“You Have Plenty of Time” and Other Falsehoods I Need to Jot Down in the Next Three Minutes

You’ve heard it said, reassuringly, patronizingly, relentlessly your whole life (or at least you will have by the time you’re my age). “You have plenty of time” they say. Whether it’s your parents comforting you after a rough break up, or the lady taking your order at Bennigan’s, people just want to remind you that you have plenty of time to do whatever it is you need to do, and not to worry.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

Sure, the statistical probability that you and I will wake up tomorrow alive and well is pretty high, but that’s not what people mean when they say you have plenty of time. What they’re actually saying is that they want you to feel comfortable in your present situation, and that, if you want, I can go check on a couple of other tables and check back with you in a few minutes.

The danger there is that thoughtful decision-making can lead to complacency, complacency can lead to stagnation, and stagnation can lead to the Dark Side.

(Wait sorry scratch that last part, there’s just a Star Wars marathon on right now on TBS, like always. They show that series of films so frequently that I thought TBS stood for “Turner Broadcasting StarWars until I was 23. True Story*).

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Where’s the (Kobe) Beef?

Tonight professional basketball player and semi-professional sexual-assaulter, Kobe Bryant, scored his 30,000th career point against the much maligned New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans, whose shoddy defense is giving up about 30,000 points a game to opposing teams anyway this season, but that’s another story. By reaching 30K+ career points, Kobe joins the ranks of basketball legends Wilt Chamberlin (31.4K), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (38.3K), Karl Malone (36.9K), Michael Jordan (32.2K) as the only players in basketball history to accomplish such a feat. And at a practically prepubescent 34 years and 104 days old, Kobe is the youngest member to join the 10,000-Three-Pointers Club (although it took him the most games to get there), and will likely hold that title for a long time…assuming Grinnell’s Jack Taylor doesn’t average 138 points per game if he goes pro.