another buddhist in seattle

Tom, approaching nirvana

My son Tom was playing around on his iPad and/or iPhone with those inane questions that pop up on Facebook, you know the ones like "Which Disney villain are you?", and after answering several seemingly unrelated questions he came up with some answers for his life:  For "Which city should you be living in?", it was suggested that he should be in Seattle, Washington, and "To which religion should you belong?", he was told Buddhism.

"What is Buddhism anyway?" he asks and, for me, that wasn't an easy question to answer.  Thank God (or Buddha) for Wikipedia, and, after giving it some thought, I think I can picture Tom as a Buddhist.  I just hope he doesn't move to Seattle, although, now that I think about Seattle, I have the feeling there are already plenty of Buddhists there.  :-)

miscommunications with the sun

I need to stop looking at the weather app on my iPhone.  First of all, the forecast is usually wrong, and second, if all is well on a beautiful sunny Sunday morning here on our patio on the creek, I'm not sure that I should worry about the storm clouds and lightning-strikes showing up in the iPhone's next hour but nowhere yet in the skies.  It's like, don't relax when life is going great, because catastrophe is just about to hit you hard.

what she did and continues to do

Hey, that looks like me....!

I value loyalty more than just about anything, but I find it much easier to write about betrayal -- maybe because it gets my adrenaline going -- maybe because I try to understand why it comes so naturally for certain soulless, wretched people -- maybe because it's a juicier topic, unless of course you happen to be the betrayee...

It's been raining hard again and the creek is rushing by and the Beatles' White Album is on the turntable... "why don't we do it in the road?"...

I'll tell you why not...

the way Neil does it

I just finished reading Neil Young's memoirs, Waging Heavy Peace, which I really liked and which also led me into two directions:  first, I pulled out all of my Neil Young albums, dusted them all off and have been having a Neil Young marathon; and second, I've found myself surprisingly affected by his rambling, casual, stream-of-consciousness style of writing.... Whatever popped into his head he wrote, regardless of how it fit into his life story.

Like, for instance, I was writing an email last night to my attorney (a whole 'nother story, which I can't tell here) and realized that I was writing it in Neil Young style, which probably had her wondering when she read it  if I was smoking weed.

I've started writing my memoirs, by the way.  Everybody has a story to tell, and every story can be interesting if told right.  I'm realizing that my life story, if told from my own particularly twisted point of view, could be more entertaining than you might think.

not much has changed

The other day, somebody told me that they sort of missed my blog since I've been absent for awhile now.  And so here I am.

There are 7 billion people on earth right now, and, to motivate me, all it took was for one of them to say they missed my blog.

One reason I put off starting again was because I didn't want to have to explain where I had been or what has happened in my life since the Academy Awards.

The short answer is, nothing.  And everything.

We had a total lifestyle change, Jerry and I.  We sold our condo in downtown Minneapolis and bought a house that is just barely in the suburbs, and we somehow just love it.  The setting is peaceful and lovely, yet the city is just a few blocks away when we need it.  We have a beautiful creek running through our back yard, and we see nature close-up, sometimes too close-up, when we have geese pooping on our lawn and deer chewing on our tomato plants.

But, meanwhile, out there in the world, Iraq is blowing up;  the World Cup has soccer players biting each other;  the Tea Party is getting crazier as it disintegrates; Jersey Boys becomes a movie; etc.....  There is much to blog about beyond how my yard is looking.  Watch for me.

Who owns our back yard?