Lessons learned from various eras of my life…

• Drama kills. On the inside. It eats away at you until you’re all chocolate Easter bunny hollow inside. And look at what drama does to people in soap operas. It kills there, too. Sure, they come back, but as soon as the drama ramps up again, they die. It’s the classic drama infinite loop. Character dies and turns out they were just lost for 5 years? Bring on the drama. Character gets reincarnated as an albino meerkat? Drama. Character dies but it turns out to be his twin brother who was actually bitten by vampires and destined to rise again as a blood-guzzling playah of the night. Yep, drama. You’ve been warned… drama kills.

• Breathing = teh good. Don’t bet someone you can hold your breath until you pass out. I’ve seen someone foolish enough to try this… and succeed. He woke up tied to a flagpole wearing nothing but shaving cream.

• Caffeine cocktails are counter-productive. We had projects that needed to get done overnight and one of my friends whipped up a concoction of No-Doz and coffee to help keep him awake. He was awake all right. Awake with hands shaking so bad, he couldn’t control his manual dexterity long enough to get his work done. Plus, every time I walked by his open dorm room door with shiny objects (which I did frequently that night for fun), he’d stop what he was doing and poke his head out into the hallway. “Ooh! What’s that?”

• Regret outlasts rejection. Sure, the rejection stings a bit worse upfront, but the pain of regret lingers for quite a while. It’s the whole, “I’d rather have tried and failed than never to have tried at all” kind of thing. I was out at a club once and there was this beautiful girl sitting by her lonesome to the side. I looked over there and got a smile from her, but never mustered the courage to go talk to her or ask her to dance (I was a shy one back in the day). So, I try to mooch a little confidence from my friend by pointing her out and asking what my chances are. “Zilch,” he said.

Because he then went over there and asked her out… and they dated for a while… and I became friends with her through him… and they got married… and about an hour or so into the reception, she’s sitting all by her lonesome because my friend’s dealing with some family drama (see above). So I go chat with her and eventually ask her if she’d like to dance. As we’re dancing, she whispers to me, “if you’d done this all those months ago, it could have been us at the altar today.” That thought… that regret stuck with me for a while since I saw her all the time (until I moved away), and thinking back, the pain of the rejection would have only lasted one night or maybe two at most.