A Day in the Life of Chaos

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

I guess when the economy is in the toilet and so many American's are suffering it is easy to lose sight of success.  Of course success has many variations and it is difficult, perhaps nearly impossible to quantify.  There is personal success, familial success, emotional success, success in quality of life.  For most, the word success reflects monetary success. One of the reasons it is so hard to raise taxes on the rich in America is that aside from the fact that the control the levers of power, many Americans cling to the thought that someday they might be among them and wouldn't that be cutting our own throat? I decided long ago that I will never leave the 99 percent.  I don't have a business mind and I am afraid to take too many risks.  Aside from a winning lottery ticket, I will never join the ranks of the one percent.  I am a realist and to even contemplate such a monetary advance is akin to looking at your child play pee wee sports and think that some day they will

How unique are we?  I ask myself this question often.  It is said with certainty that history repeats itself.  Isn't it just as likely that people repeat themselves? Everyone likes to think that they are different, in some way special inside.  To think that somehow in the formula that makes us who we are there is a unique ingredient, a secret recipe.  Perhaps there is, I still want to think so however, I am always amazed at how unoriginal I am.  Sometimes I think of an idea and will do what I couldn't fifteen years ago, search the internet.  Almost always I will find someone that had a similar idea or an equal thought.  Sure there are variances but at the core it's the same. Perhaps it is the death of Steve Jobs that has me thinking about things.  He was truly an exception.  People like him are few and far between as their minds expand conceptually to areas where no one has been before.  They walk in a different world almost as if their genius lifts them above the sea o

I stopped enjoying traveling for work a long time ago.   In retrospect, how can anyone top flying in a Vietnam era helicopter with the door open watching parrots fly over the South American jungle? To those that are set in their daily routines the idea of going someplace and getting paid for it is enticing.  It is a chance to stay in nice hotels and visit different places all on the dime of another.  I suppose it was once that way for myself but now it feels like a dreadful chore I can't wait to get over.   There is a difference between traveling when you can be yourself, free to go when and where you want and the cold realities of business travel.  Traveling as part of a job leaves little time for personal pleasures and has a goal of simply accomplishing a task.  There is also a great difference between traveling with a friend or a lover with whom you can share a memory and traveling by yourself.   For me, solitary travel when you are not destined to meet a friend on the other end

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