Waxing Eloquent. Watermelon.

So to recap, remember that long, pseudo-philosophical post about choices or something like that? Yeah, so I decided to take the new job and I start tomorrow. Winning!

This post isn't about that. I'll still try to make it short though because my version of 'waxing eloquent' can easily be mistaken for rambling.

I was just thinking about the concept of happiness and achieving it and how our entire society is based around the concept that happiness is a 'right.' Which believe it or not is a fairly recent invention. Most of us come off today as entitled to happiness, which strikes me as a little arrogant.

And people get really depressed when they're not able to achieve 'happiness.' To me, it kinda seems like people go about it all the wrong way -- the reason they do things is to be happy. I mean, search for books on achieving happiness and self-improvement. It's a huge industry in its own right, and the reason it's so big is because people keep writing books, because people keep buying them, which means trying to be happy doesn't work. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but if your end goal is simply to be happy, you never will be.

You can't ever do anything with the end goal of happiness in mind. If you want to be happy, you'll have a genuine, continuing passion for something. Theater, people, art, hey, maybe your life ambition is to make awesome engine parts at a factory, knowing that people will use them and appreciate how well they work. And that effect you'll have on other people is probably your best shot at happiness.

But then, lo and behold, irony of ironies strikes. If you're only doing it to be happy, you still won't be because that's your goal.

Of course, throughout this whole thing, I keep saying you when I really mean 'me.' I can wax eloquent (crap, I rambled) about this stuff all the time, but it usually just means that this is stuff I need to work on and I realize it.

Some people call that maturity. I call it 'pencil' because I like to assign new definitions to existing words.

I'm so watermelon.