Brave New Kitty

Curiosity is a wonderful personality trait. Curious people have open minds. They delight in learning new things. They are interesting, because they are interested. When they ask questions, you feel their sincerity. Curious people are fun to be around.

Of course, I’m not talking about nosy curiosity, curiosity about other people’s lives and business. I’m talking about the curiosity that pulls us out of our comfort zone straight into new knowledge, new experiences, and new awarenesses. It’s important to be curious, because curiosity is a basic skill necessary for learning, personal development, and an all-around adventurous life. Being curious means you appreciate the wonder and miracle of consciousness. That is, of being alive.

Curiosity also allows for a less judgmental outlook, particularly about your own behavior. When you do something that falls short of your standards, yell at someone you love, for example, a curious attitude can bring you past harsh self-criticism. Instead of stopping at, “God, I’m so stupid!” and beating yourself up, being curious about the behavior can actually bring you to new insights. If instead you say to yourself, “Now why would I do that??” with genuine curiosity and a sincere desire to understand your behavior, you have a much better chance of moving past it for good. You may discover that your bad day at work is still bothering you and you’re projecting that on your loved one, or you tend to be short-tempered when you don’t get enough sleep, or what the person did is a trigger because it’s something your mother used to do right before she got drunk. Whenever behavior doesn’t fit a situation, there is always an underlying reason. This is the case with other people’s behavior as well. Curiosity cultivates kindness and tolerance.

Curiosity has a bad time of it, though. It seems to almost be seen as a weakness, an attribute of the non-cool, or something you leave behind in childhood. Many people would rather remain ignorant than risk looking stupid or uncool by asking a question. This is one of the biggest mistakes a person can make. If you want to grow and develop, you must shed self-consciousness, not curiosity.

Something of interest is to be found everywhere you look, without exception. If you can’t find something worth your curiosity, then you are not looking hard enough, or you have not learned how to look. Because absolutely everything in interesting. I’ll give you an example. In my work as a technical writer, I wrote about pressure transmitters, medical data base software, refrigeration units, and counter tops, among other things. Each one of these things had a fascinating story. Do you know what a pressure transmitter does? It’s a sturdy but delicate industrial control, used by hundreds of different businesses, from dairies to oil refining to the paper industry, to monitor production processes. In the process of learning enough about pressure transmitters to write about them,  I also learned a lot of other interesting things. I learned about the different industries that use them. I learned about my client’s business competitors. I met people from Canada, Mexico, the UK, Holland, Italy, the Czech Republic, China, Japan, and I learned some things about how foreigners viewed Americans and America. I learned about industries in foreign countries. I learned about the translation process. I made friends. Pressure transmitters opened up a new world for me.

The point is, if I can find interest in pressure transmitters, I can find interest in anything, and so can everybody else. For me, curiosity is pretty much global; it’s rare for me to walk down the street and not be curious about something or someone I see. I take great pleasure in it. But global curiosity isn’t necessary; events, people, and desires in your own life should provide fodder enough to feed your curiosity for years; actually, for the rest of your life.

I think a lack of curiosity indicates a pathology of sorts, for the state of being curious is inherently human. Man’s survival tool is his brain. Consciousness and self-awareness make us what we are, and curiosity, about who we are, about why we’re here, about how to improve our lives, is a basic component of both. If a person isn’t curious, something somewhere has gone awry. Maybe his curiosity got squelched out by shaming parents. Maybe he learned to associate curiosity with stupidity when he got laughed at in grade school. Maybe he’s depressed, or maybe he’s high. Whatever the root cause, lack of curiosity is an unhealthy state of mind. It’s also very sad. You’re done before you’ve even begun. The road of personal development is under construction. The bridge is out, and you’re stuck on the wrong side of the river.

But take heart; curiosity is never gone forever; in fact, it’s not gone at all. If we have the capacity to think, we have curiosity. Its full potential exists within us all. Pay attention to your inner world and, in Shakespeare’s words, to thine own self be true. From a small start, a new universe can open up.

Woundology, a term coined by Carolyn Myss, is when your connections with people are formed around past hurts. You may feel comfortable only with other people who share your wounds, or you may identify only with people who are open about their wounds, or you may use your wounds to manipulate others, or you may know someone who has one of more of these traits. If any of these are the case, it’s a critical concept to look into further.

If you have undergone therapy and/or are in recovery for emotional trauma or addiction, spending time with other people who share and understand your issues can be immensely comforting. Such support is in fact crucial to triumphing over our pain. So what, then, is the problem with such support, with spending time with others who understand and accept us? How can that possibly be a problem?

If you have found a support group for your problem that you feel truly safe with, something very powerful may have been awakened in you. It may be the first time in your life you’ve experienced such intense and unconditional acceptance. You can talk freely about your pain without judgment. You share a commonality you never imagined possible. These people probably know more about you than your own family, maybe even your spouse. Your feelings for the group are so strong, you may hope to never want leave it. And therein lies the problem.

Sometimes, people form romantic bonds in such a setting. It’s easy to feel very close to someone when you are both sharing intense personal pain. And therein can lie a problem, as well.

I had a friend long ago, early in my sobriety. “Jackie” was a recovering alcoholic, cocaine addict, and sex addict, an anorexic, an incest survivor, and she had bipolar disorder. She was constantly going to her psychiatrist to get her medication adjusted. She went to several AA meetings a week; I don’t know if she went to meetings for the other addictions. She belonged to at least two incest survivor groups. She married a man she met in her treatment group; they were both the black sheep of upper class families. She was a bright, warm, funny, sweet person, and for a while, we were very close. But after a couple of years, we started to drift apart. I didn’t know why at the time, but now I do. Her whole life revolved around her wounds. They were her whole identity. She married a man who, she told me, was fine with not ever having sex, which she had problems with due to her incest issues. She had her three-year-old daughter in therapy. She laughed and joked about how “fucked up” she was, which, after a while, stopped being funny to me. This was long before I read Carolyn Myss’ work on woundology, but I knew instinctively that Jackie and I were destined for different paths. Jackie was proud of her wounds and wore them like a badge of courage. Recovery was a precious possession for her, and once she found it, she didn’t want to let go of it. I understood this. A lot of people I knew felt this way, and sometimes I did, too. But I never became totally immersed in my recovery the way Jackie did and so many others do. I thought often that there was something wrong with me because of this. I know now that my inner voice, my higher self, my survival instinct, whatever you want to call it, was guiding me, and I was fortunate enough to have listened. I worked hard to get better, but my identity lay elsewhere.

Support is immensely important when healing from trauma, emotional pain, and addiction. It is a truly miraculous event when someone moves from being stuck in misery to seeking a solution. Support provides a shelter from the storm like nothing else can. Sometimes, though, because the support experience is so powerful, we mistake the intensity for a destination rather than a beginning. Sometimes talking freely about our painful pasts feels so wonderful, we mistake the sharing for intimacy. Sometimes, surrounding ourselves with “only positive and supportive people” hinders us from taking risks and moving out into the world at large to seek our truths and fortunes. When we are ready to move on can be tricky to determine, but it’s also somewhat irrelevant. If we think we’re ready and we’re not, we can just go back, get some more support, and try again. All failure means is that you’re making an effort.

Are you a woundologist? Are you interested in spending time only with other wounded people? Do you expect others to treat you a certain way because of your wounds? Do you use your wounds to get what you want from people? Do you ever find yourself in competitions with others for who has the worst pain, or feel annoyed if somebody professes to have bigger issues than yours? Does your life revolve around one or more support groups, even though you’ve passed the point of needing the support? If so, maybe it’s time to think about moving forward to something more satisfying, past wounds and toward real wholeness.

The step out of woundology and toward wholeness is huge, a sea change of sorts, and understandably terrifying. In fact, asking for help around it is healthy and often quite necessary, as ironic as that may sound. When I first began my move toward wholeness*, I knew I wanted to write, so I joined some writing support groups and took some writing classes. I was terrified, but I knew it was what I wanted to do, so I had no choice (or rather, my other choice was remorse over not doing it). What I did, essentially, was take the support group model I discovered in my recovery, and apply it to another area of my life. I found a group of people with a common interest, but this time, it wasn’t our wounds, it was our writing. It lacked the intensity that sharing wounds had, but the sense of excitement about getting to know other writers and sharing my writing (utterly terrifying for me) held an excitement and a sense of personal power that I had never experienced in my recovery support groups. I was, if you’ll forgive the metaphor, drunk with the sense of “fulfilling my destiny.”

Our wounds will always be a part of us, and that is neither good nor bad, it just is, like the color of our eyes or our ethnicity. Our wounds usually make us kinder, more compassionate people. Often, they give us qualities and skills that we wouldn’t otherwise have. But we do not have to define ourselves by them, at least not for the rest of our lives. If we do, we are severely limiting ourselves. The world can be a big scary place, but it is scarier yet to deny ourselves the opportunity to find that out on our own.

*My whole life, I believe, is a move toward wholeness, as is yours. The move I’m speaking of here, though, I consciously undertook for one of the first times in my life.

I have a tendency towards morosity, so I have had to develop ways of heading it off before I end up in some very dark places. The concept of high-class problems has been tremendously helpful for me. I guess it’s a form of gratitude, and gratitude is always the quickest way to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Because the truth of it is, whether I always want to believe it or not, I have high -class problems. If you’re reading this, you probably have high-class problems too.

It’s easy for anyone to fall into the dark hole of self-pity. When you feel overwhelmed by life, when you don’t have enough time in the day to get done all you need to get done, when your spouse is unreasonable and your kid is sick and you’re afraid you’re going to lose your job, and your garage was broken into, and your parents are coming for the weekend, and you haven’t cleaned the house or mowed the lawn yet, and you’re having trouble making ends meet and don’t know how you’re going to replace your stolen tools, entertain your parents, and pay all your bills next month, well, it’s very hard to not feel some self-pity. But these are all high-class problems. In the greater scheme of things, none of these problems matter very much.

I have some fairly big problems right now. Neither my partner nor I currently have a steady income. We’ve gone through almost all of our savings. I’m probably going to have to sell my car and my one piece of expensive jewelry, a gold watch that I love. As I write this, Jim, my partner, is selling his beloved motorcycle. We’ve both been a bit uptight, and tensions have run high more than once in the past few weeks. The process of finding work has been slower than it has ever been before for either of us. Sometimes, it’s hard to not despair.

And yet, I know these are high-class problems. I know we’re better off than 95% of the people on the planet. We’re young, healthy, educated, intelligent, and experienced. We don’t have kids, so we have only ourselves to worry about. Furthermore, the reason we’re in this situation is that we took some risks. They didn’t pay off, and now we’re pretty much starting over. If that isn’t a high-class problem, then I don’t know what is. We had the guts to take a shot at something! If we hadn’t tried, we would both still be making comfortable incomes and probably trying to decide which part of Europe to visit next year. But I don’t regret a moment of it. I’m proud of both of us for having the courage to take a risk. Many people never do.

Anyway, the other 95% of the people on the planet have the real problems. Problems like starvation, lack of clean water, and infectious disease. Problems like feeding their children and basic medical care and illiteracy. Problems like addiction, disease, and homelessness. Jim and I will both find work eventually, but how many children are going to die of starvation or AIDS or abuse by the time we do?

I used to think it was kind of pointless to compare myself to those less fortunate. I can’t help the circumstances I was born into, and I shouldn’t have to apologize or feel guilty for my problems just because someone else has worse ones. After all, to me, my problems are real problems! I still believe this, and I don’t think that a comparison helps me or the less fortunate person very much; it doesn’t alleviate my problems, and it does nothing whatsoever for him. Then I realized that I’m not comparing my problems to his so much as I am reminding myself how fortunate I really am. I may have had no control over the circumstances of my birth, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be grateful for them now.

So you don’t need to feel guilty because you have high-class problems. Guilt does nobody any good at all. If you have high-class problems, it’s because you’ve made some good choices in your life, so feel good about that and be grateful. I’m sure you can think of a time when your life could have gone in a darker direction. I certainly can.

When you can meet your basic needs, are healthy, and have a few people in the world who love you, pretty much all of your problems are going to be those of the high-class variety. Personal development is a very high-class problem. So enjoy your next existential crisis, because being able to have one of those puts you in the elite class of human beings.

Do you remember Hogan’s Heroes, the 1970s sitcom about a German POW camp? The “prisoners” were actually Allied spies, and the Germans were depicted as nincompoops. The prison guard was a fat, stupid man named Sergeant Schultz. When Hogan would start pumping him for information, Schultz would say, in his heavy German accent, “I know noth-ING!” Hogan would wave a Hershey bar under his nose, and Schultz would always capitulate. The Sergeant Schultz Principle is something I learned in AA meetings. It’s a humorous way of saying that I know I still have a lot to learn.

An interesting thing happens when you embark on a journey of self-discovery. The more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn. Another way of saying this is, “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know.” I love this! It fits so perfectly. It’s exactly what it was like for me in early sobriety, when self-discovery was new and fresh, and the possibilities were so exciting that they literally took my breath away at times. When the learning is happening at such a pace that you can’t keep up, and you can see alternate paths and forks in the road and fascinating asides, and you become curious about how those who went before you did it, and you make connections between things you’ve been looking at all your life, and you realize there is more to the world and to yourself than you ever could have imagined, well, that is a very good place to be. In that state, the very assimilation of knowledge is a humbling experience!

“Humility” may have a bad connotation for you. If so, this is something you must get over, because humility is an essential quality for personal growth. Humility is not humiliation, that is, public embarrassment. To be humble is to be modest. It is the opposite of arrogance. It does not mean that you are insincerely modest; it means you acknowledge your strengths and your weaknesses realistically. Some definitions of humility that I like are: “feet firmly planted,” (from its Latin root humus, meaning soil), “remaining teachable,” and “not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”

The “I know nothing” principle is empowering. The need to be right vanishes. You are free to be curious about everything. You can cheerfully admit when you don’t understand something. You don’t have to be embarrassed by being wrong.

“I know nothing” is a hyperbolic expression of the principle of humility. Of course you know something. In fact, if you are wise enough to be aware of how little you know, you know a lot. But more importantly, you have the right attitude for lifelong learning.

Hogan and Schultz

We can never have enough of that which we really do not want. –Eric Hoffer

I love this quote. It captures the ennui of post-industrial life perfectly and eloquently.

We live in an amazing time. Never before in the history of human development has man had so much leisure time, time to pursue his interests and curiosities and develop himself in any way he sees fit. How do we use it? By and large, we immerse ourselves in minutiae. Why? Because it’s easier to distract ourselves than pursue something we really want.

Minutiae: American Idol. The mall. Hummers. Plastic breasts. Paris Hilton. Texas Holdem. Video games. Jerry Springer. YouTube. Harley-Davidson. Spiderman. Britney Spears. Brad and Angelina. Vegas. Chrome bling-blings. People magazine. Satellite TV. The list goes on.

The common denominator is superficiality. People seem to be fascinated by anything trivial and utterly irrelevant to their lives. I’m not saying everyone in the industrialized world lives in this cultural vacuum, but our center of gravity certainly seems to be there. It surrounds us and inundates us, and its pull is very difficult to break free of. I know, because I struggle with it on a daily basis. As, I’m guessing, do many of us. Minutia is the Great Distraction. It calls out to us like a lover, tempting us to stay when we know we should go. We know it offers no lasting fulfillment, but we succumb anyway, knowing we will regret it later. And we do it over and over again.

In this age of instant information, of vast stores of knowledge literally at our fingertips, of having the time and means to pursue whatever fascinates, excites, and moves us, we spend a lot of time doing things that aren’t very fulfilling. The reason, I think, is simple: it’s just easier. It’s easier to be fat than thin. It’s easier to be ignorant than educated. It’s easier to watch a sitcom than a documentary. It’s easier to eat what you’re fed than to go in search of your own food. It’s easier to stay a drunk than to get sober. And when all is said and done, when all of our basic survival needs are met and we have lots of idle time on our hands, inane entertainment is easier than personal development.

It’s a fascinating paradox. Post-industrial culture has come about from man’s highest and most complex achievements. It is the work of scientists, doctors, engineers, freethinkers, and other highly learned people. Yet this highly technological world has created opportunities for man to indulge his lowest, basest desires on a scale never before possible. Television, for example, is a powerful tool for education and transmission of knowledge, and we watch American Idol and Survivor. The Internet is an exponentially more powerful tool than television (because of its interactivity), and we use it to look at pornography and funny videos. The founding fathers of the Enlightenment foresaw societies in which people would be free to achieve their highest potential. Instead, we seek our lowest common denominator. What they didn’t take into consideration was that, once all of our basic needs are satisfied, the law of inertia generally takes over. Only the very motivated seek higher development by choice. The rest of us do as much as we have to do to get by and spend our free time distracting ourselves from the gnawing angst within, the voice crying out what it is we really want. If only we would listen.

I have always been fascinated by people who figure out early on in their lives that their personal development, in all the myriad ways they define it, is what matters. For most of these people, it’s about their chosen life’s work, and could be called drive, or focus, or commitment. They all mean about the same thing, which is that these people aren’t watching Survivor and hanging out at the mall. They’re creating and developing, and always, always moving forward. They pay little attention to the call of the minutiae. It holds no allure for them, because they have found something better. They are not chasing what they don’t really want because somewhere, somehow, they have found the courage to go after what they really do want.

It’s not that I have not been moving forward in my life, because I have. But my path has been circular and slow. I had to get sober, then I had to do a lot of work on my self-esteem, then I had to figure out what I really wanted, then I had to figure out how to muster the courage to go after it, then I had to actually start going after it. It wasn’t quite as linear as it sounds, but pretty close, as each stage needed the previous one to build on (i.e., you can’t become an adolescent until you’ve completed childhood, you can’t become an adult until you’ve completed adolescence. Stages of personal development are more complicated, but follow a similar unfolding: you can’t write a symphony until you’ve learned music theory.) I have always felt the higher calling, but I have also always struggled with what I call the “fuck it” urge to give up and settle. I can’t begin to recount all the hours I’ve lost playing video games and lying on the couch eating ice cream and channel flipping. Although I’ve said “fuck it” on many occasions, I’ve never said “fuck it” to the process, and I never will. I regret that I didn’t figure some things out earlier in my life, but I am grateful to have them figured out, at least somewhat, now.

My hunch is that there are a lot of people out there like me. They feel a higher calling, but distract themselves from it with things that hold no real meaning for them because it’s easier. They feel an angst, an internal agitation about doing so, but they don’t really know what to do about it and don’t want to think about it. To avoid thinking about it, they distract themselves even further. This cycle can continue for a lifetime. The power of this cycle is evident, I think, in the absurdity of minutiae that we call popular culture. Do we really care about Paris Hilton’s jail time? Or who becomes the next American Idol? No, we don’t. Unless we know the people involved, we have no emotional attachment to the outcomes of these events whatsoever. But we need greater and greater distractions to drown out the calling of the inner voice. The more inane and the more removed from any genuine human emotion the distraction is, the more effective it will be.

Listening to your inner voice requires a certain courage because it usually means going off on your own, leaving behind a family that doesn’t understand and friends you no longer share values with. It’s true, there can be a lot to give up. But if you ignore your higher calling, you are giving up on yourself. If you recognize yourself as being quagmired and want to make some changes, don’t wait. Start right now. Start small, or start big, start however you want to. The important thing is that you start. What that might look like is up to you. But you have at least one unrealized passion; we all do. Have the courage to name it aloud, then play one less video game a day, and watch one less TV show, and make one less trip to the mall per week, and spend that time learning about what you truly love. You will be amazed at how much happier you are, how much lighter you feel, and how much more hope you have about yourself and the world.

Focus, drive, and commitment are not god-given states; they are lines of development we can foster and grow in ourselves. It’s never too late to start.

That’s right, there’s no such thing as lazy, at least not when talking about human behavior. There are lazy afternoons, lazy clouds, lazy streams, and lazy dogs, but no lazy people. What? You’re thinking, “I could name half a dozen lazy people off the top of my head!” Or even, “I’m lazy!” Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not. Let’s take a deeper look at laziness and see if we can solve this little mystery I’m presenting here.

The word lazy describes a state of inactivity. When referring to a person, it usually has an unspoken judgment attached to it. To call someone lazy is to accuse him of not being willing to work, and therefore of not pulling his weight in the world. In our industrious society, laziness is considered by most to be a major sin, a flaw of virtue, a label of shame and disgrace. And granted, if a person’s lack of activity causes others to have to take up the slack, people are entitled to be annoyed by it. If the inactivity affects other people for an extended period, then they must deal with it as they see fit. In a job situation, for example, the “lazy” person should be reprimanded and eventually fired if his performance doesn’t improve. In a personal situation, it’s not so easy. Caring about a person, whether it’s a spouse, child, or friend, makes it more difficult to know what to do. You don’t want to fight, and you don’t want to be accusative, but you’re angry because you have that judgment going on.

What if the lazy person is you? What if you tell yourself, “I want to exercise, but I’m too lazy;” “I want to finish college and get a better job, but I’m just too lazy;” “If I weren’t so lazy, I’d get off my butt and write that book I’ve always wanted to write.” If you label yourself lazy, then you have a judgment about your own behavior. You probably feel pretty shameful and pretty bad about yourself. You may have a sense that those close to you are disappointed in you, too, and won’t say it, but also think you’re lazy. What a terrible spot to be in! Especially when there’s no such character trait as laziness.

Laziness is not something to be judged, but rather, something to be understood. It is a manifestation of underlying problems. No one wants to see himself as lazy, no one wants to let his family, friends, or coworkers down, so no one would do so without deeper reasons. The reasons aren’t always pretty, but they are always there. Laziness is always a symptom of deeper issues and not an isolated characteristic.

The deeper issue could be any number of things. It could be a medical condition. It could be indecision. It could be depression. It could be passive-aggressive hostility from old, unresolved issues. It could be fear of success, fear of failure, fear of loss, or fear of intimacy. It could be fear of something else. It could be grief never talked about and never healed. It could be post-traumatic stress disorder. It could be a deeply rooted belief not to be more successful than a parent. It could be a deeply rooted desire, unacknowledged and unaddressed, to be somewhere else doing something else. It could be a skewed form of self-care, keeping the person from becoming something he doesn’t really want to be.

In most of these examples, the laziness is a manifestation of a deeper cause the person is unaware of. This is because most root causes of laziness reside in our shadow, the unconscious part of ourselves that we are not aware of. Because we are unaware, it is easy to view laziness, and many other negative traits, as flaws in our character. But they are almost always indications of something deeper.

We all have a shadow. It is nothing to be afraid of or deny; on the contrary, it is a rich source of self-knowledge. When you say or do something and don’t know why, it probably came from your shadow. When you have ongoing issues that you don’t understand and can’t seem to resolve, they are probably arising from your shadow. Such ongoing issues are indications of something in the conscious mind that needs attention. Shadow has much to say, and we should learn to listen, for doing so is tremendously beneficial. Learning how to listen to, or integrate, our shadow is beyond the scope of this essay. There are many good books on the topic. One is Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert Johnson. Another one is The Spectrum of Consciousness by Ken Wilber; the chapter “Integrating the Shadow” (which can be read as a stand alone essay) was life-changing for me.

Thus, rather than judge certain character traits and apply pejorative labels to them, we should instead be curious about them, in others and even more importantly in ourselves. If we learn to view them as opportunities for learning and change, our whole paradigm can shift from one of judging to one of compassion.

I am shy, so I talk about myself with difficulty, but I thought an introduction of sorts was in order, so here it is. I am female, in my early forties, and have worked, in chronological order, as a driving instructor, a factory assembler (during which time I was a Teamster), a laboratory technician for a shampoo company, a technical writer, a blackjack card counter, and a professional poker player. I failed miserably as a poker player, which was fortunate, because it brought me back to my first love, writing. I just went bust at poker in June, out at the 2007 World Series of Poker in Vegas. My boyfriend and I left with enough money to get home and pay our bills for a month or two. Without getting into too much detail about poker (I’ll save that for another post), I’d like to say that we didn’t go broke because we suck. I am a decent player and he is a stellar player. We had a bad run of luck that just didn’t turn around. He’s going to make another run at it as soon as he gets a bankroll put together. At least I hope he does. I am probably not. I enjoy poker, but I want to write.

When we got home from Vegas, I flailed around for a few days, reluctant to update my tech writing resume as I don’t know if I can stomach another stint in corporate America. My internet research turned up a ton of non-technical writing work. But to get the work, you have to have some proven writing ability. A blog seems to be the easiest, cheapest, fastest way to showcase your writing talents. Thus, Brave New Kitty was born.

My other love is, for lack of a more eloquent term, human behavior. Everything about human development, human nature, and human relationships fascinates me. I am well read on psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. I decided that these are the things I want to write about for two reasons. The first is that I think I have something of value to share. The second is that writing about a topic is the best way to clarify and develop it in your mind. I can’t think of a better way to spend my time than focused on what really gets my motor running. I hope I can make money at it one way or another, but for now, my boyfriend is going to be the main breadwinner of the family. He’s been out of the work force for a few years too, as he was my cardcounting and poker partner, but he has ample skills to transition back in at a high level. That’s going to happen any day now.

Other stuff about me:

I am a sober person since 1992.

My favorite musicians are Bob Dylan (pre-1970), Cracker, Billy Bragg, and Steve Earle.

My favorite writer is Ken Wilber.

I like to meditate, but don’t do it regularly.

I love to travel, but I have never left North America.

I like to drive fast.

I have a very dark sense of humor.

I am not going to have children.

My two biggest peeves are probably bad driving and fundamentalist religion, not necessarily in that order.

I spend too much time playing video games.

I swear a lot.

I’ve been out of therapy for about 5 years now.

I am a very honest person, but will lie to spare someone’s feelings and occasionally because it’s easier than having a difficult conversation, but never to someone close to me.

I have a strong moral compass.

That’s about all the personal info I can share right now without feeling too exposed. It’s a weird sensation for me to hang my life out in cyberspace for all to see. Not that anyone’s looking, but nevertheless…Anyway, thanks for reading.