I’m Not Even a Regular Scientist

Now I’m no rocket-scientist, in fact I’ll admit I’m not even a regular scientist. I don’t think I have ever even owned a rocket, although as a kid I always envied my fellow classmates who had those rockets they made for the science fair, I wanted one so badly. You know the ones made out of a paper towel roll and cone thingy at the top, perhaps the reason why I never made one is because I couldn’t figure out what the cone thingy was made out of. I had a guess, maybe one of those oil funnels? I don’t really think that would be light enough would it? It’s a dream left unfulfilled, one day, maybe with one of my children I will fly a rocket like that and live vicariously through them. I hear that is good for kids right?

If I was any kind of scientist, I would probably be doing multiple studies on how gas prices have fluxuated so incredibly over the last 8 or 9 months and I would probably have some pretty damn smart answers about it. But me just being a guy without a toy rocket and a few community college business classes under my belt, I can only take a stab at it.

I bet it has something to do with supply and demand, it might be that we couldn’t afford, or “demand” the gas anymore and so there was a plethora of gas, “supply” available. In fact at the height of the gas madness this summer I was in San Francisco and the price was a staunch $5.03 a gallon.

At that point I would have pretty much bet my right pinkie that gas prices would have never gone under $2 per gallon, and while the pinkie is not as important as my thumb, I still value it a great deal and I am glad I didn’t place that bet. At the same time, I might have given my pinkie to see gas prices fall back under two bucks. Fortunately for me, I got both. Fortunate for all of us this is America and we have a choice of what we want to pay for goods and services. A choice you say? Surely I can’t decide the price I want to pay for a new pair of jeans, you say as you hold your still intact pinkie to the side or your mouth. Well that is correct but you can decide if you want to buy them at Wal-Mart or Bloomingdales or if you really need a new pair at all.

So last night I was at a get together with some friends, and after a few drinks we started talking, I am sure way too loudly, about well, stuff. Stuff like how athletes get paid way too much and how people are all upset about it, and I told my friend Dave (I’ll use his real name to protect anyone whose replacement name I might choose, Dave is my friend and I am pretty sure I don’t want to upset anyone named Frederico by using that name as a pseudonym) that if he is upset then he needs to stop going to over priced sporting events, to which his response was that he had stopped. Then somebody else started talking about how much Manny Ramirez might get paid to play baseball and how a Veteran can’t get decent health care. You’ve had those same conversations I am sure of it. After that there were some other frustrations aired and then I think someone said, “hey pass the chips,” and we were back to some random card game. Then I think my wife commented on how good the smoked cheese was, and I probably made a real stupid joke about smoking cheese and people laughed cause they had too many beers. Who thinks of all these different card games anyways? I mean really, they must be the cousins of people who come up with jokes. Can you get paid for that type of creativity or are joke writers and card game inventors like the original purveyors of open source?

The conversation was quick but it made me think, maybe this whole gas fiasco could be a model for the rest of the things we as Americans spend so much time complaining and so little time doing anything about. When will like gas prices, athlete salaries be so far out a control and ticket prices so high that we stop going to games? When will the price of movie theater popcorn truly get to the price where we stop buying it? Actually I already have stopped buying it, and some friends of mine say that concessions are the way that the theater makes money and I say back that if Tom Cruise’s 30 million per pic salary is dependent on me buying popcorn than I will risk not having movies anymore. I mean it to, and I love movies, but I bet if times were really desperate Cruise might do a movie for let’s say 1 million dollars, wow that pinkie does come in handy. I mean I don’t want the guy to suffer or anything but I am willing to take the risk. It’s also really tricky to sneak a bean and cheese burrito into a theater, but again, another risk I am willing to take.

It’s really easy to blame and to be angry, but we want our cake and we want to eat it too. We want the frosting and the fancy sugar gel writing, and the flowers, we want a cake like the ones on that TV show where they make cakes that look like skateboard ramps and then we still want it to be affordable. It just doesn’t work that way, at some point we are to blame, we make the choice to buy the jeans, the tickets or the cake that looks like a time machine. We, yes you and I made the decisions to buy cars from dealerships that we knew were crooked and over charging us for cars while providing horrible gas mileage. Nobody made us buy new cars, we chose to. We chose to just as much as it was their choice to run their businesses badly and greedily. Of course the power of suggestion and the promise of power and success has lured us, but we are still the ones who borrowed the money to buy the car that we knew was from a company that probably severely over paid their executives.

I say we could bail ourselves out, although it will probably be slow and painful kind of like my vasectomy. We could make it so eventually athletes won’t have super inflated salaries, but we have an overwhelming need to be entertained. Maybe it’s to numb us from the horrible tragic events that unfold around us everyday, maybe were just spoiled. Whatever the reason, it’s our choice. Until we made the choice to stop driving so much, the gas prices stayed inflated. You can’t be angry for buying into the hype of getting things you don’t really need, I know it feels like you need them, but you don’t. Does the system revolve around you having those things? Sure it does, but in America the great thing is we have the power to change the system.

So, you don’t get to complain about how much an actor makes if your still buying the popcorn, or still going to the movie, renting the DVD or downloading it on your IPod. Oh, and sorry parents, you don’t get to complain about how many commercials are on TV if you let your kids watch the show. Cringe worthy I know, but true, my apologies.

So what’s next? Housing prices, the value of a new car, athlete and celebrity salaries? I don’t know, you decide.

Current Itunes Top 5
1. Jon Foreman – Broken from the Start
2. P!nk – So What!
3. Weezer – Pork & Beans
4. Gavin Rossdale – Love Remains the Same
5. The Bravery – Believe