Heptadecagon

Full disclosure: I hauled this out of the draft bin because I thought it was funny. The baby referenced in the last paragraph is now two years old. Dreams are funny. Many nights, I dream about high school. I'm not sure why this is the case. That time of my life certainly wasn't my favorite of all times. I met some nice kids. I met some not-nice kids. I went to a school in a small town with a small-town mentality. I had some great teachers and some not great teachers. The story isn't exciting, and so I will never write a book about it. No one would read it. (Oh wait. No one besides my friends are reading my books right now anyway, right?) But why do I dream about people from high school? I'm in contact with pretty much one (yes one!) person from that wretched place, and I hear from a few more via Facebook, but I do not think about these people on a regular basis. So why do my dreams? Maybe, unbeknownst to me, I hold onto residual teen angst. And maybe, my subconsciou...

I wonder sometimes about our ability, as humans, to accomplish tasks. I'm certain I've spoken about this before, but the topic comes to light in my mind because I'm working on a project this summer. One that has deadlines imposed by me and a friend (we're working together). And while I know how difficult it is to get everything done at home and at work, I have to try each week to uphold my end of the bargain and get my work done. (As does my friend, and she's doing a great job.) What I find, though, is that not everyone else works that way, and I'm not sure why. Sure, I know we're all different and motivated by different things, but if I have a date on my calendar circled in red, indicating that I need to be somewhere or something needs to be done by that date, you can bet your last dollar I'll do my best to get the task finished. So I'm asking myself, and you, what motivates you to follow through with a task? Think carefully about that statement...

"I want to be a painter," she said, the day I met her. She sat huddled in a chair, her large bag next to her and a stack of books on the table. I didn't understand why'd she brought all that she did with her, but now, after knowing her for several years, it was clear to me the purpose of her stuff: comfort. She clung to the things she carried as if they had the power to keep harm away. Maybe in her head, they did have that power. Who knows. "If you want to be a painter," I said, "then you shall be a painter." I tried to emphasize the word want so that she knew what I meant: she needed to want it enough to do something about making her dream a reality. She needed to align her actions with her mouth, and pick up the brushes and the paint and the canvas. Here we are, several years later with little to show for her efforts. And I think it's because those efforts have been slim. "I need to sit down and paint," she says, and then se...

One of my mother's favorite authors is Erma Bombeck . I find it coincidental that I ended up living where she lived for many years. Thanks to Mom's influence, I've quoted Erma for a long time. In fact, one of her quotes sits below my signature line of my personal email: There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they're still there. I've been doing a lot of reflecting on Bombeck's quote lately because for a long time, I said to myself, Mom had dreams. I know she did. But she stuck them in that box and never did anything with them. I'd fault her for not having the courage to follow her dreams, all while spouting that we were to follow ours. And with each step I took, with each decision I made, I'd say to myself, I'm doing what my mother didn't . That has to mean something,...

In high school, I had a major crush on one person. My crush was so huge, so epic, that it lasted from the moment I first saw this boy to the summer beyond our senior year. Of course, this was a classic tale of unrequited love. He was too popular to even recognize my existence. He probably didn't even know my name. He never, not once, even spoke to me. Clearly, I survived. Intact, with few repercussions. While I held, at one time, onto the hope for something to happen (I mean, why couldn't my life be like a John Hughes film, right?), it didn't take long for my rational self to realize that our lives would never intersect in the way that I envisioned. Every once in a while after high school, though, I'd see him. I always said a polite hello, but I never knew if he had a clue who I was. And that was okay. We'd gone to a small school, and girls like to talk. He probably knew that I was one of so many other girls who had crushes on him. At least he wasn't the typ...