HOW TO QUIT CARING AND MOVE ON

If you quit caring about someone or something, how do you explain it to yourself, let alone anyone else?

You can’t just quit and leave it at that.

You need to explain it all in painful detail.

Or maybe that’s just me.

In this Olympic Year of 2024 there is no sport I wouldn’t quit.

Luckily I quit track and field in the seventh grade for being too slow to run and too weak to throw anything.

I did get faster and stronger, but I’d already moved on from running and heaving heavy things down the field.

No worries about baseball either.

I quit caring the summer of eighth grade; the Olympics quit on baseball this year, along with softball and karate.

 

Quitting is easy. Not so much for talking about it.

For me it was a matter of confidence.

I wasn’t sure how to react when a track race lasted so long it felt like death?

Maybe a coach had an idea, but Junior High coaches were more like, ‘Okay, go run.’

I became a hardcore runner in my twenties and early thirties.

I could run one mile under six minutes as long as I had a long downhill slope, and I found one.

My favorite race was the 15K Cascade Runoff.

One year the starting line was on the Burnside Bridge.

I clocked a fast first mile and had the running death feeling the rest of the way.

 

Like too many, I had running goals. One was to run a respectable marathon.

One marathon at age twenty-nine in 3:32 was enough.

One Hood To Coast at forty-nine was more than enough.

These days I plan on setting the bar for walking a mile in quick step so my kids will have something to shoot for when they’re sixty-nine.

You can quit caring about sports, but not that urge to set a personal record, the old PR.

 

No Quitting On Yourself Rules

Quitting on someone can be as easy as a text or email saying, “I’ve decided to opt out of this friendship.”

Opt out? That’s what they said. Opt out.

I still don’t know what it means.

What are we supposed to do with that? One way is saying, “Let me know when you opt back in.”

Then move on.

Or maybe it’s a phone call that went so far off track that you went mute.

Whether giving or receiving, don’t quit on yourself for handling things poorly.

You’re not the first and won’t be the last.

Don’t quit on yourself and condemn the rest of your waking hours to feeling blue.

Music can help.

 

Quitting a job is more than opting out.

We’ve heard the term ‘quiet quitting.’

 

Quiet quitting is a negative term aimed at workers who clock-in right on time, do exactly their job as listed in their contract, then clock out at exactly the right time.

This is being called the “bare minimum,” when it’s simply doing the job they applied for.

 

It’s ‘quiet quitting’ instead of keeping your options open, looking for opportunities, or surveying the field.

I’ve worked in places full of people who clocked in on time, did their work, clocked out and went home.

They spent their decades-long careers quiet quitting if we’re to believe the criteria.

But maybe they didn’t love their job as much as they thought they should, they weren’t the people of ‘if you love your work you’ll never have a bad day on the job’ kind of people.

Or maybe they were just lazy old farts listening to the retirement clock ticking louder and louder in their brains.

Your choice.

 

Once you quit caring about others, quit caring about getting things done, what’s next?

You either become an expert quitter and tell others how great it is, or you shut it down and no one ever hears from you again, which has an appeal if you happen to be a jackass who thinks they are good shit-talkers.

 

Who Should Shut It Down

I don’t like smart, smug, funny guys who take a turn for the serious on topics beyond them.

Who are they? Everyone who’s come out to say Biden should volunteer to quit the presidential ticket for 2024.

Why tell the press your feelings about Biden when you’ve no clue beyuont his hesitancy and drift?

If you’re a movie star with a huge social media platform with millions of followers, or a political analyst struggling for relevancy, why talk about Biden?

What are you telling us that we don’t already know?

They make the poor guy sound like Lenin.

 

In a two-man race the choices are one or the other, not one but only if he’s replaced.

I don’t need to pipe up for Biden.

All I need to know is he’s on the job, and if he’s slow, or tired, he’s got people on the job who know the drill.

Biden is a career man who might be slow quitting, but he’s not done.

Instead of taking cracks at him and his TV performance, why not talk about the other guy, the one who loves the camera so much he’s always ready.

This blog, boomerpdx, isn’t around to make lists about people with bad character, whether it’s education fraud, charity fraud, campaign fraud, or any of the nasty things he’s done with his wives, girlfriends, porn ladies, or lady columnists.

I don’t dip into the muckraking, but I’ll point you in the right direction.

One of the worst cups of coffee I’ve ever had came after my crew unloaded the archives of a prominent local pol who made it to the national scene.

He came undone after too many years of slurping on women in elevators after a few too many trips to the wine box.

We unloaded the Packwood Papers and for good will he insisted we all join him for a cup of coffee at the nearby Starbucks store.

The room noise changed when they saw who came in.

They all cut quick looks when we sat at the same table.

There was an association of guilt I’ve never felt before or since, and it’s probably me again, but the faces had a question that asked, “Are all of you in the Packwood School Of Dating?”

“Finally, he grabbed her; when she tried to kick him in the shins, he stood on her feet.

He grabbed her ponytail with his left hand, pulled her head back forcefully, and gave her a big wet kiss, with his tongue in her mouth.

She did not smell or taste any alcohol. With his right hand, he reached up under her skirt and grabbed the edge of her panty girdle and tried to pull it down.

She struggled, got away from him, and ran into the front office. He stalked out past her, paused at the threshold to the hallway, and told her, ‘If not today, someday,’ and left.”

 

How about not today, not someday, and go sort yourself out if this sounds like you, or someone you admire.

Packwood resigned before getting tossed out for his behavior.

No one cheered for Packwood when he said he was “aware of the dishonor that has befallen me in the last three years” and his “duty to resign.”

Treating people with less than common human dignity, along with cheating and lying, is not the Yellow Brick Road to follow.

The people who cheer for a candidate who embodies it all have dishonored themselves like Bob Packwood.

Don’t do that.

This isn’t a Biden problem.