My hardheadedness as a teen. My parents were ready to pay for college, but I waved them off and ended up in the Air Force and eventually got a degree, but I could have saved a lot of years.......but who knows what my life's trajectory would have been?
Meh, i bet it's paid dividends for you in other ways.
We didn't have a pot to piss in when i went to college. With three kids in college at the same time my parents couldn't afford to pay jack squat and still keep food on the table. No biggie really, lots of folks back then were in the same boat.
But it is one of the accomplishments in life i'm more proud of. Paying your own way through college. It tends to help one appreciate the degree much more and work harder to get it.
LOL.....I've said before if I was only half as smart as I was when I was 20........our one meeting place has boarded up the windows and called it a day.......another victim of New York's warmth towards busiensses! We'll find another place, never fear!
If it's spontaneous, it's natural, if not, it never will be-only hope is that you can master the facial expressions........as to worrying, you're a mom of twins that are farafield from you......worry? I would too.
I would have tried harder in college, then maybe I would have graduated with a better GPA and could have become an Air Force officer instead of an enlisted geek.
I was an extremely shy child, I wish I could have changed that. The shyness resulted in being a quiet person, and I think as a young adult I did not articulate my thoughts well.
Do you find that you tend to examine things in your head a lot more before letting them out? I've always equated a quiet person with a thinking person, though of course, I could be fooling myself and there be nothing but vacant space in there (LOL), but people that think before they speak is a good thing to my mind-and more thinking and less speaking can be a very good thing.
I would not have given my heart away to the wrong person who did not appreciate it, or me. Other than that, I have no issues with how my life has turned out. I have met some wonderful people along the way, and have some very cherished Friends who understand and appreciate the person I have become.
I do not worry about tomorrow, as it may not come for me, however, I strive every day to be the best person I can be. I do not worry what others think of me, as they are not the ones to judge me. I am happy being the person I am and strive every day to show compassion, tolerance and respect for others.
I am not perfect, I am human, and like everyone else, I make mistakes along the way, but, I know that Ye Ho Waah (the Creator) is there for me with a forgiving heart and love for all His children.
I don't let others dictate who I am, I try everyday to make my parents and my children who have walked on proud of me. I know they are watching over me and guiding me. And for me, that is all that matters.
I agree Spikegary. There are no promises of a long life when we come into this world. I have witnessed that first hand with both of my children. The young are not supposed to leave before the older. But, no matter how well we try to live, tomorrow is not a guarantee.
And I agree that each day should be lived to the fullest. It is what we leave behind that we are most remembered for, and that does not necessarily mean material belongings. It is important that we share with others what we have learned in our life so that they can grow from the love and knowledge we leave behind. Those are the things that will be remembered most as we move on to the next step of our own eternal journey.
My older brother and his wife lost their oldest about 13 years ago....he would have been 30 this year. I agree, that the natural order is for us to go before our kids, the opposite is hard to bear-I've watched them continue to deal with this in their life and their relationship-they are far stronger than me.
Losing a child is never easy to accept. However, one has the choice of giving in to their grief, or moving on and live the life their loved one would want them to and become the kind of person that would make them proud.
The second choice does take a lot of inner strength, but, it is this strength that makes us a stronger person, to accept what we cannot change, and do all we can to help those who can be helped.
I am truly sorry for the loss of your older Brother's child, and I feel sure that he and his wife understand this. And while a piece of their heart is missing, they are able to move on and live the life they know their loved one would want them to.
I guess it would be to take better care of myself. As my retirement from the military grew closer I stopped going to the gym. I've gotten off my lazy ass and started back in the gym.
As a retired Military guy myself (it's been 18+ years now), don't ever stop going to the gym. The body slows, weight loss slows, abilities fall off, energy drops. Make a good habit and keep it. It will help you for years and years to come.
I was told last week by the lead sled, after we swapped snowmobiles for a while, that "you're riding your ass off" to keep up with him-every junction we had to wait for the others to catch up......
18 years out. Damn!! Thank you for your service. I'm not even a year out. Not going to the gym and keeping busy for that short time, I started to feel every jump and every deployment. Started back to the gym and getting busy again, all those little aches and pains slowly went away.
I would have studied my Calculus course while in freshman year of Pre-Meds. Instead, I didn't open the text the whole year and rarely went to the classes, ending up getting the lowest final mark in the history of the university. I would have been a doctor, my first choice of profession, but they dumped me from the Pre-Meds course even though I had top marks in the 4 lab sciences, and so I switched to Arts without losing a year. Who knows, maybe I would have been the one to find the cure for cancer.
What I will always wonder is - why is Calculus important for a doctor?
Trig is where I fell off the earth when it comes to Math. I couldn't make it relate to me to understand it.......I think you've made your mark pretty well in life. Maybe you were meant to be exactly where you are now?
Math was always my worst subject and I just managed to get by. But, I excelled at all the rest of the subjects and they have served me well over the years.
The math was the only subject that really worried me while getting my Masters Degree in Business Management, but, I managed to get good enough grades to make it to the end.
My ladyfriend's youngest is prepping for college and is a whiz, a heard working kid with a talent for the sciences.......but........he can't seem to get a decent grade in English.......I'm like....it's the language you speak! LOL
The young man may have an undiagnosed probably mild case of dyslexia. What you describe was exactly the case with two very close relations of mine who became high achievers after getting late diagnoses in college. Einstein had dyslexia. It is not uncommon for those who are exceptionally gifted in math to suffer so. These incidences usually affect young men though some young ladies also fit this category of exceptionally bright young persons who struggle with reading and writing despite excelling in math and science classes. Parents who know such children are smart oft dismiss reading problems in gifted children denying anything is "wrong" with their otherwise gifted children. I could go on but won't. Have him checked out. In the two cases I am intimately aware of merely knowing and understanding what they were dealing with greatly helped them coping...
In this case, his mother tells me, it's more application of brain power......he doesn't want or see the need to read 'the classics' and then do the work and tests associated with them-trying to equate that to his plan to become a chemical engineer......He is truly under a huge load, going to 2 high schools, half a day doing beide work for college, half a day competing core requirements for high school. Also in Band/Orchestra (Bass) and a couple of school related clubs. Good kid though.
LOL! Yes.....I thought it was a very easy thing to master as well, but, during my studies for my degree in Business Management, I found that there are many facets to English that don't have anything to do with the spoken language. While I was able to master the concepts of the written words, there were still many areas that seemed to puzzle me as to why they were part of the English course. It seemed that it was better suited to a course of its own, such as writing a script for a play, or parsing Shakespear's Hamlet.
However, I found that my penchant and ability for creative writing, which my high school English teacher encouraged me to take up, helped me get a fairly good grasp of the process and I managed to get through that course with a B grade.
Thankfully, I had a teacher with a good sense of humor.
Calculus is important for a doctor because calculus is one of those maths that makes you think about different ways of solving the equation. Doctors have to have the ability to look at each problem and find different solutions.
I got a B in calculus the second time I took it. I had to go to class and do my homework, but I was damned proud of that B since I got a D the first time I took it.
When I first took calculus, I wasn't a very serious student. I was working 25-30 hours a week as a bartender but still taking 15 credit hours a week. I rarely went to class and actually missed an exam.
The second time I took it, the professor was the father of a boy I went to school with. His son and I had all the same classes in high school so I knew him pretty well. Obviously, the prof knew me, too. So I started the semester with the same lack of seriousness I exhibited the first time. Prof S took me aside one day and explained the facts of life. Either I start coming to class and doing the homework or I was going to fail. For some reason, I took this to heart because I felt like he really cared. So I started going to class, doing my homework, doing well on exams, etc. And found that I actually enjoyed calculus. Well, the end of the semester comes around, and I go to see him about my grade. I got a B and was excited and happy. He told me if I had started the semester the right way I could have gotten an A. I kinda ignored that because up to that point I wasn't getting very many B's and never any A's.
Thanks for that response, T.G. I get the point, but still think that the ability to come up with different solutions does not rely on studying Calculus. Throughout my life I have been able to come up with different solutions, more so than others, notwithstanding not studying Calculus. Perhaps for others it is a necessary method for training.
I agree with trout. It's proof of an ability to formulate a scientific approach to problem solving for things you have trouble understanding. A hazing if you will but a good skill for a Doc to have IMO.
Sounds crazy but as an engineering student i hated math and let me tell you we got math. Like four or five quarters of calc and a couple of differential equations. The further you got, the more numbers disappeared and it turns into largely derivation. It was awful if you didn't like math but if you wanted the degree bad enough you worked through it.
Here's the reality for most, after decades of being a practicing engineer i rarely used much calc. Most don't. Lots of Algebra and Trig but not much calc or diffy-q so it was still much of a hazing, even for many engineers as well.
Me, too. I was pretty decent in my high school math classes once I got past the basics. I liked algebra, geometry, and trig. And like I said above, I got to enjoy calculus, too. Another math class I took in college, Probability and Statistics, was a fun class, too.
I got straight A's in high school, even in gym class. I think I might have received a B in Art and Home Ec, that's why I didn't continue to take those classes once I got to 9th grade.
It sounds like I'm bragging, but I didn't have an active social life so I didn;t have anything better to do but read and do my homework
I loved gym class because the gym teacher didn't care if you had 2 left feet (me). All she asked was that you suit up and actively participate and pretend to have a good time. If you sat on the bleachers every other day, you got C's and D's in her class. An A was so easy to get. And while I totally suck at sports, what I lack in ability I make up for with enthusiasm, or I used to. I loved playing basketball, softball, and volleyball until the Air Force NCO Leadership School killed my love for the game.
We didn't have a school pool, but i grew up swimming.....I still 'swim the lake' at least annually at my family's place in the mountains-swim all the way across and back. I can still very easily spend a day diving off the boat or the dock.
When i used ot dock my boat in the Niagara River, we used to go out to the sputh end of Grand Island, on the Canadian (west) side, shut off the boat, tie off a tube, put on life vests then all jump out of the boat and swim and drift with the boat towards the other end of the island-the Niagara Runs from south (Lake Erie) to North (Lake Ontario). The water is generally moving at 5-6 knots, so you move quite quickly along the island shore. Once to the north end, got back in the boat and if early enough went back and did it again......... Not too much farther are the warning markers to turn back because the falls are ahead and the water speeds up from there to about 45 miles per hour........
I was the big kid in a very small town so participating in football, basketball and baseball was expected by everyone even though I . absolutely lacked any athletic talent whatsoever. So, I played lineman on both offense and defense. I was expected to grab every rebound but to never take a shot and always ended up hot and bored way out in center field. On top of that I started breaking horses and show calves when I was eight or nine. Daddy was a farmer and a rancher so bucking bales, toting sacks of feed and wrestling calves was normal. I loaded and unloaded trucks for spending money and generally worked hard physical labor of one kind or another until I got out of college. My point is that if I were to do it all again, I would not be so hard on my body. I probably would not have taken all those hits for nothing. In any case, I probably would not have abused my back and my knees and my skull so much. Nobody thought Baby Huey was gonna be an athlete butt they sure would let him do most of the hard hitting for one who might. I do not know why people are so damn happy about a boy being exceptionally large. It usually means he ends up dying way too early...
In high school (in Ontario we had 5 years of it, rather than 4 as in almost all other jurisdictions, although it was reduced to 4 some years after I graduated), I got the highest marks in the school in Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry. I didn't memorize deductions, I worked my way through them, and the teacher threw his chalk at me when I put two extra steps in one that were unnecessary, proving to him that I didn't memorize them.
When the boat is floating and you're in the water, you are floating at the same speed........no problem. A buddy and I were anchored out watchign the 'Thunder on the Niagara' boat races and he wanted to swim.....I went below and grabbed a 50 foot section of thick mooring line and a life vest, made him out the vest on, then tied a loop over his wrist and tied the other end of the line to the cleat on the back. He said, what's this for....I said, "Trust me". He jumped off the swim deck and in 3-4 seconds the rope was taught. I shouted out to him "that's why". He had to pull himself, hand over hand back to the boat-said he could feel the cavitation of the prop (we were at anchor with the boat shut off). So, yeah, it's a pretty quick current.......
Being a Scorpio I have pretty good discipline, but, I do have my moments of spontaneity, and that can sometimes be a problem. But, most of the time those moments have served me well. Especially, when I owned my own businesses when you have to be able to make a decision on the run. The industries that I dealt in with my businesses were considered a 'man's world', and discipline was a must in order to compete successfully, which I was more than able to do.
My Brother always told me I would make a good DI (Drill Instructor)
My hardheadedness as a teen. My parents were ready to pay for college, but I waved them off and ended up in the Air Force and eventually got a degree, but I could have saved a lot of years.......but who knows what my life's trajectory would have been?
Knowing what I know now at the age of 14.
That would be best thing ever!
Meh, i bet it's paid dividends for you in other ways.
We didn't have a pot to piss in when i went to college. With three kids in college at the same time my parents couldn't afford to pay jack squat and still keep food on the table. No biggie really, lots of folks back then were in the same boat.
But it is one of the accomplishments in life i'm more proud of. Paying your own way through college. It tends to help one appreciate the degree much more and work harder to get it.
If I could change something about myself......hmmmmmmm.
I got nothin'.
I likes me just the way I am, and have been.....lefts, rights, ups, downs.....warts and all.
Dear Friend SpikeGary: In my youth, I wish I had been more compassionate and understanding to those around me.
When first I became a parent, if I could, I would have been a better one.
As the expression in the German language goes, "We get too soon old, and too late smart".
The choices made, and the paths which I pursed I am at peace.
The execution of activities could have been done better.
All we can do in this life is to learn, repent, atone and do better going forward.
We cannot un-ring a bell.
We can make whole whom we failed, and improve at success going forward.
Great topic.
Warmest regards.
Will be in touch soon for a Route 31 pilgrimage.
We are less than a decade away from springtime.
Enoch (Still shoveling out my drive and walk way).
LOL.....I've said before if I was only half as smart as I was when I was 20........our one meeting place has boarded up the windows and called it a day.......another victim of New York's warmth towards busiensses! We'll find another place, never fear!
I worry too much.. over everything. I have gotten better over the years but there is still room for improvement.
I could be more demonstrative. I try. It never feels natural.
Dear Friend Perrie: I hear you about feeling natural.
Before I speak publicly, I practice for hours trying to look and sound spontaneous.
E.
You know what Enoch, add that to my list, too.
If it's spontaneous, it's natural, if not, it never will be-only hope is that you can master the facial expressions........as to worrying, you're a mom of twins that are farafield from you......worry? I would too.
LOL good to know, Gary!
Quite content being myself, but I would like to have known then what I know now:)
I would have tried harder in college, then maybe I would have graduated with a better GPA and could have become an Air Force officer instead of an enlisted geek.
I would have liked having superhero powers
I would have changed how much I cared what others thought about me. It is a handicap that I am trying to ditch.
The only one to please, really, is yourself. That's the only thing you can really control. I understand the thought though.
I was an extremely shy child, I wish I could have changed that. The shyness resulted in being a quiet person, and I think as a young adult I did not articulate my thoughts well.
Do you find that you tend to examine things in your head a lot more before letting them out? I've always equated a quiet person with a thinking person, though of course, I could be fooling myself and there be nothing but vacant space in there (LOL), but people that think before they speak is a good thing to my mind-and more thinking and less speaking can be a very good thing.
I wish my true passion was then what it is now when I was deciding on a career...forensic science. Unfortunately, it was in its infancy back then.
I would not have given my heart away to the wrong person who did not appreciate it, or me. Other than that, I have no issues with how my life has turned out. I have met some wonderful people along the way, and have some very cherished Friends who understand and appreciate the person I have become.
I do not worry about tomorrow, as it may not come for me, however, I strive every day to be the best person I can be. I do not worry what others think of me, as they are not the ones to judge me. I am happy being the person I am and strive every day to show compassion, tolerance and respect for others.
I am not perfect, I am human, and like everyone else, I make mistakes along the way, but, I know that Ye Ho Waah (the Creator) is there for me with a forgiving heart and love for all His children.
I don't let others dictate who I am, I try everyday to make my parents and my children who have walked on proud of me. I know they are watching over me and guiding me. And for me, that is all that matters.
nv-wa-do-hi-ya-dv (Peace) to all.
I've been using the phrase 'Tomorrow is not promised' a lot since my father's passing. I try to make it a motto to live my life by.
As to giving the heart to the wrong person, that would be a whole 'nuther article.....possible a multi-part series for me...........LOL.
I agree Spikegary. There are no promises of a long life when we come into this world. I have witnessed that first hand with both of my children. The young are not supposed to leave before the older. But, no matter how well we try to live, tomorrow is not a guarantee.
And I agree that each day should be lived to the fullest. It is what we leave behind that we are most remembered for, and that does not necessarily mean material belongings. It is important that we share with others what we have learned in our life so that they can grow from the love and knowledge we leave behind. Those are the things that will be remembered most as we move on to the next step of our own eternal journey.
My older brother and his wife lost their oldest about 13 years ago....he would have been 30 this year. I agree, that the natural order is for us to go before our kids, the opposite is hard to bear-I've watched them continue to deal with this in their life and their relationship-they are far stronger than me.
Losing a child is never easy to accept. However, one has the choice of giving in to their grief, or moving on and live the life their loved one would want them to and become the kind of person that would make them proud.
The second choice does take a lot of inner strength, but, it is this strength that makes us a stronger person, to accept what we cannot change, and do all we can to help those who can be helped.
I am truly sorry for the loss of your older Brother's child, and I feel sure that he and his wife understand this. And while a piece of their heart is missing, they are able to move on and live the life they know their loved one would want them to.
I guess it would be to take better care of myself. As my retirement from the military grew closer I stopped going to the gym. I've gotten off my lazy ass and started back in the gym.
Jeremy,
As a retired Military guy myself (it's been 18+ years now), don't ever stop going to the gym. The body slows, weight loss slows, abilities fall off, energy drops. Make a good habit and keep it. It will help you for years and years to come.
I was told last week by the lead sled, after we swapped snowmobiles for a while, that "you're riding your ass off" to keep up with him-every junction we had to wait for the others to catch up......
18 years out. Damn!! Thank you for your service. I'm not even a year out. Not going to the gym and keeping busy for that short time, I started to feel every jump and every deployment. Started back to the gym and getting busy again, all those little aches and pains slowly went away.
As you know, the body starts to crave the exercise......better than when it craves that donut......
I would have studied my Calculus course while in freshman year of Pre-Meds. Instead, I didn't open the text the whole year and rarely went to the classes, ending up getting the lowest final mark in the history of the university. I would have been a doctor, my first choice of profession, but they dumped me from the Pre-Meds course even though I had top marks in the 4 lab sciences, and so I switched to Arts without losing a year. Who knows, maybe I would have been the one to find the cure for cancer.
What I will always wonder is - why is Calculus important for a doctor?
Trig is where I fell off the earth when it comes to Math. I couldn't make it relate to me to understand it.......I think you've made your mark pretty well in life. Maybe you were meant to be exactly where you are now?
Math was always my worst subject and I just managed to get by. But, I excelled at all the rest of the subjects and they have served me well over the years.
The math was the only subject that really worried me while getting my Masters Degree in Business Management, but, I managed to get good enough grades to make it to the end.
Well, I certainly have had a lifetime of varied experiences.
My ladyfriend's youngest is prepping for college and is a whiz, a heard working kid with a talent for the sciences.......but........he can't seem to get a decent grade in English.......I'm like....it's the language you speak! LOL
The young man may have an undiagnosed probably mild case of dyslexia. What you describe was exactly the case with two very close relations of mine who became high achievers after getting late diagnoses in college. Einstein had dyslexia. It is not uncommon for those who are exceptionally gifted in math to suffer so. These incidences usually affect young men though some young ladies also fit this category of exceptionally bright young persons who struggle with reading and writing despite excelling in math and science classes. Parents who know such children are smart oft dismiss reading problems in gifted children denying anything is "wrong" with their otherwise gifted children. I could go on but won't. Have him checked out. In the two cases I am intimately aware of merely knowing and understanding what they were dealing with greatly helped them coping...
In this case, his mother tells me, it's more application of brain power......he doesn't want or see the need to read 'the classics' and then do the work and tests associated with them-trying to equate that to his plan to become a chemical engineer......He is truly under a huge load, going to 2 high schools, half a day doing beide work for college, half a day competing core requirements for high school. Also in Band/Orchestra (Bass) and a couple of school related clubs. Good kid though.
LOL! Yes.....I thought it was a very easy thing to master as well, but, during my studies for my degree in Business Management, I found that there are many facets to English that don't have anything to do with the spoken language. While I was able to master the concepts of the written words, there were still many areas that seemed to puzzle me as to why they were part of the English course. It seemed that it was better suited to a course of its own, such as writing a script for a play, or parsing Shakespear's Hamlet.
However, I found that my penchant and ability for creative writing, which my high school English teacher encouraged me to take up, helped me get a fairly good grasp of the process and I managed to get through that course with a B grade.
Thankfully, I had a teacher with a good sense of humor.
Calculus is important for a doctor because calculus is one of those maths that makes you think about different ways of solving the equation. Doctors have to have the ability to look at each problem and find different solutions.
I got a B in calculus the second time I took it. I had to go to class and do my homework, but I was damned proud of that B since I got a D the first time I took it.
When I was taking college level Algebra, not only did we go to class, but had an at least weekly study group.........
I bet that was helpful.
When I first took calculus, I wasn't a very serious student. I was working 25-30 hours a week as a bartender but still taking 15 credit hours a week. I rarely went to class and actually missed an exam.
The second time I took it, the professor was the father of a boy I went to school with. His son and I had all the same classes in high school so I knew him pretty well. Obviously, the prof knew me, too. So I started the semester with the same lack of seriousness I exhibited the first time. Prof S took me aside one day and explained the facts of life. Either I start coming to class and doing the homework or I was going to fail. For some reason, I took this to heart because I felt like he really cared. So I started going to class, doing my homework, doing well on exams, etc. And found that I actually enjoyed calculus. Well, the end of the semester comes around, and I go to see him about my grade. I got a B and was excited and happy. He told me if I had started the semester the right way I could have gotten an A. I kinda ignored that because up to that point I wasn't getting very many B's and never any A's.
I'm glad you found a 'mentor' to clarify things a bit for you!
Me, too!
Thanks for that response, T.G. I get the point, but still think that the ability to come up with different solutions does not rely on studying Calculus. Throughout my life I have been able to come up with different solutions, more so than others, notwithstanding not studying Calculus. Perhaps for others it is a necessary method for training.
I agree with trout. It's proof of an ability to formulate a scientific approach to problem solving for things you have trouble understanding. A hazing if you will but a good skill for a Doc to have IMO.
Sounds crazy but as an engineering student i hated math and let me tell you we got math. Like four or five quarters of calc and a couple of differential equations. The further you got, the more numbers disappeared and it turns into largely derivation. It was awful if you didn't like math but if you wanted the degree bad enough you worked through it.
Here's the reality for most, after decades of being a practicing engineer i rarely used much calc. Most don't. Lots of Algebra and Trig but not much calc or diffy-q so it was still much of a hazing, even for many engineers as well.
I like math, always have. Just not very good at it
I was just the opposite. Didn't 4 point the stuff but was a solid 3 point. Which i gladly took and ran when it came to that crap.
Me, too. I was pretty decent in my high school math classes once I got past the basics. I liked algebra, geometry, and trig. And like I said above, I got to enjoy calculus, too. Another math class I took in college, Probability and Statistics, was a fun class, too.
I got straight A's in high school, even in gym class. I think I might have received a B in Art and Home Ec, that's why I didn't continue to take those classes once I got to 9th grade.
It sounds like I'm bragging, but I didn't have an active social life so I didn;t have anything better to do but read and do my homework
I can see why. It takes more effort to get that B than it does the A in an easy class
LOL!
I loved gym class because the gym teacher didn't care if you had 2 left feet (me). All she asked was that you suit up and actively participate and pretend to have a good time. If you sat on the bleachers every other day, you got C's and D's in her class. An A was so easy to get. And while I totally suck at sports, what I lack in ability I make up for with enthusiasm, or I used to. I loved playing basketball, softball, and volleyball until the Air Force NCO Leadership School killed my love for the game.
That was just in gym class. It was fun
We didn't have a school pool, but i grew up swimming.....I still 'swim the lake' at least annually at my family's place in the mountains-swim all the way across and back. I can still very easily spend a day diving off the boat or the dock.
When i used ot dock my boat in the Niagara River, we used to go out to the sputh end of Grand Island, on the Canadian (west) side, shut off the boat, tie off a tube, put on life vests then all jump out of the boat and swim and drift with the boat towards the other end of the island-the Niagara Runs from south (Lake Erie) to North (Lake Ontario). The water is generally moving at 5-6 knots, so you move quite quickly along the island shore. Once to the north end, got back in the boat and if early enough went back and did it again......... Not too much farther are the warning markers to turn back because the falls are ahead and the water speeds up from there to about 45 miles per hour........
I was the big kid in a very small town so participating in football, basketball and baseball was expected by everyone even though I . absolutely lacked any athletic talent whatsoever. So, I played lineman on both offense and defense. I was expected to grab every rebound but to never take a shot and always ended up hot and bored way out in center field. On top of that I started breaking horses and show calves when I was eight or nine. Daddy was a farmer and a rancher so bucking bales, toting sacks of feed and wrestling calves was normal. I loaded and unloaded trucks for spending money and generally worked hard physical labor of one kind or another until I got out of college. My point is that if I were to do it all again, I would not be so hard on my body. I probably would not have taken all those hits for nothing. In any case, I probably would not have abused my back and my knees and my skull so much. Nobody thought Baby Huey was gonna be an athlete butt they sure would let him do most of the hard hitting for one who might. I do not know why people are so damn happy about a boy being exceptionally large. It usually means he ends up dying way too early...
In high school (in Ontario we had 5 years of it, rather than 4 as in almost all other jurisdictions, although it was reduced to 4 some years after I graduated), I got the highest marks in the school in Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry. I didn't memorize deductions, I worked my way through them, and the teacher threw his chalk at me when I put two extra steps in one that were unnecessary, proving to him that I didn't memorize them.
So much for seeking alternative solutions.....
Now THAT is scary.
When the boat is floating and you're in the water, you are floating at the same speed........no problem. A buddy and I were anchored out watchign the 'Thunder on the Niagara' boat races and he wanted to swim.....I went below and grabbed a 50 foot section of thick mooring line and a life vest, made him out the vest on, then tied a loop over his wrist and tied the other end of the line to the cleat on the back. He said, what's this for....I said, "Trust me". He jumped off the swim deck and in 3-4 seconds the rope was taught. I shouted out to him "that's why". He had to pull himself, hand over hand back to the boat-said he could feel the cavitation of the prop (we were at anchor with the boat shut off). So, yeah, it's a pretty quick current.......
I would have more self discipline.
How many problems would that have prevented during my life? hmmm....hang on I have to take off my shoes to keep counting.....
Being a Scorpio I have pretty good discipline, but, I do have my moments of spontaneity, and that can sometimes be a problem. But, most of the time those moments have served me well. Especially, when I owned my own businesses when you have to be able to make a decision on the run. The industries that I dealt in with my businesses were considered a 'man's world', and discipline was a must in order to compete successfully, which I was more than able to do.
My Brother always told me I would make a good DI (Drill Instructor)
LOL!!! My brother said I had the Sixpick curse, when I suspected something it was usually true.