WHO YOU ARE MATTERS

Where do I come from?
 I come from a galaxy far, far away. (Quote from the beginning of the original Star Wars movie)

Where am I going? 
I will boldly go where no man has gone before (Quote from the original Star Trek TV series)

How do I plan to get there?
By getting beamed up by Transporter (Also from the original Star Trek)

How am I like my parents?

Maybe I'm just like my father — too bold.

Maybe I'm just like my mother. She's never satisfied.
(Quote from the song "When Doves Cry" by Prince. Released in 1984, the same year my first child was born, which made me think a lot about the ways that I was like my father and mother. The video is rather "racy," as my grandmother used to say, so watch with caution....)
How am I UNLIKE my parents?
Let me count the ways! (An allusion to a famous poem that I thought Shakespeare wrote: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...." As it turns out, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it! It's Sonnet 43 of her Sonnets from the Portuguese)

Have you developed your own expectations for yourself?
This took me a lot longer than I thought it would. After my father died, I was split: part of me thought, "Thank goodness —now I can do what I want." The other part thought, "To honor my father's memory, I will be a good provider for my family, just like he was."

To take this a little farther, for much of my professional life, if I wanted to BE a good provider for my family, I had to meet the expectations of my superiors, for it was THEY who determined whether I would get the promotions and raises I needed to keep up with the cost of living....

Now, I balance my overlords' expectations with my own expectations, and most of the time, we reach a happy medium.

Gloria Steinem serves as a model of someone who lives life with great passion and personal responsibility. Peter Matthiessen has always served as a role model of a writer who pursues his subjects with great passion and integrity.

What upsets me?

Remorseless tyrants and despots who prey on the weak and vulnerable, and don't know how to apologize. Ever.

I feel a special connection with felis concolor, aka cougar, mountain lion, and puma.

 

I have been following the work done by Jeff Sikich, Santa Monica Mountains National Park Service mountain lion biologist, for decades. The work he does, tranquilizing mountain lions to provide routine health checkups and also taking blood samples to further his research, is filled with bravery and compassion and a true love for his subjects. He's definitely a hero of mine. 

When I was a kid we lived in a subdivision in the San Fernando Valley that had been orange groves less than 10 years before we moved in. Our street was planted with liquidambar or "sweetgum" trees, which produce these hard, spiky seed pods, bigger than marbles but smaller than golf balls.

We used to collect these pods, hop on our bikes and hurl them at each other. Our bikes were those sweet Sixties "Stingray" bikes, with banana seats and raised handlebars.

 

 

BIRTH CHART

 

SUN Aquarius

MOON Virgo

RISING Sagittarius