I consider myself typical of most of the human race, particularly in one respect. When the car is running fine, it is a wonderful machine. When it breaks down for the very first time after the 60,000 mile warranty expires, it becomes a worthless piece of junk. Such it is with my cable provider.

I went through a time period of several weeks when it seemed my cable blanked out about once a week. This is terribly frustrating, especially since I have conditioned myself to go to sleep with the television on. Of course, the cable only seemed to have problems at night, just at my terrifically late bedtime.

So in frustration I called the provider and went through the maze of pressing buttons until finally, at long last, I reached a live human being. Normally, this would have been an employee in a foreign country who spoke English with a very hard for me to understand accent. But not this time.

This particular time I reached an honest to goodness female who spoke excellent English. In the course of our conversation, I asked where she was physically located. I don’t remember her exact location, but I do remember asking her what time it was in her part of the world. She replied something like 2:00 a.m. It wasn’t midnight in Maynardville, so I confirmed that indeed she was on the other side of the International Date Line. It was already the next day for her!

I was intrigued. I know the world is divided into time zones, have known this since at least high school, but it had never occurred to me that I myself would one day speak with a person who was already living in the next day!

What an amazing place the world is. My wife’s granddaughter once wrote her a letter in which she stated in reference to herself, “Being beautiful is both a blessing and a curse.” Perhaps, but at least the granddaughter did not have a self-esteem problem!

So it is with technology. It can be used for great benefit to acquire and spread knowledge to help researchers create products that improve mankind’s quality of life. It can also be used for great evil to promote trafficking, drug smuggling and other detriments to the well-being of the human race. But who would have ever thought that Ronnie Mincey would be speaking to someone from the future about his cable problems in the early part of the 21st Century?

A question has been posed in the past few years—“What would you tell your teenage self if you could write a letter to her/him now?” I’m going to take a stab and see what I can come up with.
1. Remember the purpose of life—serve God by helping others.
2. Be loving, kind and respectful to your mother and father, and treat your girl-/boyfriends and lovers with the same respect and kindness.
3. Seek out a job that you love, for you will most likely be married to it longer than you will be with your parents, spouse, or friends.
4. Never step on anyone to get ahead. There is no guarantee that you will stay at the top, and it is most uncomfortable to find yourself once again in the ranks of those you cheated to further your own interests.
5. Find a trustworthy financial planner in whom you have confidence. The best financial planners have your interest at heart, not their commissions. Such advisors will help you purchase insurance and make investments while you are young that will see you through the rough years of retirement, illness and other unforeseen adverse circumstances.
6. Don’t buy a starter house. Save your money, buy property, and build your dream house while you are young with the hopes of living in it a long time and living to see the mortgage paid in full.
7. Do not build a house with a basement. Basements almost always leak, and it gets worse, not better.
8. While upstairs are wonderful, stair steps become increasingly difficult to navigate as age works its magic.
9. Never consider yourself better than anyone else. Everyone has a story, and you have no idea how most people came to be the way they are.
10. Choose your friends wisely, and be very careful. Friendships are sometimes ruined by a well-intended but misguided action.
Would my teenage self have listened to his senior citizen alter ego’s advice? Perhaps. There are other more intimate things I could tell my teenage self, but there would be no need if my teenage self listened to and applied the items above.
Next week I will share thoughts on a piñata. Until then, meditate on this tidbit from my world of email.

Fact to Remember as We Grow Older

Life is like a jar of jalapeno peppers.
What you do today may be a burning issue tomorrow.