What would you do?

Do I notice the amount of influence my surroundings have over me?

More than where I live and work, the people I choose to surround myself with have more influence over me than anything else in my life.

Something similar happened yesterday at a place as mundane as the grocery store.

If you know me, you know that I’m never in a rush. The people behind me in line were in a crazy hurry. They kept jumping out of line to see what problem the person in front of me had. Each time, their conclusion was simply that the cashier was being slow on purpose. But their rabid nature made me a bit antsy and I began to wonder what was taking so long.

These strange strangers were able to induce an emotional change inside of my brain without even trying. Imagine the powerful effects the people in my life have on me if they exert even a little effort.

Take some time today and give attention to the amount of influence being tossed in your direction. Can you come up with any other examples to look out for?

(see the original post here: http://www.jermilsadler.com/blog/2011/05/influence/)

I was doing my weekly checking of the mail and a pretty pregnant lady yelled out, “Are you guys catching this elevator?” Little did she know that we were purposely taking a long time at the mailbox area so we wouldn’t have to ride it with her.

We darted to catch the ride with her just to make her happy. She told us that she hates when people don’t hold the elevator doors when it’s obvious someone wants to go up!

I asked her how her day went. She said “bad!”

I told her that her day would get better startiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing (elevator doors open) NOW!

She smiled sooooooooo hard when she walked out of the elevator. My friend told me that was one of those unforgettable moments that we were talking about earlier. (I’ll let him write about that.) And it wasn’t something I even thought about doing. It wasn’t even a thought!

When she said her day sucked, I knew I could make it better even though I only had 5 seconds to accomplish my mission.

I feel like I can do so much to make people happy and I spend a lot of my time doing things that don’t even matter.

I think if I keep myself as happy as I can, I can bring that happiness to everyone that I am in contact with.

What are some ways that you have brought or can bring happiness to someone that you know can’t do anything for you? Share your stories in the comments and let’s spread happiness together!

I can make that choice consciously and decide how I want to act around other people. Or I can let my personality be chosen subconsciously by agreeing with people who told me how I should be and never thinking about how I want to present my self to other people.

I believe it is possible to decide how I want to act and act that way. I believe people do it all the time. Everywhere I go, I see people that can be easily labeled. And what’s wrong with that?

I bet it’s a blast to see an intriquing personality type and decide to become that. Then one day, decide to pick up a different personality and play a different character for a while. That sounds like fun!

And who can tell me not to be who I want to be?

I did a google search and saw that it was very true. I also found it on PETA’s website.

My initial reaction was pure astonishment. Then I thought about all the other things going on in the world right now and figured that it’s not too far outside the realm of possibility these days.

With the stock market PLUNGING 777 points yesterday (which is more points than the day planes flew into buildings and left everyone frozen across the country), a bumbling hockey mom from Alaska running for Vice President of this country, and NASA finding snow on Mars, I figured anything is possible.

But then I looked at it from a more objective point of view.

After watching a video on how humans depend so much and completely abuse animals in the name of entertainment, food, clothes, and so on, I took a different stance on the issue.

It really doesn’t make much sense for humans to continue to drink milk after we are grown. No other mammal continues to drink milk their entire life. The mother stops producing milk after a certain time. That’s about the time humans should stop drinking milk.

Why are cows the animal to torture when it comes to getting milk? In the video, it was stated that the normal life expectancy for a cow is 20 years. However, the cows that are used for milking are kept on their feet and milked constantly for their entire life. These unfortunate cows live about 4 years until they die from exhaustion. That meat is then used in fast food restaurants. YUM!!!

I decided last night that I agree with PETA. If humans want their ice cream and their disgusting milk that most people’s stomachs can’t digest, the milk should come from humans!

The letter to Ben and Jerry’s stated that the Swiss company gets 75% of their milk from human breast milk. That would be an AMAZING start for companies in the US to make an effort to get anywhere near that point.

But what about the possible diseases that can be spread from breast milk?
Those cows aren’t the healthiest during their 4 years but no one gets deadly ill from their milk.

Well, HIV can be passed through breast milk. We don’t want to get HIV from milk do we???
It can also be passed in BLOOD and humans transfuse that into other humans all the time. I’m sure a way already exists to test milk for viruses and diseases.

I’m sure no one can imagine getting all milk from human breasts. But if you asked someone back in the 1930s and 1940s if they thought smoking would ever be banned from the workplace or a restaurant, they would deny that would ever be a possibility. And look where we are today.

One small step today of having Ben and Jerry’s get 5% of their milk from human breasts could one day save millions of cows from torture and premature death!

What have you accomplished this past lovely weekend???

Seems innocent enough.

But for a split second, I was able to see myself as someone walking into my apartment would have. The sight freaked me out.

At first, it seemed all well and good to sit around and watch television after a long day of “working” and finishing a decent meal. But when I had my out-of-body experience, it was a completely different story.

I saw myself as some lazy lump that had nothing else going on with his life that sitting on a broken couch to watch television was a viable option for the rest of my night.

How many of you do this?

Does that seem like a complete waste of time to anyone else? To watch weird people on television play a role that you in some way covet. You want to be the guy that is a superhero and wears a mask. You want to be the lady who has a ton of money and a ton of shoes and nothing to do with her day. But instead of using your powerful, breathtakingly bulky brain to even attempt to figure out a way to liberate yourself from a boring desk job that you hate, you come home and watch TV until you’re too tired to think for yourself.

Everyone is good at something. Everyone has something in their life that they need to accomplish but for some reason never get around to finishing. I hope that the supersmart readers of my blog will change that.

Try this insane idea. Take 30 minutes each day this weekend (Friday after work, Saturday, and Sunday) and use this time to do that thing that you’ve really wanted to get around to doing but haven’t done.

If you think about it, 30 minutes is a drop in the bucket when you relate it to how much time there is in a day. Then consider how small 90 minutes is when you compare it with how many minutes you have in an entire weekend!

If you don’t read this on Friday, that’s not an excuse not to take 30 minutes sometime during the rest of this weekend and get something accomplished.

Here is what I will be doing. I will go through the thousands of pictures that I have taken and put on my computer. Once I do that, I will put all of my best shots into a couple of folders. Then I will finally put together some type of portfolio of my best pictures. For accountability, I will post a few of them to this blog Sunday night or Monday morning.

Post what you are going to accomplish with your weekend in the comments.

Today was the day that the RSP (Really Smart People) attempted to circulate a particle beam through the entire Large Hadron Collider.

You can read more about it and see pictures at the links below. But basically there was a chance that this thing could create a black hole and destroy most if not all of this place we call the universe. That’s my kinda invention!

Really Awesome Pictures: Boston.com’s The Big Picture
Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
LHC homepage: http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/

Later friends! Hopefully it won’t destroy us on October 21st!

Bet you’ll feel glad you stayed at your boring job and didn’t live your life to the fullest when you wake up the morning after you get sucked into a man-made black hole and become a single-celled amoeba which stores and digests food in your vacuoles huh???

There’s nothing like a potential black hole and destruction of our universe to get me thinking about what’s lacking in my life.

I’m such a dirty liar.

But I want to see infrared light. And once I quit my day job, I’ll make it my life’s work to figure out how I can see infrared light with my own eyeballs.

If you don’t know what infrared light is, I’ll tell you below. It’s not too nerdy but feel free to skip it.

***Nerdy explanation of infrared light***
The light that you can see things with is only one small part of all of the different lights we come in contact with daily. The part of the light spectrum that we can see is between infrared light and ultraviolet light. Infrared light waves are very long and ultraviolet light rays are very short. Too long and short for our almost worthless eyeballs to register. But you can still damage your eyes with ultraviolet light if you look directly into the sun with binoculars. And the rays from ultraviolet supposedly damage your skin when you’re at the beach trying to have a good time.
***Done with nerdy explanation***

Basically, infrared light rays are too long for us to see with our horrible human eyes. But I think it would rock if we could. At least if I could.

Where I Got Such a Brilliant Idea

I got the idea while watching my cat one night. She can see crazy things in the dark and can hear the smallest little poot that I make when I think no one else can hear. She gives me a knowing look and I turn away in disgrace. But if she can see and hear all that, I can imagine that she can see infrared light too.

I doubt anybody would believe me if I said I could see infrared light though. I’d be some normal dude with eyes that look like everybody else’s eyes. But I’ll say, “See that hot thing over there??? Yeah, I can see it looking hot!” They’ll say, “Yeah I turned it on about 5 minutes ago and it has a pot of boiling water on top of it. OF COURSE IT’S HOT!!!”

I guess that wouldn’t be so special.

But just think how cool it would be if you could see infrared light.

The Benefits of Seeing Infrared Light

• You could SEE HEAT!
• Your television remote would turn into a channel changing laser!!! You can beam people in the head and LAUGH. They may think you’re crazy but crazy people have more fun!
• You can see people, pets, and anything that produces heat in complete darkness!
• You’d never have to touch anything to see if it’s hot.
• You’d always see me coming because I’m soooooooo hot.

Don’t you think that would be AWESOME?!?!?!?

For more information on infrared light, read these links:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/nightvision1.htm
http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/about_cara/defn/irlight.html

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