Our future as a country may not be in our hands

Our political future, and, by extension, our economic future may be out of our hands. If the economy improves before election day, I fully expect Obama to win reelection. If he does win, between his socialist/fascist agenda and his corrupt moral policies, this country will no longer be the land of the free or the greatest country on earth, and would soon begin to tear itself apart. If the economy stays stagnant or gets worse, Romney will win but won't do those things to help us recover the greatness we once had, but might be able to keep us from tearing ourselves to shreds. Neither of these scenarios will be determined by us. Our future will be decided by the leaders of Europe as they try to resolve the nasty set of crises they are currently faced with. If they successfully resolve they problems, our economy will continue to recover. If they just manage to postpone or pull out a middling solution that doesn't really fix things but avoids a collapse, our economy will stagnate. If they really screw it up, and it collapses, we will collapse too. In that case, neither of our candidates for President would be able to lead us out of the mess. Even so, our future still is not in our hands.

Planning app

I would like to see an effective app for helping me plan. And not just one kind of planning, but all kinds of planning. It should be effective at helping me prioritize, even helping me figure out the pros and cons to various options. It should also be able to interact with my various calendars to help me schedule the parts of my plan that I am making. It should work on my phone or on the Web. Just an idea.

Interpersonal paradox

Lesson learned from conversation in the middle of the night: If you want to change others, you have to change yourself. If you want to change yourself, you have to focus on how you treat others. It is when you focus on yourself that you are more likely to have problems with how other people's actions affect you.

I think most of us can identify examples of this at work in our own lives. If we are being mostly selfish, we tend to get bugged more easily by others. If we want to change them, we have to change how we interact with them, which changes us. Thus, I suppose it could even be reasoned that when we change someone else, we really are mostly making changes in ourselves and how we interact with those others. If they are to change, they are the one that has to do the changing. All we can do is inspire them by changing ourselves.

I suppose the statement above should really read something like "If you want to change yourself for the better, you best succeed when you focus on how you interact with and treat others." Yeah, I know, a bit nit-picky, but for accuracy's sake, I figured I would clarify a bit.

Anyway, this lead me to wonder how many other areas of life do we change by changing ourselves and our perceptions and interactions with the world around us rather making actual changes in that world.

Trying a mobile app

So, after resisting for a long time, I finally got a smart phone. I have used it for a couple of months, and am now experimenting with what else I can do with it. Some things are really great, like email, and others not so great, like looking for a rental home in Utah. I have thought about what else might work well and decided to try blogging from my phone. I figure it should help keep my posts shorter, and help me post more often. Let's see how well it works.