In order to be happy, I believe you must have a complete life balance. You could look at it as a happiness index. I break it down as such:

Health - 25%
Finances - 25%
Social - 25%
Career - 25%

Health - If you are not healthy, things are bad. Self explanatory.

Finances - I separate this from job/career section because you could have a real shitty job, but still be financially secure. On the flip side, you could have a really excellent job that you love and be far from financially secure.

Social - This is the friends and family section. Do you have friends? Do they like you? Do you spend time with them? How's your mom and them? Everything cool?

Career - Do you like what you do, are you content with your current employment scenario?

Using these metrics, you can calculate your own happiness index:

Is your leg broken? Maybe you assign health a 20% instead of the full 25%. Do you have stage 4 terminal lip fungus? Well, then maybe go with a 5% instead of 25%.

Are you flat broke? Do you live paycheck to paycheck? If so, congratulations, assign yourself 10% in the finance category, or maybe 20% if you just don't care. Only you can honestly assign your own percentage.

Did you accidentally run over your grandpa with a lawnmower? Guess what? you should go with a 5%, because you suck. Perhaps your family is all well and good, and on top of that you got a free blow job from your friend's sister, maybe you could go with the full 25. Good for you.

Do you want to take a huge steaming shit on your boss's desk, or maybe something even more sinister? Personally, I say do it, but afterwards you will probably need to assign yourself around a 15% in the career metric.

So, in summary, say you are a dude who has stage 4 terminal lip fungus, you are flat broke, and you hate your job, but you still got the BJ from your friend's sister, you would roughly score a 55%. You are not all that happy. Although, due to the beej from your friend's sister, you may think you are doing better than you really are, so please, be realistic.

Now, you are instructed to not only calculate your own happiness index according to the metrics, but when someone asks you how it's going casually in passing, give them your percentage and watch the look on the face, its priceless. And, should they make the horrible mistake of asking you what it means, waste a good half hour of their precious time that they could be using to get some hot mouth love from your friend's sister.

Is it cliche to try and not be cliche?

Sad. My once mighty and bountiful blog has dwindled to virtually nothing. I am still in a creative lull. I think part of it is due to my shitty job. I essentially work alone, and on my days off, I am at home alone. When I am on night shift, I am alone almost all the time. On a lighter note, I have been 'being' and not 'having' for a while now and I am enjoying it. If you don't know what that means, then read a the last few posts and you will understand. I have been collecting a few notes for potential posts, and then not following through on them. So instead of making any sense here, I will just spout out a collection of random thoughts and you can do with them what you will.

I temporarily became a "beardo". I had a lengthy strange beard. People would see me then say oh wow, you have a huge beard. Then one day I shaved it off and went with the clean shaven look for a while. Then people would say oh wow, you are clean shaven. I guess I have the ability to change my look around at will. Some days I get carded for buying beer, other days not, depending on how I look that day.

Taking food from people, particularly at work, is something I practically never do. When someone walks up at work and says, "Hey, my wife made this cake, here have some", I ALWAYS refuse. I am now working on saying yes instead of no. One time at work, dude brought in a cake, everyone (excluding me) ate the cake. Once the cake was gone someone pointed out the 12 inch hair stuck to the top of the cake plate where the cake used to be. They are freaked out, while I just laughed and laughed. It would be virtually impossible for that hair to harm them, particularly since it was still on the plate, but the thought of it grossed them out.

In the same vein as my post on food technology, I started pondering fishing technology. I noticed that fishing technology seems to have advanced, but perhaps not necessarily in a good way. You can spend a lot of money on the brand new doo dads and gizmos. You can buy a super spoonbill chartreuse magic diving battery operated lure featuring 14 treble hooks and a 3-way scatter pattern offset for x amount of dollars. You can buy the latest and greatest rod and reel for XXX amount of dollars. You could even buy a fancy boat for XX,XXX amount of dollars. However, my grandpa could catch the same fish, perhaps even larger in size and more in quantity than you could, by sitting on the bank with the lowest model rod and reel anyone has ever produced, a shitty rusted hook he found stuck in a tree at a fishing spot, and an earth worm he dug out of the ground for free with his bare hands.

Bit of a silly rant here, and I know I have probably posted about this before, but as a friendly reminder I would like every to know that Facebook is stupid. It will be in the history books as one of the causes of global stupidity a la Idiocracy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/. It is like a shortcut to personality. Telling everyone in your friends list something at the same time robs you of the storytelling craft, and the human interaction that makes you who you are. Also, I am sure there are people in your friends list that do not need to know or care what you have done. I would also go a step further and claim that there are people in your friends list that are not even really your friend. There are probably even people who have completely exchanged human interaction and the art of storytelling with simple facebook entries, but hey, at least they have over 200 "friends".

Facebook is free. What? No, of course it is not really free. There are all types of ads on there, that of course, Facebook gets tons of cash for. Facebook gets it, not you, even though you are the one viewing the ads. Recent articles have shown Facebook to be worth 50 billion dollars. How much of that money do you get for being a member? Exactly none. Seems like a bit of a rip off to me.

They also have awesome games like some kinda farm shit, some kinda vampire shit, and some kinda mafia shit. Games where you have to keep playing to stay ahead of your friends (all the while showing you more ads), and if you ever stop playing, you probably feel bad about it. Great, now Facebook is having a negative impact on you.

Here is a small sample of some things I found on Facebook in less than 10 seconds:

"Jeff is now friends with Alex" - Great, two people I don't know are now fucking friends. Maybe they can queer off together and go ride a merry-go-round.

"thank god it's fridayyy :)" - Clearly the world's next Shakespeare.

"God damn. I LOOOOOVVVVEEEE TO COOK!" - Good, go fucking do it and shut up.

"wishing i was in a dead sleeep." - I wish you were just dead.

But hey, at least you can "poke" your "friends". GREAT! Tell you what, next time you are about to poke someone on Facebook, invite me over and I will poke you right in the eye, and we will both have something interesting to share with our friends.

I do also get the irony of posting this in an article format for the world to read at the same time, but this is not something that I haven't told everyone I know already. Also, I can assure you there was 10 times more thought put into this rant than ANYTHING you have EVER posted on Facebook. I would challenge you to go back to 6 weeks ago and assess maybe three things you posted on Facebook, and see if you feel they have any redeeming value. ...See, now you feel like some kind of asshole.

The other day I was driving to work and I saw a lady walking down the sidewalk. She had about 4 dogs with her, all on separate leashes. The dogs seemed a little unruly, but nothing she couldn't handle. Then all of a sudden, I see a guy with a single dog, also on a leash going the other direction, towards her. Just about the time I got even with where they were going to cross paths, the man's dog lashed out at the multiple dogs, causing the lady to yank the leashes and leap out into the street. I was going about 45 miles per hour, but I was able to slam on my breaks and swerve to avoid killing her and all her dogs. Not a huge deal, crisis averted, everyone and all animals were OK, and everyone went on their merry way. This could very easily have gone the other way.

It made me think about some of the tragic stories you see on the news almost every day. It was literally a matter of inches, great luck, quality driving, and good timing. If I had left the house maybe 1 second earlier and was 1 second farther down the road, I would wager there is a good chance that lady would be a dead person. Some people aren't so lucky.

This was not a life changing event, but it does make one stop and ponder how close you could be to death each and every day, or perhaps close to being involved in something where someone else gets hurt, or potentially killed. It makes one think about how many times on earth each day something like that happens, and how many of those times, it ends badly. It just takes a single split second in time to be the difference between a miss and a near miss, and there is a good chance you could have no idea this was even happening. My hero George Carlin once said, "...here's one they just made up. "Near miss". When two planes almost collide they call it a near miss. IT'S A NEAR HIT!! A collision... is a near miss. BOOM! "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yeah, but not quite!".

What is my point to all this? What lesson can we learn here? Probably none in terms of avoidance, you don't get to control that type of fate, but you can certainly take stock in what you have and what you do and who you are, and make sure you attempt to live life to the fullest, because some dickweed in a boogie van might run over you tomorrow.

....and we're back. 2011, Weird. I sort of fell off the grid for a while there. I went to Vegas, then hit Shreveport a couple of weeks later, then there was Christmas and New Years, its all a blur.

So I spent Christmas weekend in Shreveport gambling. Had a free room and free buffets and whatnot, so I said what the heck. I was only 2 weeks back from Vegas, but I figured that didn't matter, a good time is a good time, who says you can't have two good times in any given time frame. Anyway, I noticed something interesting when I was there. In case you don't recall my heartfelt opposition to cell phone companies, and their craft, you can reread the post as a refresher here: CELL PHONE ASS RAPE.

So there I was, in Eastern Louisiana, sitting at a Lord of the Rings slot machine next to a lady who had to be every bit of 75 years old. I heard a strange noise, and this lady proceeded to pull out her iPhone4, and start texting, and using apps and whatnot. Wait a sec. Did I miss something? Has that type of technology reached the elderly at this point? I must say that at first I felt sorta bad. Here I am a thirty-something white guy who has made technology a career. I should have the iPhone, and she should have my shitty low end Motorola RAZRv3. I felt like the old person in the scene. "Why do I need all that fancy new stuff, why would I wanna pay the cell phone company a thousand dollars a year when I don't need to", and so on. Someone could have given her the phone as a gift I suppose, or perhaps someone else could pay her bill for her, or maybe she could be rich beyond her wildest dreams, there could have been lots of variables, but I suspect in this case, things were just as they appeared.

Then the thought mostly faded when I realized that for the amount of money she spent on her phone and her service plan, I could go to that very casino probably 5 or 6 times annually. She is also bound to a 2 year contract, which could quite literally be the rest of her life. She got suckered into their scam, not me. I suppose this falls into my overall plan to balance 'having' and 'being'. She can have her iPhone, and I can be on vacation more. Is she better off than me? I think not. Cosmically, would someone rather listen to her story about her iPhone being awesome, or my story about the old lady with the iPhone, who thought her iPhone was awesome.

I realize this anecdote is weak, but it was one of those sort of whoa moments for me, when I realized a whole bunch of crap at the same time, so I felt the need to document it for posterity.