So, to begin: http://www.godhatesshrimp.com This is the wackiest thing I have seen in a while.

I wonder about all of these holidays. Whatever this Thankgiving thing is seems like a sham to me. Spending this time "giving thanks" for whatever is much less of a romantic holiday notion than some of the good ones that have to do with mourning the death of people or persons long since deceased. I'll throw the Christian's Easter into this acceptable pot of holidays since it has the whole creepy "back from the dead" angle going for it.

How is a holiday a sham. . . concocted ways to avoid work (for those fortunate enough not to work in the service industry), consume (fuel, food, media) to excess, and argue with the family that you may or may not have. Sure, I sound like a cynic. I have been consistent in that for most of my adult life.

Cynical optimism: Check this out. . . it came from this page--http://www.bobshouse.net/opinion/manual.html


Cynical Optimism: A Manual For Life
This will be highly offensive to people who think that people are basically good. If you are one of those people, don't read this, or alternately, skip down to the part about how to deal with your loved ones. If you do not heed this warning and you get offended, you deserve what you get. Again, don't email me about being offended, because I don't care, and I'll just make fun of you in my Stupid People Hall of Shame. Thank you, drive through.
At first, this was going to be a treatise about how one should go about eliminating anxiety, insecurity, jealousy, and misunderstandings with one's loved ones. But, the philosophy I came up with conflicted with my philosophy of holding the human race in general contempt. So, I will attempt to combine the two into a Grand Unified Theory of Cynical Optimism, or How To Improve Your Personal Life Without Really Trying All That Hard.
The first thing you have to do is divide all of the people in the world (or universe, if you like) into three groups:
Loved ones - family and close friends who you love and therefore care about.
Acquaintances - people you know, who might affect your life, so you might have to care about them.
Everybody else - people you don't know, and therefore don't really affect you or your life directly, or for the most part indirectly.
Once you divide them up, you can apply some simple group-specific rules in order to deal with situations which might normally cause you to be uncertain about things. We'll start with the third group because they're the easiest to deal with. In any situation, you can assume that anyone in the third group is at least one of the following:
An idiot
Out to get you
Crazy
Incomptetent
Untrustworthy
Trying to kill you
Covetous of your stuff By making this assumption, you probably won't be far off the mark, because by applying Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap), only about 10% of the people in the world can tie their own shoes anyway. With this knowledge, you can more effectively protect you and yours from harm's way. [Note: I suppose it might be valid to assume that people you don't know are just folks like yourself. I don't really think so though. Well, unless you fall into one of the above categories.]
This brings us to that pesky middle group of people. You know, the ones you'd rather throw into the third group, but you can't because you work with them, or have to buy toilet paper from them, or you have to get them to change your oil. You don't want to piss them off by treating them like crap, but you're still suspicious of their intentions, because although they appear to be law abiding gainfully employed citizens, Sturgeon's Law is still wandering around there in the back of your mind. Well, I have no really good answer to this, because this wasn't the problem I originally set out to solve. It's also not as funny as group three. So, I'm just going to skip it.
On to group one, loved ones. This one's hard, because you want to treat them like everybody else, because they're the ones most likely to piss you off (only because you're around them so much more than anyone else). But, you can't, because you have to live with them, especially the family ones. And while it's always fairly easy to figure out the right thing to do in any situation, it's not always so easy to do the right thing in any situation, which means that it's easier to just assume they're trying to piss you off on purpose, because this makes it easier to rationalize all the nasty things you want to think about them.
However, this is where my theory comes in (and where I get more than half-serious). Something so many people forget about the people they love is that the people they love also love them. So, how charitable is it to assume that someone you love is trying to make you angry, sad, embarrassed, or what have you on purpose and with malice in their heart? Well, it's not. I've come up with a tentative rule for avoiding these kinds of misunderstandings and bad feelings and even jealousy and anxiety and insecurity about loved ones. You have to make assumptions about things all the time with respect to what's going on with loved ones, especially when you're out of contact with them and something is puzzling you about their behavior or such. The rule is about these assumptions, which are typically the root of all evil.
Rule: Never assume anything negative about a loved one.
That's right. If you're going to have a working assumption about someone you love and you have no data, never ever attribute something bad to them in your assumption. First, you are almost always wrong, and second, it just makes whatever the situation is worse. If you're going to assume something, assume something good, because these are people you love we're talking about here.
Okay, I think I need some examples here to make myself clear. Suppose my good friend Joe was supposed to call me at 5:30 to talk about a fishing trip we're going to take, and here it is 8:00 and he hasn't called yet. Do I assume that he just blew me off and doesn't want to go fishing with me any more? Or do I assume that he got slammed on some work by his boss and has just been so busy trying to save his butt that he just honestly forgot that he was supposed to call me? Both suck, but one attributes malice to Joe. Joe's my good friend, remember? Joe wouldn't do something like that because he's my friend. So, I'd be stupid to attribute malice to Joe.
Another example, then. Jill's mom is talking to her, and says something about Jill's weight. Jill is very sensitive about her weight, and so it's kind of a sore spot, and it hurts her feelings. Now, what should Jill do, if Jill were to apply my rule? Well, Jill should get over it, because this is her mom, and her mom loves her, and wouldn't intentionally say something to hurt her feelings. To do anything else would be to assume that Jill's mom wants to hurt her feelings.
My point here (and I could have written a sentence instead of this long and boring document and gotten my point across, probably) is that so many times we jump the gun and go with the working assumption that our friends and family are trying to hurt us in some way, and we just make the situation worse. So, there you go. :)

Funny. Right on the mark.