But life is a fickle thing, as you’ll eventually discover, regardless of whatever quaint notions of deservedness, or success, or self-esteem, or cloud living you’ve managed to work into your world view. As John Lennon famously said: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Yes, even if those plans involve mansions, living off the cloud, or “hooking up with girls”.

You have a great, positive POV, and (from what I can tell) a solid moral base, but don’t confuse good-sounding advice with sound advice. Come back to this in 20-30 years and I’ll wager you’ve done not just one, but several about-turns for reasons you couldn’t hope to predict. THAT’S life.

The best instruction manuals are still children’s books. Read “The Missing Piece Meets The Big O” and “The Giving Tree”.

I think you are right about your city / Nome example, ‘perspective’ is the word I was looking for when I wrote that. i could have said it a lot better

Thanks again!

The parents decided that this wasn’t fair and complained to the school board. They argued that they though the “no cheating or plagiarism” clause referred to copying from papers done by previous students, not material in a reference book (huh?) and that their children didn’t deserve to be flunked for what they did. (At least one kid tried to justify it by saying that plagiarism is copying word-for-word, but the sentence in the original book was one sentence and he divided it into two.)

The school board AGREED and the principal – who had originally backed the teacher’s decision – ordered her to deduct just over 1/3 of the overall points available for the infraction and also cut how much it would weigh in as a part of their overall grade. That kind of stuff just makes me angry. (Thanks to the New York Times and CBS for helping refresh my memory on the details of this story *g*)

You can also see a lot of the over-entitlement mentality in the outrageous lawsuits that get filed. And I don’t just mean the guy with the $57 million pants. There are all sorts of suits filed every day because someone thinks they’re entitled to have a perfect life and if anything causes even a little ripple in their path, they want to be compensated for it.

Overall, though, I do like Glen’s take on it. Even though I’m both geeky and fat – and didn’t think any guy would want to marry a woman like me – I also felt that if I did get married (and I really wanted to) that I deserved a man who would genuinely love me, treat me with respect and consider me to be his equal – and who I felt that same way about. It took a while to find him, but next week we celebrate our 14th anniversary.

Your comments about maybe someone living in the poor parts of Africa might not know how miserable he’s supposed to be reminded me of my experience of living in Nome, AK for a summer. When I first got there, it was a bit weird because it is truly an outpost up there. When I was there, they had only 2 miles of paved roads, no fast-food places or national franchises of any kind – except the Sears “store” that consisted of a guy behind a window with a Sears catalog on the counter and you told him what you wanted to order and he’d get it set up to be shipped to Nome the next time Sears had enough orders to actually make a trip up there.

By the time I left, though, about 3 months later, getting back to the busy city nearly made me lose my mind. I couldn’t handle the noise or the lights or the crowds of people everywhere! If I’d lived in Nome all my life, and suddenly got moved to the US – even if I had more money and a plusher home, a wider variety of food, drink, entertainment, etc, I’d probably wonder what horrible thing I’d done to deserve being sent there! So, yeah, I think perspective makes a big difference in determining whether something is “good” or not.

Get my drift? I’d like to see something written about that and what everyone can do to feel entitled enough to basic rights but not overly entitled, wanting too much.