Ugh.

Earlier this year, just after Winter Break, I and a few of my colleagues were looking at the semester ahead of us. February allowed its usual breaks for Presidents’ Day and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. But then we all looked at March: a string of five straight weeks of teaching without a break until the spring holiday began on the last day of the month.

We knew it was going to be a long stretch. And, teaching seniors this time of year is especially challenging. Most of them have been accepted to their first or second college choices, and their minds are on graduation, Senior Week, and one last summer vacation–a nonstop party with friends before those sleepless nights roll into a fresh dawn of bittersweet good-byes and I love yous.

We still have two weeks to go, and it seems like that last day of March will never get here. It’s as if the days drip steadily with Mollases, slowing everything about the day, the night, the wait for break to arrive.

And then there’s Mom.

Most of you know the story. Nearly two years ago she was told she had a few weeks to live, and she was determined to fight it. And she did. Admirably. But now the cancer’s reached her brain, Diabetes has set in, and the strength that she had a few years ago to fight seems to be weakening, as if she, herself, is now caught in a mollases that compromises the passion she has always had to live, to fight, to believe.

Now, she rests most of the time, unable to do much of anything without the fear of stumbling, falling, or passing out. She’s on so many drugs that it dizzies my head to imagine how anybody anywhere near her age could figure out when to take which pills, and how many times.

My brothers and my sister and I will be having a meeting very soon about her condition. What are our options, what is best for her, what does she want to do. . .and the list goes on.

But for now, all my kids want to do is take her to Build-A-Bear one more time, to place tiny hearts inside freshly stuffed animals, and pick out perfect outfits that bring their new friends to life.

For if this wonderful woman of nearly 81 years will hold on to one thing until the day she passes on, it is the magical power of love that she shares with her grandchildren, the giddy smiles, the laughter, the experience of life, enjoyed fully, as if no moment could ever compare with the one being lived, loved, precisely now.

You are surrounded by love, Mom. From all five of your children, your sons- and daughters-in-law, your grandchildren, Charlie, the members of your church, and all who have come to know you.

We’ll care for you. Just as you have always cared for us.

Last weekend, I celebrated my 42nd birthday, and my wife gave me an iTunes gift card as one of my gifts. At first, I played around with the idea of getting a vintage Roches CD, as I really miss some of those songs that got me through some tough days teaching in my first years in southern Maryland. But for some reason, I typed in “BOSTON” and rediscovered two of the more significant LPs that got me through junior high school and my crush on Linda…

I bought their first two albums for what one would have cost me at any record store, and within minutes I was reliving those memories of everything new: love, freedom, and great music. Brad Delp and Tom Scholz had really put together something amazing. Scholz’ brilliance in the orchestration of the music took full advantage of Delp’s high voice and unparalleled ability to overdub….They were humble, and they really enjoyed making some fantastic pieces of music.

On Friday, I told a good writer friend after a cup of coffee that I had picked up these two albums, and I was enjoying the heck out of the lyrics, the notes, and the memories.

A few hours later, I learned that Delp had died within hours (minutes?) of my conversation with my friend at the cafe. It was an eerie thing to feel so close to that music, that voice, those memories after not feeling or hearing them for so long.

But then I remembered an article I read very recently in the latest Shambhala Sun journal, where a writer was more than fascinated with the connection he had with his readers. To paraphrase loosely, he wrote that, even though months or perhaps even years will have passed between his writing these words and me reading them, we have created an inexplicable, yet eternal bond between us that knows not of time. For the moment I picked up his article and read his words, the contract had been completed, and we fulfilled our roles as writer and reader. He was waiting for me to read as long as i was waiting for him to write, and when the time was good for both of us, we met.

Delp’s music reminds me of this bond between the artist and the audience. He has given us all the greatest of gifts with his voice, and we are the lucky ones to be the recipients time and time again, even beyond his time here on Earth.

May we all find a way to make that bond with the ones we love, even if we have not yet met them. It does not matter if it is music, poetry, art, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, or medical discoveries; let us all leave that message to be discovered over and over again, for all generations yet to be born.

I’m not going to lie. I’m hooked on nearly every aspect of the TV show Lost, and I trust the directors/writers that there are real reasons behind the motivations of many of the characters’ actions, even if they are not apparent to us.

Take Locke’s decision last Wednesday to key in 77, as instructed by the Dharma dude after Locke indicated the Hostiles had infiltrated the communications center. His curiosity and constant belief that all things happen for a reason, and that he is meant to be on the island, and that he is therefore meant to “push that button” when told to do so is simply a part of his character, and it makes him do those things that have a way of moving the plot in suddenly-different directions.

I got that. No problem. As K-Man mentioned to me yesterday, that’s just Locke, and maybe this character trait will ultimately save them in the end of all this.

What frustrates me about Lost, then, puts all that drama in danger, which is probably why it will continue to frustrate me, simply because correcting this one thing would stop John from entering 77 (and doing other dramatic things…).

So this is it. Why in the world don’t these people ever talk to each other about what they find, what they discover?

If Sayed came back from the underground and simply told Locke that the C-4 explosives were laced among the walls, and if Locke would have simply told Sayed that, by playing (and winning) a game of chess, he gained access to an interactive program with Dharma, wouldn’t they have had enough sense to at least discuss the possible consequences of pushing that button?

Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Charlie, Sayed, John….They all are so stubborn in communicating anything to anyone that they keep putting themselves in these horrible situations. Sure, they make great drama, but it just seems like the most unrealistic, TV-ized part of the show, and it frustrates the heck out of me.

Hurley is the only one who is quick to share….at least in more situations than the others. When he doesn’t share, it seems like it’s a direct effect of the reactions he’s received in the past when he has attempted to share information (even last week’s episode demonstrated this when he tried to share with everyone about the Love Bus that he found….Why in the world didn’t they all go running into the woods to see the car???)

Happy Friday to all….Enjoy the weekend!

Go.

It’s just about 5 a.m. My time stamp is off by an hour. Is it really worth changing if we’re going to be hit with an early Daylight Savings Time switch anyway?
I haven’t read anything about the changing of DST dates or the reasons behind it, but I can only assume that it will save the world, right? I mean, can’t I trust that there is a genuine reason for the micro-Y2K, the sequel scare that is running rampant through IT teams around the country (world? I have no idea).

We had a snow day yesterday. Three inches of snow shut down the school systems around the state. I understand. I get it. I mean, the roads were pretty bad, and there were enough accidents (one was fatal) that drove home the point that we have to be careful out there.

Not that it is any kind of trade-off for safety, but having four snow days in our school system means having four extra days of school at the end of the year, pushing final exams into the third week of June. Once again, I would never trade safety for convenience. It just means that the end of this school year and the beginning of the summer courses I teach at our local university are now only days (hours?) apart.

I know, I know. Get over it. I’m gettin’ there.

The snow day was productive. I worked pretty steadily on getting Cold Rock for publication. I finished the book’s fourth edit, and now I need to put it through one more read-thru to make sure my last round of edits don’t contradict with any other aspect of the story. I’ll wrap up that read-thru before the end of the month, which means I’ll be able to spend my spring break focusing entirely on the layout/design of the book. It’s a changing of creative hats that is very exciting for me. I love–LOVE–the fact that I am managing all aspects of this project, and I am grateful for gaining the experiences over the years to allow me to do this.

As wonderful as my day might have been yesterday, my oldest daughter wishes she could say the same. She became the latest victim to this nasty 24-hour vomiting virus that’s working its way around her gym, and she spent the entire day being sick nearly every hour from 6 in the morning until 6 at night. By the time it had worked its way out of her system, she looked as if she had been through absolute hell. No surprise there, though, because that’s exactly what her day was. My wife and I tag-teamed in caring for her, and at one point I had a flashback to when I was 22, and very sick from being drunk, and how my friends saw me through the entire ordeal. With the whole theme of letting go in my head this week, it’s not a surprise that these reminders of when people stuck with me through tough times are emerging.

What’s even greater is that these people (well, some of them at least), are still there for me today. I’ve put them through hell these past 20 years, and they deserve to hear how grateful I am for their loyalty.

And they will hear it today.

To wrap up this ramble, let me just say this: Kick-Ass Episode of Lost Last Night.

Yes?

Without a doubt.

Enjoy your days, Friends. I’ll be around your side of the world soon enough to say Hi….

It’s a pretty dangerous thing to rely on the reactions of others to gauge where you are in your life or how you might even feel about yourself. I’ve always been a person-pleaser. I’ve struggled with finding the right words to elicit the right responses at the right times. It has become almost an obsessive game of control in believing my words, my actions will have this reaction from or that change in a specific individual.

In the past, it has made me feel superior, as if it were something on a list I needed to cross off to ensure I had a good day.

The flip side of this is taking inventory of every word that might be shared with me or be about me. What do these words mean? Why did they say that? What am I doing to cause that person to say those words? What can I do to change me to control what they might say in the future?

All dangerous thoughts, I now understand.

Hugh Prather, in his first book titled Notes To Myself: My struggle to become a person, writes:

If someone criticizes me I am not any less because of that. It is not a criticism of me but a critical thinking from him. He is expressing his thoughts and his feelings, not my being.

Before, I thought I was actually fighting for my own self-worth; that is why I so desperately wanted people to like me. I thought their liking me was a comment on me, but it was a comment on them.

This is an important thing to remember, although it is hard as anything to hear another person’s words about you and keep them on their side of the fence and not invite them over for a nice game of dress-up to make them into what they never really were in the first place.

What if we were to appreciate those other comments people give us for what they are: thoughts shared by a friend who is struggling to become his or her own person? By sharing those thoughts, aren’t they themselves trying to understand and process his or her own feelings about something that has happened?

Perhaps if my reaction is not filled with motivation to change that friend, they will have the room to work through that emotion without trying to figure out why I would react in the way that I did. When that happens, the conversation is no longer about working through an emotion but about the misdirected reaction to the words that were used to express that emotion.

So how does this translate into what I might be able to do today? Whenever I am in conversation with anybody today, I will breathe at least once before responding and try to remember that their words are not about me but about them. And if I don’t work at trying to change them with the words I offer, then I’m doing a far greater thing for them by simply giving them the space they need to understand their words and their feelings in the safety of my presence. . . .

Where there are no desires, all things are at peace. . .

This passage from the Tao te Ching has stuck with me for nearly 8 years now, but not without good discussion from friends and family members who believe we must have desires to propel us forward in our careers, our lives, our everything. They argue (quite well, I might add) that desire is simply a part of what makes us human–desire to love, to be loved, to give, to receive. It’s hard for me to refute any one of these arguments.

Perhaps the revision to this phrase, at least in my life, should be as follows:

Where there are no expectations, all things are at peace. . .

That’s more like it.

Letting go (i believe) begins with a cessation in expecting something in return for anything I might do, even when it is not directed toward any one individual. And when I do let go of those expectations, I genuinely find that all things in my life begin to settle down into a nice groove of peace deeply within, allowing me to resonate that peace more clearly to those around me.

Hugh Prather, author of many of my favorite books including Notes To Myself, wrote a book about 7 years ago called The Little Book of Letting Go, where he details “a revolutionary 30-day program to cleanse your mind, lift your spirit and replenish your soul,” according to the promo blurb on the front of the book. For years, I have picked up this book, toyed with reading the first chapter, and then left it lying on my desk to be eventually reshelved on the top shelf, a little to the right, behind my desk.

Needless to say, I’ve never really made it past day one on that that revolutionary 30-day plan. Another typical example of avoiding the truth about my need to harbor the past to protect my present and prevent my future.

So yesterday, I plucked it from its usual spot, dusted it off, and cracked the spine one more time. In this latest go ’round with Prather’s book, though, I picked up a pencil and started interacting with the text, something I teach my kids how to do on a near-daily basis at school.

Practice what you preach, right?

Prather writes:

When we become preoccupied with what we want or don’t want from someone, or what we do or don’t approve of, we fail to see that person’s goodness, malice, gentleness, sadness, or anything else thatis present. This habitual reaction to other people and to everything else in life needlessly complicates our lives and blocks simple enjoyment and peace. . . .We can cover that person with whatever thoughts we wish, but that won’t get us a different individual.

As important as this is for the way we perceive others, it strikes me as being just as important for how we perceive ourselves.

Let me rephrase Prather’s words to personalize it:

When I become preoccupied with what I want or don’t want from myself, or what I do or don’t approve of I fail to see my own goodness, malice, gentleness, sadness, or anything else that is present. This habitual reaction to myself needlessly complicates my life and blocks simple enjoyment and peace. I can cover myself with whatever thoughts I wish, but that won’t get me a different me.

Letting go of those expectations has to begin with letting them go for myself. Prather has these “release” exercises throughout the book, and I found myself practicing one of them yesterday before reading the suggestion at the end of the first chapter. In “Release 1,” Prather encourages us to pick out one, two, or three individuals over the course of a single day and imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes. I did this while I was watching the news on tv. As a reporter interviewed a few people who had been affected by a tragedy that had happened in their neighborhood, I realized how important each person’s life really is, how complicated it is, how beautiful it is. Each one of us has our own moments of goodness, malice, gentleness, sadness. And placing an onion-skin filter of my own emotions over any other person’s life is not only unfair to that individual, it’s just another layer of protection against my own fight to let go of my own struggle to be my own person. Every time I turn those emotions toward others, I am simply using them to protect myself from living fully. It’s not only dangerous, it perpetuates the lie of who I really am.

Now, understanding”who I really am” is not deep or dramatic. There’s no breaking news that goes along with that. It simply means a cessation in worrying about everything and everyone else and simply “being” me in all that I do, all that I say.

I find it everywhere with me, though, and Prather’s 30-day plan may have to be repeated monthly until it really begins to kick in autonomously.

One thing is clear to me right now, even after reading only the first chapter: I’ve got to be my own friend before I can genuinely be that friend to others. I can make the changes to stop sending those negative messages to the ones I love (one friend wrote me and told me how much it hurts when friends do the things I do to them), but for it to be totally genuine, I need to let go of those expectations.

And just be.

Namaste.

For those of you who are still checking in every now and then, I appreciate your loyalty more than you will ever know. I have not written in five weeks, and yet, you may still be stopping by. I believe that one or two of you may read this in the coming week. Know that, when you do, this entry is dedicated to you.

I have been away for various reasons. As is true with my other absences, the reasons have been, for the most part, all good. I have decided to self-publish my book, Journey to Cold Rock, and that has consumed much of my time. I have also played around with the possibility of applying for a new position in the county public school system, which would pull me out of the classroom and have me working with English teachers in all 12 county high schools. The experience would be phenomenal in so many ways, but in the end, I realized that I could not leave my students, or the classroom–at least just not yet. We’ll see what happens with Cold Rock in October when we launch the book, but until then, I have no other plans of leaving the classroom. One of the determining factors was, simply put, energy. I give a lot in my classroom, but my students give me a great deal as well, and so there is this nice balance of energy that flows between us. Sometimes it’s a little more giving than taking, but it all works out nicely by the end of the day, the end of the week, the month, term, year. Everything always works out.

And…I’ve been busy working out and losing a little weight. For the most part, I have remained dedicated to my vegan lifestyle, with the exception of a small diversion this weekend to celebrate the 13th anniversary of my 29th birthday. I am more focused than ever, though, and I write these words just minutes after returning from the gym for a good aerobic workout on the elliptical trainer. In these past 2 months, I’ve managed to shed 14 1/2 pounds, so I figure that is a good beginning. Now the workouts and the diet and the weight loss are about me and not about some good biggest loser competition at school. That was fun, but now it’s time to focus on why I’m really doing all of this. I’d like to drop another 15 1/2 pounds by the end of spring break, which I believe ends April 10. That would be 30 pounds in just about 90 days or so. I’ll gladly take that.

For the most part, that’s what I’ve been up to. At least on the surface. It’s what’s been going on under the surface that brings me to my Back-To-The-Blog entry about friendship.

You see, on Friday, a few friends took me out for a drink at our local bar to celebrate my birthday. On my right was K-man; on my left was K-girl. Two of the best friends anybody could ask for. But I didn’t know that, really, until the bill came, and I reached into my pocket to pull out some money. Immediately, K-man stopped me and told K-girl to make sure that I didn’t pay. Now, that by itself is a good thing, but nothing worth returning to my blog about (at least not to reopen my blog-writing season). It’s what happened afterward, and then a long time ago, that made such an impact on me.

K-girl said she got it, but K-man was relentless. He said something like, “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. This is his day, and his tab is on me.” He leaned in to me, looking at K-girl, and I could tell how serious it was for him to make sure that he covered my tab. Not because he owed me this, not because it’s what you’re supposed to do, but because K-man’s just about the best kind of friend a guy could have, and he wanted to take care of me. He wanted to make sure that he expressed his friendship in a way that he knew how to do, without question or without missing a single half-beat of his heart.

I know it might sound ridiculous to you that such a small thing could mean so much, so let me tell you the rest of the story.

Last May, when it was K-man’s birthday, and the usual crowd had gathered at the bar to celebrate his day, I was running late at school, and one thing led to another, and I left my classroom and headed straight home. He was well taken care of by the others, I convinced myself. Who was I to him in this celebration anyway? I knew he wanted me there, but it wasn’t like my appearance was going to make or break the gathering.

It hurt him, though. It really did. The next Monday, he stopped by my room, and he walked in, looked at me, and said, “Where were you?”

I offered my usual dish of apologies, but he just looked so angry, so disappointed and hurt. He waved me off and walked out of the room without saying anything more.

I immediately got defensive and told myself that K-man had to grow up. It wasn’t a big deal. Others were there, and it certainly wasn’t anything personally against him that I did not show up. I was tired…I wanted to get home…I…I…I didn’t think I mattered to him so much.

For the longest time I thought this. In fact, for the better part of this year, our relationship has been strained. He’s knee-jerked a few responses to me that have hurt, and I know I have been less than kind on several occasions when I could have taken a step back and not been so defensive.

So when we were at the bar on Friday, and when I heard him make sure K-girl understood that he was covering my tab, this definition of friendship just hit me head on. It all made sense to me.

The relationship that I have with each of you is very special, and I have done the same thing to you that I’ve been doing to K-man for so long. I’ve ignored our friendship, and although it has never been anything personal toward any one of you, I am tired of running from friendships, from genuine friendships whether they are in person, on line, or on paper.

I want to be done running. Running from all of you.

Running from me.

I’m working on a new piece about “the lawn” at Merriweather Post Pavillion, where I spent my teens and my twenties with good, good people and James Taylor, the Doobies, and a strong line of other great performers. What I remember most about those days are the relationships that I had with those good, good people. I have always been a person with great empathy for individuals struggling to become their own person. But unlike the balance of energy in the classroom that I and my students are able to strike, I have found that those individuals with whom I have such a great affinity for never receive me for who I am. I never really give me back to them. This has been an unbelievably huge complaint from nearly every one of my friends, where we get into a groove, and then poof! I’m gone. Or I can no longer play. Or I’m *secretly* afraid of this or that or him or her. It got old a long time ago, but now I think I’m beginning to understand exactly what friendship is all about.

I know. It sounds crazy. You befriend somebody. You hang out. You be there when he or she needs you. Done. So very simple, I know.

But not when you throw in the rest of the baggage. The self-doubt, the inability to differentiate between being yourself and being a whiner, the need to wear that mask as often as possible in fear of what people may really think of you.

I’ve had this problem for years. This is nothing new. What’s new is that, through understanding friendship, I am beginning to see that there is a simple solution.

Let go.

Letting go of all of the stress and the anxiety and the fear and just being, just existing, is the best thing I can do for me and for the ones I love.

So I’m letting go.

and I’m scared as hell.

Tomorrow: What I believe “letting go” really means.