Where's the fight?

Most of my writings have been about little things here are there that you may come across once in a while. I'd rather not write about things such as religion, politics, racism, gun control, or war because these are things that are normally set in a person's head. These types of things are normally learned from an early age and many many years go in each person's decision on those particular subjects. Not to mention they can be very touchy subjects. I prefer to write about smaller things that make people think a little. Things like being nice and friendly to your fellow neighbor. Things like being careful on the roads when driving. Things like thinking about an action before actually doing it. These things are things that that people have a hard time debating because the general population feel as though we could improve in those areas. This next subject may be a little bit touchy to some and it may be on the fence between the two. I am just recently engaged. July 3 to be exact. Now we set our date for Sept 23 this week so we'll be married fairly quickly, which in my eyes is what's suppose to happen. You date, you propose, you marry. What other road can you take to get to marriage? Well, as I told family and friends about this I got a world of different reactions. One friend said "wow a 2 month engagement...you work fast!" Is an engagement suppose to be for a long time? What's an exceptable time limit? We have already decided that we both want to be married or I wouldn't have asked and she wouldn't have excepted. Why in the world would I want to be "engaged" for a long time when I can be married and we both know that's where we're going to be anyway? What's the point of even asking someone to marry you if all you want to do is continue to date with a ring involved? Now I'll go out on a limb and say an engagement is a step up from dating but the only reason I could even think of waiting would be to wait for money, or to wait for a certain date to perform the wedding. Well neither were issues with us so we set the date as early as possible. I was talking to a good friend's father and when he asked when we set the date I told him Sep. He said he did the same thing when his wife asked him "When do you want to get married?" He told her "Now! If I wanted to marry you later I would have asked you later!" I thought this was great! What's the point in waiting any longer? I don't get it! I told another family member that we were getting married and he just looked at me for a minute before he said "If that's what you think you have to do, then do it. You can always get a divorce!" I was pretty much shocked! When in the world did it become OK for people to just marry and separate? I thought vows where forever! Till death do us part if my wedding memory serves me correctly. In sickness and in health. In this life and the next. I'm not going to sit here and say that under no circumstances a divorce is right brcause some do call for a divorce but going into a marriage with divorce in mind is part of the reason that there is over a 50% divorce rate. When did we start giving up? When did we lose the fight that people use to have back in the day? For many years it was unheard of to separate your spouse. Now 1 out of every 2 couples will split. Maybe you can call me old fashion but I'm not going to sit here and start my marriage with failure in mind. I'm not going to tell myself that it's all going to be fine because when it gets tough I can bail. I'm not going to promise a person my heart for the entirety of my life and then back out on her when things aren't going my way. Relationships are hard. It is prolly the toughest thing a person can go through. Everyday is different and everyday can be an up and down rollercoaster type struggle. And it doesn't get easier after time and things never settle. It's a constant revolving door of change coming in and routine going out. You have to fight to keep things together and the day one of the two stop fighting is when they are doomed to fail. People have become OK with giving up and it makes me sad. I feel bad for those people with no fight inside them. I feel bad for the spouses that do have some fight but get none in return. It makes me upset to know that it is now OK to give up on the "supposedly" most important person in your life and turn your back on them. And it scares me to death to know that people quit on what is suppose to be the best thing that has happened to them. It scares me because if they can do that, walk out and leave the person they love more than anything, I'm terrified to think what they would do to me or any other common neighbor. I often wish we would change the list of things that are most important to us and start placing people closer to the top.
B

How did I get to this place?

So I've been taking classes at Kaplan now for almost a year. My degree plan is Nutritional Science because I have a huge...HUGE interest in health and fitness. I'll give you the background on why I am the way I am. Being a very active kid I was always "fit" or as fit as a kid can be. I always played outside, running, riding bikes or whatever else you could think of kids in south Louisiana would do. (Yea we swam in bayous and that crazy stuff too =) Well that carried over to high school where I took up sports to fill the time. Every sport I could play I would. I was always involved during all seasons. Even summer time we had basketball, football, and tennis camps. Not to include the mandatory summer work outs. Well in college I started to change my focus from fitness too parting like most college kids do. Ever heard of the freshman 15? Well that's a term used when new freshman come into school and put on 15 or more pounds because they aren't doing the same things they are in college in high school. The sad thing is it's true! So unfortunately I fell into that category after only about a year at school. One weekend I came home for a visit. Well my baby sister was in high school at the time and we hadn't seen each other for some time. I was walking around the house without a shirt after swimming and she said "Brother I've never seen you so fat. You don't have anymore abs!" Well there's no truer form of the truth than from a close family member. That lone incident changed my life. I went back to school and started a workout program. I also started a new diet. Now I'm not endorsing anything here because I know some things work for some that don't work for others but I'll tell you what worked for me. It was a book called "Body For Life" and it was a gateway to where I am now. I loved it. I read this book and wanted to run to the gym right away and start. There was nothing the author left out when he was writing this. It was informative, motivational, and had an all inclusive program where I didn't have to shop around to find all sorts of different information or piece together things from all over. It was the perfect beginner program which was exactly what I needed because every time you start something over the past in irrelevant. I was beginning a new fitness regiment so I needed a beginner program. Well this program worked and worked great. I lost weight and was back into shape in no time. The diet wasn't that expensive and it was really easy to follow. Again this is what worked for me. Now after getting back into shape you begin to fall into a routine. The routine is what makes people fall off the horse so to keep myself from falling off the horse I failed out of school! Well that wasn't intentional but it happened and I had to roll with the punches sort of speak. I needed a change anyway so I started working with a very close high school friend in an oil refinery and that really got me whipped into shape. You want to lose EVERYTHING you have, work in 100 degree heat, in a full fire proof jump suit, walking around giant engines in an oil refinery. That's shed the pounds in a few weeks! So I did that for an entire summer and realized that it wasn't the road for me so I started to look at other options. The military was the first thing that came to mind and I had a very close uncle that was in the Air Force so I gave him a call. After talking to him I set up an appointment with a recruiter. My logic was that I could stay in shape because it's a requirement in all services. Not to mention travel and school and medical benefits and actually learning a new trade, just to name a few of the perks. Now I'm not the type of person to believe in fate or chance or weird things like that but the day of my appointment was the day I got laid off from my job. Weird! So I enlist. I enlisted as a mechanic and I couldn't go to basic for about 6 months. You have to have availability and at the time lots of people were going. One day I swing by my recruiters office to have a chat and she put this cool looking poster in her window. It was a guy hurt in the snow, with another guy helping him, with a helicopter in the background, with writing that said "do you have what it takes?" I thought WOW! What in the world is this. So I asked and she said that it was Air Force Special Ops. I said "WOW! Air Force has Special Ops?" She explain that it was a very intense physical and mental training program and that only about 10% of the people that start it finish it. I was floored! I was ecstatic! I was hooked! I signed up! My old routine had just been upgraded to beyond supper size...this was cosmic. I trained for months running, swimming and lifting weights to prepare. I went to basic training and right into selection and made it through. I was 1 of 20 that made it from a class of over 90. After that, the next 3 years in the military, my job was to work out and study. The Air Force was paying me to maintain a fitness level that would kill normal people. Each day I would run miles and miles, swim for hours at a time, and lift weights sometimes multiple times in a day. I was hooked. I was addicted. There was no turning back from this. All I wanted to do was find new ways to go about it. Well, here's the next step. I know how to get into shape. I know what tricks and tools are the best to keep myself at that high level of fitness I found in this program. Now I need the fuel. I need to understand what I use to fuel my body. Hence the nutrition degree. What better way to take the next step than to go outside the fitness and dive into what we eat. I'm reading books on food and nutrition, I'm studying nutrition in my classes and I'm finding new things I never thought of before. And I'm blown away yet again. This food world is so deep that I now understand why there's actually a degree for nutrition. I can't believe where we as a society have taken our food...or at least things that we call food. I'm not going to rant on about our food this week because that's not where I wanted to go with this post so I'll save that one for next week. The message I was putting out with this one is that you should never stop growing. Never settle for things that you have already accomplished. Try each day to wake up and do something that you have never done. Push yourself to go beyond what you have already done. Don't let yourself fall into that routine where each day you get up and you aren't happy with what you're doing or you aren't happy with yourself as a person. Push yourself. Try new things. The more things we try to accomplish which we have not yet mastered, the more we grow.
B

Troubled Road...

Today I was on the road for a reasonable amount of time and what I see never ceases to amaze me. It was a short 5 hour cruise but you would be amazed how much you can see in that period of time. I'm not sure if we (as a general population) were ever fantastic drivers but I do know that we did not have the amount of distractions we have now, which in turn do make us worse drivers. Let me explain just a few of the distractions I saw today. I saw people on the phone, which isn't surprising because you can't drive a mile in any direction on any main road without seeing someone on a non hands free phone. I saw people eating which also isn't surprising because we have fast food "restaurants" off of every exit on the interstates. I saw people playing with radios because we all have to have something to distract us from driving while we drive because its boring if nothing is on (I'm guilty of this just as everyone else so I'm not judging). And I saw people looking at everything outside their cars but the road. This includes people looking at finder benders, other people broke down on the side of the highway, weather in the distance, and anything else that is flashy. Now I'm not 100% sure but I'm willing to bet most of the incidents I saw where directly related to these distractions. Just to name a few I saw 4 lanes of traffic blocked by 4 different cars going the exact same speed. I saw one car cut another off by lane changing with nothing in front of them to change lanes for. I saw three cars in two lanes of traffic because someone didn't merge when a lane ended. And I saw someone miss their exit...then realize it last minute and barely make it. This was all in a 5 hour trip..on one major interstate. I didn't know what I was going to write about this week until I was on the road. I'm not sure where the disconnect in this process is but something is wrong with the way we drive. Is it the advertisements that line our highways and streets? Is it the convenience of our "can't live without items" such as cell phones, satellite radio, drive through food, mini car tv's, books on cd or tape, or any of the other things we do while driving? Is it the fact that it takes only a few days of "class" and "practice" when you are 15 to be able to drive these medal machines? Or is it just that we don't have enough law enforcement actually enforcing laws? I don't know what it is. I think it's a combination of all of them. Everything that you can think of as a possible distraction is a distraction. We are all guilty. We all do it and most of the time without second thought. Answer that phone call...surf the radio stations...grab that food to go because we don't have time...ignore the laws of the highway. People don't realize the dangers or the responsibilities that come with driving. I know I didn't at 15 when I started driving. All I wanted was to drive. But at 15 I had way less to worry about. No cell phones, no satellite radio (I was lucky to catch 5 stations) only a small handful of fast food joints and I didn't have money for that anyway and there were less cars on the road and WAY less police cruising them. Now it seems like the new drivers are raised with these distractions and they see them as normal, but what they don't see them as are distractions. It's very difficult for someone to see it as dangerous when they have grown up watching everyone do the very thing they are now doing. It's a very painful process of monkey see monkey do. So ladies and gents I ask you to read this and take into consideration that even when people aren't watching, someone is. Our children see us answer that call or eat that burger or surf the radio over and over, or go a little over the speed limit. They see these as normal things mom and dad do and when it's time for them to start driving they too will pick up the same habits. Do you think your little Johnny or Suzy (just generic names there ;) are good enough drivers to be doing those things? I doubt it too! So my advice is to be aware. Be aware of what you do while driving and inform young drivers of the dangers of distractions. Watch out for other drivers and be cautious because you never know when something may go terribly wrong. I saw so many things on the road today it made me think of the things I do and over all it just made me more aware of what I should be doing....paying attention to the road. Stay safe out there, be watchful, do the right thing. Safe driving folks!
B