I just felt eaten up inside for this guy who's unloading his problems on me, and I had nothing I could really do to help him. I kept thinking to myself I'd have rather taken the earlier train and not had to deal with this.

I realized something, though. If I'd taken the other train, I might have found myself sitting at a train station without even a hotdog stand, and nowhere to go to get any lunch at all. If that had happened, then surely this story would have been quite different, and no doubt I wouldn't have had the imagination to think that surely if I'd waited, I'd have ended up sitting for over an hour with some stranger telling me about his triumphs and troubles with Narc-Anon. I'd just be sitting there fuming at myself that I'd made a very poor choice, and surely if I'd stayed put, I'd have had a fine time waiting for the later train. Of course, I'd be wrong.

I’d have rather skipped lunch and not had to deal with somebody else's problems, but realizing now my situation and lack of imagination, it's entirely possible that even at a stop farther down the line I might have run into some much more unpleasant fellow, or found that the station had no shade to sit in, or by some random chance, I'd have run into some vengeful ex-girlfriend or the earlier train could have crashed. Who knows?.

I find it fascinating how human nature leads us to notice coincidence, and attribute it to "luck" or even sometimes "miracles". There's been a lot written on the fact that when a psychic makes twenty predictions, and one of them comes true, people say "Wow!" in response to that one, but forget the nineteen failures. Yes, I've heard a lot about this phenomenon, but not so much on its flipside: the noting of pessimistic coincidence.

The fact is, no matter which train I had chosen, I would likely have complained of whatever results I got, claiming that surely, I had made the worst choice possible. If I'd driven, I would have spent hours stuck in traffic, beating myself up for being so foolish as to not take the train. If I had decided not to bother interviewing for the job since it was so far away, I'd have wondered if I had been extremely foolish to not even try and see what my chances were.

Pessimism is easy, and I fall into it a lot. I don't know what the cure for it is, but I do know one thing. As I sat on the train writing this, heading to my home where I would spend the evening with a wife and kids who love me, I realize that somewhere along the line, I could have easily made some series of decisions that had led to me being a homeless ex-con drug addict standing on a train platform and telling my troubles to some stranger.

FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: ad nauseam

So after some difficulties this morning and over the preceding weekend, I finally got into my e-mail this afternoon and found that I'd actually received quite a bit of electronic correspondence over the last few days. Interestingly enough, I really don't get a lot of spam, and this time was no exception. Emails giving me information that I had actually asked for, notes from family and friends, and info from guys at my church who are involved with and/or leading groups with which I'm involved. And there was the one fly in the ointment.

There's this guy, see. He's a nice guy, a good Christian, and someone who I enjoy talking with face-to-face. However, over the weekend he had sent me an e-mail with a picture of and little blurb concerning Barack Hussein Obama (with a noted emphasis on the fact that yes, that's his middle name!). This isn't the first time that he's sent me an e-mail with a subject line starting "FW: fwd: fwd:" or whatever. No, there was some matter of signing a petition that would do something having to do with prayer in schools or some such thing that of course turned out to be completely meaningless on a quick check of Snopes.com.

This time was different, though, and to tell you the truth, I was simultaneously unhappy and glad that it was different. It turned out that the bare content (minus editorializing) of the e-mail was correct! This happens so rarely in these situations, it threw me for a bit of a loop. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't just fire back, "No; this is all wrong; please stop forwarding these to me; can't you see what this is doing to your personal credibility?!" You know, I'll admit that I actually get a bit of smug self-satisfaction from sending out such an e-mail, but you can't send out that e-mail when the person sending you info happens to be right.

So what was the part that made me glad? It was the dawning of a realization that came as much less of a surprise to me than the discovery that the e-mail was technically true: I DON'T CARE! It doesn't matter to me if you find out that Hillary Clinton's a lesbian, John Edwards has made a hobby of torturing puppies, Mitt Romney has seven wives, or Rudy Giuliani was really the mastermind behind 9/11! It doesn't matter whether you have a reputable source or not, whether there's a photo attached or not, or whether there is an action required of me or not. I don't care if you have twenty pictures of cute kittens playing with balls of string, or a heartwarming poem to remind me of what's so great about mothers, or even a coupon for free ice cream. If the subject already starts with even one "FW:", don't click a button and send me a "FW: FW:" because I DON'T WANT IT!

Obsessive forwarders of the world, I'm cutting you off. If you want to send me your own e-mail, please do. I'm not going to read anyone else's.

Awakening the sleeping dad

After complaining about my own lack of consistent posting in my other blog, I've now gone over a week without posting at either of my blogs. It's not like I have a big enough audience of regular readers that I really need to explain myself, but I guess I personally feel the need. Plus, it gives me a chance to vent and complain, which we all really enjoy don't we? Or is it just me? (I noticed a few years back that I am actually entertained by the rants of people who seem to complain all the time. Whether it's an unexplainable personality quirk of mine or whether hearing other people's complaints makes me feel better about my own life, I don't know. I've always said that that's why I enjoy listening to The Smiths, who, for those of you not familiar, here's the lyrics of one of their biggest hits. I pop in an old tape, and the more pathetic Morrissey gets, the more cheerful I get. Go figure.)

Anyway, the thing that's getting me down is just life in general. As I'm sure I must have mentioned, I'm working two jobs right now, and it's wearing me out. I like a good solid eight hours of sleep, but tend to get four most nights these days. It's not fun making just enough money to get by while you don't get sufficient sleep or time together with your family. The way it's affecting my blogs is that I don't seem to have the mental energy to think coherently enough to write in a manner that feels proper to me. I actually have several unfinished posts stored up in this blog, and one in the other, but when I go to write on them, it doesn't sound right. For now, writing a little post of personal complaint, I feel more accepting of sloppiness, but the post I was working on this Monday seemed like an important one, and pretty much every post on my other blog is one I consider important. (And anyway, Exodus 21 is a really tough chapter to comment on!) The random gibberish that I type in a half-sleeping haze just doesn't seem sufficient for some topics.

Perhaps the worst of it for me personally was Tuesday. Blogs aside, which in the grand scheme of things are of course nothing, I got up before the sun, and came home after dark, never seeing my family at all. That sucks. I remember the one thing I worried about when I got a second job was that I'd turn out to be like my father.

Time for personal disclosure here. When I was two, my parents divorced, and so I really have virtually no memories of my parents together. (I do have a few, which surprises me, as I don't know that many people remember being two years old.) Most of my early childhood was spent with my mom, with something like twice-yearly visits to my dad's house. My dad at that time worked as a nurse, pulling the graveyard shift at the hospital. He always told me that doing graveyard was a great opportunity, because he was able to pull down lots of hours, since nobody wanted the shifts. However, on those twice yearly visits, he didn't often take time from work, and I would sit and watch television while he slept off the night shift. I wanted desperately to spend time with my dad, and grew to dispise his work and his dedication to it. Oddly enough, as an adult, I get a feeling of comfort rather than unease that most others feel when visiting the hospital; somehow I associate it with something warm and parental.

When I was discussing with my wife whether or not to get a second job, it was something I mentioned to her: the fact that my dad was someone who, from my point of view, seemed to sleep through my childhood. I didn't want to be that for my children. I wanted to be someone who would hear "Yay! Daddy's home!" rather than "Shhh! Daddy's home." and have my children wonder who I was beyond a snoring lump in the master bedroom.

The thing is, this is the sort of thing that I hope people only do because they have to, while I suspect my father did it because somewhere inside, he valued money more than relationships. This is the part where I start to feel sad about other people's problems rather than enjoying hearing complaints, because the people with the real problems in life hardly ever seem to be the ones complaining; they're too busy working to dig themselves out of their problems. I can complain, but in the end, this is only a temporary thing. My wife will be going back to work soon part time, as my childen are now old enough to start preschool. I'll drop my second job, and get some training to start a new career that will bring me more income. I've got a Bachelor's degree, and am looking to get a Master's in the future, and I have a lot of opportunity for upward mobility, even though my present situation is far from ideal. I'm not looking to own a big house and a fancy sports car, only to live my life with my family with some savings in the bank for emergencies and knowing that I will be able to send my children to college some day if they choose to go there (which I hope they will). I really think that I'll get there some day, maybe even within the next year or so. I also realize that there are many, many people who are not only not there, but will never get there.

There are people out there with families to support that they have to work two full-time jobs at minimum wage in order to do so, and their children must hardly know them. They sacrifice having the sort of personal relationship that (I hope) we all want to have with our children, not for a brighter future, but so that they don't starve. Sometimes it seems like one of the biggest injustices in life: that there are people who are trying hard to make life and families work, and are contributing to society in an irreplaceable manner no doubt, but never quite make things work out for themselves. Call me an anti-capitalist, but I have a hard time stomaching people who make millions of dollars who are doing it only for the purpose of making tons of money while there are others making next to nothing who only want to feed their children and put a roof over their heads.

So, depressed over my blog, depressed over my own problems, depressed over other people's problems, and even depressed over other people's successes, I take a moment out to complain. I hope I have entertained.