Spring Break Fun!

A lot of things happened this Spring Break, so much that I have trouble remembering all the fun I had. From repairing damaged bicycles to writing English essays, my two weeks off were filled to the brim with excitement. Of all the highlights, however, one truly stands out above the rest; on the second week of the break, my brother and I got to move a tree. It started as lovely as one could imagine, with digging a four foot deep hole to put the tree in. What a blast it was having to dig through hard packed clay with semi-functioning shovels for eight hours. We ended up finishing the hole after pulling out a pick axe to break the rock hard ground, but the fun was only beginning. The next day, we got the privilege of digging up a six foot tall tree from the ground. No matter how much fun shoveling hundreds of pounds of dirt out of a hole is, doing the same thing while avoiding roots always takes the cake. Best part was, the tree’s roots extended underneath a deck, meaning we got to uninstall and reinstall half of an ancient deck. So much fun! Another ten hours later and the tree was out, but we couldn’t call an end to the party just yet; no, instead the ever helpful supervisor who owned the tree decided we needed a different kind of soil for this tree. A fair line of thinking; after all, the tree only survived in this type of soil for a decade and it couldn’t possibly survive without a new type of dirt surrounding it. So the fun continued as we hauled half a dozen bags of soil to the location and dumped them in the hole alongside the tree. After all that fun, we finally got to see the finished product weeks later. A beautiful pine tree standing as tall as ever in a new beautiful location. A shame it died though.

New Year's Resolutions

In the world of self improvement, the New Year's Resolution is comparable to the mentally short changed, likely inbred cousin that is tolerated by his outside family due to the fact that the poor kid's incompetence is completely out of his control; sure, people can say it's the thought that counts, but at the end of the day, New Year's Resolutions are the most ineffective and laughable means in which people try to improve themselves. It is so much of a failure as a concept that the common approach to these resolutions isn't to uphold them indefinitely for the betterment of one's self, but rather to try to endure living with a self-set burden until it becomes unbearable to live in such agony, at which point the person with the resolution simply dumps the premise entirely and resumes the happy life they lived before the New Year. This concept of inevitable failure is a waste of time to many, and that is why I haven't bothered with New Year's Resolutions for years, instead preferring to justify my faults by blaming others. This technique of handing off accountability for the sake of dodging difficult commitment is on the rise, and I'm glad to see it be so accepted in modern day society. Whether it be people blaming the successful few in this world for keeping others down or getting mad at their ancestors and the crappy genetics they've inherited, we as a people can take comfort in knowing that blaming each other for all the problems we face is a lot easier than trying(and failing) to actually fix any of the things that makes us the horrible people everyone knows we are. So ditch your empty promises and hope for a better life, and join the world in embracing our spectacularly mediocre talents as well as our astoundingly off-putting faults, because it is amazing how much easier it is to sit around complaining about the things you hate about yourself rather than trying to fix the same damn thing year after year.