Too Honest and Not Patient Enough

In our junior year of high school they gave us a bunch of aptitude tests to guide us in our career choices. When the counselor reviewed my test results with me, she said that, with my verbal skills, I would make a good lawyer and/or politician. I replied, somewhat in jest, that I was too honest for that. Without skipping a beat, she said, "Okay, what else are you interested in?" Truth be known, I have always had an interest in law and politics as well as music and some other things, but you need more than an interest in something to become professionally successful in the field. Many people would say that you need self discipline, which I can do if I really care about something. I think what I lack is patience.

I was on a jury once, and I'm here to tell you that it's not like in the movies or on TV, where they wrap up a case in a matter of minutes, or at least hours. That's because they only show you the interesting parts. If they showed the whole trial, few viewers would have the patience to sit through it. Our case dragged on for four days, and that was just the plaintiff's side. We never got to hear the defense arguments because the judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds, which was a good thing because I was tired of it after the first day. Meetings are like that too, whether they be corporate or governmental. I glad that I don't have to do that anymore because they don't even allow smoking in those meetings nowadays. It would have been easier to take if they had allowed drinking as well, but smoking was better than nothing.

If they had home schooling when I was a kid, I might have gone on to college. I always liked to learn stuff, what I didn't like was waiting to learn stuff. One of my nieces was home schooled. She told me that, once you learn how to read, you don't need a teacher anymore, you can teach yourself. The only thing she didn't like about it was that she would finish the day's lessons by noon, and had to find something else to do the rest of the day. I think what I would have done is do two day's lessons in one day, and then take the next day off to go hunting or fishing. If that got old, I would just keep doing double duty so I could graduate early.

You might wonder why a guy with little patience would become interested in hunting and fishing, but that's different. Of course it's more fun when you get something, but it's also fun just to be out there doing it. If you get tired of sitting in one place, you can relocate at will. Hunting with hounds is a little different. You can't just go where you want to go, you have to go where the chase takes you, but that can be fun too because the chase often takes you to interesting places that you might not have found on your own. With deer hunting, you get better results if you sit still than if you walk around making noise. The way I adapted to that was to build an enclosed blind with a comfortable chair and a propane heater in it. It's easy to fall asleep under those conditions, but you're more likely to see a deer while sleeping in the woods than while sleeping at home. I don't know how many deer have walked by me over the years, but I have woken up in time to shoot a few that way. I do see deer at home sometimes when I wake up and open the curtains in the morning, but my hypothetical wife won't let me shoot through the windows, even though I volunteered to take the screens out in the fall when we don't need them. It's probably just as well. I would still have to open the window before shooting, which would likely spook the deer before I could get a shot off. In the old cowboy shows, they always broke the window pane with their gun before shooting through it. I always wondered why they didn't just shoot it out with their first round. Neither option is attractive to me because I would have to replace the pane afterwards, which costs money and takes up time that would be better spent sleeping in my deer blind.