20200820: Who I am Matters

I hail from a small hamlet in Oregon. The inhabitants are not evil per se, but the tranquil flame of rural America exists besides closed minds and limited perspectives. It’s this insularity that I started running from 20 years ago. My exit strategy wasn’t original and in the grand tradition of my family, I joined the military after high school graduation.

When I close my eyes and imagine myself retired, I always picture myself running a small elementary school in rural Michoacán, Mexico. Courses will be taught in STEM, English, and business. I make this dream a reality by growing my retirement nest egg and learning the necessary skills. I’ve been working on both areas for a long time. My career will be lucrative enough to allow me the resources to get the project started.

From my parents, I learned about having a dogged and joyless work ethic. It might not sound like a good thing, but sometimes you grit your teeth, put your head down, and just grind. I learned this from my mother, and it is a perspective I have used on several occasions to great effect. Thanks, Mom.

I’m not sure I’m behaviorally unlike my parents at all. Every fault I have can be traced to one of them and with some self-examination, every virtue.

Hmmm. How do I answer a question concerning “expectations”? Everything good I have accomplished is to make my mother proud. So, in that way I labor under her expectations. Fortunately, they are vaguely defined: graduate from school, find a good job, and don’t get arrested. I have the freedom to decide how best to please her. Currently, my plan is an Accounting degree from USC and then a position at a Big 4 professional services firm as the best way to do this.

I don’t have a role model. Perhaps, that is why my life has been directionless and chaotic from time-to-time. I only venerate dead scientists, dead writers, and dead musicians. I need someone more accessible, a give-and-take relationship with growth potential.

I feel a slight connection with the Raven. It leads an interesting life of flying about and cracking things with its beak. That seems like a metaphor for life somehow, but it’s just outside of my intellectual reach.

Once, when I was very young, I was helping clean the yard by raking up fallen apples underneath one of the trees. This old apple tree was twisted and gnarled, ancient and ugly. Choking its trunk was this sickly green ivy. Vines of its leaves stretched out grasping along the ground from the tree’s base. My rake reached along the ground underneath the thick foliage to drag every last stinking, rotten apple into the light. Unfortunately, my industry was thwarted by two things: I was wearing flip-flops and I pulled a snake out instead. I remember looking down and seeing the serpent twisting and writhing on my nearly-nude feet. My ophidiophobia was born and persists to this day.

Sun is in 21 Degrees Capricorn
Moon is in 04 Degrees Capricorn
Rising Sign is in 05 Degrees Virgo