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

When I was in college trying to graduate on time I had a problem.  Somehow in four years of study I had managed to amass credit hours from four different institutions all in the pursuit of a Bachelors of Arts degree in History and Political Science.  Anyone who has submitted transcripts to an admissions office knows what an arduous task it is to gain credit acceptance for the most esoteric subjects that just don't seem to fit in a different curriculum.  When the vast collection of transcripts mailed from distant colleges arrive on the admission's officer desk, they sit like Caesar in a gladiator arena and judge everything you have done.  One by one they give thumbs up or thumbs down to the hours of course work you have dedicated a large portion of your life to and enormous sums of money. In my case I was fortunate to attend an expensive private university that while leaving me with mountains of debt proved to be quite accommodating.  My accumulated transcripts from Anchora

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