A Day in the Life of Chaos

I can speak English, Spanish some Thai and a little Italian and German.  My wife speaks English, Tagalog, Illongo a little Cebuano and some Spanish.  Language is the most curious thing.  It is the illustration of our thoughts, emotions, feelings and desires.  It is the instrument of expression and without it we would be as limited as my loving dog.  I might be able to understand happiness, sadness, pleasure or pain, hunger and when one needs to poop.  Beyond that things start to break down. I have a lot of friends who I communicate with in English but English is not their first language.  This dynamic can frequently create misunderstandings.  Limited knowledge of a language often creates communication without nuance.  Stronger words chosen for convenience can often convey a message that was not intended.  There is always a danger of a misunderstanding, something blowing up that shouldn’t be.  In the face of such catastrophic consequence I maintain the policy of not getting piss

Karen Goerler I think a lot about aging.  I think it is because I am aging.  Well in truth we all are.  It is an inescapable reality of life.  I wrote a blog called “Today is the Youngest I Will Ever Be.”  I think as you grow older this phrase becomes increasingly apropos.  Like a computer we constantly run a systems diagnostic on our body and each pain, creak, or scatterbrained moment becomes a source of questions.  Is this a sign?  Is it the beginning of something or only momentary discomfort?  Did I do something I shouldn’t have or is this the moment of inevitable decline?   As we grow older our lives and physical well-being are impacted by the lives of those we have grown old with.  Like soldiers in a battle when one falls the others look around and wonder if they will get the next bullet.  Recently a high school classmate of mine passed away.  She was only 50.  She was a good person who lived a good life.  There was no simplistic explanation of why cancer should have ta

When an American looks at Asia they often view the region as one big exotic place filled with people that look the same and are all sort of “Chinese.”  It is only after you live or travel here that you truly come to understand the tremendous variation between the region and its people. At times these ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious and political differences combine to make westerners seem as if they are the ones that are the same. The differences between a French, White American, German, English or Italian start to seem so small in the eyes of an Asian and we are typically racially grouped together in much the same way.  The Thais even have a word for it, Farang.  The term Farang envelopes all white skinned western folk and places them into a single class of foreigner. President Tran Dai Quang I recently completed my third trip to Vietnam, a region of the world I am still struggling to define.  The land is in a word fascinating.  It is an inconvenient land.  One tha