Four Year Old Wisdom

I was testing a bug yesterday that required me to load my personal Outlook data file from home. My personal file is a good test case because it is old, large and contains several thousand email messages spanning several years. It's been years since I have actually run Outlook at home (I prefer Thunderbird now), but I still have basically every email that I sent or retrieved between the years of 1997 and 2002 in an Outlook data file.

The moral of the story is that when I opened up the data file, I realized that I had started typing a reply to an email that Holly sent me 4 years ago that I never actually sent... or at least I don't think that I did anyway. The message was still sitting in my drafts folders. Here is the [partial] content of that message:

[...] Although, I wouldn't give it too much consideration, considering that "utter disappointment" has become a common response from me as of late.

That previous statement reminds of a bumper sticker that I saw recently. It read, "If you're not pissed off, you're not paying attention". I think that I've been paying way too much attention lately :) Actually, in all seriousness, I thought that it was a pretty clever saying. It ties in nicely to some recent thoughts I've had regarding the "secret to happiness". My theory really isn't earth shattering or even original, it basically boils down to, "ignorance is bliss". Of course ignorance doesn't always look like ignorance. On a good day, ignorance can look a lot like a busy schedule. The secret to happiness then, is to fill up your schedule with so much crap that you don't have time to "pay attention" and get pissed off. I suppose a more positive spin on the saying might be, "If you're pissed off, get off your ass and do something" :)