For the past two months, every visit to a nearby Barnes and Noble either started or ended with a trip to that section of the store where beautifully ornate but overpriced journals are kept, displayed in such a way that even the blind could appreciate their beauty. Some of them are bright, others subtle; some come in hard or soft covers while others seem to be somewhere in between; they’re bound in leather, and plastic, and cardboard; some look as if they were designed to become fixtures upon desks while still others look as if they were meant to be tossed in a small bag and taken on a hike in the forrest, where a writer would note nature-inspired tales and observations.

On a trip to Puerto Rico in 2001, one of these–a small, black journal with a soft-leather cover containing two spots for writing implements and a string to tie the thing shut–became the preferred recording device of thought, conversations, and observations made during the visit. It was a place in which ideas and descriptions and pictures and memories could dance. That journal’s still around, siting in a box in a storage closet, stuffed with post cards, pictures, and other memorabilia.

That trip was eight years ago. Was it time to get another?

During a honeymoon trip to Orlando, just over five years ago, another one of those journals, received as a wedding gift, sat open in a hotel, its blank pages stared upon by eyes lusting for words but without the will to commit them. It was spiral-bound and had a hard cover of red and autumn, with the words “I hope you dance” inscribed in gold lettering. Eventually, the events and thoughts of that day were indeed committed to the pages, but that was the last time that journal would be written on for another four years, when those eyes, now filled with reverence for the notebook, would again gaze upon its still blank pages, thinking of what could be.

That journal now sits inside a desk, less than fifteen of its pages written on. Ironic.

This time there was no trip to precipitate the purchase, and it wasn’t a gift. Instead it was simply a matter of desire, which is why it took two months and multiple trips to that particular store to finally decide that it was worth it. Two months and numerous trips for a $40 purchase. Why?

Someone in a writing group once quipped that it had taken her years of writing before she was finally convinced she was good enough to write on one of those fancy journals. Another person jumped in saying that she had felt the same way, until she realized that the thing wasn’t some magical tome, it was just a notebook–an expensive notebook!–one in which she could write, make mistakes, and doodle if she wanted.

Between two living room chairs, on the floor, sits the “Medici Lions Kraft Recycled Italian Leather Journal.” That, by the way, is a rococoesque, marketing-inspired name for “pricey notebook”. Pressed on to the leather of both the front and back covers, the edges protected by a thin wrapping of leather string, are fanciful patterns featuring plants and decorative lines. These are bordered a by a string of petite, golden leaves. On the center of the front cover is a shield with the Medici lion, a beast on its hind legs, facing right.

When it was first removed from plastic packaging–protecting this notebook from passing hands until ready for use–the relaxing smell of soft leather filled the air as the notebook slipped out. That was followed by some time spent enjoying the thing for what it was, smelling it, touching it, and imagining the words that could be. Pages turned one by one, blank, waiting until the moment when they would be forever scarred and at the same time blessed with the fulfillment of their implicit raison d’être.

The only books written which can often be considered near-perfect the first time around are journals. Thinking about that, it became a possibility that this would be its use. But maybe there was something more. The soft feel of its cover and sturdiness of its pages demanded that more than the trivial thoughts and goings on of an average day be conferred upon it. A novel? A collection of short stories? An outlining of philosophical inquiries and thought experiments?

Ideas for what to write in the journal abound, but fleshing out these before beginning to write is at least somewhat important. Unlike the many tens of legal pads onto which hundreds of pens’ worth of ink have been spilled, this type of notebook isn’t one to be readily discarded. Is it okay to fill it with something trite?

Not surprisingly, a week after its purchase its pages are, of course, still empty.

It is not a holy relic, nor is it some decorative piece meant only to enhance a place by simply existing. It’s a notebook, one in which words will eventually be written, one which will eventually be filled, and one which may eventually be read by eyes other than that of the words’ author. In any case, one thing’s for sure: after a months-long line and a $40 entrance fee, it would surely be a waste to not dance.

One day, when mom was doing the laundry, she looked at the back yard told me, “That grass is so high Tarzan’s going to make his next movie in our back yard.” This was the greatest news any four year old could get: Tarzan would be coming to my house to make a movie in my back yard!

Somewhere in the back of my mind thoughts wondering whether there would be enough room for him bubbled up. I mean really, there were no trees back there, how was he going to swing around? But I pushed those thoughts out as soon as they appeared. After all, mom said he’d be coming to make a movie, so she had already talked to him on the phone, right? And how had he found out about our yard? Dad probably told him. (They knew all the famous people.)

Although those questions still gnawed at me, my excitement never lessened, my faith never waned. He was coming to make a movie: he was the king of the jungle, and our back yard was as jungle as he was likely to get around here. And most of his movies were done just a couple of streets over, like everything else.

For days, I bragged to my friends that Tarzan would come to my house sometime soon. They were excited. I beamed. We all wanted to meet him, all wanted to be in the movie, all wanted to swing on vines. We even practiced our Tarzan screams, much to the chagrin of our parents and the neighbors.

Sometime later, I can’t say when, I heard the sound of an engine buzzing in the back yard. I stood at the marquesina and looked on as dad slowly mowed the grass, cutting it down to a more civil size. Why was he doing this? Tarzan hadn’t come yet! Then again, maybe Tarzan was like Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Mouse, coming and going without being seen. Or maybe he had decided to film somewhere else this time. I never asked anyone about that, thinking that if I didn’t, maybe he’d still show up.

Months passed. Every time the grass grew more than six inches I would get excited: maybe this time he would come, or if he’d come last time, maybe I could see him. Or maybe I’d find a lion in the back yard. Or maybe… maybe…

Justifying to myself why he hadn’t come yet was easy. After all, it wasn’t like the back yard was big enough to swing in, and there really weren’t any trees, other than our neighbor’s lemon tree, which branches that grew over the fence to our yard. Maybe dad and mom decided he couldn’t make the movie in our back yard and forgot to tell me. But the hope lived, and lived, and lived, until one day it left.

I waked to the back yard, barefoot and in my underwear, with woolly hair looking a bit like a jungle boy. The grass was about as tall as my ankles. I looked around yard, at the bushes then at the sides of the house, even the where all the recao grew. He wasn’t there. He wouldn’t be there. No Tarzan, no movie. He wouldn’t come. He didn’t come. Tarzan never showed up.

Edit: P.S…
Years later–only a couple of years ago, in fact–I finally asked mom about what she said that day. She looked at me with as if she’d heard something very strange, then told me she didn’t remember saying anything along those lines.

For years I had wondered whether maybe she used the phrase regularly for things being so wild that Tarzan himself would be involved. (Having four small kids running about, this couldn’t be discounted.) Turns out this she didn’t; this was an off-hand remark, something she no longer remembered, and likely didn’t remember just a few hours after first saying it then. I obviously did.

She was describing something she was excited about. Not just speech, but also lots of hand motions. Lots. Suddenly she whacks me with her elbow; doesn’t know whether the hit lands in the head or what, but she starts inspecting me. That’s right before a punch to the arm jolts her out of sleep. “Ouch! Did he just punch me?”, she thought, turning to me and seeing me fall asleep with my back to her. Was he dreaming? What the heck was that all about?

Next morning we talked about what happened. She told me about her dream, how she thought she beaned me. I told her about my dream and how after she beaned me I, still in my dream state,  did the knee-jerk thing and punched her on the arm before going back to the park to hide and seek or whatever.

We called it even, and now tell the story to get a laugh, the story of the night we beat each other up in our sleep. Anger issues? Maybe. Not likely. For now we’re going with love taps.

For the record, I bought a bike right after writing this. $100 at Target. $118, if you count the seat I got with it. (The default seat was rather painful.) Tried a number of the thrift stores, but none had adult-sized bikes.

A few days after our arrival, we picked up a couple of wooden-frame bunk beds from either a garage sale or some of my dad’s friends, I can’t really remember, although I still remember–vaguely–the neighborhood from where we picked the beds up. To me the area looked like the typical American neighborhood: large yards and two-story homes with gabled roofs, wooden accents, no window or carport bars, and neutral colors, mostly browns. This in contrast to the flat-roofed, bright colored cement houses with, tiny yards, barred porches and car ports we had been used to until that point. It was the kind of place I would see on TV, not one where I expected to find myself in, riding a bicycle around, which I did.

Even before the beds were in the house, I was excited. It wasn’t because the mattresses themselves were blue with a spaceship theme. It wasn’t even because we finally had full beds again. It was because these were bunk beds! Bunk beds! We… had bunk beds! I always wanted to sleep in one of those. Having seen them on television and at friends’ houses, I always imagined they were a world of fun.

While it seems to be customary to fight for the top bunk, I was always more interested in the bottom. My brother lept to the top bunk and claimed it for himself, while I was more than happy taking the bottom. In fact, I’ve always preferred the bottom, for which I can think of only three reasons: First, I like small, enclosed spaces, provided they’re at least tall enough to let me sit comfortably. Second, I have a fear of heights. No, let me rephrase that: I have a fear of falling. More than once, I envisioned myself falling from the top bunk during my sleep, even though it had a guard rail. Third, I’ve always been bigger than my younger brother, and was afraid that my weight would one day snap the bed’s frame and in the process kill him. A fat kid’s worst nightmare. It also almost came true, though not because of me.

My younger sister and brother were either playing or fighting once (I don’t remember which, and one eventually led to the other anyway), with her at the top bunk and him at the bottom. With his legs, he was lifting and dropping the top bed. During one push, the bed became dislodged and fell on to the bottom. A yell went out, and mom, my older sister, and I raced into the room.

“I din’t kill him!” my younger sister yelled. “I didn’t kill him!” She was crying, shaken, repeating the innocence plea. My mom raced to the bunk and we lifted the fallen bed. Because it had fallen at an angle, my brother was able to roll into the empty pocket between the edge of the bed and the wall. He came out of there laughing.

The thing about the bottom bunk is that it was my own space, my room within a room. Here I covered the walls with drawings of the Ninja Turtles and the various starship Enterprises, decorated the bed frame with action figures, and stacked the space below the bed with books. In a three bedroom apartment of four kids and two parents, this personal space was priceless.

After we moved from our first apartment into the house where we’d spend our second and third years in the country, the bunk beds were sawed in half in order to make two separate beds. We always thought about putting them back together, until the day I broke the frame by tossing myself onto the bed, trying to imitate a move I saw Razor Ramon do on WWF. The damage was irreparable. That bed frame was eventually replaced with a box and a wooden frame which would last me until college.

The next time I had a bunk bed setup was in college, where I roomed with an old friend from high school. The bed configuration changed on a regular basis, so that sometimes we would have bunk beds, and others he would have a bunk-desk setup, with the bed on top and the space below it occupied by a desk. I, on the other hand, never once spent any time with the bottom of my bed higher than about a foot from the ground. Again, fear of falling, fear of breaking the bed. (Fear of breaking furniture comes with being fat, and by now I was fatter than when I broke the other frame a few years earlier.)

My college roommate was in the Naval ROTC program in high school, graduating the most decorated member in our school’s history. That always stuck with me, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d one day end up in a submarine. What would it be like to be in one of those tiny rooms, where the bunk beds had barely any headroom? I wondered about this for years, even after he switched from Navy to Army. I remember seeing how many of them kept pictures, books and lights in there, some even keeping curtains in order to have some proper privacy, in addition to being somewhat self sufficient. I tried, therefore, to decorate the bottom bunk in such a way that I could do almost everything I needed in that tiny bedroom (by which I mean a room that is also a bed). I built a magazine rack, kept my books and instruments under the bed, and… well, really, that was about it. I never got to adding a curtain, and everything else, other than eating, was done outside of the dorm.

Like my previous bunking experience, this had not just ups, but also downs. One of the downsides of taking the bottom bunk in college is hearing your roommate and his girlfriend at the top bunk do things they hope you don’t know about because they think you’re sleeping. The noise level was low, but there’s no mistaking the bed’s rocking. Although she was a looker–and I mean seriously, the guy did far better than I expected–I still considered this one of the biggest downsides to having a bunk bed, mostly because I didn’t know whether I should have been offended or mounting a camera. I never said anything, thinking that maybe, eventually, I’d stop being so sensitive about such things. I never did. Still, it didn’t matter: their relationship didn’t last long, and eventually it was just me and him in the room, watching Patton, burning popcorn, and prank calling the university radio station, pretending to be Bill Clinton or quoting lines from Full Metal Jacket.

I wasn’t all alone in there all the time, mind you. That bottom bunk was where I first slept with a girl. No, I don’t mean sex. I mean actual sleeping. A friend, I’ll call her Brandy, had this thing about going to sleep hugging. She didn’t sleep around, mind you–coitus or otherwise–she was just really, really friendly and very touchy-feely. The first time she asked if I’d ever done that I answered with a quick, “Uhm… no. I wish.” So she invited herself to stay over at my place. She felt like hugging and just wanted to lay down and hug. Of course, I decided to give it a try. The fact that she was beautiful, tall, slender and shapely had nothing to do with my saying yes. I just liked hanging out with her. Really. Stop laughing.

Before that night she had warned me of one thing: “I tend to be a spider in bed. I just sort of take over and end up in weird positions. The only person I don’t do that with seems to be my boyfriend.” Wait, boyfriend?

As you can probably guess, I didn’t sleep very well that night, waking up 37 times, each time in a strange, usually uncomfortable position. She seemed to do fine, a bit like a rock with arms and legs. At least that’s what I thought, until I woke up at about five in the morning. She was gone, with a note that said, “Sorry, not enough room here. Hope I didn’t disturb you. I’m going to my place to be a spider.” Next time I saw her she apologized for leaving, and invited me over to her place “sometime”. I never took her up on that offer. Couldn’t help but wonder of sleeping with someone else on the bed would always be that uncomfortable. I wondered, too, if it was the height: she was almost 6-feet tall, just a couple of inches shorter than me. Or maybe it was my girth.

Two days of marriage would later teach me a valuable lesson: never try to spend an extended period of time sharing a bed with someone if the mattress is either a single or double, not unless both of you are very slender. If both of you can’t be described as “skinny” and also “short”, you should at least make it a full size. Queen is preferable. Also, when you’re still getting used to having someone on your bed, depending on how much you move around, there’s a fair chance you’ll end up in different Y-axis positioning than when you first stared, so make sure you have both head and foot room, something I didn’t have at that point. But yeah, back to bunk beds.

It was during that semester that another one of my fears regarding bunks almost came true. My roommate was trying to get down from his bunk, not totally awake. A sudden thump followed by an “Aw, crap!” woke me (and his girlfriend, who’d been in his bed) up in an instant. He was OK, limping a little, but had it been me, I might have broken my knee. Again.

After that semester, I moved back in with my parents. My exposure to bunk beds was incidental from thereon out. The only place I steadily encountered them was at J & A’s  dorm. (J was my best friend during college, and A was her roommate.) J was the artsy, lively kind and A was a free and calming spirit. This combination made for great room ambiance, including individualistic, but subdued decor; incenses of a hundred different smells, and a constant soundtrack that included Tori Amos, Dead Can Dance, DJ Shadow and Loreena McKennitt. Of course, I never slept over at their place, so I never again slept at a bunk in college. In fact, only visits to my then girlfriend, a long-distance affair that lasted about two years, would have me sleeping in a bunk, always the bottom.

Everyone fights for the top bunk. Everyone but me, it seems. The fact is that although the top bunk gets all the glory, the bottom bunk offers a room within a room, a quiet place dedicated to only one person, and can also double as a couch in some cases. I’m a fan of small offices and private spaces, and without a hesitation I will state that almost nothing beats a well designed bottom bunk. At least, that’s what you realize if you take the time to look at the world according to the bottom bunk.

Let’s start with functionality: Gone is the massive RSS button, the endless list of bookmarking site options, and extra widgets like Blogrush. Instead, the sidebar now features the latest featured articles as well as the latest articles from all other categories. Depending on where on the site you are, you may also see the top 10 articles by number of visitors and my personal favorites. On the front page, under the featured article, you’ll also see an automatically updated list of links from my Google Reader Shared bookmarks. Honestly, if there’s one reason to check the front page it’s to check that right there, otherwise you can check out the page directly.

Now about that RSS button: you’ll notice that it’s been replaced by 2 (considerably smaller) RSS buttons, 2 mail buttons, and a link to my Twitter account. The link to Twitter is obvious if you know what Twitter is. The RSS feeds, on the other hand, are where some of the new changes in the site’s focus are seen. The site now features 2 types of articles, Featured and everyting else (general). Categories still exist, but mostly for organizational pruposes. The Featured posts will be the only ones that make it to the front page from now on. These will focus more on memories and personal observations. The other feed includes not only these articles, but also all other blog posts written, regardless of whether they make it to the front page or not. Here’s what this means for you RSS folks: If you’re happy with what you’ve been seeing, then you’re set. If you’re interested in memories and personal observations ONLY, and have no interest in anything else I write (like site updates) then grab the Featured Article stream [EDIT: THIS WAS INCORRECT BEFORE. LINK CORRECTED ON FEB 7, 10:45AM EST.] or sign up for the Featured Article stream via Email. Note that the Featured Articles feed will update less often than the regular feed, because not every article I write will be a “Feature”. (That means not every article I write will be seen on the front page, at least not the content. The titles will be there, under the section “Other Recent General Blog Entires”.)

On the navigation front, you’ll notice that the front page and the archive and categorie pages are completely different now. While there’s only one post on the front page, all archive pages have exerpts from a number of articles. That’s because, in my mind, if you’re looking at the archives, you’re probably scanning. Of course, the argument could be made that it’s better to just lay it all out there, but in cases where things like self-starting flash videos are included this can be a problem. Frankly, this right here’s my favorite part of the new design.

Other than that, the site’s pretty much the same. A couple of new textures, a simplified interface, new access to feeds, a new general focus, and a more useful navigation. Here’s hoping you keep enjoying (and recommending it to your friends.

By the way, in case you’re wondering why I’m doing this: Ive come to the realization that this site won’t ever be more than my personal blog. That’s how I like it! So I’ve stared to put together a plan for a more business-focused site, something I’ll be writing about later. That’ll mean some of the content from this site (not much) will be moved to that new site.

The first time someone asked me where the United States was, I stared into the sky, convinced that if I squinted hard enough I could see it. I never once believed the US was heaven, but it had Disney, so it had that going for it. I had this notion that the world was either layered or that it wrapped in on itself, like a giant ring, and that beyond the blue–which was both the sky and the ocean–there were other countries, that beyond that, in space, were other worlds, like Mars, Saturn, and China. While I knew we weren’t at the center of the universe–that was the sun–we might as well have been. Puerto Rico was one of the important nations, like America, Mexico, and Canada, which no one ever really cared about anyway, I mean, for goodness’ sake, their flag has a leaf! (Oddly, we used to ride around in bikes singing songs about this.)

Of course, at that time I hadn’t done any traveling outside of the island, unlike Tio Sandy, who was well traveled. To this day, I don’t know what the man did, only that once upon a time he went to China. (Or was it Japan? Maybe Hong Kong? Taiwan? It didn’t matter: at that time, all countries with squinty eyed people were China, and all people with squinty eyes were nick named Chinos; more than once, I was the group chino.) All I remember from this trip was a picture someone had of him standing on what looked like a tourist river boat. I don’t remember who owned this picture, whether it was my mom, grandmother, or my grandmother’s sister (Sandy’s her son), though I remember seeing it multiple times. I want to say it was either in front of a plate or etched into a plate, but I’m not really sure. In any case, in the photo, which must have been taken from a pier above, he stood on the river boat which had either an orange or pink cover. He wore a white shirt and shorts, and smiled. In the photo, he was alone.

When someone, I think it was my sister, told me that the picture was taken in China I was amazed. My uncle had gone to another planet! I had seen the space shuttle go up before, seen it on television lifting up into the blue then the dark. My uncle had been there! I could picture it in detail, the shuttle lifting off, passing the Moon and Mars and Japan…

My love of science fiction goes back to before I can remember. Yet being still new to this whole separation of fact and fiction, I didn’t quite grasp the where science ended and fiction began. So seeing Luke Skywalker hanging out with Yoda in the swamps of Dagobah was just as amazing seeing my uncle in that picture, on that river boat.

In addition to not being good at separating fact from fiction, I also wasn’t yet good at discerning multiple meanings for words. In Spanish, the word for the nation of China (pronounced “Chee-nah”) is the same as one of the words for orange (”china“), both the color and the fruit. So I believed that at some point in the past, my uncle took the space shuttle from Puerto Rico (also known as “La Tierra”, or “The Earth”) and flew to planet China, which looked like a giant, half-cut china floating out in space. Of course, China’s the color china, with a sky the color of china and china streets and buildings, so it must be hot in there. Not that the chinos would notice: they all lived in China. I couldn’t quite understand how it was that someone could land on a giant orange, how it could change from pulp and skin to a place with buildings and towns, but I figured that was just the atmosphere. Still, I was amazed.

For an eternity of days I looked at the encyclopedia, trying to make sense of his going to China. Eventually, I figured out that the picture showed the sun and all the planets: Mercury, Earth, The Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Japan, China… well that’s as far as I got. I still couldn’t figure out where the US and Puerto Rico were–were they one planet or two?–or how it was we saw the moon almost every night even though it had its own orbit around the sun, but that didn’t matter: my uncle had gone to China. He’d been in space. I was sure he’d tell me.

But I never asked him about it. If I recall, I asked my mom about it and she explained that we were on the same planet as China, that we hadn’t yet traveled to the other planets. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her about the other planets, I was sure I’d heard somewhere we had been, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some far away place the sky wasn’t blue: it was China.

We sat at the ledge of the mountain, looking across the vast forest below, to the lake at the foot of the behemoth of earth and rock across from us. A biting, frigid wind blew at us from the valley, yet there we sat enjoying the song of a bird whose voice carried in the wind from some far off place behind the clouds which hid the rest of the range. Our thoughts, while unspoken, were one. This moment was created for us. The mysterious beauty all around was but a sign that we had almost reached the right place.

I looked at her. She nodded. We stood up and kept moving upward on the thin ledge. The ground here was either muddy, or covered with patches of melting snow, in some places both. We were the only human souls for miles, trekking thousands of feet up on a day when we should by all rights have been at ground level spending yet another hour in front of our altar to that modern goddess, the Internet. But today was not for rituals. It was for adventure, a day which we promised each other we would live.

As we continued up the mountain, the sound of our footsteps on the mud and snow marred the quiet symphony nature’s amphitheater provided. The path grew narrower, so that now for steady passage we clung to trees which clung on to the steep mountainside with serpentine roots.

It was during this continuation that we encountered our first true obstacle, a deep patch of snow which covered the path. As we started to look for ways we could cross it without putting our lives in more risk than they already were, I realized that the idea of time had almost no meaning in this place. Coming from a world where milliseconds make the difference between Olympic history and a footnote, and where people complain of not having enough time yet spend countless hours in front of a screen, the idea that only the torpid pace of the sun’s traversal of the sky truly mattered, while for all its control over modern life minutes and seconds here didn’t, ultimately meant that this moment was both fleeting and eternal; that for one cosmological instant neither the immediate future nor the immediate past mattered.

Suddenly I felt both very small very much at peace.

We found a set of tracks in the snow and decided to use them instead of forging our own path in order to cross. Once on the other side our path would be clear for some distance, although there were other patches of snow ahead. We continued our journey, and the bird continued its song.

The path once again widened so that we no longer needed to hold on to the trees at our flank, though it was still too narrow to walk side by side. I took the lead. Before we arrived it had been drizzling, and looking down at the muddy path, I realized that the only steps to follow would be our own, all others having been washed away by previous rains and melting snow. Still, we pressed on.

Whenever there was a break in the density of the forest foliage, we took a moment to meditate upon the mountain across the lake below. Despite the sunlight breaking through clouds, the day was still overcast, and the top of the mountain still hid. We were able to see the silhouette, but in varying degrees, as with a face behind a veil, where visibility is possible only when light hits it at just the right angles. Nature continued its serene symphony, and though the bird’s solo eventually silenced, a continual crescendo accompanied our increasing altitude.

Once more, we found ourselves in front of a icy roadblock, taller than the last, and which extended a fair distance through yet another narrowing of the path. The snow was virgin, with no previous footsteps visible, and that’s how we decided to leave it. Our goal had never been to see the top of the path, only to walk it. That we got as far as we had, hearing the voice of a timeless world, watching the majesty of the land, and existing for a little while in a fleeting eternity was another reward entirely.

After getting past the front desk the place began to resemble a hospital, with its decorative laminate flooring, extra wide hallways, and sterile air. We were looking for room 114. “First hall to the right of the nurses’ station, then to the end of that hall. On the right.” The nurse front desk greeter had paused then added, “Oh, that’s a room with a window.” By the sound of it, that was a special thing to have. I would call it a necessity in a place like this.

At the end of the hall we found the nurses’ station, an administrative island where nurses shot to when they worked on the paperwork they had to complete before heading back to the rooms of the patients they cared for. It was busy, and the nurses looked like bees around a beehive: having gathered the nectar of information from their flowers, they returned to the hive to make the honey that feeds the medical infrastructure, be they care takers or bill payers.

I’ve been in places like these more than a few times. My grandmother spent most of her last years in hospitals, so the zipping nurses, wheelchairs and mechanized beds lining the hallways weren’t anything new. Her stroke was devastating: it took away her intelligence and her ability to talk. She went from being 63 to being four again.

Lucky for Art, his stroke didn’t take away his intelligence or ability to talk. It only took away the left side of his body — sight, and movement, anyway — and his ability to read. Most importantly, it didn’t take away his sense of humor.

“You know, when they put me in the wheel chair, I started doing this…” He leaned forward on his wheel chair, then with his right hand pushed himself back as he continued, “… and then they pushed me back. Then I started doing this…” He leaned to the left and pulled himself back with his right hand, “… and they pushed me back. Then I started doing this…” He leaned to the right and pushed himself back, “… and they pushed me back. When my son got here he asked me, ‘How are they treating you?’ So I told him, ‘They’re treating me great, but they won’t let me fart.’” Ruckus laughter broke out. His wife, both amused and embarrassed, told him to stop, but the laughter coming out of Jack, Jill, and I drowned her out. Yeah, Art was still Art.

When I first walked into the room, Art looked… well, like a man who just had a stroke not all that long before: disheveled hair; thin, pursed lips; and pale. He sat on his wheelchair, with his left-rear flank facing us, looking at something behind his curtain and with a smiling nurse at his side when Jack let out a greeting. I say “Let out” because in my almost-year of knowing Jack, I’d never thought him capable of speaking that loudly. But Art’s hard of hearing and wasn’t wearing his hearing-aid at the time. Jack introduced his wife (whose hand Art took as he told her “My condolences”), and then added “Look who I brought with me,” pulling me toward the front, so Art’s right eye could see who it was.

I met Art at a writer’s group run by Jack. From the outset you could tell he was a consummate performer with the experience that only comes after advancing in years with a great attitude. Obviously this hadn’t changed, although for the first few minutes, I wasn’t too sure about how to act. Jack took care of the conversation at first, and Art quickly set the tone, one that in no uncertain terms said, “I may be 83, have an artificial knee and a pacemaker, but don’t you dare even think about eulogizing me yet.” My pleasure, Art.

We spent the rest of the time talking (and laughing) about writing and Art’s new-found challenges. His limp left hand rested on a clear plastic surface strapped to the arm of the wheelchair, and his body was supported by a thick reinforcement strap just under his chest which was, I guess, used to keep him from slouching forward on the chair. (I’m sure the strap has an official, technical name, and perhaps a totally different purpose, but I don’t know what it is.) The shoe on his left leg, the one with the artificial knee, said “LIFT FROM TOE”, since trying to move the leg any other way would cause him to belt out Pagliacci. “In falsetto!” he emphatically added. But none of this kept him from telling stories, cracking jokes, or pointing out that Jack had just sat on a bed with a “Do Not Sit” sign on it. Jack, of course, hadn’t seen it, since he sat on the sign.

Art told us about how he slept with the window curtain open, to watch the birds at night, and about his therapy sessions. He also gave us a few pieces of advice for life, the most important of which, according to him, was to “Give [my] wife power of attorney, and do it now.” And here I was thinking it would be something like “love your wife.” Then again, I guess nothing says “I love you” like the power of attorney.

An hour and a half after we started it was time for diner. “So, do you guys want to watch me try to eat? It’s a lot of fun. We just sit there and watch each other drool.” We decided to pass on the drool watching at the “trough”, as Art called it, and said our goodbyes. We found out Art was being moved to an assisted living facility on the 9th (or the 9th-ish, as it may be the 10th or 11th), so this was probably the last we’d see of him at this facility. With both Jack and I moving out of the area soon, there aren’t likely to be many other visits. Still, what visits there are will likely be filled with laughter and stories, as both Jack and I have agreed to bring him the writing group one day, now that he can’t come to it.

Despite the tragedy of the stroke, Art’s still the same person all of us came to enjoy and admire. Good to see that. A big thank you goes out to Jack for visiting along with me. I’m not sure I could have done it alone, mostly because this type of situation usually leaves me in deep thought, revisiting my own existential quandaries and insecurities. Still, it was good to see Art again.

I am not what I was in my youth. At merely 28 years, I’m already beginning to feel some of the signs of aging: pains in certain joints, increased healing time, diminished multitasking capabilities. I’m sure most would say that at 28 I’m still “just a kid”, and they’d probably be right, though if you really want to get down to it, “middle age” starts during the early 30’s, biologically speaking. Hardly a “kid”. But unlike most people, I pay overt attention to these signs. I always have. I don’t know why, though I’ve started to see how it affects the way I see things.

So while my resolutions before revolved around writing and advancing these skills, I find more and more that my health–spiritual, mental, and of course physical–has taken prominence. Without addressing these items first, I find I cannot continue in my current path. In fact, I am convinced that my not having yet resolved these issues–particularly the physical one, since it is through that gate that I must walk to address the other two–is in large part at the core of my worrying about the future.

I came to this realization as a result of someone very wise, who I have come to respect very highly, and hold very dear, reminding me that “the unexamined life is not one worth living.” While I thought I knew this, it wasn’t until he pointed out that I hadn’t been examining my life that the message really hit home. I, who value wisdom so much, had become lost without myself.

In the show Babylon 5 there’s a series of episodes during the fourth season in which Dr. Stephen Franklin (Richard Biggs) resigns his post as Chief Medical Officer and goes on a “walkabout”. In Australian aboriginal cultures, a “walkabout” is a ritual in which a young man goes on a solitary journey through the wilderness in an attempt to learn more about his own character and strength. In the show, Franklin explains it this way:

“If you’re not careful, you can lose yourself in the world. When you’re too busy with things and not busy with yourself. You spend your days and nights living someone else’s agendas, fighting someone else’s battles, and you’re doing the work you’re supposed to be doing, but every day there’s less and less of you in it all. ‘Til one day, you come to a fork in the road and because you’re distracted, you’re not thinking, you lose yourself. You go right and the rest of you, the really important part of you goes left and you don’t even know you’ve done it until you realize, you finally realize that you don’t have any idea who you are when you’re not doing all those things.

“The theory is, if you’re separated from yourself, you start walking and you keep walking ntil you meet yourself. Then you sit down and you have a long talk. Talk about everything that you’ve learned, everything you’ve felt, and you talk until you’ve run out of words. Now that’s vital. Because the real important things can’t be said. Then if you’re lucky, you look up, and there’s just you and you can go home.”

Of course, in the epsodeShadow Dancing, the walkabout has a pretty bloody end when Franklin finally meets himself after being stabbed during a drug mugging, and left to die. “You said you had to keep walking until you met yourself,” says the second Franklin. “Well, here I am. So, if we’re gonna talk, let’s talk. Only, I don’t think you have enough time.” Here’s a bit from the synopsis:

He asks Franklin what he has to live for, and what he could possibly want, since he threw it all away the first time. Franklin insists he wants to do it all over again, and begins to regain his determination. He begins to move, and pull himself up the ladder that leads out of his prison. With his healthy self taunting him all the way, and despite his wounded condition, Franklin is eventually able to get out.

Franklin, on a gurney, is taken back to Medlab as the remants of the fleet and the numerous casualties are returned to the station. [Herein he sees the selfishness of his situation, injured trying to find himself while the Universe collapsed around him.]

[When Franklin gets better, he] tells Sheridan that he [was using drugs] to do more [work], when what he needed was to do better, and he knows that he ran away when he quit to avoid being fired. He explains that he has, for his entire life, looked at himself in terms of what he wasn’t, but never what he was, and that he missed a lot of important things because of it. He knows he can’t go back and undo his past mistakes, but can appreciate what he has now, and he can define himself by what he is and not what he isn’t. Sheridan asks what that is. “I’m alive,” Franklin tells him. “Everything else is negotiable.”

I guess I went on my own walkabout when I quit a number of the things I was doing. I felt I had lost myself, lost my drive, lost my direction, and instead spent my life chasing what others said I should be doing. I tried to do more, when I should have been doing better; I focused on what I wasn’t instead of what I was. Yet, during this time I’ve become more selfish, more secluded, more worried, and generally more miserable, none of which came to light until I finally started examining my own life. Right race, wrong direction. I wouldn’t have known unless I started examining my life.

For the past few days, I’ve been doing a lot of walking, thinking, and praying. For the first time in my life, I feel that my prayers are actually worth something, that they’re not simply a litany of requests I make from the Almighty to fit around my own schedule, but that they are a conversation in which He controls the mic. (Is this the “walking meditation” I hear so much about?)

During the walks, I’ve reviewed my life, from the time of my first memories. I’ve thought about people I knew, things I thought and did, and beliefs I held. When I was a kid, I worried about my parents dying. I still remember a dream I had when I was five in which my mom died in a car crash on a mountain. Then I feared the depletion of the Ozone layer, and had dreams about people dying of cancer. (One of my dreams played out like a movie. I still remember the announcer’s voice as he announced “El Fin del Mundo” (”The End of the World”). After that it was my being the last person on Earth (Stupid The Quiet Earth movie), then it was World War 3 and Nostradamus, then it was aliens, then… the end of the World. After that, during my teen years, I took a fascination with death: it was real, it was raw, it was… cool. Before that I had tried to be a Fundamentalist Christian (Southern Baptist), so no matter what happened I was saved, right? Mind you, this didn’t sit right with me, but I denied myself for the sake of my faith, as if I knew that that meant. Then I became dark and gothy (though never emo. That’s just too self indulged, though I still like the music). After that, I started looking into other faiths and religions, to find… meaning? Significance? Peace? Whatever it was, I just wanted to make sense of things. And I didn’t want to be alone. This was a big one: I’m was never a real loner, no matter how much I pretended to be, or how bad I’ve been at keeping relationships going. (I hereby apologize to everyone who I’ve failed to stay in touch with.)

Over the past few months, I’ve also been studying Christian Mysticism. While I’m far from an expert in it, I have through it come to a very interesting realization: faith is not about logic. Too much time have I spent attempting to logicize my faith, to believe only those things which could be explained via the scientific method. Yet, the logical part of the brain is only one part of it, one way of thinking. Thinking upon the mystical in order to achieve a state of simply “being” is another. The two work together. Coming to this realization has freed me to once again believe, truly and honestly, in the existence of a “God”, even though I don’t know what that God is (personal or not? in the universe, outside of it? in us or outside? all of these?) except to know that He is like a mirror: everyone looking in sees something different.

During one of my recent prayer times a thought came to me (though I attribute it to a message from God due to the way it hit me, the power with which it resonated in my mind). The message was a simple one:

“Why do you spend so much time thinking about death when you have so much life right now to live?”

I guess until then I had never really thought about it that way. I realized that the majority of my life had in some way revolved around the issue of death, and my capability to handle it. I tried believing in God, not believing in God, believing in a soul and not. Perhaps it was the Christian upbringing (and the refutation thereof), in which attainment of Heaven is so fervently emphasized (as is the reality of Hell). Perhaps it’s because I wish to understand, and my mind can’t cope with believing that this life is it, a thought which while I have tried to believe, I can’t bring myself to.

After that point, I started to see exactly ho much time I’ve spent worrying about death and the afterlife. So much that I completely missed what was right in front of me. In Paradise Lost, Milton observed that the human mind is a wonderful thing, that it could make a hell out of heaven and a heaven out of hell. It can also, it seems, make a death out of life and life out of death.

I started keeping a journal which allows me to really write what I’m thinking about, what thoughts and revelations have come to me during this time. (In other words, stuff I can’t always talk about here.) I haven’t liked a lot of what I’ve seen, what I’ve written, and have started to rectify the situations, though they will take time.

Of course, the subject of death is still important, though I see it’s not as important as the subject of how you live your life.

And yet, I’m still on walkabout, examining my life in order to make it one worth living.

It was Monday morning. The 20 minute drive from home to work through the crowded interstate and cluttered local roads was accompanied by the book-on-CD version of Issac Asimov’s I, Robot, instead of the usual political talking heads and local news chatter. Calm drive, really, just full of traffic. Got there around 8:30 AM.

By about 10 I had already settled down, checked my email and started on some work which I knew would eat up the better part of the week. That, of course, is what they pay me for, so no complaints there. In fact, I was still playing out some of the nuances from I, Robot in my head. At about that time, I started feeling a sharp pain in my chest. At first I thought my shirt got caught on a couple of chest hairs (yes, I have chest hair. Not much, but it’s there). I scratched it thinking it would go again, but it didn’t. Suddenly, I felt tingles going through my chest and making their way into my arms and hands, which had become numb. I started feeling dizzy and as if I was about to black out. Suddenly, my heart misfired and started speeding up:

Thump… thump… thump… KAthump… flump…………………. flump……………………. thump..thump..thump.thump.thump.thumpthumpthumpthumpthump…

I stood up. This can’t be, I thought. Was I having a heart attack? I needed to walk around.

I got out of my office and walked up and down the office building, thinking that if I just walked around a little my heart rate would calm back down. Maybe… maybe if I got some water…

thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump…

I had always been able to control my heart rate to an extent. Unlike most people, I can feel my heart rate by simply concentrating on it, and with a little controlled breathing I could usually speed up or slow down my heart as needed. Not today. My hands felt cold, numb, and they were trembling wildly. My tongue felt as if it had grown in my mouth and was now trying to choke me, I felt short of breath, as if having an asthma attack, and I felt disconnected, like if everything I was seeing was part of a dream.

Something is definitely wrong, I finally admitted to myself. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, didn’t want an ambulance called, but if this really was a heart attack then I better just admit it.

It couldn’t have been a heart attack, could it? I’m too young. Sure, I’m overweight, but I’ve lost a lot of weight recently. I’d been eating healthier than I had in years, and exercising more. This couldn’t be happening to me now, could it? And if I went to the hospital, if I admitted something was wrong, would I die?

I went to the office manager, still trying to convince myself that if I could just get my mind of whatever I was thinking this would all go away. “I’m not feeling too well,” I said. I then asked her to talk with me. Scratch that, I told her to talk with me. After a minute the realization had grown in my mind that I should be going. Apparently she felt the same way.

“You want to go ahead and go home?” she asked, in her light Brazilian accent.

“Actually,” I said, struggling with the words, “I think you need to call an ambulance.”

While calling 911, one of the other workers stopped by. “Are you OK?” she asked.

“Uhm… no,” I said, with a shaky voice. I was now sitting in the office manager’s seat with my legs on another chair, raised, parallel to my hips.

The worker then left and came back with another person, an ex-nurse now working as a computer programmer. She did a couple of minor checks on me and talked to the 911 operators. After a minute she told me, “I don’t think you’re having a heart attack, but I don’t know what’s going on.”

She stayed with me for what seemed like a long while. In reality it had only been about ten minutes since I first started noticing the symptoms, but every minute lasted for an hour.

Just before the EMTs came I called The Wife.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Hey, hon,” I said in my still-shaky voice. “Listen, I’m not feeling well, I need to go to the hospital.” As I said this, the EMTs walked in. “I want you to know I love you. I gotta go.” Click.

As I got poked and probed by the emergency medical technicians (EMTs), an EKG revealed that my heart was healthy. Pumping fast, but healthy. My blood pressure was high, 151/73, but that, I was told, was expected after whatever I had just gone through.

I was taken to the hospital which, lucky for me, was right across the street. There I was again poked and analyzed, turned and x-rayed, and poked again. (Blood was drawn six times, from six different places during my time there. By students. I’m still sporting some of the bruises.)

A few hours later, after The Wife had come to the hospital, after a visit from my boss who observed that my shoes had not yet been taken off (”That’s a good sign,” he noted), and after trying my best to extract information from whoever was looking at me at the time (including the x-ray technicians, who let me look at my x-rays, see my heart, and commented that I had “huge lungs,” after revealing that at least one of them was a deep-sea diver), I was let go. By now it was 2:00 PM and all I wanted to do was rest, and enjoy the fact that I was alive. (In fact, the original name for this portion of the story was “Yesterday I Died. I Was Born Today.” This seemed a bit too melodramatic, though vis-a-vis what I discovered next.)

For the next few days I took it fairly easily. I worked from home, slept a good amount, and made sure I had nothing to worry about. I opened the windows, spent time out in the porch, smelled the air, and tasted my food with a curiosity that can only be attributed to someone who’s appreciating life for what it is.

I had a meeting with the cardiologist a couple of days after the incident, as well as a meeting with my family practitioner. Nothing new came from any of those meetings.

The cardiologist — a surprisingly attractive Brazilian woman who looked like she was in her late tweens/early 30s and therefore almost too young to be a cardiologist; I felt as if in a television show — took another EKG and scheduled an echocardiogram, but said that neither the blood work nor the EKG revealed anything abnormal. (”Your EKG looks good,” she said to me. “Phenomenal, in fact.”) She ordered another blood test to check for thyroid problems, which I had revealed to her run in my family. I don’t know much about these, however, only that my grandmother has problems with her thyroid, and that she’ll fall asleep in the middle of telling you something. By this time I didn’t fear the sting of the needle any more: I had apparently been downgraded to pin cushion, and a pin cushion need not fear piercing. I was also ordered to pick up a 30-day heart monitor to record any future incidents. Aside from caffeine-induced heart palpitations, I hoped this thing didn’t record anything else.

The family practitioner — Dr. MK I’ll call her, since I’ll likely be referring to her in the future — said something along the same lines: EKG looks fine, bring back the blood test results, and keep wearing that heart monitor.

The days following the initial incident I had felt fine. In fact, I felt better than fine. I felt great! Better than I had in… years? Certainly seemed that way.

As I studied this another possibility arose, one which had been mentioned by a few people, but which I didn’t want to accept: that what I had gone through was a full-blown panic attack. I went to the usual sources for information about this sort of thing — WebMD and Wikipedia — to see what they said about it. Here’s the Wikipedia description:

A panic attack is a period of intense, often temporarily debilitating, sense of extreme fear or psychological distress, typically of abrupt onset. Though it is often a purely terrifying feeling to the sufferer, panic attacks are actually an evolutionary body response often known as the fight-or-flight response occurring out of context. Symptoms may include trembling, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, chest pain (or chest tightness), sweating, nausea, dizziness (or slight vertigo), light-headedness, hyperventilation, paresthesias (tingling sensations), and sensations of choking, smothering and dreamlike and disconnected sensations. During a panic attack, the body typically releases large amounts of adrenaline into the bloodstream. Many first time sufferers of a panic attack believe they are dying, going insane or having a heart attack. Many say panic attacks are among the most frightening experiences of their lives.

This sounded exactly like what I had gone through, almost to the letter. In fact, the list of symptoms on the page was almost verbatim what I had told the doctors I was feeling. This looked promising, although frighteningly so. Still, the more I read the more I began to be convinced that this was it, especially in light of what was now quickly becoming the second choice, Hyperthyroidism. Hopefully that first panic attack would just be an isolated incident.

It wasn’t.

I was at a meeting that Friday, again at work, when suddenly there it was again: the tingling sensations, the pain in the chest, the racing heart rate — the works. I took my chances and instead of calling another ambulance I went outside for a while to walk, quickly, up and down the sidewalk. Luckily, my office is in a medical office complex, so if something went wrong I could get to a door quickly enough. I was hoping to burn some adrenalin by walking and stop some of the other side effects of the panic attack, if that’s what it was. For all I knew, I was having a heart attack.

After a few minutes, and after being joined by someone willing to talk with me during the ordeal, I felt myself calming down again. My heart rate came back to normal range, I stopped trembling, and my skin was no longer numb or tingly. Yet, I was scared now, very scared. What if these things kept going on forever ever time I came to work? The racing heart, the moments of pure fear, the need to run away from wherever I was, the vertigo, the nausea, the fainting feelings, the numbness, the choking… Would these things just keep going all the time, everywhere?

That weekend I had a few more episodes, none as bad as the first, or even the second, but bad in their own right. I could no longer tell what the trigger(s) could be. On one night, I had them for so long I eventually just passed out on my bed. After every attack I was hungry and very, very tired. That night I simply could not stay awake any more. Thank God for that. I didn’t want to stay awake.

The next week I had the echocardiogram. Pulse was around 58, which seemed right. I have yet to hear from any doctors about it so I can only presume that if they found something it wasn’t too bad. I remember when I had broken my knee a few years ago. They called me back that night to run a more invasive test, to make sure no veins or arteries were pinched. These guys, thankfully, don’t take chances, which in this case made the old saying “No news is good news” a truism.

I also had a meeting with Dr. MK wherein I revealed my latest findings. She suggested Zoloft if I wanted a pill for it, especially since the attacks were not isolated, but were now becoming somehwat commonplace, but I told her I didn’t want a pill. She then wrote me a referral to go see a psychologist to see if we could get to the root of the problem. Even if it was biological, the psychologist could help put my mind at ease. The fact that this may be panic disorder has not escaped me.

During this time, a conversation started up in itazuraßeau’s blog in which the topic of panic attacks came in. (If you click on the link you can see part of our conversation, the public part at least. You may want to turn off your speakers. By the way, Beau, a.k.a. itazuraßeau, is an old friend of mine from college who I spent time with when working on the USF music school computer labs. Oboe player. Very good. He’s now living in Japan.) He has helped me understand the issue a bit better and as served as a bit of a sounding board for me, one which talks back and offers useful advice, some of which I may share later here. Most of this advice revolved around medications and why not to take them, advice which The Wife, a psychologist by training, echoed loudly.

Anyway, so to the point of this post: now you understand why my posting has slowed as of late. I just haven’t felt like writing and frankly, for the moment I’m not going to do things I don’t feel like doing. Might sound childish and amateur, but frankly all I care about now is getting whatever issues are causing the attacks resolved. I have a few suspicions, but I don’t care to go into them right now, mostly because they’re just that: suspicions. If I start attributing stuff to them I may be doing something detrimental by building up walls which would later have to be torn down.

You may also be wondering why I’m letting all this out in public. Mostly is to bring light to the situation. Also because the original purpose of this blog includes it being a way in which I can learn of myself better. If you’re wondering, no, I’m not going insane, at least not any more than most other people. I’m just, apparently, dealing with a bunch of stress, stress I didn’t know was there. (That this happened now is surprising because the past two years have made for one of the calmest periods of my life.) Then again, if you’ve known me personally for any amount of time, you probably know stress something I normally feel that I thrive on and enjoy. Guess I got that one wrong.

So, will I keep my writing going? Yes, but on my own schedule, something I haven’t always felt at freedom to do. I’ll try to continue posting at least twice a week, and depending on time constraints and other considerations I may post more, but for the time being, until I get all of this sorted out my posting may be a bit erratic. My apologies in advance.

Take it easy. I’ll work on doing the same.

If you’re like I was just a few weeks ago, you’re probably thinking “It’s a mug that looks sort of like a flower pot with a handle.” But isn’t it funny how if you walked into someone’s house, asked for a drink, and got it in that mug, you would probably take special notice of it? (Especially since it can hold over a pint.) Maybe you would even go as far as to ask your host a question or two about it, especially if it looked hand made, and even more so if it was the only one of its kind in the house.

This story is about just that, the fact that unlike their mass-manufactured counterparts, handmade items each have a story to tell. It’s also about going pottery shopping for the first time. In essence, this is that cup’s story (with a few addendums).

Last week The Wife and I took a week-long trip to North Carolina, where we got to spend a couple of those days with Third-Child (TC) and Peacecraft (PC). (For the record, Third-Child is a lady, Peacecraft a guy, and they’re married.) While it would have been all too easy for us to simply stay home and chat about anime and sci-fi, or to tease and feed Moo, TC and PC’s pizza loving cat. Instead, Third-Child and The Wife decided it would be fun to go explore the community. Third-Child and Peacecraft just recently moved to North Carolina, so things were almost as new to them as they were to us.

Their first thought was to walk around the city’s Historical District. Since the entire district was about four blocks total, we thought it would be a good idea to also find something else to do. That’s when Third-Child discovered (or rather, mentioned) an area known as Pottery Highway, which was somewhat near their place. The Wife and TC figured it would be fun to go check that out, so we decided to go there instead.

As you can probably guess, my vote consisted of a “Hey, whatever y’all want to do,” since going pottery shopping wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time. Walking around exploring a little town in the middle of nowhere, however, is always potentially fun. If nothing else, this would be relaxing.

For those of you who’ve never been there (and I’m guessing that’s most of you reading this), Pottery Highway is a small area in central North Carolina which houses the oldest and largest pottering community in the United States. In the span of about 16 miles of road there are over 100 independent pottery shops, all of which feature hand-made pottery made by artists in the area, most of whom are the shopkeepers. Unlike megastore-bought pottery, most of this stuff is one-of-a-kind (and not made in China), so if you see something you really like, you’d be well advised to take it, should funds be sufficient.

We headed out at about 11am. It had been an unseasonably warm winter in the area, so most of the time we did quite well just wearing light sweaters, at least when in central North Carolina. (The mountains were another story entirely.)

Pottery Highway was actually further than we expected, since (as we quickly figured out) the map being used wasn’t to scale: a span of 8 miles on one side of the map was about 1/5 the size of another span of 8 miles on the other side of the map. Still, the drive was fun. The cool, fresh air was a stark contrast to the polluted, hot Fort Lauderdale air, and the semi-mountainous terrain featured more curves than almost any landscape in Florida. All the homes seemed to be surrounded by at least a couple of acres, which is again in stark contrast to South Florida’s copious zero lot-line houses.

Our first stop was at a little place called Fireshadow Pottery. To find this place, we actually had to turn into a dirt road, then into a gravel road, followed by another dirt road, then finally second (curvy) gravel road. Our first impression of the place was that we had just entered into a horror movie: surrounded by woods and found only via dirt roads, this was the sort of place where hot, young (and usually nubile) 20-somethings came to die. Luckily, Peacecraft put gas in his car beforehand, so if we got in trouble, he was confident we could get away. (Noting that we were riding around in a Ford Focus, I wasn’t quite as confident.)

Despite our first impressions, the shop was actually surrounded by an array of beautiful pieces, including a Japanese-style gateway and a number of large vases. (In fact, the whole shop had an Asian theme going.) Going into the shop, we saw a number of smaller pieces, including everything from cups and plates to lambs, vases, and wall decorations. At first I wasn’t exactly digging the scene, since I felt like an elephant in a china shop, but Third-Child and the Wife loved it. (The shopping, not the me-feeling-like-an-elephant-in-the-china-shop part.) With the help of their contagious excitement, it didn’t take long for Peacecraft and I to get a bit more interested in the pottery. (Actually, I think Peacecraft already knew how to appreciate pottery, making me the only dolt in the group.) Each of the pieces seemingly had a life of its own: each could be admired for hours, and every one told a story. While there, we got a chance to chat with the creator of some these pieces, Mo. He would tell us about how he made a piece and about living in the area. We, in turn, couldn’t do better than this:

TC: “…Yeah, [because of all the moving around] we have enough beds to choke a horse.”
Me: “Uhmm… so, how many horses have you killed that you know how many beds it takes to choke one?”

He seemed to like that one. Maybe instead of knocking off 20-somethings he gets his kicks choking horses with beds, I don’t know. Anyway, Third-Child picked up a couple of pieces from the shop as we left. She was seriously eyeing a cup from the shop, but decided to leave it for another time.

We stopped at a couple of other places before we went to our next destination of note, From the Ground Up. Unlike Fireshadow, From the Ground Up had bit of an Irish flare to it. This was obvious when we stepped in the shop, since many of the pieces were decorated by Celtic knots. As we walked around the shop, which was divided into three rooms, we took notice of the stylistic differences in the pottery. After walking into the first room, I also took notice of the mug pictured at the top of the page. It was sitting on a shelf next to a stein with similar coloration, and it caught my interest almost immediately.

Nevertheless, after a few minutes of admiration I walked away in order to see a few of the other items. It wasn’t long before I was back again, admiring the cup.

“If you like it, get it,” insisted the Wife.

“You back on that cup again?” asked TC.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m not sure I really want it.”

After about 20 minutes of walking around in the shop (during which time I made several visits back to see the mug) The Wife picked up the mug, walked up to the counter, and bought it. My concern involved the cost of the mug: $22. Her concern was for the feeling and memories which would now be attached to the mug. She was right. Since then, every time I’ve looked at that mug I’ve been brought back not just to that shop, but to that week. You would think I was looking at a photo, from the way it reminds me of the place.

Yet, my foolishness regarding the issue of money vs. memory (where money was an available resource) got in the way: The Wife gave up a mug she wanted in order for me to feel good about getting mine. Hers cost $14. I would end up paying for that later, in both guilt and cash.

As we left the store, we heard an Irish flute in the air. At first we didn’t know whether it was a recording they had outside, but with its crisp and clear sound, I figured it couldn’t be. A minute later we saw the artist, the guy responsible for making the mug, sitting out on a tree stump in the back, entertaining his dog with an Irish tune.

By this time we started feeling a hungry so we stopped by a small restaurant in town, the Dairy Breeze. We found out from the shopkeeper at From the Ground Up that since this was their low season (the time after Christmas), most of the restaurants were closed. Aside from a Hardee’s at the edge of town, this was the only place open.

I don’t want to talk much about the place, suffice to say that it proves why when you’re on the road (and even at home) you should try to eat at locally owned restaurants. Good atmosphere, reasonable price, and most importantly, great food.

After lunch we stopped by Uwharrie Crystalline Pottery. Aside from returning to Fireshadow Pottery to pick up Third-Child’s cup, this was our last major stop.

Uwharrie Crystalline’s specialty is in making crystalline pottery, which means they make the pottery and then crystallize part of it via the baking process. Something like that, or maybe nothing at all like that. I wasn’t listening closely enough to she shopkeeper’s explanation. I don’t believe any of us did, although I think everyone else already knew how this kind of stuff was made. We were all entranced by how beautiful some of these pieces were.

Third-Child fell head over heels in love with a bowl she saw. The Wife was also eyeing this piece, and figured if TC didn’t grab it, she would. She grabbed it, along with a vase that just happened to match the bowl well. The vase, however, was a bit of my doing.

TC had been eyeing that vase for a while, but she couldn’t justify the $135 price tag. When she found the bowl, she thought to get that instead. The vase, however, kept a place in the “desired” list, but now she really couldn’t justify getting the bowl and paying for the vase, mostly because she just started a new job and hadn’t yet gotten paid (”Otherwise,” she confessed, “I would have already grabbed it.”) Knowing that The Wife wanted the bowl, and seeing how TC really actually wanted the vase more than the bowl, I talked to TC to try and convince her to get the vase instead of the bowl.

The shopkeeper overheard us talking and on the spot offered to sell TC the vase for $85. In the blink of an eye, that vase went from the display shelf to the sales counter. Along with the bowl. Sorry, Wife. Still, this played in our favor, as we got the couple of pieces which better matched the current decor of our living room and which, I admit, I preferred. We also got a bit of a discount, paying only $40 for pieces previously priced at $38 and $14.

I’ll be the first to admit, it would have been pretty hard to justify buying the vases had we bought that cup. But see, this is what guilt makes you do: I felt guilty for not getting The Wife a $14, so I was trying to get her a bowl you couldn’t really even eat cereal from — it was too big — for God only knows how much, and ended up getting her two vases. Maybe I should have bought her that cup, though something tells me we would’ve bought the vases regardless.

Our hands full of pottery, we left the shop and meandered back to Fireshadow. We stopped at a couple of places, some very nice (and tempting), some which smelled like dog food, and some displaying giant, red clay pigs, but it was mostly to see what was there: we’d already had our fill. We got to Fireshadow — traveling those same dirt roads we traveled before — and we picked up the cup Third-Child had been eyeing (and talking about ever since).

Mo, one of the owners of Fireshadow, said that if we had a bottle of wine or something with us, we could spend some time with him and his wife over at a lake in their property. (Remember that whole “murder movie” scenario I talked about at the beginning of this piece…?) Had we gone the day before, we would have stayed, since we had just picked up a few bottles of Biltmore Estate wine, but we had dropped it off at their place, and The Wife and I also had to head back to Florida that night (a 10-hour drive from their house to Tampa).

We said our goodbyes and headed back to Third-Child and Peacecraft’s, where as soon as we got there, TC and PC were already putting the pottery up for display, The Wife was admiring the vases, and I loaded up the mug with soda. (If I drank beer, this is the type of mug I would drink it in.) We finished the day by watching anime before our seemingly infinite 10-hour drive, a drive in which the GPS decided it would be much more fun for us to drive through the backwoods of South Carolina than to simply take us to 95. Hurray for the “Most Use of Highways” option! (Of course, it did spare us from having to go anywhere near that cesspool known as South of the Border, which I guess made the hour-long detour worth it.)

All in all, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the experience. I plan to go pottery shopping more often, provided I actually have money to buy, if something should catch my eye. Heck, if nothing else take that last bit with you: pottery shopping is fun if you either (a) love pottery, or (b) have money you can spend. I may not know much about pottery, but I know what I like. And I like my mug.

Side Note: I will be adding pics of this later. I just haven’t had the time, but I figured I’d go ahead and publish it anyway, since it’s been sitting in the backend for about 2 1/2 weeks.)

In high school there was this teacher who almost no one liked, not staff nor students: Poly “Demon” Demma. Depending on who you talked to she was either the most self-righteous, annoying, and power-tripping teacher to ever walk the halls, or (in rare cases) the most just and fair teacher you could ask for. Like most, I was of the former opinion, even though I started by being of the later.

I’m sure you can guess some about her attitude and how people felt about her based on the nickname alone, but the urban legends which roamed the school regarding Demma revealed exactly how deeply the dislike (I would almost say “hatred”) ran with the students:

• She walked with a limp. Two reasons were given for this. One legend had it that a student had once pushed her down the stairs and broke her hip. The other said that a student had once thrown a desk at her, breaking her leg and hip.
• She once had a bird die in school. Demma loved her parakeets. So much so she once brought them to school. Legend had it that a student killed one of her birds, dressed it up in a tiny suit, taped its wing to its crotch, and stuffed it in her purse.

Both of these, of course, were wishful thinking on the part of the students, most of whom gleefully passed on the legends to any incoming freshmen and sophomores, especially if they were unfortunate enough to be in one of Demma’s classes. However, these were still only legends: while she indeed got hip replacement surgery, it wasn’t because of a student, it was because of arthritis. As for the bird, she had once brought her pet parakeets to school, where a student opened the cage and one flew away.

To her credit, she was a good English teacher. Very good. The problem was that in order to be as good as she was, Demma felt it necessary to be demeaning to anyone who didn’t believe as she believed, did exactly as she asked. (”Commanded” may be a better description of her edicts or requests, whatever they were.) She was sort of the Richard Dawkins of teaching: it wasn’t good enough to feel you were right, you had to be a jerk to anyone who disagreed with you. (This is an unfair characterization of Dawkins, but it should get the point across.) She was also very much into the crony system: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Of course, her idea of you scratching her back (as repulsive a thought as that was and still is) was to always do all your homework and do it right. Do things right, and you would stay on her graces, even be showered with random extra points for no apparent reason that counted towards your final grade. Fall from her graces, however, and you were on her shiat-list permanently.

As you can probably guess, not many people could stay on her graces.

My problems with Demma started when we started with our reading assignments. One of her requirements was that we should be reading an approved novel every day. Since no fantasy or science fiction books were allowed, I asked her for an opinion. She recommended Tom Clancy’s books, and I got to reading. Surprisingly to me at the time, I loved them: The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, Without Remorse… all of these were novels I raced through, at the pace of more than 100 pages a night, 50 on a bad night. At one point, Demma also bought a Tom Clancy book for me to borrow and read.

This was all well and good, until one week I started coming in with having read at most only 50 pages per night. “You’re slipping,” I remember her saying. All I knew how to do was apologize, since I didn’t think she would really care that I had been ramping up my violin and double bass practice to three and four hours a night. By the end of that week I had gone from being one of her golden boys to the bottom of the totem pole. I stopped receiving the extra points she would randomly toss around to those she thought deserved the extra points (regardless of their grades in the class), was insulted regularly, and those led to ever lowering grades. While at the first quarter I had received an A in the class, with a 99% overall grade percentage, by the time the third quarter came about my grade had dropped to a D. I eventually finished the class with a C.

To a certain extent, I understand now why she did what she did: she had seen what my level of excellence was and when she saw me slipping to a lower level — 50 pages a night instead of 100 — she began to give me a hard time in order to get me back on track. Unfortunately, she never really explained this, and instead of trying to help me or even find out why my production had dropped, she told me that I was lazy and should work as hard as Chan, the Vietnamese girl who sat next to me. Apparently, the fact that I was now performing with two orchestras and a band in the middle of the high season for music — Christmas time — was of no concern. Her class was of utmost importance.

This incident revealed to me why people thought so badly about her. Of course, this wasn’t the only incident to reveal so, just the first.

I took English with Mrs. Demma during my sophomore year in high school. This was the same year the University of Florida played Florida State University at the Sugar Bowl. Demma had been invited to the game, and while she didn’t know who to root for — before she went, she couldn’t have cared less about football — she still went. (Not liking football is no reason to turn down a free trip to the French Quarter in New Orleans, right?)

The Monday after she returned from her trip, we walked in to find the words “Sugar is Sweet” written in large letters across the whiteboard. At the beginning of class, she explained what the words meant by asking a simple question: “Did anyone see the FSU game this weekend? Do we have any Gators fans in here?” She asked that last question with pampas spite usually reserved for Democrats. (Politics and the classroom mixed quite often that year in English.) All of us knew right there and then who she ended up rooting for. As it turned out, some UF fans sitting near her were a bit drunk and unruly. This led her to presume that all UF students were drunk and unruly, so out of her need for a sense of moral superiority, she instantly became an FSU fan. Lucky for her, FSU won the game.

Personally, I can’t say I even remember the game. I was never really a fan of either school’s football team (although I pretended to be became one when courting The Wife, a UF alumni), so I didn’t bother watching it. Nevertheless, I made the unfortunate mistake of wearing my sherbet orange Tampa Bay Buccaneers jacket and a pair of blue jeans that day. Orange and blue, as you may know, are the school colors of the University of Florida. A kid sitting next to me had also worn orange and blue, but his came in the form of a UF Gators Football t-shirt. After her little victory speech in front of a class of mostly confused (and thoroughly annoyed) students, Demma moved to stand in front of both me and the other kid.

“Oh,” she said, “what do we have here? A couple of Gator fans? How does it feel to have lost so badly?”

She turned to the first kid, waiting for an answer. “Eh, it’s a game. It was close.”

“Close?!” she said in total surprise. “My dear, you obviously didn’t watch the game. Three times the Seminoles made it towards the end zone. Three.” She put up three fingers. “Sure they didn’t score, but they didn’t need to. They proved that had they needed the points, they could have gotten them.” (Years later, I’m still wrestling with that logic. If you’re near the end zone and don’t score, it’s because you can’t, not because you simply let the other team have it easy.)

“Eh, whatever. I still like my team,” he replied.

She turned to me. “And what about you? What did you think, hmm?”

“Frankly, I didn’t really care,” I told her. “This is a Bucs jacket, see?” I pointed to the large picture of Buccaneer Bruce on the jacket, and the words “TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS” emblazoned on the arms. I continued, “I’m also a [University of Miami] Hurricanes fan. I like neither the Gators nor the Noles.”

“Of course, Miami. Another losing team,” she replied. (The Hurricanes lost the National Championship that year to Nebraska.) “Still, orange and blue… those are Gator colors, you know,” she said as she walked away.

“Yep, I know,” I replied. “Doesn’t change the facts.”

She continued, “I guess I wouldn’t want to associate myself with them either.”

Right then I thought about becoming a Gators fan, purely out of spite. (Remember that in the American South, football is not a sport: it’s a religion.) I couldn’t, but I did start hating FSU even more. That’s just as good, right? Funny thing that even to this day, no matter who FSU is playing, I’m almost always rooting for the other team. (Unless they’re playing the ‘Canes, when instead I wish for a meteor to strike the field and obliterate both teams. Nuke them from space: it’s the only way to be sure they both lose.)

“By the way,” she said from her desk, “have any of you ever had gator meat? It tastes just like chicken.”

For the next week, Demma kept on with the game, eventually changing her official mailing address to include the words “Florida State”, instead of the postal code “FL”. From that point on, in her class, wearing a University of Florida shirt was reason for insult, unless you were one of the few on her graces by that time.

Later on in the year I came to school a few minutes late, so I had to get a late pass from the office. My being late to my first class, Orchestra, wasn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence, so I wasn’t new to the process. Still, the fact that you’re reading this should tell you who was manning the tardy desk that day.

By this time, I had started to work with my violin teacher on training for my auditions to various music schools. I only had two years to prepare, so time was short. This morning, however, my passion for music came under fire as the Demon side of Demma came out.

“You play the violin?” she asked in her usual snide manner.

“Yeah, I’ve been playing for five years. I’m the concert master of the orchestra.” I grabbed my hall pass and started walking away.

“You know, unless you work on your English you’ll never get anywhere in life. Don’t count on doing anything with music unless you’re a Mozart or Beethoven.”

Of all the pampas, self righteous, demeaning things to say! I tried to hold it in, but I lost it. “You’re right,” I yelled, “I won’t be as good as them. I’ll be better.” I stormed out of that room determined to prove her wrong.

In later years, ironically, it would be my music which would lead me to my career as writer. On the one hand, the fact that I have become a fairly successful writer at a relatively young age proves that I was able to do something in spite of Demon Demma’s damning grades, which makes me want to tell her “Suck it, Demma!” On the other hand, the fact that she was right about my dependency on English in order for me to succeed career-wise makes me wonder whether I should be thanking her. (That last one, though, feels a bit like thanking Saddam Hussein for teaching us how bad dictatorships are.)

I guess the lesson here is that no matter how good you are at what you do and no matter how right you may be, unless you work on your people skills, people will hate you, especially if you’re a jerk. Still, if I ever see her again I might actually thank her, since I’ve used a lot of what she taught in my carreer, or at least at the beginning of it. Then again, I might just push her down the stairs. Heck, I may do both, so long as no one’s watching.

That’s right folks, it happened again. Somehow I was dragged out to the place I least enjoy yet find myself visiting the most. The mall.

Now I know that there are a lot of events going on in the world today such as the passing of a great former president and the execution of a foreign dictator. It almost seems kind of trivial and a little irresponsible to ignore this groundbreaking news to write about something so…average.

However I believe that the world will get enough coverage on these topics without my commenting upon it. There are a lot of better informed people who could talk endlessly about the facts and opinions regarding these events so they would be the ones to seek out for articles relating to these topics.

Do I choose to ignore theses occurrences? No, but I am twenty years old and the world looks like its falling apart in front of me. All I want for a few weeks during my winter break is to enjoy these magic moments with those who matter the most to me. My friends and family. No matter what insanity is going on the world, no matter what depressing news comes your way, there is always someone in your family who can lift your spirits and remind you that in the end, everything will be just fine.

Anyway, back to the point of this article.

I had grown as a person a little since the last shopping trip. Honest, I’m like 5 pounds heavier after all that holiday food. Alright fine, you know what I really meant. A little mental maturity magic had been sprinkled my way with a good chunk of holiday cheer. It wasn’t the location that mattered, but the people I was with. A year from now I wouldn’t remember visiting a massive crowded shopping area on the days between Christmas and New Years, but I will remember the good times and pleasant feelings I had with my relatives.

One of the best parts of this mall adventure was how many new friends I made while I was there. Sometimes boredom sets in while visiting various shopping outlets and that only leaves so many things to do. So I did what was most natural to me and just started talking to whoever was nearby.

Boredom seems to have a lot to do with not knowing enough people. Think about it, if you knew more people someone would always be calling you to do something or to just hang out and talk. It’s a numbers game really. Now I am not saying dump your 5 quality friends for 1000 fake friends on Myspace that you may never actually meet, but you won’t lose your top 5 by making new acquaintances.

I had a lot of interesting conversations that made me feel more at ease with the place I rarely visited. To think, if I hadn’t come, how many people would I have missed out on meeting? This was becoming almost…fun.

Of course it helped that this time I wasn’t the only guy there. I was prepared. HQ had sent backup.

My father, brother, and some uncles had also agreed to join me on this outing and that made all the difference. Sure we split up at times but for the most part we stuck together and shared laughter and good nature towards one another. It feels good to be surrounded by people you love though it feels even better to know that the people around you feel better since you also love them. Isn’t this what Christmas is really about?

Well, partially.

The other part has to do with gifts. Oh and there is some religious significance here and there but I am not the right person to talk about that.

So this time while everyone was walking from store to store I didn’t feel as awkward when the girls all headed to the swimsuit department and demanded everyone come to give their advice. Strangely enough it was here that I received some very wise consul from the elders around me. This squire in training was ready to learn. LvL. 4 here I come!

So I thought that I should post the advice I received and get the perspective of some other people on how effective it is.

Now even though I find that the women have made up their mind on which items they would like to select, they will ask a guy what they think on the matter. It’s like creating a false sense of purpose of being there. Personally I didn’t care. In a way it made me feel important.

Now it was here that I saw the advice given to me in action. A wife would pick out a swimsuit or article of clothing that they had decided they liked and judged it for some time. Having determined that the piece of fabric is worthy for further examination above and beyond quality inspector number 8, they will bring it to their respective husbands and ask them what they think.

Now I know what you are thinking. Movies and television have made this appear to be a lose/lose situation no matter how the guy responds. Well if I have learned anything in my short twenty years of life it is that for every situation there is a solution that can be hammered out. One just has to think on a different level. Thank you Albert.

I believe that if a man was heavily influenced by forms of mass entertainment they would have chocked or said something stupid yet humorous. The person would have already admitted defeat in the situation and would not have looked for that perfect way out. Instead what I heard was this comment. A perfect blend of people skills and practice.

“You make that look great.”

Not too much emphasis on the clothing while putting more favor on the girl. It sounds like a good thing to say and it did work for my uncle. Afterwards I would talk with my uncles and discuss the merits of his response. That conversation I choose to leave out due to personal reasons but it basically flowed around that comment.

The truth of the matter is I am a young boy in college with very little experience in these things. Any advice and experience I pick up on such matters is material that I have no basis to compare against. So guys, does this work for you? Gals, if this response was genuine, would you avoid giving ‘the look.’ I had to add the genuine part because there have been times when I thought a girl what I genuinely thought about something and I nearly ended up in the hospital. Yeah, I have a lot of work to do.

So, does anyone here have any advice for a young student eager to learn?