The great thing about the internet and Google (I like how the Google search results page isn't littered with ads; compare this with Yahoo and Bing's) is that when there's an obscure or old reference which you're not sure about, you can just Google it. That's partly why I love my Droid which has a nifty Google omnisciently omnipotent widget that will almost read your mind to figure out what you want. In return, it just needs a few moments from your eyes to display some relatively unobtrusive ads. So Google, you deserve the $500+/share that you command on the stock market. I'll have to buy a share one of these days and frame it. On a sidenote, if I were to be able to go back in time, I'd snap up shares of Microsoft, Apple, and/or Google when they were cheap; that way, people wouldn't suspect as much and wouldn't hassle you for your dough like if you had won the Powerball. I feel sorry for that Missouri dude for the constant hand-out requests he's about to receive.
Anyway, the obscure reference is the title of this entry, 'Free to Be...You and Me.' The first time I saw the title was as an episode from Supernatural. I knew it to be one of those things I should probably know, but didn't. The old fogies would scoff, frown, and make a face that expressed both pity and condescension. The intellectual/music elitists would as well. But I'm not that smart, and the world is so overloaded with information that it would be impossible to know everything considered 'common knowledge.' That's why Google is so wonderful! Someone buy me a share for my birthday; it's coming up you know. I'll also take cash, and it would be a very personal gift since you realized my Vietnamese inclination toward Mr. Franklin. Stuff that you made from macaroni will be frowned upon; it won't even elicit my fake gratitude.
You'll have to get used to my random preambles to my topic at hand (see the two paragraphs above). When last we met at my last entry, we found a very depressed me. Actually an agitated me to be more correct. There's a reason why people pay so much to live in temperate SoCal and not in the Houston sauna. And on half the mornings I'd wake up with severe nasal congestion due to the tree pollen. Trees, please don't [sexual reference deleted] all over my car and my house; it's quite inappropriate and immunogenic.
But I got over it. I turned the fan on the high setting (and if it broke down I'd give Dad money to fix it). For boredom, I finally got back on that reading track I promised to do last year. Pretty easy fixes now that I think about it in my dreary apartment in Dallas, with the minimal decorations taken down. In the past few weeks, I've been slowly moving my stuff back to Houston which is probably where I belong (at least for now). Still searching for a job, by the way.
The drives to and from D-town to H-town are the moments when I have my greatest thoughts (I'm stuck on one highway for 4.5 hours; it's either think or sleep or jam to Miley Cyrus, and I'd rather die via DWS* than purchase a Miley album). And this last trip I thought about how it wouldn't be all that terrible to live with my parents again.
Because this time, I would be choosing to live with them rather than being forced to live with them. And that is a profound difference. Being forced to return home because you can't afford to live on your own due to downsizing etc is sucky. It's like being imprisoned. Come to think of it, prison wouldn't be all that bad if there wasn't rampant sodomy and if you had a option to leave. The problem is you can't leave, and that's why it's punishment.
So I'm choosing to return home for now because it is a sound economic decision. My decision to not save the world (which I couldn't do anyway) was a sound economic decision. I had told Dad recently that I wouldn't go back to school--he took it surprisingly well, like a parent whose kid comes out of the closet after it is painfully obvious that he's gay**. If you think I'm making light of the gay revelation, you don't know my dad's obsession with my going to med school.
In a way, I still resent my parents for forcing me to go to pharmacy school, even if it did turn out for the best: I'd be racking up massive debts in med school right now to make pennies under Obamacare.
I'm surprised to find that I'm learning the power of choice now considering about all the coming of age novels I've read about the exact same thing. But I guess in most of those novels, the heroes and heroines were inevitably forced into doing 'what was best' for the world. To die to self, to save the world. How trite! Make way for the bad guy. Hey, at least I didn't start the subprime meltdown, though that was likely because I didn't have a choice.****
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*Driving While Sleepy
**I'm not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that***
***What's the deal with all these disclaimers nowadays?
****Kidding, I hope
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