I'm late, I'm late! By about 20 years....:)

The next ten years of my life require a real Buddha palm smackdown. I can't go back in the past and tell my younger self "Stop right there! You will get financial independence and be successful before you do ANY thing else."

I didn't care about money and power when I was young.  I wanted to be a writer who was also a good-natured college professor who was there to say, hey, crappy things happen, but we still have art, poetry, beauty, love, too.

 I would certainly get my own business while working on being a damn successful writer.

That way, if writing didn't work out, I'd have my business and keep creating wealth and infusing my community.
I've been trying a new time management schedule to do all the things I want to do.

I try to schedule an hour for writing (fiction, poetry etc) an hour for research, an hour on volunteer/internship work, and then I spend about two hours looking for and applying for jobs. I play with the kids.  I try to go for a run for one hour in the morning and at least half an hour in the evening.

 It is really hard for me to pull myself off one task when I'm "in the zone" and focus on another one.  Especially when I'm writing something I really like and I think it's good. Some part of me just wants to spend all my time writing.  I've been thinking maybe that would be the better investment. I haven't even gotten the Princeton Review for grad school yet! That's next. I want to be ready to take the GRE in fall and apply for grad school in winter.

“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.” Tom Robbins

When my dad asks me what I think Kim Kardashian named her baby, and proceeds to tell me, laughing, and my daughter says "They don't come up with very good names for kids" and everyone is so excited about well, things I think are stupid, despite my new anthropological training, I still have an overwhelming desire to run and hide in books.

I saw everyone getting excited about Pearl Jam touring in concert on Facebook this morning.

I liked Kurt Cobain.

I never liked Pearl Jam.

In high school, I thought those kids complaining about the world, and who were "liberal" and listened to Pearl Jam to be rebels, the ones with 4.0 GPAs and valedictorian, who came from well-to-do families, I just had to hold my piece and what I really thought about most of them all of the time. I still do, essentially.

I remember why I want to be a writer. Somewhere to put my imagination and entertain people. And be private while very public in other ways. This lifestyle is immensely attractive to me.

 I feel an imminent sense of a Vogon Ship on the horizon at those moments, when I feel humanity reaches new heights of stupidity, I think.  I have to hide until the feeling passes that the rest of the universe already knows a lot of the human race is idiotic.

There have been articles about transmission of our TV waves into outerspace. This means, for all intents and purposes aliens have seen humans at their most naked. Do I just embrace my own idiocy? I suppose, I have to own it.


Easier said than done for an introverted quiet kid with a large imagination who didn't bother to study and slid by in most of my classes in high school. I tried to come out of my shell and just enjoy the world's absurdity, to discipline myself in the studies of "Erleichda."

 My imagination often made more sense then the so-called real world.  It took about twenty years to come out of my shell.  I still have those feelings of wanting to hide and build my own spaceship, but for now, earth's all I've got. So, I've got to make the best of it. Ultimately, when I hyperventilate over an inanity of humanity,  I immerse myself in art and history and find beauty  and I come back feeling all right. Other people have their addictions, mine is thinking.

I really would prefer to continue to my education in Medieval Art History. I don't want to ever hear Pearl Jam again if i can help it, but I do like "Red Solo Cup." I do take a lot of pleasure in listening to  Jordi Savall.

I think I found the balance in part, thanks to writers like Tom Robbins, but mostly thanks to my own love like many people like me, of simple, delicious things in life, like a good taco and a beer. They seem so simple, but in fact, making a taco and a beer is a very complicated and intricate process.

Happy Fourth Of July -- some thoughts on the freedom of our children

Reading Encyclopedia Brown and other classics like the Ramona books with my kids, or watching ET,  the Goonies or the Navigators with them, I realize the biggest factor separating my generation from the ones after is NOT technology. It is, quite literally, the independence and freedom my generation was arguably the last to have as kids. You don't see kids now all over neighborhoods freely playing and constructing tree forts or going to the grocery stores on errands for family, playing alone in a park without an adult, let alone bicycling miles by themselves around town. My daughter, at nine is ready for so much more when it comes to participating in the community then there is opportunity available to her, in volunteering, or otherwise than there was for me at the same age.  Her options are severely limited to Girl Scouts. If we don't give kids responsibility and place in the community how are they supposed to grow into "mature responsible" adults who participate in the community? When I say community I refer to it in the broad, local and world sense. In the context of today's world, it is essential for children to learn who they are as a local and global citizen.

If we want children to take the initiative and be good leaders who can creatively and practically solve problems, there are things they need to learn by interacting independently on their own that they simply cannot learn otherwise.

That being said, we had a great Fourth of July. We celebrated watching the fireworks at the local middle school where they put on quite show. Since fireworks are legal in the county where I live, there were plenty of fireworks to be seen before and after the main extravaganza. It was not hard to imagine the fireworks hundreds of years ago and feel they answered a call to celebrate freedoms hard won.