2ndclepunkbuddha

Last Saturday, I was sitting in a bar on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights eagerly anticipating the arrival of one of my heroes from the Grunge Years.  I realize how ridiculous that sounds, I am a 41 year old woman living a hand to mouth existence, rather modestly when I was once so high on the hog, but I think a lot of us are in said situations now in terms of finance as well as in other ways.  It is in the other ways that I continue to be modest and make further adjustments, but that's another story for another day.  He came in the room without entourage or announcement, and I realized as he walked by me "That's him!"  I was nervous to meet him, as I was twenty one years ago when we first met, but he wouldn't remember that.  It was in South Bend, Indiana, where I was attending college the first time around, at a little clubhouse building dubbed Dalloway's which took the form of a modest coffee shop from time to time.  My college radio station, WVFI 640 A...

During my entrapment at CSU in the last few years, I took a class called the Sociology of Poverty.  This class was a source of much oddity, where the antics of fellow classmates and the disorganization of the professor were the sources of much hilarity.  The professor had once been a social worker who told us many a tale of her years working Intake, as anyone in the social work field will tell of their jobs.  I am not one of those people who takes in such sayings as "the culture of poverty" or even buys it to begin with, but one day I decided to ask a question before the class.  I am far too seasoned in the world to be at all idealistic or liberal anymore.  I asked the professor I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way but it could very easily, but I am asking this question because I have honestly been struggling with this, and that question is that if you want us, the students in this class, to take away one thing from this experience, what is that one thing?...

Many people in life, myself included, have missed out on opportunities.  Sometimes it was a scheduling conflict, a transportation issue, or a demand from another party that stopped us from doing something we really wanted to do.  Some of the thing we miss out on are trivial, some a serious, and many are somewhere in between.  A person who chronically does this is a person who does not wish to socialize and also criticize those who want to do social things.  Essentially, this is what the person "does for a living": In that they choose not to have a social life and rip apart the self esteem of others around them.  They find fault or reason as to how and why someone should not do something, it's a waste of time, it's ridiculous, it's boring, etc.  All or some of these observations may be true, but the ultimate problem is that the one who constantly does this is setting themselves up for a lifetime of regrets.  No one regrets that they took that crazy trip...

I always thought that bottled water was the biggest rip off of the 20th century, second only to indoor tanning beds.  Every person on earth would get it for free and suddenly we were paying for it, a tactic of marketing.  For the success of the marketers, I give them credit, but it was hardly an industry that was brand new or created just recently.  Of course the eco terrorists are still telling us how much additional plastic waste it creates, and I think that every time I take out the trash.  Since ancient times people have transported water from other geographic areas, it seems in the 90s sales all of a sudden quadrupled and we were sporting them everywhere we went, spring and purified tap water remain the best sellers in a billion dollar industry.  It remains the world's most precious resource.  And I gave it to him the last time I saw him. It was not a particularly strange day, not much if anything had happened of note.  The phone rang, he said h...

The other week, I was at my local library.  I have always enjoyed the library, more than most people I think.  Although I haven't frequented the library as much as I did in previous years thanks to advances in technology, I have always and continue to enjoy my time there.  It's also one of the best places to get movies, as my library always has currant and popular titles as well as the more high ended things, and one can always find whatever it is they are looking for depending on mood or circumstance.  I loaded up in the DVD section on some horror movies I had not seen in a long time and some I had not, then took my items to the front desk for check out.  When I approached the front desk, I had this feeling like I knew the person who was waiting on me but could not quite place her.  She appeared to be in her early to mid twenties, how did I know her?  And suddenly, it occurred to me. About nine years ago, I was in karate class.  We were doing s...

Famed English poet Alexander Pope once famously wrote "To err, is human; to forgive, divine."  One does not realize the depth of these words until you have, like many other things, experienced it firsthand.  Please be advised that I am not looking for religious significance in this statement, I am about as far away from being considered a religious person as you can get.  I have experienced firsthand the hypocrisy, guilt and contradictions of the so called "religious person" or even "spiritual people".  When one frees themselves of the fundamentalist guilt we have been taught, one is at last free to live a moral, fulfilling life.  But that's another story.  Humans are not perfect creatures by any means, we mess a lot of things up here and there.  How many times has one done or said something that we shouldn't have, don't we all have so many dirty little secrets no one knows about.  We have all been on the giving and receiving end of cruel mistr...

I've been on the dole for over six months now.  Of course this is nothing new due to my rather hilarious work history that took a severe nose dive about ten years ago, but this is the world we live in now.  When one's been kicked in the ribs multiple times, aside from what it does to your physical and mental health, one has to face a lot of humility and say that one must make certain adjustments.  Suddenly it's tightening the belt and not trying to spend on things that you used to so frivolously before, realizing that it's not about the worst thing that could ever happen to you (and suddenly you realize maybe it was), and having a new change set into one's mind that you didn't think was going to happen.  In the quest to make something happen for myself, I decided to look for a summer job.  Summer jobs are, like their name suggests, are seasonal employment opportunities, usually catering to those between the ages of sixteen and twenty one during their high sch...