Having kids at such an advanced age...and I'm talking about me, not my kids who are still quite young...brings many people to share with me that "I'll bet they keep you young!"  Well, not exactly. At times they make me feel quite old.

And being a parent has caused me to at times think that I never gave my parents the credit and respect they deserved, and oddly, sometimes I think I gave them too much credit.

Knowing what a struggle it is to remain sane and to be a good attentive parent, putting natural inclinations to do what I want to do aside to do what's best for the kids is a daily struggle, though one that I've gotten used to (and having such cool kids makes it a heckuva lot easier) and is certainly a lot more difficult than my kids realize, I'm sure and more so than I realized when I was their age.

At the same time, when I think about how much I idolized my parents, had them up so high on a pedestal, and still do, I realize that they were no better than anyone else. They didn't have to pass any tests to have kids, at least none I am aware of in this physical realm. They just had us and did the best they knew how to raise us, which most of the time was damn good, and sometimes wasn't.

And I am sure that my dad was a better dad than his dad was, and I am pretty sure I am a better dad than my dad was, and I have no doubt that Trev will be an even better dad than I am. And maybe that is the best gift we can give our kids of all - the knowledge and desire to be the best parent we can be.

Though I do still have a hard time admitting the American League is better than the National League

When I was in high school, I took a lot of pride in being open-minded and swore to myself that as I grew older, I would fight the natural tendency to grow more close-minded, as I had seen from the adults around me.

Now, that I am middle-aged, if by middle-aged, I mean that I expect to live to be 108, I actually think I am even more open minded than I was as a teen and in my 20's.

There are many things I have opened my mind to, including such things as holistic medicine, and the kinds of unexplained phenomenon that go with it, with Reiki the most obvious example, but not limited to that. I am also far more accepting of homosexuality than I remember being back then, although, according to a journal entry from when I was in college that i recently read , that was a path that started with a trip to San Francisco to visit my sister Sherry in 1978, when I hung out with some of her gay friends.

I wonder if that is another of the ways the brains of conservatives and progressives develop differently.

Except for when the Phillies lose on any given day, I mean

Occasionally I come across sayings, though that word doesn't do them justice, that I really like and embrace, like:

Boredom is a choice
Dance like no one is watching
You are responsible for your own happiness

I really like those. There is another one that I have always been interested in, but either didn't understand or maybe agree with, so I've modified it a bit.

That which doesn't kill you or anyone you love, makes you stronger and should be looked at as a positive experience, no matter how tough it is to go through at the time.

Kinda clunky, but it's something I'm going to try to remind myself of when something is really affecting me negatively.

To old friends

This is an email I just sent to a close college friend and thought I'd post it here as well, since it encapsulates a lot of things I've been thinking about the last few days:

Hey Dan –


I was just thinking of you this morning on my drive into work. I just finished re-reading my journal from my senior year at EC. Actually, I should say reading it, not re-reading it. I hadn’t read any of it since I wrote it over 30 years ago. Anyway, I want to thank you for being such a great friend and apparently listening to me talk way too much about Ruth Fischer. Man was I obsessed. It’s embarrassing to read. But Ruth aside, thanks for being such a great friend anyway. You were a frequent source in the journal of many of my favorite stories back then. Those were a lot of really good times with a lot of really good people. Funny how a group of people we can feel so incredibly close to, who defined so much of our day to day happiness, can then be spread to the distant shores, leaving us with mostly just memories, really great memories, and so little contact. Kinda like going to war, I guess, being so close to people and then never seeing many of them again. And it’s really never replicated in our lives after that. As much as I love and adore my wife and my kids and current group of really close friends, they’ll never play the same kind of role that you did along with the Daves Nich and Coulter, Dalsimer, Ellen, Slocum, Clem, Jim McKey, Stew Young, Anne Fletcher, Reb, Xandy, heck, all of Spanish House, and lots of others for me, and no doubt by the time you became a senior, you had a mostly completely different group. (I remember, thanks to you, that I can’t qualify “unique”, but is it possible to qualify “completely”?).

I see Rellahan pretty much weekly, and Dave Nich once in awhile, but I haven’t seen any of Reb, Dalsimer, Slocum, or Anne Fletcher since they graduated. Well, I crashed Dals’ wedding, but not since then. Can’t even find her on facebook. I see Ellen Jones at Westtown-related events sometimes, and you every 5 years or so, not nearly enough. I haven’t seen Stew in awhile, but I know I will sometime.

Anyway, it’s weird having all those names fresh in my mind again after reading about them in WAY too much detail. But I really did bring all this up just to thank you for being such a great friend those 2 years we were together, and I’m so glad we’ve stayed in touch and see each other once in awhile.

Your friend,

Jamie

As for me, life couldn't be on a more even course and that I do know is very, very good

Seems like there are an awful lot of tumultous events going on in the world right now - the protests about union-busting in Wisconsin among other states, pale in comparison to what has already happened in Tunisia and Egypt and are ongoing in Libya, Yemen, Iran, Bahrain and possibly other countries, including Jordan, tho unfortunately not Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

But what strikes me is how much tumult there is in the lives of many of my friends as well right now, and similarly, it's tough to tell in some cases whether the tumult is for the better or worse. Many involve couples who are either divorcing or are going through marital challenges: Jim & Stephanie, Erika and Greg, Kim and John, Gina and Louis. I can't remember a time when so many of my friends where going through such things.

But on the other side, just in the past few weeks, both Laurie and Kate and now Jim too have recently expressed that they feel like they are in the process of turning their lives around - making good, productive, energizing decisions about the way their lives are going. It seems like they're saying they're tired of taking what life gives them and they are going to take more control of which direction it goes more so than ever before. And in each case, it's so exciting to see, either close up or from afar.

Sure, there are parallels, but only in the sense that two parallel lines never come into contact with each other

I took some unfortunate pride in seeing the parallels between Charlie Sheen and Mohamar Qaddafi and how out of touch they both seem to be before I saw/heard others do the same. But now I'm going to go another direction, which is to say how completely different their relative relations with sanity are.

I am trying hard not to know much about Charlie Sheen's antics involving hookers, cocaine, wild parties, and declaring himself The Winner, but just from reading the first half of this sentence, it's clear I have a pretty general sense of how he's doing.

And it's my conclusion that as opposed to the murderous despot in Libya who is so out of touch with reality, it strikes me that Mr. Sheen may be way more right than those of us who have judged him as oh-so-wrong.

Now here's a gift you can give to me - answers to my many questions!

A recent message in Meeting came from 2 different people who decided they didn't necessarily believe in God, but decided to go ahead and do great things for others anyway, as if the only reason to do good is either, what - to honor God, to follow his beliefs, or maybe to get a chance to get into heaven? I wonder how many people do good things primarily for those kinds of reasons.

Why do we do good things? We do nice things for our partners and for our friends, tho never as often as I'd like. Sometimes we do nice things for people we'll never even meet. Sometimes we do it in hopes of seeing the look on the person's face when they receive our gift of whatever sort. Sometimes we never do receive any appreciation from the recipient, as when we send money to a charity. So why do we do it? Some sense of doing the right thing, feeling guilty because we have so much more than some others do? Or is it to give them a chance to get up to our level of comfort?

Most of all, it just struck me as odd that people felt like they were rebelling in some way by doing good things even if they didn't believe in God...which in the end, is probably all part of His or Her plan anyway.