The Life of Lou Ruppert

My annual performance review season starts this week. I think they plan it so that employees can get the tedious experiences of tax season and bureaucratic introspection out of the way at the same time. (I’m going one step further and getting dental work done tomorrow too…how’s that for overachievement?) In order for me to fill out the “Why exactly are we paying you, again?” section, I have to come up with a list of accomplishments from the last year. That means going over my logbook and finding out what it is I have done.

For a planner, I use a hybrid combination of a Franklin planner and a palm pilot. The Franklin planner keeps a daily log of everything I do, and the expenses associated with it, and the palm pilot stores everything I actually expect to have to look at again, like calendar, task lists, people’s addresses and phone numbers, etc. In theory, my Franklin notes should be indexed and in a binder now, but in the real world they’re not. They’re sitting in a dilapidated pile on my bookshelf, waiting for me to clear out the binders for 2002 and 2003 so that I can free one up to hold them. That’s what I did tonight. I took everything from 2002 and 2003, threw out the irrelevant stuff, and indexed the rest. In the process, I was able to get a good glimpse of my life five years ago.

Tonight, I learned that hindsight is a dirty, dirty liar. Where most people boast of 20/20 hindsight, I can confidently say that pessimism ran up and poked mine in the eyes with a very sharp stick. Well, I finally managed to strap some coke bottle glasses onto my hindsight, and here’s what I learned:

• I don’t spend twice as much on gas as I did five years ago. I spend about the same. I just drive a bit less and have a more fuel efficient car.
• I don’t spend any more on groceries than I did five years ago. I buy some lower quality ingredients and much less meat, so the price works out to about the same.
• I’m no more senile than I was five years ago. I came across an entry where I described arriving at work to find that I’d left my keys home, still in the lock. I haven’t done anything that bad since then, except leave the kettle on a couple times. Don’t tell my insurance company.
• I’m much healthier than I was five years ago. Every three months or so, I was home with some kind of flu or debilitating cold, back then. Either my threshold for what I consider sickness has changed, or I’m in much better shape.

The lesson here isn’t that I’m in better shape than I thought, but that if I can spin the past without realizing it, then so can you. Keeping notes is a great way to zero your aim and let you travel to the past to clear up your misconceptions.

The title is from the movie Idiocracy, which I watched again over at a friend’s house tonight. Highly recommended.

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