A Day in the Life of Chaos

It was a very special Christmas that year so long ago.  As a young man my family traveled to Europe in the winter.  There is something different about Europe in the winter.  It is a combination of many things.  The cold harkens back to my childhood Christmas’ spent in Alaska.  There is purity in the air.  The kind of Christmas that American’s imagine but left long ago.  One where commercialism and gifts are secondary.  Where cold weather is a sign for people to huddle together in conversation relishing a hot cup of mulled wine or coco.  The steam of their cups collides with frigid air as it drifts upwards into the night.  The smells of hot sausages  wafting through markets and ginger bread baking in ovens behind frosty shop windows.  Small market stalls and street side stores sell hand made goods that are as far from plastic packaged merchandise as we are from the round full moon hanging over our heads.   Some how in this panicked and manic 21st century, Europe has preserved the

Sometimes I think that the rings of a tree are the perfect metaphor for our lives.  When you look at a tree from the outside the only thing we notice is how fat or skinny it is.  How short or how tall.  Sadly as humans we are not Sequoias spanning the ages and when our tree is cut and ceases to live we find the story of its growth between each ring.  Some are pitifully narrow while others are wide signifying a lot of growth during one year of it's life.  I think if I was a tree a close analysis would find one short period spanning a single year from 1987 to 1988 where there was enormous growth. I lived in Vienna, Austria during this time attending a foreign study program. After extensive research into foreign study possibilities I had decided on the Institute of European Studies.  It seemed the perfect opportunity to combine living in Europe with cultural awakening, the forbidden cloak of Eastern European Communism and just being independent, far away from home.  Eager to pursue

Palace Corbelli Classroom Obsolescence is a part of everything.  We see it every day.  Devices we once couldn ’ t live without now no longer serve a purpose.  It could be a record player, the cassette tape or the rotary phone.  We are now even witnessing the demise of the fixed phone for that matter.  Every generation has them and are defined by them.  For my father it might have been the milk man, my grandmother the streetcar or the horse.  Some objects seem to even have programmed obsolescence like the home computer.  The saddest obsolescence of all is when it is our very self that has lost its need.  Time carries away all things but for a shining moment in our own existence in our minds, we exist.  We live, we love and we thrive.  At least those willing to breath, willing to dream willing to love, willing to give will leave the world with a smile on our face. Christian Tanzer and Joe Funk I lived in Vienna the winter of 1987 and spring of 1988. I attended an American program

Every generation says this:  "People today just have no idea about the way it was."  Life experience and the world around us contributes so much to what we are and what we will be.  Every generation had it's flash point and it is usually a violent one.  For my grandparents it was World War II.  For my parents it was Vietnam.  For those born after 1980 it was and will be, the World Trade Center, Iraq and Afghanistan.  For myself it was the Cold War and a little group of countries a third of the way around the world that most people have never heard of. When I was growing up international politics and perspective was divided into two camps, us versus them.  Everything was defined as Western Democracy facing off against Russian and Chinese Communism.  Today if you ask most people what Communism means it tends to be defined in the abstract.  It gets lumped together with skewed ideas of socialism and is simply presented as a fear word without true definition. Yet for m