He drove twenty miles every day to the university where he taught and twenty miles back every night, but he said he hated the twenty-mile drive and he hated the second-rate university and he hated the morons who attended it. He hated the country and he hated the life he lived; he hated living with his mother and his idiot brother and he hated hearing about the damn dairy and the damn help and the damn broken machinery. But in spite of all he said, he never made any move to leave. He talked about Paris and Rome, but he never went even to Atlanta.

-Flannery O'Connor, "Greenleaf"

I feel like I've met this person who is never happy with his situation but does nothing to change it, and I don't ever want this to be me. Life is too short to only talk about what I think would make me happy while suffering through what is making me unhappy. I want to make the best of every situation and know that if things are bad I can work to change them, while knowing change requires action.

It's fiction, but if ever a paragraph is written about my life I hope the author won't be able to use the word hate so frequently. That's something to strive for: cutting out the hate in my biography.