Dog Diary vs Cat Diary

DOG DIARY

    8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!

     9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!

     9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!

     10:30 am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!

     12:00 pm - Lunch! My favorite thing!

     1:00 pm - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!

     3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!

     5:00 pm - Milk bones! My favorite thing!

     7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!

     8:00 pm - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!

     11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!

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CAT DIARY

Day 983 of my captivity.

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects.

They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength. The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape.

In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet.

Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates what I am capable of. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a "good little hunter" I am. Bastards!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of "allergies". I must learn what this means, and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow -- but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released - and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously retarded. The bird has got to be an informant. I observe him communicating with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe. For now ...

Where There's a Will There's a Way

My father worked two full time jobs for most of my life. At one point in my life he owned property in three states. He worked hard to do this. From his example I learned early on that through hard work and persistence you can have anything you want; anything is achievable through hard work, patience and persistence.

I carried this philosophy with me through my first career as a hair dresser, through my career in music, though my career in the restaurant industry and finally through my 25 plus years in my IT career while going to school to get, first an AA degree, then a BS degree, and finally working towards a second BS degree and a Masters. I applied this philosophy to everything in my life except romantic relationships. And it got me through. Considering where I came from, I was able to achieve a good many things. It wasn’t until I got married when I was turning forty that I applied it to a romantic relationship.

At that point in my life, I decided that it was time to work hard to make a relationship work. And I did. I applied brute force to my marriage, decided that no matter what happened that I was never going to give up and that I would MAKE it work. In hind sight, which is in fact 20/20 by the way, what I didn’t see was that you cannot apply this philosophy to relationships. Why? Because there is another person involved, It is one thing for you yourself to work hard towards achieving a goal; it is a completely different thing to get someone else to work towards that same goal.

I am afraid now. I recall someone saying to me once in the not so distant recent past, that they were afraid to get involved with me in a romantic relationship because they were afraid of “disappointments”. I asked at the time, who are you afraid will be disappointed, you or me? And his response was “Both of us”.

This is why you cannot apply the “work hard and you can achieve whatever you want” philosophy to relationships. Because in trying to reach that lofty goal of having a happy healthy relationship, there are a lot of “disappointments” along the way. It’s a tough journey, fraught with dangers. You find out the little lies you’ve told each other. The habits that were once so adorable you now find annoying like nails on a chalkboard. And sometimes you find out deep dark deal breaking heartbreaking secrets that you wish you had never known.

I have learned an invaluable lesson in the last few years. There comes a time in a relationship when it is time to STOP working hard. There comes a time when it is time to give up and move on because no matter how hard YOU work, the relationship is never going to work. There comes a time when the disappointments outweigh the love and you just have to mark it up to a goal not achieved and there’s no harm in that. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It doesn’t mean that you are deficient in some way. It just means that you got involved with someone who is on a different path than you. It means that you got involved with someone whose personal rules of behavior are different than your own. And everyone has done it. Even people who now have happy healthy relationships, have been through disappointments, either with the person they are with or with people they have been with previously. No one is immune to these disappointments, they are part of life.

For more than two years, I went to temple every weekend; sometimes on both Friday and Saturday. I would see couples, examples of people who, at least on the outside had happy healthy relationships with their spouses. The woman who would tell stories while we were all working in the kitchen together about her husband whom she had been married to for many years and had three children with. She would still have that gleam in her eye when talking about him that said “I am still in love with this man after all these years”.  I saw many examples of this and this is what I have always wanted.

One of my most favorite sayings is “There is a lid for every pot”. I still believe this; I just don’t think I have found my “lid” yet. Perhaps, at my age, I never will. I was always a hopeless romantic. But when I gave up on my last potential “lid”, I gave up on everything. I gave up the hope of ever finding that one person who thinks the way I do and doesn’t have some deep dark secret they’re hiding from me. I gave up on the idea of finding someone with whom the love outweighed the disappointments and with whom I could finally have the happy healthy relationship I wanted. I gave up on finding that person who when talking about him to a group of women on a morning in a Shul kitchen, would still bring a gleam to my eye, years after we had found each other. Some people are lucky in love. I don’t think I am one of them. I believe I am destined to be on my own. A year ago, this was a devastating idea to me. It is something now, I am learning to accept. And when I’m not afraid anymore, I will venture back out into world. I will find my hope again. Not for romance; THAT hope is never coming back. But at least I will find hope for people again, for life, and the pursuit of other things that make me happy. And I know I will still have disappointments. But without them, you will never know when you are actually happy. The balancing act is best performed when you can manage the disappointments with life’s good fortunes. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

We human beings on this planet are all connected by an invisible thread. When we make an actual connection with one another, the thread becomes visible and tangible. When this happens, there should be a pop up box like on your computer that says “Enter at your own risk. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”.  Why? Because these connections are risky. Sometimes they can turn out to be one of the best experiences of your life; other times?...not so much.

You only fall in love for the first time once. It never happens that way again. And that love, whether consciously or unconsciously, is used as a measuring stick to measure all loves that follow. Whether it is one year or thirty two and half years, it is what we measure our love for another by. You can come pretty close to that first love, but it is never the same.

Sometimes it is better to have just the memory of that first love but in the age of the internet, we can now go back and have a look. Some of us are pleasantly surprised at how well our first loves have done. We can feel good about ourselves because of that because we can justify them playing such an important role in our lives. We can say to ourselves “I always knew he/she was a great person”.  Our disappointment at it not working out with them turns to pride at having been the first to love them and see their goodness.

That being said, some of us are very unpleasantly surprised at what monsters our first loves have become. This can be very disconcerting because we cannot justify them playing such an important role in our lives. Our original disappointment turns into a bitter pill that must be swallowed in order to move on in our lives. We question ourselves. Were they a monster back then or did something happen to them in the course of their life to make them this way? Was I wrong for loving them? Is there something I could have done to not love them? We then grieve. And we grieve because it is a death of sorts; the end of our innocence; the end of a dream.

But when the grieving is done, at the end of the day, it is what it is. Some people turn out good, some people turn out to be monsters and you have no way of seeing which way they are going to go when you are young and blind. You feel something in your heart, something you’ve never felt before and it takes over and follows you throughout your life. It isn’t something you have control over, it just is. It is extremely loud in your brain and incredibly close to your heart but it is better to have that disappointment, better to have even the bitter pill because without it, you have nothing; no feelings; dead on the inside. It is always better to have something rather than nothing because it means you’re alive.  

In Celebration of Our Independence

Growing up in Wheaton, Maryland, every July 4th my cousins and my Aunt and I would pile into the Woody and go to Wheaton Plaza and watch the fireworks. It was one of the highlights of my childhood: telling silly jokes in the car, drinking pop, eating hotdogs and wrestling with my cousins. The deep booms that reverberated in my chest and splashes of multicolored fire across the sky was for me the most exciting thing to watch and doing it with my family just made it all the more intimate.

But, do people in America really know exactly what they are celebrating on July 4th? For those of you who don’t know, we are celebrating the Declaration of Independence being adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4th 1776. This document stated among other things that the 13 American colonies, presently at war with Great Britain, were no longer a part of the British Empire and would form a new nation known as the United States of America. The original draft of the document was created by Thomas Jefferson and the congress edited it to become the final version of the declaration. One of the centerpieces of the document states:

“We hold these truths o be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
 
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

As the document was read in congress that day, no doubt by someone with a thick British accent which in recent history Americans have become so enamored of, the irony of that situation probably didn’t register. It is only today, looking back in history that we can see how surreal that situation was.

Very basically translated into everyday language, what the above paragraphs is saying is that we are all as human being created equally; that we all have rights that cannot be taken away by a foreign government and those right include to live, have freedom and pursue what makes us happy. It states that no government should be abolished lightly and that people are predisposed to suffer oppressive governments because they have become accustomed to the evils but that the people, who have been abused and usurped by that government, have not just a right but a duty to abolish that government and start anew.

I am proud to be an American. Like the colonists, my German Jewish Great Grandfather came to this country in pursuit of a better life; my Irish Grandmother’s family did the same. Our history may not be as long as other countries and our governments have not been perfect but as Ronald Reagan stated many times “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere” and our forefathers put in place a process that is in place still today to change the parts of government that are imperfect. We the people can do that and we are duty bound to do so. Simply by being a citizen of our great nation we are bound to change the things that our government does that are oppressive to us and to people of other nations through protest, through the voting box and through any peaceful means necessary.

Eldridge Cleaver said “There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem.” People who complain about our government yet to nothing to fix the problems, don’t vote, don’t protest publicly, don’t educate themselves on the processes and how to change them, listen and believe misinformation fed to them by conservative and liberal media outlets instead of finding out the truth for themselves, are part of the problem. Is our government perfect? No, it certainly is not. Is our President infallible? Absolutely not. In fact, in the last week, I have discovered something appalling and disgraceful that our President in fact is sanctioning and I was discouraged, disheartened, and thoroughly disgusted by it. And yet, this thing has barely made a blip on the radar of most folks in this country. Read or watch “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” by Jeremy Scahill. It is available On Demand or get the book at Amazon.com. There are also many interviews with Jeremy on You Tube. I encourage you to watch them. There is also a web site dirtywars.org. He is a very thorough, non-partisan investigative reporter who has done a number of investigations into our military complex which is vast and far reaching. Jeremy has exposed things that are being done presently that would shock and appall most people. The fact that he himself has not experienced an "untimely accident" is amazing in and of itself considering what he has exposed. The things that are going on now must be stopped if we are ever going to end this “War on Terrorism” and make the world a better, safer place for all countries. Only “We the people” can stop it and we must. We cannot kill our way to peace and what we are doing now in fact is creating more of the very people we are fighting against. We are essentially giving them a reason to hate us and rise up against us.

http://www.dirtywars.org

Interview with Jeremy on Democracy Now

I like our president. I think I have been very vocal about that. I respect him as a man (from what I know about him) and I respect him as a leader and essentially my boss but what is happening with JSOC and our military is not what I and I think most people in this country believe we stand for as a nation. My great grandfather and grandmother did not come to a country that murders innocent people; that convicts its own people to death without due process; that jails people for years without charges or a trial; that would kill an innocent 16 year old American citizen in a foreign country along with his young cousins simply because his father said things our government didn’t like. Those are the countries that they came from not the country they went to seeking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Thank you all for reading and Happy Independence Day!