Month: December 2002

I do not think I will get a chance to post anything more to my journal this year, so though I know it is a few day early this my end of the year entry.

This year has been a wild ride for me. From my travels in Europe, to my trials of the heart I have experienced so much in the last revolution around the sun. I have made friends .. and lost friends. I have known happiness, and pain. Joy and loneliness. The times have been good and bad. But I don’t believe in regret and I don’t count on second chances. I travel ever forward on the path before me. The road goes ever on… The experiences of this year tell me only one thing for sure—that the powerful play goes on, and I want to contribute many more verses.

I just sent out my end of the year email to all those who matter most to me. Looking at that email, with a detached mind, it sounds mushy, like feel good religious/spiritual foofoo, but I guess that sometimes things need to be said to those who matter that sound mushy, things that sound like some kind of bad, low budget Hollywood love story. As Leo Buscaglia said:

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

Too may of us go about our day to day lives, never stopping to hug our friends, to say “I love you” to anyone but our date. We insult each other in jest all the time, but how often do we compliment our friends? Or thank them for just being our friend? I do not go to church, or synagogue or mosque or any other place of worship. I hold no views one way or the other on gods or the afterlife. I place my faith in no book, no idol, no creed. I place my faith in those I love and those who love me. It is for them, and because of them I try to live a good life..

I have been Kim Chi’ed! I purchased Kim Chi last Friday at Lotte—today I went to my refrigerator planning on making Kim Chi and Udon. I picked up the jar of Kim Chi and a package of Udon. I opened the jar of Kim Chi and it spewed all over me! Somewhere between Friday and today, in my refrigerator my Kim Chi fermented! There are bubbles rising in the jar as I type this—I am afraid…

Like some real world dumbo’s a couple of elephants got drunk on rice beer in Assam, India last week and trampled six people… (BBC Story)

How does one become a redneck? For most rednecks the answer is easy; they where born to redneck parents and grew up as rednecks. But somewhere, back in time, there where no rednecks—where did the first one come? Was a child born a redneck with normal parents or did the parents become rednecks and then give birth? The chicken or the egg?

I am asking because of one of my little sisters—she is a redneck. She was not always a redneck, but in the past two or three years she has become more and more a redneck. She wares greasy wife beaters, obsesses over supe’d up cars, talks like she lives in a Tennessee trailer park she flunked out of her first semester of community college because she never went to class (she is actually quite intelligent—she’s just really lazy, and the lazy part overpowers the smart part most of the time,) and is obsessed with a 15 year old high school dropout redneck boy who talks about her like shit behind her back. Someone should just giver her a pair of slippers and the keys to a trailer.

I don’t understand it, my parents are both college educated people, who work in science, my older sister and I both have degrees, my youngest sister is a strait A student and yet the other is still a redneck? Now I hung out with some rednecks in my life—they are really nice people, don’t get me wrong, but let’s face it most of them are stuck in life. They will never be anything but a redneck, and most rednecks are poor, disgusting, wretched creatures who live in trailers and go hunt’n or ride 4×4’s thru the woods while drunk off their asses and then don’t understand it when someone gets hurt. Would you want your sister to grow up to be a foul mouthed redneck bitch?

Anyway, maybe their is a glimmer of hope that my sister can pull herself up out of the red hole she is in. I talked with her the other night and she said she had decided she wanted to go to school to learn how to put electronics together. I told her that the people who put things together most of the time did not go to college, they were just blue collar laborers. What she was actually talking about was a computer or electrical engineer—the people who design the systems. (I don’t know if that is what she was talking about, but at least it requires a college degree!) So she said she was going to look into going back to the community college and working hard to get A’s so she could transfer to a school for engineering. Now we’ll see if this is a true turn around or just a flavor of the week…

So some kid died when he tried to recreate a stunt he saw on Jackass on MTV. Now I think Jackass is a stupid show, lower on the scale than the Power Rangers and Barney but let’s get one thing strait: anyone who attempts to recreate anything they saw on that show deserves to die—it’s called natural selection and there is not enough if it in the human world today! Of course if the kid who tries to recreate a stunt is five or six then maybe it’s the parents who should be natural selected out of the population for neglecting their kid—sometimes I think there should be a licensing scheme for parenting, I know it would not solve all the problems but lets say that no college degree = no kids, a bachelors means one or two, a masters up to 4 and any number with a Ph.D. I think that would cut down on the stupid parents quotas. Now, I’m not saying there is a problem with stupidity in America, but lets remove the safety labels from everything and let the problem fix itself. And of course we put a moratorium on suing over injury and death caused by not following the directions!