I’m not going to name names on a personal level, but I’ve seen my share of people that inherit for a living. They’re the ones that get to follow their dreams unconditionally. I’ve got a number of students that are working as hard as they can to end the nightmares for them and their families. They don’t have the luxury of dreaming, not yet.

I’ve got plenty of friends that made a run at making the big time in the music industry. You have no idea how happy I am when I track down one of these late-80’s dreamers and find out he’s off the drugs and is making a living playing in bars all weekend long. Of all the bright young guys with Texas-sized hopes I knew back then, Robert Earl Keen’s made it the furthest up the music biz ladder, and he’ll be the first to admit there are a lot of others every bit as good as he is that the music business shot apart. You take every person with talent and big dreams born in a given year, line ’em up, and luck will choose one to rise up out of them all. Luck chooses maybe a baker’s dozen to never have to get their lives wrecked by alcohol or drugs, and the rest… the rest become casualties if they don’t stop dreaming.

Then you have the no-to-low-talents that become big names simply because they’re connected to pots of cash and/or a famous parent. Maybe they had no moral standards and managed to exploit that amorality to its fullest potential… whatever. Be it a stage mom that never quit or a pile of cash that kept talking, there they are, on top of the world. The worst are the ones that are famous for being famous. Paris Hilton is perhaps the most egregious in that area. So much of success in any artistic field is not in mastering the creative process, but in dealing with the business side of things. If you don’t have connections to lawyers that can run amazing deals because of who they’re connected to, you got little to nothing left to go on.

Follow your dreams? How about taking a good, hard look at those dreams, hmm?

First of all, if you say you want to make a living with your art, ask which is more important, the living or the art? If it’s the living, you will likely wind up making that living, but you’ll compromise your art. The art is more important? Don’t quit your day job, buddy. And you better make darn sure you like that day job, because you’re going to make your living that way and your art’s going to remain a hobby.

Next, ask yourself, what is success? If it’s a pot of cash left over after you pay bills, then become a white-collar criminal. That’s the fastest, most effective way to make that money and chances are you won’t even go to jail. If you can’t stomach that, then you better consider success is dying with your soul intact. Success is in helping the weak and bringing smiles to the faces of people left broken by the guys that think success and money are connected.

I like to draw. Nothing wrong with that. I have friends that will ask me to draw a little something for them and I’ll dash off a pretty picture that isn’t really print-quality, but it looks nice. They say they like it, I get my audience, and everyone’s happy. Should they have to pay for that smile? Not if I’m having fun making the picture. That’s how I reason it and it works for me. In exchange for doing things for free whenever I have the time and feel like it, I don’t have to make a living with my art. The pressure’s off and I can enjoy the experience.

So have I given up on my dreams?

I don’t think so. I love teaching. That’s what I do. I love my family. That’s who I live with. I am satisfied with the spiritual side of my life and I can find plenty of intellectual stimulation. I’m doing fine. I’m 42 and I’ve got my life in a pretty decent balance. Not being hung up on material things is probably an important part of that balance, as is a feeling that I’ve found answers to a lot of The Big Questions and know that I’m finding answers to the rest.

I like drawing, but I don’t have to be hanging in a gallery. I like writing, but I don’t need to be on a display at a Borders. Because my life isn’t sucked into running after money, I have time to enjoy it. I’m free to follow my dreams, but that doesn’t mean I follow them irresponsibly.

Not good enough for “Reason to Live”, but still pretty dang fun and tasty.

Found it at the Hong Kong Market. It doesn’t smell like durian, but it has that nice durian-y funkyness when you start chewing it. My daughter and I bought some today and had great fun.

Interesting article in The Independent about being a Viking-era re-enactor. The only people you had to worry about not offending back then were the Vikings. Otherwise, you were your own man in just about every aspect of your life. A few basic rules from God and King, but in every other way, you were truly on your own.

You don’t see it, but I get hundreds of spams on this board… so I added an anti-spam feature that should keep the spambots from even getting here in the first place. If you have trouble posting, there’s a quick feature you can use to enable your posts. If not, don’t worry, business as usual for you. Just not for me, since I won’t have dozens of spam comments waiting for me to delete at every login.

Just because.

I love this game. It’s hard to stay away from. Now that I have only AP classes on my roster again, I can do a big Diplomacy thing between my classes. It’s totally fun. (evil booming laughter)
Anyway, above please find a thumbnail of the current map… it’s only after the first turn, but still fun to stare at. If you need improved staring, you can see it here.

I recently saw a news piece about longevity research. In it, a researcher bubbled that we could find ways to extend life so people would live to be 150 or even 200 by the year 2030.

Great. Just what we need when Social Security is about to go completely bust: a way to have people live longer.

We’d have a dilemma, for sure. First of all, not everyone would be able to afford treatments for age-related diseases, so we’d have rich people live on while the po’ folks keep dying as usual. Just our luck, we’ve got enough rich people in the USA so that our average lifespan would increase, just like our average GDP increases. The poor will be poor and dead as usual, while the rich will be richer and longer-lived than ever before.

And if we should have the anti-aging stuff available to one and all, then we’ll have to modify that retirement age. In a world where the average life expectancy is around 150, we’d have to set the retirement age at around 145. Beautiful. That means we all get to work for EIGHTY MORE YEARS. Ugh. No thanks.

Entry-level jobs would be that much harder to get, what with a vastly more experienced workforce. The PhD would become the new high school diploma. We’d have to stay in school until the 24th grade before going on to college. That means grade school and living with mom and dad until you’re 30. Forget about getting out of the home when you’re 18: you’ll have 12 more years to go!

And even if we finish schooling around age 40 for most folks, that still means over a century in the workforce. Even with career changes breaking up the monotony, that’s one hundred years plus doing the eight to five thing. If you take a military career and enlist when you’re 30, you’ll serve for 50 years before being eligible for retirement and a new career in the civilian workforce. You’ll still be young at 80… with 65 more productive years ahead of you…

Wanting to live is natural. I do want to live. I love my life and the people I get to meet in it. But I also look forward to when I rest my body and take up a different existence beyond this one. I really wouldn’t want to live on another 70-80 years, working most of them. That’s too much of this world.

We can medically eliminate the symptoms of aging, but there’s nothing we can do to take out the pains of regret or longing for those that died prematurely. In my scenario of primary and secondary education up to age 30, it’s entirely possible for people to have been married, divorced, and remarried by the time they graduate… or to be grandparents on the eve of their college matriculation. That’s a lot of living, with a lot more yet to come. If we eliminate barriers to longevity, will dying of a broken heart become the new leading cause of death?

Robert Fisk is a great journalist. He won’t last forever, so I’ll enjoy him while I can. While most of his stuff is pretty grim due to the fact his beat is the Middle East and he pulls no punches, this article is a jolly nice bit of history with a rather low body count to it. It’s all about how tea helped sober up England and the rest of Europe so it could go on to have an industrial revolution.

As a historian, I like the fact that it’s an example of how China helped civilize Europe. Too often, people that teach world history fail to look much beyond Europe and North America, except when Europeans and North Americans showed up to colonize or otherwise muscle in on the locals. The fact is that, for much of its history, Europe was an uncivilized backwater with little to offer the rest of the world. All the swingin’ civilizations were around the Mediterranean, in India, and in China. The civilizations in Central and South America seem to have come along much later, but archaeology there is so difficult that we’re only beginning to realize that there’s a big possibility there was much more going on there much earlier than we ever expected.

Global contacts have existed for centuries. They have gotten more frequent and faster, especially in the last few years, but we’d all do well to recognize that no civilization is an island. No civilization is better or worse, just different. When we appreciate the differences, we prosper in so many ways.

With the new webhost, it’s about time I got a new blog system. Hello, WordPress. This thing’s got features.