When the Going Gets Tough

...Give up.

I'm serious.  I really don't know where that whole "quitting is for losers" mentality came from, but it really takes a lot less effort to just give up when something is too difficult and time-consuming to really give a shit about.

My friend Skot sent me a Flash animation of frogs on logs.  There are three frogs (green) on the left side, on individual logs, and there are three on the right side (some sort of unfortunate purple color).  There is one free log in the middle seperating them.  The object of the game is to move each set of the frogs to the opposite side, and they can only jump over one frog at a time and can only move toward the opposite direction from which they are being moved.  

I'm all for a little challenge, so I tested my brain at the puzzle.  I failed the first time.  In fact, I failed probably 15 more consecutive times.  The kicker is that the explanatory line at the top of the puzzle reads:

Switch the frogs to the opposite sides within 2 minutes.  This is a 2nd grade computer test in China.

Oh.  Well don't I feel like a fucking genius.  Apparently, 8-year old kids in China are smarter than I am.  So I quit the stupid game.  I didn't get frustrated, I didn't get angry, I didn't even get insulted.  I just quit, because I'm okay knowing that moving frogs from one side of the page to the other doesn't have anything to do with how smart I am.

Well, maybe it does, but I'm okay knowing I could square off mentally with a 5-year old Chinese kid and lose.  I'm working smarter, not harder, by not letting things such as tricky Internet puzzles put a dent in my high opinion of myself.  Hey, works for me.

This philosophy applies to pretty much anything.  Don't want to do it?  Don't.  Who fucking cares?  It's your life, and you can do whatever you want.  Sure there are consequences, but most of them are pretty navigable.  Don't want to pay your bills?  Sure, your credit may take one in the ass, but there's always marriage to fix that.  Don't want to apply yourself at your job?  Meh, there will always be more jobs available, and friends to lie for you on your resume should you need it.

Seriously.  Why stress?

No one is going to judge me as a person by whether or not I accomplish X or Y.  That's for me to judge myself, and I've already made it pretty clear that I don't really care.  See that chick?  She's like, all stressed and got headaches and shit because she's too worried about whether she's 'emotionally ready' to deal with some bullshit when she could be worrying about where she's going for lunch instead.

There's no sense in trying to work hard to have people respect you for your accomplishments, because the only people who are going to truly respect you for your accomplishments are those that want to boast about their own.  Frankly, the only pissing contests in which I'm interested happen in the privacy of my own home.  The people with which I choose to associate are more interested in my ability to make them laugh, and not whether I'm bright enough to move fucking frogs around.

Frogs are stupid, yo.