Home

I had Tuesday off from work and the day couldn't have been more needed. There comes a point when you start to not just know that you have limits, but you see them and feel them. They stretch when you push against them like a thin rubber layer surrounding you. Over the last week or two I've been driving full force into them.

On Tuesday, I started to wonder if they would break. For all my efforts to reach out and make myself better I suddenly found myself feeling totally exposed. All of me seemed, in my eyes, to be on display for the world to see. Every decision, every fault, every part of my life that I haven't quite figured out what to do with yet.

In need of somewhere safe to go I turned to what has oddly become my comfort zone: travel. I went to Atlanta and explored the malls, but with the exception of a really awesome chair store there was nothing really worth note. Even the software in the apple store seemed oddly unappealing. It was late in the day when I headed to Rome. The open highway was nice and getting to surprise Scott was even better. That night I discovered a comfort zone that I didn't realize I had left at Berry, my friends. I knew they were there, but to sit down and to actually just be able to enjoy people's company without imposing on their time or having "something that we need to talk about" turned out to be something that I need.

Now, I've never been home sick, and you couldn't pay me enough to want to go back to school, but when I sat down and played a round of BS with Kaitlin, Scott and the others in Krannert it felt like home. I was more at home in that moment then I've probably been the whole time at home.

I guess the old adage is true when it says that it is the people who make the home.

I am still going to go out and stretch my boundaries, and knowing me I will eventually stretch them too far, but now I know where I feel at home.

My meditation room is behind the steering wheel.

My bedroom is wherever I may wake-up in peace.

My dining room is on a beat-up couch in a student center.

My home is wherever I am where I have friends that accept me as is and allow me to accept them for all that they are, and all that they can be.

I once told a man that I wanted to live a life without regrets. I still do. In the meantime though, it is good to know where home is.

Parallels...

Yesterday I was so sick that for most of the day speaking seemed like a luxury that I could not afford.  In the sleepless hours of the night, when I could not sleep for coughing and needing to blow my nose yet again,  my mind began to race over a hundred ideas that lay buried just beneath the surface of my consciousness on a normal day.  I know what I have to do, but a voice deep within seems to cry with the knowledge that the messenger is almost always the one who gets shot.

Is it any surprise that a night like that gave birth to a day like today, where suddenly I had no greater desire then to accomplish my insignificant projects that I still hope will build into something greater?  

Even recovering as I was, it seemed so worth while to stand in the heat of the blazing sun to hear the thoughts of a few people who I deeply respect, not because of what anyone says about them, but because of what no one can say about them.  It is strange to find that I miss hearing the thoughts of people who aren't afraid -- like I wish I wasn't afraid -- of what people think of them.  In their jokes and suggestions they seemed to justify all that I am aiming for right now.  They are not great people by most measures of greatness, but their lack of pretensions is refreshing.  

One more thing occurred to me last night.  A parallel between a speech made in Atlas Shrugged and a debate on tv about how the proposed health care plan would affect small businesses:

"This is the age of the common man, they tell us -- a title which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has managed not to achieve.  He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he well be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce.  But we -- we who who must atone for the guilt of ability -- we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward.  Since we have more to contribute, we will have the least to say."

Even as I reconsider the passage, I recall hearing a man who owned a company of no more then a hundred employees saying that businesses like his were not considered because he didn't have a lobbyist working for him.  These small businesses don't have men in Washington.  Just the representatives who they hoped would remember that these small employers "pay 44% of total U.S. private payroll" and "have generated 64% of net new jobs over the past 15 years."  I remember also how my dad sat and ranted yesterday about how Obama is doing this as someone with no understanding of the great crime he is attempting to commit because the man has never held a non-government job with the exception of a single professor's position in which he used  to mangle the constitution in front of classrooms full of students.

Is this the future that we were told to look forward to?  I cannot believe that this mockery he is making of the democratic process in a capitalist country will be allowed to go on.  I cannot believe that this is, and should be, the end result of years of "higher learning."  Such a thought seems inconceivable,  yet here we are with our paper degrees proud of what we know, while the philosophers sit on street corners and engineering minds flip burgers because they could not put up with the most terrible lie of all.  The lie that only those who never participate in any truly hard work within the material realm can believe with full conviction.  The lie that school, as it is now, is made to educate.  

Those columns that were once made of marble are plaster now, my friends.  The ivory halls are a facade, and unless you missed it, the gate of opportunity closed before we even arrived.  All these institutions seem capable of doing now is indoctrinating young people with flawed ideals and handing out those pieces of paper that undeniably prove that they can put up with whatever B.S. is thrown at them for at least 4 years.

Sorry for the tangent to education again though.  I guess it still irks me that I've learned more about business, health, finance, philosophy and psychology in my stolen moments away from "education" then I ever did in class.  (And to head of any comments on this last sentence, I read books like a fish drinks water when I'm not in school.)  I dunno...  I guess it works for some people... somehow...  We'll blame my A.D.D. that I don't understand how, at least for now.

What am I doing?

So, for all my talk about how I'm not at Berry this semester, I ended out deciding to make a visit on the first day of classes.  It was nice to see everybody again, even if half the people I saw thought I was still at Berry.  Ha ha.

In a way, I felt almost guilty knowing that I was there actually having fun while everybody else hurried to go to class, bought the overpriced books and came to the startling realization that their "fun class" had a 12 page syllabus.  I've been there, got the t-shirt, won't be going back.  

The unanimous questions among friends seem to be: Where have I been going this summer? And where am I going in the future?  

Big questions, and what can I say?  This summer I updated my blog about half as much as I did during the school year, but I still feel good about those posts that I did make.  I got a job with zero prestige, but I'll be making more this year then I was previously figuring on making with a degree.  (Money isn't the only consideration on the job though, presently the job is funding my artistic pursuits, and the funding is always low for such things.)  Besides that I've basically cooked a little and tried to catch-up with friends whenever possible.

So basically, I've been doing what I was trying to get away to do: I got away from the stresses of school for a while and sat down and asked myself some important questions.  What have I found?  Basically what I already knew more or less on some level anyway.  What I want to do with my life is make something beautiful that will change the world in a way that will help people to be better people.   Now, I just have to narrow that down from Milky Way sized to, oh I dunno, the size of Jupiter. 

I've been trying to figure out a direction, and while I still don't know where I'm going, I'm trying to do the next best thing and go with the decisions that feel right.  I have made some pretty good intuitive decisions in the past, and in the face of the one large generalization that I have about what I want to do with my life, intuition seems best.

So, what are my plans?  Short term, I'll continue to write, paint, cook, plan the wedding and get together with friends as often as possible.  Long term, I'll... do something that I can be proud of.  I just hope that I can meet my own high expectations of myself.  I am my own harshest critic and my own biggest fan.  As such, I refuse to do anything less then incredible with this short time that I have on this little blue, green planet.

"Be the change you wish to see in the world."  -Mahatma Gandhi

Why I'm not going back to Berry this semester

"You really need to think about going back to school soon," my uncle told me in his most serious voice today after lunch.  Funny, I don't think anyone realizes just how much they're asking when they suggest that I return to school.

Flash back to spring:  I'm packing up all my stuff in the dorm.  I run across a second doctor's prescription for anti-depressants.  It had never been filled and never would be.  I through it in the trash with a slight flash of a grin at what the school shrink would think if he knew what I did with all his prescriptions.

Things were going downhill fast at school.  I kept falling asleep in class as professors droned on about the same s*** that was taught in high school, and when I didn't fall asleep I just zoned out for the whole class time.  It wasn't even that I didn't care so much as I couldn't seem to find a reason to care about the constant review.

I wanted to do something, create something and see things, meet people, all that jazz.  I still do.  That is why, the night after I went swimming in the Ford fountains at 3 am, I decided that I was leaving college and wasn't coming back unless somebody gave me a damn good reason why college counts for then a piece of paper saying that you went to class, did the reading and managed not to sleep through the final.

3 months later I don't know what to do.  I have painted a few things, cooked a little, and even worked on my drawing skills, but nothing major has been accomplished.  I have simply satisfied the the minimum requirements for not getting kicked out of the house.  I am still looking for direction, but in the very least I know where I'm not going.  I am not going to endure another 2 years of mind numbing torture for a piece of paper.  

There is a better way, and I will find it.

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character. 

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Bzzzz...

Here are the results of my cake decorating class today.  

Not half bad for a first timer, huh?