Feeling: Aggravated stressed
Listening to: Finger Eleven - Paralyzer
It can be hard to call some people on their bullshit sometimes. I'm not talking about the challenges of being passive and insecure. I wish it were that easy. I'm talking about people who, for one reason or another, manage to surround themselves with a forcefield of sympathy generated from those around them that renders any criticism directed their way completely impotent. Even worse is when this criticism, no matter how justified, makes YOU look like the bad guy.
Age is a big one. For some reason, if someone is old enough, nothing they do is inexcusable. They can be guilty of the worst type of behavior, but, if they're 80 years-old, people tolerate it. And if someone decides enough is enough, that person gets treated like the devil's scrotum sack.
Tolerance, patience and forgiveness are all elements of a decent society. Some of us are better at it than others, but where's the line at? Especially when dealing with double standards. How poorly can someone act, especially when it's someone who is old enough to know better and who IS NOT suffering from dementia or some other form of illness, before someone else can step in and tell them that it's not okay regardless of their demographic details?
I think that by far, one of the hardest lessons in life is learning how to pick and choose your battles. Because no matter how justified they may be, you can still turn into the biggest loser. Which choice might be the right choice isn't always determined by who's right and who's wrong, and you can still very easily turn yourself into the pariah of the moment.
So that's when you ask yourself; is it worth it?
It doesn't matter how right you feel you might be; this should always be the first question you ask yourself in any given situation and you can't let your anger or irritation decide that for you. That's almost always a mistake, because while your anger can make you feel like Thor with his righteous hammer of indignation one moment, your conscience will make you feel like an a** in the next.
That's the funny thing about a conscience. Somehow it can still make you feel bad even if you weren't technically wrong. Because while you may have been right about one thing, you were wrong in how you chose to handle it. It's not easy trying to explain to Jiminy Cricket why you wanted to punch that old man in the face, so why would it be easy to explain to anyone else who would see it, especially when they give even less of a s**t about your reasons than good ol' Jiminy?
And you can lie to yourself about not caring about what other people think, but, really, you do, because what they think is a reflection of what you secretly think, too.
And maybe that's what really bothers you... that you couldn't be the bigger person when you should have been. Do you really lack that much self-control? All other things aside, you're still in a reasonable state of mind; reasonable enough for you to feel bad about s**t like that. And with that, you slowly and grudgingly realize that it really hadn't been worth it, that maybe you should have just kept your mouth shut or, at the very least, used a little more tact.
Most of us will go through this same process in our lives who knows how many times, before we finally master the ability to pick and choose the right battles, and, harder still, how to go about fighting them.
And then you come across a 90 year-old douche bag and realize that some of us never do.
If not for anything else, just remember that you don't want to eventually end up as one them. We're all getting older -- you can't stop that. But you can control the type of person you'll eventually become, and honestly, is it worth getting away with being a douche bag out of the charity of other people's pity?
That's life for you. Growing up can suck, especially when you're never finished with it, but you can walk away that much more content with yourself than if you'd never done any growing up to begin with. Or regressing so it's like you never did.
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