Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for February 11, 2025

The numbers I chose for MegaMillions.

And he’d probably end up with a whole new batch of regrets.

We all wish to undo certain things we had said or done, unfortunately no one can un ring that bell. it’s up to each of us to learn from our mistakes and grow.

Can you redo the future?

That’s a good one. At each stage of your life, it would probably be easy to answer. But here at the end of it all, it’s not so easy.

Bought all the Apple stock I could (a lot) when the Iphone came out.

Pig’s right though, for many people it’s an entire lifestyle that needs to be changed, so it’s difficult to single out one particular thing they might have done differently in the past.

Yay, Pig!

There is no Back button on life.

Friends, don’t fall into the trap of wishing you had turned left where you turned right. You know your current situation, warts and all. You can’t know how an alternate situation would have panned out, so it’s much too easy to imagine an unrealistic best-case scenario and to torture yourself for missing out on utopia when you did no such thing. All you’ll wind up doing is devaluing the blessings in your life.

cannot be more specific than that…

Just live the best you can for today, the past is the past, just learn by your past mistakes, and don’t repeat them!

Bad location for talking about Pig’s life.

That’s the GREAT thing about accepting, knowing, and loving Jesus. He accepts you just how you are. No do-overs necessary. And all your wanted do overs, (sins), are forgiven and forgotten. Yes, it’s that simple and easy.

“There are many parts of my youth that I’m not proud of. There were loose threads: untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But if I if I were to pull out one of those threads, it would unravel the tapestry of my life.” — paraphrasing Jean-Luc Picard

I hear you, Pig. Me as well. It’s good to have company.

You and me both, Pig.

Today’s strip has prompted some wonderful philosophy today. It’s only human nature to look back on our lives and wish we’d done things differently.

Until a time machine is invented, the past is the past. PUT IT TO BED, SMILE AND MOVE ON.

5 mgs of Certraline helps…

Be wary of the butterfly effect; one little change could drastically alter your life, and not necessarily for the better.

Why? What’s wrong with people. We hear this a lot. You’re living your life, likely learning as you go along like everybody else. Did you screw something up? Have a regret. If you know you messed up then you learned something, like most others. Stuff like that. Have a Dr. Pepper or a nice serving of Strawberries Arnaud.

Someone else made the point.

In stories, people go back to the past, change one little thing and come back to a completely different world. Meanwhile they don’t do anything to change their present.

Yes, Pig, but you would not know what had gone wrong the first time. Thus you would be likely to repeat it.

I look over my life and there are three specific points where I am convinced of the idea of multidimensionalism. In the first instance I am sure that I didn’t survive at all. I often wonder what other life lines proceeded from there.

And go through puberty… Again?

Yes pig, I’m with your :-D

And then, BLTs.

Can’t be more specific than that.

I’d redo the painful sports losses I’ve seen. Ugh…

Maturity does not necessarily come with age, it comes with knowledge and self-awareness – the ability to forgive ourselves, as well as others, and move forward with the determination to be better human beings.

I feel you Pig…

Break the habit of wishing for do-overs.

We’ve all made wrong turns in life but maybe we end up where we are supposed to be—IDK. A wise person once said to me: “You are where you are because you want to be, and don’t try to kid yourself”.

Relatable.

If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t do much of it.

not choking to death on my own vomit as a 15 year old has turned out to be a major error.

I’ve always thought it would be terrible to get a wish like that fulfilled, and then discover that you couldn’t change anything, or your attempts to avoid mistakes only made things worse, and you’d have all those years to live through like that.

♫ ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few, but too few to mention

I did what I had to do

And saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course

Each careful step along the byway

And more, much more than this

I did it my way’ ♪

The only regrets I have are two choices I made that went against my better judgement. Bringing home a car I loved and a dog always wanted. But all the rest, the good and bad outcomes, were decisions I made with all the knowledge and information I had at the time of decision. It was a good thing.

Huh. I’m good.

This is similar to the Aunty Acid strip today.

Poor Pig!

Skip the boring parts.

I’d like to redo a few other people’s lives.

We’ll take you as you are Pig, and Rat too. You give us a chuckle a day in this not so brave new world. Hang in there just for us.

I have some moments I’d like to do over, but I think overall it’s been a pretty good run… (regardless of what everyone else says! lol!)

To the time my friend brought two girls out of the teen club and asked which one I wanted (to go to a smooching location), I replied, “I’ll take that one,” and I’d ask for her name and phone number, instead of finding her address in the phone book (June, 1959). But we ended up dating, marrying, and together till that “Till death shall you part” clause. But I’m betting on the “life after death” promise.

I could definitely use a similar redo. Where’s a DeLorean when you need one?

I’d wish for do-overs in some other people’s lives which would have extended their lives

America would like to redo November 2024

Depends. Do you still have knowledge of what has happened so far in your life?

Reincarnation is my idea of Hell. It’s like failing a grueling mental and physical test and being told to go back to the start.

How do we know, the life we are living, is not due to someone else changing their past?

I wish I could have a do-over with what I know now. Perhaps that would be too much knowledge for a child, but it would be nice to go back and put my abuser in jail.

The trouble with life is that you are halfway through it before you realize it’s a “do it yourself” proposition.

For me it would it be hanging out with those wild girls that flashed, and mooned me outside my window at the pool outside of the apartments at like past 2 in the morning. This was back in summer 2002. I didn’t even start high school yet. They came by my window tried to holler at me. Like a coward I stayed in my bed and never opened the blinds to talk to them. I really regret not talking to those girls……

Feeling the way he does, Pig probably shouldn’t be standing so close to the edge of a cliff.

I remember when your avatar was a pic of Brandy.

Well, woulda, coulda, shoulda. Sounds like a recipe for unhappiness to me.