A Day in the Life of Chaos

Being an American parent requires a lot of letting go.  It seems like you spend your child's life letting go and you wonder what if anything you ever get to hold on to.  Maybe it is simply the memories.  We certainly can't hold on to our children, if we did they would never fly.  They would never become the self-sufficient adults they must become in order to survive.  I suppose every species confronts the same dilemma.   The only difference is for most the developmental period is much shorter.  A bear for example would raise and see its cub leave in a year, an elephant in two.  Yet for a human being the time goes on and on as one stage turns to the next.  For most of us we will spend a good quarter of our life raising our children.  Arguably the time really only ends upon our own death. There is one frightening period of development all parents know we are destined for.  Sometimes we like to pretend it won't happen but it will.  It is running at us like a semi-truck five

As our politicians have been debating or, not debating, the future budget course of America I have been thinking.  Anyone that reads this blog knows that I do that a lot.  I think in the shower, I think on the way to work.  I think before I fall asleep at night contributing to sleep deprivation.  Sometimes I just wish I didn't think. That said, yesterday my wife and I were talking about the American decline and she said something that made me think yet again.  She said this country has lost its pride.  I feel it imperative to explain that my wife was born and raised in the Philippines.  Until she moved here to put up with me and my over active mind, she viewed America from a much different position.  She viewed us as the "Shining city on the hill" that President Reagan once spoke of.  No Pride, wow I thought, how true is that?  Think beyond the simplistic American Pride and go deeper, much deeper.  We used to be proud of our standing in the world.  We were proud of our

Recently as described in a previous blog I had to go to the hospital for a kidney stone.  I was pretty sure what it was but the attack came at 4 am and the ER was the only option.  In retrospect I could have stayed home and just risked not knowing the cause.  It might have turned out okay or I might have died.  Funny thing is, next time, maybe I will take the chance. Everyone in America knows the realities of health care in this country.  The maze of paperwork and policy details and fine print.  Even if you have insurance there is no guarantee it will pay for anything. Since I just went through a real world example of this I thought I would share my billing experience with Lexington Medical in beautiful South Carolina.  Two days after the visit they sent me a survey.  I guess they wanted to make sure I got it in before the bills started to arrive. So, this is my recent experience with going to the ER for two hours with my kidney stone.  They did one CT scan and gave me two shot

When you visit the Philippines and land in Manila it is often easy to lose sight of what the country really is. Manila is a modest urban nightmare of traffic and concrete.  Towering condominium towers compete with with massive bill boards as they both block out the world outside.  Rivers dark and murky flow through the city filled with pollution.  At times I find the whole thing almost reminiscent of the movie Blade Runner.  Traffic clogs the roads like red blood cells meeting arterial blockage.  The pollution has colored everything with a dirty coating that never seems to wash away. When confronting this concrete jungle it is often easy to forget that it exists in a country filled with beauty, sandy beaches and sun.  It is not the norm, it is the exception.  It seems that progressively there is a move to fly tourists directly to resort destinations avoiding Manila all together.   It is as if the best strategy to deal with the nightmarish urban center is to simply forget it is there.

Americans, when it comes to our bodies are a modest lot.  I don't know where it comes from.  Why in a society where we readily plaster an image of a scantily dressed person on a billboard do we have such a sense of personal modesty?  I think for the most part Americans don't see this in ourselves.  It is only when we travel around the world and look back do we realize how modest we really are. My first lesson in this came in Europe as a student.  I was traveling one summer with my back pack on my back through the great capitals of western civilization.  From time to time I would meet other wayward travelers and we would decide to journey with each other for a few days if we were headed in the same direction.  Usually the experience resulted in an address being exchanged and a commitment to stay in touch that would never be maintained.  After a few years we would look through our address books and wonder just who that name belonged to.  At any rate, I remember meeting two men

My son is a freshman in high school this year.  Oh my God, I can't believe I could even be saying something like that.  Children growing older is a part of the whirlwind of life.  For those of us who have children it is likely hard to conceive any other connection to approximately 20 years of our lives.  They stand like book ends supporting two decades.  When I look back I can't possibly think of how I got here so fast and when I look forward, I shrink in terror as I realize college is only three more short years away. My son is not athletic.  Okay, truth be told he is far more athletic than I ever was.  He can out skate board anyone in the neighborhood and played soccer.  He has however, never faced the ultimate gym humiliation that I did.  After three unsuccessful attempts at a layup in junior high school the coach placed me on the girls team.  If that had been now, I could have likely sued for enough money to support the next four generations of my family.  M

There is a demon in the mist.  It rears it's terrifying jagged body with razor sharp edges as it emerges from the dark like a flame from the deepest bowels of Hell.  It burns and it tortures, it makes its presence known through the agonizing moans that seem to take over our voices like a body possessed and in need of exorcism.  It's body scrapes and tears us like the claws of a rabid animal dragging against the soft flesh of the belly.  Only some of us know this pain.  It is not universal, it seems to be more congenital.  For some reason some have a propensity for it yet no one really knows why.  Women have generously claimed it is the closest pain a man will ever know to child birth yet as one friend reminded me, at least child birth has an eventual positive outcome.  At least a woman can relinquish her pain to an epidural.  I am now in the midst of my second major bout with kidney stones.  The term seems rather innocuous, it conjures images of a smooth pebble resting peac

Trinoma Mall I have traveled around the planet but I have found no place on earth that hosts more massive shopping malls then Manila, Philippines.  Even the names speak of enormity.  Mega Mall, Mall of Asia, Power Plant, Shangri-la, the list goes on and on.  It seems like no matter where you are, there is an enormous mall near by.  They seem to sprout like mushrooms in a lawn sometimes seemingly quite out of place.  Around them areas of extreme poverty cower in their shadows.  Massive parking garages often abut the main buildings typically bursting at the seams with cars.   The garages themselves are virtual palaces with parking floors coated in shiny epoxy and lights over the head of every space turning green when vacant, red when full.  Women dressed in bellhop type uniforms with white gloves spend their days in the elevators pushing the button for you. Everywhere you look in Manila condominiums are rising and the malls all owned by the same development corporations, have isl

If you were to ask someone what the most wonderful invention of the 21st Century is or actually more likely what the most wonderful invention of the 20th Century was, a debate would certainly ensue.  Some would say the cell phone, personally I think they should be locked away in a sound proof room with nothing but custom ring tones buzzing in their ears.  Others might say the computer still others the DVD.  For my money, there is only one answer and it is likely the farthest one from your mind.  No, its not frozen yogurt, it's the electronic bidet.  "The electronic what?" Bidet is one of those words most Americans probably can't even say correctly.  "Bid-ET.  What the hell is a Bid-ET?"  My son certainly didn't know when on our first trip to Italy he promptly went to the bathroom and took a dump in one.  He was then surprised when he couldn't find the flush handle.  No for those inside America a bidet is a simple little basin often accompanying toi

At forty-four years of age I can say I have had haircuts all over the world.  While lately in the declining years of my hair follicles this has become more and more of a challenge, it is still a necessity of life.  I never want to be accused of  being the sad pathetic man trying to desperately cling to his last few three feet long strands. On of the most terrifying haircuts I ever had was in a tiny barbershop in a small town in Egypt.  The barber executed his craft utilizing only a single straight edge razor blade.  During the process at any moment I could have become a flaccid ball of flesh, my life blood oozing out into a pool at on the floor. Another inauguration into the world of the third world haircut came in the Philippines during my first visit.  The... I shouldn't call him a barber, perhaps stylist, was so gay I wondered if he would break into a rendition of a Barbara Streisand song as his scissors snipped and snapped.  I have never had a problem getting a haircut from