	Bob Hostetler > Writing

How to Mess Up Your Life in 2007

by Bob Hostetler

The dawn of a new year presents us with an opportunity to look back, to look forward, even to start over. And newspapers and magazines at this time of year are filled with advice on how to lose weight, stop smoking, get a new job, turn over a new leaf, and all sorts of constructive, optimistic things.

But not all of us really want to improve our lives. Some people—if you read the paper or watch the news—apparently seem bent on royally messing their lives. Seriously, if you’ve been paying the least bit of attention to the news pages of our award-winning local newspaper, you would have to consider (perhaps even conclude) that some people set out to utterly mess up their lives, one way or the other.

So, taking a cue from those folks (and since pretty much anyone can offer a list of ways to improve your life), let us consider the following varied—but effective—ways to mess up your life, as chronicled (among others) in this past year’s pages of the Journal-News:

1. Lash out in rage. Take the case of the 27-year-old St. Clair Township man who allegedly strangled to death his 21-year-old live-in girlfriend. One young life, tragically taken. Another life, utterly ruined. Short work if you want to mess up your own life, as well as someone else’s.

2. Open a meth lab. Another sure-fire way to ruin your own life is to start your own meth lab, like the two Preble County natives who were nabbed by Oxford Police in 2006. The two had allegedly been cooking meth in a Scottish Inn room on College Corner Pike in Oxford. Whatever their future holds, little of it is likely to be good for a long time to come.

3. Mess with a minor. This is another nearly fail-safe tactic for ruining your life—especially if you’re a teacher! It happens every so often, most recently in the case of the Lakota East teacher who admitted to an inappropriate relationship with one of her male students. While her jail time was suspended (receiving a sentence of five years probation and 250 hours of community service), she surrendered her Ohio teaching license and perhaps, with it, her teaching career.

4. Send sexually explicit emails. That’s right, sending sexually explicit emails to a sweetheart…on a work computer…during work hours seems to be a fairly reliable way to mess up your life, at least for the near future. Especially if you’re the Chief of Police, who’s supposed to know better (as “at least one Trenton city council member” recently alleged).

5. Go naked. Granted, there are times and places when it’s appropriate to be naked. But let’s be clear: city government offices are not among those places, even in the wee hours of the morning. Even if you’re a Hamilton assistant prosecutor. Especially where surveillance cameras will record your every move. So make a note: walking naked through your workplace is (with just a few exceptions) a fair way to mess up your life, as one city official learned last September.

6. Use public funds to score some drugs. Buying illegal drugs is a nearly foolproof way to ruin your life, as is using them. But using a volunteer fire department credit card to exchange gas for drugs? That—as a former New Miami volunteer firefighter discovered just last month—is pretty much stacking the deck…against yourself.

7. Abandon, abuse, or kill a child. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But an amazing number of people every year seem to pursue such unavoidably tragic actions. In fact, approximately 8,000 cases of neglect and abuse are reported daily in our nation. And, on average, a child is murdered every single day in this country. Notable in 2006, of course, was the unspeakable tragedy of Marcus Fiesel, who was reportedly bound and left locked in a closet while his foster parents left town for the weekend…and returned to find him dead.

8. Try to cover up a crime. The horror of the Fiesel story didn’t end, of course, with the boy’s tragic death. Nor did it end with the foster parents’ alleged attempts to cover up their crime by gruesomely disposing of his small body. It didn’t work, of course. It seldom does. But when we start down a path that is virtually guaranteed to ruin lives—including our own—it becomes harder and harder to put on the brakes when things spin out of control.

The Hebrew Scriptures report that God told a man named Cain way back in the early days of human existence, “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4:7). Whatever else you may do in 2007, please let the tragic news stories of 2006 comprise a cautionary tale. Keep the door shut, not only to these eight ways, but to all such opportunities to mess up your life…and anyone else’s.

This article appeared in the Hamilton Journal-News.

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