A boat, some tar, and a few words

Business Statistics and Business Operations should be my primary focus, only they aren't. I can't seem to motivate myself to tackle them. I am stuck. Stuck between the drive to finish and the desire to stay here. Stuck is a place I've been a long time in my life. Not sure what the next move will be, hoping for inspiration but also knowing if it comes there is a good possibility I will let it slip away. For a while I was able to use a job to distract me and then a relationship, and well now I have neither so I'm really stuck. Like the Brer Rabbit with the Tar Baby, the more I try to change the more things stay the same and I get even more stuck in the process.

I say I want to be a teacher then I watch the show Teach with Tony Danza and see how miserable the job looks. How the heck could I teach anyone? And if I'm a teacher what does that say about our educators? I certainly haven't learned anything myself to be a teacher for others. I am barely making it through this thing called life as it is. I am pretty sure I no longer have the stomach for banking, at least in its current form which has become more of a sweat shop than a respected industry. Gone are the days when there was dignity to the profession. I think I need a job where I can respect myself in the morning. Of course, a job period would be nice. It is hard to accept being a full-time student at 33, when I have worked my entire life. I just can't wrap my head around it.

My ex-girlfriend's sister's wedding was yesterday. I was supposed to go on that trip to Boston with her and her family so that was a weird feeling and maybe why I was in such a bad mood yesterday. I don't know, it's been several months and I guess this is supposed to get easier, but it doesn't. I guess I'm eventually supposed to feel better, but I don't. I'm not doing really well in this game of life lately. I wish I could get sent back to the minor leagues and improve my game and come back up when I'm ready. I'm not sure where to start though.



Statue of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona

Today is Columbus Day and whatever you feel about the man personally, and over the last several years his image is taking a beating, he was a great explorer. He may have been a horrible human being, but his accomplishments in exploration can't be forgotten. He did not discover North America, the Vikings did that in 1100, but he did set sail and land in the Caribbean. He bravely took a ship overseas when the chances of survival were not always guaranteed. It took over two months of sailing to reach landfall in 1492. While I travelled Europe I saw the statue of Columbus in Barcelona. It shows him looking out into the sea, even though he departed on his journey from southern Spain. He did however stop over in the Canary Islands as did we, so I feel like I almost joined in the journey, except that I was in a plane flying overhead 520 years after the fact.

Even knowing the atrocities of his actions we still must admire the boldness of his journey. He may have believed he discovered Eden or thought he was closer to China then he really was, but he took a voyage most men would never dare. Whether his discoveries deserve a national holiday is not the issue, it is his courage to undertake it that we have to appreciate. I'm envious of the time when such journeys meant something and wonder what there is left to discover now. It seems the journeys are either in outer space or in our head space that we have to look forward to. Personal discoveries within ourselves, but what if we discover that what is up there isn't as grand as we once believed. What if the genius we thought we had inside of us is merely some island south of North America. What if there is no Eden, and it's just tar.

A million miles a minute

Ever feel like you've got too much going on in your head? Last night I watched the Giants and Tiny Tim Lincecum throw darting fastballs and wicked and nasty sliders to the Braves hitters sending them flailing into the ground. Lincecum looks like a cartoon character out there with his long hair and wild moves on the mound. With the orange towels waving in the stands and the ineptitude of the Atlanta hitters, looking more like Wiley Coyotes trying to catch the Roadrunner than Braves trying to hit a pitch, I wasn't sure if I was watching the Cartoon Network or TBS. I was half waiting for Lincecum to pull a Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and just peel off his disguise revealing a animated version of himself in the 9th inning. Oh...now I get it. I thought I heard he was dating Jessica Rabbit.

Hypocrisy annoys me. Hence all politicians and politics in general. I grew up a staunch conservative and even listened to my Dad's daily dosage of Rush Limbaugh growing up. I grew up in a middle class household and while my parent's were never the bold in your face type of Republicans we definitely held firm in our beliefs and some of them are still etched inside of me to this day. My frustrations with public services being at an all-time high now I can't imagine the train wreck we are about to encounter with this nation wide health care plan. Long story short though, eight years of life in Seattle as a social outcast for my belief system and I have found more middle ground. I see both sides of issues. I am neither right nor left. I would never define myself to a party so blindly and sitting in the middle now allows me to see how absolutely ridiculous both parties and the entire process is. It is agonizing to listen to each side pick apart the other without discussions on issues. The two party system is a joke. We used to have real choices early in our democracy and somehow we are now stuck with two. The problem is if a third party candidate actually stuns the country and wins they will get nothing done in a Congress and Senate full of the other two. It would just be an antagonizing stale mate until one of the two parties regroups and "redefines" their message and we vote one of them in again.

I am annoyed at how blindly some follow their ideologies. As if they have been brainwashed into believing that Republicans are bad and Democrats are good or vice versa. It's really juvenile. Did we grow up or are we still living in a playground in 3rd grade? Yes there are bad apples in both parties and bad policies but both parties are so alike I don't even understand where all the vitriol comes from. It seems to come from special interest groups that fan the flames with advertisements or stories that support their beliefs and distort the beliefs of their opponent. This has been going on since our political system began but we just see it more with the Internet and 1000 channels of television. In the old days there would just be newspapers spreading their propaganda in support of their candidates. Now if I search for a story online I get sent a thousand links to different pages of propaganda. What is real and what isn't is really irrelevant, it's online. Journalistic integrity and libel aren't even really factors online because they aren't held to those standards. So who know what is real, imagined, or just someone's personal views anymore. When the newspaper became something we burned in our fireplaces instead of what we waited for each morning with our cup of coffee then we lost credibility. Now anyone can, and does, create their own news. As isolated as we are now with online, we've become even more isolated because we can just surf our own beliefs 24 hours a day, never seeing the other side, never deepening our argument. We just rehash the same tired propaganda and talking points.

The art of character assassination should be a class taught in college. It seems that is the number one way to win an argument now. Don't like their policy, dig up dirt and destroy them. Show the world that their word mean nothing because of their alleged actions. Both parties are 100% culpable. We can say who started it and who does it more, that's all irrelevant too. It's simply trying to frame the argument to justify their actions. It's not debating anything of value by saying one guy did it first. No one wins when we do this.

Relationships now are becoming about spin control. With Facebook we are so interconnected between each other's friends that break ups are right out in the open. Essentially Facebook has created a new cycle of break up grief: 1) Frustrated posts of problems...2) Changing of relationship status...3) Deleting couple pics from photos...4) Posting of sadness or happiness (depends on the breaker upper and the dumped party...5) Condolences from friends...6) Positive quote postings..and finally 7) Starting your own blog!

Sports, politics, relationships, no religion today. I guess that is unless you count Facebook as a religion, so then I've covered all the bases. Thanks for playing.

What rules?

Can we separate our business dealings from our personal morals? Are business ethics merely an inconvenience? Are they generational? Do the ethics of our parent's generation, or my generation, even matter to the next one? Or are we all just re-writing the rules as we go along? What's acceptable? What line can be blurred and what line was boldly crossed without even an ounce of regret?

Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality — that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice, etc.

Business ethics (also known as Corporate ethics) is a form of applied ethics or professional ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that arise in a business environment. It applies to all aspects of business conduct and is relevant to the conduct of individuals and business organizations as a whole. Applied ethics is a field of ethics that deals with ethical questions in many fields such as medical, technical, legal and business ethics.

Do these concepts merge? Do we have a responsibility to deal ethically in our business dealings as we do in our personal lives? If we know something is not truthful but our employer encourages us to press onward do we not share the blame if we are willing or unwilling accomplices? We still complied and lied. It doesn't matter who enforced it. To say that this is just the way the world works seems like a cop out. Have we accepted that this is the only way?

Today I sat in a classroom of business students and was stunned by a general disregard for ethics. The prevailing wisdom of the group was that if a consumer didn't complain or bring up the issue directly then there was no moral responsibility to disclose anything. Even if that anything could be cancerous and cause death. It was as if I sat in the room with future tobacco executives, circa 1950. And yet there is a serious detachment from morals and business that I believe my generation and the one behind me is sorely missing. The Internet has taken our souls. The television has given us the impression that it is ok to lie, cheat, and steal your way to the top as long as it is covert and you are smiling while doing it. Isn't this the premise of the show Survivor and Big Brother? Form alliances, and con your way to the top? It is also the premise to many other shows. The most conniving and convincing wins. It's good television, and what's good for tv must be good for the real world. This is our new business model.

I can't comment much about the new movie The Social Network because I haven't yet seen it, but from reviews it sounds like the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg, took someone else's idea and muscled out a co-founder, fellow friend and financier in the process. Yet to many in today's generation that is merely good business. It made him billions right? There is no moral dilemma here when it involves making money, but to what end?

I think the issue for a lot of younger people hearing about morals and ethics is that they believe someone is preaching to them about religion. We live in a day and age where we can research anything we want to ourselves. We don't need someone pushing their ideals upon us. Who are they anyways? The role model becomes the one who is successful not the one who is condemning the one who is successful. They are just envious. They didn't have the drive themselves. In order to be successful we have to bend the rules a little, or a lot, and who's rules were they anyways? They were written ten years ago. We live in a different age and the Internet has changed everything. There are new rules. Oh wait, there aren't. They are the same rules, just shorter attention spans, and less desire to follow them.

I'm guilty of it. I blurred the line in my job before. I tight roped the line of ethical and unethical. I turned the black and white a beautiful shade of gray. There were days when I did things I wasn't proud of. I justified my decisions for doing so by the fact that everyone was doing it and more blatantly. I was "more" ethical and  still completely unethical. Yet in my mind I wasn't doing anything wrong. I justified it by comparing myself to someone that was far worse off. I can't be that bad...I didn't shoot anyone. We can push that boundary further and further out. If we know it's wrong, it's wrong. It doesn't matter how we spin it. But in life we have to do this sometimes right?

If anything this re-shifting of our economy should wake us up to the decisions that led to it. I worked in some industries that are responsible and saw this thing coming like a freight train in 2005. It was inevitable, but I needed a paycheck. I wasn't the culpable party because I was just an order taker. I didn't directly sell to anyone, but I knew it was dirty. It was like driving the car for a drug dealer. You know he's dealing, just because you aren't doesn't mean you aren't guilty too. A lot of smarter men then me should carry more of the guilt but they cashed out already. Maybe they wrote the new rules.

She stood next to the freeway

The wind blew against my sun soaked face as I absorbed it and the scenery around me driving in a convertible on the south side of the island of Maui. I'm not sure what heaven is, but this was as close to it as I could get. On my left was the Pacific Ocean crashing against the white sand beaches in a rhythmic pattern set almost to the music from my stereo and on my right the lush green mountains and sugar cane fields. All that was missing to this epic ride along the coast was that dream girl sitting next to me. As I pulled from one tiny beach city into the next there she stood. This gorgeous light brunette vision hitch hiking, waiting to hop into my passenger seat, to take this incredible Hawaii vacation to another level, and I drove right by. I didn't stop and it took about five minutes of intense dialogue with myself before I turned the car back around to go get her, but when I pulled back by she was gone.

In life we get many chances, some of them we take, and some we drive right by. Who knows what would have happened if I had stopped and picked her up. Perhaps she would have just told me to drop her off in the next city. Maybe she would have chopped me up like The Hitcher. Or she could have said, keep driving, and we'll just see where the road takes us. That was what I contemplated the rest of that drive. One more opportunity lost. Natural instinct told me not to pull over for hitch hikers, and yet that natural instinct never included beautiful goddess-like women waiting for a ride. No idea why I didn't stop immediately. Fear maybe. Fear of the unknown and fear of rejection. Maybe she would have looked at me and laughed and said "yeah right buddy, have a nice drive I'll wait for the next car." The truth is she would have probably gotten in the car and I would have had an even better memory than driving past her.

How often in life do we make like that drive in Maui? Do we drive past something and look back in regret and pull around only to find it is too late? Maybe we try to replicate something we lost only to find it is nowhere near what we were missing in the first place? There are many things we hold onto for nostalgia. Maybe it is an old love letter, pictures of an ex-flame, or old baseball cards from our youth. Something we hide or hold dear but if replicated actually diminish the value of our memories. It's never the same when we reconnect with an ex-flame. Life changes us and also changes them. Our perceptions are altered and maybe we held them to higher acclaim in our memories than they could even possibly live up to. We link them to a time in our life that is long gone and can never be reclaimed. This person won't give us time back. They will only reflect ourselves in how much time has passed.

This works in sports too. I know that my favorite baseball team the S.F. Giants just won the National League West and are in the playoffs. I was ecstatic that they won, but not as much as when I was younger. I remember that in 1989 when the Giants made it all the way to the World Series I was enamored with them. I would listen to every ball game that season on the radio. Hank Greenburg was the announcer and I would listen to the games sitting in my bedroom with all my baseball cards laying on the floor. Each Giants batter that would come to the plate and I'd hold their baseball card as if they were playing on the field in front of me. I would live and die with each game. When Will Clark or Kevin Mitchell came to the plate it would take the Jaws of Life to pry me away from the radio. In fact I can still see Clark's majestic swing in the NLCS series against the Chicago Cubs smashing a grand slam over Wrigley Field. He was electric that series, and yet I know my youth played a huge role in how I remember things. When the games ended on KNBR 680 I would listen to Ralph Barbieri's show afterwards and his final words after each broadcast: "Remember Angels fly because they take themselves lightly." To me at 12 it was the coolest sign off ever, yet in hindsight it wasn't that cool at all. In fact it was taken from someone else and why is he talking about the Angels?



Will "the Thrill" Clark

 I would remember how great a player was in my mind and yet looking back at their actual stats for those same years would see that they were merely mediocre players at best. They weren't dominant. They were good. As a child we believe our favorite athletes can do no wrong, but as adults we are seasoned enough to know they are merely human and full of flaws themselves, including terrible performances. Before the awfulness of Barry Zito the Giants had another awful left handed pitcher in Atlee Hammacker. Sports still bring out our childish whims though. While the Giants struggled to finally win their division I resorted to that 12 year old boy pouting and ready to rip up all my baseball cards. I texted my good friend and fellow Giants fan and moaned how I didn't care about the Giants anyways. I said that they never put food on my table. They are just over priced athletes who don't care about us, but of course I jumped right back on the wagon once they finally won.

It makes me wonder how many of us are aspiring to unrealistic goals. Perhaps it is a goal we set as a child that in hindsight has no way of being accomplished or appreciated by our adult selves. Perhaps it is a life we are now living that we thought would bring us fulfillment but is not. We do most of our dreaming in our childhoods. Most of our goals and dreams are formed long before we go through a school system and maturity process which seems to diminish what we once longed for. I guess we all can't be astronauts or movie stars. We are not all going to be the next Hemingway or Mozart. There can only be one Bruce Lee right? I know that my goal was never to be a banker or to sell products and services that I didn't make or create myself. I guess I don't have to worry about that one anymore, their goal now seems to not have me doing that! But, even in school a business degree feels to me that I am doing this for back up purposes. I am not an accountant nor the next corporate raider that is going to make a killing on Wall Street. I don't have Mark Zuckerburg's brain and will not revolutionize the Internet. I would love to have the talent of Charlie Kaufman or the talent and drive of Stephen King. I'm always amazed at how many novels these writers can churn out and what it even takes to write one. Yet here these guys get a new one to print every two years if not sooner.

Life is the road we travel. It can be on a highway along the coast in Maui or some dirt road in the middle of Modesto. It doesn't matter where it is as long as we know where it is going. Are our dreams realistic or not? Do we have the capability to accomplish them or are we just holding on to a far ago memory? Do we even want it anymore? What kind of life are you living and what can you do to improve it or maintain it? I can't go back and pick up that woman who was hitch hiking on that amazing day 6 years ago. That moment is long gone, but I don't have to drive through life blindly anymore. I can stop and start over. I can change directions and appreciate the scenery while doing so. I just need to get my head out of the clouds, out of yesterday, and into October 2010 and beyond. It's good to hold the past to remind us but we need the present and the future to drive us. Where is it taking you?

What's so social about this?

The other day I watched the film Teenage Paparazzo that came out on HBO starring Adrian Grenier about our fascination with celebrities and the illusion of being famous. It was about a young 14 year old boy who is a paparazzi and who Adrian turned the camera around on to educate on the perils of the spotlight and the unforgiving flashes of the cameras. We see this boy become consumed in his own celebrity and the attention it yields. His mom becomes an enabler just like the parents of so many other young stars and gives in to his whims. Adrian soon realizes the errors of his ways in his own project and that he simply is feeding the same beast that he abhors: everyone's fascination with fame and our seemingly train-wreck watching culture.

Here we are now and news is that an 18 year old college student killed himself because his roommate secretly videotaped him having sex with another man. Not only did he film the encounter, but he aired in on a streaming webcast. This comes a few months after another young girl took her own life when she was harassed online by other bullies. The social media can bring friends together and it can also tear lives apart. It can make people unwitting stars in videos that were never authorized or permitted to share in the first place. This new media gives access to demented individuals who thrive on hurting others and a wider audience at that.

It's hypocritical of the major news media to start harping on the online media channels now, but it will be coming. You will hear from CNN, ABC News, and Fox about the cruelty of the Internet. How the web has spawned this gonzo journalism culture and that people now have too much access to hurt others. The news media for decades has fed on sensational journalism to sell their advertising. They need ratings and train wrecks sell. They will expose the frailties of Facebook and Twitter, Skype and Youtube as they aspire for the next natural disaster to send their camera crew to. This isn't so much about the tools that the Internet provides, it's about how we choose to use them. The problem today with a lot of the younger generation is they are using them for social status but gaining nothing emotionally. They are surface builders, but feed nothing underneath. We look at pretty pictures, or are dazzled by funny videos, our lives becoming a music video.

The social media sites and Internet in general is used solely for most as a distraction, rather than a tool. That is not the fault of the providers. This is the same argument for gun control. You can't blame the manufacturers. You can blame the sellers if precautions weren't made, but guns are going to be here. It's what we do with them, it's what we do online. You can't limit free speech but we can prosecute crimes of Internet bullying, and Internet harassment. It's a different culture, and it came at us quickly. There is not the same protection and security that we had even a decade ago. The faster technology moves, the more quickly predators and criminals move through it. It's simply like adding more water and pressure to a water slide. Our policing can't keep up and are simply in a reactive mode and yet if they become proactive we will cry out that it violates our privacy. It's both. It's complicated.

Is technology good? Could I survive without a touchscreen smart cell phone? Could I live without Facebook and even this Blogspot? A Mead notebook worked just as fine before, but only I read my thoughts and opinions. Now I can broadcast them for all to read and view. Sometimes I feel I expose too much and I wonder if I do it for attention. Was it necessary to share that? Was that just vindictive? The platform we are given online is global. Anyone can surf for this stuff and even if you delete it, it may already be too late. What value am I truly providing on here? Is it better to hold a Kindle in your hands and have access to hundreds of books, or do you lose the value of actually holding a book in your hands and reading it? Don't we stare at computer screens enough in our lives? Isn't the smell of an old classic book or the feel of turning a page more satisfying? I don't know.

Free falling is anything but free

I kneeled in the plane overlooking the open world below me. I heard the snap of the buckle attaching me to the instructor with the parachute on his back. While I knew he was behind me, and as I assumed he didn't want his life to end on this day, I couldn't see him and could only hope that it was tightly fastened.The crammed airplane seemed to sputter in the air and its slow ascent in elevation seemed to turn a rambunctious crew of passengers into silently praying ones. If the intention was to put us in the most frighteningly small and ancient aircraft to inspire our bold descent out of it, it worked. I was desperate to jump.

In 2002 I was determined to go skydiving out of a plane. It was a late summer, or early fall, day in Snohomish, WA. I successfully gathered a crew of co-workers and friends at the time and orchestrated a trip I was determined would be life changing. I had been thinking about jumping for a long time, ever since my first love and high school girlfriend had told me of her tandem jump soon after our final break up some years earlier. It seemed to one-up me. Not only was she moving on to a new boyfriend back in CA while I was miserable in cold and rainy southern Oregon, but she was also pushing the envelope and expanding her horizons. She was the brave one. Here it was years later and I was determined to even the score.

What is it about break ups that inspire us to change our ways? Why do we do the things we wish we had done when we were in the relationship to begin with? This girlfriend was always so safe and passive, for her to jump out of a plane was completely out of character for her. While she was coping with our break and floating in the sky I was wallowing in my poor decisions. I seem to have the wallowing thing down. I've had my heart broken twice in my life. She was the first to do so. I even google stalked her a few years later after I moved to Seattle. She got married to the guy she started dating after me. Her life turned out exactly the way she used to talk about when we were together. She became a school teacher, he was a banker, she lived in San Luis Obispo. I'm sure they had a white picket fence and two kids. I'm not sure if I missed her so much as I envied her commitment to her life goals, and how she seemed to fulfill all of them. I was just a revolving part in her plan. Once I was no longer in the picture she just found someone else for the role. She was a director and myself just an actor in her life feature film. I also feel like I didn't fit the required bill for my last girlfriend as well. Maybe that is just my own insecurities talking, but I feel as though I didn't make the final cut. Perhaps the next guy auditioning will be the one that fills that role.

There is a feeling of complete emptiness as I fell from the sky. It was not life flashing before my eyes so much as my face getting pulled back by the g-force of me falling into the earth. My head cleared as I dropped. There was no time to think, just be, just fall. In the air there is nothing holding you up, there is nothing to hold on to. There is no balance. You fall, and fall, and fall...and then when you feel like you can continue falling forever the chord is pulled and you stop falling. Your heart is pounding so hard in your chest and your smile from the rush so intense that the world you peer down upon does look different. Your eyes see things differently. The colors more vivid. The air crisper, more invigorating. What I carried into that plane and into the sky now gone, replaced with gratitude, amazement, and wonder. Those were the same feelings I had climbing the summit at Havasupai.

I know that life has a plan for me, I still don't know what it is. I know that I'm unable to grasp the concept of fulfillment when I'm not sure what it is that will fulfill me. I do realize though that life can not be a free fall from a plane. That is an escape. It is a rush that can be revisited but it cannot be a lifestyle. Otherwise I will just rob banks, surf, and jump out of planes with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves like in Point Break; I'll wear the Obama mask. No, life has to have balance and something to grab on to. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to make sense to everyone. It doesn't need to be so damn structured and planned. And if this life of mine so far was planned then I'm a sick puppy. Obviously we control some aspects of our lives but we can not control them all. We just adjust and make do and overcome obstacles and keep a positive outlook on life. In the end it is not the possessions that we remember in our final breath but the life we saw unfold before our own eyes, even if the view was straight down from 12,000 feet.

Fall term

Tomorrow I start school again on my 14 year degree program. By now I should have a doctorate right? Nope this will be a BA, as in I've been in school Before Amazon; also before Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I started at Southern Oregon University in 1996 a year after I moved up to Oregon from Central California. I was an idealistic communications major. I was a journalist. A year removed from winning a top writing award in LA for all high school journalists. My journalism teacher gave me the word "vision" when he handed out words to his seniors. My vision was my direction in life and where I was going. Someone should have told him I have bad eye sight.

Somewhere between the Alanis Morissette CD playing in my car and my rebellious attitude with my professors I discovered I wasn't going to enjoy college as much as my senior year in high school. In high school all of my papers I finished in English were automatic A's. I could write them in ten minutes and garner wide acclaim from my English teacher on my natural brilliance. In college I was dirt. I was just one of many bright writers now forced to conform to a structured piece of writing that if I deviated from I was failed. Follow the guidelines. Conform to our rules. Your freelance nature means nothing here child, you are just another mind for us to manipulate. I realized then how corporately structured universities were. They didn't want free thinkers. They wanted free listeners. Free to listen and absorb and follow instructions or feel free to fail. I battled with all my might to adjust to this new way of thinking, but I did fail. I told off one professor and discovered that the next one after was no better than the last.

I could not accept this new way of thinking. I bolted to Seattle in early 1999 and into a more structured model than the university: Corporate America. There I stayed for the next eight years. I couldn't transfer my credits up to a university in Washington because there were holds on my account with SOU for not finishing required classes. They held me hostage. The only way I was going to finish my degree was moving back down to OR or starting all over again somewhere else. When I moved back to Southern Oregon in 2006 college was the furthest thing from my mind. I just wanted a healthier lifestyle. I had found activities to distract myself from the cold soulless embrace of the corporate structure but they were not healthy activities. The habits I started to fit in and move up the ladder actually stunted my growth. Maybe not career-wise as I was rising, but my creativity was dying a slow death. My "vision" was now being clouded in all sorts of liquid: rain, alcohol, and tears.

I've had friends drive through Southern Oregon from Seattle and say with disdain that there is nothing here. It is definitely not the metropolitan of Seattle. One friend said she would just keep on driving. Maybe I felt that way too a few years before I moved here, maybe even a couple after. And yet Southern Oregon has a different feel to me now. There is a balance I have here I didn't in Seattle. There are four seasons. There is more lightness in the air and maybe even more smiles from people you come across. Those are small things, but they are huge. Seattle is big and shiny. The buildings glow and sparkle at night. The Needle illuminates the sky, but it is cold. It is a cold and structured city. At least it was to me. I have friends who live downtown in different districts that love it. Maybe it is just perception. Yet that was a perception I couldn't get past in the time I lived there. I felt that people were more guarded and even friends. The openness was minimal and emotions much more calculated. I couldn't live a lifestyle like that. I would act out just to feel anything. Almost like a child desperate for attention from their parents.

Back to Medford and Ashland and school and slow days. I started back at SOU in 2008. I switched my major to business and found I could conform a lot easier. I had been doing it for the past 12 years anyways! Corporate America made me a good student for corporate university. I definitely noticed the professors treating me differently. It seems age and experience are more highly esteemed than youth and individuality. At least then and now. Maybe SOU went through an awakening themselves in the 10 years since I had last attended. I know that the required courses I was supposed to take to move forward in '98 were no longer required. Maybe they just needed the revenue.

I'm a year and a term away now from finishing if I go 16 credits a term. It will be difficult to do that and work full-time, yet I'm also committed to completing this. I also though realize that a degree won't complete me. Sure, it'll make job prospects in this economy more accommodating and it will be a burden off of my back, but it is just a piece of paper. It is just a reaffirmation that I can follow instructions and conform to rules and guidelines. I've done that. It doesn't prove anything more to myself than that. Does that make me a sell out? I don't know. Am I selling my passion to prove I can conform, or am I being realistic? Does this just provide a back up plan? It certainly isn't the "vision" I anticipated.