Every so often, and actually pretty regularly these days, I ask myself, “self? What are you doing with your life?” Well, let me tell you.

A while ago, Overstock.com’s CEO Patrick Byrne was on NPR doing an interview. Apparently he has a good friendship with the legendary Warren Buffet, and so the interviewer was questioning Byrne on that relationship and some of the ways that it had influenced Byrne’s life. In response to one of the questions, Byrne shared this analogy that Buffet had told him at some point:

You see, life is like a baseball game where you’re perpetually up to bat. So more like a home run derby, actually. Anyway, life will throw you lots of pitches. Some will be good, and some will be bad, and the temptation is going to be to swing at all the good pitches. The problem is, if you swing at all the good pitches, you might knock a few, but you’ll be exhausted from all the swinging. Instead, you should sit and wait for a big, fat, slow pitch right over the middle. And once that pitch comes along, you swing away for all you’re worth, and because you’ve saved your energy, your odds of hitting it out of the park are multiplied.

I’ve chosen to adopt this strategy, so anytime I ask myself what I’m doing, I tell myself that I’m waiting on a big, fat, slow pitch. I just hope that life keeps throwing.

Here’s a quick list of highlights from today:

8:00 AM - I walk into the office and notice that my coworker who always locks his computer has left it unlocked for the first time. I commemorate the occasion by changing his background to cute, cuddly puppies and kittens.

11:00 AM - I find a video called Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag about the annual air combat exercises held by the U.S. Air Force. Somewhere, my inner ten-year-old self starts drooling.

3:00 PM - Our HR Manager walks into our office and hands me and my two office mates little sqooshy rubber balls. A sqooshy ball fight quickly ensues, ending with me pegging one of my coworkers in the face. Totally awesome.

6:00 PM - I rekindle my love for documentary filmmaking by stepping behind the camcorder lens to capture my little sister’s 20th birthday party. My camera privileges are quickly revoked.

6:45 PM - My brother and I arm wrestle for a solid two minutes before we call it a draw, much to my chagrine.

10:00 PM - I go to the gym to make sure I beat my brother next time. While there, I determine that PC Laptops have the most annoying commercials since Totally Awesome Computers. Their tagline is “PC Laptops, where we love you!” Insultingly stupid commercials + obnoxious CEO on TV = not feeling the love.

11:30 PM - After giving up the search for a link to the kitten picture I put on my coworker’s desktop because of some disturbing search results for “kitten,” I decide to give it up and go to bed.

Since I graduated, I’ve really been trying to figure out what to do with all this free time that I now have. Now that I don’t come home to a shload of homework that has to be done for class the next day, my evenings are full of open-ended possibility. When I think of all the awesome things that I could do with that time, I get almost giddy. After all, there are classic pieces of literature to be read, musical instruments to be learned, businesses to start, and friends to hang out with. Therefore, you’re doubtless interested to hear what I do with all my free time. Well, I’ll tell you.

I come home, sit on the couch, and watch TV. Somehow, between the time I leave the office and the time I get home, all my motivation and excitement dissipates from my body, leaving a shiriveled, lazy husk. Somehow I manage to extract myself from the car and drag myself upstairs to the couch, where I sit with a bag of whatever junk food is most convenient, watching Law and Order reruns whatever happens to be on TV.

This is a frustrating situation for me, because deep within this unmotivated shell of a man is someone who really wants to do great things with his time. And yet the siren song of easy, mindless entertainment is too much for me to resist. After all, the TV promises an evening of effortless enjoyment, asking only my time in exchange. Forget the fact that at the end of the night, all that’s left is this vaguely disappointing sense that, somehow I have managed to waste yet another portion of my life on something of little to no value. Curse you, TV, with your seductive, seductive appeal. I shake my fist, nay, I bite my thumb at you for the hours of time you have stolen from me.

Anyway, writing this blog post has made me pretty tired. I wonder what’s on right now?

P.S. It’s remarkable how many cat pictures show up when you do a Google image search for “couch potato.”

Whenever a big company loses a court case, the losing lawyer usually makes a statement concerning the company’s feelings about the loss. Generally these feelings are described using the words “shocked,” “dismayed,” and/or “deeply disappointed.” The statement “company X is shocked and deeply disappointed about this verdict,” is a textbook example of proper usage. I have two things to say about this.

First of all, I love how this is almost universally the leading statement that the losing lawyer says. There must be some class in public relations or something in law school where they teach law students to say this exact statement just in case they have to represent a client in front of cameras because it shows up so consistently. And of course, who can blame the lawyers for expressing this sentiment? After all, what corporate lawyer is going to get up and say “yeah, we totally saw this coming, and, well, we’re really not all that torn up about it?” But at the same time, I could use a bit more variation.

Second, the sheer hyperbole of the statement is audacious enough that I’m considering using it in my own day-to-day operations. After all, how much more sincere will I sound if I’m “shocked and deeply disappointed” when I don’t get my way, as opposed to just “bummed?” This new phrase is guaranteed to pull at the ol’ heartstrings of everybody who hears it, thus swaying public opinion in my favor, which is all I was going for in the first place.

Too tired to say much more than this: I’m having a healthy-eating competition, and if I lose, I have to clean a girl’s bathroom. Needless to say, I’m sufficiently motivated. So don’t ask me to eat anything fatty, sugary, greasy, or delicious, because it’s against the rules. I’m NOT cleaning that bathroom.

A friend of mine confessed to me that her mother had purchased from just about every magic juice MLM known to man. Xango, Noni, you name it. “Coming from a sales background has made her really susceptible to sales techniques,” my friend confided.

My first inclination was to scoff. After all, what kind of salesperson allows themselves to be undone by the very tactics that they should be familiar with?

However, yesterday as I filled up at Chevron, I started to wonder why I insisted on paying several more cents to go to Chevron, as opposed to gas stations with cheaper prices. And then I realized that I was EXACTLY THE SAME AS MY FRIEND’S MOTHER. Turns out that all Chevron’s marketing, what with the happy, clean colors, cute car mascots, and all that talk about top-tier gasoline and Techron additives has worked on me. I’m a Chevron customer, bought and paid for. And why? You would think that as a marketer I’d recognize the tricks and schemes that they use to convince people to pay more for a gallon of gas. Nope. In fact, it’s because I like their marketing so much that I continue going to Chevron. I feel good about using a brand I trust and like, and that feeling is totally worth the extra 50 cents at the pump.

So to make a long story short, I think I’m a way bigger sucker than I previously suspected.

So last night was the annual Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards at the Salt Palace. Our good buddy and fearless (former) leader, Josh Coates, was nominated as one of the finalists for the award this year, so a bunch of us tripped it on up to support him.

This award ceremony was awesome for several reasons.

1. The company paid for it.
2. I had an excuse to wear a tux.
3. It was as close to the Oscars as I’ll probably ever come, what with the eveningwear and high-class clientele and all that.
4. We totally won. (and by we I mean Josh. But we helped.)

Here’s me at the event. As more pics become available, I’ll try to post them.

(Not impressed by the competition.)

Nate over at TheBigBags.com showed me this site. If you’ve ever gone to BYU, UVSC, or just lived in Utah Valley, this blog is going to have a very familiar feel to it. Seriously, I think I know people who are really like this.

http://seriouslysoblessed.blogspot.com/

So yesterday someone stole my car antenna. I suspect GoYin (our soul-sucking MLM next-door neighbors).

One of the unwritten rules of being a guy is that, if given the proper opportunity, you are not to shave. (Proper opportunities include camping, significant other out of town, midlife crisis, etc.)  These opportunities are called “excuses,” which we need in order to justify “laziness” to “women.”

Generally, at the end of these opportunities, we drag a razor across our faces and create a presentable front for ourselves, earning us praise for our clean-shavedness and non-laziness from the womenfolk. However, occasionally, we decide that since we put all that laziness work into getting our facial hair to grow thus far, it would be a shame to throw all that effort away. Thus, we grow either a.) moustaches, b.) goatees or c.) mountainman beards.

In my case, I chose to go with the goatee. I imagined that it would make me look cooler, tougher, more debonair. Instead, I just got older. Every time I’d look at myself in the mirror, I pictured a 35-year-old me, stuck in a dead-end job, potential wasted, slightly overweight, overworked, and underpaid. Needless to say, the goatee is now gone. Remind me to regrow it when I’m 35.