19 02, 14 01:37 Filed under:
LifeI remember when the road to Hell was barely a rough track, primarily paved with the odd good intention. Today, thanks to social media, the road’s more like an eight lane beltway, endlessly circling a burgeoning metropolis. You see, social media has given good intentions unprecedented reach. What was once no more than an occasional wink and nudge has become a continuous, unblinking stare and a disturbingly hard shove. The infrequent, useful ping has become an unrelenting HellPing, good advice morphed into a nasty vice, with advertisements attached. Slip over here for more ...Tags: Living, Working, Manifesting, BriefConsulting
16 02, 14 04:37 Filed under:
JustVisitingI’ve been fortunate to visit several different countries and to live for short periods within different cultures. No master of my native tongue, I made no attempt to master the daily life phrases guide books phonetically describe, but relied instead upon what I labeled the point and click method, as if I were an enterprising two year old and the locals benevolent interpreters. We’d triangulate toward a rough understanding, language being only one of a wide variety of methods for comprehending. This technique turned out to be a humbling tactic, inhibiting most every pretense, and a gratefully humanizing one.Had I stayed longer, I suppose verbal language might have emerged. Just visiting, I could at best observe and rather crudely adapt. Still, I managed to feed, transport, and house myself, albeit with a considerable measure of help from my new, temporary friends. I was, after all, a foreigner.
Slip over here for more ...Tags: Writing, Working, Manifesting
15 02, 14 05:40 Filed under:
JustVisitingI should be no stranger to being the stranger by now. I’ve spent much of my life shuttling between here and there, sometimes including somewhere else entirely. My normal state seems surrounded by strangers which I suppose qualifies me as a stranger in even most of my neighbors’ eyes. Curiously, it doesn’t feel terribly strange to me to feel like a stranger.The first twenty or so years of my life was just the opposite, I knew many of the people I came in contact with, and they knew me. This might have been simply the result of growing up in a small city, living in the same house in the same neighborhood, never having to change schools. Understandably, I calibrated myself to recognize this state as normal, and that it must be somehow strange to be a stranger. That innocent level setting guaranteed that my next four decades would find me in exile, displaced, a stranger to almost everyone around me.
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02 01, 14 13:35 Filed under:
ChristmasOn the NinthDay of Christmas my family gave me some Christmas attitude.
I should have at least suspected, but I didn’t learn until nearly the end of the boyz’ visit that both were accomplished soloists. They’d given little hints of their musical abilities, but they’d been cloaked and clandestine. The last night, though, as we were finishing supper, The Muse explained that since I hadn’t pulled out the guitar during the whole visit, there would be some music that night. Slip over here for more ...
Tags: Writing, Working, Christmas, Manifesting
01 01, 14 14:57 Filed under:
ChristmasOn the Eighth Day of Christmas, The Muse gave me a day with my nephew. Before he arrived, we’d planned to have many long rambling conversations after he arrived, but with the rug rats roiling around the ankles, we’d barely managed well-intended mumbles between wrestling one or the other of them into rough acquiescence. I’d mentioned visiting Arlington National Cemetery with the boyz, but The Muse insisted we leave them ruffians behind. She’d keep them engaged with a game of Monotony (you might recognize it by its registered trademark ‘Monopoly’) and by making a big batch of anise candy. (Yes, the boyz quickly perverted the candy name into ‘anus’; snicker, snicker. ... Boyz.)
The purpose of this excursion was not to visit the cemetery, but to provide a premise for some unencumbered conversation. The barriers to unencumbered conversation seem legion, and only some decent distractions ever provide the context necessary for it to emerge. Slip over here for more ...
Tags: Writing, Working, Manifesting, Christmas
31 12, 13 21:13 Filed under:
ChristmasOn the Seventh Day of Christmas, I chose to offer a choice. My nephew was showing some of the strain of single parenthood, and while he’d promised to escort the boyz to see an Egyptian exhibit and one of the Mall museums, I offered him a day off instead. “Just wander around the town,” I suggested. “The boyz won’t mind.”
Fact was, I figured everyone would be better off if bedraggled dad wasn’t expected to yet again wrangle them kids through another wildly distracting situation. I could apply some of my strategic inattention, which wouldn’t disturb the young ‘uns a lick. He’d have to be on call throughout if he went, and he looked frazzled. Gratefully, he jumped at the chance. Slip over here for more ...
Tags: Living, Writing, Working, Manifesting, Christmas
28 12, 13 13:15 Filed under:
ChristmasOn the fourth day of Christmas my nephew’s boyz brought me one first class, life-affirming conspiracy.
I prefer the company of kids. Not because kids are so sweet. Perhaps because they are just as capable of meanness as kindness. They are, to an individual, every one of them, a pirate until acculturated. After that, they’re a bit worse. Slip over here for more ...
Tags: Writing, Living, Manifesting, Working
22 12, 13 05:24 Filed under:
HomeboundBound might have more meanings than any respectable word should. Like many English words, it means its own opposite, but also its own orthogonal: captive and moving, an abrupt movement, a continuing one, also no movement at all. It bounds, bound and determined to be bound no longer. (Could I be bound and NOT determined, too?)
Home-bound holds every ounce of bound’s ambiguity. Was I heading home or stuck there? Maybe I was simply leaping towards? Perhaps all of these simultaneously. Slip over here for more ...
Tags: Living, Working, Manifesting, Writing
31 07, 13 03:53 Filed under:
OrdinaryTimesThe Christian liturgical calendar classifies most of the year as ordinary time. Between Christmas and Easter, then again between Easter and Advent, many lesser holidays fall, but none qualify as extraordinary. The Greeks distinguished between festal and ferial times, formal feasting days and times when supper involves ferreting around in the back of the fridge to find whatever’s threatening to go bad. For both Christians and Ancient Greeks, most of their year featured ferreting around.
Perhaps we should celebrate ferreting. Not with parades and fireworks, but with whatever’s at hand. Could we celebrate the daily routine and thereby elevate mere existence into the realm of, if not pomp, at least some decent circumstance? I believe I could and I think I should. Slip over here for more ...
Tags: Writing, Living, Working
