'Cause you're just as far in as you'll ever be out

In the same way that it's really easy to regret things retroactively once you have the hindsight to show you what an idiot you were (unless you're a politician or nationalistic historian and are never ever wrong about anything), it's equally easy to be retroactively relieved and grateful for how things turned out, if you keep an eye out for the opportunity. For example, I learned yesterday that I have a weaker muscle in my left eye than in my right. If I had gotten proper optometric care to detect and treat it when I was little, my awkward protruding teeth and uncomfortable body shape I had during the ages of 8-11 would have been accompanied by an eye patch. Instead, now I have to take less permanent corrective measures in the form of lenses. Personally, I think I'd rather have a pair of relatively cute glasses during my current Well Adjusted Phase than be mentally scarred from the old inevitable playground brand of Bucky the Pirate. In this situation, hindsight only makes me want to give my lackadaisical eye care history a high five.

With the exception of Cathi, who has been attached to me like a benevolent reverse-leech bearing happiness and friendship since the day I was born, practically all my best friends are people I'd have voted as Least Likely to be My Future Close Friends When We First Met. I've noticed the trend before, but considering the time travel theory-esque cycle it would create, I can't really do much about it as far as "psychically trying to figure out who my friends will be" goes.

I've been reading a lot of books, and I guess unsurprisingly, a whole lot of books seem to be centered on a journey to find meaning/self/worth. I guess writers think that the Location of the Self is more important to describe than the Location of the World's Largest Cheese Curd. But most of these books seem to either come to no conclusion or only come to one after a lifetime's worth of arduous searching. As far as I know, a very small part of the population actively does that to the extent that these heroes do, yet I get the impression that most people die relatively satisfied. Now, I'm not going to presume to suggest that all of literature is focusing on the wrong thing, but I suppose it's possible that the cheese curds of subject matter need some love, too.

"The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility... Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."