Boomer Randomness

A friend and regular participant in my community affairs radio programs has a New Year’s strategy that resonates with me. Each December she chooses a single word that represents her main goal for the coming year. I have tried this for the past few years with a fairly good degree of success. My life was a little unfocused for the past two years but the keyword concept did help me. So as I write this on New Year’s Eve 2012 my keyword for 2013 is very clear to me … ‘renew’. As the year ended, I finally succeeded in starting the next chapter in my life. The self-discovery journey I’ve written about for three or four years reached a major destination. Less than five hours from the moment I hit ‘publish’ on this post the first minutes of the next leg of my journey begin. I am alone tonight by choice, but I am not really lonely. I am in touch with my real friends and my Facebook friends (some of whom are real friends too). I know I’ll be trading texts with at least two close friends....

Well, I did it. I have turned the page to the next chapter in my life. After several years of inching toward this goal, I have now reached it … I am now on my own. So how does it feel? Bittersweet. If you expect me to be dancing in the streets in celebration then you don’t know me very well. This is the next step toward the end of my third marriage. When looking at it through that filter, there is nothing to be happy about. Marriage is supposed to be a ‘forever’ thing, as unrealistic as that may be. I can name five people I know who lived that ideal … my parents and four of my best high school friends. My parents celebrated a 50th anniversary and three of those four high school friends have past their 30th. Two of those three are happily married and the third tolerates problems because of the security even a troubled marriage can provide. My first two marriages lasted less than two years each. The first ended entirely because of my immaturity. The second ended mostly because of he...

The biggest obstacle has been overcome.  Now it's time for the move.  I hate moving, I hate packing, I never expected to be doing this again, yet I am.  The good news is that this really is the final page of the current chapter and I am almost surprised I reached it. More soon.

As I inch closer to a new chapter in my life, I wake up this morning with a churning stomach, partly due to the lingering effects of a bad cold and partly because of an incredible amount of stress. Movers arrive in two days, signaling what should be a day of celebration for me, but I continue to face roadblocks in my attempts to move on with my life. At this moment I trust almost no one, and seriously doubt my own ability to judge character. Yesterday afternoon I thought I had overcome the major obstacles to moving forward but last night saw there are more. In my twenties my personality was largely negative. Decades ago I turned that around and became the model of optimism. Right now it is all I can do to believe that my normally positive outlook still exists and that it will carry me through the end of the week. A voice very deep in the recesses of my mind is trying to tell me I can survive this with my personality intact, but a louder voice is shouting messages to the contrary. Se...

At 9:30 on a sunny Friday morning in small-town Connecticut, a teacher heard a sequence of unfamiliar sounds … pop, pop, pop. Fireworks? Gunshots? Both were unlikely noises coming from a classroom down the hall. But it was indeed gunfire. That teacher and her students survived, but minutes later twenty six people lay dead; twenty of them were children. The school principal and the school psychologist were among the dead adults. How does something like this happen? Mass shootings are hard enough to understand, but it is even worse when children are targeted. Schools in Columbine and at Virginia Tech, a movie theatre, a hospital, a shopping mall … none of it makes sense. Yet we try to process and explain. If the school psychologist wasn’t a victim in yesterday’s massacre, he or she would be analyzing the shooter. What leads a 20-year-old male (I refuse to call him a man) to kill his mother, then go to a classroom and kill twenty elementary school children? And don’t give me that “Go...

Every time I think I’ve had the craziest week of my life, another one pops up. The coming week will likely land in my top 10 list. This week at the office I have to work ahead for the following two weeks that I am on vacation. My home week includes finally resolving the next big step in an ongoing personal matter, packing boxes and signing papers. AND I’m fighting the onset of a nasty cold. This should be interesting.

I used to think I understood women. I didn’t. And I don’t. Generalizing about an entire category of people is usually not my style but in this case I can lump together several seemingly common female personality characteristics that amuse and confuse me. Here are a few random observations, in no particular order. Many women want men to be mind-readers. They claim they are individuals and say they want things to be a certain way, but then when men go along with that it turns out the women didn’t really mean that at all and what something completely different. And we men are assumed to be able to figure that out and act accordingly. A scene from the movie Tootsie comes to mind. Dustin Hoffman plays an actor who stumbles into a role as a woman, which he is then compelled to continue off screen as part of an unintended deception. An actress he likes confides in ‘her’ that she wants a decisive, aggressive manly man to come on to her in a specific way. In a later scene he is at a party as...

I admire and respect people who seem to have complete control of their lives, the ones who seem to always do things their way, play by their own rules, chart their own path. 'Seem' is the key word in that observation. Those people probably do exert a greater amount of control than most of us, though, and we can learn from them and adopt some of their methods. My job is primarily one of reaction. Although I report to one person, in reality I have to please four or five different people with every piece of audio I write and produce. Some of those people are executives in my company, some are clients and ultimately every element I create should engage listeners of the radio stations where these things play. So I am pulled in many competing directions several times a day and I subject myself to this torture willingly because it is usually fun and they pay me well. Basically what all that means is that I only have partial control of what I do every day. That is normal for most...