In ancient Greece there once lived a wise philosopher, he was greatly admired by his peers and extremely smart for his time, indeed he was considered a genius. There was a young man who looked up to this philosopher with great admiration, he wanted to know everything he knew, and become great like he was. The young man approached the philosopher one day seeking to become an understudy. The philosopher informed the young man that he would not teach him - he was not a teacher but a philosopher. The young man persisted, he asked the philosopher every morning for a lesson, anything would do. This went on for several months. Finely one day the philosopher agreed and informed the young man that his first lesson would be taught at the beach the following morning, he was to meet him there at dawn sharp. The young man didn't sleep much that night, he was anticipating the great lesson he would learn about the ocean, or maybe the sand, or maybe some deep insight to the mating ritual of crabs; it didn't matter, he was finely going to learn something. He showed up at the beach at dawn sharp as agreed, but the philosopher was no where to be seen. He scanned the beach up and down several times, he gazed as far as he could down the road to town hoping his teacher was simply late, nothing. A little discouraged he sat down and gazed out into the ocean, and then he saw him, or his head rather, about seven paces out into the water, submerged all the way up to his chin. The young man was surprised but excited, he leaped up and ran out to his new teacher as fast as he could. When he got within arms length of the philosopher, the philosopher grabbed him by the arm and twisted him under the water, the young man struggled, but the philosopher was fast and agile, he had a firm grip. The young man was unprepared to be forced under water so quickly, he only had half a lung full of air. 10 seconds passed, then 20 then 30, but he could not free himself from the old man. Panic started to set in, he realized that he was about to die, his vision started to tunnel, he desperately needed some air. Just before he was about to give up and take in a lung full of sea water the philosopher let him free. The young man, quite frightened, swam as fast as he could to shore. He yelled out to the philosopher and asked, "What was that for, are you crazy?" to which the old man replied "That was your lesson. When you want knowledge as much as you just wanted air, you'll find it"

I heard this story a few years back on a boy scout trip I believe. It has stuck with me ever sense. I guess it has come to mind lately because of how much my life has changed in the past few months. Now that I'm married and looking to the future for kids and a family, I'm forced to think a lot more about how I'm going to provide for my family. I can't keep living paycheck to paycheck for example, with a joint bank account that's nearly impossible. I found a really good budgeting methodology that I've adopted and am really excited about using. I've also been really interested in purchasing a house (or letting the bank purchase it for me rather *sigh*) I'll be a first time home buyer and don't have a lot of money to use as a down payment. I'm realizing that I can't just keep living in the now, I really need to start looking to the future. My whole mentality is starting to change, I don't know exactly how to put it into words. I no longer work just to work, I'm constantly thinking of ways to improve my marketable job skills, I'm more on the lookout for extra income sources. I guess in short, I'm becoming responsible, I know it's weird!

It's so easy to live our lives on a daily basis, only thinking about what's available to us now, and by now I mean right now. I'm learning that it doesn't take that much time or effort to plan for the future. Gaining motivation and a desire to improve ourselves, I believe has to come from within, it cannot be taught to us. Like the young man in the story, when we want to improve ourselves and our surroundings as much as we want air to live, then opportunities will present themselves, or maybe it's as simple as noticing things we didn't (or couldn't) notice before... food for thought.

This past weekend my wife Jennifer and I decided we needed to take an adventure together, and what better way to do that then to ride the new valley metro light rail! Neither of us really knew where the light rail went or how long it would take us to get there, all we knew was that there was a platform a half a block from our apartment, and that the train would eventually take us to downtown Phoenix.

Our adventure began right away when we arrived at the platform. A huddle of people surrounded the ATM-ticket’thingy with confused looks on their faces. I’m not sure what they were confused about because we decided not to buy tickets, but I’m guessing it had to do with the half dozen different ticket options to choose from. We both heard that it was supposed to be free for the first few weeks, so we decided to try our luck; we could always fall back on the fact that we heard it was free if we got caught. The platform had a kind of nostalgic Disneyland monorail feel to it at first, completely non-threatening, and when we boarded the train it was clean and only sort of full, we actually found two seats next to each other. As the ride progressed we passed a few familiar places,

 “I used to eat there” my wife commented.

 “…and I used to live there”

It was all pretty fun. However after a few stops it started to feel like that Weird Al song Another one rides the bus:

(Chorus)
Another one rides the [train]
Another one rides the [train]
Another comes on and another comes on
Another one rides the [train]
Hey, who's gonna sit by you
Another one rides the [train]

There's a suitcase poking me in the ribs
There's an elbow in my ear
There's a smelly old bum standing next to me 
Hasn't showered in a year
I think I'm missing a contact lens
I think my wallet's gone
And I think this [train] is stopping again
To let a couple more freaks get on look out

We started to see people from all spectrums of society getting on the train, and not very many getting off. It started to bring feelings of germaphobia and claustrophobia and other non-PC phobias I’m not going to mention.

After about a 30min. ride we reached our destination. How did we know it was our destination? Because we reached the middle of downtown Phoenix and we didn’t know where we were; mission accomplished!

We walked down a few streets and saw a sign for the Phoenix convention center. Our first thought was that we would join whatever convention was going on and become part of the crowd. If there was a cowboy convention being held, we would become cowboy and cowgirl, if it was an I’ve-been-abducted-by-aliens, well then we would act like we were abducted by aliens, but to our dismay there wasn’t any conventions being held that day at all. As we sat there with a now-what-do-we-do mentality, we saw it. It wasn’t a convention per-say but it was close enough Star Trek the Exhibition was being held at the Arizona science center, it was perfect; we would become Trekies! So we got our tickets, waited in line and acted (ok it was genuine) like we were super excited to be on the replica bridge of the Enterprise and the Engineering room and sick bay. We looked at all the costumes and models of different ships and we even took a Star Trek trivia game, we only scored a 68%. It was totally nerdy and way fun. We got our pictures taken on the bridge to remind us of our adventure and left feeling satisfied. Our tickets included general admission to the science center exhibits as well, so we stuck around for a few hours looking at them, and we watched a movie in the planetarium about black holes.

After having our nerd fun we headed back to the train platform. The ride back on the train was basically the same except for this time we stood next to a crazy schizophrenic  women who appeared to be reading a book at the top of her lungs while holding it an inch from her face. After about 10 min of listing to her belting out her book, I realized that she wasn’t reading at all, but making up weird dialog with fictional characters… nuts! Needless to say we were happy to get off the train and head home.

So my experience with the light rail was exciting and interesting. I’ve never really been a fan of public transportation before, and this experience hasn’t really changed my mind. I do like the fact that for about 2 bucks my wife and I can take a ride downtown to try out new things, but that’s about all the use I’m going to give it. It stops a mile north of the airport a mile north east of ASU and ten miles south of my office, so I really have no other use for it. Meh!

So here I am 2 days and 20 hours before I tie the knot and I've finally got a blog up and running! A lot has happened these past six months. It was a long wait, it tried my patience at times and drove me crazy with anticipation at others. There are some things I would have done differently; there's some things I wouldn't have changed for the world. But nothing changes the fact that I love my fiancee and always will! I can't wait to be able to call her mine!