Yesterday morning I received an email from my professor, who was reviewing my Masters Portfolio. It was acceptable, which means that I am officially a recipient of a Master of Science in Education with a Focus in Technology Integration in the Classroom degree.

I will now devote more time to posting my observations and reflections in my blog, reading the numerous books I have not been able to finish or even start, and watch some videos that are not produced by Laureate and used in the Education Program at Walden for distance learning. I feel as if I am liberated, once again.

This video is back by popular demand. It's my Mom and Aunt Rose at Karen's 2005 Memorial Day get together. Video by Stephen Latman.

Last night my cat searched my library

for reading matter

and found herself a copy of Thoreau's

All Nature Is My Bride

and Whitman's Leaves of Grass

or so it seemed,

as I found both books

on the bedroom floor in the morning.

"So you were reading Thoreau and Whitman?"

I asked her when I woke up and found the books.

She just yawned, probably still sleepy

from all of that reading.

I am an old man. I sit in this chair unable to speak. I utter sounds. Force words out of my mouth, but they just come out as unintelligible sounds. Tears run down my cheeks. Sometimes the aide wipes them with a look on his face like he knows that I am trapped between two worlds and yearn to be alive in one or the other. Feelings without words, without someone to share them with explode in urine, feces, and tears.

Regarding the remains
Of two American soldiers
A 23 year old from Texas
And a 25 year old from Oregon
Fighting that insane war in Iraq.
Maj. Gen. Abdul Azziz Mohammed Jassim
Said, "It was a brutal torture.
The torture was something unnatural."

Are there aspects of war that is not brutal?
Degrees of torture less brutal than others?

Computer Dreams

It's the end of the day. Chairs stacked up in my computer lab. Suddenly, several women with about 8 pre-school aged children come into my lab. My initial thoughts are they are going to ruin my lab, but I immediately begin to accept that I don't own the place and it would be best to start organizing things before their instructor arrives. After all, I'm a teacher and these are kids who are here to learn. Then I woke up.

It's a sunny Saturday morning. Looks like it's going to be a glorious day!

Hanging Out with C

Sometimes you have to move 

                                         forward 

or backward 

                 or even sideways 

to get un- 

              stuck 

                      and move                     

                                               on.

---

The best way to find something is to look for it.

---

I sent this letter to my cousin in Copenhagen. She and I went to the early grades of elementary school together and were constant companions early in our lives.

"I seem to remember that long before I considered whether life had any meaning, I found that most everything was humorous. I remember mocking all that was serious and taking great pleasure in being able to make you laugh, knowing that you shared in this sense of sillyness. Adults in my life (except for your dad, which is why I loved him more than any of my uncles) always made life seem so serious.

These thoughts have surfaced, because just before going to bed I began yet another book (I must be reading 7 or 8, not including the stuff I must read for my Masters....multi-tasking or attention deficit disorder?), Woody Allen and Philosophy, essays about Woody Allen's movies and the philosophies that underlie his writing, edited by Mark T. Conrad and Aeon J. Skoble.

Deep shit, but with humorous underpinnings.

I appreciate your recent email about what you are involved in. Sometime, I'd like you to share with me some of the social graces you have learned and some of the funny thoughts that I know must have played inside your head as you mixed with royalty, CEOs, and government leaders. Knowing that they all are pretenders to the throne, which is really located in our souls, somewhere just around the corner in a little all-night cafe in the Twilight Zone."

Isolation

Isolation, lonliness, being alone. If you truly believe in an HP (Higher Power) or God, and that this HP is always with you, then you are never alone. Internal dialogues are necessary to help maintain focus, and levity as well. In fact, it's a good idea to make yourself laugh; you can't always rely on someone else being as clever or funny as you are.

Advice to Myself for 2006

Advice to Myself for 2006:

Don’t try to understand, just enjoy it.
Don’t try to figure it out, because it will be gone before you do.

Another Day

Another Day

Another day’s gone by
And yet I do not know hunger
I found something to feast upon
In my cabinet or refrigerator
Or chose a restaurant to serve me
What I desire
And though I may be hungry
For something to eat
I do not know hunger
I do not know empty belly longings
My hunger is for love
I have not felt since
I was a very young man
Before I had built a fortress
Around my heart.

Gary at Mickey's Farm 2002 

I don't know why, but this is my favorite picture of me, taken by cousin Rickie at my cousin Mickey's Wisconsin farm during the summer of 2002.

Gary as a Baby 

They say I was a cute baby. I don't remember anything before I was 3 years old. Here's a thought: If I live long enough to be a cute old man, I might be waiting for someone to change my Depends.

Bubbie and Zadie Plotkin 1953

We used to go to Bubbie and Zadie's, my mother's parents' apartment, in Englewood. Things I remember about this include the overstuffed furniture and the quiet, stacking and wrapping the coins from the newsstand, the 63rd Street streetcar and electric sparks flying from the line, and the visit always being the same time on Sundays. When my grandfather died, my Bubbie moved in with us. I was 10 at the time and had to give up my bed to my grandmother, so she and my sister shared the one bedroom. My parents slept in the sun-parlor, and I would be sleeping for the next 3 years on a roll-away bed in the dining room. The light coming off the kitchen and the rattle of my dad's breakfast dishes waking me temporarily every morning about two hours before I needed to wake up for school.

And this from the desk of Wade:

I have no words for this current situation. My only words are to live life and create things that are outside the mainstream pursuits dictated by mass media and corporations who don't care if our brains go to mush or we get fat or die of some premature death. Actually, they want our brains to turn to mush so we'll consume more and more mindlessly.

And eat blood sausage and herring.

Several observations:

You can call it anything you want, give it any name, and it's clear just what you are talking about.

If I were any more lucid I'd have the runs.

My brain is at war with the hour. It is active, wanting more of the day, while the control agent checks itself against the time and demands that I shut down. Damn the regulator.

Sleep can seduce me as well as any coquette can.

"In Vietnam the tipping point came when reporters at White House briefings, students at universities and the American people in general suddenly found the confidence to ask the hard questions. Under intense daily scrutiny, the official, rosy version of the war suddenly dissolved, revealing an ethical and strategic quagmire. We may be reaching a similar kind of tipping point on Iraq, perhaps later this year." (Culture Jammers Network)

John Lennon and Yoko Ono protested the Vietnam War by having a Bed-in during May 1969. They wrote Give Peace A Chance, which was released on July 4, 1969. During the same year John and Yoko put up the billboard message "The War Is Over (If You Want It!)" around New York City. Two years later for Christmas 1971 he released Happy X-mas (War Is Over).

Perhaps war doesn't end, just by willing it to end or by proclamation in a song. But consciousness is lifted by acknowledging not denying. Let's acknowledge for this July 4, 2005 that this war in Iraq is wrong. Next to all the ribbons we have on the back of our cars that say: Support Our Troops, let's add: Bring Them Home Now

The old man's naked buttocks was drooping and wrinkled, appearing like folds of a Shar Pei. I've had a growing old prayer that I say to God: "Don't let me become a pissing on myself old man." But I think I'm adding, "and don't let my tushy look like the body of a shar pei.

Today is Memorial Day in the USA, the day we honor the men and women who have fought for our country. Perhaps, that is why we have made war against Iraq, so we can honor the heroes who die fighting, so we can barbeque hamburgers and hotdogs in parks and backyards across the country today.

Can the truth be carefully worded
So it doesn't hurt anyone,
Least of all myself,
And so it doesn't cost anything?

I don't trust my impulses,
which is why I cook them;
I don't serve them up
Raw.

Mind poisoning
Like food poisoning
Can make you deathly ill.