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Rave of the Moment
After four years of surfing the net, things can get a little dull. Oh look, yet another web page devoted to Joe's Favorite Links. Oh joy. And what's this? Just another clueless newbie sending out the same message 983 times. Sigh...
But when it came time for me to buy a truck and a travel trailer to begin the next phase of this adventure that is my life, I stumbled upon a whole new use of the net: access to the "Other Side." Now some women out there won't know what I'm talking about because they've always had access of some kind of another, but for those of us who were raised to be the super-feminine standardbearers of Womanhood, the types who inspire even the crudest men to say "pardon me, Miss" when they let out so much as "durn" in our presence, the internet gives us a way to eavesdrop on the virtual lockerooms, country clubs, and shop classes and, at long last, to learn the mysteries of How Things Work.
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Travel
I love being in motion. Travelling gives me a sense of purpose, of destiny, a feeling that all my movement is not in vain, even though I rarely care where I'm actually going. It's the movement itself that is meaningful.
I am easily given to fits of obsessive contemplation about the meaning of life, but a few moments behind the wheel of my truck and the anxiety slips away like wind. I am going somwhere. I have a reason for being.
I've also been known to say that travelling "erases my tapes," by which I mean that all the worries and puzzles and annoyances of my life have a way of just playing themselves out the longer I'm on the road, leaving me with miles and miles of new thoughts, new experiences, new ideas to record. As well as plenty of time to just listen to time passing.
I love to travel, so much so that I've now made it my life!
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Emotional Freedom: Hallelujah!
Some of us are just slow. I grew up dating boys, and waiting for the fireworks. My mother assured me they would appear, when I met "The One," but my skies remained dim, and I concentrated on my books. Meanwhile my friends daydreamed about their candlelight weddings, their loving and devoted husbands, their 2.5 children and family vacations by the sea. They too were waiting for "The One," though none of us knew how we would know when we'd found him.
One by one my friends paired off with their Ones, and sometimes Twos and Threes ("when you hit 25," my Mom said,"you can't be too picky"), and I pursued the academic life as my primary relationship, quite happily. That is, until I fell in love with a woman. "A HA!" I thought. "This is it! This explains why I haven't yet met The One! Because he's a she!!"
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Books
When I was a child, my mother loved to have me entertain for her guests. My first trick: drinking water out of a paper cup while in a backbend, without spilling a drop. My second: carrying on fifth-grade conversations with the vocabulary of an English professor. My talents at the first I owe to an unusually flexible physique; the second, to my lifelong love of books. |