In a week’s time I will delete this blog. Rather than let it wither and die, I’ll do it in one fell swoop.

This blog was always an experiment, write about anything and see what happens. I used it to write about a lot of shit that made me angry and I simply no longer care.

The Dalai Lama apparently once said:

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”

I’ve written on here a dozen times how I used to want to buy a house. I used to get angry that young people couldn’t afford houses. I now realize it was all a ruse: you don’t buy a house, you just take on debt.

I somehow thought you couldn’t have a home without owning a house, which is complete bullshit. We have a wonderful home, and we don’t have a single dollar of debt to our names. It has meant we are blessed to make decisions we wouldn’t have been able to make if we had debt. Kitty has taken two and a half years off (so far) to raise two wonderful boys. We live in a beautiful apartment with a wonderful roof top garden, and when we get sick of it, like we did our last place, we give our notice and pay a few hundred dollars to move somewhere else that suits our phase of our lives.

I now truly believe you need to change your mind. I used to believe a lot of shit I no longer believe in, that’s how I know I have grown.

The older I get the more I believe that everything happens for a reason, no matter whether good or bad. It sounds harsh because some truly terrible stuff happens to very undeserving people, but it’s what I believe. When something bad happens, I see it as an opportunity to make things better. I dislocated my patella (knee cap) in November last year and saw it as an opportunity to focus on losing weight and living a more healthy lifestyle. Without it, I probably wouldn’t have made that change, and I would have been my same old self. I can now sleep on long plane trips because I don’t drink copious amounts of carbonated caffeinated beverages that keep me wired.

But the biggest change in my life has been having the two boys. Everyone told me (but I didn’t believe them) but it’s so true: everything changes when you have kids. It’s no longer about you, it’s now about them. It sounds negative but it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me (besides meeting Kitty of course) and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

“To call banks casinos, as is often done, is actually unfair to casinos, which are required to hold certain levels of capital because they must be able to cash in a customer’s chips.”

~ Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek June 22, 2009)