Seems like ages since I last posted anything. So much has been going on and I barely make time to go online much, well at home anyway. Work has been so boring lately I have accomplished most of my online fun at work. I do need to search for a doctor so I can get my shots for my trip to India. It's not needles that I am afraid of as much as the idea of injecting vaccines into my bloodstream.

I dodged a promotion at work a few weeks ago. It would have meant running half of our offices, dealing with employees, schedules, doctors, patients, phone calls at night and on the weekends, all for a couple thousand dollars more. All in all not a good deal for me, especially if I want to finish school. Which leads to the question of whether or not I want to finish school... I do want to finish and move on to teaching again. So I have to get my ass in gear again once I get back from my trip.

Something is bothering me and I can't quite figure it out. I have an eye twitch again, only this time it's on my left eyebrow. Last time it was the right brow/eyelid and I am positive thats what lead to the uneven receding hairline. So I guess it's about to become symmetrical unless I can relax and get it to stop.

The other day I was out having dinner with my good buddy and as we ate I listened to the song that was playing,it was "Missing" by Everything But the Girl. I was overcome by a sense of sadness and longing. Back in the day when I was about 22 and was just in the beginning stages of dating my future ex, I would leave work late at night and drive to her place which was just around the corner. I would walk down this little sidewalk past her window and see the warm glow of candle lights and I could hear "Missing" or some other such song.

The funny thing is that my phantom memory was not longing or missing her in anyway. But rather that fresh feeling of being in love. Of having passion in my life and expressing it. Lately I have become more convinced that is one of the reasons why I just seem to exist rather than live. It's like a numbness, I don't seem to feel much pain or joy. Frankly it scares me and makes me happy. It's nice to just "be" and not have to have drama in my life. But it also saps me of my sense of purpose if I can't really enjoy life.

Obviously having a girlfriend would help, but I don't know that I want that either. I really do like my freedom and the ability to do as I please. It is so easy to get wrapped up into someone else's life and have their agenda take over your agenda. I also feel like I am on the brink of something great happening. As the year draws to a close I feel more and more as though I am closer to exiting this neutral wilderness and finding my path again.

I went to the Orange County Fair last night and saw Chris Isaak in concert. The man is such a great performer, he always puts on a great show. I saw him perform at the Fresno Fair when I was living there, and I was really impressed. It is funny how different some fairs can be. As Orange County continues to urbanize and lose the last vestiges of agriculture the fair loses it's flavor. When we were kids we used to always go to the LA County Fair in Pomona. Why would we go there when the Orange County Fair is so much closer? Because the Fairplex in Pomona has horse racing and the Orange County Fairgrounds don't. Of course it is only a matter of time before the LA Fair loses its agricultural flavor too. More and more farmland, dairy land and ranches are being sold to build more monopoly houses and Walmarts.

I suppose this is progress and my resistance to change. I have these same conversations with my friends who disagree with me and think that such things are positive. I certainly can see how people would think that with the bursting population and the need for growth. But I think that people lose sight of the fact that as the population grows, so does our need for food and as a result, our need for agriculture. The idea that we should depend solely on the Midwest for our food is as crazy as it is irresponsible. The more dependent that communities become on other communities, especially those farther away, the more vulnerable a community becomes to actions they have no control over. The concern for immediate gain ignores the need for long term planning with regard to how these changes will affect the future.

More crazy talk I guess, but I feel the same way about the closing of so many military bases and the dismantling of our defense industry. I could go on and on, but I won't, at least for now.

My love affair with wikipedia.com continues to grow as I seem to spend more and more of my free time following twisting and turning paths of links from one subject to another. There seems to be no end in sight as I voraciously devour the information at my fingertips. I must have tons of bookmarks on subjects that I have not finished researching. Recently I was walking down the road of the Bhagavad Gita and I realized that one of the reasons for my stagnation of the past few years is that I lack passion in my life.
That is one of the reasons I need to get back to teaching as I knew that was my calling in life. But also, I don't feel the ups and downs of life as I once did. I have a balance and steadiness now that quite frankly bores me. I went out three times this past week and had alcohol, much to my regret. Not that I drank lots and lots, no just a few beers each time. Rather, I just end up feeling uneasy and "off." I have never been much of a drinker, I refused to drink until 21 and then did so for most of that year and then swore off alcohol for a couple years after that. I saw the effects of drugs/alcohol on some people I cared about and remembered why did not like to lose control or poison my body.
I think that I am now at that point again where I no longer with to dull my mind and poison my body. I have far too much work ahead of me. With all this expensive dental work I have been getting, I have begun to get back into working out and taking better care of my body. My sister has initiated a trip to India that will include herself and her husband as well as our father and me. I am pretty excited about it and have decided to brush up on my Indian history to better appreciate the visit. Also ordered some books on learning Hindi to make communication much easier.
I should be able to finish up school when I return and get everything set to go back to teaching by Fall of 2006. The lure of money and comfort still leads me to believe that I should stay in the corporate world and move up the ladder and jump to bigger and better companies. But all in all that would only provide me with temporary happiness by providing me enough money to afford distractions and entertainment. None of those things would help me help contribute to helping society progress as it should. Long ago I knew the path to take and I need to continue to work back to that path, though it may not be as comfortable and easy as the current path, I do know that the destination is a much more worthy place to be when the journey ends.

One of the things I miss most about my youth is the music scene. I had quite a few friends who were musicians and we used to go see their bands play all the time. And then of course there were all the fun concerts to go to. I really enjoyed the local music scene. I met my friend Rich when I was 20 and I just started at this telemarketing job for a timeshare company. Rich had been there awhile and after some time we became friends and hung out a lot. Then my friends and I would go see his band play local venues. He was a good friend in many ways and was one of the few friends that I looked up to. I think he was maybe 28 or so at the time and we would talk about our issues and what not.

He got me hooked into the poetry circuit for a couple years. This consisted of hanging out at several local coffee houses on their open mic nights, drinking coffee or in my case iced tea or hot chocolate, and talking to all the regulars who also followed the circuit. It was a lot of fun, other than the usual pretentious folks. But even they were enjoyable to watch as I could respect someone for being creative and expressing it. Though at times much of it was just a cry for attention. Of course, what isn't?

I miss him and wonder what ever became of him. He was a really great guy, who also had some problems. But I look back on so many friendships that I valued then and value now, but I didn't continue to nourish or cultivate. I suppose that is just the way life is. Nothing is permanent and the best we can do is enjoy and appreciate what we have, while we have it.

Father's Day is this weekend and I have already bought a present. Tonight when I was at the store buying groceries, I looked for a Father's Day card, something that I always have trouble with. Take a look at most of the cards and they are either all corny or overflowing with sentiment. My dad doesn't golf or fish, so all of those cutesy cards just never interested me. And looking at the pictures of these blonde or brown haired dads with their kids on the cards never felt real to me. Even when I was a boy, I saw very few people that looked like my father and looking through these cards each year always feels odd because of it. And then of course there are just my own emotional issues to deal with.

We had a very up and down rollercoaster sort of relationship for most of my life. It's like the first 7 years of my life and the most recent 7 years are the ones where we get along great. Its the middle 18 years or so that were confusing. Sometimes I just don't know what to make of it. I wonder what I will do when I get my chance at fatherhood. And I know that I learned so much from my father, good and bad. I am very proud of him and love him a great deal because of what he has given me, both intentionally and unintentionally. As I grow older I fear I will miss out on the chance to impart my father's teachings to future generations. Aside from the basic biological need to procreate and continue the forward progress of my genetic history, there are other, more spiritual, intellectual and emotional things that I want to pass on. And many of these are things I learned from my parents. Many are things they meant to pass on, others are things I learned from observing and making my own decisions based on those observations. Parent-child relationships are so complicated, that I won't even continue going into this.

But all I can ever think of on Father's day is that I hope I can make my children as proud as I am of my father. Because of who he is and who he helped me to become I love and appreciate all he has done for me.

Another one of those days where I drive home with a million things on my mind and so I don't even want to begin to babble on. I came home from work and watched Trekkies and Trekkies 2 on Showtime. WOW. I was scared by some of these people. Denise "I Quit" Crosby hosted these documentaries about Star Trek fans and the conventions. It's funny because I have always loved Science Fiction and grew up watching the Star Trek reruns. I may even have my old posters of Spock and the Enterprise. But these people really are scary. Harmless, but scary. blah blah, we all have our hobbies and such, but c'mon. I am impressed by how much effort some of these people put into their love of Star Trek. And it really is cool in a way that the conventions and such have lasted so damn long.
I think what may be more sad is people like Denise Crosby and Michelle Forbes who made the great career decisions to quit Star Trek. I have so much respect for actors who have the brains to milk something for years and make money at it. Hopefully they do it well and the shows are still fun to watch, like the Simpsons. anyway, so these movies are interesting at their look at how much people get into Star Trek. The worst part is the people who try and justify their love of it, by talking about how smart it is and how its about science and such. Granted my love for Mr. Spock influenced me in some ways, but I am not going to say more than I enjoy Star Trek and leave it at that. It's fiction and many of their stories have deeper meaning, etc. but it's also fantasy. A few months ago our CEO was whistling the theme song to the XFiles and he asked me if they still made them. Uh, no it's been a long time since it was cancelled...For some reason he asked this question two more times, as though I was either lying or mistaken. He told me he recently watched season 4 on DVD. Yah thanks, for not running the company while you watch tv, asshole. Then he asked me if they still made Stargate. The inner geek in me woke up and said oh sure, in fact they are heading into their ninth season, and they have a spin off, Stargate Atlantis, which is more serious... He cut me off to tell me he doesn't like spin offs. Which is funny because I never knew him to have any principles he would stick to. He then proceeded to tell me how much he enjoyed Stargate because it was "Smart and the science is good." Now I love the show, it's fun and very entertaining. But I will never justify it by saying it's smart or some such shit. Anyway, so I told him about Battlestar Galactica and how they made a new one and he should watch it because it rocks. By this time our General Manager walked out of his office to see what in the hell we were talking about. A few other people walked by and gave me an odd look that also told me they were freaked out that the CEO and I were talking about Stargate. Hell even I knew how odd it must have looked. Two of my friends were in the GM's office and overheard this exchange. They told me that they looked at each other and both were like "WTF?" So now I just joke with them that on Fridays the president and I hang out and watch Stargate.
It just goes to show you, something. I don't know what, but I suppose it must. I was going with a whole thing on why he would justify watching it, or how things like that bring people together. But I think it just proves what a geek I may be.