on being excellent (and why money does matter, but is meant to help one be excellent, not get in the way of it)

a good friend of mine has an excellent dad.  i don't mean he is really awesome or cool or off-the-charts-with-deadliness (although i'm not saying he's NOT these things of course!).  i mean it completely literally: any time you ask my friend's dad how he is, he says he's excellent.  completely just excellent.  one day somebody asked him what happened for him to be so excellent and he was a little confused by the question before explaining that we can choose to be whatever we want to be, so, because that is his choice, he chooses to be excellent: "why would i be anything less than excellent, since i have the option to be excellent?"

i never really questioned how excellent he was.  i didn't doubt that he was actually feeling quite excellent since this person has a rather upbeat, positive disposition, but ever since i heard his explanation of his being excellent i cannot shake his outlook on things.

when people ask me what i'm up to, i've become rather prone to responding with "learning about the law".  it's my favourite joke-pretentious phrase.  as IF i am sitting there, learning all the things about "the" law, this exceptionally broad discipline.  not even just a subject.  i'm not just learning about the history of chopin or some discrete subject, i'm apparently learning just everything there is to know about a discipline.  every time i say it it cracks me up.  it's not that i really AM that pretentious, i just think it's a hilarious sentence.

however, regardless of how funny (or not...) that sentence is, it's also synonymous with "i have to sit here and continue to read all about [energy law/defamation/the conflict of laws (ewwww)] and what i'd really like to be doing is [making music/reading a book/going running/drinking medium priced gamay noir with my favourites] but instead i have to do this".

i think a lot of people do this.  perhaps they're not all dropping some go-to silly comeback about what they're doing, and perhaps they have no interest in doing any of the things i'd rather be doing, but nonetheless - lots of us spend lots of time thinking about what we'd rather be doing and how this deflates our mood and so we're not excellent.

i'm quite certain my friend's dad doesn't mean to insinuate that there aren't reasons why one might be feeling something less than excellent.  perhaps his thought process is that for all the things that happen that are not excellent, you try to handle them while feeling as close to excellent as possible.  for example, just because i have to write a paper on something i don't know anything about, and i'm freaking out and panicking and i have to get my friend to reformulate my question for me (shout out to Stan who is the reason why i will (most likely) not fail janterm!!!!) doesn't mean i should just start sitting around feeling all down in the dumps and not turning my knowledge-less existence into a better one.  if i really hated what i was doing (i don't), perhaps i ought to go in search of something else because i'm just wasting my time.  and, if you guys gained anything from my post on time, it ought to be that i simply cannot abide by a life of time wasting.

the balancing of being excellent with having things going down that make you feel less excellent brought the "What if Money Didn't Matter"video to my mind.  for those who haven't seen it (likely nobody...):




there's the rather obvious criticism of this video that how the heck can one be expected to be happy if one is out endeavouring to become the world's best skip-rock'er and has literally ZERO dollars?  spot-on criticism.  i think being starving and having no home and no friends because you smell bad because you can't afford a shower will definitely get in the way of achieving happiness.  i think perhaps the message is meant to contribute to one's self-construction rather than become the literal method of attaining excellency.

my new years resolutions for 2013 are plentiful - drink more water (failing so far), drink more green tea (failing), call home more often (succeeding!), and be excellent every day.  if it's simply a choice i get to make, it really is that simple - why would you choose to be anything less than excellent?