A Day in the Life of Chaos

Freshman Orientation The older I become the more circles I see in life.  Really it is the consequence of time and living.  Both intertwine and the result is the definition of a pattern once invisible to the mind.  Nothing brings this home like being a parent because in your child you see a shadow of your own life.  Not only do you re-live the stages of life through the eyes of your child they become a reflection of your own life and experience. My son recently began study at a university yet his course is quite different from most.  Rather than follow in the footsteps of his friends and attend college in the place he was raised he has followed his nomadic father on an unconventional journey through life.  I have tried to give him everything I had, because in truth I regret little about the path I have followed. My parents gave me a home in Alaska.  It was a place for me to bloom that was not to big to breath. A small city where I could learn to appreciate life, friends

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

There is a small liberal arts university in Salem Oregon named Willamette.  It was the first major step in my process of breaking away from my parents and becoming my own man.  While I only spent my freshman and my senior year there I look back now at Willamette with great fondness.  My classes were small and personal.  My professors cared deeply about what they taught and the environment was one of intellectual growth.  Willamette is a little treasure built around a winding creek that flows through the campus.  It is an oasis of old trees, brick buildings and Oregon history nestled in the shadow of the Oregon State Capitol.  I studied history and politics.  I worked for a State Senator in the capitol writing letters to consituents and researching policy.  Most importantly, Willamette was a university that pushed its students to write.  Somewhere in the endless term papers and essays I learned that writing was the most important skill I would ever have. In the midst of my four ye

As time passes I have always chosen to look over my shoulder.  I like to know who is still following, who is still there.  Some people blaze a trail into the future and chose to let the moments of their life they built it upon to fade into the mist.   You should never look back they say, never dwell in the past.  While we can't live in the past, forgetting is is like forgetting the foundation a building was constructed on.  Memories can be kind, beautiful or as sharp as a knife.   They can rip at our psyche like the teeth of a jagged saw yet they make us what we are.  To forget them entirely is to forget a piece of yourself. While I may never see them again, there is something wonderfully cathartic about knowing the figure I harbor in a memory still exists.  Occasionally, lives might cross again.  The most magical of these crossings allows for apologies for the mistakes of the past and redemption through the knowledge of a moment in life once shared together.  It transitions the