Never Walked In High Heels

As a performer I often have to force myself to watch things that are immensely popular despite the fact that I hate them. I am at home today watching the entire first season of Glee; and truth be told, I can’t stand it. To me all I can see is a bunch of teenagers encouraging America to continue with bad theatre and poor acting habits. So many amateur thespians in America think that the apex of acting comes when you can smile big and sing loudly on cue, which only perpetuates those poor habits and generally bad theatre.

As I am watching, one of the teachers said to the students “Adults have to make difficult choices.” The tone in which he says it is pejorative at best. Adults have to make difficult choices? What about high schoolers? Don’t they have difficult decisions. When I was in high school, I was never able to have the world revolve around who I was interested in dating or what the cheerleaders were doing that Saturday night. A typical day in high school consisted of me putting on a three-piece suit and carrying a suitcase; worrying about making grades that were high enough that I wouldn’t be sent back into special education classes due to an over-controlling teacher who insisted that all students with disabilities be taught solely by her. Every “B” I received on an exam was a sign for red alert; and often I chose between sleep I needed to make it to the next day and putting in that extra four hours on an English paper when I was only able to type at an alarmingly slow rate. Teachers supported me, and often ran interference between myself and my school administration. Sometimes even putting themselves at risk. These are the things I remember from my high school experience.

I listen to older American women who often say of their years before college “Those were the happiest years of my life.” Really? At seventeen? All their dreams came true when they were the lead in the high school musical and they dated the captain of the football team? Looking at my yearbooks this weekend, I noticed that someone wrote “Don’t worry, it has to get better than this.” Surely that friend of mine had more wisdom than the ones who said the period between the years of fourteen and eighteen are the most precious. What about the birth of your first child or your wedding day? The time when you realized that your family is remarkable; or having your own kids graduate from high school after years of struggling with dyslexia? That outshines being fifteen, having acne, and wondering if anybody will ask you to the prom.

Due to modern technology, I am able to keep up from a controlled distance with several “friends” from high school. I wouldn’t consider them friends that I have a relationship with now, but the magic of the internet means that I can look at what their careers are, pictures of their first baby, and engagements. Overall I’m glad that my dreams didn’t come true in high school. Now these friends of mine are working for insurance companies and shuffling off to law school when at seventeen, all they wanted to be was actors and make the world a better place. I’m sure in their own way they have come to the conclusion that they are doing just that. But for someone who did have a great deal of trouble in high school, I must say difficult years early on make one much more confident and excited about the dreams that are to come.

He always bows at me as I go by him in my electric wheelchair. He is a man, one of many, who sells the “Big Issue” on the same street corner day after day. He interacts with everyone who walks by him, trying to look them in the eye and smile; often, he is able to get them to smile as well. More often than not, however, people do their best to ignore him; even changing directions to be out of his reach. His hair is longer and he has a beard the color of maple syrup as well as a jacket that says in big letters on the back “God Loves You.” In fact, in many ways it’s hard not to look at him and think of the old Sunday school pictures of Jesus with milky eyes, long hair and a beard; wanting to tell everyone that God loves each of them. It looks as if, except for the complacent eyes, this Big Issue seller could have modeled for any of those paintings from my early church days.

After nine months of driving past him, looking at my watch, sometimes managing a smile, but trying to avoid him all the same, I realized that I was being absurd. Here is an individual I saw everyday who always tried to make me smile and even more amusingly; always treated me like a queen by bowing whenever he saw me. So I stopped one morning when I could spare the time.

“This is absurd, I see you every day and I don’t know your name; what is it?”

“I’m Brian, what’s yours?”

And so, for a while, we chatted briefly, promising to call each other by name the next time our paths met (or rather I traveled down his path, depending on how you look at it).

Knowing Brian as a man named Brian, and knowing that he knows my name somehow makes the city of London seem instantly smaller. I can wave at him from across the street, or he can whistle and shout my name to get my attention. And because he looks so much like Jesus and insists that God loves everyone in this city, a city where the definition of love has been forgotten. It’s impossible not to make the connection between him and a life of faith.

Christ himself said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” in one of the most confusing texts ever written. The Beatitudes managed to tie any person regardless of religion and background in knots. At first it sounds like this man is handing out consolation prizes, “Well, you don’t get to be rich but at least you get to be blessed.” This is where some of our adamant anger against faith lies. A blessing is a lousy consolation prize when someone is starving. But what Brian illustrates is a world that we all dream of, where everyone knows everybody else’s name. Not just name, but everyone knows everyone else and can recognize the value and talents of each individual. The thought that this could ever happen in a city like London is enough to cause apoplectic fits. \Being known is much more intimate. Most of us, when we walk by Big Issue sellers or people sleeping on the street, do not directly disrespect them. But the automatic response of the diverting of eyes and the insistence of continuing walking when confronted with such individuals is ultimately the refusal to know these people and the conditions and events that have shaped them.

All of us enjoy being with people who know us, not just our names, but our likes and dislikes, qualities and characteristics, even when that other person is able to finish your sentence for you. There is a sort of relief when anyone passes a friend on the street and they stop you by name. Inevitably, it sets the rest of your day on an ecstatic level, as you recall the brief, but solid encounter of a friend chasing you down the street calling your name for everyone to hear. What we all want is a world in which people connect with us, serve each other, and recognize the need that every individual has and how he or she can help fulfill those needs. The relief comes when you know a persons name and can communicate about yourselves with each other, even if , it is a simple wave across the street.

For some time now, my friends have been begging me to join one of those internet dating sites. “You are a busy woman, you can’t waste time going to bars and looking for the ideal match.” “Things aren’t like how they used to be, everybody is super busy and that’s OK. We need more direction in looking for romance. It’s completely normal to have a profile on one of those sites.” It seemed for a while that no matter where I was there was a Match.com advertisement promising a match in six months or my money back. This of course, I thought, meant that my money would at some point have to end up in their bank account rather than stay in my own. How wrong I was.

So finally, on a cold evening when I wasn’t feeling in the best moods about myself, I decided to give the advice of my friends a go and signed up for a service which will as always when I have to use proper nouns, remain nameless. I signed up, filled in my birthday, my gender, my age, my email address and hit “OK”. Only to be faced with a form of over two hundred absurd questions. What did I think about Smoking (Strong dislike, moderate dislike, dislike, like, moderate like, strong like, no preference)? Religion (Strong dislike, moderate dislike, dislike, like, moderate like, strong like, no preference)? Performing arts? Financial planning? Dogs? Cats? Small rodents?

And to be honest, some of these questions I had no idea how to answer. After all, how can any woman in my position ever tell if her dislike of, lets say, naked sacrifices of chickens is something I am “moderately” opposed to or “strongly” opposed to? What constitutes a moderate support as opposed to simple support? I was about to give up when I finally reached the holy grail of dating sites, that is, the end screen. I waited for the little rainbow pinwheel to stop spinning on my computer in eager expectation as they calculated my matches and results. My credit card was ready for the six month money-back guarantee. I had it all planned out, I would go into a coffee shop to meet with the guy and my girlfriend would be in disguise at the next table. That way, if he wound up trying to kidnap me she could take action in her little five foot two inch, 110-pound sort of way.

“We’re sorry, we feel that it would be inappropriate to use our services given that your results fall outside of the standard deviation of a majority of men who register with us. Thank you for trying our dating site.”

So, apparently there are standard deviations in online dating. I immediately went back to my junior year stats class where we talked about standard deviations and Z factors for a review of what this could possibly mean. Take your typical Bell curve: Ninety-nine point nine percent of the individuals must fit within the bell. The other point one percent are just out of luck when it comes to looking to romance it turns out. I, with my answers of strong likes and moderate dislikes, am a member of that point one percent where it is apparently so statistically impossible to find me a match that they won’t even bother to take my credit card number.

Beyond the entire absurdity of the whole situation (I am apparently unmatchable) begs the question, can human emotions ever be broken down into standard deviations and mathematical equations? At the risk of sounding too much like an excerpt from Carrie Bradshaw’s “Sex and the City”, I don’t think there is a standard deviation when it comes to romance.

I have had friends who are absolutely driven to pure militancy when it comes to finding a boyfriend. Why? There is one individual I met who told me that she was determined through one of these online dating sites to be married within the year. Her strategy was simple, she would go out and meet a guy at Starbucks, and if in ten minutes they didn’t click she would immediately say “I don’t think this is working out”, offer to pay for his coffee and then leave. Within nine months she was engaged, and I guess her clear-cut organization and decisiveness coupled with on the spot thinking worked to her advantage.

But it always seemed to me that half the fun of dating is not knowing what will happen next, like any adventure in life. If a guy walked into where I was sitting with a big neon sign above his head that said “I am the one”, then I might be giddy for a moment but then that excitement would completely disappear and I suspect I would feel completely shackled.

Scientists have struggled and eventually discovered a massive amount of hormones and chemical reactions that go into establishing a good relationship, but there are some aspects of human interaction that science is anywhere near explaining such as true self-sacrificial love. Where is the evolutionary self-preservation in that? If there is any, I’m not sure I would want to find it. There are some wonderful things out there that have been going on for centuries which scientists can’t even begin to explain. These are omens, interactions, and emotions that should be celebrated because they all help create the adventure inherent in the unexpected. After all, as Dr. House indeed said “If the wonder disappears when the answer is gone, there is never any wonder to begin with.”

Most of my friends are substantially older than me. They are mostly able to look at my upcoming milestones on from the other side of accomplishment, assuring me that there is life after 30, the trials of my age do pass, and eventually new problems of an even larger sort will replace the ones I face now. When they offer their support it’s wonderful. There are times, however, when their age catches up with them.

For just about everybody I know, life didn’t turn out exactly how they imagined it when there were younger. And for most people in western society, this fact begins to work its way into some form of cynicism which inevitably hardens into some form of jaded stone. Often my friends will look at me, turning their face around suddenly and saying “That’s not how the world works. You have no idea what you’re in for. Don’t dream too big, please…” And I must give them all credit because they are all correct. I have no idea of the challenges which lay ahead of me.

I had a theory that the second give up on your dreams coming true is the very second you start to grow old. All of sudden, once cynicism descends you find yourself living in a world without miracles. Everything is expected or explainable and the magic goes away. Every once in a while I get glimpses of this in my friends as I try to protect my own innocence in believing that the problems of the world will still be fixed, and remain fixable. Ironically, its in their fierceness of protecting me that I see exactly what kind of force I am up against when it comes to breaking the status quo.

To me the protected shrink wrapped life is not worth living, even if it comes without the bitterness of giving up. But I worry that in fifteen years, when I’m the same age as they are, I will have fully succumbed to bitterness because of the curves life will have thrown me. Perhaps my friends are doing a more admirable job of teetering on the edge and maintaining their balance than I will be able to by the time I reach their age. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if my friends are right to put up such walls around me in the name of assisted self-preservation.

Right now all I know is that each day I do what I can to fight the bitterness. It takes actively scraping calloused areas away from one’s heart and running the risk of the sore opening and bleeding fresh. And as the years go on and the inevitable pain returns, it becomes more difficult to willingly stay vulnerable. But if life was about avoiding pain, we’d all be failures. I tend to think that life is about avoiding bitterness, especially when doing so seems very foolish.

Last week, while I was on holiday, Never Walked in High Heels finished its first year of publication. A year ago, a friend said that he read some basic rules for starting an electronic publication and they all recommended the same thing: patience.

I always have thought myself to be a very patient person until about a year ago. Due to my disability, I’m always last in line, waiting for doors to be unlocked, and dealing with my own slowness in daily tasks. If anyone was going to be impatient it was never going to be me. And then I became a working professional. And, if that wasn’t enough, I was working in a world that wasn’t used to seeing people like me work. To top it all off: I’m working in the arts.

Here’s the thing they never tell you during those inspirational movies about crusaders who beat the odds and come out changing the world on the other side of their struggles, there was always a ton of waiting around. If the struggles themselves don’t get you, the waiting game surely will. Take a look at some all time favorites such as My Left Foot. It looks like all the sudden Christy Brown wakes up in the morning and decides to write ‘Mother’ on the kitchen floor. What you don’t see, is the ten years before, when Brown’s mother stared at him wondering what she did wrong, nor do you see the months of laborious and profoundly unclear dictating it took to write the books he’s so famous for. (You also don’t see him choking to death on a pork chop after supposedly being abused by his wife who may have been a lesbian… but hey, even Hollywood has its limits.)

Gandhi’s hunger strikes get condensed to a quarter of an hour. Helen Keller is saying “wa-wa” in the first scene. And William Wilberforce’s twenty years of fighting against the slave trade takes about two hours on film.

I remember once I asked a friend, who was an ex-cop, if crime shows were accurate. He laughed and said, “if they wanted to make it realistic, they’d have to add a lot more paper work and cups of coffee. Nobody would watch it.”

The truth is, I am impatient when it comes to myself, my dreams, and what I want to accomplish. And as I compare my readership this week to what I thought it would be a year ago, I am disappointed. And, if I allow it, I begin to let the waiting game beat me because I’m falling short of my own unreasonable expectations.

A year of Never Walked in High Heels means just under one hundred and fifty essays, two freelance assignments, and a steadily increasing readership. If anyone else accomplished this, I would have said “well done.” Somehow my biggest fault is to want to live in the future, rather than the here and now which will inevitably get cut in the edited version. So when I sit down tonight and, like a good little entrepreneur, sketch our my plan for the next year, I will have to have my roommate hide all the inspirational movies she can find.

It was the last purposeful thing I ever remember my grandmother saying before she was permanently pulled below the waves of dementia. The entire family was gathered in my uncle’s living room, waiting for his last daughter to be married. My mom’s mother had been going in and out of our world and her own for the past several years, but in this moment she was perfectly balanced on the boarder of our harsh temporal planet and her universe where time was cyclical rather than linear. My grandmother turned to me, introduced herself, and then acknowledging the harpist hired to play at the wedding said, “if I had to live my life over again, I would learn to play one of those.”

I think of that statement often when I lay on the sofa in the home of one of my dearest friends and she plays her harp. She is newly married and nesting, the elegant harp looking slightly out of place amongst the used leather couches and prefab furniture. She looks positively angelic as her fingers leave the strings and she straightens her back in a way that shows her immense beauty hidden by her everyday posture. I open my eyes to look at her and for a split second I am jealous of her talent.

“I have got to sell my harp,” she declares walking away from the instrument out of frustration. “Every time I look at the thing in my living room I feel guilty because I know it should be played in a symphony orchestra and not be here to fiddle around with when I feel like it.” She quickly explains that she’s not about to give up playing, she simply wants to sell an otherwise brilliant piece of equipment to someone who could appreciate the music it makes on a consistent basis. She says that as she was learning to play the harp, she always was a disappointment to her teachers who wanted my friend to turn professional rather than play the harp for enjoyment.

And I am instantly reminded of my grandmother’s statement right before a vacant expression overtook her eyes forever.

I often wonder what talents I will regret not sharpening thirty years from now. Sometimes I swear to myself that I will try every activity that strikes my fancy at least once. And then I look at my friend’s harp and my uncooperative hands, a pair of toe shoes, or even the wii at our local pub, and I know such a promise is impossible to keep. The nature of this vast and seemingly endless world is one that might just give you the freedom to race towards all your dreams but it certainly won’t give you the time. Thinking of my grandmother growing up on a rocky hill in the Ozarks, the opportunity to learn how to play the harp was as slim as me learning how to dance en point. And at the end of her life, she still had unrequited dreams which she wanted to announce to someone she thought was a perfect stranger.

My friend begins playing again. For her, as for any of us really, with her talents come great responsibility to use her talents not only to the best of her ability but also with discretion. For her that means selling her professional harp to a musician who will use it professionally. More often than not we take the talents that we do have and, taking them for granted as commonplace, wish we had other skills in our capacity. If something comes easy to us, we tend to think it is easy for everyone and thus unimpressive. For my grandmother, at the end of her life, it was the harpist sitting in the corner of her son’s living room that represented second chances and unfettered dreams. For my friend playing the harp, keeping up her skills is not simply a blessing, but also a burden of responsibility. And for me, my jealously of other skills robs me of my time, so that, if I am not careful, by the end of my life, I will turn to a stranger and say what I would do differently, if I had to life my life over again.

A short story about life, death, and roadkill.

“God’s in an Art Deco mood today.” The sky was a perfect split between pink and blue. Airplane trails had streaked across the sky, and light sprayed over the earth as the sun rose to reveal its full shape. Every day has its own smell; today it was particularly overpowering. The morning air filled one’s lungs and scraped the old air from the inside. It was not a typical springy morning with birds and fresh creek water flowing against age and towards romance. It was more. But not in the car. The car air was stale despite the dawn. It had become difficult to move as the two drove throughout the night only to have more hours of driving ahead. They had fallen into silence for a few minutes until now.

“Shut up.” The intimacy of the car had annoyed her long before now. Yellow lines passed them at a constant beat. Buh-bum. Rest. Buh-bum. Rest. Buh-bum. They had become hypnotic to her as if the yellow lines acted as a baby mobile. She had a good mind to crash the car. At least that was she could get some sleep. She turned on the radio.

He kept talking about life and goals and fluff over the music. She gave up trying to drown him out and turned the radio off. Shaking her head, she rolled down the window to wake up. The fresh air rolled over her body and achieved its desired effects. Except now he started talking about how wonderful the morning wind was and gifts and such. She was losing her patience fast.

“I love long car rides. They’re so intimate. I always feel as if I know the people inside and out when they’re over. But I feel like I’ve been talking the entire trip. What about you?”

With that, she lost her temper. “Do you have to simplify everything like a two year old?” The car ride had suddenly become much more uncomfortable as the sun rose high enough to annoy. It was low enough not to be affected by visors. Where were her damn sunglasses? She continued her rant. “Name one thing that is beyond your understanding. Everything always turns out just joyfully in your mind, doesn’t it? Listen, in eighty years you’ll be gone, and nothing you have done will matter. That is the only thing that’s simple, predictable, and universal.” She stopped and tried to catch her breath. Her lungs pushed out until they touched her ribs and then collapsed to the motion of the lines on the road.

She almost regretted her explosion. Seeing him with his head rested on the back of the seat, his eyes closed, and his face beaming in the sun made her feel abandoned. The drive had gotten longer and her words hung in the air like a burlap curtain. She wasn’t even sure that he had heard her sine he just sat and stared at the sky. She gritted her teeth and clutched the wheel to straighten her spine. The stillness was deafening as they drove, and time sulked in between the cup holders. She wished he hadn’t told him the truth. He opened his mouth, thought, and then closed his lips again.

“Death.”

“What?” she snapped.

“Death isn’t simple.”

“Death is the simplest thing humanity knows. You simply stop breathing. It’s the end.” She had found her sunglasses and opened them with her teeth. They rode again in silence towards the end of the horizon. He pursed his lips in thought. Looking out the window, he could see her expression in the reflection. Her brown were knitted, and her neck was out stretched like a bird’s. He leaned his head against the glass. The sky now had wisps of clouds stroked across its canvas as if the bristles of a paintbrush had just barely tickled its edge. There was no other car in sight as she hit the gas and the engine roared.

“When I die I want someone to year bright yellow to my funeral. As a celebration.”

“This is depressing,” she shot back, flipping her head so hard to look at him that her sunglasses nearly fell off. She had meant to signify that the conversation was over, but that never stopped him.

“It really is so much bigger than us. I think that is why we think death is so frightening. The fact that at any moment we can be gone is humbling.” She didn’t want to answer him. The silence made the moments lag as the yellow lines spurred past with increasing intensity.

“Kind of a shitty grand finale, don’t you think?” she found herself saying. It was the fact that she even answered that annoyed her. The last thing she wanted on this car trip was to get on a carousel ride the same argument up and down. Turning around and heading away from their destination wasn’t an option. Here they were, in the middle of their trip, where it would take just as long to go home as it would take to get there. Well, one thing was for sure, she was not going to allow him to make this drive into some sort of triumphant conversion experience where she came out with some balanced new attitude. It was either because she was so tired and her eyelids throbbed or because she was so irritated with her company, but she really wanted to crash the car. She could grab the wheel and fling it so the small car would flip so easily. There were wire coat hangers, cigarette lighters, tools, glass windows. At that very second the vehicle became a suicide machine.

“Well, I guess death is never considered as a possibility,” she blandly stated.

“Everyone thinks the sun will rise tomorrow. Nobody can prove it.”

He looked back up to the painted sky and began with his own wide expanse of thoughts. He curled up to the side of the car and squashed his cheek against the window. His thoughts and opportunities made the blue sea above them seem like wading in a tear drop. A hawk flew over the car and into his sight. It spread its enormous wings and floated, suspended in the sky. It glided just over his head so he could see the mouse struggling in its mouth. He could practically hear the small creature struggle in the sky. If freedom came it would only result in a plunge. The hawk tilted, turned away from the car, and soared away from the road.

She squinted from the glare on the road. Putting down the visor to shade here eyes, she took a deep breath and relaxed. The lines had begun skipping playfully along the road. She slowed the car as another came over the horizon. The lines ahead shifted from the heat. Her eyes rested on a lump in the middle of the road. As the car edged closer to the lump, she could make out where the fur had turned gray and the scrawny rat tail had flattened against the pavement. Flies had begun to collect on its rankling intestines. The festering eyes were staring at the sky. Sometimes she wished she weren’t so observant. The car sped past, and it was gone as soon as the intensity was at its maximum. The road was clear and now touched the end of the sky.

The summer marks my forth year in London. I realized the other day that I have now spent longer being graduated from school than I have spent in my undergraduate education. And although I’m not exactly where I want to be, I like where I am.

The problem is the shift between living three years somewhere and four years is drastically different physiologically speaking. It’s like for the first few years out of college one is allowed to make whatever mistakes you can or be wherever in the world you want to be. And then the timer goes off with a ding and we are all supposed to come home and settle down, leaving our stories of adventure to tell the next generation. But as I get closer to the forth year milestone to pressure to come back to “the real world” increases. Adults who taught me growing up now call me to ask when I’m planning on coming home. And then they get upset when I tell the truth. That I don’t need to go home. For right now, I am home.

In the US, college is four years long for most people. After that, most people move to a drastically different life before coming into where we are going to actually be growing old and having a family. Its like that fourth mile marker signifies it’s too far away to turn around and come back home. And as I approach that point the questions become much more persistent… Athena, when are you coming home?

It’s taken me until now to actually realize this question does signify a certain rationality which everyone who is annoying me by asking this question is, ultimately aware of. It takes three years (as in full years) to settle into a place and make it yours. In the past year, I’ve notice a shift in my own life, my friends call me up to see how an audition went, or arrange for informal picnics where we used to have stilted and even semi-rehearsed coffee dates. We don’t notice who brought the last tickets or cup of tea. My friends here know that I am not going anywhere for a while (barring a fabulous opportunity… everyone knows I’m not settled down that much). The friend who lives in the red Dutch barge in the opposite quay and I are already making plans for our Christmas Cakes.

This is where my life is right now. It consists of understanding art and acting as well as boats and tides. It means waiting all week in patient expectation to bake with the women who live in the quays and learn how to weigh flour on an eighty year old scale given to her by her grandmother, while my American measuring cup sit uselessly in my kitchen. I get to listen to actors debate about Mamet and offer my opinion over Turkish coffee in our local pub run buy the old man from Ephesus who swears he’s in love with me. And no, while I was getting my degree and sitting with my hand raised and my ankles crossed, this was never where I envisioned my life being.

But now I’m here, I see no reason to go back.

I’ve seen the commercials. The male announcer almost teases you with the idea that all your problems will be solved if you only buy the correct application for under a dollar. And from the stance of creative businesswoman, the App Store for the iphone is enthralling. With no overhead, a constantly changing storefront and boundless creativity, this is, without a doubt, the correct formula for the next stage of entrepreneurship for the new frontier.

If only that ‘boundless creativity’ would come in the form of faster evolution.

After all, what exactly is the use of a program which is an alarm clock on a device where one is automatically build in. Better yet, how about coming to and end of a fine dinner and being unable to calculate the tip without the help of your trusty technological companion. Or there’s always the program, that tells you about what other programs have come out and which other programs you need. (This one, much to my surprise, was not created by Apple.)

I bought an iphone in hopes to make my life as a disabled woman easier. With life in this position one is dependent on barons of industry, invention, and software to make life not simply more convenient but also simply livable. To say that my iphone has changed my life would be an understatement. But I was also one of the first people investing in voice activation all the way back in 1994, and have since thrown money at nearly every piece of assistive technology conceivable. In the case of adaptive tech hardware and software, it really doesn’t matter what sort of resources you have, if can’t be sold to the mainstream population the software will not advance.

This is how we get over 200 software developers which create alarm clocks, and no program that will actually call a London black cab. After all, my friends argue, its easy to hail a cab off the street. But figuring out what fifteen percent of your dinner bill is… that’s a real challenge.

The App Store illustrates to me that the leaders of industry are few and far between while those who have the programming skills but lack the imagination are well in abundance. It’s proof that just because there are lots of hands which can make the industry move forward, without the brains there is little guarantee of it doing so. Looking at what sells today will only show you what you should’ve been selling yesterday. And so to hop on the ‘alarm clock bandwagon’ only serves to tell you where the industry is. As with any other form of progress the market has to look to the needs of people who are not in the mainstream to figure out what comes next.

When I decided to trek through the mud in order to throw my acorn branch into the fire, I was also agreeing to make both my wheelchair and my ankle length coat saturated with grey mud. So through the three inch deep muck I went, all in the name of increasing my cultural awareness. The tradition goes that if you throw the branch of an oak tree into a bonfire on Twelfth Night, you will be blessed all year. It was more than superstition. The elders would approach the flames tenuously, trying to keep their footing, throw their branches in and cross themselves while muttering a prayer.

This is when I have to admit that I wasn’t going through this just for my own cultural edification. It’s a good cover, but deep down there was a part of me that was hoping that good luck would come as a result.

What is it in us that still believes that if we do X, avoid Y, and call upon Z good things will be bestowed upon us? Are we waiting for someone else to make our life brighter by not acknowledging that we ourselves only have the power to propel us towards our dreams? Or perhaps we know that some things are out of our control and these are the attempts to nudge things in the directions we think they ought to go. And although most of us know deep down that these attempts are feeble, we do them anyway… even in the rain and mud.

I forget its source, but somewhere I heard that psychics get asked questions which mainly fall into three categories: love, money, and health. When I was younger I somehow thought that these concerns were silly. I don’t know why I couldn’t wrap my head around the notion that everyone would be concerned about these three issues, but now that I’m older I can see them popping into my worries. And after a few frustrating but predicted years, I found myself taking somewhat extreme measures to ensure that this year would go, if anything, more smoothly.

Deep down, I think we are all willing to take extreme measures to ensure things go our way. Some of the most horrific events in history can be attributed to this. If luck and blessings won’t serve us, then we will do it ourselves and all of a sudden a muddy coat looks like child’s play in front of what we are willing to destroy or deny so we can have what we want.

Its been just over a month since Twelfth Night, and I’m just flaking the last bit of mud off my coat. I remember throwing my branch in and being almost surprised at what I found myself wishing for and the long lasting dreams I suddenly forgot. Perhaps I am fooled as to what the desires of my heart actually are.

Several people have enquired about my mud caked coat over the past month. They all get excited when I tell them about a bonfire next to a mystical church that’s in the middle of nowhere. The mud and rain adds to the story’s appeal. And I realize that after barely a month, it’s already been a great year.