PandoraBlog

On Having Flaws

2011-03-25T14:37:00.005-04:00

Before I had my nervous breakdown in the 90s, having worked in the mental health field with adolescent offenders, and having taught anger management courses and scored kids against a list of "thinking errors" in the name of teaching them self-assessment skills, I found myself in a position where I felt a human being was honor bound to be as good a person as they were capable of being.

Part of it was my Christian upbringing, which although I had already become agnostic, I was very conscious was still a large part of the reason I had become the person I was. Part of it was in response to the years of teasing and abuse from my classmates in school. It was a challenge to myself that I would show them all (and perhaps myself) by being a better person than they ever were. Part of it was that I felt I had been given a gift as a counselor and friend to all, and had to be no burden on anyone else so I could instead take on their burdens, be the Good Samaritan, the caregiver, the man people wrote soliloquies about when you died.

I never got angry, I just felt a sadness that there was pain in the world.

I never allowed myself selfish wants and desires.

And when I made a mistake, I made sure to feel really, really bad about it. And I did.

When I let my hormones get the best of me on a hot, frisky night, and I didn't hear the word "no" the way I should have, not to the point of actually crossing any lines, but definitely to the point where a woman who had already experienced sexual trauma felt suddenly retraumatized, and I didn't see it, didn't respond as I, as an advanced soul, should have, I felt such shame. I felt like the lowest of the low.

When I, not knowing I had ADD, but knowing instead that I was clearly very intelligent and creative, and interested in so many things, could not reconcile that knowledge with the fact that I was getting Cs, and even sometime Ds or incompletes in school, I became increasingly despondent. I felt like I was an imposition on more than just the people who had such hopes for me, like my parents and my very intelligent friends. I began to feel I was an imposition on the world.

When, after nearly three years in the mental health industry, it became increasingly clear that I was not going to advance in stature and salary until I had at least a Master's degree, but that I wasn't going to get that Master's degree until I finished my Bachelor's, and that wasn't going to happen while I was taking fewer courses each semester, but I couldn't seem to manage to take those courses without becoming overwhelmed, and I had to work to pay bills, rent, food, car payments. Well, I began to wonder if perhaps the very oxygen I was breathing might be better breathed by other people.

When my writing, on which I increasingly began to pin my hopes of justifying my very existence, increasingly became lack-luster, bland, repetitive, dry and (gasp!) uninspired, I lost the last of my hope. My muse had died, or perhaps had even abandoned me for someone else.

I now officially had nothing to give the universe.

I was eating the universe's food. Breathing its air. Accepting the goodwill and high aspirations and terrific compliments and "Wow you are such a good actor, a good writer, wow you're smart", and I was giving it nothing in return.

I. Was. A fraud.

And this was a great insult to my very essential sense of identity. I was a higher soul, with a sense of purpose, a gift to give, and I was pissing on it and throwing it away.

Perhaps, in this light, it might make sense that I became suicidal, despondent, lost in a hazy cloud of shame and doubt and cynicism. Smart, creative, and unable to do anything with it worthy of the man I felt I should be.

Perhaps, on the other hand, someone might conclude I was melodramatic, and they would likely be right. But melodrama is not melodrama to the person experiencing the pain. The pain is very real, the shame, the quandary of being responsible for being better than you clearly are.

Anyhow, the suicidal impulses and depression were very real, more real that the doctor on the psych ward where I checked myself in would admit to my mother. ("He wasn't really suicidal." Yeah, right.)

Bear with me. There is a point to this.

Recovery, for me, began with a most curious realization.

It is okay to be flawed.

It is okay to be human.

The real fraud is to think that you are a higher soul with grand gifts and great responsibilities.

The real tragedy is to consume oneself so much with the need to be grand, amazing, gracious, generous, even-keeled, wise and always right-minded, right-hearted, unselfish. The greatest mistake we can make is that any mistake or base motive we have is somehow an indication that we are docked against some cosmic scorecard, that karma has just revved its motor, and it's waiting in the wings for the opportunity for me to step into the street so it can run me over. That God just frowned and wrote a memo to St. Peter. That Santa just transfered my name to the bad list.

The greatest gift we can give ourselves is permission to be human. Flawed. Imperfect. Impatient, grumpy, and yes even hypocritical.

I celebrate being a hypocrite. I actually do. You can ask most of my friends, because I have preached it more than once.

I zealously protect my right to be angry sometimes. To stand up for myself, only to realize later on that I was in the wrong, that someone else was under undue burden, and I only made things worse by getting uppity and snippety and snivelly.

I am not perfect, and that's fine.

The measure of a person is not the ability to get by with the grace of a ballet dancer in all things. Perfect people freak me out. People that have every hair in place, that seem calm and eternally happy, unflappable, poised. Those people are the people I watch, because I know that they will have one hell of a collapse, and it will truly be epic in proportion.

I recently read of a notion of a form of enlightenment in Buddhist circles that is, at best, temporary. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about it in Eat, Pray, Love. The idea is that, on the path of meditation and reflection, one will occasionally meet the universe, taste the "oneness" of enlightenment, feel at peace and truly, at last, understand. Everything.

And then the feeling will fade, hunger and illness will eat away at the equanimity, people with annoying rasps in their voices will begin to talk just 5 seconds longer than you really are prepared to handle, mosquitoes will begin to bite, and you begin to care about that again, bill collectors and phone marketers begin to call on your cell phone, deadlines demand your attention, and you very steadily begin to lose your shit and become a very unenlightened being and finally one day you might snap at a cashier, say something quite offensive to a loved and cherished friend, be very insensitive to someone you love.

And that's all right.

You're not a bad person.

You are a glorious human being who goes through cycles who is occasionally strong, occasionally not and wants, really wants, really does want to be a better person.

But isn't yet.

Our flaws don't define us. And sometimes, the task at hand isn't to become perfect, but to develop a sense of humor, like one would show to a five year old who can't quite master dancing and keeps tumbling most gracelessly onto the couch, to laugh, and hold the child, to hold "you" in loving arms and say the simple phrase:

"That's okay. You're allowed to be imperfect. I think you are glorious just the way you are."

Ready for Autumn

2010-11-05T14:57:00.000-04:00

Ready for Autumn

by Vania Smrkovski

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Contemplation on a bench in the park on a cool autumn day and she reflects on her life and her entrances her exits and her hours no maybe days no maybe months or even years in this very seat in this park in years past and she wonders how to measure her life.

Snow flowers sweat grass-stains dirt ground into her dress as her dress ground into her hips as her hips ground into him and she smiles, red-cheeked, at that steamy memory and she wonders how to measure her time here.

Grammar middle high college grad doctor mother wife retired diagnosed terminal and now she waits here on the bench in the park on this cool autumn day and she reflects on her lessons and she breathes and she smiles and she sees so many choices.

So many ways to measure her life.

Contemplation. As leaves fall upon the ground as leaves fall upon her bench as leaves fall upon her shoulders her lap her face and cover her eyes and they measure her in inches and then feet and then yards and she is covered by the autumn leaves and she waits for them to do their final act upon her.

Baby-blankets quilts backpacks rain-gear grunting man with garlic breath and whispers of love, and children on her breast as she sleeps, and knitted quilts and one day a shroud and she wonders if anyone will remember.

Will anyone remain to measure her life.

Contemplation with no urgency only peace only love only certainty of a life fully lived in this park in this world with her friends with her loves, as the leaves leave the trees till they're bare, and she knows she is ready she has given she can go she can go she can finally let go.

Hand on her shoulder warmth and firmness and calm and timeless and she turns, sees his face and she smiles.

And she smiles and closes her eyes and arises and takes his hand.

And she bids her park goodbye.

I Am Mighty

2010-11-03T23:49:00.001-04:00

I Am Mighty:

by Vania Smrkovski

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

You try to weigh me down, but I am mighty, and I will dominate, and I will defeat you.

Yes! I am made up of chemicals, neurons, imbalances, experiences, scars, self-esteem, and

Yes! I know the words of my own doom by heart and hear their echo still, and

Yes! I still hear the words from the school yard, the school bus, from college, from work, from the darkest night in bed alone and weary and teary and afraid, but

You! Cannot defeat me and

You! Cannot break me and

You! Will not define me for

You! Are but what I make of you and

I! Will not be limited by the world you paint for me, you deamons of doubt and fear and anger and angst and self-loathing.

For while I cannot control the tidal flow of despair that you create in my mind and my soul,

I can still choose how to respond

And I will defeat you

And I will perservere

For even in the deepest pit of depression and despair, my tears will erode you, my fury will blow you down, and you must know that I am mightier than you can ever conceive.

________________________________________________________

Vania 3.0, it's happening.... The writing, the act itself, the inspiration, has come back to me.....

Allee Willis Blog � Blog Archive � Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – 1970’s Disco Suitcase Set & Pomplamoose

2010-05-04T08:35:00.000-04:00

Allee Willis Blog � Blog Archive � Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – 1970’s Disco Suitcase Set & Pomplamoose

Being a fan of Pomplamoose, as I have been so eager to share on my profile before, I thought I would share this great blog by the writer of "September", who was so impressed with their remake of her song that she tracked them down and offered to collaborate on a record with them!

AWESOME!

It has happened at last. Officially single, ready to start anew.

2010-04-07T12:31:00.002-04:00

Well, to be sure, I never really knew where I would be when I found myself in the summer of 2009 wondering if I had indeed reached the point of no hope. I put everything I could into my marriage, trying to really look at my part in our arguments, to see what I needed to improve, so that I could be sure I had ruled out everything before I finally gave up.

But I had lost hope, and while I didn't know where I was going, I knew that I was in the unique and wonderful position of having recently reconnected with friends from years past, and I found myself looking at the world of theatre for the first time in nearly 20 years.

And I felt just a little less afraid.

These last 8 or 9 months have been quite a journey, and now I have capped off the first chapter of what I have termed "Vania 3.0", the next great revision in my self-identity. The divorce was final as of yesterday. I can't quite celebrate. I do not hate my ex wife. Not even remotely. I still fervently hope that we will be able to develop a strong friendship again.

She is still my primary veterinarian for my cats, and we still get together once every couple of months to watch TV together. It's awkward, maybe more for me than for her, I don't know, but I met her when she was still freshly in the United States, a college student not quite ready for the real world, and I watched her grow into a strong, independent woman. Even if it turns out that we are not meant for each other, I still cherish those memories together.

But, I'm starting chapter 2 of my Vania 3.0 life, now. I've made major headway in the story analysis of my "Great American Existential Novel", developed characters, back story, potentially interesting plot developments. I've done three full stage productions, the last, Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, being the most challenging and fulfilling for me yet. And I might, just might, actually be seriously in a position to open up a dinner theatre here in my home town of Knoxville, TN.

And now I'm spending a great deal of my time wondering what I am going to do with my personal life. Do I just happily find a way to live on my own? Do I remain open for a new relationship one day? Do I just crassly find a way to get laid whenever I can? I'm not sure if I'm that kind of guy. For all that I still get urges (fairly often, truth be told), I just can't bring myself to just be happy banging a stranger. I do want to actually know the person I'm with. Call it a sense of propriety, maybe, or perhaps just call it a sense of insecurity -- maybe I just need someone I can trust enough before I make love with her.

Meanwhile, knowing that a relationship happens pretty much despite anything I do, I am just content finding my home is indeed my home. My salvation, my protection. I can tuck away all the corners that lead to the outside world and rest in the cocoon that is my condo, feed my kittens, cook a meal and lay back and read, or watch some TiVo'd programs, or just close my eyes, pick up my recorder and dictate some thoughts on my book.

So here's to you, my ex-wife, my friends who knew me as Vania 1.0, or Vania 2.0. I hope you'll be able to tag along as I enter chapter 2 and take part in the story that is my life.

It's only now starting to get really interesting....

Vania

The Gardener: a peek into the story

2010-03-10T20:28:00.001-05:00

I hereby provide you an email I sent to a friend describing who this Gardener is and why she (? he?) is important in the story. Most of this will not make sense.

So be it.

________________________________________________

Sandy,

Hey, thanks for the offer of help....

I know very little about gardening, so at this point I am doing a character study. I want to understand it well enough to build a character. I want to understand enough about its history to hopefully build on that knowledge.

The character is a god, of sorts, and a mortal character as well. I'm not sure how much even she/he knows of the dual nature. But the Gardener has been building, harvesting, nurturing for aeons. The garden he tends is as much heavenly, ethereal. They are the stuff of forces, wind, gravity, electricity, but they are also attraction, between people, inspiration, focus.

While I do want to study our own many mythologies for my stories, I plan to kind of tear them like you might make confetti out of paper. Reattach them as with tape, or water for papier mache.

The Gardener is interested in particular in a peculiar thing he/she has encountered. Its original form is lost to us, but upon the discovery of "DNA" in our mortal world, its reality changed and it became highly complex DNA, strands distributed throughout our reality, sometimes in people, many of whom are remarkable, known to history as saints, artists, philosophers, kings, but many of whom are animals, plants and even rock.

These strands were once part of one original god-like being, one of a handful at the time of the creation before creations, the creation that created the canvas upon which our Judeo-Christian god painted the light upon the darkness.

The Gardener doesn't understand everything -- in fact what the Gardener thinks she knows is mostly myth, misinformation, legends, deception, but she understands that, like mating different Orchids, one can create something new and unique, and so she serves the purpose of the story by heralding the first transformation I need for my main character.

In my stories, Sandy, I plan to follow a mortal, an ordinary divorce who moves to a small town to rebuild his life, as he faces the confusion and certain descent into madness as he discovers he is more than a mere mortal, but is -- what? Divine? Even that word is so Judeo-Christian as to be meaningless. But definitely made of subtler stuff than what can be understood is his world of physics, psychology, is, is not, either/or, mass, meaning.

So the Gardener is only representative of the next level of reality, but a reality that is just as false as our own, and once the first book is done and our hero has discovered a truer sense of himself, he will only come to discover that there are many layers to the skin that covers his eyes.

I want the Gardener to be as rich a character as I can make him or her. I want to know legend and history. I want to know what callouses form where, and how the clock is set differently each day and each season.

I hope this gives you a better sense of what I need......

Ankle Deep in the Black Bog of Writer's Block

2010-03-02T10:46:00.005-05:00

Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune is just about over. It's been a terrific run, and I feel like I've learned a lot as an actor. I am hoping for this last weekend to be the best yet.

One more weekend to go, and I no longer have any huge commitments after hours. Well, having just about wrapped up this latest 2-month excuse not to really do anything with writing, the thought of the massive project has been getting ever so insidiously under my skin again. At the recommendation of a friend, I purchased a book called "No Plot? No Problem!", just for the sake of having the topic of writing part of my evening regimen.

The real problem is that, while the act of writing itself is important, I still find myself going back to the notion that I have a very specific story that I want to tell -- I am simply not yet at the point of writing the tale. It's that simple. I could sit down and write fifteen short stories in a week's time and it wouldn't give me one iota of a sense of satisfaction because they simply would not be stories that I want to write.

So I am recommitted to giving this process of story outlining and back-story development a go. I have printed out every single note I have on the topic, in my Google Documents & Spreadsheets collection, in my Google Notes collection, in the LiveScribe notes I've been collecting, on my over-sized sheets of notepaper that I bought last December along with lots of permanent markers and lots of stick'um so I can post them on my wall, and over the next few weeks, as Frankie and Johnny closes and I am able to commit more time, I will cut these notes up into little scraps of thoughts and paste them on my wall in my office at home and pray that a sensible pattern emerges.

See, I am exploring something very peculiar. It doesn't even have a fully fleshed out story, yet. It's an exploration into the very notion of identity and reality. The story presumes a set of physical laws that would have an impact on so much of our notion of what is a person, what is a moment in time, what is "real".

Meanwhile, I will take a break from theatre work. At least a couple of months. These little hermit-moments don't tend to last too long. The writer's block has made it difficult for me to stay on task and sort through my thoughts. I'm still trying to enlist the aid of some of my creative friends, but they either complain irritated that they can't grasp what I'm trying to do, as if the fact that I can't either isn't relevant, as if I'm trying to show off for them, or they focus on irrelevancies or try to advise me to "just write", ignoring everything I've been saying all along.

Yes, I know that "just write" is important. I'm not discounting the idea that the act of writing, in and of itself, sets the creative juices flowing. I've already been down that road and the motivation simply isn't there to continue. The reason for this is that the real problem I am trying to solve, this puzzle of how to tell a story about a god who doesn't even know what is real, isn't yet ready to be written.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com

2010-02-10T09:22:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com

This one is a keeper. What an amazing discussion about the creative process. A totally non-scientific, non-rational process that is so intrinsically entwined into the ego, that tests ones faith, self-confidence.

In my own writing, I found one day years ago that I was suddenly unable to write any more. Where I had once written because poems and stories settled into my mind with a demand to be heard and recorded by me, the humble artist, I was suddenly faced with a daily barrage of tired, repetitive and very hollow sentiments. I struggled with this for a while as I entered a depressive stage in my life and talked with a friend who worked creatively every day in his career as a producer/filmmaker/writer.

He told me something that stays with me to this day: "At first, we write because we are inspired. As years pass, we are inspired because we write."

Elizabeth Gilbert shares her very similar experience as a writer of a hugely successful and lauded work of art, and the humbling experience of trying to continue in the creative process with the dread of never being able to achieve that success ever again. And in the process, she describes the historical relationship we humans have had with the creative process, where we have variously ascribed the causative agent of creativity to external muses (or "geniuses") and when we instead suddenly began to anoint the artist him/herself with the label of genius.

I know that I, as an agnostic man with a respect for the rational process of looking at my world objectively, have tended to over-intellectualize things, and yet I have always had a reverence for the experience of the divine, even when my rational brain demanded I define it, codify it, ferment it, engrave it, emboss it and seal it forever as a measurable quality that can be understood and displayed. But this experience of the divine does not need to be defined, and in fact must defy attempts at vivisection and inspection. The divine is ineffable because it is beautiful, irresistible, ephemeral, and indefinable.

As Gilbert suggests, there is something lost when we put the onus of the creative process squarely on the shoulders of the artist. A foreboding sense of responsibility, dread, where the artist has no where to turn but toward the mirror for her solutions.

Clinically, it could easily be argued that the brain is not engineered to be creative under such circumstances. The abstract, creative portion of the brain whithers under analysis and ceases to in fact exist under such prodding and poking. The artist becomes crippled under the weight of unending analysis and dithering. The creative brain can only survive when it is allowed to believe in something that is not rational or even internally consistent.

In my efforts as a resurrected writer, I have been trying to build myself an altar, a shrine, a sacred space in my home. A place where I can put my rational brain aside for a while, where I can hang my ego on a coat hook at the entrance and become a supplicant to the process. To survive past the years of regular visits by my muse, I have to nurture a space, a garden in which to attract more muses, more genii (the "genius", get it?), and allow them the opportunity to thrive. As she describes the site of a dancer who suddenly appears to be touched by the divine in his dance, the trick comes the next morning when the dancer wakes up and discovers it is Tuesday at 11AM and he is mortal and is no longer a glimpse of God. In a like vein, I need to remember that I am not a writer, an actor or an artist of any sort at all so much as I am a gardener, a shepherd, who maintains a plot of creatively fertile soil and hopes the seeds he plants will one day flower and thrive.

It is not a failure. It is not a failure. It is not a failure.

2010-01-25T16:32:00.002-05:00

Okay, if I keep repeating that it's not a failure, then clearly I'm fighting the feeling that I've failed.

Argh! So much for Vania 3.0, right?

Acting, and poor life decision making, has managed to keep me from tackling this. Or maybe they are simply filling in the gap that is left from the writer's block. Or likely, there is some mixture of the two extremes.

Needless to say, no more journaling has been done. The writing desk is covered in bills and pillows and blankets (from my niece's Christmas visit) and I've been consumed this month with memorizing lines for my role in a two person play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (http://www.theatreknoxville.com), opening February 12th and playing through March 7. Now, granted this is definitely consuming a lot of my available time. And I have positioned myself otherwise well by taking part in the Tennessee Stage Company's New Play Festival, where I get to read parts in new, unproduced plays, and study and critique where they fail.

But no writing is issuing forth. When I sit down and prepare, I freeze. Nothing comes forth. I have a writing notebook that I carry with me, and I do indeed take notes in it. I bought $200 worth of easel and over-sized board room pads and pens and tape so I could cover my wall with story ideas. They are mostly empty. I have three large sheets of paper that say list the topic of the ideas I have in mind for that sheet. And there they have been for a few weeks now.

I started making progress on a short story, but ideas just weren't coming. No good ideas, anyway.

I came up with a new notion that I am going to try. A game. Pick a story that fits closest to one of the stories I have in my head, and use it as a guide, a template. A starting point.

The Great American Existential Novel is there!

Sigh.

Wondering

2009-10-19T10:02:00.000-04:00

Now I wonder what to wonder, and if wondering derails my wondering.
Shall I wander round and wonder, or wait and wonder what to sing?

Whether wandering withers wondering, well there's a thought to ponder.
Shall I play it safe, and stay in place, forgetting what lies yonder?

I think instead I'll lie in bed, and wonder 'bout this wondering.
For it seems that I can't verify that I've fin'ly stopped my wondering.

Latest Writing Tasks

2009-10-05T13:15:00.003-04:00

Hey, folks. Some progress is being made in the writing. The daily journals have kind of stalled a bit. I've had a number of weeks of alternately being sick with some bug or with fall molds and possible allergies. Plus I've been getting stressed over the transition at work from contract to permanent, since they kind of low-balled my salary. In almost 15 years in the field of technology, nearly 10 of it being as a programmer, I have never actually had a problem with the lack of a degree. My resume is strong enough to earn very good salaries. But my parent company has decided to hold me to a salary cap, and as a result I am actually getting a tiny pay CUT for the honor of working here permanently.

But I'm not too worried about it. The folks in the local office were not in support of this cap at all, and they unilaterally managed to get a generous singing bonus for me, and this in combination with a refinanced mortgage on my home will result in the freeing up of a fair bit of cash, which will help toward getting me out of debt (credit card debt) at last.

The other major distraction to writing has been the play that I just got done performing: The Diary of Anne Frank. I just didn't have enough hours in the day to eat, sleep, rehearse, work and write.

Or....

Or at least that's what I tell myself.

Fact is, there is still something that is keeping me from freely writing and polishing my stories. They are stuck in my head and are rarely committed to paper. Somehow I have this drive, passion, near obsession with getting my stories down, but that white page is still more frightening than anything else out there.

My latest creative effort, for instance, was this not-even-a-haiku blurb I wrote last night:

Blank page, still you taunt me.

Bastard.

I'll take it, though. It speaks more clearly to where my head is than anything else.

It's not to say that I haven't made any progress at all. The fact that I have allowed writing to re-enter my daily world of thoughts means that I am re-introducing the types of things I used to have around me. Notebooks, pens, books on the writing process, books of art. I am making great friendships with writers and painters and photographers. I am spending time listening to tipsy friends play on drums around a camp fire. I am spending time with actors and directors and doing, doing doing and playing, and I am awakening my artist, teasing, feeding, playing and laughing and singing and crying and dancing. And playing with my cat whenever I get the chance.

So I wanted to take this opportunity to share this with you, and to share one of the resources that has sort of unlocked my thinking a bit. Since my drive for my stories has always been the "neat-o" factor, sometimes I find myself struggling over the silliest of things. Things like character development, conflict, pacing, these things are often where I get stuck, because what got me to reflexively pull the pen out was some simple twisted idea that was all by itself an idea I would love to see on paper.

So I happened to stumble on a great book which has served as a great thought generator for me. It's called "Story Structure Architect", by Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Pd.D., and it isn't one of those dry books on how to make your story boring and dry so only a critic could love it.

Instead, I have found it to be a great idea generator, a questionizer, designed to be opened at any random page, perused, bent, folded, spindled and mutilated until the moment that you suddenly read a page and ask yourself: "Wait a second! That there describes my story. This situation is the category that I have been trying to work out, and here's why I'm getting stuck. I never really asked myself WHY character X is so obsessed over character B." Or: "Oh yeah, this describes Zeb, all right. But really, why haven't I had him look at his situation and complain? I've missed a completely important element of his struggle, here!"

I am finding it is very useful as a pocket tour guide into my stories. After I have an idea that is fairly fleshed out, but isn't quite clicking into place as a compelling experience, this book is allowing me to ride the trolley car down my story's streets and look at the significant places and wonder, from the point of view of these chapters, if I have considered how each element could be made more relevant when cast in this light.

Is it a love story? Is it an action-adventure (Roller Coaster)? One of my stories, I came to realize, fits well under the "Supplicant" structure. The supplicant structure deals with three characters at its core. The supplicant (the person with life happening out of her control, seeking help from outside), the persecutor (that person who interferes by invoking fear by use of some power) and the power in authority (that character that has the ability to solve or torment simply by interfering to help, or by withholding that help).

Did I intend to write the story this way? No.

The story was of an artist who is so obsessed with his emotional demons that he imbues life into his artistic creations and ultimately becomes a victim of his own creations as they trap him and attempt to subdue him as a permanent source of life for them all.

But by casting the story in light of this notion of the Supplicant, I began to wonder if I had suitably considered whether Ian, my main character, was even fighting back enough? Shouldn't he at some point feel compelled to want to be free? See, I hadn't considered this in my earlier drafts of the story. And the story became dull and uninteresting because of it.

I am looking forward to seeing how this and many other stories might evolve further due to resources like this book. These tools strike the right balance between the bad extreme of having a formulaic book and the opposite extreme of having a story that just isn't interesting to read.

2009-09-17T12:52:00.000-04:00

Very frustrated with Palm and Palm Support for Pre!!!!

My Google Calendar and my Pre tend to stop syncing some appointments, and it terribly abuses repeating events if you have made an exception on one device and not the other.

eChatting with support rep Valborg was like pulling teeth. I had to explain my problem numerous times as he kept mis-stating the problem and giving me solutions that had nothing to do with what I said.

Finally, it came down to a problem with the way Palm synchronizes repeating events from Google Calendar and the Pre, and he kept insisting that GCal events that are changed from the repeating schedule SHOULD exist on the Pre, even if they have been deleted or rescheduled from GCal.

Asking him if there would be a change addressing this problem in the future release of WebOS turned out to be futile, as he insisted again that this was correct behavior.

Please. If you have a repeating event on Google for 7PM and you change one day so the event occurs at 9P, the whole notion of synchronization means that you should not have to have a 7P AND 9P event on your Pre. It should know that the 7P has been changed!

If you are going to tell me of a work-around, then admit that it is a work-around and tell me if there is a chance the behavior will be corrected. Do not talk to your customer like they are children!

My one published work

2009-09-15T10:21:00.002-04:00

And I say to you, the stars in the sky are great in number, but a mind's emotions are greater .... And when thrown in among them, 'tis far easier a thing to get lost.

And as you stand gaping at me from your place, you imagine patterns, as I do the same with you ... patterns of allusion showing my every desire, my every fire, my every light.

And still I stand among them, covered in cold vacuum, surrounded by the lights of myriad passions and pains I simply do not understand.

And still I gaze at the wonder of them all, pulling at one another, spinning debris throughout my universe of thought, leaving some non-existent creator within me to clean ... to organize, to comprehend.

And you say to me that understanding begins with traveling from one thought and emotion at a time, and whether the patterns in the stars be illusion or real, being and identity can only exist with every star in its own place.

Vania Smrkovski

I'd have to look up the exact year, but I published this sometime around the turn of 80s to 90s. Hope you enjoyed it!

Vania 3.0 as explained to a friend....

2009-07-13T09:44:00.003-04:00

So had a friend ask me recently about my recent play, and the story behind it all. It'd been years since we'd seen each other, and we'd only reconnected for the first time in almost 10 years last -- what? June? May even?

I remember particularly that when he was last in Knoxville, we were good friends, but I was waist deep in a depression that had become over the years nearly crippling. God(s) love him, he was one of those people who, when I started picking up on his and his girlfriend's body language showing awkwardness around me, admitted that they were getting frustrated with me because it was hard to listen to someone who complained all the time but didn't do anything about it.

Can't remember exactly how he phrased it.

At the time, I told him, actually, that I quite understood. And I hardly ever saw him and his girlfriend again. And I rarely brought up any of my depression issues again to him. And increasingly, I rarely brought it up to anyone else again. I didn't want to be a burden.

It was only years later that I began to get a little angry about it. But as angry as I was about how cruel it felt to be told to shut up about my depression, I was also angry at the very real predicament depression puts you in.

If you haven't experienced depression personally, it is next to impossible to rely on your friends as a support structure, because you are imposing a burden on them. And yet, the most critical part of getting past crippling depression is to relay on your support structure until you are more capable of using your own coping skills.

But that was then. 14 or 15 years ago. When my practical world was steadily shrinking down and it was almost to the point where I had to kill myself or have a miracle to keep myself sane. My how perspectives can really play with your world.

Well, I recently reconnected with this old friend of mine, after he and I both had spent over 10 years almost entirely separated a continent apart living our own lives. It'd been a while since I had an opportunity, for work or otherwise, to make a trip to San Francisco, where he lives, and he'd hardly made a trip to Knoxville at all since he moved out there.

Then a few months ago, we reconnected on Facebook (the theme of my life this year especially) and lo' and behold, he was coming into town! We got to spend some time together, got caught up on the latest, and then he left.

And as I've mentioned before, I then got back into theater for the first time in nearly 20 years, and I got a hankering to get back into a long lost love, writing stories....

Well, Don, my friend, got interested in my posts about my play, and decided to drop a line on Facebook and ask me about what was behind it all. I thought it was worth sharing here.

Don

Those pictures Patty Pope posted. wowow. beautiful.

Hey! how'd the play go? what's the story there?

Vania Smrkovski

Today at 9:35am

Those pics were taken forever ago, back when we were all still in school, back even when we'd only just first met, or even before that. But then, perhaps you can tell. If you put my and my brother in law side by side with those pics, you'd be much more likely to say that they look like him than me. It's weird to see them.

The story behind the play? Hmmm.....

There are two answers to that. The briefer (which I guess is not all that brief) one is that, as is so common on Facebook, my circle of Facebook Friends grew by invading a different time period of my life, by having a random friend from my past connect, and then connecting with all of their friends who I also knew from that time period. This year was the most intense, starting from January or even late last year, and connecting with people from iPIX, from my counseling days, from my frakking High School days in Illinois! [Note: I moved to Tennessee during my 4th year in high school.] And then at last from those few years around 1990 where I did some theater here in Knoxville.

An actress friend, Lisa, found me and we got to talking quite a bit, and she started egging me on to get back into theater after she found out that I'd been playing around with the idea recently. (Lisa was one who was really pushing me to keep at my writing way back when in the early 90s.) After a month of catching up, she told me about auditions for Picnic, and I got totally stoked, and my life has been amazing since I auditioned, got a part and performed for the first time in nearly two decades.

The longer answer is this. After my breakdown, which I felt was largely caused by my depression and feelings of being unable to connect with people, but also feelings that I was not cut out to do anything meaningful, especially in art, writing, acting, etc, I spent most of my years focused on the task of learning how and accepting being an ordinary 9 to 5 worker bee, sheeple, whatever you want to call it. I literally made the decision that if I was determined to commit suicide, might as well kill off the writer, actor, dreamer that was trying to achieve impossible dreams, but leave the ordinary guy in me to still have some kind of life, even if it was totally unextraordinary. (Can't even say "ordinary".)

After about 7 or so years of this, becoming an increasingly successful programmer, I started having these scary moments where I wanted to write again, to dream of doing something grand. By that time, I looked at this as if it was a symptom of depression, I would feel panic attacks, full on anxiety, so I suppressed the urges as best I could, but after a while I started wondering if I might, in my new "Vania 2.0", be able to do it again in a way that wouldn't create the anxieties and false , unrealistic expectations I had that brought me to my knees before.

This time I was focused on the problem as an ADD problem, since that was a theme in my self-care at the time (I did actually get diagnosed with neurological tests, if you're curious). How do I organize notes, character studies, plot summaries, timelines, snippets of writing in such a way that I could be inspired, write, walk away and still have the body of work collected in increasingly large collections of stuff that I might one day be ready to tackle full on. How could I learn to re-learn all of the life of a writer I once knew. I had forgotten everything I knew, all of the little things like looking at people in a restaurant and absentmindedly wondering if any of my characters might say similar things, or driving down the road and spontaneously imagining a new twist or piece of evolution of the story.

When the above mentioned nagging to get back into theater happened, I'm starting to think I hit a watershed moment where I was at a proverbial cliff and I had to choose to jump. And I had friends who kept egging me on to do those creative things again, people who knew me back then and wanted me to have that happy feeling once more, and I jumped. Even before I really knew what I was doing.

Don, these last few months have been absolutely terrifying, thrilling, overwhelming and liberating for me!

For the first time in over 13 years, I am feeling a sense of confluence in my life, a series of events and experiences that are conspiring to change my course again. I feel like I am heading to Vania 3.0.

Everything terrible, remarkable and amazing has been happening. On the terrible side, my marriage has been called into question. My wife wasn't prepared for this new commitment, this new mistress called the theater. And she will not be prepared for the writer if I let him out to play again. Besides, I have also realized that in the process of learning to tend to my own wounds these past 13 years, I have unwittingly allowed my self esteem to be diminished by her. Not out of any sense of overt abuse on her part, but from the natural give and take compromises one tends to do in relationships.

Meanwhile, I am hanging out with that singularly exceptional group of people known as the theater crowd. I hadn't realized how different they were until Olya came to an outing with us after a show. She felt more lost there than I ever felt with her and vet school colleagues. If you remember "Freaks" and can remember the nice suit guy taking the dainty lady to meet his circus freak friends, that's how I suddenly felt with this thespian crowd.

And I realized that it was time to start feeding my muse again. That it wasn't just about writing in the dark rooms of my home. I had to nurture that other side of me again.

The last ten years have been spent tending to the ordinary guy in me, trying to build a strong foundation, a core of being that could help me weather the bad times, and manage the bills and finances.

Now, with that task done, I realize it is time to begin preparations for Vania 3.0. The artist didn't die of suicide after all. And now it is time for me to nurture him to grow, give him a playground, give him paper and a chance to write the story he wants to tell.

I really don't know what will come of it. Somehow my sharing all of this with my circle of friends has unexpectedly inspired some of my friends to start writing and exploring, too, and they are making more progress and writing and doing than I am. Maybe it's my core, methodical self managing the show, but I'm tending a garden here, and instead of using fertilizer and UV lamps to get really fast growth for quick harvesting, I am working on the process, trying to learn how to live like an artist again.

I may never get around to actually writing again, but I'm trying to remind myself that the life of the artist, the living and thinking like an artist, is really the first goal. Tackling the fear of failure by simply loving the act itself.

"Picnic" went resoundingly well. I have a short list of things I'd like to have done better, but I am very pleased with how I did on my first play since before you and I even met, and the director has invited me to join in his upcoming production of The Diary of Anne Frank for September (I play Mr. Van Daan). I have some friends who are hounding me to start posting some writing, and I'm still actively finding ways to explore the process and how to integrate it into my life.

Olya and I are seeking counseling, which I think we need (we have had some very nasty arguments, and well there are other issues), but in the process, our counselor has also been my personal counselor and has had some interesting things to say about how he thinks I have never really had a suitable father figure and the resulting self-esteem is really something that has been keeping me from focusing and challenging myself. Whatever the truth of all of that, he seems to have some interesting notions of how I can improve some things in my life, and I'm excited.

Vania 3.0 is happening, and it's largely happening without much effort on my part. Things outside of my control are changing, and I am often reacting instead of planning. It allows me to focus on responding and nudging things here and there, learning and hopefully growing.

I am fascinated to see where it will all go.

So that's it. That's the story. The upgrade to Vania 3.0 is free for you. Or maybe I'll charge you a sushi/sake meal next time I'm out there.

As a general update, I haven't been doing a lot of writing yet. But I've been following the book "The Artist's Way" and have been trying to diligently (not so much) do my "daily pages" where I write 3 pages of whatever is on my mind. The idea is that it's a toxic brain dump that helps clear your head of the distractions and stresses that cause your writer's (or artist's) block.

But I said up front it was going to be a long term rewiring of me. Vania 3.0 doesn't get to happen over night, so I'm not discouraged, yet.

And I am very thankful that I have had some new friends and some already dear friends nagging the hell out of me to get something out there for them to read. I may end up doing that very soon.

Writing Beyond My Current Abilities

2009-06-24T09:58:00.006-04:00

I have been writing a book for twenty years.

Now, that's quite an oversimplification, to be sure. It started out as a short story in high school that I insisted was going to be the beginning of a career. Soon the short story evolved into a novella, and then into a series of novels, all before even beginning to put pen to paper and writing.

Now, that, too, is an oversimplification. I did write. In high school, and then in college, I did write. I wrote pages and pages of free-style poems that, I thought, were going to show my budding genius and build the foundation of a successful career as a writer and a thinker. I imagined I would be invited to do speeches and readings. My life would finally make sense.

Now that.... that's not really an oversimplification. Though I sometimes wish it were. See, those years... well those years were very problematic. Without going into nauseating detail, suffice to say that I had years of depression to face and years of recovery after that yet to go. At the time, this craving to write, to act, to philosophize, all of this came out of a need to feel special, worthy, to fill that void inside of me, and it ultimately kept me from actually facing the hard work that I needed to do to really prepare to be a writer.

Those who have experienced mental illness in various forms and degrees can probably understand, much more quickly than most others who have not, that the mind can have an immense power over one's well being and sense of self. The very part that controls the gates of logic and self-care is sick! The very part that says "well, that's not very productive of you, moaning in the corner" is shunted aside by a foreboding, a palpable, physical sensation of fear (in the case of depression, at least) that says that you are worthless, leaching oxygen out of the air that could be breathed in by others more worthy than you.

Wow. That's enough of that, I think.

And yet, yep, yep, this is how I lived the years of the early to mid 90s. With an absolute certainty that I had found myself in a corner, the long end of a bad choice in a maze. And I was very, very seriously considering suicide.

(What does this have to do with writing a bloody book?!)

All of the sordid details of that little death spiral I will share when plied with alcohol in a safe environment. Maybe. But suffice to say that one of a small number of decisions and discoveries I made to help me get out of that funk was the realization that a big part of my depression was drawn from the belief that the only skill and career I had left as an option was writing. And my muse was gone. I was no longer inspired to write. None of what I wrote was compelling. My little nuggets of gold that I had in my hand, my creativity, had turned into lumps of tin.

So I decided to go ahead and let myself suicide.

I killed that part of me that was the actor, the writer, the dreamer, the philosophizer. I decide though that I would let the other half of me -- the boring worker, the 9-to-5er that came home and paid bills and watched the parade go by, fighting the impulse to run onto the streets and join in the fun -- to live on.

And for 10 years, I did just that. I had developed almost a phobia of anything of the creative in me. The very consideration of committing to a writing project would make me shake and sweat. Accuse me of being dramatic, and I'll stare you down with such conviction you'll walk away shaking your head. I was terrified.

And then time passed.

And friends reconnected.

And old memories came back to the surface.

And like Lazarus himself, that corpsed artist inside of me started belching up putrid coughs warning me that things were going to change around here, buddy! Things are going to change! And somehow I was ready for it.

I had spent 10 years recovering from depression and building my life from the ground up, developing a stable inner core that I could rely on.

(So at last we get on with the Writing??)

Besides the depression, I also had to face a late-diagnosed ADD. Seems to have been integrally involved with my depression, as it was a large part of the reason I could not commit to projects of nearly any kind long term, and certainly explained why I wrote great when I was inspired (short, frantic and mad bursts of writing till the wee hours of the morning!), but couldn't organize a thought for five minutes when I wasn't. As a creative (and successful) friend once put it, "At first we write because we are inspired. Later, we are inspired because we write." Well, it seems I had not figured out how to transition to that later stage.

And yet this process of tending to my core, building on my center, growing, has also led me to learn new tools, ways to write things down and track them, keep them around, knowing that I can use them later.

(Like when you finally get to the Writing part of this essay!)

Like now. When I finally face the realization that I really do want to write this long, fabled book again.

I last left my writing as a notion of a series of books that explored the nature of reality and its experience in a very direct, personal way for the hero of the story. Fortunately, I did not throw most of my writing away, choosing instead to pack it in boxes and wrap it in so much tape that it could easily be confused as a bean bag (though not a very squishy one) wrapped in a shopping bag and... well... tape.

Over the years before my breakdown, I had somehow got it in my head that ultimately I could not bring myself to write several books in separate worlds, all with their own history and characters. The more I found myself exploring the nature of the experience of reality, the more the universe itself had to be, I argued, the same universe. Different people see the world in entirely different ways, be it two crazy loony artists or two pragmatic business executives. The only way I could compellingly explore that was to drop the convenient dishonesty of creating a different universe from scratch each time I started a new story. Each story had to be part of the same world.

I started calling my project TGAEN. Or, "The Great American Existential Novel".

Now, here I am, facing the challenge I have set before me. And I realize I have to re-learn the process of writing. Practically the whole process of creating. I am a different person, who is more aware of his failings and strengths and tools. And I have set before me a task that is far beyond my current skill set.

I have a story that will likely be broken up into several novels. I still don't really know the main character, or the rules, or "laws of physics" I will be applying. In terms of meaning, message, take-away, inspiration, hell even in terms of conflict/resolution, I am completely unclear.

What I have is a series of very tantalizing back-story notes, an overarching tale of existence and the transformation of characters from the very beginning of time, themes that are difficult to convey to even me, who is describing and discovering them!

I am using Google Notebooks and Google Documents to track articles, quotes and ideas that seem to resonate with my project. I use my hand-held smart phone to coordinate much of this and to review. And recently I purchased a LiveScribe digital pen, thinking that maybe one problem is that, since I entered the world of the World Wide Web, perhaps I walked away from the one avenue my muse required. Hand to pen to paper.....

I have topics and themes and ideas and character sketches that are more complex in this vaporous stage than I can organize in my ADD-ridden brain.

I am nervous. Shaking -- just a little. And I am excited as hell. Even if I work on this till the day I die of old age, it will be the most enjoyable project I've ever done.

However, I'd like to make more progress than this.

Is there anyone who has suggestions, resources, ideas? Do I pay for a writer's coach, go to every writer's retreat? How to I manage to track and organize my story, when I am not yet even at the stage that I know what my story is going to be?

Who has found themselves in the same situations, facing a task that was larger than they were, and how did you break it down, and keep yourself motivated and on task?

I am interested in meeting anyone who can share their experiences and their tricks of the trade. Now that I have a paying career during the day, this is not about a desperate act of finding something useful to do. This is about finding out why this book won't let me go....

And finding out how it ends.

An Obsessive Compulsive's 'Life In Rewind' : NPR

2009-05-14T10:13:00.000-04:00

A fascinating, tragic struggle with the horrors of a brain just slightly out of balance. Tortures of OCD told from the point of view of the man who experiences the compulsions.

An Obsessive Compulsive's 'Life In Rewind' : NPR

I am working on a story idea (well, have been for quite a long time, actually) that deals with different views and experiences of reality. I've been exploring, lately, the notion that the main character might be, by the strict clinical point of view, showing signs of mental illness, perhaps scizophrenia, perhaps more. When I started thinking of this approach, I found that I really wanted to understand more about life from the perspective of those who suffer from these conditions.

As someone who has suffered from crippling depression, moderate anxiety and a processing disorder that fits under the rubrik of "Attention Deficit Disorder", I know something about how one's mind can color and twist the world around you.

So I am seeking sources that can help me understand even more the human dimension of mental illness.

Anyone who is interested, please feel free to email me at vania at pandorasdream dot com. Or if you feel comfortable, feel free to leave a comment.

Smiley Lore :-)

2009-05-08T14:40:00.002-04:00

I first started using the Internet in 1986, my freshman year in college. Al Gore had not invented it yet, so I guess this was a prototype.

Anyhow, this Internet wasn't something that was available on your PC that would allow you to view web sites and see porn movies or the latest news video. In fact, this Internet bore little resemblance to what we commonly think of today. It was really little more than a gentleman's (and -woman's) agreement between science facilities, universities and military bases (and telecommunication companies, which primarily was AT&T at the time) to establish a commonly accepted method (we call them protocols) of taking messages and instructions and converting them into simple little packets of information that could be sent from facility to facility to share information and otherwise keep in touch.

Email and news boards were pretty much the primary method of people communication, and there were ways to access files like kermit, ftp, telnet (which also allowed you to control the machine you were connected to).

About the time I started school, a recent experiment had been in play for some few years called "Internet Relay Chat" (IRC). Like email, IRC allowed you to send messages to other people. But unlike email, IRC was real-time, and with multiple people. You would sign in with a name of your choise, you could choose different "channels", and any message you typed would only be seen by others on that same channel, and you could direct private messages to specific people.

If this is familiar, it should be. It was the pre-cursor to what we now think of as Instant Messaging.

But I digress.

This is when I was introduced to "emoticons", though I don't think most people refered to them by name, and I'm not even certain they were even named that at all by this time.

There were the still-used icons :-) ;-) 8-) (and their frowny versions as well). There were several other variations, too, but there were several others that had little to do with faces.

Being a lonely geek who found that gals actually talked to him on IRC, there were all sorts of flirting symbols that could be used, too! Like roses: @}---,----'------.

There were others, too, but I can't think of them. Perhaps you know of some?

To whit, here is the story of the origin of the use of tyographical symbols to cheat out the nuances of communication:

Smiley Lore :-)

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm

Evolution of Dance

2009-05-08T13:52:00.002-04:00

Somehow I missed this video when it went around in 2006. A very thrilling 16 minutes, and a great laugh!

Web providers must limit internet's carbon footprint, say experts | Environment | guardian.co.uk

2009-05-05T09:20:00.001-04:00

This is something I've been reading about for months, but it's become particularly common in the last week or so.

Could the Internet, with it's Tweets, Spam, Porn and YouTube, News, Blogs, Facebooks, reach a point soon where it implodes due to energy and environmental concerns?

Personally, I think that the growing drain on resources by computer servers will only serve to (finally) push the hardware industries to develop for efficiency as a priority in their future designs. And hopefully, new energy sources such as sunlight, wind and wave will make a great deal of these issues go away.

But there is no way that these efficiencies and new power sources are going to stave off the energy demands any time soon. And if priorities change, how will the Internet be affected? Will it go back to the extreme of being primarily used for military and science? I'm doubtful it would go that far.

Perhaps Internet use will ultimately become metered, despite the emphasis on the Internet as a democratizing tool. Perhaps the energy costs to Comcast and Google and Microsoft et al. will ultimately force them to charge per use.

Now that would definitely change the nature of the Internet.

Web providers must limit internet's carbon footprint, say experts

Many Twitters are quick quitters: study - washingtonpost.com

2009-04-29T11:45:00.000-04:00

Many Twitters are quick quitters: study - washingtonpost.com

I find the conclusions in the article absolutely wrong. With every new "social networking" site that's come out in the last four years, from LinkedIn and MySpace to Facebook and Twitter and the various and sundry others, I personally have joined, played, then dropped its use within weeks.

But then after a few months, with the occasional check-in and addition of detail to a profile, or not, I have always found that I will one day just find how I like the tool and just be a regular user.

The question is not whether Twitter users will sign up and then never use it again. The question is how many of those 60% who drop Twitter will come back every couple of months and then start using it within a year. That 10 percent growth only accounts for a small fraction of the overall growth, which should be higher.

Facebook Manners And You

2009-04-27T10:08:00.007-04:00

Ah, Facebook. Such a long history. As this old school public service film reel attests, there are rules of etiquette to follow.

Hysterical!

Simon's Cat 'Cat Man Do'

2009-04-20T08:44:00.001-04:00

Oh this is so my cat Kritter!

Moving to Louisville, KY, summer 2010

2009-01-21T14:37:00.002-05:00

My wife, who is half-way through a 3 year residency, has been offered and plans to accept a position at a veterinary clinic in Louisville, KY, when her residency is over.

Thus, we will be moving in a year and a half. My hope is that I will be able to continue at my current place of employment, which I love and hope to retire from (which is a strange thought for an IT person to think, as there seem to be so few companies that last that long, do not lay off their employees, and offer benefits worth staying for). But if I cannot, I want to be sure that when I get to Louisville, I already have a deep appreciation for what the IT industry is like there, what non-IT companies exist that invest well in an IT infrastructure, what companies treat their employees well and are stable and appear to understand their place in their industry well enough to suggest they will last a long time.

I'd like also to know where I can reliably find good food, good entertainment (I think the theater scene is great there), museums, parks, shopping (my wife likes to shop, can you believe it?).

Most importantly, I would like to find out where I can find us a good home, fenced in yard, good sized fenced in yard, plenty of space in the home, good neighborhood, good traffic.

Do you know anyone in Louisville, KY?

If you know anyone in Louisville, please post here whatever you need from me to get their contact information. I've been in Knoxville since 1985, with the exception of just 9 months, and I have come to value the in-depth knowledge a long-term resident can have about a city and it's businesses.

Thanks!

Google Friend Connect

2008-12-04T13:35:00.002-05:00

This site has been integrated into Google's new "http://www.google.com/friendconnect/".

As an experiment, I am trying to integrate Pandora's Dream into Google's new attempt at creating a social network out of ordinary web pages.

Please join! Make comments and suggestions!

Emails from an estranged, and alien father

2008-11-25T12:25:00.001-05:00

My father and I have had what can only be called a non-relationship ever since my parents divorced 30 years ago. He would call from time to time, usually every two years or so, to wish us happy birthday for the missed years, to say he would be visiting my sister and me.

These contacts became fewer and fewer as time passed. (Someday I'll share one reason why -- he was in a Saudi Jail. But that was hard enough for a teenage son to deal with (How can I be mad at my dad when he's being tortured in a Saudi jail? How can I just out of the blue love the man when he has done nothing to earn that love?), that I'll just as soon put off any details on that until some other date.

After a few more years, we suddenly came into contact again, this time while I was studying world religions at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Suddenly things had changed. Like magic, I was now in contact with someone whose intellectual curiosity was very much in tune with mine. My father, as a sometimes-student of religions himself, was asking questions, and providing new ideas, that were very much in line with things I had become interested in as well.