Openings

I have no intention of ever posting anything about my day here. About my life. Aside from, maybe, the thoughts that emerged in it.

Today I have mainly been thinking of the conversation with my compadre on Saturday.

"What, precisely, would it be like to be a school contemporary of Barack Obama?".

Now, seriously here, when you are in school with people, you can make the odd excuse for people being a little more successful than you. Hey, they are, y'know, a different class, the well off swine. They work harder. They might be a little better at the whole exams/schoolwork thing. They are lucky. Better looking. Suck up to teacher. Yadda yadda yadda.

All completely reasonable excuses in the teenage mind, I would say. Maybe you can hold on to a few of them till adulthood. Maybe, if you are the kind of person who believes everything is an excuse for something, you can hold on to that for years to come.

But, there's a point, surely. There's a point where you stop and think "oh. hang on". I'd say that point has now officially happened for the high school contemporaries of Mr O. I mean, yeah, he's not exactly stupid, and he seems the type who worked hard. But he's the FUCKING PRESIDENT OF THE USA. And you sell aluminium. In Des Moines. Not very successfully.

I wonder if anyone has done a study of these individuals. I wonder how high the suicide rate amongst them is now.

(Idea: newspaper article, you know, one of them Sunday Supplement jobbies. With pictures of maybe two dozen of his school contemporaries and a little potted history of their life post growing up with "Barry")

I suppose you could always try to marshal a defence about how he's not very good at it (at present, I would say, the jury is out. Foreign Policy is a yay, Domestic is a bit more patchy) but really, thats just sour grapes isn't it? That's like being in school with Brad Pitt and saying "yeah but Benjamin Button was a bit shit wasn't it?" (which, again, it was).

It's a given, really, that most of us in the world are in the middle. We aren't the guy from school who ends up on "Crimewatch" for molesting pigs. But we aren't the guy who ends up President of the USA either. What must really grind is being the one in school who everyone THOUGHT would be a success and ended up in the middle. Whilst the quiet guy from the back of the class ended up Bill Gates. Or Barack. Or Brad. Or, jesus, even being David Hasselhoff is more of an achievement than most of us muster.

Conclusion: The ambition gland should be surgically removed if you aren't half way there by 25, for your own mental health.