TB THURSDAY

DIGGING UP OLD SCHOOL WORK BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE SCHOOL TODAY (YAY!) :D

This is the transcript of a speech I made in seventh grade. About how life sucks but it also doesn't. Yeah, the writings a bit shabby, but the idea I'm trying to get across, I hope was communicated pretty well?:

At least, according to Murphy’s Law, which isn’t so much of a law than a satirical statement.

From the second you step out of your front door, you’re in for a load of trouble. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into: a cosmic mish-mash of a thousand different possibilities racing towards you all at the same time. They have an invisible fight right in front of your eyes, lasting only seconds before you -

Step in that tiny brown parcel your neighbour’s dog left you. Slip on the ice and tear a hole in your new jeans. Maybe you’re backpack spontaneously bursts at the seams, barfing your books up all over the porch.

Now, don’t even get me started on getting across the street. If you manage to get that far. You could immediately be run over if you’re not paying attention. If you do get across, kudos to you. Now you’re walking down the street, hurriedly now. Cars are all pulling out of their driveways and heading off to work. They honk their horns at you as you sprint across. And when you finally arrive at the end of the street, your bus stop just five paces away, guess what? Patience enemy number 1: Traffic. You glance at your watch and realize with a sudden twist in your gut: you’re late. You missed the bus. You were so close; you can see the edge of its yellow tail rattling off into the distance. Now what are you supposed to do? Because it’s the last day of school, your carrying truckloads of bags and shopping carts of food and you just missed the gosh-darn bus. Not to mention it’s pouring outside. Everything’s completely and utterly soaked. You’ve given up on life, your contemplating why you even got up this morning, and you’re just sick and tired of everything. Literally sick and tired. You got a cold from running around in the rain and you were up all night making cards for your classmates.

Everything I just mentioned did in fact happen to me at some point in time. Seriously. Not all on the same day, because wow, if it did, I would have probably require medical attention right now. Well, more medical attention.

When life goes well, some part of our sub-conscious doesn’t care much of it. Life should work in your favour. It’s supposed to...right? And so, when things start to go wrong, we’re always trying to find something – anything - to blame. Because “There has to be a reason!” This, my fellow peers, teachers and strangers, is why we have Murphy’s Law.

• Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics - Things get worse under pressure.

• The Murphy Philosophy - Smile . . . tomorrow will be worse.

• Murphy's Constant - Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value

• Addition to Murphy's Laws - In nature, nothing is ever right. Therefore, if everything is going right ... something is wrong. - No matter how perfect things are made to appear, Murphy's law will take effect and screw it up.

But as one of the guys on a website, which is basically just a bunch of people complaining about Murphy’s Law, says:

No degree of acceptance can ever change the facts.

Translation: You may come to terms with being screwed, but nevertheless you're still screwed.

I lived the majority of my life in fear of . . . basically everything. I’d anticipate the littlest things to go wrong. Which is why when I was younger, I’d always carry around this small bag filled with all kinds of things: a pair of binoculars, tweezers, magnifying glass, bandages and poly-sporin, a fingerprint scanner and a code book. Aside from my secret aspirations to one day become an undercover spy, I truly believed that this pack would be the saving grace against anything and everything that came my way.

Which is why on that fateful midsummer day as I was walking home from school and a bird pooped on me, oh, not once, but twice, I was beyond surprised. I ran home, tears cascading down my face, desperately trying to get the terrible wad of green goop out of my hair.

Bad things are bound to happen. It is totally possible for the train to derail and come screeching at us. It being especially probable taking into account the school’s distance from the train tracks, and the frequency of one passing by during the day, which is about two, three, or four times?

Yet has that ever happened?

I don’t know, maybe a train derailing somehow isn’t the worst possible thing that could go wrong? Maybe life believes that failing tests or crashing computers is worse?

Things do go wrong, things will go wrong, but that doesn’t mean you have to be afraid of it, or complain about it, or frustrate yourself over it. ‘Cause sure, Murphy’s got you set on believing that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, that the world is out to get you, but using this same logic, if something can go right, it will. The good and the bad experiences is what makes life something you can live. Good situations can result from bad, bad situations can result from good. They balance each other out.

That day when I missed the bus before winter break? I did end up getting to school anyways, from the help of some really nice teachers at my sisters high school. At the same time, breaking the number 1 rule of never getting into a car with strangers, much less tell them your school and give your contact information to them...but they were my sister’s teachers, so technically not strangers, and we did get a parent’s permission, so things did work out.

To paraphrase a quote said by Thomas S. Monson, “We can’t choose the direction in which the wind blows, but the sails will always need adjusting.”

#writeon #speechesamiright #TBT