Pep Talk

My friend Meg wrote an entry in her blog yesterday about how she believes that her life is going nowhere at the moment, and it depressed me because I seem to know a lot of people that are in the same boat as her. You know these people, they're the ones that "have so much potential, but why are they so fucking lazy?"

I've got too many friends that were told they were special when they were children, only to spend the rest of their young adult life trying to comprehend why they still live with their parents. What went wrong? Dude, maybe you played too many videogames. Watched too much TV. Didn't do enough of your high school homework. Maybe you daydreamt too much about having sex. Like I always say to people, if I were only castrated a long time ago, I would have been a Nobel Prize winner by now.

Or maybe when teachers called you "special", what they really meant was you were the retarded, short school bus kind of special.

Back to Meg. Meg usually likes to hide behind her energetic "life's a bitch and so am I" routine, but nowadays she's just enjoying her time as the Incredible Sulk. It hasn't been fun to watch, so I wrote her an email:

Dear Meg,

Grrr, your blogger wouldn't allow anonymous comments, so I couldn't comment on your site.

It's ironic how you say that you have all this potential but haven't accomplished anything, because what I just read was the greatest thing (to my knowledge) that you have written. I read it three times.

Meg, you really touched me because I know where you are coming from. When I was a kid, I was the little boy genius that my teachers and parents were in awe of. I used to read the encyclopedia JUST FOR FUN! My dad would see me reading Volume J-K of the Encyclopedia Britannica and stroke his chin and nod his head in approval. I was to become the first doctor in our family. The Chosen One. Unfortunately, gangsta rap got to me in high school and I spent those four years alone in my room listening to 2pac instead of listening to my history teacher.

Sorry if I'm sounding too silly here, but I'm a silly guy. But then again maybe there's a point to my silliness. Why take your failures/successes so seriously? Why sing ourselves a sob story? We all end up somewhere in life, and after we live there for a while, we die.

Fuck apathy, because it's bullshit. Apathy. It's an SAT word that conveniently describes what we are not. We're not lazy and indifferent to our world, we're just too busy fantasizing about our own greatness. The fact of the matter is people like you are too content already with their so-called potential and too resentful of the hurtful truth that a lack of hard work and diligence has them seemingly straightjacketed in a tough situation. Meg, I know your last blog entry was probably more about That Guy's view than your own, but you can't let something like that distract you. And yes, if you didn't know, feeling down about yourself is a VERY distracting thing. You can be doing much better things with your time.

Cheer up, Meg, and have a great day.

Pep talk over. Seacrest out.

The moral of the story is to quit being sad about what you don't have and start being excited about what you can have. And this goes for all of you smart-but-lazy fools out there too. Sincerely, Pete.