What I'm Talking About When I'm Talking About Dreaming

When you're little you have big plans. They are plans which come with being young, having your whole life in front of you and more or less not knowing better. Since these are usually longshots that noone can or will tell you aren't likely to happen, they get grouped together as your dreams. While an actual dream may have you flying or speaking in front of your whole school while naked, these are things that under the right circumstances could possibly happen. Anyone who has ever achieved them has begun with the dream of one day doing them. In that regard, you've completed the first step.

Then life catches up with you. Things aren't as easy as they seem and that person who achieved the dream you're aspiring to... well, they're the one who did it. There were other people who also wanted to do the same thing, who dreamed the dream just like them, who never got there. You don't hear their stories because there's no way you could document them all. They are swept away by the rushing horde who follows the one person who did achieve their dream. When Eminem says "You can do anything you set your mind, man," at the end of Lose Yourself, he's speaking from his own experience. He just omits that he was a remarkably talented and experienced individual who benefited from being in the right place to have the opportunity to do what he'd set his mind to doing.

I was young once with my whole life in front of me and the benefit of more or less not knowing better. During that time I had two dreams. One was to be an actor. The other was to be President of The United States. I wanted to be each of them because then I'd get to do something I was interested in all of the time. I'd be recognized being that person and that would come to define me to the world. All I wanted was the recognition and to know that people liked me. As I got older, those dreams began to melt and to become more reasonable. By the time I was 21, I wanted to be a film director or just an important local politician. There are way more people who can do those jobs. Then my dreams continued their slide. By the time I was 26, I wanted to be a writer or just someone who was a political insider. Even if I couldn't head the process, I could still be a part of it. Five years, a breakup and an economic crash later, I don't even believe in those dreams anymore. I've found my level and it is what has always been: interested observer. Nothing has changed except for the future as I imagined it. It never arrived.

What I've learned as I've gotten older is your dreams change. What you want out of life becomes less of a destination than a place, a continuous feeling over a one-time accomplishment. It's less about becoming something different and more about fully becoming yourself. Your personal identity is developed so you're less worried about something outside of yourself defining you. In fact, I'm more worried about something negatively defining me than I try to latch onto something positive. If I were more religious that might be different. As it is, I aim to represent the inner me to as many people as possible who want to know it.

Now, as I'm older and less and less naive, I have different dreams. They're things I started a long time ago and thought I would come back to if and when I ever got a chance. They were what I would do once I'd achieved my dreams and then could do whatever I wanted. The irony is I wanted the freedom which would come with success and have been provided that same freedom by abject failure. It's very much the same as the monetary freedom I enjoy because I didn't push myself academically and thus didn't incur astronomical amounts of debt by going to graduate school. P = q but not p can = q too.

My dream now is to have a room. It will have to be a place where I can complete my project and be able to leave it. One of the constants in my life since I was 16 is not living in the same place for very long. Part of that is my choice and it is in response to the part of it which is not. I'd like to be able to not need to tear it down. This room will be mine and it will reflect the inner me. To that extent I've been saving pictures and articles from magazines since I was 19 years old. I keep them in a tan plastic filebox which I dutifully slug from old apartment to new apartment waiting for the day they can all come out to stay. In it are basketball and baseball players I thought were cool, bands which I wanted to memorialize and even a few pictures I tore out because it made sense. They are just things I was interested in or thought looked cool. I'd like to have a place where I can put these mementos on the wall and just sit amongst them. I enjoy high-backed chairs and I will have one in my room. Whenever I'm feeling not like myself or want to reminisce that room will be my refuge. I won't keep snacks or work or even anything I'd use on a regular basis in there. And when I'm not using it, I will keep the door closed.

You can visit it if you'd like. But please be respectful of your surroundings. Take note this is what my dream became. My dream is to have a place which reminds me of the time when I still held onto my dreams. Others may lament the lose of their dreams or continue holding onto them under longer and longer odds. My dreams fulfilled their destiny to become nothing and I feel better for recognizing it. If they say it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, then I say the same is true of dreaming. And like love, I will not dream like I did as a young man. The loss of my dreams will not embitter me or cause me to close my heart to them. It will be a mature dream I seek, a better and more realistic dream for me to follow. One which is based on me who I am instead of the me I'd once hoped I'd become.

Untitled Pt.2

"Then six weeks ago, I received an invitation to her wedding. She's marrying some guy she met at a company conference or something like that. They had a by-the-numbers story book romance. He met her, he was nice to her and he really appreciated her. They moved in together, they got a dog and they decided to get married."

He raises his voice a few octaves and buttons his cuffs. "'I want you to be there,' she told me when I expressed reservations. 'You mean as much to me as anyone else I've ever known. Well, other than Brent.' Then she used the dirty trick it was perfectly fair of her to use. 'Please, do this for me. It wouldn't be the same if you weren't there'."

"So I'm going. I'm going to sit near the back on the bride's side and stare across the room at Louisa. She won't be up there making sure I'm watching and it would be the same if I weren't there. But I'm still going."

"The tense moment will come when the priest asks whether there is anyone who knows why these two people shouldn't be married. In my younger and more reckless days, I might've stood up and screamed, 'I do. Because I love you Louisa.' Today I will stay in my seat and the moment will pass without so much as a burning in my legs. She'll run down the aisle and they'll cut the cake. I'll give her a hug and we'll promise to do a better job staying in touch. Two months from now she'll be the furthest thing from my mind. I have enough other women I keep close but not too close to take up my time. In that way, she's been an odd precedent."

He ties his tie while looking at the ceiling.

"I don't want to sound like I regret the way this ended up. Louisa was not the 'one great love of my life' and I did not miss the boat by never telling her how I felt. In reality, we just liked being the center and focus of someone else's attention. The invigorating rush of a crush eventually gave way to how little was behind it all."

"I'm steeling myself for one moment though. At some point in the night, I'll look at Louisa or she'll look at me. We will be talking to seperate groups of people and our eyes will meet across the room one last time. She'll wink at me and I'll wink back. It will be a hold over from when we cared about the other person seeing. Back then, it meant 'I know that you know.' Now it will mean the exact same thing but in a different way."

"It was crazy to be so unhappy for so long. Our relationship could never last. We had to move on with our lives and be happy."

He pulls his suit jacket on. "Does this look good?" He stands there arms spread, his shirt already wrinkling from the sweat.

Untitled Pt.1

"I once heard, 'A relationship can never last between two people who are the same kind of crazy.' At first, I thought it was the sort of thing which sounds wise because of its odd sentence construction. A lot of advice is repeated because it sounds antiquated and it's a common assumption anything which lasts long enough must be The Truth. So I was skeptical and thought my results would inevitably vary."

"That was before I met Louisa. She was exactly the same kind of crazy as me. By that, I don't mean she loved Japanese animation, Ernest Hemingway novels and Left Coast punk. Quite the contrary."

"I mean she took the world in the same way I did. She could see the differing nature of any moment. Most people see the world in only one way. It's easier to think if you live your life by one hard and fast code of ethics that apply to every situation and every time. In fact, it's so easy most people don't even think they are as they're doing it."

He imitates a voice. "'That's just me,' they'll claim. 'That's how I am.'"

"Louisa saw every new moment as unique. She once told me her only presumption upon entering an unknown situation was she knew absolutely nothing. I remember making a wise crack about how wonderfully Zen that was and how I wish I could be so free-minded and unfrightened by the world."

"She was right though. By going in with an empty slate, her first instinct was to listen."

"Now, years later, I think that's why so many people gravitated to her. She was constantly sticking out her neck and taking risks for what she believed in. And what she believed in was she could actually make things better if only people would tell her what was wrong. She was the most selfless person I'd ever met."

"That was what attracted me to her as a friend. It was a different thing entirely which made me want to be something more. I honestly thought she treated me differently, treated me better. As nice as she was to everyone she met, I thought I caught a certain sparkle when she noticed I was in the room. It was something special to me. Her eyes would beam, her smile would light up and she would stop."

"It became a little game between us. Who could dance around the issue better? Who could let on in a more deniable way? I stretched on for weeks and then weeks became months. The game grew more complex. Soon it became 'Who could flirt more while the other watched?' 'Who could brag more and who could bear more while talking about meeting a nice new...?' Who could get the other to say, 'You'll find a nice ... who really appreciates you,' when the nice new ... left?"

"We became co-dependents in romantic failure and co-conspirators in never being happy. That was the crazy we shared. We chose to always be the bridesmaid instead of ruining our tacit 'If all else fails and we're both 30...' agreement."

"Slowly we drifted apart. Other things and other people started to clutter up our lives. Where once we flirted to make sure the other was still paying attention, now we flirted and didn't care. I could have entire relationships and only mention it off-handedly once it ended. We no longer mattered. All of the years melted, swept away as though there had been a gust of wind. The last time I really talked to Louisa was almost three years ago. She was just out of undergrad and she was freaking out about actually being out in the world. There was so much she just couldn't deal with and she called to lean on my shoulder."

He begins buttoning his shirt, the very bottom button first.

"It was fair of her to call me since I'd been something like a confidant for years. I would listen, make some noises which implied I understood and then make broad, wisened-sounding statements. This time I was bound for failure because what each of us had done was never actual support. We were experts on each other's idiosyncrasies. But we'd never let each other in far enough to truly know us."

"The last time we talked I listened and made affirming grunts in her little pauses. Then when it came time to make my usual non-commital advice, I realized I had nothing. I couldn't even find something someone else would say. There is no old saying which expresses 'I don't even know you anymore and can't relate to your problems.' In real time, I mumbled a bit about how everything would be okay and how she would find her way eventually. It was the first time in our relationship that someone's bullshit openly stunk."

He steps into his dress slacks one leg at a time and makes a grimmace as he buckles his belt to his usual loop. "Not as skinny as I once was."

"We made plans to see a movie in the upcoming weeks and neither of us called back with firm plans. We could've repeated it a few times more, each time behind an 'Oh, hey...' facade. But we both knew it was time to quit."

Thirty By Thirty - Finis

As I approached my 30th birthday, I followed through on a decision of how I would celebrate the last year of my twenties.

A lot of people approach their thirties in a mournful state. I should know as, in the last few years, my peers have increasingly become people approaching and then passing thirty. They think of it as the dying of their youth and the end of their best years. I took the opposite tack. I am much happier be 30 than 20. When I was 20 I had no money, had no girlfriend and didn't know who the fonk I was or who I wanted to be. Well, those three things are no longer true. I wouldn't peel back my twenties in any kind of redo because what I did and what happened made me into who I am today.

Thus I celebrated my twenties as this great time I did, went and saw everything I could and enjoyed myself while doing, going and seeing. In much the same way we congregate together on New Years Eve to celebrate the passing of time instead of mourning it, my turning thirty will not be the dying of one era but the commencement of another. They will be the years when I find my way in the world, grow with those people who will be my life companions and enjoy all of the perks of being an adult instead of being an over-inflated kid.

As a part of this year long celebration I have done thirty things which I had never done before and then came back here to write about the experience. My brother originally called it my "busted list" as in I had to do these things before I'm old and busted. Some of the tasks were small and easily completed. Others required planning and assistance. It was not my intent to have a list of thirty items and only accomplish twenty-something. There was a list which was greater than thirty items and your suggestions were appreciated to expand upon it further and into the future. As I said, the intent was to share in this celebration both in the actual commission of the thirty things and also in writing about it in this space.

To that extent I have re-written the Thirty by Thirty mission statement:

Between his 29th and 30th birthdays, Michael Herman celebrated his transition into his third decade by completing thirty tasks he has never previously experienced and embracing the idea you can always find new experiences no matter how old you are thanks to the wonder, beauty and timeliness of Life. He hopes to continue the rest of his life in the same spirit.

MRH 1/31/10

Thirty By Thirty #3 - Stop Buying Comic Books

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known."

1 Corinthians 13:11-12

In the spring of 2001, I dropped out of college. Specifically I'd had my fill of the small liberal arts institution I was attending in Wisconsin and decided to move home mid-semester. I moved in with my grandfather for the summer, got a job downtown at a production company and started riding the 156 bus to work. Most days I'd have a little extra time on my way to my stop and I'd duck my head into Big Brain Comics which was located on 10th St at the time.

When I was growing up I read a lot of comic books. My grandmother would buy old issues at garage sales and bring them to our family cabin in Central Minnesota. For the most part they were Archie comics with people being more willing to part with them I'd guess than X-men books. But occasionally there would be a superhero book mixed in. This was providential, of course, because when I was nine the first Michael Keaton Batman movie was released. Suddenly there was an entire realm of knowledge to dive directly into face-first.

Now fast forward back to 2001 when I'm living with my grandfather. I'd wanted to get back into comic books for a while but getting comics in Green Bay was inconvenient if you were like me and lacked a car. Now I was walking past a comic book store everyday on my way to the bus. After doing a little poking around, I took the plunge.

Even though the movie was still a year away, the character I was most interested in was Spider-man. Seeing there was a new title which was less than a year old I bought my first issue of Ultimate Spider-man written by Brian Michael Bendis. I was instantly hooked. I started adding other Bendis titles like DareDevil and other Ultimate titles like Ultimate Marvel Team-Ups. Little did I know there was a comic book renaissance going on which would explode a year later when that first Spider-man movie would push comic books into the collective conscience. I expanded my titles and reading further and further, again discovering new knowledge to drink up.

But like all good things, there needed to be an end. My favorite series "Y: The Last Man" ended in January of 2008. Most of the books I was reading out of habit instead of really wanting to read them. I wasn't spending a lot of money keeping up but it felt more like responsibility than entertainment. So I decided I was going to follow the series "100 Bullets" to its conclusion and that would be it.

The 100th and final issue of "100 Bullets" came out this April. I went into Big Brain (now on Washington Ave but again on my commute home) bought the last issue and put it on the stack of comic books I need to catch up on. I'll probably keep reading comics from time-to-time in graphic novels. The days of buying individual issues though has ended.

I threw the "growing up" tag on this post even though I dislike that phrase. "Growing on" would be a better way to describe setting aside comic books. I've benefited from reading comic books because they taught me a love of reading and of voluminous knowledge and itt would be foolish to lose that message as I separate from the medium.

Thirty By Thirty #2 - Read A Murakami Book

(It's not that I'm falling behind. It's that most of the things I want to do are more conducive to good weather and full employment. What I'm falling behind on is documenting.)

I've recently been thinking about who my favorite authors are and I'm coming to the realization they are almost all authors who are my contemporaries. Not necessarily my peers as they are usually older than me and most definitely more accomplished than me but my contemporaries because they are writing about now. If I had to name my five favorite authors three of them [1] would be writers who are producing excellent work right now while there are many more [2] who I hold a great deal of respect.

I find this to be a thrilling realization. Part of this may be passing beyond the saturation point [3] where the canon has revealed the majority of what it's going to or maybe it's because the level of access to writing is just higher right now [4]. More likely though is the simplest explanation. Right now is just a really good time for literature.

Case in point is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Often praised as one of the great post-modern authors and perhaps the greatest author Japan has produced since the war, Murakami has written 12 novels since 1979. Still his 2002 book "Kafka On The Shore" (English Translation 2005) stands amongst his greatest work. He's not slowing down and he's not resting on his laurels.

"Kafka" details the travel stories of two men in Japan with possibly intertwining stories. Murakami uses dream sequences, the supernatural and American advertising figures to suggest a world which isn't real. Which in the end is true. It's a fiction book detailing the lives of fictional characters.

What was so amazing about the book is how the suggestion of unreality in the fictional world pointed back at the reality of the world around you the reader. Murakami may have a character who wears a white suit and a small goatee named Colonel Sanders. He also has his characters taking naps, preparing food and using the bathroom. With these little anchors linking his world back to the real world, he suggest the reader take a deeper awareness of their own life.

Part of the idea behind Thirty By Thirty is to experience new things like reading an author I had not before. It's also about doing things which remind me to be aware of my own life. For that reason I am glad not only to have read "Kafka On the Shore" but also to be living in an era with a wealth of literature.

[1] Klosterman, Gladwell and Simmons
[4] Chang, Pollack, Hornby, Sedaris, Ruiz-Zafon, Martel, Jacobs, Moore, July, Auster, Azzerad, Thompson, Roumeiu, Bendis, Mack, Johns, Morrison

Thirty By Thirty - #1 - Start Taking a Multi-Vitamin

Okay, when I was thinking up things to do for 30 x 30 it wasn't all just glamorous things like "Go parachuting" or "Visit New York City." Sometimes they're just going to be little things which I really should be doing anyway. Taking a multi-vitamin is a good example.

When you're young, you don't have to care about things like eating right. Your margin of error is much higher and you can do most anything without facing really grave consequences you can't recover from. Ask anybody you know about "how much wilder" they were in their youth and you'll surely hear tales of "I can't believe nothing bad happened" from most of them.

Well, later in life is when you start paying for those youthful indulgences and indiscretions. I know this personally from needing to undo years of abuse by losing a lot of weight and now fighting to keep it off. So I need to start thinking now about the little things I can be doing now to pay off positively much later.

Thus I am taking a multi-vitamin. There are some questions about their effectiveness. But I know that I'm most definitely not getting a balanced and completely nutritious diet right now. So I will take a One-A-Day multi-vitamin a vitamin C tablet to make sure I am augmenting my diet correctly.

The 29 Things About Me At Age 29

1.) I was born at 8:30 in the evening on February 1st, 1980 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The hospital where I was born (Abbott-Northwestern) is still standing. No, Gregory Peck, it did not burn down years ago.

2.) I grew up in Edina, Minnesota where I lived at the end of a cul-de-sac with a large yard. I'm the oldest of three children with one sister two years younger and a brother four years younger.

3.) When I was really little (my aunt estimates 3 or 4 years old) I kept another little boy from drowning. We were up at my family's lake cabin and this boy hadn't been raised near the water like I had and thus couldn't swim very well. I laid down on my belly on the dock as I held his head above water and shouted until the adults heard me.

4.) I've been to the hospital a few times in my life. I can't give you an exact number because a good number of them happened when I had epilepsy as a very small child. There are the three times I remember.

When I was four, I was playing in the basement of our old house with my dad and my sister. My sister and I were taking turns jumping over a comforter my dad was swinging back and forth. Normally if you tripped you'd fall into the comforter. I overshot once and had to get stitches in my chin.

When I was 13, I had an incident during my sleep at summer camp which made it seem like my epilepsy was coming back. It turned out it wasn't. But I did have to have a battery of tests to verify this. The one upside was my dad and I stayed up all night watching "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" and "The Commitments" per doctor's orders.

Then when I was 20, I fell into a door frame and needed stitches in my eyebrow. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. It was a klutzy trip into a door frame, not a shameful display of foolishness. Move along now. Nothing to see here.

5.) Since I was very young I've been fascinated by the news. As a kid I would read Newsweek and US News and World report while being glued to CNN Headline News. On the morning the democratic demonstrations in Tienanmen Square were suppressed I watched the news report on CBS's This Morning with Charles Kuralt. It was the same day the Ayatollah died.

6.) The very first time I was on the Internet was in 1988 or so when the kid up the block got a modem. He had to place a long-distance call to Houston in order to sign into a very basic version of Prodigy. Later his father got the phone bill and hit the roof. The point was we were there.

7.) I was there in-person with my dad, my sister and my brother when this happened.



The fact I love baseball is not entirely unrelated.

8.) After my ninth grade year I transferred away from Edina to Orono where I graduated in 1998. Being at a smaller school allowed me to letter in varsity basketball, concert band and theater while participating in the school newspaper, the literary magazine and ultimate frisbee. I would not have had the opportunity to participate in all these extra curriculars at a school like Edina High School.

9.) I lived in the state of Wisconsin across three academic years while I attended school near Green Bay. This experienced exposed me to what it's like to live in a town smaller than Minneapolis.

10.) While I was in school at St. Norbert, I was a member of a "frat." It wasn't frat really. It was technically a "men's independent social group" and it was made up of a the really smart, really independent kids who "would never join a frat except... Hey, what's this?" To this date, my best and closest friends are people I met through this group.

11.) In the fall semester of my junior year, I won a student-faculty grant from the school to write a manuscript under the supervision of a professor. The college gave me $2000 which I promptly dumped back into tuition. To this date I have yet to finish the manuscript. But at one point in my life I was technically an endowed writer.

12.) I published the on-campus underground satirical newspaper while I was at St. Norbert. We were pretty serious about getting the paper out every two weeks. So serious that one time I drank too much, got up the next morning, puked during class (I was running to the restroom at the time), went home to sleep it off and still got up to meet my own self-imposed deadline of that evening.

13.) After my junior year of college I was blown out. I wasn't feeling challenged by my school work so I was making up impossible challenges to complete this school work. For example, I would type my papers for the critical writing class (the hardest class in the English major) on the day of class. When this wasn't enough, I started writing them in the two hours before class. In April I took incompletes in all of my classes and moved home.

14.) I graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2003. Since I'd missed some gen ed classes on my first time through I took an extra two semesters (fall and summer) to finish. Recently I saw my diploma for the first time in five years. I put it back in the box it was in and don't expect to see it for another five years.

15.) I've visited 31 out of the 50 states. My family was very good (and fortunate) at taking a lot of trips when I was growing up. Since then I've added to my 50-state tally by taking long road trips to each coast either with my friends, my high school band, protest trips or just by myself. These are the states I've visited.




16.) I've been out of the country three times total. I went to Canada with my mom for a week and I've been over the border from Brownsville into Matamoros twice. I don't consider this a deficiency. Do you know how much of the United States there is to see?

17.) The one time I ever tried to hitchhike I was successful. In fact, it was someone I knew who picked me up. My friend Pete and I were leaving the Phish concert in the middle of the Everglades for Y2K and he needed to be on a plane the next morning. We were holding a sign near the front gate when my friend Jake drove by in an RV. It's possibly the luckiest moment of my entire life.

18.) When I got out of college, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I did what any person would do in that situation. I went into whatever paid me the most. In this case, it was insurance.

19.) There was one Friday night when I was nary a year post-college I was sitting at home watching a re-run of "Cops." Suddenly it occurred to me. I was sitting at home on a Friday night watching a re-run of "Cops." Even worse, I'd seen that episode previously. It was that night I decided to be more of an extrovert.

20.) I've had seven girlfriends in my lifetime. I loved all seven of them in their own way. I've felt bad about how things ended with all seven of them. The good news is three of the last four will probably read this so I'm getting better at staying friends.

21.) I lived in the state of Illinois for two years while my now-ex-girlfriend pursued an acting career. This experience exposed me to what it's like to live in a city larger than Minneapolis.

22.) When I lived in Chicago, I worked for the insurance arm of a large property holding firm doing complex filings of yada yada yada and blah blah blah. Our offices were on the Magnificent Mile and I would ride the train down from Evanston every morning. This was the best job I've ever had. The work was challenging, I was given a great deal of autonomy and there was an amazing culture of camaraderie amongst the young people of the office.

23.) The best part about living in Chicago for me was the really cool concert festivals I attended in that city's parks. I went to Pitchfork three times, the Touch and Go 25th Anniversary weekend and numerous great bands famous and otherwise playing at the summer street festivals. Still one of my five favorite moments ever was at Lollapalooza last year when this happened by accident.



24.) Three of my friends have died in my lifetime. The first was my childhood friend Brendan who used to come down the block to play when we were little. He died from a sudden onset of meningitis when we were in high school. The next was my college friend Emily who crashed her bike and flipped over her handlebars while not wearing a helmet. She used to call everything "fascist!" and I'm sure would've actually exploded if she had lived to see the Bush years. Then I was 24 when my friend Chuck who worked across the hall passed away after coming home from the bar. He complained to his girlfriend about feeling ill and went to bed. That "feeling ill" was his vital organs shutting down.

25.) I have only one grandparent left, my paternal grandmother. I was six years old when my dad's dad died and that makes me the youngest member of our family who remembers him. My mom's mom died when I was a sophomore in college and my grandfather died two days after I'd visited him when I was 26. I realize how lucky I am in all four circumstances.

26.) I cried when Kirby Puckett died. I actually cried twice, once when I heard the news and once when they held a moment of silence for him at the T'Wolves game two days later. After the moment of silence I turned to my then-girlfriend, pointed at Kevin Garnett and said, "That's the only other athlete I will cry over when he dies."

27.) I've been quoted twice in the newspaper of the metro area in twice I was living. When I was in high school, I was a part of an article about kids who transfer high schools under Minnesota's open-enrollment rules. When I was in college, I was a part of an article about a protest trip we took to the School of The Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. I also appeared on the front page of the newspaper in the later article.

28.) My brother and I were in a band together called MidDef when I was in college and he was in high school and even wrote a few original songs. We played exactly two concerts; once in Dad's basement for X-mas and once in our Mom's backyard for some friends.

29.) When this posts I will be when I have just turned 29 years old. If I live until at least 70, my life isn't even halfway over. The best part isn't that I feel like I've done a lot with the 29 years I've had. It is that I feel like I can do even more in the coming years ahead.

Going To California - Day 4 - Flagstaff to Bakersfield

Departure Flagstaff - 35 degrees and clear
Arrival Bakersfield - 82 degrees and clear

Sundown - 4:48 pm
Miles Traveled - 482 miles
States Visited - 2
Major Cities - Ummmm...
Average speed - 70 mph

A Sampling of Gas Prices
$2.11 Kingman, AZ
$3.29 Bullhead City, CA
$2.25 Junction of Hwys. 395 & 58
$1.99 Bakersfield, CA



One of the things that's both neat and frightening about growing up is you start to deal with your parents as adults. Rather you're dealing with them for the first time as an adult yourself. In fact it may be the first time you get to talk with them about grown up stuff at all.

Since thirty is just up around the bend for me I'm actively working on redefining my individual relationships with my parents. I want to reset the structure of our realtionships to accomodate two adults instead of one adult and one "child." More importantly I want to actually know my parents. Neither of them are particularly old and we'll have at least another thirty to forty years together. Up until now they've had to be models from which I might base my behavior. But now that I'm pretty much a fully-formed adult I can look and see them as they are.

More importantly, if your family was nuclear like mine, these are the two people who have ostensibly known you for the longest. They were the ones who can tell you the most about who you were before you remembered and even tell you a lot about the stuff you do remember except from an adult's perspective. They really are the mirror of your experiences and if they are honest and respectful of you they can tell you more about yourself than any other person not walking around in your skin.

So when I was having dinner with my mom last night, we just talked like I normally would with any other adult in my life. We talked about the election, we talked about my sister's wedding, we talked about my upcoming job prospects. But mostly we talked about each other and ourselves. That is to say we talked as adults.